Legacies

**Warning: Spoilers for Tron: Legacy**



**I pretty much talk about the movie here**



*You have been warned.**


So anywho, i came to Tron late, having not seen the whole film until late last year, then immediately watching the Rifftrax for it, thus securing that I shall never take it seriously ever again.

So I saw Tron: Legacy tonight. And something bothered me.

It was not the 3D, which was fairly slick though seemingly unnecessary in some scenes (I took my glasses off for the conversation on the Solar Sailor, and the cinematography looked far better in 2D).

It was not the whole "putting on the Reich" scene where the bad guy speechifies to amassed troops in a very Nazi way (we'll play a drinking game later).

It's not the bad Final-Fantasy-Spirits-Within-style de-aging of Jeff Bridges.

It was not that the aforementioned Solar Sailor scene stopped the plot dead in its tracks for 30 minutes (the original did that too).

It's the casual murder.

"But wait, Lucas!" you declaim. "This is a Disney film. Surely they'll never SAY die!"

Well, they say de-rezzed, so allow me to explain my issue.

The Tron world is peopled by Programs, who look and act human and are essentially people, and Users, who are humans.

In the original Tron, Flynn is put into the Deadly Discs contest (and later, the lightcycle fight) where he must battle for his life in a kill-or-be-killed situation. Even then, it takes a few attacks on him for him to finally fight back against the human-looking program and defeat him. When asked to finish the job and de-rezz the opponent, he is horrified and refuses to kill for the whim of an overlord. Later, in the lightcycle fight, he does fight back by surviveing, and the nature of the contest spells doom for his opponents.

In Tron: Legacy, Sam Flynn is digitised into the Grid and selected for the games. He's put into the Deadly Discs scenario. He avoids the first few attacks, then sees in the next court that the disc can kill. He immediately launches his disc with intent to kill. It doesn't work at first, and the match becomes heated, with Sam finally de-rezzing his opponent with disc-through chest. He's almost immediately put into the next match. He kills his opponent quickly and uses the extra time to look for a way out.

Wait, what? This guy's been dropped into a computer world for 5 minutes and he's already killing people stylishly and without remorse? And that's just in the games. Once he's on the run, he's blasting those Orange guard programs left and right, sending the digital chips flying.

"But wait, Lucas!" you declaim anew. "Those programs he's killing are Orange Guys. Orange guys are bad guys, just drones. Surely it's okay to de-rezz them!"

Wrong again. Late in the film it's shown that not all captured blue guy Programs are sent to the games. Some are sent to "Rectification camps*" in boxcars**, where they're force-marched*** into glowing orange boxes that look like ovens****, and come out as perfect goose-stepping*****-in-formation Orange Guys.

So allow me to clarify: HE'S GLEEFULLY KILLING BRAINWASHED-AGAINST-THEIR-WILL INNOCENT PEOPLE.

The Big Bad of the film, Clu, is shown as an Authority-Equals-Asskicking dictator, who's destroyed an entire race within the grid because they didn't fit his ideal of perfection******. This is to make sure to point out to those of us still playing the home game, that this mook is a complete monster.

So how do we defeat this monster?

***last warning, major plot spoilers here zomg***

In order to get his son and Token Girly out safely, Flynn uses his physical god powers (which really would have been useful in the big fight) to hold back Clu, then Force-pull him in and reabsorb him, causing a massive energy release that destroys them both and the entire city.

Let me repeat that. THE ENTIRE CITY IS WIPED OUT.

That means every program, good or bad, is dead. That's genocide. And he's the good guy.

I couldn't believe it.

Disney, ladies and gents. You know, for kids!


* DRINK!
** DRINK!
*** DRI*hic*NK!
**** DRINK!
***** DRINK!
****** DRINK! Whoa. I gotta sit down.

I will do you a favour.

I shall recommend you go and download (for free) Super Crate Box. It recently won Free Indie of the Year (on Bytejacker) and it has casuall sucked up about an hour of my time today without even trying. It's basically a metroid-style platformer, but you're confined to one room. Your little dude has to run around collecting crates, each of which gives him a weapon upgrade. Problem is, it's a randomised weapon upgrade (so you might trade a bazooka for a weak-ass pistol), the enemies you don't kill get faster and angrier, and even if you sit and plug away at the enemies, you don't advance to the next level until you get a certain number of crates without dying.

It's addictive. Play it.

This is the link.

It sounds really silly, but it makes me happy when people mention things that I've written in my blog (well, people who aren't people that I've forced into reading it, anyway)

To show my joy, here is a gif of Scott Pilgrim rocking out.

Machine of Death: HA!

I'm reading this book on my Kindle:
"Machine of Death: A Collection of Stories About People Who Know How They Will Die"
Here is it's Amazon listing.
Here is it's website.
It's about people who go to a machine which pricks their finger and then tells them the exact method of their death (but not time or details. Like "Almond" or "Car Crash").
Some of the stories are ironic, some are Twilight-Zone-Dark, a few are worrying, and one so far touching.

But this one made me laugh out loud the moment I turned my Kindle-page.

(Oh, FYI, the titles of each story is one of the causes of death mentioned, most, but not all, being the cause of death of the main character.)

I present it here, in full:























HAHAHA. Ah ha.

The Pusher.

I'm sick of having interests that are diverse and oddball enough that when I get a reaction to something, I can't talk about it unless I force that thing onto them and then press them for a conversation.

I first felt this feeling after going to see My Disco with Ted. I name dropped the band at work to local metal/odd-ball music people that I talk to and no one knew it. I assumed that, as it was one of Ted's bands, it'd be known to people who like Teddish tunes like Godspeed You Black Emperor and such. The one person who seemed interested recieved a burned CD from me and he didn't like it.

It's similar to when I try to talk about Scott Pilgrim to some people and they go "Oh, yeah, I read that." and I gush and start talking about the fact that I love it. And the person goes "Yeah, it was okay. I just read the first one." Argh.

I'm not saying people shouldn't have their own opinions, far from it. I just wish that sometimes those opinions would match or at least be nearish to mine without my having to forcefeed them to people.

So anyway.

I was disappointed with the last trade of Ex Machina. It was the series conclusion and it was unsatisfying.

If you don't know Ex Machina, I am not the least bit surprised.

It would not be worth my explaining the premise or anything. I probably wouldn't convince you to try it. Even then, you might hate it.

edit: That being said, in the last month I've had two great conversations, one with a guy at work, and one with my boss, about my love of insects, and nature in general (which lead to the loaning of Bill Fitzhugh's "Pest Control" to Joe, and Rick's highly recommending Attenborough's Planet Earth to me. So I could easily be full of shit.

I don't think I've ever found the solution to a problem I've been having with my computer by looking online.

Lately I've had an issue on Windows Vista where anytime I rename or delete a file, the script showing "deleting" will hang on the screen after the file is gone. I'll hit cancel, and it'll sit "canceling" forever until i use task manager to close it.

I've trawled forums, I've streamlined my start-up processes, I've found no answers. One forum suggested that it was a search indexing fuction that was causing it, but when I located and stopped that process it did get rid of the script, but the next time I edit something it hangs again. Occasionally it'll affect iTunes when I'm transferring purchases back to the PC, cause that to freeze. Finally, it'll affect my Windows Movie Maker in that if I save a project and open it to edit again, the program will freeze as soon as the project is open.

Yesterday i spent 2 hours editing together video footage for a project. I saved it, but left the computer running overnight. Today, while I was at work, Tanja wanted to edit some of her iTunes playlists, but noticed the computer was running slowly, so she saved what was open and restarted. Later this evening when I tried to check on the project I had saved? Couldn't open it.

I don't even get mad anymore. I just sort of sigh. Things will fail, and no one can fix them.

This is about the feeling you get, you know, like when you're the smallest doll in a babushka doll.

This kind of got me a little bit. Just a bit. Sniff.

Stick around for the 4th verse.



For those who are impatient, this is the 4th verse:
This is my body
And I live in it
It's twenty-nine and twelve months old
It's changed a lot since it was new
It's done stuff it wasn't built to do
I often try to fill it up with wine
And the weirdest thing about it is
I spend so much time hating it
But it never says a bad word about me

This is my body
And it's fine
It's where I spend the vast majority of my time
It's not perfect, but it's mine
It's not perfect

*sniff*

I'm being good.

Want to know how good I'm being?

This is how good:

I have on my bedside table the latest Robert Jordan/Brendan Sanderson Wheel of Time book, the latest volume of Empowered, the two Bone prequels/sequels, a compendium of Hopeless Savages, plus a couple of miscellaneous graphic novels & comics, and a book on the nature of jokes and humour.

On my Kindle I have the latest Terry Pratchett Tiffany Aching book, Robert Rankin's latest Brentford book, a collection of short stories of people who know the exact method of their death but not the time (by a slew of webcomic authors), about 30 Neil Gaiman short stories, the entire Dresden Files series, and all but one of Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series.

In the spare bedroom I have the last 4 months of The Word magazine.

I am not reading any of these things. I am reading my wife's draft of her novel on my Kindle. Because she asked me to.

You bet I'm good.

Now the game is on the other foot.

So I've finished Bioshock 2. Don't worry, gentle reader, I'm not going to do another "Lucas goes in-depth in pros and cons of a game" post. It's just that while I was playing Bioshock 2, I told myself that I'm not going to even look at other games until I finished it. So as Dead Rising 2, Fallout: New Vegas and other new and shiny titles went by, I stuck with it. Now that it's finished, and I'm done with that universe, I can play other. But I have to buy others first. In the meantime, I popped Borderlands back in.

And had zero fun. I'm a god-like level 61 with no missions left. Sure, there's the new Claptrap DLC, but meh. I was running around shooting Spiderants when it hit me why I wasn't liking this game I got so many hours of joy from: There's no meaning. Nearly every action in both Bioshock games meant SOMEthing later on: whether you harvest or rescue little sisters, what you spent your money and Adam or, what Plasmids you outfitted, every audiotape you listened to... whereas the complete open world freedom of Borderlands is without meaning. Nothing I do has any impact.

Also, the Bioshock "change weapon" button is the Borderlands "throw grenade button." Stupid muscle memory

Return To Rapture

So I finished Bioshock this week. I looked about for some sort of celebratory dance to do, but it seems none have yet been invented. As I mentioned in this post here, the game initially frustrated me. However, I can go down my list of gripes nearly point for point and say that nearly all of them are vindicated by later gameplay. It seemed to be one of those games that got way easier as you went along.

So I thought I would give Bioshock 2 another go, after Rage-Quitting due to lack of fun all those months ago. I like it much better now. It plays very much like the first game, but have streamlined a few things, and needlessly complicated others. Hacking, instead of being a pipe-based puzzle, is now a swinging needle you need to stop in the right place, and can be done remotely with a dart. Security robots are not the incredibly persistent little buggers they were, only doing one sweep before leaving. The initial guns are fun and powerful (a rivet-gun instead of a pistol, a gatling cannon instead of a tommy gun) and the enemies come at you in droves. The rivet gun has a trap feature that is like the crossbow in the first game, but you can deactivate the traps (and it's the first gun you get, as opposed to the last). As for the complications... your main weapon is a spinning drill instead of a wrench. Drills need fuel. Feh. Remote hacking needs darts, but happily you can just walk up and do it the old fashioned way, hand to motherboard. So I'm optimistic. So optimistic that I didn't even need to point-form this list.

So there you go.