Sense of Adventure

Is a winner.

I went ahead and busted loose from my somewhat (read: way too) insular routine and caught an afternoon matinee of this Wednesday, Opening Day.

I loved it. A fine action movie. Definitely the best Die Hard since the first.

Nits may be picked, of course. It’s based on a seminal work promulgating the “Electronic Pearl Harbor” myth, John Carlin’s WIRED article “A Farewell to Arms,” ably debunked by Great EPH Trasher George Smith on his Dick Destiny Blog and in (much) more detail here. But even as the curmudgeonly Smith seems to admit, it’s a plenty-good premise for an action flick.

Despite some … imposing … stunts and special effects, the dreaded Michael Bay Effect I alluded to in my earlier post seemed missing. There is one moment, when McClane leaps from a stricken F-35 strike fighter to a fallen freeway overpass - I’d preface that with a spoiler warning, but since it’s in every freakin’ TV trailer, there seems little point, yes? But even that doesn’t stretch belief’s suspension bridge into Galloping Gertie the way, say, Obi-Wan Jr. and Miz Scarlett surviving a 65-story fall down a skyscraper does in The Island. (Nice save attempt to Bay and his screenwriters for having the rotund black construction guy say, “I know Jesus loves you.” But, no.)

Actually, the whole third act is basically the same as in True Lies. Fortunately it leaves out anything near as creepy as the Arnold-stalking-his-wife-Jamie-Lee subplot. Unfortunately it does entail going the hated Screaming Female Hostage route. Still, there’s something about an SCF who invites the lead bad guy to step outside and settle things face-to-face: points on for that.

Overall I loved it. The Apple Mac is engaging as the would-be white hat programmer caught up in schemes beyond his dreams who winds up as unwilling partner to the crusty McClane. McClane himself still comes across as a basically believable character who’s still, yes, resourceful, unbelievably tenacious, and, yes, just a wee bit lucky. The lunch-pail approach, even to the most extraordinary challenges, that made the character stand out in the first film seems very much intact. The interaction between the two male leads doesn’t become cloying. Silent Bob Kevin Smith plays, basically, Kevin Smith as super-cracker. Of course, there do seem to be fewer “character-based” moments in this than in the original.

Still, it works. The action is mostly crisp and fairly convincing. The villains are … deeply OK. Timothy Olyphant is sinister but petulant in a role better played by Eric Bogosian in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, but then, no one wrote him dialogue as crisp and cool as, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captor speaking…” Maggie Q is incendiary - kinda literally, there at the end - as usual, playing the Head Henchwoman. And just as in last year’s (also superb) Casino Royale, there’s a goon who practices the eccentric French roof-hopping sport of parkour.

It’s a shame the movie doesn’t sport more memorable antagonists. I suppose a villain of Hans Gruber’s magnitude and coolness factor is a lightning-in-a-bottle sort of thing. And they are certainly adequate; they don’t detract. They simply don’t add that much.

On the whole, though, it’s excellent. There’s even a nicely understated message on the true nature of heroism: that it consists simply in doing what must be done when there’s no one else to do it. Which strikes me as fairly Heinleinian.

I’m fairly stoked to see Live Free or Die Hard. The first was the definitive modern American action movie. The second sucked a mighty wind. The third was deeply OK but way too convoluted.

I’m made a little uneasy by the TV trailers for this, though. It looks as if it’s very special effects-heavy. That could take it into Michael Bay territory, and nobody wants that.

The original was character-driven and offered up lots of well-shot and edited and mostly credible action. Giving all due credit to Bruce Willis for his surprisingly excellent (to me, at the time, anyway) portrayal of John McClane - resourceful, incredibly durable, and still thoroughly Everyman - the film was made by its suave, mellifluous-voiced villain, Hans Gruber. A perfect blend of scripting, direction, and Alan Rickman’s acting made Gruber one of the all-time best screen heavies.

This one - well, I’m eager to see how it turns out, whether it’s Die Hard or Blow Harder. I may even cut loose from my current Rogue Angel book and the new Wild Cards story and go catch a matinee.

I mean … it’s Die Hard. Yippee-ki-yay!

To my mind, the real interest in the release of Tank Johnson by the Chicago Bears lies in what it says about the power of bloggers and the so-called “New Media”: blogs give unprecedented voice to the fan; but they aren’t necessarily representative of fans in general, and as such show us that in some very important ways the so-called “New Media” may not quite so unassailably hold the moral high ground in relation to the much, and justly, despised “Mainstream Media” or MSM.

Unlike most of the people I at least expect to read this blog, I enjoy certain sports. I like baseball and football. I also enjoy combatives such as boxing and martial arts. I suspect some of my hoplophilic fans might feel a little more sympathy with the latter, although of course as broadcast they don’t actually employ weapons.

But this piece isn’t really about sports. It concerns a sport which, as said, I enjoy, football. But it doesn’t deal with it as a sport per se; rather as a business. And even more, the effects the Internet community, particularly bloggers, may have upon that multi-billion dollar business.

Here’re the basics: the NFL and its new commissioner, Roger Goodell, have gone on a tear about players’ off-field behavior. Bears player Tank Johnson has been under a major cloud for several arrests, including for firearms possession. Obviously I don’t endorse anti-gun laws; but again, that’s not the point here. And anyway Johnson has repeatedly run afoul of the law in the last year or so.

I’m not an apologist for corporations for reasons I’ll undoubtedly bore you with at some later point. What I do accept is that professional major league football - the NFL - is a business. The Chicago Bears are a business. As such they have the right to protect their product.

I don’t approve of corporate attempts to interfere in their employees’ private lives. I do accept that getting in the headlines and getting yourself prominently featured on Sportscenter for being busted takes your behavior out of the realm of “private.”

After Johnson’s latest arrest for DUI (and again, I’m not dealing here with whether that’s a victimless crime or not) the Bears released him - which is to say, fired him.

From a standing start I’m willing to say that’s justified. He’s an extremely well-paid employee whose job entails being a public face for the product - Bears football, NFL football. He’s made both the league and the team look like schmucks. He’s manifestly impaired the saleability of their product. So it seems justified to me that they gave him the boot.

What I find more interesting is what all this might say about the power of the so-called New Media: the Internet, including blogs.

Both “major” sports I’m interested in, baseball and football, are on morality kicks. Baseball is undergoing Congressional investigation over steroid use - which is of course utterly ridiculous, even from a statist standpoint. (My own perspective is that if the politicians are busy posturing and woofing over something about baseball, they’re not infringing our liberties at large or endorsing any new disastrous foreign policy initiatives, such as wars. However, I’m forced to admit that no matter how much of this extracurricular nonsense they engage in, they still have plenty of time to work authentic mischief that harms us all.) Football is, as mentioned, flying up in the air about players getting arrested. And it’s not always for victimless crimes: Carolina Panthers player Rae Carruth was convicted several years ago for hiring his pregnant girlfriend killed. While that incident is ancient history by contemporary standards it did a great deal to start the league feeling nervous about its players more lurid legal misadventures.

It seems to me that the baseball steroids issue is driven primarily by the MSM. I don’t actually see or hear a lot of fan interest. What I do see and hear is ESPN, in particularly, relentlessly trying to convince us that we care.

Maybe I don’t get out enough. OK: I definitely don’t get out enough. But that probably has nothing to do with blogging, except inasmuch as I do it instead of going out, and little to do with baseball (other than I’ve yet to go to a game by Albuquerque’s “new” AAA team, after several years.)

Anyway, I have seen a lot of fan response to the NFL’s off-field conduct issues - on sports blogs. And I can’t help feeling that’s contributed to the league’s taking action. They’ve started paying attention, especially when massive negative publicity is involved. I don’t know that blogs played a huge role. It just seems a smart bet that they did - since they do give fans a public voice which they haven’t had before.

What I don’t know is that the blogs are representative of fan opinion. Do fans really care about Pac-Man Jones’ lurid (alleged) exploits in a Las Vegas strip club? Beats me.

But the blogs were all over that story, and many others of similar ilk.

Why should blogs reflect fan opinion? (Granting that their comment sections reflect the opinions of that segment of fans who feel moved to write comments to blogs.) Where’s the incentive?

Blogs, let’s face it, respond to the same pressures that drive the, gasp, MSM.

The MSM sell (remember: media is plural!) viewers, basically. Or readers. They harvest as many of them as they can (maybe I should retitle this entry “Harvester of Eyes,” in line with my usual obsession about referring to rock songs) and sell them to advertisers. The more eyes, the more income.

Bloggers sell page views. Is there a fundamental difference? Whether they actually have advertisers, or are just doing the blog for self-promotion (ahem) or even sheer self-gratification - how does that differ in reality?

So the blogs (I hate the awful clunky neologism blogosphere, and intend never to use it again, and will also now go and wash my hands, with soap) will tend to follow the classic MSM dictum: if it bleeds, it leads. What the blogs and the MSM really use to harvest eyes is entertainment - regardless of the disingenuous posturings to the contrary by “news” people, and even more ludicrously, by many sports figures, that’s what the media offer. And the lurid, the sensational - these things draw eyes like flies.

Now get that visual out of your head. I dare you.

One feature of entertainment the blogs make abundant use of that the MSM mostly stay away from is mockery. (Although Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are exceptions.) The off-field antics of NFL players provide irresistible targets for cruel humor. Some of it’s pretty damn funny. The mockery also generate tons of comments - reader participation - which leads to more page views …. more eyes.

I have many reservations about and objections to the mainstream media. Now we see an alternative, the Web-based media, showing real muscle. While I think in many ways that’s a good thing, let’s keep in mind that the online media are no panacea.

A few days ago I updated my WordPress installation and it fracked up the formatting in certain messages.  These (and the blog’s subhead) have been fixed.

I hope.

Under my own name and everything!

It’s called Mechwarrior: Dark Age #26: A Rending of Falcons. Yes, it is another franchise piece. If you liked the first one, Mechwarrior: Dark Age #10: Flight of the Falcon, check it out. Or heck, if you just enjoy space opera involving giant robots. Although of course BattleMechs aren’t robots per se, but really big powered battle-armor suits. More like vaguely anthropomorphic tanks.

Even if I am playing in somebody else’s pool, it’s still my characters and my action. If you like the way I do those things, give the book a whirl. I think it’s a pretty cracklin’ yarn. Wait’ll you meet the fat but resourceful Baron von Texeira, Lyran merchant prince (and a whole lot more, to quote Eddie Lee, maitre d’ of the Dragon of the Black Pool) , and his less-than-obsequious aide Rorion. And of course if you enjoyed mad Malvina from my last one, she’s back - and badder and madder than ever!

I confess I announced this on my Forum a few days ago. Click here for the post, which details a bit of the history of the book (and its predecessor.) As I’ve mentioned, I’m still finding my way with this blog thing, and part of that is apportioning what fits the Forum and what fits here.

Since this blog is primarily about me as a writer of fine adventure fiction, it belatedly strikes me it’d be a good place to talk about my latest arrival. So I just did. So there.

Maybe the most commonly-offered, if not outright hackneyed, bit of advice on writing is, “write what you know.”

Screw that.

Write what you love.

Or at least what you like.

What do you want to read? More specifically, what sort of thing do you want to read that you’re not getting enough of?

Why not write that?

There’s a shipload of reasons to do that. First and foremost is: why make it hard on yourself? Or harder on yourself than necessary. Writing’s hard. Otherwise nobody’d be able to make any money at it. If you’re not writing what you love and loving what you write … why bother?

If it doesn’t entertain you, why should it entertain anyone else?

On a related subject - related to the bottom line, your prospect of actually getting anyone to pay to read what you write - if you’re not finding enough of the sort of thing you love to read, isn’t that a ripe old hint there’s an unfilled demand for it? Your demand for it ain’t being filled.

There you go: market research. Absolutely free.

Finally, on a realistic level, unless you’re selling regularly, there are no guarantees you’ll sell what you write - to say the least. So why not enjoy actually writing it as much as possible? At the end you’ll be assured of that much gratification at the very least.

There’s nothing wrong with “writing what you know,” surely. If it’s what you want, really want to write, wonderful. Otherwise - isn’t that what research is for?

I find I get the best results all the way around - personal satisfaction, sales, and fan approval - when I concentrate on writing the kind of thing I really want to read.

As always, your mileage may vary. Try it and see!

First off, I apologize for falling behind, here. Things have gotten a bit on top of me the last month or so. Or correctly: I’ve let things get on top of me.

Ah, well. We live, and sometimes we learn, as a very wise person once said. (Scrooge McDuck, if I recall correctly.)

One factor, I admit, was a system-wide infection that appears to have resulted, improbably, from my jamming my right elbow while scuffle hoeing - not as fun as it sounds, but fun withal, especially if you hate weeds - a bit too enthusiastically. I don’t see how this works, given that I didn’t end up any more holes in my body than I started the day with, but infection got introduced somehow, and my elbow swole all up with something called “olecranon bursitis.” This had the effect of knocking me on my ass for days, causing me to sleep much of the time and fuzzing my thoughts most of the rest.

Ah, well. Better now. Even if I still can’t do kettlebells for a few days yet until the elbow pain goes away completely.

Where were we - oh, yeah. Got my new PDA. It’s not all that new anymore, inasmuch as I got it about a month ago now (I told you I was a bit behind.) It’s a Palm TX.

I really like it. It’s got a fast processor for a handheld and 100 MB of usable RAM onboard. I can, and will before too long, buy a 2 GB SD card for some ridiculous price like $25. As it is I have a dozen or so novels stashed in eBook form, and I’ve barely dented the capacity.

The real thing that put me over the top was the color 320 x 480 screen. As mentioned before, I just wasn’t going to settle for anything less than the beloved Miss Clié’s 320 x 320 hi-rez greyscale. A friend of mine who came over to help me commission my swamp cooler (by which I mean, did all the hard, scary stuff on my new slippery red-metal roof, while I stayed on the ground and fetched and made helpful noises) had just bought a TX a couple weeks before. Looking at its nice, big, clear display settled my mind.

Of course, after the nature of things, a week or so ago I got an email from this friend profusely apologizing for recommending the TX to me. His had gone south and he’d faced a world of static from Palm “support.” I assured him, truthfully, that while I had made up my mind finally based on getting to see and handle his TX (that just sounds wrong, but it’s gonna no matter what write, so heck with it) I had already pretty much fixed on it both because of the specs and because it was the top-rated PDA I found on both Amazon and ZDNet.

In all events, my TX continues to function fine, and I’m really pleased with it. Of course you realize this means the next time I turn it on it’ll refuse to display in anything but Urdu … still. There are some ramifications to my having the machine, including for my take on electronic publishing, and a new blog I think has a lot of interest to it.

But I have to save something for tomorrow’s entry.

OK, last night I seriously came out (no, not that way), unveiling the big project I’ve been working on the last several years: a high fantasy novel called The Dinosaur Lords.

Remember that name. You will come to know it well.

I read a couple of chapters to the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society, to a gratifyingly enthusiastic response. (The able assistance of the museum-replica dino toys I brought, with additional sound effects by yours truly, helped a lot.) The book’s half done; I’m rockin’; and rollin’ on it; it’ll be great.

Expect to see lots more about it here and on my Forum in weeks to come.

Anyway, I was gonna go on about the reading - thanks so much to Craig and Steve and Kathy and Roslee and the rest for being a wonderful audience and supportive friends, and a particular shout out to Kevin for the suggestion about executions - heh, heh - but then this intervened.

According to the UK’s Times Online, scientists at the Royal Veterinary College, University of London, assure us that Tyrannosaurus rex was “A slow, clumsy beast.”

Really?

(Time out. Note: when I write something like that, please envision me doing the Mr. Spock, “You’re not so freaking bright, are you, Dr. McCoy?” eyebrow raise. I practiced for hours in front of a mirror as a kid to perfect it. You might as well get the visual.)

Like so much of what’s called “debunking” today, the article’s assertions don’t seem to make much actual sense.

T. rex is alleged to be slow because it maxed out, at least in the study, at 25 mph. To prove its slowness, they compared Rexy to a cheetah - world’s fastest predator - and a marlin. That’s, yes, a fish.

How does that differ from saying the T. rex couldn’t have been an effective predator because it couldn’t swim fast and stay submerged for long periods of time . . . like a shark? Or for that matter, that the shark can’t be an efficient predator because it can neither move nor breathe on land?

According to Infoplease.com, a lion can charge at 50 mph, twice as fast. If T. rex maxed out at 25, it is slow . . . relatively. Yet an elephant also charges at 25 mph. So how slow is that really?

Also: we are assured Rex was not agile because “it would have been hampered by its long tail.” Then later we are told the dinosaur “would have been front-heavy.” Do those two things add up? Doesn’t the long tail counterbalance the heavy front? If it doesn’t, how much could it hamper Rexy?

“The findings were reached after researchers used computer modelling and biomechanical calculations to work out the dinosaur’s speed, agility and weight.”

Ah. We all know if it’s shown on a computer, it must be true, right? We know from first person-shooters, for example, that if you shoot someone with a normal small arm, a rifle or a shotgun, they either fly twenty feet through the air (”rag-doll physics”) or disintegrate in a shower of bloody gibs (Doom.) So that must be how it works in the real world, too . . . right?

Apparently, you can always get headlines - which can readily translate by not very arcane processes into increased funding - by dissing the Big T.

The study’s assertions may be true; I don’t deny that. What does the study show, at least as represented through the article, which would lead a rational person to buy it? Keeping in mind the scientists can be presumed to have used their most compelling case to cadge free pub, they showed nothing that impressed this one.

A computer game isn’t science. A computer “simulation” isn’t necessarily a simulation of anything real. And “scientists say” has the same rational weight as “witch doctors say.” Assertion is not science. Neither is appeal to authority.

===

Subject line: Mott the Hoople reference, ladies and gentleman. Yes, I am obsessed with referencing late 1960s-early 1970s rock songs. Thank you for noticing.

So, who the hell made up the phrase, “If it’s too loud, then you’re too old,” anyway? If you are old, if it’s not too loud, you can’t hear it.

You think Stones concerts were loud in the Sixties? I bet nowadays they’d powder corundum. You got all these ancient guys up on stage who have to be deaf as marble columns.

Granted, I’ve thought Keith Richards was clinically dead since sometime back in the early Eighties. But dead is pretty deaf, right?

Mind you, I don’t think he’s died and been replaced. It’s still him. He’s just undead. All the drugs are preserving him.

If the primary (or sole) reason adduced for doing something is that “something has to be done,” isn’t that a pretty solid guarantee that the course of action won’t be responsive to the actual problem?