Paint porn

Adam Savage just destroyed a half hour of my life by linking to this Paint Mixing tumblr. It’s mesmerizing. It’s just close-up videos of different colors of paint being mixed together, with different movements and different palette tools. I found it pleasantly soothing.

The comments are also pleasant. People apparently have favorite palette knives and color combinations. People are weird. They can also be nice.

Dance!

Human bodies can do impressive things.

That’s a commercial to sell perfume. I’ve already forgotten what brand, though, and if I did it would be only to avoid it — it seems to have spectacular neurological side effects.

I like this dance better.

However, that ballerina does not have enough legs. Maybe we need to start tinkering with genomes to figure out how to create 6 or 8 legged dancers?

Wil Wheaton disliked it, too

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I saw Star Trek Beyond. So did Wil Wheaton. I detested it and was considering walking out halfway through it…and I should have, because it got worse and worse as it progressed, rather than improving. Wheaton also disliked it, and has a long list of reasons why. I agree with every one, but I have to add another one, and it’s also one of the reasons Star Trek Into Darkness was so bad.

This is a story about a far future civilization that spans a large chunk of galaxy, that has ships that travel faster than light, with immensely powerful weapons like phasers and photon torpedos. They are deciding the fate of entire worlds.

And they always end up resolving everything with…fist fights. Men and aliens punching each other. Often these fist fights take place in absurdly improbable architecture, or at ridiculous altitudes or on machines moving at deadly velocities. Galactic conflicts and the survival of interplanetary civilizations are all settled with two guys in a slap fight on the equivalent of a 3-D platform video game. It totally deflates the scope of the story.

Superhero movies have become little more than exercises in urban demolition. Star Trek movies seem to have settled into the rut of having star ship captains hammering out their disagreements with a couple of bare-knuckle brawls.

It doesn’t matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Caine brings up a good point: the musical Hamilton is deeply flawed, failing to address native Americans or slavery adequately. This is an important concern because one of the things Hamilton does exactly right is break the myth of the Founding Fathers as demigods spreading enlightenment and justice and freedom across the land. It is appropriate to take it to task for not shattering all the myths.

But here’s the thing: I can simultaneously appreciate the wonderful music and the strong story, and recognize the validity of criticism. It does not detract from art to say it does this one thing really well, but it does this other thing poorly; it does not mean that Lin-Manuel Miranda needs to go back and rewrite everything, nor does it mean the critics have to shut up and accept it as is.

It means the story isn’t finished. It’s never finished. There’s always room for more great art that tells another part of the story, and we’ll always have new art that portrays another part of the beauty and tragedy of the human experience.

The 2016 Hugos

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Man, they’re just torturing puppies. The Sad/Rabid/Pathetic Puppy slate got repudiated again by giving awards to people who earned them.

The winner of the best novel was The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin. This book is not light reading: three different narrators gradually coming together in a complex fantasy story set on a world with frequent apocalyptic geological catastrophes, held together by by wizards who focus on calming seismic events…or in some cases, triggering them. This is a story with a lot of hard detail and psychological nuance. It deserves this award.

The best novella (and for me, it literally was — this was my favorite SF story of the past year) went to Binti by Nnedi Okorafor. This was classic hard SF — humans live in space, engage in interstellar travel, and meet alien species, some of whom want to kill us. And at the same time, it doesn’t erase 90% of the human species by turning starfarers into an American monoculture of endless variations on Captain Kirk.

Both of those are written by black women. That has got to sting the Puppies, who hate “SJWs”, which is actually a code phrase for “doesn’t think white men necessarily deserve all the things”. There’s also no way to call these token awards — these were stunningly good books.

Most of the rest of the nominees I hadn’t read — especially that very popular “No Award” that seemed to beat out offerings from Castalia House. Of the ones I did read or saw, I did not much care for The Martian by Andy Weir, which won best long form dramatic presentation, although I will admit that the book was a fast-paced page turner, and the movie was slick. I just objected to an engineering wish-fulfillment fantasy presented as science. That one is going to be long forgotten while people will still be watching Mad Max: Fury Road. I noticed that one episode of Jessica Jones also won best short form dramatic presentation.

The best thing, though, is that when awards are given on merit, rather than racial and gender bias, you start to seen great new voices being appreciated.

NK Jemisin’s acceptance speech is worth reading. For completely different reasons, Vox Day’s weird rationalizations are also worth reading, to see the depth to which the puppies will sink. He calls Jemisin a half-savage, claims her win was primarily a vote against the Puppies, claims credit as kingmaker for The Martian’s win (it was a very popular movie and book, you know, without Theodore Beale’s “help”), and declared that coming in second place was a great victory. He also comes right out and says that the goal was to burn the Hugos.