Horatio Hornblower

2006.04.28 - Friday

I've been watching A&E's excellent "Horatio Hornblower" series recently, which was a gift from my friend Chris that I'm only now getting around to. I wasn't sure if I was going to like the show, but I must admit I have been surprised by how good it is. The acting is decent, the dialogue fantastic. Each "episode" is over an hour and a half long, so the stories are deep and nuanced without feeling rushed.

It's surprising to me that people have described Star Trek as "Horatio Hornblower in space", because there has never been a Star Trek series or movie even close to resembling it. What? Because they're on sailing ships? Please. Quite frankly, I would love to see a Star Trek series done in the same vein as "Hornblower". Introduce us to a young Starfleet ensign fresh out of the academy and follow his career from first posting all the way to captain, assuming the show ran that long. Or do the show as an ensemble of characters, introducing us to bottom feeding officers and crew, but have the command staff in the background. Hell, following the life of a young officer on a starship might mean we don't even see the captain in half the episodes.

You'd have to avoid some pitfalls to make the show work. First of all, you absolutely cannot have our young officer saving the ship every single episode. I like the idea of a starship's survival not always depending on the decisions of a chosen few. Our young officer can make mistakes, but the consequences don't always have to have "grave ramifications for the Federation". The whole idea of that is ridiculous.

The other upside of such a show would be the chance to explore the Federation a little more. A young officer transferring from ship to ship might get the chance to see more of the Federation than we have before, interact with the civilian population and allow us to find out how their society functions. I hope that whoever ends up making the next Star Trek series takes up that particular challenge.

I doubt anything like this will happen. Good or bad, the next show, assuming there is one, will still have the command staff as the main characters, sitting in comfy chairs and looking at a big screen. Boring.

Thank God

2006.04.20 - Thursday

Jendresen Blames 'Regime Change' For Film Delay

Man, that was sure a close call. A prequel trilogy of Star Trek movies? Bleh!

Space: Above and Beyond

2006.04.15 - Saturday

I just finished watching "Space: Above and Beyond" today, which is a Fox series that originally aired in 1995 and 1996. The show only lasted a single 23 episode season, but thanks to DVD, I get to see it all over again. I was pretty young when "SAAB" premiered, so I was definitely afraid that the show would turn out to be poor when subjected to my slightly improved dramatic tastes. Thankfully that didn't happen, although the pilot episode had me worried.

"Space" is a perfect example of why science fiction television should never be subjected to the whims of the network world. I'm positive that if the Sci-Fi Channel or any number of other small cable channels had been around back then, "Space" would have gotten at least one more season. The show is actually pretty good, following a Marine Corps squadron through an interstellar war with hostile aliens. The fun part about the show is that it's not set too far in the future, only about 100 years, so socially and technologically, not much has changed. The combat scenes suffer from the same "World War Two-itis" that seems to infect all sci-fi war series, but I can live with that. At least "Space" made an attempt to show at least semi-modern air combat tactics, like fighters with *gasp* missiles, or shots of pilots physically dealing with high-G turns, as opposed to just talking about them in briefing rooms.

Wishing I could see more isn't helped by the final episode of the series, which suggests pretty strongly that over half the squadron ends up MIA or KIA just before Earth is about to launch a final assault on the aliens' home solar system. It's a real shame, as the last half or third of the 23 episodes really feel like the production was finding their footing and putting more into it. It reminds me a lot of the first season of "Babylon 5", at least in terms of potential.

I suppose the whole network TV thing does have some advantages. The acting tends to be better, the music tends to be better, and the sets and props are definitely better. Visual effects is about the same. Mostly it's the sets and props I suppose. In "SAAB", you can tell things are made of actual metal, at least most of the time, and the cockpits of the fighters have real screens, real flight sticks, and real throttles, with real buttons. It's just the cable way of life that shows like "Battlestar Galactica" make all of their ships out of molded foam, or wood, and use old PC joysticks from garage sales in the cockpits of their "ships". It doesn't really make the show any worse, but you notice.

I suppose it's not surprising that the general network audience won't support a sci-fi series. Even if it were to happen, that show would almost certainly be made up of beautiful, dumb looking people and episodes that focused on inter-personal relationships and sex more than 80% of the time. A soap opera in space. "Battlestar Galactica" is already about as far in that direction as I'd want to go, and even it can't get itself onto NBC on Friday or Saturday nights. No, it's better than science fiction stays on cable, stays out of the mainstream, so the mainstream can't rape and kill it.

Wal-Mart Rules

2006.04.12 - Wednesday

Wal-Mart Rules

Here's a pretty interesting article on Wal-Mart's power over the gaming industry, and I imagine it doesn't stop with games. Granted there are some advantages, like the smaller game packaging, and the secondary result of pushing developers to online distribution systems. For the most part however, Wal-Mart seems to be a pretty negative influence, in a way I'd never really considered before.

What a Great Game!

2006.04.11 - Tuesday

World Juniors, 1987, Canada vs. Russia

Sounds Like It Would Make a Good Book

2006.04.07 - Friday

From "The World Is Flat: A Brief History Of The 21st Century" by Thomas L. Freidman (2005):

What if regions of the world were like the neighborhoods of a city? What would the world look like? I'd describe it like this:

Western Europe would be an assisted-living facility, with an aging population lavishly attended to by Turkish nurses. The United States would be a gated community, with a metal detector at the front gate and a lot of people sitting in their front yards complaining about how lazy everyone else was, even though out back there was a small opening in the fence for Mexican labor and other energetic immigrants who helped to make the gated community function.

Latin America would be the fun part of town, the club district, where the work day doesn't begin until ten p.m. and everyone sleeps until midmorning. It's definitely the place to hang out, but in between the clubs, you don't see a lot of new businesses opening up, except on the street where the Chileans live. The landlords in this neighborhood almost never re-invest their profits here, but keep them in a bank across town.

The Arab street would be a dark alley, where outsiders fear to tread, except for a few side streets called Dubai, Jordan, Bahrain, Qatar, and Morocco. The only new businesses are gas stations, who's owners, like the elites in the latin neighborhood, rarely re-invest their funds in the neighborhood. Many people on the Arab street have their curtains closed, their shutters drawn, and signs on their front lawn that say, "No Trespassing. Beware of Dog."

India, China, and East Asia would be "the other side of the tracks". Their neighborhood is a big teeming market, made up of small shops and one room factories, interspersed with Stanley Kaplan SAT prep schools and engineering colleges. Nobody ever sleeps in this neighborhood, everyone lives in extended families, and everyone is working and saving to get to "the right side of the tracks". On the Chinese streets, there's no rule of law, but the roads are all well paved; there are no pot holes, and the street lights all work. On the Indian streets, by contrast, no one ever repairs the street lights, the roads are full of ruts, but the police are sticklers for the rules. You need a licence to open a lemonade stand on the Indian streets. Luckily, the local cops can be bribed, and the successful entrepreneurs all have their own generators to run their factories and the latest cell phones to get around the fact that the local telephone polls are all down.

Africa, sadly, is that part of town where the businesses are boarded up, life expectancy is declining, and the only new buildings are health-care clinics.

Link Changes

2006.04.06 - Thursday

Just this past week I noticed that Overclocked Remix is going to be moving to a monthly payment system for their website. I'm perfectly willing to sift through most of the bad game music remixes on that site to find the diamonds in the rough, but I'm certainly not going to pay for it, especially at the outrageous price the operator is planning to charge. $15 USD per month is, well, ridiculous. I could see maybe two or three bucks, but fifteen? I don't think so.

I've changed the link to point to Galbadia Hotel, which doesn't offer as many remixes but has a pretty huge library of original game soundtracks as well as some officially released remix discs. I've found quite a good amount of stuff on this site, although it's not very well organized and downloading everything you'd like is tedious. So far they haven't even hinted at starting up a subscription based venture, so they'll be the ones satisfying my game music cravings for the time being.

The hockey team link has been changed as well. You'll now be able to find the Pointstreak page for the "Killer Fins", the spring team I'm playing on. The league only goes for a couple of months, then I'll break for the summer. I'm not sure how long we'll last in div 2 however, as we got handily outplayed in our first game but managed to come up with a tie. We'll see what the other teams bring.