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Doctor Who
I have never been a fan of Doctor Who. I never really understood the attraction it held for a surprising number of my friends. I have been reading science fiction (and science) since I was in primary school, but the kind of story I always enjoyed the most was one where the writer played with ideas to alter our perception so that we saw old things in new ways. The other kind of SF I enjoy is where stories convey an important message.
I haven't watched a lot of Dr Who, so I can't speak with any great expertise, but the old series of Dr Who seemed to be about reinforcing prejudices (e.g. ugly = bad), cult of personality (superior stranger comes and saves us), and a simple storyline (inscrutable, melodramatic, psychopathic, bad guys come to destroy or enslave).
Friends brought the third season on DVD and I watched it over the last few days and was pleasantly surprised at the level of improvement. It is still very much about hero worship and inscrutable, psychopathic, bad guys out to destroy, but there are now extra levels to the stories. My favorite so far is "Blink" -- a brilliant, twisting, turning piece of horror. It hardly features the Doctor at all and is mostly about a very well-written young girl (played very believably by Carey Mulligan) and her relationships with those around her as she struggles to understand a dangerous puzzle. Another surprisingly good episode (well, until the bad guys showed up) was the double episode "Human Nature/Family of Blood" in which the Doctor becomes a normal human and gives David Tennant a chance to show that he is capable of some excellent acting when he isn't bound to the overblown Doctor character. In Gridlock there isn't a conventional bad guy, some of the makeup is just beautiful, and the justification for the dangerous situation is simple, but elegant. "42" was a nice concept for a story too. Some of the supporting cast were very good, particularly Michelle Collins who played McDonnall superbly.
So, I'll be on the look out for the earlier episodes of the new series Doctor Who. I'm particularly interested in stories written by Steven Moffat, the guy who wrote "Blink". He also wrote the two-part "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" (season 1) and "The Girl in the Fireplace" (season 2).
I haven't watched a lot of Dr Who, so I can't speak with any great expertise, but the old series of Dr Who seemed to be about reinforcing prejudices (e.g. ugly = bad), cult of personality (superior stranger comes and saves us), and a simple storyline (inscrutable, melodramatic, psychopathic, bad guys come to destroy or enslave).
Friends brought the third season on DVD and I watched it over the last few days and was pleasantly surprised at the level of improvement. It is still very much about hero worship and inscrutable, psychopathic, bad guys out to destroy, but there are now extra levels to the stories. My favorite so far is "Blink" -- a brilliant, twisting, turning piece of horror. It hardly features the Doctor at all and is mostly about a very well-written young girl (played very believably by Carey Mulligan) and her relationships with those around her as she struggles to understand a dangerous puzzle. Another surprisingly good episode (well, until the bad guys showed up) was the double episode "Human Nature/Family of Blood" in which the Doctor becomes a normal human and gives David Tennant a chance to show that he is capable of some excellent acting when he isn't bound to the overblown Doctor character. In Gridlock there isn't a conventional bad guy, some of the makeup is just beautiful, and the justification for the dangerous situation is simple, but elegant. "42" was a nice concept for a story too. Some of the supporting cast were very good, particularly Michelle Collins who played McDonnall superbly.
So, I'll be on the look out for the earlier episodes of the new series Doctor Who. I'm particularly interested in stories written by Steven Moffat, the guy who wrote "Blink". He also wrote the two-part "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances" (season 1) and "The Girl in the Fireplace" (season 2).
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Hey, I have a Silicon Graphics machine -- since you're interested in VR, just thought I should mention ;)
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SGI were the market leader in 3D till some Microsoft marketroid persuaded them to fire their 3D staff and change their systems over to WindowsNT.
My favorite VRML viewer is still CosmoPlayer which was originally made by Silicon Graphics almost a decade ago. It is a brilliant piece of human-computer interfacing.
SGI gave us OpenGL -- exquisite, yet showing its age a bit now.
You might be interested in the downloadable book:
OpenGL on Silicon Graphics Systems (http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/tpl/cgi-bin/download.cgi?coll=linux&db=bks&docnumber=007-2392-003) If you have difficulty downloading it let me know and I'll send it to you.
Of course the OpenGL site is great too.
http://opengl.org/
And the Red Book and Blue Book. Both are freely downloadable, and can be bought on paper. I have them both on paper, but prefer the electronic versions.
http://www.rush3d.com/reference/opengl-redbook-1.1/
http://www.rush3d.com/reference/opengl-bluebook-1.0/
Again, if you want easier to use electronic versions let me know. I've spent quite a lot of time reformatting them and making them easier to use in html instead of horrible pdf.
The NeHe tutorials http://nehe.gamedev.net/ are very useful too, though I hate their formatting on the net. I've spent ages reformatting local copies to make them much more usable.
Also the two books Linux 3D Graphics Programming and Advanced Linux 3D Graphics Programming by Norman Lin are amazing sources of info on using OpenGL on Linux (and doubtless BSD).
http://nlin.g0dsoft.com/book.shtml
I bought the books. They have CDs with them containing a lot of resources. It would be great to have electronic copies of these books. I'm only part way through reading the first one.
:) There ya go. Some holiday reading for ya. :)
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You can get old sgi machines off ebay these days. :)
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I've been thinking a lot about computer architecture lately, both software and hardware. I can't help thinking we have been moving in the wrong direction. SGI, Amiga, Archimedes, etc seemed to be something of a high point in computing. We have faster processors, faster video cards, faster comms, and bigger storage, but our machines, by and large don't do stuff much faster (Windows or Linux running on a 1GHz machine is not much faster than an Amiga on a 30MHz processor). Today I listened to renowned technologist Nicholas Negroponte say more or less the same thing. Our faster machines simply stumble under the weight of our slow OSes.
I wish it wasn't true, but older machines still have great advantages.
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Some of the new series are quite good, but in my opinion, nothing else comes close to it.
And, of course, some of them are quite dreadful. I'd avoid "Daleks In Manhattan" if I were you, and the last episode in Season 3 is not a shining light...
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I'd agree about "Daleks in Manhattan", but I kept wondering why. I like to watch shows that are pure corn and wonder what it is that makes them "bad"... it is a bit of an obsession with me. Sometimes it is surprisingly hard to pin down exactly why some things don't work. In "Daleks in Manhattan" I think it is a combination. The converting humans into work-drones might have worked if they weren't pig people. The Doctors inviting the Daleks to blast him in the park is just plain unbelievable. A human being joined with a Dalek genetically is plain stupid, but if that is an ambitious and fairly heartless person who then becomes compassionate after the merger it requires a convincing explanation or else it just looks silly. I become annoyed when chromosomes and evolution are used for hand-waving obfuscation because the author doesn't understand them and simply expects that everyone else has their low level of science knowledge.
All that said, there are a number of nice aspects of the story, like the budding love relationship being tragically broken, the comparison between how opposite are the reactions of two war veterans (the black guy who was the leader in the park, and the ambitious white guy who ends up hybridising with a dalek). So why does the episode not work better? A lot of people spent a lot of time and effort on it, but still it falls short. That is humbling.
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You're absolutely right.
Let me join you
I came up with a felicitous simile that you're welcome to use if you're willing to lose the last of your friends, too:
"As dead as Jesus." Worm food. Shriveled up and mummified.
"As dead as Jesus."
Hope you don't mind a soon-to-be pariah like me loving your new NaNoWriMo thing.
Re: Let me join you
Isn't it interesting that such a line would have shock value -- more so in USA than here in Australia, I suspect. "As dead as Jesus" is quite literally true, so why would it elicit any more than a nod? It tells a lot about the current problems in our society.
I was listening to a brilliant talk by Sam Harris again recently:
http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail785.html
In which he discusses the fact that we can openly say that it's stupid to believe in the Ancient Greek gods, but it has somehow become impolite to say that about the icons of current religions, even though the lack of reason for belief in either is exactly the same.
My favorite example is where he talks about a hypothetical person believing a diamond the size of a refrigerator is buried in his back yard. They go out into the back yard with the family each sunday and dig in joyous anticipation. The clincher is when he points out how absurd it is when the person says digging for the diamond gives his life meaning, and that he wouldn't want to live in a universe where there wasn't a giant diamond buried in his back yard.
I like the statement, spoken to a religious person, that I'm an atheist, just like they are -- I just disbelieve in one more god than they do.
I'm glad that you like Selena City.
I must finish the last 2 chapters. Eeek!
I'm heading over to New Zealand next week to see my old girlfriend for a few weeks. Maybe I can get some writing done there.
When I'm finished writing, of course then I have to set about rewriting it. Bleagh! Don't know if I'll get that done soon. Hoping to start up a business with my sister this year.