GalacticMu

The headline for this article does well to summarize both its content and what I have to say about it:

“Nintendo to not release Holocaust-themed game in U.S.”

The game in question is called “Imagination Is the Only Escape” and is not, game developer Luc Bernard says, about concentration camps, graphic violence or… anything to do with the Holocaust, I guess. It is instead about a fantastic inner world that the main character, a child, must enter into in order to save himself from the psychological horrors he is exposed to. By my reckoning, is sounds a hell of a lot more like Pan’s Labyrinth than a war game.

I don’t find it offensive. The video game world is rife with questionable moral lessons, and for a long time now it has been perfectly acceptable to kill Nazis in WWII shooting games. After all, they’re Nazis, fuck ‘em. I think it’s just the word “Holocaust” that is throwing people. And “game” so closely thereafter. If he called it a “WWII-themed game” it’d already be doing well on presale lists.

Remember when they tried to market Concentration Camp Tycoon? That didn’t go over very well.

Over at GoNintendo.com, an unknown poster had this to say about the game:

“I have a feeling that some people may be offended with the idea of a game teaching about the Holocaust.”

Uh. Um. I guess that would be not Jewish people? I mean, I don’t want to put words in anyone’s mouth, but maybe that sentence should have been reworded to something like:

“My children are only allowed to play World Wrestling Entertainment titles because I don’t want them gettin’ smarter than me.”

This is America, after all. We don’t like thinking about feelings. We like shooting things. Especially things that might expose us to feelings.

It is no secret that I’m an atheist, though other members of GalacticMu vary. And this shouldn’t matter, except when I am doing something like watching this astonishing clip of a title sequence of a movie called 3:19 (and no, not the western, like I also briefly, sleepily, thought - 3:10, 3:19, what does nine minutes matter?).

I was sent into a fugue state watching the first half of the animation, enjoying it for one of those moments where, because I expect nothing at all, I am startled to my very core. And then I started to notice the religious implications. Oh, that 3:19, as in Genesis (no, I didn’t read the sidebar for the link until afterwards). God’s great mechanism, I get it. Everything of infinite and divine plan. Yawn.

From what I’ve read the movie itself is not religious as much as “faithy”. It sounds unappealing to me on a lot of levels, but largely because it apparently succumbs to the neo-dramatic mechanism of having everything connect, making for lumbering, interconnected failures such as Crash and Babel. I’d like to watch a movie about how nothing happens for a reason, about how no one action any of us takes affects the lives of anyone else around us. I’d like to see how the poor black girl working at the White Castle does not affect a affluent Swiss banker whose father was shot in the street by a cop who mistakenly identified him. That’d be a good movie.

Via Dark Roasted Blend

I am predictably obsessed with Pixar cartoons. An art-student Seattleite once said to Halcyon and myself after we’d just been to see Cars, “Isn’t that a children’s movie?” Yes, and mostly no. I asked her not to make my latte too hot.

Children, as you may know, are underdeveloped human beings. They have an underdeveloped stature, an underdeveloped taste in beer and an underdeveloped sense of what constitutes as entertainment. Through what I can only assume is torturous experimentation, Pixar is one of the few production companies ever to exist who have managed to make compelling, artful and genuinely touching movies that children manage to enjoy anyway. And while the subject matter has been only marginally of interest to me as of yet (though the recent Ratatouille veered the closest ), the up-coming WALL•E makes me tear up, and these are just the trailers. I have a bad feeling about the fate of my mascara when I get around to seeing the entire film.

As an aside, a true story: I went to see The Iron Giant in the theater, and I cried so hard I scared the children in front of me. Truth.

This is by no means breaking news, but it’s good enough to keep sharing: Pixar has made an absolutely GORGEOUS fake website for the fictional company that produces the eponymous WALL•E.

Called ‘Buy n Large’, the website is more a masterpiece of social commentary than a background for an upcoming movie. A children’s movie, if you recall. Aside from being visually flawless, the site is deep: every link goes somewhere, and almost every page has something worth reading on it. If you know what is good for you, you’ll read the tiny link to the Privacy Policy at the bottom of each page. Even if you are someone that has ever had to work on corporate websites or use stock photography of “perfect” employees, something about Buy n Large will make you want to simultaneously applaud for Pixar and shoot horse tranquilizers directly into your heart. Because the comedy? Very, very close to reality.

Once upon a time there were two girls. One of them was named BattleGate and the other one was named Subspace. One day Subspace was in an argument with a co-worker because Subspace wanted to listen to the Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack and the co-worker wanted to listen to the new Madonna album. BattleGate, an innocent bystander, overheard this and later asked Subspace: “So, you like science fiction?”

And that, folks, is history.

Well, wait. There’s more to the story. Not long after that, BattleGate asked Subspace if she wanted to go to a thing called Norwescon. Both of the girls were very shy and as you introverts know, making any new friend is as big a deal as asking someone on a date; things are hesitant, awkward, and there’s a terrible, lasting and fragile moment where you are absolutely certain that you’ve just made a fool of yourself and you’ll have to go back onto your diet of Suzy Qs and self-loathing. But fate smiled upon the two girls, and BattleGate brought her man-friend and Subspace, in lieu of a man-friend, brought her dad (listen - if anything I have ever said has ever granted me more nerd-cred than that last confession, I’d like to see it) and they all crammed into a tiny microcar of some foreign persuasion and thundered to a fantastic realm called SeaTac.

It was at Norwescon that Subspace and BattleGate realized they were the mythical Best Friends Forever. Like all true love, it was unspeakable and sacred. But what they really, really discovered was this: while watching the nerdiest of the nerdy, the dorkiest of the dorky, the geekiest of the geeky, they saw one another blush with a lightly embarrassed but mostly proud defiance. This is me, they seemed to challenge each other. Can you handle it? And more importantly, are you willing to take a shiv for it? That last part is largely hypothetical.

I’m going to switch to first person now, because I’m tired.

From that day forth I felt I’d passed a silent, secret test. Not just with BattleGate, but with myself. There is a boundary with scifi/fantasy/comi-cons that is too easily crossed, where you imagine yourself different from these people, you believe that you have perspective. But there is no purgatory between mocking and participating: you either are or you aren’t. An instant of mockery and I’d feel no hesitation hissing “traitor” at you before running off to sign you up for Scientology newsletters online. We might not all be comfortable being a chubby Slave Leia or a profoundly obscure Anime Cosplayer, but for those of us that are, I got your back.

All photos on this page taken by Apelad at Megacon 2008. All hail Apelad!

Between Dreamhost hiccups and a snowstorm, our communications laser is experiencing problems. Stand by while we crush some minion windpipes with our minds.

We here at GalacticMu are all poor poor poor, but we pretend it’s just a “character-building” phase by keeping voluminous bookmark files of items we’d like to accumulate.  Here’s a round-up of ideas. Click on the images to link to the items.

Sadly described as a “tongue-in-cheek” gift, these robot gloves are high fashion as far as I am concerned. Made from light gray suede, I wish they were fitted for daily use instead of heavy labor, but you know what they say: if wishes were rocket fuel, I’d be halfway to Betelgeuse by now. I’d also like to point out that they are described as “painted graffiti style on [the glove]”. Uh. Does this mean the paint is sprayed on with an aerosol can? Because it certainly isn’t “graffiti style” art. Terrible copy aside, they are not badly priced at $20.

If I had the freedom to purchase whatever I wanted (what do they call that again? “rich”?) one of the first things I’d get is this ring. There are a few different jewelers on the internet doing variations on the theme, but the folks over at Arizona Skies Meteorites seem to have the nicest. I can’t vouch for actual quality or anything, but I sure wish I could. In case what you’re looking at isn’t immediately clear to you, the center band is a unbroken ring of Gibeon meteorite, surrounded by a band of metal (in this case platinum). If the ring isn’t your bag, the same website sells items ranging from “heirloom quality” spacecraft models to fossilized bear teeth. Prices are not currently listed, but it has to be less than a diamond ring.

I generally don’t fall for that “let’s have everything in white porcelain” shtick all the cool design kids are pushing, but this 10-inch tall factory vase is appealing to me. I’m not sure it is $70 appealing to me, but nevertheless: Tolkien famously railed against the encroaching factory destruction of his country, now you can sculpt tiny Uruk-hai to complete the scene.

I’ve had my eye on these astronaut cutting boards for about a year now, and they’ve always been sold out. Some day, though… some day they will actually make some for sale. Apparently they hand-position the little astronaut and his flag for each board so that the flag seems appropriately placed in a knot/lunar lump. They’re made from acacia wood and decently large (9×13) for the $40 price tag.

What’s better than being a scientist named Krzysztof Matyjaszewski? Being a scientist named Krzysztof Matyjaszewski who has invented a way to make nanoparticles “invisible”.  I’m uncertain as to the usage of the quotation marks over there, because they aren’t faking being invisible, they really are.  Visible to the naked eye, anyway.

Basically, nanomaterials are often whitish in color, or milky, due to the way they refract light.  By combining them with a polymer,  Matyjaszewski and pal Michael Bockstaller had produced a way to “grease” the light on through, as Matyjaszewski says.  And I can never argue with a scientist who says that photons can be greased up.

And while Bockstaller says the invisible materials have use in the “aerospace and cosmetics industry” I think what he means by this is UFOs and cyberpunk urban camouflage cloaks.  Or some kind of new and totally revolutionary Apple product that is packed to the gills with DRM and costs more than your mother’s hip surgery.

Secretive and teaser-y article here at Scientific Blogging.

I don’t have cable TV, so I haven’t yet had a chance to watch the new Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, but Quagmire is a watcher and a fan.  He points us towards a particularly well-written article by Entertainment Weekly’s Whitney Pastorek.  Equal parts re-cap to review, Quagmire delightfully reports that Ms. Pastorek is spot-on.

(A cleaner flash version of this video is available here at Virgin Galactic’s website.)

I am having a hard time articulating the intensity of feeling I have while watching this video. I don’t have a lot of allegiances in this dimension; governments are corrupt, the gods have all gone missing and everything left is subject to entropy. But something happens to me when I see Sir Richard Branson or his enterprise Virgin Galactic: I become devotional. There’s no mindlessness to it, no guru-deception or blinding corporate candyfloss. The epiphany hit me like a surprise sneeze: Branson is in my karass. I don’t know exactly what we are doing, or why, but I know that we’re in it together.

There was a time when serious books were allowed ostentatious names, and those days are long buried under the castoff knickers of the Pussycat Dolls.  Books like this one:

I have not yet read it, but I am looking forward to the dreadful looming horror of the plastic-eaters.  Kit Pedler was a science adviser for Dr. Who, and later was partially responsible for the BBC science fiction series Doomwatch.  From what I read, “The Plastic Eaters” was the pilot episode for Doomwatch, the plot of which this novel is based.  I will keep you all updated to the delights of Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters.