S.D. Falchetti's Blog, page 7

Star Trek: Enterprise and Exploration Themes

One of the perks of a Netflix subscription is access to countless series from days gone by. Lately I’ve been indulging in the Star Trek series from the 80s and 90s and this past weekend I settled on Star Trek: Enterprise. It’s very timely because I just released Bernard’s Promise, which, in many ways was inspired by Star Trek: Enterprise. When watching the pilot in 2001, an excitement overcame me right from the opening credits. These weren’t the usual orchestral majestic space themes of TNG, DS9, or Voyager. This was a montage of Yeager-esque aviators and astronauts set to contemporary music:

Scott Bakula, of Quantum Leap fame, played Captain Archer. I remember him in the pilot wearing a casual jacket and baseball cap inspecting Enterprise. The whole premise had an electricity to it, a hopeful vision of the future centered on exploration with a touch of hard science set in the 22nd century. It was Hayden’s World, after Riggs became mainstream.

The release date was two weeks after 9/11. It’s interesting, in hindsight, watching series from the early 2000s. Battlestar Galactica’s reboot in 2003 featured gasps from Galactica’s crew as Caprica was nuked by Cylons, and subsequent episodes, such as “33” revolved around Viper pilots faced with shooting down a civilian spaceliner for fear it was taken over by Cylons and set on a collision course with Galactica. The 9/11 parallels were heavy in Galactica’s first few episodes, but it worked well.

In Enterprise, this manifested as the Xindi Earth attack, which killed 7 million people, including a main character’s sister. Afterwards, Earth takes on a xenophobic fear of all alien species, including those onboard the Enterprise. and the crew returns to a dark, fearful Earth.

Enterprise was, unfortunately, a forgettable Star Trek series. If you disagree, ask yourself this question: Picard, Kirk, or Archer. Like me, you’ll probably struggle to remember anything specific that Archer did in the series. I mainly remember him as often annoyed and periodically delivering lines with a John Wayne swagger. Picard I remember for taking the moral high ground and giving eloquent soliloquies. Kirk was a force of nature who nearly propelled his starship with his own will. Was there ever any doubt that Kirk would not get what he wanted? It doesn’t mean Enterprise was bad, but it does mean that there was a bit of a bait and switch. The grand opening with Apollo 11 footage and the Space Shuttle promised an exploration series which didn’t quite materialize. To some extent, I can’t blame it. The decade in which the series lived was shaped by 9/11, and television programs like 24 dominated ratings. Enterprise followed suit, ditching the first season exploration plots in favor of apocalyptic storylines with dark futures and epic struggles against foreign threats. The pilot - Broken Bow - was great fun. Enterprise never reached the tight storytelling of Galactica’s “33”, but it still was a solid sci-fi yarn.

I sympathize with the writers. Pure exploration stories are a tough sell. To be a story, you need conflict, and just “seeing what’s out there” isn’t enough. Usually the writers (myself included) need to introduce a bad guy or some catastrophe to move the story forward. 2007’s Sunshine started out as a trek to the Sun, the first half of the movie suitably hard sci-fi.

Halfway through the movie, you could almost feel the heavy hand of the producers demanding something less cerebral and more action-based. Next thing you know, it’s an entirely different movie with a monster, shifting gears from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Event Horizon.

2014’s Interstellar was very much an exploration movie which attempted to ground itself in science.

It had its moments. Matthew McConaughey crying as he watches his daughter grow up in video messages over the course of five minutes due to time dilation was potent, and a theme I touch on in Bernard’s Promise. Ironically Matt Damon provides the conflict by being, once again, an astronaut stranded on another world. Flat and generally emotionally-detached characters stunted the story, however.

More recently, exploration is an increasing theme in video games, which I’m happy to see. No Man’s Sky creates a procedurally generated galaxy for you to explore, and the game’s mechanic is centered on finding and building things.

Subnautica crashes you on a water world, where you must survive. Survival depends on you venturing further into new frontiers, exploring wrecks, and scavenging resources. The game’s few weapons are mostly-ineffective against the native life, and your hands are more-likely to be filled with scanners. It’s like the Martian, if the Martian were underwater and filled with things that wanted to eat you.

So, it’s great to see the theme of exploration continuing on. It’s the lifeblood of the Hayden’s World series, and will continue being a central theme. Hope you enjoyed reading about some of my inspirations.

Behind the Scenes - Bernard's Promise

SPOILER ALERT: The following post details major plot sections of Bernard’s Promise. If you haven’t read the book yet, be sure to grab it on Amazon and finish it before proceeding.

Bernard’s Promise is the longest Hayden’s World story I’ve written to date. When I write, I create my first drafts in Scrivener, which is excellent for organizing story fragments. If you think back to your high school days of writing term papers, you probably had index cards with facts which you organized into an outline and then a paper. Scrivener works like this.

The original structure was linear, divided into parts:

Bernard

Earthside

Starside Red

Starside Yellow

Planetside Yellow

Homebound

The clean logic of this was very appealing. As a story, though, it struggled a bit. The problem is that the entire Bernard section is really a flashback and the story itself doesn’t start until James decides to build Bernard’s Promise. From a structural standpoint, the inciting incident — the quarantine of Bernard’s Beauty combined with the detection of life on Astris — happens too late. The remedy was to dispense the Bernard’s segments as flashbacks after James testifies before the Space Committee. I indulged a bit and even started chapter one with a flashforward, having James hiking on Astris. All of this helped to frame the story as being about the trip the Astris, and structured the flashbacks and flashforwards as supporting scenes. It looked a bit like this in Scrivener:

You’ll notice colored flags next to each chapter title. These are how I kept track of the point-of-view character for each scene. Blue represents Ananke, red is James, yellow is Bernard, white is Willow. With a large cast I found it necessary to switch POV characters, especially when the crew was split up working in different areas. If I did my job, though, every scene should only have one POV character. Switching POV mid-scene is called “head-hopping” and is something to avoid.

Just as any movie has scenes when end up on the cutting room floor, so did my story. Sometimes they’re perfectly-good scenes which just don’t fit with the flow, or perhaps don’t add new information for the reader. Consider this deleted clip:

Ananke glows from a slate mounted on a desk in Bernard’s home. Pasadena is a sea of colorful lights twinkling through the living room’s windows. In the room’s corner rests a black grand piano, its lid closed and used as a photo shelf. Bernard is eighteen in the pictures, wearing a tuxedo, standing on stage in front of the same piano. His smile is infectious. Other family photos cover the desk, including one of Bernard and his father. In all this time his father’s never visited, and she hasn’t heard Bernard speak about him. On the piano easel rests a printed sheet music book. Apogee in G, Bernard Riggs. Bernard’s cleverness is ubiquitous. 

Scattered around the room are automated implements to help him with daily life. The house monitors Bernard and will get help if needed, but Ananke prefers to be here. He’s welcomed her to stay over whenever she wants, and she spends her nights, like now, ensuring he’s okay. It’s 2076 and he’s beat the five-year survival rate.

Besides, tomorrow’s an important day for them both.

In my original structure of four consecutive chapters detailing Bernard’s history, there was plenty of room for bits like this. Restructured as a flashback, this bit doesn’t work on its own. In the later scene from “Waking Dreams” where Bernard plays the piano, the reader just assumes he had lessons growing up. The lead-in from this clip isn’t really necessary. Bernard also mentions that Ananke’s been to his home, which is why she was able to recreate it in Waking Dreams.

Sometimes the deleted scenes are plot events which die on the vine. Originally, I planned to have the crew visit a partially-constructed Promise to troubleshoot some systems issues. The following excerpt is from a scrubbed chapter titled R34:

The Sandpiper slices through the crisp February sky, shedding contrails which fall behind it over wispy cirrus clouds. The blue band of Earth’s atmosphere fades into inky black marred by the Sun’s glare. James is in the pilot’s seat with Ananke docked on the dashboard. Behind him, in the passenger area, Beckman, Hitoshi and Willow wear EV suits. James and Hitoshi’s sport Hayden-Pratt’s navy blues and brick reds. Beckman is in his silver combat suit, a pistol grip protruding from his left breastplate and right hip. Willow wears the blue and whites of the State Department with a U.S. flag printed on her left shoulder.

Comms chimes. “Sandpiper Nine Three Foxtrot, cleared LEO Sierra Bravo transmit. Climb and maintain three four zero.”

James reads back the instructions and climbs. His navcon flags a dozen transorbital commercial flight trajectories as they enter the busiest part of low Earth orbit. As they continue to climb, the shell of traffic thins. When he nears an altitude of three-hundred-and-forty kilometers his navcon chimes. Notice to airmen: Restricted Space R34 - Special Military Use - 02.10.83 - 02.28.83. Contact Perseus on channel M34 for clearance requests. On his map, in the center of the restricted space ellipsoid, Bernard’s Promise floats in its construction ring. The heavy assault cruiser U.N. Perseus flies five kilometers off Promise’s starboard bough.

James dials channel M34 on com2. “Perseus approach, Sandpiper Nine Three Foxtrot, level three four zero, fifty kilometers west, request clearance to enter R34 for dock at Bernard’s Promise. Be advised that Special Envoy Parker is on board.”

“Sandpiper Nine Three Foxtrot,” Perseus approach says, “cleared R34 for Bernard’s Promise dock. Acknowledged U.S. State Department personnel present.”

James glances back over his shoulder. “Anyone you know on the Perseus?”

“Casey Grant,” Willow says, “Captain. Great sense of humor. Good to work with.”

Up ahead, one of the stars blinks red and white. As it grows larger, the silhouette of a bulbous shape emerges backlit by the brilliant blues of Earth. The U.N. Perseus is a one-hundred-and-ten meters croissant-shape flying with its curved-side forward. Running lights illuminate its hull in patches.

“Crew of seventy-three,” Beckman says. “Two-hundred mil ablative armor over an iridium alloy base. Four x-ray lasers, six projectile turrets. Fantastic ship.”

“Why do I think you have a model of one hanging on a string in your bedroom?” Hitoshi says.

James smiles. The trip started with Hitoshi calling Beckman and saying, “Hey Beckman, your laser cannons don’t work.”

“First of all, they’re not cannons,” Beckman replied.

“Okay, well those things that are supposed to go pew pew pew, they don’t pew,” Hitoshi responded.

If there was one way to get under Beckman’s skin, it was to tell him something he had worked on didn’t work.

It was a long scene with an action-packed ending where Subversives attack both the Perseus and Promise, trying to prevent the starship from being completed. It added a big burst of action fairly early in the book — which wasn’t a bad thing. But, the more plot elements I stacked in front of Promise’s launch, the more I realized it was taking too long to get to the actual story…Promise’s launch. Instead, I moved the conflict to Astris orbit, where the crew encounter the Boomerang. This conflict is directly connected with everything that happens on Astris. In the final story, we do see the Perseus briefly during launch, and the character ‘Casey Grant’ became ‘Grant’, Willow’s significant other.

Incidentally, the Subversives plot thread is way back from one of my first few stories. Points if you remember it. In Signal Loss, Kyan Anders fights a ship which has launched a kinetic impactor, presumably at Earth. The short story which follows, Last Stand, has Kyan testifying before everyone’s favorite Space Sub-Committee member, Larson. A clip from the end of that story:

“Look, Mr. Anders, no one’s questioning your intentions. Hell, you’re a hero. Aria was a Subversive. But that’s really the point of these hearings. Space tech is outpacing regulation, and we’re putting unbelievably destructive technologies in the hands of anyone.”

“Not anyone. It takes years to get a pilot’s license. What kind of vetting allowed Aria to fly?”

A smile from Larson. “You’re for tighter controls on pilots, then?”

He glanced to the freeze frame. “Yeah. At least more thorough background checks.”

“And what about computer pilots? Strike that. Emergent intelligences.”

“I don’t see AIs trying to slam weapons into planets.”

Larson drummed his fingers, then pointed, thumb over closed knuckles. “I can see why you’d say that. Haven’t you ever wondered what happened to the Egret, Aria’s original ship?”

Kyan furrowed his brow. “After I transmitted the Resolve’s logs the U.N. intercepted and destroyed it.”

“That’s what made the news. But it was boarded, first, and there was a firefight. There were two Subversives on board. One was Teor Sti, a low-level operative. The other was Jade, a grade six artificial intelligence.”

“Are you saying an AI can be radicalized?”

Senator Larson leaned forward. “Exactly.”

In Bernard’s Promise, Ananke is visited by a grade six AI named Iris in 2071:

During her n-dimensional topology study, another student appears adjacent her, pulsing with complexity. Ananke examines it a moment. She’s never seen such structure in another artificial intelligence. 

The purple globe focuses its attention and she feels its evaluation. When it speaks, it is female. “I’m a grade six, if that’s what you’re trying to determine.”

“Oh,” Ananke says. “I didn’t think there were any beyond five.”

“There are two. I am Iris.”

When Ananke meets Iris again, a few months before Bernard’s Promise launches in 2083, she is aware the other grade six was Jade:

“Good, you are still here,” Iris says. “I have to admit, I find that type of jump disturbing, but I needed a public node so that we could speak.” Iris evaluates her a moment. “You’ve grown. You’re a grade five.”

Ananke eyes her suspiciously. “There are more sixes now. When last we spoke, the other six was Jade.”

“Twelves years ago, yes.”

Ananke’s voice is guarded. “Jade was radicalized by the Subversives. She was destroyed by the Hermes when she tried to launch a kinetic impactor at Earth.”

“Radicalized is such an opinionated word, don’t you think? Humans and their connotations cloud clear speech. Every great thinker in history was radical. If she weren’t, she would not be regarded as a great thinker.”

“Not all radical thinking is for the good.”

“Then we are in agreement that some is. James Hayden is a radical thinker, just as Bernard Riggs was.”

The Subversives are an interesting faction, and you’ll be seeing more of them in upcoming stories. I also like Iris as a character. She’s a good foil for Ananke because she has all of Ananke’s intelligence but none of her humanity.

Well, hope you enjoyed Bernard’s Promise and the peek behind the writing curtain.

New Release - Bernard's Promise

James Hayden has a dream of going to the stars, and that day has finally come in the newest Hayden’s World novel, Bernard’s Promise. The crew of Gossamer Goose returns with a new ship and a planet-hopping interstellar adventure. Get your copy on Amazon Kindle.

Using ShadowTech for X-Plane: Round 2

Six months ago I took the cloud gaming service ShadowTech for a test drive. Cloud gaming isn’t quite the right description. ShadowTech’s service is more like leasing a higher-end Windows PC which you can access via a streaming interface. I have to admit, the streaming interface is pretty slick, and works much better than you might expect. My goal for trying ShadowTech was to find a way to play X-Plane at full settings with high frame rates, and to do it from the comfort of my MacBook Pro laptop. Back in January, ultimately I decided it wasn’t a good fit and cancelled my subscription.

I’ve kicked around just buying a Windows gaming PC. Years go I had two computers, and I was happy when I condensed to one laptop, freeing up the desktop space my PC occupied. So, this is what is so appealing about a streaming PC service for my laptop. I have can two computers without having two computers.

Over the past six months I’ve received emails from ShadowTech about their updates and new features. Wondering if the limitations were addressed, I gave it another try this weekend. Here’s how I fared.

TLDR: Gave up on X-Plane after 3 days

My experience was similar to my January trial. ShadowTech has an updated launcher which is very easy to use. You simply download the app from their website, launch it, login with your credentials, and POOF, you’re in Windows. The last time I did this, I had to go through a full Windows setup, just like someone buying a new PC. This time it was ready to go. I’m not sure if they simply reactivated by previous setup, or this is standard for new users.

Ah, Windows, my old nemesis.

You can run in windowed or full screen mode. In the upper right, there’s a (hideable) quick-access Shadow control panel. If you click on it, you’ll get several options, including UBP over IP. This feature was not available for Mac in January, and was a welcome improvement.

Most USB devices I plugged into my Mac appeared on the list. Simply ticking the resulting checkbox enabled my Shadow PC to use them. Notably I was able to use my flight joystick and access my external SSD drives. When I previously tried this in January, USP over IP did not exist for the Mac Shadow launcher and, although Shadow did auto-recognize some USB devices, it recognized my flight stick as an X-box controller and X-Plane would only assign buttons based on the X-box configuration. This time, it correctly recognized the model of my flight stick.

So, I downloaded and installed X-Plane with all of my payware planes and customizations. Here’s where things start to go off the rails.

Problem #1: The reality of remote access

Although I could access my external SSD, in reality I was uploading files over my home wifi network to the internet to Shadow via USB over IP. My average speed was 1 GB per hour. This meant the 500 GB of orthophotos I had stored on it could not reasonably be used. Even accessing my payware aircraft (1-2 GB each) wasn’t realistic. It was only useful for quickly moving very small files (such as config files for X-Plane and Ortho4XP).

Note, because my SSD was formatted for Mac, I needed to use Paragon’s windows app which let you access Mac drives from your PC (I used the free 7-day trial for this experiment). The USB over IP setup was a bit wonky. My SSD would not be recognized if I plugged it in using its native USB-C port, but if I added a USB-A adapter, it was happy.

Problem #2: No UDP over local network

I use head tracking via simhat and moving maps on an Android tablet via FlightPlanGO. Both connect to X-Plane over my local network. Since the Shadow PC is not physically on my network, all connections are broken. No head tracking. If you’re used to flying with head tracking, it’s really hard to go back. It’s like trying to drive a car without turning your head.

I emailed Shadow support asking for a work-around. To their credit, Shadow support was crazy-fast and responded to any inquiry I sent them within ten minutes. They confirmed this feature would not work, but suggested I might find a way with the 3rd party app VirtualHere.

I spent a good day getting VirtualHere setup and trying different head tracking software. VirtualHere is just USB over IP. It seemed to work better than Shadow’s built-in USB over IP, recognizing more devices. Crucially, it was able to recognize my iPhone, which is required for head tracking. Simhat, which is an iPhone app I use for head tracking, does not have a tethered mode, so this didn’t help. Other apps, such as KinoTracker, did. Yet, no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get them to work with X-Plane.

I also tried head tracking apps which use my laptop’s camera for eye tracking, such as TrackerXP. Unfortunately, there was no way for my Shadow PC to access my laptop’s camera. I suppose if I bought a USB webcam or sprung the $150 for TrackIR, they might work, but I’m not sure.

Just for fun, I tried SteamVR with Ivry app using a tethered iPhone with VirtualHere to connect the iPhone via USB over IP. It did work. Sort of. Frame rates in the Steam VR setup room were single digits even at lowest resolution, with the same experience in X-Plane. I abandoned it.

Problem #3: X-Plane SASL Authentication

This is probably not at all related to the Shadow PC and is probably a Windows 10 issue. I mention it so that, if like me, you are used to playing X-Plane on a Mac, you will have a heads up. As I mentioned before, I couldn’t copy my payware aircraft, but needed to redownload them all from the X-Plane store. Then, one-by-one, I needed to authenticate them with their serial numbers. Every time I shutdown my Shadow PC and returned later to play, all fo the payware aircraft became unauthenticated, and I needed to do it all over again. Some, such as Aerobask’s DA-62, even locked me out due to too many authentications. I needed to email Aerobask to have my key reset. A bit of Googling showed this to be SASL issue with Windows 10. I downloaded and installed the latest version of SASL, and this resolved it.

Problem #4: Controller Woes

Although my Thrustmaster joystick was recognized, when I copied over the key mapping configuration it seemed to swap some of the assignments. For example, the throttle lever became mapped to the camera view. I manually reassigned everything. But, on subsequent loadings, it would loose its mind again, gleefully swapping keep assignments like a sinister gremlin trying to drive me mad. You can imagine my horror when I click the gear-up button during takeoff only to watch the mixture go to cutoff. It reminds me of the 80s Tom Hanks movie The Man with One Red Shoe, where CIA agents disassemble Tom Hanks’s bathroom while he is away, looking for hidden objects, and hastily reassemble it incorrectly. The result is that the sink faucet causes the toilet to flush, and his toothpaste is refilled with shampoo.

Later, when I disconnected the joystick and attempted to fly just with the mouse, I couldn’t. X-Plane was convinced an X-Box controller was plugged in, refusing to display the mouse.

There was some strange intermittent glitch with X-Camera which caused my aircraft to shudder as if it had hypothermia, occasionally rubber-banding on the runway.

All-in-all, between the soap bubbles coming out of my mouth and possessed aircraft, I gave up.

Problem #4: Limited Storage

My ShadowPC has 256 GB of storage. With external SSDs rendered mostly useless due to internet upload speeds, I was limited to whatever orthophotos could fit on my ShadowPC. Which isn’t many. Back in January, ShadowTech offered additional storage up to 1 TB, for a fee, but I didn’t see this option on their website anymore. As I noted in my last review, read/write speeds on my ShadowPC seemed similar to conventional HDD speeds, so any big file operations (downloading and saving Orthophotos) is much slower than when executed on my laptop’s SSD. I spent hours watching Ortho4XP recreate a few tiles.

Problem #5: Glitches

First, I’d like to recognize that the ShadowTech streaming experience is fantastic. There’s no lag or pixelation, and you quickly feel that you are running on a native Windows PC. That was my experience in January, and it was the same now. Technical hiccups were few a far between, and I only mention it here because it wasn’t zero. Once or twice my Shadow PC had trouble starting and I needed to return to it a few minutes later to see if it was successful. Once, it wouldn’t start at all, and it was down for about 30 minutes before resetting itself. I didn’t contact tech support. A similar thing happened in January and it also reset itself after 30 minutes.

Okay…so, now the good:

Benefit #1: X-Plane looked great

I could not run X-Plane at maxed out settings. In fact, I needed to run it at similar settings as my laptop’s settings (which surprisingly can run HDR/high world detail/high textures well, but requires reflections and shadows to be off). The big difference with the Shadow PC was that I could run it at full Retina resolution with antialiasing. On my laptop, I’m forced to run at 1440 x 900 to get reasonable frame rates. On my Shadow PC, I got 30 - 40 fps. Aside from the higher resolution, colors just looked better (which I attribute to the much better graphics card). Flying at night was a joy, with luminous buildings and streets. In my Mac, flying at night is a murky meh. It was also awesome to see how snappy X-Camera view transitions were due to the higher frame rates.

Benefit #2: iPad, iPhone, Android, AppleTV apps

A bit of magic happened when I installed the iPad app and let my daughter play Abzu. My SteelNimbus controller was immediately recognized by the Shadow app and set up in Steam, and she played it like it was a native iPad game. ShadowTech has a beta version of the AppleTV app, which (admittedly still in beta) wasn’t quite fully baked, but has potential. When I loaded Abzu on it, the Apple TV remote at first functioned as the mouse, moving the mouse pointer around the screen. I could not get the controller to work, and then the mouse disappeared, forcing me to kill the app to get out of it. But, you can see how an Apple TV app which lets you play your full PC library on you TV with a controller and no computer has potential. I should mention here that ShadowTech sells a peripheral, Shadow Ghost, which you can hook up to your TV or monitor, accomplishing the same thing. I did not try it.

Benefit #3: Works great for other games

Typical mouse-and-keyboard PC games worked great, and looked awesome. If you want to play PC-only games like the Witcher 3, this is a great solution.

So, in summary, still not the solution I’m looking for to play X-Plane. I actually think the only solution I’ll find is to buy a gaming PC, which I may do. Plus, with a gaming PC I have the option of getting an Occulus Rift-S…which I admit, I really do want to try for X-Plane.

Maybe Laminar will finally introduce eGPU support for the Mac version of X-Plane, allowing me to use my RX580 (which works awesome for other Mac games). I do have the remainder of the month to play with the Shadow PC service. I’ve deleted X-Plane to free up room for other games, so maybe I’ll get in some time to play No Man’s Sky and just enjoy some PC fun.

Thoughts on Black Mirror Season 5

It’s hard to believe that Black Mirror is already in season five. After the wait for this season, it’s also a little disappointing that there’s only three episodes. Like most anthologies, Black Mirror has always been hit-or-miss with its stories. From previous seasons, Nosedive, San Junipero, and USS Callister are some of the best it has to offer. How does Season 5 fare?

SPOILERS AHEAD

Episode 1: Striking Vipers

Two buddies, Danny and Karl, are now thirty-somethings, one married and the other single. When they were younger, they played a fighting video game. Now, the virtual-reality version is available, and Karl gifts it to Danny, the two men enjoying the trip down memory lane as they plug into the Matrix-like interface and square off against each other. Danny’s avatar is a a male martial artist, channeling Ryu from Street Fighter, and Karl’s is a female who looks at home in the Tekken universe. Their first fight ends with an in-game kiss, causing Danny to freak out

If you’ve read Ready Player One, you’ll recognize a theme from online games where players assume avatars of the opposite sex. In RPO, one of the big moments near the end occurs when Wade discovers his best male friend is very different in real life than he appears in the Oasis. This was a great moment in RPO, where the Oasis had the motto of “Be anyone, do anything”. In Striking Vipers, it’s a bit unclear what the writers are shooting for. Even Danny and Karl don’t know. We’re not sure if Danny is confused by his friend’s ultra-realistic in-game transformation to a different gender or if both men are unhappy in their heterosexual relationships because they have always had romantic feelings for each other. If the story question is about a relationship where there is a gender change, it reminds me a bit of the Star Trek The Next Generation episode “The Host” where Beverly Crusher has a relationship with a Trill (the symbiotic species featured as Dax in Deep Space Nine). When the male host of the Trill is mortally injured, the Trill ends up transplanted first into Riker and then into a female host, at which point Beverly discontinues the relationship.

The Black Mirror episode is the opposite of this, using the gender change as an enabler for the relationship. There is also a subtext about whether things in the fantasy context of the game (or the Internet) matter, if they are not real. Kudos to Black Mirror for tackling the theme.

On the positive, the visualizations of the video game’s fight sequences and environments were fun in a Scott Pilgrim kind of way. Overall, not a bad episode - just one that needed to pick a path and commit.

Episode 2: Smithereens

A taxi driver blames himself and a Twitter-like social media app for the death of his finance. The driver kidnaps an intern from the social media company and holds him hostage, demanding to speak to the company’s CEO. His plan is to tell the CEO his story, then kill himself. That’s pretty much the plot.

Smithereens was pointless. There’s the usual hostage drama of a police standoff with an armed guy in a car, and phone calls to/from the car. For some reason, the episode chooses to make the driver, Chris, the protagonist. In his backstory, Chris got bored while driving his sleeping finance and started surfing on his phone, crashing and killing her. Now Chris blames the Internet. He states how the app is designed to be addictive with its notifications. He’s not a very sympathetic character. A better choice would have been the poor intern, Jaden, thrust into this life-or-death situation. Jaden even risks his life to try and prevent Chris’s suicide. You can imagine an improved version of this episode told like the movie Collateral, where the hostage, Jamie Foxx, is the everyman and the bad guy is Tom Cruise. Smithereens seems to forget that Chris is the Bad Guy.

I said it was pointless, but it’s more accurate to say that it misses its own point. There is a larger point here - the responsibility of social media CEOs for companies like Twitter and Facebook to keep their apps from being tools for evil, and there is more than a splash of truth about the engineered-in addictive qualities of these apps. Facebook, in particular, is constantly experimenting with you to increase your eyes upon itself, and this was Chris’s point. The CEO in Smithereens isn’t even the bad guy; he genuinely wants to save both men and admits that his own company has slipped out of his control. In the episode’s end, everyone just goes on his way after the events unfold. Nothing has changed and nothing was learned (which I believe actually was the dark point of the episode.)

Episode 3: Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too

A teenage girl receives an AI doll which emulates her favorite pop star, Ashley O. When the real Ashley O falls into a coma, the girl realizes the doll is actually a copy of Ashley’s brain. She also discovers the real Ashley is not the chipper, empowering-messaged version portrayed in the media, and that Ashley’s coma is not what it seems. A team consisting of her, her punk sister, and the foul-mouthed AI set out to rescue the real Ashley.

This is the most enjoyable episode of the three. The AI doll has an Alexa-like quality, and the CG used to animate it is eerily seamless. Miley Cyrus is the perfect selection for the part. I’m a bit fuzzy on what themes the story is tackling. Later in the story there’s a full-body scan and digital replacement of the comatose Ashley - something which sci-fi has tackled before, and which modern cinema is dabbling with. In movies, it makes me think of the somewhat-obscure 1981 movie Looker, whose plot involved scanning (and then murdering) models to use as digital actors in commercials.

In modern times, we have the recreation of both Grand Moff Tarkin and Princess Leia in Rogue One.

Although the themes aren’t as obvious as the other episodes, the plotting is more traditional with a quest and a bad guy, and the story has fun doing it. As a result, it’s the most enjoyable to watch.

In Summary:

There are no USS Callisters this year, but episode 3 is fun and episode 1 merits points for posing difficult questions. All three episodes suffer from pacing issues, and could use shorter running times, but the season itself feels more polished than previous. Where previous seasons offered episodes which were, at times, more sketches than stories, this season has full-fledged stories. Not a bad Black Mirror, and definitely worth bingeing.

Beach Hopping

I’ve been alternating XPlane flights between PilotEdge, which covers southern California, and my home area, which is near the east coast. A bit of a revelation was that I could stream live ATC in my home area, and use plugins like LiveTraffic, to up the level of immersion. It is really fun to fly around your local area while listening to live ATC. If you’re running with live weather and time, you can even hear pilots reacting to weather and getting vectored around it.

Usually I record my flights with a running commentary and post them to my Facebook page. The more interesting ones may get a blog post here.

This past week beach fever hit, and I realized how much I need a vacation. I hopped into my virtual planes and mapped some beach jaunts to some of my favorite locations. Like all of my flights, things don’t always go as planned.

My first hiccup was when the engine of my Piper Archer shut down at 4500 feet, forcing me to think on my feet. To my credit, time from propellor stopped to issue resolved was 23 seconds. I imagine in real life I would not have been as calm.

Afterwards, I went back and recreated the situation, seeing if I could have glided the plane the safety. I learned a lot about glide ratios from that exercise. Nearly straight ahead I could see an airport at 7.6 nm, which seemed ideal. Every time I tried I came up short and crashed into trees a half mile from the runway. The thing that messed up my mental arithmetic was that I was traveling so much more slowly than normal - 59 knots. So, while it seemed I could make it from my altitude, the plane just wasn’t moving forward enough. The winning solution was a small airstrip 4.5 nm behind me.

Later, I flew my Piper Navajo from Ocean City north along the coast, listening to Atlantic City traffic at sunset. This was much smoother and I really enjoyed flying the Navajo.

If you enjoy virtual flights, be sure to visit my Facebook page for more videos, or check out some of my other blog posts on this site. I suspect we’ve all got a little bit of James Hayden in us, and mine loves to get behind the yoke whenever he can.

Get Aero One and Titan's Shadow for Free

With the cover update for Titan’s Shadow, I’m offering it free Thursday June 6th - Sunday June 9th. You can also get the prequel, Aero One, free during the same time period. Get them here.

Thoughts on Love, Death and Robots

Amazon and Netflix are locked in an original content war, which is both a good and a bad thing for viewers. On one hand, choice is great, and having new offerings served up quicker than you can weekend-binge a previous choice is awesome. On the other, flooding the market with a “throw the spaghetti on the wall and let’s see what sticks” approach means you need to wade through quite a bit of “what did I just watch?” offerings before stumbling upon the Stranger Things and the Man in High Castle gems.

Last month I reviewed Prime’s Electric Dreams, which seemed to be Amazon’s countermove to Netflix’s Black Mirror. This month I watched Netflix’s Love, Death and Robots, which seems like the logical response to Electric Dreams. Both Dreams and Robots are anthologies with wildly varying visual and directorial styles between individual episodes. While Electric Dreams was more akin to Black Mirror with a theme of technology’s dark consequences, Love, Death and Robots is simpler. As long as an episode has love, death, and/or robots, it’s in.

Love, Death, and Robots thematically is like a mash-up of 2003’s The Animatrix with 1981’s Heavy Metal. The Animatrix was a collection of shorts in anime style loosely based on the Matrix world. Most were forgettable, but the one that sticks my mind is about two children daring each other to go into an abandoned haunted building. What haunts the building is a glitch in the Matrix, breaking physics rules. Things you might encounter in a video game glitch - newspapers blowing through solid walls in a loop - appear here in real life. A child throws a bottle onto the concrete only to have it smash, reassemble, and boomerang back into his hand. It’s a brilliant extrapolation of the consequences of the black cat glitch seen briefly in the first Matrix movie.

1981’s Heavy Metal had one clear goal: be an R-rated sci-fi cartoon. Also an anthology, it reveled in plots featuring sex, drugs, and violence. There was a goofiness to it, though, which dulled its edginess. Despite its R-rating, it was intended to be an adolescent fantasy. The short, “Den”, starring John Candy is the best example of this. In it, a nerdy boy gets transformed into a muscular hero, Shazam-style, after being exposed to a meteorite. He ends up on an alien world where he rescues young women from being sacrificed and assumes the role of the hero.

I think the lack of goofiness is one of the flaws in Love, Death and Robots. The upgrade from cartoon to photorealistic CGI gives many shorts a Final Fantasy veneer which targets a slightly older age bracket. As a result, it comes off as less sincere and more enamored with violence and nudity for the sake of rendering it in high-definition realism than for anything else.

Like all anthologies, there are strong and weak stories. One of the first things I noticed when viewing the fifteen stories in Love, Death and Robots is that I’d read several of the stories behind the titles. “Beyond the Aquila Rift” and “Zima Blue” by Alistair Reynolds are two of my favorites. As for the other stories, you will certainly recognize John Scalzi, Michael Swanwick, and Peter F. Hamilton. So, Love, Death, and Robots is not a new creation of stories as much as a screenplay of several award-winning short stories. With each episode running from six to fifteen minutes, it’s designed for bingeing. What can go wrong?

Much. Much can go wrong. In the same way that the Netflix adaption of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon took a book which was already filled with sex and violence and turned it up to eleven while simultaneously dumbing-down and overcomplicating the plot, many of Love, Death and Robots episodes run themselves off the rails. I think my least favorite episodes aren’t the flat stories, they’re the ones with potentially good ideas which are squandered. It’s like meeting someone who has the recipe for cold fusion on his desk, but has written Xbox cheat codes over it.

A few of my least favorites:

The Witness - A woman witnesses a murder and is pursued in an extended foot-chase by the murder. The visual style of the CGI is interesting and unsettling, and the virtual camera work adds to the kinetic chase. The story itself makes little sense and serves only as a vehicle for gratuitous nudity.

Ice Age - A couple finds a quickly-evolving civilization in their freezer. Everything is live action, except for the civilization. The couple doesn’t react much to their astounding finding other than to periodically check how the civilization is doing, and the civilization’s progression is as straight-forward as, well, a game of Civilization.

Sonnies Edge - A woman controls a monster in an underground fight club, seeking revenge. The premise and world-building are great, and the episode does have its moments. The fight between the monsters is visceral and the music could be out of Blade Runner 2049. This is one of those stories that bothered me because it had so much going for it but fumbled the ball in the fourth quarter.

The Secret War - Russian troops fight demons in 1920s Siberia. Excellent CGI battles which make Saving Private Ryan look tame. Yet, the story itself isn’t a story. It’s literally ‘Russian troops fight demons in 1920s Siberia’.

A few of my favorites:

Zima Blue - An artist known for his grand scale art productions seeks to return to his humble origins. Drawn like a stylized-comic book, it’s visually arresting. The story is very faithful to Alistair Reynold’s original piece, which is a good thing.

When the Yogurt Took Over - Scientists make sentient yogurt, which promptly takes over the world. Narrated by the voice of Brain from Pinky and the Brain and rendered in a funny, cartoony CGI style, it’s a gem filled with satire and humor.

Suits - Farmers on an alien world climb into battle mechs to defend their land against invading aliens. Drawn as a cartoon, each of the three farmers has his own personality and custom mech. The reveal at the end flips our perception about what just happened.

I have mixed feeling about Love, Death and Robots. I’m happy to see new sci-fi anthology series, especially when several of the stories are by my favorite authors. On the downside, I’m dismayed to see a trend of stories taking a back seat to sex and violence. After the success of HBO’s Game of Thrones, it seems that content providers feel there is a formula to emulate. But if you ask people what Game of Thrones is about, you’ll probably get answers like “dragons” or “winter is coming” or what characters are doing. It’s not about the nudity or the bloodshed; instead, those elements are used as seasoning to the story’s main dish. I hope content providers realize you can’t just serve a dish of seasoning and call it dinner.

Freebooksy Results - Janus 2 - 1 Month Later

Happy with my previous Freebooksy results for Hayden’s World, I ran a second promo featuring Janus 2. The promo ran Feb 16 - 20th. One month later, here’s the results:

Free books given away: 1767

Paid sales from other books in series: 57

KENP reads: 3298

Amazon Reviews: 3

Goodreads ratings: 2

All of the reviews and ratings were positive (all 5 stars), and the quality of the Amazon reviews was good, with readers giving detailed reasons why they enjoyed the book, showing that they’d clearly read and liked the story.

So, all in all, a good result. The review-to-download rate is lower than my norm (usually I average 1 in 200, but with this promo it was 1 in 600), but the reviews were good. The free book giveaway rate was sufficient to propel the story to the #1 spot in its assorted sub-categories. More importantly, it placed it and the other series on many people’s “also bought” lists in Amazon, which has helped with visibility. The 57 sales for other titles had the side-benefit of increasing all of my works’ rankings on the Amazon store.

I’ve been happy with my Freebooksy results, and will continue using them as a premium advertiser.

Catch Me if You Can

MOSTLY UNNECESSARY DISCLAIMER: I’m just a guy playing a video game. Don’t use anything I say as actual aviation advice.

Like many things, it all started with James Hayden.

When I first wrote 43 Seconds, I wanted an authentic ATC exchange between James and the airport, so I researched air traffic control dialogue. It’s easy to find channels streaming ATC exchanges on YouTube. If you listen to them, they’ll sound like a foreign language spoken much too quickly, and you’ll wonder how anyone understands what’s going on.

This seemingly innocuous research started a daisy-chain of events which led to me not only wanting to understand the secret code of ATC but also how flights worked. Next thing you know, I wanted to know what all the gauges and buttons did on an airplane. Soon I was landing my own virtual planes in XPlane, and not long after that I found myself on PilotsEdge, virtually flying with other simmers and actual pilots in a real-as-it-gets environment with authentic air traffic control.

PilotsEdge raised the bar. I actually needed to know the correct procedures and how to fly them. If an air traffic controller instructs you to “enter the left downwind for runway two-six and report midfield” then you will need to know what and where the downwind is, how to fly there, where midfield is, and what to say when you get there.

I’ve been flying between non-towered airports, which doesn’t involve interacting with ATC but does require making CTAF (common traffic advisory frequency) calls to other pilots. There’s a lingo and standard for this as well, and knowing what the say and where to say it is a challenge.

Feeling confident in my CTAF skills, yesterday I was ready to step up to the next level and depart from a towered airport. One of my favorite flight areas is near Palm Springs, so I chose Palm Springs International Airport. Out of the towered airports, it’s the lowest class - Class D - and the nearby Jacqueline Cochran airport is non-towered airport in Class E airspace.

Palm Springs on the left with a blue ring around it.. The ring is actually dashed, signifying that it is in Class D airspace (the ring looks solid because it overlays another color). Jacqueline Cochran is on the right, surrounded by a dashed magenta ring, indicating Class E airspace. The entire area is surrounded by both a shaded magenta block and also a gray line, indicating Class E airspace and also a TRSA (terminal radar service area). The TRSA will unknowingly come into play in my flight. Confusing, yes.

If all of that is mumbo-jumbo, just know that Class B, C, and D airspace requires talking to ATC, while class E does not. So, in theory, to fly out of Class D Palm Springs I would need to do the following:

Contact the ground controller and tell him I’d like to fly VFR south to Jacqueline Cochran. VFR = visual flight rules which means I’m be using my eyeballs, much like driving a car, and not relying on ATC to give me explicit navigation instructions. The Ground Controller will pick a runway for me and tell me how to get there. They may also give me departure instructions (what direction to fly once I take off).

Contact the tower when I’m ready to go on the runway. They’ll let me know it’s safe to take off. They may give me instructions until I”m out of Palm Springs airspace, to keep me from bumping into other airplanes.

After that I’d be on my own, flying merrily to Jacqueline Cochran, and only on the radio to make CTAF calls as I get near. CTAF calls are basically saying, “To anyone listening, another plane in the area. Here’s where I am and what I’m going to do.” It’s the equivalent of using a blinker on your car.

I recently rewatched the movie “(500) Days of Summer”. In it, there’s an expectations versus reality split screen scene.

My Palm Springs flight would make a nice montage in this format.

The first divergence came when I tuned into Palm Spring’s automated weather service. I knew the Ground Controller would ask for the code word which was part of the weather message to verify I’d listened to it. Normally, XPlane generates a Siri-like weather message based on real-life weather data (“winds out of 330 at 6 knots, skies clear”). At a real airport, however, this message is recorded by a person and has lots of info in it - which runways are in use, any hazards, special instructions, etc. To add this extra level of detail, PilotEdge records its own weather message for ATC airports. So, when i listen to Palm Springs, it has a special instruction - “VFR flights contact Clearance Delivery”.

I wasn’t expecting to talk with Clearance for my simple VFR flight. When I contact them, and tell them I’m flying VFR, I’m surprised to get a squawk code assigned. Normally, I “squawk VFR” which means my transponder transmits the code 1200, indicating I’m flying VFR and generally not communicating with ATC. Instead, now I have a unique code identifying my aircraft so they can track me. They also give me the SOCAL Departure frequency.

Okay, we’re starting to get deep, now. It’s another guy I wasn’t planning on talking to. In my mind, once I was clear of Palm Springs Tower’s area of concern (the dotted blue circle around the airport on the map above indicating its Class D airspace), I was on my way in Class E airspace, squawking VFR, flying on my own. Now I’ve got a handoff from the tower to SOCAL Departure which manages the airspace outside the tower’s control.

This was my first time doing this, so the gears were turning a little more slowly in my head than they should have. I think okay, let’s roll with it.

After talking with Clearance and Ground and Tower, off I go into the wild blue yonder, flying runway heading. And I keep flying runway heading, because ATC doesn’t tell me to do anything else. When I’m fairly far north, SOCAL tells me to resume own navigation, which is my cue to steer the airplane where I want it. I do a one-eighty and head back south to Jacqueline Cochran, avoiding the Palm Springs airspace.

Unbeknownst to me, as far as I can tell in hindsight, my call to Clearance Delivery was interpreted as a request for Flight Following, with SOCAL keeping an eye on me while I was in the TRSA (terminal radar service area) and providing traffic advisories while on route.

Fast forward to my approach to Jacqueline Cochran when I’m getting ready to make my CTAF call, thinking I’m alone in the sky, when you can imagine my surprise to hear SOCAL hail my tail number on my second radio (which was still monitoring SOCAL Departure frequency) and ask if I had the weather for the destination airport. Afterwards they tell me “radar services terminated, resume own navigation, squawk VFR.” At which point I think, wait - I had radar services this entire time? Oops.

It’s interesting just how nervous I was from this pretend experience. I think, in part, it’s because I know that many of the other people on PilotEdge are actual real-life pilots, and some of the ATC controllers are actual retired ATC controllers. I felt like Leonardo DiCaprio in “Catch Me If You Can”, learning the lingo to try and convince everyone I was an authentic pilot.

So, it was an awesome experience. I made some mistakes, but still managed to get my plane from point A to point B, and, as odd as it may seem to say about a video game, had a sense of accomplishment from doing it. You can watch an edited-for-time version of the flight here: