Eminem – ‘Till I Collapse

‘Cause sometimes you feel tired,
Feel weak, and when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up.
But you gotta search within you, you gotta find that inner strength
And just pull that shit out of you and get that motivation to not give up
And not be a quitter, no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face and collapse.

So yeah, I’m still working on this short story series tentatively called “Pantheon Pandemonium.” One is finished, another is close enough, and two others are well advanced. Two more should come.

I’ll post them here… soon? When it’s done. No comment. Go away.

But come back!

I’m currently reading a book that does have some interesting to say, but which is FILLED with examples. Most of them don’t add to the mix as other examples made the same point before. I’m applying fast reading techniques, and I’m finding myself flipping entire pages that don’t teach me or illustrate anything new.

My guess? The author wanted a book that looked like the others on the shelf. Maybe the publisher agreed “Can’t put out a 150-page book,” he might have said. I’m not going to name the book or the author, because the truth is, I have absolutely no idea if this is how it went down in this particular case, but I can definitely see this happening all over.

The thing is, now that we have eBooks and the Net, nobody cares how big your book is.

That’s shelf space thinking.
That’s physical world thinking.
That’s old thinking.

If you have something to say, say it in the best possible medium. If your message is short enough, it’s a blog post. If it’s really long, then it’s a book. But if your message can come across 100 pages, then price it right and make it an 100-page eBook, not a 50%-filler, 200-pages book.

A few things I’ve learned during first let’s-get-serious-about-writing session:

1. Writing is 10% writing, 90% re-writing: Cowering in horror at your first draft is perfectly natural (because let’s face it, it sucks), but it’s a reaction that needs to be fought off (with violence if need be). This is why you need to force yourself to write. Hell, finishing that first draft is, in itself, a challenge. Duct-tapping yourself to your desk might be a lousy solution, but hey, if it’s the only one…

2. Clearing your head in between rewrites: It’s good to stop thinking entirely about a story while it matures. And the best way to get your mind off of a story for a week or so? Working on another story. Juggling with several stories works, but it means organizing your schedule meticulously (and sticking to it). More dedication.

3. Letting go: Any work of art is a tug-of-war between perfecting the work, and moving on to bigger and better. When you have an infinite supply of ideas, the temptation is to botch up the current project to jump to the newer, sexier idea. Which gets you zero results. The other extreme is to keep polishing your turd to make it shine just a liiiiittle bit further. Which doesn’t get you anywhere, either. Depending on who you are and what type of project you’re working on, you always run the risk to wander in either of those directions.

The curse of writing? It’s never over. There are plenty of collaborative medium where the work gets pulled and stretched in all directions until it pops out at the other end of the process (movies, videogames, etc). But if you’re medium of choice is the written word? Forget it. Anything you might think of changing is just 2 clicks away, so why not indulge yourself? Yeah, well, don’t. In the words of the great Tyler Durden: LET! GO!

What’s interesting is, I knew all of this before I started. But it just so happens to be (much) easier said than done. This all requires a dedication and an organization I didn’t quite grasp. Well, now that I do, onto the next one!

Found on Gamasutra:

Conscience Is But A Word: Why videogames need better villains, by Xander Markham.

Great article. Plenty of valid points are also made in the comment, but I’ll specifically second Jeffrey Wilson’s opinion: bad guys who do evil stuff just for the sake of being bad guys are flat out uninteresting  (and I’ll add, those who do it simply for their own good can get boring pretty quickly).

The audience needs to know enough in order to connect with them: understand what they want and why they want it, and then reject it.

A friend of mine told me about a great analogy between grading movies and dives (please bear with me on this). In fancy diving, the process judges have to take into account the difficulty of the dive the athlete set out to do before grading it.

This is tightly linked to what I once said about under-delivery in business-related matters, and it very much applies to movies as well : as long as a movie delivers on what it set out to do, it’s a good movie, period. It means that it can be nothing more than an action-packed flick without a “message” and still be really good.

This does not mean that any meathead movie gets a pass, though; even action needs to be a bit original to be off the hook.

A lot of people have been asking about why they’d put the boring stuff in Heavy Rain. I think the goal is simply to lower the Emotional Baseline: most games are all about the shooting (or the action of some kind). Now there might be some more subtlety in the storyline, but it’s usually told through cinematics or non-interactive means, so every time the player does have the controller in hand, he’s always right there in the middle of the action, killing dozens, business as usual. By resetting the Emotional Baseline to a lower (mundane) level, the developers made it so that when something out of the ordinary happens, it does feel like something out of the ordinary to the player.

Or at least I think. Can somebody get me a PS3 over here ?!

It’s actually done only every single time in movies: rare are the ones that start with action right off the bat; it always begins with the hero living his ordinary, everyday life, right before the terrorists/aliens/bad guys show up.

Moving on as I’m catching up with everything I didn’t have the time to watch, I finally sat through the whole first season of Dollhouse. The first time I tried, I couldn’t get passed the first episode, steered away by a nasty combination of not-so-stellar acting, and a non-compelling story. Now that I have, I’m forced to get down to the most basic questions.

What’s the series’ synopsis again? There are dolls into which you can blow your darkest, most secret fantasies.

What kind of theme does that bring about? Identity. The separation of mind and body. What if the same mind ended in two different bodies? What if someone ran away with an active to try and live a second life? What would a long-term engagement look like?

There are enough stories to tell about our weaknesses and who we are to fill a couple of seasons right there. And yet the first 7 episodes are nothing but action tales of super-duper agents – hostage negotiator, kung-fu expert, high-end thief, etc; this looks like a string of unrelated episodes of The Pretender. You could strip the whole “dollhouse” concept out of the first 7 episodes and still retain 90% of the storyline; that’s how intricated the themes are to the episode writing.

I can’t believe the writers failed to identify the question of Identity as the main theme of the series. So why is it that the only way they found to express identity crisis was through a whole lot of action, global conspiracy or even apocalypse (in the feeble “Epitaph One” episode)?

That’s exactly what happened with True Blood, as well: supposedly a vampire story, it’s like the writers had so little to say about vampires and their society, they had to throw in a psychic protagonist and what? Shape-shifters? Damn. Whether it’s about designing a product, a service or writing stories, if you fail to identify what you’re about, you’re guaranteed to end up into a wall.

So I finally watched Hancock.

Following my newfound enthusiasm for alternate superheroes, I came around and watched it (among other things). The verdict is that it was kinda nice for the first two thirds, but obviously went downhill on the last part. So, what would I have done different?

I remember this pivotal scene where Hancock tries to kiss Mary Embrey (the wife of the PR consultant that helped him); she steps away from him, triggering a dispute of epic proportion. But why does she rebuff him? Because they were married and their kind lives and dies in pair? Please, no. Because she’s his mother? Now, that would work. That’s actually what I expected (wanted), partly because I read disgust and distance more than fear in Charlize Theron’s performance.

Now, why is that better? a) because it’s less conventional: Hollywood has trained us to see a couple in every on-screen pair of attractive actors. b) because it makes just as much sense, if not more: The whole ‘we die when we’re together’ bit doesn’t make much sense, and smells horribly like an artificial artifact, solely designed to bring Hancock into exile. Hancock could just leave because he can’t stand being in love with his mother (and I wouldn’t blame him). Of course, we’d need to rewrite their interaction a bit to squeeze more passion out of Hancock, but it would (additionally) shine some light on the predicament of people living that long.

Now, what is the downside of having Hancock and Mary as a mother and son instead of a husband and wife? The only impact I see is that we’ll miss the explanation of their kind’s disappearance. Except I honestly don’t care, at least not in a first chapter. As a bonus, their separation would be more of a human-rooted reaction, instead of being a non-sense response to an alien condition the viewer cannot empathize with.

Finally, and because I love me some drama, I’d also alter the following (although it’s purely a matter of personal taste):

• What are the odds that Ray’s wife just so happens to be related to Hancock? That kind of coincidence is fine for a comedy, but doesn’t work well in a drama. So Mary Embrey probably would have initiated this, maybe simply because she missed her son.

• Ray’s public relation career makes him a prime candidate for some shady intentions. He’d have to have some ulterior motives, once he realizes he can manipulate Hancock. This would generate conflicts with his wife Mary further down the road.

• Finally, I’m missing a couple of scenes showing the reaction of the LA/NYC population following Hancock’s departure/arrival at the end of the movie. A superhero, even a controversial one like Hancock, leaving a city for another, well, that really must create some ruckus, one way or another. Hell, he’s the only official superhero!

Oh, and because some coincidences are just too hard to swallow, I really can’t believe that the fight between Hancock and Mary leads them right below her unsuspecting husband’s window; let’s just have him discover the truth via the news, okay? He wouldn’t be the first celebrity spouse to get the surprise, after all.

Anyway, I think this version of Hancock would have been better (meaning I would have liked it more), but I can only admit that a drunkard superhero was a damn good idea in the first place.

Back from Terminator Salvation, with lots of things to say.

I’ll mainly talk about Information Technology however, as its nerve-racking lack of credibility made me uneasy  through the whole movie. Credible science / IT is something that mostly doesn’t exist in today’s entertainment, and even if it was alright at some point, it just doesn’t cut it.

At the beginning of the movie, Connor and a squad of soldier enter a Skynet R&D Camp – btw, briefing soldiers on their mission when they’ve already hit the ground running is just bad exposition. Soldiers search the compound for intel, and one of them spots a laptop; he starts browsing the files, uploading them to a secured location and…

Wait, what?

So the terminators use laptop. Did they launch Judgment Day from a windows desktop shortcut as well?
2 reasons for which this is stupid:

• Efficiency and convenience: the emergence of Skynet as a sentient being can only be seen as the aftermath of a Technological Singularity: machines breeding faster, better machines. With their exponential knowledge, would these keep on using hardware designed by pre-singularity technology? Of course not. Would they use graphical representations for their data? Of course not. I’d like to believe they’d just plug to a port and go, or simply use some kind of wireless technology.

• Security: as soon as you connect a secured network to the Internet, it is potentially vulnerable: computers are computers, and their operators are humans on both side of the fence. They have the same tools, the same capabilities. On the other hand, Skynet doesn’t have a world wide web to maintain. It would be extremely easy for it to secure their IT: develop user interfaces that are simply impossible for humans to use. Having laptops and interoperable networks is like having Matrix phone booths in the ruins of the real world, powered by the Matrix itself and with a big sign on top “hey, come hack us”

HOWEVER.

Even though the telling of a story must remain coherent enough to be credible, it might change things entirely: locking humans completely out of the information network means they’d have to fight completely in the dark, which could be an interesting story to tell, but rest assured a very different story. I can accept that.

Let’s just not have it so obviously flawed. The resistance could have, for instance, taped into an optic fiber backbone. Or they could have intercepted encrypted wireless communication and decrypted them with an enslaved AI. Or a non-sentient AI. There are plenty of solutions around that don’t jump out of the screen and punch you in the face.

One word to describe the Caprica pilot: dense. So much potential for drama, I don’t even feel sorry Battlestar Galactica is over anymore. Beware of SPOILERS.

I always thought the audiovisual landscape lacked some “Social Scifi” programs; even though it’s a genre that allows powerful parallels with our own life experiences, science-fiction is still for the most part confined to the realm of either war and spaceships or fantasy in popular media. I believe it’s William Gibson who said that (and I might paraphrase a bit here), what’s interesting about science fiction is not science itself, but how science and what it allows changes and affects people.  Caprica looks like it’s going to drive us along this idea.

To elaborate a bit more on the pilot itself, it’s interesting to see each of the main characters having pieces of the puzzle. As they don’t communicate on these, the moment of truth of each situation is left hanging until later: for instance, Graystone sees the infinity symbol and discovers the technology that makes Cylons possible, but doesn’t know what the sign implies. His wife knows nothing about what her daughter has accomplished, but knows of her involvement with the terrorist group named “Soldier of the One”. Finally, Adama knows about the technology, but doesn’t know about Zoe’s involvement in the death of his wife and daughter. All of these threads are left open by the end of the pilot, but not in the way a juggler would throw too many props in the air: everything remains connected, logical and I can’t wait to see what will happen when all these threads will join. The impact of these revelations even seems to be more of  a driver than the larger questions (namely the emergence of Cylon technology).

Another important thread is the misunderstanding revolving around Zoe’s intentions and reason to be present on the bombed train: she just wanted to leave Caprica for Gemenon, while Ben wanted to leave Caprica as a martyr. From the outside, it all looks the same, which sends a horrible message to Zoe’s mother: her baby child is indeed a terrorist. This will probably haunt her for some times and have important developments.

Lastly, the Battlestar Galactica franchise was firmly set in my mind as a daring franchise from the moment they portrayed a “justifiable” suicide bombing on New Caprica right when the war in Irak was at its worse. Similarly, Caprica pilot writer and supposedly showrunner Remi Aubuchon delighted me with a scene on religion. Very interested by the fact that the colonists from Battlestar Galactica were polytheists, I had my illusions quickly shattered, as very little additional information was disclosed about this. With the emergence of religious movements at its center, Caprica doesn’t seem to be so shy on the subject. In this scene, Global Defense Department investigator Duram is quizzing Sister Clarice on monotheism in her  school:

- Where does the Athenian Academy stand on the question of monotheism, Sister?

[...]

- The Academy is dedicated to following the path of the Gods, the Goddess Athena being our patroness. We are, however, open to all forms of worship, including belief in a singular God.

- That’s very tolerant. And how many of your students are practicing monotheists?

- You know I can’t answer that.

- It doesn’t concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutism view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal?

Overlooking the very last minute that felt a little bit like cheap drama (the little girl trapped in a killing machine, calling on her girlfriend), Caprica is a very rich and promising series that will probably complement BSG very well. Long live Caprica!