Friday 40K: Plasma-ed By An Angel

Now that the camera has finally been located (it was, it turns out, entirely my fault), the business of showing off painted models can now continue.  This week, it's the second of my Sanguinary Guard, Brother Fino.

(It was supposed to be Brother Vituto, but I had a weird brain lapse and painted "Tivo" on his chest instead; Fino was the best rescue job I could manage.)

Here he is with his fellow guard, Brother TBA.  I realised late in that I've painted the two pairs of wings differently, but it's not easy to tell, so that's OK.

Finally, the progress of the entire squad.

It Is What It Is

(Hmm. Post 1800, apparently. How lovely.)

I saw We Are What We Are (or Somos Lo Que Hay, to use its original title) on Sunday night, after a long and exhausting day of brain chemistry issues.  I mention this purely by way of pointing out that if I'd realised what it was about in real-time, rather than the following morning, I think Id have enjoyed it more than I did.

Which isn't to say I thought it sucked, even through my late-ish-night hazy malaise. It looked utterly beautiful - I really at this point be getting sick of films using muted filters as a mood-setting trick, but damn if I don't fall for it every time.  The performances were solid enough; nothing flashy, but then flash wasn't what was needed.  And the sort of slow, mournful tone contrasted well with the occasional moments of gore in a way contemporary filmakers are getting pretty good at.

At the same time, though, it was fairly minimalist plot-wise. Which I suppose is entirely reasonable when one's goal is a character study of a family in turmoil, but aside from the practical problem of the family never quite seeming to gel (a distinct issue from each individual actor doing well), the issue here is that the slow-burn approach gives the audience too much time to realise that they don't have any idea why this family is acting the way in the way it is.  A cannibalistic ritual must be performed in the next day or two, or they're all dead, apparently.  The men do the catching, the women run the ceremony, and that has important social connotations we never get a grip on. It's not that I require everything in my horror films be spelled out, to be clear, it's that if I can't understand why characters are interacting in the way they are, it's difficult for me to buy fully into what is going on.

So went my thinking as I stumbled upstairs in the closing minutes of Sunday night.  By Monday lunchtime, I'd fully grasped how stupid I was being.

Roughly (very, very roughly) speaking, there are three types of unresolved mystery in film.  There's the accidental omission (something thrown up by a script issue or an injudicious edit; the vanishing replicant in Bladerunner, for example), the mystery left unresolved deliberately because it doesn't really matter (shorthanded as MacGuffins, of course), and the mystery that has to remain unexplained because the structure of the film would be harmed by its solution.

I spent Sunday night assuming We Are... was operating under the second definition, and wondering whether it was really getting away with it. Only later did I realise it was in the third category.  Not knowing why the family needs to eat human flesh or perform unexplained rituals is central to what the film is doing.

(Spoilers below the fold)

Exclusive Secrets Of Secret Exclusiveness

Everybody knows how hard it is to get George R R Martin to talk in public about his future plans for A Song of Ice and Fire, up to and including when he's going to get the next installment out.  Fortunately, your humble blog scribe has finally found a way to break through Martin's silence and bring you the skinny regarding The Winds of Winter: just dream you had a conversation with him and assume all details revealed are accurate!

We therefore provide here the juciest details of last night's interview with Martin, which took place simultaneously in a bar, on a beach, and outside my parents' house.

• Major clues to the direction of books six and seven can be found by listening closely to the Toto's 1979 album Hydra, though ironically "Saint George and the Dragon" has no connection to the plot whatsoever;
• Martin expressed bafflement in over his fans' obsessions.  Yes, there are a race of hyper-intelligent shape-changing fish creatures attempting to take over Westeros, but very few of the main cast have been replaced with fishy duplicates;
• The entirety of the series was written specifically to piss of Robert Heinlein, by demonstrating that military societies are always filled with twats (when it was pointed out Heinlein passed away eight years before A Game of Thrones was published, Martin replied only "Good riddance". It is for this reason an extended sequence featuring the Night's Watch fighting bugs on Klendathu will appear early in the next book. Rumours this will lead to a casting opportunity for Casper van Diem are unconfirmed, mainly because I didn't know if he was dead;
• "Treme + swords - trumpets = next book";
• Theon will receive a penis transplant from a Ibennese serial killer with "hilarious results";
• Dany's dragons will actually be some fucking use.

All pretty exciting, we think you'll agree.  At the end of the interview, Martin expressed some displeasure at having been interviewed at such length without being invited in for tea with my folks, but promised he would happily sit down for another chinwag the next time I can tear my dreams away from Christina Hendricks riding Shai-Hulud bareback.

Monday Pessimus #2

Rapid Blood Loss

Depressingly, it must be close to thirty years ago that I first sat down in front of a flickering, tiny TV and tried to persuade a creaking Kempston joystick to help me guide a jumbled block of yellow pixels - all but unrecognisable as the Welsh thief I was allegedly aiding - through turnstile mazes in his quest to escape the law by, er, catching turtles and turning them into monsters.  I think. Logic, like diagonal movement, was still just a dream.

There is nothing in the subsequent evolution of videogames that has pleased me more than the conclusion that videogames can and should be coherent works of art.  You can keep your pretty lens flares and your twelve-button joypads ("games controller" still sounds too much like someone legally prevented from calling themselves DM). Even the decision to make a game's story an actual driving force rather than a vague justification for incomprehensible madness doesn't drizzle my olive oil like the dedication to crafting something whole and unique from the marble of coding; to rely on something other than raw processing power to entertain and impress.

It's a good job this approach impresses me, because as an actual game, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon isn't tremendously impressive. At seven missions it's too brief to work as a linear challenge, and its open world is too repetitive for it to function as an explore-em-up.  Too much of the game relies on the thrill of collecting things (which the main character mocks as stupid; it's never a good sign when you have to slate your own game mechanisms) in order to unlock weapon upgrades, which is kind of tedious, and makes the sudden removal of your arsenal in the penultimate mission a supreme dick move [1]. On the other hand, the advantage of a game speed by all but the most dedicated of completists (a group which includes me, but that isn't Ubisoft's fault) means you reach the finale before the joke wears thin. 

And what a joke it is. If Skynet had sent the Terminator back in time not to kill Sarah Connor but to force James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven to make a first-person shooter whilst drunk, Blood Dragon is what they might have come up with. Relentless, pointless carnage flows from the barrel pink laser-spewing automatic rifles or suspiciously familiar machine pistols as your cyborg soldier marches through neon-lit military bases looking for people to shuriken to death.  Women with gel-heavy blond hair and wearing shoulder apds that could double as armour plate come across as tough yet vulnerable as they explain the plot to you, and then fuck you in a manner both gratuitous and appropriately simplistic in its animation. Hardly a minute goes by without your ultimate badass (voiced by Michael Biehn, natch) engages in some hilariously off-kilter '80s action movie dialogue ("Way to die, dipshitter" remains a personal favourite).

References to '80s movies and cultural ephemera in general are everywhere, and the dedication to detail is such that it can be difficult to tell which is which.  Does the final mission really reference Zoids (or even Dinoriders) for example, or was that decade's obsessions over cyborgs and dinosaurs so prevalent that mixing them together was an obvious choice for the game?  And does it really matter? Either way, hearing the stentorian tones of a cyberdino intone "I am firing my lasors" is hilarious, and anyone who disagrees is a fool.

Or possibly just didn't experience the '80s as history, rather than farce. It's not clear how well the game will translate to today's kids with their twerking and their Beibermania.  You can get somewhere to understanding the game by a diet of appropriately blood-soaked synth-heavy period movies, of course, but that's only half the battle. You don't just need to know that this was how Hollywood was extrapolating the future back then, you need to understand how that was possible, and the materials we had to do it with.  That's why whilst the actual gaming environment here is thoroughly modern, the cut-scenes are defiantly 8-bit. It's why so much of the game is spent seeking out VHS tapes (to the best of my knowledge, no piece of '80s sci-fi assumed those things would make it to 2008). It's not enough to understand that in the '80s cyber-ninja was assumed to be a legitimate career path for post-millennials.  You have to have waded through the decade of horrific materialistic excess and bewildering technological change that made looking cool through paying to have your body upgraded with computers seem like a reasonable plan.

Or maybe not.  Being a fully-processed child of the '80s, it's hard to determine how well its touchstones can be packaged as vicarious nostalgia, rather than the more direct kind.  Either way, Blood Dragon is a mildly diverting FPS humming beneath a gloriously high-concept idea, executed almost to perfection. A run-of-the-mill engine made fascinating by tinkering at its edges. A patch, in other words, pulling a game into a realm of dedicated design so well-constructed the actual underlying structure seems almost beside the point.

Ironically, what could be more 21st century than that?

[1] On the other hand, given the game's obsession with the '80s, might this not represent the ultimately hollow nature of the acquire-at-all-costs mentality of the Reagan/Thatcher era?  Probably not...

"Make Me A Coffee And Swallow This Pill"

One of the main roles in my job is to meet people who want to put together a medical trial, and help them to construct in such a way that the analysis will be sound, and the process will be ethical. The resulting meetings vary wildly in how easily they go, of course, depending on both the experience and the temperament of those involved.

Every now and again truly ridiculous ideas are thrown up, like the idea of forming a control group out of people who refuse to be included in the trial (let's just steal their info without their knowledge) or creating them from people who can't speak English to consent in the first place.  No obvious statistical or ethical problems there!

As crazy as some of these ideas are, they always come from small cogs in larger machines.  If I didn't shoot them down, someone else would; that's why they come to me in the first place.  So when I see governors of entire states buying tickets for the Ethical Vacuum Express, I get worried.

In August 2011, following an email from Bob McDonnell to Virginia's secretary of health, Maureen McDonnell met at the Executive Mansion with Williams and one of the secretary's senior policy advisors. At that meeting, according to the indictment, Williams discussed the idea of having Virginia government employees use Anatabloc, Star Scientific's anti-inflammatory dietary supplement, "as a control group for research studies."

This wasn't the only time this kind of idea came up. In October 2011, according to the indictment, Maureen McDonnell accompanied Williams and a research scientist who consulted for Star Scientific to a company event in Grand Blanc, Mich... The scientist later emailed Maureen McDonnell a summary of their discussions. In it, he suggested it might be useful "to perform a study of Virginia government employees… to determine the prevalences [sic] of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions."

This, of course, is two tastes of conservative thought tasting great together.  You've got the idea that you shouldn't feel bad about assuming the people working under can be taken advantage of above and beyond the fact they do what you want them to for fairly indifferent pay, and you have the idea (not stated, but doubtless ready to be deployed at a moment's notice) that if this scheme were made voluntary, all considerations about inappropriate arm-twisting would suddenly disappear.  An employee taking on a role they really shouldn't be expected to for fear of rocking the boat? Unpossible!

There are hundreds of thousands of people in America and across the world who would say the biggest problem with this idea is that Virginia hasn't done enough to crush its unions to ensure the skids are greased enough for medical experimentation on your underlings. An awful lot of them spend extraordinary amounts of money to acquire the ears of the people who write the law.  This should be more of a worry than it is currently being allowed to be.

(h/t Rising Hegemon)

Adventures In Alcohol

One of the drawbacks of working in a medical school is that when you announce your intention to consume your own weight in cider at your birthday do, people are likely to offer compelling biological reasons as to why this should not be allowed.  Following Plan A's nixing, I attempted to move onto plan B, which is to drink my friend Siew-Wan's weight in cider, she being the lightest person available for measurement.

Alas, this too was deemed impractical. She might be petite, but there's still an astonishing 92 pints-worth of weight to her.  It looks like we're going to have to make this a team effort.  In order to keep track of the resulting consumption, I have divided Siew-Wan into 92 areas, as shown:

Alcoholic drinks will be marked from the top down (she always claims alcohol always goes straight to her head), and soft drinks will work their way up from her feet.

Will we consume an entire Siew-Wan in seven hours? Will the soft drinks find themselves massacred by the alcoholic variety, or merely soundly thrashed?  Only the future can say!