It Means Workhorse

So I really enjoyed The Mandalorian, but it isn't my favourite scifi TV series of the past few years.

I mean in terms of actual sheer quality, the best TV show I can remember is actually Chernobyl. It was mindblowing. I will also never let go of the candles I hold for Firefly and MST3K.

The best series I watched this year, though?

Well, that would be The Expanse.

Based on a series of books by James S. A. Corey - 8 books out so far with various supplemental novellas and shorts, the 9th and final book coming out TBA 2020 - the TV series was always going to have a hard time actually capturing the characters that the books so masterfully brought into existence.

It isn't just the characters, of course. The actual scifi elements of it - the ship design, the way the physics works, the way society and politics have arranged themselves in this future that Corey has imagined - masterful. Everything from the cultural boundaries between the Earth folks, the Martians and the Belters, even down to their language and accents and their attitude to life in general. How conflict in space is handled, in the most reasonable and common-sense way I can imagine - almost always conducted at long range with torpedoes and point-defence countermeasures, with occasional need for railguns.

It's the characters I come back for, though.

Like this guy. Jim Holden.

Yes, I know he looks a bit like Jon Snow, and yes, I know a random white guy with facial hair is a boring main character, but hear me out:

Jim Holden is fantastic.

In a show about all of the choices having potential costs and consequences and the politics of situations making no-win scenarios increasingly likely, the best arc you can see is a man who is determined to do the right thing, or the best thing, or - hopefully - both.

In a world full of grit and shades-of-grey and meaningful sideways looks, to have a protagonist that you can trust to just do the right thing and tilt at the windmills that need tilting at, even if he thinks he will lose... that's valuable.

(That's why the ship is named the Rocinante, by the way. Well, that and because Amos liked it because he knew someone called that once. It means workhorse.)

But of course a man needs a crew, and that crew needs a technician, and thus you have Naomi Nagata.

Now Jim is from Earth, the son of a collective family of seven parents; Naomi is from the Belt. She spent her entire life in the void, and doesn't trust planets. "Nothing to hold the sky in, it's weird," she says at least once.

Naomi is brilliant. Literally a genius. Fearless, too, but rarely will she conflate that lack of fear with foolishness. She is Jim's externalised common sense. She knows the systems of the Roci like she knows the back of her hand, better probably, and she's never afraid to put her foot down if necessary.

And boy does she love Jim. And he loves her. And when you watch the series, it will make sense as to why. Suffice to say there's some actual development rather than "because the scriptwriters said so".

Every good crew needs a pilot. You could do a lot worse than Alex Kamal.

Martian by birth, Alex speaks with an affected Texan drawl, because everyone from that bit of Mars tends to. Yes, it's odd, but it's also now an indelible part of their culture - as is the pride of adapting and overcoming a hostile environment. He's ex-military (so is Jim), and that shows, at times.

He's a lovable guy. Like, you can't help but like Alex. He's a great dude. He's made his mistakes, of course, and he'll be the first to admit it - part of his draw. He's under precious little illusions as to how life works and his place in it. When it comes down to it, though, he's reliable and trustworthy, and the Rocinante couldn't ask for a better pilot.

And then there's this guy.

Amos Burton, who puts bits of the ship back together that break, and breaks people that need breaking.

He's a lot of people's favourite. He's from a difficult and somewhat shrouded past, which has left him with an abiding need to protect and look after kids, an amiable smile that sits on his face almost all the time, and a hair-trigger willingness to kill you with his bare hands if you need killed.

His favourite technique appears to be to snap you in half backwards over a table.

Seriously though - Amos is immune to bullshit, incapable of lying, and as long as you're doing the right or the smart thing, you want this man at your back. He's the most dependable man in the galaxy.

He'd so easily be my favourite, were it not for the existence of...

Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper.

Power armoured Martian marine badass. There is nothing not to love. Her approach to problems is direct but she is far from stupid. She takes pride in who she is and what she does, and she does it better than anyone else. I love Bobbie.

Like yeah, the show has a lot of asses that need kicked, and Bobbie is capable of doling out most of those. Her and Amos together are a fearsome combination.

And that's just... like, five of the characters. Perhaps the main five.

I haven't even talked about Miller, the detective who looks how I feel, who wears a hat in an orbital habitat to "keep the rain off". Chrisjen Avasarala, the politician, who is definitely not a protagonist but you definitely kind of want her to win anyway. Camina Drummer and Klaes Ashford. Shed. Murtry. Praxideke Meng. The Mao family. Elvi Okoye. There's just so much good character here that you love seeing them being on the screen, let alone reading them on the page.

I am evangelical about this show. Perhaps that is why I like it more. Like, The Mandalorian is good, but it doesn't need me to talk about it. It doesn't have hidden depths, it is what you think it is. The Expanse has so much more to it than any trailer can prepare you for.

Watch it.

Make it your 2020 New Year Resolution.

Watch it, read it, catch the last book.

You will thank me later.

Might do a blog on New Year's Eve, might not. If not - happy new year.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

A Debt To The Truth

Fair warning. Some of this blog is going to be pretty upsetting. It's about an awful thing that happened, and about a media representation of that awful thing. Continue with a strong constitution.

My mother told me a story recently, about something that happened in April, 1986. I was three, nearly four.

I don't remember where we were living at the time - either Monkton Street or Milligan Road, in Ryde. One morning - one very specific morning - my father went out into the garden, went down to the aviary where he kept all sorts of canaries and budgerigars and such. Dad loved keeping birds - small ones. Nothing like a parrot or a chicken. He had a few finches, too, as I as told.

He got to the aviary and found every single last one of them dead.

They hadn't been killed by another animal - once, a fox or a cat got into the aviary, and I saw the results of that myself. It is obvious when it happens. No, it was as if they had all literally fallen off their perches at the same time. Just literally dropped dead.

Dad was upset, and thoroughly confused. He found out later that day that other people on the same street who kept birds had found the same thing. Every last one of them that was smaller than a chicken. All on the same day.

Nobody really put two and two together until months later - that events from half a world away, nearly 1,400 miles as the crow flies, had reached out and touched us with an invisible hand.

I've always been interested in what happened at Chernobyl.

I mean, when I was real young, the Cold War still existed. I was raised in circumstances that tried to prepare me for a potential nuclear strike from the Soviets. I was told what the evacuation plans were, why the Isle of Wight would be affected by a nuclear exchange, what the sirens meant, what our chances were.

For reference, here is what happens when a standard Soviet warhead of the era hits the busy naval base of Portsmouth. I simulated this with the Nukemap, which is a fascinating, awful place to learn about the worst thing that could happen.

Ryde is in that third circle, which is third degree burns for everyone that isn't protected. Also included is the fourth circle, which is every window smashing and generalised carnage.

So that is a thing I distinctly remember. I also remember being horribly fascinated with everything relating to nuclear war, radiation, the works. In school we read books like Children Of The Dust by Louise Lawrence, and Z For Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien, both of which deal with the aftermath of an atomic exchange.

I can't tell you how many hours I have devoted to watching documentaries and media on the topic - Threads, The Day After, When The Wind Blows, all of these got a viewing. That last one, based on the Raymond Briggs comic criticising the lack of nuclear preparedness in the UK, actually came out in the same year as the Chernobyl explosion.

So when I heard that HBO were producing a television show about Chernobyl, initially, my lip curled.

A dramatisation? Seems a bit tacky, given the magnitude of what happened. I mean of course that never stops anyone making a movie about a tragedy, but still. I would have much preferred another documentary, something that drilled down into the topic.

So I slept on it, until it came to light that it had become the highest rated TV show ever on IMDB. Which piqued my interest. I mean, I am bad at TV. This is more a me-problem than a media issue, but a problem it remains. So I clambered out of my own ass to watch it. After all, it's only five episodes, right? Five hours, give or take. I can always duck out of it proves to be unbearable.

It almost did prove to be unbearable, but not in the same way.

Most people know what happened, though most people don't strictly know why, or the costs and repercussions. This changes that. At least, it should - and because of that, it is at times hard to watch.

It will leave you feeling like you understand why, which is key. And there's the thing. The reasons why could easily be placed upon the head of one man -

YEAH YOU, YOU RAT-FACED FUCKING DICKHEAD

- but the entire point is that it isn't strictly fault. The responsibility is widespread. No one single action caused the situation. Multiple unrelated events and decisions, that all stacked together to create something truly awful.

I don't think there is a single bad performance in this show - although I feel weird calling it a show, like I am disrespecting it, like putting it in the same category as Friends or something. Not a single bad performance. Stellan Skarsgård is brilliant as always. Emily Watson. Jared Harris. Paul Ritter - PAUL RITTER, you get a special shout out, because by god I love it when you can make me hate someone but still make me want to see them on screen. Everyone in front of and behind every camera.

The accuracy. Multiple different sources who are actually from the region around the time that this happened have stated that they are surprised by how accurate it is, down to the license plates on the vehicles. I think the biggest niggle someone could put their finger on in one place was that the glasses that Ulana and Valery are drinking out of in one shot are actually modern Ikea glasses. This video that my friend Nick is pretty fascinating on that topic, and for sake of transparency, also covers things that the show missed.

The sound engineering. The soundtrack is available on Spotify and numerous other places, and it is haunting. It is perfectly designed to prey on the mind, to remind one of invisible danger. This constant anxiety-inducing reminder that this thing kills, this thing kills in minutes, and this thing continues to be lethal and inimical to human life even today in its new sarcophagus.

Just as tragic, just as awful, is how the disaster is treated. How it is solved. How the problem is dealt with. That is the outcome, that is the cost. That is the bill that needs paying. The work done in the months following the accident, is a harrowing and brutal study in and of itself.

There is a memorial near Chernobyl fire station, called the Monument to the Chernobyl Liquidators.

These are the individuals that put in the work to save as many lives as they could, most of whom paid with their lives. A significant proportion of them had no idea that was what they were doing. Another proportion of them knew exactly what they were doing. They went anyway. They did it anyway.

We are still dealing with the consequences today. The location is still lethal. Those working on the containment facility - pictured above, and visible in the very first picture in this blog from above - can only work on the roof of that structure for twelve minutes, before they tick over a year's worth of radiation exposure, and are banned from returning to the site.

This is what is in the guts of the facility.

It's called the Elephant's Foot. It is a material known as corium, and it's essentially the melt bit of the word nuclear meltdown. It's lava made of the fuel containment materials.

The man who took the picture is Artur Korneyev, and he is also the man in the picture. The distortion you can see is the radioactivity of the foot itself warping the film and the operation of the camera. The picture was taken in 1996, ten years after disaster.

So for a television show to actually convey to you the scale of this - the absolute jaw-dropping gut-churning awfulness of what happened at 01:23:45 on the 26th of April 1986 (yes, that is the actual time it happened) - is an achievement in and of itself.

It is hard to watch. It is a physical difficulty, to see the harm done to people. To see just what radiation sickness does to a body, at every stage - from initial burns to cellular degradation sufficient to end life. Valery Legasov - chief of the Chernobyl commission - describes how that works to Boris Shcherbina, vice chairman of the Council of Ministers. Watching the soldiers, the work force of 600,000 people drawn in to help combat the spread of radioactive materials, do their work - this, too, is horrific. Episode 4 is not a thing to be approached lightly. A work of devastating horror that sadly proved to be both effective and necessary.

You are left cold, by the end of it. You are left hollow. Desolate. You are left feeling much like that swathe of the Ukraine still probably feels like today. You are left glad that such a thing hasn't happened to you, that you have never had to live through it - that you have never been that close to an apocalyptic event. You feel your guts turn to ice when you think about the people that had to deal with it, how it must have felt to go into that situation without any information. To see a lump of rock on the ground that you don't recognise, to pick it up, and in that instant to have written your own death warrant.

And then, you are left angry. Because you realise how totally preventable it could have all been. It would take precious few changes. The actual mechanical final cause of the explosion - adequately explained in the show but more accurately described in this video by John Green and this video by Scott Manley - was in and of itself a case of budgetary restriction, working on an assumption that the consequences that would make it deadly wouldn't happen. The decisions that led to the test happening the way it did, when it did, was a combination of ambition, stubbornness, ignorance and pride. The mishandling of the disaster in the initial aftermath can further be laid at the feet of the same four sins.

The official casualty count was initially listed as two, by the Soviet Union; this was later updated to 31, and many nations still hold this figure as being the actual figure. The World Health Organisation contends that the figure is closer to 4,000 - though it is claimed that at least 6,000 Liquidators died as a direct result of their work in and around Chernobyl.

NTV - a Russian media network - is reportedly working on its own version of the show, apparently dissatisfied with the blame being placed at the feet of common human failings. Instead, it will be dealing with the conspiracy theory that the power plant was sabotaged by CIA agents, and the heroic KGB's attempts to stop them. NTV is part of Gazprom Media, which is part of Public Joint Stock Company Gazprom - formerly the Soviet Ministry of Gas Industry - which is majority owned by the Russian government.

The fallen seeds continue to produce tragic fruit.

I don't think we'll ever learn.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Why Would They Do That?

I think that one of the key parts of fiction - and perhaps of life - is understanding motivation.

Part of enjoying a character is understanding them, grasping who they are - and following that, understanding why. Inigo Montoya, as demonstrated above, has who he is writ on his sleeve from the get-go. You learn more about him later, obviously. More depth is revealed. The important thing, though, is you know why he is doing what he is doing.

And a strong driving motivation is good. Right? Like, it helps a character move in life. It's hard for them to be dynamic and proactive if their main goal in life is Like Whatever. Why are you here, pal? Why are you doing what you are doing? Why should we care about you?

Consistency is important here, too. Like, if a character is going to have to change what they want or what they are doing, it should be for a good reason. The story should show you that. There should be little doubt - and if a change is sudden, it doesn't hurt to acknowledge the fact.

You know a movie that has a bunch of characters with easy-to-understand motivations that absolutely rocks?

John Wick.

Great film. If you can get past the, uh, reason why he is motivated to absolutely fucking end Alfie Allen's entire fucking existence. But once that happens, you totally grasp WHY he wants to murder the eternal shit out of Theon Greyjoy. In fact you are practically begging for it to happen, because Alfie Greyjoy is such a scumbag that I'm fairly convinced he'd run as a local UKIP candidate (OH SHIT POLITICS KLAXON).

You kind of understand why everyone does what they're doing, in this movie. Iosef (Alfie FUCKING Allen) is the exact kind of weak-ass pathetic shitweasel that would absolutely steal a mans car and do, uh, what he does, just because that guy stood up to him. His father Viggo is a Russian mob boss, torn between survival and familial duty. There's precious few moments where you are left confused.

That's just good writing. Combine that with the absurdly beautiful cinematography, the fight choreography that redefines an entire genre, the soundtrack oh god the soundtrack and one of the best performances ever put in by Keanu Criminally-Undervalued-As-An-Actual-Actor Reeves amongst others, and it makes John Wick one hell of a film.

...sorry, I got distracted.

Anyhow, it is part of - as best I can tell - why people feel Gang of Throne ended so poorly. The consistency. Or lack therein. A bunch of complicated characters with conflicting agendas all of a sudden forgetting several key parts of their motivation and how they feel about, well, anything. If only there was a character who could use some kind of mind control to manipulate how people acted, a thing that could be used to justify the personality transplants that several Thronefolks seem to undertake...

Okay, okay. Settle down, Kellogg's All Bran.

All this is about writing, of course. It's about making your characters either easy to understand, or making them compelling enough to stick around and find out why they are the way they are. If someone just shows up, and we have no idea why, and we have no reason to care - well, why? In fact, sometimes the only thing you need about a character is their motivation. We didn't know anything about what the Winter Soldier was, or who. All we got was how he locked, the music that played when he showed up, and the fact that he is 100% here to FUCK UP YOUR DAY.

This movie, dude.

All of this said... what is scarier than being totally lost on someone's motivations in real life?

Like, that's the thing, isn't it? Not knowing why someone does what they are doing? Why mass murderers mass murder, why war criminals think it's okay to use white phosphorous, why that guy at the bus stop says racist shit to the nice lady waiting for the next bus? Why anyone would put toilet paper on the roll the wrong way? (You know what I am talking about.)

Why would someone gleefully strike down equality legislation, make people's lives objectively worse, deport people that have every right to live here, make an environment hostile to people who are literally allowed to live here, and simply shrug over literal deaths on her watch...

...and then only cry when she announces her resignation?

Sometimes it isn't even that we don't understand a motivation. Sometimes we understand it just fine - and we hate it.

It's just easier in fiction.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Our Demands Are As Follows (What You Are Owed Part 2)

So I blogged about this once before - specifically around Neon Genesis Evangelion and how the writer was treated in regard to its ending - but a couple things have happened recently that make it relevant once more.

While the constant drone of "not in MY franchise" happens whenever the overlooked and underused non-white non-male non-hetero folks get a look in, these two events are a little different. They're only loosely connected, but they are two different angles of a similar attitude.

For the first, we revisit Batman.

A LOT of people have played Batman over the years. Off the top of my head, just counting live-action film appearances, I count Adam West, Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and now - Robert Pattinson.

A lot of people seem to have issue with this.

For sake of flying my own flag, I have to tell you my favourite Batman movies were the Nolan-directed Christian Bale movies. That said - I don't know if he's the best Batman on that list? Like, Nolan does a good job of the movies not being much about him at all, and more being about the clash between him and the forces at work trying to influence Gotham.

I did blog once before about the people that could play Batman, in which I wandered through my own brain for a while and had a lovely time. I came to the conclusion that most people could play Batman, really.

So why are people mad about Pattinson?

Could it be that his appearance in a certain series of movies has tainted his reputation? Much like Kristen Stewart? Well, yes. Frankly. Despite both of them putting in solid performances in a variety of other roles, they will always carry the sparkle curse with them, because we as a species are horrible people.

(I did my own fair share of hating, don't get me wrong. I'm just capable of seeing that it was pretty childish, I was wrong to do it, and now I know better.)

Herein, several batpeople.

Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Ben Affleck all playing the same character. Except not, really. As mentioned in my last blog, they're all kind of different Batmen. Affleck in particular is playing THIS Batman.

It's hardly his fault the writing, direction, cinematography and general production values of every movie he was in were frankly awful.

So given that how successful an actor is as Batman relies so heavily on the rest of the movie not being garbage, all we can assume each of these individuals bring to the role - aside from how okay they are with their suits having nipples - is a chin.

Robert Pattinson has a chin.

The end. Like, literally, that's it. He'll probably be fine, honestly. He will not be a worse Batman than Val Kilmer or George Clooney, simply by virtue of Tim Burton probably having nothing to do with the movie he is in. He probably won't be worse than Ben Affleck, because I have no idea what kind of drugs were being used when Batman V Superman and Justice League were being made, but I think they probably ran out.

Are we owed a better Batman? Are we owed a better Batman movie? Better DC franchise in general?

Well it would be nice to see, but - they aren't our political representatives, and we haven't commissioned these people to make these things to our specifications. They don't actually owe us anything.

Remember that sentence, as we dive into our next situation.

How we feeling about Season 8 of Game Of Thrones?

Yeah. Lots of mixed opinions.

Again, flag on the mast. I don't watch it. I know a lot about it, because I am surrounded by people who like it, and by people who watch it religiously. It is next to impossible to ignore its existence, especially seeing as every day there's at least one news story about something regarding the show. Be it a Starbucks cup, a bit of foreshadowing that the writers have made happen, or about a petition to reshoot Season 8 entirely.

...wait, what?

Okay so... I don't have an actual proxy for this. I have similar experiences - Babylon 5 for example, which was shuffled about a lot and didn't necessarily get the respect it was due from corporate - but I don't know if I've ever invested in a show for seven and a half seasons only to discover that it is currently being run badly despite being set up very well.

There is, however, an explanation.

So the book series that the TV show is based on is called A Song Of Ice And Fire. The first book, A Game Of Thrones, came out in 1996. A Clash Of Kings - the second novel - was released in 1998, followed by A Storm Of Swords in 2000. It's at this point that the author, one George R. R. Martin, starts taking longer to finish his work - because he is threading together a more and more complex world, more and more embedded story seeds are coming into bloom, and because it's hard to actually follow up on a complex beginning. The next book (A Feast For Crows) came out in 2005, five years later; six years after that, the most recent volume (A Dance With Dragons) hit the shelves in 2011.

Thirteen years, five novels. Two more in the works according to the man himself. The creation of the world that the show-viewer loves so much has taken quite a lot of time.

It's in the gap between that last novel being released and now that the entirety of the TV show has run. One season every year, aside from last year - which caused a lot of consternation amongst the fans, as I recall.

The plot that Martin had written thus far ran out partway through the seventh season, as best I can tell. Which meant that one of two things had to happen.

1) The show goes into hiatus until Martin finishes his work, and then adapts each novel as it has done previously.
2) The show tries to pull together the plot known only to someone else to fit within the constraints set upon it by HBO, and releases it in as timely a fashion as possible.

Now, you and I both know that option 1 won't happen. As mentioned - the year-and-a-half wait for Season 8 was enough to send half the internet into paroxysms. Can you imagine if they were told they'd just have to wait for as long as it took?

It's not a conversation that happened, but it's a conversation I think the showrunners probably had in their own heads, and decided against having to actually address. So they did the best they could, with what they had, which has proven to be not necessarily to the liking of the fans in general.

The fact is - they were never going to do as good a job as Martin, because he's the one writing the thing. He's the one that knows where all the threads are going. He's the one that knows which of his buried bits of foreshadowing were actually foreshadowing and which weren't. He's the one that has as long as he needs to finish a book that is going to be as long as it needs to be to tell the story he wants to tell.

They have a season, to tie everything up in as satisfactory a way as possible, to cap off the seven seasons previous in terms of character development and arc, to provide a suitably dramatic conclusion. Something that I don't think was honestly possible.

So the fans are angry, because the fans didn't get what they wanted.

And so a bunch of the fans - like, over a million at time of writing - have signed a petition demanding a do-over. No death threats, not like poor Hideaki Anno with Evangelion, as I explored in this previous blog. At least none that have been reported. Just petitions, stating that:

...to which the obvious response is...

...I mean, think about it.

If you are an individual who believes that you DO deserve better, that the showrunners owe it to you to make a better show, that you are entitled to something that is greater than what you were presented with - would you be willing to wait until a year (at least!) after George R. R. Martin finishes The Winds Of Winter? Whenever that might be?

Because that is what would get you better. That is what would result in the show being more satisfactory, more in line with the quality of previous seasons. Having it be based on the writing of the actual author, the actual creator of the world, rather than people viewing it from the outside.

Could you wait that long? Do you think the people that made the petition could wait that long? If you aren't willing to wait that long, do you still think you are entitled to more?

I've said it before. I will say it again. The creators of these works owe us literally nothing. Unless you have gone to them to commission a piece of art, and they agree to the terms, and you pay them the agreed sum - in that case alone, you are entitled to the result that you have paid for. That isn't what happened. You didn't knock on their doors, hand over several million dollars, and then explain in painstaking detail how you want this complicated fantasy story to pan out.

They are not politicians elected by us, they are not accountable to us. We did not vote for Martin to pen the first book in 1996, and we didn't vote for David Benioff (whose prior writing includes X-Men Origins Wolverine) or D. B. Weiss (whose prior work included several unused scripts for various other projects). We didn't put them in that position on the understanding that they would deliver a thing that we wanted, they didn't give us a manifesto, and they didn't make us any promises.

And that is without even going into how much what we are watching (well, what YOU are watching, and what I am seeing second-hand) is being pushed down by HBO, wanting to fit everything neatly into the box of "Television Show" that they have made - which as we all know, doesn't always make a good show.

For what it is worth - I'm sorry that those who have followed this show from the very beginning have had to see it come to an end in a substandard fashion. I'm sorry that the show that you enjoy so much has suffered at the hands of corporate nonsense, because that's what happened. It sucks, it really does. I know.

But, like... a petition? To reshoot an entire season? To make it more to your liking?

We aren't entitled to that.

And so the creators, when subject to this kind of treatment, are justified in having this opinion:

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Good Old Days

The Goonies was a formative movie of my childhood.

I mean, why wouldn't it be? Adventure! Mystery! Kids having fun! A fat kid that still gets to join in despite everyone treating him like shit! (Okay it hasn't necessarily aged well.) It's my Sean Astin movie - Lord Of The Rings just borrowed him.

What it leaves, though - the thing it left with me, that it has always left with me, ever since I first saw it - was this sense of nostalgia that it immediately provoked in me. A yearning for specific elements of a childhood that also included a bunch of really shitty elements - to just be running through the woods, chatting nonsense with people I know and trust, or going off and doing whatever for a whole day and having nothing to care about in the intervening hours.

What movies like The Goonies and its peers really do is sell us a childhood we really wish we had, by framing itself in terms and tropes that we actually experienced.

That's not a criticism. It's the nature of fantasy/adventure films of a certain age aimed at kids. Because they were shot when we were kids, they were made back then, so everything is redolent of the era. Using bikes to get everywhere and needing to come up with creative ways to stay in touch because, hey, we didn't have mobile phones.

It calls back to the time when that was the concern. When the biggest worry of any kind was managing to get the crew together to do some stupid stuff, like ride around on bikes for hours arguing about if Tommy from Power Rangers was rubbish or brilliant.

It was before we went through the awkward phases of partial knowledge of world events, where we sought for simple answers as to why things were hard for certain people but not for others. Before we started realising how things really work.

Wanting to be back in that space, wanting to be in a position wherein the primary concerns are small ones, is hardly a sin. It says more about the world as it stands right now than it does about us as people and what we want out of life. That there are so many things today - anxiety-inducing things which are made difficult for no reason other than to change them would be just slightly more difficult and would disadvantage those more important than us - which we accept as just being normal, and never seem to question.

"That's just the way it is," is the answer you get given. Which is dangerously close to "That's just the way it has always been," which echoes the warning from the (fictional) five monkeys experiment. I'm sure you know of that one: five monkeys in a cage with a ladder leading up to food, and whenever one monkey goes up the ladder all the rest got soaked in cold water, so they start beating up any monkey that goes for the ladder. Then when they substitute out one of the monkeys for a new one, the new one immediately goes for the ladder, and gets beaten up for it, and without even knowing the original reason why, is encouraged to not go up the ladder by societal pressure.

(As an aside, the actual experiment is kind of more interesting. Monkeys, when manipulating an object that had previously appealed to them, were punished with several blasts of pressurised air - enough to alarm but not harm. After a while they stopped manipulating the object when by themselves, but upon mixing with other monkeys who did manipulate the object, they themselves did it too. Thus, the actual experiment proves the complete opposite of what the ladder bullshit tries to tell us: that we can be encouraged by others in positive ways rather than just negative.)

I don't think it is a contentious statement to say that there is a lot of nostalgia media around right now. Old video games becoming fashionable again, the iconography of an entire decade becoming people's standard aesthetic, neon and grid lines and synthwave and fake VHS lines. Stranger Things and stuff like it. Awesome musical acts like Robots With Rayguns literally evoking the era with their imagery, their samples and their songwriting. Tim Capello - the sexy sax man from Lost Boys, Tina Turner's tour saxophonist, the man that taught me I was bisexual - has an album out, and is recording synthwave music with other bands. This guy.

The people who grew up with The Goonies are now the people consuming most of the media - and the people making a lot of it, too. There's still a lot of influence from the older folks, because hey, there's money in the industry and they want it. The nostalgia train is loaded with cash. We just hanker for that time - that time back when things were simpler, and not necessarily for good reasons. Like, things still sucked back then for a lot of people - living standards by several metrics were objectively worse.

On a personal scale - that is where things were better. Less existential dread. Less worry. Less fear of the future. Life wasn't better because the world was better, life was better because we were kids and we didn't know any better.

We must take care to pay attention to that - and it is perhaps something we might mention to those who talk about the past as a mythical better place. Like everything back in the seventies, sixties, fifties, forties, thirties, was better than things are today.

Our childhood wasn't better because it was the past. It was better because we were children.

Be kind to yourself. Life is hard enough.

Wading Through Sludge

Sometimes settling on one topic for the blog each week is difficult.

Like, a lot will have happened - a lot that I have opinions on or want to think about or discuss - but actually picking one of those things can be difficult. Or, sometimes, very little has happened that I am aware of, and I can't stir anything out of my mind to put onto the page.

As of right now I am vaguely torn between subjects.

The horrible events at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland Florida, are both awful and sickeningly familiar. You noticed the Onion article that they just put out every time? Because every point is still valid? Because nothing changes? Even after the eighteen mass shootings this year alone, and we are still in February?

The ways to prevent it are complicated - if only because the obvious right thing to do is counterbalanced by what people want, and by the information being put out by a variety of sources, some of which genuinely don't give a damn about how many children have to die - as long as the rifles and ammo keep being sold.

The change is a thing that is hard to enact, because it will be fought against at every turn, by everyone from people who sympathise in principle but think your methodology is flawed, all the way up to the kind of people that want a handgun in every teacher's hip holster.

But then I have said a lot of this before, because this happens constantly, so I move on.

Black Panther was amazing. One hell of a movie. A classical tale of power and statesmanship, with a beautiful cast, cinematography and soundtracking to die for, characters that are absolutely popping with life.

I knew that people would complain about it. It was absolutely guaranteed to draw detractors - the kind of people that throw around the terms SJW and Snowflake. I heard claims of a lack of diversity, which made me laugh, because what the individual is actually saying is "there's not enough white people to make me happy".

I mean, I haven't been there, but I am fairly convinced that the border region of Uganda and Kenya doesn't actually have a lot of white folks hanging out there. Even before we take into account Wakanda's secrecy and closed borders, thus its lack of a colonial past.

So representation in movies is getting better, and that is a slow thing to happen, but each success makes it happen faster - even if movies with good POC representation always have to jump through more hoops and adhere to better standards than your average white-guy action flick.

Altered Carbon - neocyberpunk crime/action drama. I love the books, and the author has done some great work, so I was worried about the Netflix adaptation. It's pretty good. I mean it has its problems but it also shines in a lot of ways that are, maybe, not the ways you might think.

For one thing it has a nicely diverse cast. I don't often see a character who is a Muslim, whose faith is not only a character trait but a relevant one, who doesn't get played as an "other" or insinuated to be a bad guy. Most of the characters are multilingual.

The women of the series are treated pretty horribly. In general. This isn't ideal, but at the same time, I can see how it would be the way things pan out. It's not a GOOD thing, far from it. It just indicates to you who is in charge, how they treat other people, and who those people tend to be. That even in a future wherein technology exists that means nobody has to really die, society's class structure never really changes. The gap just gets bigger.

Everywhere, we are held back and down by the shit that sticks to us.

All the worst of humanity, colouring even the best art we can create, because while the sublime is hard to grasp - our sins and our vices are omnipresent and inescapable.

And they are what will kill us all, in the end - or make us so crippled as a society, so weighed down by the chains of greed and ignorance.

All we can do is wade through the sludge, day after day, to get to the dry land of our own greatness.

Drunk Uncle Doesn't Like Your New Star Wars

I've seen a few legit complaints about The Last Jedi, but I've seen a lot more that are - basically - the same old shit.

You know the shit of which I speak.

They're the reason why I am painfully aware of the term Forced Diversity, a string of syllables that comes packaged with its own brand of irony, which I will delve into in a moment. They're the ones that resent a character not being part of their acceptable list. "Wait, that guy just kissed ANOTHER guy? Why do they have to CROWBAR these (insert slur) into MY (insert name)? Why do they always have to be EVERYWHERE? Why do there have to be WOMEN everywhere? Ugh! (insert name) is RUINED!"

Sooooo okay.

Who amongst my readership has never heard of Eastenders? It's a long-running British soap opera, set in the east end of London. (Fun fact: most soap operas were labelled as such because they were sponsored by soap companies, because of course, daytime serials are mostly going to be watched by the woman of the house who does all the cleaning, right? Seriously, it's fucking everywhere.)

Eastenders has been running since 1985, and it's had over five thousand episodes, showing like five days a week or something. I don't watch it myself, but it was impossible to get away from knowing something about it back when I was a kid. A lot of our parents watched it, older siblings, the works.

Hands up who on my friends list has spent any time in the east end of London.

There weren't a lot of people of colour on Eastenders for as long as I was aware of it. Which, you know, coming from the Isle of Wight as I do - that didn't really seem that out-there to me. If you've ever been there, though - if you've been to most bits of London, in fairness, some more than others - you'd realise just how laughable that notion is.

Current demographics puts the population of London as being about 60% white folks - but if you take a look at distribution, most of them live around the outskirts of the Greater London area, the suburbs and such. So let's be conservative and say that Eastenders should probably have a fifty-fifty split.

It doesn't, obviously. And in the past, there's been kickbacks from the show introducing people of colour as characters. A couple years ago the producer - who has since quit - said that if he had to adhere to "box-ticking ethnic quotas", he'd resign.

Now doesn't that sentiment seem familiar?

Spoilers: Star Trek Discovery has two main characters, both men, in a relationship. I've heard this described as forced, too. Why do there HAVE to be a whole TWO gay/bi men on a starship with a standard crew compliment of about 140? It's the same thinking that led to complaints about Lieutenant Uhura, pressure to make her quit during the original series' first season, until she was talked down by none other than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr himself.

Herein we get to Forced Diversity.

Society built a wall, brick by brick, starting way back in history. It built a wall, and put everyone different to them on the other side of it. There, they stayed, because on one side of the wall - that was where all the money was, and all the political power. The walls stayed in place, because the people who could most effectively pull it down had no interest in doing so. As Dr King himself said - freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

As the world swings ever closer to the 2020s, more and more, we're starting to see media actually reflect the world we live in. It's work, though. It's hard. Pushing through the walls that were built to keep out everyone that isn't a middle-aged middle-class white cis het male. There's a lot of those walls still standing, obviously - and so any reflection of the actual diversity of the world, even taking steps toward such diversity, HAS to be forced. It has to be forced against mandate, against the preconceived notion that the main character in the movie has to be a white dude.

It has to be forced against the people who decided to make a cut of The Last Jedi without any women on it, because there's no women in space, or something. It has to be forced against people who believe there's just no LGBTQA people anywhere, so they shouldn't be in movies or on TV or in comic books. It has to be forced past the decision-makers who decided that a forthcoming Netflix series based on Journey To The West (a classically Chinese story) only needed a single Asian actor. (Who is playing Sun Wukong for fuck's sake, I mean if any of the actors in a story about the MONKEY GOD can get away with not necessarily being Chinese, it's the MONKEY GOD. It's like the fuckup cherry on top of a fuckup cake.)

A lot of more conservative right-leaning folks like to make the argument that seeing LGBTQA folks or people of colour or anything that isn't them in a piece of media is some kind of values-pushing. Like their lack of acceptance is a position that deserves defending, and that any show of how reality actually works in the face of that position is an attack on them personally. I suppose that leads to the belief that the very existence of a black woman in Star Trek is likewise a personal attack, let alone a gay couple.

Well, feel free to tune yourselves out.

Because this is how the world is, how the world actually is, and the desperate scramble to try and keep it off of our movie screens and comic book pages is just another paroxysm of bigots losing their grip on our lives, an inch at a time.

You feel free to keep making your fan edits, and to keep cutting things out that you don't like. Get creative with it. Apply yourselves! Write a better movie, a better novel, a better show format, that only includes the things YOU want to exist. Go ahead and get it made.

We'll be over here celebrating the release of Black Panther, and ignoring your 47 minute misogyny-cut of Star Wars.

Running The Asylum

 Quick, name five Batman villains.

Okay. Good.

Think about the folks you named. Like, imagine each of them. I would have a few guesses but honestly, I want y'all to do the mental footwork here. It's been a day of it, and I am running a couple cylinders short.

Hold the images of those five Batman villains in your head.

How many of them suffer from mental illness?

You'll note my choice of words, there. I didn't ask how many of them were crazy, or how many of them were lunatics or whatever. I asked how many of them suffer from mental illness.

My guess is that out of the five you guessed, we're looking at...MINIMUM two. Probably more. Maybe all five. It's certainly easy enough to go for all five.

It's not just Batman that has a significant quantity of this going on. I mean as best I can recall he has the MOST going on, but if we look at a cross section of everything - not just comic books but novels, movies, television - time and again we find that the bad guys have profound mental health complications.

I mean, just look at Split.

We are entering a dark time, right now. As I write this, the newly inaugurated 45th President of the United States is beginning his... let's call it an escapade, through the rights and wrongs of the nation. People are feeling under threat, and rightly so - the rhetoric of the man himself and his followers is inimic to justice, nobility and equality.

And in this environment of hostility and toxicity, a forthcoming movie - admittedly one directed by a man whose spectacular fall from respect in Hollywood circles is legendary - will tell people who know no better about how dangerous those who are mentally ill can be.

I have mental health problems. I know plenty of people who do, also.

We're not fucking comic book villains. We're not just waiting for our moment to strike. We don't lurk in the shadows and wear special costumes and plot our revenge against society.

See, this is part of why this shit is taboo. Because when the protagonist has a mental health issue, it's so often something that gets presented as fucking comedy. Monk, anyone? In fact, every shade of being neuroatypical is used as either the marker of villainry or something to laugh at every now and then.

Why is it considered a daring or risky thing when a MAIN character experiences something that one in FOUR of us will experience each YEAR? It's more likely that a character will experience mental health problems than them being a white male (~8% of the world's population, but classically overrepresented literally EVERYWHERE).

Just a thought.

Top 40 Tipple Game

Who here has played a drinking game?

Let's face it, most people have, at least once. You don't need to have enjoyed it. Most of them are just expressions of our latent masochism. From perennial favourite "I've Never" to the protean and punishing "Ring of Fire", it's all about the agony baby. And in the end, you start to forget how they are played - which is why simplicity is sometimes key.

Then there's drinking games that are based on watching or listening to things. Who's heard of the Roxanne drinking game? Two teams, both listening to the song Roxanne by the Police - one who takes a shot whenever they hear the word Roxanne, one takes a shot whenever they hear the term Red Light. It sounds like a sure-fire way to end up on the floor.

Myself and my crew recognise a variant of the Studio Ghibli / Miyazaki Drinking Game. If you've ever watched one, see if this sounds familiar:

• 1 Drink - Landscape that looks like Wales.
• 1 Drink - Thing flies that clearly shouldn't.
• 1 Drink - Non-human character makes a snarky comment.
• 1 Drink - Character has ridiculous facial hair.
• 1 Drink - Character's face fills the screen.
• 3 Drinks - Character with ridicuous facial hair's face fills the screen.
• Bonus - 1 Drink - Character design has been in previous Ghibli movie.

You're imagining being shitfaced by the thirteenth minute of Kiki's Delivery Service, right? (You should be. I've seen it happen.)

Who pays attention to the top 40?

It's kind of gone to shit over the years, hasn't it? But this isn't about the quality of the music. This is a bit of an exploration of the themes that I have noticed to be prevalent. We're not gonna pick on the super-obvious ones - casual sexism, auto tune - but we ARE gonna play for keeps, which is that by the end of these forty songs, you will be wishing you'd stayed home.

Without further ado.

• 1 Drink - Rihanna, Drake, Justin Beiber, Nicki Minaj, Arianna Grande or DJ Khaled. (Because jesus christ they are fucking everywhere. Like all the time.)
• 3 Drinks - At least two of the above in the video, though not necessarily contributing musically. (This is especially relevant to Rihanna and Drake.)
• 1 Drink - The rhythm section, for at least half of the song, sounds like it was recorded in a submarine. (Meant to sound like you're outside the club or something?)
• 1 Drink - Main hook of the instrumental is either a rubbish sample of a trumpet or a synth section that sounds like steel drums. (This shit is ubiquitous.)
• 1 Drink - Song actually sounds like a really toxic relationship. (THIS IS SO COMMON. Like just listen to some of this shit.)
• 1 Drink - Lyrics feature the words Work. (Seriously. It kills me.)
• 1 Drink - Beat structure is kick-kick-kick-kick-kick-kick-kick-SNARE. And that's as complex as it gets. (TRY PEOPLE. TRY. FOR GOD'S SAKE.)

...that's all we need for now. Because frankly that will get us pretty sloshed before we've even reached number 20.

Do you, the reader, notice any other trends?

Televisual

So, at home, we don't have television.

I mean we have A television. We just can't get satellite signal or anything, so we just use it for streaming or gaming. It gets used, most of the time.

I don’t miss television.

I mean I miss some things. The chance of coming across something you weren't expecting. The shows that haven't made it onto youtube, netflix or some other online option.

The list of things I don't miss...

Well let's start with advertising. Commercials are 90% awful. Like genuinely terrible. There's several types of ad, but they broadly divide into the pretentious (cars and aftershave) and the insipid (most other shit). With the exception of standouts like the Guinness ads and the occasional rather funny Danepak piece, the rest drive me to distraction to the point of actual anger.

Then there's the network advertising itself. If two thirds of the commercials you see are for products you don't want, the last third is to try and make you either buy subscriptions to another TV service that funds the channel you were originally watching, or for other shows on partner channels. Get a Sky subscription! Watch other episodes of that show that you kind of don't care about! Clips of sports!

And then we come to the core of it: the actual programming.

When I used to have a TV, it was almost always stuck on a rock music channel, the cooking channel, or a gameshow channel. All of these things can just be watched pn and off, and don't require continuity. Perhaps it is personal, but if I was to watch a TV drama or similar, I would want to watch it on my schedule - not at the whim of The Channel Network or whatever.

Also - paying a significant amount of cash per month to watch ten different shows dressed up into four hundred different titles is a bit of a joke. Ever noticed that all the historical dramas look the same? Shot the same way, same beats, same intro... same with cop shows. Same with what I call the Right-Wing Loyalty Shows - reality police shows, border control, debt collectors, everything that follows authority around and shows you that they're the good guys, really.

Skim through the channels. See if there's anything you REALLY want to watch, or if it's just something that will "do".

So on the rare occcasion that I miss having a TV, I just boot up YouTube...