Books and synthetics
Okay, I'm tentatively in love with Almost Human, although it's early days. And despite the fact that I still think Karl Urban looks exactly like a Lego Man brought to life (sorry!). But Michael Ealy is surprisingly gorgeous, even though I wouldn't have said he's my type; too slight, too gentle, too conventionally handsome. I do however have a known weakness for the dark hair/blue eyes combination, so possibly that's it. I even had to google to check that they weren't contact lenses, because I couldn't quite believe they were natural (he's playing a 'synthetic' and gets occasional glowy light patterns on his face, so it's not as though it couldn't have been some kind of enhanced special effect *g*). But, yep, it's allll him.
The show is basically Robocop revisited, set in a fabulously futuristic world which must cost a fortune in CGI. John (Urban) was badly injured in some shoot-out gone horribly wrong, and now has a prosthetic leg and a bad attitude towards 'synthetics' in general. However, every human cop must be paired with a synthetic, and so they've dragged Dorian (Ealy) out of storage to be his partner. Dorian is an old-model synthetic, the kind with feelings, which makes him less efficient, but hopefully his in-built sensitivity will better enable him to deal with John. Predictably, John loathes him at first sight, but as they start working together, he learns to value him as a partner, blah blah blah. That part's pretty textbook.
The thing that's really making this show for me, however, is the banter, which seems expressly designed to fuel slashy audience vibes, and although it really is anvillicious fanservice at times I can't help but enjoy it. Their partnership is sweet and hilarious and I could watch them annoy and insult each other all day. They do go out and solve futuristic crimes, of course, but it's really all about the driving around and insulting each other. In that sense there are obvious similarities to H50, but this just goes way over the top - I mean, what are you supposed to make of lines such as, "don't ever scan my testicles again"? That's pretty much about the level of subtlety involved here. Also having "Gareth" in the cast as a kind of bumbling genius is a hilarious bonus and I just love watching him do pretty much anything (he has some other name on the show, but he's Gareth from The Office, and will always be - yeah, the creepy one). The woman playing the hard-nosed Captain was driving me crazy in a HITG! sense until I looked her up to find she was flower-child Lisa from Six Feet Under, of all people.
Quick recap of recent reading:
The Cult of the Amateur (Andrew Keen) - To be fair, you know when you hear about a book, and you kind of suspect in advance you'll disagree with the author and everything (s)he stands for, but you still want to read the entire thing just to feel that you've given them a fair hearing? That was me and this book. Short argument: the internet is killing 'fine' art and culture, because instead of letting 'professionals' with years of dedicated experience decide for the benefit of the unwashed masses (ie YOU) what kind of culture is worth seeing, hearing and propagating, the internet has enabled everyone to 'publish' written works, to 'record' music, to 'distribute' films, thus ruining culture for everyone. Worse, this includes the misuse of technology to defile existing classic works of art and literature by *gasp* sampling, remixing, and extending them. You can see why I wouldn't be exactly sympathetic to his attitude, and I don't think he said anything much more nuanced than that.
At most, I do have a certain sympathy with the idea that the internet has led to a loss of localised cultural cohesion, in the sense that children nowadays will probably wax nostalgic about global YouTube hits such as Gangnam Style and The Fox in the same way my generation might reminisce about the uniquely Australian experiences of, idk, watching Thunderbirds at 6am on Channel 9 because there was absolutely nothing else to watch at that hour. So there's that. But I can't really get behind the main argument that when you could only widely and publically view what TPTB decreed worthy - you know, quality programming like home shopping and Australia's Funniest Home Videos - the world was Better Off. That is, when The Cult of the Privileged Usually-White Usually-Male ruled instead. Strangely, he doesn't bother mentioning this aspect. Not only that, but the mass media still has tremendous influence, imo, so it's not as though the existing power structures have been destroyed, only weakened. If there's one thing I've learned from fandom it's that the amount of sheer raw talent demonstrated by unscreened, unsung 'amateurs' on the internet is amazing. So... there *g*
Linked: The New Science of Networks (Albert-László Barabási) - Popular science book about the development of networks (with particular emphasis on the internet) and the way that such networks tend to be structured. As you probably realise implicitly, the internet isn't an 'evenly' distributed network - rather, there are major hubs (major news organisations, popular social media sites, etc.) where links are concentrated, smaller hubs around them, etc. But even if you take out a large hub, there's enough of a distributed network around it to reroute information, which makes the internet as a whole reasonably robust. However at the same time, he shows that system failures can cascade if sites are then forced to handle traffic they're not accustomed to due to the the failure of a larger site, and so on, meaning the internet isn't entirely safe from a properly targeted attack. He also looks at the 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' thing, and shows that Bacon is actually not the most interconnected celebrity; it just sounds cool to use his name. Another thing I found interesting was his drawing of the way hyperlinks work, since they're uni-directional - if you link to a site, it doesn't necessarily link back to you. So he draws the mainstream internet as a big interconnected mass with 'ingoing' continents (sites that only link in) and 'outgoing' continents (sites that are only linked to). Then off to the side are little 'islands' of links that only connect to each other but don't lead back to any of the main hubs. All in all, it's quite interesting if you like that kind of thing.
Horns (Joe Hill) - nightdog_barks, fellow Stephen King fan, raved about this one, so I thought I'd give it a go, and it was indeed an enormously entertaining read. I know it's horribly unfair to compare Joe Hill to his Famous Father (ie Stephen King), but on the other hand, that's part of the reason I was interested enough to read it in the first place, so. And as someone who's read most of what King has written, it's an interesting comparison. The plot of Horns centres around Ig, who wakes up one morning after a heavy night before to discover that he's growing, well, horns. In tandem with this physical development is the disturbing realisation that the horns somehow compel everyone he meets to spontaneously reveal their deepest, darkest secrets to him. Ig's been going through a tough time - he's never been quite the same since his girlfriend was murdered. At the time, everyone thought he did it, but his privileged family connections enabled him to beat the rap. Now, however, he finds himself in a position to finally discover who's really responsible.
Hill has that same knack of creating instant empathy for his characters - I cared about Ig and his plight within moments of meeting him, and all of his major characters and scenes were drawn just as vividly. Horns is really more of a murder mystery with a supernatural touch - more 'magic realism' than horror - but no less enjoyable for that. Like King, Hill is as much about the journey as the destination, and creates some really atmospheric settings and scenes. Hill has a darker, more realistic writing style and dwells more on sex than King, but he's just as immensely readable. His characters are similarly very striking, but I think he keeps them at slightly more of a distance, whereas King gets really visceral with them, with all the internal monologues and the fixation on bodily functions that Hill mostly avoids. But in short, I loved it, and Heart-Shaped Box is now firmly on my list.
The Perfect Meal (John Baxter) - one of those 'I can't walk past a discounted book stall without buying something' purchases. Expat Australian in France seeks to recreate a classical French banquet, and goes around France in search of both the right dishes to serve, and the right ingredients to put in them. Mostly ends up as a series of random travel and food anecdotes - fun, and entertainingly told, but not particularly memorable.
Still reading: The Quincunx (Charles Palliser). Heeelp meee *g*
The show is basically Robocop revisited, set in a fabulously futuristic world which must cost a fortune in CGI. John (Urban) was badly injured in some shoot-out gone horribly wrong, and now has a prosthetic leg and a bad attitude towards 'synthetics' in general. However, every human cop must be paired with a synthetic, and so they've dragged Dorian (Ealy) out of storage to be his partner. Dorian is an old-model synthetic, the kind with feelings, which makes him less efficient, but hopefully his in-built sensitivity will better enable him to deal with John. Predictably, John loathes him at first sight, but as they start working together, he learns to value him as a partner, blah blah blah. That part's pretty textbook.
The thing that's really making this show for me, however, is the banter, which seems expressly designed to fuel slashy audience vibes, and although it really is anvillicious fanservice at times I can't help but enjoy it. Their partnership is sweet and hilarious and I could watch them annoy and insult each other all day. They do go out and solve futuristic crimes, of course, but it's really all about the driving around and insulting each other. In that sense there are obvious similarities to H50, but this just goes way over the top - I mean, what are you supposed to make of lines such as, "don't ever scan my testicles again"? That's pretty much about the level of subtlety involved here. Also having "Gareth" in the cast as a kind of bumbling genius is a hilarious bonus and I just love watching him do pretty much anything (he has some other name on the show, but he's Gareth from The Office, and will always be - yeah, the creepy one). The woman playing the hard-nosed Captain was driving me crazy in a HITG! sense until I looked her up to find she was flower-child Lisa from Six Feet Under, of all people.
Quick recap of recent reading:
The Cult of the Amateur (Andrew Keen) - To be fair, you know when you hear about a book, and you kind of suspect in advance you'll disagree with the author and everything (s)he stands for, but you still want to read the entire thing just to feel that you've given them a fair hearing? That was me and this book. Short argument: the internet is killing 'fine' art and culture, because instead of letting 'professionals' with years of dedicated experience decide for the benefit of the unwashed masses (ie YOU) what kind of culture is worth seeing, hearing and propagating, the internet has enabled everyone to 'publish' written works, to 'record' music, to 'distribute' films, thus ruining culture for everyone. Worse, this includes the misuse of technology to defile existing classic works of art and literature by *gasp* sampling, remixing, and extending them. You can see why I wouldn't be exactly sympathetic to his attitude, and I don't think he said anything much more nuanced than that.
At most, I do have a certain sympathy with the idea that the internet has led to a loss of localised cultural cohesion, in the sense that children nowadays will probably wax nostalgic about global YouTube hits such as Gangnam Style and The Fox in the same way my generation might reminisce about the uniquely Australian experiences of, idk, watching Thunderbirds at 6am on Channel 9 because there was absolutely nothing else to watch at that hour. So there's that. But I can't really get behind the main argument that when you could only widely and publically view what TPTB decreed worthy - you know, quality programming like home shopping and Australia's Funniest Home Videos - the world was Better Off. That is, when The Cult of the Privileged Usually-White Usually-Male ruled instead. Strangely, he doesn't bother mentioning this aspect. Not only that, but the mass media still has tremendous influence, imo, so it's not as though the existing power structures have been destroyed, only weakened. If there's one thing I've learned from fandom it's that the amount of sheer raw talent demonstrated by unscreened, unsung 'amateurs' on the internet is amazing. So... there *g*
Linked: The New Science of Networks (Albert-László Barabási) - Popular science book about the development of networks (with particular emphasis on the internet) and the way that such networks tend to be structured. As you probably realise implicitly, the internet isn't an 'evenly' distributed network - rather, there are major hubs (major news organisations, popular social media sites, etc.) where links are concentrated, smaller hubs around them, etc. But even if you take out a large hub, there's enough of a distributed network around it to reroute information, which makes the internet as a whole reasonably robust. However at the same time, he shows that system failures can cascade if sites are then forced to handle traffic they're not accustomed to due to the the failure of a larger site, and so on, meaning the internet isn't entirely safe from a properly targeted attack. He also looks at the 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' thing, and shows that Bacon is actually not the most interconnected celebrity; it just sounds cool to use his name. Another thing I found interesting was his drawing of the way hyperlinks work, since they're uni-directional - if you link to a site, it doesn't necessarily link back to you. So he draws the mainstream internet as a big interconnected mass with 'ingoing' continents (sites that only link in) and 'outgoing' continents (sites that are only linked to). Then off to the side are little 'islands' of links that only connect to each other but don't lead back to any of the main hubs. All in all, it's quite interesting if you like that kind of thing.
Horns (Joe Hill) - nightdog_barks, fellow Stephen King fan, raved about this one, so I thought I'd give it a go, and it was indeed an enormously entertaining read. I know it's horribly unfair to compare Joe Hill to his Famous Father (ie Stephen King), but on the other hand, that's part of the reason I was interested enough to read it in the first place, so. And as someone who's read most of what King has written, it's an interesting comparison. The plot of Horns centres around Ig, who wakes up one morning after a heavy night before to discover that he's growing, well, horns. In tandem with this physical development is the disturbing realisation that the horns somehow compel everyone he meets to spontaneously reveal their deepest, darkest secrets to him. Ig's been going through a tough time - he's never been quite the same since his girlfriend was murdered. At the time, everyone thought he did it, but his privileged family connections enabled him to beat the rap. Now, however, he finds himself in a position to finally discover who's really responsible.
Hill has that same knack of creating instant empathy for his characters - I cared about Ig and his plight within moments of meeting him, and all of his major characters and scenes were drawn just as vividly. Horns is really more of a murder mystery with a supernatural touch - more 'magic realism' than horror - but no less enjoyable for that. Like King, Hill is as much about the journey as the destination, and creates some really atmospheric settings and scenes. Hill has a darker, more realistic writing style and dwells more on sex than King, but he's just as immensely readable. His characters are similarly very striking, but I think he keeps them at slightly more of a distance, whereas King gets really visceral with them, with all the internal monologues and the fixation on bodily functions that Hill mostly avoids. But in short, I loved it, and Heart-Shaped Box is now firmly on my list.
The Perfect Meal (John Baxter) - one of those 'I can't walk past a discounted book stall without buying something' purchases. Expat Australian in France seeks to recreate a classical French banquet, and goes around France in search of both the right dishes to serve, and the right ingredients to put in them. Mostly ends up as a series of random travel and food anecdotes - fun, and entertainingly told, but not particularly memorable.
Still reading: The Quincunx (Charles Palliser). Heeelp meee *g*