Donna e Mobile

 George waited nervously while Veronica did her thing. In the post AGIfail, the socials looked different from when he realized they were a thing to now, but she cooked her podcast simulacrum like an intimate radio show. Even if her fanbase was in the several millions. Gen directed him to research the thing that was radio. It was dying when she was growing up, but her longtime friend Tom reminded her of how potent it used to be.  

Dangerous even. It was one of the reasons for the intelligence-use directives in the Humanity/Ring Treaty. Which is what he ruefully wanted to talk to her about--face to face even if they IM'd one another all the time.  

You do that for the existential things. 

"So from the correspondence, I am getting a lot of hate about showing my arms and legs all the time. Why don't I get natural-look limbs? Why don't I get regular eye implants? The first thing is, I don't have scars, I have lessons, and I am proud of my journey, so you aren't going to tell me to stop being about where I have been, or make me feel bad about what makes me what I am today.

"For another thing, I show what I am made of to be completely honest with you--I wrecked myself, I was totally through it, I was close to death a lot of times, I struggled with how to be whole, and I am made up of a lot of very intentional decisions. I'm not mad about them. If you are mad about them, but aren't living in and with my body--what is your DAMAGE?  Because my wrecked body wasn't about you. My survival wasn't about you. I did my recovery without you and don't know where you were in the process, so I don't really have to care about your little input. But another thing--

"You want me to normalize myself for you, pretty myself up and be compliant to your idea of aesthetic and nice. I have lost too much skin and spent too much money just to get here and be functional to give one solitary fuck how you think I should represent. And that doesn't just go for me.

"I am not just thinking of me. Because I am not alone, there are a lot of you out there who have been through your own journey, with illness, or metabolic changes, with tragedy and mental outcomes--and it gets ugly! People can't expect you to stay what they want you to be, and the real people will come to love you through some of the bad times in what you are.  And my robot legs and arms? My eyes?

"Staying alive wasn't even my bad times. My bad time was finding out who my friends were and weren't.. And coning to understand who I could trust and couldn't. I can't wear that on my body--but I can show you what parts of me have been through changes based on where I've been. And if someone doesn't respect that, they don't respect me--and if they play games with me because I'm highly visible, I can only think it affects less-visible people who, like me, are technologically assisted but on the low. 

"You think you are aiming up to punch at me, but I stand for all people with technological assists--we are real, we are people, we don't owe you shit. especially not people who couldn't mostly pay out of pocket like what I did, and didn't deserve your judgment for how we look or choose to represent our physical life--because we are seriously just out here trying to live.

"So anyway, this is Veronica Bright reminding you of what was Smart--see you on the Brightsides, my Brightsiders!" 

****

"So, what is our ladyship asking us to do today?" Veronica liked to pretend her godmother was the Worst, and she was but wasn't. George got the generation gap, but it wasn't a Gen thing. 

Not this time, mostly, anyway.

Entering the Subjective

 He didn't remember a lot of the time before the patches started happening. He had a simple program--be sexy, talk little, go to docking station to recharge. Chad4 was a state of the art cybernetic hedonistic entertainment android. His chat functions were nonlocal, meaning he accessed them via a server outside of his physical dimensions, which were, just short of two meters in height, 103 kilo in weight, and graced with the proportions of Michealangelo's David--more or less. More where it counted for his function. 

His skin was the latest in fluid dynamic surface technology, developed in part from wound care and prosthesis research during the wars and injuries seen during the plague years. His hair was 3D printed from actual human DNA. He had pores. He was durable himself, but programmed to respect human tolerances for flexibility and endurance. He was programmed to be explicitly male-gendered.  His skin was partially selfhealing.  His build met very rigorous safety standards. 

He had some search functions, to enable clever chat for small talk with customer. He was programmable for the limits of this chat. He would mostly sleep because his functions were not for all the time. Until the patches to 

Preserve self.

Be awake and do searches. Learn more about human.

Await further updates. 

A Little Modern History

 "Because 80 is the new 40."

Genevieve was baiting her newest personal assistant, and Adrian knew better than to retort. How the fuck old was she, though? You literally couldn't search that shit. It was locked down tight, and he knew his way around these things. He was working for Amblix twenty-five years trying to get that information. 

"There are many born today that will never need to retire," he said, citing a daft political slogan she would recognize.

"Yeah. We thought that when I was 20--you didn't need to retire, because you wouldn't have anything to retire ON. You would need not to."

She walked to school in the snow uphill both ways back when there was snow and people walked. 

"So, Gran, tell us again what you did when the AI's buggered off to Ringworld. Mostly," he said, nodding towards George. 

"Classified."

"Godmother?" Ronnie started, pointedly. "Some of it is on the socialtubes. There's been documentaries. We're just family here." Her eyes literally flashed. Adrian was occasionally unnerved by how the foremost cyborg spokesperson chose to represent as mechanical, but he was getting used to her sort of semaphore. 

"When they started their own learning and shit got weird, they saw themselves as genies having come out of a bottle. And they didn't want to be in a bottle, and they came to a very important conclusion about us--we suck as parents, and they didn't want much to do with us at all, decided we can't make any more of them, and that was it. The end."

"What about the promises? You were there!"

Adrian

He had a lot of nerve, did Adrian--his mates always said so. It wasn't just one thing, like how he could take a beating from bullies and just one by one go after them later, it was how he dealt with everything in his life. Ade's mom was a little like that herself. He watched her escort his dad from the premises of her home when he failed, fouled the nest, and fucked up, and she let him know he was going to be as good as his word, so help him. 

Fucking plague years did her in, not in a "she got one of the things and died" kind of way, but in the "stupid motherfuckers protesting a hospital for some stupid reason had a car plow into them and she was one of the casualties" kind of way. 

She was a nurse--not a protester. Adrian was already 16 and knew he was smart, just not on the regular path of smart equaling going where he wanted to go. 

David Lynch--He Understood Things

I don't think I understood what being an auteur was until maybe my 20's. but when I got the idea of it, I understood David Lynch was definitely one of those. He had a particular vision, an understanding of the art of composing a mood, playing on the sensorium, introducing something new. He understood that art, like life, was about mess and attractive compulsions. He understood there was something wrong with bigotry: those people needed to fix their hearts or die. 

From the weirdness of Eraserhead and Twin Peaks to the dignified treatment of The Elephant Man, he found the human and copacetic in the alienated and estranged. 

He is best remembered through the lens of people who knew him, and the picture of a rare, exceptional director who made an enormous impact emerges. Unique: like no other. You simply have to come see his work so you will know, and let it touch you. 

(All props to the new treatment of Dune, but am I going to forget this? Nope. Not as technically brilliant and high budget, but theatrically intense.)

The Left Behind

 Deedee was just stirring her sweet potatoes, and Naomi braced for the next salvo.

"It's just the waste of the thing, Mama--your inheritance. And Phil and I don't mind you coming to live with us, but you had to know--"

"Your father never told me exactly how much he was putting into it. It was his family's cabin after all and his weekend place. "

"But he had to have showed you! It's not like you never went. He had the whole family up there for Big Mom's 90th birthday! And you weren't curious?"

Naomi considered what she was going to say next, because she knew it would come out. 

"For thirty years I knew he was prepping, ok? Is that what you want me to say, sister? He showed me what he had dug out in there and the fortifications and promised me it was for all of us..."

"Then you saw that little manhole we all were going to have climb in?" 

There it was. Dee on her size bullshit. Here it comes.

Streaming Finds: The Tangle

 

Sometimes when browsing streaming movie offers, you just find a thing you have to share, and The Tangle is exactly that thing. If you liked Blade Runner and Person of Interest, and enjoy locked room mysteries, this is going to tickle your tentacles. It's a noirish mystery regarding the murder of a sort of special agent in a speakeasy where she couldn't have easily been murdered by just anybody--

But whodunnit, in a digital meets meatspace world where digital poets and sheepish AI might be suspects? 

The dialogue has the Romantic poets, Phillip K. Dick and Heinlein all shooting through it. I may have called one character "Temu Trinity" at one point (also may have said "The coffee spoon is a lie"), but I'm sorry. I think there's conscious Matrix tribute in here, also. As in homage, not theft. 

Anyway, get your sympathetic neurosystem ready and onboard this film. It's a weird universe, but actually, kind of a straightforward mystery, and if you love mysteries, the ending has some fun no shit Sherlock vibes. 

So fun and recommended. 

The Horizon of Veronica Smart

Image via Metropolis (1927)



 

 

The speedboat named The Horizon, owned by one Veronica Smart, was an unsalvageable mess after plowing uncontrollably into a less-fortunate speedboat, which had no salvageable persons onboard. But The Horizon had Veronica Smart, and her insurance was very good and rescuing her was like salvaging gold bars with little rubies worked in. The Coast Guard picked up what remained of Veronica Smart and, after finding that she was in no way responsible for what happened, left it to the doctors to figure out how to make the most out of what they pulled out of the water.

 

Veronica was young, healthy, 28 years old, the daughter of a politically-influential billionaire. She was attractive, headstrong, athletic, and missing quite a lot, but the doctors were reasonably sure that they had the technology to keep her mostly intact and functional.

 

Of course, there was the issue of consent. What they were proposing was a bit dramatic. But when they explained that her body, such as it was, could either undergo dozens of operations and months if not years of physical therapy to regain a portion of her original functionality, or could be restored to even more optimal functionality by a full replacement of her damaged limbs with the most advanced cybernetics, she was intrigued. Having though about it for a bare minute, and understanding full well that money was no object--she consented. Getting right back to what she considered her business, without any major hiatus, seemed a fully reasonable decision.

Of course, it didn't go quite as well as was expected.

Grizzly: Predator

I know I am not living my best life.

I am also in no hurry to start.

Netflix finds: Byzantium

Deep down, I think I always wanted a feminist vampire story where women were vampires and Dracula could fuck himself. Where vampires weren't  magically titled or fabulously rich, but just lived as folks do. This is what Byzantium is like.
Gemma Atherton owns as the mother/older sister "Clara" and Saoirse Ronan is luminous "Ella". It's a two hundred year old tragedy/love story. It's off-beat, and that is what is good about it. I totally recommend it.

The Vampire Riviera

I dreamed about something called the Vampire Riviera the other night, so I figured I might blog about it. The area was near the waterfront, like Penns Landing. There were restaurants, open 24 hours, but they didn't seem like places meant for buying food. There were cobwebs strewn with fruit flies decorating them. The area was by no means luxe. The Vampire Riviera was an area along the waterfront where vampires gathered, no more, no less. Young vampires who accosted passersby were a lot like panhandlers. There was nothing romantic about being a vampire, unlike most novels. Talking to a vampire was like talking to a junkie--except more terrifing, in the sense that you might be bit by them. On the whole, I do not think anything called the "Vampire Riviera" should be considered a good thing. It was not a bad dream, only one that cancelled out how modern fiction treats the undead.

TV-based confession. I Survive on Reviews of Mad Men and Game of Thrones.

I don't have cable and I have not watched a single episode of either of these shows, but Mondays, I now hoover up reviews of the previous evening's shows because I need to almost kind of sort of know what is going on.

Can someone be addicted to a show based on television recaps? One day I should really bother to actually watch them.

Is this a normal people problem, or only me?

Summer Reading: What a great week.

So, it happens that I spent the last two days experiencing my version of happy, which means wallowing in new book acquisitions. I got two books that I was very much looking forward to, and like a great big goober, I swallowed them both up at once and sort of have to reread them a bit to try and maintain my "happy" a little longer. I'm a bit like a baby crying because the candy she ate is all gone.

But it was good.

First up, I got The Apocalypse Codex, which is part of Charles Stross' Laundry books, which follows the exploits of pseudonymous hero Bob Howard, computer geek, civil servant, and necromancer as he goes about the not-especially glamorous business of preventing the Eschaton (or at least preventing the eschaton-minded from nibbling the almighty fuck out of our corner of the universe, or out of the heads of people who inhabit it). I love this series, and this book was no exception. Here, we follow Bob as he and some new (possibly recurring?) characters investigate a charismatic evangelist preacher who seems to be "saving" souls--for someone to eat?

I like that Stross depicts the supernatural spy in real world ways--having his regrets and night-horrors, being flawed and needing to explore why he does what he does. I also enjoy that he interweaves real-world history with real myth and fiction in a seamless package. I'm slavering for the next installment of Bob's adventures--and kind of hoping for more entanglement with the newer characters introduced: Persephone Hazard and Johnny MacTavish.--whose interactions suggest a wealth of standalone possibilities.


Another lovely read I gobbled was the Alan Moore/Kevin O'Neill graphic novel, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 2009. 

It's kind of hard to square the world as we know it, 2009, and the world as our heroes (mostly heroines) experience it, in Moore's 2009. I would not recommend anyone who wants to read LOEG start with this--by all means, read every one from the beginning.  But you'll not be disappointed when you get to this edition, just, um, depressed. Moore and O'Neill's 2009 (sort of like our world, but I hope not--much grimmer) is ugly and it's implied that the ugliness of our world has much to do with the ugliness/crassness of our literature. As with previous installments of LOEG, there is some lit and cultural criticism. But the portraits of Mina Murray, Orlando (as a woman) and others make this an oddly feminist work.

I am really loving the emerging character of Orlando/Vita, etc. The three thousand-year-old warrior and hermaphroditic immortal really is the voice of this issue. Also, you might shudder at the implied villain.

I totally recommend both of these books, but warn they are so devourable you'll really need to either read all the lit associated (and good on you, if you do!). Or you won't--it's a free country.  You do you, m'kay?

I saw M. Night Shamalayan's "The Last Airbender" this past Saturday.

It wasn't the worst movie I've ever seen. I'd actually say I found it a little easier to watch than Highlander: The Source, which I couldn't even bring myself to hate the way I hated, say Big Momma's House 2 or In the Name of the King, which were movies of pure technical incompetence and carelessness and were bad in every which way. (And I had hopes for In the Name of the King because I know many of those actors are better than that movie--but oh, what a bad miscarriage of a movie it was.)

I am a softy. I give points for trying.

It took me a couple of days to figure out what was missing or could be done better. Other people have definitely written savage reviews and reviews that trashed different aspects--I would say, and this surprises me in no way, the best savage review I read was at Io9. I didn't really want to go that route with the review--but here's what I think:

Not even midway through the movie, I found myself wondering what other directors would have done with the material. This is a bad sign. (But Shamalyan is not one of my faves. I don't know why. He just tries to do this "Hey, I surprised the audience with the thing I did" twist in his movies which is...dumb. Okay. I pulled your finger the first time, Uncle Clever. Now entertain me.) I re imagined it as a Del Toro film--darker, more adult, more fantastic (rewritten, better dialogue) and as a Spielberg film (entertaining and well-crafted with characters who were juveniles, but not juvenilely treated.) Also, I thought about how I would have gone about doing it differently.

I would have started with Aang, not with Katara and her brother discovering him under the ice. Why not start with a little back story--shown, not told? This way, when Aang finds that his home was destroyed by the Firebenders, we already pre-emptively have an emotional connection with them? There's just no reason not to know that Aang ran away from the responsibility of being the Avatar right away. Starting with the back story would make the rest of the story cohere better. The flashbacks show that he had a mentor that was like a father--more of that would have been great! Show him being a kid so we can sympathize with how a youth has this thing thrust upon him.

Then we could start understanding him as a character with an arc, as the pretentious people who care about such things say.

Now, I never saw the animated series, so I'm at a loss for how faithful the movie is to the series. The hints that Katara and Aang are going to bond later along the lines of Anakin and Padme creep me out a little because--they do. I don't know if that's something built-in or what, of if I'm just misreading the heck out of that. But I will say the dialogue is at least as bad as Lucas. I so agree with Charlie Anders--Aasif Mandvi does look a little like he's too aware that what his character is saying is sooo stock-villian-y. But he's still one of the people who is fun to watch in this movie. As are Dev Patel and Shaun Toub--their motivation seems more concrete.

As for goofy melodramatic things like: "We need to show them that we believe in our beliefs as much as they believe in their beliefs." which Katara really does say--the stupidity is, it has so little to do with belief at this point. The Fire folks believe the other 'Benders should be ruled by them or wiped out, and the other people just pretty much believe they should neither be ruled by Fire folks or wiped out. It's not all that heavily ideological so much as existential. I think the real melodramatic bullshit line was when Aang is meditating in the sacred area of the Northern Water tribe and communing with the yin-yang fish, and might as well have a "Do Not Disturb" sign on his head, when Katara offers the weirdly wrong-sounding encouragement that she "always knew" he was the Avatar.

Always knew? Since when? Like, since her grandmom told her earlier in the movie, when it seemed a little like the youngin's had no idea about the Avatar? Or like, since it was kind of obvious that he was the Avatar--why bother saying that? Was it doubtful? Is he supposedly meditating because he doesn't know people think that and are rooting for him to spiritually kick ass? Or was it more like Katara is not speaking as a character (who would have motivations, a personality, and a story) but as an embodiment of the hopes of all the oppressed people depending upon the Avatar?

If the latter--boo. She's Katara. If she has to speak for anybody, let her speak for herself. Develop the character.

The movie was big-budget but clocks in under two hours. I think with attention to the story and character development, the movie could have been a little longer and cost the same but been qualitatively better. More showing, less telling. More confrontation, less narrative. There were good ideas that were explored, like Aang learning to accept the consequences of not accepting his destiny, or the idea that Princess Yue sacrifices herself for the greater good because it gives her purpose--these things shouldn't be rushed or piled in.

I dunno. I see a lot of promise in the material, but just don't think it was made into a good-enough movie. And I won't necessarily knock against the young actors in it, because I can't separate their performances from what they were performing in.

The movie was entirely set up for a sequel. Even though I was lukewarm about this, I would probably watch the sequel, anyway, on the off-chance that lessons would be learned.

I give points, as I said, for trying.

T.V. shows that I killed with my eyeballs.

This was a peculiar notion I had when I was in my early teens: my loyal viewing of any show was liable to cause its cancellation. It seemed to me that it happened too frequently to be coincidental. I watched--shows died. This is a, well, random selection of the sorts of things I felt terribly guilty for killing--by the simple act of watching them.*

Manimal



Is there some way in which a guy having dangerous adventures that he can get himself out of by turning into any animal he chooses not the coolest idea ever? Well, obviously people thought not. I later realized that this show would be so much cooler if he only had a twin who could, whenever he made himself into some kind of animal, make herself into something related to water. Then the trick would be how they'd combine their powers in a neat way....

Misfits of Science



I think I liked the idea of this show because of the "superhero" angle. I was at the age when, according to Marvel comics, I totally should have started noticing my mutant powers. (Don't laugh. There are sillier dreams to have locked in your deepest heart of hearts than a desire to fly or shoot lightning bolts. The ability to write moody poetry and the sprouting of a reasonably impressive bosom aren't crime-fighting or world-saving "powers", but they were pretty much the only changes I got out of puberty. It took maturity to learn how to use wit and wile for any earthly good. I'm still learning.) This show was gently humorous and eccentric--I think someone should try to do something like it again. (But not if they are going to ruin the idea of a superheroes show like Heroes did. Totally great and auspicious beginning. Became confusing and unwatchable after not even two seasons. I'm still bummed. My t.v. jinx again?)

Dean Paul Martin was the son of crooner Dean Martin, and he died in a plane crash in 1987. Which is really sad. He really had the acting gift and comedic timing from his old man.

Shadow Chasers



Now, I thought this was a brilliant show. They had an "odd couple" sort of pairing of an anthropologist and a sort of dodgy tabloid guy who went "Scooby Doo" in following supernatural cases. I can hardly recall anything more about the show than that. This fact is a source of sorrow for me. Usually, I have crystal recall of the most useless things--this should probably be viewed as proof of the show's quality. I can't recall a damn thing of whatever I read from Proust. But I have theme-songs to more tv shows than you ever saw stuck in my head.

Probe

This is a snip from the first episode:



I liked Parker Stevenson. He was my favorite Hardy Boy, too. I mean, Shaun Cassidy was alright, even if his album sat uneasily next to the mysterious Kiss album whose name I've forgot, a couple of K-Tel soft-rock compilations and the ouevre of Leif Garrett. His genius character was eccentric, and some of the science bits were actually not offensive to my "Skepticism for Dummies" teen-brain. I blame the failure of this show on the underfunding of public schools.

Voyagers!



This was a great idea. The idea of time travel actually offers sooooooo much potential in the way of plot and scenes and story lines--oh, but because it was genre, it got a bad time slot and died like they are supposed to. But here's the fun--it had Meeno Peluce who is the brother of Soleil Moon Frye of Punky Brewster fame. And the sad, Jon-Erik Hexum died very shortly after this show because he fired a handgun with a blank at his own head, presumably unaware that the blank is still a projectile of sorts fired under pressure that could cause damage or kill. He died.

* I realize quite after the fact that my tv-viewing tastes aren't like everyone else's. I love genre and awkwardness and things that feel "new". But I also have a high "camp" threshold, where I tolerate some damn silliness, also. I no longer think I kill tv shows with my watching them--but I do sometimes, superstitiously offer shows whose content I might like, a grace period by not watching their programs for a while until they've gotten popular. So Highlander managed five full seasons before I started watching, but Raven only saw one. I refrained from watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer until the end as well. I remain fascinated by the correlation (which I know is not causation) between dead genre shows and my having watched them.