Eruditorum Press

Some sort of samizdat wind effect

Comic Reviews (Wednesday April 29th, 2015)

4

From worst to best of what I paid your hard-earned Patreon donations for.

X-Men #26

Regrettably, this G. Willow Wilson arc simply didn’t work. He script had interesting ideas, but between subpar writers and a general sense of this being an auxiliary book running out the clock until Secret Wars, this just landed with the dull thud of a story that’s not going to be staying in print. Alas.

The Multiversity #2

Grant Morrison takes his usual superhero story to seemingly new conceptual limits, managing to change it not at all in the process. There are moments of distinct cleverness, but one kind of suspects that the final joke, with Nix Uotan wishing himself $800, is Grant Morrison laughing all the way to the bank.

Silver Surfer #11

The formalist gubbins are in overdrive, and the result is perhaps more a comic to respect than enjoy, with the cleverness really coming in at the expense of actually resolving the Surfer and Dawn’s conflict in any character-based way.

Daredevil #15

A perfectly competent comic in which Waid plays his big twist both to go into the end of his run and to put the toys back in the box. But Daredevil has been a lower tier book for me for a while now, and in a week as top-heavy as this, this is about where “perfectly fun” ends up.

New Avengers #33

Yeah, I’ve gotta say, I’m not thrilled with the tying into Secret Wars here. The waiting until the same week to release both of these drained momentum from Hickman’s already momentum-lacking run-in. That this seems to, unless I’ve misunderstood the plot, actually tie into the story several issues earlier than where we are right now makes it feel all the more insubstantial. There are some neat ideas in the exposition here, but wow, it’s as overworked as you might have feared. And… eh. Countdowns are never satisfying at the end when it comes to event comics, are they?

Avengers #44

It’s very funny to see the Ultimate characters and the 616 characters in the same panel, but talking with different capitalization styles. That’s proper comedy, that is. As for the big Captain America/Iron Man fight at the end… why? I mean, to provide some sort of thematic unity to Hickman’s Avengers run, but given that his Avengers run is going to go down as little more than a 77-issue prelude to Secret Wars, which is to say, and this is worth stressing, the prelude to Secret Wars is longer than Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run, Sandman, Transmet, or The Invisibles… who cares? Why are we doing this? Oh god, I’m having existential doubts about my pull account again.

The New Avengers: Ultron Forever #1

Meanwhile, in “we should have a movie tie-in or two, eh?” we have a mashup of Marvel history punching robots. Robot Odin. A two-headed Hulk. Alan Davis art. what can I say, I really just wanted to put this ahead of Hickman’s Avengers.…

Continue Reading

“Griefs and Anxieties”: The Loss

, 9

Ugh, but first we have to sit through “The Loss”.

Last time we talked a bit about how speculative fiction can sometimes get so caught up in its own ideas it neglects certain other aspects of good storytelling convention. And we also mentioned how Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s various creative teams have pretty much always had a problem with their characters, for some reason never quite managing to find a way to make them understandably human while also maintaining the idealism they’re supposed to represent (a problem that is, I should point out, exclusively limited to the TV series side of things at this point in time. Michael Jan Friedman has never once been tripped up by this). “The Loss” is the most cringe-worthy and egregious example of this worrisome trend we’ve seen to date, because nobody on the Enterprise seems to furrow quite as many brows in the writer’s room as Deanna Troi.

Wesley may have been sent of in an excessively tropish way, but at least it seems like “Final Mission” was something the creative team was onboard with and knew how to approach, even if the way they approached it was glaringly lacking in ambition. Yes there’s still a glut of Picard, Riker and Data stories such that even if you don’t like specific individual episodes about them, there’s almost certainly another one you will, and no, don’t get me going on Tasha Yar again, but the fact remains that we’re at a point in the show’s history where even Worf and Doctor Crusher have had extensive (and more or less effective) stories dedicated to them. And even so poor Deanna Troi gets shunned like she somehow offended every single crewmember on the series. The only other character who elicits anywhere near the same amount of confused emotions from Star Trek creator types seems to be Geordi La Forge, and we’ll deal with the issues he gets saddled with at the end of the season.

With “The Loss” though, the show tries to do for Deanna much the same thing it had done to Captain Picard last season in “The Best of Both Worlds”: Strip away something vital and fundamental to her character and see what’s left behind. But it plays out very differently for Deanna than it did for Captain Picard-“Family” notwithstanding, the whole ordeal with the Borg and Locutus was supposed to be about demonstrating how human Picard really was by showing what he looked like as the hollow shell of a human: Something is defined by its absence wherein we notice what we’ve taken for granted when we notice it’s no longer there. “The Loss” is sort of the inverse of that-The episode plays out almost as a critique of Troi, trying to show that how, absent the one thing that defines her as a character, she’s rendered a seething, barely-constructed bundle of negative emotion.…

Continue Reading

There is an Ocean in my Soul Where the Waters do not Curve (F-Zero)

8

Anna Wiggins will be contributing a guest post for each year’s worth of games covered in the Super Nintendo Project. For 1991, she’s talking about F-Zero.

It begins with sound. When I think about F-Zero, it is the soundtrack that sticks in my mind. Where other games I had played had background music, F-Zero had songs. Big Blue was the most memorable. These memories are pleasant. This music has been a part of my internal soundtrack for most of my life, occasionally earworming in over the years, always an oddly comforting sense memory.

And this sort of sound was unprecedented. The number of bits in a gaming system was on the one hand meaningless to me; at seven years old, I had no idea what the technical difference between an “8-bit system” and a “16-bit system” were. But on the other hand these terms held an iconic power; clearly the SNES was twice as powerful, and so its games would be twice as cool. If I’d had a little more knowledge, I probably would have expected them to be 256 times as cool.

So this, for me, was my first real taste of what “16-bit sound” could do. I was hooked, and after this game music became a much larger part of how I judged games.

(What I didn’t know at the time was that the SNES made considerable improvements to the NES’ sound system, beyond just doubling the size of all the registers. The SNES came equipped with a separate dedicated co-processor for audio processing, the S-SMP, which meant game programmers could spend more cycles doing software manipulation of sound samples without affecting the game’s performance. Separate graphics processing chips were common in consoles already, but a coprocessor dedicated to audio was a leap forward for sound capability, and allowed for a lot of the richness in sound that jumped out at me here.)

Next comes light. This game looked great, with an initially dizzying faux-3d effect that pivoted around as the player’s car turned. I remember being amazed by this, and it’s what made me want to play the game, despite racing games not being the sort of thing I’m naturally inclined to play.

(F-Zero and Pilotwings were both basically tech demos for Mode 7 graphics, though I didn’t actually come across the term Mode 7 until much later, when SquareSoft ran television advertisements for Final Fantasy III. “Mode 7” was Nintendo’s great technical superiority claim for the SNES, a counterpoint to Sega’s “Blast Processing”. It sounds less impressive than Blast Processing, and indeed, described from a technical standpoint, it sounds like a fairly humble feature. However, unlike Blast Processing, it can be described from a technical perspective. The SNES graphics hardware had 8 different “modes” for drawing backgrounds, numbered 0-7. (Programmers always start counting from 0. It makes us feel special.) If you know just enough about computer graphics processing to be dangerous, it may seem strange that backgrounds were handled differently than anything else, but console graphics chips at the time had built-in notions about ‘backgrounds’ (things that didn’t move) versus ‘sprites’.…

Continue Reading

“Dual Survival”: Final Mission

, 6

A requiem for the would-be boy wonder?

Wesley Crusher, of course, had to go. That’s been obvious to everyone since at least “Encounter at Farpoint”. Perhaps not to the writing staff, however, as the final impetus for the Whiz Kid’s resignation from Star Trek: The Next Generation came not out of basic good sense on the part of the creative team, but from the person who played him. Wil Wheaton was an established, in-demand Hollywood film actor before and into his tenure on the starship Enterprise, and it was becoming increasingly apparent that while the show was doing nothing but increasing the stature of his castmates, it was holding him back and forcing him to turn down lucrative job offers. Of course, it’s also somewhat bleakly funny for me to point out that LeVar Burton was *also* an established Holywood personality, and he had no problems not only committing to Star Trek: The Next Generation but also holding down a whole second television career over at Reading Rainbow, so it’s not exactly like Wheaton was some special case or anything.

But either way, it came to pass that Wheaton would follow in Denise Crosby’s footsteps and leave the show, and that Wesley Crusher would finally be shipped off to Starfleet Academy.

The writing staff were apparently very proud of “Final Mission”. Everyone involved says they wanted to make sure they were able to send Wesley off with the most fitting tribute showcase they could think of. Jeri Taylor says this is the script she put the most work into all year, and Micheal Piller said everyone was very cautious on this production because there were a lot of bad feelings surrounding the way Tasha Yar had been written out…

Oh yeah. Tasha Yar.

Yes, I’m going to bring up Tasha Yar again, and no, I’m not sorry in the slightest. Let me put it to you all as bluntly as I can. How precisely do you think it makes me feel to read this? To hear people like Piller, Taylor and Rick Berman say it was incredibly important to everyone to make sure Wesley Crusher went out on a good note and then mention Tasha Yar in the same breath? I could maybe accept that this was them trying to make good on their past mistakes and make up for how poorly Tasha was handled (even if that does weirdly seem to throw “Yesterday’s Enterprise” under the bus) had this show not just come off the one-two punch of “Legacy” and “Reunion”. Bringing up Tasha three weeks after you still sort of failed to do a story about her with the appropriate dignity that was kinda sexist on top of things and two weeks after tossing out one of the most jaw-dropping, misogynistic affronts to utopian progress and basic fucking human decency imaginable does not come across as good in the slightest, particularly when you’re doing so in the context of an episode about how wonderful Wesley Crusher is.…

Continue Reading

High Sparrow

10

Game of Thrones Season Five reviews are supported by my backers on Patreon. We crossed $300 this week, so I’ll be doing the whole season. Assuming, you know, that nobody backs out or anything. There’s a new milestone at $310, however, for a bonus post on the episode leaks of Doctor Who Season Seven. Which might be interesting to Game of Thrones fans as well, all things considered. 

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly.

The Lion, Tyrion Lannister
Lions of King’s Landing: Cersei Lannister, Tommen Baratheon
Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow
Mockingbirds of Moat Cailin: Petyr Baelish
Roses of King’s Landing: Margery Tyrell
Burning Hearts of the Wall: Stannis Baratheon
Ships of the Wall: Davos Seaworth
The Spider, Lord Varys
Kraken of Winterfell: Reek
Direwolves of Moat Cailin: Sansa Stark
Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark
Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly
Shields of Moat Cailin: Brienne of Tarth
Coins of Braavos: No one
Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton
With the Bear, Jorah Mormont

Meereen is vacant.

The episode is in eleven parts. The first part is three minutes long and is set in Braavos. The opening image is of one of the many statues of gods’ faces in the House of Black and White.

The second is seven minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by hard cut, from Arya to an establishing shot of the city.

The third is three minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by hard cut, from Cersei looking angry to Bolton men outside

The fourth is nine minutes long and is set at Moat Cailin. The transition is by dialogue, from Roose Bolton talking about Ramsey’s forthcoming marriage to Sansa, his bride-to-be.

The fifth is four minutes long and is set on the Wall. The transition is by dialogue, from Brienne talking about Stannis to Stannis.

The sixth is six minutes long and is set in Braavos. The transition is by family, from Jon Snow to Arya Stark.

The seventh is two minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by family, from Arya to Sansa.

The eighth is five minutes long and is set on the Wall. The transition is by family, from Sansa to Jon Snow.

The ninth is seven minutes long and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from the ritual of execution for Janos Slynt to the High Septon’s ritualistic sex game.

The tenth is three minutes long and is set in Winterfell. The transition is by causation, from Qyburn writing a message for Littlefinger to the scene where he receives it.

The eleventh is seven minutes long and is set in Volantis. The transition is by hard cut, from Littlefinger to an establishing shot of Tyrion and Varys’s cart outside the city. The final shot is of Jorah Mormont capturing Tyrion Lannister.

Review

There is not quite such a thing as a default pattern for Game of Thrones, simply because the show’s basic function depends so heavily on breaking the pattern – for instance, by putting the Purple Wedding in the second episode of the fourth season, thus defying expectations about the speed at which a season gets off to a start.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (April 25th, 2015)

23

These Saturday Waffling posts are ostensibly sponsored by my >$5 a week patrons at Patreon, but only like five of them ever gave me links to what they’d like me to plug for them, so now I’m just unabashedly trying to shame the rest into giving me them so I don’t just have to link Eric Rosenfield’s site week after week after week.

First off, I’m pleased to announce that not only did we hit the $290 threshold for “High Sparrow,” we’ve reached $300, which means I’ll be reviewing all ten episodes of Game of Thrones Season Five. I’m intrigued by this “small milestones leading directly to extra content” idea, so if the Patreon makes it to $310, I’ll bang up one of the essays that would otherwise wait for the Capaldi book (which in turn will wait for there to be an end in sight to Capaldi’s tenure), namely “Outside the Government: Marcelo Camargo,” a look at the leaked workprints and their implications for Doctor Who, television, and anything else that comes to mind.

Second off, thanks to everyone for the very generous response to my Hugos piece. I am especially flattered by the people who said they’d be nominating it in next year’s Hugos. My current thinking, very much subject to change, is that I’ll knock together a small book containing it, Recursive Occlusion, and some other short pieces and aim to get that out this year along with Eruditorum Volume 6. (I’ll probably do this in lieu of a wide release of Recursive Occlusion‘s standalone “art book” version, which you can still buy here.)

And third off, since it seemed a popular aspect of “Guided By the Beauty of Their Weapons,” I’m curious: who had heard of Janelle Monáe before that piece? Who has gone and looked at more than just one song? What songs of hers do people like? Why is she so awesome? And have you seen her latest video?

…

Continue Reading

Poverty Reduction Programme (The Last War in Albion Part 93: Song of the Terraces, After They Were Famous)

, 4

This is the fifth of eleven parts of The Last War in Albion Chapter Ten, focusing on Alan Moore’s Bojeffries Saga. An omnibus of all eleven parts is available on Smashwords. If you are a Kickstarter backer or a Patreon backer at $2 or higher per week, instructions on how to get your complimentary copy have been sent to you.

The Bojeffries Saga is available in a collected edition that can be purchased in the US or in the UK.

Previously in The Last War in Albion: The second major run of The Bojeffries Saga came in the magazine A1, and concluded with a strip called “Song of the Terraces.”

“The Hoop was a massive dead end in which to dump America’s unemployed. Called a ‘Poverty Reduction Programme’, it didn’t reduce poverty… it just meant that people no longer had to look at the poor. If you lost your job you were moved to the Hoop, where you lived on a state-provided credit-card system called MAM until you found employment. Except that there wasn’t any employment.” – Alan Moore, The Ballad of Halo Jones
Figure 709: The symphony grows more complex. (Written
by Alan Moore, art by Steve Parkhouse, from “Song of the
Terraces,” in A1 #4, 1990)
Described as “a light opera with libretto by Mr. A. Moore and full orchestration by Mr. S. Parkhouse,” the strip is formatted as a musical, beginning with the chant of a paperboy as he walks down the terraced street, identifying the paper of choice of each house he walks past: “Sun, Sun, Sun, Sun, Sun, Guardian, Sun.” He is quickly joined by further paperboys, taking up his chorus and adding in descriptions of the papers’ contents: “Page three, transfer fee, ‘Is your man a sex bomb?’/ Which M.P.’s been compromised outside a Gent’s in Wrexham? / Outrage, sports page, ‘Di: her secret vices!’, / Someone out of Neighbours whose domestic life’s in crisis…” In time the original paperboy takes up a new verse, imploring the reader to, “when letter boxes snap / pity the little chap / who does not write the crap / but is its victim. / For while the world’s asleep / he works to earn his keep / lest, with poll-tax so steep / his folks evict him.” 
Figure 710: The symphony concludes. (Written by Alan
Moore, art by Steve Parkhouse, from “Song of the Terraces,”
in A1 #4, 1990)
At this point, things really get going as the first actual member of the Bojeffries family appears, with Raoul stepping out and singing his own tune about going to work, with other men quickly joining in and singing about how “we’ve little dicks and big dogs / and we’re not too fond of nig-nogs / but we whistle as we make our way to work” as Raoul proclaims, “At veekends I vill shop for shelving down at M.F.I. / or vatch a fourth diwision team at play / I’d like to vin der futball pools und then retire und die / so I vhistle as I go to vherk each day!”
…

Continue Reading

“We just get a fragment of a hint”: Future Imperfect

, 1

This is the archetypal example of the problem I’m having with the fourth season. “Future Imperfect” is a perfectly straightforward and even enjoyable hour of television, but it doesn’t leave me with a whole lot of room to craft a creative and entertaining critical analysis of it. I mean, pretty much everything that can be said about it is pretty obvious to anyone watching it.

I actually remember “Future Imperfect” quite well. I did tend to mix it up with “Parallels” a lot, which I like better than this episode, but “Future Imperfect” still sticks with me. The caves on the planet where Commander Riker spends the episode in particular, as well as Barash’s design, reminiscent as it is of the stereotypical Grey aliens from abduction reports while also being endearingly cute and childlike at the same time. I guess if you’re going to do an abduction, missing time and false memories story in a Star Trek: The Next Generation setting, that’s the kind of character you’d naturally want to create for it. The illusory Enterprise stuff is obviously pretty fun in a sort of “lets play around with our stock programmatic conventions a bit” kind of way. I just don’t have a whole lot to actually say about the episode itself, so this is going to be another one of those entries where I tell you how much I’m trying to fill space in this post as a way of filling space in this post.

“Future Imperfect” holds the distinction of being the one episode Michael Piller apparently thought was so good he told the team to buy it sight unseen without even hearing a formal pitch. At least, that’s the story Brannon Braga tells: Piller himself says he thought the story was “a little flat” after the action got going and he, along with the script’s writers J. Larry Carroll and David Bennett Carron, came up with the Romulan illusion misdirection subplot during a brainstorming session. With that kind of setup, “Future Imperfect” is obviously an extraordinarily good showcase for Jonathan Frakes, who gets to sink his teeth into a stylistic range as Riker he hasn’t always gotten the chance to. To broadly generalize, in more mediocre outings Will has tended to be written as either a pallet swap of Captain Kirk from the Original Series, an affable everyman or a grumpy Starfleet lackey. This is one of the first episodes to really play up and play on where he really shines on the show, which is in his strong relationships with the other crewmembers.

Here, Will is confronted with the possibility that a huge chunk of his life is missing, so he defaults on what he knows best. And, Minuet notwithstanding, it turns out he knows his friends so well that this becomes the key to figuring out the illusion-One of my favourite exchanges from this whole year happens when Will confronts the illusory Geordi: “[You’ve been running a Level 1 diagnostic] For thirty hours?…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (April 22nd, 2015)

6

Theodore Beale has responded to yesterday’s post. I’d link it and say not to read the comments, but honestly, why read the article. There’s some other highlights on my Tumblr. Which I bet, by linking here, I’m going to get some fantastic asks to ignore soon.

Comics, from worst to best of what I voluntarily paid for via what a commenter on Theodore Beale’s blog calls “e-begging on Patreon.” (Which is still $2 off from a review on “High Sparrow” come Sunday.)
The Black Vortex: Omega

Man, I love the word “Omega” instead of issue numbers. Kitty Pryde as literal Manic Dark Cosmic Power Dream Girl. This should never have been thirteen issues long. It was preposterously dumb. But its resolution is at least interesting in a general sense of being a thing that will probably be retconned by Secret Wars anyway. 
Lazarus #16

A somewhat self-consciously clever interstitial issue to let Michael Lark catch up with the schedule. Fine, although I’m not sure it works satisfyingly after a self-consciously clever arc finale – Rucka’s pop virtues are not quite so virtuosic as this requires. He’s an album man, not a singles man. Nothing wrong with this issue, but not why this book is in my pulls either. 
Guardians of the Galaxy #26

I see we’ve caught up with Secret Wars. Which is, once again, unsettling more than exciting – this issue sets up a lovely premise. Then it ends by going into a series that at best puts that premise on hold for several months. I mean, I’m not saying I think it’s going to suck, but I have to say, April is not doing wonders for my excitement on this series. In particular, I continue to think the pacing of Hickman’s Avengers issues was wonky – the fact that there’s no actual Secret Wars content coming out for the last few weeks is making the rest of Marvel feel disposable. There’s no swagger or confidence to this. 
Chew #48

Chew continues its frustrating trend of being good enough, often enough that I don’t drop it. 
All-New X-Men #40

This has generated some deserved controversy online over accusations of bisexual erasure. You can see, in the full issue, why Bendis thinks that accusation is misjudged. I’m very much unconvinced, simply because there’s still nothing motivating the decision to make Iceman, as he rather awkwardly puts it, “full gay” as opposed to bisexual. There’s nothing gained by having Iceman be gay instead of bi, and there’s plenty of implication that bisexual people are just gays who lack conviction, which is a bullshit stereotype. 
In any case, the sense of momentum leading into Bendis’s big X-finale is satisfying. 
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl

Nobody is ever going to write a better line for Galactus than “Thanks, Tippy-Toe,” except of course, for Ryan North, who writes numerous other lines of similar quality for Galactus in the course of his defeat at the hands of Squirrel-Girl. (This is not spoiling the ending, since the title of the book pretty much guarantees it.)
…

Continue Reading

“Put ’em On Ice”: Reunion

, 17

No. Unforgivable. Fuck this and everything about it.

Yes, you’re all in luck today. Been awhile since I’ve done a proper polemic on this blog, but here we are: “Reunion” is simply godawful. This one deserves to stand with “The Naked Now” and “Code of Honor” among the series’ absolute lowest lows. This episode is pretty much everything I hate about scripted drama in general and Star Trek in particular all neatly wrapped up in a gift bundle.

Unless this is literally the first thing of mine you’ve ever read (in which case, hi! And sorry you had to come in on such a crap episode! Please go read something I enjoyed writing about instead!) you know why I hate “Reunion” as much as I do. What happens to K’Ehleyr is a textbook example of fridging: Randomly and unceremoniously killing off a female character solely to give her male significant other something to lament about. With no agency of her own, she’s treated as a disposable satellite of a male character’s dour, angst-ridden narrative existence. It’s a flagrantly sexist (and in this case, borderline misogynistic given a few concerning habits the show’s developed over the past couple of years and with an eye on one or two specific episodes coming up this season) approach to storytelling that Star Trek: The Next Generation not only has no business engaging with, shouldn’t even be something conceivable to someone working in it.

It tells you something about how rotten and vile the concept of fridging is given that I’m not even a *fan* of K’Ehleyr and I *still* think she deserved better. Every woman does. Yeah, I still think K’Ehleyr was a not-entirely-functional attempt to “spice up” a show and cast the second season creative team didn’t really know what to do with: Her big contribution, setting Worf on a path to put the Klingon and human sides of his personality in better harmony, could have been done a lot of other ways. I mean, isn’t it *also* sort of sexist to have that all wrapped up in a single, female package? That’s just the infamously-dubbed Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, which is just another form of objectification. It’s always a warning sign when men expect you to breeze into their lives, straighten them out and help them figure themselves out. Those are men who don’t know how to grow up.

But you know what? None of that actually matters, because you don’t fridge characters period, not even Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Once again, what does it say that this creative team is so sadistic and creatively bankrupt their first instinct is to wheel in a former one-shot guest character and put a bullet through their head to give one of the mains some more precious “conflict” to deal with? Fuck off. Fuck off and think about what you’ve done.

K’Ehleyr’s death is also stands in for a unanimous vote of no confidence in Suzie Plakson as a potential new member of the Enterprise extended family, which hurts for its own reasons.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 175 176 177 178 ›»