K-Squared Ramblings

Found Shell Beach

Listening to Dark City soundtrack while scanning a roll of old photos. Just picked up a photo of the sign for Shell Beach. #

New Spring (Wheel of Time) Comics Finishing Soon

The long-delayed comic-book adaptation of New Spring may finally be coming to a close.

Since reading The Gathering Storm (which was very good), I’ve been saying that the previous book, Knife of Dreams, was the point where Robert Jordan finally got The Wheel of Time back on track. Thinking back, though, it was actually the expanded version of New Spring that got me excited about the series again after the dull, plodding Crossroads of Twilight.

Dabel Brothers started an 8-issue comic-book adaptation of the prequel back in 2005, published by Red Eagle Entertainment. It got off to a great start…until the studio and publisher started to feud, and the comics ceased publication entirely after #5 came out in early 2006.

Two years later (summer 2008), Dabel Brothers announced that they would start adapting the main Wheel of Time series, but at the time had no plans to complete New Spring. Finally, in April 2009, they announced that they’d be finishing the miniseries. #6 came out in May, as did the Eye of the World prologue, but #7 didn’t come out until August. It’s November now, with no sign of #8…or of Wheel of Time #2. Meanwhile, Bleeding Cool has been reporting financial problems — like not paying artists — and the Dabel Bros. website has gone offline.

It doesn’t sound promising…but there is some hope. I posted about several stalled comic miniseries at Speed Force, and Dabel Brothers’ Derek Ruiz* stopped in to comment:

NS #8 News coming soon. It’s complete and ready for printing. Once I have more to tell you on release date I’ll make my way back here. [emphasis added]

He didn’t mention Eye of the World, and I didn’t follow up. One thing at a time, after all!

As I understand it, Tor has the rights to publish the collected editions — and I suspect that’s where the main audience for this is going to be. If Dabel Brothers can ship the final issue of New Spring soon, Tor can have a hardcover in bookstores next year to tide fans over while they wait for Brandon Sanderson to finish Towers of Midnight.

*I don’t really have a way to verify it was him, but the email address does match a previous comment.

Hazards of Keyless Ignition and Office Chairs.

• Today I learned that keyless ignition makes it easy to accidentally leave your car running. Good thing it was only 5 minutes. #
• The fact that it idles silently (no need to run the motor unless it’s charging the battery) was probably a necessary factor too. #
• Amusing: Apple has released Safari 4.0.4. Seems appropriate for a web browser. #
• By Fox “The Cancelator” standards, waiting 4 episodes to cancel Dollhouse Season 2 is generous. #
• WTF? I just tweaked my *other* shoulder doing nothing more exciting than reaching for my mouse. Nowhere near as badly, at least! #
• Right shoulder seems OK. Left shoulder still recovering from whatever the heck I did to it yesterday. The dangers of…office chairs? #

Finished The Gathering Storm (Wheel of Time) – It’s Good

This weekend I finished reading the new Wheel of Time novel, The Gathering Storm. Now that I’ve read it, I can definitely say that Brandon Sanderson was a good choice to finish the series from Robert Jordan’s notes, and that splitting the final book into three was the right approach. It may be a doorstopper, but it would be difficult to cut more than a tiny amount without diminishing the impact of what remained.

No spoilers unless you don’t want to know which characters appear in the book. In which case, stop reading now. It focuses primarily on Rand, Egwene, and their respective entourages, though most of the other major characters make appearances. If I were to guess, the next book (Towers of Midnight) will probably focus mainly on Rand and Mat, and maybe Elayne. Katie reminded me that the title is a Seanchan reference, plus there’s another mission — well, quest, really — being built up involving a tower. (Not to mention the White Tower and Black Tower, of course!)

As in Knife of Dreams (and unlike Crossroads of Twilight), things happen in this book! There’s a growing sense of urgency throughout the novel, and everyone who can is pushing hard to have everything in place for the coming apocalypse. For some characters it’s a personal journey. For others it’s political. And for some, it’s simply geographical.

As far as meshing with the rest of the series goes, the only thing that stood out for me was that points of view would switch in the middle of a chapter more often than I expected. It’s not that Robert Jordan never did it, but I remember it being rare outside of the prologues. Brandon Sanderson is more likely to take what would have been two shorter, thematically linked chapters and combine them into one. Katie also noticed one spot early on that one character from Tarabon didn’t speak with the Taraboner dialect — but only the one instance, and one in which the phrasing would have been awkward. It still reads like a Wheel of Time book.

I wish Robert Jordan had been able to finish his epic himself, but it looks like we’re getting the next best thing.

Seanchan Programmers

A tech list is discussing EAGAIN errors, and I keep misreading it as EGEANIN. #

On Army of Darkness

This weekend I finally watched Evil Dead 2. Aside from some nifty low-budget cinematography, it mostly confirmed that the only movie in the trilogy I actually like is Army of Darkness. Not surprising, since I like the sword and sorcery genre better than horror to begin with.

I also started thinking about what sets the Evil Dead trilogy apart from other 1980s horror series: instead of focusing on the villains, the later installments are all about the hero.

Friday the 13th? All about Jason. Nightmare on Elm Street? Freddie Kruger. Hellraiser? Pinhead and the Cenobites.

Evil Dead? Ash. Hail to the King.

At the comic store today, I noticed that there’s a whole line of sequel comics, focusing again on Ash (including “Ash Saves Obama”). But they’re not titled Evil Dead. They’re all Army of Darkness. It must have greater name recognition.

Geeky Pumpkins of Halloweens Past

I’m not much of a pumpkin carver myself, but Katie likes to get creative. Here are some Jack-O-Lanterns she’s done, inspired by science fiction, fantasy, comics and games.

From 2003… Gourdzilla!

Inspired by a Grand Ave. strip earlier that week.

Also, Aeryn Sun from Farscape!

More about these: 2003 Halloween Madness

From 2005… Puzzle Pirates’ Navigation puzzle!

Yes, the “Arrr!” on the wall is a projection.

More: Pumpkin Arrrrrt.

And finally, one that hasn’t been on this blog before: The Eye of Sauron, from 2002. Unfortunately we could only find one picture of it, and it was lit up from the outside, so you can’t see how awesome it looked in the dark.

(Evidently, whoever sat at this desk liked dogs.)

This year’s Jack-O-Lantern will be up soon!

Droidmark

I wonder if Lucasfilm will try to assert trademark over the Motorola/Verizon Droid? #

Sci-Fi Remakes

There was a meme running through Twitter today to come up with movie titles for #scifiremakes. Here are my contributions.

• Shaka Sulu #
• Schindler’s Arcology #
• Obi-Wan Hur #
• Droids on the Side #
• Shuttlecraft 54, Where Are You? #

WoT Comics, SWHS, and a Mobile Alarm Clock

• Argh! Looks like the Wheel of Time comics are stalled again! # One issue left of New Spring, one issue into Eye of the World…
• And the award for Most Disturbing Use of an Alarm Clock in a Prime Time Show goes to… FlashForward! #
• XKCD on the Star Wars Holiday Special: True. Absolutely true. #
• Wish I knew what caused the Flickr spike yesterday. 71% of visits from “Unknown source,” but hits are spread around the usual con photos. #
• Oh, yeah: I got a weird kick out of recognizing that alarm clock on FlashForward as Clocky (before the disturbing part). #

Rereading FlashForward

I’ve been re-reading Robert J. Sawyer’s original Flashforward novel…

…for obvious reasons.

Adaptation

It’s been interesting to look at both where the TV series diverges from the book — the setting, the time scale, recordings, and in most cases the cast — and where it tracks — the concept, the impact of the worldwide blackout on people now, the way different people approach their foreknowledge, a main character investigating his own murder, and the way the viewpoint organization just pulls together to take point on investigating the incident.

And every once in a while, a specific conversation is adapted. Demetri’s “You’re going to be murdered” phone call from Hong Kong and Theo’s phone call from South Africa are very similar. And there’s a discussion on the likelihood of an event hitting exactly on the hour that was practically lifted for episode two.

I doubt the TV show will tackle the question of whether the universe exists without observers (sort of “If a tree falls and no one is there to hear it, does it make any sound?” taken to the extreme) or the long-term implications of life extension. And somehow I doubt the Large Hadron Collider and search for the Higgs boson are involved (though I noticed the TV show’s Lloyd Simcoe works at Stanford, which does have their own particle accelerator).

It’ll be interesting to see where they go with this.

Prediction

Entirely separate from the TV show, it’s also been interesting to look at the book’s predictions for the present day. Most of it takes place in 2009, but it was published 10 years ago. I list a few items — like getting the Pope’s name right, but missing the explosion of cell phones — in my review of the book from when I read it last year.

Then there’s the suggestion made that one could prove the future can be changed by demolishing some major landmark that many people saw in their visions, but “I don’t suppose the National Park Service is going to let us do that.” In my head, I imagined a deadpan voice saying, “You can’t blow up a national monument.” Hmm, I doubt the cause of the blackouts in the TV show will be robots from space.

Optimus Prime(s)

Realized why the Japanese name for Optimus Prime bugs me: “Convoy” implies more than one vehicle. Maybe it’s a translation issue? #

Sylar vs. Sylar?

Possible spoilers for the beginning of Heroes Volume 5: Redemption.

So. Last season, Nathan Petrelli died and Matt Parkman telepathically brainwashed Sylar into believing he was Nathan, and since Sylar can change his appearance, as far as anyone can tell, he may as well be Nathan.

Now, Matt has a version of Sylar living in his head like Harvey, the neural clone of Scorpius living in John Crichton’s head in Farscape. This Sylar seems to be under the impression that he was pulled out of his body and put into Matt’s head. Meanwhile, “Nathan” seems to be exhibiting flashes of Sylar’s personality and powers.

In short, Sylar’s personality exists in two places:

• Matt Parkman’s mind, where he can interact with Matt.
• Sylar’s mind, where the personality is currently suppressed in favor of Nathan Petrelli’s personaility.

While I still think Sylar has long outstayed his welcome and should have been left for dead after the first season finale (they could have brought him back later with much greater impact if he’d been out of the picture for a year or two), I’m kind of intrigued by the possibility that the Sylar in Matt’s head might catch up to his body and find another version of himself occupying it…because I don’t think he’d be interested in sharing.

Seeing Transformers 2

I finally saw Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen today.

In some ways it wasn’t as awful as I’d heard, and in some ways it was worse. On the plus side, it had giant robots blowing stuff up, and they put more thought into the story than I expected them to. And there were certainly good moments spread throughout the film. On the minus side, the visuals were so complex that they were hard to follow. That’s a problem I had with the Transformers’ designs in the first film, too — they look insanely cool in still shots, but start them moving and you end up with two clouds of shrapnel fighting each other. Plus Michael Bay has a very different sense of humor than I do, which didn’t help. And amazingly enough, the movie was tedious. I don’t know how you can possibly take a movie about giant robots and explosions and make it dull enough that I checked my watch at least five times during the film.

In summary, I’m glad I waited for the second-run showing and only spent $1.75.

Flash Forward Premiere was Awesome!

The first episode of Flash Forward is one of the best-constructed pilot episodes I’ve seen in a long time, especially of an arc-driven series. (I’ve been trying to think of the last show I saw where I didn’t feel like it took the cast or story a few episodes to get up to speed, and all I can come up with is Firefly.) In one hour, it managed to introduce a slew of characters, show the major world-changing event that sets the arc in motion, pose serious questions (both story-wise and philosophically), force characters to change, set up conflicting agendas and points of view, establish a mystery or two, and find a thematic conclusion to the episode that doesn’t feel like it’s just the first hour of a two- or three-hour show.

Most shows would take two hours to do all that, or pick and choose to cram it into one. (They even found time for a car chase.)

One of the things that really impressed me was that, just using one episode’s worth of characters, they showed the beginnings of so many totally different ways of looking at humanity’s glimpse of the future, whether through hope, fear, or simply confusion. From what they said at Comic-Con, one of the ideas is to be able to expand this to theoretically anyone in the world.

The extended preview of upcoming episodes (a flash forward to Flashforward!) seemed to be making a great effort to say that yes, they’ll be answering questions, and no, you won’t have to wait 3 years to find out what the heck is going on (unlike that other show with Sonya Walger, Dominic Monaghan, and Oceanic Airlines).

There were a couple of moments that I thought were forced, though the only one that really stands out was the immediate juxtaposition of the “we’re being punished” and “this is a gift” reactions.

Adaptation

They did a good job of taking the source material, Robert J. Sawyer’s novel Flashforward (I’m getting really confused as to whether the TV series has a space in the title or not, but the book definitely doesn’t), and making something that’s recognizably the same idea, but telling a new story with it. It has the benefit of all the thought he put into it:

• What are all the consequences of everyone blacking out for two minutes?
• If everyone experiences his or her own future at the same instant, what about people who are asleep at that time?
• How do you determine whether people are seeing different possible futures or the same future?
• How do you determine whether the future can be changed? (It’s a common enough storytelling trope, but how would you scientifically prove it?)

And so on. But they can tell a larger story, with more characters…and still surprise people who read the book. I don’t know whether they plan on using a similar explanation for what caused the event, or whether the TV version will come down on the side of “The future is not set” or “You can’t fight fate” (though I expect it will be the former, for storytelling reasons). And there was a moment a few minutes before the end that just came out of nowhere and left me thinking, “Wait, what???”

The book is definitely worth reading, especially if you like science fiction of the “what would happen if…?” variety, and it looks like it probably won’t spoil much.