Freeways

My brain was actually working the other day, which was good because it turned out to be a particularly disappointing day. When my brain is actually working, which is rare, I come up with random thoughts. And one random thoughts was that freeways are just modern marvels. I don't mean that they're marvels because of how they're built, how big they are, what they allow us to do, or anything like that. I mean those are marvelous, but that's not what my thought was. The amazing thing about freeways is that they work, at all.

Think about what it takes for a freeway to actually function. You have to have tens of thousands of people all driving cars. All the cars have to be reasonably maintained. They all have to be driven by people who can judge speed, distance, direction, and so forth. These people all have to have a shared understanding of rules of the road - how to pass, what it means to pass, how to merge (oh yes, they REALLY need that shared understanding), when and why to honk, when to stop (never), when to speed up, and so forth. And the thing is, if even ONE of these things doesn't happen, a freeway won't work. If ONE driver is sufficiently inept, they can either slow the whole thing down atrociously or they can get in a wreck and stop the whole damn thing. It amazes me that we can get tens of thousands of people to more or less satisfy these requirements every day to the extent that freeways actually run. In general, it seems impossible to get a group of 10 people to work together at even mundane tasks, but here we routinely get 10,000 people to work together on a rather complex task.

Now I know, Mr. and Mrs. Snark, that there are plenty of times freeways DON'T work, and that when they don't it is precisely because someone or a group of someone's don't meet those basic requirements. They drive like idiots, or they drive a car that blows up, or they don't know the rules of the road, or whatever. And I know this because I have sat there for hours paying the price for this failure of some individuals out of our 10,000 to be smart or lucky enough to keep the thing going. But consider, I live in a city which, with the metro included, has a few million people, lots of them use the freeways, and it is almost NEVER the case that I can't get where I'm going on the freeway. Given the variables that have to align for that to happen, it's kind of, well, amazing.

Another fascinating thing about the freeways is when you view them as a complex, self-correcting system. Freeways can be a chaos theoretician's dream experiment. A butterfly flapping it's wings, distracting a driver, causing a fender bender, causing police to come, causing rubber-neckers, can indeed cause the freeway equivalent of a hurricane.

It is finished

Lo, many months ago Shifter did undertake a great undertaking, which was undertook lo many months ago. And that undertaking did require the undertaking of a buttload of reading. And that buttload of reading, which was undertook, did involve ALL of the Wheel of Time books, each of which has a gazillion words and pages. And now, as it was undertaken, so it was undertook, and it is done.

Finally.

Having now re-read the entire series, and read the new Book, which was outlined by Jordan and finished by Brandon Sanderson, I can make a few observations.

First, the series is, if anything, even longer than I remembered.

Second, the first books were every bit as good as I remembered.

Third, the latter books were not, overall, as bad as I remembered. Reading them all in order definitely helped with many of those later books.

Fourth, SOME books (especially Crossroads at Twilight) were EVEN WORSE than I remembered. Really, CaT was a colossal waste of trees, brain cells, and precious hours that I could have spent plucking my eyebrows or other tasks, all of which would have been more interesting and valuable than reading that book. However...

Fifth, the new book (book 12, The Gathering Storm) really rocked! I am very impressed by what Sanderson did. It is definitely not a "Jordan" book and in some ways that is not a bad thing. The pace was much faster, for example, and clothing was described much less often. I know it seems like I harp on clothing descriptions a lot but believe me, I harp on them far less often than they show up in all 11 of the other damn books. There were actually some decent and I think fairly accurate reviews of Book 12 on Amazon, and I agree with them that the writing for Matt Cauthon was a bit jarring compared to Jordan, but aside from that it was a fairly seamless transition from Jordan to Sanderson. And it was just a good, fun book.

So now the next book (Book 13) comes out in about a month and I will pick that up and read it, but probably not right away. I'm longing for some books that are under 800 pages - working on some true pulp at the moment. The Malazan empire books are calling to me as well, but again I'm hoping for some lighter, sub-900 page novels for a bit.

And there you have it.

Actual Excerpt From Our Team Meeting

"So we feed all this data into the system and use it to forecast the financial impact over the term of the transaction down to the dollar, the euro, the yen, what have you."

"How do you do that?"

"We have a midget in a room."

Better Off Ted S2 on Netflix Streaming

Including two episodes the network couldn't even be bothered to burn off.

A movie experience

I recently had the experience of watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I went in to this movie with mixed feelings. On the one hand, some of my family had seen it and liked it. Also, the first 2 X-men were pretty good movies - not stellar, but good. On the other hand, the reviews were far from stellar. On the whole I'm glad I watched it. Not because it was good. It was, to me, the worst movie I've seen in at least a year. But I am glad I watched it because it helped me understand what makes a good comic book adaptation.

One of the challenges good comic book adaptations face, Batman Begins, Spiderman, Ironman (why all "man"s?) and so forth, is that their subject matter is inherently cheesy. A simplistic adaptation of any of these characters ends up with a guy in tights and a mask dropping insipid one liners while punching people. (Ok, Ironman wore a metal costume, but the same idea's there). What a good comic book adaptation does is take these characters and develop their back story, their context, and their powers (and their costumes) enough that you can engage with them as people. They'll never be "believable" but they are, (they do, after all, wear tights), but if this is done well they WILL be engaging. You can find enough humanity and story in there to put aside the men in tights aspect. To do this, the writer/director often must go beyond the original characters to some extent. Often not to a huge extent (Frank Miller's 2 Batman works - Batman Year 1 which became Batman Begins and Dark Knight, for example, both were well written and so translated well), but at least a bit.

The reason I came to understand this watching Wolverine is that they did exactly the opposite. They took a character who is inherently cheesy (the man has metal claws growing out of the back of his hands, and likes to growl, for Chrissakes) and they set up a story line that was if anything less believable, less engaging, and more cheesy than the comic book. They started with a nonsensical so-called plot (two mutant brothers are sucked into a mutant special forces that ends up hunting down other mutants all to develop a sinister super mutant who will hunt all other mutants, which Logan/Wolverine didn't know because he quit to become a lumberjack halfway through), threw in truly ridiculous dialog, and then went on to show that even competent actors cannot save a train wreck of a movie from itself. They did not do this to stay true to the comic book (I've seen that done - it turns into a train wreck too, but at least then it is a train wreck with a reason). No, they twisted the Marvel universe more than any of the movies I've mentioned above. Far more.

No, I think that this was the result of a different deliberate choice - not to make a bad movie, or a "accurate" movie, but to focus exclusively on bringing 1) a little bit of action, 2) a lot of special effects, and 3) as many good/bad guys with powers in as possible. All of this is done with no regard to any other part of the movie, parts like say plot, or character development. The bad news is that as a movie it failed utterly. The worse news is they made a lot of money at it, so we will of course see its ilk again.