LEGO FTW

If you're reading this and thinking, should I buy a "Lego Mindstorms kit ?", let me save you the trouble and say yes. Yes you should. Because it's brilliant. Don't bother reading the rest of the post, because that's all you need to know.

I'm a great believer in self-rewarding for significant achievements. Completing my PhD got me a laptop, now 4 years old and still going strong - the second most expensive thing I've ever purchased, but by far and away the best. Publishing my thesis data got me a large glass brick (full of thesis data), which I use in just about every presentation possible. This time I'm celebrating publication of another data set, one which took an inordinately long time.

Lego Mindstorms has always been a case of, "yeah, looks fun, but I don't think I want to spend £200 on Lego." Fortunately, I had a £100 gift voucher from my friends at Arecibo when I left.
"I'll spend it wisely", I said.
"That's a shame, we were hoping you'd spend it foolishly", they said.
That was obviously a far better idea, so that's what I did.

I am not a hardware person. As a child, Meccano was OK, but I didn't have the patience to screw everything together (though for some reason typing in programs on a ZX Spectrum wasn't a problem). Woodwork was just a bit meh. Sewing was tedium itself. As for electronics, circuit diagrams give me a paroxysm of bewilderment while my soldering was the inspiration for the death scene of the T1000 in Terminator 2.

But even I can put Lego together from a kit. Plus I already know how to code in Python (which you can use to control Mindstorms if you're that way inclined, and I am), and the fact the kit comes with the parts for not one but five different robots sealed the deal for me (actually there are now official guides for fifteen !).

Each robot comes with 5 different "missions" which can involve modifying the robot and/or the code to control it. So far I've completed the missions for the most basic robot, the "Tracker". This is a simple tracked robot that demonstrates just about all the major features. It took me about 1-2 hours to construct.

In the box, you get bags and bags of >500 Lego pieces. Sadly there's no plastic container within the box to hold them all, so, having read another review beforehand, I went out and bought some Tupperware boxes. That was extremely sensible, since the raised rims of the lids stop the pieces from falling off when I'm gathering the requisite parts. The parts in each bag were pretty well organised so I kept them in the same system. It's simple to find whichever part I need.

I don't recommend just throwing all the parts in a big bag unless you want to give yourself massive Lego-rage later. Especially since there are a few parts you only get one of. Seriously, no, don't do it. Those boxes were quite a lot more full before the Tracker was built, and there's more in the shoebox.

Apart from the Lego, the box contains the instructions for the most basic robot (with handy parts guide and a ruler), and the cover of the box detaches to form a mission mat (where you can test some of the specially-designed programs). The full manual and instructions for the other robots are available online, unfortunately there's no printed version. But you're going to need to be on a PC to program the robot anyway, so that's not really an issue*. A nice thing about the online guide is that it gives you full 3D, rotatable views of each step of the build process, which can be incredibly helpful when assembling some of the more fiddly bits.

* I think it is possible to program the Lego directly, but I can't imagine why you'd want to.

Batteries aren't included either, so go out and buy a few packs of AA and AAA batteries (requires 6 AA and 2 AAA). You'll also, annoyingly, need a very small crosshead screwdriver to open one of the battery compartments.

The build quality is what you'd expect from Lego - genius. Unlike the cheaper imitations everything fits together pretty easily, but is robust enough to withstand some persuasion, when needed. Things don't fall apart unless you want them to. Assembling the Tracker was about the closest I've felt to being 10 years old again since Jurassic Park was re-released at the cinema. Sheer delight. In about an hour - a very, very happy hour - I had a little tracked robot roving around the house, servo-motors making pleasant whirring sounds.

Next step, add lasers.

The basic idea of Mindstorms is very simple - you have a programmable brick which can take input from different sensors and control different motors accordingly (the brick itself can light up, show simple images on its quaint LCD screen, and make sounds -  "INPUT, STEPHANIE !"). The demo program just makes the robot rotate and move a bit, then stop. Switching it to manual infra-red control was simple and a lot more fun. The robot easily clambers over small obstacles and even quite respectable slopes.
(sometimes the IR stops working and I have to turn the robot off and on again, but I haven't updated the firmware yet)

Things get more interesting with the various missions, which teach you how to program the robot and use the different sensors. Programming is done not by typing out code (that's possible but I haven't tried it yet) but by visually placing different blocks in a sequence. Each block can take input from the sensors (e.g. determine how far away the nearest obstacle is with the infra-red sensor), affect the program itself in some way (e.g., wait for a few seconds, repeat some action), or control a motor.

The instructions on how to create the program blocks were simple, though the interface itself could maybe be a little streamlined. It has a few too many similar buttons that do different things, for example, a + button in one place will start a new project, whereas a + button very close to it will merely start a new program. I'm not really sure what the distinction is for, other than causing confusion when I press the wrong button. However, actually "writing" the programs is very easy indeed - it's an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

The only difficulty I ran into was enabling the Bluetooth connection to the computer. The programmable block can connect via USB, Bluetooth, or wi-fi (but wi-fi requires a USB dongle, not supplied). Unfortunately the USB slot isn't accessible on the assembled robot, so Bluetooth was the only practical option. It wouldn't have been majorly difficult to take the programmable block out, but it would have been irritating - the cables that connect the sensors and motors to the block are long and inflexible, making things a bit awkward.

Anyway, I found the secret was to enable Bluetooth on the block (duh), but not to use the blocks "connections" setting to find the PC. Instead, use the Mindstorms software on the PC to connect to the block. That seemed to do the trick. So now I can press a button on my PC and a little robot will start shooting plastic balls at some miniature rubber tyres. Which is immensely satisfying.

EDIT : After updating the firmware, the only way I can connect via Bluetooth is to make a connection via the Lego brick itself, then turn it off, then connect using the PC software. That's quite annoying as it takes 1-2 minutes to do this. On many (most) designs, disconnecting the brick would be very difficult or even impossible without disassembling the entire robot.

Things got more interesting with the other Tracker missions. The basic model has a spinning blade, while others have a bazooka (shoots plastic balls a few feet), a gripper (very cool, my favourite - robots with hands are just innately more awesome) and a hammer (classic Robot Wars). My favourite mission was with the hammer - the program makes the robot jerk around like it's developed an unfortunate disorder, hammer twitching spasmodically, until you sneak up on it from behind. Then it turns around and gives you a good thump. Wonderful.

All of these accessories connect interchangeably to the "medium motor" (the large motors are used to drive the caterpillar tracks) and demonstrate ingenious ways that rotational motion can be used to do cool things.

As you can see, a rather nice feature is that there are enough parts to build all the accessories separately - you don't have to take apart the bazooka to build the gripper. Sure, it could use a few more spares, but it's hardly lacking.

With the kit you get a touch sensor, a colour sensor, and an IR detector (which can find the distance to nearby objects). It can also, somehow, sense the direction to the IR controller. You can also buy extra sensors online (the manual even mentions that it's designed for use with third-party sensors), like temperature and ultrasound (a Lego sonogram , anyone ?). The output of the sensors was easy to understand in the program builder - it was trivial to make the robot stop when it detected an obstacle, for instance. You can even control the whole thing from a tablet, though I've yet to try that.

The recommended age for this product is 10+. That's just stupid. If I had a ten year old there's no way I'd share it with them. They won't enjoy it on as many levels as I do.

I'd love to tell you more but I think I desperately need to build the six-legged walking robot now.

Review : God's Philosophers

Science in the medieval period was virtually non-existent. The Catholic Church did not take at all kindly to anything that contradicted its rigid, inflexible teachings, and the few people brave enough to speak out were summarily dismissed as heretics and burned at the stake. At least, that's what we're all taught. And that's what many people today would like to believe. But it simply isn't true, says Dr James Hannam, graduate of both Oxford and Cambridge, in his fascinating 2009 book God's Philosophers. You can read the first two chapters of the book for free on his website.

Rather than a detailed review of the style of the book, instead I'll give a short summary of some of the aspects I found more interesting. I'm going to concentrate on the philosophical and moral aspects of the relationship between science and religion; if you want more direct examples of how highly devout medieval Christians contributed to modern science, you should read the book itself.

As far as style goes, suffice to say it's very accessible, with a good balance between science, philosophy and theology. You don't need to be a scientist, philosopher or theologian to understand it. However, to get anything out of the book you'll have to be prepared to surrender many of the impressions of the medieval Church you've probably grown up with. If you're one of those people convinced that only science has led us out of the darkness of religion and into the light of reason, well now's a perfect time to put your money where your mouth is. You're not allowed to extol the virtues of science unless you're prepared to question your own viewpoints - otherwise you ain't no scientist at all, boyo.

Hannam is under no illusions that science (or natural philosophy as it was then) and religion did not sometimes come into direct conflict, and that when push came to shove, the Church had the upper hand. But the extent to which that meant the Church actively suppressed freedom of thought has been vastly exaggerated, and the achievements of medieval theologians (yes, theologians) that were crucial for the breakthroughs of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo - who were all devout Christians - have been unfairly airbrushed from history. It's not an attempt to convert anyone, only to point out the debt modern science owes to medieval Christian thinkers. They not only rediscovered the works of ancient philosophers, but surpassed them.


Theology, Doubt, and Natural Philosophy

As a fervent and unswerving agnostic, the concept I found most interesting from the book was the idea that theology and science were closely linked. Although I was aware that medieval universities existed, I've normally dismissed them as being irrelevant theological schools, producing nothing of any real consequence. This was a huge mistake. Theological training, says Hannam, not only included the study of mathematics and natural philosophy, but was virtually obsessed with logic. The underlying idea, it seems, was that by studying the natural world one could understand God. Natural philosophy was seen as, "the handmaiden of theology" - not perhaps a very flattering label, but completely at odds with the (mis)conception that science and the Church were mutually exclusive.

The obsession with logic produced some genuinely very interesting consequences. Could God create a weight so heavy he couldn't lift it ? No, said the theologians - that would be a logical contradiction, and even God isn't that omnipotent. Moreover, not even the most devout scholar (and remember that these people were members of the Church) believed in the literal truth of the entire Bible. They couldn't, because that is simply impossible. If you took the Biblical phrase, "four corners of the Earth" literally, you'd believe it was flat*. The idea of interpreting the scriptures figuratively goes at least as far back as St (emphasis : Saint) Augustine, 354 - 430 AD.

* Which they didn't, even by 1000 AD - this is a more recent myth about medieval scholarship. Other examples included various passages which state that the Earth does not move, the interpretation being here that it meant "from the perspective of someone standing on the Earth".

In a somewhat roundabout and almost perverse way, the Church actually encouraged freedom of thought. While initially the teachings of Aristotle were almost treated as Gospel, the omnipotence of God would allow him to create anything he liked (so long as it wasn't a logical contradiction). So it was perfectly fine to contemplate vacuums (which Aristotle didn't believe in) since, even though they might not exist naturally, God could potentially create one if he wanted. By today's ideologies this is a truly bizarre way of overcoming difficulties with mainstream theories, but it was certainly better than assuming the ancients had already got natural philosophy licked - most of Aristotle's ideas were complete gibberish. His prestige kept his ramblings at the forefront of scientific theory long after they should have been rejected, but medieval inquiry was (albeit very, very slowly) able to come up with better ideas.

Interestingly, God's ability to do as he pleased in no way hindered investigations into the workings of the natural world. God was seen as the primary cause of all things, but he usually operated by invoking secondary, natural causes that proceeded to operate with strict rules. Moreover, if God didn't like what you were up to, he was free to cause a miracle to stop it. If you were sick, you could try using magical remedies to get better, but if God wanted you to be sick, then sick you would damn well stay*.

* At least one popular image of the medieval world appears to be entirely correct : doctors were something to be avoided like the... err, plague. Prayer actually did have a much better chance of success - supernatural deities aside, at least priests weren't going to bleed you half to death as a "cure".


The Burden of Proof

When something was found that disproved a statement in the Bible, or a decree by the Church, this was accepted. The flat Earth is one example, the fact that the antipodes are inhabited (a notion condemned by the Pope sometime in the 8th century) is another*. When the level of proof was 100% certain - as in finding people living in the antipodes - then even matters of faith had to give way to rational science.

* The Church was, however, quite right that the hot, sweaty tropics are uninhabitable. The fact that people stubbornly continue to live there anyway is beside the point.

A running theme of the book is that (for instance) the image of the Earth being at the center of the Universe was the most rational, logical viewpoint given the evidence available at the time*. Proving the Earth is round is easy; proving it goes round the Sun with only the evidence of your eyes and nothing else is very, very hard. It's extremely difficult to see the world as medieval thinkers would have, though Hannam makes a valiant effort. Of course, we know today that the acceleration of a rotating Earth isn't sufficient that we can all feel ourselves whirling round at tremendous speed, but at the time, that was a logical, sensible reason to reject the notion of a rotating Earth.

* Interestingly, Earth wasn't placed at the center to reflect its importance - quite the opposite. Heaven was the most important place (the medieval Universe believed to be about 90 million miles across), so anything further away from the surface of the Earth was closer to God. Conversely, anything deep in the ground was closer to Hell and therefore worse. We were literally living on the surface of a "Middle Earth", if you like.

Hannam makes the important point that science cannot function where every idea requires absolute, irrefutable proof. For instance, I wasn't around when the Earth started forming, so I cannot proove God didn't do it. But to make any further progress, I must assume (based on other lines of inquiry and well-tested theories) that this is the case, and proceed from there. That is the essence of a scientific principle, something which unfortunately seems to have largely escaped the medieval mind. Having speculative models was fine, as we'll see, but being allowed to assume they were true was quite another. When it came to theorising, religion definitely had the upper hand over natural philosophy. And that caused some very acute unpleasantness when Copernicus's model of the Solar System was found to be much more accurate than the then-mainstream Earth-centered view.


The Limits of Freedom

There were most certainly limits on what ideas the Church would put up with - cross them, and you would indeed meet with a very nasty fate indeed. But those limits were very much larger than I realised.

The Inquisition wasn't a good thing, but don't confuse the Papal and Spanish Inquisitions. The latter (see Toby Green's Inquisition) was a brutal, oppressive system that was largely politically motivated, and did indeed place very tight restrictions on what you could and could not say. The former, however (as Green also says) was quite different. If you admitted your "crime" (and by today's standards of course they would not be crimes at all) to a Papal inquisitor, you'd be set free (though woe betide repeat offenders). Not so with the Spanish Inquisition, where torture was common and confession still meant death more often than not. The Inquisition of the Papacy was not a nice thing, but the Spanish Inquisition was far, far worse.

So what would it take to be declared a heretic ? Well, quite a lot, actually. You could speculate about almost anything, so long as you were clear to state, "this is just an idea, I don't know if it's really true." Take Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401 - 1464), who had the notion that maybe the Universe was limitless and the Earth was just another star moving through space, and not in the center at all. He even postulated the existence of aliens. He was a Cardinal, for crying out loud, and no-one thought anything amiss with this. It's worth noting that this idea was based on the idea that the Universe would have to be limitless to "reflect God's majesty", not for any scientific reasoning. There was absolutely no scientific observation (or even discussion - Olber's Paradox being centuries in the future) at the time that gave any evidence of an infinite Universe.

What about Giodarno Bruno (1548 - 1600), that noted visionary burned at the stake for believing that the Earth wasn't at the center of the Universe ? Nope. Bruno was, quite simply, a nutter.  He seems to have tried to come up with an entirely new religion based on magic, plagiarised more competent thinkers (though Galileo also did this) whose mathematics he simply couldn't understand, and had the annoying habit of loudly telling everyone he was a genius. Basically, he would be this guy :

Now, being a bit of a jerk and believing in magic are pretty stupid reasons to convict someone, but, although he did believe the Earth went around the Sun, that's not what he was investigated for - it wasn't declared a heresy until 16 years after his death. Unfortunately, the list of charges has not survived, so we can't be sure what the real charges were. Certainly, Bruno was an example of the Church behaving at its worst and this is clearly an example of suppression of freedom of thought, but Bruno wasn't a martyr for science by any stretch of the imagination. He was a magician and a mystic, with no more claims to scientific genius than Cardinal Nicholas.

Not that even heresy was always a guaranteed immolation, mind you. Virgil of Salzburg (700 - 784) not only got away scot-free for teaching the antipodes were inhabited by people not descended from Adam, but was later even canonized. William of Ockham (he of the razor) also escaped, although in this case quite literally by hiding under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor. And Galileo (more on him in a minute) was, for a while, allowed considerable leniency by a somewhat corrupt and capricious pope.

Before returning to Galileo, it's worth noting one very clear example of religious doctrine impeding scientific inquiry. Nicholas of Autrecourt (1300-1369 AD) attempted to claim that everything was made of atoms. Unfortunately, this appeared to make the transubstantiation in the Eucharist (bread into flesh and wine into blood) not merely miraculous, but a logical contradiction - something cannot appear to be made of bread but really made of atoms of flesh. Nicholas was forced to recant and the offending document burned, but he himself gained a cushy job as a dean and lived more or less happily ever after. Hannam contends that this is a rare example, and if he'd only not made the link to the Eucharist so explicit and just been a little more careful to emphasise that it was "only an idea" (which would have been sensible given the lack of definitive evidence at the time), everything would have been tickety-boo. He doesn't use the words "tickety-boo" though, which is a shame.


And Yet It Moves ?


Galileo is the archetypal heretical scientist. Unlike Bruno, he was certainly no mystic, and his ideas were based on solid observational evidence. Ultimately, this one does boil down to science versus religious ideology... well, sort of. Maybe. It's far from as open-and-shut as you might think.

Many discoveries essential for Galileo's work had already been made. Copernicus had published his Sun-centered Solar System model (dedicated to the Pope) in 1543, with a careful foreword by his friend Osiander stating that it was only a hypothesis. Interestingly, this seems to have been more to ward off scholarly skepticism than Church wrath. At the time, the model seemed at odds with the observation that the constellations do not change throughout the year. Since the medieval Universe was only 90 million miles across, if the Earth moved through a significant fraction of that, the constellations would appear distorted as it approached the sphere of the fixed stars.

Copernicus's solution was the correct one, but so dramatic it was very hard for everyone else to accept. To reconcile the theory and observations, he increased the distance to the stars by a factor of a billion. Changing theory has never been a popular move - the idea you need to create multiple Universes to kill a cat still causes problems for quantum theorists today, as does the idea of changing Newtonian gravity to fit observations of galaxies. We seem to have an innate tendency to prefer to think that we're basically on the right lines, unless the evidence becomes overwhelming. And in 1543, Copernicus' case was not overwhelming.

But it worked. There seems to have been little or no ecclesiastical backlash (perhaps because the book was so mathematical, suggests Hannam) and by the 1570's a Papal commission was using the Copernican model to develop our modern calendar. There was no getting around the fact that it produced much better results than the alternatives, though it seems that people were happy to accept it as "only a theory". The trouble only began when people began to believe it might also be a true description of reality.

By 1588, Tycho Brahe had demonstrated that the planets were not moving in giant crystal spheres. His model of the Solar System still had the Earth at the center, but the planets orbited the Sun rather than the Earth. In 1596, his protégé Johannes Kepler published a model with the Sun at the center, and no-one seemed to mind. Very few people believed the idea, but some priests stated that it while it was religious unobjectionable, it was scientifically unsound.

So three great scientists had already postulated alternative models of the Solar System that directly contradicted scripture and no-one had even got so much as lightly singed. For a long time, Galileo also got along just fine, conducting scientific observations and publishing them in what amount to 17th-century popular science books. He was also on good terms with the Pope. As we've seen, no-one at the time was particularly bothered by Copernicus or Kepler's theories.

That all changed though with a particularly strict Inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine. Galileo held the opinion (as did many others, theologians included) that the Bible should be taken figuratively except in matters of morals - leading to the famous quote, "The intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how the heavens go.". The official Council of Trent had said much the same thing.

Bellarmine was having none of it. His view was, unusually, that the Bible was the literal word of God and should be taken as such unless absolutely irrefutable proof was given. The Italian friar Foscarini had recently forced the issue by writing a letter tackling the problems with scripture and the movement of the Earth head-on. It failed utterly. His letter was banned and Copernicus' work suspended pending corrections. Galileo got off with a warning not to teach Copernicus' theory. Hannam's implication (he does not say this explicitly) is that Bellarmine was the main proponent responsible for turning the previously unobjectionable Copernican model into a heresy, but I would have liked a lot more detail on this point.

Four years later, in 1620, the Church released the corrected version of Copernicus' work. It was hardly a ruthless censorship (as the Spanish Inquisition would have done) - ten corrections, released as a special insert, in a book hundreds of pages long. Hannam gives the example that "admitting the Earth moves" became "assuming the Earth moves", emphasising that it was just an idea, not a proven fact. Which, after all, it wasn't - this is scarcely worse than having a paper or thesis go through peer review today (albeit with potentially more extreme consequences in the case of failure to comply).

Bellarmine died a year later, and soon after Galileo began work on a a popularisation of the Sun-centered Solar System, confident that as long as he was careful, his friend the Pope would support him. And perhaps he would have done, had he not (according to Hannam) made a single catastrophic error of judgement, by what amounted to mocking the Pope. It's worth noting, however, that initially it did pass muster from the Papal censors and it was allowed to be published. Only when the Pope read it did things get ugly.

The problem, it seems, was that Galileo did not have a good enough explanation of tides. His idea that they were caused by the rotation of the Earth, with the water being left behind and so sloshing around. He not only tried to use this to prove the Earth rotates (even though he'd been warned not to) but for the counter-argument in the dialogue of the book he used an argument by the Pope that God can create any circumstances he wanted (basically saying that, "no, the tides are caused by the will of God"). Worse, he put this toward the end of the book, which the Pope took as adding insult to injury.

The resulting trial didn't exactly see Galileo stand up for his ideas, and I can't say I blame him. Initially claiming he didn't support Copernicus at all, when pushed he admitted that, "well I suppose some moron might read my book that way" (not a direct quote, unfortunately). No-one but believed him, but, threatened with torture, he stood his ground and called their bluff. Satisfied by his apparent conviction, the threat was withdrawn. Though he avoided the rack or a burning, he was condemned to life imprisonment under house arrest.



Conclusion

Hannam does  an admirable job of demonstrating the debt modern science owes to medieval theologians. Within this very limited scope, the book is excellent. It would have been nice to have added a least a few related points though - in particular, it's clear that Universities offered protected intellectual havens, but almost no mention is made of how academic ideas were regarded in society. Similarly, there's no discussion on what the academics thought about more broad issues : morality, the Crusades, etc. Although this lack is understandable, given the obvious subtext of the book it would have been nice to include something.

There are certainly examples from history of the Church suppressing freedom of thought, sometimes brutally. But these are rare, and in the case of scientific inquiry, practically non-existent. The ultimate weapon, the auto de fe, potentially could have been used against troublesome scientists, but it doesn't seem to ever actually have been. The fact that the Church was ever allowed to have any say over what people could publish and could punish (or even execute them, if only in principle) for stepping over the mark was not, of course, a good thing. In practise, this was extremely rare. Medieval theologians contributed far more to modern science than the Church ever held it back. At least, Hannam does a good job convincing me of this.

Maybe it's possible to argue science would have been better off without the Church, I don't know. But at the very least, the popular idea that the Church only worked to hinder progress is now simply untenable as far as I'm concerned. It's also worth remembering that even in the modern age, espousing viewpoints too far from the mainstream may not get you burned alive, but it will certainly get you laughed at and ejected from academia. Given the intensely rational nature of medieval theology, the line between heresy against scripture and unconventional ideas is, perhaps, thinner than we might like to think.

Perhaps the most glaring omission from the book, however, is any discussion relating to what happens next. Hannam concludes with the trial of Galileo. What a future version of the book is badly in need of is an epilogue to summarise the next few centuries. What I would especially like - and this would probably need a whole other book - is some discussion on how we went from being able to say, "well, obviously the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally about everything" in mainstream medieval theology, to the current view of a disturbing number of people that the Earth is only a few thousand years old.

Far from condemning modern scientists as heretics, a medieval theologian - if properly briefed on the current evidence - would almost certainly have little good to say about modern creationists. These ideas do not take us back to a medieval world view - they're much worse than that. Even Cardinal Bellarmine would be forced to concede to modern evidence. Small wonder that Frank Herbet once quipped that in religion there is "always the unspoken commandment, thou shalt not question !". Ironically, such a view is a far better description of modern extremists than it is about the logical, questioning mind of the medieval theologian.

Dear Peter Jackson

and also Guillermo del Toro and New Line Cinema....

Thanks for making The Lord of the Rings ! Wasn't it just awesome ? Everyone I know thought so. In fact, I think it's pretty tough to find a better movie adaptation of a much-loved book. Like Shary Bobbins, it's practically perfect in every way. No need for me to wax lyrical about this, because the millions of dollars earned (and all those shiny Oscars too) are well-deserved. I hope you all sleep soundly at night on top of a pile of money with many beautiful women, or, possibly, the other way around.

I'm not so sure about The Hobbit though. Now, before we get off on the wrong foot, let me say that I saw both films in the cinema (the second in HFR) and will definitely see the third next year. I may even buy the blu-rays at some point, so you haven't lost a sale here. On the other hand, LOTR was an easy top-of-Christmas-list three years running. So, let me humbly offer a suggestion that I think would make you even more money and make the film even better. It's very simple :

Release a truncated version as well as the special extended editions.

See, isn't that easy ? If you re-release The Hobbit as a single three-hour film, I absolutely promise I will go to the cinema to see it and buy the blu-ray. Because nine hours is just too dang long for a 200-page children's book. I don't want to listen to the dwarfs singing for fifteen minutes while they wash dishes. Or watch some crazy-ass weed-smoking wizard dash through a forest in a rabbit sled. Or even listen to a dwarf-curious sexy "she-elf" prattle on about absolutely nothing for no apparent reason.

A.k.a., "Honestly, there's a dragon later", and, "That's right, there's
 an even longer version ! With 63% more dish washing !"

Not that there isn't much about the films to admire. Casting is decent - Gandalf, well, he's still Ian Mc-frakin' Kellen, so nothing can go wrong there. Bilbo - Martin Freeman will always be Arthur Dent to me, but he does look quite a lot like Ian Holm from the right angle, so that's good. Special effects are solid, even if there's too much CGI and not enough models. Most importantly, I thought the all-important conversations with Smaug scenes were pretty near perfect, and if you'd messed that up then rest assured I'd have let you know.

EDIT : I just thought I'd say a little bit more about how frickin' awesome Smaug is. Also, it would be criminal not to link to his interview with Stephen Colbert. I wish him well in his future career eating T.V. interviewers.

As an aside though, please take note : Smaug is a British dragon, so it's pronounced how it's written - Smaug. As in "Paul", or "maul", or "Gaul". Not Smowg. That would only be the case if Smaug were, in fact, a German woman ("Guten tag, Frau Smaug !"), not a 500ft long British dragon. Hope this helps !

Note the key difference - one hoards gold, while the other - according
to the internet - hoards beer. This makes it easy to tell the two apart.

On the other hand, what was going on with Legolas ? It was fortunate that the character is completely generic, so I could pretend it wasn't Legolas at all, but some other random elf. Later on, it was a good idea to have the dwarfs venture into Smaug's lair to rescue Bilbo, but what was the point of the ridiculously overblown scenes with the forges and the giant molten gold statue ? Or the singing goblins in the first film ? Fortunately, most of these scenes seemed designed to be easily removed later, so hopefully you've already had "my" idea.

But by all means, go ahead and release a extended special edition that's sixteen hours long. Heck, let's shoot the moon - make a reality T.V. show where we see the hobbits trekking to the Lonely Mountain in real time. Call it... err... Little Brother. On account of the hobbits being small. Yeah. Each day we'll discover what Bilbo had for breakfast and learn how he keeps his great hairy feet clean.

Alas, this may not quite be ambitious enough, so why not go the whole hog and make a movie about Tom Bombadil as well ? Or the Silmarilion ? And forget high frame rate - do the entire thing in slow motion, just in case anyone should somehow miss anything. Maybe remake them all as musicals !

Please feel free to use all of these ideas. I don't mind. But just remember to also release a version without all the faffing about. Fantasy is, when you get right now to it, just someone making stuff up, but so is all fiction. Making edits to the novel to make it screen-friendly is one thing - and the (relatively) subtle revisions for the Lord of the Rings movies were a masterclass in this - but don't think you can easily get away with inventing your own extra scenes or even hacking in other Tolkein stories. To do that, you'll have to travel back in time, become a WWI veteran and then an Oxford professor of English literature. Just because a story involves magical dwarves and dragons doesn't mean you can do what you like with it.

Sincerely,

Me.



P.S. It is now one year later, and I have seen the conclusion of the trilogy. I congratulate you on apparently paying very close attention to this post, as I see that you have mostly taken my advice to heart. The invention of random extra scenes was this time kept to a minimum, thus making this much the best of the Hobbit films. However, I still think a single 3 hour film would be 3 hours of pure awesome, compared to 9 hours of mostly padding. Not only would it cut out a lot of the "anyone got any chloroform ?" moments of the first two films, but it would also make the whole Smaug sequences tie together in a much more satisfying way. Because, in the second film, we ended with :

I. AM. DEATH.

Then, a year later, but barely ten minutes into the third film, we get (effectively) :

I. AM. DEAD.

Which feels like a tremendous anti-climax, and leaves me thinking that the writers had been smoking too much of some rather "special" pipe-weed. I mean, at some point someone must have said, "Guys, should we add an extra ten minutes of the last great fire-drake of the Third Age, or the dwarves washing dishes ?". And given that the battle scene lasts a full hour* and features Billy Conolly riding a battle pig, don't you dare tell me that CGI is expensive.

* Not that it doesn't have some fine moments, but it's not Helm's Deep.

So anyway, a shortened version still seems like a damn fine idea to me. An official abridged version would be easy to make, you could release it at cinemas and make even more money (sell even moooaaarr merchandise ! release another soundtrack !), fans will approve and shower you with rose-petals, and basically the world would be a better, happier place... and let's be honest - if you don't do it, someone else will. And that'd be a shame. Don't be the rich douchebags who sue fans for making their movie better. Be the kind-hearted douchebags who redeem themselves by also making the movie most Tolkein fans actually wanted in the first place.

Red Cliff

Seriously. It's an awesome movie and you should watch it at once. And with one-liners like "I never expected I would be defeated by a cup of tea" I'm at a loss to explain the complete absence of internet memes. Sure, it's 5 hours long and subtitled, but so what ? It's 5 hours of AWESOME. After watching the blu-ray, I have no problem with labelling this as one of the most spectacular films of all time, right up there with Waterloo. So go out and buy it right now. That is all I have to say.

Review : The Count of Monte Critso

Well well well, it's been a long time since I bothered to post a review of anything. I figure that more than enough people do that anyway, but very few of them take the trouble to tell you about the time they didn't meet the British Ambassador, or accuse amazon of racism out of sheer spite. However, the time has come to make an exception.

As I've previously mentioned, owning a Kindle is a perilous affair. I haven't even made a dent in its 3GB memory yet (filling it only with books is a good way to appreciate just how large a gigabyte really is) but I've already got more than I could hope to read in a year. Or, based on one of my latest reads, 20 years.

Having seen a decent film with Richard Harris some time ago (no, it wasn't Harry "Angsty Wizzard" Potter), I've long felt that The Count of Monte Cristo might be a worthwhile read. So, this being a Kindle, I downloaded the complete unabridged works of Alexandre Dumas for some amount of currency so small it's zero within errors. However, it's fortunate for Monsieur Dumas that he is dead, or I would be forced to write him an angry letter. I might do so anyway, but it probably wouldn't help much.

"Dear Mr. Dumas,
While your hair is truly something to behold, your writing isn't.
Adieu."

From the 800 reviews on amazon, I was expecting a magisterial masterpiece that would be indisputably one of the cornerstones of Western literature. I was wrong. What it actually is a bloody awful book that is almost entirely forgettable. Not that I gave up without a fight, oh no. I made it 70 chapters of the way through (there are about 120 total, I think) which took me about 4 months before I've finally had to admit defeat. Because, you see, it's just not very good.

99% of the time it feels about as twee as Lark Rise To Candelford, a comparison not to be made lightly. Almost everyone is an unbelievably prim and proper superlative of something, which results in them being completely unlikeable. The descriptions of places are almost incidental, Dumas preferring to insert 20 pages of completely pointless dialogue that doesnt't go anywhere rather than tell us anything about the setting. And when he does, it's again nothing but superlatives.

Well isn't this just jolly SPIFFING, what what !

The plot, for those who aren't familiar, is that our hero Edmond Dantes is imprisoned for a crime he didn't even know he didn't committ. Abducted from his wedding to the extremely boring Mercedes, he spends 15 years in a dingy dungeon. There he meets the impossiblly knowledgeable Faria, the 19th century equivalent of Google. Fortunately our hero has a perfect memory, and Faria, taking a shine to the young lad, tells him (via a long and
 REALLY
FRAKKING
BORING
backstory) of a treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo.

On escaping from prison (a rare example of a good part of the book) Dantes embarks on a mission to very, very slowly track down his enemies, and very, very slowly exact his revenge upon them. Along the way there are yet more endless RFB backstories and improbable plot twists, or least meanders. It even features a 19th century version of Captain Pike - Monsieur Nortier - who can only communicate by blinking.

Why this mighty tome is deemed a classic by anyone is something which utterly escapes me. Maybe you're not supposed to actually read it. Maybe you're supposed to buy the hardback edition, for which I can think of a number of uses :

• Starting forest fires
• Blocking a toilet
• Beating your enemies into submission
• Making a lot of paper aeroplanes
• Starting more forest fires
• A handy substitute for cat litter
• Weightlifting
• Starting even more forest fires
• Making yourself look erudite on the bus
• A doorstop
• Something to drop when you really need to generate a satisfying "thoonk" noise
• Crushing small animals
• Continuing to start forest fires

By the time I admitted defeat, Dantes had done no more than cause some mild inconvenience to his supposed enemies. Sure, there are a few much darker passages - like burying a child alive - but they're embedded in such a thick, rose-tinted mush that they lose virtually all force. And sure, the complex lives of the RFB characters are intertwined very cleverly, but it takes a life-age of the Earth to start to reveal any of this and it's just not worth the effort.

This could have been a memorable swashbuckling adventure, chock full of pirates and a man on a quest for bloody revenge. What it actually is is tedium incarnate. In short, I can think of better things to do with my time. Like stare blankly and silently into space for six solid, uninterrupted hours, all the while reminding myself how much worse it would be if that dreaded book was in front of me instead of a nice blank white wall.

Review : GTA IV part 2 - the expansions

Following my recent completion of GTA IV, I thought I'd have a bash at what I guess you'd call GTA IV.V (strictly speaking that should be GTA IV S in Roman numerals) : The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Rather irritatingly, they're not expansions but standalone games, eating up another 16 GB of hard disc space. That's not a big deal, but they appear to share the same savedgame directory as GTA IV. And so, with the unstoppable inevitability that only narrative causality can bestow, my "story complete" saved game from the original has now gone.

I can only assume this part of the code was written by Muppets - most likely, Animal. It doesn't matter how many "Are you sure ?" messages are present, if you have a 40hr saved game file in a directory where other save games can be written, it is absolutely and irrevocably destined to be overwritten. Good job there's no point playing when the main story is complete, I guess.


He also works part-time as a programmer for Rockstar

This aside, the Lost and Damned is a decent addition to the GTA canon. You play as Johnny, a walking cliche who's second in command of biker gang "The Lost", previously encountered in the original game. Happily, bike physics has undergone some kind of Newtonian/Einsteinian revolution, so now you can cruise around without fear of suddenly finding yourself 70 feet up in the air because you got too close to an especially pointy bit of tarmac.

That's far from the only niggle the game irons out, either. For starters, it's now much easier to evade cops at the 3 star level. Once you're about halfway to the edge of the circle, the cop spawning rate drops dramatically. This doesn't detract from the challenge of the game, because it's skillfully balanced by the increased difficulty of combat. Enemies are not only more aggressive, but there are far, far more of them. Hiding behind cover will only protect you for so long.


Another screenshot I stole off the Internet. Combat is actually mostly about shooting people, not blowing stuff up.


To help you combat these hordes of unruly foes - usually other gang members, but also cops - you're given a selection of handy new weapons. First up, the grenade launcher. What does this do ? Lob grenades. Hmm. I could do that before, actually. With my hands. Yet it's strangely fun, probably because it makes a satisfying "thwoonk" noise. Then there's the assault shotgun, which is surprisingly poor as an anti-personnel weapon but very useful against vehicles.

There are a few totally new features introduced, like riding in formation to replenish your health and armour. 's alright I guess, but a bit of a chore. I'd rather just pay $1 for a hot dog from one of those foul-mouthed street vendors. You also get gang members to come and assist you on your travels, and if they survive they gain experience and toughness. Meh, I find it very difficult to care about any of them. It's far more fun to think of them as extra targets.

The downside of the game is the story. Like GTA IV, it's trying to be gritty and edgy but even more so. It's even more difficult to empathise with your character than Niko, because this time you play an annoying, fully-developed bad guy who's really nothing more than that. There's precious little joy in any of the missions (with the occasional exception) and far too much angsty "Oh woe is me, for I live such a hard and terrible life as a drug-dealing loser making buckets of cash off other people's misery but I'm just too much of a douchebag to do anything about it." Can it, Johnny. I expect this sort of nonsense in The Wire, not video games.

"Dear Aunt Agony, today I killed 15 people with a shotgun and stole all their heroin. I only did it because I feel trapped in the overarching socio-political situation in which Liberty City resides. Does this make me a criminal ? Will I still be able to claim benefits ?"


Which all meant that I got a bit bored after a while and stopped playing. Fortunately, the Ballad of Gay Tony is almost the polar opposite of the Lost and Damned. Here you play the sex-crazed Luis Lopez, assistant to nightclub owner Tony Prince. While the writers can't quite seem to bring themselves to lose the angsty gibberish entirely, they have at least seen fit to introduce Omid Djalili, attack helicopters with rockets, base jumping, a decent checkpoint system*... and oh yes, a tank.

* It's on your phone. Possibly it was there all along. Umm....

Like LAD, combat is far more intense than the original game. This time you get some pretty cool new weapons, like sticky bombs, a minigun, and the overwhelmingly powerful explosive shotgun. You get to blow up a large yacht. Skydiving becomes an integral part of the game, with one mission requiring you to go skydiving to steal a tank for Omid. What's not to like ? In another, you stand on the back of a moving subway train and use your explosive shotgun to take down wave after wave of attack helicopters.


Screenshots do not do this game justice.


The story line is... umm... well, I assume there is one, somewhere, but I didn't notice. I was too busy making things explode, which is all I've ever wanted from the game anyway. There's a nice variety of side-jobs that make the "pick up some stuff for Jacob" of the original look like even more pointless than they actually were. In place of boring driving missions you now go skydiving, get in involved in powerboat chases to steal drugs, and play golf*. Luis even has a day job as a nightclub manager. Unfortunately this last consists of you walking slowly (very slowly) around the club looking for trouble, and has all the engaging gameplay qualities of rancid cheese. Oh well, can't get everything right.

* Luis Lopez would have an interesting CV. Other hobbies : Skydiving, private security, sha.. entertaining the ladies, golf.

Alas I could not complete this expansion, although I really wanted to. One particular mission crashes about halfway through every time, and nothing I can do prevents it. Ah well.

The Lost and Damned : 5.0/10.0. Overall, not bad, but too angsty and just doesn't compare with...
The Ballad of Gay Tony : 9.0/10.0. This is what I wanted from GTA IV in the first place. Buy it. Buy it now ! NOW !! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR ?!?

Fallout : New Vegas



So beautiful... they should have sent a poet...

Let's be clear on this : Fallout 3 was amazing. I completely completed it and its 5 expansions, or near as damn it as makes no difference. So with a spring in my step and a song in my heart (but not anywhere near my vocal chords because that would cause the old and vulnerable to drop dead from fright) I happily plunged right back in to the weird, wild and wonderful world of the wasteland. Wooo !

For those who have spent the last few years as a hermit, entombed in ice deep underground in a cave on Mars, congratulations ! Not only have you finally escaped your cruel and very unusual prison, but you've emerged into a world where you can play a really addictive RPG. Lucky you. Anywho, the Fallout sequence is basically this : you play a lone wasteland wanderer, ~250 years in an alternative future where the culture of the 1950's continued, culminating in a massive nuclear war. Consequently the world is now not only quite untidy, but also chock full of radioactive monsters. None of which are at all interested in cleaning up the place.

Though it may voraciously consume ~100 hours of gameplay, FNV can be summarised in a single breath : like F3, but slightly better. Last time there were fire ants in one town, this time there are fire geckos all over the place. Previously we had the smartly dressed Enclave to contend with, this time it's a legion of really angry Roman re-enactment enthusiasts. That's right people : this is Fallout with radioactive cowboys and Roman soldiers. Someone somewhere has obviously sat down and thought, "Let's make a game for Rhysy today. And let's add some Mongols too, just to make sure. Not enough ? Two words : SPACE ZOMBIES." Sold.

How many other games let you bazuka giant scorpions while dressed like a Roman solider from the 23rd Century ?


First impressions are that it is in fact F3 but in a slightly different location. Be ye not deceived - this IS a different game, though most of the differences are subtle and it's certainly not a massive leap forward (nor did it ever claim to be). It is true that large parts of the game are visually strikingly similar to F3 - far too similar, in fact this smacks a little of laziness. How long does it take to download a different rock texture from the internet, Bethesda ?

But there are differences, some of them subtle, some of them striking. The sky is blue and there is some level of weather, although still no rain for some reason. Without the contaminated water that afflicted Washington D.C., there is as much wild vegetation as there ever was in the Mojave, along with farms and even - in places - snowy forests and the best botanical garden ever. Oooh, preetty.


A 23rd century Roman, a cyber-dog and a wise-cracking doctor visit Kew Gardens



Much as I love F3, some similarities do irk. The Pip-Boy is identical to that in F3, which is a shame because it lacks a proper journal to keep track of your many adventures. Oblivion did this far better and someone should tell Bethesda this, possibly in a loud obnoxious voice with the aid of a megaphone. For some quests are, as in F3, extremely elaborate, and certain side-quests aren't even recorded at all. And while the latest iPad may not yet be able to tell you the status of your limbs, it can access Google Street View, which is infinitely superior to the Pip Boy's mapping technology. Why can't we have a Pip-Boy Tom Tom ?



"At the Lucy 38 casino, kill the Securitron, then proceed - immediately - left."

Gameplay is very repetitive, extremely similar if not identical to F3 - and as addictive as crack, probably. All missions boil down to same few varieties :

1) Go and kill things
2) Go and find things
3) Go and talk to things

Sound dull ? It isn't. For you see :

1) Killing things is always fun, especially given the wide selection of weapons, with new ones to discover at a very suitable rate. And proper weapon choice depends on enemies, so there's lots of variety here. Though for some of the longer missions, this can begin to be a chore. I don't want to kill 500 zombies in a dungeon, I've done this before in F3. And Oblivion too, come to that... hmm, Bethesda, how's about something other than zombies, eh ? Let me get that megaphone again...

2) This is made fun by the graphical beauty of the game. Exploring is cool. Much more variety than F3, although the core is the same. There are certainly more epic locations, like Helios 1 and the Hoover Dam.

3) Curiously absorbing just listening to people, especially the sarcastic ones. And you can't really argue with the likes of Neil the Super Mutant. More importantly, here there are genuinely new features. If you've done right by a faction previously, you'll be able to persuade them far more easily and can even skip quite a lot of minor quests if you choose. Equally, if you've ticked off a faction, they'll not be wanting help from the lowly likes of you.

Wearing a cheap suit and a sheep skull helmet makes people trust you, apparently. I suppose this makes sense in a world where bottle caps have become legal tender.

While it possible to become hated by certain communities, quite what it takes to get them to become automatically hostile I'm not sure. Massacring a dozen or so will make them angry enough that they might feel the need to write you quite an irate letter. To become properly hated, it seems that you must commit genocide by cannibalism against that faction's babies.

For the most part missions are well-designed, and generally better than F3 - shorter, tighter, and with more of a point. Though there is the occasional doozy. For example, the mission to recover a special gun from Vault 34 is so excessively long-winded I wanted to write an irate letter to the game designer, or possibly kill his entire ethnic group by eating their children.

It's horrendous. There's no hint of what you're supposed to do, the map - lacking Tom Tom technology - is utterly useless. The vault is radioactive, requiring a good supply of RadAway and/or frequent trips back to a doctor. This makes the zombie-killing mission proceed at a pace a glacier would be ashamed of. It is, in fact, boring. But - and it's a but so large it's practically obscene - the payoff is worth it (a gun that can kill any robot instantly). And not to give too many spoilers, but some of the other payoffs (SPACE ZOMBIES !!! WAGNER !!!) are equally rewarding.

The general feel of the game is, as you'd expect, somewhat more civilised than F3. There are still plenty of dangerous inhabitants in the wasteland - in parts, huge numbers of them - but generally less than F3, which makes exploring more about exploring and less about running for your life like a startled badger. Gone is the need to travel anywhere by zombie-infested subway, which I found irksome. Whereas F3 featured the Brotherhood of Steel waging war against the Enclave, this power struggle was only a sideshow of life in a deadly, oppressively bleak radioactive wasteland. And this was reflected in the main story itself, which revolved around a quest for clean water to keep everyone alive.

Not so in NV. Here a veritable maelstrom is brewing between many different organised factions all vying for control for the shiny, shiny lights of Vegas. Not sure why, exactly. One can only assume that in the future, all organisations are composed entirely of alcoholic, sex crazed compulsive gamblers. Hmm. Anyway, chief among these groups are the bureaucratic New California Republic and the much less formal Caesar's Legion. First big choice : whom to side with ?

Caesar's Legion might have cool armour, but they also crucify people which I found a tad rude. But what really doomed them for me was their insistence of pronouncing Caesar as "Kaisar". NO. That's not even a word ! Just for that, mighty Caesar, I'm gonna rape your pets, kill your women, break your house and burn your legs down. And probably I'll do all of that using my heavy incinerator, which is as awesome as ever.


Firery death for all


Weapons and combat in general are pretty much the same as F3, although there are some nice new additions and a nifty new mod system to upgrade them. One thing I missed was the ability to craft new weapons out of junk. Workbenches are still there, so maybe you can - but if so, there are far less quests-for-blueprints than F3. The damage system has been changed, so rifles and certain energy weapons are now the killers of choice. Alas, the Gatling laser is now useless, But the cinematic replays when you snipe an enemy from halfway across the map remain as satisfying as before.

Which leaves only the story. As I mentioned, this boils down to a conflict between the NCR, Caesar's Legion, and in some permutations it can also involve an army of robots, a horde of Mongols and a bunch of people who are nigh-on horny about explosions. All well and good, but it's not quite as well executed as F3. The main story also doesn't lead you towards the side-quests quite as well as F3 did, and sometimes the lack of a journal makes it difficult to figure out how you're supposed to advance the main plot. But the main problem is not the middle, but mostly the beginning and end.

I found the start a little odd. Unlike F3, your character starts fully grown, so has already lived at least 20 years in the wasteland without your expert guidance. They may or may not have amnesia, it's never really revealed. Yet absolutely no-one recognizes you (well, one old dude does, vaguely, but he doesn't really know you so isn't any help).

The actual storyline is engrossing enough, but lacks heart. In F3 you were searching for dear old runaway Dad and his miracle scheme to provide clean water for all. FNV lacks any personal focus. You're helping decide the fate of a city, but ultimately only by deciding who's in charge and it probably won't be anyone you know. And you make that critical choice before the final mission even begins, rather than right at the end in F3. Which makes the ending rather lack punch, somewhat - even if you do have an explosive ballistic fist. The mission itself is OK, but nowhere near the truly epic finale of that in F3. I wanted something bloody spectacular - instead, there's just lots and lots of fighting. Meh, maybe I'm just missing Liam Neeson (but can you blame me ?).

The very final ending is certainly rewarding - Ron Perlman with a very long, thorough narrative explaining what happens to everyone else in the long term. Great. Can I get back to exploring the wasteland now ? No. For no apparent reason, it won't let me. At least in F3, there was a very good reason for ending it there. In FNV, there certainly isn't. So save your game often.

Now of course I've only played one ending. Maybe the final mission is more rewarding if you're a bit more evil, but I don't want to be evil. The sad thing is I can think of numerous ways to make the ending vastly more spectacular without altering the story in the slightest.



Hoover Dam may be impressive, but the final mission there is less so.


Incidentally,  the fact that there are multiple endings is more than a little worrying for sequels,  both for FNV and Washington D.C. Neither of these can ever be used again in a subsequent game. I guess there are plenty more cities in the U.S. (but for the next Fallout I vote for Australia - I want to see radioactive kangaroos, crocodiles and koala bears with lasers for eyes...).

Summary : 9.0 / 10.0. Overall, awesome. Not perfect, but more than good enough to overcome its paltry deficiencies. But don't expect anything startlingly new here.

Speed Reviews : The Star Trek Movies

I managed to watch 8 of the 10 Star Trek films in a weekend. Such a monumental feat requires a blog post.




Star Trek : The Motion Picture

The Voyager spacecraft is very angry that Earth hasn't called in a while, and the only way to stop it destroying the planet is for some random dude to have sex with a bald woman who's really a giant robot in disguise.

(could this be the last film to be promoted as a "motion picture ?")




Star Trek II : The Wrath of Khan

Best described pictorially.

Star Trek III : The Search For Spock

Doc Brown is a Klingon who's quite angry at Kirk because he won't give him the Genesis project, but Kirk won't stand for such nonsense and responds by blowing up the Enterprise, trapping the good doctor on an exploding planet and then stealing his ship. Most of which happens in the last 30 minutes or less.

Star Trek IV : The Voyage Home

Angry space whales will destroy the Earth unless Chekov can find some nuclear wessels.


Picard would have dealt with those space whales very differently.

 Star Trek V : The Final Frontier

Spock has rocket boots. Why don't I have rocket boots ? Oh right, because I'd like to retain both my legs.

Star Trek VI : The Undiscovered Country

Shakespearean Klingons become mildly irate over the death of their ruler, but threaten to get really quite cross until Kirk is dead.




Star Trek VII : Generations

Kirk and Picard ride some horses to stop Malcom McDowell and two Klingons with scary cleavage from destroying a planet no-one's ever heard of.

Star Trek VIII : First Contact

Patrick Stewart reprises his role as Ahab in order to stop killer robots from the future from killing Farmer Hoggett. You can't tell me that's wrong.

Star Trek IX : Insurrection

Err....

Star Trek X : Nemesis

Picard's angry young clone needs to drink Picard's blood which he can't do without turning everyone on Earth to stone. Also, Data sings.

Captain Picard does not approve of singing robots.

Review : Stargate Universe - Lost in Plot Space

Let's start with the obvious : They cancelled Atlantis for this ?!? Small wonder MGM are in administration.

It appears to be a case of "let's ride the Battlestar Galactica bandwagon so hard the wheels explode". Given that BSG came up with "The Plan", this is patently unnecessary. Sure, BSG itself was fantastic. It was full of imperfect characters, political commentary, weird mystical elements no-one understands, and gratuitous typecasting. It was seldom, if ever, funny, and was perhaps even less of a sci-fi than Firefly. All of which mean that imitating the same thing in the world of Stargate, in many ways its polar opposite, is bloody daft.

Things didn't start well from the word go, with the first episode being done in a Lost-esque fashion (i.e. nothing but pointless flashbacks). It reminded me of Olive Stone's Alexander, a film which similarly seemed to have had a nasty accident with a fan in the cutting room. Mercifully, subsequent episodes didn't follow this ridiculous non-linearity.

Not that this helped much. Sure, the show is full of imperfect characters trapped in a mostly hopeless situation, just like BSG. Unfortunately, unlike BSG, virtually all of them have the riveting personalities of... well, rivets. The comic genius of Colonel O'Neil and Dr McKay has been replaced by the introspective moping of a bunch of cretinous teenage cretins who spend far more time complaining about the food than exploring a gigantic alien spaceship. Even so, you'd think that it should be at least reasonably interesting to see them trapped millions of light years away from home.

It isn't. Most episodes in Season 1 were set on Earth. In a spectacular, "we've missed our own point" move, the show's designers wrote in communication stones that let the crew swap souls with people back on Earth in order to communicate (hmm, soul swappers is a much better name, someone should tell them this). Besides being bloody daft, it turns out that everything the crew do back on Earth is criminally boring. Most of the time the show was on the verge of being "Coronation Street, but very occasionally, in space". Which isn't nearly as interesting as it sounds.

After milling about for a while, doing nothing anyone would ever care about, about halfway through Season 1* we find out that the ship is powered by flying through stars. And that's cool - it's a neat, properly sci-fi concept. Unfortunately it appears that this was only a fleeting moment of inspiration,  since the following episodes only descended further into the "Neighbours" level of talent of scriptwriting.

*Halfway through the first half, anyway. Sorry, but a "mid-season break" of 3-4 months cannot be called a break. It's a sabbatical.

Things did eventually pick up. The characters, script, acting... none of these improved in the slightest. But the plots did. Stuff actually happened. Alas this is offset but the tendency to put, at the end of each episode, a 4 minute long song so cheesy that its mind-liquefying potential could be compared to the Ebola virus. I hesitate to say it, but even the Enterprise theme tune has greater musical merit than some of Universe's selections.

I never thought I'd say that. Ever. Oh, Gods....

Almost as bad are the plot holes wide enough to sink the Lusitania. For instance, a time-travel episode apparently saw most of the cast killed, but next week they were all tickety-boo. Presumably, everything rest itself but with little exposition as to how. A few weeks later, some aliens attacked. "There's no point trying to communicate," says chief science dude Robert Carlyle, "they can't possibly understand English."



What the... ? Did you just forget the last 15 seasons of Stargate ? Every single week they'd find a new lost tribe or actual bona fide aliens, every single one of which spoke (but for some reason never wrote in) perfect English. Everyone speaks English in Stargate land. It's been a time-saving principle of the show ever since the end of the movie. Just because one of the main premises of your show is fairly ludicrous doesn't mean you can just abandon it. That'd be like remaking Star Trek but without warp drive.




One week, some of the crew get stuck on a planet with a buried Stargate. With limited time until the ship automatically leaves without them, and the gate buried in solid rock, what could possibly be the solution ?That's right... C4 ! Stargate's explosive of choice since time immemorial. Miraculously leaving the gate not only unharmed, which is believable, but also standing perfectly upright, which is not.

But the piece de resistance ? Undoubtedly this occurs at the start of season 2. The formely rather hot medic has been pregnant for some time and is now about to burst at any moment. Hmm, this could be a problem. How to avoid bringing up a baby in a dilapidated starship with no doctors and oh so many other interesting things going on all the time in this action-packed show ? Simple, have it abducted by friendly planet-building aliens.


Problem solved !


It doesn't end there. To everyone else, it appears that the baby has been lost. So has it been abducted or was it all in her head ? No, it's really been abducted, because the aliens have given her a prescient vision of a nebula which is encountered shortly after. But if that's true, then there shouldn't be a teeny tiny baby corpse in the ship's sick bay. Is there ? I don't know. This rather obvious question is simply ignored.

Which leaves me wondering as to why I'm still watching. Well, if they'd continued with what could laughably be called the Earth-based "stories", then I certainly wouldn't be. Nor am I shallow enough to watch it for the small assortment of fairly attractive members of the opposite sex. No, the reason is quite simple : there's nothing else on.

Reasons to watch Stargate Universe ? No. Unlike Loreal, they're not worth it. They're really not.

Overall, 3/10. Poor script, poor editing, poor acting, pointless plotlines. Hasn't even invented its own watershed-proof swearword. What's the frelling point ?

Review : Windoze 7

So that y'all know where I'm coming from here, let me begin by stating my opinion on previous OS's :

DOS : Hah !
Windows 3.11 : Happy times. Ran for 7 years on a 486 and was so stable that it wouldn't get angry even if you insulted its parentage and called it fat.
Windows XP : Less happy times. Had to reinstall the thing twice in 6 months, losing everything... later, didn't like having a CD writer installed at all, and died soon after. Second computer was OK for a while, then slowly degenerated, like the Black Knight in Monty Python having his limbs cut off one at a time. By the end, there was no taskbar and the search function simply didn't work.

XP : Almost unkillable, but ultimately doomed

Windows Vista : O Happy Day ! Like XP, but prettier, more stable, yet in defiance of all the odds considerably more annoying. Much like Myleene Klass compared to David Mellor (who is a worthless human being and not even a good DJ yet somehow manages to be marginally less boring than Mrs Klass). Yes, that's right, I'm comparing Classic FM DJ's to Microsoft Windows. OH GOD WHY !

Radio : The Great Equaliser

 Linux : Don't be silly.

So then, 7. Well it follows the long tradition of ever-increasing shininess. Although the new taskbar by default is as ugly as the rotting carcass of a pregnant beluga whale that died from Ebola, thankfully you can make it look just like Vista's very easily. And the Peek function, letting you quickly look at individual windows via the taskbar, is at least vaguely useful.

The new "Themes" feature is lovely, giving you an automatically varying desktop if you so wish. And it comes with some nice images, although the default so disgusting it'll make you vomit with rage before gouging out your own eyes with your toenails. Moreover, the shuffle feature isn't particularly good, often repeating some pictures at the expense of others.


Anything but the Windows 7 default wallpaper !


Moving on, there have been two huge criticisms of Vista :
1) It has more security alerts than Heathrow
2) It uses so many system resources than it takes the entire power of Canada to open Notepad

Well, (2) is just a lie. Since I spend terrifying amounts of time rendering 3D graphics that max out my system, I can attest to this. Sure, Vista wouldn't be able to cope with 128MB RAM or a poor graphics card as XP can. But come now, it's time to say fare thee well to the Stone Age and move into a realm where we've all gotten over how neat digital watches are. So far as I can tell, 7 is at least slightly better than Vista. Closing down a memory-hogging program is now almost instant, compared with Vista which required at least 6 months notice and a letter tattooed on your own scalp delivered to the head of the World Bank.

(1) however, is massively improved. Although they are still numerous, no longer is it necessary for Windoze to force you to drop whatever else you're doing to press "Yes" 19 thousand times in order to close Paint. Gone is the bizarre, hugely retarded screen dimming that stopped you from clicking anything other than yes or no. At last Microsoft have realised that in the worst-case scenario, your computer might catch a nasty virus but it isn't likely to go running amok on a killing spree. Unless you see the following :


It's OK Bill ! It was just a movie !

What else ? Well, gadgets are a lot more stable than in Vista, which had the peculiar habit of re-arranging them very badly and at random intervals. You can also see the progress of downloads in the taskbar directly, rather than needing to open the window, which is nice. Also, you can access some program options directly from the Start Menu (such as, ooh I don't know, starting I.E. in InPrivate mode, although I've yet to find a use for this myself, you understand).  And it shuts down in 15 seconds.

That's the good stuff. But, inevitably, Microsoft is not all "smiles und sunshine". Possibly the biggest annoyance is its use of Libraries. These are just folders with built-in links to other folders, so you don't have to have all your sound files in one place. Now that's actually quite a neat idea, and if you've saving in a Library folder then the default puts it in a sensible place so you can easily find it through the file browser. But it would have been nice to have the option to go straight to the default folder - you're somewhat forced to use the library system.

The main problem is that libraries are regenerated practically every time you open one. And with 800 tracks (which isn't even that many), this takes an annoyingly long time. This is daft. It shouldn't take a computer any time at all to deal with organizing a mere few hundred files. What are quad cores for ? Surely it should really store the library index as a file somewhere that becomes updated periodically, like when people add or change a file in one of its directories, or if a refresh is requested manually. Then there'd be no waiting at all. If you do take the trouble to navigate to the folder directly, you'll find it's very much faster.

A similar problem affects Windows Live Mail, at least if you're using it with gmail. It's nice that what you do to your Live Mail controls your actual gmail account. It's less nice that this can take a life-age of the Earth to accomplish.


Microsoft libraries just can't compete with the Dewy Decimal System*


* Why are all these blog entries becoming so gratuitously exploitative ? I promise there'll be no more of this in the next post.**

** I'm probably lying.

Then there are the small but weird features. Sound Recorder can't play back recordings; you have to open them in something else (???). The wi-fi strength shown in the taskbar can differ considerably from what it may indicate in the full window, which is just odd. Minimising WMP12 doesn't give you the same nice functionality in the taskbar that WMP11 did, a foolish oversight.

Two final points. Live Search. Can we please stop this madness now before it's too late ? Stop bloody searching before I've finished typing ! It feels like I'm being interrupted. It's downright rude ! It always leaves me with the distinct impression that if I stop or delete anything it's just going to ignore me. I hate it. Bring back XP's search assistants - they might have been daft, but, like Roger Moore's James Bond, they got the job done.



Secondly, I want multiple workstations. This is Linux's sole good trick, but it's a very good one. And since Linux is open source, just copy the stoopid code already. Who's gonna sue ? The OS community wouldn't last 20 minutes against Microsoft's highly skilled hordes of Barbarian Attack Lawyers.




So that's basically that. It is, quite simply, better than other versions of Windows. Really the only reason not to get it is if your computer is struggling to keep up with an abacus. Of course, no-one can yet attest to its long-term stability, but if it's as nice as Vista then things are promising. The real question is : if it were a Classic FM DJ, who would it be ?