E.R. Torre's Blog, page 169

A sign of the times…

Perhaps one of the best known/watched TV shows today is HBO’s Game of Thrones.  This past weekend, as they are wont to do, HBO offered a “free” weekend of viewing for those who don’t have the cable station as a way to give them the premiere of this season’s Game of Thrones (it aired Sunday).  Of course, the free “taste” of the fifth season of this show is intended to get people to, hopefully, subscribe to HBO.

But even before that first episode aired came news that the first FIVE episodes of the fifth season had already leaked and were available to be downloaded at various pirate websites:

http://gizmodo.com/nearly-half-of-game-of-thrones-season-5-just-leaked-1697305966

As I said in the heading, this is unfortunately very much a sign of the times.  If you have anything that is popular and desirable, be it music, movies, books, and, yes, TV shows, chances are good you’ll find pirate copies of them available online.

And that’s too bad.

While shows like Game of Thrones no doubt earn their investment dollars many times over, the fact is that not all works of art and their creators/investors are as fortunate.  Piracy, even in small amounts, hurts the bottom line.  While there may be those who illegally download something and later on legally pay for the same product, there will always be some percentage of these people who get material illegally and for free and do not bother to pursue it any other way.

One of the great concerns I have today is that artistic creations have become dangerously devalued.  There are great and powerful industries out there that create wonderful machines that allow you to see and experience artistic works (smartphones, computers, tablets, etc.) and as consumers we’re willing to pay sometimes big money to have the latest of these items…yet the things the machines allow us to see/hear -from music to movies to books- are for the most part unprotected.

You have the latest iPhone or iPad or Samsung or HP computer, etc. etc. and with them you can go to assorted websites and illegally download a movie/music/book/etc. you want to see.  Sometimes, this movie/song/book hasn’t yet been formally released!

The end result, I fear, is that the ease with which people can get these items creates a sense the act of creating them didn’t involve much actual work.  I’ve noted before the weird (to me) idea that authors “shit out” their books in their free time while and during the rest of the hours in the day pursue a life of fun and leisure.  This concept has been exacerbated by TV shows such as Murder She Wrote and, more recently, Castle.

I fear this idea is permeating other creative fields.  Coming up with a song/album?  Come on, how hard can that be?  Drawing a 22 page comic book?  Shouldn’t take more than a day, right?  Writing a story?  Can’t take much more to create it than it does to read it.

Even worse, there are those who know creating such works takes time and effort and they just don’t care.

If I work somewhere -from a Wall Street office to a McDonalds- eight hours a day for two weeks, at the end of this time I expect to get a check for my work.  With artistic creations, you may do the very same time and work just as hard and for just as long…and your hard work can then be taken from you, posted online, and whatever monies you might have made are now subject to that loss.

I’m not saying anything anyone out there shouldn’t know already.

Piracy is, at least as of now, a sad reality of life.  Perhaps in time there will be a way to more securely protect your artistic works so that they don’t end up pirated online.

Or perhaps there will never be a way of doing this.

Regardless, the irony is that the people who will ultimately be hurt by this are the consumers.  The Beatles took years to practice their trade and be properly paid for their work until they were able to create some truly memorable songs and albums.

Somewhere out there might be a band that, with time, might have become just as good as them, but they make no money from their music because it simply doesn’t sell as much as it is pirated.  Unlike John, Paul, George, and Ringo, the members of this band eventually have to break apart…they simply cannot sustain themselves.

And we, the public, will never get to hear what this band might have made.

Or see what this director could have created.

Or this writer.

Or this artist.

Your daily dose of anxiety…

Today, let’s worry about the rise of Artificial Intelligence machines, and the fact that so many scientists and figures involved in high level technology have expressed concern regarding the imminent appearance of said machines:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-barrat/hawking-gates-artificial-intelligence_b_7008706.html

For those who have read all five (so far) of my Corrosive Knights novels, the concept of Artificial Intelligence, along with a few others, are a central concern.  I have wondered about the possible appearance of a self-sustained AI and, like many in the article, worry what will happen once such a creature appears.  Will it view humans as an obstacle?  I can’t help but think it will.  And depending on how much power it controls, the effects could be devastating.

It is certainly something to think about…yet another worry to ease you into your day.

Welcome to the future…part deus

After the scary news of hackers shutting down a major French TV network, here’s some good technology news: It would appear the clean energy “revolution” is ahead of schedule:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-04-08/clean-energy-revolution-is-way-ahead-of-schedule

How interesting that as we reach what seems to be a tipping point regarding global warming/pollution, we’re moving pretty quickly into the area of far cleaner renewable energy.

To this, all I have to say is I couldn’t be happier.  If there is an alternative cleaner energy source out there to use, why would anyone want to continue using the older, dirtier methods?  Why would anyone want to live in a world increasingly filled with polluted skies, land, and water?

Here’s hoping at least this part of the future is bright.

Welcome to the future…welcome to today

So a French TV network got hacked big time earlier in the day.  Of the 11 channels it has, it’s regained control of one of them.  Oh, and all their social media material was also hacked.  Click on the link for details:

http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/09/europe/french-tv-network-attack-recovery/index.html

I’ve mentioned before my feelings -both good and bad- regarding the rapidly changing economy thanks to the arrival of computers and the internet.

One of the biggest negatives of the interconnectivity people/businesses have is the fact that somewhere out there might lurk very clever people with some deeply dark thoughts.  And so it is that today I’m reading about hacking a major French TV network.

Will one day we read about an airplane that was hijacked electronically and forced to land (or worse!) somewhere other than its intended destination?  I see the writing on the wall and know that we’re soon going to have driverless cars.  But what if someone hacks into the programming that drives these vehicles?  Could you picture the mass chaos?

But let’s think bigger: What if someone should hack into a city’s electric grid?  Or a government’s military?

No wonder the field of cyber security is a booming one.

Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969) a (very) belated review

As a film fan, I couldn’t be happier about living in this era.  Movies I’d seen many years before and hadn’t had a chance to see again are, to my delight, being released to home video.  A few weeks ago, for example, the for the most part forgotten 1979 thriller Firepower (read my review here) was released and I finally, finally got a chance to see it again after having originally seen it one time in and around the date of that original release.

Sure, the film didn’t hold up that well, but I was so damn curious to see it again.  For whatever reason, pieces of it stuck with me all these years and I just had to revisit the work, regardless of how it would come off to my much older self.

This week, a trio of interesting films I’ve yearned to revisit have been released to home video.  The first two, Hooper and Sharkey’s Machine, are Burt Reynolds vehicles that were available before but are now, for the first time, being released to BluRay (and, I hope, are finally being presented in their proper cinematic aspect ratio).  I had avoided the earlier releases of these films because people who saw these video releases said the image quality of each film was very poor, a debit I hope these BluRays correct.

The third film, the 1969 feature Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (aka Doppleganger), is a film I have the barest of memories about, having seen it (probably) on TV one day way back in the mid to late 1970’s and never again.

And yet, like Firepower, the film lingered in my mind, an itch I had to scratch and a movie I was dying to revisit.

Yesterday the BluRay was formally released and I eagerly put it into my player.

Would the film enchant or disappoint me?

As it turned out, it did a little of both.

For those familiar with their works, the names and should set off certain memories.  The one time husband and wife duo were responsible for, among others, the TV shows Thunderbirds, UFO, and Space: 1999.  They are the ones behind Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (so I don’t go insane re-typing the film’s title, lets refer to it as JFSS from now on, OK?).

The plot of the film goes like this: In the near future, the European Space Agency sends an exploratory probe towards the sun but an unexpected magnetic draw shifts its position and it takes pictures of a mysterious, and surprising, object: A planet that lies directly opposite the sun!

This planet, it is found, rotates in the same orbit as our Earth but has never been seen by us because it is always opposite the Sun and therefore obscured by it.

What follows is a race to get a European spacecraft up and away to explore that mysterious planet.  Eventually, the ship is sent but the mysteries of this alien world are just beginning to be uncovered.

I won’t say more (for now) because I don’t want to spoil the story.  I will get into SPOILERS after the trailer, however, so for those who don’t mind a more in depth examination of the film, feel free to read on.

To conclude the non-spoiler part of this review, I’ll say the following: JFSS proved a far more positive experience to me than revisiting Firepower.  The film’s effects remain quite good although the story could have been a lot more focused (I’ll get into that below).  If you’re a fan of the works of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, picking up JFSS is a no-brainer.  If you’re curious to see an interesting and at times even haunting sci-fi mystery/thriller, you’d do far worse than check this film out.

Alright, there was the trailer.  What follows below are…

SPOILERS!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

As I mentioned above, JFSS’s story could have been a lot more focused and this is my biggest complaint against the film.  And yet paradoxically let me state that while the story could have used more focus, the “extraneous” material was presented rather well.  The problem was that it didn’t really need to be in the film.

Which is my long winded way of saying that this is a film that could have used a few tweaks of the screenplay.

The movie’s entire opening act, for example, involves the attempts of the head of the European Space Agency to a) find a mole ( in what amounts to a curious, almost non-speaking cameo) and b) use the discovery of this mole to force his reluctant allies to fund the exploration of the mysterious planet on the far side of the sun.

This part of the film was well presented but left me baffled when all was said and done.  Why did we need to spend all this time on the funding of this space probe?  The writer in me would have excised this entire section of the film.  Why spend all that time there, time that could have been used more wisely getting our spacecraft up and into space and dealing with the movie’s central mystery?

But wait, there’s more!

After the head of the agency gets his sought after funding, we go through the next part of the film, which first involves figuring out who will fly this mission.  The United States, the main backers of this mission, insist their most experienced astronaut, Colonel Glenn Ross () be the senior officer on the flight.  The head of the European agency agrees to the US terms and puts his right hand man (and friend) John Kane () to fly with Ross.

Having taken care of that bit of business, we then spend time following the grueling training of the relatively inexperienced Kane preparing for the flight along with some bits and pieces involving the rocky marriage of Colonel Ross.

Once again, this part of the film isn’t bad per se and is presented fairly well.  However, once again the writer in me wondered why we were spending all these precious minutes of film on these issues.  The Ross marriage, I suppose, did matter a little later on, but Kane’s training?  Not so much.  That could have easily been dispensed with and allowed more time for the space flight and the movie’s central mystery.

Anyway, once we got past all that, the film finally reached the point it probably should have forty minutes before: Liftoff and arrival to the mystery planet.

It was here where things got good and interesting and where my dim memories came roaring back.  Though I said I would get into spoilers, I won’t go into many more details here and leave the mystery for you to see.

I will say this much, though: I loved the film’s use of mirrors in this part of the film and felt the ending, and especially the denouement that makes us question whether what we’ve just seen was real or the ramblings of a madman, really made the whole thing end on a troubling yet satisfying note.

Again, I recommend the film despite the overly extraneous opening elements.

10 Unique Items Left Behind on the Moon…

I was totally expecting to find #3 on the list:

 

About that Cross-Country Delphi Driverless car…

A few days ago (you can read the original post here) I wrote about how the Delphi company, which has driverless car software, had initiated a cross-country trip from San Francisco to New York, effectively duplicating Horatio Nelson Jackson’s famous 1903 cross country trip that was the first made in a car.

It barely made the news then, and out of curiosity I did a search to see if the car made it to its destination.  It did.  Three days ago:

http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/driverless-car-completes-cross-country-trip-9-days-n334776

It amazes me that this story didn’t receive much press (at least none in the venues I usually frequent!).  Granted, the car supposedly made 99% of the trip using its driverless features, so it didn’t make the entire trip using only the Delphi software, but still: It crossed 99% of the entire United States, effectively, on “auto pilot”!

That’s pretty damn amazing!  And, paradoxically, chilling.

Once again I can’t help but think what the future of car transport will be like.

On the one hand, using driverless cars will greatly reduce both traffic congestion and highway/road fatalities/accidents.  As I noted before and given some of the smaller driverless cars such companies as Google are working on, there may come a time when people no longer even have to have a car.  I envision a future where there is a small fleet of very economical to use driverless cars on the streets.  You use an app on your phone to call one in, it takes you to your destination, and when you need to return home, you call one in to do that.

The other side of the coin is darker.  How many jobs will be lost with the full arrival of the driverless car?  Already there are several careers that will be endangered, from truck drivers to taxi/Uber drivers.  What about public transportation drivers?  School/Public bus drivers might become irrelevant as well.

Alas, technology moves ahead and there’s no turning back.  After all, there was a time the Blacksmith had one of the most secure jobs in any town.

Not anymore.

Twin Peaks revival…without David Lynch!?

Before I get to the story, a brief statement: I’m a fan of director David Lynch and certainly appreciate his work and its influences (especially when it comes to Twin Peaks), but I’m not a fanatic of his works.

To me, his best all around film was Mulholland Drive (2001), and I believe part of the reason that film worked so well is because it felt as if Mr. Lynch took everything he knew and/or had worked on up to that moment and distilled the very best of it into that film (one very clever critic at the time of the film’s release stated that watching Mulholland Drive was the equivalent to buying one of those “Best of” albums from one of your favorite bands).

As for Twin Peaks, my memories of watching it when it originally aired are rather foggy.  This much I recall: I didn’t watch the show religiously.  Curiously enough, after seeing the show’s pilot episode I accurately guessed the central mystery (ie who had killed Laura Palmer, though I didn’t see the whole evil spirit stuff coming).  Again, my memory is hazy about all things Twin Peaks (including the pilot), so for all I know it was very obvious who the killer was and my realization was nothing more than a “no shit, Sherlock” type deduction.

Having said all that, I was curious when I heard Mr. Lynch was coming back to Twin Peaks.  Alas, it appears financial issues have forced Mr. Lynch out of the production:

http://io9.com/the-twin-peaks-revival-is-happening-without-david-lynch-1695866373

What a bummer!  Apart from seeing all those original actors in their original roles, the main reason one wanted to see a Twin Peaks revival -even for a casual fan of the series such as I- was for the chance to see what new concepts/ideas Mr. Lynch would bring to what is arguably his best known work…and now it appears he won’t be involved in it.

At least for now.

Who knows, maybe the studios and Mr. Lynch will come to some kind of agreement.  One would hope so.

Having Twin Peaks return without Mr. Lynch is like having a Beatles reunion…only without half the band.

Because you needed to know! (Part…uh…three?)

Here it is folks, by Anna Pulley for Salon.com:

The 8 Kinkiest Passages of The Bible

Hmmm…no need to wonder why the priests/nuns in the Catholic schools I attended early on never focused on these particular passages!

The thrill is gone…

So I’m sitting before the computer in a near daze.  Being in the early stages of a cold can do that to you.

Last night, while completely out of energy and dealing with a throat that’s on fire, I tried to watch some of the TV shows I’ve been DVRing for the past few weeks (in some cases, months!).  And I find there are 10 episodes of Justified waiting patiently to be watched.  This represents the whole of the sixth season of the show aired to date minus the season’s very first episode.

Seeing this, I couldn’t help but be somewhat surprised.  Used to be that I couldn’t wait to see the latest episode of Justified.  Season Two of the series, which featured Mags Bennett, was a stunner.  In retrospect, that may well have been the series’ high point and one could argue that, while still good, the show hasn’t reached those dizzying heights again.

This was certainly the case, in my humble opinion, with the show’s fifth season.  That season featured a relatively weak menace in the form of Daryl Crowe Jr.  When the season ended and it was announced the show’s sixth season would be its final one, I felt this was, well, justified (blame the pun on the cold!).

Mind you, I have a great deal of sympathy for those who toil behind the scenes on successful shows.  The fact is its difficult to sustain a show for four years, much less six.  Plot lines inevitably get repeated and the surprises that may have drawn you into the show in the first place become fewer and fewer.  With Justified, there was always a sense of menace and absurdity presented in equal measures.  Characters could -and did!- die violent, sometimes very unexpected deaths.  After a while, though, you have a core of characters you almost have to maintain, fan favorites whose unexpected end might lead to audiences revolting against the show.

Ah, you say, but what about Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead?  They’ve had some very big characters die and yet people still watch them, don’t they?

Both shows most certainly have turned heads with the deaths of “big” characters, but there are still certain characters who haven’t been offed and who remain “central” to the story.  With the passage of time it appears clear they’re going to hang on for quite a while.  If you think about it, I suspect you’ll know who they are.

Anyway, just offering some fevered musings.  I’ll catch up to Justified.  I’ve invested enough time in it so far that skipping out the final season would be silly.  Yet I’d be lying if I were to say I’m not ready for the show to be over.