Category: Not-politics

I’m still trying to decide whether The Colony is worth checking out.

The latest in reality shows: The Colony: It’s Post-apocalyptic Virus House!

The premise: There’s been a massive plague that’s killed off most of the human population, and these ten survivors, all strangers, have to try to start rebuilding from scratch, using only what they know about the world and what they can find in the warehouse they’ve chosen as their home and the areas around it. There is very little to eat, the water has to be filtered because the main source is the poisonous and sludgy Los Angeles River, which is hardly even a river anymore, so much as it’s a chemical runoff ditch for the whole city.

The excerpts I’ve seen so far here and here are producing a fine level of scorn and derision from my wife the engineer; the bit about ‘controlled experiment’ alone was good for a three-minute rant. Also: biker gangs, and it’s apparently the aftermath of a biological outrbreak – but no zombies. Aside from the unwillingness to go Full Metal Gonzo with the premise, well, everything is better with zombies.

Moe Lane

The Men Who Stare At Goats Trailer.

My only real worry about this movie:

…(based on the non-fiction book of the same name) is that it may end up being another Burn After Reading: a movie whose trailer promises something that’s a good deal funnier than the actual movie delivers.  I’m hopeful – the title is inspired, and should have hopefully forced the script writer, director, and actors to live up to its promise – but you never know.

As to the merits of the programs described in either movie or book: I figure that if we had troops who could kill goats with their minds we’d have heard about it by now.  Forget keeping it quiet: the US military would mass-deploy that on a black-box basis just as soon as the results were replicable.

Moe Lane

As promised, Scalzi goes after Star Trek’s design failures.

For a given value of ‘little.’ A taste:

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.

(Via Fark Geek) They get better. No discussion of modified tachyon bursts, but the Star Trek holodeck gets its nod.

You know, I liked Foucault’s Pendulum.

This is not the first time that I’ve seen the book casually criticized, and while I’m not actually upset or anything I’m also not exactly sure what was supposed to be the problem with it. You sort of have to assume a certain quirkiness from translations and Foucault’s Pendulum is probably one of the better correctives to conspiracy thinking anyway. Watching one of the characters… well, no spoilers.

Moe Lane

PS: If you’re wondering why nobody ever made a movie out of it, it’s because after The Name of the Rose Eco didn’t want his books turned into films. Which is kind of odd, because that was actually a pretty good adaptation.