The premiere of SATURDAY NIGHT MASSACRES!

If you were to timewarp to some day many decades hence (I hope, gulp!) and find me about to depart this moral realm for the Great Beyond, and of all the questions you could ask me the one thing you would want to know is "What were your favorite websites of all time?"...

Even then, one of the top three would be WWWF Grudge Match: that hilarious page from the earliest days of widespread accessible Internet featuring epic battles between Mister T and Mister Clean, a Rottweiler versus a Rottweiler's weight in chihuahas, John McClane versus the Death Star, and that immortal bout between English Soccer Hooligans and the French Army.  Grudge Match ran uninterrupted in a few iterations between 1995 and 2005, but its impact on Internet humor will ever live on.

Thing is... since 2005 there's been so much crazy new stuff come about that's just SCREAMING to be put into a Grudge Match-style.

Just for fun, the past several months I've been making posts on my personal Facebook page with match-ups between various characters from fiction, real life, whatever.  Those who will courageously admit to knowing me seem rather entertained by it.  And so I thought "hmmmm... maybe this could be made wide open for others?  Perhaps honor the spirit of the original Grudge Match and make it appreciable for a modern audience?"

And so it is that as of today Saturday Night Massacres has been launched on Facebook.

Barring unforeseen circumstance, every other Saturday at noon EST there will be a new battle between two or more combatants, and they could come from anywhere: the real world, movies, books, television, games, sports, ancient mythology, toys, politics... anything and everything is in play.  All in good humor, all in good taste (which is sadly something that too much "comedy" these days is not).  Nothing cruel or mean-spirited, just good clean wholesome family carnage.  For two weeks the matchup will be active and if you've a Facebook account (ehhhhh... "I have no further comment Senator") you can cast your vote.  At the end of two weeks voting ends and the victor will be declared.  And then a whole new contest will begin!  As things stand now, there are matches in the pipeline that will carry us well into late summer.  And new ones are being thought up all the time.  Fans of the page will always be free and welcome to suggest future matchups (with proper accreditation of course).

And for the inaugural edition of Saturday Night Massacres, it's a good one:

Archery contest between Robin Hood - the legendary defender of the poor and downtrodden - and Katniss Everdeen - the "Girl on Fire" herself and champion of District 12 - and only one of them will take dinner home for his or her friends and family.  High stakes indeed!

So let fly those arrows and vote now for the winner at Saturday Night Massacres!

Read More

Star Wars: Making sense (?!?) of THE LAST JEDI internal timeline

Okay, this is probably going to fanwank me into utter oblivion but since today is the quasi-holiday of May the Fourth and in light of the festivities here are some thoughts - that have been nagging at a lot of us these past few months - about Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi...

Taken at face value the internal chronology makes little to NO sense whatsoever. There is ENORMOUS incongruity between the events of the Rey and Luke, and the Resistance fleet, and Finn and Rose, and even Kylo Ren and Snoke. And it's bugged the mynocks out of me... until I began studying this film alongside The Force Awakens and now... it kinda jibes pretty well after all.

(Mind ya though, these are the words of a maniac who once upon a time composed a mini-doctoral thesis explaining away midi-chlorians. So parse all of this as you may.)

The key is bearing in mind what the opening crawl of The Last Jedi tells us from the very start: the First Order has struck across the galaxy. In the aftermath of the destruction of Starkiller Base, Snoke isn't playing in the shadows anymore. He's laying ALL his cards on the table and the First Order has come out of the Unknown Regions to take the galaxy in a cosmic blitzkrieg. As crazy as it sounds, the First Order is apparently more powerful militarily than the Empire was, if it's being able to assault the former Republic worlds on all fronts. This was sadly understated across the span of the film (though I suspect it will be emphasized in Episode 9).

This did not transpire instantaneously after Rey left the Resistance base to find Luke. In fact, it was likely several days between her departure and the First Order fleet's arrival at D'Qar. Snoke was taking his time coordinating the invasion of the civilized galaxy. It was also during this time that Kylo Ren was recovering from the wounds he received from the duel in the forest on Starkiller Base (and that hit in the leg from Chewie's bowcaster). General Hux had to rendezvous with the Supremacy and Kylo got bacta treatment, stitched etc. before appearing before Snoke. That all takes time.

Meanwhile, some days after leaving the Resistance base, Rey arrives at Ahch-To and finds Luke Skywalker. And she is NOT going to persuade him quickly by any measure to get back into the fight. It's likely, given the changes in weather and time of day, that she spends a number of days following Luke around the island.

And that is a beautiful thing, actually. This is a common motif in the story of master and apprentice: the aspiring student having to demonstrate patience and tenacity and a refusal to surrender, until at last the master takes him or her on as an apprentice. As Rey told Luke, she has seen his daily routine: intimating that she has had time to understand how he spends his time in self-imposed exile.

So again, there are several days between Rey's departure and when Luke acquiesces and concurrently several days between the First Order's galaxy-wide assault and its arrival at D'Qar. Why didn't Snoke come out and hit the Resistance immediately? Well, for all how they have just broken his new toy, he still considers them a minor nuisance at best in the greater scheme of things. The bigger threat is Skywalker returning and that's not necessarily something to be solved with all-out military action. So the First Order is taking its time. And only when it is unavoidably clear that the First Order is en route does Leia begin a proper evacuation. Which underscores why there wasn't frantic fleeing from the base at the end of The Force Awakens.

And when the First Order does arrive, it is several MORE days possibly between the jump into hyperspace by the Resistance fleet and its arrival on the outskirts of the Crait system. And it's not long after that when the Supremacy and its entourage arrives. And so begins the long slow pursuit across realspace.

(Kylo enters Snoke's chambers after he's sufficiently recovered, which is after the battle at D'Qar. Again, a clue that The Last Jedi's series of events are more protracted out than is initially assumed ).

So why didn't the First Order simply sent a second task force to jump in front of the Resistance ships and end them all there? Two reasons. The first is that the First Order has committed ALL its military resources to attack systems of the former New Republic. Likely a reinforcement for the pursuit of the  Resistance couldn't be spared.

More likely though: Snoke is being cruel. Making Leia and her comrades suffer the agony of knowing they've limited fuel, limited time, limited life left to them. It's prolonged psychological sadism and Snoke is reveling in it. He's enjoying every moment of this crawl across space, picking the Resistance fleet off one vessel at a time.

Now here is the wild supposition on my part. I've a sense that Finn and Rose were off to Canto Bight and back in much longer than within 18 hours.

How it works out fuel-wise for the Resistance fleet, I can't explain unless that was their overall optimum fuel supply before hitting reserves (which has a real world analogy, by the way). Finn and Rose and Poe must have figured that there was some time afforded them though, 'cuz there sure doesn't seem to be utter desperation on their part. I mean, Rose takes time to admire the fathiers racing, fercryinoutloud! So again, possibly a few days travel to Canto Bight, finding the Master Codebreaker (or someone loosely approximating him) and then getting aboard the Supremacy.

It was during the time that the Resistance fleet was in hyperspace on the way to Crait and then for much of Finn and Rose's mission that Luke was teaching Rey, and also Rey and Kylo Ren's "communion" through the Force. And it was a number of days after Rey abandoned Luke before the Millennium Falcon dropped her off in an escape pod to be captured by the First Order. When she is taken captive, at that same time Finn and Rose and DJ are infiltrating the Supremacy to find the hyperspace tracking device.

And it is at this point that the separate chronologies of the film at last convene and take place simultaneously. Everyone is at Crait and the final moves of this chapter of the saga begin to play out.

Between Rey and Chewie and Artoo taking off on the Falcon in the final minutes of The Force Awakens and that coming together of all the elements in The Last Jedi, there could have been a week or even TWO weeks or more of "story time".

But, it really doesn't matter in the end. Star Wars is after all a legend. And no legend is without the quality of being protean and open to interpretation.

Just my two Republic credits...

Read More

Alfie Evans and Prince Louis: A Tale of Two Britains

While the western world has been obsessed this week with a baby boy born into a family that to be perfectly honest lives in ultimate luxury while producing nothing but a tourism industry and fodder for gossip magazines, another little boy - born to parents who work hard to provide a happy home without need or desire for celebrity - was denied nourishment and life support by order of the High Court in Great Britain.

But few people outside of England, it seems, heard or ever bothered to hear about Alfie Hastings, who had a severe brain condition.

His parents and others tried their very best to save his life, but the judges of Britain decreed that Alfie was a lost cause and a drain on the system.  And so Alfie should die.

Which, he now has.  As of this past hour or so.

Louis and Alfie.  Baby boys born in the same country.  One will never know want or hunger or discomfort, the other has been taken from a Mommy and Daddy who loved him very much and did everything they could to give him a fighting chance to live.

If the situation had been reversed, and Prince William and Kate given birth to a child with the same medical condition as Alfie Evans... would the British courts have ordered and enforced a mandate that their baby boy must die?

Read More

Review of AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR

It was a Friday afternoon in the spring of 2008.  A friend was running for state office in North Carolina and I had been serving as his campaign treasurer.  And at a rally in Chapel Hill he had been given the hearty endorsement of then-presidential candidate Ron Paul.  Meeting Dr. Paul was a great honor and I was feeling pretty good about things.  So en route back home, just on a whim I decided to take in a movie that was just released that same day.

Said movie was Iron Man (read my review here).

Ten years later, dozens of movies and many television spinoffs later (and maybe someday we'll see those intersect with the main films... I mean how hard is it to get Peter Parker into the offices of Nelson and Murdock for legal advice?!) and what seems to me like two or three other lifetimes, the grand experiment that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe has come to this: Avengers: Infinity War.  And if you had told me when Iron Man was coming out that this would be the result of an unprecedented concerted effort across a full decade, I would have said "Not possible.  It's never going to work."

It worked.  And when the final credits began to roll at the premiere screening last night here at a local cinema somewhere in North America...

There was no applause.  There was no cheering.  There was no praise.  There was no laughter.  There was no crying.  There was nothing at all.  Except collective shell shock.  It was an audience reaction I had never seen during a lifetime of watching movies at at theater.  To be honest everyone looked drained.  Like seeing Joker at the end of Full Metal Jacket: that "thousand yard stare".  It was like all of us had the same thought: "did that just happen?  Did that REALLY just happen?  What was that?  NOW what?!"

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been pure orchestrated cinema magic.  And Avengers: Infinity War is the massive conflagration that it has all been building up to.  EVERYTHING that has come previously ties into this film, even the bits and pieces that seemed so inconsequential.  Now we know: nothing has been inconsequential in this saga.  As with all the best magic tricks, when it's happening before your eyes and you don't even realize it, and then you whomp yourself upside the head stunned by the sheer genius of it...

Everyone who has contributed to this over the past ten years deserves utmost appreciation.  And the Brothers Russo - Anthony and Joe - are going to see their work on this film the subject of study in storytelling for many years to come.  Avengers: Infinity War is a perfect ensemble film.  With a cast of zillions it would seem nigh on impossible for everyone to have a chance to show their virtues.  And yet, there is not a character you've come to love (or hate) across the MCU that doesn't get their moment to shine.  They play their parts in a tapestry stretching across the cosmos, the stakes couldn't be higher.  And the Russos pulled off a dance most elegant with them all.

If you've been following every iota of the MCU material, you will be rewarded immensely with this movie.  And even if you haven't (memo to self: need to watch Black Panther) you are most likely still going to have no problem following along with Avengers: Infinity War.  I still haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 but found it no trouble at all to accept Mantis with the barest minimum of exposition.  Again, more of the beauty of this franchise at work.

It's been a long time since I've reviewed anything on this blog.  And maybe I'm just out of practice.  But more likely it's because Avengers: Infinity War shatters the superhero movie oeuvre wide open, that I find myself inadequate to write more about it without risking tipping a hand about the details of the film.  And this movie merits more than any other in recent memory going in cold.  If you've seen it already, heed the hashtag campaign of #ThanosDemandsYourSilence and be considerate of those who haven't the opportunity yet.

However, I will remark on something and if this doesn't whet your appetite then I don't know what will.  For the better part of ten years we've been seeing Thanos teased on screen, either as silent cameo or in fleeting "stingers" mid-ending credits.  And apart from the Marvel comics themselves Thanos has remained a pretty obscure figure in pop culture.  Most people outside of the comics fan base have been seeing Thanos and probably asking "Who's he?  Why should we care about this corrugated-chinned purple guy?"

After this opening weekend of Avengers: Infinity War, they will care.  Thanos has just shot up the charts to the top of the Greatest Film Villains Ever.  And somewhere Mike Friedrich and Jim Starlin must be wielding massive grins on their faces.  That the character they created forty-five years ago has come out of left field to threaten all of creation.  Bookstores this weekend are going to be selling out of 1991's The Infinity Gauntlet trade paperback.  And if there is any sanity left at the Academy, then Josh Brolin will get a Best Actor nomination.  There has never been a cinematic bad guy like Thanos before: someone with this kind of complex character and motive and power to manipulate.  Brolin breathed an all-too rare depth into Thanos and he's set a platinum standard for all movie nemeses to come.

If Star Wars Episode 9 is even half as good as Avengers: Infinity War, then we are gladly going to forgive every mis-step that saga has made.  Even Jar Jar Binks.  Yeah, I said it.  I went there.  THAT is how mind-blowingly awesome Avengers: Infinity War is.

I gotta give Avengers: Infinity War my highest possible accolade for a comic book-based film.  Go see it as soon as you can.  And remember: DO NOT DISCUSS SPOILERS AND AVOID SPOILERS HOWEVER YOU CAN!  Because Thanos wouldn't like that.  Don't make Thanos angry.

(By the way... and you should know this by now... stick around for the end of the credits.)

Read More

When the odds are against you, remember Luke

Read More

Social commentary from the grim darkness of the far future

Y'know, if the Emperor of Mankind hadn't embarked upon his crusade to wipe out ALL religion from humanity, the galaxy would have been a much better place.  Some things are too ingrained into the human psyche.  The need for spirituality is one of them.  Attempt to deprive a people of that, and disaster will be the outcome.

Anyhoo, just an idea for a pic that crossed my gray matter last week.  Had a dilly of a time finding the right image from the Horus Heresy but in the end Horus himself cuts a fine jib.

Read More

Retro-Internet on an iPad Pro

For whatever reason, over the weekend I found myself musing on how far the Intertubes have come from the crazy days of dial-up PPP and ICQ and RealPlayer (you kids with YouTube have NO idea how well off you are). And just for fun I wondered how much of the "classic" Internet from its earliest years could be replicated on my iPad Pro...

Turns out: quite a bit!

Here's what I came up with after reaching back into the inner fog of time immemorial, or at least those strange days of college. Trying to find analogies on the App Store of everything that most of us had as Internet utilities on our PCs or, if you were fairly wealthy, laptops. Don't even think that we had smartphones in those days. "Internet" and "phone" usually meant waiting until your roomie was finished talking to his girlfriend before you could fire up the 14.4 baud modem (sorry about that guys).

The resulting group of apps, which with usual creative flair I dubbed "Old School Internet":

 

I still hate that %#$@ Gopher icon, looking at me, grinning, mocking...

That's pretty much what most people had on their Windows and Mac machines, absent having an account on a UNIX server (which students at most colleges and universities were given access to so even if you didn't have your own PC then, you still had quite a bit of Internet power to do uhhh... "work" with).

Aesthetically the most glaring omission from this group is Apple's Quicktime Player, which was the precursor of the H.264 video standard now so ubiquitous on most devices. Quicktime became the most commonly used - and most trusted in terms of security - video format on the 'net in a fairly short amount of time, supplanting RealMedia and some other competitors. But since the descendants of Quicktime are built into every browser (and Apple-built product) nowadays anyway, a dedicated Quicktime app would be worse than redundant.

For the web brower app, instead of using Safari as comes with the iPad Pro, I opted to include Firefox. Why? Because Firefox is the successor of Netscape Navigator, which was derived directly from Mosaic: the first "killer app" in Internet history. Mosaic was the first browser to incorporate the ability of using graphics and also gave greater control over fonts and text sizes. So let's pretend that this is Netscape Navigator, or even Mosaic:

 

The last website that Kip Chalmers ever saw...

That's the "official" website of Wyatt Oil. If you get the reference without Google-ing it, go buy yourself a candy bar and pretend you bought it from me. I'm not going to give you the candy bar because if you know the reference you already realize that giving it would be a violation of moral code.

If we seriously wanted antiquated Internet by any means, we would have to get e-mail through a UNIX system and using the Pine program. We used Pine with our accounts on the server at Elon (my own account name was was knigr5c0) but I don't have a UNIX server handy at the moment. So instead let's find an app that approximates the kind of program most of us used with commercial Internet providers. For a long time I used Eudora, made by Qualcomm. But there is no Eudora on the App Store and I didn't want to use the E-Mail app that comes with iOS devices, so I used the Google Mail app instead:

Just imagine it without the Nigerian scammers...

And now we're getting into the good stuff! I'd venture to say that the vast majority of Internet users have either never heard of Usenet or it's a vague notion playing on the edge of memory. But once upon a time Usenet was how a LOT of productivity - more or less - happened on the Internet. I know of at least two major websites, still going strong today, that spawned from their founders being active on newsgroups.

Okay so what's a "newsgroup"? Basically a big trove of publicly posted e-mails on just about every subject imaginable and some that Hunter S. Thompson wouldn't hallucinate matter how much acid he'd drop. I'm still trying to figure out what alt.muppets.bork.bork.bork was supposed to be about. Anyway, if you were a Star Wars geek, rec.arts.starwars was the big central place to pow-wow at. There was a hierarchy (more or less) and to be an "official" newsgroup it had to be voted on by Usenet, errr... users. Otherwise they were an "alt"-something. And of course this being the Internet even then one had to take anything you'd find on Usenet with a massive cow lick of salt.

I sincerely thought that Usenet wouldn't be around anymore, and I can't even remember the last time I went to a newsgroup. But there are a few Usenet servers still around. Most of them are with ISPs and are included with monthly subscription, but some out there are free... IF you can connect to them. No luck on that. Still, having a Usenet reader on my iPad is pretty neat:

 

Before Facebook and the Russian hackers THIS is how we got our fake news...

Telnet is a utility that is still often used in academia and other purposes. Not so much today by most private users but once upon a time this was one of the best arrows in your quiver. Telnet is remotely logging in to another computer, and usually a very BIG computer, and using it on your own desktop. It's how most of us checked the e-mail on our student accounts when we lived off campus. It's also how you could play MUDs (Multi-Level Dungeons) and join in the community on ISCA BBS. Operated by Iowa Student Computing Alumni, ISCA BBS was the "hang out place" for all the cool kids... even if we only had plain ASCII text on a screen.

So I found a Telnet client on the App Store and out of pure muscle memory typed the address, expecting it to not be there at all...

... but it WAS!

"I'm BAAAA-AAAACK!!"

Holy crap!! ISCA is still running!! Wish I could remember the name of the account I last used on there. My first screenname was "The Man Eating Cow" and over the next couple of years I was "Jedi Master Yoda" and "Let My People Go" and a few others (why so many names? There was a girl at Elon who was stalking me. Long story...). I joined this time as "TheKnightShift" and was welcomed by pretty much the same screens that came up every time I ever logged in before.

And then there were MUDs.  Something I never got into but they were popular enough that you knew what they were.  The MUDs were essentially an MMO like World of Warcraft, except all-text.  If you ever heard of a waaaaay old game called Zork well, a MUD was pretty much Zork with a few hundred people running around inside of it.  And some of them are still online!  If you want to telnet into one of the more famous ones from the ancient times and give it a try here's the official website for ShadowMUD.

FTP means "File Transfer Protocol" and is one of those things that is now running under the hood even if you don't know (or care) that it's there.  Still, it gets a fair bit of usage, particularly when bulk uploading or downloading material.  Here is one FTP utility I found in the App Store:

 

Meh...

I could never make sense out Gopher.  It was a search engine thingy that let you look for material on Gopher servers, usually at universities and major libraries.  If it was out in "Gopherspace" you could easily find it.  IF it was in Gopherspace that is.  But it must still be used and appreciated because there is at least one Gopher client for iOS devices and I'm assuming for Android also:

 

"Gophers, ya great git! Not golfers! The little brown furry rodents!"

I figured that a text-based browser like Lynx wouldn't be on the App Store.  If it is, it's so obscure that it didn't show up in a search.  And some might wonder about the point if a web browser that shows only text.  But there is quite a good rationale for it.  Lynx and other text-only browsers can tie in to software that converts the words into audible speech.  Hence, even thoughs with little or no eyesight at all can "surf the web".  Pretty neat aye?  There are some textual web browsers for the iPad Pro and other mobile devices. However none of them make it plain "Amish-style text".  All they do is strip out the graphics and other bells and whistles and generate text with the formatting, fonts etc. intact:

 

The Knight Shift: Apocalypse Mode
Because the wasteland cares not for your bandwidth...

And that's pretty much how it was two decades or so ago.  We were the pioneers.  The ones who had to dial in through a landline and hope that there weren't so many connections that we couldn't log in.  Who could only share photos with other users (like that girl who sounded so cute) by giving them our snail-mail address and wait a week for a Kodak print to arrive.  Who had to trust that the character waving at us inside a MUD really did have a sword equipped before we stormed the castle.  Who had to uudecode that file from a newsgroup, having good faith that it really was a pic of a computer-animated dewback from A New Hope: Special Edition and not something obscene.

That's how we had our Internet.  And we LIKED it!

"Now get off my lawn!"

Read More