Serenity Now!

I finally went to see Serenity. Being a not-very-rabid-yet-somewhat-enthusiastic fan of Firefly, I had pretty good expectations of this movie. I was not disappointed – the movie indeed was pretty good. My gripes can be best presented in the following bullet points (if I had the time, I would have created a powerpoint deck for you):

  • No blue-handed men (“Two By Two, Hands of Blue”) or any explanation as to why their hands were blue. And mighty Google brings back hilarious, but most unsatisfying results
  • “The operative” is not bounty hunter Jubal Early, but instead what seems like a one-dimensional character based on the early notes for Jubal Early.
  • I don’t like the explanation of the nature of Reavers.
  • The soundtrack was worse than in the TV Series

Meanwhile, it seemed to me that I’ve seen Morena Baccarin, the actress who plays Inara, somewhere else. I was not mistaken – she had a bit role in a movie that I like very much, Roger Dodger. There she is, Cosmo in hand, next to the boss she has a crush on, right after talking to Roger:

I got to give her credit – so 2 out of 4 movies Morena took a part in are really good. I have half the mind to pick up the other two, to see maybe if they are good too.

By the way, I never really understood what’s so great about Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It always seemed like a cheesy show with wooden acting, but then again, I never watched an entire episode or learned the backstory. I guess I’ll have to rent the first season DVDs and see if it’s any good.


Shiny stuff:

Serenity comic book prequel – a bit of filler between the TV series and the movie:

Original TV series soundtrack. It’s on pre-order still, but at least it’s happening.

“Finding Serenity : Anti-Heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly” contains rants about “Firefly” from various pundits, including an inflammatory (and labeled by some as “male-chauvinistic”) article about the role of women in sci-fi by John C. Wright (as much as I like his science fiction and hate his fantasy, I have to say that he’s full of it).

Wright Is Wrong

I started reading John C. Wright’s “Last Guardian of Everness” but got stuck in the middle because of the cursed conventions of the degenerate genre that Wright chose to try his hand out in, and “MTV style” narration that jumps from a character to character (there must be an official name for that, but I don’t know it). 

The degenerate genre is Fantasy, of course, and the conventions are:  magic, characters that are “chosen” (and “last guardians” in general), unicorns and other mythological critters, cities with names that sound like allergy medicine names (Celebradon? give me a break).  Passing by much abused elves and gnomes in favor of lesser know dudes like selkie and Koschey The Deathless is ok, but still short of coming up with original types. 

Wright is much better than an average Fantasy writer, but his storytelling is somewhat sloppier than necessary for me to swallow Fantasy.  Unfortunately, it looks like he is becoming much more boring, sloppy and he is yet to produce something better than “Guest Law” and other of his short stories.  The Phoenix Trilogy was good (even if too long and not polished enough to be a true masterpiece).  He has a beautiful world created in “Guest Law”, and the best part of  the Phoenix Trilogy for me was that it was kind of related to that world. But he squanders all of that to write slightly above mediocre Fantasy.

Dream A Little Dream Of S-40

If you’ve been readin my journal for a while, you might know how important dreams are to me.

There are a lot of important and famous dreams recorded in history – Mendeleev seeing the periodic table; Kekule seeing the worm Oroborous and understanding the benzine ring; Chief Sitting Bull seeing soldiers falling upside down and predicting victory of the Little Big Horn, Hitler seeing the trench engulfed in molten lava in his dream and leaving it thus saving himself, Julius Caesar having a dream in which one website that will be left unnamed says “his mother appeared” and then “taking” Rome, etc.

Over the weekend I was reading Igor Sikorsky, His Three Careers in Aviation by Frank DeLear, and in it was an example of a forshadowing dream that I haven’t encountered before.

The book says that when he was 11 years old, Sikorsky had a dream in which he was standing in a narrow passageway. There was a bluish light overhead and the floor with a fine carpet under his feet. The floor was vibrating, but for some reason he immediately realized that it wasn’t a train or a boat, but a flying machine. He walked through to a door that led to a richly decorated lounge and then woke up. Since he was born in 1889, this would make it the year of 1900 when he had the dream. The Wright Brothers flight was three years away.

Years later, in America Sikorsky was walking through his latest design, the S-40 plane and was struck by a sense of deja vu. There it was, bluish light of fluorescent lamps overhead, the vibration and the fine carpet and even the smoking lounge at the end.

(the photo is from Igor Sikorsky, His Three Careers in Aviation) by Frank DeLear

Next in my reading queue: John C. Wright’s The Last Guardian of Everness – a fantasy that deals with dream worlds and such. Figures.

All Wright!

In the latest attempt to break the work-home-work-home Worm Oroborous cycle was my and my wife’s trip to Manhattan’s equivalent of Springfield’s South Street Squidport to listen to John C. Wright read from his latest book. The book, which I already pre-ordered from Amazon seems very promising, despite the fact that I hate the whole degenerate genre of Fantasy. You can find my previous rants about Mr. Wright (and assorted other Wrights) here.

We listened to the Wright’s reading of the first two chapters, talked to him for a little while and got a copy of the Phoenix Trilogy signed.

If you want to understand why I am so excited about this author, get a copy of Year’s Best SF 3 which sells for as little as one cent on Amazon and read Wright’s short story “Guest Law”. Then you’ll just have to read everything else that he’s written.

After the reading we went to explore my favorite skyscraper and the SquidSeaport itself (I haven’t been there in years).

Post While Waiting For Defragmentor: Blogger Exultant

My favorite modern science fiction writer, John C. Wright, Esq. , also started a livejournal, . I must warn you, that Mr. Wright is as controversial as he is brilliant. A retired lawyer and journalist, Libertarian turned Conservative, a self described Christian Atheist and Stoic he is nothing like a common livejournal blogger.

I strongly urge you to buy Year’s Best SF 3, a book containing a short story called “Guest Law”. This story made me a big fan. Copies of Year’s Best SF can be had for as little as 50 cents + shipping at Amazon.

Unfortunately Mr. Wright’s other short stories are rather hard to obtain, but you absolutely must get his Phoenix Exultant trilogy books. I’ve read the first two volumes and I can’t wait for the third one to come out.

The only thing short story of Mr. Wright’s that is available online is a William Hope Hodgson’s Night Land tribute titled “Awake in the Night“. Now, I am a staunch detractor of the fantasy genre. And I absolutely hate fan fiction. In this case I am willing to make an exception. Yeah, yeah, you heard me say that. But even though
“Awake in the Night” is a very good read and it revealed to me Night Land books which I will definitely pursue, I still wish it was an original Wright story instead of a tribute.

Rantosourus Rex – Part I

Here I sit, in my favorite seat on the Q train facing the window, writing this post on my Blackberry TM.

Remember, I promised to write a long and involved post about pen computing, mind mapping, memex and electronic books? Well, I don’t think I can cram all of my thoughts on the subject into a well organized linear article. Instead, I think I’ll write a series of hyperlinked rants. I think that will be even more appropriate. So here goes.

Joel Spolsky likes to refer to “future so bright, you’ll need sunglasses”. Most of the people I know, are wearing Mylar goggles. But that future is not bright enough right now, so it only seems like eternal night with a few sparks here and there. That future is electronic books and pen computing.

So, I sit on this train with a copy of the New York Times. And I’ve just read an article about a woman with a Masters degree from Columbia who sells her short stories for two bucks a piece from a cardboard box in a subway station. There is so much wrongness here. And a parallel : me, struggling with turning pages of a gigantic broadsheet that is the NYT, in a cramped subway seat, my hand filthy with newsprint by the time I found something interesting among the piles of information that the editors and advertisers thought I should read; and her, crouched on the cold cement floor, with a pathetic cardboard box, selling her information that way because nobody wants to publish it.

This is wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG!

The first thing that is wrong is that the NYT is published in broadsheet (as opposed to tabloid) format. Which means that to read it you need to use some weird folding techniques.to read them on a train. This is something that I might enjoy, but I am absolutely not typical. I enjoy practical applications of the science of topology. I can tie many nautical and surgical knots, and I fold and stack my t-shirts in a way so that the design of the shirt always shows up on the same edge. And I learned how to fold broadsheets from my High School Economics teacher. And even I am annoyed.

So dead tree newspapers are not ergonomic. But that’s not all. I can’t get only the information that I want to purchase. If I were rich, I could employ the services of newspaper clipping service. I would gladly pay to read ‘s articles if they were clipped from Ediot Achronot and translated into English somehow. Even right now I pay 10 dollars a year to get newspaper and online comics from http://www.mycomicspage.com.

Unfortunately most information providers want to lump together everything that they’ve got and sell it as a whole. Out of a couple of hundreds of cable channels that I pay for, I am interested in maybe 15 – 20 shows that run on a few channels. But to get only those channels would cost me just a few dollars less than the whole deal. And that sucks! I am subsidizing a whole lot of stupid no talent shows at the same time when shows that I crave are being canceled. Firefly, Futurama, The $treet – gone. I’d give up 180 channels just to get those three shows back. And so would many, many people.

Sirius satellite radio has two things that I like immensely – a good jazz channel and their hypnotic callsign. Everything else I don’t care about. But to get that I would also have to pay for every other channel they provide. And I am not gonna.

This is socialism, people. Few talented information creators feed hundreds of no-talent parasites. What is even worse, there is a certain threshold that is equally hard to overcome to both talented and non-talented people. That threshold is the editors. They are a proxy, a layer that is supposed to filter out crap. But the filtered stuff has the same proportion of crap in it (governed by Sturgeon’s law).

For instance, a few years ago I picked up a book called Year’s Best SF. I was reading crappy story after crappy story. But one of the stories, “Guest Law” by John C. Wright, Esq. was definitely not crappy. In fact, it was so good that I tracked down every single piece of Mr. Wright’s prose. In fact, after sending money to some two bit sci-fi rag that published one of the stories, through almost half a year I had to send a few dozen emails to the publisher just to get that one magazine with the story. And it was worth it. To me, but not to Mr. Wright. What is very upsetting, is that instead of paying the author directly, I had to pay the derelict editors and all the other authors I don’t care about.

All of these problems can be solved with technology, and I’ll write about that in the next post.