Monthly Archives: September 2018

A New Short Hits the Digital Shelves

A theme I often return to again and again in various pieces if the concept of machine intelligence and possible implication.

I am fascinated by artificial intelligence though I think many writers, particularly of the screenplay variety, rarely think deeply about in the interaction of physical form and how that drives intelligence. More often than not A.I. are treated as people with just a different box housing the intelligence. It’s very common in the Western Tradition to think of the mind and the body as independent effects, divorced and without impact on one another.  Consider how well worn the trope is of the mind transfer. That one person’s entire mind, their memories and thoughts can be moved to another person’s body. Granted this sort of thing is more often in fantasy fiction where magic can be used to induce the switch, but it is fairly common in Science-Fiction as well. And yet we are all very aware of how brain damage can alter personality, distort memory, and influence emotions. The vessel for the intelligence shapes the intelligence and I believe that machine intelligence in some ways will be utterly alien to us and perhaps even incomprehensible.

My most recent short story — Any Landing …– now published in Newmyths.com issue #44, explores the concept of human forced to exist with a machine intelligence it created but cannot comprehend.

The site is free so drop by and give the stories there a read.

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TV Series Review: TABOO

Recently my sweetie-wife and I finished season one of the FX series Taboo. Starring Tom Hardy who produced it along with Ridley Scott and Steven Knight the story takes place in 1814 London and is a gritty tale of treasure, treason, and slavery. Hardy plays James Keziah Delaney, a man who has returned home to find his father dead and quickly becomes into conflict with both the Crown and the power East India Company. Delaney has inherited his father failing shipping company and a property desperately desired by not only the Crown and the East India Company, but the Americans, currently engaged with England in the war of 1812, also will stop at nothing to steal it away.

The first season follows Delaney as he assembled a team of thieves, orphans, and charlatans to challenge the great powers aligned against him. Throw into the mix a half sister, played by Oona Chaplin, with whom James has an unconventional relationship, and Taboo becomes a story with passion, savagery, and heavy doses of cynicism. It is very nearly a noirset in 1814 England. The main character is hardly a person of admirable character. Delaney is a man who lets no one and nothing, not even lifelong relationships, stand between himself and his objectives. One should not look to this series for examples of moral characters and lessons in ethical actions. The series strongly suggests a supernatural undertone but never lets this subtext overpower the muddy realism of the piece.

One aspect that particularly pleased me about the season one was that it ended on a note that leaves it open for more stories but with enough closure that it can also be suitable as a self-contained story. I detest the trend for season cliffhangers. Too often the conclusions are far from satisfying.

Now that we have finished Taboo our next television adventure will be AMC’s adaptation of Dan Simmons’ The Terror.

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A Different Recollection

Seventeen years on this date old the World changed forever. Others will be more eloquent and more analytical about the importance and reverberations echoing from that terrible evil act and I will leave such remembrances to their skillful prose. So, not to ignore but to reflect on a happier occasion I’m going to post about the only party I ever went to during my high school years.

In high school I was very much a loner, I had a small tight circle of friends, but the larger social environment simply was alien. Because of that I don’t have the usual American experience of attending games, proms, or parties held while a student’s parents had departed for an evening or weekend. However there was one exception to this, my acting class.

In my senior year, 1979, as an elective I took a class in acting taught by the engaging Mrs. Linda Crumbo. It was a fun and lively class and one where I even slipped in a bit of my own original writing as a prose piece that I performed. The class was small, we became friends, and towards the end of 1978 it was planned that there would be party held at Mrs Crumbo’s house. Her husband had been wrangled by members of the class to arrange things so that the party would surprise to Linda. The event’s evening arrived and I rode out to the party with four classmates, among our little troupe was Roberta and Pam who during the entire drive out discussed a horror film, Halloween,  that they had recently gone out and watched.

The drive I must tell you was not an urban one. We drove through darkened wood on a small two-lane road with only the car’s headlights for illumination. Pam and Roberta recounted to film with great detail and the tension in the car grew as we transverse the dark and somewhat threatening forest. Eventually we arrived at Linda’s two-story wood-frame house.

Every window was dark.

We sat for a few moments debating how to proceed. Naturally someone had to go to the door and find out what was going on but after the tales of violence and murder no one wanted to venture alone from the car. The wood seemed to close in around the house and around us. Several more moments passed and together we got out of the car and crowded around the door, knocking loudly. A second story window illuminated and footsteps proceeded down the stairs and to the door. Linda Crumbo, a robe closed around her, her eyes bleary from sleep, her blond hair disheveled, opened the door.

“We’re having a party!”

I’m not sure who or how many shouted that as greeting and the scrum of students invaded her house. Nearly at once we encountered her husband, half way down the interior staircase and her said. “I forgot!’

The Crumbos got dressed and a pleasant party filled the remainder of the evening hours. This was not a drunken bacchanal and it is one of my more pleasant memories from that time.

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Flashing That ‘Secret’ White Power Symbol

This week’s confirmation hearing for SCOTUS nominee Brett ‘I’ve changed my mind’ Kavanaugh has reignited the ‘debate’ over a supposed ‘secret’ white supremacist hand gesture. As the word ‘reignited’ indicated this is a fake controversy that has been visited before. Vox has an excellent article explaining the history of the live trolling and how it started. This has been spreading around the Internet faster than heated opinions about geeky media spurred onwards by a large dose of accepting anything that confirms preexisting biases. In addition to pointing people towards the Vox article I have a couple of thoughts on the matter.

First off the very concept of a public but secret symbol to identify one as a member of an ideological group seems quite ridiculous. Certainly secret symbols and identifiers, handshakes and the like, have existed and continue to exist, but they were used, primarily, as a method of revealing oneself as part of one-on-one interactions. So that someone could know that they had a friendly audience before revealing the secret part of themselves. Public gestures and identifiers have a very different purpose and that is to proclaim, loudly, where one stands in respect to an ideological concept, the Nazi Salute, the Black Power Raised Fist, the MAGA hat, and the Lapel Flag Pin all serve the same purpose for different factions, announcing ‘I am here and this is what I stand for.’ A gesture, particularly when is seems out of context, performed publicly creates interest and curiosity from those not part of the communication which defeats the entire concept of secret. It however perfectly aligns with the idea of ‘trolling’ taking actions in order to provoke a reaction.

And before I leave this thought on the absurdity of secret public signs let me also point out that in my opinion nothing about this administration or its devotees has anything in common with subtlety. Steven Bannon, Steven Miller, Richard Spencer, or Donald Trump have no need for secret communications as they loudly and blatantly announce who they are and what they believes quite often.

Another aspect of this is that the meanings of symbols can change over time. Because some people are in on the trolling gag does not mean that everyone is or that new people will adopt the symbol in the same manner.

Take for example the word ‘gunsel.’ In many film noir movies the term is used to describe a low-level thug with a gun, as a synonym for gunslinger. However that is not how it started. In the classic film The Maltese Falcon Spade provokes Wilmer into a rash angry action by referring to him as a ‘gunsel.’ It seems strange that Wilmer reacted so angrily to simply begin called a gun slinger but what Spade, Wilmer, the writers knew is that ‘gunsel’ doesn’t mean gun slinger it means the submissive partner in a homosexual relationship, specifically it is slang from the hobo community. The Breen Office did not the meaning no did most of the audience and the filmmakers flew under the radar with their code violating insult. Over time other writers and filmmaker, taking the definition from their misunderstanding of the context used the word to mean gunman and the new definition became the accepted one.

I believe that most of the people flashing the hand-sign are in on the plan to troll others, but you cannot be certain that everyone is aware of the purpose. Certainly as time passes and the reports grow that the OK hand gesture is really a racist one then there may come a day when the new definition and intent supplants the original intent.

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What Did You Expect?

A few weeks ago I came across an article at National Review Online, Corporate Gun Control Might Be the Worst Threat to Gun Rights, and with this week’s announcement by Levi Strauss with respect to their corporate stance on the nation’s gun issues I thought it might be worth revisiting the topic.

The article by David French cites a number of victories for the gun right’s faction of the debate before going into the central thesis of the pieces that actions by corporations taken outside of the political sphere represent a new front in the eternal conflict over firearms in the United States. French asserts that the motion on these large companies on the issue is, in his opinion, driven principally by the cliquish nature of their management. In the case of companies such as Facebook or Twitter, which are helmed by dynamic charismatic persons, he may be correct, but that doesn’t apply to large publicly held companies such as Levi Strauss, Bank of America, or Citigroup; these companies are driven by their board of directors and their focus is the bottom line. If such corporations such as these are taking a divisive political stance it is because they believe that being seen as neutral or on the opposing side would be more disadvantageous than the position that they publicly asserted. These behemoths are cautious and never the vanguard of social movements. These positions are ones taken, in their estimation, which will cause the least damage to their public images.

Why is that? Why do they feel pressured to take a position at all?

Because for many people the current environment is intolerable. What appears to be a steady, deadly, and endless parade of mass shooting, murder, and terror, even as I write this reports are breaking of a fresh mass shooting, coupled with inaction by the political process, instills fear in the population. We live in a time when children come home traumatized because they practiced hiding from their killers as part of their school day. Given that sort of experience people will demand that something be done. Eventually the paradigm breaks and new things, right or wrong, good or bad, will be deployed. In that situation a platitude about ‘thoughts and prayers’ will not quell the fear, sooth the anxiety, and placate the anger. Here we get to the failure on the conservative side.

Not in enacting the legislation proposed or favored by their political opponents, but by their inaction, their refusal to take any action that can be seen as even attempting to resolve the issue/ Now some may claim moves such as Must Issue laws for concealed carry permits or Castle Doctrine laws, or wide acceptance of Open Carry are solutions proposed by the conservatives, but they are not proposal intended as solutions for this issue. If we were living in a culture without these mass murders, random killings, and schoolhouse slaughters, these exact same proposals would remain on the Conservative whish list. They are goals that their political faction wishes to achieve regardless of the current criminal climate and tying them to the issue is an act of rationalization not resolution.

So in a climate of growing terror and trauma one side in a political debate offers legislative solutions, setting aside if such solutions would resolve anything at all, that is not the point, while the offers nothing but at best a wish list of things it already wanted, and some are surprised by which side grows in public sympathy? This is a bed of the Conservatives making, refusing to do anything yields the field to the opponents and while procedural power may hold legislation at bay, and that is a fleeting situation, the culture, including the corporation taking the pulse of the public mood, moves on and to quote a silly but favorite film, ‘You can be a part of it or a victim of it.’

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Movie Review: Rampage

I’ve had the disc from Netflix for several weeks but over the last couple of nights I finally got around to watching the expected silly summer movie Rampage.Based on the coin operated video game from the 1980’s, a game without any form of narrative, the movie stars Dwayne Johnson, Naomie Harris, Malin Akerman, and a scene stealing performance by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

Rampage  centers on the relationship between Davis Okoye (Johnson) and the albino gorilla George in his care at the San Diego Wildlife Sanctuary (apparently our zoological society did not participate in the film.)  After George is exposed to evil genetic editing super stuff he grows in size and aggression. Developed by an evil corporation doing evil corporation things for evil military applications, this movie is far from subtle, the contaminate also infects a wolf and an alligator. The Head of the evil corporation, Claire Wyde (Akerman) uses a homing beacon to bring the animal to her facility, located in the Sears Tower in downtown Chicago. (Because bringing enraged, overly aggressive, giant monsters to you is always a good plan.) Okoye is helped by a renegade scientist from the Evil Corporation, Caldwell (Harris) and a government agent Russell (Morgan) as they attempt to stop the rampage and return George to his normal peaceful self. Of course this terminates in a grand Kaiju  battle in downtown Chicago with the monsters destroying building (that got you points in the game) and eating people (which got you even more points.)

Rampage  is the sort of film where it is best to leave one’s higher reasoning faculties in the lobby and is enjoyable based upon the performances and the action. On those criteria the movie works. The giant monsters wrecking havoc in a major metropolitan locale is done quite well, though there are moments when the CGI FX are not quite as good as they could have been. On the subject of performances most are good enough. This is not the sort of material that normally allows an actor to shine but instead usually requires that specialized talent for delivery jargon-filled exposition. Harris performs perfectly well as the ‘good’ scientists and Akerman seems to enjoy chewing scenery as the lead villain of the story. I’ll have to agree with the Youtube movie critic MovieBob that Dwayne Johnson has too much natural charisma to pull off playing someone who hates people. Throughout the movie he is charming, and a delight to watch but the real standout performance is Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Russell. Deploying some sort of Texan/Southern accent Morgan steals every scene. The script requires him to enter as an antagonist and flip to becoming an ally and this role reversal Morgan pulls off without ever feeling like he violated his character. Frankly I could watch an entire movie of Morgan playing this character.

This movie doesn’t carry any deeper message or theme such as in 1954’s Gojira but rather is simply a fun action filled story suitable for when you really do not want to think about anything.

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Horrible Imaginings 2018

This year the Horrible Imaginings Film Festival, a celebration of horror cinema, moved from its home in San Diego to the Frida Theater in Santa Ana in Orange County. In previous years I had attended the full festival, driving to the venue each morning and then back home again late in the evening. With Santa Ana about a 90-minute drive from home and with the expenses of World Con incurred just earlier in the month I felt that this year I could only attend a single day.

The drive up was pleasant enough and there was ample parking near the venue. I must admit that the venue itself, The Frida Cinema a non-profit dedicated to the cinema arts, is a lovely theater. It presents two screens with comfortable seating and a large impressive screen. I was told that the Frida has been trying to woo the festival up from San Diego for a number of years. Unlike the Festival’s previous venue the Museum of Photographic Arts, the Frida sells concessions and for me a movie is always a better experience with popcorn.

The days started with a short film block presenting a number of intriguing, intelligent, and well-made films. While I enjoyed quite a few of them my favorite from this block was Roake about a photographer that made his subjects with a single photo in famous celebrities, but of course there is always a price.

The next block was long form short film. That is short movies that run longer than most short but still far short of a feature length presentation. These tended to be 20 to 30 minutes long and for the stand out presentation was The Quiet Room,  a movie that explored mental health, and our own self-destructive tendencies.

The first feature film of the day was The Returning a movie from Malaysia that dealt with ghosts but literal and figurative that haunted a small town after a terrible tragedy. The feature was preceded by a few more shorts including a haunting animated featurePhototaxisthat explored the myth of the Mothman.

Follow The Returning was a presentation by an academic about afrofuturism and race in horror media. It made me wish I could take his course it sounded very fascinating.

After a dinner break we returned for the final Feature of the evening, Vampire Clay. From Japan this film was easily one of the oddest horror movie I have ever watched. Set in a small art prep school in the countryside with a small class of student s hoping to get accepted into the hyper-competitive big universities their lives are disrupted by a mound of clay that lusts for blood and recognition. Aside from one-third act info-dump that brought the narrative momentum to a halt Vampire Clay was an enjoying if not odd horror movie.

They closed the festival with a screening Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, but with a 90 minute drive ahead of me I skipped out on that and drove home. Next year I plan to see more of the festival in its new home.

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