The danger of COVID-19 has shut down pretty much everything around me. I've been holed up in my apartment and hopefully by the time this entry posts I'm not in the hospital or on a slab in the morgue. Since I'm diabetic and 42, I'm in the vulnerable category, so I'm not one of those people with the luxury of calling it a hoax and violating the quarantine.
Anyway, you might wonder: what about this blog? Well, I wrote most of my A to Z Challenge entries about 11 months ago, so those are still going to post in April. And like last time I have a couple of bonus entries I wrote in May.
After that...who knows? There's so much uncertainty in the world that I suppose in the grand scheme of things a simple little blog don't mean a hill of beans. I hope you're staying safe and that my little blog might amuse you for a few minutes as your blogs amuse me for a few minutes. That's about all we can ask for.
Until All Are One, May the Force Be With You and Live Long and Prosper.
Monday, March 30, 2020
Friday, March 27, 2020
The Best Star Wars Since 1983 Has All Been on the Small Screen
At the start of the month I finally got around to signing up for Disney+. I had thought about it before but then I saw a Hulu ad saying I could add it and ESPN+ to my existing subscription for $7 more so it seemed like a decent price. And I didn't really have anything on Hulu or Amazon I was keen on watching.
The upshot is I finally got to catch up on Star Wars TV shows I hadn't been able to watch. First I watched The Mandalorian and I loved it. The thing is, the story itself is pretty much a cliche. There are tons of movies where an assassin has been around a while but goes rogue when asked to kill a kid or a woman--or both. That was what set The Bourne Identity in motion as just one example. But one of those things you can talk about with writing is that you don't need to reinvent the wheel; you just need to make the wheel seem not as used. So you take the shopworn tale of an assassin finding a conscience and going rogue, make that assassin a Boba Fett-looking dude and then make the child he saves a baby Yoda creature and you have screen magic. And other than books, we'd never really gotten to see anything in the post-Empire era between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, so it was nice to finally have something in that time frame.
After that I watched Star Wars Rebels, which I'd never really gotten a chance to watch. I saw the first episode at Michael Offutt's house and I caught one or two others either on Sling or at my mom's house but most of the time I didn't have access to Disney XD or whatever so I could finally catch up. That was for the most part a good show. It kind of picked up where The Clone Wars left off in that while it was a cartoon and the computer graphics were not very real looking, it wasn't silly or stupid. Of course it wasn't extremely dark and gritty either because it was on a Disney channel, but like Clone Wars it managed to be grown up enough for adults while not too grown up for kids. And the best part was it gave us an in-continuity Grand Admiral Thrawn. Hooray!
I do have one bone to pick with that show and that's that I think it was the origin of all that "running low of fuel" bullshit in The Last Jedi. Several times the Rebels have to steal "fuel" for their ships. Which again, smaller ships like fighters or the Ghost it would make sense for them to use some kind of fuel cells, but the big ships it still seems dumb. It would be extremely impractical for Star Destroyers to run on "fuel" rather than something like fusion. Imagine how much "fuel" something like Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer would go through! And the Death Star had some kind of "reactor" to power it, so why wouldn't ships?
Watching The Mandalorian and Rebels back-to-back there are some common elements (besides typical Star Wars stuff) like the darksaber, blurghs, a Loth-cat that tries to eat Baby Yoda, and the transport Imperial troops show up in near the end of The Mandalorian. Mandalorian culture also had a fair amount of detail in Rebels and in The Clone Wars before it.
I watched The Clone Wars years ago when it was still on Netflix. It was the kind of show where it didn't really start out all that great, but as it went on it really started to gel. Characters like Anakin, Padme, and even Jar-Jar who weren't all that deep or interesting in the movies were able to get fleshed out a lot more in the series. And then there was Ahsoka Tano who starts out as Anakin's bratty little Padawan but then grows up over the course of the series. Even the clones became more than just generic troopers. Some like Rex and Cody developed their own personalities. The series really was able to take a lot of the concepts of the prequels that seemed dumb or lame and make them work. Though it's a cartoon and was mostly on Cartoon Network back in the 2000/2010s before moving to Netflix and then Disney+, it wasn't really a show written for little kids. Like Robotech in the 80s it was a sci-fi cartoon but there was a lot of violence and death and stuff that would probably scare little kids.
The bone I have to pick with The Clone Wars is by the third season they had story arcs that were unnecessarily stretched out. Like one where they have to break Tarkin and a Jedi out of a prison went on for three episodes when it could have just been one. Or one where they have to stop some slavers and they had a rescue going and that should have been it, but instead the rescue fails to wring one more episode out of it. Or one where R2D2 and some droids have to steal something from the Separtists which should have just been a wacky little episode went on for 4 episodes! They should have just got the stuff and gone home and made it a happy little diversion instead of a drawn-out storyline. That's always something to remember in writing: don't make things too long if you don't have to.
The other difference between Clone Wars and Rebels is that Rebels focused on a small group of...Rebels, while Clone Wars was far more free-wheeling with its storytelling. The first episode after the movie focused on Yoda and 3 clones, not Anakin, Obi-Wan, or Padme. That was the tone set for the rest of the series, where sometimes you might not see a main character for four or five episodes in a row as a story focused on one or two main characters--or none at all. In writing, Clone Wars was like an old-fashioned omniscient 3rd person POV that cuts to lots of characters while Rebels was more of a limited 3rd person POV.
So the thing is that as the title of the entry says, the best Star Wars since the original three movies has all been on the small screen. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First off, the TV shows don't have to try to be Star Wars movies. And by that I mean they don't have to be a big flashy 2 1/2-hour spectacle. They don't have to try to match the original trilogy in awe and wonder. Which brings me to the second point that the series can go slower and actually develop stories and characters. They could probably have made The Mandalorian into a 2 1/2-hour movie, but it also wouldn't have been as good. For one thing because the producers would want to make everything bigger and flashier and tie it to some big event and so on. Because it's a Star Wars movie so we have to pull out all the stops! But a series can stretch its legs and grow better. That's why The Clone Wars is so much better than the prequel movies were.
The most recent trilogy of movies were so concerned with trying to live up to the originals that they couldn't really cobble together much of a coherent story. As three 8-episode TV seasons they probably could have done a better job with it to build characters and the setting instead of just throwing together shit that was supposed to remind us of the movies we grew up with.
Anyway, maybe it's time they just forget about the movies and focus on TV. I mean, except for the billions of dollars the movies make.
The upshot is I finally got to catch up on Star Wars TV shows I hadn't been able to watch. First I watched The Mandalorian and I loved it. The thing is, the story itself is pretty much a cliche. There are tons of movies where an assassin has been around a while but goes rogue when asked to kill a kid or a woman--or both. That was what set The Bourne Identity in motion as just one example. But one of those things you can talk about with writing is that you don't need to reinvent the wheel; you just need to make the wheel seem not as used. So you take the shopworn tale of an assassin finding a conscience and going rogue, make that assassin a Boba Fett-looking dude and then make the child he saves a baby Yoda creature and you have screen magic. And other than books, we'd never really gotten to see anything in the post-Empire era between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens, so it was nice to finally have something in that time frame.
After that I watched Star Wars Rebels, which I'd never really gotten a chance to watch. I saw the first episode at Michael Offutt's house and I caught one or two others either on Sling or at my mom's house but most of the time I didn't have access to Disney XD or whatever so I could finally catch up. That was for the most part a good show. It kind of picked up where The Clone Wars left off in that while it was a cartoon and the computer graphics were not very real looking, it wasn't silly or stupid. Of course it wasn't extremely dark and gritty either because it was on a Disney channel, but like Clone Wars it managed to be grown up enough for adults while not too grown up for kids. And the best part was it gave us an in-continuity Grand Admiral Thrawn. Hooray!
I do have one bone to pick with that show and that's that I think it was the origin of all that "running low of fuel" bullshit in The Last Jedi. Several times the Rebels have to steal "fuel" for their ships. Which again, smaller ships like fighters or the Ghost it would make sense for them to use some kind of fuel cells, but the big ships it still seems dumb. It would be extremely impractical for Star Destroyers to run on "fuel" rather than something like fusion. Imagine how much "fuel" something like Darth Vader's Super Star Destroyer would go through! And the Death Star had some kind of "reactor" to power it, so why wouldn't ships?
Watching The Mandalorian and Rebels back-to-back there are some common elements (besides typical Star Wars stuff) like the darksaber, blurghs, a Loth-cat that tries to eat Baby Yoda, and the transport Imperial troops show up in near the end of The Mandalorian. Mandalorian culture also had a fair amount of detail in Rebels and in The Clone Wars before it.
I watched The Clone Wars years ago when it was still on Netflix. It was the kind of show where it didn't really start out all that great, but as it went on it really started to gel. Characters like Anakin, Padme, and even Jar-Jar who weren't all that deep or interesting in the movies were able to get fleshed out a lot more in the series. And then there was Ahsoka Tano who starts out as Anakin's bratty little Padawan but then grows up over the course of the series. Even the clones became more than just generic troopers. Some like Rex and Cody developed their own personalities. The series really was able to take a lot of the concepts of the prequels that seemed dumb or lame and make them work. Though it's a cartoon and was mostly on Cartoon Network back in the 2000/2010s before moving to Netflix and then Disney+, it wasn't really a show written for little kids. Like Robotech in the 80s it was a sci-fi cartoon but there was a lot of violence and death and stuff that would probably scare little kids.
The bone I have to pick with The Clone Wars is by the third season they had story arcs that were unnecessarily stretched out. Like one where they have to break Tarkin and a Jedi out of a prison went on for three episodes when it could have just been one. Or one where they have to stop some slavers and they had a rescue going and that should have been it, but instead the rescue fails to wring one more episode out of it. Or one where R2D2 and some droids have to steal something from the Separtists which should have just been a wacky little episode went on for 4 episodes! They should have just got the stuff and gone home and made it a happy little diversion instead of a drawn-out storyline. That's always something to remember in writing: don't make things too long if you don't have to.
The other difference between Clone Wars and Rebels is that Rebels focused on a small group of...Rebels, while Clone Wars was far more free-wheeling with its storytelling. The first episode after the movie focused on Yoda and 3 clones, not Anakin, Obi-Wan, or Padme. That was the tone set for the rest of the series, where sometimes you might not see a main character for four or five episodes in a row as a story focused on one or two main characters--or none at all. In writing, Clone Wars was like an old-fashioned omniscient 3rd person POV that cuts to lots of characters while Rebels was more of a limited 3rd person POV.
So the thing is that as the title of the entry says, the best Star Wars since the original three movies has all been on the small screen. And I think there are a couple of reasons for that. First off, the TV shows don't have to try to be Star Wars movies. And by that I mean they don't have to be a big flashy 2 1/2-hour spectacle. They don't have to try to match the original trilogy in awe and wonder. Which brings me to the second point that the series can go slower and actually develop stories and characters. They could probably have made The Mandalorian into a 2 1/2-hour movie, but it also wouldn't have been as good. For one thing because the producers would want to make everything bigger and flashier and tie it to some big event and so on. Because it's a Star Wars movie so we have to pull out all the stops! But a series can stretch its legs and grow better. That's why The Clone Wars is so much better than the prequel movies were.
The most recent trilogy of movies were so concerned with trying to live up to the originals that they couldn't really cobble together much of a coherent story. As three 8-episode TV seasons they probably could have done a better job with it to build characters and the setting instead of just throwing together shit that was supposed to remind us of the movies we grew up with.
Anyway, maybe it's time they just forget about the movies and focus on TV. I mean, except for the billions of dollars the movies make.
Wednesday, March 25, 2020
The Last Encore: It's New to You
Last Friday I talked about Amazon and Draft2Digital pulling most of my age regressions books. So the first couple days of the quarantine I spent a lot of time updating the Planet 99 Publishing website so most of those books you can download for free.
One of the ones they pulled was The Comeback, but instead of putting that for free, I decided to re-edit it and release it under the P.T. Dilloway name as The Last Encore.
You can get it for $2.99 on Amazon--until they ban it again for no real reason.
One of the ones they pulled was The Comeback, but instead of putting that for free, I decided to re-edit it and release it under the P.T. Dilloway name as The Last Encore.
Most of the world has given up on 80s rocker Alex Axx--including Alex himself. His life has become a series of small venues , binge-drinking, and one-night stands with fading groupies.
During a festival in Michigan, a drunk Alex falls off the stage only to wake up in a rehab facility as a teenage girl. Acquainting himself with a new body is difficult, but not as difficult as acquainting himself with feelings he hasn't experienced in decades. He falls in love with another patient, but far too soon he's whisked away by his former manager--now his guardian--to take part in a televised talent show as Alexa Axelrod.
The new career brings new fame for Alex, but will he make the same mistakes the second time around?In editing it, I made it more PG-13 instead of R-rated by taking out a lot of f-bombs and the more explicit sex talk. Maybe that will make it more palatable to mainstream readers and it can find a new audience. Or maybe someone will accuse me of plagiarizing myself. It wouldn't be the first time.
You can get it for $2.99 on Amazon--until they ban it again for no real reason.
Monday, March 23, 2020
The Democrat Establishment Learned Nothing From 2016
It was funny that the day my article on how Bernie Sanders could win the Democratic nomination this year like how Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016 posted, both Pete Buttieg and Amy Klobuchar suddenly dropped out to throw their support to Joe Biden. Biden who until winning South Carolina was dead in the water. Really he had as many wins as Buttieg but Buttieg just drops out with most of the states still in play? Klobuchar dropped out when her home state of Minnesota was voting the very next day? The timing of this being the day before "Super Tuesday" stunk to high Heaven.
It was pretty obvious what happened: the DNC was thinking the same thing I was and so they pressured Buttieg and Klobuchar to drop out. I wouldn't be surprised if a VP or Cabinet spot was brought up. And then Bloomberg ended his expensive but low-results campaign to also throw his support to Biden. You can clearly see the Democrat establishment circling the wagons, rallying behind the candidate they think has the best chance.
And the thing is, Biden is basically just Hillary 2.0. We're hearing all the same bullshit out of the establishment: he's "electable," "moderate," centrist," "safe," and so on. And he'll beat Trump. Just like the electable, moderate, centrist, safe candidate did in 2016, right? Right?
It's astounding how utterly obtuse people can be when it comes to repeating the mistakes of the past. They really learned nothing at all from Hillary's electoral college loss. They still think if they have a recognizable face with a moderate agenda basically promising not to rock the boat that they'll win.
And just like 2016 it's all bullshit. A "friend" on Facebook reposted this British op-ed from January going into exactly why Biden is such a bad candidate. First, you have the shit with his son Hunter and the Ukraine. That has all the potential to become the "her emails" of 2020. Because as the author says, even if it's true nothing illegal happened, it's like Hillary's emails: it just looks bad. I mean Biden is going to go to the Rust Belt and West Virginia telling poor people like me how much he cares and is going to help them when his son was getting a $50,000-a-month pencil sharpening job with a Ukraine oil company? I mean that's twice what I make a YEAR.
And let me just point out something else here: Trump got impeached for coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Hunter Biden thing. Rudy Giuliani was in Ukraine to gather dirt on the Bidens. So throwing all your support behind Biden to force him on Democrat voters is just playing into Trump's tiny hands. It's the match-up he wants. Clearly. He wasn't gathering dirt on Bernie or Bloomberg or Buttieg; his team has been preparing for Biden and now the DNC has given them exactly what they want.
And sure you can say, "Well Trump's kids..." But like we saw in 2016, no one cares! It didn't matter that Trump was using an unsecured cell phone or that he and his kids are continuing to use unsecured devices. The cult of Trump doesn't give a shit about anything he does. As he said, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they wouldn't care. And the Republican establishment is a bunch of lemmings anymore; they'll happily follow Trump over the cliff as long as they get tax breaks for the rich and stuff the courts with conservative morons who'll make us the Christian version of Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Here's a good quote about Biden's issues from the article:
And unlike Obama or even both Clintons, Biden doesn't really have a great backstory. He's just an old white man, a career politician with a knack for putting his foot in his mouth. He's not the first black presidential nominee or the first female presidential nominee or a veteran or a celebrity like Trump. There's nothing to inspire or motivate voters, especially the younger ones.
Because the most damning thing for Biden is that I don't think many people are supporting him because they really want HIM to be president; they just don't want Trump to be president. In one of those how-to-sell-books books I read it talked about how you need to have people who will evangelize your books, people who will go sing your praises to all their friends (online and offline), relatives, coworkers, etc. That's what you really need to sell books and get reviews.
And it's how you win elections. For better or worse, Trump has his crowd of MAGA-hat wearing people who will wear their hats and jackets and jerseys and bumper stickers and whatever. I used to see one guy who had a whole little pro-Trump mini-float thing he'd tow everywhere with his truck. Can you imagine anyone doing that for Biden? How energized do you think kids saddled with student loan debt are going to be for another Democrat with big bank ties? You can say, "Well young people don't vote anyway," but why should they? You have two candidates who don't give a shit about them. Neither will help them with student loan debt or do anything real about global warming and the destruction of the environment they have to live in.
Just being "the guy who isn't Trump" isn't going to win a lot of people over, not unless things go to Hell in a handbasket with coronavirus, the economy, or some natural disaster. I mean Democrats impeached him and it didn't move the needle at all. If anything, Trump's poll numbers went up afterwards! Because people don't really give a shit about minor scandals--unless it's a Democrat they don't really like much in the first place. As the article put it:
One of the arguments people make is, "Well we need a Democrat for the Supreme Court and Federal judges, etc." That's a valid point, but it's not a sexy point. It's a boring, overly logical point that those "undecided" voters don't care about. And in a lot of red states you're asking people to stand in line for 7 hours to vote for a Democrat who might get to appoint a Supreme Court justice--if Moscow Mitch doesn't block it again? It's a logical argument, but not a persuasive one.
Finally, let me just put this to you as a question of logic. In 2016 the narrative was that all these poor blue collar slobs were so downtrodden and beaten down because they didn't have good jobs and all that so they latched on to Trump's promises despite the racism, misogyny, and scandals. So how smart do you think it is to run the guy who was VP in 2016 and the 7 years leading up to it? Hurm...
It was pretty obvious what happened: the DNC was thinking the same thing I was and so they pressured Buttieg and Klobuchar to drop out. I wouldn't be surprised if a VP or Cabinet spot was brought up. And then Bloomberg ended his expensive but low-results campaign to also throw his support to Biden. You can clearly see the Democrat establishment circling the wagons, rallying behind the candidate they think has the best chance.
And the thing is, Biden is basically just Hillary 2.0. We're hearing all the same bullshit out of the establishment: he's "electable," "moderate," centrist," "safe," and so on. And he'll beat Trump. Just like the electable, moderate, centrist, safe candidate did in 2016, right? Right?
It's astounding how utterly obtuse people can be when it comes to repeating the mistakes of the past. They really learned nothing at all from Hillary's electoral college loss. They still think if they have a recognizable face with a moderate agenda basically promising not to rock the boat that they'll win.
And just like 2016 it's all bullshit. A "friend" on Facebook reposted this British op-ed from January going into exactly why Biden is such a bad candidate. First, you have the shit with his son Hunter and the Ukraine. That has all the potential to become the "her emails" of 2020. Because as the author says, even if it's true nothing illegal happened, it's like Hillary's emails: it just looks bad. I mean Biden is going to go to the Rust Belt and West Virginia telling poor people like me how much he cares and is going to help them when his son was getting a $50,000-a-month pencil sharpening job with a Ukraine oil company? I mean that's twice what I make a YEAR.
And let me just point out something else here: Trump got impeached for coercing Ukraine to dig up dirt on the Hunter Biden thing. Rudy Giuliani was in Ukraine to gather dirt on the Bidens. So throwing all your support behind Biden to force him on Democrat voters is just playing into Trump's tiny hands. It's the match-up he wants. Clearly. He wasn't gathering dirt on Bernie or Bloomberg or Buttieg; his team has been preparing for Biden and now the DNC has given them exactly what they want.
And sure you can say, "Well Trump's kids..." But like we saw in 2016, no one cares! It didn't matter that Trump was using an unsecured cell phone or that he and his kids are continuing to use unsecured devices. The cult of Trump doesn't give a shit about anything he does. As he said, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and they wouldn't care. And the Republican establishment is a bunch of lemmings anymore; they'll happily follow Trump over the cliff as long as they get tax breaks for the rich and stuff the courts with conservative morons who'll make us the Christian version of Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Here's a good quote about Biden's issues from the article:
Joe Biden will face many of the same problems. He has been in Washington since the age of 30, representing Delaware, the “capital of corporate America”. He is infamous for his connections to the credit card industry, and he has lied about his degree of support for the Iraq war.
And unlike Obama or even both Clintons, Biden doesn't really have a great backstory. He's just an old white man, a career politician with a knack for putting his foot in his mouth. He's not the first black presidential nominee or the first female presidential nominee or a veteran or a celebrity like Trump. There's nothing to inspire or motivate voters, especially the younger ones.
Because the most damning thing for Biden is that I don't think many people are supporting him because they really want HIM to be president; they just don't want Trump to be president. In one of those how-to-sell-books books I read it talked about how you need to have people who will evangelize your books, people who will go sing your praises to all their friends (online and offline), relatives, coworkers, etc. That's what you really need to sell books and get reviews.
And it's how you win elections. For better or worse, Trump has his crowd of MAGA-hat wearing people who will wear their hats and jackets and jerseys and bumper stickers and whatever. I used to see one guy who had a whole little pro-Trump mini-float thing he'd tow everywhere with his truck. Can you imagine anyone doing that for Biden? How energized do you think kids saddled with student loan debt are going to be for another Democrat with big bank ties? You can say, "Well young people don't vote anyway," but why should they? You have two candidates who don't give a shit about them. Neither will help them with student loan debt or do anything real about global warming and the destruction of the environment they have to live in.
Just being "the guy who isn't Trump" isn't going to win a lot of people over, not unless things go to Hell in a handbasket with coronavirus, the economy, or some natural disaster. I mean Democrats impeached him and it didn't move the needle at all. If anything, Trump's poll numbers went up afterwards! Because people don't really give a shit about minor scandals--unless it's a Democrat they don't really like much in the first place. As the article put it:
At the same time, compared to Trump, Biden has:
Ask yourself: how likely is such a candidate to win? Is such a person really the one you want to run against Trump? Look at the enthusiasm Trump gets at his rallies. It is real. Trump has fans, and they’re highly motivated. How motivated are Biden’s “fans”? Is Biden going to fill stadiums? Are people going to crisscross the country knocking on doors for him? Say what you want about Clinton, but there were some truly committed Clinton fans, and she had a powerful base of support. By comparison, Biden looks weak, and Trump is savagely effective at preying on and destroying establishment politicians.
- No money
- No voter enthusiasm
- No organization
- No agenda
- No real argument for himself
One of the arguments people make is, "Well we need a Democrat for the Supreme Court and Federal judges, etc." That's a valid point, but it's not a sexy point. It's a boring, overly logical point that those "undecided" voters don't care about. And in a lot of red states you're asking people to stand in line for 7 hours to vote for a Democrat who might get to appoint a Supreme Court justice--if Moscow Mitch doesn't block it again? It's a logical argument, but not a persuasive one.
Finally, let me just put this to you as a question of logic. In 2016 the narrative was that all these poor blue collar slobs were so downtrodden and beaten down because they didn't have good jobs and all that so they latched on to Trump's promises despite the racism, misogyny, and scandals. So how smart do you think it is to run the guy who was VP in 2016 and the 7 years leading up to it? Hurm...
Friday, March 20, 2020
Corporate Authoritarianism is Not as Bad as Real Authoritarianism But Close
When we think Authoritarianism, we think about brutal regimes like the Nazis, Soviets, and all the dictatorships in history. But really most of us tolerate Authoritarianism in our "free" country every day because usually it's pretty benign--until it isn't. When it puts its boot on your neck, corporate Authoritarianism isn't as bad as Nazis or Saddam Hussein, but it's pretty close.
Where I work for the first 3+ years it was pretty loose. If you needed time off you just asked. If you wanted to come in a little early, you could. If you wanted to work a little late, you could. If you wanted to work through lunch to leave a little early, you could.
But then all the sudden they started forcing a bunch of rules on us. Like you HAD to take a 30-minute lunch. And you HAD to start at a certain time. And if you wanted to take time off you had to fill out a form to be signed by someone. Then they brought in an "office manager" to enforce this shit and add even more useless rules. Like you HAVE to take your lunch between 11am and 2pm, which is really inconvenient for our department when the mail comes at that same time. One day I had my phone on my desk and she tells me to put it away and asks, "Do you have work to do?" And then later I wanted to take off the last week of March/first week of April because I wanted to take some time off since there are no holidays until Memorial Day and my lease would be up that week so in case I moved, I'd want that off. But, oh, no, I can't take off the last week of the month! Unless maybe I was having surgery or something. Fine, whatever. I just took the week before off, so basically starting tomorrow I'm off until the end of the month.
Her generous response to the coronavirus thing was to say that you could stay home sick and be paid--if you use your PTO time. Otherwise you can stay home sick--or to care for someone who is sick--and not be paid. Gee, thanks. Making people use their vacation time or not paying them will really keep people from coming in sick with a potentially deadly disease. Great thinking. [eye roll]
It's stuff that makes a miserable job more miserable and there's really nothing you can do about it. I mean it's not like we have a union to go on strike or anything.
At pretty much the same time, Amazon pulled some of my books for the 3rd or maybe even fourth time. And suspended my KDP account. Why? Who the fuck knows? All they ever say is "violating Content Guidelines." Which their Content Guidelines are so broad as to be completely useless.
I spent a couple hours that night putting all those books on Draft2Digital. I thought, Man, it's going to be so annoying to get like 10 emails for each book...except I only got 1 email. An email saying my account was on "permanent probation." I guess that's what comes after "double secret probation" like Animal House.
Unlike Amazon, I'd never had any problems with Draft2Digital. I really liked their website and when I could, I recommended it to people on Facebook and message boards over Smashwords. And just like that, because I violated some rule they never told me about, my account was locked. Not only locked, but they threatened legal action or informing the "proper authorities" if I tried in any way to circumvent it. Holy shit, what a bunch of assholes!
Though the one thing they did clear up was the reason they and Amazon were putting the corporate boot on my neck. It seems booksellers have decided they don't want to carry age regression stories anymore. I mean, age regression stories by indie authors. I'm sure all the traditionally published authors who have published stories like that won't have their books pulled, their accounts locked, and threatened with legal action. Nope, just the poor, defenseless people like me.
I get the reason they're doing it. It's like why so many stopped carrying erotica: there could be a few bad apples in the barrel so let's just throw out the barrel and light the fucking thing on fire because that's easier than actually looking through it to pick out the bad ones. It's fucking ridiculous that I have to lose a good chunk of my second income because of some completely arbitrary rule made because companies are too fucking lazy to actually check the stories being sold on their websites. It's going to finish ruining me financially and there's nothing I can do about it. At least not that I can think of. Because not only do I lose the money from sales on Amazon, but also all those KDP pages read. That was like an extra 50%. Short of getting a second job or some other "side hustle," which isn't really plausible, there's no way to make that up.
But again, what can you do? Nothing. When corporate Authoritarianism stomps on your neck, there's nothing you can do. Not when you're poor. You're fucked. Especially a huge company like Amazon. I can boycott them, but so what? That's a drop in the bucket. That's why they can be assholes and literally turn away money. It seems odd that Barnes & Noble, which is beingdestroyed rescued by a hedge fund wants to turn away easy money, but that's where we are right now. You can send them an email to protest, but they just ignore it. You can call and yell at some underling, but so what? You can get an attorney, but they have the money to outlast you. So, yeah, you're fucked.
I'm still trying to think of what to do. Maybe I could sell the books on my own. Or just give them away. Most of them are pretty old and not necessarily making a lot of money anyway. Going forward, as long as I can go forward, it means I can't write what was the most successful genre for me. Amazon and Draft2Digital and these other booksellers are literally telling me what I can and can't write--if I want to get paid anyway. Imagine if dealerships told Ford, "We aren't selling pick-up trucks anymore." There goes 90% of their business.
Not to be alarmist, but we've seen in real Authoritarian governments how that works. First they come for the Gypsies. Then they come for homosexuals. Then they come for Jews. And so on...
In this case, first they come for erotica, then they come for age regression books, and then...? By virtue of market power, Amazon especially can instantly snap thousands of books out of existence. So if some asshole at Amazon decides tomorrow they don't want to sell vampire books or werewolf books or gay books or lesbian books or books featuring black people, they can do it. Who's going to stop them?
Now if they tried to get rid of something more popular there might be enough of an outcry to make them back down...maybe. Or not. They don't have to unless they want to because it's a private business and especially in America a private business can do what it wants. Most businesses like restaurants or banks or pharmacies if they're assholes to you, you just go somewhere else. (I started switching my prescriptions from CVS for that reason.) You can't really do that with publishing because there are so few options available. When that Authoritarian boot comes down, it comes down hard, crippling you.
And don't give me any schadenfreude bullshit about how I shouldn't have done what I done or anything. Like Amazon and Draft2Digital, none of my Phantom Readers have read any of these stories to actually know what's in them. So fuck you if you think I'm getting what I deserve or anything along those lines. I wrote something, people bought it, so I wrote more of it. Isn't that how the fucking industry is supposed to work? At least until they decide to change the rules on you. Some of the stories aren't all that great, but others I thought were really solid stories. The Comeback especially is one I'd like to make available somewhere because I think it's a great story. Why should I have to delete it just because someone, somewhere, MAY have written a bad story?
And if the justification is, "There are children in these books and people might jack off to it," well, people will jack off to any goddamned thing. I mean, name something and someone, somewhere will find it erotic. People are fucked up. Should we ban everything just because some asshole might find it erotic? Are we that fucking Puritanical? Should we get out the red robes and white bonnets now? When American Pie came out, did we ban all apple pies just because someone might put his dick in one? It's just an overreaction and a massive overreach that unfortunately I can't really do anything about.
Finally, if you think I'm joking about any of this, go fuck yourself. That clear enough?
Where I work for the first 3+ years it was pretty loose. If you needed time off you just asked. If you wanted to come in a little early, you could. If you wanted to work a little late, you could. If you wanted to work through lunch to leave a little early, you could.
But then all the sudden they started forcing a bunch of rules on us. Like you HAD to take a 30-minute lunch. And you HAD to start at a certain time. And if you wanted to take time off you had to fill out a form to be signed by someone. Then they brought in an "office manager" to enforce this shit and add even more useless rules. Like you HAVE to take your lunch between 11am and 2pm, which is really inconvenient for our department when the mail comes at that same time. One day I had my phone on my desk and she tells me to put it away and asks, "Do you have work to do?" And then later I wanted to take off the last week of March/first week of April because I wanted to take some time off since there are no holidays until Memorial Day and my lease would be up that week so in case I moved, I'd want that off. But, oh, no, I can't take off the last week of the month! Unless maybe I was having surgery or something. Fine, whatever. I just took the week before off, so basically starting tomorrow I'm off until the end of the month.
Her generous response to the coronavirus thing was to say that you could stay home sick and be paid--if you use your PTO time. Otherwise you can stay home sick--or to care for someone who is sick--and not be paid. Gee, thanks. Making people use their vacation time or not paying them will really keep people from coming in sick with a potentially deadly disease. Great thinking. [eye roll]
It's stuff that makes a miserable job more miserable and there's really nothing you can do about it. I mean it's not like we have a union to go on strike or anything.
At pretty much the same time, Amazon pulled some of my books for the 3rd or maybe even fourth time. And suspended my KDP account. Why? Who the fuck knows? All they ever say is "violating Content Guidelines." Which their Content Guidelines are so broad as to be completely useless.
I spent a couple hours that night putting all those books on Draft2Digital. I thought, Man, it's going to be so annoying to get like 10 emails for each book...except I only got 1 email. An email saying my account was on "permanent probation." I guess that's what comes after "double secret probation" like Animal House.
Unlike Amazon, I'd never had any problems with Draft2Digital. I really liked their website and when I could, I recommended it to people on Facebook and message boards over Smashwords. And just like that, because I violated some rule they never told me about, my account was locked. Not only locked, but they threatened legal action or informing the "proper authorities" if I tried in any way to circumvent it. Holy shit, what a bunch of assholes!
Though the one thing they did clear up was the reason they and Amazon were putting the corporate boot on my neck. It seems booksellers have decided they don't want to carry age regression stories anymore. I mean, age regression stories by indie authors. I'm sure all the traditionally published authors who have published stories like that won't have their books pulled, their accounts locked, and threatened with legal action. Nope, just the poor, defenseless people like me.
I get the reason they're doing it. It's like why so many stopped carrying erotica: there could be a few bad apples in the barrel so let's just throw out the barrel and light the fucking thing on fire because that's easier than actually looking through it to pick out the bad ones. It's fucking ridiculous that I have to lose a good chunk of my second income because of some completely arbitrary rule made because companies are too fucking lazy to actually check the stories being sold on their websites. It's going to finish ruining me financially and there's nothing I can do about it. At least not that I can think of. Because not only do I lose the money from sales on Amazon, but also all those KDP pages read. That was like an extra 50%. Short of getting a second job or some other "side hustle," which isn't really plausible, there's no way to make that up.
But again, what can you do? Nothing. When corporate Authoritarianism stomps on your neck, there's nothing you can do. Not when you're poor. You're fucked. Especially a huge company like Amazon. I can boycott them, but so what? That's a drop in the bucket. That's why they can be assholes and literally turn away money. It seems odd that Barnes & Noble, which is being
I'm still trying to think of what to do. Maybe I could sell the books on my own. Or just give them away. Most of them are pretty old and not necessarily making a lot of money anyway. Going forward, as long as I can go forward, it means I can't write what was the most successful genre for me. Amazon and Draft2Digital and these other booksellers are literally telling me what I can and can't write--if I want to get paid anyway. Imagine if dealerships told Ford, "We aren't selling pick-up trucks anymore." There goes 90% of their business.
Not to be alarmist, but we've seen in real Authoritarian governments how that works. First they come for the Gypsies. Then they come for homosexuals. Then they come for Jews. And so on...
In this case, first they come for erotica, then they come for age regression books, and then...? By virtue of market power, Amazon especially can instantly snap thousands of books out of existence. So if some asshole at Amazon decides tomorrow they don't want to sell vampire books or werewolf books or gay books or lesbian books or books featuring black people, they can do it. Who's going to stop them?
Now if they tried to get rid of something more popular there might be enough of an outcry to make them back down...maybe. Or not. They don't have to unless they want to because it's a private business and especially in America a private business can do what it wants. Most businesses like restaurants or banks or pharmacies if they're assholes to you, you just go somewhere else. (I started switching my prescriptions from CVS for that reason.) You can't really do that with publishing because there are so few options available. When that Authoritarian boot comes down, it comes down hard, crippling you.
And don't give me any schadenfreude bullshit about how I shouldn't have done what I done or anything. Like Amazon and Draft2Digital, none of my Phantom Readers have read any of these stories to actually know what's in them. So fuck you if you think I'm getting what I deserve or anything along those lines. I wrote something, people bought it, so I wrote more of it. Isn't that how the fucking industry is supposed to work? At least until they decide to change the rules on you. Some of the stories aren't all that great, but others I thought were really solid stories. The Comeback especially is one I'd like to make available somewhere because I think it's a great story. Why should I have to delete it just because someone, somewhere, MAY have written a bad story?
And if the justification is, "There are children in these books and people might jack off to it," well, people will jack off to any goddamned thing. I mean, name something and someone, somewhere will find it erotic. People are fucked up. Should we ban everything just because some asshole might find it erotic? Are we that fucking Puritanical? Should we get out the red robes and white bonnets now? When American Pie came out, did we ban all apple pies just because someone might put his dick in one? It's just an overreaction and a massive overreach that unfortunately I can't really do anything about.
Finally, if you think I'm joking about any of this, go fuck yourself. That clear enough?
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Prepare for the Challenge!
Monday I announced my A to Z Challenge topic: Mystery Science Theater 3000/Rifftrax movies. So that you don't spend a whole month saying, "I haven't seen any of those," maybe you could, I don't know...see some of those! So here are some of my favorite MST3K and Rifftrax movies that you can watch for FREE on Pluto TV and in some cases free with Amazon Prime. (You can also probably find the Rifftrax ones on their site and there's always YouTube for a less legal way to watch them...not that I'd recommend that.)
The first thing to understand about me is that when it comes to these, I'm kind of a snob. I like the 80s-2010s ones mostly. Not just because they're in color and have better production values (usually) but also because those kaiju and sci-fi movies from the 50s are bad, but what do you expect--they're super-duper old. The newer movies are bad when they really shouldn't be, either through cheapness or incompetence--or both.
So if you're one of those people who doesn't like black-and-white movies, not many will be on my list.
Another thing is Pluto TV is not on demand (mostly) so catching the movies there can be tough. And they tend to cycle them so you might see a title three days in a row and then not for weeks. Amazon titles you can of course watch on demand so long as you have an Amazon Prime subscription or want to pay to rent/buy them.
All that said, let's get to it!
Mystery Science Theater 3000 Faves:
Rifftrax Faves (Pluto TV):
Birdemic: a true cult classic, so bad that it has to be seen to be believed
ROTOR: a mind-numbingly bad crossover of Robocop and Terminator
Julie & Jack: From the guy who gave you Birdemic--nuff said
Miami Connection: featuring a ton of cheesy 80s kung fu, music, and fashion
Samurai Cop: A really bad early 90s ripoff of Lethal Weapon
Rollergator: Like anything 90s, this was Extreme-as in extremely bad
Sharknado: This is a live show riffing on the cult classic Syfy film
Sharknado 2: Second verse, same as (or worse than) the first!
Time Chasers: If you can't catch the MST3K version, there's also a live show of this
Terror at Tenkiller: Low budget mid-80s "horror" movie that's more boring than scary
To Catch a Yeti: An early 90s kids movie pitting Meat Loaf against a little girl and an extremely lame puppet
Laser Mission: A largely incoherent 1989 German-produced action movie starring the late Brandon Lee.
Firehead: A really lame 1990 action movie with the titular sorta-superhero
Future Force: Another lame action movie, this one from the late 80s with David Carradine as a bounty hunter
Abraxas Guardian of the Universe: A lame 1990 sci-fi movie starring Jesse "The Body" Ventura
Alien Outlaw: a goofy low-budget sci-fi movie from the mid-80s
McBain: Not The Simpsons character; this is a lame 1991 action movie starring Christopher Walken
Mutant: A really lame mid-80s horror movie
Supersonic Man: Only very slightly better in production values and acting than The Pumaman.
And the granddaddy of all bad movies: Plan 9 From Outer Space--available on its own or in a live show
Rifftrax Faves (Amazon Prime):
Honor and Glory: Extremely lame mid-90s action movie featuring a lot of bad kung-fu
Fever Lake: A really bad mid-90s horror movie starring the dead Corey and Slater from Saved By the Bell
Star Games: A truly wretched mid-90s sci-fi movie starring Tony Curtis and the director's sons
Radical Jack: A lame action movie from 2000 starring Billy Ray Cyrus (aka Miley's dad)
Icebreaker: Another lame 2000 action movie starring Sean Astin and Bruce Campbell
Worth a Rental on Amazon:
Space Mutiny: A truly awful 80s sci-fi movie that recycles its space footage from Battlestar Galactica
Space Mutiny Live (Rifftrax): A 2018 live showing of the "cult classic"
Ghosthouse (Rifftrax): An incredibly ridiculous late 80s "horror" movie; sometimes they show the original version on Pluto TV; check the "Cult Classics" or "Shout Factory" channels.
The Final Sacrifice (MST3K): A really bad late 80s Canadian movie featuring the heroics of Zap Rowsdower! (That's not the name of a superhero or space hero, just some Canadian hoser.)
The good thing about renting the MST3K ones on Amazon is you get them a whole week even after you watch it the first time so you can watch it again and again and again! (Or just once.)
Not Recommended: (Some bad movies are just bad)*
The Sword & the Dragon (MST3K): Really boring Scandinavian fantasy movie
The Day the Earth Froze (MST3K): Ditto
The Castle of Fu Man Chu (MST3K): Extremely racist and boring 70s "action" movie
Fist of Fury (Rifftrax): A very long and pointless Bruce Lee movie with shitty dubbing
The Revenge of Dr. X (Rifftrax): Ed Wood was involved in this somehow so you know it's bad. The obnoxious noises the killer plant makes really get on my nerves
*First season MST3K episodes like The Slime People, Moon Zero Two, and Untamed Youth look even lower budget than usual and there's a different voice for Servo so watch at your own peril.
Some of the MST3K titles might be on Netflix. Consult your app.
The first thing to understand about me is that when it comes to these, I'm kind of a snob. I like the 80s-2010s ones mostly. Not just because they're in color and have better production values (usually) but also because those kaiju and sci-fi movies from the 50s are bad, but what do you expect--they're super-duper old. The newer movies are bad when they really shouldn't be, either through cheapness or incompetence--or both.
So if you're one of those people who doesn't like black-and-white movies, not many will be on my list.
Another thing is Pluto TV is not on demand (mostly) so catching the movies there can be tough. And they tend to cycle them so you might see a title three days in a row and then not for weeks. Amazon titles you can of course watch on demand so long as you have an Amazon Prime subscription or want to pay to rent/buy them.
All that said, let's get to it!
Mystery Science Theater 3000 Faves:
- Mitchell: it's a classic episode that was also a milestone for the series as it was when they changed hosts
- Time Chasers: A really bad time travel movie from the early 90s that you can also watch on demand on Pluto TV through the Shout Factory channel
- Future War: this is the newest movie of the old MST3K series, so bad that it was available pretty much right away
- Werewolf: another mid-90s movie, which says how bad it is
- Final Justice: Joe Don Baker--Mitchell!--also stars in this dumb mid-80s action movie
- Overdrawn at the Memory Bank: If you don't like MST3K or movie riffing, you might want to watch a normal version of this. It's an early 80s PBS sci-fi movie that's like a forerunner to The Matrix as Raul Julia is stuck inside a computer and learns how to control reality. Not all that bad, all things considered.
- Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders: What if you took a horror anthology like Creepshow and used the framing device of The Princess Bride? This.
- Master Ninja I & II: 4 episodes of the short-lived 1984 series The Master are mashed together into two "movies." Look for cameos by a young Demi Moore and Crystal Bernard, Claude Akins, and the least-tenured Bond, ie George Lazenby.
- The Pumaman: a really awful superhero movie that'll make you believe a man can fly--with his ass hanging up awkwardly in the air
- Warrior of the Lost World: a bad Italian ripoff of Mad Max from the early 80s
- Laser Blast: a cheesy late 70s sci-fi movie, but also this was the first series finale for the show
Rifftrax Faves (Pluto TV):
Birdemic: a true cult classic, so bad that it has to be seen to be believed
ROTOR: a mind-numbingly bad crossover of Robocop and Terminator
Julie & Jack: From the guy who gave you Birdemic--nuff said
Miami Connection: featuring a ton of cheesy 80s kung fu, music, and fashion
Samurai Cop: A really bad early 90s ripoff of Lethal Weapon
Rollergator: Like anything 90s, this was Extreme-as in extremely bad
Sharknado: This is a live show riffing on the cult classic Syfy film
Sharknado 2: Second verse, same as (or worse than) the first!
Time Chasers: If you can't catch the MST3K version, there's also a live show of this
Terror at Tenkiller: Low budget mid-80s "horror" movie that's more boring than scary
To Catch a Yeti: An early 90s kids movie pitting Meat Loaf against a little girl and an extremely lame puppet
Laser Mission: A largely incoherent 1989 German-produced action movie starring the late Brandon Lee.
Firehead: A really lame 1990 action movie with the titular sorta-superhero
Future Force: Another lame action movie, this one from the late 80s with David Carradine as a bounty hunter
Abraxas Guardian of the Universe: A lame 1990 sci-fi movie starring Jesse "The Body" Ventura
Alien Outlaw: a goofy low-budget sci-fi movie from the mid-80s
McBain: Not The Simpsons character; this is a lame 1991 action movie starring Christopher Walken
Mutant: A really lame mid-80s horror movie
Supersonic Man: Only very slightly better in production values and acting than The Pumaman.
And the granddaddy of all bad movies: Plan 9 From Outer Space--available on its own or in a live show
Rifftrax Faves (Amazon Prime):
Honor and Glory: Extremely lame mid-90s action movie featuring a lot of bad kung-fu
Fever Lake: A really bad mid-90s horror movie starring the dead Corey and Slater from Saved By the Bell
Star Games: A truly wretched mid-90s sci-fi movie starring Tony Curtis and the director's sons
Radical Jack: A lame action movie from 2000 starring Billy Ray Cyrus (aka Miley's dad)
Icebreaker: Another lame 2000 action movie starring Sean Astin and Bruce Campbell
Worth a Rental on Amazon:
Space Mutiny: A truly awful 80s sci-fi movie that recycles its space footage from Battlestar Galactica
Space Mutiny Live (Rifftrax): A 2018 live showing of the "cult classic"
Ghosthouse (Rifftrax): An incredibly ridiculous late 80s "horror" movie; sometimes they show the original version on Pluto TV; check the "Cult Classics" or "Shout Factory" channels.
The Final Sacrifice (MST3K): A really bad late 80s Canadian movie featuring the heroics of Zap Rowsdower! (That's not the name of a superhero or space hero, just some Canadian hoser.)
The good thing about renting the MST3K ones on Amazon is you get them a whole week even after you watch it the first time so you can watch it again and again and again! (Or just once.)
Not Recommended: (Some bad movies are just bad)*
The Sword & the Dragon (MST3K): Really boring Scandinavian fantasy movie
The Day the Earth Froze (MST3K): Ditto
The Castle of Fu Man Chu (MST3K): Extremely racist and boring 70s "action" movie
Fist of Fury (Rifftrax): A very long and pointless Bruce Lee movie with shitty dubbing
The Revenge of Dr. X (Rifftrax): Ed Wood was involved in this somehow so you know it's bad. The obnoxious noises the killer plant makes really get on my nerves
*First season MST3K episodes like The Slime People, Moon Zero Two, and Untamed Youth look even lower budget than usual and there's a different voice for Servo so watch at your own peril.
Some of the MST3K titles might be on Netflix. Consult your app.
Monday, March 16, 2020
#AtoZChallenge Topic Reveal
I revealed my topic last May but let's go over it again! I thought since I watched tons of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax movies on Pluto TV/Amazon in the last 3 years that I could do a whole A to Z Challenge on it. Doing one movie for each letter would actually be just the tip of the iceberg, so I broke it down into theme days corresponding to each letter.
Now your first question is: what the hell is Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax? Good question. (Actually, dumb question. Shame on you.)
In the not so distant past, about 1988 AD, a guy named Joel Hodgson came up with the idea of a show that would show old, public domain movies and have a guy and two robots shown in silhouette at the bottom of the screen as they make fun of the movie.
The show premiered on local Minneapolis TV about 1988 and soon became a fan favorite. This first season starred Joel Hodgson as "Joel Robinson" a man trapped in space on a ship called the "Satellite of Love." As the theme song tells us, a mad scientist named Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) and his henchman Larry (Josh Weinstein) are torturing Joel by making him watch terrible movies. To help cope he makes robots out of spare parts. One named Tom Servo and one named Crow T. Robot. They sit with Joel in the theater to make fun of the movie with him. Another robot called Gypsy maintains the ship.
The show came to the attention of Comedy Central, who picked it up for their network the next season. The first season was rushed into production and thus featured only a slight improvement in the quality of sets and puppets. The same cast from the local TV season reprised their roles.
So the second Comedy Central season is really the first real season in the way that Star Trek the Next Generation didn't really get going until season 3. The second season there was time to upgrade the sets and screen quality and there were also cast changes with Frank Conniff taking over the henchman role as "TV's Frank" and Kevin Murphy (who had worked behind the scenes on the previous seasons) taking over as Tom Servo. That's when the show really started to hit its stride.
This lineup lasted until mid-way through the fifth season Joel Hodgson left the show and was replaced by Michael J Nelson (the head writer and frequent guest star) as Mike Nelson. Otherwise pretty much everything remained the same for about a year when Frank Conniff left. Instead of a henchman, he was replaced by writer Mary Jo Pehl as Dr. Forrester's mother.
After the 1996 season Comedy Central dropped the series from its schedule. The same year they released Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which ended up in limited release in a few theaters for a short time. That was the last appearance of Dr. Forrester.
The show was picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel with some more cast changes. Once again they turned internally to fill the holes with Mary Jo Pehl taking over as the evil Pearl Forrester and writer Bill Corbett taking over the voice of Crow T Robot and also playing the henchman "Brain Guy."
After three seasons on Sci-Fi the show was cancelled again in 1999. It was finally revived for Netflix in 2017 with an all new cast though pretty much the same format.
After the original series was cancelled for the second time, the cast went on to a few different ventures. The most successful of which is Rifftrax. The idea was originated by Michael J Nelson in the mid-2000s. The concept was that since he couldn't sell DVDs of most movies with the "riffs" included because of the rights issues, he would sell the riffs separately for people to play while watching the DVD on their own. Riff tracks or Rifftrax, get it?
At first Nelson did them by himself or with guests like Fred Willard, Joel McHale, and "Weird Al" Yankovic, but eventually he reunited with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett from the Sci-Fi Channel years of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
They also had a side project around that time called The Film Crew. The idea was pretty much the same as MST3K only the setup was they were in a basement shop recording "commentary tracks" for DVDs at the behest of a rich guy called "Bob Honcho." Unlike MST3K there weren't silhouettes shown during the movie and there was only one intermission instead of the 3 or so in MST3K episodes. There were only 4 episodes produced in large part because of issues that caused them to switch from Rhino to Shout Factory. According to Wikipedia "Bob Honcho" was originally called "Bob Rhino" but they changed it when they changed distributors.
Around the same time much of the rest of the MST3K cast was doing a similar show called Cinematic Titanic. That featured Joel Hodgson, Frank Conniff, Trace Beaulieu, Josh Weinstein, and Mary Jo Pehl. I'm not really sure what the setup was supposed to be but like MST3K it used silhouettes all during the movie but also before and after as well. Instead of sitting in a row they also arrayed themselves around the screen with some standing and some sitting. Which was kind of distracting really.
Anyway, while those other two projects ended, Rifftrax continued on. The riffs available only on a website soon expanded into Videos on Demand on DVD and streaming on sites like Amazon, though the selection is more limited because of the rights issues. Like MST3K it's mostly stuff that landed in public domain or otherwise was super cheap to pick up.
With the advent of smartphones they also developed an app for playing riffs. And they've done a number of live shows since 2009, usually in Nashville or Minneapolis though simulcast to movie theaters through Fathom Events or whatever. Besides the "A-Team" of Mike, Kevin, and Bill, there have been other guest riffers and there's a regular "B-Team" featuring Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Jones, who was also a former MST3K writer and the wife of Michael J Nelson.
So there you go, a brief history of movie riffing thanks to my personal observations and Wikipedia.
To wax philosophical, I think the success of MST3K was helped in part by when it came out. The late 80s and early 90s allowed it to ride the tide of post-irony like Seinfeld, The Simpsons, the work of Quentin Tarantino, and Scream. Three guys making smart-aleck remarks during cheesy movies fit in with the sarcastic, snarky humor that began to dominate the airwaves. As well the expansion of cable TV with Comedy Central and then Sci-Fi gave the show a home without the pressures of a big network. Had it come along a few years earlier it might have remained a local cult favorite instead of gaining notoriety.
At the same time MST3K and Rifftrax are perfect for the streaming world of today with the 90 minute to 2 hour run times that are hard to fit into a network schedule but far more palatable for audiences on Netflix, Amazon, or Pluto TV. That's what allowed MST3K to be revived on Netflix for a new generation of fans and has kept Rifftrax going for over 10 years.
There you go, now you're ready for the A to Z Challenge!
Now your first question is: what the hell is Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax? Good question. (Actually, dumb question. Shame on you.)
In the not so distant past, about 1988 AD, a guy named Joel Hodgson came up with the idea of a show that would show old, public domain movies and have a guy and two robots shown in silhouette at the bottom of the screen as they make fun of the movie.
The show premiered on local Minneapolis TV about 1988 and soon became a fan favorite. This first season starred Joel Hodgson as "Joel Robinson" a man trapped in space on a ship called the "Satellite of Love." As the theme song tells us, a mad scientist named Dr. Clayton Forrester (Trace Beaulieu) and his henchman Larry (Josh Weinstein) are torturing Joel by making him watch terrible movies. To help cope he makes robots out of spare parts. One named Tom Servo and one named Crow T. Robot. They sit with Joel in the theater to make fun of the movie with him. Another robot called Gypsy maintains the ship.
The show came to the attention of Comedy Central, who picked it up for their network the next season. The first season was rushed into production and thus featured only a slight improvement in the quality of sets and puppets. The same cast from the local TV season reprised their roles.
So the second Comedy Central season is really the first real season in the way that Star Trek the Next Generation didn't really get going until season 3. The second season there was time to upgrade the sets and screen quality and there were also cast changes with Frank Conniff taking over the henchman role as "TV's Frank" and Kevin Murphy (who had worked behind the scenes on the previous seasons) taking over as Tom Servo. That's when the show really started to hit its stride.
This lineup lasted until mid-way through the fifth season Joel Hodgson left the show and was replaced by Michael J Nelson (the head writer and frequent guest star) as Mike Nelson. Otherwise pretty much everything remained the same for about a year when Frank Conniff left. Instead of a henchman, he was replaced by writer Mary Jo Pehl as Dr. Forrester's mother.
After the 1996 season Comedy Central dropped the series from its schedule. The same year they released Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which ended up in limited release in a few theaters for a short time. That was the last appearance of Dr. Forrester.
The show was picked up by the Sci-Fi Channel with some more cast changes. Once again they turned internally to fill the holes with Mary Jo Pehl taking over as the evil Pearl Forrester and writer Bill Corbett taking over the voice of Crow T Robot and also playing the henchman "Brain Guy."
After three seasons on Sci-Fi the show was cancelled again in 1999. It was finally revived for Netflix in 2017 with an all new cast though pretty much the same format.
After the original series was cancelled for the second time, the cast went on to a few different ventures. The most successful of which is Rifftrax. The idea was originated by Michael J Nelson in the mid-2000s. The concept was that since he couldn't sell DVDs of most movies with the "riffs" included because of the rights issues, he would sell the riffs separately for people to play while watching the DVD on their own. Riff tracks or Rifftrax, get it?
At first Nelson did them by himself or with guests like Fred Willard, Joel McHale, and "Weird Al" Yankovic, but eventually he reunited with Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett from the Sci-Fi Channel years of Mystery Science Theater 3000.
They also had a side project around that time called The Film Crew. The idea was pretty much the same as MST3K only the setup was they were in a basement shop recording "commentary tracks" for DVDs at the behest of a rich guy called "Bob Honcho." Unlike MST3K there weren't silhouettes shown during the movie and there was only one intermission instead of the 3 or so in MST3K episodes. There were only 4 episodes produced in large part because of issues that caused them to switch from Rhino to Shout Factory. According to Wikipedia "Bob Honcho" was originally called "Bob Rhino" but they changed it when they changed distributors.
Around the same time much of the rest of the MST3K cast was doing a similar show called Cinematic Titanic. That featured Joel Hodgson, Frank Conniff, Trace Beaulieu, Josh Weinstein, and Mary Jo Pehl. I'm not really sure what the setup was supposed to be but like MST3K it used silhouettes all during the movie but also before and after as well. Instead of sitting in a row they also arrayed themselves around the screen with some standing and some sitting. Which was kind of distracting really.
Anyway, while those other two projects ended, Rifftrax continued on. The riffs available only on a website soon expanded into Videos on Demand on DVD and streaming on sites like Amazon, though the selection is more limited because of the rights issues. Like MST3K it's mostly stuff that landed in public domain or otherwise was super cheap to pick up.
With the advent of smartphones they also developed an app for playing riffs. And they've done a number of live shows since 2009, usually in Nashville or Minneapolis though simulcast to movie theaters through Fathom Events or whatever. Besides the "A-Team" of Mike, Kevin, and Bill, there have been other guest riffers and there's a regular "B-Team" featuring Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Jones, who was also a former MST3K writer and the wife of Michael J Nelson.
So there you go, a brief history of movie riffing thanks to my personal observations and Wikipedia.
To wax philosophical, I think the success of MST3K was helped in part by when it came out. The late 80s and early 90s allowed it to ride the tide of post-irony like Seinfeld, The Simpsons, the work of Quentin Tarantino, and Scream. Three guys making smart-aleck remarks during cheesy movies fit in with the sarcastic, snarky humor that began to dominate the airwaves. As well the expansion of cable TV with Comedy Central and then Sci-Fi gave the show a home without the pressures of a big network. Had it come along a few years earlier it might have remained a local cult favorite instead of gaining notoriety.
At the same time MST3K and Rifftrax are perfect for the streaming world of today with the 90 minute to 2 hour run times that are hard to fit into a network schedule but far more palatable for audiences on Netflix, Amazon, or Pluto TV. That's what allowed MST3K to be revived on Netflix for a new generation of fans and has kept Rifftrax going for over 10 years.
There you go, now you're ready for the A to Z Challenge!
Friday, March 13, 2020
Page to Screen: The Expanse, Part 2
Wednesday I gave an overview of The Expanse series of books/TV series, focusing on the factions and characters. If you haven't read that, it might help to do that first so you're not like, "Who's James Holden?" Cuz I'm not gonna explain this shit again.
One problem for me in comparing books and the TV show is that I read the first book like 3 1/2 years ago so it's not really fresh in my mind. But I can say that I think the TV show has the gist of the book. There are probably minor details that differ, but overall it's a good representation.
It starts off with Julie Mao on an abandoned ship. We don't really know how she got there or why, but we know everyone else is dead.
The book alternates two POVs: James Holden and Detective Miller. The later books use a lot more POVs but looking up the first book it only uses two through the main part of the book plus Julie's for the Prologue and Fred Johnson's for the epilogue.
Holden is on the ice hauler Canterbury and gets a promotion to XO when the previous one starts going mental. It's not really a promotion that he wants, but there's not much he can do about it. The ship picks up a distress call from the ship Julie Mao was on. The captain doesn't want to waste time investigating, so he tells the crew to ignore it. Holden seems OK with this, but when he's alone on the bridge, he logs the call so that the ship has to divert to investigate.
The captain then sends Holden out on a shuttle to board the ship. He takes along the core group of Naomi Nagata, Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton and some redshirt. They go aboard the ship and there's no sign of Julie--or really anyone else.
As they're investigating, the Canterbury comes under attack from a stealth warship. The ship is hit with nuclear missiles and destroyed, as is the derelict ship. Holden and the others barely manage to escape the destruction of both ships in their shuttle. The problem for Holden and company is the shuttle they were on doesn't have the engines, air, water, or other facilities for a long journey. The radio is also damaged, so Holden and Naomi go outside to fix that.
They manage to send a call for help that draws unwelcome attention: a Martian warship. Holden figures the Martian Navy is going to quietly disappear them so he broadcasts a message to the whole system saying the stealth ship belonged to Mars. He and the crew are taken on the ship and interrogated when the stealth ship shows up to attack it, proving it wasn't actually a Martian ship.
Holden and his crew manage to get to a hangar and aboard a gunship. A wounded Martian soldier is able to give them control of it before he dies. Holden and company escape the Martian ship's destruction. But now what?
Meanwhile, Detective Miller is working on Ceres Station when he's given the job of locating Julie Mao. But like in a lot of detective stories, when he starts getting too close to things he's not supposed to know--like what Julie was doing on that ship at the beginning--he's taken off the case. But he's able to find a key piece of evidence in a computer drive stored in a mechanical hamster or something. (That might be one of those details that differs in the book slightly--I don't really know.)
Holden and his crew name their "salvaged" gunship the Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse and then receive an invitation from Fred Johnson to come to Tycho Station. Not seeing any alternative except to let Mars or Earth arrest them, they decide to go there.
And it just happens that Miller is going there too! Miller meets Holden and they all wind up going to Eros Station. In a seedy motel on the station they find Julie Mao--what's left of her. She's been infected with an alien thing called the "protomolecule." Holden and Miller look around the station and find more infected people and are dosed with hard radiation when some bodies they're examining are vaporized.
They manage to get back to the Roci and treated for radiation poisoning--something they'll have to be treated for the rest of their lives. They head back to Tycho Station while Eros is actually starting to move! It's flying like it's a ship or something instead of a big chunk of rock. Its course puts it on track for Earth, so Earth launches a bunch of missiles--except the big space rock can of course avoid those.
Holden and company realize they have to reboard Eros and try to plant some explosives. But things don't go as they plan and Miller winds up stranded on the station with Julie Mao, who's bonded with the protomolecule. He convinces her to steer away from Earth--to Venus. So what's left of Eros crashes there.
Holden and his crew are no longer actively being sought by Martian or UN officials. And they still have their "salvaged" ship to do whatever they want. And Fred Johnson managed to capture all those nuclear missiles Earth fired that missed Eros. Sweet.
That's pretty much the TV version. The weird thing to me is the story takes not only first 10 episodes of season 1 but also about 6 episodes of season 2. You have to wonder why they didn't just do the first book in the first season because it makes it a little odd when the story has to suddenly shift gears to the next installment.
***
Book 2 starts with a little girl named Mei Ming being pulled out of her nursery school or kindergarten on Ganymede by a Dr. Strickland. Except we soon learn her father Prax, a botanist on the station, knew nothing about this and so it amounts to a kidnapping.
Meanwhile, Gunnery Sergeant Roberta "Bobbie" Draper of the Martian Marine Corps is on patrol with her squad on the surface of Ganymede. She suddenly sees a group of UN Marines running towards them and at first thinks it's an attack. But then she sees a creature not wearing a suit of any kind following them. The creature (which I usually think of as sort of like the xenomorph from the Alien movies though in the TV show it's more human looking, which would probably make sense) kills the UN Marines and then Bobbie's squad too. It nearly kills her before it suddenly stops.
The attack on the surface has the UN and Martian ships overhead firing at each other, destroying big mirrors that help keep Ganymede operating. Much of the colony is destroyed and many people are injured. Prax is frantically searching the station for Mei, but he can't find her. He visits her classroom, where the teacher says she went off with Strickland, but there's no sign of Strickland anywhere.
Out in space, Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are intercepting pirates at the behest of the OPA, but Holden doesn't really enjoy playing mercenary. He and Fred Johnson have an argument and Holden quits. Instead they go to take relief supplies to Ganymede.
Meanwhile, Bobbie wakes up on a ship to find no one has seen the "monster" except for her. Nor does anyone seem interested in finding it either. In the book she's able to retrieve gun camera footage from her armor, but still no one is really interested in it. The Martians don't want to risk destroying the fragile peace they have with Earth.
Prax is still looking for his daughter weeks later when the station is going to Hell. There's a "cascade" happening where the plants that help to create and purify the air are dying off because of a lack of nutrients. Between that and a lack of food, things are going to get real desperate, real quick.
Holden and company show up and they meet Prax, who tells them his story. Holden and Amos go with Prax to a computer hacker who they coerce into giving them an idea of where Strickland might be--in the old lower levels of the moon. Holden, Amos, and some mercenaries go down there to fight with some other mercenaries, where they find the body of a little boy in Mei's class and signs that someone has been experimenting with the "protomolecule" from the first book, which freaks Holden out to the point he basically wants to leave and destroy the whole moon.
Meanwhile, Bobbie and a Martian contingent meet with Chrisjen Avisarala and a UN contingent. Bobbie blurts out her story about the monster but again no one seems to believe her--except Avisarala. The Martians are pissed at her for talking about the monster and are going to send her home, but instead she defects to the UN and starts to work for Avisarala.
On Ganymede, things are going bad and Holden, Prax, and the others barely make it out alive. After they take off, they find out a protomolecule monster is in the cargo hold! They manage to kill it by luring it outside the ship with some radiation and then burn it up with the engines. But it left a little surprise for them--a bomb! It damages the ship but doesn't destroy it.
Then, with Holden's encouragement, Prax tells his story over a system-wide communication and it turns into like a GoFundMe as people send him money, encouragement, and tips. At least until someone gets to his ex-wife to start accusing him of abusing her and Mei; then he starts getting death threats.
Meanwhile, Bobbie has a hard time adjusting to life on Earth with Avisarala. She discovers that Avisarala's aide is spying on his boss and gets him fired. But eventually some other higher ups get Avisarala and Bobbie banished to a yacht owned by Jules-Pierre Mao that's supposed to take them to Ganymede. Really it's just to keep them out of the way.
Bobbie breaks them out to Julie Mao's old racing ship the Razorback. They link up with Holden and compare notes. Then they all head to Io, but they're followed by ships from Earth and Mars. They convince the Martians to help them against the Earth ships and then land on Io. But the bad guys fire off a bunch of missiles loaded with protomolecule monsters. One of them hits a Martian ship and Holden goes aboard to try to stop it. Meanwhile Bobbie leads the attack on Io and kills a monster while Prax finds his daughter is unharmed.
It turns out Jules Pierre Mao was weaponizing the protomolecule by binding it to kids who had an immune system deficiency. Mao is arrested and put in prison. Prax and his daughter go back to Ganymede to help it rebuild. Holden and company go back to being an independent ship for hire. And at least in the books Bobbie goes back to Mars as a civilian. The missiles with protomolecule soldiers on them are blown up before they can do any damage.
Everything seems good--until something rises from Venus. It flies out past Uranus--insert joke--and opens a mysterious Ring. But what is it? You'll have to find out.
That's pretty much the book description. The TV version covers half of season 2 and half of season 3 for pretty much 1 season total but again it's weird to have it stretched over two seasons. The TV version gets most of the gist. I didn't think the attack with Bobbie at the beginning was all that well done and I'm not sure why they had Prax be taken off Ganymede instead of staying on the station. Avisarala and Bobbie's journey from Earth is more streamlined, which is probably better.
What the TV season probably does better than the book is it involves Jules Pierre Mao more. He develops a soft spot for Mei, probably because his daughter Julie died in the first season. But that doesn't mean he isn't willing to sacrifice her and the other kids.
***
The third book takes place like 6 months or more later. "The Ring" is out there in deep space and some ships from Earth and Mars have gone out there to study it, but no one really knows what it is. Then a would-be daredevil slingshots his little ship around Saturn, into the Ring--and doesn't come back out.
That gets even more people interested in what's going on with The Ring. Holden and Rocinante are not interested in going, despite that Holden has been seeing a "ghost" of Detective Miller telling him that he needs to go there. Instead, Holden is looking to take a shady-seeming job to the other side of the system, but that falls apart when Martian officials demand the immediate return of the Rocinante. The only way to get out of it is to take an important journalist named Monica Stewart to the Ring so she can do stories on it. Reluctantly, Holden agrees.
Meanwhile, the UN is sending an expedition to the Ring with scientists, artists, philosophers, and clergy aboard. One of the clergy is a Russian woman named Anna. She left her fairly small congregation in the Belt to be part of the expedition--and left her wife and daughter behind. She makes friends with a rich woman named Tilly who basically coerced her way on board.
On another ship, Clarissa Mao is working as a technician by the name of Melba. She's embarked on an elaborate plan to destroy James Holden, the first pieces being to get Holden to go to the Ring. Now she's taken the technician job so she can plant a bomb aboard the ship. She almost gets away with it when a supervisor starts nosing around, so she has to kill him and stuff his body in a case or something. Then she takes a transfer to the ship Anna is on, where she's nearly recognized by Tilly, who rubbed elbows with Clarissa's family.
With Earth and Mars sending ships, Fred Johnson of the OPA dispatches the Behemoth, a former "generation ship" or "colony ship," that was supposed to carry a bunch of Mormons to another star system over like 100 years, but now it's fitted out with a shitload of weapons that will either blow up other ships or blow up the Behemoth with how hot-wired it all is. Carlos "Bull" Baca was supposed to be the XO of the ship but when people complain about a guy originally from Earth being the XO, he's demoted to security chief. And promptly throws a drug smuggler out an airlock.
When all the ships get to the Ring--including the Rocinante--Clarissa finally puts her plan into motion. She blows up the ship she was on and then a confederate on the Roci tampers with the communications so it starts playing a bogus message from Holden saying he's claiming the Ring for the OPA. The crew tries to stop the message, but they can't. On the Behemoth, Bull convinces the captain they need to fire on the Roci first to convince everyone they aren't working together. They finally do but the Roci escapes by flying into the Ring.
Ships from Mars and Earth follow, along with the Behemoth. What they find is a bubble of null space inhabited by a spherical alien station. It soon becomes known as "the slow zone" because there's a "speed limit" ships have to follow or they're dragged towards the alien station.
In part at the Miller ghost's behest, Holden takes a really long spacewalk over to the station to try to shut the slow zone down, but he's interrupted by some Martian Marines, who take him to one of the Martian ships.
But when someone opens fire, the station defenses lower the "speed limit" even further, which causes massive damage on all the ships and without being able to go much faster than the average baseball fastball, none of the ships have any gravity. Eventually Bull offers up the idea to bring everyone over to the Behemoth because it can spin "the drum" or a thing on the outside of the ship that when spun creates minimal gravity on the ship. It's not as good as Earth gravity but it's better than nothing. The captain, a guy named Ashford, doesn't want to do it so his XO leads a mutiny and throws him in the bring. Then to get the Martians to agree, they supercharge their communications laser to make a crude weapon.
Things are recovering until Ashford breaks out and launches a counter-mutiny. He wants to use the laser weapon to destroy the Ring and thus keeping anyone else from ever getting stuck there again. Then there's a counter-counter-mutiny with the XO, Bull, Holden, and his crew all trying to take engineering and the bridge. While the attack is underway, Anna uses Monica Stewart's equipment to give an inspirational speech to try to encourage people to stop the madness. In the end Clarissa helps to stop Ashford, joining forces with Holden. Miller's ghost is able to shut off the alien defenses to raise the speed limit so the ships can all escape. And it also opens wormholes to 1300 other systems! So humanity is no longer stuck in the Solar System. Which can be bad or good. As a reward, Anna convinces Tilly to buy the Roci from the Martian government and then sign it over to Holden to end their legal troubles. The Behemoth stays in The Ring, becoming "Medina Station," sort of like Deep Space Nine as the transit point to the wormholes.
Like the TV series, I kind of left a lot of stuff out. Maybe because they knew they were being cancelled on Syfy, they compressed the third book into only 6 episodes. So it was more of a mini-series. They basically lop off the first quarter of the book, pretty much starting with everyone at the Ring. They also sort of combine some characters and have different characters in other roles. For instance they have Naomi on the Behemoth as the engineer since they never introduced the OPA mechanic Sam Rosenberg from the previous books. Which is too bad because Sam is a cute redhead but then she's also shot by Ashford in the book, so maybe it was better to just not exist. The character of Bull is largely played by Fred Johnson's assistant Drummer, who's also the ship XO--unlike in the book. It turns out not to be all that bad. Ashford is played by veteran actor David Staitharn (a Syfy series alum from Alphas) and is less crazy and evil than the book version. He sort of picks up the rest of Bull's character that Drummer didn't inhabit.
I liked the third book, but turns out there was a lot of bloat that could be cut.
***
Now that the Ring is open to 1300 systems, there's a rush to find out what's there and to exploit it. But a group of refugees from Ganymede beat everyone to a planet they call Ilus. They set up a village and start mining Lithium, a rare material in the Solar System but plentiful on the planet.
Naturally the governments want a piece of the pie. The UN gives the charter for Ilus--which they call New Terra--to a company called RCE. When the settlers hear about this, some decide to give them a warm welcome by blowing up the landing platform. The plan was to blow it up before anyone got close but as they're rigging it, a shuttle is on its way down. One of the guys named Basia wants to stop the explosion, but the others veto him--with force.
A scientist named Elvi Okoye is on the shuttle when the platform explodes. She manages to survive, as do some others, including the thuggish head of security, Murtry. Elvi and some of the others are tended to by Basia's wife, the colony's doctor.
With things getting heated between the settlers and RCE personnel, Avisarala sends Holden and the Rocinante to go and negotiate a settlement. And Miller's ghost uses the opportunity to start experimenting with the alien technology on the planet. As he calls it, he's just a monkey flipping switches to see what works.
While Naomi and Alex stay with the Roci in orbit, Holden and Amos stay down with the colony. But things go from bad to worse when Murtry kills a colonist. To calm things down, Holden "arrests" Basia and has him sent up to the Roci, where he basically is a member of the crew. Then it gets worse when something on the far side of the planet explodes, sending a shockwave and tsunami across the planet. Holden leads everyone to an alien structure, figuring something that has lasted millions of years is probably pretty sturdy.
They survive the shockwave and tsunami, but the colony is pretty well destroyed. And there are new problems. For one thing, everyone is going blind thanks to some alien bacteria or whatever. And death slugs! They're slugs that excrete something to move around that paralyzes humans completely, killing them almost instantly.
Within days everyone is blind--except Holden. He's then working around-the-clock to help everyone survive. In space the situation is also deteriorating as some alien device has turned off the fusion reactors of the ships so they have to use their back-up batteries, which will eventually run out. The ship the settlers took is in worse shape than the RCE ship or the Roci because it's older and was lower, to the point its orbit will decay until the ship burns up in a few days. Basia's daughter is on the ship, but there's little he can do to help.
Eventually Elvi realizes that Holden is immune because of drugs he takes to prevent cancer after the radiation he was exposed to on Eros Station--see Book 1. They're able then to cure everyone. Miller's ghost shows up then to tell Holden he needs to take some old alien transport deep into the planet. Murtry follows him and Elvi and Amos follow him.
Meanwhile, in space, Basia's daughter and Naomi figure out how the Roci can tow the older ship to a higher orbit to buy it more time. It's a very tricky maneuver that's nearly sabotaged by some people on the RCE ship, until the head of security on that ship helps to stop them.
Using an old robot, Miller's ghost is able to get Holden to something in the planet that's supposed to turn off all the alien shit. But Murtry interrupts them and so it winds up being Elvi who helps to turn the stuff off. Murtry is incapacitated, though Holden refuses to kill him. With the alien stuff off, the settlers and RCE people agree to work together to rebuild while some like Elvi are more than happy to go back to Earth. All the fusion drives start working in orbit so they can go home. Hooray!
The fourth season premiered on Amazon last fall and while it was 10 episodes it still cut out a lot from the book. It dropped the character of Havelock, the security guy on the RCE ship, entirely, which is ironic since Havelock was in Season 1 as Miller's young partner on Ceres. Maybe they couldn't get the same actor back. They also gave most of Basia's role to his wife and changed his name to Jacob or something. Again it's ironic as someone named Basia appeared in Season 2 or 3 on Ganymede, but maybe they couldn't get that guy back either. They did get Burn Gorman as Murtry, though I don't really see him as the murdering thug type; I mean some of his most visible roles were as one of the scientists in Pacific Rim and Ben Mendelsohn's henchman in The Dark Knight Rises. They should have got some big wrestler-type for the role. I'm just saying.
One thing I didn't like was they waited until halfway through the season to flash back to the sabotage of the landing platform. That was supposed to be a dramatic scene, but moving it to the middle instead of at the beginning took a lot of the drama out of it.
Really almost all the stuff in space was cut from the book except for having to save the colonist's ship from burning up. Meanwhile they added stuff from the novellas about Bobbie Draper joining a group of arms dealers on Mars and Avisarala running for Secretary General of Earth. Meanwhile, Drummer and Ashford attempt to apprehend a Belter terrorist named Marcos Innaros. This all isn't really important to the 4th book but it sets up books 5 and 6, which presumably would be seasons 5 and 6 of the TV series, when the shit really hits the fan. That's definitely something to look forward to as there's basically a civil war in the Solar System. Woo, war!
Overall the series sticks closer to the books than Game of Thrones probably did, but they obviously had to cut stuff out. Not a lot of it turned out to be all that important. Some of the creative decisions I didn't really agree with, especially because the books are written pretty cinematically to start with, so some of the changes seemed needless, like the placement of the landing platform sabotage or Mei's kidnapping. Others I could understand because of time and financial constraints.
I would say I like the books better, though they're more expensive and take more time than watching the series on Amazon Prime. I'm just saying. If you got the time and money--or they have the books at your library--then go for it and expand your universe.
One problem for me in comparing books and the TV show is that I read the first book like 3 1/2 years ago so it's not really fresh in my mind. But I can say that I think the TV show has the gist of the book. There are probably minor details that differ, but overall it's a good representation.
It starts off with Julie Mao on an abandoned ship. We don't really know how she got there or why, but we know everyone else is dead.
The book alternates two POVs: James Holden and Detective Miller. The later books use a lot more POVs but looking up the first book it only uses two through the main part of the book plus Julie's for the Prologue and Fred Johnson's for the epilogue.
Holden is on the ice hauler Canterbury and gets a promotion to XO when the previous one starts going mental. It's not really a promotion that he wants, but there's not much he can do about it. The ship picks up a distress call from the ship Julie Mao was on. The captain doesn't want to waste time investigating, so he tells the crew to ignore it. Holden seems OK with this, but when he's alone on the bridge, he logs the call so that the ship has to divert to investigate.
The captain then sends Holden out on a shuttle to board the ship. He takes along the core group of Naomi Nagata, Alex Kamal, and Amos Burton and some redshirt. They go aboard the ship and there's no sign of Julie--or really anyone else.
As they're investigating, the Canterbury comes under attack from a stealth warship. The ship is hit with nuclear missiles and destroyed, as is the derelict ship. Holden and the others barely manage to escape the destruction of both ships in their shuttle. The problem for Holden and company is the shuttle they were on doesn't have the engines, air, water, or other facilities for a long journey. The radio is also damaged, so Holden and Naomi go outside to fix that.
They manage to send a call for help that draws unwelcome attention: a Martian warship. Holden figures the Martian Navy is going to quietly disappear them so he broadcasts a message to the whole system saying the stealth ship belonged to Mars. He and the crew are taken on the ship and interrogated when the stealth ship shows up to attack it, proving it wasn't actually a Martian ship.
Holden and his crew manage to get to a hangar and aboard a gunship. A wounded Martian soldier is able to give them control of it before he dies. Holden and company escape the Martian ship's destruction. But now what?
Meanwhile, Detective Miller is working on Ceres Station when he's given the job of locating Julie Mao. But like in a lot of detective stories, when he starts getting too close to things he's not supposed to know--like what Julie was doing on that ship at the beginning--he's taken off the case. But he's able to find a key piece of evidence in a computer drive stored in a mechanical hamster or something. (That might be one of those details that differs in the book slightly--I don't really know.)
Holden and his crew name their "salvaged" gunship the Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse and then receive an invitation from Fred Johnson to come to Tycho Station. Not seeing any alternative except to let Mars or Earth arrest them, they decide to go there.
And it just happens that Miller is going there too! Miller meets Holden and they all wind up going to Eros Station. In a seedy motel on the station they find Julie Mao--what's left of her. She's been infected with an alien thing called the "protomolecule." Holden and Miller look around the station and find more infected people and are dosed with hard radiation when some bodies they're examining are vaporized.
They manage to get back to the Roci and treated for radiation poisoning--something they'll have to be treated for the rest of their lives. They head back to Tycho Station while Eros is actually starting to move! It's flying like it's a ship or something instead of a big chunk of rock. Its course puts it on track for Earth, so Earth launches a bunch of missiles--except the big space rock can of course avoid those.
Holden and company realize they have to reboard Eros and try to plant some explosives. But things don't go as they plan and Miller winds up stranded on the station with Julie Mao, who's bonded with the protomolecule. He convinces her to steer away from Earth--to Venus. So what's left of Eros crashes there.
Holden and his crew are no longer actively being sought by Martian or UN officials. And they still have their "salvaged" ship to do whatever they want. And Fred Johnson managed to capture all those nuclear missiles Earth fired that missed Eros. Sweet.
That's pretty much the TV version. The weird thing to me is the story takes not only first 10 episodes of season 1 but also about 6 episodes of season 2. You have to wonder why they didn't just do the first book in the first season because it makes it a little odd when the story has to suddenly shift gears to the next installment.
***
Book 2 starts with a little girl named Mei Ming being pulled out of her nursery school or kindergarten on Ganymede by a Dr. Strickland. Except we soon learn her father Prax, a botanist on the station, knew nothing about this and so it amounts to a kidnapping.
Meanwhile, Gunnery Sergeant Roberta "Bobbie" Draper of the Martian Marine Corps is on patrol with her squad on the surface of Ganymede. She suddenly sees a group of UN Marines running towards them and at first thinks it's an attack. But then she sees a creature not wearing a suit of any kind following them. The creature (which I usually think of as sort of like the xenomorph from the Alien movies though in the TV show it's more human looking, which would probably make sense) kills the UN Marines and then Bobbie's squad too. It nearly kills her before it suddenly stops.
The attack on the surface has the UN and Martian ships overhead firing at each other, destroying big mirrors that help keep Ganymede operating. Much of the colony is destroyed and many people are injured. Prax is frantically searching the station for Mei, but he can't find her. He visits her classroom, where the teacher says she went off with Strickland, but there's no sign of Strickland anywhere.
Out in space, Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are intercepting pirates at the behest of the OPA, but Holden doesn't really enjoy playing mercenary. He and Fred Johnson have an argument and Holden quits. Instead they go to take relief supplies to Ganymede.
Meanwhile, Bobbie wakes up on a ship to find no one has seen the "monster" except for her. Nor does anyone seem interested in finding it either. In the book she's able to retrieve gun camera footage from her armor, but still no one is really interested in it. The Martians don't want to risk destroying the fragile peace they have with Earth.
Prax is still looking for his daughter weeks later when the station is going to Hell. There's a "cascade" happening where the plants that help to create and purify the air are dying off because of a lack of nutrients. Between that and a lack of food, things are going to get real desperate, real quick.
Holden and company show up and they meet Prax, who tells them his story. Holden and Amos go with Prax to a computer hacker who they coerce into giving them an idea of where Strickland might be--in the old lower levels of the moon. Holden, Amos, and some mercenaries go down there to fight with some other mercenaries, where they find the body of a little boy in Mei's class and signs that someone has been experimenting with the "protomolecule" from the first book, which freaks Holden out to the point he basically wants to leave and destroy the whole moon.
Meanwhile, Bobbie and a Martian contingent meet with Chrisjen Avisarala and a UN contingent. Bobbie blurts out her story about the monster but again no one seems to believe her--except Avisarala. The Martians are pissed at her for talking about the monster and are going to send her home, but instead she defects to the UN and starts to work for Avisarala.
On Ganymede, things are going bad and Holden, Prax, and the others barely make it out alive. After they take off, they find out a protomolecule monster is in the cargo hold! They manage to kill it by luring it outside the ship with some radiation and then burn it up with the engines. But it left a little surprise for them--a bomb! It damages the ship but doesn't destroy it.
Then, with Holden's encouragement, Prax tells his story over a system-wide communication and it turns into like a GoFundMe as people send him money, encouragement, and tips. At least until someone gets to his ex-wife to start accusing him of abusing her and Mei; then he starts getting death threats.
Meanwhile, Bobbie has a hard time adjusting to life on Earth with Avisarala. She discovers that Avisarala's aide is spying on his boss and gets him fired. But eventually some other higher ups get Avisarala and Bobbie banished to a yacht owned by Jules-Pierre Mao that's supposed to take them to Ganymede. Really it's just to keep them out of the way.
Bobbie breaks them out to Julie Mao's old racing ship the Razorback. They link up with Holden and compare notes. Then they all head to Io, but they're followed by ships from Earth and Mars. They convince the Martians to help them against the Earth ships and then land on Io. But the bad guys fire off a bunch of missiles loaded with protomolecule monsters. One of them hits a Martian ship and Holden goes aboard to try to stop it. Meanwhile Bobbie leads the attack on Io and kills a monster while Prax finds his daughter is unharmed.
It turns out Jules Pierre Mao was weaponizing the protomolecule by binding it to kids who had an immune system deficiency. Mao is arrested and put in prison. Prax and his daughter go back to Ganymede to help it rebuild. Holden and company go back to being an independent ship for hire. And at least in the books Bobbie goes back to Mars as a civilian. The missiles with protomolecule soldiers on them are blown up before they can do any damage.
Everything seems good--until something rises from Venus. It flies out past Uranus--insert joke--and opens a mysterious Ring. But what is it? You'll have to find out.
That's pretty much the book description. The TV version covers half of season 2 and half of season 3 for pretty much 1 season total but again it's weird to have it stretched over two seasons. The TV version gets most of the gist. I didn't think the attack with Bobbie at the beginning was all that well done and I'm not sure why they had Prax be taken off Ganymede instead of staying on the station. Avisarala and Bobbie's journey from Earth is more streamlined, which is probably better.
What the TV season probably does better than the book is it involves Jules Pierre Mao more. He develops a soft spot for Mei, probably because his daughter Julie died in the first season. But that doesn't mean he isn't willing to sacrifice her and the other kids.
***
The third book takes place like 6 months or more later. "The Ring" is out there in deep space and some ships from Earth and Mars have gone out there to study it, but no one really knows what it is. Then a would-be daredevil slingshots his little ship around Saturn, into the Ring--and doesn't come back out.
That gets even more people interested in what's going on with The Ring. Holden and Rocinante are not interested in going, despite that Holden has been seeing a "ghost" of Detective Miller telling him that he needs to go there. Instead, Holden is looking to take a shady-seeming job to the other side of the system, but that falls apart when Martian officials demand the immediate return of the Rocinante. The only way to get out of it is to take an important journalist named Monica Stewart to the Ring so she can do stories on it. Reluctantly, Holden agrees.
Meanwhile, the UN is sending an expedition to the Ring with scientists, artists, philosophers, and clergy aboard. One of the clergy is a Russian woman named Anna. She left her fairly small congregation in the Belt to be part of the expedition--and left her wife and daughter behind. She makes friends with a rich woman named Tilly who basically coerced her way on board.
On another ship, Clarissa Mao is working as a technician by the name of Melba. She's embarked on an elaborate plan to destroy James Holden, the first pieces being to get Holden to go to the Ring. Now she's taken the technician job so she can plant a bomb aboard the ship. She almost gets away with it when a supervisor starts nosing around, so she has to kill him and stuff his body in a case or something. Then she takes a transfer to the ship Anna is on, where she's nearly recognized by Tilly, who rubbed elbows with Clarissa's family.
With Earth and Mars sending ships, Fred Johnson of the OPA dispatches the Behemoth, a former "generation ship" or "colony ship," that was supposed to carry a bunch of Mormons to another star system over like 100 years, but now it's fitted out with a shitload of weapons that will either blow up other ships or blow up the Behemoth with how hot-wired it all is. Carlos "Bull" Baca was supposed to be the XO of the ship but when people complain about a guy originally from Earth being the XO, he's demoted to security chief. And promptly throws a drug smuggler out an airlock.
When all the ships get to the Ring--including the Rocinante--Clarissa finally puts her plan into motion. She blows up the ship she was on and then a confederate on the Roci tampers with the communications so it starts playing a bogus message from Holden saying he's claiming the Ring for the OPA. The crew tries to stop the message, but they can't. On the Behemoth, Bull convinces the captain they need to fire on the Roci first to convince everyone they aren't working together. They finally do but the Roci escapes by flying into the Ring.
Ships from Mars and Earth follow, along with the Behemoth. What they find is a bubble of null space inhabited by a spherical alien station. It soon becomes known as "the slow zone" because there's a "speed limit" ships have to follow or they're dragged towards the alien station.
In part at the Miller ghost's behest, Holden takes a really long spacewalk over to the station to try to shut the slow zone down, but he's interrupted by some Martian Marines, who take him to one of the Martian ships.
But when someone opens fire, the station defenses lower the "speed limit" even further, which causes massive damage on all the ships and without being able to go much faster than the average baseball fastball, none of the ships have any gravity. Eventually Bull offers up the idea to bring everyone over to the Behemoth because it can spin "the drum" or a thing on the outside of the ship that when spun creates minimal gravity on the ship. It's not as good as Earth gravity but it's better than nothing. The captain, a guy named Ashford, doesn't want to do it so his XO leads a mutiny and throws him in the bring. Then to get the Martians to agree, they supercharge their communications laser to make a crude weapon.
Things are recovering until Ashford breaks out and launches a counter-mutiny. He wants to use the laser weapon to destroy the Ring and thus keeping anyone else from ever getting stuck there again. Then there's a counter-counter-mutiny with the XO, Bull, Holden, and his crew all trying to take engineering and the bridge. While the attack is underway, Anna uses Monica Stewart's equipment to give an inspirational speech to try to encourage people to stop the madness. In the end Clarissa helps to stop Ashford, joining forces with Holden. Miller's ghost is able to shut off the alien defenses to raise the speed limit so the ships can all escape. And it also opens wormholes to 1300 other systems! So humanity is no longer stuck in the Solar System. Which can be bad or good. As a reward, Anna convinces Tilly to buy the Roci from the Martian government and then sign it over to Holden to end their legal troubles. The Behemoth stays in The Ring, becoming "Medina Station," sort of like Deep Space Nine as the transit point to the wormholes.
Like the TV series, I kind of left a lot of stuff out. Maybe because they knew they were being cancelled on Syfy, they compressed the third book into only 6 episodes. So it was more of a mini-series. They basically lop off the first quarter of the book, pretty much starting with everyone at the Ring. They also sort of combine some characters and have different characters in other roles. For instance they have Naomi on the Behemoth as the engineer since they never introduced the OPA mechanic Sam Rosenberg from the previous books. Which is too bad because Sam is a cute redhead but then she's also shot by Ashford in the book, so maybe it was better to just not exist. The character of Bull is largely played by Fred Johnson's assistant Drummer, who's also the ship XO--unlike in the book. It turns out not to be all that bad. Ashford is played by veteran actor David Staitharn (a Syfy series alum from Alphas) and is less crazy and evil than the book version. He sort of picks up the rest of Bull's character that Drummer didn't inhabit.
I liked the third book, but turns out there was a lot of bloat that could be cut.
***
Now that the Ring is open to 1300 systems, there's a rush to find out what's there and to exploit it. But a group of refugees from Ganymede beat everyone to a planet they call Ilus. They set up a village and start mining Lithium, a rare material in the Solar System but plentiful on the planet.
Naturally the governments want a piece of the pie. The UN gives the charter for Ilus--which they call New Terra--to a company called RCE. When the settlers hear about this, some decide to give them a warm welcome by blowing up the landing platform. The plan was to blow it up before anyone got close but as they're rigging it, a shuttle is on its way down. One of the guys named Basia wants to stop the explosion, but the others veto him--with force.
A scientist named Elvi Okoye is on the shuttle when the platform explodes. She manages to survive, as do some others, including the thuggish head of security, Murtry. Elvi and some of the others are tended to by Basia's wife, the colony's doctor.
With things getting heated between the settlers and RCE personnel, Avisarala sends Holden and the Rocinante to go and negotiate a settlement. And Miller's ghost uses the opportunity to start experimenting with the alien technology on the planet. As he calls it, he's just a monkey flipping switches to see what works.
While Naomi and Alex stay with the Roci in orbit, Holden and Amos stay down with the colony. But things go from bad to worse when Murtry kills a colonist. To calm things down, Holden "arrests" Basia and has him sent up to the Roci, where he basically is a member of the crew. Then it gets worse when something on the far side of the planet explodes, sending a shockwave and tsunami across the planet. Holden leads everyone to an alien structure, figuring something that has lasted millions of years is probably pretty sturdy.
They survive the shockwave and tsunami, but the colony is pretty well destroyed. And there are new problems. For one thing, everyone is going blind thanks to some alien bacteria or whatever. And death slugs! They're slugs that excrete something to move around that paralyzes humans completely, killing them almost instantly.
Within days everyone is blind--except Holden. He's then working around-the-clock to help everyone survive. In space the situation is also deteriorating as some alien device has turned off the fusion reactors of the ships so they have to use their back-up batteries, which will eventually run out. The ship the settlers took is in worse shape than the RCE ship or the Roci because it's older and was lower, to the point its orbit will decay until the ship burns up in a few days. Basia's daughter is on the ship, but there's little he can do to help.
Eventually Elvi realizes that Holden is immune because of drugs he takes to prevent cancer after the radiation he was exposed to on Eros Station--see Book 1. They're able then to cure everyone. Miller's ghost shows up then to tell Holden he needs to take some old alien transport deep into the planet. Murtry follows him and Elvi and Amos follow him.
Meanwhile, in space, Basia's daughter and Naomi figure out how the Roci can tow the older ship to a higher orbit to buy it more time. It's a very tricky maneuver that's nearly sabotaged by some people on the RCE ship, until the head of security on that ship helps to stop them.
Using an old robot, Miller's ghost is able to get Holden to something in the planet that's supposed to turn off all the alien shit. But Murtry interrupts them and so it winds up being Elvi who helps to turn the stuff off. Murtry is incapacitated, though Holden refuses to kill him. With the alien stuff off, the settlers and RCE people agree to work together to rebuild while some like Elvi are more than happy to go back to Earth. All the fusion drives start working in orbit so they can go home. Hooray!
The fourth season premiered on Amazon last fall and while it was 10 episodes it still cut out a lot from the book. It dropped the character of Havelock, the security guy on the RCE ship, entirely, which is ironic since Havelock was in Season 1 as Miller's young partner on Ceres. Maybe they couldn't get the same actor back. They also gave most of Basia's role to his wife and changed his name to Jacob or something. Again it's ironic as someone named Basia appeared in Season 2 or 3 on Ganymede, but maybe they couldn't get that guy back either. They did get Burn Gorman as Murtry, though I don't really see him as the murdering thug type; I mean some of his most visible roles were as one of the scientists in Pacific Rim and Ben Mendelsohn's henchman in The Dark Knight Rises. They should have got some big wrestler-type for the role. I'm just saying.
One thing I didn't like was they waited until halfway through the season to flash back to the sabotage of the landing platform. That was supposed to be a dramatic scene, but moving it to the middle instead of at the beginning took a lot of the drama out of it.
Really almost all the stuff in space was cut from the book except for having to save the colonist's ship from burning up. Meanwhile they added stuff from the novellas about Bobbie Draper joining a group of arms dealers on Mars and Avisarala running for Secretary General of Earth. Meanwhile, Drummer and Ashford attempt to apprehend a Belter terrorist named Marcos Innaros. This all isn't really important to the 4th book but it sets up books 5 and 6, which presumably would be seasons 5 and 6 of the TV series, when the shit really hits the fan. That's definitely something to look forward to as there's basically a civil war in the Solar System. Woo, war!
Overall the series sticks closer to the books than Game of Thrones probably did, but they obviously had to cut stuff out. Not a lot of it turned out to be all that important. Some of the creative decisions I didn't really agree with, especially because the books are written pretty cinematically to start with, so some of the changes seemed needless, like the placement of the landing platform sabotage or Mei's kidnapping. Others I could understand because of time and financial constraints.
I would say I like the books better, though they're more expensive and take more time than watching the series on Amazon Prime. I'm just saying. If you got the time and money--or they have the books at your library--then go for it and expand your universe.
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Page to Screen: The Expanse, Part 1
First, a little prologue. Back in October 2016 I read the first book of James SA Corey's series The Expanse. I liked the first book and wanted to read the others, but they were like $10 a book on Kindle. I put them on my Wishlist and figured at some point they'd be on sale, right? Right? A few more times the first book was on sale, but it wasn't until Amazon premiered the 4th season of the TV series that the other books went on sale. So it was a full 3 years before I bought the others. And by then it was the holidays so I didn't actually start reading them until 2020. At this point I'm almost done with the 8 novels.
I made a conscious decision not to watch the TV show until I had read the books. (Plus I didn't have Syfy to watch it before it was on Amazon Prime anyway.) Or at least as many books as the series covered--which is up to 4 so far. Once I got through the fifth book in late February, I finally started to binge the series on Amazon.
I'm going to take a somewhat organized approach to this. Part 1 here is going to give you the background on the characters and factions. Then in Part 2 on Friday I'll get into the story from the 4 seasons of the TV show vs 4 novels. Some of the story is obviously going to bleed into this, but probably not too much.
Background:
It's the 23rd Century, but it's not like the classic Star Trek series/movies. Mankind has left Earth in spaceships, but is still unable to break the speed of light and thus remains rooted to the Solar System. They also don't have niceties like artificial gravity, transporters, or food replicators.
Factions:
United Nations (Earth)
So apparently the UN went from a largely impotent body here in the early 21st Century to a government of over 30 billion on Earth and Luna, ie the moon.
Something I said in a post a few years ago (and that has been said in other sci-fi novels like Player Piano, Make Room, and so on) is that a huge population and advances in technology have made for few job opportunities on Earth. Most people live on "Basic" or a welfare-type program where they're provided food, water, and housing but not work. Naturally then most people hang around watching the equivalent of TV or getting up to no good. A lot of people end up waiting for decades on a waiting list for jobs or training.
Earth has a large but old fleet of ships and also at the beginning of the first novel at least owns Ceres Station in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Saturn.
Martian Congressional Republic (Mars)
Mars was for a while a colony of Earth, but it eventually broke away. Befitting its name, Mars is largely a military colony with an advanced navy and Marines. They've been working on terraforming the planet for centuries but still most people have to live underground. Because of this, when Martians come to Earth they have to wear sunglasses and take special drugs to handle the higher gravity. The wide open spaces can also be disconcerting for them.
The Belt
To provide for all these places and people, companies needed to access the raw materials from the asteroid belts between Mars & Jupiter and Jupiter & Saturn, as well as moons like Titan and Ganymede. This became a huge industry and thus permanent settlements sprang up.
At the point of when the first novel begins, people have been living out in deep space so long that whole generations have never set foot on Earth. This has affected their physiology, so that "Belters" are taller and skinnier with more bulbous head because they haven't ever really been exposed to real gravity. In the books then it's easy to tell most Belters from "Inners" or people from Earth, Luna, or Mars because they have a different shape. But mostly for financial reasons, this isn't really true in the TV show except for one case early on. To accurately depict the Belters they would have had to have all the actors wear motion capture suits and replace them with CGI or else it would involve a lot of time-consuming and expensive makeup. Thus on TV the Belters don't look that much different except a lot of them have more tattoos than Inners.
The Belters don't have a central government, but rather have a bunch of different factions like gangs. The primary one is the OPA (which always makes me think of that Greek exclamation, "Opa!") that means Outer Planets Alliance or something like that. At the start it's more of a terrorist organization. It's kind of like the PLO in the 70s/80s if you're old enough to remember that.
The main OPA station is Tycho Station, which is a space station rather than an asteroid, moon, or planet. There's also Ceres Station that I already mentioned and Eros Station.
Those are pretty much the important locations through the first two books. Then everything changes with the opening of "the Ring," essentially a wormhole into a pocket of null space that opens wormholes to over 1300 other systems. Ilus, also called New Terra, is in one such system and while the gravity and such are tolerable for humans, it has a myriad of dangers that we'll discuss later.
Characters
James Holden: Holden has a fairly interesting conception in that 8 people donated their genetic materials. The resulting fertilized egg was put into one woman to give birth to him. The reason is that these 8 people have a farm in Montana and through some legal thing if they had a kid they could keep the land--or at least they hoped so. When he's 18, Holden joins the UN Navy, but he's dishonorably discharged when he disagrees with a superior officer and punches him.
Holden then signs up with an ice hauler called the Canterbury. He mostly sleeps with women and tries to avoid much real responsibility. But in one of those Greek things, those who try to avoid Fate will wind up finding it anyway. Holden inadvertently starts a war between Earth and Mars, but also helps to stop an alien threat from destroying Earth. Then he helps to stop another alien threat. Then he opens The Ring and later helps the settlers on Ilus to survive. The guy who didn't really want responsibility becomes the guy who's somehow involved in every significant event. A line in the sixth book pretty much sums him up: I keep thinking the assholes are outliers. He believes in humanity even when most experience should tell him not to.
In the TV show, Holden is played by Steven Strait, who's also listed as a producer, which is a good way to get a little extra money. He doesn't necessarily look like Holden as described in the books as his hair and eyes are too dark, but otherwise he's OK. But he often has this squinty look that sort of bugs me. I'm just saying.
Naomi Nagata: Naomi is a Belter who's a gifted engineer, but she has a mysterious past that isn't really detailed much in the books until the fifth one. But a lot of it is detailed in the TV show. Basically she met up with this guy named Marcos Inaros when she was young and he had sort of a mentally abusive hold on her, convincing her to do things she didn't want to do, like write a code that would cause a ship's fusion reactor to blow up. This made her inadvertently responsible for killing a bunch of people on a freighter. After that she left Marcos, but he kept her infant son Filip.
She bounced around and wound up on the Canterbury to help keep it flying. She and Holden didn't really have anything going until after the Canterbury was destroyed. Then they hooked up and mostly stayed together ever since.
In the show she's played by Dominique Tipper and like all the Belters on the show doesn't really look quite how the book describes. But also the book frequently talks about her hiding behind her hair, but on the TV show her hair is too short for that. Not that it matters all that much.
Alex Kamal: For over 20 years Alex has been piloting ships, first with the Martian Navy and then ships like the Canterbury. With his "Mariner Valley drawl" that's kind of like old-fashioned cowboy talk, he tries to project an air of cool and calm all the time. But of course he's hiding some pain under the surface. He had a wife that wanted him to settle down, but he couldn't give up flying so they got a divorce.
In the TV show Alex has an ex-wife and a son back on Mars. It's not until the 7th book that he has a son--and second ex-wife. Alex is played by Cas Anvar, whom you might have seen in small roles in movies like Transformers 2, Argo, and Punisher War Zone or at least heard in Halo 4, Archer, or Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In the books he's supposed to be black and not have much hair, but whatever.
Amos Burton: Amos is the last man standing in any situation. He grew up in Baltimore, where he ran with some tough customers. After making his way to the stars in a not-quite-legal way, he eventually wound up as a mechanic on the Canterbury, where he sort of adopted Naomi as his conscience.
The thing about Amos is that he really has no conscience of his own. Whether he's a sociopath, psychopath, some kind of autistic or whatever, he has no compunctions about beating or killing whoever needs beaten or killed. It's funny in the 3rd season of the TV show where he tells a reporter, "You're trying to make me feel guilty about getting that guy killed, but I won't. Ever." And that's probably true. He makes a good team with Holden, Naomi, and Alex because he'll do what they can't to remove obstacles without a thought or any mental anguish after.
In the TV show he's played by Wes Chatham, whom you might have seen in the Hunger Games movies--or not. He has more hair than Amos does in the books and maybe his voice isn't as deep as I'd imagine Amos's, but I love how he deadpans threats to people. I'm going to kill you--it's just a fact, like the sky is blue or water is wet.
Detective Miller: Miller is a cop of Ceres Station who's been working that beat for a while, long enough to become world-weary. Mostly to keep him out of the way, his boss assigns him to find Julie Mao, the daughter of rich industrialist Jules Pierre Mao. Miller's investigation leads him to falling in love with Julie, even though they've never met. He eventually does meet her on Eros Station, and the two of them "die" on Venus.
But Miller reappears at the end of the second book as sort of a ghost. A ghost created by an alien intelligence as "the Investigator" to search for its lost creators. Holden is the only one who can see the ghost Miller, which leads to some trouble at times. Miller helps Holden open up the Ring gates, not really for altruistic reasons. While he causes alien machines on Ilus to become active, in the end he helps Holden to stop those machines. And in exchange, he's finally put to rest.
In the TV series Miller is played by Thomas Jane of that 2003 Punisher movie and also the TV series Hung and some other stuff. I don't think he's necessarily old enough for Miller and his hair looks stupid most of the time, but whatever.
Fred Johnson: A former colonel in the United Nations, Fred gained the nickname "the Butcher of Anderson Station" when his unit killed a bunch of miners on Anderson Station. But it turned out the miners were trying to surrender, so Fred left the military. He began to work for Belters instead of killing them and became a big wig in the OPA, though a lot of factions refuse to trust him because of his Earth ties. When Holden and company are looking for a safe port, Fred lets them come to Tycho Station. Later Holden and crew do some work for Fred to deal with pirates and such. Naomi also gives him a sample of alien protomolecule as sort of a deterrent against Earth and Mars.
In the TV series he mostly shows up the first 1 1/2 seasons and then doesn't really appear much more until season 4 and then only for like an episode. He appears slightly more in the books, though not a ton more until the 5th and 6th books.
I would have really loved it in the books if just once they had written, "Right," said Fred. Like that 90s one hit wonder artist. And then Fred could have said, "I'm too sexy for my..."
Chrisjen Avisarala: For years she was the power behind the throne at the United Nations as an undersecretary. A shrewd political player who curses worse than a sailor, she's not someone to trifle with. Though like a superhero she has a more mild-mannered secret identity as a wife to a college professor, mother, and grandmother.
Unfortunately for her, some of her political enemies and allies are destroyed and she's eventually thrust into the limelight as the Secretary General. That's really the worst thing for her as she had never even had to win an election before.
She doesn't really show up until the second book but she's in the TV show right from the start. It was probably just easier that way for them.
Roberta "Bobbie" Draper: A Gunnery Sergeant in the Martian Marines, Bobbie and her squad are attacked by an alien-human hybrid creature on the moon of Ganymede. But no one wants to believe Bobbie even when there's gun camera footage of it, as happens in the book. She ends up defecting from Mars to Earth to work for Avisarala to find out what's going on on Ganymede.
In the books she goes back to Mars as a civilian once the alien threat on Ganymede and Io is stopped while on the TV show she remains in the Marines to be sent to the Ring in the third season. Then she attacks some of her fellow Marines to help Holden and company and is drummed out of the Marines. She's not really in the third or fourth books but in the fourth season of the TV show she gets mixed up with some criminals on Mars who are smuggling military hardware to Belters. According to Michael Offutt, this is taken from one of the novellas that I haven't read.
Julie Mao: She's not really much in the book or TV show but she is a critical character. The black sheep daughter of Jules Pierre Mao, she left Earth to go out to the Belt to help the downtrodden Belters. This led her to uncover a conspiracy by a company called Protogen to use an alien substance called the "protomolecule" on people. She's one of the first infected by it and becomes a focal point for the protomolecule. A ship she was on sends out the distress call that lured Holden and the Canterbury crew into a trap as well. Her racing ship the Razorback also saves Avisarala and Bobbie later on.
Clarissa Mao: Julie's sister who's always tried to be the good one. After Julie dies and Jules Pierre is jailed for trying to weaponize the protomolecule, Clarissa launches an elaborate scheme to take revenge. This scheme is laid out a lot better in the third book vs the third season of the TV show. First she gets some upgrades that when she licks the roof of her mouth allow her to have super strength, speed, and reflexes for a brief time. But it leaves her body depleted afterwards; they did something pretty similar recently in Terminator: Dark Fate.
From there Clarissa joins a work crew on a UN ship heading to the Ring. This she uses as a cover to plant a bomb on a ship. To get away with it she has to kill one of her coworkers and jam him in a case. Meanwhile she has a blind technician working with a reporter sabotage Holden's ship. After she blows the UN ship up, she sends a fake message purporting to be from Holden to claim the Ring for the Belters. The idea then is that the UN or Martians near the Ring will destroy Holden but of course he escapes and so she goes after him. But in the end she realizes the error of her ways.
I made a conscious decision not to watch the TV show until I had read the books. (Plus I didn't have Syfy to watch it before it was on Amazon Prime anyway.) Or at least as many books as the series covered--which is up to 4 so far. Once I got through the fifth book in late February, I finally started to binge the series on Amazon.
I'm going to take a somewhat organized approach to this. Part 1 here is going to give you the background on the characters and factions. Then in Part 2 on Friday I'll get into the story from the 4 seasons of the TV show vs 4 novels. Some of the story is obviously going to bleed into this, but probably not too much.
Background:
It's the 23rd Century, but it's not like the classic Star Trek series/movies. Mankind has left Earth in spaceships, but is still unable to break the speed of light and thus remains rooted to the Solar System. They also don't have niceties like artificial gravity, transporters, or food replicators.
Factions:
United Nations (Earth)
So apparently the UN went from a largely impotent body here in the early 21st Century to a government of over 30 billion on Earth and Luna, ie the moon.
Something I said in a post a few years ago (and that has been said in other sci-fi novels like Player Piano, Make Room, and so on) is that a huge population and advances in technology have made for few job opportunities on Earth. Most people live on "Basic" or a welfare-type program where they're provided food, water, and housing but not work. Naturally then most people hang around watching the equivalent of TV or getting up to no good. A lot of people end up waiting for decades on a waiting list for jobs or training.
Earth has a large but old fleet of ships and also at the beginning of the first novel at least owns Ceres Station in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Saturn.
Martian Congressional Republic (Mars)
Mars was for a while a colony of Earth, but it eventually broke away. Befitting its name, Mars is largely a military colony with an advanced navy and Marines. They've been working on terraforming the planet for centuries but still most people have to live underground. Because of this, when Martians come to Earth they have to wear sunglasses and take special drugs to handle the higher gravity. The wide open spaces can also be disconcerting for them.
The Belt
To provide for all these places and people, companies needed to access the raw materials from the asteroid belts between Mars & Jupiter and Jupiter & Saturn, as well as moons like Titan and Ganymede. This became a huge industry and thus permanent settlements sprang up.
At the point of when the first novel begins, people have been living out in deep space so long that whole generations have never set foot on Earth. This has affected their physiology, so that "Belters" are taller and skinnier with more bulbous head because they haven't ever really been exposed to real gravity. In the books then it's easy to tell most Belters from "Inners" or people from Earth, Luna, or Mars because they have a different shape. But mostly for financial reasons, this isn't really true in the TV show except for one case early on. To accurately depict the Belters they would have had to have all the actors wear motion capture suits and replace them with CGI or else it would involve a lot of time-consuming and expensive makeup. Thus on TV the Belters don't look that much different except a lot of them have more tattoos than Inners.
The Belters don't have a central government, but rather have a bunch of different factions like gangs. The primary one is the OPA (which always makes me think of that Greek exclamation, "Opa!") that means Outer Planets Alliance or something like that. At the start it's more of a terrorist organization. It's kind of like the PLO in the 70s/80s if you're old enough to remember that.
The main OPA station is Tycho Station, which is a space station rather than an asteroid, moon, or planet. There's also Ceres Station that I already mentioned and Eros Station.
Those are pretty much the important locations through the first two books. Then everything changes with the opening of "the Ring," essentially a wormhole into a pocket of null space that opens wormholes to over 1300 other systems. Ilus, also called New Terra, is in one such system and while the gravity and such are tolerable for humans, it has a myriad of dangers that we'll discuss later.
Characters
James Holden: Holden has a fairly interesting conception in that 8 people donated their genetic materials. The resulting fertilized egg was put into one woman to give birth to him. The reason is that these 8 people have a farm in Montana and through some legal thing if they had a kid they could keep the land--or at least they hoped so. When he's 18, Holden joins the UN Navy, but he's dishonorably discharged when he disagrees with a superior officer and punches him.
Holden then signs up with an ice hauler called the Canterbury. He mostly sleeps with women and tries to avoid much real responsibility. But in one of those Greek things, those who try to avoid Fate will wind up finding it anyway. Holden inadvertently starts a war between Earth and Mars, but also helps to stop an alien threat from destroying Earth. Then he helps to stop another alien threat. Then he opens The Ring and later helps the settlers on Ilus to survive. The guy who didn't really want responsibility becomes the guy who's somehow involved in every significant event. A line in the sixth book pretty much sums him up: I keep thinking the assholes are outliers. He believes in humanity even when most experience should tell him not to.
In the TV show, Holden is played by Steven Strait, who's also listed as a producer, which is a good way to get a little extra money. He doesn't necessarily look like Holden as described in the books as his hair and eyes are too dark, but otherwise he's OK. But he often has this squinty look that sort of bugs me. I'm just saying.
Naomi Nagata: Naomi is a Belter who's a gifted engineer, but she has a mysterious past that isn't really detailed much in the books until the fifth one. But a lot of it is detailed in the TV show. Basically she met up with this guy named Marcos Inaros when she was young and he had sort of a mentally abusive hold on her, convincing her to do things she didn't want to do, like write a code that would cause a ship's fusion reactor to blow up. This made her inadvertently responsible for killing a bunch of people on a freighter. After that she left Marcos, but he kept her infant son Filip.
She bounced around and wound up on the Canterbury to help keep it flying. She and Holden didn't really have anything going until after the Canterbury was destroyed. Then they hooked up and mostly stayed together ever since.
In the show she's played by Dominique Tipper and like all the Belters on the show doesn't really look quite how the book describes. But also the book frequently talks about her hiding behind her hair, but on the TV show her hair is too short for that. Not that it matters all that much.
Alex Kamal: For over 20 years Alex has been piloting ships, first with the Martian Navy and then ships like the Canterbury. With his "Mariner Valley drawl" that's kind of like old-fashioned cowboy talk, he tries to project an air of cool and calm all the time. But of course he's hiding some pain under the surface. He had a wife that wanted him to settle down, but he couldn't give up flying so they got a divorce.
In the TV show Alex has an ex-wife and a son back on Mars. It's not until the 7th book that he has a son--and second ex-wife. Alex is played by Cas Anvar, whom you might have seen in small roles in movies like Transformers 2, Argo, and Punisher War Zone or at least heard in Halo 4, Archer, or Batman and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In the books he's supposed to be black and not have much hair, but whatever.
Amos Burton: Amos is the last man standing in any situation. He grew up in Baltimore, where he ran with some tough customers. After making his way to the stars in a not-quite-legal way, he eventually wound up as a mechanic on the Canterbury, where he sort of adopted Naomi as his conscience.
The thing about Amos is that he really has no conscience of his own. Whether he's a sociopath, psychopath, some kind of autistic or whatever, he has no compunctions about beating or killing whoever needs beaten or killed. It's funny in the 3rd season of the TV show where he tells a reporter, "You're trying to make me feel guilty about getting that guy killed, but I won't. Ever." And that's probably true. He makes a good team with Holden, Naomi, and Alex because he'll do what they can't to remove obstacles without a thought or any mental anguish after.
In the TV show he's played by Wes Chatham, whom you might have seen in the Hunger Games movies--or not. He has more hair than Amos does in the books and maybe his voice isn't as deep as I'd imagine Amos's, but I love how he deadpans threats to people. I'm going to kill you--it's just a fact, like the sky is blue or water is wet.
Detective Miller: Miller is a cop of Ceres Station who's been working that beat for a while, long enough to become world-weary. Mostly to keep him out of the way, his boss assigns him to find Julie Mao, the daughter of rich industrialist Jules Pierre Mao. Miller's investigation leads him to falling in love with Julie, even though they've never met. He eventually does meet her on Eros Station, and the two of them "die" on Venus.
But Miller reappears at the end of the second book as sort of a ghost. A ghost created by an alien intelligence as "the Investigator" to search for its lost creators. Holden is the only one who can see the ghost Miller, which leads to some trouble at times. Miller helps Holden open up the Ring gates, not really for altruistic reasons. While he causes alien machines on Ilus to become active, in the end he helps Holden to stop those machines. And in exchange, he's finally put to rest.
In the TV series Miller is played by Thomas Jane of that 2003 Punisher movie and also the TV series Hung and some other stuff. I don't think he's necessarily old enough for Miller and his hair looks stupid most of the time, but whatever.
Fred Johnson: A former colonel in the United Nations, Fred gained the nickname "the Butcher of Anderson Station" when his unit killed a bunch of miners on Anderson Station. But it turned out the miners were trying to surrender, so Fred left the military. He began to work for Belters instead of killing them and became a big wig in the OPA, though a lot of factions refuse to trust him because of his Earth ties. When Holden and company are looking for a safe port, Fred lets them come to Tycho Station. Later Holden and crew do some work for Fred to deal with pirates and such. Naomi also gives him a sample of alien protomolecule as sort of a deterrent against Earth and Mars.
In the TV series he mostly shows up the first 1 1/2 seasons and then doesn't really appear much more until season 4 and then only for like an episode. He appears slightly more in the books, though not a ton more until the 5th and 6th books.
I would have really loved it in the books if just once they had written, "Right," said Fred. Like that 90s one hit wonder artist. And then Fred could have said, "I'm too sexy for my..."
Chrisjen Avisarala: For years she was the power behind the throne at the United Nations as an undersecretary. A shrewd political player who curses worse than a sailor, she's not someone to trifle with. Though like a superhero she has a more mild-mannered secret identity as a wife to a college professor, mother, and grandmother.
Unfortunately for her, some of her political enemies and allies are destroyed and she's eventually thrust into the limelight as the Secretary General. That's really the worst thing for her as she had never even had to win an election before.
She doesn't really show up until the second book but she's in the TV show right from the start. It was probably just easier that way for them.
Roberta "Bobbie" Draper: A Gunnery Sergeant in the Martian Marines, Bobbie and her squad are attacked by an alien-human hybrid creature on the moon of Ganymede. But no one wants to believe Bobbie even when there's gun camera footage of it, as happens in the book. She ends up defecting from Mars to Earth to work for Avisarala to find out what's going on on Ganymede.
In the books she goes back to Mars as a civilian once the alien threat on Ganymede and Io is stopped while on the TV show she remains in the Marines to be sent to the Ring in the third season. Then she attacks some of her fellow Marines to help Holden and company and is drummed out of the Marines. She's not really in the third or fourth books but in the fourth season of the TV show she gets mixed up with some criminals on Mars who are smuggling military hardware to Belters. According to Michael Offutt, this is taken from one of the novellas that I haven't read.
Julie Mao: She's not really much in the book or TV show but she is a critical character. The black sheep daughter of Jules Pierre Mao, she left Earth to go out to the Belt to help the downtrodden Belters. This led her to uncover a conspiracy by a company called Protogen to use an alien substance called the "protomolecule" on people. She's one of the first infected by it and becomes a focal point for the protomolecule. A ship she was on sends out the distress call that lured Holden and the Canterbury crew into a trap as well. Her racing ship the Razorback also saves Avisarala and Bobbie later on.
Clarissa Mao: Julie's sister who's always tried to be the good one. After Julie dies and Jules Pierre is jailed for trying to weaponize the protomolecule, Clarissa launches an elaborate scheme to take revenge. This scheme is laid out a lot better in the third book vs the third season of the TV show. First she gets some upgrades that when she licks the roof of her mouth allow her to have super strength, speed, and reflexes for a brief time. But it leaves her body depleted afterwards; they did something pretty similar recently in Terminator: Dark Fate.
From there Clarissa joins a work crew on a UN ship heading to the Ring. This she uses as a cover to plant a bomb on a ship. To get away with it she has to kill one of her coworkers and jam him in a case. Meanwhile she has a blind technician working with a reporter sabotage Holden's ship. After she blows the UN ship up, she sends a fake message purporting to be from Holden to claim the Ring for the Belters. The idea then is that the UN or Martians near the Ring will destroy Holden but of course he escapes and so she goes after him. But in the end she realizes the error of her ways.
Monday, March 9, 2020
Never Drink Wine (Or Release a Product) Before Its Time
Way back in January I watched a documentary called The Power of Glove on Amazon. It told the story of the Mattel Power Glove for the original Nintendo. Remember the Power Glove? It was a glove (duh) you put on and it would let you use your hand as the controller. Sort of a precursor to virtual reality and the Nintendo Wii.
The documentary is only about an hour that could easily be distilled into a 5-10 minute YouTube video. The distilled version is this: back in the late 70s a couple of guys came up with a glove that could control primitive computer programs and electronic music of that time. In the 80s they sold the idea to a company that sold it to a toy company that sold it to Mattel in the late 80s.
What ultimately killed the product is Mattel loved the idea so much they they rushed it into production so it could be out for the holidays in 1989. There was a huge, gaping problem: there was no software actually designed for the Power Glove! The programs were still being written that could maximize the Glove's features. When used on existing games, the Glove worked, but it didn't work as well as using the normal controller. So people buying into the hype were soon disappointed and the product crashed and burned.
Though a cult following developed around it and people have hacked the Glove for use as a VR controller, drone controller, and other stuff. About 20 years later, Nintendo came out with their own motion-capture system, the Wii. And some of the same problems still came up. The games actually designed for the Wii like Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort were really fun. Playing them with my mom and sisters on Christmas made me go out and get a Wii of my own.
But the problem was when I tried other games that weren't made specifically for the Wii, the kind made for all the platforms of the time: PS3 and X Box. Software companies didn't want to program a whole new thing just for one platform, so you'd end up with awkward controls even on games like baseball or basketball or football where you'd think motion control would make it a lot easier. I mean to pitch a baseball you should just wind up and pretend to throw, right? Nah. That would be too easy. So those weren't much fun to play and the actual Nintendo games were mostly minigames that got boring after a little while. So in the end the Wii mostly got used for Netflix until I sold it back to Amazon for like $40 credit or something.
Anyway, there's an obvious lesson for writers and everyone else: don't release your product until it's absolutely finalized. Had they waited a year for games to actually be made for it, the Power Glove might have done better. Though I suspect it would have had the same problem as the Wii in that third parties still weren't going to make stuff designed specifically for it.
So often with self-published books you see a lot of typos and/or really shitty covers--sometimes covers with typos! Obviously those people needed to take a little more time on the project before releasing it. By releasing the Power Glove earlier than they should, Mattel made some money right away, but lost more than they probably would have made had they waited.
 |
| I love the Power Glove. It's so bad! |
What ultimately killed the product is Mattel loved the idea so much they they rushed it into production so it could be out for the holidays in 1989. There was a huge, gaping problem: there was no software actually designed for the Power Glove! The programs were still being written that could maximize the Glove's features. When used on existing games, the Glove worked, but it didn't work as well as using the normal controller. So people buying into the hype were soon disappointed and the product crashed and burned.
Though a cult following developed around it and people have hacked the Glove for use as a VR controller, drone controller, and other stuff. About 20 years later, Nintendo came out with their own motion-capture system, the Wii. And some of the same problems still came up. The games actually designed for the Wii like Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort were really fun. Playing them with my mom and sisters on Christmas made me go out and get a Wii of my own.
But the problem was when I tried other games that weren't made specifically for the Wii, the kind made for all the platforms of the time: PS3 and X Box. Software companies didn't want to program a whole new thing just for one platform, so you'd end up with awkward controls even on games like baseball or basketball or football where you'd think motion control would make it a lot easier. I mean to pitch a baseball you should just wind up and pretend to throw, right? Nah. That would be too easy. So those weren't much fun to play and the actual Nintendo games were mostly minigames that got boring after a little while. So in the end the Wii mostly got used for Netflix until I sold it back to Amazon for like $40 credit or something.
Anyway, there's an obvious lesson for writers and everyone else: don't release your product until it's absolutely finalized. Had they waited a year for games to actually be made for it, the Power Glove might have done better. Though I suspect it would have had the same problem as the Wii in that third parties still weren't going to make stuff designed specifically for it.
So often with self-published books you see a lot of typos and/or really shitty covers--sometimes covers with typos! Obviously those people needed to take a little more time on the project before releasing it. By releasing the Power Glove earlier than they should, Mattel made some money right away, but lost more than they probably would have made had they waited.
Friday, March 6, 2020
The Rarest of Rare Events
What's the rarest event in the world? A solar eclipse? A blue moon? The Lions winning a playoff game? OK, maybe the last one, but also: me actually being right about something!
Way back on July 27, 2018 I posted an article called, "Hasbro's Distribution is Stuck in the 80s." It was about how hard it was to find Transformers in stores and online at retail prices. Which is still largely an issue, though maybe not quite as bad as it was 18 months ago.
Anyway, when I was watching Toy Galaxy videos on YouTube, one of them was the host talking about many of the same things I was. And then on Facebook I saw my brother reply to an article by Retroblasting that was also saying pretty much the same things I was back in 2018.
And that is that the toy distribution system is broken. Especially since toy store chains were driven out of business (thanks Bain Capital), retail distribution has become a mess. Some items you might never find on shelves. Hell, if it's like my local Walmarts, 80% of the time most of the shelves will be empty, probably while product is rotting in the back. Then you have scalpers who snap up product when it does come out so they can mark it up online. Meanwhile, companies are doing a poor job making their products available online at normal prices. Store websites are just as lousy since they don't usually have stuff to buy online and can't tell you where you can actually find it with any accuracy.
And then you have these "Exclusives" to stores like Walgreen's. I mean, a pharmacy? When I was in Petoskey a couple of years ago, a Rite Aid there was still selling a toy from 2009's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, so pharmacies are not well-known for having the latest, greatest merchandise.
Anyway, my point here is that people who actually know a lot more about this shit are saying the same things I was. Which means I am undeniably right. So there. Mark it on the calendar because who knows when (or if) it'll happen again?
I just wanted my Phantom Readers to realize that not everything I post is just me talking out of my ass. Sometimes I actually know what I'm talking about--even if I don't really realize it at the time. Every squirrel finds a nut sometime.
Now you know--and knowing is half the battle!
Way back on July 27, 2018 I posted an article called, "Hasbro's Distribution is Stuck in the 80s." It was about how hard it was to find Transformers in stores and online at retail prices. Which is still largely an issue, though maybe not quite as bad as it was 18 months ago.
Anyway, when I was watching Toy Galaxy videos on YouTube, one of them was the host talking about many of the same things I was. And then on Facebook I saw my brother reply to an article by Retroblasting that was also saying pretty much the same things I was back in 2018.
And that is that the toy distribution system is broken. Especially since toy store chains were driven out of business (thanks Bain Capital), retail distribution has become a mess. Some items you might never find on shelves. Hell, if it's like my local Walmarts, 80% of the time most of the shelves will be empty, probably while product is rotting in the back. Then you have scalpers who snap up product when it does come out so they can mark it up online. Meanwhile, companies are doing a poor job making their products available online at normal prices. Store websites are just as lousy since they don't usually have stuff to buy online and can't tell you where you can actually find it with any accuracy.
And then you have these "Exclusives" to stores like Walgreen's. I mean, a pharmacy? When I was in Petoskey a couple of years ago, a Rite Aid there was still selling a toy from 2009's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, so pharmacies are not well-known for having the latest, greatest merchandise.
Anyway, my point here is that people who actually know a lot more about this shit are saying the same things I was. Which means I am undeniably right. So there. Mark it on the calendar because who knows when (or if) it'll happen again?
I just wanted my Phantom Readers to realize that not everything I post is just me talking out of my ass. Sometimes I actually know what I'm talking about--even if I don't really realize it at the time. Every squirrel finds a nut sometime.
Now you know--and knowing is half the battle!
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
Two Scores on Amazon
Early this year I noticed something different on the pages for my books. The number of reviews suddenly skyrocketed. Not because people were actually giving me new reviews. Nope, instead, Amazon was adding international review numbers to the US review numbers. So now if you go to the page for Chance of a Lifetime, you'll see that where it was at 42 reviews, now it's at 50 reviews for the 8 international reviews.
But at least for the moment, when you look at the "Books in This Series" list, it still shows only the US reviews, which means the rating it shows doesn't even agree with the one on the rest of the page.
It's probably confusing for readers to see one number of reviews on one page and another number on another page--or another section of the page. Really it seems like Amazon should decide which way they want to do this and be consistent. But it's Amazon, so it's not like you can tell them what to do; you just have to hope that eventually they'll figure it out. Or not.
The other thing going on with Amazon reviews recently is that now you don't even have to write a review to rate a book. In the old days you had to write like 20 words. Then they rolled it back to one so idiots could give a book 1 star and just write "ok." Now cowards don't even have to write a single word!
Check out the page for A Change Will Do You Good by my pseudonym Jessie Love. 3 "ratings" but not a single word written!
I'm not sure how this happens because on the site I think you still have to write a word. It's probably if you rate it through your Kindle or Kindle Fire. Kinda sucks that now you can get drive-by 1s like on Goodreads that just drag down your book's score without telling the author anything of value. And it makes it even easier for trolls to attack authors without even having to use a generic name like "Kindle Customer." I'm sure Amazon wasn't thinking about that when they did this, but I'd say it's just a matter of time before someone starts running a troll campaign on an author famous enough for people to give a shit.
If you think about it, if the "ratings" come from Kindles/Kindle Fires, all you have to do is buy a copy, give it a 1-star "rating" and then return the thing--probably. That would allow trolls to troll books without even having to spend any money. If that's how it works.
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| Before |
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| After |
It's probably confusing for readers to see one number of reviews on one page and another number on another page--or another section of the page. Really it seems like Amazon should decide which way they want to do this and be consistent. But it's Amazon, so it's not like you can tell them what to do; you just have to hope that eventually they'll figure it out. Or not.
The other thing going on with Amazon reviews recently is that now you don't even have to write a review to rate a book. In the old days you had to write like 20 words. Then they rolled it back to one so idiots could give a book 1 star and just write "ok." Now cowards don't even have to write a single word!
Check out the page for A Change Will Do You Good by my pseudonym Jessie Love. 3 "ratings" but not a single word written!
I'm not sure how this happens because on the site I think you still have to write a word. It's probably if you rate it through your Kindle or Kindle Fire. Kinda sucks that now you can get drive-by 1s like on Goodreads that just drag down your book's score without telling the author anything of value. And it makes it even easier for trolls to attack authors without even having to use a generic name like "Kindle Customer." I'm sure Amazon wasn't thinking about that when they did this, but I'd say it's just a matter of time before someone starts running a troll campaign on an author famous enough for people to give a shit.
If you think about it, if the "ratings" come from Kindles/Kindle Fires, all you have to do is buy a copy, give it a 1-star "rating" and then return the thing--probably. That would allow trolls to troll books without even having to spend any money. If that's how it works.
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