Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 44

The intergalactic community is ready to welcome Earth into its fold…but only if we prove to be sufficiently civilized…by placing in an interstellar version of Eurovision. If we lose…well, “elimination” is the right word in more ways than one.

Absurdity, social satire, lots of music references, and a fast read that still feels like a wall of words at times. In the same vein as Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Year Zero (though in this case humans are the worst musicians in the galaxy). Fun, though it’s got some dark moments. The world isn’t totally awesome or totally awful, it’s both: Everything is messy, and you can find the sublime in chaos.

The book’s subtitle is “How to Fake Your Way into Getting Rich on Instagram,” and it’s a fascinating exposé of a side of the network (Follow me on Instagram! Actually, don’t. I’m mostly on Pixelfed these days.) that I’ve mostly ignored.

I’ve known the high-rolling “influencer” side of Instagram is out there, but for the most part, I’ve tuned it out by following only friends and people whose photos I find interesting (including the author, which was how I found out about this book), rather than following personalities.

The book covers three main topics:

• How and why people game the system on attention-based social networks, using Instagram as a case study.
• How attention-based social media games your brain.
• Ways to keep yourself in control of your social media experience.

I’ve read a lot about the second and third topics, so that part was mostly familiar to me, though I expect it will be more interesting (and helpful) to other readers.

The first topic - which is basically the hook to get people looking at the rest of it - proved to be very eye-opening as it describes the sheer amount of product placement and sponsorship going on, the lengths people will go to in order to make it look like they have a bigger audience than they do so they can get the deals, and the various techniques used to get around fraud detection.

Available through the author’s site at Stuck in Customs.

The art is great, and the scope is ambitious, but the story feels really familiar. The Dark Multiverse and World Forge concepts are interesting, but the story follows the same beats as Final Crisis: a dark god takes over Earth and begins dragging it downward into an unending hell while a handful of heroes mounts a desperate resistance in a conquered world where they have to fight twisted versions of their allies.

And by the end of the book, I feel like it was less about the story itself than about the pieces it set up for the next round of new comics launches.

I’ve seen The Last Jedi twice now. I’m still not sure how I’d rank it, but the performances are way better than most of the prequel trilogy, and the story is the first theatrical Star Wars to break new ground in ages.

I’ll admit there’s a lot of stuff that happened that I didn’t like, but it made sense within the story context, and it was done in an interesting way. And there was a lot of cool stuff too…including a ton of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it details that I missed the first time through.

What do you mean, “Like?”

I learned years ago that “stuff happened that I didn’t like” and “it was badly made” are two separate comments on a movie, TV show, book, or other work of art.

Do I like the reason Luke left? No, but it makes sense. (A lot more sense than him joining the Dark Side with a resurrected clone of Darth Sidious, TBH.) When you think about it, it’s probably the best explanation they could have come up with for why Luke would decide that he’s part of the problem and remove himself from the galactic stage. It would have to be something majorly traumatic that he would blame himself for.

Do I like that the Resistance command don’t trust each other enough to share plans? No, but again it makes sense under the circumstances, and it feeds into the themes.

Structure and Hope

The Last Jedi feels different from the other Star Wars films. It’s a lot of separate threads that seem mostly unconnected but come together toward the end into a clear picture. Rey’s journey is critical, as is Kylo Ren’s, as is the link between their journeys. Luke’s reasons for being on the island, and his triumphant return, are tied deeply into the plight of the Resistance as it battles the loss of hope, which we see in the slow attrition of the fleet chase, the breakdown of trust within command, and finally the point where they’re reduced to one small band making what could well be a last stand.

And the trip to Canto Bight? For all the whining about it, I think it’s thematically more important than the chase. It shows people taking advantage of both sides of the conflict, and it shows ordinary civilians being oppressed…and that epilogue.

The First Order does everything they can to snuff out that spark of hope, and almost succeeds…but it flares again. We see it with Luke, and with Rey, but their actions only preserve what’s left. It still feels like a hollow victory until we see the epilogue and realize that the spark has taken hold, and is growing again – and that’s inspired as much by one kid’s encounter with Finn and Rose as the legend of Luke Skywalker.

Take out Canto Bight and you take out the epilogue. Take out the epilogue and you’re left with an unremittingly bleak story. Bleaker than Revenge of the Sith…but only* because we already knew where RoTS had to go.

Uncharted Regions

This is the first time since 1983 that there’s been real uncertainty about the future in a Star Wars movie. We didn’t know where The Empire Strikes Back was going, or Return of the Jedi. The prequel trilogy had a lot of surprises along the way, but we knew it would end with Anakin turning to the dark side and helping wipe out the Jedi, Palpatine becoming the Emperor, and the Republic becoming the Empire. I loved Rogue One, but again, we knew what it was building up to. And The Force Awakens was too focused on bringing fans back into the fold with familiarity to break new ground.

The Expanded Universe quickly set up a new status quo and told episodic stories within that setting. Some changes would stick over time, but you knew at the end of the day Leia was rebuilding the Republic, Luke was rebuilding the Jedi, and so on. Eventually they broke out of it and started making big changes with New Jedi Order, and subsequent stories that moved toward the more distant future of Legacy, but it was only a secondary canon, blessed but less official than the movies.

Now? We have no idea what might happen next. We can hope that the First Order will be defeated, because that’s the kind of story Star Wars is, but we have no idea what the cost will be, or who will make it through to the end, who might redeem themselves or turn to darkness.

And I have to wonder if that’s part of the backlash: Star Wars has been a familiar place for decades, and now that certainty is gone.

Cool stuff

So, some of those great details that I didn’t notice the first time through:

• When Leia floats through the ruined bridge, she passes through the hologram of Snokes’ flagship, disrupting it just like Holdo’s hyperspace maneuver does later in the movie.
• After Luke’s projection is finished, he sees two suns and the Force theme swells. The first time through I was so caught up in worry about Leia (tied up with Carrie Fisher’s death) that I didn’t quite notice. The second time through, I knew what was happening with her, but I just lost it at this moment.
• The kid with the Resistance ring at the end doesn’t grab his broom and lift it - the broom moves to his hand.

This isn’t a review so much as it’s a collection of comments I made while reading the book back in August 2018, originally posted on one of my Mastodon accounts. I’ll probably fix it up into an actual review at some point.

Chapters 1-2 and Silent Spring

I find it bizarre that a book that criticized excesses of capitalism would have been characterized as counter-revolutionary, capitalist propaganda.

But of course both capitalism and communism are quite capable of environmental destruction. Rapacious state, corporation, or individual, it’s a universal human failing, like the image of an iceberg in the ocean that Wenjie imagines, independent of ideology.

I would not at all be surprised if Silent Spring was actually portrayed this way, particularly knowing China’s environmental record.

I also did a double take on the idea of banning teaching relativity for ideology…but then I remembered we’ve got the same problem with people trying to block teaching evolution here in the US.

One more thing I have to wrap my mind around to read a story set during the cultural revolution.

It’s a weird mindset to imagine, and it’s interesting to compare to the more familiar present-day culture in the next few chapters.

Chapters 5-7: The Game

The mystery, the questions about the nature of fundamental laws of physics (i.e. are they actually fundamental?), and the countdown have all been fascinating.

I’m up to the introduction of the VR game that lends its name to the title, and for the first time I feel like the story is getting bogged down.

I know it’s symbolic. I figure it’s a way to get ideas across to the players without discussing them openly. But it’s still dragging.

Leveling Up

Now that I’ve gotten through another cycle of the VR game story, it’s become more intriguing. Presumably we’re going to work through a bunch of cosmological models as it goes on.

I love the idea of using NPCs to simulate a computer in-game. It reminds me of the working CPU models made in Minecraft with redstone, except more creative because NPCs aren’t designed for circuitry.

I also like the way the author mixes up the narrative structure, with documents, a personal statement, and of course the game interspersed with the regular narration.

And I’m really curious as to how the trick with the cosmic background radiation is supposed to have been managed.

And of course, is the countdown really leading to something, or is it, as Shi suggests, just a way to mess with Wang’s head?

Chapter 22

I don’t quite buy the game as a recruiting tool.

They’re supposedly all about replacing human society with the aliens’ (one way or another), but the game doesn’t tell you much about that society except that it’s persistent, can hibernate for eons, and coming for us.

It conveys key facts about their environment and biology, but doesn’t present a culture to emulate. Unless it’s in the chapters Wang misses?

Or is the vagueness itself part of the appeal? Anyone dissatisfied with the world as it is can project their own ideals onto the aliens?

Final Chapters

I’m seriously impressed by the concept of the sophon. It’s one of the most overpowered pieces of impossible tech and yet it’s a simple extrapolation from string theory – and making use of known quantum effects gives it a lot of other abilities that handily explain the mysterious happenings early in the book.

Some of the catastrophes, I can go with. But one big enough to create a new moon? The planet would have basically been sterilized.

I also wondered about the secrecy of incoming communication with Red Coast 2. Surely other SETI projects would have picked up the signals, whether they could decode them or not.