June 2004 Archives

Here's a great LiveJournal post about Joss Whedon's Firefly (and its upcoming movie sequel Serenity). It really explains why something as ridiculous on the surface as a Western set in space could lead to such great storytelling.

What's "the black" like? The terraforming teams left behind air that could be breathed, and at least some water that can be drunk. On the second-wave colonies there are maybe a few small fields of straggly crops, and a few scattered flocks of domesticated animals. Third-wave colonies don't even have that much. Nobody has concrete or steel buildings, nobody has hospitals, nobody has high-tech medicine, nobody has high-tech communications gear. Heck, most places don't even have much in the way of electricity. What little they've got, they concentrate in starports so that they can hope at least to export at least something in order to be able to buy even rudimentary medicine. In the mean time, they try to maintain a hardscrabble existence with crops that don't always survive, and horses, and maybe a few cattle or pigs or sheep. But blacksmithing doesn't take much in the way of high tech, you can do that with cast pig iron. If you can get from there to making even rudimentary steel, you can make old-fashioned pistols and rifles and a some decent knives. And it's not like gunpowder is hard to make. If your colony is even halfway stable, you wear homespun cotton and cured leather. If not, you wear whatever rags you can get. So sure, back in civilization, on the Core Worlds, they have ultra tech medicine, and computer networks, and zap guns, and flying cars, and force fields, and fancy synthetic clothes, but they can't afford any of that out in The Black, and couldn't really afford the electricity or exotic power cells to run it if they had it. (It at least one place that we see, one guy has managed to import a single hover car and a laser pistol, and enough solar cells to power both of them. It makes him an absolute monarch.) And most of the newer immigrants to The Black are disturbed at best, and not a few of them are stone cold crazy killers.

I don't think I'll ever forgive the Fox network for cancelling the series.

When you consider whether or not to kill an idiot programmer, always remember to take consideration of who might be assigned to take over their projects. If the person who is likely to have to maintain their code is (a) an even bigger idiot, or (b) you, it might be better to allow them to live. Until next time, at least.

I've posted on this subject in other places before, but it's time I put my thoughts on this Matter of Great Import in one place to which I can refer in the future.

I live in pizza Hell. If there is a bright center to the pizza universe, St. Louis is the city that it's farthest from.

I managed to do one moderately productive thing over the long Memorial Day weekend. I put a gallery of my mother's quilts online. I'm really proud of her work, and have been looking for a way to show it off. I still have a bit of captioning to do, hopefully this week or next weekend.