"necessary and accidental"

"Taking possession of this new abode, I put on my thinking cap.  I reasoned more or less as follows: Civilization is a thing both necessary and accidental; like the lining of a nest, it is a shelter from the world, a tiny counterworld that the large world silently tolerates, with the toleration of indifference, because in it there is no answer to the questions of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, laws and customs. Language, the creation of civilization, is like the framework of the nest; it binds all the bits of lining and units them into the shape that is deemed necessary by the occupants of the nest. Language is an appeal to the joint identity of the nesting beings, their common denominator, their constant of similarity and therefore its influence must end immediately beyond the edge of that subtle structure."

-- Stanislaw Lem, His Master's Voice

The Long Walk: Wut I Thunk

When it doesn't seem like it should work, it manages to.  When it has moments that might be capitalized on to go from good to great, it doesn't quite manage.

Mark Hamill isn't given much material to work with, so he grunts a lot.  The violence is predictably graphic, but the script also manages to bring some warmth and humor at times.

It's ultimately a movie about relationships, as strange as that might sound in such a twisted world.

Peter, the second lead, has an accent that swerves crazily between rural Alabama and Cockney London.  It's truly distracting.

The ending is safe and predictable and goes against a major sacrifice by the main character.  If only it had ended about one minute sooner it would have been something special.

Three sets of post-apocalyptic insoles out of five!

"bigger and bigger machines"

"'Strategic considerations dictate the construction of bigger and bigger machines, and, whether we like it or not, this inevitably means an increase in the amount of information stored in the brains. This in turn means that the brain will steadily increase its control over all of society's collective processes. The brain will decide where to locate the infamous button. Or whether to change the style of infantry uniforms. Or whether to increase production of a certain kind of steel, demanding appropriations to carry out its purposes. Once you create this kind of brain you have to listen to it. If a Parliament wastes time debating whether or not to grant the appropriations it demands, the other side may gain a lead, so after a while the abolition of parliamentary decisions becomes unavoidable. Human control over the brain's decisions will decrease in proportion to the increase in its accumulated knowledge. Am I making myself clear? There will be two growing brains, one on each side of the ocean. What do you think a brain like this will demand first when it's ready to take the next step in the perpetual race?'"

-- Stanislaw Lem, The Investigation

Fantastic Four: First Steps, Wut I Thunk

I'm a sucker for retro-futurism, and that's probably the best thing about this film.  No spandex, just wool!  Performances are fine except for the huge bad guy Galactus, who literally says almost nothing other than he's hungry for planets.  Johnny Storm is kind of the dumb lady's man, but a twist in the plot gives him a little more credit for having some brains.

The real question is, in 2025 are superhero movies still something worth watching?  I'd say this is an above average Marvel product, although just that.  The Silver Surfer never really looks right -- too much CGI or too little I don't know.  Natasha Lyonne is criminally underused, as is her relationship with The Thing.

Three Clobberin' Times out of five!

"stand and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth"

"What did that word mean to me? Earth? I thought of the great bustling cities where I would wander and lose myself, and I thought of them as I had thought of the ocean on the second or third night, when I had wanted to throw myself upon the dark waves. I shall immerse myself among men. I shall be silent and attentive, an appreciative companion. There will be many acquaintances, friends, women -- and perhaps even a wife. For a while, I shall have to make a conscious effort to smile, nod, stand and perform the thousands of little gestures which constitute life on Earth, and then those gestures will become reflexes again. I shall find new interests and occupations; and I shall not give myself completely to them, as I shall never again give myself completely to anything or anybody. Perhaps at night I shall stare up at the dark nebula that cuts off the light of the twin suns, and remember everything, even what I am thinking now. With a condescending, slightly rueful smile I shall remember my follies and my hopes. And this future Kelvin will be no less worthy a man than the Kelvin of the past, who was prepared for anything in the name of an ambitious enterprise called Contact. Nor will any man have the right to judge me."

-- Stanislaw Lem, Solaris

Mickey 17 -- What I Thunk

Hey, it shares a major plot point with Keanu Reeves' and China Mieville's The Book of Elsewhere!  What if you could live forever?  Scratch that, what if you could die forever, as in over and over and over again?

The first half of Bong Joon-Ho's film is pretty great.  When the titular Mickey finally meets a copy of himself, things fall apart.

Robert Pattinson is good but never does seem to get his working class American accent consistent.  New characters show up out of the blue.  Mark Ruffalo as the villainous president is actually not that great.  I'm willing to be a nickel that Bong told him to "do his best Trump," and it's not a very good Trump.  The animal rights stuff isn't unwelcome, but not really integrated the way it should be either.

The ending does manage to tie the important stuff together in spite of the sloppy second half.  I liked it.  I could have waited to watch on DVD too, nothing lost.

The Book of Elsewhere by China Mieville and Keanu Reeves (Minor Spoilers)

 

I was honestly a bit trepidatious going into this one.  Mieville is one of my favorite science fiction writers, scratch that, favorite writers.  Keanu is -- one of my favorite people, not necessarily one of my favorite actors?

And right off the bat I was looking to figure out which passages where written by which dude.  There are a lot of interesting, if not great, moments, and the use of certain high-falutin' language makes me think they are Mieville's, but who knows.  A collaborative project can bring things out of you you never expected, so maybe I should give Reeves more credit.

But at the end of the day, we have a pretty good, not great, "chosen one" story (which screams Reeves) met with some philosophical ruminations as to the implications (spoiler!) of immortality, or rather quite cleverly, "infinite mortalities."

If you're really desperate to read something new by Mieville, you could do worse.  But it's never going to rank among his best work -- Perdido Street Station, The City and the City, Embassytown.  The overall focus just isn't there.

Still, I liked it just fine.  Thank you, Ted.

"The ghosts of everything"

"'What I have found,' he said, 'is that most journeys take you back to where you left from.  But not all.  A very long time ago I learned that at the end of some journeys, you start again somewhere new.  They don't happen very often.  Such journeys as those.  So when they do it's worth taking note.'  He gestured at the book.  'In any case recalling has never been a difficulty.  But there are ways of seeing.  See too many and it's overwhelming.  If you're looking for patterns, there is a line between too little information and too much.  So this is data.'

'And this,' I said, holding it up, 'is enough?  The perfect amount of information?'

'No,' he said.  'Not nearly enough.  It might be enough in a long time.  And when I write in it, as when anyone writes in any book, what I record is accompanied by the infinite ghosts of that which is not recorded.'

'The ghosts of everything,' I said."

-- China Mieville and Keanu Reeves, The Book of Elsewhere

"What was gourmet about it, I couldn't tell you."

"We went into a fast food joint.  It proclaimed itself a 'Gourmet Soupery.'  What was gourmet about it, I couldn't tell you.  I got a little dizzy when I tried to lift the tray with our two bowls on it.  Despite chiding HIM about HIS diet earlier, I realized I hadn't eaten anything since yesterday myself.  They were saying on the news that more and more young people were forgetting to eat, starving to death.

'This feels kind of embarrassing somehow,' I said as I picked up my spoon.

'Uh-huh.' HE nodded.

'I've never eaten with someone else before.'

'Me neither.'

We ate sitting side by side gazing at the video screen.  It's so hard to relax without something to look at.  The screen was showing a sunset over some southern island.  The camera didn't move, so it was pretty much like an ultravista.  Once the sun had sunk fully behind the horizon, the programme changed to Top Forty This Week.  That restaurant chain's catchphrase is 'Brand new videos, guaranteed.'"

-- Izumi Suzuki, "Terminal Boredom"

"nor devotional salve on his chin!"

"He took Cugel to a pleasant chamber on the ground floor, furnished with couch, commode, rug and lamp.  On one wall hung a tapestry woven in purple and black; on another was a representation of a peculiarly ugly baby which seemed trapped or compressed in a transparent globe.  The room suited Cugel; he announced as much to the innkeeper and returned to the pergola, where now the merrymakers were commencing to disperse.  The girl Zhiaml Vrax yet remained and she welcomed Cugel with a warmth which undid the last vestige of his caution.  After another goblet of wine; he leaned close to her ear.  'Perhaps I am over-prompt; perhaps I overindulge my vanity; perhaps I contravene the normal decorum of the village -- but is there reason why we should not repair to my chamber, and there amuse ourselves?'

'None whatever,' the girl said.  'I am unwed and until this time may conduct myself as I wish, for this is our custom.'

'Excellent,' said Cugel.  'Do you care to precede me, or walk discreetly to the rear?'

'We shall go together; there is no need for furtiveness!'

Together they went to the chamber and performed a number of erotic exercises, after which Cugel collapsed into a sleep of utter exhaustion, for his day had been taxing.

During the middle hours he awoke to find Zhiaml Vraz departed from the chamber, a fact which in his drowsiness caused him no distress and he once more returned to sleep.

The sound of the door angrily flung ajar aroused him; he sat up on the couch to find the sun not yet arisen, and a deputation led by the elder regarding him with horror and disgust.

The elder pointed a long quivering finger through he gloom.  'I thought to detect heretical opinion; now the fact is known!  Notice: he sleeps with neither head-covering nor devotional salve on his chin.  The girl Zhiaml Vraz reports that at no time in their congress did the villain call out for the approval of Yelisea!'

'Heresy beyond a doubt!' declared the others of the deputation."

-- Jack Vance, The Dying Earth

"You cannot step in the same river twice"

"Now, dear Reader, to say that two events occur at the same time is no simple matter.  In the Newtonian universe, there is an absolute gridwork of space and time, within which the material phenomena of existence fluctuate; and measuring against that gridwork one can of course say that any two given events are occurring at the same absolute time.  In the curved continuum of the Einsteinian universe, however, there is nothing but the material phenomena of existence; there is no underlying gridwork to measure against, and so you cannot say two events separated by space occur at he same time, because there is no clock that can encompass both of them -- their time is inextricably bound up with the other three dimensions that locate them.  This idea was expressed long before Einstein, by Heraclitus: 'You cannot step in the same river twice.'"

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, The Memory of Whiteness

"gossamer in a basalt world"

"Our lives are plants, creating leaves and flowers that fall away and are lost forever.  I suppose that writing this account on these leaves will make little difference; words are gossamer in a basalt world.  Still I am glad I did it.  Soon we will descend to the ninth planet, and in this interregnum I feel completely cast loose, on the edge of a new world, a new life; stripped of all habits, opinions and expectations, I tremble like a blade of grass in the open air.  The old life swirls in my mind like rock jasmine blooms down a canyon stream, and I wonder what will live on into my new existence, for even my unsheathing feels like a dream to me now, fragmentary, delirious, unreal.  Still, spun into gossamer these parts of a world may remain within my ken: what we feel most, we remember best.  The weak link is."

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Icehenge

"beauty is the ache of mortality"

"'Gods fly through space in bubbles of glass, and their powers exceed ours as ours exceed those of the stones we stand on, who know only to endure.  And once long ago gods voyaged through this forgotten bay of the night sea, and to pass the time they argued a point of philosophy.'  And here the speaker's voice grew harsh, the edge of every word sharper until they were as edged as the taste of Garth's shoulder fruit, sending the same kind of bitter shock through Thel.  'They argued aesthetics, the most metaphysical of philosophical problems.  One of them said that beauty was a quality of the universe independent of any other, that it  was inlaid in the fabric of being like gravity, in a pattern that no one could pull out.  Another disagreed: beauty is the ache of mortality, this god said, an attribute of consciousness, and nothing is beautiful except perceived through the love of lost time, so that wherever there is beauty, love was there also, and first.'"

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, A Short, Sharp Shock

"a biological contamination of the infinite"

"Here, human beings had to remember that the universe was far wider than their little nest of stars -- that, in the universe at large, silence was always more than the noisiest shout of life.  Humans explored and intruded against it, and built their stations and lived their lives, a biological contamination of the infinite, a local and temporary condition."

-- C. J. Cherryh, Foreigner

"you have not seen it properly"

"Galileo flew into another tilted mirror, and both shot through it and bounced off it at the same time, either reintegrating or not on the far side, breaking up as he became whole --

'Wait!' he shouted in a panic to Aurora.  'Help.  Help me!' This can't be right, it makes no sense! Help!'

Aurora's voice croaked in his ear, full of amusement.  'No one understands it in the way you mean. Please, relax. Fly on.  Be not afraid.  Bohr once said if you are not shocked by quantum mechanics, you have not seen it properly.  We have come to an aspect of the manifold of manifolds that cannot be understood by recourse to any images from the sensorium, nor by your beloved geometries.  It is contradictory, counter to the senses.  It has to remain at the level of the mathematical abstractions that we are moving among.  But remember, it has been shown that you can use these quantum equations and get physical experimental results of extraordinary accuracy -- in some cases as much as one in a trillion.  In that sense the equations are very demonstrably true.'

'But what does that mean?  I can't understand what I can't see.'

'Not so.  You have been doing that quite frequently now.  Rest easy.  Later the whole of quantum mechanics will be placed in the context of the ten-dimensional manifold of manifolds, and there reconciled to gravity and to general relativity.  Then, if you can go that far, you will feel better about how it is that these equations can work, or be descriptive of a real world.'

'But the results are impossible!'

'Not at all.  There are other dimensions folded into the ones our senses perceive, as I told you.'

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo's Dream

Shai-Halud? It Was Pretty Good!

I finally saw Dune, and I liked it.  Denis Villeneuve is predictably excellent, and the performances and music were great.

I guess my only gripe (although a major one) is that he should have done the whole novel in one film, in one go.  If he doesn't like Marvel films so much, why go down the sequel path?

"finding somebody living in your area who shared your very peculiar hobby was not an easy task"

Last year I finally finished Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, a history of roleplaying games as they grew out of a surprisingly long and rich history of tabletop war games.  I thought it was longer than it needed to be, but as a well-sourced academic work it's hard to criticize.  This interesting article by Giaime Alonge gets into some of the cultural context surrounding the rise of modern war board games in the 1960's simultaneously with the anti-Vietnam war movement:

"Should we assume that there was a morbid fascination with Nazism among wargamers? I would say 'yes', at least in part. One of the most important sections of the aforementioned magazine The General was the 'Opponents Wanted' page. In the pre-Internet era, finding somebody living in your area who shared your very peculiar hobby was not an easy task. Wargamers used ads to find playing mates. Several of these ads clearly state a preference for playing the Germans – or even the Japanese – in games on World War Two. Some ads go even further, like one from a 1971 issue, which reads: 'The Fuehrer desires a good Joe to crush in Stalingrad.'[17] Actually, some of the interest in playing the Nazis has strictly technical reasons. Besides games specifically devoted to the last phase of the conflict, in World War Two games the German player is usually the one on the offensive, at least in the first part of the game, and one could argue that wargamers normally prefer to attack. In some ads, authors say that they prefer playing the Germans in games where the Axis has the initiative, but want to play the Allies in Anzio (1969), a game about the Italian campaign, where the Germans are on the defensive from the very beginning. Moreover, one of the main pleasures in playing a wargame is achieving a result that is different from the historical outcome. You thus might want to win World War Two with the Axis, as you might want to win the battle of Waterloo with the French. It would then mean that you would have been 'smarter' than Napoleon. Nonetheless, dismissing this whole phenomenon with simply technical reasons would be naïve and misleading. There was a fascination with Nazism. After all, in the 1970s, Nazi paraphernalia were widespread in American and European popular culture. Susan Sontag’s well-known 1975 essay Fascinating Fascism elaborates on this point in detail.[18] Wargames were following the current."

The article also reminds us that Dungeons and Dragons, a game where you roleplay a violent vagabond, kill monsters, and take their stuff, was created in part by Gary Gygax, a lifelong pacifist and Jehovah's Witness. 

"technosignatures"

The Galileo Project is looking for intelligent life in our universe, but not through radio or light signals, but rather physical objects:

"Rather than searching for electromagnetic signals, the Galileo Project will search for physical objects associated with extraterrestrial technological equipment, also known as technosignatures.

The project will follow three major avenues of research: obtain high-resolution images of UAP through multi-detector sensors to discover their nature, search and conduct in-depth research on 'Oumuamua-like' interstellar objects, and search for potential ETC satellites.

'It is very important that we keep in mind that the Galileo Project is not for everything, and it is not for everyone,' said Laukien. 'It has a defined scope, and it has limitations,' he added, referring to the project’s aim of only exploring known physics explanations rather than speculating on prior UAPs [unidentified aerial phenomena], alleged observations and informal reports."

It's becoming clearer by the day that the Earth would be better off without humans.  And I love the phrase "technosignature," even though it's klunky as hell.

"something of narcissism in this"

"It's clear, then, that always our real interest has been not in any particular place, but rather in our ability to get to that place.  It's the process of exploration itself that fascinates us, not the places we explore.  There is perhaps something of narcissism in this.  So, these days we hear all about the asteroids, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, the clouds of Venus, and so on.  These places are the new focus of our interest, of our primal urge to walk over the next ridge and see what's there.  There are the next hardest place to reach, and said to be supremely fascinating, but what will happen when we reach them?

Anyway, now here I am, on the moon.  After the Americans got to it in the twentieth century, they left, and for a long time it rolled in our sky, empty as it had always been.  A bone-white ball of rubble.  Airless, freeze-dried, unlivable, without extractable resources.  Why go back, having been there already?"

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Moon

"with a bad joke written over His head"

"That was not for her to know, either.  God worked discreetly, and in the ways that pleased Him.  It had pleased Him that the Children of Israel should sweat and strain under the Egyptian yoke for generations.  It had pleased Him to send Joseph into slavery, his fine coat of many colors ripped rudely from his back.  It had pleased Him to allow the visitation of a hundred plagues on hapless Job, and it had pleased Him to allow His only Son to be hung up on a tree with a bad joke written over His head.

God was a gamesman -- if He had been a mortal, He would have been at home hunkering over a checkerboard on the porch of Pop Mann's general store back in Hemingford Home.  He played red to black, white to black.  She thought that, for Him, the game was more than worth the candle, the game was the candle.  He would prevail in His own good time.  But not necessarily this year, or in the next thousand. . . and she would not overestimate the dark man's craft and cozening.  If he was neon gas, then she was the tiny dark dust particle a great raincloud forms about over the parched land.  Only another private soldier -- long past retirement age, it was true! -- in the service of the Lord."

-- Stephen King, The Stand