RPG Articles

Went and saw this on Halloween. In short, it’s a fun movie with some solid performances, good makeup, and is worth seeing if you don’t have any reading to catch up on or other movies that grab your attention.

The Good:

Some of it was quite funny. The “zombies” had good makeup. Bill Murray shows up for a bit.

The Bad:

We’re subjected to some really pointless love interest bits, pointless back story for Harrelson’s character, a total lack of curiosity on the part of everyone, and generally the characters doing things that make you sit back and wonder how they got by before the apocalypse.

The Hideously Stupid:

Voice over? Really? When did this story seem so complex that we needed a fucking narrator a la The Wonder Years? At one point, in this voice over, we get an explanation for the zombies, begging the question “How the fuck do you know that?”, since the narrator is obviously not any older than he is in the film, unlike The Wonder Years, and it’s not like there was anything around to tell him what happened.

General Bits and Bobs:

There was no reason to have the beginning be asynchronous like it was. It added nothing to the story and would have probably worked a touch better just laid out point A to point B style. For that matter, it would have been a lot more interesting to see the main character actually working through the initial days of the outbreak. Instead we end up with something feels like ten minutes of youtube videos spliced into 60 minutes of marginal value and possibly another ten minutes of story relevant comedy. It felt really forced, like it was made by committee.

I can’t help but wonder what it’s like to be the guy they turn to when they want a low rent Michael Cera.

Today I ended up eating at this place.

Having trundled about on public transit and foot with only a very small breakfast I was quite hungry, so imagine my surprise when the kefta I ordered was only tolerable, despite the extra spice of hunger.

Perhaps the place has gone downhill since then. Maybe cosmic rays were blocking my taste buds. I can only give my honest impressions.

The kefta itself, which I ordered in a wrap, was super dry and bland. The veggies were good enough, but everything was slathered with some sort of ho-hum sauce. Possibly sour cream that a tahini jar once bumped into. Even if it had been great there was just far too much of it. The pita it was wrapped in wasn’t stale, but it seemed a near thing.

Really the whole impression was “here’s some crap that’s been sitting here drying out all day”, which is odd considering it took a fairly long time for the food to get to me.

While the place seems fairly resistant to zombie attacks, what with so few patrons and only a small frontage, you’ll probably end up killing yourself for want of something good to eat.

Base Zombie Safety Index: 7

Adjusted for suicidal yearning: 3

So, uh, yeah. Know that bit about not saying anything if you can’t say something nice? Yeah, that’d lead to dead silence here.

This book was excruciatingly boring, pointless, and various kinds of not good. Very Neal Stephenson, and if you think that should be a compliment, then by all means pick this book up.

So, this is the book Soylent Green was based on. Based on in the same way that another Heston classic, The Omega Man, was based on I Am Legend.

Allow me to adjust your set for reading this book. There is Soylent, but no Soylent Green, and nothing is distressingly made out of people. Soylent is the closest thing to affordable protein available, and it’s still far too expensive for most people. It’s comprised of soybean product and lentils. The mainstay food are weedcrackers, which are made of seaweed. Also mentioned are ener-G, which are granules of plankton, and meat flakes, comprised of snail or slug bits, issued to the very ill.

No, the thrust of this book is the living hell we’ll create with unchecked population growth. In this New York City has about 35 million inhabitants, the vast majority of which are beyond impoverished.

I really have to point out how amusing, and interesting, it is that someone as pro-life as Heston was in that movie. Of course, it leads me to wonder at how much impact he, or someone else in production with similar morals, deflected the message of the movie from birth control to outrage at defiling the dead.

Anyway. The plot, characters, and setting, are all carried out so very well. Sometimes you feel the author himself shy away from the future he can envision with such clarity, but it really only serves to get your own wheels turning.

All that said, you really have to prepare yourself for a soul crushing ride. You are left feeling that happiness, in any form, is at best a setup to more cruelty, and that you have been pre-fucked by every generation before you, while failing to summon the strength or resources to unfuck the future even a little.

Like anything I’ve suggested by Peter Watts, read this one when you think your feeling too good about yourself and the world.

Ok. So, there’s this TED talk about artificial brains.

First off, whenever you hear something is 10 years away, it usually stays 10 years away for a very long time. I’m not saying it can’t be done, because it really should be less than 10 years away, but that’s not what I’m hear to talk about.

Oh no. No. There’s this nugget in there that stopped me cold.

“It’s a new brain,” he explained. “The mammals needed it because they had to cope with parenthood, social interactions complex cognitive functions.

“It was so successful an evolution from mouse to man it expanded about a thousand fold in terms of the numbers of units to produce this almost frightening organ.”

I swear they don’t teach people anything. I am thankful, and spiteful, every day for my general love of reading and thinking. Check this out. Do you really think that something evolves because a species needed it? Really? Stab yourself in the eye. There might be follow up questions, so you might want to take a time out to do research.

Evolution has no goals. Strictly speaking evolution doesn’t exist, just like you can’t say (though many do) that time exists. They’re both logical constructions that we use as intellectual tools. Both are frameworks to hang observations on so we can correlate this shit in a half-orderly manner and look for possible causal relations.

Evolution is easy. You have a number of critters. They breed, and over time have a variety of different traits. If a trait inhibits mating it dies out pretty rapidly, along with any other unique traits those individual may have had. Duh. If a trait increases the chance of mating then it succeeds and is, obviously, passed on. If a great big stress comes along, like a large shift in what makes up the air, then you see a large paring down of the gene pool to just those individuals with traits that allow them to breed in spite of the stressed environment. Obviously the second phase of “success” is that the new generation is able to live long enough to breed.

All those complex behaviors, and ability to think new things, came about because of the increased processing ability, not the other way around.

The second statement seems dubious to me, but I can’t deny it outright since it’s not like I’ve done any research on it. Still, without a lot of mutation, and pressures that make those mutated individuals more likely to breed than others, there’s no reason to assume a trait is continuing to expand. Again, there is no motive force to this stuff, it’s just physical principle.

So yeah, this series of books is all wrapped up now. It was fun, had some neat ideas, and was thoroughly enjoyable, but there’s just something about it that doesn’t make it stand out in my mind.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s quite worth reading, unlike, say, certain books written with Brian Herbert. I think the biggest hindrance to the story hanging with me is it all felt a bit too much like television. I can’t really find the right way to describe it. I suppose one of the biggest similarities is that it really seemed like we could have wrapped some of these points up well before we did, know what I mean?

The Ildirans kept whining about how stagnant they were, then someone would throw out something at least a little innovative, but it would either go nowhere or they’d die, horribly. The Roamers were like MacGuyver clones, and never ever failed. It all just came off as a bit too static.

Anyway. Onward.

I didn’t have any real expectations going into this, just fyi, but I found it to be fun, and funny, but ultimately forgettable.

That’s kind of all I can think to say about it.

A very energetic story that manages to convey a sense of doom, humor, and hope; usually in the same breath.

It’s a tough one to explain without giving away everything. The best I can do is that it sums up all the feelings of heartbreak, whether it be of a lover or friend that has abandoned you, without getting maudlin, and always as part of the story.

Also aliens and doomsday cults. Just read the damned thing, ok?

You can check out the author’s website and even read a chapter of Spaceman Blues.

But assuming I see this posted correctly, I figure I’m about done.