Get that heathen some popcorn

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I know that Steve Allen was a lifelong skeptic and freethinker, but was he also a squid worshipper? How else to explain this sign?

Through the Center for Inquiry in LA, which hosts that Steve Allen Theater, there’s also a very useful list of dramatic productions of interest to freethinkers, including everything from Agnes of God to Zardoz (sorry: Red Dawn didn’t make the cut). Any college students interested in subverting their university’s film series might want to recommend some of the movies from this list. Or you might just try adding all of them to your Netflix subscription.

The SF fanboy stirs again

More SF indulgence, excuse me: Gary Farber has been reading Heinlein’s rediscovered “first” novel (brief summary: it’s very bad), and Kevin Drum raises the question of correlation between early SF preferences and later political biases, with Heinlein inspiring conservatives and Asimov motivating liberals (Drum says, “Well, I liked ’em both, but I liked Heinlein more and I turned into a liberal.” I’m not touching that straight line.)

I disliked Heinlein’s stuff intensely. It was badly written, with a patronizing tone, and always smugly assumed that his simplistic opinions were absolutely true. Even his juveniles were irritating in that way, but those self-indulgent later doorstops with old men waited on by nubile vixens? Gah.

I also wasn’t a big fan of Asimov. He was OK, but those gimmicky stories didn’t do much for me.

My favorites began with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne—I was very old school. As I began to branch out in grade school looking for new stuff, after gagging over Heinlein and being bored by Asimov, I really got into Ray Bradbury. Later I favored a collection of British authors—Brunner, Wyndham, Moorcock—and then Harlan Ellison, Fritz Leiber, anybody who could actually write, a talent that eluded the old guard. Nowadays I lean towards Banks and Mieville.

I don’t know what that says about how my political inclinations were shaped. I think the stronger correlation is with my utter apathy towards engineering, not my politics.

Brokeback bigotry

I’m stretched out in my easy chair getting ready to watch the Oscars this evening, when this horrid ‘news’ profile about Brokeback Mountain and middle America comes on. I found it offensive: they seem to have sought out the most narrow-minded representatives of this part of the country—your stereotypical Christian bigot, a clutch of white-haired geezers—who hadn’t seen the movie, who rejected it out of hand, who claimed Hollywood didn’t understand farmers, who thought a good movie was that treacly crap, The Sound of Music. If there is anyone who doesn’t understand this part of the world, it’s the patronizing yahoos at CNN who went out of their way to find people who fit their stereotypes.

[Read more…]

Spore

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A reader sent me a link to this video of Spore by Will Wright—it’s the new simulation/god game/tinker toy by the maker of SimCity and the Sims. It looks very, very cool, and I think I’m going to want a copy when it’s available for my computer—but one thing has to be cleared up.

This is not a game about evolution.

It’s highly teleological, with a preset goal of achieving high intelligence—which is a painfully unrealistic and skewed perspective. Why shouldn’t we be able to play to become the very best squid we can be? I guess it’s necessary to constrain the advancement path of the game to something manageable, but I hope they’re crystal clear about the fact that they’re modeling something that does not resemble evolution much at all.

It still looks fun. It looks like they’ve overcome some of the limitations that made the old SimLife and SimEarth such bores, but there’s always the risk that every game here will also end up being the same, with just some more elaborate cosmetics.

Underworld: Evolution

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Dr Beckinsale visits the Discovery Institute

I saw the movie Underworld: Evolution last night. Stop looking at me like that—it was research. It has the word “evolution” in the title, doesn’t it? Besides, I have this idea to improve the promotion of science by having all of our spokespeople be dangerously nubile armed women with good cheekbones, full lips, and very sharp teeth. I figure the two things we’ve been lacking in our presentations to the public are lust and fear, and if we can just bring those into play, we’ll have an unbeatable combination.

As I learned at this movie, too, if you’ve got gorgeous women and slimy, ravening beasts confronting each other with big guns, nothing in the story has to make any sense at all. There was no plot: instead, there are a series of set-pieces strung together in which Our Heroine is placed in someplace dark, wet, and seedy with a supply of weapons and hapless allies/fang fodder to confront a suitably snouty or batty SFX playtoy. They aren’t even consistent in how these conflicts are resolved. Big bad immortal vampires get shot multiple times at point blank range with a shotgun, and shake it off with a snarl; but when Sir Derek Jacobi, following in the fine British tradition of slumming in some well-paying American trash, finds the movie so embarrassingly bad that he has to get out, the movie makers decide that the way to have his immortal character die is to poke him with something pointy, followed by a languorous death scene in which Jacobi completely turns off his ability to act. It was impressively flat, a cinematic vampire death scene that ranks right up there with Pee Wee Herman’s in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, yet utterly different.

Somehow this murky, muddled mess of a movie got made, and got people (like, say, me!) to attend. There’s a lesson here.

I’m going to have to get a skin-tight vinyl body suit for my next presentation.

I’ll let you guess whether I’m trying to inspire lust or fear.

A good day to get a day pass

There are several items of note at Salon today, so if you don’t subscribe, watch the little commercial, you’ll get some good bang for the buck.