My wife likes chocolates, shoes and shiny jewelry as much as the next woman. But the truest way to her heart involves things far nerdier than such pedestrian items.
See, I married a gamer. She carries dice in her purse, she knows the ins and outs of many character classes in a variety of games and she’s got very well-reasoned opinions on what’s worth playing and what’s a waste of time. She blogs about these things. And then there’s the fact that I met her playing World of Warcraft.
So when it came to picking something up for her in celebration of Singles Awareness Day (her name for the holiday commemorating St. Valentine), I knew I had to think beyond the normal bouquets of flowers and boxes of sweets. Of course, she’d just finished Mass Effect and its sequel was released late last month, so it was obvious what she really wanted. Even if she hadn’t reminded me in her signature subtle fashion. (That’s what we call “sarcasm,” kids)
I brought the game home last night, along with a box of chocolates, because hey, some traditions aren’t all that bad.
Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetheart. I know it’s actually tomorrow, but you prefer spontaneity in your gifts, not obligation.
So that idea I mentioned in yesterday’s IT CAME FROM NETFLIX! podcast? I got it off the ground. I actually got off my ass and tried something new. Basically, the idea goes something like this.
There are a lot of podcasts out there that get awfully boring awfully fast. I enjoy podcasting, but just because I enjoy talking about stuff that’s interesting to me doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be interested in listening to me talk about it. So why not open up the forum for people to contribute by sending me ideas? I mean, I don’t want to be boring and you don’t want to be bored. And you’re probably going to be more interested in what you’re hearing if you had a hand in making somebody talk about it. Give folks the keys to the city, so to speak, and let them vote on what’ll be discussed. One could even open up the possibility of having people donate to put weight behind their vote.
So I picked a song that’s freely available for some opening & closing music, brewed up a cup of tea, and blathered the first thing out. Oh, the other gimmick? Unscripted, unrehearsed, unedited. A little raw, as it were. Getting the creative goods directly from the source without worrying about little hiccups or snags. A more conversational experience, rather than me acting like a professional on a pedestal dispensing precious knowledge to you peons below.
This is just going to be a quick little reminder about an undeniable fact that is occasionally hard to swallow.
I’m imperfect.
Yes, I’ll blog about how I go about doing the writing thing as if other people should do the same, or venture my opinion about a piece of entertainment media that some others appear to consider having merit. But I never come out with these things under the impression that I know everything about whatever it is I’m discussing. Heck, my dayjob involves me dealing with Flash on a regular basis, but I managed to mess up my Star Trek Online preview to the point that it came out long after the Escapist did one.
So yeah. I’m not perfect. I’m happy to share my thoughts on writing, the process I’m going through with The Project, my reviews of movies and/or games and whatever else manages to find its way here. I just never want people to think that I’m under the impression my shit doesn’t stink. Because it does. Dear God, does it ever.
The reason I’m letting my fingers fly about this is some of the other writing blogs I’ve encountered. Let’s face it, we can be a pretty pretentious bunch. Now, being a published author can give someone the rights to crow a bit, and I don’t blame them a bit. And we need to be all about the self-promotion and that means puffing up the plumage. That’s fine too. What gets to me is the occasional blog I stumble across that sounds like it’s being written by a wildly successful novelist about everything they’ve done that makes them so awesome but is completely undermined by the fact that they’ve gotten ink for nothing of note beyond perhaps a few articles. By the way, this is not directed at any of the writers I know personally. Most people I know personally are delightfully tongue-in-cheek about either their current success or their prospects for future publication. They know that publication is a hard, soul-crushing, will-sapping process and those that come out of the other side of it with any measure of success are either wildly talented or masters of salesmanship, especially when it comes to selling themselves.
These blogs which shall remain unlinked as I don’t want anybody else to suffer through their pretension fall into the latter category. They talk about endorsements they’ve gotten from celebrities. They gleefully tell us when their next draft is getting reviewed. They act, in short, like Shakespeare or Austin reborn, God’s gift to the bookstore, a veritable fucking revolutionary in the realm of modern entertainment.
I hope I never come across that way.
It wouldn’t be that hard. I could plaster the good things Bob Orci has said about me all over the place. I could recount every single pitch I send to the Escapist or other publications, with the assumption that Jordan’d be foolish not to put me into the issue in question. But I’m not going to. I know not everything I produce is worth publishing even in embryonic form, and things I do submit that have a chance are going to need rewrites. I know it’s not an easy process and it won’t always go the way I’d prefer. So it’d be foolish of me to act that way.
I guess I just have a low tolerance for the people who do.
If I ever should start acting this way, please, pick up a hardcover copy of Lord of the Rings or Stranger in a Strange Land and give my noggin a good whack. You’ll be doing the world a favor. I’d love to do the same for these people I’ve encountered, but I’d rather not be working on The Project from prison. It’d be hard to concentrate on character interaction when I’m avoiding gang rape.
I’ve mentioned sfdebris a couple times now, most recently in my post discussing my favorite critics. I bring him up because he’s relevant to something going on in my day job currently. In his review of the Star Trek: Voyager episode Good Shepherd, he covers the opening in which Seven of Nine gives an efficiency report, and mentions that a crew member with 5 degrees in theoretical cosmology is at the bottom of the ship doing menial engineering tasks.
Why no, I didn’t use this photo just because Seven of Nine’s in it, why do you ask?
Chuck puts it another way: “On a ship meant to explore the wonders of the universe, you’ve put Carl Sagan in charge of shoveling coal.” While this is more inexplicable than normal in a semi-utopian future world set in space, it still happens in the normal, everyday world. Over-qualification is something that happens in the workplace, especially when the economy isn’t behaving as well as most would like.
When companies cut back in areas, it’s usually in places they’d like to expand but simply don’t have the capital to invest. This means that a lot of the people who get axed are people with ideas, creative folk with esoteric backgrounds who might not be focused on business or profitability. When losing their jobs, they do what they can to look for further employment, brushing up their resumes and beginning the arduous search for a job, a search that is every bit as tedious and uncertain as the search for an agent or publisher. Those who still have jobs, on the other hand, might find themselves in a position where, in addition to their regular tasks, they’re doing things like answering the phone for other departments or watering the boss’s plants or something.
Times are tough, even for a Nobel laureate physicist like this gentleman.
Either way, you have creative people doing menial tasks – like Carl Sagan shoveling coal. I don’t have any sort of real solution in mind for the issue, other than keeping one’s eyes peeled for better employment elsewhere. And one should continue to make time for creative pursuits, because as theman has said several times, if one isn’t fortunate enough to be pursuing their dreams on a full-time basis, it becomes a spare-time endeavor. But that doesn’t mean one should give up.
It just means one might have to get by with less sleep and, really, who needs sleep? I don’t. And now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s coal that needs a-shovelin’.
At least, if I’m lucky, it’ll be coal and not something else.
Behold, the target audience of most summer action flicks!
I’ve had this opinion brewing for a while. I touched on it in yesterday’s Netflix post. While the prevailing sentiment out there in the dark and wild expanse of the Internet is that the new Star Trek is, on the whole, good, the film has taken some criticism that the writing was sub-standard, some of the acting was wooden and a lot of the big ideas and brainy philosophy that marked the old series as innovative and locked it forever in the hearts of nerds like myself has been stripped away to be replaced by the kind of kitschy, generic action that appeals to beer-guzzling frat boys. I’m not about to completely poo-poo those arguments, but at the same time I think that while they have some merit, there is enough good in the new Star Trek to balance out the bad.
In case you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few years, here’s what lead up to this film. Star Trek had, by and large, been languishing in the smell of its own failure for quite some time. The dangerously insidious one-two punch of Star Trek:Enterprise pissing on some of the established history and conventions and Nemesis pitting the Next Generation crew against an ailing Romulan clone of a Frenchman had all but slain the franchise. Enter J.J. Abrams, visionary director and apparently a man with gonads cast in the same metal used for the hull of a starship. Already known for his work in Lost and Cloverfield, Abrams set his sights on one of the most beloved and long-running universes in the history of science fiction. He also had previously done a movie called Mission: Impossible III, which was also a revisit of a franchise that had somewhat tanked and made it cool again, if not quite as good as the original. The best chance for repeat success was to team up with the writers who penned MI3 and also had helped Abrams launch his wildly successful show Fringe: Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
WANTED for crimes against die-hard fan bases!
Yeah, the same two guys who wrote the two live-action Transformers films. And the unfortunate victims of a LOT of criticism. Some of it is warranted. Revenge of the Fallen was a let-down on a lot of levels. Unlike the renegade smash hit sequels Wrath of Khan and Dark Knight, the second live-action TF flick turned out to be somewhat hackneyed, confusing at times and pandering to the aforementioned frat demographic. Granted, I’m a paradoxical being, in that I’m a Transformers fan and am also willing to admit that the original cartoon series wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of science-fiction writing that will stand the test of time. However, the writing is not the biggest weakness in either film. Sure, it could have been better, and more could have been done with these concepts and characters, but at the helm of the films was Michael Bay. The writers, ultimately, had very little say in how the final product would be put together. When Michael Bay directs, it honestly doesn’t matter how good the writing is. He could pick up Hamlet, fill it with explosions in Denmark, cast Megan Fox as Ophelia, and have 30 Seconds to Mars do the soundtrack. Guess how bad & brainless it would be. Go on, guess.
“I gotta FEVER… and the only PRESCRIPTION… is MORE LENS FLARES.”
Let’s get back to Abrams. He started as a writer and producer and, while his résumé does include the unfortunate missteps of Gone Fishin’ and Armageddon, he’s also responsible for the television series Lost and Fringe. The latter series is, as I mentioned, the result of a collaboration between Abrams and the supposedly criminal writers – and it’s engaging, thoughtful, funny and well-paced. Blaming the failings of Transformers and its sequel on the same writers who brought us Fringe is, in my opinion, illogical. Here’s an example: the last major contribution Uhura made to Star Trek, back in The Undiscovered Country, was reading haltingly out of a Klingon dictionary. It’s one of the few problems with that otherwise solid film, since Uhura is supposed to be an expert in linguistics. In Abrams’ Trek, Uhura is not only a xenolinguist of the highest order, she has the chutzpah to tell Captain Pike that she can do the comm officer job better than the senior officer whom Pike promptly sends to scrub toilets on the engineering deck. On the other hand, back in Transformers, the character of Jazz, who had previously been characterized as Optimus Prime’s competent and improvisational second in command, has fewer than a dozen lines. Instead of focusing on the established characters, the reason we’re sitting in the cinema in the first place, Michael Bay focuses on the bumbling trigger-happy humans and gives us as many opportunities as possible to ogle Megan Fox. By contrast, Abrams’ Star Trek is all about the characters. Scrape the layer of the TF flicks and you’ll just find blasting caps and thongs. Under the lens flares and shiny objects of Star Trek is something a bit more substantial.
I know some critics wanted Star Trek to be ‘about’ more than just zipping around the cosmos blasting things, but consider this: both Kirk and Spock are living in the shadows of their pasts. Kirk is expected to measure up to the heroism of his father, and Spock has a massive chip on his shoulder when it comes to his mother. They need to overcome these challenges in order to seize their destinies. And yes, relying on the machinations of fate to have everything resolve in the space of a story is a mark of lazy storytelling, and might be the weakest part of the film, but the fact that the story is driven by the characters and most of them are portrayed so well balances this weakness. I also know the themes of the film are not as deep or powerful as, say, District 9, but there’s still something meaningful about it, especially for anyone who’s been held to an impossible standard by themselves or others.
And then there are some individuals, one with whom I’d worked personally on something exceptionally nerdy, that believe that this latest iteration has RUINED STAR TREK FOREVER. Between branching universe theory, the support of such luminaries as Leonard Nimoy, the nearly unanimous critical acclaim and the sheer amount of pure awesome packed into this film, I believe I am entitled to my God-given Internet-based opinion that these individuals have a problem in which their cranial spaces have gotten spatially dislocated into their ventral waste disposal cavities. I’d go so far as to continue this little tirade in Klingon, but I don’t want the Internet to explode from such a dense concentration of unapologetic nerd.
