An adult lady friend of mine has a birthday coming up. I asked her what she wanted for her birthday, and she pulled "A pony!" out of thin air.
My adult friend really likes animals, and can handle a little rough treatment; I looked into giving her a professional horse-riding lesson (there are stables in the area), but the prices were way out of range for my gift budget.
Then I considered "My Little Pony." For a joke, I ordered my friend the "Friendship Express" DVD of "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic", which is cheap enough to give away as a gag gift, and my friend just might be girly enough to appreciate it. I also ordered something I knew was good: Amy Winfrey's excellent "Making Fiends" animated series.
When "My Little Pony" was introduced, it was a line of pastel-colored plastic horse figurines with pastel-colored acrylic hair which little girls could comb. I do not recall if these horses were even poseable. There was an insipid tie-in TV cartoon series. It was the kind of toy only a little girl could enjoy. I imagine My Little Pony play sessions involved tea parties and mane-grooming, but if any female reading this ever played with these My Little Pony toys, please enlighten me and I will issue a correction.
In contrast, little boys continued to play with their violent robot toys and their violent military GI Joe toys, and watched the corresponding violent cartoons. They toys, at least, seemed poeseable and each one seemed to feature separate personalities and skill sets.
Shortly after Wizards of the Coast (the owners of the "Dungeons & Dragons" franchise) got bought by Hasbro, the D&D folks did an April Fool's news update wherein they reported lots of new tie-ins with Hasbro's toy lines, especially "My Little Pony." The article announced plans for much more horse-related content in the D&D game, and adventures intended for entirely equine characters. They provided an image of a re-envisioned girly pink "Beholder" monster, dolled up with little bows on each eyestalk (by the way, Beholders are evil floating monsters from another dimension that hate all humans, they have several eyeballs on eyestalks, and each eyeball can fire powerful deadly magical rays at you). Of course, the My Little Pony tie-in premise seemed ridiculous at the time, and the D&D rules continued to treat horses as mere vehicles.
All good humor has a kernel of truth, however: part of the inspiration for this was no doubt the very real efforts of Role-Playing Game companies (like Wizards of the Coast) to sell their products to the largely-untapped female market. Unfortunately, D&D games and adventures stayed in the boy's-only thematic rut of adolescent power fantasies: manly heroes robbing graves and slaughtering monsters in dank grubby dungeons in between visits to the tavern; even though the game rules and mechanics feature the potential for intrigue, diplomacy, investigation, acts of compassion, and other insightful elements prominent in girls' literature. My point being that there is no reason that D&D need remain a boys'-only game; imagine Nancy Drew and Xena in a Medieval-era supernatural romance novel, where you could determine the outcome!
As it so happens, the My Little Pony franchise got a serious thematic reboot and upgrade with "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic," put together by one of the "Powerpuff Girls" people. Often a franchise reboot takes something swell and drags it through a field of manure (remember the live-action "How the Grinch Stole Christmas?"), but the My Little Pony reboot takes something lame and elevates it into something somewhat more rich and entertaining, with plots and message and characterization. As a result, "Friendship is Magic" is getting really popular, even with boys (called "bronies"), which seems weird on first glance; I mean, only girls like ponies and horses and stuff, right?
Since I had already mail-ordered the "Friendship is Magic" DVD for my friend, I decided to watch some of the cartoons online so that I'd know what I'm subjecting her to. I started with the first episode.
The first episode of Friendship is Magic is a 2-part story featuring a magical quest with a party of 6 ponies (each of whom possesses different skill sets) who must deal with an angry manticore, a water-controlling dragon, and a grudge-bearing spell-casting boss monster. The story starts with an ancient prophecy and hinges on control of magical gemstone maguffins.
For those unfamiliar with D&D, this has all the elements of classic "Lord Of The Rings"-inspired D&D adventure, with monsters almost straight out of the rule books.
(In this part of my little essay, imagine we're in the final seconds of a classic "Twilight Zone" episode. I've dropped hints throughout this posting, and now I'm going to reveal the amazing twist ending that will bend your mind and chill your bones.)
Remember that whimsical joke about "Dungeons & Dragons" adopting elements of "My Little Pony"? It's gone the other way: in a weird twist of fate, "My Little Pony" has adopted elements of D&D!
Not that I'm complaining.
Thursday, June 14, 2012
In Soccer News: Portugal takes Denmark, 3-2
I watched a soccer game on Wednesday, while I was waiting about an hour for my fried chain-restaurant meal. I generally don't like spectator sports, except hockey and minor league baseball. Why did I watch this soccer game? Like a tray of donuts, it was there staring at me, and I had nothing better to do. It was more interesting than golf or NASCAR.
Portugal played Denmark. I rooted for Denmark because I like Danish cartoonists.
Soccer involves a lot of running around on a huge green lawn back and forth for a long period of time. When someone scores a goal, it's huge, because there are so few goals scored in any soccer game.
I would pay good money to watch 400-pound American football players play a full game of European soccer. I don't think they could handle all the running.
One unfortunate Danish player got kicked in the forehead by a Portugese player. This is apparently legal if the ball is somehow involved; it means the guy's head just got in between the man's foot and the ball. I was unsettled watching this unfortunate athlete in peak physical condition trying to blink away the effects of his semi-concussion.
Denmark lost. I was disappointed. Is this the Buffalo sports curse? Will any team I root for lose?
The restaurant was Poor Richard's, by the way. If there is a significant difference between Poor Richard's and Friday's or Applebee's or any number of these very similar chain restaurants, I don't really see what that difference is. I'd really rather eat at a mom & pop outfit.
Portugal played Denmark. I rooted for Denmark because I like Danish cartoonists.
Soccer involves a lot of running around on a huge green lawn back and forth for a long period of time. When someone scores a goal, it's huge, because there are so few goals scored in any soccer game.
I would pay good money to watch 400-pound American football players play a full game of European soccer. I don't think they could handle all the running.
One unfortunate Danish player got kicked in the forehead by a Portugese player. This is apparently legal if the ball is somehow involved; it means the guy's head just got in between the man's foot and the ball. I was unsettled watching this unfortunate athlete in peak physical condition trying to blink away the effects of his semi-concussion.
Denmark lost. I was disappointed. Is this the Buffalo sports curse? Will any team I root for lose?
The restaurant was Poor Richard's, by the way. If there is a significant difference between Poor Richard's and Friday's or Applebee's or any number of these very similar chain restaurants, I don't really see what that difference is. I'd really rather eat at a mom & pop outfit.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Mint Tea
My wife asked for advice on how to make mint iced tea. She had mint tea bags, but she wanted to use some fresh leaves from her healthy mint plant.
We brewed the tea bags with hot water. Instead of making a broth out of the fresh leaves, I convinced her to muddle the fresh mint leaves with ice, then pour in the (now cooled) brewed tea, kind of like making a mint julep. I was hoping to preserve more of the menthol and other minty essential oils.
My wife claims it tasted swell.
We brewed the tea bags with hot water. Instead of making a broth out of the fresh leaves, I convinced her to muddle the fresh mint leaves with ice, then pour in the (now cooled) brewed tea, kind of like making a mint julep. I was hoping to preserve more of the menthol and other minty essential oils.
My wife claims it tasted swell.
Buffalo has no gaming shop
I grew up in Buffalo, New York.
I recently spent a week in Buffalo, and I decided to check out the local gaming shop and see what was available from Paizo and maybe pick up some more dice (you can never have enough dice!).
According to Google, Buffalo has no gaming shops. There are Meetup groups and so forth, but without any shops, it all seems rather underground.
I heard about former Soviet republics where people had Dungeons & Dragons translated into their language, but nobody had any polyhedral dice. When I discovered that Buffalo had no gaming shops, I felt a similar sense of pity.
Granted, with modern web-based storefronts (and even PDF distribution), I realize that almost no hobby requires a local brick-and-mortar storefront.
I got my first polyhedral dice at Clayton's Toys on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo (before the fire forced them to move closer to downtown). I still have those sharp-edged dice cast in vibrant fluorescent translucent acrylic (I wish I could get more of those fluorescent acrylic polyhedrals!).
I recently spent a week in Buffalo, and I decided to check out the local gaming shop and see what was available from Paizo and maybe pick up some more dice (you can never have enough dice!).
According to Google, Buffalo has no gaming shops. There are Meetup groups and so forth, but without any shops, it all seems rather underground.
I heard about former Soviet republics where people had Dungeons & Dragons translated into their language, but nobody had any polyhedral dice. When I discovered that Buffalo had no gaming shops, I felt a similar sense of pity.
Granted, with modern web-based storefronts (and even PDF distribution), I realize that almost no hobby requires a local brick-and-mortar storefront.
I got my first polyhedral dice at Clayton's Toys on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo (before the fire forced them to move closer to downtown). I still have those sharp-edged dice cast in vibrant fluorescent translucent acrylic (I wish I could get more of those fluorescent acrylic polyhedrals!).
"Fifth Planet" by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle
I just read "Fifth Planet" (1963) by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle. In brief, you don't need to read it. It contains nothing terribly interesting nor thought-provoking which you can't find elsewhere in better quality.
Back in the 1980s, the cool lady who lived next door moved out, and she gave me a big box full of old sci-fi novels. I am still reading through these old paperbacks.
One of them is "Fifth Planet." I was going on a plane trip, so I read this old paperback to fend off boredom.
When you read old sci-fi stories (or watch old sci-fi movies), you have to make allowances for the unreality of the science, or else you will be an insufferable prick, complaining about every nitpicky detail, and ruining it for everyone else. Basically, in order to enjoy the story (e.g. people travelling in space), you have to overlook all kinds of science details (e.g. inefficiency of chemical rockets, relativistic velocity limitations and effects, spacecraft interiors are necessarily cramped, etc.).
If you do decide to explain all the nitpicky science details, you will wind up with a very tedious story. Similarly, I don't care how the guts of my car work, I only care that it still runs and takes me where I want to go. Similarly, just as a spaceship is a real vehicle, in a story it is a literary vehicle: as a reader, I don't care how it works, I only care that it gets spacemen from point A to point B; if it breaks in some way, that failure should serve the plot somehow.
You might think that I am simply a dolt, that I'm bored by science, or that I'm just spouting off idiotically. However, the playwright Anton Chekhov has detailed this sentiment with his rule, known as "Chekhov's Gun": if you have a story wherein you mention that there is a gun in the room, you need to have that gun go off in the next 2 chapters or so; otherwise, the gun in the room is irrelevant and you should eliminate it from your story.
Fred Hoyle is apparently a knighted British astrophysicist. In his novel about space travel and policy in 2087, he has decided not to spare you the technological detail. Seriously, there are approximately 6 pages of engineers standing around debating how the rocket should work. Worse, the entire rocket is fictional; you will never need to know how this rocket works in real life, buy Hoyle tells you anyway.
The Hoyles also give loads of other details the reader does not need to know, including the color patterns of a plush toy donkey. "You can put your pajamas in it." The donkey is irrelevant. The whole donkey scene is irrelevant.
In fact, the whole first 100 pages of this almost-200-page novel are irrelevant. You really don't need to know how the rocket works. The author is either trying to impress you that he knows about science and engineering; or that he thinks you will be amazed by the possibility that humans might build interstellar rockets, and that you have boundless curiosity about every detail. I suspect that the truth is worse: Hoyle had an idea about how to make a rocket, and he couldn't resist telling you about it for 6 pages. Hoyle details characters who later die in ways which are irrelevant to the nature of their personalities. Hoyle spends several pages making a point using an electrical switch that a Soviet cosmonaut is going insane. This goes nowhere.
Once you get past that first 100 pages, the whole thing becomes kind of a "Twilight Zone"/"One Step Beyond" mind-bender which is quite interesting; it's kind of like breaking the sound barrier in that the flying is rough until you actually get past Mach 1.
Regardless, you don't really need to read any part of the novel at all. At best, it's a comment about the Cold War, which ended less than 30 years after the novel was written.
The most interesting part of the novel, for me, was that the US was depicted as having an interstate high-speed rail network, using which an astronaut sleeps with his girlfriend in New York City the night before his big rocket launch in Florida. (Either it's high-speed rail, or Hoyle has underestimated this 1100-mile commute.) Unfortunately, Hoyle decided to gloss over the details of that awesome rail network. Europe has had high-speed rail for years and we should have it now, but certain Republican state Governors are determined to keep their states "flyover states" and relegate a sane American transportation policy to the world of science fiction.
Back in the 1980s, the cool lady who lived next door moved out, and she gave me a big box full of old sci-fi novels. I am still reading through these old paperbacks.
One of them is "Fifth Planet." I was going on a plane trip, so I read this old paperback to fend off boredom.
When you read old sci-fi stories (or watch old sci-fi movies), you have to make allowances for the unreality of the science, or else you will be an insufferable prick, complaining about every nitpicky detail, and ruining it for everyone else. Basically, in order to enjoy the story (e.g. people travelling in space), you have to overlook all kinds of science details (e.g. inefficiency of chemical rockets, relativistic velocity limitations and effects, spacecraft interiors are necessarily cramped, etc.).
If you do decide to explain all the nitpicky science details, you will wind up with a very tedious story. Similarly, I don't care how the guts of my car work, I only care that it still runs and takes me where I want to go. Similarly, just as a spaceship is a real vehicle, in a story it is a literary vehicle: as a reader, I don't care how it works, I only care that it gets spacemen from point A to point B; if it breaks in some way, that failure should serve the plot somehow.
You might think that I am simply a dolt, that I'm bored by science, or that I'm just spouting off idiotically. However, the playwright Anton Chekhov has detailed this sentiment with his rule, known as "Chekhov's Gun": if you have a story wherein you mention that there is a gun in the room, you need to have that gun go off in the next 2 chapters or so; otherwise, the gun in the room is irrelevant and you should eliminate it from your story.
Fred Hoyle is apparently a knighted British astrophysicist. In his novel about space travel and policy in 2087, he has decided not to spare you the technological detail. Seriously, there are approximately 6 pages of engineers standing around debating how the rocket should work. Worse, the entire rocket is fictional; you will never need to know how this rocket works in real life, buy Hoyle tells you anyway.
The Hoyles also give loads of other details the reader does not need to know, including the color patterns of a plush toy donkey. "You can put your pajamas in it." The donkey is irrelevant. The whole donkey scene is irrelevant.
In fact, the whole first 100 pages of this almost-200-page novel are irrelevant. You really don't need to know how the rocket works. The author is either trying to impress you that he knows about science and engineering; or that he thinks you will be amazed by the possibility that humans might build interstellar rockets, and that you have boundless curiosity about every detail. I suspect that the truth is worse: Hoyle had an idea about how to make a rocket, and he couldn't resist telling you about it for 6 pages. Hoyle details characters who later die in ways which are irrelevant to the nature of their personalities. Hoyle spends several pages making a point using an electrical switch that a Soviet cosmonaut is going insane. This goes nowhere.
Once you get past that first 100 pages, the whole thing becomes kind of a "Twilight Zone"/"One Step Beyond" mind-bender which is quite interesting; it's kind of like breaking the sound barrier in that the flying is rough until you actually get past Mach 1.
Regardless, you don't really need to read any part of the novel at all. At best, it's a comment about the Cold War, which ended less than 30 years after the novel was written.
The most interesting part of the novel, for me, was that the US was depicted as having an interstate high-speed rail network, using which an astronaut sleeps with his girlfriend in New York City the night before his big rocket launch in Florida. (Either it's high-speed rail, or Hoyle has underestimated this 1100-mile commute.) Unfortunately, Hoyle decided to gloss over the details of that awesome rail network. Europe has had high-speed rail for years and we should have it now, but certain Republican state Governors are determined to keep their states "flyover states" and relegate a sane American transportation policy to the world of science fiction.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Moneyball
"Okay, Anton, get this: it's a movie about an underdog baseball team..."
"That's one thumb down."
"...and it co-stars Jonah Hill."
"Annnd that's the other one down."
Seriously, "Moneyball" is awesome because it is about a man fighting against a world entrenched in a bad philosophy. And that man is played by Brad Pitt. And Jonah Hill doesn't try to be funny.
The criticism leveled against Brad Pitt's character reminds me of so much of the criticism of President Obama, because so many of these critics seem to be rooting for him to fail somehow--rooting for the country to fail, really--so they can be the first to say: 'see, I told you so.'
"That's one thumb down."
"...and it co-stars Jonah Hill."
"Annnd that's the other one down."
Seriously, "Moneyball" is awesome because it is about a man fighting against a world entrenched in a bad philosophy. And that man is played by Brad Pitt. And Jonah Hill doesn't try to be funny.
The criticism leveled against Brad Pitt's character reminds me of so much of the criticism of President Obama, because so many of these critics seem to be rooting for him to fail somehow--rooting for the country to fail, really--so they can be the first to say: 'see, I told you so.'
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