Compromise and Conceit

Current reading: Blood of Elves

September 28, 2009

Blood of Elves is the “sequel” to The Last Wish, which is the first book in the series which spawned that most excellent computer game, The Witcher. It’s by a Polish writer called Andrzej Sapkowksi.

Unfortunately – and I knew this before I bought it because a Polish girl warned me but I forgot the warning – Gollancz sci-fi have done the dirty and released the English translation of the third book in the series without releasing the second. The inner sheet on the book even acts like Sapkowski has only written the two books, but he hasn’t, he’s written at least 3. I got several chapters in before I started thinking “there’s an awful lot of assumed knowledge here” but because the first book had a lot of unstated or implied information (see below!), for some time I assumed the “second” book was doing the same. Sadly, it wasn’t, and now I know everything that happened in the second book even though I don’t read Polish. This is a Bugger. However, the book is excellent so I shan’t stop.

The Last Wish is essentially a set of fractured fairy tales, fairy tales with a twist or revision to the original story. The central character is a Witcher who runs around the world protecting people from Monsters, which in many cases are the Monsters from the Fairy tale; but sometimes the humans involved are the real monsters. Often the Witcher drops into the fairy tale after the original story is over. But the book really doesn’t bash you over the head with its fairy tale element, so for most of it you just feel you’re reading a set of vaguely related short stories about a washed up Polish rock god with mutant genes[1]. I liked the character, I liked the world and I liked the stories, and I liked the subtle element of fairy tale revisionism built into them[2].

Blood of Elves is a much less literary effort, using a standard fantasy trilogy-style narrative structure, less special fairy tale references, and occasional shrek-style references to modern ideas. Geralt (the Witcher) is on a quest, it’s simple, it goes from beginning to end (so far). It’s also got more of that desperate sense of struggling against the darkness. However, it still has the key elements of the original – some very dry cynical wit[3], Geralt is the same, the sense of a world on the cusp of modernity but surrounded by magic and evil powers. It’s very fun to read, alternating between dry humour, satire, dark emotional depth and good old-fashioned fightin’ and lovin’. It also has a much better depiction of inter-racial conflict (between elves, dwarves, humans, etc) than many other fantasy stories, and the central conflict in the book seems to involve issues of racial harmony very strongly[4]. I do wonder if this part of the book reflects Polish cultural debate about Europe, though I don’t know enough about what’s going on in Poland and their attitudes towards Europe, history or modern race relations to be able to make a judgement.

This is part of what I enjoy about the Witcher, actually – there are hints of cultural references I don’t quite get that make the whole thing a tad more mysterious than it might otherwise be. But mostly I like it because it’s funny, dark and well written. I should probably advise waiting for the books to come out in the proper order but, hey! We all enjoyed the Firefly series despite this sort of philistinism on the part of its producers, so hey – go and read it! Screw the linear time thing! If you had to sit through distorted narrative structure in the whole of the first book, why stop now!?

—

[fn1] That’s just what he looks like – you’ve all played the game, you know what I mean!

[fn2]: My partner, who is really into fractured fairy tales and studied them at University, was not so impressed; she is a much better judge of literature than me and a much harsher critic. So maybe my opinion is best taken with a grain of salt. But you knew that.

[fn3]: of course when I lived in Australia I knew nothing about Poles; but since I came to London I’ve met and worked with many, and they do seem to have a wickedly dry and cynical humour in general, more fatalistic and biting than the British without some of the worst of the ascerbic rudeness that comes with British sarcasm.

[fn4]: I’m not entirely sure what the outcome of this discussion of racial harmony will be. I think it might be something like “we’re all fucked anyway, so can’t you just get over it?” but I’m reserving judgement.
In place of Japanese Reading, Randomised Block Experiments

September 28, 2009

I use a Japanese social networking site called Mixi, that is a kind of blogging/photo uploading/community/facebook style site all rolled into one, minus (mostly) the spam weirdness of facebook, with a lot more privacy settings and slightly more obtrusive advertising. Recently I have been roped into playing a farming game with my friends, called Sunshine Ranch:

See the turtle god smile on my harvest…

The principle is that of all civ-type games. I grow plants, I sell them, I make money and buy seeds and upgrades. You can see in my dock down the bottom[1] that I have various tools. Sometimes I have drought, sometimes insects infect my crops. I start with 6 plots and as I get rich I can buy more, and when I get to level 10 I can go to the animal yard and start growing chickens (which are very cute; I’m looking forward to the cute way they die horribly when I “harvest” them). This game has competitive and cooperative options though – on the right hand side of the screen you can see a list of those friends of mine who have replied to my request to waste their time harvesting stuff. I can go to their farm and put insects in their crops, and scrump their apples. I can also water their crops or kill insects. I get experience for this (and I can sell the apple-y loot).

The thing is, it’s all in Japanese (this is why I use Mixi!). I can read most of what’s on the screen and the tooltips, but there are some things I can’t read properly – particularly the explanations of what the various purchasable items do. So I have this suspicion that putting fertiliser on your plants increases the amount they yield as well as the speed at which they yield; but the tooltip doesn’t say this and I can’t read the more detailed information (well, i could, copy and paste and the joyous rikaichan being very useful; but I can’t be bothered). So instead of reading about it, I am doing a kind of randomised block experiment where I choose one of the blocks of similar plants (in the picture above, it’s apples) and apply fertiliser, while the other one remains natural. I then compare yields at the end of the period. Normal fertiliser costs 30 coin and gives a 1 hour increase in speed, and I can apply it once at each stage of growth (there are usually 4 stages). But an apple tree (for example) takes about 15 hours total to grow and yields about 100 coin; so unless I gain a significant amount of yield benefit from the fertiliser beyond the time frame, it’s not worth spending the money. Hence the experiment. The problem is, yield may depend on my level and also on how many insects my friends blight me with; so I should really be keeping detailed data on covariates.

If I were going to do that though I would just as well translate the help, eh?

Anyway it’s fun, and I’m currently a better rancher than my friends. I even have a 7th plot! Just wait till I have a horde of chickens to slaughter!! I’m sure they’ll be very cute…

—

[1] I didn’t notice at first but it really is exactly like a dock – the tool symbols increase in size when you roll over them.
All foxes are grey

September 26, 2009

Yatta! We did it!!! Even though the pop-up porn virus Echo put in the world’s computer system didn’t work because the architects of the flesh knew we were coming to their space station to throw their god into space to join the christian god who is all beardy and looks down on you from very far away and didn’t like his own son very much but maybe they were too busy looking at all the colourful lingerie that the porn girls were wearing and they didn’t have time to arrange a proper party for us because all they had to throw at us were 50 space zombies and a spinning dragon called Desdemona who’s really a woman. They really really must hate clothes in the future because the space zombies weren’t even wearing space suits they just fired them out of the space station straight at us in just their underwear but I suppose if you’re dead you don’t care what you’re wearing or maybe once you die in the future you get some sense and you refuse to wear their stupid grey clothes I wish I did! Actually after Grandma Noodles’s Apprentice fired me out of the airlock with all the other rubbish I thought about that a bit and I used my magic to change my body so I didn’t have to breathe anymore and then I didn’t have to wear that stupid grey suit. I suppose I got the idea from Grandma Noodles because I had to help her change her suit so it could fit all those bottles of special potion that smells like bad sake. She fights really well after she drinks that potion but it smells pretty bad especially since she’s such a good noodle cook (her noodles are sooooooooo oishii yo!!) but I’ve never actually seen her make the potion so maybe she buys it somewhere anyway when we take over allllllll the Feng Shui sites in the world maybe she can make a better potion.

[gasp!]

anyway so they fired 50 space zombies and a dragon at us, so Grandma Noodles’s Apprentice fired me out of the airlock with all the rubbish, and then he found out that the spaceship has this big claw on it which must be what he was going to use to bring me back inside when he realised he’d fired me out of the airlock but instead he started hitting the zombies with it which is a really good idea because in space even a little bump makes you fly off forever into the sun unless you’re like me and you can fly wherever you want and wear any miniskirt you want even a grey one but I’m never gonna wear grey again never ever! So I thought making the zombies fly into the sun is a good idea so I threw rubbish at them with my magic and it hit lots of them and Grandma Noodles and Kitsune and Echo and Uncle Ed who turns up sometimes when I think really hard went out onto the spaceship and started killing space zombies who move like really slowly but then the big dragon stopped spinning round and round and landed on the nose of the spaceship so everyone had to fight her but she kept blowing up and even though I was a long way away and hiding behind rubbish I nearly died which is weird because my science teacher told me that there’s no fire in space so it must have been magical fire who knew that a dragon has magic fire? I thought they just flew around and had a pearl in their brain and said clever things but then I didn’t know they moved by spinning around either so I suppose you learn something new about people every day before you kill them.

[gasp]

so after Kitsune turned the whole spaceship into an electric exploding death rocket and Grandma Noodles’s Apprentice crashed the spaceship into the space station through the dragon and Kitsune had somersaulted off its exploding spleen we all went to the door to the space station which the Architects of the Flesh had to keep locked because there’s no air in space so I disintegrated the door and then Echo opened the inner door because she’s really clever but I came in late because I had been burnt really bad like the yakitori Grandma Noodles makes only yakiyuki so I had to spend a bit of time healing myself. We all got inside the door and looked around and there was a room with these scientists in and there was a hole in the roof but no air was escaping because it actually went to the netherworld which has air in it even though demons don’t need to breathe which must mean they like yelling a lot which is what the dragon did when Grandma Noodles’s Apprentice flew the rocket ship through her stomach only we couldn’t hear what she was saying because there was no air and if there was we probably would only have heard lightning and explosions anyway

[gasp]

but the Little God that’s tougher than our God was there in Fox form with one tail sticking into the netherworld and the other 8 tails swishing about like my Cat did when it was watching a mouse and the God was looking at us but it was kind of see-through like a jellyfish so I don’t think it had manifested properly which is kind of an oops but then when we looked down under the floor we saw that the shrine box that Gods come in was bound in a kind of magic circle that must be stopping the Little God from getting out which is weird because that’s what the Architects wanted to do with the God but we didn’t think about that too much yet because we don’t think we just Do because that’s what Bruce Lee said works and it’s worked so far hasn’t it? But Echo thinks and she said she thought Omega was somewhere in the room and she would know because she’s just like him only younger so I cast a spell through my phone and I could see omega was right in front of us and I sent everyone the picture and then Echo did a thing with her big sword and one of his scary guns broke and all his scary agony grenades that hurt us last time fell on the floor like that time I was trying to leave the convenience store with the chu hais and my high school skirt unrolled by accident and they all fell on the floor and I’d forgotten to pay and the guy behind the counter got really angry and it took me like 10 minutes to calm him down which is really long for me and then the other customers were really angry because they were locked out and there was a special offer on UFO Noodles. Only Omega didn’t get to pick up his agony grenades and go home and lie down like I did because then everyone started kicking and punching him and his other gun exploded and melted his face and then Grandma Noodles touched him on the elbow like Bruce Lee does and then while he was standing still looking at the ceiling Kitsune said something to him that none of us could hear and then he died horribly and I said “otsukaresamadeshita” and everyone else clapped and Grandma Noodles had a drink

[gasp]

which makes me think that if the Buro’s super soldier is that easy to kill then maybe the God is too but the scientists didn’t want to let the God out for us to kill but then I disintegrated the glass barrier between us and them and all the bits of Omega that Kitsune left on the glass went spattering into the room and I think that scared them so they let the God go but that was a really stupid thing to do because we were just going to talk to them and maybe also throw them out of the airlock to die unless Kitsune got to them first but the God stole their souls and turned them into wraiths and then the God changed from its Foxy Form to its Wraith Form and I didn’t know shrine Gods had a wraith form maybe that was something Mummy was going to tell me if the Copycat Ninjas hadn’t killed her

[gasp]

so anyway I was thinking that maybe I should go out of the airlock too but my scooter blew up with the rocketship and its a long way to fly to earth without a scooter and anyway I’d be trapped in the future with the grey clothes and a mad Fox Wraith chasing me after it ate my friends’ souls so I figured I’d better stay and die well so I stayed. We had this magician with us and he turned out to be from 9AD and because in 9AD they don’t have the internet or philosophy or anything their magic is really really evil so he offered us snakes we could use to become evil too and only the good die young so everyone said YEAH we’ll have snakes and be powerful and evil and live forever and me and Kitsune said no we’ll be good and weak and die young because we don’t think we just Do like Bruce Lee who must be good because he died really young. And the WraithFoxGod made its dead scientist wraiths attack us and plugged itself into the computer because all the chi beaming up from earth was going to go into it and it was going to keep getting bigger and tougher until it was bigger and tougher than anyone so Echo plugged the Big God that’s weaker than the WraithFoxGod into the computer too and then Echo started trying to channel the chi from Earth into our God instead of the bad God but they were fighting in like the spirit world or something which is a really boring place but at least they weren’t doing it where we were. So we fought the 9 Scientist Wraiths which steal chi but then I remembered that I’m like a priest so I started banishing them and Grandma Noodles hit a few and Kitsune killed a few and then they were all gone.

[gasp]

and because Echo was doing really cool computer things our God was beating the WraithFoxGod and so then we all attacked the WraithFoxGod and it died really fast and disappeared and we were all really happy until we realised we were stuck on a space station without a rocketship and the only way out was through the netherworld portal but that goes to the army of the Architects of the Flesh and the way the world works we could probably kill all of them but if they had more spinny-explodey dragon-women then we could all die and that’s what you get for being like Bruce Lee and not thinking before you Do I suppose but he died from taking aspirin not from being eaten alive by a giant spinning exploding dragon (but I haven’t seen the movie so I don’t know for sure) anyway then the bad wizard with the evil magic from 9AD made a hole in the floor and said “frying pan or fire”? which I think must be some kind of 9AD invocation of great power, because when we jumped down the hole and he said “oh fiiiiiiiire!” we ended up in Hell. Well, we all guessed it was hell from the fires and the moaning sounds and the colour of the sky and the smell but sometimes Kitsune takes a long time to understand what’s happening like how she didn’t realise it was a copycat Ninja that killed her mother but kept thinking it was Omega but there was this man who was looking over his shoulder at us and he was crying like he’d cut an onion and he told Kitsune we were in Hell

[gasp]

so now we’re in hell but at least we killed a God. Yatta!
So many bullets, so little time…

September 6, 2009
The Guardian has a Friday article about which computer game its readers would most like to see deleted from History.

Amusing points from this article:
1. a surprising number of people hate Halo
2. Guardian readers say really nasty things about people they don’t like
3. WoW is seen by some commenters as a nasty influence on computer games generally.
I particularly like this quote:

If WOW was removed from history I’d have about 2400 hours of life back, which I could use to learn to paint, play piano to a high standard, travel the world, write a novel etc. But I’d probably spend it playing Eve Online or something.

It shows how much time people burn on these games… still I’m sure it’s better than spending that time in front of a TV.

Also I like the commenter who thinks the Final Fantasy series should be deleted, just in order to prevent Sephiroth Cos-players. I don’t have a theory on deleting games, but I would certainly say not to delete Freedom Force, Baldur’s Gate 2, or Halo. I definitely disagree about Halo, sure it was just a FPS but it made up in atmosphere and beauty for what it lacked in depth.
Compromise and Conceit: New Nations of the Red Empire

September 6, 2009
It is now spring in 1755, 6 months since the Indian rebellion and the collapse of the British at Albany. The Indians have overrun the forces of the British, capturing Albany and other key towns all the way South to the heavily settled areas of New York. Rebellious colonials maintain essential control over the major cities of the North – places like Albany and Boston – but their cities are essentially white outposts in the new red expanse. The British government holds a band of cities along the coast, from New York in the North to Richmond and Hampton in Virginia. They also have a sizeable community of Delaware Indians hostage South East of Washington, on the Delaware peninsula. They are moving troops into these cities to reinforce them, and it may be that they are going to be able to maintain some kind of status quo, provided that the French remaining threatening to the North.

Things as they were…

The most likely outcome of the endgame of this war will be that the colonials will establish an independent kingdom in the belt of cities from Albany through Boston to Maine, possibly constituting them as independent city states within a broader series of native American nations. The British will then retain the seaboard and its immediate surrounds, from New York to Hampton, and will repatriate the Delaware tribes they have captured as part of a peace settlement. Any attempt by the Indians to capture New York and Washington will lead to a brutal and devastating series of battles, and the massive loss of forces on both sides. The only way that the Indians will capture these cities easily is if something forces the British to withdraw, and it is looking likely that the only thing which would force this is a collapse of support for the colonial enterprise in England, or a catastrophic loss to the French in Europe forcing a withdrawal of forces from the colonies.

Should the Indians overrun the British territories, the most likely outcome will be the slaughter of British forces and the civilians living there, especially now that the enigmatic Cherokee and Shanwee have moved into the campaign to the South West of Virginia. The colonials of the North Eastern territories will then be able to move into these cities and form them into additional city states, though there is some possibility that the South-Eastern Indian tribes – the Southern Delaware, Shawnee and Cherokee – will want to take over Hampton or Richmond in Virginia as a kind of Indian city-state, and the North-Eastern Indian tribes – the Northern Delaware, Iroquois, Mohawk and Mohican – will want to take over Ohio for the same purpose. This will involve displacement or destruction of white families, and in the latter case possibly some conflict with the French.

The Iroquois, Mohawk and Mohican nations have now captured all the hinterlands North, Northwest and West of Albany and Shenechtady, which has been designated a joint Indian–colonial trading town on the edge of the “independent” city-state of Albany. In recognition of their efforts, the characters have been granted a huge slice of this land to rule as their own kingdom. This land consists of a triangle stretching from Fort William Henry through Sackets Harbour on Lake Ontario to the Canadian border, along this border (essentially the St Lawrence River) as far as the trapping town of Cornwall, then East to Rouses Point (the northernmost tip of non-French land at this time). Everything lying between this boundary and the western bank of the Lakes Champlain, George and Saratoga belongs to the characters.

Map-making in this era is truly Infernal

Negotiations are currently underway with the tribes and colonial towns of this land to arrange their transfer of allegiance to the PCs. This will be the only multi-ethnic land in North America, consisting as it does of mixed Mohawk, Mohican and settler country. It will be the PCs’ responsibility to make this land richer, and to defend it from the French…

The PCs have to decide the answers to the following questions:
1. Do they want this land?
2. Do they want to see the victory of the Indians and Colonials in the New World?
3. If they side with these people, can they think of a way to bring about the peaceful collapse of British forces in New York and Virginia?
4. If not, will they aid in a war to destroy them, or press for peace?
5. If they take the land, and knowing that they will be able to make money trading with the newly constituted city states, do they care what happens between the Indians and the British?
6. Is there anything else they want to do?
Discuss in comments…
Strange Doings in Strange Junctures

September 6, 2009

Schoolgirls in space…

So we were all doing fine in the 2009 juncture, but we hadn’t found my Shrine’s God so we went to 2056 where the Architects Of the Flesh had taken It, and when we got there we met these flying apes and they helped us to find the secret research lab where my god was being held only we had help from the Dragons and while the apes were fighting the Flying Iron Men from the Buro I had to try and rescue my mummy who was trapped in a sarcophaga-[whatever] and like I said we had help from the Dragons but Kar Fai is old and Useless so mummy had to stay unconscious

[gasp]

only then we all had to go raid the flying ship-thingy, and Kitsune’s mummy was there but she was a hostage of the Architects of the Flesh and I disintegrated the bomb belt she was wearing because it didn’t suit her and I did it through my phone and then Kitsune and Grandma Noodles flew down to earth on a parachute of noodles and I rescued Echo who smells and has a robot arm and where has that ghost-girl gone? Doesn’t matter anyway because we all went back down to save my God from under the floor of the lab but Kar Fai and the Dragons had gone and taken the God with them AND my mummy even though she was brainwashed

[gasp]

so then anyway we chased them in a big tanky-thing but it was slow and Echo thinks she is so good at driving but she is completely like heta yo, so I jumped on my moped and I caught the Dragons in their car but they didn’t want to talk to me and my mummy was angry and then kitsune had to protect her mummy because my mummy tried to kill kitsune’s mummy and when she did kitsune had to defend her mummy but she must have cut her by mistake or something because when my mummy’s magic cleared and all the flashing dots were gone from my eyes Kitsune’s mummy was gone and there was a big soldier with a robot arm who Echo called omega and then we had a fight but I threw my moped at omega and he ran away but we couldn’t catch him

[gasp]

so then my mummy died and she didn’t even say thanks but she said something about 1868 and I thought she meant that new CK perfume I can’t afford but Grandma Noodles said that was her birthday – I mean like when she was born, not like the last time she was pretty and someone gave her a present on her birthday, which was probably 1898 – and Kitsune said we were both stupid and that was the Meiji restoration and I really don’t think you should speak to Grandma Noodles like that especially when she’s drunk but Kitsune’s a ninja so I suppose she’s okay

[gasp]

so anyway then we had an argument with Kar Fai and the Dragons and then these big monkeys arrived and they got angry with me too because they say an ape is different to a monkey and then they tried to tell me that whales are not fish and I was confused but I took a photo anyway and the Dragons told us that the Architects of the Flesh had this plan to take my shrine’s God and brainwash it and then they would go back in time to like 9 AD or something and bury my God somewhere so it would grow old and then when they dug it up in 2056 it would be 2000 years old and super powerful and really dirty, and then they would use it to take over the world in 2009 which I suppose they have to do because the food and fashion in 2056 is like completely saiyaku yo so I suppose they want to steal our cool

[gasp]

which they could like soooooooo do if they used my God’s power to take over the Feng Shui sites in 2009 like they own them all in 2056

[gasp]

but they could only brainwash my God because it was young because it was born in 1868 which is like…

…

…

so then we were all like let’s go back to 1868 when the God was born and convince the previous God to come with us to the future to fight the new god when it becomes the extra-old god. So we went back to 1868 and walked all the way across Hyogo in those funny wooden geta they had then and my feet hurt but we pretended to be travelling musicians and everything was all like tale of genji except for the steam trains and it’s weird because when we went back to before I was born I wasn’t any thinner but I suppose that’s why they call it baby fat and so the God said like YEAH let’s go and kill the new god and then we went forward in time again and put our old God into a suit of Iron Armour like hagane renkinjitsu shi only bigger and I made sure I didn’t paint the little symbol in blood so it can’t be washed off with a water pistol why does no-one else ever think of these things but I suppose I didn’t try to resurrect my mummy either maybe I’m growing up

[gasp]

and in forward time which is like the future only you can’t do things there if they might stop what happened in the past which is called linear time we were all like, what are we gonna do and this big monkey called BattleChimp Potemkin said we should kill everything and Kitsune agreed (of course) and The Dragons said that they had heard that the Buro were planning on putting my Shrine’s new God that was now a super old god into a satellite called Sheba so that they could beam its Godlike powers through a space portal into the past and take over the world so we would have to stop it by going into space on a rocketship and taking the god out of the satellite and throwing it away like rubbish and it would burn up in space even though space is like really cold and then we could put our old god which is now the younger god but isn’t brainwashed into the satellite and beam its Godlike power down to earth and take over all the Feng Shui sites in 2056 and then we would be like the most powerful magicians on the planet and then we could find that omega guy and completely kill him

[gasp]

so Echo put pop-up pornographic virusses in all the world’s computers because she’s weird and then we went to Tunguska and stole a rubbish truck and drove it into a spacebase and I had to disintegrate some people that Kitsune and Grandma Noodles killed because she was drunk again and then we went downstairs into a like command centre thing and then Kitsune killed some other people who were in the way but it looked like a kind of disco or a noh play or something only the actors don’t die in Noh plays at least that’s what mummy used to tell me when I was scared and then I disintegrated the wrong half of the door and all these guys got angry and tried to shoot us so Kitsune and Grandma Noodles killed them and then we talked to some other soldiers who were scared of us and one of them agreed to call his boss if I didn’t disintegrate his special treasures and then the boss came over but Grandma Noodles was still drunk so the boss died too and then Echo broke everything except the remote control rocket ship and we drove over there and hopped on

[gasp]

but there was this creature made of leaves that chased us and even though I poured a potion on the sand it still tried to kill us the stupid thing and Echo told us that its really bad if vines grow on a rocket just when it’s taking off ’cause it’s going really slowly and it can tip over and kill everyone like in a movie so Kitsune and I went onto the outside of the rocket ship and I had a rope and I disintegrated the vines and then the plant monster died and it was like surfing only really hot and kind of high up so I went back inside and Echo told me to make sure I locked the door properly because we were going into space and it’s really cold and now we’re on our way to the satellite and it’s boring…
Antagonism, Nerds and our Idols

August 13, 2009

Writing about Torchwood made me think of a conversation I had with a colleague about the show. She is your classic role-playing nerd, computer geek and all round otaku. When I mentioned – somewhat breathlessly – to her that I had watched 5 episodes of amazing Torchwoody goodness, she immediately launched into a tirade on how the first 3 episodes were great and then it turned shit[1]. She then revealed that she had watched all 3 seasons, and gave a blistering critique of the homophobia in the show. I checked with a friend, and it turns out the show’s writer is gay. So homophobia, probably not so much[2]. Now, I didn’t get a hint of this and aside from one small section of episode 4 which I thought was a bit kooky, I thought the last 2 episodes of this arc held together very well and, even if not satisfying everyone’s definition of perfect, could hardly be called shit.

I also recently had a big argument with a friend about the Lord of the Rings Movies[3], and was reminded (just coincidentally) of an old role-player in Australia who was so hell-bent on believing that these movies wrecked the books that he was 100% sure that Gandalf said “Run you fools!” in the movie, i.e. that his famous phrase had been corrupted “for the sheeple”. I had to force him to watch the movie to point out to him that he was wrong.

And I realised – I think nerds have a quite antagonistic relationship with their cinematic and literary idols, in which we are happy to lap up their good work but are really critical of even the smallest failings, failings of course which occur in a very complex and difficult medium beset by forces beyond the creator’s control [i.e. producers]. I think nerds go out of their way to find fault with their idols, with the creators of new work, and with re-imaginings of old work. I think this is part of the grognard movement – which seems to hold that, the more people D&D tries to attract, the worse it must become – and is also linked to a strong tendency to reject any work which attempts to popularise any aspect of our sub-culture, and any creative figure who wants to be approved of by the mainstream.

I think this is the product of years of being abused by the cool kids, and in many of us it has led to a “Nerdier than thou” attitude which refuses to allow for the kind of compromises which any artist or creative person has to make to get their work liked by more than 3 guys in a room (who aren’t going to pay anyway, because they can use bittorrent). We’re like the Metallica fans who didn’t like the Black album because we found this band first, don’t you know, and who are all these middle class 14 year old girls who like that song and how dare Metallica try to become popular? It’s okay for us to sell out and get a windows certification so we can keep working [4], but how dare Joss Whedon consider doing the same!!? He’s the standard bearer for our paaaaiiin…[5]

… and as a consequence I think quite often nerds criticise otherwise good works, which may not have been perfect but deserve some respect anyway. And this leads to an attitude of refusing to share our life’s interests with people who don’t “get” something as plainly “obvious” as rolling 4d6 for strength, keep the best 3. Which just keeps us separated from the rest of the world, wondering why they don’t want to understand the fat kids who’re sneering at them…

—

fn1: Which, can I mention, is a really common English thing – you mention to your interlocutor that you like something and, even though they may never have even met you before, they immediately launch in with “what you like is shit”. I have had this sooooo many times since I came to London and it is sooooo thoroughly offensive.

fn2: yes yes, I know, gay people can be latent homophobes, but I prefer to have solid evidence of this before I make such accusations, because they’re really mean-spirited.

fn3: I will be coming back to this, because the claim they spoilt the books really gives me the shits

fn4: I haven’t done this, btw, but I would if I had to

fn5: which, incidentally, shows pretty clearly how our relationship with our idols is coloured by this history of social rejection – why should we even care if our feelings and worldview have a standard bearer? Except that when we were kids our weird and somewhat off-kilter interests were sneered at…
Current viewing: Torchwood, Children of Earth

August 12, 2009

On the recommendation of a friend I watched this 5 episode arc of Torchwood, and I was stunned by its brilliance. Torchwood is some kind of Dr. Who spin-off, which means that by rights I should hate it (I’m not a big fan of the good Doctor). It is about a UFO investigation unit based in Cardiff – yes, Cardiff – consisting of 2 humans and some kind of god straight out of the UFO universe, Dr. Jack Harkness, who wears a really badly clashing and naff combination of military overcoats and chinos, and can’t be killed by any means. This is a weird combination of people. Also Jack is in some kind of gay relationship with another investigator of undisclosed name (which could be Yantov but is impossible to understand in the show). So I suppose it’s an X-Files/Dr. Who/6′ Under kind of crossover show, made in England.

Hardly an auspicious beginning.

However, the series was brilliant in the best tradition of brilliant British TV – that is, dialogue, acting and tense pace sufficient to kill any costuming or special effects flaws. The premise is contact with an alien race who do some very bad things to kiddies, and a subsequently increasingly nasty series of increasingly immoral decisions that various people have to make, mostly in the best interests of everyone but themselves. It takes the kind of parlour-room, drunken moral debates we all had when we were 12 – would you kill 1 to save a thousand? and other assorted blandness – to a stunning and brilliant conclusion, in which you can’t fault anyone for putting aside their conscience, but everyone comes out looking very very bad. The final scenes involve breaking so many of the kind of taboo images that TV thrives on that one has to be satisfied. And best of all, the whole thing is carried off without even the slightest hint of a skerrick of a whiff of even the smallest implication that the taboos are being broken just in order to shock, or that the moral decisions involved are just university debating school stuff. By the beginning of the 4th episode I really felt like I was caught up in a life-and-death, future-of-the-race kind of moral decision, not a cheap university debate about whether I would rather kill the dog or the baby.

This of course is the essence of good science fiction, and so rarely done on tv or film – to try and use the speculative elements of the genre to create the kind of moral and intellectual positions which are not believable in normal fiction. And Torchwood does it at its best.

The plot is also blessedly free of inconsistencies or mistakes. There were a few things I thought could maybe have been done faintly better (I won’t list them here due to their intense spoileriness), but in discussion with others who have viewed the show I haven’t been able to conclude that they were very crucial or very obvious mistakes, so they’re probably just a matter of personal preference. And it is a rare series of tv episodes where everything just slots together in a complex and multi-layered story. Well done, Torchwood.

Also, finally, I thought the gay lead was done very well. It wasn’t until the show was over that I really even stopped to think about whether or not it had been done well, because it just fitted in. Sure, the gay thing was presented as unusual and surprising by family members who didn’t know, but it was presented to the viewer – treated like a privileged friend and ally of the lead characters, of course – it was presented as completely normal. This also is very rare in television.

I heartily recommend this show – 5 hours of gripping tv from beginning to end.
Internet oddities

August 4, 2009

A question for my reader(s): what is stranger? That my blog gets the top hit on a google search for china mieville “curvaceous women” or that yesterday two people did that search? Strange.
Life imitates role-playing

July 20, 2009

I read an article in the guardian on Saturday morning about the fall of Ceacescu’s Romania in 1989. The article is a bit rambly, and like most attempts at opinion by journalists it fails to reach a proper conclusion. But it has this excellent passage in the middle, which struck me as a classic moment of life being stranger than role-playing:

One day, as we walked the gallery floors, the view across the cobbled square through a large opening blown in the elegant wall by an artillery shell was of tanks grinding over charred debris, nervous young soldiers – with flowers placed in their helmets by the people – returning the occasional crack of sniper fire, and crowds come to gawp at the fallen fortresses of the Ceausescu regime. It looked like war from another time, on black and white newsreel; a week had passed since Ceausescu’s execution, but it had taken days to subdue the stench of gunsmoke, shellfire and scorched masonry.

Beneath our feet as we walked were the incinerated remains of the museum’s inventory – paintings were pitted with bullet holes, the canvases strewn like corpses in a morgue. “As you can see, there was heavy fighting here, the Byzantine room,” Cruceanu said. “And a lot of shots were fired in the 19th-century national school, where we think our army had come in. But the Securitate [Ceausescu’s secret police] must have come through the forbidden corridors from the palace, or a skylight”… and we ascended to the third storey… “so that most of the shooting was here among the European paintings, of which I’m the curator.”

My notebook recorded that there was damage to Boccaccini’s Samson Breaking the Pillars of the Temple, Gentilleschi’s Mother and Child and Rembrandt’s A Man Begging the Forgiveness of Esther. At the end of the gallery was a piano, lightly coated in snow which had drifted in through the holes punched by shellfire and the top of a dome that had been blown off. Cruceanu raised the lid and played a few notes of, I think, Bach. “It works!” she said. “So you see, there is hope.”

It reminds me of Iain M Banks’s work, or something you would see in a Cyberpunk adventure.

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