The Triumphant Return

The other day I was wondering why I even bother trying to write a blog. I've been neglecting my writing wholesale lately, especially after the move to New York (Oh yeah, I'm living in Queens now. It's awesome.) and it seemed strange to me that the thing I've been coming back to over and over is this blog. I tried and failed four times since I got here to write out a blog post, but it's been little more than a crappy status update each time, nothing that anyone who isn't my friend on facebook would give two halves of nothing about. That's not to say that I'm writing for an audience, or that I need what I write to be read to feel that it's valid, but heck if it doesn't help. Anyway, I kept thinking basically the same thing: Does anyone even read blogs anymore? Was that all just a flash in the pan? Then I realized, no. People still read blogs. Tumblr is basically the biggest thing around right now, even though most people don't put more effort into a post than hitting a little button that says "Reblog" and little more effort into reading them than watching some flashing text on a .gif of their favorite characters in some TV show. The internet has made it so that we never have to see anything new but can still get inundated with content that is tailored to our whims. We know this. It's been pointed out. But today I realized, I read a lot of blogs. I actually love blogs and had no idea. I read one about teen pop (Sean Rose's masterful Digital Get Down), one from my favorite comicker (Aaron Diaz's Dresden Codak tumblr), and I check out i09.com most days. So why the heck can't I figure out what I want to write about? I've got things to say, dangit! That's when it hit me that I never know what to write about because this whole blog set-up that I have going is too general. So this is essentially a post to say, I need something consistent to write about, and I'm not much for journals. I'll probably still do little update-type-things now and then here, and this will remain as my personal blog, but there's going to be something new in the works soon and when it hits it will have a topic, dangit. What will that topic be? Who knows. Maybe robots! Maybe adventures! Maybe robot adventures, or even something unrelated to adventures or even robots! I don't know yet, is what I'm saying. But I do like adventures and robots. Also, quick question for the comments: Does it help to have images interspersed within the blog? My gut tells me yes, but my heart tells me "yeah, but you don't want to put them so unless everybody says to put them or it's relevant just forget about it" and my brain tells me "Yeah, dude, every good blog has at least an image or two when it's relevant, but you probably don't need it" so I'm mixed up. Done rambling now.

America's Mask Tradition

Throughout history, mankind has been fascinated with the mask. We've fashioned them out of everything from animal hides and bone to wood to high-quality polyurethane, for dozens of purposes. Most often, masks have been associated with a performative aspect of a culture, be it the Japanese art of Noh or the Italian (and later European) theatrical style of the Commedia del Arte. Each mask is associated with different characters, and each has codified factors that denote who the character is and what they do in the world of the play. Masks are so common, in fact, that they've been found in almost every culture around the world.
What is odd, though, is that modern America has no unique or formalized or accepted form of masked performance. We are obsessed with realism, thanks to film, and masks on stage strike us as odd and off-putting. We want to see the actor's face to understand the emotions. Seeing something like this:

doesn't register to us as realistic. Bear in mind, that is the same mask shown at three different angles. Masks can give a wide range of emotional performances, but they require a certain style of training that is exceedingly rare in our commercialized entertainment industry.
But wait. There are plenty of masks on American stages. They just tend to look more like this:

or this:

and they're far more often associated with spectacle-heavy, art-light shows. Granted, Commedia in its original context had little to do with art, but it has become a theatrical tradition rather than simply a mode of entertainment. Mask work now is typically seen as either kitschy and child-friendly, or arcane and "artsy."
All of that discounts one thing, the true American Mask Tradition. I speak not of Julie Taymor-esque spectacle or Halloween antics, not of Hollywood slasher flicks or murder mysteries, but rather the Masked Hero. We see them all the time in movies and television, but we don't often associate their masks with their performance for the simple reason that the character is aware he is wearing a mask. Still, while America may not have originated the masked hero, we've certainly perfected it. For example, take Zorro. One of the earliest examples of a masked antihero in popular culture, he laid the groundwork for popular icons like Batman, the Phantom, and countless others. One man dons a mask to hide his identity and fights crime and corruption. It doesn't matter if the man behind the mask is a billionaire playboy, reclusive photographer, or sign-carrying lunatic in the street; when he's in the mask, he's the hero and we want him to win. We've also seen a great evolution of what a mask can become. For example:

As you can see, I've only included masks from film versions, as I am talking here about a more theatrical or at the very least performative mask tradition. However, what I want you to look at is the vast difference between some of these masks, from the foolishly simple to the elaborately obscuring. In every case, the mask augments the character, never detracting. That is the main objective in every situation. If the mask takes away from the character, it has failed. But Zorro's lends a vague anonymity (even though we can all see Antonio under there), The Phantom's gives a sense of unreality, Batman's strikes a certain sort of insane fear, Spider-Man's completely hides his identity, and Iron Man's serves as the hub of his tactical battle armor that he calls a suit. Each is best suited to its purpose, each designed for a reason just as much as the Noh or Commedia masks.
So, theatre scholars, eat your collective hearts out. Or, rather, nod your heads questioningly and proceed with your day.

Idea Snippet: The Lightning Rod

The lightning rod is a magical item that sits somewhere between the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons-style high fantasy and Dresden Files-esque urban fantasy. In truth, it could be easily justified, and created, in either world. It functions essentially as follows, and is on the surface quite simple.

First, one fashions their rod. For many this is a staff of some kind, typically a hardwood or metal, usually five to six feet long. On one end, the "top," a connecting port is fastened. This port uses gold filaments and a simple screw-in system found with most modern bottles, but could also connect to the bottle (which I will mention soon) in a variety of other ways. Once the connector is attached to the rod, a special bottle can be connected. This bottle is a vacuum tube with a gold filament coming out the top that serves as the current connection to the rod.

Now comes the tricky part: catching lightning in a bottle. This can be done in multiple ways, with two being most common. The first involves the already-connected rod and bottle. The user enters a clearing during a natural thunderstorm and extends the rod above himself. When lightning strikes the rod, the energy is stored inside the bottle for later use. The second method fills bottles without using the rod, and allows multiple bottles to be filled at the same time. Using an apparatus similar to an upside-down umbrella, the user sets out the bottle beneath the apparatus with its own extended lightning rod. Each bottle is connected to a wire that is connected to the rod. There should also be an extra grounding wire, unless the user plans to collect every bottle and dismantle the apparatus in the midst of the storm. Each lightning strike fills one bottle with one charge, which can then be magically unleashed using the lightning rod.

Alternatively, the bottles could be thrown. When they strike a hard surface, they will shatter and release all of their energy in an undirected blast, either escaping in a bolt toward the closest conductor or simply exploding in a sphere of electrical power. The rod is used to direct this energy in a single bolt at a specific target, though proper aim is incredibly important, and environments with multiple powerful electricity conductors or strong sources of ambient energy are likely to tamper with even an experienced user's aim.

Writers, creators, artists, what have you: Feel free to use this. Just thank me when you get published.

It's Time to Prepare for a Regime Change [APR 13]

Hello again, dear friends. How are you enjoying your day? Has it gone well? Good. I'll just leave this here...

Oh, wow. What's that? A little upset by what you just saw?
Good.
This video was brought to my attention by Wil Wheaton via his twitter feed (@wilw), and there was an article that accompanied it that laid out the facts nicely, but the long and short of it is basically as follows. A family from Kentucky were returning home from New Orleans when their six-year-old daughter was selected for additional screening. The TSA agent who performed the screening was very polite, explaining everything that she was doing very calmly to the girl, but apparently there was a supervisor on hand (maybe visible briefly in the background?) who adamantly refused the requests that instead of an actual pat-down, the young and confused girl be given another scan instead. The family has since been on television to talk about their experience, and young Anna has become something of a symbol for just how strangely far the government will go to "protect" its citizens.
Now, first and foremost let me say that we should not vilify the agent who performed the screening, nor even the supervisor who enforced it. They were both doing the job that has been laid out for them by people with access to information that isn't readily available to most people, and they've been tasked with a difficult job that doesn't earn them many hugs or high-fives. That said, the system that allows this sort of conduct is so obviously out-of-touch, so broken, that it must be and will be overhauled.
We, as Americans, have been living for the past ten years in a culture of fear. Actually, we've been taught and conditioned to fear everything for most of the lives of the oldest people in the nation, but that's a different story. Since 9/11, we have been told that there are enemies of America who will stop at nothing to destroy us, and that they will use absolutely any method that they can to do this. Thus, we submit to invasions of our privacy ranging from the inconvenient to the downright offensive in the name of "homeland security." Many of us hoped that some of this fear-mongering, often associated directly with the Bush administration, would subside with Barack "Hope and Change" Obama. This has obviously not happened. Technology is advancing to the point where a machine can get an accurate image of your naked body no matter what you're wearing, and those immediately went into airports for security purposes. We've heard about the Muslim Brotherhood, a Middle-Eastern political organization with heavy anti-West values, and they've dominated many stories coming out of the recent string of "Twitter Revolutions" happening in countries with oppressive regimes. We are safe from terror attacks, yes, but they still happen. Are we safer because of these screening and security measures, or are we not the biggest target anymore? I don't have an answer to that, yet.

Anyway, to get to my point, it's time to finally cast off this "culture of fear" mentality. A big part of that comes from tribalism, the idea that "our guys" are intrinsically different from "their guys" and thus "their guys" must be bad. For a lot of people, this is not the case. However, there are very vocal minorities that thrive on promoting this idea that America is the greatest and everyone else hates us because we're the greatest and they don't understand/ are jealous/ think we're hedonistic devils. I would posit that those in the international community who hate America (which I believe is just another vocal minority) are just reacting to our boastful proclaiming that we are the best and that all other nations should aspire to be like us. If Saddam Hussein had invaded America in 2003 with the promise to free us from our dictator, there would have been citizen insurgents fighting back here as well. Sure, Bush didn't commit the same sort of atrocities, and certainly not on Americans, but the idea of reciprocal situations should be taken into account. When we stormed into Iraq as "liberators" we caught a lot of flak from Islamic nations that saw it as an attack on their way of life. When we stayed back from Libya recently, showing support but not leading the charge, that did a lot to alleviate some of the fear of us that other cultures have. We are no long the nation that blindly rushes in to every conflict. We are no longer the great imperialist devils (and we really never should have been).

As for the title, I'm not calling for a new American revolution. I'm calling for a mass immigration to the land of sensibility, away from the jingoism and nationalism that is holding back the human race. Let Obama do his thing for now, and if he gets into his stride and continues to improve, I say let him keep the job for a while.

Just, dear god, please don't elect the Tea Party.

Zombies Again! Part 1

I've come to realize something very important, and I feel it should be shared. It's a simple point, but one that is so very often overlooked in this day and age of popcorn-horrors and summer blockbusters. Plainly stated, a zombie apocalypse, as we've seen them portrayed, is impossible.

"But Jesse," you say, "surely someone's put forth a plausible zombie scenario! There have been so many! What about-" and then you can fill in the blank with the apocalypse of your choice. 28 Days Later, World War Z, Dawn of the Dead, whatever. I call shenanigans on all of them, at least the ones I've had the pleasure of being familiar with. And that's a decent number. "But why? What's flawed about their premises?" Well, let me lay it out for you.

First, the "disease" itself. For the purposes of this essay, I'm discounting the magic-based zombies. Let's stay at least somewhat rooted in realism when dealing with our fictions. So that essentially leaves the zombie-plague as a disease, be it engineered by humans, naturally-occurring, or somehow alien. For most zombie situations, they have a couple core principles; either the dead are re-animated and hunger for human flesh, or the living are infected with something that causes them to lose their humanity and become violent, erratic monsters. Okay. For the most part, the disease is spread by the transferral of bodily fluids, such as blood or saliva. Sure. Infection is typically endemic to humans, but that's more a Hollywood necessity (I've already discussed how infected mosquitoes could destroy humanity entirely), but it also makes some sense when you think about how few diseases really affect multiple species (at least in the same way). All of that understood? Wonderful. Makes perfect sense, right?

Well, there are some problems. First off, it's not supremely difficult to keep someone from biting you, especially if you have any clue that they're about to. In this age of the internet, we'd know about the first zombie attacks in America within a matter of hours, so even if enough people are infected quickly to take hold of a small area, you'd have quarantines going up within days. People are notoriously paranoid, too, especially in the post-9/11 era. The outbreak would have difficulty getting going on a wide scale, and even if it did most people have at least a dozen things in their home that could be fashioned into self-defense weapons with the most minimal effort. But let's assume for a moment that everyone is a moron and they swap needles with their local undead.

For a zombie outbreak to really take hold, you're assuming that almost every military force in the world is comprised of under-armed, incompetent, neglectful skeptics, who look at these reports of rampant looting and barbarism as a local issue that happens to be going on everywhere, or something that they simply can't do anything about. After all, that's a civilian eating his grandmother! No honest American boy is going to shoot his neighbor! Some of this can be contributed to the ick factor of seeing zombies doing their business, but that would take hold of most soldiers (bear in mind that we train our armies pretty decently) for maybe fifteen seconds before the lead would start flying. Most outbreaks could be contained, or at least effectively localized and quarantined, in a matter of days, if not weeks. Yes, you'd have a couple hold-outs and isolated incidents, but these would be rare and hardly pandemic-starting. But what if people are idiots and the militaries of the world fail?

In the event of an absolute cock-up of human logic and survival skills, please bear in mind that most of us are separated by vast distances, and, in many cases, nearly-impassable geographical features such as oceans. What this means is that victim #1 is going to have to be pretty darn ingenuitive to get to any other continent than the one he's on. If the infection starts in China, America's got a good chance of surviving. If it starts in America, Europe and Asia and Africa are probably going to be fine. The global pandemic is supremely unlikely unless zombies get really good at flying planes or piloting ocean liners.

So what's my point? Basically, unless a series of absolutely stupid and catastrophic mistakes are made on a global scale (i.e., ignoring the corpses/ crazed cannibals running around destroying things) humanity could handle a zombie apocalypse. At least one like Hollywood keeps showing us.

Tune in next time, when I tell you how I'd set up a (fictional, let's hope!) zombie apocalypse!

DISCLAIMER: I know almost nothing about the Resident Evil movies, and there might be other films I've not heard of. If I'm off on something, or someone has averted these pitfalls, don't hesitate to let me know. I'll check it out!

Gliese 581 is all the proof I need.

Gliese 581 is a red dwarf star in the constellation Libra that's been getting some press lately because a planet was found in the "Goldilocks Zone," a small ring of habitable temperatures where liquid water might be found on solid planets. The star is 20.5 light years away, making it relatively close as far as astronomy goes. A lot of people are claiming this discovery as humanity's next destination, the second earth we've been searching for and dreaming about for years.

Well, I've done some math to figure out exactly how far this planet is, in terms that are more easily understood. Warning: I am not an astronomer or mathematician. These numbers came from sources online, and might not be accurate.

A light-year is a massive distance, we understand that. 20.5 light years, in terms of miles, comes out to around 120,439,334,310,000 miles. That's one-hundred-and-twenty trillion, four-hundred-and-thirty-nine billion, three-hundred-and-thirty-four million, three-hundred-and-ten thousand miles, or 24,641,915,694.5 round trips from New York to Los Angeles. In other words, Gliese 581 is really far away.

Now take into account the speeds of the space shuttle. In orbit, this technological marvel goes a blazing 17580 miles per hour in orbit. Pretty fast, but not nearly fast enough. At that speed, the trip to Gliese 581 would take 781,534 years. That's longer than humans have been throwing pointy sticks at each other by about six hundred millenniums. Now, in theory, we could use the gravity of the sun to slingshot a spacecraft at speeds of about 100,000 miles per hour, though a conventional ship would not survive the g-forces, or be able to escape the sun's gravity well. But, let's say for a second that we achieve that herculean feat. We get a ship going 100,000 miles an hour. We still have to go the 20.5 light years. At that speed, the trip is cut to a much more manageable 137,393.719 years. That's less time than humans have already existed, at least. Only 4580 generations! Unfortunately that's enough that whatever settlers happened to be sent would probably be only mostly-recognizable as humans.

However, all this math and these big bleak numbers prove to me one thing: We need to work on our tech. Humanity is going to need to expand eventually, and we're going to need some serious ships to do so. I'm not naive enough to think that humans will achieve faster-than-light speeds, but we should be able to approach light speed before too terribly long. Hell, if we could get to Gliese in 200 years it would be worth it. If we had a viable chance at making the trip in 1000, I'd sign up. But right now, when you can measure the travel time in thousands of generations, it's not worth speculating. We need to up the ante and make it viable.

That is all.

I guess I'm blogging again.

Aw oh aw oh aw aw ah aw aw oh JUICY

Needed: Three other Hitlers to dance down a street for about four minutes, someone to film, camera to film with, five Hitler outfits, five Hitler mustaches, a free afternoon that's decently sunny and a few days before to organize and choreograph.

IO: Get the gang together. We're making this happen soon.