Interesting links and notes on updates to my main website.



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a salty death, yar

President's Choice Indian Chicken Madras (350g): 1120mg of salt

1120mg! Over a gram of salt. Fricking hell.

PC Indian Chicken Korma: 802mg
PC Yellow Curry Chicken (280g): 810mg
PC Sesame Ginger Chicken (280g): 750mg
PC Chicken Curry (280g): 560mg
Lean Cuisine Italian Cheese Ravioli (222g): 554mg
LC Glazed Chicken (225g): 541mg
PC Organic Mac & 3 Cheese (300g): 957mg! posted by Richard at 18:03 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

like a bird on a wire

There is a bird in Hartman's.
High up in the lofty new ceiling.
Sitting on a pipe, chirping. posted by Richard at 18:00 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Battlestar: a brilliant, fractured mirror of our times

There is much to admire in Battlestar Galactica.
It is a sort of magic realism wrapped in the cloak of science fiction.

Galactica is post-Trek, post-tech, post-rationalist (or is it pre-rationalist).
It's about good and evil in a grey world of madness.

The Cylons are brilliant.
Because it's easy when they're all cold killing robots.
You might wonder about the opening titles, why the focus on the fact that the Cylons look human, that they feel.
It's important because it's easy to hate a dehumanized enemy.
But the new Cylons are just modified humans.
The Cylons are about what it means to be human.

Bringing in unreason and religion also gives the story a great twist.

The enemy, these evil Cylons, are monotheists who believe in a God of love.
On the face of it, this is madness. How can you believe in a God of love and wipe out an entire civilization, nuke them almost out of existence?

But of course, most human religions preach peace and practice war.

The humans, meanwhile, are polytheists.

Religion has been and continues to be a driving force in human civilization and behavior. In the 16th century, Philip II of Spain literally believed that he and by extension the Spanish empire was the chosen instrument of the true, Catholic God.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth of England and her citizens believed equally that they were the instruments of the true, Protestant God.

And you have to wonder, these enemy Cylons, weren't they designed to be slaves?
Aren't we supposed to be on the side of slaves who revolt against their corrupt masters? Are the Cylons noble Christians, rising against the corrupt Romans?

The humans meanwhile have flaws aplenty.
The doctor is a great character, because again this idea of the dispassionate rationalist is shredded. He's smart, but also weak, lustful, amoral, and possibly insane.

In traditional SF, we have this wonderful expansive definition for rights. Anything with sentience equal to or greater than human, is equivalent to humans, and deserves human rights.

Galactica is having none of this.
We like Starbuck right, she's cool.
But she has no problem torturing the human Cylon Omen.
That's not such a nice side.

One minute, Helo is loving Sharon quite a lot, the next,
he's treating her like a thing, an object, non-human,
nothing has changed, she looks the same, she's the same person,
he just knows that she's a Cylon.

What is this ability that allows us to dehumanize other humans, when we decide they are our enemies.

In the season ending confrontation, we have a great scenario.
The President is having drug-induced visions of prophecy which lead her to send Starbuck off on some mad mission.
The military commander orders her to step down.

So we're rooting for the President right? Democracy, rule of law against military coup. But wait, the President is basing her policy on religious mysticism.

So, the good guy is well... no one.

It is the anti- Star Trek: The Next Generation.
TNG has three main flaws:
1. There is no conflict, there is no money, there is no drama. It's a future of people on a cruise ship, spending their lives in conference rooms coming to a harmonious consensus. It's boring.
2. With a few notable exceptions, the characters have no vibrancy. It's not clear how much of this is due to the constraints of their perfectly boring lives, and how much is due to the actors.
3. They seemed to decide that science fiction meant you had to fill the show with meaningless babble about particles and rays and explaining some gibberish futuristic pseudoscience.

The standard episode goes like this:
Enterprise cruising around for no particular reason.
Anomaly is detected in space.
We all admire the image of the anomaly on the viewer.
"Let's have a meeting."
The anomaly is emitting deadly boguson particles!
Can the deflector be reconfigured to emit anti-boguson particles in time?

Good lord, I can't belive they lasted for 7 seasons with that garbage.
What they didn't understand is that if you're going to do 20 hours of TV a year, it needs to about something. Drama, comedy, something.

There are all kinds of types of science fiction.
But the core is no different from any play or book.
What kind of interesting fictional scenarios can we create, to better understand people and ideas, and be thus entertained.
All science fiction does is give you another stage on which to act out your performance, another background for your action.
After all, where can you set a fictional story?
Basically, in the past, with some connection to a historical period,
or in the present or some variation thereof,
or in the future.
That's about it.
The only other alternative is to set your scene against a background of rules very different from our own experience: this is fantasy.

The key to most good science fiction is that it may be in the future, or in space, but it's not about that setting.
It's about how that setting and actions in it can illuminate the present.

There is of course some good SF that is "imagine this cool future" or "imagine this cool technology" or otherwise purely driven by the scenario, but you have to admit, that is a bit odd. It's as if you had a play that was about the background scenery, and not the players.

Galactica is great because it's about people, with all their failings.

Labels: battlestar galactica

posted by Richard at 11:59 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Battlestar Galactica

I watched all of Battlestar Galactica.
Yes, the whole thing. There are 13 episodes.
It's really quite very good, and quite demented.

It has been renewed for a second season.

The creator has a blog, Battlestar Galactica Blog.

Labels: battlestar galactica

posted by Richard at 19:01 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

dear americans

Canadians can decide the issue of same-sex marriage for themselves and don't need help from other countries, a coalition of same-sex marriage advocates said Tuesday.

Right-wing Christian Americans have been telephoning MPs to tell them how to vote on the proposed Civil Marriage Act. One Ontario MP has said she has received 30 calls from Americans in the last 10 days.

Americans should butt out of same-sex debate, coalition suggests

Dear, Dear Americans,

Please shut the fvck up.

Thank you,

Canada posted by Richard at 19:36 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

wave ruling

I'm reading To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World. It's interesting so far. posted by Richard at 13:06 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

cookie monsters

God Bless America.

Girls sued for delivering cookies

Two teenage girls who surprised their neighbors with homemade cookies late one night were ordered to pay nearly $900 in medical bills for a woman who says she was so startled that she had to go to the hospital.

from CNN.com posted by Richard at 11:58 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

Galactica

Incidentally, if you still watch your television the old-fashioned, scheduled way,
with commercials and those horrible giant screen popups and logos all over the place,
Galactica is on twice on Space:

Saturday at 8 PM Eastern
Sunday at 6 PM Eastern

I watched episode 2 "Water" last night, I'm just err, getting Internet caught up with episodes 3 and 4 right now.

Labels: battlestar galactica

posted by Richard at 11:12 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)

there's a bit of spam in it

I'm certainly glad the problem of spam has been solved.

Spam since 2004-08-28 (these are non-overlapping categories):

general spam: 5035
spam to my domain: 78
nigerian / fraud: 51
spam to my other domain: 1
phishing: 42

virus: 126+9 posted by Richard at 09:23 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)