Colby Cosh reposts a very odd craigslist posting (well, I’m assuming that it’s not representative of typical craigslist postings . . .)
September 3, 2009
That’d better be a really, really good concert
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August 27, 2009
Now it’s Star Trek‘s turn
John Scalzi returns to the well of nerd bile (see last week’s geek-disturbing here), this time he’s aiming at Star Trek:
Me: Star Wars design is so bad that people have to come up with elaborate and contrived rationales to explain it.
Star Wars Fanboy: YOU ARE SO VERY WRONG AND I WILL SHOW YOU WHY WITH THESE ELABORATE AND CONTRIVED RATIONALES.
It’s a little much to hope for (or fear) the same result two weeks in a row, but nevertheless I promised everyone I’d point and laugh at Star Trek design, so here we go. I’ll confine myself to things in the movies. There are eleven of those, so it’s not like this will be a problem.
V’Ger
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a Voyager space probe gets sucked into a black hole and survives (GAAAAH), and is discovered by denizens of a machine planet who think the logical thing to do is to take a bus-size machine with the processing power of a couple of Speak and Spells and upgrade it to a spaceship the size of small moon, wrap that in an energy field the size of a solar system, and then send it merrily on its way. This is like you assisting a brain-damaged raccoon trapped on a suburban traffic island by giving him Ecuador.
August 20, 2009
It must be a slow week in movies . . .
. . . so John Scalzi decides to kick over the hornet’s nest of Star Wars geekdom:
I’ll come right out and say it: Star Wars has a badly-designed universe; so poorly-designed, in fact, that one can say that a significant goal of all those Star Wars novels is to rationalize and mitigate the bad design choices of the movies. Need examples? Here’s ten.
R2-D2
Sure, he’s cute, but the flaws in his design are obvious the first time he approaches anything but the shallowest of stairs. Also: He has jets, a periscope, a taser and oil canisters to make enforcer droids fall about in slapsticky fashion — and no voice synthesizer. Imagine that design conversation: “Yes, we can afford slapstick oil and tasers, but we’ll never get a 30-cent voice chip past accounting. That’s just madness.”C-3PO
Can’t fully extend his arms; has a bunch of exposed wiring in his abs; walks and runs as if he has the droid equivalent of arthritis. And you say, well, he was put together by an eight-year-old. Yes, but a trip to the nearest Radio Shack would fix that. Also, I’m still waiting to hear the rationale for making a protocol droid a shrieking coward, aside from George Lucas rummaging through a box of offensive stereotypes (which he’d later return to while building Jar-Jar Binks) and picking out the “mincing gay man” module.
And the crowd goes wild.
July 28, 2009
Did James Lileks like The Watchmen?
One quote from a fascinating take-down:
. . . it’s a sign of the movie that leaving in the giant squid would have made it less ridiculous.
Haven’t seen the movie myself, although Victor said he liked it.
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