The End of Time: Guns and Life and Death Decisions

The Doctor Who finale.  The end of David Tennant as the Doctor. A choice: to kill or let the Earth be destroyed.  A choice that he must make with a gun and a bullet.

OK, so guns, something that the Doctor does not use and murder.  Must be a really good and juicy ending to the story arc.  Oh, wait he shoots a machine.  Really, he was given an A or B question and he chose C? RTD is just fucking with us at this point right?

Now, to put this into perspective, let’s look at a good use of a gun as a plot device.

Full Metal Jacket.  If you have seen it: congratulations, you have seen a great movie.  If you haven’t: get your ass down to the video store and get a copy.

So the movie starts out with a group of recruits being trained to go to Vietnam.  Their Gunnery Seargent uses mockery and verbal abuse to harden the recruits into fighting machines as he feels it is his job to product warriors to go fight overseas.

I mean just look at this guy.  The recruits are in their underwear and this maniac is screaming at them because of some petty shit he finds to be an insult to the American way of life.  That’s a scary dude and on top of that he’s trained to kill.

So he picks on this one guy, Pvt. Pyle who is overweight and probably borderline mentally retarded.  He makes this guy’s life miserable.  The rest of the platoon at one point haze Pyle and beat the shit out of him with bars of soap wrapped in towels.

After that, Pyle seems to improve, but he’s actually gone crazy and ends up going apeshit and killing the Gunnery Seargent before blowing his own brains out.

Now why did I mention all of that.  Throughout the training, the recruits have the importance of their rifle drilled into their heads.  When Pyle goes crazy, he starts talking to his gun.  He then uses the gun to kill the Seargent and then himself.

The gun is used as a plot device as it it’s usage defines the recruits as soldiers (that’s how they kill the enemy) and then is used by Pyle to kill the Seargent and himself.  OK, so that makes sense as you kind of see it coming and when the murder happens, it is a satisfying end to the story arc.  The reaction follows the action of training as Pyle had become desensitized to killing.

On the other hand, the shit that we get in The End of Time is not logical.  The Doctor is told that he must kill to sever the link.  It is almost like the woman in white and Wilf are training him to kill.  You would think that he would shoot The Master or Rassillon or maybe he is another part of the link, so maybe he kills himself.  Shooting the machine doesn’t make sense.  We are told that The Master is the link, the other side is Rassillon.  Having The Doctor be the bridge I could buy since he ended the time war, but the machine had no part in the Time War.

My advice to RTD: “Stop writing crappy endings, if you can’t come up with an ending for an arc yourself, just steal one from someone who could.  Your fans won’t be upset, heck you can even make it a nod to a fellow filmmaker and people will respect you for it.”

The old series was great because there were consequences for The Doctor’s actions.  Perry never made it back to Earth, The Doctor could have stopped the Daleks from existing but failed.  He changed the course of events on planets, but that hardly happens anymore.  RTD teased us about killing Rose, but then he didn’t kill her.  He teased us about a companion dying but then no one died.  Hell, even David Tennant’s own death sequence turned into a frigging walk down memory lane.

I just  hope that the next season brings some better stories.  Otherwise Dr Who is turning into another Heroes, but worse.  Even Heroes kills off some of its characters in order to show that a plot exists.

WoW Stats

I found this picture on a link on Digg.  Don’t know where it originally comes from but whoever they are, thank you for putting things into perpective.

Via: Online Schools

Those are some amazing stats.  I especially like how WoW has become a billion dollar a year business.

I know I have played it and enjoyed it and gotten bored and quit and then found reasons to come back and play some more, so it really is a compelling experience.

Acer Aspire Revo 1600 Review

I have been looking into getting one of these Nettop PCs for a while now.  The idea of having a super thin, super light terminal that I can hook up to my home network and my TV to view videos on and browse the web has always seemed like a basic thing to have in a home.

I found one of these Acer Aspire Revo 1600 units at TigerDirect.com for $170.  It was a refurb, but from my experience, these are actually higher quality since they are inspected more closely than the models that go out as new.  I have purchased a lot of refurbished things over the years and have come to the conclusion that the reason they were returned is due to lack of understanding of the product by the original buyer.

The first thing I noticed about this unit is how clogged it came with bloatware.  A dozen game demos, Office demos, MS Works, anti-virus, Google desktop, just tons of stuff.  So it ran slow and I mean very slow.  OK, so I went ahead and uninstalled all of that stuff since I know of lighter freeware alternatives and hey there’s a spry little box under all that clutter.

The model I have only has one GB of DDR2 which hamstrings it a bit, but it still putters around online pretty well.  Some video streaming sites don’t do so well, but basic web tasks are just fine.  From personal experience, it seems like it is slow because it is always paging to the hard drive.  So, it needs more memory.  Luckily, you can add up to 4 GB of memory and I do plan on doing so to give this little box a little more pep.

Another drawback is that it does not have integrated WiFi.  Well, that’s not a drawback to me since more integrated WiFi solutions in these little boxes has terrible range.  So, I find that it is better to just find a good performing dongle and use that.  I don’t have to worry about massive range since I live in a medium sized apartment, so I went for the Tenda WiFi 802.11N adapter.  It was $15 at MicroCenter and it was very easy to install.

I tried this box in the farthest corned of my apartment and it was still getting full bars, download speeds were also very good and definitely on par with other WiFi solutions I have found.  So, the lack of WiFi out of the box is not really a drawback.

The ION graphics do pretty well.  I installed World of Warcraft and with the settings set way down (as I knew I would have to set them for onboard graphics).  It ran at 25-30 fps.  Not great,  but not terrible considering the computer is so low on RAM.

The CPU kind of sucks, but it does its job well enough and for a $200 PC it is amazing.  It is Hyper-Threaded and handles multi-tasking far better than I expected.  The only thing that this machine doesn’t do well is Flash.  But then again, I’ve seen Quad-Core i7s where a bit of poorly written Flash code causes full loads on the CPU, so I won’t call that a big setback.

In terms of connectivity, this little guy is amazing.  It has 6 USB ports.  One of them is capped with a little rubber stopper, but it does work. It has a media-card reader on the front as well as audio inputs for a headset and an e-Sata port for external hard drive.  It also has VGA and HDMI on the back.  The HDMI is the main draw of this box as it will power a 1080p set making your thousand inch TV able to browse the web.  Yeah, that is as cool as it sounds.

The keyboard and mouse it comes with are pretty lackluster but they do function and do so well enough.  The keyboard has that chicklet layout that Apple pioneered with its laptops and the feel of the keys is actually quite good.  This is a compact keyboard, so you do not get a num-pad.  This is slightly better than a netbook keyboard.  Functional, but not much more.  It looks nice though with a nice finish on the face of the casing.

The mouse is crap.  It is too light and squeaks when you click it.  The scroll wheel is also too big for the mouse, but again it is functional and usable, but not great by any stretch of the imagination.

Overall, the unit is nice and small, and once you de-clutter it, it does a great job as an internet terminal.  Just don’t expect it to replace you full-tower box unless your full-tower box is from 2000 or earlier.

Heroes: The Angry History

OK, so I saw the season finale and wow, just wow.  What a pile of shit!

Really, the evil mastermind can be defeated if everyone just walks away?

He doesn't try to raise a bunch of walls to keep people from leaving?

How about locking the individuals away in cells and making them stay?

No, they puss out again and the whole season has built up to...drum roll please...a talking to.

That's right, they talked the bad guys down.  Sylar was so damn cool being able to fight off like one damn guy.  Oh wait, it should have ended with him fighting the entire carnival and not being able to let any of them die, so he goes all berserk and beats the shit out of all of them while protecting all of their lives at the same time.  How's that for an ending?  And I just came up with that...while I was writing it...and I'm on the john.  OK, that last part is a lie, but my point still stands.

And don't get me started on the Peter v. Samuel confrontation.  They pushed dirt.  I don't care how you slice it...they pushed dirt.

So, what did they stop, like 1000 people being violently killed by Samuel.  Oh, wait, in the time they did that more people died of hunger and disease in Haiti (probably).  So, why don't they just grab the guy who can make shit grow, convince him that Samuel is a douchy guy and have him grow cabbages for Haiti.  Why cabbages you ask?  Why not carrots and apple orchards and a bunch of other stuff that is really good for you? Because free food should not taste good, it should just nourish you so you don't die, otherwise you're OK with getting handouts, but that's a different matter.

Why didn't they make it more epic, like Samuel was going to cause an Earthquake and hit Manhattan with a tidal wave 600 feet tall so it will kill millions of people across the eastern seaboard.  You know, some really epic shit like in season one where they were going to nuke New York.  You see, that was really messed up and so had to be avoided.  1000 people dying at a carnival.  You can write that off as the ferris wheel spinning out of its holding and crushing them all to death.  You can't write off 6 million people, but 1000, well there's lots of example throughout history where a few people in an isolated area can just be written away by the media.

All in all, the bit with Claire revealing that she has powers was awesome and it does set up a neat next season, but the rest was a pile of crap.  I'm still waiting for the main characters to go all X-Men on us and they haven't.  I blame all of the bad ratings and the declining popularity on the writers and their inability to move forward with a perfect setup each season.

Season 1 ended well.  Then you had a rival team of supers in season 2.  So what happens, they go rob a bank.  Really a bank? Not a nuke silo or a toxic gas storage facility?  They want cash?  OK, why not.  They also have an immortal guy who wants to kill off humanity with a virus.  Great idea, but wait, he gets frozen in time and buried alive.  Yeah, that's a good use of evil Wolverine with a great accent and the ability to deliver awesome one liners.

Season 3 started off all right.  You had an evil corporation, headed up by a guy who can steal powers from the good guys.  You even had a pair of twins with the power of life and death. Awesome, oh wait, the life brother gets clubbed to death.  The death sister gives up her power (which she could not control, which basically writes plots by itself) and then the evil guy with the power over death gets his powers frozen and then shot in the head.  Does his regeneration kick in when everyone walks away?  I would think not otherwise he would have shown up again.  And surely they weren't stupid enough to just walk away without checking.  Oh and for good measure, why don't we make it so the main good guy who was the ying to Sylar's Yang can't have more than one power at once.  Yeah, that's some good writing.

And then we got the disaster that was Season 4.  Carnies...the bad guys are carnies...think about it.  Oh, and the main bad guy is a walking Irish stereotype.  He should have just had a rant about potatoes at some point just to complete the insult.  Plus he attacks civilian population and has a family of outcasts.  Why didn't we just call Samuel Ira and complete the idea.  He could have worked for a snobby British family and had then shit all over him in his childhood.  While we're stealing random things from history and mixing them with racist stereotypes, let's just to town on it.

Overall, I used to be a huge fan of this series and it has become a very sad thing over the years.

Lack of Speech Skills in Star Trek

So, before you all jump on me for going down this rabbit hole, I want to state that this is just a mental exercise and should be taken lightly and as a humorous logical argument.

In Star Trek, every time the Federation crew meet a new species (with a new an exotic set of forehead ridges or funny looking ears) that species speaks English.  Maybe they speak British English or with a strange accent, but they still speak English.  Why is that?  According to the show’s creators’ the Federation has universal translators that translate on the fly.  Let’s go ahead and assume that such a thing is possible and proceed from there.

First, why do the universal translators translate to English and if so, why the funny accents?  Well, you can see how you can poke holes in this all day and have a lot of fun with that mental exercise, but let’s assume that the programmers wanted to throw some flair in their translator and wrote the code to do funny accents and dialects.

The bigger question is: since the translators work both ways, what do the Federation crewmembers speak? You would think English, but let’s think about that.  Even if the whole world were to start speaking English, after a while, everyone would just use the universal translators, so the words would be lost and only the most basic sounds required to convey ideas would remain.

If you follow that train of thought through and apply what we see with modern language evolution (think texting and how some people can read it as if it was plain English), then you realize that in reality the Federation must speak in formalized grunts.  So if the power ever fails, then they would be stuck grunting to one another.

That would make for some terrible television, but it does make logical sense and I dare you to watch Star Trek after reading this and not smiling about Picard and Riker grunting at each other about the meaning of life and command.