Televised Sheep Fighting

Another classic idea from Jeremy Clarkson: Televised Sheep Fighting. I laughed myself silly.

Warning: Do not read Jeremy Clarkson if you are offended by the politically incorrect. It will only upset you.

Talk Like A Pirate Day 2009

Arrr, maties! Don’t ye forget that tomorrow be International Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Homicide and The Corner

Over this last few months I’ve been reading these two works by David Simon (and Ed Burns, as co-author of The Corner).

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets is the story of a year in the life of the West Baltimore Homicide unit, and the inspiration for the cult TV show The Wire. Overall verdict: Very interesting, highly recommended.

What strikes me most from this book is the things TV detective shows get right (the pressure on detectives, the damage to their family lives, the internal politics, the attempts to trick prisoners into confessing, and the black humour) and the things they get wrong (the trustworthiness and value of forensic evidence, the likelihood of a gunfight occurring, the likelihood of a gunshot wound dropping someone instantly, and the chance of actually solving any given murder).

I particularly recommend the Geraldine Parrish case, which would not be at all out of place on Life or The Mentalist. I couldn’t help laughing at the plaintive cry of the hitman with a contract on one of Mrs Parrish’s female relatives, after three or four failed attempts: “Why won’t she die?”

The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood is the other side of the coin; a year amongst the drug-addicted urban underclass of West Baltimore. Overall verdict: Outstanding journalism, but very depressing.

One can’t help but have a grudging respect for people who every day wake up with nothing but the clothes they’re wearing, and by nightfall manage somehow to scrape together enough money to feed their drug habits. One can’t help but be depressed by the way they live, and give thanks that one doesn’t have to live that way oneself.

The authors’ thesis is that these people have no sense of self-worth, no purpose, and precious little love in their lives; and they will do anything to get it (dealing drugs, teenage pregnancy), or to anaesthetise themselves against the lack of it (consuming drugs). In the absence of any hope of improvement, I’m not at all sure I’d do any better than that myself; the few people highlighted as trying to make a difference work incredibly hard for miniscule rewards, or more often, the hope of a miniscule reward in the far future.

It’s hard to see how more police, more prisons, or tougher laws will deal with all this. Modern Western culture has written off those on the corner as irrelevant; the way to resolve the problem is to change that underlying position. Unfortunately, the authors just document the problem and the approaches that don’t work; they offer no solution, and I don’t see one either.

Insularity

It came to me last night, as in a dream, that my life has drifted into an undesirable pattern. What used to be leisure time, spent with friends, has turned into overtime and commuting. Apart from dinner with my family (most nights) and work, I only see real people for a few days each August; my personal life is on the Internet at odd hours of the night.

This is not acceptable. Time to move back into meatspace, so if posts become intermittent again, that’s why; I’ve decided to get a life.

The Searchers

WordPress has a useful feature that lets me see how many people visit which page of the site, and what they are searching for when they do so.

Most of it is games-related, as you might expect; and it looks like a lot of people would be interested in rules for solo games of Warhammer 40,000; but I am curious what I have in the site that attracts people looking for (and I quote) “porno wedding episodes”.

I’ll probably get even more of them now I’ve typed that. Sorry guys, nothing to see here, drive on…

Watch the Sky

I’ve been quiet for a few days, because my bride is back from Sicily! Yay!

And since then, our evenings have been spent in front of that worthy addition to our busy modern lifestyle, the Sky+ box. Even after I culled a load of stuff, and a determined assault on the remainder over the bank holiday weekend, we still have about 40 hours left to watch. So what has filled our box? I’m glad you asked.

• Chuck: A fish-out-of-water sitcom, featuring a guy who works in a discount warehouse who has bizarrely learned the bulk of the secrets held by the CIA and NSA, which they have then lost. An average guy trying to keep up with the superspies. This is territory that has been covered before in things like Jake 2.0 and (to an extent) Reaper, but it works well. Like Father Ted, in that I sit down each week thinking it will be awful, but find myself enjoying it.
• Dollhouse: Which I have enthused about before. A grown-up version of Joe 90, but none the worse for that.
• Life: Which I like for its bizarre plots and strange protagonist (a millionaire Zen Buddhist detective).
• The Mentalist: Another detective show with a strange protagonist, a fake psychic turning his powers to fight crime. Entertaining, but takes liberties with things like NLP for the sake of the plot.
• My Own Worst Enemy: An interesting premise, but it struggles to hold my interest after half a dozen episodes – it would have been better as a movie. The premise is that there is a group of secret agents who have deliberately induced split personalities; their cover is unbreakable because it is a separate personality completely, which knows nothing about the agent – except for the protagonist, who due to a technical fault switches randomly between the two. There’s only so much you can do with that.
• NCIS: One of the better detective shows. Perhaps because it is limited in scope (NCIS investigates crimes involving US Navy and Marine personnel only), it develops bizarre crimes for the team to unravel, and has a range of fully developed and unusual (not to say weird) characters. Probably the best of the bunch for us.
• True Blood: Was there for awhile, but we lost interest halfway through the pilot and erased the lot. Twilight meets Californication. Not our cup of tea.
• Ugly Betty: Which my better half watches while I’m playing with my toy soldiers, of which more anon, no doubt.

Pride & Prejudice & Zombies (again)

Or, what I read on my hols, part 3…

My children bought me this as a present, and I read it over a couple of days at the seaside. It’s a fun read, although I wouldn’t class it as great literature. But what can I say about it? It’s Pride and Prejudice, with zombies and wuxia. The bit that amused me most was the mock revision notes at the back, as if it were a set book for English Literature. (“Can you imagine what this novel would be like without the zombies?”)

Earth Abides

Or, what I read on my hols, part 2…

Earth Abides is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1949 by George R Stewart, who amongst other things seems to have invented the template for the disaster movie.

We follow the protagonist (a graduate student of geography) from his return from a field trip to discover that humanity has essentially died out, to his meetings with other survivors, to his old age some decades later.

The book has aged surprisingly well, I suppose since once civilisation collapses there is nothing obviously out of date. Althought Stewart glosses over the initial apocalypse (and the protagonist never does find out what happened in any detail, other than a mysterious disease arising and nearly erasing humans from the globe), he does focus on the Secondary Kill – people who survive the disease, but are unable to cope with the new world, and implode under the stress. We then follow the protagonist as he lives alone for a while, eventually links up with a few others, and essentially becomes a tribal elder.

The novel speaks well to what technical and social concepts can survive this, and which can’t. It also discusses what would happen to domestic and wild animals, although I’m not entirely convinced that sheep would die out. I can see romantic love being a lost luxury; in a community of say 20 people, there are not going to be many choices of a partner near the right age and the opposite gender.

It’s a book which is likely to haunt me for some time, especially the hero’s steadily declining expectations of what level of technology his tribe can actually maintain.

Overall, Earth Abides reinforces what I’ve felt for a while on this topic: Once the electricity goes out, we’re back in the Stone Age, and precious few of us know how to live there any more.

The Tekumel Novels

(Or, what I read on my hols, part 1).

Finally I got around to reading the last three of these, and since it’s so long since I read the first two, I reread those as well.

The books are all travelogue fantasies, each taking the reader through a specific area of the world of Tekumel, created by MAR Barker and the setting for the Empire of the Petal Throne RPG. The first two were published by DAW, and seem to have benefited from better editing; the last three are published by Zottola. Roleplayers interested in the EPT RPG will find some (but not all) of the milieu’s questions answered; I also noted that coins and ancient technology are much more common in the novels than in the game backgrounds. Dates in parentheses are the year the novel occurs in the setting.

1. The Man of Gold (2360?). Chiefly of interest because the hero saves the world without ever knowing it, and feels like a failure as a result, despite his material rewards. That was genuinely novel for me.

2. Flamesong (2361). The only one of the novels in which the priest Harsan does not figure as a central character; the most memorable feature for me was the unusual nature of the magic weapon.

(Here Prince Dhichune’s grab for the throne and the resulting civil war occur, offstage. There should have been a book covering this, I feel, even if neither Harsan nor Trinesh – the two principal characters – were involved.)

3. Lords of Tsamra (2363). Very interesting to me as an EPT roleplayer, not so good as a novel; a tale of mediaeval fantasy biowarfare, explaining who the real Lords of Tsamra are, and their surprising connection to the ancient subway system.

(Here the Mu’ugalavyani invasion occurs, offstage again.)

4. Prince of Skulls (2372). Dragons and demons and priests, oh my! Prince Dhichune reappears, and in a surprise plot twist he and his old foe Harsan are compelled to work together.

5. Death of Kings (2373). This reads like the first half of a much longer novel. I found the ending disappointing, in particular that all the major romances except one are broken up, for no very obvious reason; and the plot doesn’t feel resolved. One of the main characters is Captain Harchar, the character run by Dave Arneson (RIP) in Professor Barker’s own EPT campaign.

The books, especially the last three, rely heavily on deus ex machina and on critical events occurring far away, to other, more powerful characters, which shape the world dramatically but which the novel’s protagonists only find out about in passing, weeks or months later. For me, this makes them dissatisfying as novels, although the world of Tekumel and its history remain fascinating as a complete break from the usual Dark Ages mediaeval milieux.

I would, however, read another one of the series if it appeared, because I still want to know how and why Tekumel dropped out of realspace into a pocket universe. Some hints are dropped, mostly in book 5, but I’d still like the correct answer at some point; I think I know who did it now, but not why.

Dollhouse

We’re watching Dollhouse now, Mr Whedon’s latest. It will, of course, be cancelled and not renewed – that happens to anything I enjoy watching, it seems. (Maybe I should write to screenwriters and threaten to watch their shows unless they buy me off?)

The premise is that a group of people, kept in the titular Dollhouse, have their personalities erased, and are used as programmable slaves – the client specifies a task, and the Dollhouse programmes someone to carry it out perfectly. After the mission, the programming is erased, so the agent retains no memory of it.

This started me thinking. If this technology were to exist, how do I know I have not been programmed with fake memories? Which of the many personalities who have used a physical body would have the best right to keep it permanently, and why? An interesting variation on the simulationist hypothesis.