25 February 2024

A Little Tipsy

Let me start by admitting that I am by no means an expert on aerospace engineering and could most certainly not land anything on the moon or Mars or anywhere else in our solar system. I don't think I ever even succeeded at that egg drop challenge everyone did in elementary school (not even sure I participated). The point is that my opinion on the Odysseus Lander is only that, one of 10,000 opinions by someone with no expertise on the subject. 

Remember that email chain letter from a few years ago about how the booster rockets on the space shuttle are based on the width of a horse's ass? It's got to do with train tracks being based on old wagon trails, which in turn owe their dimensions to Roman chariots, and you see where this is going. The credibility of the story is debatable, but the point is that for anything we construct, eventually some part of the process is going to be arbitrary or born of a necessity that's no longer a problem to overcome. 

I was thinking about this when I saw the Odysseus lander. I wondered if it had to be designed the way it is to properly fit in the payload space of the rocket, hence it effectively being taller than it is wide. 

From what I can find, the Falcon 9 rocket is about 3.66m (12 feet) wide. I don't know what that is in horse asses, but let's leave that rabbit hole be. I don't feel like researching what other landing craft it housed or exactly how much of that diameter is usable cargo space and not insulation or whatever else it takes to get that phone booth into space. All I want to know is why it was designed that way when so many other craft understand the importance of placing your center of gravity as low as possible. 


This is the Philae Lander, part of the Rosetta mission to Comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko back in 2014 (launched in 2004, by the way)It had a rough landing of its own. One missed harpoon and a failed thruster caused it to bounce twice before finally landing and resuming its mission. You'll notice it only has 3 legs and is overall fairly low to the ground.


This is the Viking lander. It landed on Mars in 1976. It also only has 3 legs and is overall wider than it is tall. Are you noticing a pattern yet?

The Odysseus lander has six legs, but according to reports, one leg may have snapped, sending it on its side and possibly leaning against a rock. I don't want to diminish their accomplishment, but ignoring decades of sensible design doesn't endear me to their cause.


This is a tensegrity robot, designed by the Creative Machines Lab out of New York City. It uses tensioning rods to maintain its shape and can even roll by telescoping and expanding its legs in a sequence. Theoretically, a science payload could be suspended in the center of this "skeletal ball" and with no obvious up or down could land in any orientation and be able to correct itself. Also, depending on where we drop it, it may not even need a chute or booster to slow it down. As stated, though, this is all theoretical as only various field tests have been conducted to prove the concept of rolling as a viable means of locomotion on uneven terrain. 

It makes me wonder if Intuitive Machines, creators of the Odysseus lander, maybe had to answer to some higher-ups who weren't too keen on any unproven technologies, instead opting for something that at least resembled a more conventional design. 

23 January 2024

The Death of Drafts

Something I need to get in the habit of is using Evernote to write my rough drafts before bringing them into Blogger, rather than my usual method of writing into Blogger directly. The interface is fine when I need to insert things like links or videos, but as far as the core activity of writing the entry, it's not always as smooth and pleasant a user experience as it should be. I feel the same way about WordPress, though to a lesser degree because the block system it uses is relatively intuitive. Blogger is too much like a word processor; it's very much about the WYSIWYG philosophy.

To better illustrate what I mean, we have to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey. A lot of people don't understand the relationship between the movie and the book, specifically which came first. Technically, the book was written first, but it was meant to serve as something of a wiki for the screenplay. As Arthur C. Clarke put it, "Before you can make a movie, you need a script. Before you write a script, you need a story." Screenplays, by their very nature, aren't really meant for embellishing details or offering backstory to a spotlighted item. There's an unwritten rule in screenwriting of no paragraph of more than 3 lines. They're designed to be concise and quick to read, each page amounting to roughly one minute of screen time. Novels can play with time and structure in ways screenplays can't, hence why some novels are deemed "unfilmable."

There's another rule about screenplays, that the first version of your screenplay submitted is always your first draft, no matter how many rewrites it went through up until that point. When I was in school, we made these things called rough drafts. They were handwritten on paper, and your teacher would eventually hand it back to you with red marks all over it, pointing out every little mistake you made (sometimes with helpful suggestions on what to do next). You would then completely start over and write out another paper taking the edits to heart. I'm sure this is still technically done, only with digital files instead of sheets of notebook paper. My point is that word processing created a convenience in terms of editing your written work. Some writers forgo "drafts" altogether and edit as they go along, never even bothering with the "version history" feature some word processors and notetaking applications provide. There's no more starting over, barring any serious fundamental hiccup like finding out a source is inaccurate or an entire premise is off the mark. It's overall a more nebulous process. You can still number your drafts, but those can be reserved for page one rewrites rather than little typos or moving a sentence from the end of a paragraph to the start of one. 

This concludes the experiment. Draft was successfully transferred from Evernote to Blogger

13 January 2024

I Am The Alphabet And The Omega

Google has declared my site unfit for advertising. I imagine it's due to a low level of traffic. I'm far from an influencer, and if I had to guess, my WordPress blog probably gets more views than anything I've written here in the past year.

And that's fine. 

The upshot to all of this is it means there are no ads on my site, which is how it should be. Contrast this with YouTube, where a channel can be demonetized, but still have ads all over it. The channel in question simply does not get the money. Maybe that's how it should be, though. After all, what advertisers were most afraid of when it came to YouTube was their money going to content creators who they disagreed with or otherwise didn't want to be associated with. The platform still got the support it needed, and users were free to share what they wanted to (within reason). 

Of course, I'm sure Blogger takes a lot fewer resource to maintain than a data hog like YouTube, so Google didn't have much of a choice when it came to their "advertiser friendly" policies. It's what makes Elon Musk's recent middle finger to advertisers so frustrating. He's both right and wrong for more or less the same reason. Businesses have a right to decide who they will and won't do business with, just as consumers have a choice with where they spend their money. That's called the free market. However, just like George Carlin said about the American Dream, you have to be asleep to believe it. Right now, big businesses hold more power than they deserve and the average consumer is in no position to do anything to their bottom line and therefore effect change in an unfair market. 

When consumers boycott, it takes a town, so to speak. When businesses boycott, it's usually a handful of guys in suits sitting around a table, never mind the hundreds or thousands of employees who may feel otherwise. This is the fundamental flaw with voting with your wallet, something I used to advocate for quite vehemently. When people vote, it's one vote per person. When dollars vote... well, they can't actually vote. The people holding the dollars do. As Douglas Adams said, "On the whole, it was not the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy." 

As for Blogger, I intend to stay; monetization wasn't the goal... not really, anyway. I've been comparing WordPress with Blogger for a few weeks now as the former keeps sending discount codes my way. Blogger technically offers a lot while asking for "nothing" (besides your data) in return. The only real paid feature on Blogger is registering a domain name. WordPress, meanwhile, offers a more streamlined user experience, but only if you play their paywall game. Automattic is not Alphabet; they can't afford to give WordPress away for free. They want money, not data. 

As of now, WordPress is my after show for Blogger. Anything I don't feel like posting here usually ends up over there. At most, WordPress is my back up if Google decides they don't like keeping Blogger around. It wouldn't be the first time I've had to migrate from a blogging service, and if the Muskrat's acquisition of Twitter has affirmed anything for me, it's that no platform is permanent. 

01 January 2024

Lowest Resolution

Roughly this time last year, I gave myself a project with a year's deadline. I thought it was enough time, only for it to fall by the wayside because of life happenings and a host of other factors. 

I was going to program a rock, paper, scissors game, start to finish and from the ground up. I didn't think a year's deadline would be too onerous. I looked into some programming courses and tried a few small projects, as I've done in the past. Unfortunately, nothing quite worked out. The same problem I always have when I learn to program came up again. There's this method in the way coding is taught where it always feels like there's a step missing. The best analogy I can think of is learning an alphabet, then being asked to write a paragraph. 

At one point, I made a second Twitter account just to chronicle my journey into learning to code. Now, that's sitting abandoned along with my primary X account as I've migrated over to places like Threads, Post, and even Bluesky

I'm mad at myself, but I suppose I should have expected it. I need a new approach, but I have no idea what that could be. Most coding schools I've seen advertised are brick and mortar campuses, cost a lot of money, and are nowhere near me, so I'd have to move to New York for 3 months, which I am in no position to do. I was hoping my local college literally down the road from me offered coding courses, but strangely that's notably absent from their curriculum. 

I suppose I could simply make the same resolution this year and see how far that goes, make a full-fledged application, from the basic, under the bonnet coding all the way up to the graphical assets and... any other technical jargon I'm forgetting. Essentially, I want something to put on a resume or in a portfolio. 

Happy 2024, everyone. Hopefully you have better luck with your resolutions this year than I did with mine last year. 

31 December 2023

Quoth the Elephant, Evernote

Something I forgot to bring up in my last entry about Amazon Prime was a little addendum about how Evernote is increasing its price by nearly twofold. It's gone from around 70 per year to 130. I was a little stunned by this. It's one thing for Amazon to want 3 extra dollars to take away ads on their streaming service, but this is a pretty big fundamental shift in the business model. I don't pretend to know all the goings-on at Evernote, but they do promise some major upgrades to the newer versions of their application. Most of these had to do with AI, which made me roll my eyes a bit. To be fair to them, they also offered better synchronization among devices, which is definitely something I've felt has been lacking. There was a glitch for some time with the scratch pad where it would "double" itself when I went from typing it out on the desktop to checking it on my phone. Rather than simply double post whatever I'd written, it would insert the copy in the middle of the text, which made copy and paste rather tedious. 

So, I'd write out what I wanted to say in the scratch pad on the desktop versi So, I'd write out what I wanted to say in the scratch pad on the desktop version, and then when I'd check it on my iPhone to copy and paste into something like Threads... on, and then when I'd check it on my iPhone to copy and paste into something like Threads... 

Irksome, isn't it? In any case, despite the sticker shock, keeping Evernote running is kind of a no-brainer. I've been using the application for years, though most of that time was in using the free version, and I still use it virtually everyday. It's where I keep track of my medications, probably the longest journal I've ever kept outside of Blogger. It's also my address book for when I send out my holiday cards. The point is I don't mind this increase. I just hope the synchronization is all it's cracked up to be. 

30 December 2023

A Prime Example

In the interest of full disclosure, I am an Amazon slave. I've been a Prime Member for years, I have several Alexa smart speakers, I use Subscribe & Save, I use Kindle and Audible, and I even watch Prime Video (mostly for the Grand Tour or anything the old Top Gear crew is attached to). I know the company is evil, they treat their workers (especially their drivers) like garbage, their returns are a joke, and Jeff Bezos is dumping tons of methane into the atmosphere with his phallus rockets, to say nothing of that stupid yacht he tried to have a bridge disassembled over. 

Yet... I'm still paying. I can only offer so much in my defense. There's still plenty of small and local businesses I support, and there's certain items that I simply will not buy from Amazon if I can avoid it. If I can get it straight from the manufacturer, I'll go that route (especially if they let me check out with PayPal because that's just as convenient as Amazon). To me, Amazon offers a way to eliminate tedium. I don't have to haul bags of cat food, kitty litter, and sparkling water around in a cart, into my car, out of my car, and into my house. Now, all but that last step has been eliminated. It's one less thing I have to deal with. It's cruise control, not fully autonomous driving, if you follow. The point is if it all went away tomorrow, I'd be only a little bit bummed... for about five minutes, and then I'd move on to something else. 

Is it really an addiction if you're in control of it? 

Anyway, there's still the dilemma of supporting a terrible company, but the awful truth to that matter is that voting with your wallet is kind of a hollow promise. After all, there's no "vote against" just voting for something, and not voting at all. Moreover, if you know anything about how the company is structured, their main money maker is not their retail branch. It's all their web hosting. That's where this gets really scary. I heard once that all of Netflix's servers are owned by Amazon. That may seem like a massive conflict of interest, but it's actually good business. There's a similar sort of relationship between Apple and Samsung. Yes, they're rivals in the smartphone space, but if you were to open up your iPhone, you'd find Samsung's name on more than a few components. In fact, the iPhone camera is actually a Sony component. I find that funny because the camera on my old Xperia phone wasn't all that great, but the little iPhone 5c I got to replace it took damn fine pictures right out of the box. 

I decided to write this entry after receiving an email from Amazon that some of you may have read yourselves or at least heard about on social media. Ads are coming to Prime Video. Although they insist there will be overall fewer ads than television, it's more than a little disheartening that this is what they resorted to in terms of expanding their market share in the streaming space. 

Rather than create a new, lower-priced, ad-supported tier and bring in new customers, they'd rather punish loyal customers who have been paying for Prime for years (seriously, whatever happened to grandfathering?). Instead, they now offer an ad-free version of Prime for an additional fee. Obviously, this is about Amazon making more money. They chose this strategy because simply raising the rates would have deterred many from renewing, so they decide to raise the proverbial temperature of the pot of water instead of dunking us in straight away. As I said, I think they could have done more to draw in new customers than try to tiptoe around existing ones. 

As for what I'm going to do about it... very little. Ironically, most of what I've been watching on Prime Video of late has been through their subsidiary FreeVee, which is ad-supported anyway. There's also that practice of advertising their other shows before the ones I'm already watching. It's frustrating that this is happening, but I'm more mad at myself for not being more bothered. I feel like I should be cancelling my Prime membership as a statement, but I know it's not going to change anything and despite what I said about what I'd do if this all went away, I don't want to be the one to pull the plug. Given the scale, it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. Then again, we're also living in a time when a comedy about Wile E. Coyote suing Acme was brought back from a fate worse than death for media

Maybe we're reaching a point where it's more than just the bottom line that a business can pay attention to. Yes, Coyote Vs. Acme got a big boost from a number of meetings being canceled, as well as the potential threat of Capitol Hill getting involved (one congressman compared the move to committing arson and insurance fraud), but it's still notable how much of a public outcry got heard. Hell, remember when the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie got delayed because of backlash against the early trailer? No calls for boycotts there, just plain, "Dear God, what is that thing!?" from a few thousand voices on Twitter. Yes, there was still a bottom line ultimately being threatened, but we didn't have to wait until opening weekend for the change to occur. 

24 December 2023

I'm The Type to Block Things Out

I realized I've been lying to myself the past few months. I've been writing a lot about my keyboard of choice and my potential efforts to preserve the typing experience by buying a backup (made difficult by it being constantly out of stock at Logitech). What I haven't been very honest about is my alleged love affair with the sound and feel of the keys. 

I'm wearing headphones right now. 

There's even a dark ambient mix playing in a YouTube tab as we speak. It hasn't completely blocked out the G413 Carbon's Romer G tactile switches, but it has taken the edge off of them. I'm reminded of something Sir Alec Guinness once said about writing, how amateurs will go in full of enthusiasm only to get bogged down. The idea of a clicky, tactile keyboard always seems delightful... for about five or ten minutes, then you've got to get some real work done. 

There is an upside to this. As being clicky goes, the switches in this keyboard are something of a worst offender. Logitech's site has a comparison of the various key switches, including those in the G413's. Put simply, you can do a lot better for not very much in the realm of pricing. 

Speaking of blocking things out, I've learned something about WordPress that I feel rather embarrassed about. I had thought for the longest time that embedding videos was behind a paywall. In a way, it kind of is, but not to the extent I'd previously thought. If you want to upload a video file directly to the entry you're writing, that requires a plan. If, however, you're simply embedding a video from YouTube or Vimeo, there's a block for that. Maybe it's a newish feature, but I wasn't aware of it until a few days ago when I was trying to see what I could do with my current WordPress theme. It's not bad, but I'm not sure I like the way it's structured. It was chosen because it closely resembled the one I use for Blogger. You've got your main body of text, next to which is a sidebar with a few widgets and an index of all previous entries. My Wordpress theme is technically set up the same way, only there's a wall in front of it, so to speak. Instead of showing you the most recent entry in full and with the sidebar and widgets fully visible, it shows you a "highlight" reel of sorts. You see excerpts of the entries in chronological order, but with no sidebar and widgets. You have to click on an entry in order to get to a place that's closer to what I've got going here on Blogger. I don't know if there's a way to restructure that, but it's only really a minor annoyance. 

Speaking of mild annoyances, there's one thing I think WordPress does better than Blogger, and that's inserting images. Here, it's kind of a hassle to upload (I had quite a time with an entry from some months ago about old videogames) and once you've inserted it, it's another struggle to get it to fit in with what you're already writing. on WordPress, everything is separated into blocks. I don't have to worry about infringing on the caption of the photo I've uploaded. I don't have to worry about empty space above or below the image. I don't have to readjust the alignment of the text. Best of all, I don't have to adjust the size of the image based on some arbitrary "small, medium, large, or original" selection like I do here. It justifies it to the width of the text column. 

None of this means I'll be leaving Blogger for WordPress. There's still plenty of things I don't like about the latter. It also wouldn't feel right to simply migrate this site over there. Granted, it's not like I've built up some large, loyal following that I'd have to impose upon. I'm sure I have a few regulars and a few curious passers-by. Of course, when comparing WordPress and Blogger, one must consider who's footing the bills. Blogger is owned by Google, after all, and they don't have much vested interest in upgrading or overhauling it. In fact, I'm convinced the only reason they keep it around is it doesn't cost them very much to keep the servers running and it would probably be a small headache in and of itself to shut it all down. WordPress doesn't have such a sugar daddy. Automattic isn't the tech giant like Google is. It's not even close. Sure, a number of websites are powered by WordPress, but that still doesn't translate to the kind of figures that Google deals in. 

That's the dynamic. Blogger is a little clunky and outdated, but it's more or less completely free and full-featured for it (there are some paid features, but you've really got to dig for them). WordPress is a far smoother and more straightforward user experience (theme customization notwithstanding), but they try to nickel and dime you every step of the way. It's a little like with my keyboard; it's familiar, but clunky and not entirely pleasant. Other keyboards are more expensive, but they offer a smoother and more engaging typing experience. 

02 December 2023

Not My Carbon

Logitech lied to me. I asked to be put on a waiting list to be notified when the G413 Carbon is back in stock. I recently received the notification and was all set to buy up my backup. When I clicked the link, however, I found it was only the G413 silver version. Similarly, they've made another G413 called the SE, which splits the difference between the silver and the Carbon in the worst possible way. 

The silver is the same keyboard as the Carbon under the bonnet, only with an aluminum faceplate and white backlighting. By no means an ugly keyboard, just not what I'm looking for. Also, I refuse to believe more people prefer white-lit keys to red. 
The SE is black like the Carbon, but uses white backlighting. There's also a TKL version that's still white-lit. As I said, I can't believe some people would prefer white to red when it comes to ambient lighting on their desktops. 
I only wish I could turn the LEDs on the Mac mini and SpaceMouse red. Guess I'm going for that 8BitDo keyboard sooner rather than later. That's not backlit at all, nor is there a number pad, but it will give my setup more of a vintage vibe rather than a Batmobile interior sort of look. I'll consider that a fair trade. 

I've never participated in NaNoWriMo. At least not in any official capacity. Frankly, the workload terrifies me. I once used it as a jumping off point for a shorter novella project I wrote some years ago from October until around mid December. It was released as an eBook for the exorbitant price of a whole dollar. I later made it free and even posted the first chapter to my DeviantART. It's probably aged far better than anything else I've written, though I'm sure if I took a good, long look at it, I'd end up sitting down and rewriting it from page one. 

There is another story of mine I thought of a few weeks ago that I might want to take another swing at. It was about someone checking themselves into triage by way of a robotic receptionist. It didn't have much meat on it in narrative terms, a quick jab at the bureaucracy of the healthcare system, the dehumanization of automation, and a cozy, wholesome interaction between a nurse and a patient. Now, years later, I want to make it a horror story, the robot now going haywire and posing a threat to everyone in the wing. I doubt I'll go through with it. My days of writing about monsters tearing people apart left me in around the end of middle school. We were learning a writing technique called "sensory imagery" which is best described as "Tell, don't show." Being the age I was, this meant an awful lot of gore and bizarre creature designs. 

Although November is now 2 days behind us, I do hope some of you consider continuing work on whatever writing projects you were thinking about during National Novel Writers' Month, even if it's only al sort of catch-and-release approach and it never moves far beyond a file on your desktop. 

26 November 2023

A Gigabyte of RAM Should Do the Trick

I am forever fascinated by the craft of writing. I always have been. Even merely looking at photos of old typewriters is inspiring to me. I read that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a Hermes portable typewriter. In his words, it's "the kind of thing Hemingway would have used in the field." By contrast, I heard an interview with Robert Ludlum where he explained that he used to type out his books, but resorted to writing on legal pads to hand off to a typist because he didn't want anything between him and his work. 

Here's a fun fact about typography. Once upon a time, it was customary to follow each period with two spaces. The reason for this has to do with typewriters not always striking the ribbon properly, potentially making a comma look like a full stop. The extra space is supposed to signal to the reader that the mark they've just read is in fact a period and not a comma. Nowadays, with the state of word processing being what it is, this is unnecessary. Now we've adopted this behavior in texting where ending a sentence with a period is seen as cold and unfeeling. Meanwhile, leaving the sentence hanging, so to speak, is taken as warm and inviting, encouraging the conversation to continue. 

As for my weapon of choice, I'm using a Logitech G413 Carbon mechanical keyboard hooked up to an Intel-based Mac mini with a mere 8 gigabytes of RAM. I don't know remember how big the hard drive is, maybe 256 gigabytes, but the most data intensive thing I even do on the Mac is SketchUp, and I haven't opened that program more than a half-dozen times since my job finally agreed to reimburse me for using it out of pocket all these years. I think the largest file I've ever created in SketchUp was about 20 megabytes, and that was because it used a custom texture I painted in Procreate on my iPad. Speaking of my iPad, keyboards are the primary reason I don't ever want a laptop again. I utterly despise their keyboards. They just don't feel right and they hurt my fingers after a while. It doesn't help that many are also exceedingly fragile, a problem I seem to recall Apple having with one of its MacBooks. I have a portable, bluetooth keyboard for my iPad I sometimes take with me when I go out. It has a kind of low-profile version of a mechanical switch. It marries the solid, tactile feedback of a mechanical keyboard while also keeping a low profile in terms of its ergonomics. It's still no match for my G413, but it does well enough on its own. I have considered upgrading to something a little closer to my G413 in a portable package, but that may end up having to wait. Besides, I've written at length about it in a previous entry, so I'll try not repeating myself here. 

Really, I simply felt like typing something today. I wrote up a long Wordpress article a few days earlier, but there was a fair bit of copy and pasting there. For as long as it ended up being, I was able to write it up fairly quickly, since most of the counterpoints I was offering to the diatribe it was dissecting were old hat. It was practically instinctual, like when your predictive text is making all the right suggestions because its well-worn territory for your earlier discourses. 

It does give me quite a charge when I get into a good groove and can almost space out a little while I'm writing. The only issue is I tend to make a lot of mistakes. Auto-correct catches most of them, but it always makes me feel a little guilty when I lean on it too much. Once upon a time, unless you shelled out for some especially fancy typewriter, your options were limited in the backspace department. Your speed suffered, but your accuracy went up, and vice versa. Makes me wish there was still a good typing game out there I could drop into and hone my craft with. That one typing game I was eyeing some time ago has been delisted from the App Store, and Facebook games aren't exactly a thing anymore. I mean, they exist, but it's a very different landscape than when I played Bejeweled or something like that. It's more cluttered and overall has less variety than it appears. It's over-saturated and spread too thin is what's wrong with it. Searching for "typing" returns zero results. It's a shame, really.

Maybe it's all this internet discourse that's reduced our need for typing games. Now, we have keyboard warriors training themselves via online spats over various socio-political discussions and hot takes gone awry. I'm sure the rising of mobile platforms hasn't helped things much, either. More people interact using their smartphones than laptops or especially desktops, where that's more the realm of online gaming, MMO's and shooters and such. 

My Mac isn't exactly a gaming machine, but that's not why I got it. I needed something for SketchUp and Inkscape. It's more than adequate for that, though I'm wondering more recently if it's worth getting an upgraded Mac mini or simply going in whole hog on a new iPad. I wouldn't be able to bring my G413 with me, but I'd still have plenty of options for keyboards. The fact is I don't use Inkscape that much here as Affinity Designer is a very good vector drawing program. As for SketchUp, like I said, I don't use it very much at this point for my artwork. Of course, I'm making it sound like this is all going to be a decision I have to make soon. My Mac is holding up beautifully and my keyboard is great. I may get a new monitor, such as an ultra wide so I can have reference images off to the side while I work in Affinity Designer. 

Ideally, my monitor would be some kind of split-level affair, a normal-sized monitor up top for most conventional tasks, and a small, narrow, lower-res one just below it, about where I'd be looking at a sheet of paper in a typewriter. There are some "cyber deck" projects out there that are close to what I'm looking for, but I don't have the patience for such a project. I feel I would get too absorbed in the process and lose sight of the end goal. It would be the Ferrari Cameron's dad wipes down with a cloth diaper in his glass house. 

My keyboard at work is wearing down, certain letters completely worn away revealing the colored backlight. It certainly doesn't get used to anywhere near the extent as this one, but it isn't exactly a high end model anyway. There isn't any noticeable wear on the G413, not even a fuzzy edge on any of the letters. I think it's due to how the keycaps are made. Logitech recently got more back in stock, according to an e-mail alert I got some time ago. Maybe it's time to buy that backup I mentioned in a previous entry. 

My roommate is upset that she doesn't know what to get me for Christmas. My answer is always nothing, which flusters her. Maybe I'll move that one keyboard I added to my wishlist up a few tiers and start dropping some hints her way. 

If you made it this far, thank you for joining me on this little typing session/stream of consciousness. 

22 October 2023

Batflash: a 90's Shared Universe?

 Unpopular opinion time.... 

I actually kind of like The Flash movie. Don't get me wrong, it is a bit of a mess, but it's nowhere near the mess that is the original Suicide Squad. As the DC movies go, I do feel it's one of the stronger entries. It took some legitimately creative risks. Whether or not those risks paid off is up to you. For my money, it hit more than it missed, but there is something about it that's been bugging me for some time. 

Why exactly is Batman the one to explain the time travel problem Flash created? 

Backing up, if you haven't seen the film, here's the fastest rundown/summary you will ever need. Flash (real name Barry Allen, portrayed by Ezra Miller) uses his speed to go back in time to undo a personal tragedy to make a better future for himself, his friends, and his family. However, instead of merely changing the future, he changes the past as well. This is known as retrocausality. 

While the movie's explanation of this phenomenon is adequate, I prefer the explanation offered in the animated film Flashpoint Paradox (itself based on a similarly named crossover event in the comics). The briefest rundown of that is as follows: When a speedster uses their power to travel in time, they're essentially outrunning time itself. Going faster than time creates the temporal equivalent of a sonic boom. 

In the film, what Barry creates in his time travel endeavor is a kind of mash-up universe, bits and pieces of alternate timelines playing mix and match into some sort of cohesive whole. In this case, it's comprised primarily of the Batman from the 1989 Tim Burton film and a minor variation of the plot from Man of Steel, namely General Zod's invasion of earth. Other details include Eric Stoltz playing Marty McFly in Back to the Future instead of Michael J. Fox. However, it's what ISN'T spelled out that makes this crossover interesting. After all, Back to the Future is never mentioned in Batman, so who's to say Eric Stoltz isn't the lead in that film and Michael J. Fox is known only as that kid from Teen Wolf? There's also no mention of Superman (Batman & Robin's throwaway line doesn't count as that was a different actor and director, we're focusing on Batman & Batman Returns). While there's also no mention of the Flash, Bruce Wayne (as portrayed by Michael Keaton) doesn't seem all that surprised by his arrival. Sure, there's a little scuffle between them, but it settles down relatively quickly and, as we've said, Bruce is the one who explains the situation rather than Barry. It's almost as if he expected this. Speaking of the past... 

We haven't forgotten this version of the Flash, have we?

This was a series that ran for one season in 1990, 22 1-hour episodes featuring John Wesley Shipp as Barry Allen. Production began in 1988, but picked up speed (ha) after the success of Tim Burton's Batman the year earlier. My memory of the series is overall positive, if a tad faded with the passage of time. It was a very well-made show, with exceptional production values despite being spread a little thin over 22 episodes. Of particular note is the costume itself, which ran a pretty penny for the time. It was decided that audiences wouldn't accept a spandex bodysuit, even in a modest television outing of a well-regarded superhero. In fact, it was because of Batman that the sculpted rubber suit was accepted as a justifiable expense. After all, it's in every episode. That makes it an investment. 

My point is that, in terms of overall aesthetics, who's to say these two different properties aren't sharing a setting? Who's to say Shipp's Flash and Keaton's Batman haven't met in the time following Batman Returns? Maybe this Flash isn't around anymore because of his own time travel shenanigans. Maybe he's the one who explained retrocausality to Bruce

I'm not pretending this is a perfect solution to what may not even be a problem. In fact, it might even create more problems by bringing another Flash into a film with 3 different Batmen. It could simply be a matter of plot convenience. Perhaps Bruce spent his post-Batman days reading up on Quantum physics. After all, in Flashpoint, it's Flash's nemesis who explains the problems with causality, and since he's not in this new movie, someone else had to take on the role of exposition dump. Like I said, despite some problems with the scene, I think it's one of the best, and Michael Keaton is clearly having fun with every last minute of it. He's still got it.