Time for more photosnark

Cracked has another photoplasty contest, and that can only mean one thing.

Oh, joy. The topic is: "Images from the Inevitable Future of Celebrity Culture."

#21: We see a number of pictures and busts people with no talent but the ability to win national popularity contests in a room. Obama is represented by a lifelike statue for some reason.

#20: ...I might barf a little bit. There are probably people who would watch that.

#16: Is that what I think it is?  Yikes. Also eew.

#15: Wait, you mean there's not a Church of Hollywood already?  "Thou shalt not kill, except if the victim is an evil white male." "Thou shalt not keep and bear arms, but thou shalt pay through the nose to watch others use them in unbelievable situations." "Thou shalt not torrent."

#13: Welcome to Japan.

#12: Um. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is already a pretty obnoxious endorsement of celebrity culture. But yeah, take it up to 11 (see what I did there?) and make it totally tasteless.

#9: Congratulations. You have just raped my childhood more than the thought of handing Star Wars over to the guy who gave us the vapid Star Trek Into Darkness ever could. F*ck you.

#7: By the way: my children (in the horrific event that I ever breed) will never be allowed to date anyone named after a fictional character.

Well, those are the only ones worth commenting on. Until next time, I'm your host of hatred and snark.

And now, a word on the Blaze Bayley albums

They suck.

It's not just that Blaze is a god-awful singer (he is - I can count on one hand the number of songs where he doesn't flub a note), but the songs themselves just aren't good.  Hell, the average Iron Maiden fan is going to pick up No Prayer for the Dying and Fear of the Dark before getting to the X albums, and, well, it's a sign of what's to come. 

What's the best song on Somewhere in Time? Okay, I'll grant you, "Alexander the Great" is pretty awesome, but realistically, it's Adrian Smith's "Wasted Years."  Best song on Seventh Son of a Seventh Son is either "Can I Play With Madness" or "The Evil That Men Do," both of which were co-written by Smith.  Without his contributions to No Prayer and Dark, you're left with "Fear of the Dark" itself.  And even that creative spark seems to be gone on both Blaze albums.  You've got "The Clansman" and that's about it.  "Sign of the Cross" is decent (when you've got someone who can sing "Croooooooooooooooooooooooss" without being horribly flat), and Dickinson's decision to jump up an entire octave for the chorus of "Lord of the Flies" in this live version makes that song acceptable.

Without that, it's an extremely pedestrian song. 

And that's all.

Farscape: I, E.T. (and Premiere notes)

I'm not doing a full review of the Premiere because SF Debris already did, and, well, I try to not overlap with SF Debris's reviews for the same reason I haven't reviewed The Phantom Menace. Not because it's been done to death, but because those guys have video and I do not, and basically say everything I want to say.

(And no, the sudden dive into another "old" sci-fi TV show does not mean I'm abandoning either B5 or A Game of Thrones. My B5 reviews are on hold until I have time to go back and re-watch some early S3 episodes, because I feel like I missed something. A Game of Thrones read/blog continues this weekend; I haven't been keeping up with that because I have to finish The Screwtape Letters for a book club meeting.

So. Just a few notes on "Premiere" and then on to "I, E.T."

Defense: Season 3 should have stopped where it did

See this post for the opposing view, yes this reply is late, and yes there will be SPLOILERS!

Best comment on the internet today

as found on r/starcraft

By the way, I'm not at all surprised that he got constantly supply-blocked. All a zerg has to do to deal with supply-block is go 1svvvv, problem solved. No clicking, no looking back at the base, done. I recently switched from zerg to protoss (nowhere near GM, thanks for asking), and found supply-blocks to be far and away my biggest problem.

Prosecution: Should Season 3 have stopped where it did?

Tune in tomorrow for the Case for the Defense. Naturally, there will be massive spoilers for Season 4 of Game of Thrones.

Addendum to my Yunkai/io9 rant

Two things I missed. One, the author's tag at the bottom indicates he's a stand-up comedian. I don't know if the rant was satire or not. It was neither funny nor a serious critique.

Two, I should explain my "This. Is. Deliberate." comment a bit more. So that's what most of this post is going to be.

When I read, I'm colorblind. Normally a character's skin tone gets mentioned about once, and then that's it. If there's something important about a character's description - say, golden hair - I'm more likely to remember it. How brown is Arianne Martell? I can't remember off the top of my head, and I'm one of the people who likes the Dorne plot. So to me, when I read fairly late in A Storm of Swords that Astapor and Yunkai both went to pot after Dany's revolutions there, my first thought was less "Iraq or Afghanistan" (the novel was published in 2000), and more "The French Revolution." Which, by the way, had a bunch of white people in it.

Now, because a bunch of intellectuals going potty over an unequal class system and losing some heads is basically Occupy Wall Street's wet dream, we're probably going to see more "War on Terror" and less "French Revolution" in the show. (Although again, I'd like to point out: the show equates homosexuality and incest pretty much every opportunity it gets. So either it's hyper-liberal or it's fairly conservative.) Which in turn means that, because the TV audience is stupid and doesn't understand metaphor unless it dances naked in front of them while singing "I am the Walrus," the "liberated" folk have to be brown.

TLDR: Read the frakking books and you'll see what they're doing and why.

What do I mean by "the TV audience is stupid?" Read on.

The most f&cking idiotic thing I've read on io9 in a while

Now, look. Io9 is one of those sites I find myself visiting pretty often despite the fact that its obnoxious liberalism rears its head on a semi-regular basis. They write mostly good stuff about a lot of things that are relevant to me as a sci-fi nerd, but every once in a while they post something so utterly f&cking stupid that I wonder what the hell I'm doing on that site.

Case in point: an article posted today (appropriately tagged as a "Rant") entitled "Daenerys' whole storyline on Game of Thrones is messed up." It's messed up because it's about a white girl going around saving POCs from their own backwards societies. In doing so, Daenerys paradoxically becomes "a liberal white woman who goes around saving and civilising [sic] brown people" in a story that is "at its heart, a neocon wet dream." Got it? A liberal living out a neocon dream.

But let's cut through the semantic gobbledygook (can I still say "gobbledygook?") and get right down to the bone the author wants to pick.

What happens when Game of Thrones catches the books?

Lengthy quote from io9.

Co-showrunner David Benioff discusses in general terms how he and partner D.B. Weiss will approach the fourth book, A Feast of Crows, which features a largely new cast of characters and is generally considered the weakest entry:

"I don't think we want to answer specifically what we're keeping and dropping, but we do take your point. The series has already reached a point where there are so many characters, particularly in season three we're introducing so many new ones, we run the risk of bursting at the seams as we try to cram every single subplot and all the various characters and it becomes impossible on a budgetary level and it becomes impossible on an episode-basis to jump around every few minutes to 30 different characters and locations. We don't want to do that, and recognize that as a real risk and we will take steps not to fall into that trap."

And author George R.R. Martin says he's still optimistic the TV series won't reach the end of the story before he does:

"I think the odds against that happening are very long. I still have a lead of several gigantic books. If they include everything in the books, I don't think they're going to catch up with me. If they do, we'll have some interesting discussions."

Now, look, first of all, Feast is by no means the weakest entry. I'm puzzled as to why people think Brienne wandering around in the middle of nowhere is worse than Tyrion wandering around in the middle of nowhere, or why finding out that Cersei has the political acumen of Ned Stark is worse than finding out Daenerys has the political acumen of Ned Stark. (Or why Arianne Martell is a weaker supporting character than her brother Quentyn. And so on.)

But that nitpick aside, I think George is a tad optimistic.

Rant of the day: Episode Rankings

Buzzfeed has done a list ranking the Game of Thrones episodes from best to worst. Go check it out. I don't specifically disagree with any one thing, but...

This is like if I went through and ranked my favorite chapters of the books. ("Oh, man, Dance with Dragons chapter 59 got me excited about the plot for the first time in 500 pages!")

It's because you're telling one massive story. You can go through and rank Star Trek episodes, even the later Deep Space 9 ones. You can even do it to Bablyon 5 and Battlestar Galactica because each episode does tend to have one or two focuses while still advancing the overall story. But with Game of Thrones, you're always advancing everyone's story in five-minute chunks every episode. With one exception. But there's never a Jon-specific episode or a Daenerys-specific episode.

So to me, picking and choosing your favorite Game of Thrones episode is like saying "I liked how everyone's plot was handled in this specific week more than any other week" rather than "that episode had good story, solid character development, emotional impact, etc." Which is not to say that Thrones doesn't have those things, but I just can't judge an episode based on how it tells five minutes' worth of ten different story.

"Mhysa" follow-up

In which I promise to have complaints other than "where in the seven hells was Stoneheart?"

So. Episode 9 is the whammy and then Episode 10 is the denouement/Dany does something awesome episode. We know how this works.

Who fought who?

click to expand

The age of the Doctor(s)

No this is not a "he was 953 in Remembrance but magically jumped back to 906 in Voyage of the Damned" sort of post. I'm actually just trying to make a point.

William Hartnell: Born in 1908, played the 1st Doctor in 1963, age 55.
Patrick Troughton: Born in 1920, played the 2nd Doctor in 1966, age 46.
Jon Pertwee: Born in 1919, played the 3rd Doctor in 1970, age 50.
Tom Baker: Born in 1934, played the 4th Doctor in 1974, age 40.
Peter Davison: Born in 1951, played the 5th Doctor in 1981, age 29.
Colin Baker: Born in 1943, played the 6th Doctor in 1984, age 41.
Sylvester McCoy: Born in 1943, played the 7th Doctor in 1987, age 43.
{hiatus}
Paul McGann: Born in 1959, played the 8th Doctor in 1996, age 36.
{hiatus}
Christopher Eccleston: Born in 1964, played the 9th Doctor in 2005, age 41.
David Tennant: Born in 1971, played the 10th Doctor in 2005, age 34.
Matt Smith: Born in 1982, played the 11th Doctor in 2010, age 27.

After the jump, I take the data and play with it.

AGOT Sansa I, Eddard III: The Boy Who Cried Direwolf

Chapters 15 and 16: Ye Olde Direwolfe Incidente

That other big thing this week

Matt Smith is leaving Doctor Who. And no, the next Doctor will not be a woman.

Now some fans are leaping to blame Patrick Troughton's ghost for this (cuz Troughton told Davison told Tennant told Smith to only do three years - nevermind the fact that Davison regrets not sticking around for a fourth year), and others are clogging Reddit with discussions about the possibility of a female doctor, even though that's not likely to happen any time soon.

Well, bye, Matt. I have a bit of difficulty differentiating your take on the Doctor from a) your predecessor's, and b) your boss's, so I think I'll just let history judge you. The fact that I haven't seen an episode of the show since you cheated death by hiding inside a robot replica of yourself while kissing your future would-be murderer in a universe that has since ceased to exist timey-wimey ball notwithstanting, you were, and I quote directly from my brain, "pretty good."

I love that, in the article quoted above, Rusty tries to suddenly be a moral guardian. The guy who put same-sex couples in Doctor Who thinks transsexuals cross the line. Apparently. (Sidebar: I'm also amused by Game of Thrones constantly equating homosexual and incestuous relationships.)

I'm disturbed that people want Billie Piper to be the next Doctor. ATTENTION YOUNG PEOPLE: Way back in the 1980s, the BBC did in fact cast someone as the Doctor who had already been on the show. His name was Colin Baker, and his tenure was a clusterfrak. Now, it wasn't his fault - Eric Saward wanted to write about bounty hunters and space marines, and George Lucas Jon Nathan-Turner wanted to sell toys rather than focus on telling a good story. But it is not a good omen. And besides, I don't want the next Doctor to say "fink" instead of "think."

But there's a second reason why I don't want Billie Piper to play the Doctor. And it has nothing to do with her gender.

Red Wedding follow-up

From a reader's perspective, things I liked, things I didn't like, and things I'm "meh" on.

Sploilers.

"The Rains of Castamere" immediate reaction

Spoilaaaaaaaahs

It's a nice day for a...

...White Wedding

Doctor Smith's tenure is up

Matt Smith is leaving Doctor Who at Christmas. Opinionated fanboy that I am, I'm weighing in on that.