tv

Sunday

I have done nothing more interesting in the past two days than watch the entire eighth season of How I Met Your Mother on Netflix.

I’d fallen out of the habit of watching it, but honestly I think the show is best when experienced in big blocks back to back. I really want to continue watching, but at the same time I worry about getting caught up and therefore falling out of the habit again. (The again, the ninth is apparently the final season, so maybe that’s not an issue.)

On Friday night, I re-watched Running Scared, inspired by this article about it and the discovery that it’s also on Netflix. It really does hold up very well. Then last night I watched Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing. I really think he and this “Shakespeare” fellow are going to go far. Also Amy Acker and Reed Diamond should be in everything. Everyone’s delightful — and Joss Whedon has a lovely house — but those two are really something special.

I’m off from work next week. It’s maybe not the single best week for it — I have my computer home with me and will probably read and send a few e-mails — but I’m nevertheless glad for it.

No writing group again this week — still on hiatus — and not much else going on.

Sunday, again

No writing group again this week, as we’re taking a short hiatus.

So instead, I put a new issue of Kaleidotrope online. The new issue has stories of alien encounters, warring tribes, strange events and stranger journeys, and, of course, the future. Plus poems and silly horoscopes. I’m pleased with how it came out, though I’d appreciate any feedback, there or here. (I don’t get a lot of feedback on the zine, actually.)

I wish I could say it’s been a busy week otherwise, but I’ve mostly just been working.

Last night I watched Prince of Darkness. It’s a deeply odd and silly movie on some levels, but also really creepy and smart about what’s frightening. It’s far from John Carpenter’s best — I’d say that’s easily Halloween followed by The Thing — but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.

I was not surprised by how much I enjoyed the finale of Breaking Bad this evening, though. There’s been a lot of hype, particularly if you’re on Twitter, calling it “the best show ever,” and some of that is probably overblown. But I liked it a lot, and I thought tonight’s episode was as strong as the show has ever been.

I mean, it’s no Sleepy Hollow, of course, but then what is?

Sunday

It’s been a relatively quiet weekend, although we did have some very bad news yesterday afternoon. One of my uncles, my mother’s oldest brother and my godfather, passed away after a protracted illness. We knew this was coming — my parents, along with the rest of my mother’s siblings, went to visit him a few weeks ago — and there’s some comfort in knowing he’s no longer in pain. But it’s still a shock, it always is, and my mother especially is still grieving. He and I weren’t necessarily close, but I always liked him, and it’s sad to think of the world without him. We’re still waiting to hear about the funeral arrangements.

Life does go on, though. Last night, I watched Elmer Gantry. It’s a complicated movie about religion and revivalism and faith, with an Oscar-winning performance by Burt Lancaster. (And one by Shirley Jones, too, I just discovered, although she’s also quite good in it.) I quite enjoyed the movie, although at two and a half hours it did occasionally feel a little long.

And then this afternoon I wrote this:

The trouble all started when they blew up the world.

It was just one planet of a dozen slated for demolition that year, uninhabited and, moreover, uninhabitable, at least by every estimate and simulation the Corportion’s budget had allowed them to run. “Not so much as a protozoa on the surface,” the chief engineer was fond of saying, with what he always hoped the colonial press would characterize as a hearty chuckle. “Not a creature is stirring, not even a mouse.”

Which was not to suggest that the discovery of indigenous life somewhere topside would have necesarily halted the project. A mouse was just a mouse. The Corporation had a mandate to catalog and preserve any extraterrestrial life they might happen to find, but in eighty-plus years of stellar expansion they had so far found exactly none. Just one long stretch of stars, and the dead hunks of worlds too fiery or gaseous or bitterly cold for human settlement. Most planets, they’d long since discovred, weren’t good for much of anything unless you broke them down into their constituent parts, brought in the demo team’s world-eater ships and vacuumed up the natural resources. You couldn’t settle on a big ball of methane or frozen nickel ore, but you could fill the ships a hundred times over. And then, when the giant rock was reduced to dust and rubble, and the orbits of everything else in the local system had been carefully adjusted, you could take those ships and power the Corporation’s real purpose for being: the singularity drive.

Each one had a black hole at the center, and each one of them was a picky eater.

James Way didn’t have any worries that the planet on his viewscreen, which was designated #579NI-17-5LQB5 in all of their log books, harbored any sort of life. He had faith in the chief engineer, if not the man’s strange sense of humor, and furthermore he trusted the simulations and surface telemetry that he’d checked at least a half dozen times himself. But it always paid to be sure. Way knew you couldn’t just turn the world-eaters off — “you don’t start it, you unleash it,” he’d been told his first week with the Corporation, when he’d first stood and watched a planet turned into its base elements and ash — and nothing that was down there had any chance of surviving.

The first blip on his screen took him totally by surprise.

One of the prompts that inspired it, the last quote at the end, was taken from a magazine ad for some car, so I’d probably have to rework that. (And I don’t know, can nickel ore even be frozen?) But I like it, mostly because it occurred to me near the end that I could introduce a character, and it could start to be a story, not just backstory. That might sound obvious, in part because stories often do start with character, but here it wasn’t until the appearance of James Way — somewhere near the end of our forty free-writing minutes — that this started to feel like something to me.

Anyway, that — plus failing at the Sunday crossword, and watching tonight’s incredible episode of Breaking Bad — was my weekend, both good and bad.

Sunday

It’s a long weekend, which, thanks to the last week of summer hours, started early on Friday. I’ll miss those half days at the end of the week a little, I think, but I’ll be glad to go back to a normal work day starting on Tuesday. I can’t claim to have made any great use of those free hours on Friday all summer; most often, I’d come home and decided to read or watch something (a movie or TV) and find myself nodding off in my chair, falling asleep. I don’t know that an extra hour of work every other day is really worth it for a Friday afternoon nap.

This Friday I managed to stay awake, watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which I’d somehow managed to never see. (Maybe because I was five when it first came out.) It’s exceptionally dated, very much a movie of the very early ’80s, but in some real ways that works in the movie’s favor. In 1982, Roger Ebert called it “a scuz-pit of a movie,” but history has been much kinder. I don’t know if Ebert ever revised his opinion, but the movie is considerably less raunchy and scuzzy than a lot of comedies in the three decades since. Fast Times is funny a well observed, and it’s an interesting snapshot of the time.

I can’t the same, at all, about Elektra, which I watched on Friday night. With the recent announcement that Ben Affleck would be cast as Batman in the upcoming Man of Steel sequel, I’ve honestly been wondering if I should maybe revisit his earlier superhero movie, Daredevil. (Affleck also once played George Reeves, TV’s Superman, in Hollywoodland, but I don’t see that connection being made much in the discussion.) I don’t remember Daredevil being very good, but there’s that whole “history being kinder” thing to consider. Colin Farrell and Michael Clarke Duncan certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves… And honestly, my reservations (or in fact doubts) about a Man of Steel sequel, and Batman being in it, and a Superman vs. Batman movie, don’t really stem at all from the casting.

But Daredevil wasn’t available, and I’m not paying good money to sit through it again. (I’m also not convinced it’s worth sitting through again, just in the off chance some of it’s okay.) So I watched Elektra, which is a spin-off in that the character appears in the earlier movie, played again by Jennifer Garner, and they’re linked characters in the comics, but it doesn’t have a whole lot to do with Daredevil the movie. Which doesn’t make it any good either, unfortunately. Strangely, some of the acting is rather good, but the film falls down on almost every other level: script, direction, cinematography, musical score. Long stretches are just tedious, and the climactic fight scenes are just kind of dumb. (Will Yun Lee’s main bad guy basically just has the power to throw sheets up in the air. I wish I could say that was an exaggeration.)

So anyway, not a very good movie. I was going to watch a movie tonight, but then I remembered there’s a new episode of Breaking Bad.

Otherwise, it’s been a pretty average couple of day. I did some reading, I’m working on edits for the next issue of Kaleidotrope — next month! — and I wrote this:

“All that’s happening here has happened before,” said Fleet Commander Admiral Jeremiah Wells as he looked out into the ampitheater and its rows of graduating cadets. “And chances are good it will all happen again. But I hardly need remind you of that. You have months of training under your belts, each of you, and no doubt you’ve each seen your share of reports from the front. I can’t say I approve of that — there’s a place and a time for war reports, and I’m not convinced academy training is either. But better you too prepared than not at all. You know what you’re facing, and where the fleet will be headed, and I’m quite sure each one of you will do the temporal navy proud.”

It wasn’t much of a pep talk, well meant but uninspired, and delivered by a man who was clearly unaccustomed to public speaking. Which, on the face of it, was ridiculous. Wells had given this speech a thousand times, perhaps a hundred thousand. He has said so himself just now, when he said all of this had happened before. Josey wasn’t sure how often Wells had been hit by repeaters — even the fleet’s best scientists didn’t know how often the enemy had used their temporal weapons — but if it was true that basically everyone on board the flagship was a casualty of the Loop on some level, if even she could expect to feel its effects despite having ported from Earth less than one year (standard) ago, then she could only imagine how it must feel for Wells, how often the Admiral had lived through these very same moments, given this very same speech. He ought to seem a lot more practiced for all of that.

Yet obviously he had other things on his mind, and inducting the graduating class into the fleet for the hundreth-thousandth time could not have been a top priority.

There were reports, Josey knew, of rising sea levels on Base Europa, the ice starting to thin and crack; she’d be stationed there herself in a week — that was a week standard but also several more days of cryo — but maybe not for much longer if the frozen continents continued to shift, if the moon’s waters began to seep in and make operations there untenable. And if the fleet lost Europa, where was there left to draw back?

They’d managed to suture together a quarrantine zone for Earth in the first years of the war, and those lines of defense, though sometimes shaky, still stood. There’d never been a repeater blast topside on Earth in forty years and, god willing, there never would be. The fleet was here to protect Earth from that kind of temporal confusion, to prevent the Loop from circling further in — if they couldn’t find a way to counteract or cure its effect altogether and wage a war of offensive against the enemy.

A speech to several dozen frightened students hardly seemed to matter in the scheme of all that, however many times it had appeared to happen or would happen again. Josey knew all this, but still, it wouldn’t have hurt the Admiral to try just a little harder.

Sunday

So it’s been a couple of days.

They’ve been good days, mostly, and in fact quite remarkable by the poor standard that the rest of August had already set.

My back seems to be doing a lot better, in that there aren’t terrible twinges of pain every time I bend or move in the wrong way. Or, sometimes, in any way. That’s actually the worst part about having a bad back: is this the perfectly ordinary movement that’s going to cripple me for days or weeks? (Well, the worst part if you discount the pain itself.) My back is a lot better when I sit than when I stand, which is actually the exact opposite of how it was when I was first diagnosed with a herniated disc, when standing seemed to relieve it more than anything else. (I’d find reasons to work standing up, when I could, and I’d frequently not take a seat on the train.) This is probably better, since it’s usually easier to find somewhere to sit (or make excuses for having to do so) than needing to stand all the time, but it’s a little weird. And it does still kind of hurt when I’m standing. Not nearly so much that I can’t — or would prefer not to — move, but enough to make me cautious and I’m sure occasionally a little irritable. I don’t know if it’s getting better, or if this is as better as it’s going to get, but this is much, much better than it’s been for the past couple of weeks, and so I’ll take that.

And honestly, there are people who have it a lot worse than I do.

My parents spent most of Friday and Saturday away, visiting my mom’s brother in Connecticut, who isn’t doing very well. All of her brothers and sisters made the trip, and I spend the time at home looking after the dog.

Some things I did, in no particular order:

I read a couple of books. On Friday, I finished listening to David Mitchell’s Back Story and reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama. I think the former was probably better than the latter. What Mitchell may lack in a hugely exciting biography — he grew up fairly normal, went to school, became a comedic actor, and now does that for a living — but he tells that story well and amusingly, and I particularly enjoyed hearing it in his own voice on the audio book.

Meanwhile, I like Clarke, or at least I remember a great fondness for him when, as a young teen, I discovered the Space Odyssey series. I don’t remember if the books or Kubrick’s movie came first for me, but there’s more humanity in Clarke’s writing, more warmth and humor, and I quite enjoyed reading the books, even if I never went as far as the fourth and final volume in the series.

(3001 came out in 1997, and I have a dim recollection of it getting some bad commentary at the Penn State Science Fiction Society, which I was part of at the time…and which I discovered on Friday, quite sadly, appears to have disbanded. Or maybe I should say re-discovered, since this is apparently something I learned of back in 2007. I have a comment on that post and everything, so it’s not like I didn’t know. I was actually more distressed to learn that the Monty Python Society, of which I was a long-time member and two-time president, has probably also disbanded. With only a few exceptions, I sadly haven’t kept in touch with most of the people I knew through the club, but I’m saddened by the idea that it might be gone forever. There’s apparently a Harry Potter fan club on campus that’s taken up a lot of the slack of both clubs — inheriting the science fiction library, putting on sketch comedy for Red Nose Days — but it’s just not the same.)

Anyway, back to Rama. While I like Clarke — his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” remains a favorite — I was a little surprised to discover this one both the Hugo and Nebula when it was published. I haven’t read any of the other nominees from the same year, but Rama is…well, kind of boring. Very little actually happens, and maybe that’s in part by design, and maybe that’s why Gentry Lee (who continued writing a number of sequels) apparently introduced a lot of new characters and plot, but it feels much more like a short story padded out to novel length. It’s never exactly unenjoyable — I was worried it would be risibly dated, remembering cosmonauts in 2061 — but that wasn’t ultimately a huge concern. There just wasn’t enough to the book. There’s a huge central mystery — and this is maybe a bit of a spoiler — and it’s one that never gets solved. Along the way a few other things happen, although the stakes never feel terribly high, but not nearly enough.

On Saturday, I finished reading Voltaire’s Calligrapher by Pablo De Santis. I hope to say more about it in the near future, since it’s an interesting book, but for now let me just say that when you pick books out of the local library based almost exclusively on their short length, you may wind up with some weird choices.

On Friday evening, I finished watching the last two episodes of the British crime drama Broadchurch. I could probably say a lot more about it than I’m gong to now — it’s late, but I also know some people who are not yet caught up with watching it — but let me just say I’m a bit torn, and my feelings about the finale in particular are hugely split. Is it possible to find something both completely compelling and effective and also a letdown?

On Saturday, while the neighbors partied and karaoked, I watched Lincoln. I’ve had it out from Netflix for a while, unable to watch it until my new computer (with its working Blu-Ray drive) arrived. It’s not a perfect movie, maybe a little too pat and certainly not a full biography of the man, but it’s quite entertaining, moves at fast clips, and the performances are terrific.

And today, I went to see The World’s End, which was quite funny.

That doesn’t feel like a busy weekend, and it probably wasn’t, but it was a decent one if nothing else. I had pancakes for dinner on Friday night, so there’s at least that.

And today I also wrote this:

“When the world ended, all the birds fell from the sky, and Rachel found out she was a cyborg.”

“That never happened,” said Rachel. “Don’t believe him, Mom, he’s just being dumb.”

“Thank you, Rachel,” said their mother. She’d been trying to finish the Sunday crossword when the two kids had come in from the yard, and her pen hovered momentarily over 8 down before filling in the now obvious four-letter MINX. “I might have believed your brother if you hadn’t said something. You have been looking a little cyborgy lately.”

“Told you!” said Peter. He snatched a cookie from the plate on the counter.

“Mmhmm,” said their mother, looking sternly at her son. “And those were for after supper, but I guess if the world’s really ended neither your father nor I have to cook tonight.”

“Pizza!” said Peter around a mouthful of chocolate chip. “Gino’s will still deliver.”

“How WILL they get around the mountains of dead birds?” his mother asked. Forty-seven across, she now saw, was FLIGHT. Which crossed, perhaps morbidly, with CRASH.

“The birds didn’t die,” said Peter. “They just fell from the sky. They’re all just walking around out there, looking stunned. The thing you’ve got to watch out for are the alligators. They’re the ones that can now fly.”

“You don’t see a lot of alligators in Pennsylvania.”

“End times,” Peter said. “Anything could happen.”

“Mmm,” said his mother. “Maybe I was wrong. Maybe your sister really is a cyborg.”

“Mooooom!” Rachel said.

“There was that mad scientist who used to work at the hospital where your born. What was his name? Frankenstein?”

“You’re making that up! There was no Dr. Frankenstein at the hospital!”

“Not any more. Not if his cyborg creation was loose in the world. You did make a lot of weird whirring, clicking noises as a baby!”

“I knew it!” said Peter.

“Moooom!” said Rachel. “Quit encouraging him!”

“It would make things a lot easier,” said her mother. She dipped her pen down again: 18 across, NECTARINE. “Your father and I would just have to figure out the right computer code to make you clean your room. Maybe we could get you to do your homework by remote control.”

“Very funny, ha ha!” Rachel said. “And I suppose you believe the little brat about all the dead birds, too.”

“They’re just stunned,” said her mother.

“Right,” said Peter, “just stunned.”

“It’s the flying alligators that are the real problem.” She stumbled over 22 down, then saw that it was PIANO FORTE. “And, I imagine, the zombies.”

“Zombies?” said Peter and Rachel, almost as one.

“Well it wouldn’t be the end of the world if there weren’t zombies,” their mother said. “I mean, stunned birds, flying gators, and cyborg girls are one thing, but zombies seems like standard operating procedure to me.”

Five down, she finally saw, was EDAM. You only ever saw that in a crossword puzzle.

“In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Gino’s was the first places that got overrun with zombies. It’s always so crowded on a Sunday night.”

“Does that mean no pizza?” Peter asked.

“I don’t know. Is your sister really a cyborg?”

“Probably not,” he said, reluctantly.

“Then go wash your hands and we’ll talk. And wake your father — he’s asleep on the couch.”

Peter ran from the room, shouting, “Daaaad!” and snatching another cookie from the plate as he did so.

Rachel eyed her mother. She could never understand why her mother enjoyed doing those silly crossword puzzles.

“He’s starting to suspect,” she said.

It’s probably more a meandering joke than a story — thanks in large part to the cyborg bit, which is not part of the writing prompt I supplied — but I had fun writing it.

And that’s pretty much it.