The Best Sodas

Recognizing that no one should drink soda save perhaps one can a month...

1. Coca-Cola
2. Orange Crush
3. Coca-Cola Cherry
4. A&W Root Beer
5. Canada Dry Ginger Ale
6. The Pop Shoppe Black Cherry
7. Sprite
8. 7-Up
9. Any no-name grapefruit soda
10. Jarrito's Cola

LEGO Film Noir

How cool would it be if Lego made a Film Noir line, made exclusively of pieces molded in black, white and shades of grey? Plus pieces to make neon signs. There would need to be minifigures of grizzled detectives and life insurance agents, FBI men, femme fatales, girls-next-door, toughs, goons, police officers walking a beat, sleek roadsters, suspicious dives...fun times. 

Earl Trek Into Darkness

I left work at five this evening, prepared for a long, slow, stressful commute, which Edmonton delivered in spades. After about a half hour I'd managed to make it from 105 street to 124 street, cars all around me, most of them wanting to make the same desperate turn at Stony Plain Road I hoped to take. 

Suddenly, sirens crowed behind me. A fire engine was driving against the oncoming traffic, its lights forcing cars to give way. Serendipitiously, I happened to be parked at one of the few gaps in the long windrows, meaning that if I wanted to, I could stealthily pull in behind the fire engine and travel rapidly north on 124 street in its wake, bypassing traffic with none the wiser and perhaps shaving a half hour from my commute. 

Of course that would be a ridiculously irresponsible thing to do, not to mention selfish, so I resisted temptation. I wonder what sort of fine that kind of driving would get you? 

Rebooting Reboot

According to the Huffington Post, 90s animation favourite Reboot is coming back to television...maybe. I hope the planned reboot of Reboot succeeds; it was a fun, smart, clever and funny show, with a fully realized world, sympathetic characters and even considerable drama. Pretty good for something marketed as a kid's show. 

The Martian: SF or Mainstream?

It took me a few seconds of thought to figure out how to classify Andy Weir's debut novel The Martian. It takes place in outer space and on Mars, so the obvious choice is to call it science fiction. But it wasn't marketed as a genre novel, and in fact everything that happens in the book is grounded in scientific reality; indeed, had space investment continued at a 1960s pace, such a scenario could have already happened.

I waffled, but in the end I called it SF - not because it's set in space, but because it'll eventually be alternate history. But then, every work of fiction is alternate history by definition, making everything SF..!

I guess this is why it's not always a good idea to slot works of art into various genre ghettos. 

Sources of Joy for November 25, 2014

Aside from my usual sources of joy - Sylvia, family and friends - two products of popular culture are making me happy today. The first is Taylor Swift's "Shake it Off," which I've been bopping to for days, and the second is Andy Weir's debut novel The Martian, which I read over lunch yesterday and today.

I know Taylor Swift's been pretty famous for years, but until "Shake it Off" I don't think I've listened to any of her music. Now I'm going through her back catalogue, because I find this track catchy (I love the horns) and strangely sweet and uplifting - the same feeling I get from The Martian, a very uplifting story of humanity's can-do spirit and our propensity for pulling together in times of crisis.

So thanks, Taylor and Andy, for brightening up the last few days significantly. 

99 and 4/10ths Dead

In Stephen King's The Stand, an experimental flu virus, Captain Trips, kills 99.4 percent of Earth's population. That made me wonder how many people would be left on Earth of the events of The Stand happened today. Simple math reveals that out of 7.276 billion, 43,656,000 would survive Captain Trips, scattered all over the planet. That number of survivors could entirely repopulate Argentina with a couple of million left over; it couldn't quite repopulate Ukraine.

It's only natural to wonder how many Canadians could be expected to survive. The answer: about 200,000 people, or a little over the population of Regina, Saskatchewan. Of course all Canada's survivors wouldn't be concentrated in one place, so let's imagine how many survivors there might be in each province and territory: 

Nunavut: 191

Yukon: 203

Northwest Territories: 249

Prince Edward Island: 841

Newfoundland and Labrador: 3,087

New Brunswick: 4,507

Nova Scotia: 5,531

Saskatchewan: 6,200

Manitoba: 7,250

Alberta: 21,872

British Columbia: 26,400

Quebec: 47,418

Ontario: 77,111

It's pretty sobering to imagine being one of 200,000 or so survivors in a country as vast as this one. Supposing that the electrical grid would take a little while to collapse, I suppose survivors could find each other by frantically posting on Twitter or making YouTube videos, since there's be virtually no competition for being at the top of the new content lists. 

Top of the Evening

Last night our D&D plans went south, so like the grownups we are, we decided to spend the evening discussing comic book movies and playing with tops. A good time was had by all. 

My Ring is Legion

Hitchcock Update

I have now seen 34 of the 50 films in the Alfred Hitchcock canon. That's 68 percent of them, and I've seen everything from 1938 onward. Now I'm working my way back to his earlier works.

The Pleasure Garden (1925)

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

The Ring (1927)

Downhill (1927)

The Farmer’s Wife (1928)

Easy Virtue (1928)

Champagne (1928)

The Manxman (1929)

Blackmail (1929)

Juno and the Paycock (1929)

Murder! (1930)

The Skin Game (1931)

Rich and Strange (1931)

Number Seventeen (1932)

Waltzes from Vienna (1933)

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

The 39 Steps (1935)

Secret Agent (1936)

Sabotage (1936)

Young and Innocent (1937)

The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Jamaica Inn (1939)

Rebecca (1940)

Foreign Correspondent (1940)

Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)

Suspicion (1941)

Saboteur (1942)

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

Lifeboat (1944)

Spellbound (1945)

Notorious (1946)

The Paradine Case (1947)

Rope (1948)

Under Capricorn (1949)

Stage Fright (1950)

Strangers on a Train (1951)

I Confess (1953)

Dial M for Murder (1954)

Rear Window (1954)

To Catch a Thief (1955)

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

The Wrong Man (1956)

Vertigo (1958)

North by Northwest (1959)

Psycho (1960)

The Birds (1963)

Marnie (1964)

Torn Curtain (1966)

Topaz (1969)

Family Plot (1976)

Making a Glass of Myself

I Never Claimed to be Cresswell

In the future, critics will look back on a ten to fifteen year period in the late 21st century as the era of Film Blanc, a genre marked by overweening optimism in a period of real-world strife. Critics will point to the overabundance of bright colours, vivid scenery and themes of acceptance, renewal, redemption and love triumphing against inevitable odds. 

Green Eye Flames, Why?

So I just signed up for Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop and Lightroom) to play with some of the new features. And like a child playing with fire, I've made a hash of things. Using the pen tool and the new Flame render, you can create awesome special effects...or a horrifying mess. I chose the latter. Well, practise makes perfect...

Lone Star Mod for Fallout: New Vegas Coming?

As a huge fan of Fallout: New Vegas, I hope this fan project comes to fruition. Since it seems like it'll be quite some time before we see Fallout 4, a total conversion mod with all-new content would be great to tide fans over. 

The Shocking Truth

Iron Chef: Pepper

Today's First World Problem

Had a long post typed out, an accidental combination of keystrokes erased it. And my new PC, which I picked up Wednesday, turned into a lifeless brick this morning. Thank goodness this was a short week. 

From the 1940s to Yesterday

Today I am learning that it takes 13 hours to back up 1.45 terabytes of photographs. They stretch backward in time to the collections of my parents, aunts and uncles and forward to the shots I took yesterday. As Sean remarked, "That's a lot of photos." Maybe one day the'll go in the national archives or something. Actually, the photos Aunt Jean and Uncle John took of the Etsell farm in the 1960s and 1970s are certainly worthy of such preservation...

Agent Boucher Shyluk Style

After seeing my faux SHIELD ID for Agent Sylvia Boucher, Jeff offered to create comic-style art in place of the original photograph. I suggested something Kirby-esque might be appropriate, and voila, Jeff has delivered in spades as always. Here Sylvia looks like a blonde version of Kirby's late-period character Beautiful Dreamer of the Forever People/New Gods - it's really in the eyes, lips and cheekbones...and of course the trademark Kirby dots in the background.

I hope Jeff will post the large version on his blog, JSVB. It's really something to behold. And I should mention that Jeff is a professional, working artist; I've commissioned his work a couple of times and he's always delivered above and beyond my expectations. 

Man of Letters

The letters they
Slide off the page and
Bounce off the floor leaving
My book empty
Useless yellow parchment crammed impotently
Between two covers

I slammed it shut too hard last time
Angered by the plot twist
Now ten thousand little black letters
Are stuck in my carpet
I'd vacuum them up but
Then I'd never know the ending

So I'll pick them up one by one and
glue them back in the faint little outlines
I can see on each page

That's a lot of work for a Dan Brown novel

Nerdieth Anniversary 10th Anniversary

I wasn't feeling terribly inspired when I sat down to blog today, and in desperation I wondered "What was happing at this time ten years ago?" Well, I don't have any photos from exactly ten years ago, but I do have this from ten years and a month ago, when we celebrated the Nerdieth Anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. And yet it feels like this only happened maybe three, four years ago...

Ice Cube Mystery

We have two ice cube trays, identical in shape and composition. But one tray creates perfect cubes that pop out whole, while the other produces brittle cubes that shatter. Can a scientist explain why this might be so? The water is coming from the same tap, and the trays produce brittle or solid cubes no matter where they are placed in the fridge.

The Captain is Dead

Agent Boucher

Template by "sanchez2007," who kindly made his work available for download on deviantart. This is just a quick mockup - I'll do another one with a better photo before I actually have a physical card made...which I aim to do. Heh heh. 

Star Wars: The Phantom Titles

Today we learned the title of the next Star Wars movie; it's going to be called The Force Awakens, which sounds more like a video game than a movie to me at first blush. But perhaps that's not a fair assessment.

According to Hollywood folklore, George Lucas' original vision called for nine (or twelve) movies in a vast saga echoing the structure of movie serials from the 1930s and 1940s; hence "Episode V" and so on. So it's perfectly reasonable that the Star Wars films should have subtitles that sound like the chapter titles of yore.

Compare the chapter titles of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940)...

The Purple Death
Freezing Torture
Walking Bombs
The Destroying Ray
The Palace of Horror
Flaming Death
The Land of the Dead
The Fiery Abyss
The Pool of Peril
The Death Mist
Stark Treachery
Doom of the Dictator

...to the subtitles of the Star Wars films:

The Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
Revenge of the Sith
A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
The Force Awakens

Historical revisionism of A New Hope aside, I can't really fault Lucas and his successors for naming the films the way they have, since they're paying tribute to a particular genre and form. The Phantom Menace is my favourite of the titles, capturing both the theme of its particular film and a very 1940s sensibility. It's evocative, while the others are mainly descriptive.

Were I to name the remaining films in the series - despite not knowing anything about their content - I'd suggest the following:

The Forbidden Abyss
The Final Apprentice

I'm being a little cute here, using the same initials for all three films in this new trilogy, both for symmetry and to suggest a traditional three-act structure - only one with a false ending, since in my scheme there will be one final trilogy:

From Long Ago
Planet of Death
Fate of a Galaxy

My first title attempts to evoke the famous "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away..." line that opens each film; at the same time, the title hints at something even deeper in the past will be crucial to the film's plot; perhaps an ancient threat of some kind looms, or the protagonists need some wisdom or weapon from the past to complete the hero's quest.

Planet of Death is an attempt to create a flat-out hokey title in the spirit of the serials (and Attack of the Clones). The planet of death in question could be a battleground or trap for the heroes, or a long-abandoned place of peril that holds a key secret.

Finally, the last film in a twelve-film epic needs a suitably grandiose title, hence I've chosen something quite literal. Since there's a battle in every Star Wars film, it should end with the biggest Star War of all, the one that decides the fate of a galaxy - literally.

I've no doubt that the titles actually chosen for the remaining films will follow the established pattern, the one started by Lucas himself a long time ago, in a galaxy not so far away.