Tuesday 24-ery

Well, less of the set-piece motorcade ambush than I thought. Instead we get Lynn getting ousted by the CTU's equivalent of the 25th amendment and Logan making the case that the real thing ought to be tried. Who is Logan's VP, anyhow?

And, of course, Jack demonstrating by-negative-example key rules of villany. You lock the hero in the escape-proof bunker or you blow him up, not both. And when he flat out tells you he's going to be making some phone calls when you've cut the lines, don't be so leisurely about detonating aforementioned bomb...

Too Busy...

To type up anything more substantial than this. But expect 24blogging tomorrow and Merchants of Souls blogging Wednesday. Currently reading ColinRobert Charles Wilson's highly recommended Spin.

More Thousand Cultures Blogging

So, in the middle of re-reading John Barnes' The Merchants of Souls, I had a sudden realiztion about the enitre series: the entire series can be read as a critique of Utiltarianism. The first book (A Thousand Open Doors) has it all out in front, showing the problem with classifying some desires as non-rational in order to make the balances work, and the third (Merchants) is a reducto in the other direction, with multiple digressions on the bad consequences of a utilitarianism that allows consideration of any old desire or pleasure. Between them, the second (Earth Made of Glass) is all about the problems introduced by other-regarding preferences...

Much more on The Merchants of Souls to come.

Lazy Blogging 102

In which the author lists recent search terms to turn up in his referrals.

• McGillicutty Moonlighting
• Coyote Frontier
• Hootenanny
• Lost "second season opener" walt hatch
• remmington steele plot
• "24 season 4"

Nothing particularly interesting, is there? I guess I should be talking more about fetish gear or Kerr Avon-Ramna Saotome crossover slash fanfic or something to get the really amusing refers, right?

Manifold:Time

Reread Manifold:Time, the first in Baxter's Reid Malenfant (bad-boy, get it?) series. The Carter Catastrophism is, of course, just as silly as it was the first time. Had an interesting thought near the end, though: the same argument can be applied to universes. If the 'current generation' of universes contains billions of billions of universes each with billions of billions of black holes created, implying an exponential curve backward and forward, why doesn't the same logic conclude that the vacuum collapse business is doomed to fail and that there's a cosmic extinction event coming in the immediate metacosmological future?

Nihilist science fiction at it's best. No other author could attempt to convince you that obliterating the entire universe is the morally correct thing to do...

Open up a socket so I can datamine the protocol...now!

(Or, this week's 24blogging.)

So, this week we swap out to the 'A' team of terrorists, have Lynn suffer a breakdown, and set up a set-piece motorcade attack for the next hour. And foreshadow one of the season's major baddies.

When that set-piece does start, it's going to get increasingly hard to justify the Chinese not seeing Jack on TV at some point during it. Unless someone shuts down all the media covering the Russian president...

Kim Bauer, meanwhile, is taking a preturnaturally long time to cross town in the 24-verse physics. When will we see her, and will it be with a new boyfriend? If so, will we once again prove the so-far-infallible rule 'Sleep with Kim, Lose a Limb'?

Earth Made of Glass

The second book in John Barnes'[link is to his Amazon blog] 'Thousand Cultures' series. Just finished up the reread of this one, leading up to the upcoming release of book 4.

This one also doesn't much make obvious the book 3 issues about which more when I finish that reread, although it does start to drop hints about the setting. (We find out that the aintellects not only keep the various economies running, but are also doing all of the actual new science. We learn of Addams, the major world with 92 cultures that has not built a springer and joined the outside world. A few more details on the aliens thrown in. And likewise some hints as to the history leading up to the thousand cultures.)

But mainly, it's a novel of two disintegrating relationships, one between two cultures and the other between two people, and how they end badly despite well-intentioned efforts to save them. Still recommended reading for anyone.

Hey,

Anyone notice/remember that Games Magazine has a website these days?

No, apparently google doesn't know either. So here's an infinitesm of help for them.

Domesticity and Order:Special Victims Unit (Season 1)

So, recently finished watching/re-watching Law and Order:SVU's freshman season.

For those who don't recall, this is the spin-off that did away with the 'Law' part of the formula in exchange for a series of domestic interludes with Television's Most Boring Family. And was about the Sex Crimes unit, which is apparently called in on any case that's sex-related that isn't being handled by the main L&O cast.

Y'know, one of these days I'd like to see Law and Order:Internal Affairs. Or a non-franchise cop show with the same premise. A show where the 'rat squad' are the good guys, and bad/incompetent/corrupt/over-violent police are the baddies...

Anyhow, the DVD set, for some inexplicable reason, fails to include the second half of a crossover episode. This was, of course, a flaw in the Homicide DVD sets as well, but at least there there were different producers and studios involved. Here, they could have taken a few minutes to pull down one episode out of season 10 [which probably won't come out on DVD itself for another 5 years or so], but no...

Not the best of it's class, by any means. But it does have Richard Meltzer as Detective Munch. And that allows one to forgive a lot.

Beep...Beep...Beep...

Not much to say; last night was the least impressive 24 in years. Still more support for the media/censorship/cover-ups motif theory, still more examples of this year's terrorists being utter clowns and incompetents compared to the bad guys of previous seasons...

And a very confusing preview for next week. So is Jack going to be hunted by CTU for less than one hour and then back to working for them again by mid-afternoon, or are they showing scenes out of order or something? And, while speaking of the ancillaries, why previously Lynn's mugging when it isn't going to play in any kind of way.

Bags Evelyn has a reporter boyfriend, by the way...

A Feast For Crows, speculation and spoilerage

Finished the audio version of Feast. Another book in the series that, at the very least, does no damage to my pet theories on the book, which I will present below:

1. Daenerys is not the Prince who was Promised, and in fact will not survive long after landing on Westeros. Why do I think that? Because in this world, the only way to stop being betrayed at a mere three is for the last one to be fatal, and also because Daenerys and three dragons beat any other conceivable alignment of forces too handily.

2. The Dragon has Three Heads: there are, in Westeros, three other Targaryen heirs, all bastards. One of them is obviously Jon Snow, who is Raegar's son by Allana Stark. That's the obvious one that everyone is supposed to figure out eventually. Presumably Howland Reed is the only person alive in Westeros who knows this. The second is Tyrion Lannister. That's the tougher one to figure out, but (1) Tywin always suspected him to be not his, and he's not a fool, (2) Tyrion was drawn to the Dragons beneath King's Landing, (3) Tyrion had an instant kinship with Jon, (4) Tyrion's hair is described as being even lighter than the usual Lannister blonde, edging toward the Targaryen white, and his eyes are split between the Lannister green and one black [violet eyes are largely interchangable with black ones.] The third I'm not sure about, but after Feast, I strongly suspect Geran, who certainly has the classic Targaryen appearance.

3. When Dany dies, the dragons will fly off, and later each find one of the heirs. Although one of them-most likely Jon's-may get snared by Euron's Dragonhorn on the way. At any rate, that will begin the War of the Three Dragons.

Zen Post

With a 'one post every weekday, no more, no less' charter, is it possible for me to make a post apologizing that blogging will be light today?

Let's find out.

A Feast For Crows Comment

Almost, but not quite, through the second go-round on A Feast For Crows (first was in print, second is in audiobook.)

An interesting idea that's come to me is that, more than Dragons or Magic or the bizarre elliptical/irregular orbit-induced multi-year seasons, the world of George R.R. Martin's series varies from the historical events on which it is loosely based in that there exists an extremely safe and reliable means of female birth control and early-term abortion.

What makes it odder is that it is not only not condemned by any of the (highly patriarchical) power structures, but in fact actively abetted by at least one of them (the Maesters.) Given how important the production of an heir is to so many people out there, it's stunning that nobody has yet seized power by means of an anti-Moon-Tea campaign...

You a Bad Guy? Moonlighting, Season 2

Finished up the last of the Season 2 part of the first Moonlighting DVD set the other day, just as Season 3 is heading to market. Some thoughts on same:

First, the format of the show. When it works, it works by (1) establishing a fairly 'straight' noir/detective yarn, and then (2) throwing the Agents of Chaos at it. At the beginning of the series, Dave is the sole Agent of Chaos, but by the end of season 2, Maddie and, to a lesser extent, Agnes have swirled into the Chaotic Orbit.

Second, the season 2 finale, 'Camille', may well be one of the finest hours of television ever. Damn, but everything worked right in that. Taking a noirish story that already has its own Agent of Chaos (Whoopi's character) as the 'base' allowed them to dial back the incidental winks-and-nods to the audience that broke the fourth wall in the earler episodes (especially the one right before it, another excellent episode in it self) to nothing up until the final act, where it was completely shattered...

Other note: impressive that they managed to re-acquire the rights for all the music used in the first two seasons for the DVDs. Shame that they didn't commentate 'Camille'.

By the time you finish reading this post, you're gonna wish you felt as good as you do now.

Or, Tuesday 24-blogging.

My, but that was a weak-ass cliffhanger this time. Jack's lost his lead on the terrorists...except that they're going to be calling in five minutes. And the preview shows how that works out. And the bad guys have absolutely no way, barring fantastic incompetence on CTU's part, of being able to activate the canisters.

I still say that these clowns are going to be mopped up before the halfway point, and then someone, probably the first lady, is going to leak Jack Bauer's name to the press in a Valerie Plame-esque moment, leading into a 'China and possibly CTU hunting Jack' second act.

Motif-Watch: the media/censorship angle is still alive, with the discussion of the Cummings cover-up feeding into it...

A Thousand Open Doors

This is the first book of John Barnes' far-future sci-fi series, which I just finished re-reading in the run up to the imminent release of the fourth book, The Armies of Memory. I'll probably have a big ol' post on some issues with the series when I get to the third book, but for now, just a general recommendation: this series is good stuff.

Something else to note is that this is one of three excellent series involving fictional societies that become more casually violent in reaction to the availibilty of resurection technology or equivalent magic. The other two being Richard Morgan's Kovacs series, and Steven Brust's Vlad Taltos series. And John Varley's Eight Worlds comes close, with 'medicine that makes anything other than severe head trauma survivable' standing in for ressurection...

Gnomic Utterance

That a policy enrages evil persons should never be taken as an argument against that policy.

Blogroll: Still Angry

Popping Still Angry up onto the blogroll just so as I don't lose track of that one again. And for a lazy day's post. Which builds up to the even lazier day where I can post about sorting the blogroll. But not nearly yet.

TenTwelve things I wish I could buy...

...but aren't on the market, for some reason or another:

1. The 3 1/2 seasons of The Paper Chase on DVD.

2. A Nintendo DS port of Ultima VII. And also of Ultima VII Part 2 while they're at it.

3. The compete run of It's Your Move on DVD. We want the Dregs!

4. A DS port of Star Control II. (The source of the Hootenanny's current Tagline.)

5. Trade Paperbacks or DC Showcase versions of the entire run of John Ostrander's Suicide Squad comic.

6. Harlan Ellison's The Glass Teat and The Other Glass Teat. Which I've been able to read though the magic of Interlibrary Loan, but really ought to be in print. With a fresh introduction, even better.

7. A fourth volume of Phil Foglio's What's New, collecting the second Dragon Magazine run.

8. Oh, and while I'm on the Foglios, a Gallumaufry collection. Colorized would be good, but sooner would be better.

9. The remaining Grendel arcs in Trade paper back. Not just God and the Devil and Devil's Reign, but also the two Batman/Grendel crossovers as well.

10. A DS or GBA port of Chrono Trigger.

Update
11. An audiobook of The Illuminatus Trilogy

12. Fish/Bethancourt's Lock and Load on CD. Which may be cheating, since that may be a dead project and all of these are supposed to involve no new creative work other than software ports between platforms. But all of the songs that were supposed to have been on it were written long ago, at least.