Amusements 10/10/2000 • j********o@***.com 10/10/2000 00:00:000 UTC "Gene Roddenberry's" Andromeda: dammit, I liked it. Maybe I have a high tolerance for schlock (I liked Space Rangers too), and there were a few dopey lines, and the aliens are a bit goofy, but it could be fun, and there's definitely some neural activity - they're trying. It's a promising premise: basically, what if Captain Kirk and company aboard the Enterprise brushed past a black hole and found themselves trapped three hundred years in the future, long since their beloved Federation has fallen into a chaotic dark age. Paradoxically, this would leave them a singular and potent force for civilization. This sort of regressed interstellar Empire has been invoked in various stories (e.g., Foundation, Traveller, Mote in God's Eye), but although these explore the themes of lost grandeur and technological potency, they are after all about *empires* in interrega. A collapsed Federation would tap into the poignant theme of the Postman, about the fall of an idealistic and noble civilization, and the hope of its restoration, plus lots of ass-kicking fun. In Andromeda, it's just the captain and his ship that wind up in the future, where he recruits a misfit crew from the salvage team that rescues them, including the very likeable Lisa Rider (insert ribald comment here) who played "Perky Tracy" in the final season of Forever Knight. The other female cast members are yummy too. I wish they'd let him keep at least a few of his crew - I kind of liked his little insectoid pilot. The Nietzscheans were cool. That puts me in mind of a rather obscure criticism of B5 (now showing in wide screen format on the Sciffy Channel). On Old Trek, the heroes won by their nobility of character, while on B5, they win by the ignobility of their enemies. You might argue this to be more realistic, but I don't enjoy it, given my egalitarian bias. On Trek, the villains got their due: mostly they were formidable and clever, worthy of respect, believing in their side. On B5, the opponents (with the exception of Bester) are caricatures, no more formidable than the street punks of the average cop show. Everyone who isn't all tingly over their values is a bigot/xenopath/ignoramous/corrupt. Book Review: "The Ghost Light" by Fritz Leiber. I have a certain instinctive affection for the man, since he wrote stories for the fledgling Dragon magazine back then in the early Eighties (this book was first published in 1984), and the book was only two bucks on the discount table of a now several-years deceased bookstore chain, but I have only now gotten to actually reading it. It consists of a half-dozen stories retrospective of his career plus a very long autobiography. The stories are fairly indifferent (the title ghost story being quite mediocre), but with a gentle storytelling approach: the best stories put one in mind of a less creepy Ray Bradbury. The autobiography is amusing and candid, and offers the comforting confirmation that everybody has their weird bits. Re: "The Patriot," the Mel Gibson movie. I haven't seen it: I got enough Braveheart from Braveheart, thank you: War Sucks, and I'm against realistic war movies (memo to Mister Speilberg). My problem with the premise of this particular movie is that the hero isn't a patriot at all: he isn't motivated by political ideals, but by revenge and fury. The American Revolution was a very deliberate philosophical act by idealistic men, where, by great sacrifice, we attained our independence and individual American freedom. I also object to the related point that it suggests that the only just rebellion is against Nazi-grade tyranny. Indeed, by today's p-whipped, New Deal, One World-era standards, the Founding Fathers were anti-government fanatics overthrowing a relatively gentle, lawful, democratic government. And while atrocities did occur on both sides, especially in the South where the movie is set, they were the result, rather than the cause, of the Revolution. It is not only unfair to the Redcoats to suggest a resemblance to the Gestapo, but dangerous to perpetuate the self-fufilling notion that (to quote Stony Brook Tech-Sci Shit-head Dr. Liao, who pronounced it regarding the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait) "All armies commit atrocities." No, they don't. War Sucks, but civilized armies make it suck as little as possible. The British were quite civilized if I understand correctly, indeed a model for all armies. I wonder if that assbag Liao ever issued that pithy comment about a purported *American* atrocity. Dr. Liao, what's your opinion of the Mai Li massacre? "So what, big deal." How 'bout the rape of Nanking, Dr. Liao? "Shit happens. They were only gooks, anyway." Researchers in the biochemistry of memory (in rats) have discovered the somewhat unsurprising result that memory recall is an active process, that is, a recalled memory is retrieved, altered, and placed back into memory. This ties in with the maleability of memory, as well as the ability to learn incrementally, but with the less obvious consequence that a memory *must* be altered/reset each time it is recalled. Specifically, if the proteins used to store memories are suppressed, when an old memory is recalled, it isn't fully restored to long term memory and weakens as a result, i.e., rather than a working copy being made from a permanent disk file, it's as if a document is taken from a filing cabinet and must be returned to it or lost. This offers a near-term possibility that traumatizing memories could be suppressed by recalling them while taking a drug like that given to the rats to supress their memory fixing proteins. All sorts of creepy misuses present themselves... Gorno "Commander, do you know what it's like when two telepaths make love?" "Oh Jesus..." "All the mental barriers fall:" "I *don't* wanna hear this..." "Their souls merge together..." "La La... La La LA LAAA!" "It's the only time the voices stop..." "AAAAAGGGGHHHHHH!" Meanwhile, Garibaldi interrogates Ironblood: "So, you nailed Talia?" "Yeah... nice rack, but too high maintenance. Always clingy afterwards. And yak, yak, yak! I need my space, so I told her I had a suicide mission. Best going away present I ever got!" • s******j@f****.**o.com 13/10/2000 06:08:29 UTC On 10 Oct 2000 08:01:16 GMT, JohnGorno wrote: >"Gene Roddenberry's" Andromeda: dammit, I liked it. Maybe I have a high Weird background trivia: Back in the early 70s, there was a pilot for another Gene Roddenberry show with a very similar plot (only, the ruined civilization was Earth, and the heros were a high-tech enclave) and a lead character with _the same name_. I belive it was called "Earth II." There were actually two pilots made for the concept. I wonder if Andromeda was an early, higher-budget concept . . . or a later, higher-budget concept, created after GR got a taste of big special effects money with the production of the first Trek movie. I missed out on Andromeda because me and my co-workers were getting fucked over by a giant corporation around then. Stefan -- +-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-+ SeJ@ay-oh-el-dot-com ~ stefanj@eye-oh-dot-com http://www.io.com/~stefanj/ CHARGES APPLIED FOR UNSOLICITED COMMERCIAL EMAIL! • j********o@***.com 25/10/2000 04:56:056 UTC "Gene Roddenberry's" Andromeda I expected them to launch immediately into wandering the galaxies do-gooding, but interestingly, these first episodes seem to be about the Captain trying idiotically to apply his ideals to a very inideal universe, and maybe wising up a bit. After blowing off all 40 of Andromeda's nova bombs in the first episode to escape the black hole (bombs which might have stopped the Nietzschian Revolt then and there had he the cran to use them five minutes earlier ("I will NOT use strategic weapons in an inhabited system!")) he destroys another twenty (plus as many slip-stream enabled fighters) in the most recent episode. (The Nietzschian was practically pulling out his dreadlocks at this behavior: "With those bombs, you could restore your Commonwealth in weeks.") In that installment, he preaches pacifism to a lost tribe of adolescent warriors (a la, i.e. ripped off, the very good Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) who've been fending off constant attacks by baddies for 300 years (the station is surrounded with the accumulated wreckage of would-be looters!) For Christ's sakes, they walk by the fresh corpse of a Magog attacker and he's telling them they must defeat not their enemies but the darkness inside! He gets the kids access to these fighters which they launch on suicide missions to destroy their bad neighbors in droves - the only reason there's a chance they might live long enough to live in peace is that one gets past Andromeda and novas the nearest system (a one-time resort planet now infested with Magog). This itself was pretty damn cool and un-Wuss Trek-like. Anyway, at the end, the Captain keeps one nova bomb despite his and Andromeda's sissy misgivings. The fact is, Captain Hunt's ideals are crazy in a universe as nasty as his has become, a universe brimming with really bad people who just plain need to die before any level of civilization can be restored. What's his plan anyway? Wander the stars preaching good will, a latter-day Jesus telling the Magog to love their neighbors (ick!)? His idealism evokes Voyager's Captain Catherine "Wrongway" Janeway (although with Janeway you get the feeling there's some actual mental illness: that not only is she willing to die to defend the Prime Directive and explore gaseous anomolies, but that the thought makes her all tingly), but I think they're setting him up for a steep learning curve, where he'll have to come up with some actual strategy rather than a few mouldy platitudes. Or at least I hope. Next week, the Nietzschian evidently mutinies. It's a pretty decent little show so far, with interesting tidbits. The fact that they have no FTL communication and must use couriers and drones for everything is neat. In the most recent episode, the kids have tried to preserve the High Guard training, but their most recent leader can't read, so she's garbled and sacrilized the tech manuals (a la Star Trek's "Yangs"). Of course, the girl leader has a good heart and is convertable and there's a bad kid who wants to take over and keep fighting and who turns against Hunt, but amusingly, the bad kid evidently *can* read and uses his knowledge to good advantage in a well-planned effort to take over Andromeda (also, Hunt inadvertantly gave the kid reason to doubt his identity, which is kind of cool that they didn't go total cliche, as is the fact that the "bad" kid doesn't get killed or disappeared at the end, merely demoted). They haven't been completely explicit in how nasty the Magog are (with the exception of the pacifist on their crew) but they are apparently very nasty indeed. "They reproduce by rape." Putting the pieces together, this seems to mean that they've like parasitic wasps, paralyzing their victims (men, women, children) with venom, then making use of any convenient oriface to lay their larvae, which slowly consume the host. Ick indeed. Excellent candidates for nova bombs if you ask me. A shame Captain Fossil screwed it up! The nice Magog in their crew seems to be a minority of one among his own race: given the story the engineer related about growing up on Magog infested Earth, you'd think he'd be a little less friendly to his crewmate, like maybe blowing his head off with a blaster? Getting back to his strategy, it's well noted that Andromeda is little more than a juicy floating target at this point: it's got no crew, they jettisoned most of their cargo and sent off most, if not all, their couriers and auxiliary craft at the beginning (when they thought they were on a rescue mission), then expended all their combat drones in the ambush, the well-trained crew of hundreds left in the lifeboats, and now they're left with one lousy nova bomb (also twenty fewer slip-fighters than they could have had!) Sure, they have a lot of cool technology, lost medical knowledge, a now-extinct species of oxygenating trees, and maybe a decent stock of ground assault weapons (including at least two big F'ing mecha, i.e., Giant Robots!), but they have almost no attack/defense capacity left (and probably a lot of battle damage, including Andromeda's robot avatars). The ship is so high profile, yet worth almost nothing intact, and unable to defend herself in a universe of predators. But this too is interesting in giving them somewhere to go with the plot rather than falling into a Trekian rut from day one. Gorno