Category Archives: Space!

The Spoilers Become More Awake

Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Nostalgia, Reviews, Space!

Earlier, I talked a little about fear and redemption in The Force Awakens:

The Spoilers Awaken

This post is more a bunch of scattered thoughts…

The movie was all about Han Solo, and that was a good thing. Harrison Ford has really matured as an actor (I should see how he is in American Graffiti), where you see the gravitas, which smoothed out the ‘scruffy-haired nerf-herder*’

There’s probably something about having actors of varying ages and maturity levels, and how it smooths things out. (Even though the young actors in this movie are more skilled (or better directed), they still have the very young energy, attractiveness, and rushing intensity, all of which can do better with guidance…)

‘Droids’ is an excellent example of good ‘in universe’ lingo**.

Seeing the characters old and the death of Han Solo was not just the passing of the torch to the next generation of Star Wars, but also perhaps a passing of the torch to us, that it’s time for us to step up (similar to when Jack Layton died)…

Leia’s dress with a New Republic neck was a nice touch.

Some people have said that Leia was not the most convincing actor, but her acting worked fine for me. Her scenes with Han were very touching, along with the scene near the end with Rey. I also found her convincing as a general, who ‘went back to what she knew the best’, and seemed to fit well in that role.

In a galaxy with hyperdrive and even reasonable astronomy and astrogation, how could you not tell where a sector was, if there was a map of it that included 5-10% of the galaxy? Even with 300 billion stars in a galaxy, you wouldn’t need very many to be narrow down a sector, if the map had any reasonable level of accuracy…

So much regret for time past with problems remaining unresolved…Like Tron:Legacy…

Good use of X-wing quad lasers in ground combat against stormtroopers (apparently they added an under-blaster-cannon in the updated model for the movie), similar to R2-D2’s method for dealing with Joruus C’boath (even a jedi master cannot deflect startfighter-sized weapons, and/or they cannot predict what droids will do). Also, I liked the new X-wing colours. Apparently the shape is slightly different, but I didn’t notice that. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/T-65B_X-wing_starfighter#Behind_the_scenes

It was very fitting that the new death star reformed back into a sun…

The art department had many scenes of groups of aliens, just doing their thing, ‘world building’ as S says.

The establishing shots were really well done (you should do Comic Book Boot Camp http://comicbookbootcamp.com/).

The force continues to be weak in dealing with droids…The light side of the force more often appears with empathy, so they they can use that to interact with droids

A very tech-savvy force user…Anakin, perhaps Luke, for sure Rey…Either a force ability, or something about growing up on desert planets. If it’s a force ability, interesting that it allows much easier repairs and jury rigging, but not sensing or understanding the motivations of droids.

A small complaint about Cineplex showing spoilers in the opening ‘pre-movie games’

Also, the imperials just sound better with English accents.

Interesting the ‘order’ vs. ‘freedom’ contrast between ‘The First Order’ and ‘The Resistance’.

*Similar to how the last few vestiges of Garath the thief were the only differences between Belgarath the Sorceror and Aldur…

**The counterexample I always use is ‘Argonians’ and ‘Kajhit’ in Oblivion, where no matter how racist the character, they always used the official names, which I always found jarring and unrealistic.

The Spoilers Awaken

Idle Speculation, Reviews, Space!

This is my second post on The Force Awakens, this time with spoilers… (If you don’t want spoilers, you should go to the other post here: http://nayrb.org/~blog/?p=553)

From Anakin to Luke to Kylo Ren, the Star Wars movies are about the failed teaching of apprentices. It felt very poignant seeing the older Mark Hamil, with a beard, almost an echo of Alec Guinness’ haunted eyes. This suggests that movies VIII and IX may be the story of Luke Skywalker’s redemption as much as they may be Kylo Ren’s (in the same way that IV was Obi-Wan Kenobi’s redemption).

At the same time, it still feels like Luke ran away, at least it seems that way not knowing what has happened in the intervening time… Even if one of his students ran away and fell to the dark side, why would he not try again? What would make him flee that responsibility so resoundingly? Was it because he let his sister and best friends’ son fall to the dark side and kill all of his students?

Obi-Wan had more of an excuse, as the entire empire was after him, if he had stuck his head up, they would have sent out squads to kill him. But he had his redemption when he faced his fear/failed student.

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” -Yoda

So much fear on both their parts…You could say that the fear of Obi-Wan and Luke of their failed teaching and students led to much of the conflict in all seven movies so far…Who will break the cycle, to help adolescents actually grow up properly? (Or is this an endless part of the human condition?)

(It could also be, like Ty Templeton taught us in Comic Book Boot Camp http://comicbookbootcamp.com/, how you want to torture your heroes, to give them more depth, to give them more complex motivations, and in Star Wars, it’s often mistakes they’ve made in the past that they want to redeem.)

Speaking of redemption, it made Han Solo a much more interesting character to have him needing redemption for his perceived failures with his son. Also, this may be me projecting or reading things in, but it felt like there was some Harrison Ford wanting redemption for his terrible acting in the original trilogy. (Just after I wrote that, I read an article talking about how he re-wrote much of Han’s terrible dialogue to be more in tune with the character, and apparently also wanted Han Solo to die at the end of Jedi, to give the movie a ‘bottom’. So maybe it was the drama of Han Solo that he was trying to redeem, to finally give him some gravitas.) (Also, given how much he apparently put into the part, I feel bad complaining about his acting…Maybe it’s just that many actors are not that good at that age, or that directing has improved (or that George Lucas was much better at the art and setting than at script writing or directing actors*), or that he was being compared to Alec Guinness and Peter Cushing.)

Either way, fear and redemption is the catch phrase of Star Wars. Comment below!

*Apparently, Harrison Ford also contributed a lot to his character in American Graffiti, which was successful for George Lucas in part because he set the scene well with the setting and music from the period.

No Spoilers Awaken

Reviews, Space!

Well, we just saw The Force Awakens, and it was really good. I think I can say ‘great’, possibly the best of all of them.

I’ve promised no spoilers for this review, so I’ll be focusing on other aspects.

First, the music was seamless and brilliant. It carried the mood superbly, through all of the lonely scenes, the poignant scenes, the battle scenes that Star Wars is known for.

Second, the movie felt really tight. It was paced well, it felt like it moved all the way through, that all the scenes needed to be there.

There were many sendups, but they weren’t jarring, they felt natural to the characters saying them (like the conversations about aging in The Undiscovered Country).

It felt very true to the feel of the Star Wars universe, while at the same time, being a great movie.

Also, I feel like Harrison Ford was much better, like he’s grown into himself.

In short, go see this film.

Cineplex: 100 Years

Nostalgia, Reviews, Space!

This trailer, “Cineplex – 100 Years of Movies” which currently shows at the beginning of all Cineplex movies (at least, the ones I go to), always makes me tear up:

There’s something about the nostalgia, the ‘humans trying so hard, with whatever they had at the time, all sharing the dream of flying’, going from the first tentative flights, to biplanes, to the first propeller planes where it was important enough to have retractable landing gear, to the first jets, to fighter jets, to the Space Shuttle*, to some type of Interstellar-like FTL ship.

It’s the “we’ve been here, helping you tell stories all the way through this, and we’ll still be here, helping you tell stories when we reach the stars.”

Even though multiple iterations of the planes are fighter planes, there is no violence in the trailer, and it feels very hopeful.

“If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.”

*Probably not quite on a trajectory the Shuttle would take, but that’s reasonable dramatic license.

Tenagra, on the Ocean

Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Languages!, Nostalgia, Space!
Pooh and Piglet at Tanagra
“Pooh?” said Piglet.
“Yes, Piglet?” said Pooh.
“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” said Piglet.
“Shaka, when the walls fell.” said Pooh.
Pic by Cathy Wappel
Words by Michael G Munz

The above pic came across my fb feed this morning.

Some random thoughts about this.

1) There exists this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/Tenagra/ which is, in the internet way, developing a similar-type language.

2)

TEXT OF COMIC:
Hi, Abby. How are you?
Spock’s response to his mother’s question at the end of The Voyage Home.
Huh? What’s up with your communication skills today?
The aliens in “Darmok and Jalad.”
You’re… communicating only in obscure references to Star Trek.
Decker’s answer to Kirk saying “You saved the ship” in The Motion Picture.
And WHY exactly are you doing this?
The 74th Rule of Acquisition.
“Knowledge equals profit?” Okay, what the heck are you trying to build your knowledge for?
Kirk’s exclamation after Spock’s death.
Oh, that’s right. You’re going to a con.
MOUSEOVER TEXT: whenever I want to get laid, I just tell John ‘Spock in Amok Time’ and he knows EXACTLY what I mean
http://www.johnanderikaspeak.com/an/2012/05/12/1168/

3) The title of the post is somewhat ambiguous. It could be a reference to Dylan Thomas’ ‘A grief ago’, in its use of parts of speech, saying something deep about Tenagra, and the myths behind it leaving us behind on the seas of fleeting cultural memory… Or it could just be commenting that Tenagra was an island.

If you don’t understand the reference, this might help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok

Buck Rodgers: Countdown to a Better Ship

Games!, Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Space!

So, when I was growing up, I played all of the gold box games. One of the ones I don’t remember if I finished or not was Buck Rodgers: Countdown to Doomsday. One of the things that rankled was that you couldn’t upgrade or otherwise modify your ship. Also, in the course of the game, depending on how you play, you could destroy or capture dozens of enemy ships, many more powerful than yours. But you couldn’t fly one of them instead…

I did a couple of modifications which allowed you to have higher ship hitpoints (your ship has hitpoints in 6 areas: ‘Hull’,’Sens’,’Ctrl’,’Life’,’Fuel’,’Engn’), and more ship weapons. At the time, I wasn’t able to determine the hex location for the ‘current’ hitpoints, so I could only modify the maximum. This seemed reasonably game-balancing for me, as your party would salvage parts, then have to repair them themselves. (The one irritating part here was that when you went back to base for free repairs or fuel, they would ‘repair’ the current status back to the original values, so you had to fight space combats and repair it all the way back again.)

Now, with my recent success understanding and modifying the Pool of Radiance series (and probably more diligence now that I’m older), I’m going to try these games again, and see how it’s different with a snazzier ship (and different with the passing of time).

BoF I: “The Zero-Body Problem”

Science!, Space!

The zero-body problem:
29 October 2010 at 18:58

“It might be noted here, for the benefit of those interested in exact solutions, that there is an alternative formulation of the many-body problem, i.e., how many bodies are required before we have a problem? G.E. Brown points out that this can be answered by a look at history. In eighteenth-century Newtonian mechanics, the three-body problem was insoluble. With the birth of general relativity around 1910 and quantum electrodynamics in 1930, the two- and one-body problems became insoluble. And within modern quantum field theory, the problem of zero bodies (vacuum) is insoluble. So, if we are out after exact solutions, no bodies at all is already too many!” — Richard D. Mattuck, A Guide to Feynman Diagrams in the Many-Body Problem

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1845884&cid=34068552

Life Along the Terminator

Fiction, Games!, Space!

A world half molten, half colder than ice. A thin strip of land between, where humans can barely survive, where a mining company has sent you to extract minerals and gemstones, where your only sustainable source of food, your tiny hydroponic farm, is giving anomalous readings…

The orbital insertion was not easy, as the dropship had to fly most of the way in the shadow of the planet, then quickly nip around and avoid melting while landing on the small habitable section. Living and working in a mining base on the terminator of a tidally locked hot Mercury is fun to talk about, but the G-forces of the abrupt turn before landing were almost like launching from a standard-G world.

It was really beautiful, though, seeing just a sliver of the molten red hot side, and the false blue colour from the sensors looking at the cold side, to zoom in at the tiny green dot which would hopefully sustain you while you complete your tour here, hoping to make a name for yourself (and get rich at the same time).

It’s too bad you couldn’t share that beauty with anyone, though. It’s hard enough finding people who would want to be alone for the years required, never mind the expense of a capsule big enough to sustain a person for that long. Far simpler to send an automated task force (and quicker, what with G-forces not sending electrons to the feet of robots).

As you land, you think again about the message sent: “Anomalous readings from plant matter. Plant matter showing periodic and changing visual anomalies. Plant matter showing unknown and changing composition. Safety tests show no adverse effects on bacteria. Analysis suggests plant matter still consistent with and edible by human biochemistry.” Not that there was anything you could do about it, as you were already decelerating when you received it, but here’s hoping the computer was right this time, or it’s going to be a long trip home on emergency power…

Mars like crying

Science!, Space!

So, we just watched the Curiosity Mars rover land, and what struck me the most was the way that they bounced signals during the landing off a previous mission’s orbiter…

It’s that the missions are building off each other, and we’re slowly building up a presence around Mars… That this is even possible is awesome.

(There are also a number of crazy things about all the new things, such as the mini skyhook, the all the pieces, the size of the rover, etc…)

Interestingly, this mission looked really tightly controlled, such that they learned many of their earlier lessons, or at least that this project has the true enerfy behind it.

Verklempt about Mars,

Nayrb 😀