Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 20

I remember watching the 1960 movie of The Time Machine many times on TV when I was growing up. But somehow I never quite got around to reading the book until now.

It’s a bit dry by modern standards, but the framing sequence does draw you in, and of course once he starts telling the story of his trip 800,000 years into the future, there’s a wealth of speculation. The narrator self-conciously admits that he’s drawing inferences on what’s going on beyond what he sees, that the short week he had in that time isn’t enough for him to be sure he really understands.

There’s a bit of adventure, a bit of travelogue, a side trip to the last days of Earth before the expanding red giant sun swallows it up. But time travel isn’t really the point. It’s just the mechanism to comment on 19th century western society.

Eat the Rich

The division between labor and capital, or working class and aristocracy, has become full-on speciation. Humanity has split into the beautiful, childlike, idle Eloi and the monstrous, brutal Morlocks who maintain the vast underground machines that provide the Eloi everything they need.

Ironically, the socialist Wells sets up his protagonist and his audience to have more in common with the Eloi than the Morlocks. The time traveler is upper class, has servants, and has the money and time to spend years tinkering with inventions. His friends gather for formal dinner parties, though they’re mostly professionals rather than idlers. He pities the Eloi for their complete uselessness, identifies with them as they look more like today’s humans, and of course has nothing to fear from them. The Morlocks look more monstrous to him, and you get the impression that even if they weren’t attacking the Eloi at night and stealing the time machine, he’d still be horrified rather than pity their fate.

(Interesting side note: the description of the Morlocks in the book is awfully similar to the way Weta Digital designed Gollum. And yet Bilbo and Frodo both found it in their hearts to pity him.)

It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when you treat whole classes as subhuman, and still insist that they do all the work for you.

Science!

With old science fiction it’s always interesting to look at how it stacks up to today’s scientific knowledge. And The Time Machine holds up pretty well.

Biologically there’s an engineered world gone feral, and the evolution of the Eloi and Morlocks is very much in line with the selection pressures (or in the case of the Eloi, the lack of selection pressure) that they’ve lived under. The Eloi are neotenous, never emotionally developing much past childhood, much like housecats when compared to their wild cousins. And it’s not treated as an endpoint but simply a later stage – one which spirals down to extinction because ultimately, neither the Eloi nor the Morlocks are resilient enough to survive in the long run. In the distant future, the time traveler sees a post-human world in which insects and other wildlife return, the garden landscape returned to the wild.

It was written only a few decades after On The Origin of Species, and Darwin’s theory of evolution has just kept collecting more and more evidence since then, with a lot more incremental refinements than major changes.

Astronomically, the time traveller remarks on the constellations being completely changed, but the Milky Way still being the same. Motion of stars has been known for a long time, but we didn’t know what galaxies actually are – or that there are so many more of them than just our own – until several decades later. But the sun’s path within the galaxy is going to keep it within the same band and around the same general distance from the center. The hazy view along a disc of distant stars is still going to be a hazy view along a disc of distant stars. It’s not going to look exactly like it does today, but it’ll be in roughly the same part of the sky and look similar enough to be familiar. And in the far, far distant future, it certainly seems possible that Earth could become tidally locked with the sun (which would definitely alter weather, wind and waves considerably!), and we do know the sun is the type of star that will become a red giant. The only thing that seems off in that scene is that there’s still (barely) enough oxygen for him to breathe, and that one of the inner planets has moved outward toward Earth instead of just being swallowed up by the sun as it expands.

Geology is a bit sketchier. He stays in the location of London, and can still recognize the landscape even with all the buildings gone, but it seems like there ought to be more of a difference after almost a million years. Even without considering plate tectonics (not yet discovered) and continental drift, just ordinary erosion ought to have changed something in a river valley. That said, it’s a good thematic choice that strengthens the link between the future world and the then-modern society being critiqued.

The second Dr. Strange movie was not as bad as I’d expected from what I’d heard. Exploring alternate realities, the temptations of power, roads not taken, and so on. Some fun twists, like the zombie doctor, and seeing the greatest heroes of an alternate world.

But the alternate realities weren’t as fun to watch as the reality-bending in the first movie, and there was waaaay too much reliance on characters running with the Idiot Ball (starting with Scarlet Witch, though they at least gave her a reason for her tunnel vision), and way too many characters who showed up with potential only to be tossed aside as cannon fodder.

Still, I kind of want to watch Army of Darkness again. Bruce Campbell vs. his hand, the book of evil, all that.

StreetComplete is a great, easy to use mapping tool for contributing to OpenStreetMap on the go, as a beginner, or both. It finds nearby items on the map that are missing information - street names, bike lane status, parking access, building levels or business hours - and turns them into “quests,” asking you to fill in what’s missing around you. Preferably by actually walking over to it and looking. And it runs really smoothly. The only times I run into performance issues with it is when I zoom too far out and it tries to find quests for an entire city.

It gamifies the process of building a searchable map that’s available to anyone and isn’t dependent on Google.

It’s not particularly powerful, though - if you want to add new paths or structures, or add information that isn’t in one of its quests, you’re better off using a different app or making a note to come back to it later. You can leave notes for other mappers (or future you) to take care of those additions. There also isn’t a good way to double-check information that’s already there, especially if the background images haven’t caught up with recent changes.

But what it does, it does very well, and I use it for most of my on-the-ground mapping.

Update (Sep 2022): I recently discovered the layers feature, which highlights path segments to show how (and if!) sidewalks or lighting are currently mapped on them. It’s been extremely helpful in adding and correcting sidewalks, both while walking with the phone and while armchair mapping on another device.

StreetComplete is available for Android phones and other devices on the Google Play Store and F-Droid.

Compared to Vespucci

StreetComplete and Vespucci are complementary. StreetComplete is good for casual mapping (ex: filling in street info), while Vespucci is good for more significant changes (ex: adding a new street). I use both regularly.

The Sandman has been brought to life. And it’s amazing.

Visuals like the captured Dream in the summoning circle and the glass globe. The Gates of Horn and Ivory. The castle at the center of the Dreaming. Goldie. Martin Tenbones. The Threshold. So many fantastic images pulled directly from the page.

Seeing the story unfold – yes, with changes. Some to separate it from the DC Comics elements (like Arkham, the Justice League and the 1970s Sandman). Some to raise the stakes or give it more emotional punch. (What Morpheus asks of Cain and Abel to recharge his powers is a lot more impactful.) Some to connect the different parts of the season more solidly. (Bringing in the Corinthian early on. Bringing Ethel forward to the present day to make Dee’s link to Burgess both clearer and more immediate.) And some to set things up since this time through, they know where the story’s going. Ultimately it’s all about how stories change, and how Dream has to change, and what happens when he reaches a wall and can’t change any further.

’Cause at this point in his existence, Morpheus is more than a bit of a jerk.

I picked up the first volume of the comics again a few episodes in, and had to stop myself before I got too far ahead. But I was surprised at how much of the original dialogue made it through!

The horror is toned down a little, which fits more with the tone the comics settled into later on. Except of course for the diner and the cereal convention. And anytime the Corinthian is “working.” And Dee is creepy as hell (more about that later). He and the Corinthian make an interesting contrast, one sad, one charming, both dangerous.

Bringing the present-day story into the actual present day, rather than making it a 1990s period piece, is a better choice overall. It messes with characters’ ages a bit, especially for Unity and Dee, but hey, they tracked Mad Hettie’s age: 247 in 1989, 280 in 2022. And Dream missing his 1989 appointment with Hob Gadling actually added to the way that story resolved.

Speaking of Hob Gadling, I’m so glad they managed to include some of my favorite one-shots between the longer arcs!

Stand-Outs: Death

Death is perfectly cast. Does Kirby Howell-Baptiste look different than on the page? Sure. Does she sound different than the character’s voice in my head? Yeah. Is she a perfect representation of the kind, caring, personification of Death who appears in the comics? Absolutely! I’m really looking forward to seeing more of her in upcoming seasons.

Stand-Outs: John Dee

John Dee in the TV series actually is a more interesting character than the wasted-away Dr. Destiny from the comics. He isn’t just a one-note megalomaniac supervillain who wants to take over the world just because. He has reasons for what he’s doing. A horrible, messed-up, one-track obsession of a reason, but a reason nonetheless. He’s sort of a less deliberately malicious TV Killgrave. Or Gollum.

And putting more focus on Ethel forward to the present day helps tie Dee more clearly to Burgess with a more solid through-line for the ruby.

But holy crap, David Thewlis can be seriously creepy when he wants to be. Two people in a car was more tense than Dream literally walking into hell and engaging in a battle of wits with Lucifer. And that’s not even getting into the diner, which was just as disturbingly f’ed up as it was supposed to be.

Diverse Cast and Characters

I’m pretty sure that anyone who considers this TV adaptation to be “too woke” either wouldn’t have liked the original comics to begin with, or is hung up on characters being played by Black actors, which makes you wonder why they’d choose that hill to die on…

I mean, Death is perfect. Rose is perfect. Unity’s great. Hector is frankly a better version of the character anyway. Lucienne looks the most different, but her performance is spot-on as Lucien.

The rest of the socio-political aspects, though? The LGBTQ characters being both present and fully human? The writer who claims to be feminist while assaulting a woman he keeps locked up in his house? The Corinthian inspiring a century of the worst of humanity and tying it to the dark side of the American Dream?

It’s all there in the source material. It just would’ve been harder to put it on TV back in 1989.

The surrealism is the best part of Doctor Strange. Creative use of Escher gravity, portals, astral projection, and time manipulation. Incredibly detailed alterations to reality - buildings don’t just stretch and fold, they add and remove bricks, windows, etc. as needed. Fights where some people are moving forward in time and others backward, or between astral forms while things are still going on with their physical bodies. And the effects make all of that look incredible.

As for the story itself: it’s fun, but it’s also very familiar. They try to patch up or subvert old tropes, some more successfully than others. But overall it follows the same beats as the first Iron Man and Thor movies: Arrogant but extremely capable man finds himself out of his depth and unable to do what he’s accustomed to, and turns things around once he starts to see the big picture and the impact his actions have on others. And of course since this is a few years into the Infinity War saga, the stakes are higher, with the world itself in danger. (It’s still better than Thor, though.)