Spoiler Review: Star Trek Into Darkness

20130611 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
7

So, I’ve been a little remiss in getting this review put together, mainly because I really had to think about how I felt about this film, and its implications for the future of the franchise. Also, I guess, I wanted to wait until I could feel 100% safe discussing spoilers, and really, when a movie’s been out for a month, if you really wanted to see it and haven’t yet, I can’t help you.

Let’s start with this: I saw Star Trek (2009) 13 times in the theaters, including at least two IMAX viewings (at a time when those were less common). I have never regretted the repeated expenditure (which included a second ticket every single time, since I always saw it with someone) or the degree to which it branded me a monumental nerd, because I liked the movie a great deal as well as enjoying it. Yes, it had its problems, which repeated viewing of course only highlight, but by and large I was happy with the result.

I have seen Star Trek Into Darkness twice. At this time, I expect I may see it in the theater once more, possibly when it starts to hit the cheap seats, but beyond that, I intend to wait for the iTunes release for re-watches, and I doubt it will ever go into the kind of heavy rotation in my play list its predecessor has. In the end, I did enjoy the movie, but I didn’t ultimately like it, nor was I happy with it.

No, that’s not entirely accurate. I like, and am happy, with about 90% of the movie. But the 10% I don’t like comes very close to ruining the whole thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Detailed Reviews, Reviews, Star Trek

MINIMAL SPOILERS: Star Trek Into Darkness Review

20130517 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
2

I will likely have a more spoiler-filled discussion of my thoughts about this movie after the weekend, when everyone has had a chance to see it (and I’ve probably seen it at least one more time). But for now, here are my initial thoughts.

First thing to know is, I enjoyed it immensely. I will be seeing it again, probably many times. There is a lot to like in this movie, and most of it comes down to character. For good or ill, we’re in an era where bringing strong characters to life is overriding crafting strong plots (Doctor Who is suffering from this as well), and this movie shines at bringing its characters to life. Even Sulu and Chekov, who, as always, are not given as much screen time as we might like, get some excellent moments, and the actors make the most of them. Uhura shines in a way that might actually make Nichelle Nichols a little envious, and Simon Pegg’s Scotty goes well beyond the comic relief character he was in most of Star Trek (2009). He’s still funny; it’s just that now, there’s more to him than that.

Kirk and Spock? To say too much about them would delve into spoilerville. Suffice it to say for now that Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto thoroughly own their parts.

I have one character complaint, but it’s the Big Spoiler, so I won’t delve too deeply. Suffice it to say that my complaint is with whom the character turns out to be, not how he’s portrayed. The actor does an amazing job with the material. It’s just the exact direction I did not want this character to go, and I’m still processing my disappointment that they went there anyway. However, I will say that, in the end, they contrived a way for it to make sense.

The plot, as I say, suffers. It’s not terrible, and some of its holes can be be explained by saying, “Yes, the writers probably know this; the actor probably knows this; we know it; that doesn’t mean the characters know this or are thinking about it right now, and hence, they just did something really ill advised.” And some — like the rapid travel time between two very distant star systems — can be excused, as travel time in Star Trek is always excused — by dramatic necessity.

As with the best Star Trek, the themes are actually contemporary rather than futuristic. I’ll admit I might be starting to get tired, or at least jaded, of 9/11 / terrorism related themes, but it’s certainly going to play in Peoria.

The film is peppered — almost overly so — with references that long time fans of not just Classic Trek but the entire Trek sub-genre will catch. Surprisingly, almost all of these actually make sense in context, although some of them require you to remember (and may well be there to specifically remind us) that this is a different timeline, that the arrival of Narada in the 2009 film was a butterfly’s jet engine, and a lot of things will not happen the way we expect. There’s a Gorn reference, for example, that would be impossible for the same year in the Original time line…

There are lots of implications in this story for the future of the franchise; lots of hooks on which one could hang the next movie. There are situations brewing, and technology that’s been unleashed, that are completely different from the same period of time in the original timeline, now, and there’s a lot of story that could be mined from that. I just hope that they pick up the pace of how often they make these films…or else, find some way to make a new television series with this cast. It will be frustrating to have so much potential wasted by too slow a movie-making cycle!

All in all, 7 out of 10.

 

 

Categories Star Trek

20130515: This Week in Shameless Geekery

20130515 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
1

I’m reviving an attempt at a semi-regular feature I did last year. Mainly because this week is an extraordinarily good week to be a geek.

Let’s review…

Last Saturday/Sunday: Doctor Who: “Nightmare in Silver” by Neil Gaiman

Bringing the Cybermen back in an anniversary year doesn’t always work out so well. The classic story Silver Nemesis, for example, was a jumbled mess of a story. Worse, it’s basic beats and themes were almost identical to the same season’s much better Remembrance of the Daleks.

“Nightmare in Silver” isn’t quite the piece of brilliance it could have been, but it’s a much better return to the Cyber-mythos than almost anything the New Series has produced since the “Age of Steel”. I find myself wishing for a copy of Mr Gaiman’s actual, submitted script. I have a great deal of respect for his writing, so I find myself wondering how many of the things that marred “Nightmare in Silver” were insertions or deletions at production time…

But frankly, I want to talk about what worked more than what didn’t. Once again, Doctor Who proves it’s general ability to world-build in a matter of seconds. We know almost nothing about this particular iteration of the Earth Empire (although diehard fans know there have been several), for example, but in a very short time we learn enough. One gets the impression that this Empire is almost-but-not-quite entirely a defense agreement against threats like the Cybermen, for example, in very short order.

The series also proves its ability to reinvent its villains as easily, and as successfully, as it reinvents its main character.  Gaiman manages to capture the two essential elements of the Cybermen: patience and opportunism. Their way is to wait for the right moment — for centuries if necessary — and then pounce. It doesn’t always work out for them, but only because the Doctor so often turns up at the moment they pounce!

From there, however, he spins an entirely new, deadlier iteration of the race. One that can move like lightning when it needs to, and that adapts continually. One might complain about the similarity to the Borg, but of course, the Cybermen originally predate the Borg, and this development is only natural in a cybernetic organism. When the Cybermen were invented in 1966, nobody really knew anything about computer networking or the mania for upgrading that the modern electronic age would create. Now that we know, it’s foolish to expect a truly modern iteration of the Cybermen not to include those features, no matter who else it makes them similar to.

So, yeah, that was a good place to start.

Last Sunday: Commander Hadfield’s Serenade

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield has become an Internet Celebrity by staying in touch with Earth via social media. Sunday, as he prepared to leave the International Space Station, he regaled us with a cover of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” (actually…more filk than cover, to be honest). He’s pretty good, too!

Tuesday: Agents of SHIELD trailers pop up

I feel a little bit dirty admitting this, but I think I’m going to have to watch a network television show this fall. Because from both the 30-second and 3-minute trailers that are now circulating, I would say that this series has at least some potential to Not Suck.

Of course, there’s more than a little pressure on this project to Not Suck.

First of all, show-runner Joss Whedon is not exactly Midas, but he does seem to have some idea how to tell a story, most of the time. People expect a lot from him, and now he has to deliver.

Second of all, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in general, has raised the bar for telling interesting stories about comic book characters on screen. Until now, they only had to deliver once a year, or so, and they had lots of time and money to spend on making it all look spiffy and exciting. Now, they’ll be subject to the exigencies of weekly television. People will be expecting a certain level of “blockbuster” awesomeness that may be very hard to deliver.

And lastly…Coulson Lives. OK, that’s great. I really have no issue with it whatsoever, for the same reason most people don’t: Clark Gregg is a solid actor, Agent Coulson is a great character, and except for the fact that he looked pretty dead in Avengers, he’s the perfect character to lead a team of agents at this point. I don’t really even care how he’s still alive. I don’t care if he’s a robot, a clone, or just secretly has Wolverine’s healing factor.

All I care about is that they don’t waste him with crap scripts. They’ve gone out on this limb, and now it needs to pay off!

Tuesday: Confirmation of Doctor Who Season 8

At the BAFTA awards, Stephen Moffat confirmed there will be an eighth season of the revived series. Internet speculation is rampant about how long he, Matt Smith, or Jenna-Louise Coleman will continue to be involved, but regardless of who’s writing it or who’s starring in it, the series will be back in 2014.

Thursday: Star Trek Into Darkness

I was deeply skeptical of Star Trek (2009) when it was released.

I wound up seeing it no fewer than 13 times in the theaters. So obviously, I’m mostly OK with JJ-Trek, so far.

But the skepticism is still there, honestly. I don’t really like the main rumor of who Benedict Cumberbatch’s character really is (no, no spoiler — you can Google for it yourself if you really want the spoiler). I think it represents a failure of imagination, a missed opportunity, and something of an attempt to one-up the Original Series and OS films by creating a direct point of comparison. I think that’s a huge mistake, and no matter how much I like the film itself once I see it, that disappointment won’t change if the bad guy is who I now think it is.

That said, I am past the point I was at when the rumor first started flying, when I declared that I wouldn’t even see the film once if it turned out to be true. I will see the film. I am prepared to enjoy the film for what it is, even if I wind up criticizing it for what it could have been. I will do everything I can to leave the chip on my shoulder at home, because honestly, in the end, I want to like this movie, and I want them to keep making them — ideally more often than once every four years!

Saturday/Sunday: Doctor Who: “The Name of the Doctor”

Speaking of skepticism…this week’s Season 7 Finale is itching me a bit. No, I haven’t seen it yet. No, I don’t have any problem with its stated premise, nor even if they actually pay it off and tell us some of his Deep Dark Secrets. It’s just that I don’t trust Doctor Who finales to not suck any more!

First of all, I think the New Series has at best a mixed track record with its finales. All too often, the impulse to be “bigger and bolder and better” than the year before results in something that’s just absurdly broken. For example, “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End” comes across like questionable fan-fiction — the sort where you find excuses to mash all your favorite characters together even if they have no reason to even know about each other. The difference, of course, is that the fan writing this fiction was also the show-runner, Russell T. Davies, and he could get away with it.

And then, there’s Stephen Moffat. When he first took over, I was truly looking forward to his tenure, because other things I’d seen him write, I’d enjoyed.

But Mr. Moffat has come to rely entirely too much on the fairy-tale/fantasy aspects of Doctor Who. “Timey Wimey” has become code for “Inexplicable Magic with no rhyme or reason to it.”

Combine these two trends together, and I’m left with some severe trepidation about this Moffat-penned finale, in an anniversary year when he knows he needs to deliver something more than average.

This entire season has marked a second serious attempt to explore the mystery of the Doctor — his past, his name, what makes him who he is. The last time they did it, the series was cancelled before they could pay it off! At the very least, at least this time, we know the series will get to pay it off, and will continue on afterward and have to actually live with the consequences of what it reveals!

And that, even in Moffat’s hands, could be exciting. If they don’t pull back from the brink, if they actually reveal Important Things, then it could mark the same sort of “reinvention” moment that the Time War did for the Revived Series in the first place, a chance to shift the game in such a way that new viewers can come on board at the beginning of Series 8 and have almost a level playing field with old hands. That, in turn, could maybe shake it loose from some of the ruts it’s fallen into!

So I guess, in the end, I’m willing to put up with even a bit of Moffaty incoherence and series-finale bombast if the result is something new and interesting!

Categories Doctor Who, General Geekery, Living in the Future, Star Trek, Unsolicited Opinion

The Geeks Have Inherited the Earth

20130507 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
7

Exhibit A: As some of you likely already know, there’s a set of court cases that are often collectively referred to as the “Prenda Law” cases. This has become a bit of a macro for quite a lot of court filings that actually have been made under several different names (which is one of the issues). You can read up on all the details via Popehat, although the ruling I’m about to link also summarizes it far better than I can, really, so I’m not going to try, except to say that, if the charges leveled in the ruling are proved, it represents some pretty stunning abuse of a court system that is still learning how to cope with technology.

Anyway, this morning, Judge Otis Wright  II of the Central District of California did more than just call Prenda Law and its seemingly related firms on their activities. He did more than rebuke them sternly. He trashed them; sanctioned them; referred them to their various state and federal bars for investigation that will likely lead to disbarment; referred them further to the feds under RICO — basically coming out and calling their operation a racket — and the IRS; and best of all, by far…did it all in a ruling that is not only dripping with sarcasm but laced entirely with Star Trek quotes and metaphors!

A choice quote near the beginning of the ruling:

But Plaintiffs’ filing of cases using the same boilerplate complaint against dozens of defendants raised the Court’s alert. It was when the Court realized Plaintiffs engaged their cloak of shell companies and fraud that the Court went to battlestations.

And another near its end:

Third, though Plaintiffs boldly probe the outskirts of law, the only enterprise they resemble is RICO. The federal agency eleven decks up is familiar with their prime directive and will gladly refit them for their next voyage.  

Exhibit B: If you had told me, before this afternoon, that Audi AG or any advertising firm it might possibly hire A] had a sense of humour B] were remotely geeky C] were geeky enough to cast Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto (That’s classic Spock and new Spock if you somehow didn’t know that already) in a television ad, I would not have believed it.

If you had told me that the were not only that geeky, but geeky enough to have Leonard Nimoy sing “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” during said advertisement, I would have had you committed.

Nevertheless…here’s the proof….

I have no idea who signed off on this. I hope he gets a promotion. To Admiral.

So…yeah. Today is a good day to be a geek :-D

Categories Fandom, General Geekery, Living in the Future, Star Trek

The Tragedy of SimCity

20130423 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
7

I wanted to like SimCity (2013).

I really, really wanted to.

I’ve been an obsessive SimCity fan since the original. SimCity 4 has held my attention (or rather, regained it as other games waxed and waned) throughout the entire decade the franchise was allowed to lie fallow.

And therein, in my opinion, lies the great mistake that begot all the other mistakes that culminated in an absolutely disastrous attempt to revive the franchise. They left it alone for a decade. Instead of working incrementally to improve SimCity 4 as computers got more capable, they dropped it entirely and ignored it.

As a result, when they came back to it, they didn’t feel they could just pick up from where they left off. They couldn’t just make SimCity 4++ — improve the graphics, add curved roads, fix some of the simulation issues that never got fixed, maybe add an option for online region play. They had to make a new game, with an entirely new codebase, new simulation engine, new graphics… it had to be a reboot of the franchise. Or so they seem to have convinced themselves.

They convinced themselves of a lot of other things, as well. Like the idea that SimCity 2013 has to be designed like an MMO, played always online, with a strong encouragement toward social, cooperative play within regions. Which might have been forgivable if the launch of the game, and its servers, had not proven that they had no clue whatsoever how to provision or run an MMO. Or if they hadn’t wound up turning off about half the multi-user features in order to stabilize those servers — most of which have never been turned back on.

[Also, please note, I am not interested in hearing about how so many other MMOs screw up their launches with inadequate provisioning. That just demonstrates that the entire gaming industry is full of incompetence, and excuses exactly nothing]

They also talked themselves into an entirely new concept of how cities should be simulated. The first four SimCity games were all, at base, statistical simulations and cellular automata — Conway’s Game of Life writ large (Google it). This time around, they decided on a completely different model that would actually simulate the movement of resources on a direct basis. Buildings would generate some things (sources) and require other things (sinks) and agents would “carry” resources from one to the other. In theory, almost everything could be, and is, modeled this way. Power is modeled by having the power plant act as a source of electricity; buildings require electricity; and, if you look at the data visualization of the flow of power, you will see little yellow pips (the agents) representing the electricity flowing around.

And of course, people are agents in this model as well. As advertised, the idea was that a given “person” would be simulated through their entire life cycle, and you could follow them from home to job/school/shopping and back again.

Sounds OK in theory. In practice, agents turn out to be pretty stupid, with the result that one winds up concluding that maybe the statistical simulation and cellular automata — old fashioned as they were — might have been a better plan.

For example, those people you’re supposed to follow around? Every day, they leave a house (note, I say a house, not their house; wait for it…) and travel to the nearest job, shop, or school available to them. The workers don’t have specific jobs. They leave their house and go to whatever job-providing structure needs workers and lies along the shortest (not fastest) path. At the end of the day, they return to the nearest vacant home, not necessarily the one they left in the morning.

The agents responsible for fire, police, garbage, bus transportation, and so on, are even worse. Every single one of them leave their depots and follow the shortest path to the nearest hotspot for their area of interest. If two houses are on fire, every single truck from a given station rushes to the nearest fire first. Then, maybe, just maybe, a few of them will move on to the further fire while one or two stay behind to put out the nearer one. Garbage pick-up, school busses, everything worked this way.

[This part has supposedly been improved by a long-awaited 2.0 patch...but the patch also caused the very first client crash I myself ever experienced, which means I didn't really get to play long enough to notice a difference before getting fed up].

But this was not the worst sin they committed.

In deciding that they wanted players to focus on a region rather than a single city, they made their cities small, trying to push players into specializing them, rather than making a single city all things to all residents. In theory, neighboring cities can fulfill each other’s needs.

Except that in practice…it’s completely broken. And worse, because of this dynamic, they decided they could completely abandon one of the fundamental mechanics of the SimCity franchise.

SimCity, before 2013, has always been based on finding a balance between Residential, Commercial, and Industrial demand. You don’t always have to fulfill all three, but if you want people to move into your city, they have to have places to work and places to shop (which could also be places to work). A highly educated city could be more commercial than industrial, but you almost always needed both. Otherwise, people wouldn’t even move in. Similarly, if you wanted lots of industry, you had to provide places for the workers to live. Industry wouldn’t flesh out without workers.

SimCity 4 introduced the idea of a region of connected cities, but they were all controlled by you, because it was still a single-player game. The point, however, is that it retained the classic formula, but allowed you to use other cities in a region to provide some of the demands. Sims would only go so far to find a job, but generally speaking, once you’d established one city, you could expand, say, dirty industry into a neighbor and spare your original city for cleaner development.

Now, this sounds like exactly what the developers wanted for SimCity 2013…but in encouraging specialization, they decided that there was no need at all to explicitly fulfill demands for the things you weren’t specializing in. Want to build a clean bedroom community with no actual jobs? Go ahead! People will move in anyway!

Now…if you were still required to make sure some other nearby city in the region fulfilled the demands you were ignoring, that would be fine. But you’re not. And the developers have said they consider this to be a feature, not a bug, and don’t plan to significantly change it. Oh, the 2.0 patch mentioned above does actually make it necessary to provide some jobs to keep the city going; but it still clings to the basic idea that, because any given city could be and should be specialized, there’s no need for the region to provide for the deficiencies. Worse, even when you choose to do so, commuting remains a chancy proposition, meaning even trying to do the “right thing” won’t help to provide for more than a fraction of unfulfilled demand in a given city.

sigh I could go on. And on. And on. In fact, one reason it’s taken me so long to write an article about the game is that I have so many thoughts and opinions about how it is, how it could still be, and how it should have been, that it’s been hard to come up with something remotely coherent.

Not everything about it is bad, mind you. The visual aspects, in particular, are quite good. The data visualization system is, in fact, amazing, and possibly the one major feature I’m going to miss as I drift back to SimCity 4 and dream of a city simulation game that is simultaneously as deep and well thought-through as SimCity 4, and up-to-date in its use of modern visualization, graphics, and processing.

The upshot, however, is this: SimCity 2013 is not SimCity, except in as much as Maxis owns the brand name and can slap it on anything they like, really. This is not just a case of “new is bad”. Lots of the basic ideas behind SimCity 2013 could have resulted in an awesome game, if they’d used those new ideas and technologies to implement SimCity in all its challenging glory. Instead, they robbed it of most of its challenge, implemented good ideas badly, and rushed the entire package out to ship well before it was really ready for prime time, without any really serious play-testing.

The other upshot is this: SimCity 2013…is a bad game. It hurts me to say that. I’ve given it every chance to prove me wrong. As I said from the outset, I really really wanted to like it — no, to love it. I wanted this to be the game that I was obsessively playing for the next several months.

Instead, unless some upcoming patch corrects both the instability of the 2.0 patch and a host of other things that are simply wrong, I’m going back to Civilization V and SimCity 4 and my go-to default games. Since the developers have said publicly that most of the things I consider to be defects are in fact deliberate design decisions, I don’t hold out any hope.

Tags
Categories Gaming

A Rant about Doctor Who companions and plot devices

20130410 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
3

[There are spoilers here, more or less up-to-the-minute. This is your only warning.]

OK, yes, it’s been a while since I posted anything here. We all know I’m like that.

Enough meta. Here’s what I want to talk about.

Does anyone remember when the Doctor’s companion was not also a plot device?

If you’ve only ever seen the new series, chances are, you don’t; because for you, the companion almost always always has been a plot device. In the modern series, the “big picture” story is about the Doctor’s companion and the impact s/he has on his life. By contrast, in the classic series, there really wasn’t a ‘big picture” story, and the series was mainly about what happens to existing situations when the Doctor and his companions fall into them.

Let’s review:

Rose: the Bad Wolf, the woman whom the Doctor actually loves with something almost like romantic love.

Captain Jack: the man who can’t be killed, the anchor for the spin-off.

Martha: OK…Martha’s ALMOST what companions used to be. There’s no strange, timey-wimey- stuff around Martha. She’s just a pretty smart person who was in the right place at the right time to stumble into the Doctor’s orbit.

Donna: the Temporary Time Lord

Wilf: The Doctor’s doom.

River Song: Where do I even START on this one, really? She’s almost nothing BUT plot device, which is probably the most disappointing waste of an intriguing character in the history of the series, old or new.

Amy and Rory: Actually, these two start out almost promising. Yes, the whole cracks-in-the-wall thing kinda follows Amy around, but other than that, their first year almost avoids the trap. The second year-and-a-half, however, gets them so entangled with the River Song plot device that they also become plot devices, not people.

And now…Clara. I really, really want to like Clara, but unless something changes in some of the upcoming stories, I’m not sure I can. Oh, I don’t mean Clara-the-character. Clara the character, when we actually see her without any attempt by the writers to shove up our nose how special she is, is interesting enough.

But Clara the plot device is starting to actually make me uncomfortably itchy. Partially because she’s the Latest in as Long Line of plot-device companions; but also because the main effect she seems to be having on the Doctor is to turn him into a creepy, obsessive bastard.

Now, mind you…the Doctor is not a good person. The first thing we ever see him do, back in 1963, is kidnap two school teachers because they’d stumbled upon the TARDIS. Most of the time he seems to have risen above that sort of thing, but every now and then, the fact that he just doesn’t think like a normal, well-adjusted human being, because he’s absolutely none of those things, is made starkly obvious. Sometimes it makes for a good story.

Right now…it’s not.

Right now, the fact that Clara is a Mystery To Be Solved™ is overriding the fact that she’s a person, in terms of how the Doctor treats her. I have no idea what the writers were thinking when they decided to show us that the Doctor wound up stalking her and her family through her childhood, but the end result is that the Doctor is creeping on a little girl on the playground.

[Credit where due: while the scenes bothered me from the first, I didn't think of it in those exact terms until my friend @quasilaur on Twitter made a similar complaint.]

Are the writers trying to demonstrate for us just how alien the Doctor is by showing us the lengths he’ll go to to solve a mystery, even when that mystery is a person? Or have they themselves lost sight of the fact that their characters are supposed to be people first, and plot devices second?

I’m terribly afraid it’s the latter, and if that’s the case, then I suspect Series 7, and the 50th Anniversary, are likely to be very disappointing. at the very least.

 

 

Categories Doctor Who, Unsolicited Opinion

Election 2012: One More Bit of Good Stuff

20121108 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
1

A friend of mine pointed out a glaring omission — one a lot of people seem to be leaving out.

To her knowledge (and mine), the re-election of Jesse Jackson, Jr. marks the first time a person who was openly and self-admittedly suffering from and under treatment for a mental illness (bipolar disorder) has been elected to Congress. Congress has been plenty full of people we all knew were crazy, but this is the first time someone who is publicly known to be struggling with a mental illness has been elected.

It’s also been pointed out to me that Maize Hirono, the new Senator from Hawai’i, is a Buddhist.

Categories Dammit!, Politics

Election 2012: All the Good Stuff

20121108 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
5

[Updated!]

Before we all get mired in the reality that the fiscal cliff still looms and the House of Representatives still has a majority that thinks taxing the rich is a bigger evil than bigotry, let’s take a look at all the things about this election that were awesome, from a progressive’s point of view. Because the list is actually suprisingly long. I think it’s premature to suggest that these results represent the turning of a tide, represents the increasing marginalization of ideologies that favor a single “master” constituency and its values (read: rich, white, Christian, heterosexual men). But it sure looks that way at first blush, don’t it?

Here’s the summary: a state with an all-woman congressional delegation; the US’ first openly gay congressperson; the first female disable combat vet in congress; gay marriage legalized in three states; gay marriage not made harder to legalize by constitutional amendment; voter ID defeated in several places; science and math triumphed over wishful thinking. Oh, and our inspirational yet rational, mixed-race, center-right President got re-elected in favor of a lily-white plutocrat!

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Dammit!, Politics

Remember when the Future was going to be Awesome?

20121030 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
16

I’ve been thinking about the state of science fiction, these days; science fiction on television in particular, but also, the popular franchises and concepts in SF in general. Thinking in particular on the fact that it’s all so damned bleak and hopeless and pessimistic!

What we need now, frankly, is Star Trek. And not just another movie — although I’m looking forward to the new movie with absurd glee. We need another series. We need a space-opera television series whose premise is simply this: The Future Is Going To Be Awesome!

Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Living in the Future, Politics, Star Trek, Unsolicited Opinion

Vote NO!

20121011 // by Michael Scott Shappe //
0

We have two constitutional amendments on the MN ballot. One would explicitly define, as a matter of state constitutional law, “marriage” as being between one man and one woman. The other would amend the constitution to require Voter ID.

The Marriage Amendment needs to go down in flames even if you honestly don’t think that two men, or two women, or polyamorous families, should ever possibly be recognized as “married”. Constitutions should never, ever, curtail human rights or human dignity. Ever.

Now, defeating the Marriage Amendment will not suddenly enable same-sex marriage, and plural marriage isn’t even really on anyone’s radar at the moment. Both are currently explicitly illegal in Minnesota, and I would estimate that the best case scenario would give us at least a decade before same-sex marriage could be recognized as a matter of law (as opposed to a sudden judicial ruling). I have no statistical backing for that estimate, by the way. Just a feeling that the tide has already turned on the question, and that the Marriage Amendment represents, in fact, an act of desperation by those who want to hold the tide back.

On the other hand, obviously, allowing the amendment to pass will almost certain delay the legalization of the practice by the simple virtue that the constitution is harder to amend, even in repealing something, than the law is to change. That’s exactly why foes of same-sex marriage have been pushing to get their bigotry enshrined in constitutions — because they know that, even once the tide has turned, their victory will linger for quite some time while the restrictions are dismantled.

Somewhat less important to me, honestly, but still pretty important is the Voter ID amendment. Let’s be very, very clear, here: there’s only one reason Voter ID laws and amendments are being pushed, and that’s to try reduce the number of people who are likely to vote for Democratic/DFL candidates and liberal issues by making it harder for minority voters to exercise their franchise. The people behind these efforts know they could not get away with overtly trying to change the terms of the franchise, so instead, they’re trying to do it through the back door.

They say, of course, that it’s about limiting voter fraud…but there are far more documented cases of ballot-machine malfunction, hanging chads, and fraud at the systemic level rather than the individual voter level. From that standpoint, this is a solution in search of a problem, or, really, just an excuse with a friendly audience. After all, nobody likes voter fraud, right?

At the risk of belabouring a point, let me be clear: both of these amendments represent a last-ditch offensive by reactionaries who see themselves and the world they remember — a world, to be fair, which they honestly believe in — becoming increasingly irrelevant. They see the pendulum swinging away from them right now on these issues, and they hope that, by forcing their views into state constitutions, they can preserve the world they prefer for at least another generation.

If you care at all, in any way, for equality, fair treatment, and if nothing else keeping discriminatory measures from becoming constitutional law, VOTE NO.

Categories Politics, Uncle Mikey Explains the Inexplicable, Vote, Vote Dammit!
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