“Last Resort”: ABC is trying to tempt me back to TV
A new drama from ABC promises to combine two of my favorite concepts: civilization-building, and submarines.
“Last Resort” is about the crew of a nuclear submarine, declared pariahs, who find a tropical island and start building their own civilization there.
As far as I can tell, it’s the first submarine-based show since the late “SeaQuest DSV,” a corny, uneven, very-1990s sci-fi drama that nonetheless was a formative show for me. (It was cancelled partway through its first season, just as it had started to find its footing by discarding the post-Cold War utopianism and paranormal elements that had weighed down the first two seasons.) There’s always been something I’ve found cool about submarines — the alien undersea environment, the close quarters, the tension from observing the world only indirectly through sensors.
The show also seems to mirror eerily closely a game/exercise I used to do with a friend when I was in first grade or so. Inspired by SeaQuest, we would make up and act out a scenario where a super-powerful submarine started its own country (and then conquered the world, because obviously) from a base on some tropical island. Hawaii? I can’t remember. Anyway, it was pretty sweet, and ABC has clearly plagiarized me.
Walking off right
Longtime Cubs pitcher Kerry Wood retired today in the most fitting fashion possible: with a K.
He’ll go into the record books with the second-highest strikeout rate in Major League Baseball history, behind only surefire Hall of Famer Randy Johnson.
Wood’s retirement today also unseated a less momentous mark. As he struck out Dayan Viciedo and then walked off the field to a standing ovation and the waiting arms of his young son Justin, my eyes unexpectedly teared up.
That hadn’t happened to me, as near as I can remember, in about six years.
It was undeniably an emotional moment, but I’m clueless as to what about that scene pushed me over the edge when other intense times haven’t cracked my stoicism.
I’m not complaining. Baseball is one of my biggest passions, and Kerry Wood has been at the center of that since the beginning.
This western life’s no paradise: “The Idiot” then and now
Stan Rogers wrote “The Idiot” 30 years ago, but listening to it last night I was struck by how a song written about Alberta in the early 1980s applies to North Dakota in the early 2010s.
The Canadian folk singer included “The Idiot” on his 1981 album Northwest Passage, part of a series of concept albums Rogers was doing on different regions of Canada. His earlier work had focused on the maritime life in Atlantic Canada, but Northwest Passage touched on the country’s north and west.
Specifically, “The Idiot” was about a man from eastern Canada who moved to Alberta to work in the oil industry:
I often take these night shift walks when the foreman’s not around I turn my back on the cooling stacks and make for open ground Far out beyond the tank farm fence where the gas flare makes no sound I forget the stink and I always think back to that eastern town
HDR success
It looks so cool, but it’s far from easy. I’ve made a half-dozen attempts at taking HDR pictures lately, and until today all of them had turned out terribly. In fact, the first one I tried today didn’t come out, either. But on my second set of shots on a trail around Devil’s Tower National Monument in Wyoming, I managed to produce this:
A high-dynamic range photo of the Belle Fourche River as it flows by Devil's Tower in Wyoming, with green grass and blue sky contrasted with the red soil of the Spearfish Formation.
An over-confident Witness
The Atlantic just featured a story about the new game by “Braid” maker Jonathan Blow.
The article, and Blow, were rife with criticisms that almost all video games today are “juvenile, silly, and intellectually lazy.” Blow’s work, first the time-bending platformer “Braid” and now his upcoming puzzle-solving adventure game “Witness,” was presented as a new, more intelligent alternative.
Granting, for a moment, the partially true but incredibly overbroad premise about modern video games, Taylor Clark is certainly right about “Braid.” A game that at first appears to be a simple “Super Mario Bros.” clone turns out to be so much more. While you run around a world filled with platforms, obstacles and waddling monsters, jumping to avoid and squash them, that’s only the game’s most basic mechanic. In addition to controlling your character’s motions, like any of thousands of platformers since Mario, you also control time.
Spare the spoilers
For millennia, we struggled with insufficient information. Now our bane is getting too much.
I speak, of course, of the spoiler — learning something before you wanted to know it, in a way that ruins the pleasure of the journey.
After all, when we consume fiction, we don’t just want a summary of the plot. You don’t get the same thrill reading a Wikipedia plot summary as you do letting it unfold. We like to enjoy the moments as they unfold, to discover twists and turns when the author intended, not all at once.
For example, I’ve never seen M. Night Shymalan’s “The Sixth Sense.” Why bother? I learned about the movie’s twist well before I even considered seeing the movie. I’d probably still enjoy watching it, but losing the thrill of figuring it out has sapped any motivation to go out and go see it. And in a world where there’s always another entertainment option, that’s a death knell.
Earnest and the Snarks
Want to get the zeitgeist of our times? Check the reactions to the Olive Garden review.
The story’s gotten seemingly everywhere the past week, but briefly: 85-year-old, semi-retired Marilyn Hagerty wrote a review of the new Olive Garden restaurant in her home town of Grand Forks for the Grand Forks Herald. The review was straightforward and unassuming, praising things like the “Tuscan farmhouse style,” the busy kitchen staff and the “warm and comfortable” chicken Alfredo.
Then, as Joe Posnanski put it, the Internet exploded.
Not in the business
Media companies deserve piracy if they make life too difficult for consumers. Or do they?
That’s the argument today over a new comic (sNSF) by Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal. The frequently provocative Inman sets his sights on the question of media piracy by presenting a hypothetical case of a young man who wants to watch the HBO series “Game of Thrones.”
Inman’s character, a well-meaning sort, listens to the angel on his left shoulder who urges him to pay for the show instead of pirating it. But Mr. Oatmeal (as I’ll call him), credit card in hand, finds he can’t buy the show on iTunes, he can’t buy it on Amazon, he can’t watch it on the Netflix or Hulu subscriptions he pays for, and he can’t even watch it on HBO’s own website. Giving in to his demon-on-the-right-shoulder, Mr. Oatmeal visits a shady website, downloads a torrent, and is quickly watching direwolves, horse lords and the “Douchiest. Prince. EVER.”
This argument is the moderate “piracy’s not bad” argument. (The radical pro-piracy argument says piracy is a good thing, because charging for information is wrong.) Piracy, the moderate argument goes, isn’t a good thing. But good people who are willing to pay for content are DRIVEN to piracy when antiquated content-providers put roadblocks in their way. If these companies would just let us get our content through simple, one-click purchases, piracy would wither away. Look at what happened to music piracy when iTunes came around, they say — sure, some people still pirate songs, but those are the irreconcilables. Reasonable people want to be able to buy TV shows and movies the way they buy music.
It’s a reasonably persuasive argument. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday night miscellany, part 5
None of my longer posts are coming together, so I write short to break the writer’s block:
— Food for thought: The proposed Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar would replace our current calendar — jury-rigged to fit the unequal revolution and rotation of the Earth — with a fixed calendar, where every day of the year always falls on the same day of the week. Christmas would always be on a Sunday. Americans would always celebrate their independence on a Wednesday, while the French would do the same on a Saturday a week and a half later.
To equalize out the calendar, Hanke-Henry would add an extra week every five or six years.
Moreover, they’d also abolish time zones. All time would be UTC — so when it’s 0700 hours in London and the sun is coming up, it’s also 0700 in New York City but the middle of the night, and also 0700 in Honolulu — and the late evening. 0700 hours would always be evening in Honolulu, just as it would always be morning in London.
(It’s unclear how Hanke and Henry expect people to function — whether they want people to continue working 0900 to 1700 every day for synchronization, even if that means people in some parts of the world become nocturnal, or if they want people to continue setting their schedules largely by the sun but just calling it different times, or some combination of both.)
It’s a proposal that’s a big step towards the “rational” and away from the “natural,” and I’m not sold at all that it would be an improvement. But it’s at least thought-provoking.
A baker’s dozen short
On “The Hobbit,” dwarves and why Peter Jackson is right to deviate from Tolkien’s classic
As a fan of literature, I rarely root for a film adaptation to make wholesale changes to a beloved book. And yet strangely, for among my most-beloved books, those of J.R.R. Tolkien, I’m in the position cheering for major changes to plot, theme and tone in the upcoming adaptations of “The Hobbit.”
I was a huge fan of Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” both books and movies. Peter Jackson’s movies took a lot of liberties with the books, generally focusing more on action than the often meandering travelogue of Tolkien’s prose, and cutting out sequences both extraneous (Tom Bombadil) and cool but probably unworkable (the Scourging of the Shire). Characters were tweaked and plots rearranged, with battle sequences extended far beyond Tolkien’s brief descriptions and characters given extra adventures and conflict.
While some purists complained, I largely didn’t mind. For the better part of four years I obsessed over the films, tracking news as they were shot and produced and then watching them multiple times, in theaters and on DVD, after release.
But anyone who thought Peter Jackson’s adaptation of “The Lord of the Rings” played fast and loose with the original had better hurry up and hook up a dynamo in Wolvercote Cemetery, because Professor Tolkien is about to be spinning madly in his grave.
