Unnecessary Prequels, Part Two

Last week’s episode of Enemy Lines delved into The Thing (2011), the prolonged deleted scene that is the prequel to The Thing (1982). Now, spoiler alert, I’m going to spoil Prometheus. I mean really spoil it, just get up in its grille and spoil the shit out of it.

Before the release of Prometheus, Ridley Scott became annoyingly coy about whether or not he was making a prequel to Alien. Now that I’ve seen it, I understand. Prometheus glances off Alien, taking place in the same universe as the 1979 film, but it’s a different story. The problem is that it’s a story that makes no sense and is largely driven by characters with random motivations doing unbelievably stupid things.

The film opens with a pale alien/god stripping down to show us how ripped he is before consuming something that causes him to disintegrate on a genetic level. His remains mix into a scenic waterfall to make a genetic soup that will eventually simmer into humans. This makes it immediately clear to the audience that this is going to be a WTF(BILC) movie: What the fuck? (But it looks cool!)

Apparently alien-gods that are kick-ass bodybuilders and travel the galaxy seeding planets with life don’t think of just adding their genetic disintegration snack to a simple blood sample, but instead prefer a suicide approach. WTF(BILC)

Next we get some human Scientists. I cap it because that seems to be how they feel about themselves: Back off, man, we’re Scientists. They discover a star chart in various ancient artworks across multiple civilizations, which they think is an invitation. Somehow, a few dots scratched in stone is accurate enough that they’re able to find the exact match dozens of light years away. WTF(BILC)

So they travel there and high jinks ensue. I’m not going to list all the WTF(BILC) moments, because the sheer volume could break the internet. And some of the WTF stuff doesn’t even look that cool, like when they keep taking their helmets off in an alien environment which, although it has breathable air, could still be full of who knows what sort of bizarre alien shit. Which, of course, it is. But why would they think of that? They’re just a bunch of Scientists.

Let’s just do a quick sampler list of further WTFs:

1. Two guys freak out and want to go back to the ship when the team finds some dead aliens. Even though they’ve mapped the site, and one of the freaked-out guys was in charge of the mapping tech, the two get lost.

2. When the rest of the team evacuates the site, they think the other guys must have already gone back to the ship even though all the ground vehicles are still there.

3. When the guys that got left behind find a creepy alien worm/snake, one of them—and remember, they were scared of DEAD aliens—talks to it like it’s a puppy and tries to touch it. Then things get squishy.

4. When one of the Scientists ends up pregnant with an alien squid baby, the crew is going to put her in suspended animation until they get back to Earth. Instead, she beats up a couple people so she can escape and perform a C-section on herself (see next WTF) . . . and then everyone acts like it never happened. No one says, “You hit me in the head when I was trying to save you. That shit’s messed up.” Or “Dude, what’s with the line of sutures on your stomach?” Or “So, boy? Girl? Other? Where are you registered?”

5. Scientist with alien squid baby ducks into a robotic med unit so she can take care of business, but the unit isn’t programmed for C-sections because it’s set up to treat males only. But the unit is the personal property of Charlize Theron’s character, whose skin-tight suits make it clear that she is in fact a woman. This raises two possibilities: a) that she is secretly a man, but that’s a pretty big WTF, even for this movie, or 2) that she is secretly an android (a distinct possibility that is hinted at in a couple other scenes) and she only has this as a way to say, “See, I’m a person, I need a robotic med unit in case something happens to me that would hurt a human but not an android, because I’m a person not an android. Why are we talking about androids?” Either way, however, it’s pointless, because she gets killed (see next WTF) and the whole thing was just awkwardly injected into the story (like an alien squid baby) to provide a way to extract an alien squid baby.

6. Big alien spaceship crashes and is rolling over toward C-section and Secret Android/Man. They run in the direction it’s falling, like dumb animals on the road running in the direction the car behind them is driving. Finally C-section runs perpendicular to the ship and gets to watch Secret Android/Man get crushed because she never thinks to turn left or right. But then when the ship stops rolling and tips over, C-section goes back to moving in the direction it’s falling and it lands on top of her, but she lucks out and there’s enough of a space beneath it that she survives.

7. Along the way it’s revealed that the alien/god bodybuilders had second thoughts about humans and were at this site preparing deadly alien creatures to bring back to Earth to exterminate us. Which then leaves them with no motivation at all to have ever revealed the location of their weapons lab to early civilizations which ended up in cave paintings and set this whole story in motion in the first place.

8. Turns out the whole mission was actually underwritten by a terminally old guy hoping the alien/god bodybuilders would cure him. Instead of being played by someone old, he’s played by a guy in obvious old-age makeup, I assume to trick the audience into expecting he will be regenerated at some point so that it’s more of a surprise when he gets offed by the roid-raging alien/god they wake from suspended animation. Not cool.

9. The alien/god bodybuilder doesn’t die at the controls of his ship like you expect to match the scene in the derelict ship in Alien, so this isn’t even the same ship or batch of aliens as in that film, making the link to Alien so tangential that it comes across as a shameless marketing ploy to package an independent story as being related to a beloved film classic.

Well. I’ve already gone on far longer than I meant to, and I only scratched the surface of all the nonsensical events that drive this film. But it sure looks cool.

Unnecessary Prequels, Part One

I just got around to watching The Thing (2011) and Prometheus, prequels to the fan-favorite science fiction films The Thing (1982) and Alien. Yes, the prequel to The Thing is called The Thing. More on that later. But first . . . spoiler alert. You know the drill.

Presumably one makes a prequel to answer questions the viewers had after seeing the original film. Like after The Thing (1982), when viewers wondered what exactly happened at the Norwegian Antarctic camp which first found the shapeshifting alien and dug it up from the ice. Or when otherwise-satisfied viewers left the theater after Alien and said, “But who made humans?” Oh, wait, no one asked that after Alien. Ever.

First up, The Thing (2011). The short answer to “What happened at the Norwegian camp?” is “The exact same freakin’ thing as at the American camp except with a female lead.” In some ways this is a remake, as it hits almost every plot point of the original, except with Norwegian accents and occasional subtitles. Some of the dialogue is almost verbatim. It’s a preremakequel.

They tried to open it up a bit more by going inside the alien ship, but it’s not much of a diversion, since we already know they kept the alien from escaping, since the ship was still there in the ice in the original film. Which is, of course, the challenge of making such a direct prequel . . . the audience already knows the ending.

Nevertheless, it’s a surprisingly effective film despite the fact that it’s the same plot and is completely unnecessary. As we get to the final scenes, they are, inevitably, the opening scenes of the 1982 movie. By giving it the same name (see, I told you I would get back to this), the filmmakers seem to be asking us to accept that it’s just one big movie. The problem is that the reason why the Norwegian camp scenes in the 1982 film were so effective was precisely because we didn’t know what had happened there. The prequel deflates that by spelling it all out. No one who hasn’t watch The Thing (1982) should watch the prequel first, because it’s just one long spoiler.

There is some cleverness to how the producers of the prequel nestled it into the original. I’ll admit that when the prequel first moves into the room with the alien in the ice block, which we saw in the original film after all the destruction, it’s kinda cool. Not everything fits, however; when Mac visits the ship in the ice in the 1982 film, they don’t see the two snowcats that should be there, one with a charred alien corpse, the other with a frozen dead woman. In the end, however, the entire prequel feels like a really long deleted scene from the original. And like most deleted scenes, even when they’re fun to watch, you’re not really missing anything by skipping over them.

Next week: Unnecessary Prequels, Part Two. (See what I did there? I’m doing a sequel about prequels.)

Deja Vu(lcan)

Last week I commented on my growing frustration that a number of Trek fans who have enjoyed the new film are dismissing those fans who didn’t enjoy the new film as just suffering from original-series sour grapes. I’ve now realized this is deja vu all over again.

While going through notes on possible blog posts, I rediscovered my unfinished review of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. I never finished writing the review because my daughter and I talked about the film in our podcast, Generations Geek (Episode 4: The Day the Geek Stood Still). There in the review was a rant about a similar topic, but with Star Trek scratched out and Middle-earth written in. So, begin Hobbit rant:

I need to comment on an article with a title that really burned my lembas: “Dislike Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit? Then You Don’t Know Tolkien.” Granted, the article is a little more focused than the headline would lead you to believe, replying to specific negative comments from professional critics, but it still rubs me the wrong way.

I first read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in high school and although I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve reread them, I’d guess well over a dozen times (including once aloud to my then baby daughter). I’ve also read, among other things, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Children of Hurin, and the twelve-volume The History of Middle Earth. I’m very excited that the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Lord of the Rings finally says “They can go ten miles north to Brandywine Bridge” instead of “twenty miles.” (Those of you who know what I’m talking about KNOW what I’m talking about. Am I right?)

I own the animated The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, but not the animated The Return of the King because it’s a train wreck (people who think Bakshi’s LOTR film is bad really need to check out this “kid-friendly” version of the last book by the same people who made the lovely cartoon Hobbit: it includes orcs singing the song “Where There’s a Whip There’s a Way,” which is simultaneously the worst Middle-earth song ever and the best S&M song ever). I own Jackson’s theatrical and expanded versions of his Lord of the Rings movies.

All of that background is to say, ZOMG, if I wasn’t thrilled with the first Hobbit movie, don’t presume that means I don’t know my frakkin’ Tolkien. I’m not going to tell people they shouldn’t like the film simply because of my own lukewarm response, so do me the courtesy of not dictating that I should like it by questioning my Tolkienitude if I don’t.

End Hobbit rant. So, people, please: if you enjoy a film, that’s great, you got your money’s worth. Tell me why you love the movie, I’d like to hear your opinion. But if I don’t like the film, don’t undercut my point of view by implying I just don’t understand or I’m not open to new interpretations. Listen to what I’m saying about the movie. The film you love may not be perfect, but I’m not saying you shouldn’t still enjoy it. As filmgoers, we weight the various elements of a movie in different ways, so our scales will balance out differently. One person’s minor flaw is another person’s final straw.

JJ Trek’s New Clothes

Another Trek fan has posted that most people who don’t like Star Trek Into Darkness just haven’t accepted that this is an alternate timeline. This attitude is really starting to tick me off.

Nearly all of my problems with the movie have to do with its problems as a movie, regardless of it being Trek in general or its specific timeline. If you like the movie, that’s fine, I’m glad when people like Trek, but don’t dismiss my criticisms with a whitewash of “Oh, you just don’t like it because it’s not Shatner and Nimoy.” 

I don’t care that it’s not Shatner and Nimoy, and I certainly don’t care that it’s set in an alternate timeline. I wrote an alternate timeline Trek novella for Simon & Schuster! I enjoy alternate timelines, and rebooting the franchise in an alternate timeline was the right decision. 

But when I read a book or watch a movie, I hope for a certain level of quality in the writing. That includes believable characters with relatable emotional arcs, as well as consistent plot points that evolve organically as complications develop from the actions of the characters. 

As a film, Into Darkness fails upon those points, and any other details about timelines or actors are irrelevant. Now come the spoilers. Hiding the Enterprise underwater made no sense. Hiding cryopods in photon torpedoes made no sense. Relying on a madman frozen for three hundred years to design new weapons made no sense. Harrison fleeing to the Klingon homeworld made no sense. The idea that a giant warship could be built in secret made no sense. And so on. 

That’s just sloppy writing. You can either try to persuade me that I’m mistaken with details from the movie or even just say I’m taking it too seriously. But please don’t brush me aside as some sort of disgruntled fanatic, which is really just sticking your fingers in your ears and saying “Lalalalalalalala” in a Pee-Wee Herman voice. Feel free to enjoy the movie in spite of these flaws, but don’t disrespect my reasons for not liking the movie.

Labels, Schmabels. A Semi-Coherent Monday Rant.

Labels can be helpful if you’re shopping for clothing or food. If food companies are made to disclose the irradiated baby seal hearts they’re using as sausage filler on the label, that’s quite helpful for the irradiated baby seal heart intolerant. But political labels…pshaw. Yes, I said “pshaw,” and I don’t regret it. I’m tired of them and what they stand for.

I admittedly fall on the left side of the spectrum. I usually call myself a liberal. Some say “leftist.” Some say “lefty,” using the diminutive form with a sneer, as if you really make a cogent political point by adding that long-e sound, when what you really do is make yourself look like a puffed-up name-caller.

The problem with political labels—and what are the parties but the biggest brand-name labels?—is they elevate ideology above thought. Voters reflexively disparage their opposing labels, and politicians do stupid things to maintain their own labels. It’s part of the overall dumbing down of American politics. That said, I’m going to do some of my own dumbing down to make my point.

The Republicans lean so far to the right that if you went into a GOP convention and shouted “Free government cheese!” most of them would smash their foreheads on the right side of the door frames trying to flee the nanny state. And most of them would have stuffed their pockets with cheese.

The Democrats have moved so far over to compromise that most of them seem like also-ran Republicans. They still trumpet a few key planks from the platform so that you know they’re Democrats, but the notes they blow are shrill and random. They’re just all over the place, like a roomful of frightened cats with a lot of Hollywood friends.

The Libertarians stand smugly aside because they have actually convinced themselves that simply because they are not the other two parties that it means their self-serving nonsense is better than all the other self-serving nonsense. It’s like whooping cough congratulating itself for not being small pox or diphtheria.

There are other parties, but they tend toward the single issue. Like the Jeans That Fit Party, whose platform consists of demanding jeans that fit both a tubby midsection and stubby legs. I’m not a card-carrying member, but I did hand out flyers for them once.

I’m increasingly convinced our government would do better if it were selected from a playground. Take a group of kids playing well together and put them in office. That sense of fair play, kindness, and community would serve us well. We’d probably play nicer with the rest of the world, and we’d also get longer recesses and free pudding. That’s a win-win scenario.

So eff politics by label and catchphrase. I want to start the Nuanced Party. We’ll never win an election because our policy answers will be too long for sound bites. I’m going to launch the party by leading a march on Washington where we carry blank signs so that people have to really think about what should be on them.

But now I gotta go. I need to label my comic book storage boxes.

Some Publishing Nuts and Bolts

Here’s a little behind-the-scenes publishing info. Photo insert placement is one of the hundreds of odd little decisions I make as a book’s editor. Books aren’t simply a bound-up stack of single pages; they’re a bound-up stack of little booklets; each little booklet, called a signature, is a folded group of a certain number of pages. The number of pages per signature can be 16, 32, or 48 (or others, but these are what I deal with the most).

When a book has a photo insert, that special signature of glossy paper gets placed between the regular text signatures. At some point, a person from production will come to see me and say something like, “Where do you want the insert? The best breaks are at pages 138/139 and 234/235.” The page numbers might not match what you would expect from the signature size if the book has front matter paginated with roman numerals.

The preferred placement for an insert is usually near the middle of the book, but it’s also nice if it doesn’t break a sentence, that is if the last signature before the insert ends with a complete sentence instead of in the middle of a sentence that’s concluded after the insert. It doesn’t always work out this way. Sometimes the only clean signature break is on, say, page 48 of a 336 page book, and it would just look weird having the insert that close to the front of the book.

Under those circumstances, I’ll pick the signature break closest to the middle, but with some more preferences involved. If I have to break a sentence, fine, but I wouldn’t want to interrupt a hyphenated word. That just seems rude somehow. These are the kinds of esoteric aesthetic decisions that go into making a book. I think they help, at least subliminally, the end experience for the reader by providing a nice flow while reading.

My Big Fat Copyright Infringement Adventure

Last August I got an email from a major textbook publisher asking for permission to reprint my story “The Mailbox” in a college textbook. This was a small, custom textbook, one of those things where the professor picks an anthology-worth of stories for a class and gets a short print run.

Of course I was happy. Other authors in the anthology included Percy Shelley and T.S. Eliot. Holy crap, I was mixed right in with the big guns. Cool. And “The Mailbox” is a special story for me. It was my first pro sale way back in 1987, when it was picked as a Tamarack Award story in Minnesota Monthly magazine. In recent years, the annual award goes to a single story along with $10,000. Back in my day, there were several winners, and we got $500 each. That $500 helped me buy my first word processor.

I couldn’t afford a full-blown computer, so I got a Smith-Corona word processor, an electronic typewriter that plugged into a monitor and external hard drive. It had a monochrome green screen and a 3.5 inch floppy drive. The typewriter could be used on its own, like a regular typewriter, but when plugged into the hard drive and monitor it functioned like a word processor, with your typing appearing on the screen. When you printed from the hard drive, the typewriter served as the printer, so you had to feed each page in manually. It was an ungainly thing and kind of buggy, but it still made me feel like a real writer to invest in new-fangled word-processing technology. But I digress.

The permissions form had a couple things to check off: there was one place where you could check “gratis” and another for “fee.” I thought, “Well, of course I’m going to try for a fee.” I asked my boss at the day job, who’d worked in the textbook market in the past, what a per-story budget might be for something like this. He thought $300 to $500, so I figured, “What the hell,” and wrote in $500. They accepted!

But I was wondering how the heck the professor came across my twenty-five-year-old story published in a magazine. I contacted the professor, who explained someone had brought it in when they were putting together the first edition of the anthology in the late eighties. Oh, that explains, wait, what now? First edition? Turns out “The Mailbox” had been in this anthology almost since it had first appeared in the magazine. Without my knowledge. That first edition had been published by a different textbook company, and then there was a second edition by the same publisher that was now organizing the third edition. The professor was apologetic, but wasn’t to blame; the whole reason the college went to the textbook company in the first place was so that the company would handle permissions.

On the one hand, cool, college students have been reading my story and discussing it for nearly twenty-five years. On the other hand, this had been done in violation of my copyright, which had remained with me, not the magazine. Through the freelancer who had originally contacted me, I got in touch with the publisher’s in-house rights guy and explained I had no recollection of granting reprint permissions previously and asked for him to check his records. I also tried contacting the first edition publisher, but they never responded. The current guy turned out to be an upstanding fellow. He got back to me and apologized, owning up to the fact that when they did the second edition they contacted Minnesota Monthly, and after the magazine informed the publisher that I held the copyright and that they had no current contact info, the publisher went ahead and included my story anyway.

Acknowledging that was bad judgment on their part, he said I should obviously be compensated for the second edition, and he offered me $500 for that. I replied that that would have been a nice offer up front, but after the fact it didn’t really take care of business. During the course of our emails he had mentioned they had sold about 1,200 copies of the second edition. So I said how about you pay me $500 for the rights plus a token $1 penalty for each book sold. That would then be $1,700 for the second edition and $500 for the third edition. He countered rounding down to an even $2,000 for both. “Done,” I said.

So, for a twenty-five-year-old story, and without paying any lawyer fees, I negotiated myself a $2,000 paycheck. I’m quite happy with that, and I’m not pursuing the first edition publisher any more, because it’s not really worth my time. The odds of getting anything out of them is slim, and how much could I possibly get, anyway? My boss told me I’d outdone myself on getting as much as I did, and I think he’s right. Now I’m waiting for my copy of the textbook, which I also requested. That’ll be nice on the bookshelf.

Lucky 2013: A Resolution for Writing

I generally don’t do resolutions. Mostly because my success rate would be, let’s be honest, fairly low, and then it becomes something to feel guilty about and what a way to start out a new year, with a feeling of failure. With that in mind, I’m reluctant to label any newly turned over leaves as resolutions. But so far this year there are a couple things going on that I’m feeling good about.

One is that I haven’t purchased a pint of Ben & Jerry’s yet in 2013. Now, I’m not a monk over here, I’ve had some ice cream now and then, but I’m not guzzling down those pints of sugar-fat goodness like I used to. Does it count as exercise when you swiftly turn your head away from the Ben & Jerry’s freezer in the grocery store? I think so. Just like pumpkin muffins count as a vegetable serving. Again, not a monk.

More importantly, I’m really going at the writing this year. I’ve got three chapters and a synopsis done for a steampunkish novel, something that’s been simmering on the back burner for years. I plan on starting to write the thing after I get some feedback from beta readers. I’m hoping to pursue this as a traditional publishing project, depending on which way the wind blows.

I finished it after I sent in my story for the forthcoming ReDeus: Beyond Borders anthology, due out in late May. Next up I will be writing another ReDeus story for ReDeus: Native Lands, due in early August of this year. The idea, as introduced in the first anthology, ReDeus: Divine Tales, is that all the ancient gods, like Zeus and such, have returned to the world and demanded worship from the descendents of their historic followers. This changes the world quite a lot, and it is in that shared world, at various points in the near future, that the stories take place.

In my story “The Tale of the Nouveau Templar” in the first anthology, I introduced Etienne Joubert, a knight of the Templar Order from 1310 who was miraculously returned to life in the ReDeus world of 2018. The story was set in the year 2026, after Joubert had settled into his new life. In the second anthology, my story “A Medieval Knight in Vatican City” returns to 2018 to tell the full story of what happened when Joubert returned to Earth. Let’s just say that when he talked about it in ”The Tale of the Nouveau Templar,” he left a lot out. For the third anthology, I plan to give a little more screen time, as it were, to his valet, Wilkins, and his sidekick, Tony, back in 2026 or so in Manhattan.

The ReDeus books are small indie press projects, residing in the print-on-demand and e-book world. I’ve also got some irons in the fire for more e-book publishing this year, more news on those as they develop. I’m trying to pursue various projects across the spectrum from self-publishing to indie press to traditional, both e-book and in print. Diversifying, if you will, in this strange new world of publishing.

In addition to the above, my story “On My Side” will be in the Hadley Rille anthology A Quiet Shelter There sometime this year, and I hope to enter new stories in a couple other open-call anthologies, if my schedule allows. And so far, I’ve got a nice schedule, and I hope I can just keep this momentum going. I’m also planning on blogging more this year, although that’s gotten off to a slow start. As I continue to develop better writing habits, however, I should also have more to talk about.

For example, I often wish I could afford to go to more conventions like the fab Shore Leave at which I’ve been a writer guest for several years. Then it hit me that there a number of nice local conventions that I’ve never gone to simply because I’m a bit of a homebody. So I took a look at CONvergence, sent them my CV, and, boom!, I’m now a guest. I’m looking forward to meeting fans and guests alike.

Quick sidenote before I sign off: the podcast I do with my daughter, Generations Geek, is now up to six episodes, the last two featuring our epic interview of our first ever guest, Star Trek and Doctor Who novelist Una McCormack. Our next episode will feature our reviews of King Kong 1933, 1976, and 2005, all three of which we watched or rewatched in a single weekend to prepare for the show. After that we will have very special guest Thomas D. Jones, astronaut, scientist, and Star Trek fan. Be sure to check out our shows on the Chronic Rift Network or on iTunes, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook. Just search for Generations Geek.

Okay, plugging done, time to watch one of my stories. Geek out.

 

After finally watching Caprica . . . Meh

In honor of finally posting a new blog long after I should have, I’m blogging about a show I finally watched long after I should have. For my nongeek readers, I’ll explain that Caprica (2009–2010) was the prequel series to the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (2003–2009). I loved much of BSG, particularly since I accepted early on that the finale would not be satisfying. There’s no satisfying way to end BSG, because the premise inherited from the original show in the seventies—that there’s some connection between these far-flung colonies and ancient Earth mythology—is a nonsensical muddle, a hole out of which one cannot climb with dignity or clean pants. The new show put a couple spins on it and tried to move the inverted cups around fast enough that you wouldn’t notice under which one the nonsense was hidden, but in the end it’s still a big cluster of “What the huh?”

Anyway, I didn’t get around to watching the new BSG until years after it was broadcast, so by the time the last DVD had spun down I already knew Caprica had come and gone in a season, so I didn’t rush out to watch it. Over the last couple weeks I finally zipped through all nineteen episodes courtesy of the Netflix. I had avoided almost all details about the show, so I was able to approach with a fairly fresh sense of “What the huh?” If you still haven’t seen it, I warn you I’m going to go full-on spoiler in the following comments, so you may want to avert your eyes. 

The decision to stay on just one or two planets without a bunch of space battles was a good one, but what they then did on those planets left me, for the most part, wondering what they were thinking. The BSG characters were generally well-rounded people with flaws, but most of them were decent people. Caprica, on the other hand, is populated by a lot of unlikable characters with hands dirtied by various moral failings that make for a bleak show. One of the colonies is portrayed as having a mafia-style culture, like that Star Trek episode where someone left a book on Chicago mobs behind and influenced an entire culture to wear cool retro suits and use lots of ammo. In addition to the mobsters, you’ve got monotheist terrorists blowing up trains for reasons. I’m not really sure why. One of them plans to convince the polytheists that there is only one true god by killing people and uploading digital avatars of them into a virtual heaven, because that will prove…uh, well, I’m not really sure how that will prove anything beside the need for lots of memory on their servers.

The show almost has the air of a bad pitch meeting. It’s Sopranos meets the Matrix…plus high school girls who dress in sexy outfits! I suppose they were trying to appeal to a younger demographic, but instead it just makes older viewers feel creepy watching the show. Caprica‘s set about fifty-eight years before BSG, which is apparently before they invented consistent character motivation. Characters lurch from one extreme to the other in ways that are convenient for the plot twists. One of the more consistent characters, the wife of the man who builds the first Cylons, was helped by apparently receiving only one direction: “Let’s do that again, but more brittle!”

The daughter of the man who builds the first Cylons is a terrible teenage brat, but also a computer genius who revolutionizes realistic responses from avatars by essentially amassing data from the cloud (the same as Google’s doing). She’s killed in the terrorist bombing in the first episode while running away for reasons. She lives on in her avatar, who ends up loaded into a Cylon memory chip. They intercut between a hulking Cylon and the young actress in a tight skimpy dress, creating some really awkward moments when her father is staring at the Cylon.

All these plot elements are tangled together but just as the show was gaining some steam in spite of itself, Syfy pulled the plug. I like to think it was because they realized the show was born out of the same drunken meeting as when they decided to change their name to “Syfy.” Now I’m ready to watch Blood & Chrome, the follow-up movie that bridges the gap between Caprica and BSG, set during the First Cylon War. I haven’t paid much attention to reviews yet. How was it?

The Birth of Generations Geek: A Father/Daughter Nerdcast

Back in July I was thinking about podcasts. As in, “I should have a podcast.” I’d been noticing how many of my writer friends had podcasts, and it seemed interesting and challenging and, yes, another part of my “online platform” as we say in the pub business. But what would the podcast be? It seemed like if I started one it could be called A Writer You’ve Never Heard Of. Now, With a Podcast. Now that I reflect upon it, that’s not a half bad name. But, no, I wanted something more.

Then somehow I thought of doing a podcast with my fourteen-year-old daughter. We share a healthy geekosity, and I figured we’d have fun. And we would call it Generations Geek. That night, after I got home from work, I asked her. She thought it sounded cool. So we were united geeks. We would make it happen. But how? And when? I found a website that hosted podcasts, with certain limitations, for free. Free is good. After all, I work in publishing. And I was already going to have to buy some microphones.

So, when? I ordered the mics. Started thinking it would be cool if we could get one show online before we went on vacation at the end of July, before we went to the Shore Leave convention the weekend of August third. But I quickly realized there was no way, with everything else going on and getting ready for vacation, that we would have time to make an episode. Okay, then we would focus on it when we got back.

Other things started happening. I posted about the podcast online, and was contacted by John Drew of the Chronic Rift Network. He liked the idea of the show and invited us to be a part of the network of geeky podcasts on CRN. I jumped at the chance. I was already having second thoughts about the fine print of the free podcast website I’d been thinking of using, and Chronic Rift and the other podcasts on the network are done by a bunch of great people and already have a following. That would give our new show a leg up.

Because I couldn’t imagine having the time to get an episode done before Shore Leave, I came up with the idea of doing a Generations Geek panel at the convention. I pitched it, and it happened. Here’s a shout out to Allyssa Holmgren, Lisa-Michele McMullen, Susan Olesen, and Jen Rosenberg who all joined us. It was fun and the other perspectives we gained from everyone were interesting and really added to the panel.

When we got home, it was time to kick it into high gear. I hooked the microphones up to our basement computer, which seemed the perfect, quiet place to record the podcast. They weren’t working the way I expected them to. Aahhh, I needed a newer version of GarageBand. But not the latest version, which wouldn’t run on the older computer. So, figure out the latest version that will run on it, find a cheap deal on line, order the software. Install software. Software starts, software crashes. Fiddle with the situation for many hours over many days. Eventually have to give up. Because . . . 

Meanwhile something else had happened. John from Chronic Rift had asked when we’d have our first show ready. I wasn’t sure, so we’d just decided on announcing that show would debut in September, and we’d set a specific date when we got closer to wrapping up the first episode. No problem, I thought. But after agreeing to that, I remembered that the kid was going for a week-long camping trip with friends, then going to my mom’s for a week, then starting school with a four-day field trip. So, suddenly, we wouldn’t be recording until the second weekend in September. For a show due in September . . .

So, forget trying to work out tech problems with older basement computer. Plug the microphones into our main computer and get recording. Which we did. Then we played it back. Pop, pop, pop. Every plosive, letters like p and b that are created with a burst of air, was exploding onto the mics. We needed pop filters, little screens that diffuse the burst of air, so that we could talk without exploding. But you can spend 20 or 30 bucks or more for them, more than I want to spend after our family vacation, and they’re pretty much all made to mount on proper mic stands . . . which is not what we have. We have little plastic microphones on plastic bases. 

A little online research showed how to build your own pop screen for a few bucks apiece. OK then. Rush out, buy supplies. Get building. Do some recording. Pops gone! And before we know it it’s the next to last weekend in September, and we simply have to finish recording and editing and get the thing in to John. We’re finally getting the hang of it, having fun talking. The kid records some keyboard noodlings in GarageBand for a theme and for between segments, and I edit like crazy. And it came together. Give it a listen. We call episode one “Rise of the Planet of the Geeks.” We talk about going to see Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen, all the cool movie trailers we saw before Raiders, and the kid’s binges on Star Trek series. If you enjoy it, please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, and do other cool stuff just because you’re in a good mood.