Readers Request: Poland, Dad Jokes, Kebabs, Wisdom

Sentient beings of all ages, it's time for another Readers Request - the first since July! We have several treats for you in this one, including about a quarter of the questions being submitted by one person who had consumed enough wine to intoxicate a rat with his breath?

So without further ado.

Best historical rant - This may be controversial, but here goes: The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli. Often cited as being a how-to guide for the budding tyrannical despot, it is also one of the most scorching and excoriating takedowns of tyranny that you can ever read, and may have had a hand in eventually unseating the Medicis.

Surprising Polish facts - Copernicus was Polish, and studied in Krakow. It is common to celebrate your Name Day in Poland, which is the Saint's Day of the Saint you were named after - which is a common thing as Poland is quite a religious country. It contains the last ancient forest in Europe which is the home of the European Bison.

The power of the pangolin and your own personal statement - Pangolins are wonderful beautiful creatures that deserve our care. The third Saturday in February is World Pangolin Day. I want these critters to be saved from their endangered status because god damn look at this little fucker what a BEAUTY (wait I've been asked this before too)

Lost skills you'd like to see come back? Either you personally or humans (of which you presumably belong) in general - My first instinct is to yell the words Critical Thinking or Empathy. I think, though, that maybe I am being facetious or illogical in thinking that either of those things was much more prevalent in the past than they are now. So let's go with the skill of knowing who to trust. (NASA over that guy you know who says the Earth is flat, e.g., or your family doctor over Suzanne from the MumsNet local page who says that vaccines cause homosexautism.)

What shows are you excited for this coming year? - Oh uh. I dunno. I haven't paid a lot of attention really. Masters Of The Universe? Picard? Next season of Dark Crystal?

Is global existential dread just a part of adulthood, and has it always been so? - Yes. It is my firm opinion that the human condition is centralised around insecurity, and existential dread is an extension of insecurity. The only way you are going to avoid such things is to either pay no attention to the world, or to have no awareness of anything. (I blog about this a lot.) (In fact I have been asked this one before I think?)

Various things John has wanted to set fire to over the years. - Parliament, myself, the US President, capitalism, the human race, myself, half of the villages and towns we come across in Pathfinder, myself, the human race, capitalism, elves, nazis, antivaxxers, chauvanists, homophobes, transphobes, racists, sexists, myself, capitalism, Michael Bay, the human race, Parliament, Tolkien, every building I can see, everything I can see, myself, whoever keeps signing off on the Anime live-action remakes, capitalism, the human race.

Favourite tabletop builds for various archetypes - Welder Cleric (offensive spells that can be fast-cast as healing abilities), Sword-And-Board Fighter (smack em with your shield), Rogue With Knives (seriously just rogues with knives), and one of my personal favourites, Combat-Centric Character With Psychological Issues In A Mostly Social Setting (because I like a challenge).

I read this as on the bog #mumofasevenyearold - I might be. You don't know.

The current political state of the world if it were a DnD campaign. - The world is falling to darkness. As hellfire sweeps continents and toxic taint seeps into the oceans, the dark powers ally with each other to take over one nation at a time, ruled by lords of deceit, greed and malice. This is not a quest to conquer a dungeon; this is not a quest to save a kingdom. This is a fight for the world, to prevent it from becoming the next level of the abyss.

Best "dad joke" - I bought some shoes from a drug dealer. I don't know what he laced them with but I've been tripping all day.

I've been told you shouldn't make dad jokes if you're not actually a father. Apparently it's a Faux-Pa - Included as a comment because frankly it's funny shit.

Favourite set of dice you've ever owned or come across - So rather than pick a set of dice that I own - if I play favourites the others will betray me - I will instead pick this set of dice that I would dearly love to own. Blacklight dice that, without a blacklight shining on them, just look like blank polyhedrons.

How can we divert course from dystopia to a utopian future? - I've been asked this one before - the answer is the same as last time.

You, the touch and the power -

Time to talk day 6 feb 2020 - Time To Talk Day is a day for us to start talking more about mental health and breaking down the taboos surrounding it. It is uncomfortable and it is upsetting but think about how much worse it is if someone is suffering? 123 people die by suicide every day on average - that is one every twelve minutes. Think about that. If even one of them can be solved by talking, then we should talk. That's what the day is for. We should ALSO talk about how government funding for mental health solutions seems to involve 100% awareness and precious little treatment, too.

Why Justin shouldn’t suggest topics when drunk - I mean he can if he wants.

Or me even - You're drunk?

Who is Justin? - Dave's not here man.

Is this his kebab? - A kebab? I'm hungry.

Irrespective of my previous answer can I eat it? - I want it. I want the kebab.

Why are the two old ladies talking about shoes in Cowes on the 22nd? - I don't know, I'm not privy to the secrets of the aged.

Is there always a bigger fish? - Almost always.

From your point of view are the Jedi a) evil, b) a bigger fish or c) a bunch of self destructive smack heads? - All three. The Jedi are just rubbish. One of the weaknesses of the prequels is having to include Jedi - like not just some smart guys hiding on moons and spreading their own personal wisdom but a bunch of dickheads in robes making poor decisions on an industrial scale. Why are they the protagonists?

Wisest things said by fictional characters - I present to you a selection, beginning with Granny Weatherwax from Carpe Jugulum.

"It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray."
"Nope."
"Pardon?"
"There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."

In reality a self sustaining oligarchy is the only form of government the uk has had since at least 1568, discuss - The signing of the Treaty of Adrianople? I mean I agree but I fail to see how relevant -

I of course mean 1658 I’m embarrassed now - The death of Oliver Cromwell? ...oh okay.

Why I married Nicholas Wright - I mean he's a nice enough lad, isn't he?

The couple that ....... together stays together! - "Is Good". It's not to do with the things you do or don't do together - some people are inseperable to the point of creepiness, some people are fiercely independent. The important thing is, not only, that you accept each other for who you are - but that you are genuinely OKAY with each other being who you are. When you can accept each other without reservation, not because it is what you have to do, but because you are genuinely at peace with where you differ and where you overlap. That... is how you stay together. (I do however recommend gaming! It works!)

Can I get a rat drunk with just the power of wine breath? - Yes. I mean. Probably.

Best/worst/both pickup lines - "Are you a parking ticket? You got fine written all over you." Which is of course inviting the response: "Are you a parking ticket? You look like an expensive mistake that I'd rather not make."

Favourite quote and why. -

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain."

 Khalil Gibran, The Prophet. I don't want to lionise pain and suffering. I don't want to say that you can't hold wisdom unless you have suffered. At the same time - it is true, that without the context of what suffering actually is, you don't necessarily have the context to understand just how important it is to prevent or cure suffering. If you have never stared into the dark and known that you want your life to end, you can't grasp the full extent of what it is to save someone from the same. Without a crippling heartbreak, there is no You've Lost That Loving Feeling; without the darkest depression, there is no Black Hole Sun; without a plane crash, there is no Fire And Rain; without the tragedy of a painter at the mercy of his darkest demons, there is no Starry Night, and there is no Vincent. Would I rather be pain-free and have less context for, say, It Never Ends? Well yes - but if life is for poetry, if life means nothing without art, then I will take my enrichment where I find it. Especially given as the pain is a feature rather than a bug.

Favourite meme you've seen recently. - This one.

Studio Ghibli Netflix tie-in - ACCESS. Expanded audiences. YES. People can see some of my favourite animated movies that couldn't before, for whatever reasons. YES. And they started with two of my favourites (Castle In The Sky and Ocean Waves). YES.

That's it for this time, folks. Thank you for your contributions - something more personal next time. Thank you for joining me on this odyssey!

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.

Best Of The Bad Bunch

Having just come back from Nine Worlds - and there will probably be a blog about that - I am absolutely shattered, having socialled myself into a coma. What this means is that the blog will not be some kind of epic sojourn into perfected academic understanding of any particular topic.

So I am, instead, going with a suggestion provided by my lovely significant other, inspired by a brilliant panel featuring several brilliant authors:

Who are your seven favourite villains?

Well, alright then. Hold onto your britches. In no particular order.

Carter Burke

YOU KNEW IT WAS COMING.

Okay so Carter Burke, right? If you haven't seen the 1986 action science fiction horror movie Aliens, you haven't lived - especially the special edition, look for the sentry guns and the scenes in the colony before the marines show up. It is my literal favourite movie ever made, if the last blog didn't clue you in on that fact. If you haven't read it, it's about Bishop, go read it. Now. Yeah, now. Then come back here.

You back? Good. Okay.

Carter Burke. The man who made the xenomorph look reasonably honourable. The greasiest rat-fuck son of a bitch to ever become dogmeat. When he bites the dust, you feel the most deep sense of "yeah fuck you" satisfaction, because you hate him. You hate his slick smarmy attitude, you hate his duplicity, you hate his lying fucking face, you hate the way he makes these empty hand gestures and gapes like a dying fish. You hate him. You hate him so thoroughly and so completely.

And then he gets his head fucking eaten.

Delicious.

-

Rick Deckard

TW-TW-TWIIIIIST

You see, Blade Runner is a noir flick; this means that the morality is all higgledy-piggledy. So you need to look deeper than the surface when you look for who is right and who is wrong, and in a previous blog, I talked all about why Roy Batty wasn't wrong.

So we have Rick Deckard. He used to be a Blade Runner - he still is one - and a Blade Runner is a person who, in this setting at least, hunts down Replicants and retires them. Given that Replicants need a very specific test to even tell them apart from humans, what that basically means is that Deckard hunts down people and kills them. The only crime those people commit is to not do what the company that makes them tells them to, such as wanting to live for more than four years.

Rachel doesn't know she's a Replicant. Roy does, and wants to live. Deckard wonders at one point if he might be. (He isn't, by the way. I will die on that hill.) Both the original and 2049 really serve to erase the difference between Replicants and people. So - yeah, Deckard's a professional murderer cleaning up corporate messes, who would retire himself if they told him to. He forces himself on vulnerable girl, and gets piss drunk because he can't deal with his job but keeps doing it anyway.

Sure, the greater villains of the piece are Tyrell and Bryant - the corporate overlord and the demanding police chief - but Deckard, being presented as the protagonist while actually being an assassin for hire, surely takes the cake there.

-

Megatron

"I would have waited an eternity for this. It's over, Prime."

Sure, there are a great many different Megatrons in different Transformers timelines - but all of them are awesome, let's face it.

I am particularly fond of the gladiatorial pit-fighter of Kaon presented in Transformers Prime. He just oozes hostility and nastiness. When presented with perhaps certain death, at the mercy of a human controlling an industrial drill, Megatron tells him simply:

"Kill me now, boy. Or you will never get another chance."

Jack doesn't, obviously.

In another episode he has to fight a super-powered Insecticon bare-handed, does so, wins, then turns on the Autobots and dares them to have a crack at him too.

He then falls the fuck over, because he's near death himself.

Bad. Ass.

-

The Tessier-Ashpool Family

You know what Cyberpunk is - I already talked about Blade Runner - now meet the real villains of the novel that pretty much started it all, Neuromancer.

The Neuromancer in the title is an AI. As is Wintermute, who gave their name to my Starfinder character. They are both created as a way for an insanely wealthy family to keep maintaining their fortune and their legacy, a family that hated the earth enough to build a literal space arcology - the Villa Straylight - and that hated being in space so much that they just stayed there, in their baroque nightmare, being frothing mad and wealthy beyond understanding.

We encounter this place in the third act of the novel, a novel which begins in the murky underworld of Chiba City in Japan. Chiba is a place profoundly ruled by poverty and crime. Case - the main character - rents a plastic gun early on, just in case something bad happens. He rents a plastic gun. That's just a thing he does. Imagine the kind of world that creates that demand. Now imagine the kind of people who have more money than ACTUAL sense, like literally, who hang in orbit up above that world.

If you need more evidence as to their literal evil, one of them - the patriarch - has sex with and consequently murders a clone of his own daughter.

So fuck these people and everything they stand for.

-

Carnage

In terms of Marvel villains, there's few I like more than Carnage.

I mean... he's pretty great, isn't he? When you think about it. Like Venom is cool, but Carnage is like cool but injected with maniac juice. Venom is a dangerous foe to Spider-Man, who defeats his spider-sense and can catch him totally unaware. Carnage is all that, plus, if he wants to, he can turn his hand into an axe and eviscerate you with it. Something he is very willing to do, because he loves eviscerating people.

There's just something so much more dangerous about the Carnage symbiote than most other bad guys in the Marvel universe. He sits between the huge deific threats (Apocalypse, Galactus, Thanos) and the powerful-but -mortal bad guys (Omega Red, Doctor Octopus, The Mandarin). It took one of the literal most powerful heroes in the Marvel universe to actually put him down, via flying him up into orbit and ripping him in half.

See?

He's scary. He's violent. He's hard to defeat in a way that is morally sound. You can slap around a mugger, you can web up a thug, but Carnage? Carnage demands that you run, or fight. Just to survive, let alone to win.

And when you consider that the symbiote can infect other people... like, say, Wolverine... or Juggernaut...

...or Multiple Man...

Yeah, just thinking about that makes me sweaty.

-

Donnie Darko

I'm gonna have to explain this one...but also I kind of don't want to.

See, the entire trick to the movie Donnie Darko involves watching it, understanding it, and then interpreting it properly. If you do all these things, then I daresay you will agree with me insofar as that, in terms of the bad guy - Donnie is that guy.

Sure, there are worse people.

I mean, Kitty. Kitty is the most horrible, awful individual I can imagine. She's like that pink flowery shithole woman from Harry Potter but actually real. We all know someone like Kitty.

And Patrick Swayze... like, (SPOILERS) when you find out some wealthy pseudo-Christian self-help guru has a bunch of child porn stashed in his closet, you're probably not surprised. He's still an asshole, and he still needs punishing.

I am not going to go into the core of the plot. What I am going to do is tell you to go and watch this movie, and then understand this:

Donnie looked at what Donnie had done, and decided that what Donnie had done was the wrong thing to do.

Villains often think they are heroes of their own story. It's rare that they can witness evidence to the contrary and realise the fact.

He does.

-

The last villain is one that may surprise you, and herein I will present all the choices I went through before settling on one:

The Human Race
SPACE!
Stalin
War
Yourself
Film Production Companies
Internalised Homophobia
Religious Extremism
That Guy On The Bus That Always Wants To Talk To You Before 8am
My Grandmother
George Lucas
Whoever Threw Out The Whedon Script For Alien 4
Nazis
Whoever Didn't Throw Out The Script For AvP Requiem
Rocky Balboa
Stalin
Impressionist Painters
Lists
Wasps
Buzzfeed
Calorific Content
Empty Carbs
That Weird Feeling You Get When You Drink A Cold Beverage Too Quickly Like Not Brain Freeze But Like A Chill In Your Throat That Is Just Super Uncomfortable
Superman
Yourself
Batman
Magneto
Professor Xavier
Nazis
Yoko Ono
Tyler Durden
Scott Pilgrim
Toxic Masculinity
When They Change The Recipe Of That Thing You Like And It Just Tastes Kind Of Wrong Now Like Not Super Different But Different Enough That You Don't Like It Much Any More And You Can't Explain Why
That d20 You Used The Last Time You Failed A Save
Lists
Yourself

No, really. Yourself. From Enter The Gungeon.

So to clarify.

Enter The Gungeon is a super-fun twin-stick bullet hell game with an amazing soundtrack, superb pacing, graphics to die for, replayability out the ass - it's just great, I can't recommend it enough. If you don't believe me, go watch a review or LP. Try Dunkey, his one is pretty much on point.

You see those crosshairs?

You, as the player, are entering the Gungeon in order to take - from its depths - a gun that shoots into the past, to kill your own mistakes. That is your end goal, the reason why you decide to enter this mad labyrinth filled with bullets that shoot you with smaller bullets, and enemies that are puns on firearm terms. This is why you bullet hell. This is why you have to live.

And when you lose all your health, where in most games you would be killed by the thing that killed you - in Enter The Gungeon, you get shot by the time gun.

You are literally shooting yourself from the future.

The thing is, THAT is what kills you. That is the thing that stops you. Not the bullet that the cute little shotgun shell just shot at you. It's the bullet YOU shoot.

One of our greatest enemies is ourselves. Our doubt, our internalised hatreds and fears, our damage, our dissonance. Of course, we have a lot more enemies than that - systems that are rigged against us, people that hate us for being us, people that casually harvest their fortunes while damning the rest of us to a forever up-hill climb. One of the things we can definitely work on changing is ourselves.

And a thing we should definitely stop doing is shooting ourselves before we have a chance to fail.

...huh.

Well done, John.

So yeah. There you go. My seven favourite villains.

Normal service resumes on Sunday.

I May Be Synthetic, But I'm Not Stupid

I'd like to open with Asimov's three laws of robotics.

1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Aliens is my favourite movie, something I have established before - and it is my not very humble opinion that it is a far more clever movie than it lets on. There's several world-class performances in this movie, and not just from the principle main cast too - perhaps one of the best performances in this movie is put in by the legendary Lance Henriksen, in his portrayal of the (spoilers) android, Bishop.

Let's talk about the first time we really meet Bishop - no, not when he walks past out of Cryo.

No no no, when we MEET him. In THIS scene, in the mess hall, right here.

See, this scene establishes character and setting, and it does so with great subtlety. It does so without you even realising it is happening, because these people are just playing out their roles, right? They're just being the people you know they are.

So let's review.

In this scene, we have all the non-commissioned Marines dining together, while the Lieutenant decides to eat on a separate table with the two civilian contractors - a fact that is noted, and interpreted as aloofness. This is an assumption that carries through until it's revealed that he's not really aloof - he's just inexperienced, and has no idea how his soldiery would perceive him doing the very basic thing of eating with Burke and Ripley. After all, none of the Marines want to eat with the civvies - and they'd just have to sit there by themselves. So it's the right thing to do to keep them company, right?

As much of an asshole as Hudson can be, he still respects Sergeant Apone, referring to him as "Top" when he enquires about the mission - but Apone doesn't know, so he spins a joke about colonists and their virginity. A further divide between the soldiery and Ripley in particular. This is a hyper-macho social environment, and it remains to be seen whether or not these Marines are all talk or not; an impression further portrayed by Frost and Hudson slapping hands over "Arcturan Poontang". Spunkmeyer has a smart mouth, but Hicks replies to his derision regarding the food with fatherly advice, humorous or not: "It's good for you, boy, eat it."

As this happens, in the picture above, we can see Bishop offering people food.

This is easily seen as his job - we don't know who or what he is yet, but he's been established as not a soldier (he's not sat with them) but not quite a distant civilian (not sat with them either) - and also, he's interacting with the troops directly, quietly, socially, positively - but in a subservient role. Everyone else has gone to retrieve their own main meal, but here he is, handing out cornbread to people and not, himself, eating.

And then this happens.

"Bishop, do the knife thing, man."

Further character establishment. Specifically we establish that Hudson is a clown, and that the Marines know Bishop, and have known him for longer than their new Lieutenant - no shared experience with them, but this is an event that has happened with Bishop and the Marines before. Hence the cheers and jeers from the others, until he caves in and...

Obeys.

Later - when the scene has played out as we all know it does - Bishop explains to Ripley that he cannot "harm, or by omission of action allow to be harmed, a human being", which is almost word-for-word a repeat of the First Law of Robotics. He states it is part of his behaviour inhibitors, which Ash - from Alien - simply wouldn't have. Perhaps due to what happened in Alien, even if the events of the movie are officially denied by Weyland-Yutani, or perhaps due to other events wherein the "twitchy" Hyperdyne 120-A/2s have hurt people.

Now if Bishop just outright said "I can't hurt you, I'm not allowed," then this would be a throwaway line - but he phrases it in almost exactly the same way as the First Law is written; and if he is encoded with the First Law, then it isn't a huge assumption to believe he is encoded with the Second and Third laws, as well.

So what happens in this moment is the Second Law is invoked - Bishop must obey the instruction given to him by a human, even if he initially resists - despite the fact that it can cause him physical harm, because the Third Law implicitly gives way to the Second Law. So of course he will relent, and of course they know he will.

As this goes on, Drake and Vasquez, in left of shot, exchange a look - she slaps his arm and he gets up, wandering back behind Bishop casually and up to Hudson's left hand side. I like this look, because it's clear throughout the movie that Drake and Vasquez are very close, having a bond over and above that which is shared by anyone else in this unit, and one that appears to also be entirely platonic.

Then he does this.

For one thing I love the fact that Hudson grumbles at Drake for what he is doing - clearly indicating that as the class clown he doesn't appreciate being shown up by the far more confident and capable Drake - but his real surprise is shown by Bishop going along with it.

Another thing - see those brackets mounted into the table? All of the Marines are eating out of standardised lunch trays that fit into those brackets. Clearly this is a design nod to the fact that there might be a sudden shift in momentum or similar, or that artificial gravity may fail. Just a nice touch.

Here, though, could have been a moralistic dilemma for Bishop.

He's not allowed to hurt Hudson, directly or by omission of action, even if Drake tells him to - the Second Law can't subvert the First Law.

He could have refused the order, but that would also involve refusing Hudson's own order, which was made without any perceived risk to Hudson. Which he isn't allowed to do.

So he does the next best thing.

He puts his own hand directly over Hudson's, overlapping somewhat as Lance Henriksen actually has larger hands than Bill Paxton. Which is a good thing.

In this circumstance, he is obeying the First Law by placing himself in harm's way, so that the knife will harm him before it ever harms a human. In doing so, he is obeying the instructions given to him by both humans involved in this scenario - and he is invested in not harming himself as per the Third Law, which gives him further motivation to not miss.

We all know what happens next.

Look at their faces.

Vasquez and Apone are loving it - she knew exactly what Drake was planning. Drake is satisfied, amused by Hudson's constant terrified scream. Bishop is so focused on what he is doing that he doesn't have a facial expression. He's too busy not hurting himself (Third Law) OR Hudson (First Law).

It bears mention, as an aside, that this scene was shot as-is and sped up - and that while Bishop's knife trick was part of the script, Hudson's hand being involved was not. The entire cast and crew involved discussed the scene, how to do it, and agreed that Mark Rolston should be the one to force Bill Paxton's hand under Lance Henriksen's. EVERYONE knew it was going to happen...aside from Bill Paxton. So that look of terror is real. Even if the production knife is blunt, Henriksen stood a good chance of hurting both of them during the shoot. Of course Henriksen wasn't worried. He'd practiced this a lot.

Bishop gives Hudson his knife back, thanks him, and walks away. Drake puts the tray back, slaps Hudson's shoulder amiably and tells him to enjoy his meal. We're left with Hudson looking visibly shaken at his own uninjured hand.

Brilliance.

Bishop walks back to the civilian table, offers the remains of the cornbread to those at the table, and then notices that he's nicked his finger in the showboating. Something it was entirely possible for him to do without actually hurting Hudson, given that his hands were bigger.

"I thought you never miss, Bishop," quips Burke. Which is interesting. It indicates he knows Bishop, or at least has heard anecdotal evidence of the already-established prior behaviour of the Marines and their accompanying artificial person. Arguably, he wouldn't have missed if he didn't have Hudson's hand trapped underneath his own - the necessity for protecting the person leading to a lapse of care in terms of protecting himself.

Ripley's following reaction is understandable - and Bishop's alarm at her fear of him, given that he knows he can't hurt anyone. Of course, she wouldn't know. She's been out of the loop for almost sixty years. Sigourney Weaver's acting in that moment is stellar, by the way - she glances, she realises what she is seeing, she turns to face the threat and leans back, head tilting back so far she is almost looking at him with sanpaku, her words of recrimination toward Burke coming out in a rush. It's a brilliant moment which is sold so well by Weaver that you can't help but feel her alarm yourself.

It's when he explains that he is bound by behavioural inhibitors to never hurt a human, and then rather tactlessly offers her some cornbread, that she loudly makes her feelings on the matter clear. Her precise words to him:

"Just stay away from me, Bishop. You got that straight?"

This scene alone is a goldmine for Henriksen's portrayal of Bishop. The hints all the way throughout this scene as to his nature, before the reveal of the white blood, should tell you what he is - and sets you up for the revelation, leaving you to just accept it. Of course he's an android. He's acted like one, he's been treated like one. Subconsciously the character has been set up for us to be the thing he is.

Further down the rabbit hole.

Ripley orders Bishop to stay away from her. It is done out of anger, out of fear, and out of alarm - she has an understandable suspicion of the behaviour of any android, let alone a company plant as she must suspect Bishop to be, given that he is canonically the spitting image of the man who runs Weyland Yutani in the events of Alien 3 (and presumably this movie, as the two are separated by almost no time whatsoever, perhaps a month maximum).

It is 55 minutes and 34 seconds before Bishop actually speaks to her again, almost an hour. Not to a group that she is a part of - directly to her. In that time the Marines have landed, they've made their initial investigation, found Newt, cleaned her up, entered the atmosphere processor, been ambushed, been almost wiped out, lost their Cheyenne dropship, lost their APC, witnessed Hudson's first breakdown, salvaged what they can from the wreckage of the APC, found out that they can expect rescue in two and a half weeks and witnessed Hudson's second breakdown.

He only speaks to her when the group are in a resource-restricted emergency situation. The group knowing what he is doing and where he is going is important, so there are no breaches of security, and so that his time can be efficiently used in treating a member of the group who is seriously injured and also trying to discover a way to defend themselves against the xenomorphs. Ripley's order to "stay away from me" (Second Law) is countermanded by her requirement to know what he is doing for the safety and security of the group as a whole (First Law), seeing as she has established herself as a competent leadership figure in the absence of the incompetent Lieutenant Gorman.

Likewise in a scene later, in which he is presenting his findings to the group - Ripley primary among them - he does so knowing that Ripley has shown discomfort and displeasure at his presence, but knowing that conveying the information he has is likewise important survival. It's at the end of this scene, wherein Ripley orders him to destroy the samples, that he lets slip an important bit of information.

"Mister Burke gave instructions that they were to be kept alive in stasis for return to the company labs...he was very specific about it."

This instruction he was given only gets brought up when Ripley gives him a conflicting instruction. That the samples could do harm to people isn't a metric that comes into it - fourth, fifth and sixth degrees of separation from harm done is a sticky area to get into in terms of absolute laws - but as he states later: he may be synthetic, but he's not stupid. So when Ripley states he wants them destroyed, he doesn't quibble. He immediately informs her of the vaguely potentially dangerous situation that Burke had ordered him to instate, and in doing so, forces her to resolve the discrepancy between the two instructions. He can't tell Burke no; that would break the Second Law, unless his action would directly cause harm. He CAN engineer a situation in which Burke can be forced by another person to rescind his instruction, and thus, he can conflict-free follow Ripley's instruction, which I daresay he is happy to do.

When it comes to the realisation that the atmosphere processor is set to explode, and the only way to get off the planet is to manually re-align a satellite dish at the far end of the complex, Bishop volunteers.

There's several reasons to do so. For one thing, as he says, he's the only person qualified to remote fly the second dropship from the Sulaco. He conversationally adds, after that statement:

"Believe me, I'd prefer not to. I'm synthetic, but I'm not stupid."

The balance of this is easy.

In the scenario presented, perhaps one of the marines would stand a greater chance of making it through the tunnel unmolested, reaching the satellite dish and doing the requisite technical work - Hudson has demonstrated significant electronic competency multiple times in the movie, further proven by him being one of the qualified motion detector operators.

As Bishop establishes, though - Bishop is a better choice to remote-pilot the vehicle, increasing the chance that it will land without incident and be capable of conveying the marines off-world. Also, if Bishop is ambushed and killed during his trip through the tunnel or while aligning the dish, then it is him who has died in the line of duty - rather than one of the humans.

He isn't qualified to fight. He literally rejects the firearm that Vasquez hands him, in a cinematic moment that I adore - she gives it to him without a second thought, as she is a Marine, and having a weapon to defend yourself with is second nature. He gives it back to Ripley, knowing that if it came down to pulling the trigger, he'd be dead already. The look on his face.

That's why he never volunteers for any combat operations - he would be more of a hindrance to his human team-mates than an asset, and would thus put their lives at risk more by his presence than his absence. In this scenario, though - the lives of all the humans are best served by him doing the job, a metric that balances the primacy of the First Law perfectly over his Third Law programming to protect himself.

The last thing he says before they close and seal the conduit behind him is to tell Ripley to watch her fingers, before he starts to shuffle down the crawlspace; Vasquez murmuring "Vaya con dios, man," as she welds the plate back.

He may be crawling down a two-hundred-meter choke-space tunnel toward certain death, but the last social interaction he has with the people who didn't even ask him to do this is to look out for the safety and well-being of the woman that previously ordered him to stay away from her.

In the scene earlier in the movie when Spunkmeyer brings some supplies to Bishop - who turns and looks at him in a vaguely creepy way, but Spunkmeyer's response is more akin to dealing with someone who is spacing out than an inhuman machine - wherein Lance Henriksen had suggested he wear special contact lenses to make his eyes creepy, to give him the appearance of inhumanity. James Cameron did a screen test for the scene and found that the way Henriksen played the scene out, from his coldness and distance to Spunkmeyer to his only really seeming to engage when he is studying the xenomorph under his microscope, was creepy enough.

That's the two ends of this character - a nuanced, textured individual who is a stand-out personality in a unit full of alpha gung-ho soldiers. A stellar job of character acting from a stellar actor. Both Henriksen in Aliens and Ian Holm in Alien put in simply breathtaking performances, for two different reasons - and of course, Holm's performance informs Henriksen's in terms of trying to make Bishop a counterpoint to Ash. No pretence of humanity, here - in fact, the only reason Ripley didn't know was because Burke should have told her but didn't. The Marines all know who Bishop is, and they like and respect him. He does his job, and they tolerate his personality quirks, and they trust his competencies as he trusts theirs.

Just another example of fantastic character from my favourite movie. Part of my reasons why it IS my favourite movie.

You Postulate, I Prognosticate

Having run out of ways to express my current opinion at the political state of the world, I have turned to you, my readers and friends, to entertain and delight.

Standard Q&A format. Names removed to protect the innocent.

Firefly: Where do I even begin? One of the best shows on television. The scrappiest little show that should have lost the moment it began...but it didn't. It'll always hold a very special place in my heart.

Tropical beaches: Oh that sounds pretty wonderful.

New nicknames for Mopeyface McDumpster: I guess we mean the Commander In Cheeto, the Curtseying Clown, the White Russian?

Examine a selection of different Sci Fi futures and decide which is the most likely... : Okay so wow there's a lot that, right now, AREN'T very likely. All the ones in which we have a sudden expansion out into the stars under a single unified peaceful banner, for one thing. Some are more relevant - Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid's Tale, V For Vendetta. You know the one I think is the most likely? The Alien franchise. Space isn't inhabited by bold trailblazers. It's bored blue-collar workers moving big things back and forth under a corporate charter. And Earth is a shithole that nobody wants to go to. If you have to ask why, well...

Why Vin Diesel is the perfect human being: I don't believe in perfection. He's pretty high up on that scale though. Just listen to him talk when he plays Richard B Riddick. ...wow.

Why we should all vote labour...? (ducks and runs for cover): Are you applying for the job of party whip or something? In all seriousness, I know I said no politics, but - vote whoever you have to, to get the Tories out.

Obedience in different countries: There are very interesting differences in how cultures view the expectation of obedience, and the corresponding expectation of rebellion AGAINST that obedience. Sometimes the two of these things aren't necessarily connected. Like how the Amish have their year of going wild and doing whatever the fuck they want, then they come back to an otherwise pretty stratified life? Whereas in the UK we have a similar thing with University but there's less expectation afterwards to just do as your told - though there's a big social pressure to just fit in and do what you are meant to do...which is another issue altogether.

The Alien franchise in relation to the new movie: Still my favourite franchise. Though tying Prometheus more closely into the mainline franchise - the highly mutable and frankly very strange Engineer bio-weapon adopting a structurally very stable though slightly morphic shape in the form of the xenomorph itself - is a welcome thing. There's still questions which need answering but there's sequels, and I look forward to those. And it keeps up the tradition of Alien. Space belongs to the roughnecks and the yahoos, not the pristine geniuses and lantern-jawed heroes of the pulp era.

Dibdabs. Stop motion animation in the modern world. Ice cream: Nice. Kubo and the Two Strings is fantastic and I am looking forward to the new Aardman project. I'm not a huge fan of ice cream.

Whether failure to implement the EMF directive will have significant long term health consequences: Probably not significant, but what do I know, that sounds more like your job than mine dude...

Turnips, Barbie Dolls: Both of them exist and I don't own either of them.

Cheese: Oh my god I fucking love cheese.

Your favourite misheard lyrics/song titles: So I have a few of these. Stuck In The Middle With You features a "Friendly Uncle Colin," Stupify by Disturbed is apparently about an angry chicken, and I can't tell you how many times I have sung the intro to Fuel by Metallica as being "GIMME FUEL GIMME FIRE GIMME DABIJADESAH OOOH!" In terms of song titles I usually nail those...

Prolapses: Oh you nasty.

Anal leakages: OH YOU NASTY.

Losing a fake nail in a dog's bumhole: OH YOU FUCKIN NASTY TOO

The lack of roof terraced pubs in Ryde: This is actually a serious problem. I mean come on. I'd drink there. But then so many pubs and such are on a halfway hibernation until people have money again...

The possibility of hope in a post Trump post Brexit world: There always has to be hope. Has to be. As Charlie Chaplin said in The Great Dictator - as long as men die, tyranny can end.

Arsenal missing out on the UEFA CL next season: Who?

Favourite bits of the Isle of Wight: I'm quite fond of Ryde's beaches, Fort Victoria, the Downs, and most of Ryde when the sun is out...the views on my morning commute are pretty wonderful in the summer.

The Blame! Netflix original and the quality of anime on Netflix and whether or not they should just leave stuff like that to Crunchyroll, etc: I am all for every means of distribution that anime gets, even if that means of distribution also funds or produces more anime. When I first started getting into it, we were looking at having to import VHS tapes at massive markup, for the stuff that Manga didn't want to distribute itself - one of my buddies collected the entire Guyver series on VHS and that cost a BOMB as there were only three episodes per tape. Exclusivity pisses me off, though. So I am okay with Netflix AND Crunchyroll distributing stuff...but I will always look for better and more universal ways for such media to be accessed. Make it accessible, make it affordable, and you will make money.

Life of a pencil: How weird it must be to solely exist to turn ideas into physical representations of those ideas? And to get shorter every day of your life? Weird.

How the explosion in mainstream fantasy (game of thrones etc) Marvel and sci fi is an indicator of social dissatisfaction: You know what, I daresay it is. I also think it is an indicator that the "acceptable media" that people are expected and encouraged to consume has expanded somewhat in scope. Like can you imagine pitching Rick And Morty thirty years ago, or even Game of Thrones as a big glossy TV series? Television, movies and such have all changed a lot since the 90s, and are the better for it. But while there's always been the realism and the drama, like the holdouts of the world of grit that we live in, there's a lot more of the escapism that indicates people dream of far more. Given how shit we are capable of being to each other, I don't blame them.

Alien Covenant: Read up there somewhere. I loved it, as it stands. It wasn't Alien, it wasn't Prometheus, and it wasn't ever going to BE Alien. It was thoroughly acceptable.

The baywatch remake (remakes in general?): Ugh remakes. This kind of stuff generally pisses me off. Rarely you'll get a remake that is worth its salt, but usually it's a cynical cash-in on a name that people recognise that follows the standard currently-popular format. It's so rare that the people making the remake even reference the older material they are basically stealing from. Baywatch as a series was meant to be a drama as I recall, kind of like a soap opera. This remake is a parody. I don't know which I dislike more. Not even my beloved Dwayne can save it for me.

How are you going to take over the world?: Why would I want to? Shit is broken as hell. Besides, I wouldn't want the whole world. A nation would do. Just one. Just for me.

Boobs: Yes, lovely. (YAY! SOMEONE SAID BOOBS!)

Kittens: Also, very very lovely.

The English tradition of tea drinking: Not a big fan of tea myself - but I'm glad that some people enjoy it, and that we can bond over something.

Tattoos: Fucking hell yes. I love me some tattoos. Love seeing them, seeing people get them, getting them, love the idea of them. LOVE THEM. I'm planning my next one already.

The English tradition of tea drinking in terms of boobs and kittens: I have no fucking idea what you are talking about but whatever stops you from voting Tory on 8th June I suppose...

That's it folks. Thank you for your contributions. Next week there may be something a little more serious. Who can say?

You Suggest, I Digress

So with only a smattering of ideas in terms of what to write this week I turned to the smartest bunch of people I know to suggest topics for the blog.

Last time I suggested I might only do one but ended up doing them all. Frankly there's not even gonna be a shadow of a doubt this time, I'm just straight up doing all of them.

So with some names removed to protect the innocent (HAH)...

Mighty Max playsets - Mighty Max was AWESOME. I had a bunch of the playsets, a lot of the smaller ones, one or two of the bigger ones. The cartoon was the absolute bomb, too. Just check out this intro. It should tell you everything you need to know. It's METAL AS FUCK.

Boobs - Yes, they're very lovely.

Kittens - Yes, they too are very lovely. BUT - controversial opinion - having had more elderly cats as pets, I prefer them, honestly. Especially the big sloppy ones that don't really care about going outside, they just want to sit on your lap. Love them.

Roses - I get hayfever. Overpriced sex organs that die very quickly. Not a big fan of flowers. Succulents, however - cacti - that's my shit. If only I was actually good with plants, I'd keep some.

A gadget you don't have but want - Oh lord there are so many. See I love gadgets, I love little bits of technowizardry. If I lived by myself I'd love one of those speaker systems that you can stream to anywhere in the house - a 3D printer would be kick-ass - one of those super-expensive but very stable drones with really high definition cameras - a set of those exoskeleton legs so that walking around wouldn't fuck my knees and ruin my joints - god, the list is endless.

Boobies - They are very lovely. (Okay are you folks noticing a pattern here?)

Tory Manifesto Promises - Said it time and again. What a politician says and what a politician does are two different things. You can always trust the Conservatives to make cuts and to help big business. That's not just an opinion. Look at history, and look at the voting records of those in parliament right now and previously. If anyone took their manifesto promises as being at all believable - The Party Of The NHS, don't make me laugh - then it shows a general lack of political acumen. This isn't limited to Tories I will bear mention. Manifesto promises are all well and good, but before you put any stock in them, see if the MPs of that party have actually ever voted for or supported those promises previously. You CAN do that. They DO keep records. No matter how non-connected a politician will tell you they are with the fracking industry, there is a record on how they have voted in connection to it - and that, they can't make up. (If anyone DOESN'T know how to check voting records, TheyWorkForYou and The Public Whip are two great places to start.)

The Art Of War - I read this fairly regularly. It's not such a great guide as people think it is, but it does contain several little nuggets of wisdom, which can be applied to a wide spread of daily experience and general life. I play a lot of games, many of them involving strategy or conflict, and so I perhaps get more out of it than most would. One of my favourite sayings originates from the Art of War: "If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you will not be defeated in a hundred battles."

Staffs/Staves in a fight - The problem is room to work with. The same as two-handed swords, which I actually have a little training in. If you've got empty space, like at least twelve feet, then they will do the job. They give you reach and are a flexible way to do damage to someone and stop yourself from being stabbed to death. The way they are presented in movies, though, well. People spin them around like they weigh nothing, yet they hit like they're made of lead. Most weapon fight scenes in films don't do justice to the techniques and items in question. Don't get me wrong, I love watching it happen - the Neo vs Agent Smiths fight in the park in Matrix: Reloaded is a great staff fight scene for all of its ridiculousness - but it just doesn't reflect the usability in the real world. Again, same is said with swords. If you're still fighting with a sword after like three minutes, you've done it wrong.

The trans bathroom debate - In my eyes there isn't a debate. There's just people that want to use the bathroom, and other people making ridiculous demands of them. I don't mean to attack the person that suggested this as a topic, it's one that needs talking about. It's just that calling it a debate implies that both sides approach with equanimity - and I don't think that's true.

Trumpton - My views summed up here. (Content Warning: Dank Rave Music.)

Thoughts on narratives told using multiple mediums (Transmedia storytelling) - So in terms of a franchise I like this idea. Like, playing Halo tells you a lot about the story, and is a self-contained story in and of itself; but the expanded media, novels and such, present a far more textured and interesting world for the games to exist in. However...if I am playing a video game but need to pause it and watch a movie to get the whole story, like the narrative has a hole in it if I don't do this thing, then - well I dislike that. I dislike that quite keenly. "It makes more sense if you've read the book", that I can be slightly more forgiving about - hell, I like some films that are kind of incomprehensible compared to their books. (And films whose books are almost incomprehensible, too.) It just...you know. If you can't tell the story, try a different story, and don't make me go out and buy something new to fill in the holes.

The weird subtext of Kong: Skull Island - I haven't seen it yet. I want to. When I am mobile I will. But to me, from just the trailers and such, it looks a lot like a Vietnam war film with big monsters in it, which suits me just fine. Like down to the colour choices of shots and the way people talk, the way it is written. Again - just from the trailers, this may change when I watch the movie. Now I like movies about Vietnam, and I like monster movies, but do the two great flavours taste great together? Remains to be seen. By the way. Why isn't this film called Viet Kong?

Boobs - Okay see that's the third person on my Facebook friends list to suggest I write about boobs. All ladies, no less. I have no idea why. I will make no secret of the fact that I am a big fan! But like...that's kind of problematic, 'cos that's a very short step away from objectification. So suffice to say this: however much I love boobs, people that may or may not have them are more important to me. Just please lord don't test that statement. My spirit is strong, my flesh is very, very weak.

Insomnia seems appropriate - I asked for these suggestions at 00:30, I was still checking them at 04:00. Insomnia used to rule my life, now it is more of a background character trait than a primary thing - it's often primarily driven by pain anyhow. But yes. Sleep is not easy for me. Until I fall asleep, and then, half the time it is very very easy indeed. The other half of the time it just doesn't last anywhere near long enough. I've kind of learned to cope without the standard 6-8 hours, though if I do look wild around the eyes any time before noon, that's why.

Go all meta and blog about your blogging - Hah, well. I've been doing this blog for a while now. The first entry was on the 8th of July 2012, and talked about me dropping my previous blog. There weren't even any labels that far back. I should fix that really. Spend an afternoon tagging up all my old entries. I've found it a great way to get things out of my skull and into a more legible format; it's helped me deal with things I am thinking and feeling in a way that feels constructive. Also I sometimes get audience participation which is really entertaining in its own way. I used to worry about viewership, but then I stopped. I shouldn't care how many people read this. I'm writing it for my benefit primarily, even if other people reading it may get something from it (and I hope they do!). So honestly, it's a great thing to have in my life. I enjoy my little slice of the blogverse.

Though, that said - if any of you think that anything I've said would be of interest to other folks you know? Do feel free to distribute. Even if they just want a snide laugh at my overly-optimistic Leftie principles or how I feel about Transformers.

So there you have it. Another job lot of suggested topics done. I always enjoy this - I can never guarantee what I will get asked about...

...though perhaps I can guarantee one politics post and one post about boobs?

Thanks for tuning in, folks. Have a better one.

Where Are All The Aliens?

So we've all seen or read at least one thing involving aliens, right?

For some of us that will be any of the incarnations of War Of The Worlds; for others, hokey B-movies and old Godzilla flicks; for others still, Stargate SG-1 and Farscape; follow that with the plethora of novels and graphic novels that feature extraterrestrial life, and hollywood sci fi blockbusters in the vein of Independence Day. Let alone Star Wars, Star Trek and their ilk.

Science fiction featuring aliens is pretty popular. It's everywhere. It has been popular for a while now, which has of course led to some actual science devoted toward the existence - or lack thereof - of extraterrestrials.

Enrico Fermi and Michael H. Hart formalised, between them, an argument indicating how unlikely it is that aliens could exist and that we have seen no identifiable evidence relating to them. It's called the Fermi Paradox.

It states this: with the galaxy being so big (at least 200 million stars, maybe twice that), the chance of there being other Earth-like planets is relatively high. Following this, the chance of life developing on those planets is greater than zero. And if we could develop space travel, then so could they; and if they developed before us - likely, because our sun is actually a relatively young star - then they would have had the time to travel and explore.

So why haven't we seen any evidence of their existence? Nothing left behind by them that we can identify. Nothing to show. Not even a footprint or a chunk of material - not that we've been able to recognise, anyway.

There's a lot of answers that have been conceived over the years. Some of these are more likely than others, in my eyes. The Rare Earth Hypothesis, for example, holds little water with me - the hypothesis that the Earth becoming what it became was a lot less likely than evidence has previously suggested. An answer I like is that, honestly, the galaxy - and the universe - are really REALLY BIG. Like so big that coming up with an adequate example of how big it is, is actually difficult. We've only just - in the grand scheme of things - started blurting out radio into space, and you know how long that is going to take to get from where we are to the galactic centre?

Almost 27,000 years. That means that the earliest that the Nuremberg Rally broadcast could be in the middle of the galaxy would be the year 28,930. To reach the far side of the galaxy we are more looking at 75,000 years, give or take. That's quite a lot.

Something that Enrico Fermi never saw - he died in 1954 - could be the actual explanation, however; and it is, perhaps, the one that my mind is settled on as an explanation even if it hurts my heart.

The Fermi Paradox works on several assumptions, many of which have had holes poked in them over the years. One of them is that aliens would use technology or have biology even remotely similar to our own. That could cause its own problems in terms of detection.

Instead, let us take an example from our own selves, and discuss how Fermi missed a cultural factor: social influences curtailing continued expansion and exploration over space.

Apathy. Lack of political will. Lack of engagement with science and its exploration. Planetary introversion. The resources needed for exploration and space transit under the control of entities that would rather use them for other purposes, including but not limited to personal profit.

Fermi never got to see us walk on the moon - though Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, two believers in extraterrestrial life, did. I never got to see it when it happened, but of course, ever since I have been enchanted with the idea. I find it hard to believe that there are those that aren't. They're out there, though. People who just don't care, when it is announced that private corporation X or Y intends on landing on Mars, or when we get pictures of the kind of asteroids that land on aforementioned red planet every day, or when we find radio signals coming from bits of the galaxy that we've never had them from before.

But that is kind of where we are, right now; and with several of the governments around the world taking a distinctly anti-scientific bent with much of their funding and ideas, well...it's not a good sign.

Maybe this is just a step toward one of the other potential answers to the Fermi Paradox - which is that every intelligent life eventually destroys itself, and does so before it can proliferate beyond its home system.

Who knows.

The Modern Neuromancer

I begin this blog with a definition of the term Cyberpunk:

"A genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology."

Interesting, no?

There was a lot of talk about how Back To The Future 2's future never happened, but then actually did happen. The only thing that hasn't shown up is the hoverboard - something I blogged about right here actually.

It's like we wished for the whimsical aspects of that future, and not the more gritty, more day-to-day, more prosaic elements. We were so looking forward to our hoverboard that we forgot to stop Biff Tannen becoming president. At least the two-tie thing never took off...

...but I digress.

It is very possible to sleepwalk into a situation, because in a world wherein information is actually very free and very quick to travel (and misinformation doubly true), people's chosen method to not be overwhelmed is to trim down what they pay attention to.

This can mean that some very big, very important things go unnoticed, because of unequal coverage.

My favourite book is Neuromancer, by William Gibson.

Highly acclaimed as being the inventor of the term and the genre, Gibson is the grandfather of cyberpunk, to the point of a supercomputer in the hokey-but-fun 1995 movie Hackers is named after him. He wasn't hugely on-point with technology and computing at the time of writing Neuromancer - 1984, when I was two years old - and so that made him free to imagine a future based on social aspects, rather than technological. Still, he framed the world in technological terms, because in his eyes, the social - the spiritual and emotional - aspects of the world would be slowly eroded away, like a crack in a tooth.

There are several tell-tale core concepts that are present in most (if not all) examples of cyberpunk. The biggest is simply summed up as High Tech, Low Life; wherein the world's capacity for technological marvels and genius is incredible, but those technologies aren't capable of elevating the majority of the populace from poverty and squalour. Sure, you may have your highly-advanced computer system, and your replacement left arm, but you still need to grind for fifty hours a week to afford food and crappy lodgings - and social and societal mobility is basically a myth, except within your own little clique.

There's more to it than that, obviously.

Privacy and information is a huge part of the world. Information is currency. More important than almost anything, information leads to rep, which gives you anything. Those who possess data guard it jealously. Rather than use it or open it up for other people's use, it is a thing to lock down. Conversely, those who do not possess other data are constantly pushing to acquire it. Contravening the basic privacy of normal people, while defending one's own. Hacker society is predicated on the notion of all information being free, and the idea of sousveillance is a very nice one (observation from below - the opposite of surveillance, observation from above). How that data is used after the fact? Well, that's up to the people harvesting it - harvesting it and dictating how much of it anyone has access to, including themselves.

Sometimes a legal framework is needed to facilitate this kind of thing. Like the Investigatory Powers Bill, let's say.

Part of cyberpunk is the attitude that is almost entirely prevalent in most of its characters. You have to do it for yourself because nobody is going to do it for you. Becoming enclosed, wrapping ourselves up in ourselves. How can we possibly give a shit about X, when we can just about eat OR pay this bill, but not both?

This applies to almost all echelons of society. Not just the most poor and downtrodden, having to threaten others for a bite to eat, but further up the ladder - the corporate and political entities, who can't care about the effect of their actions on a macro scale, because they need to keep up their rep and their bankroll. The life won't fund itself. Who has the time to help anyone else?

That ruthless, headlong drive toward ourselves. Does that sound familiar?

Another key aspect of cyberpunk is the overwhelming presence of corporation, even over politics. Businesses are simply more important. They set the agenda, they do the dance, and the bureaucrats and so-called rulers pretty much run to keep up. Taking a stand against the march of gain is almost suicidal to one's career, because the monoliths of industry are the real fixed points of the world. So the politicians have to buy in, because to do otherwise is to invite certain doom - and hey, we can probably make a tidy profit from it at the same time, right? Why bother putting so much effort into making things different and achieving nothing, when one can put less effort into making a man in a suit happy and retire before the age of sixty?

Again, does that sound familiar?

I suppose the point I am working toward is that, I don't think Nineteen Eighty-Four is the future we have been sleepwalking towards. Not yet, anyway. We're getting there but not yet. Where we are going first, is Neuromancer.

Think about it.

We all have a phone, because phones have been price-pointed to perfection. Put one in every pocket. Make luxury models for the wealthy, and make finance options available for those we can buy debt from. I speak only for "first world" societies of course, but owning a phone in this country in particular is considered the default. If you don't, it is a statement. It's not a lack of availability. Every one of us has access to a portable supercomputer, by Gibson's standards.

We even have access to these things when we are in relative poverty. Even when our social mobility is stifled, and our income goes up so much slower than the cost of living and our average productivity. Even when the cost of owning a house is becoming inescapable to those who actually need one, despite the constant societal pressure from those who already own one to "get on the ladder".

Corporate interests have far greater influence on our lives than any shade of democracy. They also tend to guide scientific development. We don't get what we want. We get what they want, and then we are brought to understand that we wanted it all along. We're also, frankly, not in touch with what they are doing. Nobody cares enough. Everyone is too busy trying to keep their shirts on their backs.

We might not be able to plug data cables into our necks to eperience a virtual world (we have regular old headsets). We might not have built-in endoskeletons that vastly increase our lifting power (we have ever-increasingly complex exoskeletal frames). But we are definitely getting there.

You know the thing about cyberpunk?

It's a dystopia.

But then, nobody cared enough to stop it, and nobody noticed enough to want to care. So I guess I had better get some cybernetic limbs and some mirrorshades.

Black Swans

Once upon a time, the term Black Swan was used to describe something that didn't exist.

It springs from a saying coined in 82AD by Juvenal, a Roman satirist - rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno. ("A rare bird in the lands, and very like a black swan.") It means, quite simply, something that doesn't exist. For absolutely centuries, this was stated as a bald truth, by those who had a mind to discuss such things. Europe's swans were strictly white.

Imagine the surprise of Europe, then, when in 1697 Dutch explorers in western Australia discovered that very thing: black swans.

So now, the term Black Swan means something that we thought was impossible, but wasn't. It is something that was beyond our field of vision that has just sprung into the light.

The author Iain M. Banks, one of my favoured science fiction writers, described this in the Culture novel Excession as an Outside Context Problem. It is something that we can't possibly have seen coming because our worldview does not include its possibility. To understand how that would work is very difficult - getting outside of our own minds is hard. They're our minds after all.

How we relate to the world, and how we understand it, is always put through a lens of our own experiences. When told to imagine our reaction to something, well, it's just been described to us by someone with a generally similar experience of the world. That's how hard it is to describe an Outside Context Problem, but the example Iain M. Banks uses is this:

The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you'd tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass... when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you've just been discovered, you're all subjects of the Emperor now, he's keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.

Sometimes, though? Sometimes, we're the ones that place the object outside of our context.

See, in a case of a world or society where nobody ever talks or communicates (every kid with a mobile phone, if you ask a certain subsect of a certain generation) - that is next to impossible to imagine. How would anything even work? I'm communicating the idea to you, that is what reinforces how alien that idea is. That isn't a scenario that we made impossible, though; we could only develop into the species we are if we communicated, social evolution being just as important to who and what we are as physical evolution.

Now, though - now imagine a world without any kind of vehicle that isn't horsedrawn or man-powered.

That, we did to ourselves. We made that internal combustion engine, and we put it everywhere, and we made it necessary to our day-to-day lives in certain areas, and we so firmly embedded it into our culture and society that it is actually fairly hard to picture a world without them - or a world in which even the concept of them never existed.

The thing is, there are people alive today for whom that is a reality; people for whom the modern world is outside of context. Five generations ago, the notion of most people in England owning a mobile phone would be a totally alien one. Now place yourself in the shoes of the shocked, and advance the world past you. What lays in wait for us? Can we even predict, outside of speculative fiction?

This, right here, is why so many problems we face - as a race, as a whole - seem impossible to solve.

We've painted ourselves into so many corners, and then thrown away the brushes, and then forgotten that paint actually dries. The problem is A - but the solution B is impossible, because C. We accept all of these points because we just...can't not. That's why solutions are often dismissed as radical, because we just... don't think they can happen. Beyond a certain point it is preprogrammed into us. It's too far a jump, and thus it's not something we can grasp.

Even after having said all that...we still found our black swans. It took over sixteen centuries for us to prove Juvenal wrong, but it still happened. All we can do is keep educating ourselves, keep learning the positive changes that CAN happen - and dreaming of the ones that we don't think can, yet. Total nuclear disarmament - a dismantling of the primary capital-based system - a real and lasting green revolution.

Sooner or later, they may well become a reality.

The Lazy Problem In Science Fiction

Consider, for a moment, this quote.

"Let's gather up the bits and pieces and define the Simon-pure science fiction story: 1. The conditions must be, in some respect, different from here-and-now, although the difference may lie only in an invention made in the course of the story. 2. The new conditions must be an essential part of the story. 3. The problem itself—the "plot"—must be a human problem. 4. The human problem must be one which is created by, or indispensably affected by, the new conditions. 5. And lastly, no established fact shall be violated, and, furthermore, when the story requires that a theory contrary to present accepted theory be used, the new theory should be rendered reasonably plausible and it must include and explain established facts as satisfactorily as the one the author saw fit to junk. It may be far-fetched, it may seem fantastic, but it must not be at variance with observed facts, i.e., if you are going to assume that the human race descended from Martians, then you've got to explain our apparent close relationship to terrestrial anthropoid apes as well." - Robert A. Heinlein

What's your favourite science fiction story?

It is a highly debated genre, science fiction; totally ignoring the notion that literary fiction considers genre fiction to be unimportant, it is at war within itself. What counts as science fiction? What doesn't? There's several different definitions, assigned in different periods and by different individuals. The one I picked above - one by an author whose work I enjoy - is perhaps cherrypicked for purpose of the point of this blog.

Here's a selection of others:

"Fantasies are things that can't happen, and science fiction is about things that can happen." - Ray Bradbury

"I like to present my characters—whether they are in the past or in the future—with interesting moral choices, and it seems to me that science-fiction writers are, or should be, the prophets and moralists of today. I am fairly well up on the biological sciences, but I am deeply uninterested in gadgets. A writer's job is to write about people with sympathy and insight." - Naomi Mitchison

"Science fiction is the improbable made possible, and fantasy is the impossible made probable." - Rod Sterling

"SF has never really aimed to tell us when we might reach other planets, or develop new technologies, or meet aliens. SF speculates about why we might want to do these things, and how their consequences might affect our lives and our planet." - John Clute

"The hardest theme in science fiction is that of the alien. The simplest solution of all is in fact quite profound — that the real difficulty lies not in understanding what is alien, but in understanding what is self. We are all aliens to each other, all different and divided. We are even aliens to ourselves at different stages of our lives. Do any of us remember precisely what it was like to be a baby?" - Greg Bear

I have used a lot of other people's words in this blog. A lot of good people up there. I hope I don't piss any of them off in spirit by using their words poorly.

Almost all good stories include a conflict. This conflict can take a great many forms, but if there isn't a conflict, then the story is probably going to be a bit tedious (and/or described as "fun and frothy" in the pages of Hello magazine). We can probably identify the central conflicts in our favourite stories, they are pivotal to character development and plot resolution.

See, wherein we accept that science fiction is about the consequences of some kind of scientific advance and the social and personal repercussions of them - and wherein we accept that conflict is central to any story - surely the conflict in question is the futuristic otherness that makes the story scifi?

...well...no.

The conflict in 2001 isn't between the humans aboard the Discovery One and the monolith - it's between Dr David Bowman and Hal 9000. The monolith, and the subsequent change that it puts Dr Bowman through - that is the future, the otherness. It's not the central source of conflict.

Alien - the conflict is between an alien creature that we couldn't conceive of. It's put on the ship by the manipulation of a company whose job is moving around heavy industrial goods through space, the first blue-collar sci fi movie. Now if it was simply a story of the workers not liking being bossed around - that would frankly be lazy.

To just have the thing that is different be the conflict each time is...well, it's not very likely, is it? Which is part of why I find Star Trek hard going most of the time. I like Deep Space 9 - wherein the Federation isn't perfect, and the constant tussles between two warring people and those trapped in between that conflict are the actual story. It's not about the wormhole - it's about the people.

Because in the end, while I do love the fascinating what-if stuff about cool tech and aliens and out-there goings-on - stories are about the people. They're not about what megacorporations did to the world, or how one travels from one place to another, or how creating too many robots fucks your life up. Sure, that's a thing in the background - but what effect that has on people is what the story is about.

So to all you writers: yes, your theory on how we can get to Mars is amazing. Yes, that alien species is wonderful. Yes, the concept of energy-based life is fascinating. But don't make it the conflict. That's the domain of cheap tricks - action movies with an element of the future in them, with a special effects budget of millions and zero scientific consultancy.

It's hard, but it's worth it.