Having Been Human

Well, hang on...

OK.  Before I go any further, let me just say; I've seen much, much worse finales to a TV show. And some of what went wrong last night has more to do with the ending not quite having the effect it should because of the total absence of the original cast, which can't have made things easy for anyone.  It was imperfect on it's own terms, too - the middle sagged somewhat, the show's overarching theme suddenly reappeared after at least a year's absence and rubbed uneasily against what's happened this year - but, really, it was at the very least a B- finale.

But because I'm me, just because I enjoyed the finale and the finale season overall doesn't mean I don't have questions about just what the fuck was going on, anyway.

Unterfold, ueberspoilers.

The Git That Keeps On Giving

If I'm being entirely honest, I probably don't have too much of a point to explore in this post.  Mainly, this is here because a) I like the title, b) I wanted to put up another post before returning to the subject of Being Human, and c) John Bolton is a terrible human being, and being rude about him is always something worth doing.

Just about every neocon is pretty much by definition a bully.  For some though the bullying is an unintended consequence of their foreign policy preferences.  Not John Bolton.  John Bolton likes being a bully.  It's not what follows from his positions, it's a deliberate life-style choice.  Simply put, Bolton just wants to be a cunt to people.

This is obvious to anyone who's seen footage of him in action at the UN.  It's obvious to anyone who caught his appalling performance during the UK coverage of the 2008 US elections (I believe he was on the Beeb, but I might be wrong in that) in which he took great pleasure browbeating a young female reporter by insulting her knowledge and questioning her coverage - by misrepresenting what she'd actually siad, naturally - all the while relying on her being to professional to call him out for the vainglorious, snorting turd he so clearly was.

Given this life-long dedication to the craft of bullying, then, his piece discussed by Dan Larison amused me greatly:

I think the entire Republican party has spent four years making a huge mistake really retreating from its historic role as the main advocate of sound national security policies. And in that sense the [Romney] campaign’s unwillingness to take on Obama’s failed foreign and defense policies was symptomatic of the problem of the party as a whole.

This is just the perfect encapsulation of Bolton's worldview, a worldview he is by no means unique or even particularly unusual amongst neocons in holding.  As Larison points out, you'd have to be functionally insane to believe Romney didn't spend enough time banging on about alleged flaws in Obama's foreign policy.  Anyone remember Romney's disgracefully inaccurate op-ed on the revised START treaty?  The repeated insistence that Obama wasn't sufficiently enslaved to the desires of whomever happened to be in charge of Israel at any given time?  Or how about this infamous photo snapped just seconds after Romney held a press conference to insist Obama was sending messages of support to terrorists through White House tweets, or something?



The problem the Romney campaign had wasn't that they didn't attack enough. It's that their attacks were utterly and obviously ridiculous, the reductio ad absurdum that inevitably sprang from thirty years of screaming "traitor!" at every Democrat who didn't want to blow up everything east of Martha's Vineyard.

This, of course, simply cannot be processed by the mind of John Bolton.  Above the bushy 'tache and behind the squinting, angry eyes, there lies nothing but the most simple of flow charts.

I promise you, a copy of that chart was hanging on Mitt Romney's wall during the campaign, though whether it was carved from gold or inked upon the flayed skin of his Mexican former gardeners, we may never know.  Lack of dickishness was never Romney's problem. Except in John Bolton's mind, apparently, the only place in the world "insufficient dick action" can appear as a phrase outside test screenings of hardcore gay porn.

This is the man George W Bush thought best qualified to talk to the rest of the world.  A man so scabrous and vile-hearted he thinks Mitt Romney pulled his punches too much whilst acting the asshole.  There are occasions when the only sensible thing to do is marvel that any of us are still alive.

Friday Video: The Certainty Of Chance

Something slightly different this week, since I've still not finished any of the ten models I'm currently painting.  This video (found on Youtube whilst checking a link from old internet buddy RtR) made me giggle, though tragically it's all too accurate a version of what happens when I try my hand at 40K.

Just For The Record...

...It would be a lot easier to cheer Rand Paul for insisting the US President shouldn't have the hypothetical power to kill US citizens without due process if he didn't also believe the US President should actually exercise his actual powers to let tens of thousands of actual US citizens actually starve, choke or bleed to death.

I mean, fine, the dude's right about that first part.  Just don't expect us to be leaping out of seats to congratulate the guy who's planning to make the death toll in his own country spike upwards, is what I'm saying.  Hell, give the average Joe on the street a choice between being blown up by a overhead drone, or having their brains attacked by viruses escaping vast lagoons of pig-shit, I'm not sure the answer will go the way Paul and his business lovin' buddies might hope it would.

Like I say, it's not that I disagree with him on his latest stand.  But when someone comes to the right destination by walking down a terrible, terrible road, it's a bit much to be told you should be applauding the guy's map-reading.

"There Are Many Similars"

While we're talking about similarities, how impressive is R Scott Bakker's impression of George R R Martin?

Not because of the relentlessly horrible nature of his fictional world, or the idea that a terrifying ancient evil from the North long considered myth is about to return to destroy the world, of course.  Because he wrote three awesome books, didn't wrap things up, wrote a fourth book in which nothing happened, wrote a fifth in which a whole bunch of people marched to battle and didn't really get there, and keeps promising a book with a publishing date that keeps slipping further and further away from sight.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, of course.  Maybe Bakker's hoping The Prince of Nothing gets a TV deal.  Though you'd think even HBO would shy away from a prologue which concerns itself mostly with pederasty...

Also, I have invented a new game!  I accidentally forgot to use Google to find a picture for this post, instead using the terrible search engine my computer came with as standard.  The image above is what the image search came up with for "Prince of Nothing".  The game involves finding the most ridiculous image possible from the first few hits, whilst keeping some kind of link between what's found and what was sought.  I may well employ this in the future, just to keep things interesting.

We've Been Human Here Before

(Spoilers throughout)

So, let me see if I get this straight. A woman who died as a result of terrible taste in men has fallen for a vampire, only to feel horribly betrayed when said vampire turns out to have fed in secret. Meanwhile, a shadowy agency of well-connected humans attempt to combat the supernatural by turning it against itself, only to find itself in trouble when a woman in the organisation falls for a supernatural being.  The goals of these antagonists are then complicated by interaction with a third party, nominally an ally but with what prove to be incompatible plans, which leads to a confrontation with the ghostly heroine. Sadly, the ghost is then banished by her foes, with the forces of the afterlife itself determined to bring her in.

None of this however is as concerning as the fact that a massively powerful leader amongst the supernatural who happens to live nearby is planning global domination, with the coming horror repeatedly prophesied. This enemy has a direct creative link to the vampire protagonist, but it’s still a surprise when the threat returns. The enemy then constantly fretting about the combination of a ghost, a werewolf, and a vampire in the same house.

Meanwhile, a ghost has to look after a socially difficult member of the undead, a precocious child causes trouble despite no longer having a heartbeat, a seemingly simple werewolf proves to have hidden depths, and a comedian from a show no-one cares about anymore shows up and tries not to look miscast.

We’ve seen this all before, haven’t we?

Don’t get me wrong; this final series is perfectly respectable, even if I’m not sure how they’ll manage to wrap it all up satisfactorily next week.  But damn, that’s some fairly major recycling going on right there

Plus of course there’s the fact that every damn episode in this entire show seemed to involve the housemates having hyperbolic fallings out over ridiculous misunderstandings and obvious manipulations.  They really could just have called this thing Being Thick As Shit.

(Also, while we're on the subject, I reckon my brother looks an awful lot like Michael Socha.  Observe:

"I fear tonight the moon will be full"

"I fear the night will be full of Muslims"

Uncanny.  Well, a bit. There's pictures of my brother that look more like Socha, actually, but none with such a brilliant caption right beneath him).

Passings

Gosh, it's gotten a bit quiet around here, hasn't it?  Don't worry, I'm still alive.

Not everyone else is, though.  I was saddened to learn of the deaths of two men, one who influenced my childhood, the other my first steps into playing board games more complicated than those one is liable to break out at Christmas.

There can't be many more instantly recognisable piece of music to my increasingly battered brain than the Roobarb and Custard theme; just this ridiculously joyous mix of filthy synth and manic harmonica.  I watched the show every week as a kid and I can't tell you a thing about it, but I can whistle the theme note for note, and remember the sight of Roobarb's delighted expression as he ran towards the camera.  Bob Godrey - who animated the show and who passed away a little under two weeks ago - insisted that animation should always fundamentally be about fun, and few things make the point more economically and directly than Roobarb's grin. The mechanisms of fun are truly known only to children and to dogs.



My main memory of Godfrey's work, though, isn't a green mutt trying to make peace with a pink cat, but the mellow yellow feline who knows everything about nothing. Again, the fact that the theme song is so catchy certainly helps, but it's Godfrey's own drawled narration and theshifty kohl-lined eyes of Rum Baa Baa, most evil sheep in all the world, that stick in the memory.  Was there no end to his ovine outrages? It takes a particular kind of wonderfully strange mind to reimagine silent film villains- complete with top hat and pencil moustache - as depraved farmyard animals.  Godfrey, we salute you.

Spare a thought too for Allan Calhamer, inventor of Diplomacy, the genesis of which he describes in detail here, but basically seems to have been born from the desire to remodel chess so you could invade Tirol.  I have fond memories of this game from my misspent youth, particularly the occasion when we used drinking straws to fashion the tools used to push models around maps seen in basically every WWII film ever.  That was almost as much fun as ganging up on one poor guy, reducing him to a single army, and forcing him to write "Paris stands" as his only order whilst the rest of us vied for European supremacy.  Calhamer passed away one week ago, with his reputation amongst gamers secure.