The documentary Technocalpys not well thought out, I think

I got about six minutes into a documentary about transhumanism, Technocalpys, before stopping.

I'll probably be posting, soon, about how we have a bias towards technologies that are expensive, hard, fast and energetic and how this limits our understanding of technology, but this was definitely on my mind when watching, y'know, the first six minutes of the Technocalpys.

What really lost me is that some talking head was saying that humans are beginning to cheat nature's limitations. Which . . . is very much baffling to me because humans have been reshaping themselves for thousands of years. Pretty much the first time a person decided that they didn't want the body that nature and their own unconsidered habits gave them – the first time a human set about exercise – the decision was made to transform us from the coincidence of our genetic inheritance and circumstance into something different. Likewise, the first time a human set out to consciously discover something, they started the process of education which created a vastly different kind of person.  To a paleolithic human, we are transhuman.

Sure, compared to the future, the ttechniques humans use to improve themselves will be considered crude. Much in the same way an abacus is crude compared to a laptop. But the continuum is there – the ancient Greeks invented progressive weight training, a conscious way to develop and improve physical strength. They decided to be more than nature made them, to be stronger, to be better, shaped by their own conscious desires. To me, that's the pivot upon which transhumanism moves and it started moving long ago.

The bias is, as I hinted above, primarily the bias we have for technologies that are expensive, hard, fast and energetic. For instance, I believe that steroids and human growth hormones intermediary between simply progressive exercise and cybernetic or genetic manipulation for improved strength. If you take steroids intelligently, you become slightly superhuman. If you take them intelligently combined with progressive exercise techniques, you might as well be superhuman. Seriously, take a look at the abilities of professional athletes and the way their abilities tend to increase over time. Much of that improvement is due to various performance enhancing drugs.  Compared to the athletes of yesteryear, modern athletes are slightly superhuman.

But, y'know, that's cheap. It is also hard on a personal level. I suppose that we also tend to approve of technologies that make things easier for us. I'm sure the first robot bodies won't actually be better than the bodies of elite athletes – the primary difference will be that to be an elite athlete takes an awful lot of work whereas, in people's minds, having your consciousness transferred to a robot will be relatively quick and painless.

At any rate, when I realized that the documentary was going to be so tone deaf as to make no connection between historical and present efforts to reshape our bodies and minds past their natural states, I realized that it had nothing to teach me or, I think, too much interesting to say.  

They also used a lot of Burning Man imagery and I've never met anyone who's gone to Burning Man who is capable of seriously talking about futurism.  Just sayin'.

Thoughts on watching The Hunger Games movie

I realized another way that The Hunger Games novel, the first one, didn't work for me. I was thinking about this because I was watching the Rifftrax of The Hunger Games. Anyway, uh, Peeta lives.

The Rifftrax guys were going on pretty hard about their probable impending deaths and, yes, exactly, their deaths were probably impending. Now, really, if you look at it, Katniss – a skilled hunter and gifted archer – is the precise kind of person who has a good chance of winning the games and, in fact, she's the odds on favorite to win at the start of the game. For her to win, okay. Even for Peeta to win, okay, he is a strong guy, physically fit, clever, so forth and so on. But what are the odds of BOTH of them winning? Something that had never before happened in 73 years of Hunger Games? Basically zero, of course.

But then, thinking more (as I was watching the movie), I realized having Peeta win was narrative cowardice. I know that part of what the books were supposed to be about were Katniss' feelings for both Peeta and Gale. But what's better, narratively? A weak love triangle (Gale is barely in the books and don't expect to see a bunch of him in the movies, either) or Katniss having to kill Peeta to win. Think about that. At the climax, Peeta and Katniss have the drop on each other. Neither one moves. Cut to them being told if there is no winner of the Hunger Games, their families will be executed. (You need to do something like that so Katniss remains sympathetic. She doesn't kill for the selfish reason that she wants to live, but has to make a Sophie's choice.) Then, Peeta . . . does nothing and Katniss kills him. At which point she realizes that he did, in fact, love her and none of it was a lie, and she murdered him for the entertainment of the Capitol.

OK, here's the real kicker, too. You could still have the love triangle. Rather than Gale not really being in the next two books, you can put him in there all you want and he would be competing with Peeta's ghost.  It is notoriously hard to win against a ghost.  It would have also allowed Peeta and Katniss to develop real feelings for each other in The Hunger Games.

The book and movie both tried to make you feel the horror of the Hunger Games by killing the little black girl, Rue. I . . . didn't like that in either the book of the movie. Yeah, good going, put in black people to be killed so white people feel guilty. Not just the little girl but also Cinna. Jesus fucking Christ, really? You're really just going to put black people in to be killed so white people can save the world? Fuck you.

Anyway, that's how they tried to drive home the horror of the Games. But the little girl we barely know so her death means little. For other plot reasons, they should keep it in – in particular because it also shows that Katniss is making a connection with the people and is becoming a symbol – but it didn't really drive in the horror of the games. What would do that is killing someone we, the audience, has come to like rather than someone we had barely seen. To put Katniss in the situation of having to kill this really nice guy who drive the horror home in a big way.

By having them both survive, well, it was chicken. And weakens the overall story. It was a forced on happy ending, yay, the good guys win, which was inappropriate given the material of the book and movie.

**

I was also just struck, again, over the general stupidity of the games. The Hunger Games is literally a show where children are forced to murder each other. Worse, the richest districts have ringers – they train kids from a young age to do nothing but win the Games. So for districts 1 and 2, they have volunteer ringers. So, not only do they win most of the time, when they lose, well, they were volunteers. The other ten districts have kids selected by lot, who generally watch their children get humiliated and butchered by the kids from districts 1 and 2.

Like, whose idea was that? Because, let me tell you, it takes a LOT less provocation than seventy-four years of graphic child murder for the amusement of the ruling class to spark a revolution among oppressed people. Every time a child is murdered, that whole family turns instantly and irrevocably anti-government. Sure, most of them won't be hardcore about it, but some will be. That's tens of thousands of people ranging from merely committed to hating the government to actively seeking it's destruction. Not even counting those who are equally committed simply over their horror and disgust over children being forced to murder each other for the amusement of the capitol.

It doesn't even take a lot of thinking to work this one through. Riots started in LA because Rodney King's attackers were exonerated in court. King lived. The living conditions in South LA aren't nearly as bad as in most districts. Uprisings would be constant, every district would be littered with resistance cells constantly plotting the overthrow of the government. The districts would be under constant and massive police violence – we're talking constant ID checks, weapons checks, cops kicking in doors, public executions, the whole lot, if you're committed to something as spectacularly stupid as the Hunger Games.

Yeah, yeah, the author says (in the book, if you just watch the movie you have no such knowledge) that a district was destroyed and that suppressed the revolution.  Except that doesn't really work.  It often creates addition opposition because then the people more forcefully believe that it is a fight of life or death.  It wasn't the destruction of Fallujah that stopped Iraqi resistance to US occupation.  It was the US getting out of Iraq, first of pulling back to our bases and then massively reducing our troop presence.  The same was true of the US in Vietnam.  Who districts were wiped out, two million Vietnamese were killed, but even after three decades of fighting overwhelmingly more powerful countries -- the Japanese, the French, the US -- they still found the will to fight.  So, no, that's not really sufficient, either.

This confirms that it's really hard to make a plot.  But it makes me realize something else, too.  It's really hard to understand a plot.  I hate to say this, but it sorta looks like plot doesn't matter very much, even in plot driven stories.

I did not like Assassin's Creed 3

Assassin's Creed 3 stinks, I'm sad to say

I have been a fan of the Assassin's Creed games since the first one. A open world platformer/stealth game? Hell, yes. By the time AC3 came out, they had four games to figure things out, too. Which it looked like they had. AC2 was a huge improvement on AC1. The post-assassination sophomoric explication was very much cut down, the personality free Altair was replaced with the extremely likable Ezio Auditore and the lengthy fight sequences were dramatically shortened by Ezio's incredible ability to kill a person. Ezio also got a laundry list of nifty gadgets, a hidden wrist gun, dual hidden blades, a crossbow, more weapons to choose from, poisoned daggers and darts, the ability to use ziplines and gadgets to climb faster, parachutes and eventually bombs and grenades, too. He was like a Renaissance Batman. Additionally, Ezio got three games and you could see him transform from a callow, but likable youth, to a serious and mature man who accepted responsibility and taught others his arts. Ezio was a great character, fun and likable  who matured believably (in a video game sense) without the tedious monologues of AC1.

In Assassin's Creed 3, they decided to fuck that up.

First, the combat regression. In short, the AC3 protagonist, Conner, is not nearly so well armed as Ezio. First, they removed throwing knives. In the four previous AC games, the protagonists could throw knives quickly and accurately. Most foes fell after one knife hit. Conner can't throw knives. Sure, he starts out with a gun, but it is in all ways inferior to Ezio's gun – when someone was targeting Ezio with a gun, Ezio could generally shoot them before getting shot. Conner draws much slower and is likely to be shot before he can do anything (well, he can grab people to use as a human shield, and it's cool when there's someone around for it to work on, but there often isn't). I have no idea why Ezio's gun is technologically superior to Conner's, or why knife throwing is out, but it is. Sure, Conner has a bow but it's no better than Ezio's crossbow and since Conner has fewer arrows it is in some ways worse.

Additionally, when on a ledge, Conner has no ranged weapons he can use. Both Altair and Ezio could knife throw from ledges, which was useful.

In the AC2 games, they made combat shorter and more interesting than in AC1. In AC3, they regress by making combat less interesting (difficult to use ranged weapons in combat, elimination of dodges) while radically increasing the number of people you have to fight. In AC2, a guard patrol was between two and four guys, generally. In AC3, a patrol is a dozen people. It also takes Conner longer to counter-kill someone than Ezio, which means combats take longer and you're less likely to get a combo kill going because you'll be taken out of it by someone stabbing you when you're engaged.

The game will also, for no good reason, fairly often put you on the highest notoriety. The British couriers will sound the alarm even if you've got no interest in them, so you'll be minding your business and suddenly you'll be surrounded by literally thirty guys. So, there are random fights that are either extremely long and tedious or chases where 2/3rds of everyone around you is a guard, making it hard to get away.

And on the guard note, apparently the colonials work with the British in chasing you. This is baffling but whatever.

So, there is more combat, it is longer and less interesting, and your weapons suck compared to Ezio's – they do less damage and take longer to use. Didn't Ubisoft learn this lesson from The Warrior Within?

Let's move on to Conner, himself. First, the simple one. He's boring. He's incredibly dull. It's like all they could think of for a Mohawk character was “noble savage”. The liveliness they introduced with Ezio vanished in AC3 and Conner's stoicism. Conner does not smile, he, nor does anyone about him has the least sense of humor.

Second, there's the racism. He is a noble savage, which is a stereotype. It's painful to watch. This is mixed up with the atrocious writing, generally, which I'll talk more about in a bit, but Conner's stereotypical noble savage motive is to save his village's land from British expansionism . . .

Which is also a complete reverse of actual history. The Indians were overwhelmingly on the British side because the Crown had started limiting intrusion into Indian lands. An English High Justice had even opined in a newspaper that he saw no reason why England's white subjects should be allowed to steal the land of England's red subjects. In the Revolutionary War, around 13,000 Indians fought for the British. Around 1200 for the colonials. The knew that the colonials were no friends of the Indians and, of course, they were not.

But Conner is just so painfully boring. Combined with that noble savage bullshit and the idiocy of proposing the colonials were better for the Indians than the English, ugh.

The writing is generally awful. One of the things I learned is that no one in colonial America is either pleasant or attractive. And the pedantry that was so awful in Assassin's Creed 1 returns in full goddamn force. Many “missions” are Conner walking around protecting some famous historical figure as they ramble on about the sad plight of rich white men.

I mean, I'm an American, but I honestly don't know what side I would have been on during the Revolutionary War. When the war started, it was not obvious that the US would become a republic and usher in a new global democratic era. But it's hard for me to have too much sympathy for the colonials. The whole “taxation without representation” business wasn't some cruel trick of the English, but a fact arising from the fact England and the Americas were two months travel time apart. The trip, in addition to being long, was dangerous. It is a bad idea to let the weather hold a government hostage.

Second, you look at the “tyranny” of the English and it's really . . . not that tyrannical. It's mostly very modest tax increases on items on paper and tea. Tea! It'd be like rebelling because the government taxed Coca-Cola!

Then there are the reasons few people talk about – particularly England's growing unease with slavery (the English would outlaw it altogether in 1820, forty-five years before America got around to it) and England's limits of colonization westward. Many immigrants came to America for land, equating Indian lands with free lands. The English court system was starting to rule in favor of the Indians. This was unacceptable.

About the worst thing the English actually did was housing troops in private dwellings without getting the consent of the owners. The English and French were doing a fair bit of fighting in the Americas and the colonies wanted protection, but barracks were in short supply. So the English quartered troops in private houses, forcing their way in.

Mind you, they paid for the soldiers being quartered. And heavy knows I'd hate it if I was told that four guys were going to move into my house and I would be responsible for feeding them, no matter how much I was paid. It would really piss me off. There are also canards of the English troops behaving badly to their landlords, but there are no specifics. I'm sure that more than one soldier seduced more than one wife or daughter, and that would also fuel my rage, but I don't think that revolution is the answer, there, more like . . . build some damn barracks.

The real reason the Revolution happened is a growing sense among Americans that they weren't English. Many of them had been there a while and the American experience was so little like the English experience that the divide between the two places grew large, particularly during the period of Salutatory Neglect. The English had unintentionally allowed the colonists to grow more attached to local government than the English government, so after the French and Indian War when the English came in and treated the Americans like subjects, when the English started to pay attention to the colonials, again, it heightened the feeling that the Americans weren't the English. But that reason is pretty hard to sum up in a game about running through trees and knifing people.

In the game, this manifests, like I said, with Conner being nattered at by various figures, pontificating in the most tasteless ways imaginable about the causes of revolution. Case in point, Conner is walking around Boston with Sam Adams, and Sam is mentioning the unjust nature of British soldiers being quartered in private homes. Conner says, basically, “Well, you keep slaves.” Then the game has the fucked up audacity to equate quartering troops with owning human beings. There is a scene with some British soldiers behaving badly to the people quartering them and Sam Adams smugly says that it proves his point about the quartering soldiers is worse than slavery.

I mean, I almost stopped playing right there that shit is so fucked up. Slaves were flogged, raped, humiliated, mutilated. They were owned. No, they did not quarter troops. They didn't have homes, after all. The idea that the struggles of a land owner being inconvenienced is the same as the savagery of chattel slavery is racist and detestable. I understand where it comes from – there has to be a justification for rebellion and the real reasons aren't, like I said, that good or defensible. But it's horrible to suggest that anything is as bad as slavery this side of genocide.

Plus there's the whole Indian thing. The idea that the colonials would be better for the Indians is farcical and obviously untrue. Sure, some Mohicans fought for the colonials, but as mercenaries. Not exactly high-minded motives, there.

For additional racism, Conner's mentor is black. So, we have an Indian and a black guy who are involved with the Revolutionary War? Like the Revolutionary War improved conditions for black people in America? It's boggling, just boggling.

The game is also not about Conner. As far as I got, the main missions were about people like Paul Revere or Sam Adams, with Conner being their ethnic sidekick as they accomplished various historical acts. While I understand how things got there, I don't know why someone didn't notice. If they wanted the game to be about Sam Adams, they should have made him a goddamn Assassin. (Which would have been wicked, come to think about it. It would have provided motivation sorely lacking in Conner.) But the supporting cast, who are actually the stars, go on at great and tedious length about everything. None of the characters are interesting or even personable.

Other gameplay issues . . . the game has a lot of tedious bits relative to other games. So in AC2, the Assassin's become capitalists. Ezio goes around buying land and businesses to get the money he needs to do what he needs to do (including buying art). But the way it's handled in that game is . . . Ezio goes up to a shop, buys it and every so often money is deposited in his account. Every so often he had to go get it. That's it.

Conner, on the other hand, has to actively take a hand in transactions. He has to manage the estate's affairs – personally selecting what is made and where it is sold, and to whom. If you don't go into their menu intensive trading interface, you don't make any money.

Well, you can by hunting. The glories of hunting. You spread bait near a snare. Animal goes into snare. You skin the animal. Exciting!

Also, something that vexes me a little bit, is the wolves. Wolves will attack you pretty much on site. That perpetrates the canard that wolves are man-eaters when, in North America, there are zero unprovoked wolf attacks. Zero, as in “none”. Gray wolves are endangered, for crying out loud!

You also go around performing a beaver holocaust. There's good money in beaver pelts and they're more or less helpless. But, c'mon! Assassin's Creed III: the Extinction!

Funniest moment for me – the man-eating black bear. I . . . laughed aloud when I heard that one. Black bears are famously cowardly.

So the game has a lot of tedious gameplay. Some of it, like the trading, is reasonably important to the game. You need to buy things to succeed in the game so you have to use their silly trading interface to make money, rather than trade being something that just arises from your estate's growth. Hunting is amusing for about ten minutes but then it's a drag.

There are some improvements over the AC2 games. Well, one improvement. The freerunning – which is the core of the game – is greatly improved. And, yet, they seem to want to use it less, there are far fewer jumping puzzles than in previous games, at least as far as I got (and since I was about halfway done when I gave up, it would be a long stretch otherwise).

Mostly what AC3 did was make me want to play AC2, Brotherhood and Revelations, again. Which is okay since those games are great.

A bit of a rant about Joss Whedon's fans vis-a-vis his Romney parody video

Okay, I admit it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is pretty cool – uneven, but some of the episodes are among the best in television (Hush, Once More, with Feeling stand out, IMO) and I liked Angel even better overall (Smile Time is among the funniest things ever put on television, and I'm counting the Thanksgiving episode of WKRP in Cincinnati and the Futurama's Roswell That Ends Well). But sometime around Firefly, well, it was clear there was a cult of personality going on. I don't particularly like Firefly and when people ask me why, I go, “The sexism.” Then, with near 100% reliability, Firefly fans say, “There's no sexism! Kaylee! River!” And I go, “Mal publicly and frequently sexually humiliates Inari by calling her a whore . . . and this causes her to fall in love with him. That's sexism. That isn't near the line. It's so far over the line that it can't see the line from orbit.” While this (with almost 100% reliability) gets them to concede the point, it seems to do little to dent their uncritical praise for Whedon's work. And I won't even get into Dollhouse and the whole prostitute-assassin-rape thing. Or even how embarrassingly stupid The Avengers is (though it most certainly is very stupid). I'm not saying Whedon is a talentless hack, I'm just saying he doesn't walk on water and I think much of his career is currently being sustained by the goodwill generated by Buffy that has transformed into a cult of personality. I'm sure that if almost anyone else had written a movie as bad as the Avengers, someone would have noticed.

Right here is a convenient place to show both Whedon's strengths and weaknesses as a writer. I'm not considering his acting, which is wooden, because that's not my point (and isn't the problem with the piece, anyway). The problem is that this joke is about a minute too long. Whedon spends about a minute belaboring the ways in which Romney's policies will bring about a zombie apocalypse. Except for Romney's unrestrained embrace of corporations, it was unnecessary and didn't build comedic tension but drained it due to the transparency of the humor. He essentially repeated things that are known about Romney, that are repeated by Obama's campaign ad nauseum. 

The basic premise is good. The zombie apocalypse bit is quite funny. But at two and a quarter minutes? Man, a joke has to be as good as The Aristocrats to be that long.  (I'm sure there are many versions of it on YouTube, if I recall, Bob Saget's is particularly good, but his, Gottfried's and Silverman's are all worth listening watching – or just watch all of Penn and Teller's The Aristocrats, great flick).

Because of it's unnecessary length, furthermore, it fails as political satire. For political satire to work, it's gotta hurt. With a premise as absurd as a zombie apocalypse, you've got to strike fast or you'll lose the audience you're trying to satirize. A Romney supporter, watching this video, will be taken aback by the zombie apocalypse thing and right then, right there, in that moment of shock, is when you've got to hurt them. Whedon should have employed his best weapon, the corporate line, immediately. Otherwise, you're allowing them to recover and go, “This is just a guy repeating the same ol' Democratic line.”  Which he is.  By the time he gets to Romney's worship of corporations, they've fully recovered. He went for a grind instead of a finish and lost on points.

This is the basic pattern of much of Whedon's work – it has moments of sharp wit but it's in between all this other stuff which is not so good. Which isn't a problem for Whedon, in the sense that no writer lands the knock-out punch every swing. Even brilliant writers, like Mark Twain, have good and bad days. Whedon did give us Buffy, he did give us Angel, he certainly owes no one anything, artistically speaking. I'm just annoyed that people praise his works while seeming to willfully ignore his flaws.

How Awful is the Battleship Movie?

Battleship was worse than I thought it would be.

First, the protagonist is a fuck up aged 26 who is bullied by his brother to go into the Navy (as he is in the Navy). I thought that meant “enlisted” but at the movie's beginning he is an officer. Now . . . there are three ways to become an officer. The first is to go to the Naval Academy, the second is the Naval ROTC program and the third is to serve as an enlisted sailor for years with distinction and go to Officer's Candidate School.

The Naval Academy is a hard to get into school. Not only do you need the kind of grades and SAT scores of top Ivy League schools, you need things like a letter from your congresscritter. The NROTC program is basically a scholarship program, merit based, meaning that you need, again, a great high school career. Fuck ups do not get into either.

Then the fuck up officer fucks up and is told he's going to be kicked out of the Navy. His response is, “Oh, golly, I'm so ashamed” and not “Yay! I hated this job, it was a bad fit and I was bullied into it in the first place!” I mean, SHOCKER, a job a dude was bullied into doesn't work out.

Then they call the battleship Missouri the “greatest warship in US naval history”. That's . . . almost offensive. The greatest warship in US history is either the USS Constitution or the USS Monitor. I'd tend to say the Constitution, myself, a Revolutionary War ship that repeatedly won engagements with better armed and more numerous British warships. Considering the time, that was pretty epic. The Monitor was the victor against the CSS Merrimac in the Civil War. The battle was a technological turning point, the death of sail powered, wood hulled warships for steam powered, steel hulled ships.

The Missouri, on the other hand, was obsolete when constructed. It was just a leftover from the early 20^th century's focus on big ships. Everyone knew, militarily, real sea power was with aircraft carriers and submarines and everything else was just support for aircraft carriers and submarines. Battleships were always kind of pointless, an egotistical race for side. Easy to target, slow to maneuver, with guns that could not track small, fast ships, they were always utterly pointless. Even for the wars in which the Missouri served, it was militarily insignificant.

But then, cut to the female romantic lead, who is a physical therapist (they probably found “nurse” too cliched, but clearly did not stray far afield) talking to this dude who had his legs blown off in Afghanistan. He's got a bad attitude because, y'know, he has lost his legs and IS SURROUNDED BY CONDESCENDING IDIOTS. He is introduced in physical therapy being told by a dull eyed therapist to correct his form on his artificial legs and to focus. I know different people respond differently to motivation, but a whole hell of a lot of us, when we're tired and in pain, really, really object to people telling us what we already goddamn know.

Then the new pretty white lady therapist shows up and says he's still the same man who won the Golden Gloves and was an elite soldier. That's . . . an awful thing to say to a guy who's lost his legs. Because those are precisely the kinds of things he can't do, anymore. Your stick and move really suffers when you've got not fucking legs. And, of course, the Army puts you on 100% disability when your legs get blown off. He will never be a boxer nor soldier, again. Saying he's the same man is just wrong. And cruel. He has suffered a terrible, permanent injury that is preventing him from doing many of the things he loves.

Of course, in the end, he'll get an attitude adjustment and be okey-dokey. Because a positive attitude solves all wrongs! (I have now watched it all and I was of course right. Stupidest moment in the movie – the legless boxer submitting an alien with a reverse triangle with artificial legs.)

Then they gave us, about the aliens, “No material on the periodic table!” Except for . . . lawrencium! My soul, it aches. I mean, it's quite possible that alien materials would be hard to analyze because any really foreign compound is liable to be hard to analyze, and it could well be produced with technologies we don't know. But atoms are the same everywhere in the universe and some form of stabilized lawrencium, sure, maybe there's a stable allotrope, would be just as hard to analyze. I mean, how do you even figure out something is a stable allotrope of lawrencium? The stuff barely exists on this planet.

OHEMGEE! The Navy fired first! They sent out a warning horn, got a much more powerful one in return and then OPENED FIRE. The aliens might have been peaceful but some idiot yahoo OPENED FIRE on an ALIEN SHIP.

What the aliens were trying to say: “We come in peace. Our planet's environment has been destroyed and we're looking for a new home. We're a primarily aquatic people so you'll barely notice we're there, except for all the incredible technologies we're willing to give you in payment for part of your ocean.”

Afterward: “Fuck you guys.”

Then the cowardly academic! Of course, no academics are intelligent, well-adjusted people with lots of social skills. It's all Big Bang Theory, yep, where academics are awkward, socially inept yobs. (By the end, the Cowardly Lion finds his courage.)

A big part of the “plot” is the aliens need to coopt human communications equipment to phone home because theirs was destroyed in reentry. The idea is that a land based system fired off a command to a satellite that “boosts the signal”, apparently with sufficient intensity to break the light barrier, I dunno. I kept asking myself, “They have space ships. Why don't they just go up to the satellite, directly, and send the signal from there.” I, of course, do know the reason. The script writers are either fools or (and I think this is more likely), well, unmotivated. Some guy comes up to me and says, “So, we're making a movie based on the game Battleship.” “You mean, that double blind target finding game based on WWII sea duels?” Yeah, except instead of that, we're going to have aliens.” “Aliens?” “Aliens. We'll pay.” Not exactly the best material to work with so I'll give them a pass. Indeed, I'll give everyone in the movie a pass except the producers who pushed this through to completion. I understand that everyone else, the director, actors, CG guys, best boys, I understand all of these people need to put food on the table, they need to work. But the producers? Fuck those guys.

And let's talk length. The movie is over two hours long. Which is admittedly over two hours too long, but there's a reason action movies used to be around ninety minutes.

Then they use the Missouri. With WWII and Korean era vets that conveniently happen to be on hand. Now, Korea ended in 1952. By my reckoning, that's sixty years ago. Since enlistment age is 18, the MINIMUM age of any vet of the Missouri is SEVENTY-EIGHT.

Then they fire up the boilers of the Missouri, which is physically demanding labor in extremely hot conditions. Remember, minimum age, seventy-eight. And some of them are from WWII, meaning they're no younger than EIGHTY-FIVE. Of course, some of them will be older.

And then they do that thing that they did in the one horrible Pirates of the Caribbean movie – not that one, the OTHER one – where they drop anchor to swing a ship around by ninety degrees. Well, it would not have worked in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, that kind of sudden deceleration would either snap the chain (if you're lucky) or rip the chain through the hull of the ship or some combination of the two. When you do it with a BATTLESHIP . . . the ship would either snap in two or the capstan would be ripped out or the chain would shear through the hull, or some combination of the three.

In the denouement, of course the fuck up saves the day and he's awarded a Silver Star – which is the third highest honor a military person can get.

HELLLLLLO, the person who is responsible for saving the SPECIES would get a Congressional Medal of Honor – and then spend the next six months touring the planet while every nation on earth hands him the highest honor they can give to foreigners.

His brother, who DIED, and started the conflict by opening fire on an alien ship, got the Navy Cross, a higher honor than the guy who SAVED THE SPECIES.

They get nothing right. No thing.

I will also say that the screenwriter, at least, realized that these aliens were not military. Their weapons could not instantly destroy our ships. They had no weapons of mass destruction, no armed aircraft much less spacecraft. Our weapons could hurt their ships. Their people on the ground, while wearing powered armor, had no guns. (Lots of reasons, too, why they had powered armor, the Earth has higher gravity, maybe, and they did do a lot of heavy lifting). It's like . . .

Imagine a Spanish galleon from the 16^th century fighting a modern destroyer. The galleon would vanish under the power of the destroyer's weapons – the least powerful of the destroyer's weapons could easily sink a galleon before the galleon was in range of hitting the destroyer. Which it would never get into because it is a wind driven craft and the destroyer has diesel engine.

Now imagine that galleon up against a cargo ship with a top speed of around six miles an hour. Sure, the crew have some weapons, guns and such, but they have no armor, no training, and the galleon's guns would be able to blow holes in the cargo ship's hull – it isn't designed for war. It wouldn't necessarily be an easy fight, but it would be a winnable one for the galleon.

That's what happened in Battleship. We destroyed essentially unarmed recon ships full of civilian crew.

And so what if they don't contact their world? Will that necessarily stop additional exploration of earth? Would it stop humans? And they more less said that the aliens' world is fucked – they might not need to move but they definitely want to. Somehow, I doubt one failed recon mission will put the matter to rest. And next time, they will send a warship. It's what we'd do.

Where are their holidays? Other people also protect our freedoms, right?

Now that it's after Memorial Day and the worst of the chatter is over, I'm going to say, as I do every year, that I find it a little silly that people praise soldiers more than any other group for keeping us free.

Here are some other people, right off the top of my head, that I can think of who are at least as responsible for keeping us free as soldiers.

Police.  This should be evident.  Hard to be free without good social order.

Teachers.  Again, evident.  Teachers are one of the groups of people who are responsible for teaching our children the blessings and responsibilities of liberty.  Soldiers are not in our classrooms, day in and day out, for the inglorious and poorly paid primary education positions that are vital for the continuation of a free society.

Protesters.  Every expansion of liberty in the United States came about because someone decided to make an issue of it.  The struggle against slavery, universal emancipation, worker's rights, racial and gender equality.  You name it, it's protestors who did it.  Fredrick Douglass, Susan Anthony, Martin Luther King, Jr., these people faced tremendous difficulties to create and expand the reach of freedom.

Lawyers.  Many of the liberties we hold dear were not won on the battlefield, but in the courtroom.  This goes back to the writing of the Constitution, itself, largely the world of James Madison, who was a lawyer.

Writers.  I'm going to throw a bone to myself, I guess.  But writers have inspired people all over the world to seek freedom and whenever you look at a group of people fighting oppression, there are a bunch of writers who are all up in it, creating the moral and intellectual arguments for defiance of tyranny.  This goes from Thomas Paine, through guys like Alexander Solzhenitsyn right up to Aung San Suu Kyi.

Others could be added to this list, all of whom are at least as important as soldiers for creating and maintaining freedom, many of whom have and continue to face tremendous persecution, violence and death in their struggles for freedom, all over the world - but many others who toil in difficult circumstances in ignomy, without any glory at all.

Where are their holidays?

My bike vs. my trike

Now that I've had the recumbent bicycle a couple of days, I can run down the benefits of each!

Benefits of the recumbent bicycle relative to my recumbent trike:

1.  It's lighter.  But about ten pounds - 32 pounds for the bike, 42 for the trike, before throwing the other garbage on it.

2.  It's easier to manhandle.  It's around the dimensions of an upright bicycle.

3.  You can use normal bike racks for transportation.  Which is nice.

4.  It can easily be brought inside the house for security and protection from the weather.

Advantages of the recumbent trike over the bicycle:

1.  I can ride it.

Like, whoa, riding a recumbent bicycle is more than a little weird.  After three days, I have finally gotten to the point where I can ride a little bit in a straight line.  Leaning back and keeping your balance is . . . well, I'm not used to it.  But to go at all, you've got to lean back, as far back as you'd be in a recliner, and pedal outward, not down.  So, my balance is weird and I don't know where to put my feet.  I thought my experiences with trike would help me - I'm used to leaning down and pedalling out! - but that turns out not to be the case.  So I suppose I should put down the rest of the advantages the trike has over the bike, hehe.

2. More comfortable - only by a little, the trike is more comfortable.

3. More cargo space.  Important since I want to use the bike/trike to pop down to the store.

4. More stable.  No balance required.  Get on and go, every time.  Which also means there is basically no hill you can't go up so long as you can go up it even a little.

I've heard that some of the problems with my particular recumbent can be fixed by getting wider, softer tires.  It is currently running a 26" x 1.25" in back and a 20" x 1.25" in the front at 80 psi.  If I go wider tires - 1.75", used in mountain bikes and BMX bikes for back and front - and go down to 60 psi, I hear the stability goes up considerably.

But right now, there is no way I can use the recumbent bicycle to ride.  But I came up with a solution to keep the trike - after getting the recumbent!  Bad timing, I know.  Some of it is things some people have suggested, too, so I'm sorry for not having listened more!  Ego is a sonofabitch.

For security, I'm going to use this nearly indestructible chain to attack it to a tree in back of our house, and attach the chain to the bike with a u-lock that has an alarm - so if it's disturbed, it sets out a wail.  To protect it from the weather, well, I'll get a cover.  Duh, right?  Then right by the tree, I'll get some gravel and bricks and shovel some stakes and 1 x 4s and make a little porch for it.  If we get really lousy weather, tropical storms or what have you, we can go through the effort of bringing the bike indoors.

While in general, I'm still very much pro-bents, this experience has moved me more towards being pro-bent trikes as being stupid easy to use relative to bent bikes, that have a fairly steep learning curve.