spaceyear 2000

From listsofnote.com, a 1950ish Robert Heinlein warns of what’s waiting for us all the way in the year 2000:

So let’s have a few free-swinging predictions about the future. Some will be wrong – but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong.

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It’s yours when you pay for it.

2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.

3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space.

4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a “preventive war.” We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.

5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a “breakthrough” into new technologies which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies.

6. We’ll all be getting a little hungry by and by.

7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called “modern art” will be discussed only by psychiatrists.

8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will be replaced by a growing, changing “operational psychology” based on measurement and prediction.

9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish “regeneration,” i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb.

10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a-building.

11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision.

12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars.

13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed.

14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.

15. We will not achieve a “World State” in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet.

16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance.

17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic “brain.”

18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.

19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will “Civilization” be destroyed.

Here are things we won’t get soon, if ever:

– Travel through time
– Travel faster than the speed of light
– “Radio” transmission of matter.
– Manlike robots with manlike reactions
– Laboratory creation of life
– Real understanding of what “thought” is and how it is related to matter.
– Scientific proof of personal survival after death.
– Nor a permanent end to war.

Here.

the whole game incised

Festive music warbles in the cafe behind me, but I am the only customer here. The wind is moving trash in the empty street. I imagine releasing the lot I hold in my hand and permitting it to escape along this street. The trembling stars shout down to me, and the life that is in me shouts back. That I know I’m living goes up levels in me like surf rising against tide marks. I’ve never been to the ocean, never seen it. How can I use such metaphors? -Michael Cisco, The Narrator

everyday banality presents the skagway connection

Out of my holding pattern, gone far away to yet another. Okay. Look: awaiting my flight in Portland I listened to two elderly men in suits discuss generic business things before segueing into talk of the cheap military sci-fi paperback one of them was holding. This guy with the book, he described with great relish the part where “this old master sergeant” runs out of bullets, but there are still aliens! “So he gets out is ka-bar knife and stabs one, and kills it! But there’s another, so he stabs it too! And it’s just a great moment Earl I’ll tell you!”

The book (he said) borrows a lot from Starship Troopers, which is of course a lot different from the movie. He was going into the borrowings when our flight was called and I was

Near all this a woman with a stroller, and it takes about five minutes for me to notice that the stroller’s centerpiece is a mesh cube with a zip-top, and I notice because the woman lifts from the cube a toy poodle wearing a pink tutu w/ a silver-sequin spine. This woman will continues on with me from Seattle to Juneau, where my Uncle remarks on her in a way that suggests he didn’t notice my mentioning the very same person to my mother on the phone thirty seconds before. Three hours before, in Seattle, two people queue for the flight to Juneau whom I know will be in Skagway, and they appear again on the ferry the next day in the sixth hour when I finally wander forward to the observation lounge. One I don’t recognize in the airport, but I recognize the name of the Thai/Mexican restaurant on the hoodie she wears. The other I saw regularly at the grocery store, last summer, and she stood out in my mind because my coworker was a little obsessed with her.

It was my fault, maybe. She looked young and I know he likes that and I was bored. Bored and stuck with him for hours, I’d come back from break and mention that the underage-looking girl sure did receive money in exchange for my groceries and he would launch into the same two-minute monologue about her ass in those jeans and how we would see, we would, that she was of age, he swore he would be vindicated.

Eventually he learned her name and the fact that she was 22 but he still resented us for mentioning her corpse-pallor and her twelve year-old torso and the fact that we had seen her, across the street, entering and exiting the Mormon church. He wanted validation of his desire. He wanted validation of anything ever and we were just assholes (me doubly so for knowing what would happen the moment I made specific mention of anything female and of a certain age to him).

Yesterday, he arrives at the house and promptly shows me his phone wallpaper: a barely of-age Disney star (he assures me she was eighteen when the paparazzi snapped the photos) in a blue bikini that’s dating Justin Bieber and he would suck Bieber’s cock just to get close to her, just because it had been inside of her. He says he’s spent the last two months considering “why black people use the n-word”. He says they should abolish its use, make that one word illegal. He says, “it’s been 200 years since slavery get over it!”. I don’t correct his math but I ask him what that has to do with anything and he walls straight up, blinks, opens his mouth a few times before “But yeah! We just shouldn’t be saying it! If a cop is nearby and hears a black person say that word, he should arrest him!” This line of conversation dies to my unresponsiveness: I don’t want to know where this is coming from, and doubt he can deliver a semi-coherent explication re:anything if it’s not a stand-up comic’s routine, memorized.

A few minutes later, he holds out a stack of papers in a plastic cover. The top sheet printed with ENTER MY MIND over a color photograph of a human eye. He tells me it’s his poems, and some inspirational quotes. Would I like to read it? I’m wondering if the eye is his own. I beg off: this might not be a good idea, when I’m so tired. Who knows how terrible I will be to you, ha ha?

I remember him handing one of our coworkers, and a friend of hers who worked on the train, his green spiral-bound notebook of poems (scrawled on the front the same title). It was my second summer and I made some joke about the horrible consequences of me reading them while the girls said “oh they’re very nice no that’s fine you can take them back”. I remember picking up the same notebook over a year later, when he left it behind on the dock as I relieved him for break, and finding he had written perhaps two pages more in all that time. And yesterday I saw the notebook, on top of a box of his stuff on the coffee table, the wire binding undistorted after all this time.

He often asked me about my notebooks, and I’d tell him that they were just dumb bullshit and/or symptoms of unhealthy compulsion. Nothing worth talking about, but he would want to talk. He would tell me he felt Another Poem Coming On, that he needed to bike out to one of his favorite spots, his favorite Poetry Writing Spot, to Write His Poem. In his aimlessness, he tries to shape himself into a romantic image. He wants to be an Artist. When I replaced my Army Surplus Man Purse (home of the endless procession of almost identical dumb bullshit black notebooks*), he asked for the old one. I think I have become a model for him. I don’t know how.

He asked me to go get a beer but I was tired and my stomach was churning and I begged off.

So here I am. I’ve worked eight hours in three days and really could have arrived a week later than I did. So I watch torrented video and read and wonder why it feels different than it did a thousand miles ago. So I sit here and I type this which will go on a thumb drive I’ll trudge to the office and throw up on the internet, because it’s good to have goals even if they’re nakedly arbitrary. At least there’s only three more days alone with the Disney Channel.

btw Bored to Death season 2 the “buy a new insulin pump for my mom” joke reveals a fatal ignorance re:the cost of insulin pumps.

Also the grocery store is out of milk until the barge comes on Tuesday.

—

*dumb anime notebook????

different strokes

“Are you going to a psychiatrist?”

“Yeah, I started a couple of weeks ago, but I didn’t talk much, so they let me take a break for a while. I’ll start up again in a few weeks. They said if I didn’t like the guy they’d find me another one.”

“That’s the same thing they said to me, but I’m still with the same one. I asked them for another one, for a girl, a lady I mean, because there are some things I just can’t say to a man with a beard.”

“He’s got a beard?”

“Ugh, a huge one, he’s like a bear. Like a big scraggly bear.”

I don’t know why, but I started thinking that maybe if my shrink had a beard, things might be a lot better.

-Ray Loriga, My Brother’s Gun

masturbeard theater: largo winch

I guess it’s more of a beardjob really.

But all too soon her oral fixation turns tragic:

;__;

and done

“How many notes have you made on this book?” The Mouse chanced a tentative light through the hangar.

“Not a tenth as many as I need. Even though it’s doomed as an obsolete museum relique, it will be jewelled—” he swung back on the nets—”crafted—” the links roared; his voice rose—”a meticulous work; perfect!”

“I was born,” the Mouse said. “I must die. I am suffering. Help me. There, I just wrote your book for you.”

Katin looked at his big, weak fingers against the mail. After a while he said, “Mouse, sometimes you make me want to cry.”

-samuel r. delany, nova

ncf: MoH

Early in Medal of Honor’s 2010 lunge at Modern Warfare’s boot heels*  I’m shadowing a beard-and-Oakleys wearing operator tasked with leading me  around a Taliban compound by the super-sneaky halter when he tells me: I’ve got this one.

And I say fuck you, buddy, this is my game, and rush around the corner ahead of him to stab the one-he’s-got in the back of the neck. The collision of neck and knife produces a sound like metal striking metal and a sentry who continues to stand staring off into space as it nothing has happened. I try again, get the same result, and back off a few steps to watch Oakleys wrassle him to the ground.

I followed my bearded companion to this encounter on an ATV. I followed him, and he murmured prompts like “go slow” and “kill your lights before bad dudes shoot us!!!”. I did as I was told, going down a long corridor of rock in the dark until I reached a village and there I snuck, carefully guided/instructed by my partner, until deciding I’d had it, it was time to take the initiative, and the game rewarded me with PANG. Afterward, we got back on our four-wheelers and tore down another uneventful outside corridor to another compound. At some point, Oakleys asked me to retrieve the bolted-down-at-all-other-times .50 caliber rifle from the front of my ride to shootmen from a great distance. He talked about windage and bullet drop while I put my cross hair right over heads and exploded them.

It’s a limp combo of MW’s “All Ghillied Up” and the breathless snowmobile escape from MW2:  the vehicle parts are boring and the sneaking is never particularly tense. It starts and stops and lurches back into action again. It locks you in a room with another pair of fellows so you can not participate in their lengthy-seeming dialog re: THE MISSION. Later, it will often make you walk calmly with your weapon down, lest you escape the non-participatory conversation chunks, or else block the narrow way with friendlies crouching to discuss tactical options.

There are doors.

Sometimes, your allies open them, usually so they can close-quarter a scripted enemy to death in some Awesome Special Forces kind of way. Other times, you are prompted to perform the opening ritual, and you maybe apply bullets on the immediate other side. Of course, you can’t kick down a door if the level is designed for COMRADE X to do it. For most of the game you have to move at the pace dictated by your partners.

Which makes a certain sense, right? You’re a soldier, you’re not supposed to go tear-assing around the map, indulging whatever whim.  Medal of Honor seems to be striving for a certain authenticity, eschewing Modern Warfare’s crazed barely intelligible technothriller shenanigans for a more modest story of YOU KNOW SOME GUYS rooting around SOME MOUNTAINS looking for some Taliban to shoot. Almost every gun has two reload animations: one for when you’ve run dry, another for when you hit the manual reload key.  The former is what you expect, while the latter excises the working of bolt-or-slide and results in a +1, for the still-chambered round, in your ammo readout. You no longer play hot potato with the opposing force’s guns, except in desperation: if you run low on ammo, you can request that another team member top you off, so you’re not switching to the Kalashnikov to the G3 to a sawed-off shotgun spewing pellets that magically disappear after 20 feet. This device allows you to retain your own weapon (JUST LIKE A REAL SOLDIER!) and reinforces how the game wants you to approach it: Work with your team, it says, listen, and if you do then everything’s buttery-smooth.

What about that sentry I couldn’t stab? The time I’m sent to a window to provide sniper cover, and can do nothing else because only Oakleys can open the door to the next chunk of level, and there is no way for me myself to get through it until all the enemies on the other side are dead? The two-dozen other times in the length of its short campaign that I tried to get a little ahead or approach a situation in a different way, only for the world itself to rise up as a barrier? Discover self-motivation and the seams tear; you feel annoyed, or like a jackass. As a staunch defender of American Special Forces Canon, Medal of Honor’s pretty great. As a video game, it’s stifling.

Medal of Honor is that kid** who read all the for-younger-readers history books in the third grade, demanded that his friends play viking with him, then lashed out when  they in turn insisted on some detail that wasn’t supported by his books. No Ben, vikings didn’t have castles like that! The fort is going to be a longship! Eventually, they stomped off to sulk because no one would play the right way. Medal of Honor doesn’t have to sulk: it makes the world, you play by its rules or go home.

Also, I was really hoping to play the guy with the massive special forces beard. Ideally, my body would be visible from first-person so I could look down at the huge beard on my chest at any point during the game.***

——————–

*every time I bring this game up I call it “the new Call of Duty” and have to correct myself

**me

***Trespasser style beard-based health gauge??????

ncf time after time: duncan jones’ source code

SPOILER THEATER!

A man wakes up on a train. Opposite him sits a woman. She speaks to him with familiarity, but he does not know her and insists that he’s not who she says he is.

Then they blow up.

A man wakes up in a harness in a chamber opposite the image of a woman on a screen, who addresses him with familiarity. He asks: where am I?  The woman spits a nonsensical program name at him.

The woman asks: did you find the bomb? Did you find the bomber?

The man says: where am I? The man says: oh, that train was a simulation! But where am I? I should be in Afghanistan, I was in Afghanistan.

The woman says: find the bomb, find the bomber, then the man wakes up on a train.   He tells the woman who thinks he’s not him: you’re the distraction, there’s always a distraction. He finds the bomb, he does not find the bomber.

Then he blows up.

The woman on the screen sends him back to the train. She will continue to do this, for eight-minute increments. He will, for several of these increments, behave with a sort of video game sociopathy: harassing and assaulting people who prove innocent.  They’re not real, right? Later, he learns that they were real, but died some hours before he met them: he is exploring a template provided by the brainwaves of a dead man. Still later, he learns that he himself is dead, or dying.

The simulated people begin to matter.

He blows up, or dies in some other way, over and again. He begs to not be sent back, but the quicksave is always loaded, he’s always stuck back on the train to try again.

Source Code doesn’t do anything terrificly unexpected and stretches its central premise until it breaks, but there’s some good stuff buried underneath the formulaic competency:  the lead’s transition, within the simulation, from confusion to indifference to caring; some images that are almost powerful enough on their own to elevate the narrative.

The inside of a dead/dying soldier’s head rendered as video game.

I had mixed feelings about Jones’ debut picture, Moon: I liked almost every individual scene, but didn’t like how they fit together. Characters wandered off screen with one attitude and returned seconds later with another. They weren’t so much characters as plot tokens to keep things jumping, no matter how impressively animated by Sam Rockwell. Then the end, whose sudden fierce optimism felt abrupt and unearned.

Source Code feels whole, until the end. Our Lead goes through the whole stack of emotions, but in a way that doesn’t  feel forced. The film is organic, at least when people aren’t spouting vague sci-fi bullshit to prop the plot up. The end feels lame, for lack of a better word, a gotcha that undermines all that prior vague sci-fi bullshit in a way that makes the film’s previous treatment of its premise suddenly less strained, while making that premise even more far-fetched. The lame doesn’t come from it straining my suspension of belief that much further (the film hints at this conclusion many times before the fact), but from it undermining the emotional resonance of the initial conclusion with sentiment that feels cheap.

(The train passengers frozen in postures of joy was already pushing it pretty far.)

In conclusion Vera Farmiga should have been wearing

the business of the future

our enchanted postapocalypse

THE WILD BOAR IS STANDING 30 OR 40 yards away, at the bottom of a grassy bank, staring right at me. Even from this distance I can see its outrageously long snout, its giant pointed ears, and the spiny bristles along its back. It looks part porcupine, a number of shades of ocher and gray. And it’s far bigger than I expected, maybe chest-high to a man. The boar is like some minor forest god straight from the wilderness, gazing wild-eyed at the strange spectacle of a human being. For a moment it seems to consider charging me, then thinks better of it. When it trots away, it moves powerfully, smoothly, on spindly, graceful legs twice as long as a pig’s, and vanishes into the trees.

I climb back into our VW van, tingling all over. The sighting bodes well. I’ve come to what is being dubbed Europe’s largest wildlife refuge in early July, when I knew spotting animals wouldn’t be so easy. (Winter, with its scarcity of food and lack of foliage, makes them more visible.) And within a couple of hours I’ve ticked a wild boar off the list. Maybe luck is on our side.

But luck isn’t our only obstacle to wildlife spotting here. This is northern Ukraine’s Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a huge area, some 60 miles across in places, that’s been off-limits to human habitation since 1986. Even now, 19 years after the collapse of the USSR, nothing happens in this former Soviet republic without sheets of paper typed and stamped in quintuplicate. It took months of e-mails and phone calls to get permission to spend a few days here. Yes, we’re only a couple of foreign vagabonds—photographer Rory Carnegie is an old travel buddy of mine from England—but we have cameras and a telephoto lens, and my notepad has lines in it: obviously we’re spies. The Soviet Union may have died, but the Soviet mind-set has not.

-Henry Shukman