Silicon Valley Redneck

Hoo-hah!

Sometime last year, while I wasn't looking, Son Of Mission: Impossible finally came out on DVD!

And it hasn't sold out yet.

Not that I was totally impressed with the series back when it was on TV, before being sent off to the top-security vaults - it did have a tendency to cannibalize the original series, and make multiple episodes out of plot elements that were all packed into a single old-series episode (sorry, no specifics right now; this is a vague recollection from Back When) - but it was still pretty good, and vastly better than most of the drivel in the Vast Wasteland.

Anyway, the DVD set will be on its way shortly, so I'll be able to watch the series again, and perhaps be reminded of what was good, and what not-so-good, about it.

Oh, and if memory serves, I didn't even get to see the whole series when it was on TV.  Something about episodes being bumped to make way for feetball games and not re-shown at any time that I heard about, or just not being carried by the local station, or whatever.  I hadn't even realized, at the time, that there was a second season.

Skiffle? Scuffle?

Yeah, I finally got around to seeing Skyfall.

Capsule review: feh.

Expanding on that a little...

The story line was incoherent.

A lot of the visuals made no sense, unless maybe you'd read the script, and I'm guessing not even then.

Everything about computers, and just about everything about firearms: does the phrase "not even wrong" ring a bell?

Seriously, "tracing the encryption signal"?  Or, a super-expert trying to defeat the exotic security features on an enemy's computer, with it booted up and plugged into the damn internal network?  Rather than leaving it turned off, pulling the hard drive, and hooking the drive up to a Linux (or BSD, or whatever) system that won't be running any of the special security code?

And that business about the depleted-uranium pistol bullet... riiiiight.  Not only does such a thing make basically no sense, but, if it had hit Bond intact?  Neat little round hole, like an FMJ only more so.  And that clown with the machine pistol had to be carrying at least his own weight in ammunition.  Somewhere.

Technical details that make no sense, plot elements that make no sense, general incoherence: we're talking Roger Moore-era quality here, only without the benefit of being funny.

Afterthought: an incoherent story line is nothing new.  Fleming's stories generally made some sort of sense, if only because they're been subjected to the editing process for novels.  The Hollywood writers, though, seem to be basically coming up with excuses for protracted chase scenes and exploding helicopters, and occasionally shoehorning in a mandatory plot point. ("Oh, yes: we need to get rid of a long-running character because the actor is retiring.")

Are we living in some sort of composite Bond flick?

As the news coverage of the Newtown atrocity broke out, I got the distinct impression that the stories* had been written ahead of time: Tomorrow Never Dies.

Now I hear that the killer couldn't feel pain: The World is Not Enough.

So... anything else?

Is there a Lily Weatherwax lurking behind the scenes, feeding people to stories**?

* The demands for government action had clearly been written ahead of time, and the protest signs already printed, but that goes without saying.

** And, if so, has the White House been equipped with a pond?

Ah, the vast wasteland

The latest Netflick Joy sent away for is a TV show called Defying Gravity.

Impressive visuals... but it takes a lot of turning-off-the-brain.

Ten years ago: deadly Martian sandstorm!  For Niven fans, the phrase "about as dangerous as an enraged caterpillar" springs inevitably to mind.

Current events: it seems that as a result of changing two Supreme Court justices, abortion has been absolutely outlawed, as have home pregnancy tests - as we all know, this follows automatically, with none of that pesky business about state-by-state legislation.  Curiously, though, women are still allowed to wear shoes and fly spaceships.

I guess we can allow the handwaving explanation of how the floor attracts the special clothing.

In space: aside from the apparent inconsistency of controls for the outer door of the airlock - is it just a touchscreen button, or is there a physical lever involved? - well, let's see what else annoyed me on the way past, during the Venus-suit event.

Suit, pressurized to 5 atm, has a slow leak.  Can we boost the pressure?  No, that might make it leak faster!  Wait, why would you want to boost the pressure anyway?  If the air for boosting the pressure is available, can't you use that to stabilize the pressure at, say 0.5 atm?

Donner is pulling on the safety line to retrieve Zoe.  He needs to speed up!  Pull faster!  Er... given the lack of friction, each tug should be faster than the one before.  Braking, however, is problematic; she'll come crashing back into the airlock at the speed of his last pull, which may be excessive.

As the pressure drops from 5 atm to 0.5 atm, Zoe gets incoherent.  It's nitrogen narcosis!  And the bends!  Now, let's get this straight... 5 atm is about equivalent to 170 feet of water, so, yes, if they were silly enough to pump up that suit with standard air, nitrogen narcosis while pressurized would be a serious problem.  And, as pressure came down, the bends would become a problem.  Both of which are excellent reasons that no competent space agency would use standard air for such a purpose.  Also, the symptoms of the bends are very different from those of nitrogen narcosis, and surely by the time she starts babbling she should be out of narcosis and into screaming in pain.

Oh, and why were they testing the suit with high pressure inside and vacuum outside anyway?  Why not go to 6 atm inside, and keep the airlock at 1 atm?  And is that really a good test anyway, when what you're worried about is high pressure on the outside leaking in?  All the seals and joints ought to have been designed for higher pressure on the outside, so reversing the situation seems likely to miss actual problems and cause gratuitous failures.

 

And then there's the whole business of the Mysterious Thing With Eldritch Powers.  Is Pod 4 a portal that opens onto Mars?  Is it a TARDIS that contains Mars?  Or is it just a sort of Room 101?  Or, perhaps, is the Thing the Venusian ambassador to Mars, hitching a ride home after millennia in the post-apocalyptic wasteland?

There were a bunch of other distractingly-wrong things, but I've already managed to forget most of them.  DVD #2 should be showing up in a couple of days....

At least it's not as bad as Le Morte d'Arthur.  That, I can't get more'n a couple of pages into without reaching for the history books to see just how wrong it's getting.

 

Update: I have now seen all there is of it.  Unlike Firefly, there's really no need for a second season... or a first, for that matter.

Silly annoying distraction: they don't even handwave over the subject of FTL communication, which they must have, or the conversations with Earth would have annoying coffee breaks in them.  (Besides which, what's with all the remote control?  Shades of old Soviet spam-in-a-can.  Except the astronauts have local controls for most stuff, only those can be overridden from Earth, and some critical routine functions seem to require calling on Mission Control to push the buttons.)

Then there's the whole system-wide Pokemon game...

A: Cut it into several pieces, and bury each on a different planet, moon, or asteroid.
Q: How would you imprison an immortal being of unspeakable evil?

Seriously, if you have no clue what they are, where they came from, why they are where they are, or what will happen if they're brought together... hey, kids!  Let's go trick-or-treating for large pieces of plutonium!

And then there's the utter dysfunctionality of, well, everyone, and the well-worn TV staple of "rewriting people's DNA", and the vast conspiracy that makes no sense whatsoever, and, ....

Apparently it was meant to become a 6-year soap opera, addressing (audience for soap operas) ⋃ (audience for science fiction), but somehow* ended up attracting only (audience for soap operas) ⋂ (audience for science fiction).

 

* Which could not, in any conceivable way, involve a brain-damaged concept and crappy writing.

THIMK!

El Reg has a piece about James Bond's new pistol.

He's back to carrying the signature* PPK.

Only it's been high-techified with a biometric lock.  Kind of like the camera gun from a few movies back, only now the fancy fingerprint recognizer is built into a mostly-normal-looking pistol.

And this high-tech super-spook feature is useful because?

Let's see, now.  You're a secret agent operating behind enemy lines.  You get into a confrontation with enemy agents, and they get ahold of your gun.  Which is your bigger worry:

• The enemy agents shoot you with your own gun, or
• The enemy agents figure out who you are?

The way I figure it, any enemy worthy of the attentions of a secret agent probably already has guns of his own, and so do all of his henchmen.  So: do you carry a standard-production beater gun that any thug could have bought on the black market, or do you carry a brand-new high-tech custom piece that you could only have gotten from a major government?

Think carefully.

* Signature: so much so that, as we learn in at least one of the movies, villains can identify him by it, even if he's regenerated again and has a totally new face.  Because, y'know, no one else in the whole wide world carries a Walther PPK.

AvP and other silliness

Recently got around to seeing Alien vs. Predator.

Obvious question: if you were organizing such an expedition on Earth in 2004, how would you go about gathering a rather large group of people who had neither seen nor heard about any of the Alien or Predator movies?  Maybe it's set in some alternate-history universe where those movies were never made?

Given the venue, I kind of figured The Thing should put in an appearance, but maybe that's a crossover for another movie.  Along with Alien vs. Terminator, Predators vs. Cybermen, and the immensely popular Aliens vs. Sparkly Vampires.

V: I vant to drink your... Ow!  My teeth!  My face iss melting!  Aaaah!

A: Ssssss... CHOMP!

Only problem with this is, you probably wind up with undead aliens, so it might be best to hold that contest on some other planet.

And even my silly idea from last week has crossover sequel potential.  Suppose that Tannhäuser-with-the-Tarnhelm succeeds in his quest, and is still alive at the end of the film (or opera, or whatever).  Next, he could set off for Africa to confront an H. Rider Haggard character in... Allan vs. Precator!

Yes, my brain is still fried.  Wanna know how fried?  I'm having visions of a cheerleading squad, in long skirts with bumps on, waving asymmetric pom-poms and chanting "2-4-6-8! You-will-be-ex-ter-mi-nate!"

Humming a bit from the Eroica Symphony

Yeah, just back from seeing Prometheus, and the creatures thereof.

Even allowing for the loss of a few partial scenes to my sitting-in-a-darkened-room narcolepsy, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Like: if the atmosphere is 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, how can it be over 3% carbon dioxide?

And, yes, I have to agree with all those who pointed to the stupid-people-behaving-stupidly aspect.  (Back to the tunnels to look for the missing people!  We have no idea what happened to them!  Let's all take off our helmets!)

That spaceship didn't make a lot of sense, either, but space travel in films usually does have problems with scales, speeds, and the difference between a propulsion system suitable for hurling a spaceship across the mind-paralyzing distances between the furthest stars and one suitable for maneuvering it gently down to the surface of a planet.

And now it's late, and I'm thinking of silly alternative titles such as Prometheus; or, the Ancient Frankenstein, and I'm going to bed.

Further: if that's Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, where's the rest of U.N.I.T.?

The past's supermarionated future

So, while waiting for Iggle to munch through a test autoroute on Monday, I came across this post at The Lexicans, and watched the video.

And something jumped out at me near the end of that first segment, around the 9:09 mark.

That P.17D lifting platform thing.  The triangular platform with all the jet engines (70, or 44, or 56 of them, according to whose account one believes).  The one that would act as a sort of flying airfield, bringing VTOL capability to the overall system.

Another fine product of Anderson and Anderson, Aeronautical Engineers?

Except... that show came several years later.  So, getting it right way 'round: viewed against the background of the glory days of postwar British aviation, those wacky flying machines of the Andersonverse make a a weird kind of sense.

Wait, did Mythbusters just try this?

Knight-Mare Hare, 1955.

Bring back engineer pr0n!

Over at the Castle, Bad Cat Robot expounds (in short form) on the need to bring back the sense of wonder in science fiction.

Ah, yes: the good old days!  When the hero would invent a star-drive, build a space-ship, and go gallivanting off around the galaxy, fighting and/or befriending bug-eyed monsters along the way!  And, if a villain was needed, a lawyer or pointy-haired manager would do nicely!

And, indeed, this is the sort of thing that used to inspire a new crop of budding engineers: the notion of creating cool new toys (yes, folks, toys can be created, not just bought), using them to do awesome stuff, and making the galaxy a better place.

Not only is it inspiration to the young, it's escapism for those stuck in the world our future turned into, in which even a small and mildly innovative project drags on interminably, and no mighty deed would ever get past corporate management and government regulators.

So bypass the publishing cartels, and go back to writing the good stuff.  Perhaps it'll inspire the youngsters, and show them the future we've lost.  And maybe, just maybe, they'll try to salvage it from the present we have.