Fully Restored

2007.03.29 - Thursday

Finally, the new computer has all of the data from the old one. I uninstalled Kaspersky Internet Security last night and replaced it with Trend Micro Internet Security, saying goodbye to that ridiculous 16,384 file copy limit. I reported the error to Kaspersky's support, but they couldn't give me any kind of ETA on a fix, so I took them up on their refund offer. Trend Micro's "PC-cillin" doesn't get as high of marks as Kaspersky in the reviews, but at least it doesn't cripple a basic function of my operating system.

In any case, I've got all of my data on the new machine now, so it finally feels reasonably complete. There are a few little things I'd like to deal with before I can give it 100% status, but they'll come with time. Of course, playing through "Call of Duty 2" isn't exactly doing wonders for those little chores. Oh well.

Vista

2007.03.21 - Wednesday

Well I'm happy to say that Windows Vista itself has been a pretty smooth ride so far. I haven't thrown too much major work at it yet, and that will surely come in time, but so far it seems quite good. I've had a few programs crash, including "Half-Life 2", but never lost the desktop. The OS recovered or wasn't affected in each case, which was certainly nice. That being said, there are some issues with using the operating system, they're just not issues with Vista itself.

The big problem with Vista right now is that the 3rd party developers have dropped the ball on this new operating system, big time. Consider that Windows XP-64 bit is a couple of years old now, and certainly has a lot in common with Vista. Consider that Vista went through a year long public beta program, and was certainly available to developers before that. Consider that Vista went on sale to corporate customers over six months ago. Now, explain to me why Adobe doesn't have a 64-bit version of the Flash player for Vista. Explain to me why Kaspersky's "Internet Security" program has a bug in Vista which stops you from copying more than 16,384 files without rebooting. Explain to me why Apple still doesn't have an official Vista version of iTunes, and why the one they do have has bugs so massive that it might corrupt your entire iPod if you use it. Explain to me why Nvidia only released their DirectX 10 compatible drivers for Vista two weeks ago, despite selling DirectX 10 graphics cards in the marketplace, their boxes covered in "Windows Vista" stickers, since last summer.

Now I'm not saying Adobe has to have a full 64-bit Vista edition of Photoshop available right off the bat, even though I'm not convinced that's a particularly hard thing to do. If Valve can release an update to "Half-Life 2", giving it a full 64-bit mode, almost as a curious experiment, then I'm not interested in hearing long-winded excuses from lazy programmers. Of course, Adobe has never exactly been a model of corporate or programming efficiency. Seriously, though, Flash? iTunes? This isn't rocket science. Programming isn't magic. These people are supposed to be working at jobs, not getting around to stuff when they feel like it. I can't imagine any excuse that could possibly convince me that it was acceptable not to have full Vista versions of stuff like Flash and iTunes ready the day the OS was released to market. As for Nvidia, what they did was borderline criminal in my opinion. Selling hardware which promises to be compatible when the drivers for that device aren't is ridiculous. How long does it take to write a graphics card driver, really? Well obviously it takes almost 18 months, because that's how long they've had to work on it, even assuming Nvidia couldn't get a look at Vista before the public beta.

I think the thing that pisses me off most about the whole situation is the media. Everywhere I read articles about the operating system, the headlines always read "Vista not yet ready" and "Vista sluggish on support". It's absolutely ridiculous how far the anti-Microsoft hatred will go. Vista looks plenty ready to me, it's everyone else who's screwed up. So what? Now Microsoft isn't allowed to release a new operating system? I mean seriously, what are they supposed to do? I even read one blogger's post regarding the iTunes issue which was titled "Vista doesn't support iTunes!" That kind of bias is impossible to counter, but that's what Microsoft is dealing with in the techno-elitist circles.

Maybe if all of those technophiles and programmers actually spent their time and energy working at their jobs, instead of bitching and moaning about how evil "Micro$oft" is, then we wouldn't have to deal with brand new operating systems devoid of 3rd party software support. With these people, I'm not holding my breath.

Up and Running

2007.03.16 - Thursday

I picked up all the components for my new computer on Tuesday, and it's taken quite a bit of solid work since then to get everything working. I had the machine assembled and Vista installed at the end of yesterday, with some issues. I'll cover the whole process in more detail soon. I'll just say that the number of third party developers who seem to have been twiddling their thumbs during Vista's year long public beta is astonishing, and pathetic. The OS itself has been great so far. Very stable, reasonably quick, with a nice look which remains tasteful. I still need to get some 3D software on here to see what the new machine can do, but I'm not in a rush at the moment.

It'll probably be another long day of tinkering tomorrow. There's no other kind of tedious fun quite like building, or rebuilding, your own computer.

Character Development

2007.03.13 - Tuesday

For a long time, the big knock on Star Trek has been the stand-alone nature of the episodes. Non-fans and mainstream writers have frequently taken the various shows to task for not having any sense of cause and effect, where things have "changed" at the end of a particular episode. Personally, looking at the state of serialized television today, I can hardly say with confidence that it's inherently "better", as so many of these critics obviously believe. Still, even in TNG, some evolution can be found, and it's mostly in the characters.

Now there are some blatant examples of evolving characters in TNG, namely Data, Worf, and...ugh...Wesly. Still, I would challenge anyone to watch the first episode of TNG, followed immediately by the last, and tell me with a straight face that Picard is the same man in both stories. In real life, the character of a typical adult doesn't change a lot in seven years, at least not without some seriously traumatic circumstances. Considering that, I'd say that TNG did a great job of what I would call "realistic" character development, or perhaps you could call it character evolution. I don't know if TNG's writers did this on purpose, or if it had more to do with the various actors' performances, particularly with Picard. I'm inclined to say it was a bit of both. This is how real people change, in the real world; slowly, bit by bit, over time.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, these days everyone seems to be obsessed with moving things along quickly. "Character development" in a show like Galactica means throwing some ridiculous series of hyper-traumatic events at someone, and having them emerge as a totally different person, in a span of maybe three or four episodes. If you need the change to happen more quickly, like say, within one or two episodes, at the end of which the character will commit suicide, well then you just throw in some flashbacks of their miserable, abusive childhood (which, of course, has never been referenced or discussed until now) and you're done. Congratulations! You've just done a masterful job of "developing" your characters, unlike that "stagnant" Star Trek show.

I honestly haven't seen much of "Atlantis", but in SG-1 at least, I'm not really sure if the characters change at all. Going back to watch the premiere episode, O'Neill, Carter, and Daniel stay pretty much the same. Teal'C is a bit different, I suppose, sort of. You get all of the same vibes from the characters all the time, no matter which season of the series you're watching. Of course, the Stargate shows have always been a little more lighthearted than the Star Treks, and certainly Galactica. Jesus, I'm not sure it's possible for Galactica to be "lighthearted" compared to anything. Anyway, Stargate has a reasonably involved and very consistent development of the story, so I suppose it gets a pass from people.

The only other show that has a great sense of real character development is "Babylon 5". Everything develops and changes in B5, though, and that's because Joe Straczynski knew exactly where everything was going before the first episode even aired. If it happened on Galactica, Sheridan and Delenn's slowly developed romantic relationship, which only became "official" after two full seasons, would probably start with a drunken romp between the sheets and go from there. One or two episodes later, after some kind of falling out, Sheridan would be heard saying something like "I still want to try and make this work". What show am I watching? The OC? Thankfully, B5 wasn't made today, and we can still watch the series on DVD and enjoy G'Kar's enlightenment, Londo's tragedy, and all of the other realistically paced and entirely beleivable changes in character which the series shows so well.

Still, and maybe this is just me being a Trekkie again, there's a feeling of change and connection to the characters when Picard looks around the poker table at his senior staff in "All Good Things..." and says: "I should have done this a long time ago." Babylon 5 has some similar moments, though for me at least, not quite as profound, during Sheridan's last dinner with friends, and his salute to Babylon 5's new crew. I have yet to get the same feeling from Stargate even after ten years, and I'll be surprised if Galactica has any more main characters left by the time it's over to even attempt such a scene. So who's doing such a great job with their character development again?

300

2007.03.11 - Sunday

I think yesterday was the first day in months where I didn't at least drop by the office or an hour or two to check on things. With Babylon 5 finished, and with some of the clean up work well underway, now it a good time to take a couple of weeks off, and that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm hoping to get through all of the nagging chores that tend to pile up when you ignore normal life and almost live at work. I'm going to be building a new computer next week, moving into the wilderness that is Windows Vista, and finally leaving my current, four year old machine behind. It should be fun.

In any case, I finally got out to a movie yesterday, deciding to check out "300". I liked it, quite a bit. A lot of people are concerned that this style of film, where almost everything is shot against green screen, is where movies are going. I don't think that's quite right. While visual effects and computer technology have advanced far enough to give us these visually amazing, but by no means realistic environments and characters, it's not quite ready to handle a more typical film in the same way. "300" gets away with it because of the style. Things are soft, and there's a lot of grain. Colours are muted; desaturated. Glows are intense and the atmospheric lighting creates an almost dream-like quality. Compare that visual style to something like the recent Star Wars films, where the same greenscreen production techniques were used, but the visuals ended up being too colourful and too clean. That look led many people to think of the backgrounds and CG characters in Star Wars as a "video game". Make no mistake, however, that it's the creative team who calls these shots. Looking at both "300" and the Star Wars films, while the techniques might have been similar, the ultimate successes and failures of each visual style couldn't be further apart. I would be curious to know exactly how much time the VFX team had to work on "300". Full greenscreen work is certainly a viable alternative to having real sets these days, as long as you've got the money, and almost more importantly, the time, to make it work. This kind of work is far from easy, so even looking at "300" and their "cheated" visual style, I find it very impressive.

Visuals aside, the movie was a lot of fun. This is by no means a realistic film, and it's not supposed to be. Going back to my previous thought about the future of film-making, Chris made the observation that while this isn't the future of standard films, he thinks it is the future of graphic novels. While people are always going to like looking at cool drawings and artwork on a page, you have to admit that market is pretty small. Pushing graphic novels and graphic storytelling into film is a great way to hook a larger number of people, and get them on board with that stylized reality which comic fans are so familiar with. Doing so also avoids a lot of potential creative pitfalls, like trying to show Galactus in a live-action movie, or making a believable Juggernaut or Dark Phoenix. At some point, these character designs just cannot be seen in a "realistic" setting, because they look absolutely ridiculous. Going for a more stylized route could avoid a lot of that, without having to compromise the character design to the point where they're only recognizable by name. If films like "300" can get the general public on board with the approach, the possibilities for other graphic novels or comics being made into films becomes a lot more manageable.

One final thing about "300". David Wenham, well done. You might remember him as "Faramir" in the Lord of the Rings films, but in "300" he plays one of the Spartans, and ultimately, a sort of chronicler. Next time I see the movie I'm going to time his monologue at the end, because I swear to God it's over five minutes long. Thank God for classically trained English theatre actors, because he does a masterful job making cheesy, over the top dialogue seem believable and fun at the same time. Absolutely excellent. There is no way an American actor could have pulled that off. It's all that Shakespeare. Anyway, I was worried we were going to get another "Sin City", but I definitely recommend checking out "300", a great swords-and-sandals action movie with a fantastic visual style.

...Continued

2007.03.09 - Friday

I got a bit of feedback on my last post, which is always nice because it doesn't happen very often. One reader brought up Galactica, saying that while it does tend to focus on the negative, it still carries a message of "soldiering on" despite what life throws at you. The idea that while bad things may happen, we keep moving forward and working hard, hoping for the best. I suppose that's true, even if I have to really think about it. The only time Battlestar has really interested me, other than on a professional and "cool space battle" level, is during the brief moments where they talk about the legend of Earth. I love the scene in that holo-room on Kobol, where the "way to Earth" is revealed, sort of. The idea that Battlestar might be happening in our future, so far down the line that not only have Humans made it into space, but they've forgotten where they came from, is fantastic. Unfortunately for me, that theme occurs so rarely in the series, it may as well not be there.

However, it did get me thinking about what exactly the difference between "new" sci-fi and the old Star Trek days is. These days, it seems to me that the major sci-fi shows, Battlestar and Stargate, are both very character oriented. Atlantis's appeal seems to largely depend on the characters and their relationships, and Battlestar is the same. Galactica was even trumpeted as "24 in space" during its premiere. In other words, while there may still be space ships, aliens, and robots, the core focus of the story is on the characters, just like every other mainstream drama series on television.

Now some people might argue with me about this, but for me, the characters were never the focal point of Star Trek. Oh sure, everyone loves Kirk and Spock, Picard and Data, and all of that, but the characters were there because they had to be, not because the show was all about them. No, in Star Trek, the focus of the story was about the idea. It was about the idea of alien life, the idea of time travel, the idea of alternate realities, the idea of how Human existence would fit into all of these. Star Trek's characters would even go so far as to discuss, on screen, what their journeys and encounters would mean to them, to their society, and to the Human condition. Sci-fi, or at least Star Trek, used to be fundamentally different from other television series in that way. These days, at least for me, it's all "sci-fi lite"; shows with all of the same flash and flare, but without as much real substance.

Why I love - and hate - Star Trek, Science Fiction, and its fans

2007.03.07 - Wednesday

I've got a day or two more of cleanup to do at work before I get a couple of weeks off. When you get into the habit of working such consistently long hours, you don't realize how tired you really are until it's over and you have a chance to rest. I've noticed over the last few days that no matter how much sleep I get, I'm still exhausted. I expect it will be another few days before I start to feel rested. In any case, I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but was never quite sure how it should go. I'm still not sure, but I figured that being certain about it would probably never happen, so I may as well go ahead. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

I can't remember how long I've been a sci-fi fan for. I also can't remember the first time I saw Star Trek, or Star Wars, for that matter. It wasn't really until I was a teenager that I began to watch sci-fi regularly and seriously. TNG was in perpetual re-runs at that point, DS9 was going through its first air dates, and I didn't watch Babylon 5 the first time through because it was on way too late (which is funny, because when I finally did see the show, I had to either stay up until or get up at 1:00am every weeknight to see it on the Space Channel, and I dare not miss a single episode). In any case, eventually, thanks to syndicated TV and channels like Space here in Canada, I managed to see every episode of every Star Trek series and of Babylon 5. I had managed to catch the first runs of shows like "Space: Above and Beyond" as well as more recently, Stargate and Battlestar, though I watch those exclusively on DVD these days. Even as I'm writing this, I'm listening to the score from "Star Trek: Generations", which is one of my favourites even if the movie itself isn't considered to be one of the stronger efforts. Personally, I think most people just didn't get it, but what can you do. Anyway, all those years of sci-fi watching, discussion, and contemplation have made me emotionally susceptible to videos like this:

God, just hearing "I am the Guardian of Forever" churns stuff up in me. The first time I saw this last year, I took a few deep breaths when Kirk and crew appear, and got a bit chocked up during Picard's walk around the bridge of the Enterprise-D. Plus, I've always been a huge fan of "The Inner Light", which is, at least in my book, one of the best episodes of any sci-fi series to date. It's right up there with B5's "Sleeping In Light" for emotional content, but in some ways is a tad more impressive because it doesn't draw on your memories and emotions from an entire series. Almost everything it creates it creates inside that single hour, and to this day that episode has huge emotional ties to Picard's character, especially during the events of "Generations". Anyway, I'm rambling a bit. I bring up this video because it's the perfect example of everything that's great about Star Trek and sci-fi, but also everything that's wrong with them.

People like me, for whom this video triggers some kind of reaction, are one of the problems with sci-fi today. In the case of Star Trek, the problem is that we have a hard time letting go of our memories of past series and past characters. Older Star Trek fans just want to see Kirk, Spock, and McCoy again (a sentiment almost proven by all of the fan-made, TOS-based series being distributed online), and that's why we're getting a prequel film featuring those characters. Star Trek fans my age just wish that TNG had never ended, and that we could still see new stories with Picard and crew. Both of those groups look upon DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise with disdain, because we watched those shows as adults or young adults, and they and their characters can never seem as fantastic as the ones we grew up with. Younger kids who watched Enterprise can look at an episode of the original series and say things like "hey, they just copied the plot from last week's episode", which should tell you everything you need to know about the originality of that show. Ha! In all seriousness, I think prequels are a bad idea, simply because they try to show us events or characters which we've already imagined and discussed for years amongst ourselves, and what ends up on screen can never match that imagined reality, in the same way that a filmed version of a book can never match what someone conjured while reading it. Anakin Skywalker's turn to the dark side was infinitely cooler in my mind, even if I hadn't worked out all the details, than the version I saw in "Sith", for example, and the same goes for the birth of the United Federation of Planets in "Enteprise". I hope Joe Straczynski never shows us the first contact between Humans and the Centauri. It's much better left to our imaginations. Babylon 5 fans will even go so far as to argue that the visual effects in the latest incarnation of the franchise don't match the originals, which is something I haven't seen even from the notoriously anal Star Trek fans, though to be fair, Star Trek looks pretty much the same from show to show. The bottom line is that we want new sci-fi shows to be just how we remember our favourite ones, from childhood or otherwise, which I'm pretty sure we can all agree, places a set of completely unrealistic expectations on any writer, director, producer, or actor.

Now the Star Trek fan in me is really going to come out here. The other problem in sci-fi, at least to me, is the subject matter. I recently watched "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and found it pathetic and almost embarrassing how that story, and even some of the visuals, still feel fresh and original, almost thirty years later. When I watch that film, it feels like the future. At the end, when the Enterprise warps away, a fantastic phrase appears on the screen: "The Human Adventure Is Just Beginning". I had completely forgotten about that, and quite frankly, I think if you tried to get that into a sci-fi series or film today, you'd be laughed out of the building by everyone on the production and the audience as well, assuming they ever got to see it. Today sci-fi feels like it's close to being hijacked by anti-Human interests and stories. Either everyone's talking about transhumanism and "the Singularity", which is supposed to allow us to download ourselves and live in perfect digital worlds where intellectuals hold the real power and beauty because of their minds (which, if you ask me, sounds an awful lot like what the Internet was supposed to do, but didn't), or they're doing stories like Battlestar, which seems to focus inevitably on how shitty people are and how miserable their lives have become. I enjoy the show, or at least I did when I was watching it (haven't seen much of season 3 yet), but I'm not sure if the goal of the show was to make me feel better about my life because I'm not suffering, or to tell me that when push comes to shove we're all animals, or if it even has a message at all. For me, Star Trek, and even Babylon 5 especially towards the end, really had messages that even though there will be problems in the future, we're going to make it. We're not going to blow ourselves up, or kill the planet, or succumb to a global plague or asteroid. We might have to deal with those things, true, but in the end, Humanity would extend itself beyond Earth, protecting ourselves from any one catastrophe, and become a truly timeless civilization. Compared to Babylon 5, however, Star Trek carries the added message not only of technological and civilizational progress, but of moral progress. The idea that we can rise above those animal instincts, which Galactica's characters seem so chained to, and actually work to better ourselves and our society.

The question is, has the audience changed, or have the show creators? Is the audience demanding darker, self loathing characters and desperate, tense stories, or are the producers creating them because they think that's what people want? I'm not willing to accept that society has "changed" just yet. Stargate, a show with a much more positive outlook than Battlestar, stayed on the air for 10 years, and Atlantis still continues. You can still find Star Trek on the air somewhere on almost any day of the week, yet I keep hearing and reading people wondering about how much longer Battlestar can go on after only three seasons. So is Battlestar really what people want to see, or is it just a nice flash-in-the-pan, media darling but ratings unfriendly, change of pace? I'm not saying there isn't a place for the Battlestar type shows, but I can't agree with those who would say Star Trek and its like aren't relevant or popular enough to be successful anymore. I think Rick Berman and Brannon Braga failed to realize why people loved Star Trek , and in their never ending ratings chase, they over-sexed, over-actioned, and over-darkened their shows right off the air.

Within the sci-fi community, at least, the dialogue has shifted a bit, there's no question. Chris told me once about how during TNG's first run on the air, people used to log-in to Compuserve or even more primitive online communities to discuss the new technology in that week's episode. Joining everyday fans were scientists and engineers from NASA and JPL, all theorizing together about how things could be done. Today, he notices more threads on forums about how bitchy Starbuck is being this week, or about how Weir and Sheppard should hook up. There definitely seems to have been a dumbing down of the discourse, and maybe of sci-fi in general. It's strange that in TNG's hay day, the show was one of the most watched television series in North America, but today, even the "popular" Battlestar is fighting for its ratings-dependent life. Somewhere along the line, a lot of people stopped watching science fiction. Still, reading the comments for that YouTube video, and seeing all of the other great TNG moments which are posted on that site, leads me to believe that those viewers are still out there somewhere. They just aren't interested anymore. I'm positive the right show, or shows, can fix all of this.

Speaking strictly for myself, I'm not asking for my old Star Trek back. If they do make another series, I'll be the first to suggest it should have nothing to do with any of the previous ones. It should be set even farther in the future and feature a totally unknown cast. I also wish I could staple the sci-fi cliche list to the wall of the writers' room. I want original stories, or at least new twists on old ideas. I want to see some new ideas of technology, some real futurist stuff that might be on someone's drawing board but isn't even on the horizon for the general public. Most of all, I want to see stories about the nature of existence in this future Federation. Maybe they're taking the first few steps into sanctioned time travel? Enterprise's "temporal war" was a great concept which was never properly realized. We've all seen time travel before, but we haven't really explored how it would affect Humanity's place in the Universe, and what it would mean for the nature of our existence. TNG's final episode, "All Good Things...", layed the conceptual groundwork for a future series with Q's comment to Picard: "For that one fraction of a second, you were open to options you had never considered. That is the exploration that awaits you... not mapping stars and studying nebula... but charting the unknown possibilities of existence." Yes! Let's see some of that, shall we? I know it's a lot to ask, but I'm confident that somewhere out there are the people capable of bringing my kind of science fiction back to the screen. In the sci-fi community at least, never mind society as a whole, we need to get back the feeling that we are going to make it, and that the impossible is or will be possible, if we work towards it. As I've said before, I don't want sci-fi to make me thankful to be alive today, I want it to make me angry for not being alive tomorrow. Give us something to shoot for!