Attack of the Blog!

Online I found an old paper I wrote in college, many moons ago. The crazy part is that it was on SchoolSucks.com, a website that I glanced at once or twice out of desperation back in the day, but never bothered to plagiarize from because I knew it was supremely stupid to copy material from something that could be run through a search engine in about five seconds. It’s the perfect test of intelligence for students; if they’re too dumb to realize that their teachers know how to use google.com, they deserve an F.

I wrote it more than ten years ago, and it wasn’t a bad essay. It was on “The Birth of Venus” by Sandro Botticelli. What I’d really like to know is how they got it in the first place. I didn’t sell it to them. I didn’t give it to them. And it pisses me off that somebody is peddling something I created, even if it’s as trivial as some dumb essay from a million years back.

I wrote them a nasty gram telling them the unauthorized use of my intellectual property was not to my liking. They’ll probably ignore me or just tell me to go pound sand. And, sad to say, it may be within their legal rights to do that, especially if their servers are in a country that doesn’t really care about privacy, fairness, or preventing exploitation.

It does raise some pretty disturbing questions– if some digital dumpster diver comes up with something you wrote, do they have the right to publish it? And what can you do against them? Legal action is a royal pain to engage in, and most sites like SchoolSucks.com are probably willing to take the gamble that you’re not really going to sue them over one little infringement of your intellectual property. No, what you’d really need is a class action lawsuit . . . hmm . . . class action lawsuit . . .

Anybody else have papers on SchoolSucks.com?

Mmm. Oh YEAH!

Six wheel drive. Active suspension. Low-rider mods. And it comes in gold. Bling! Sounds like my kind of truck. Too bad Nasa’s new space toy, the lunar truck prototype won’t be hitting the retail market!

This thing is so hot it makes my piston surfactants simmer. Six sexy long gold legs, a drivers’ seat that can pivot 360 degrees, and a redefinition of the term “moon roof.”

Dang, baby. You fly. It almost makes me want to break up with the Camaro.

Diamonds are somewhat rare on earth, but apparently space is littered with them, and the Spitzer Space Telescope is perfect for looking for them.

Before you get too giddy and have spectacular visions of finding out if isometric-hexoctahedral crystal lattice carbon allotropes are an extraterrestrial space babe’s best friend, keep in mind that the glittering stardust out there is mainly nanodiamonds, or gems 25,000 times smaller than a grain of sand. Spitzer’s powerful infrared vision is sweeping the sky looking for the stones, which can help tell us more about the origin of the universe if we can figure out the conditions under which they were created. We won’t be intercepting any 42 million carat asteroids any time soon.

The thing that raises my curiosity is the “Utopia” question of exploration. Thomas More described Amaurot, the capital of Utopia, as a city that didn’t care much for gold and silver because it serves no practical purpose in daily life, the way iron does. “The folly of men has enhanced the value of gold and silver, because of their scarcity,” he wrote.

There must be other worlds where diamonds and gold are more common, due to whatever specific geological activity existed there in the age in which it was created. But how strange to imagine a society where:

They find pearls on their coast, and diamonds and carbuncles on their rocks; they do not look after them, but, if they find them by chance, they polish them, and with them they adorn their children, who are delighted with them, and glory in them during their childhood; but when they grow to years, and see that none but children use such baubles, they of their own accord, without being bid by their parents, lay them aside; and would be as much ashamed to use them afterward as children among us, when they come to years, are of their puppets and other toys.

I think I could handle a little of that world . . .

Today at the office someone asked me if I was looking forward to seeing the new Star Trek movie. My answer was immediate and definite: No. Why? Because Star Trek stopped being fun a long time ago, when it got all serious and stopped being about searching the universe looking for more places to have a good time. I want to go back to the earlier days, when life was simpler and sillier and all about having a good time. I want to go back to Camp Sci-Fi. No, I don’t mean cabins where you sing songs about pwnage and make arts and crafts projects out of tin foil and old motherboards. I mean back having fun was enough of a justification to make and see a movie.

Star Trek after the original series wasn’t totally lame, but it also wasn’t very good. It was a simple show with a simple message: explore your universe. Share. Love. Keep the peace. All that hippie crap. As vacuous as a lot of 1960’s political ideology was, the one part of it that really rings true is the idea that sex is supposed to be fun. The advances of the 1970’s and 1980’s launched our culture forward, making solid progress toward equality and opportunity for all. But somewhere along the way we revitalized our puritan seriousness about things, especially sex, and sucked all the fun out of it.

Star Trek got lame when it was overburdened and crammed into a box it was never meant to fit in. When they started publishing technical readouts of the Enterprise, devised a suspiciously contrived grammar structure for Klingon that posesses none of the organic elegance of Sindarin, and banned miniskirts from the bridge, it wasn’t fun anymore. It’s not politically correct to have Captain Picard cruising for babes with his officers in a space bar somewhere. Oh no. He has to go through some elaborate, overly polite courtship ritual, bonding with his one night stand on a deep emotional level before getting down.

So what’s the perfect Sci-Fi film?

Yeah, that’s right. Barbarella. It’s terrible. It’s campy. It’s funny. It’s full of tacky references to peace and love. But it also isn’t ashamed of glorifying hotties in space, which is a lot of what Science Fiction is all about. The Next Generation and all those other spinoffs were okay, but they were too serious. They got technical. They couldn’t laugh at themselves. Where I signed off for good was when Dr. Troi was telepathically raped. Are you kidding me? Rape is far too heavy to be treated as a side plot in an episode that should be focused on blowing things up and seeking out new life forms to consensually smooch on.

Although it shouldn’t be looked to as a source of decision making when it comes to casual sex, Barbarella is a great character because she’s completely without guile. She isn’t a prude, and she isn’t a skank. As ridiculous as her quick forays into cosmic coitus are, her attitude is the same one Dr. Laura’s tried to encourage whiny housewives to have for years: sex is fun, and you and your man are supposed to want each other. So quit being so snotty and get busy already.

Campy Sci-Fi and Fantasy flicks retain their cult status because it knows what it is and it doesn’t try to be anything other than that. Greater meaning and heavy significance aren’t layered onto something that was meant to be kept simple. Conan the Barbarian and Red Sonja still stand as perfect examples of this from the fantasy world. These stories aren’t trying to be The Lord of the Rings. They never could be, and they know it. So they do what they do best: show Arnold Schwartznegger at his Mr. Olympia peak wearing fur, killing monsters with a big sword, and getting some action. The ending of Red Sonja really epitomizes how the old-fashioned SciFi/Fantasy attitude toward sex is so much healthier than this super serious, end-all be-all approach to doing the nasty. Sonja and Kalidor duke it out, neither wanting to admit defeat. It’s the classic battle of the sexes. Hardcore 70’s style feminists will criticize the woman if she gives in, since welcoming a man’s advances is a sign of oppression, right? And if the man defeats her, well, then he’s just another evil raping patriarch. In the end, both warriors realize that fighting is counterproductive when what you really want to do is get busy. So they do. The end. What more could you ask for in a healthy relationship? Make love, not war.

The new Star Trek film is supposed to go back to the earliest days of Kirk and Spock’s career. But I know what it will be like– it won’t be true at all to the early days. The costumes and sets won’t be charmingly low-budget yet creative. There will be no go-go boots, miniskirts, or dancing alien babes. There will be no semitransparent costumes, and any references to sex will be awkward, too serious, and make a shallow attempt at being far deeper than they should be considering the fact that the characters will not have known each other more than a few days.

The one thing that could possible drag me to the theater would be to see Simon Pegg as Scotty. He will, no doubt, tear it up and do that role justice. Karl Urban as Dr. McCoy probably will rock the infirmary as well. But I really don’t want to have to hate this movie for killing the fun, so I’m probably just going to to stay away.

I’ve heard a lot of chatter over Toshiba’s planned departure from HD-DVD– “OMFG what now? Is Blu-ray the only one left now? WTF?” Like all new technologies, some styles make it, some don’t. Betamax was obliterated by VHS. Nobody wants to watch movies on delicate, double-sided discs the size of my dad’s original vinyl copy of “Dark Side of the Moon,” so Laserdiscs got chucked. MiniCDs, on the other hand, were too tiny, so they didn’t supplant CDs. Format wars are a big part of emerging technology, and home video players have been most prominent in recent years as quality leapt ahead to bring the visually luscious experience of the theater to our homes.

But I have to wonder: have we reached the maximum threshold of digital quality? There is, no question, an enormous difference between mono and stereo sound. The leap from VHS to DVD was stunning. The first time I watched a movie in 5.1 surround sound I really thought the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were going to eat me, and watching this year’s Super Bowl in High Definition let me see the beads of sweat on Eli Manning’s forehead. But I really feel that, as long as TV and movie entertainment is filmed and played back in the manner it currently is, I will never experience another leap like that again. The human eye can only register so much, and the differences in perception as technology advances will grow ever more slight. That’s not going to make things easy for companies eager to cash in on the hunger for stunning visual quality.

So HD-DVD will go the way of the Betamax, but I really have to wonder if, long term, Blu-ray or digital recordings of a similar standard of quality are pretty much where we’ve capped out. Ordinary DVDs are still drastically outselling Blu-ray, mainly because of price. I liked Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, but not enough to pay $40 for a format whose quality nearly outstrips the limits of my visual quality perception and definitely exceeds the performance of my entertainment system (my laptop).

Unless something drastically changes about the way films are made, like a shift to three-dimensional holographic filmmaking, I don’t really see how formats like Blu-ray or anything of higher resolution and quality are really going to take the market by storm the way VHS and DVD did. It’s the law of diminishing returns in a classic application: current video formats are basically at a point where if they get any better, the human eye won’t be able to perceive it, and most people don’t care if the quality is pushed right up to the limit. Do you really care if you see Pride and Prejudice in mind-blowing high definition?

I can answer that for you: No. You don’t. Mr. Darcy looks just fine on VHS. A lot better on DVD, but last time I checked, there aren’t explosions, robots, or rampaging dinosaurs in Derbyshire, so an ordinary DVD is going to cut it just fine. Especially if it’s a 50% difference in price. This is the same reason that I won’t go to the theater to see a romantic comedy. Well, half the reason. Most romcoms give me hives. But of those that don’t, I always wait to see them at home. I’m not paying ten bucks to put up with rude idiots who won’t stop text messaging one another to attempt to see a movie which has no action or special effects that properly benefit from a theater’s audiovisual setup, and can also drown out people who don’t understand how to shut up for two hours.

Blu-ray does offer better quality than DVD, but it’s facing an uphill battle that previous improvements in media quality haven’t had to deal with: a resounding “meh” from consumers when it comes to the difference in quality. If Blu-ray and other hi-def formats can be brought down to the price range consumers have come to accept– $10 to $20 per title– people will buy them. But as long as the difference in quality is so slight that only mind-melting action films benefit from them, DVD is where the majority of films have capped out on quality when it comes to the average couch potato out there.

So happy trails, HD-DVD. We hardly knew ye.