Hitchhiker's Guide to the Movies

Like any respectable geek, I've read the HG2G 'trilogy' several times.  I've seen the tv shows once or twice.  I snicker faithfully at the allusions to 42 in geek pop culture. I went to see HG2G this past Sunday.

I am actually fairly surprized that this movie got made.  I figured the intended audience was way too small.  When I first heard about the movie, last summer I was excited about it.  However, the closer it came to actually seeing the movie, the less excited I became as I realized that HG would be a tough translation to the big screen. 

The success of HG2G is three-fold.  First, the absurdity of normal Arthur Dent finding 'nothing new under the sun' (or is that suns?) normality in a fantastic environment.  Second, the equal opportunity swipes at both left-wing and right-wing ideology (which is a rarity in sci-fi), and finally, genuinely cool sci-fi ideas inserted into the story.  Ideas such as the improbability drive, custom planet fabricators, babel fish, super-intelligent computers, etc.

On the whole the movies works acceptably well.  There are a few Hollywoodizations of the plot and characters, but they are still recognizable.  The special effects are great.  The Vogons are well done.  Even the added parts on the Vogon home planet (which I don't remember from the book) are true to Douglas Adams.  Fans will recognize the all the familiar elements and in-jokes.  But for some convention of using a narrator to interrupt a, story works more thoroughly in a book than it does in a movie.  IMO the interruptions worked better on the old TV series than they did in the movie.  Actually, the low tech sets worked wonderfully on the old TV show as it emphasized the story over the effects.  Which is sorta the point with HG2G.

My favorite moments from the novels: one - early on when Ford is introducing Arthur to Zaphod and Arthur tells Ford that he already knows Zaphod.  Perfect timing and off-set from Arthur's flustered performance to that point!  Second favorite is the mice's decision to toss 15 million years of research and fake the ultimate question with a tossed off excuse by Arthur.

This is gonna start mild, then get tense....

I was recently at the Harper's Ferry National Memorial in West Virginia two weekends ago with my family.  Harper's Ferry was a key site in the Civil War and the location of John Brown's ill-fated (and ill-conceived) attack on a Federal garrison.  It is a great place to visit, funding by the Feds and staffed by knowledgeable volunteer re-inactors.  It is also a low crowd area.  It is a good day trip for anyone in the Baltimore-Washington-Northern Virginia area.  Oh, and they have a killer book store.

In addition to enjoying the quality time with my wife and kids, I was struck by the moral tension present in the exhibits.  The exhibits were clear in condemning slavery and the hypocrisy/paradox of a newly free nation tolerating/defending slavery.  I was also struck by the clear presentation of John Brown's crimes.  Brown was a guerrilla warrior.  He killed people from Kansas to Maryland.  He attempted to instigate a rebellion and hoped that slaves would rise up and attack their masters.  The exhibit texts were clear in presenting him as a terrorist and a criminal, but they also condemned the society that created him.  Bottom-line is that John Brown seems to have been a whack job that supported the right ends, but went about it in the most violent, wrong-headed means possible.  What's worse is that his convictions were steeped in religious lingo that, if uttered today, would get him a visit from ATF's tank brigades before he ever rounded up his posse.  His incitement of rebellion was a incompetent failure and he was hanged for his crimes.  Though I wonder if he was hanged for his murders or if he was hanged more for his rejection of Federal and Virginia state authority.

Recently, on the Powerline website, link, I read the following

"It looks like we're heading for a terrible result here. Congress has passed legislation that raises serious federalism and rule-of-law concerns. And Terry Schiavo is probably going to die at the hands of the state anyway."

Can't say I disagree.  It is like we are watching a slow motion horror movie that we can not turn off or walk out on.  We are forced to watch or at least listen, nearly against our will.  The Terry Schiavo incident reminds me of a Ann Coulter column written in December 2003.  Coulter's site archive did not go back that far, but I found a link at Front Page Magazine

In this column Coulter discussed judicial tyranny and abortion clinic bombers and abortion doctor attackers.  She did not defend the immoral individuals who kill, attack and destroy abortion proponents, but she did observe that the attacks came after two decades of the left imposing its morality on the American people and purposefully evading the Constitutional processes it was supposed to defend.

It is possible that the latest attacks on abortion clinics and doctors came after certain fringe elements in society decided that the liberals were not going to abide by morality or the rule of law, therefore they took the law into their own hands.  I call it the John Brown Effect and I think that the more we face judicial tyranny on issues such as abortion and euthanasia, the more we will endure violence in the future from right-wingers who seem to have the right idea in terms of the overarching moral goal, i.e., ending abortion or euthanasia, but use despicable means and methods because they are unhinged.  Such violence will likely engender the same response that John Brown received from the Feds - bloody suppression and execution.  The violence, perpetrated by those on the right, will make it even harder for moderate, i.e., law-abiding, voices on the right to be heard.

I don't expect rioting if Terry Schiavo dies, but I hate to say it, I do not think that this will end well in the long run.

Personally, my enthusiasm for BT dates back no further than 1997 when I realized that the MW2 computer game was a sequal to the MW1 computer and then had the mind blowing experience of finding out that there was a whole PnP phenomena behind both of them. So, I am not a pre-clan absolutist by any stretch. But I can definately see the origins of the faith when the greatest heros of the BT canon where those, like the GDL, who fought against anarchy and barbarism.

Resisting the triple evil of Capellanism, Draconism and the collapse of civilization was the highest calling and central thesis of old Battletech.

Sigh! Back when men were men and toaster worshippers were toaster worshippers. Davions were unintrospective and Dracs were superstitous twits. Memory cores and Brian's Caches were objects that nations would go to war over. Worth at least a whole battalion of mechs! A different era than the Managed Warfare paradigm that is the post Ian Davion era.

Annnnnnyway, musings such as these, combined with Neko's taunts about Davions and ongoing discussion threads at the AFFSHC forum regarding recent finds on eBay shook loose some stray thoughts that have been spinning around in my head for a while.

Real life Battletech fandom imitates Battletech art on eBay! and other online sales sites.

Have you ever noticed the sheer triumph and pride that one feels when a rare BT item is snagged? No different than what other hobby enthusiasts feel, of course, but it seems to me to be a good corelation between the feeling that BT fanboy obtains when finding a copy of on of the older BT sourcebooks online is the equivalent of Wilson's Hussars lance leader finding a mech arm with a working gauss rifle and a small ammo shots left in it.

Getting a copy of one of the unseen mechs is like Wolf's Dragoons returning from clan space after a resupply run. Actually finding a relatively cheap copy of the Star League Sourcebook would be the equivalent of the Comstar personnel on Terra figuring out how to crack one of the 500 or so Brians Caches on the planet.

Finding and buying old Battletech stuff on the internet is great fun. So, go hold back the darkness. Buy all the real life lostech that you can find!

Settlers of Catan

I started a poll over on the CBT forum about this game. See this link.

As I mentioned there, Settlers is a great balance between the luck romps of Risk and Monopoly (both of which I despise as as massive waste of gaming time.) and insanely complicated Avalon Hill Games of the 1970's and 1980's.

Though I almost always buy an game from a brick and mortar store - just to support the institution, I occasionally peruse the Catan offerings online. There are the normal deals for the game, but I recently found two interesting Catan gizmos that people are actually manufacturing themselves, in their homes, as accessories for the game.

Someone has actually made a large flat wooden board with hexagonal cutouts for each of the game tiles.

In addition, someone has made 3D plaster models of the different new resource tiles.

Just for the record: I am not selling either of these items and I do not know the people who are selling them. I am posting them as curiosities and as clever accessories.