I realized this morning what struck me as odd about the original crew of Moya: they’re not a crew, they’re a D&D party. Two warriors, a priest, a thief, and Ordinary Guy (who’d probably be classed as a bard). We started trying to categorize everyone else who shows up and realized that we’d need to know all the kits and extra subclasses to do it right. Then I thought of trying to determine alignments and couldn’t decide whether to use the D&D system or the TMNT system (which I barely know but seems to work better for actual people). It was at that point that Kelson said, “You know, it’d be easier to sort them into Hogwarts houses.” So we did. Continue reading
Tag: Science Fiction
Cancellations
When it comes to serial entertainment, everything will end at some point. I’m sure even Superman and Spider-Man comics will cease someday. A show can end before or after it’s run out of things to say, but it’s worst when it hasn’t finished speaking.
We’ve all seen shows that kept going long after, by any rights, they should have been cancelled. Is there any doubt that Voyager only lasted 7 years because it was Star Trek, on a studio-owned network, and the previous two Treks had also run that long? “The Far Side” and “Calvin and Hobbes” ended while the artists were at the top of their form. Compare that to “Peanuts,” whose last 20 years were hardly worth reading, or the new “Opus” from Berkeley Breathed (although it does have its moments). Continue reading
Not where I was expecting it!
The mystery of where the Farscape miniseries will air has been answered! From Sci-Fi Wire [archive.org]:
SCI FI announced it will be bringing back Farscape with an all-new miniseries — called Farscape: Peacekeeper War — slated to air in the fourth quarter of this year.
WTF? OK, it’s not the last place I’d expect – that would be Fox, or maybe Lifetime – but the Sci Fi Channel has spent the last year and a half distancing itself from Farscape, and a good chunk of that trying to move away from actual science fiction. I guess Dune must have done better than Scare Tactics.
Hmm, it might be worth getting cable again.
Further reading: Save Farscape, in particular Sci Fi Picks up the Mini [archive.org].
Congratulations to the Farscape cast and crew! We’ll be watching!
Neo Genesis Revangelions
Saw The Matrix: Revolutions yesterday after hearing almost nothing but bad press. We went in expecting nothing, so except for the crappy dialogue, it wasn’t bad at all while we were watching it. Afterward, though, once there was time to digest everything in the context of a single movie as well as a trilogy, it was a different story. I’m not bashing it Kenneth-Turan style, but as a person who appreciates both style and substance, I found myself retrospectively disappointed.
Those of you who’ve seen Evangelion will know exactly what the title is referring to. I’m not big on religious symbolism for its own sake, but if it serves a purpose, as it does in Evangelion, I’ll go with it. There wasn’t really a purpose in this beyond being messianic. I guess what ticks me off the most is Continue reading
Vertical Horizon winning the filk wars
It’s official: Vertical Horizon now has ten songs to their name that we’ve determined to be at least 75% appropriate for sci-fi, fantasy, or anime music videos. The only other band that comes close to this is the Wallflowers, with four. Don’t ask me how they do this. We just watch (and occasionally read) stuff, then listen to songs, and the songs fit.
Tuesdays, we go over for dinner and Farscape with Kelson’s family. Scapers, get ready to wail: last night’s program was “Self Inflicted Wounds.” Both episodes. For non-Scapers, yes, it was as big an emotional wringer as you may have guessed. When we got home after a round of coffee and sympathy, I checked a hunch on the lyric sheet for the latest VH album, Go. Bingo–“Won’t Go Away” has now officially joined the ranks of the video-able.
At the risk of sounding like an IMDb summary, get the full list here…… Continue reading
Fuzzy logic?
I finally saw Terminator 3 this weekend, and something has been bothering me about the ending (aside from watching the end of the world).
Skynet’s a distributed system. Presumably its intelligence scales along with the number of nodes it has. Those nodes are computers all over the world. Those computers are most concentrated in major cities. Skynet launches a global nuclear attack on those major cities. That wipes out a huge percentage of its own computing nodes. It’s also going to take out huge chunks of the Internet’s infrastructure, leaving many of the remaining nodes disconnected from each other.
In its attempt to wipe out humans, Skynet gave itself a world-class lobotomy.
I don’t know about you, but that just doesn’t sound like a winning strategy to me.
Science Meets Fantasy: Wheel of Time genetics
I’m beginning to understand why someone would jump out of a bathtub and go streaking through the streets with a fantastic new idea. Recently, in the shower, my brain decided it wanted to write a graphic novel. The day after, it worked out a genetic explanation of channeling in the Wheel of Time universe. If you haven’t read any Robert Jordan, or if you don’t know basic genetics, this won’t make a huge lot of sense. If you’ve read some but not all, be warned that this explanation contains information you may not have reached. None of it is serious, but if you’re a fanatic about not being spoiled, watch out. I’ll break the article before I get into speculation that people might not have heard or want to hear.
Here’s my model. There are three factors controlling channeling ability: whether you can do it, whether you have the spark or can learn, and how strong you are. Strength and sparkiness don’t seem to be related, and neither seems to be related to sex. What I propose is that basic channeling ability is a recessive, sex-linked trait. There are variations of a gene on both the X and Y chromosomes, X’ and Y’ to borrow from Katherine Kurtz, that enable awareness of, respectively, saidar and saidin. In order to channel, someone has to have this variation on both their sex chromosomes. So an X’Y male can’t channel, but an X’Y’ can. X’X women and X’Y or XY’ men can’t even sense the Source. The elegant part of this is that it explains why men who can channel or learn can sense when a woman is channeling: they have the X’. It also explains why channeling-capable men can only tell other men can channel when they do it, while women have an easy time telling when other women can channel (sensing other Aes Sedai, seeing the glow, knowing who’s sparky), since they have double sensitivity to saidar.
Sparkiness is easy compared to that. It seems to be a simple dominant-recessive or absent-present allele situation. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say there are two possible places on non-X-or-Y chromosomes that the allele (call it “spontaneity,” S for absent and s for present) can appear. If someone has one, and all other genetic markers are in order, he/she is a learner; two means he/she has the spark. This makes for a very easy Punnett square giving about twice as many sul’dam as damane.
I won’t address strength, since it’s not a black-and-white issue and probably involves a lot of genes that most people just don’t use, not having the right matchups in spontaneity or sensitivity. However, I do want to look at what happens when you examine a few special families…. Continue reading