^dMuppets/_d30Rock = (theOffice)^Muppets + ¹/_{(GarryShandling^Muppets)} – Vaudeville

…where theOffice, GarryShandling, and Vaudeville are all constants. It’s trickier than the usual prime-time equation, but not exactly unsolvable.

…though no matter how you solve it…

(wait for it)

…it’s kind of derivative.

ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar

Honestly, though, I thought it was pretty hit or miss, but when it hit, I laughed like a hyena. I’ll give the second episode a go. XD

Hey, I just got my panel schedule for VCON 40! The concert is 7pm on Friday – exactly where I don’t yet know, because some things are apparently still in flux. Otherwise, here’s where I’ll be:

I hope you’re coming, it’s always a lot of fun in Vancouver. ^_^

Stonewall, the “fictionalisation” of the Stonewall Riots that I talked about back in August, is finally getting reviews.

It is even worse than originally feared, rewriting history carte blanche to eliminate and/or outright mock the actual people of the Stonewall riots, replacing it with a straight-looking white-guy butch hero narrative, filled with caricatures of pathetic too-femmy-to-ever-find-love gays, abusive and vaguely pedophilic drag queens, and comic-relief trans and gender-variant people of colour.

It rewrites history, taking the actual revolution from the hands of the real heroes – the transwomen, the lesbians, the bulldykes, the drag queens, almost all people of colour – and actually has the straight-passing cisgendered corn-fed white-boy hunk start the action. (In real life, those guys mostly hid out in back, because they could pass, and didn’t like going to jail. Can’t blame them for that – and neither did the cops, who generally didn’t arrest them.) It’s whitewashing, it’s erasure, it’s the elimination of women and people of colour from history, all exactly as the trailer promised. It is a bundle of abominable racist lies.

From Vanity Fair‘s review:

Real-life Stonewall hero Marsha P. Johnson only gets a little screen time, and is played as comic relief, flatly, by Otoja Abit. Many of the characters who don’t look and sound like Danny are rendered as jokes, silly people who need Danny’s relatively rugged masculinity to get them angry and organized. Stonewall is ultimately yet another cartoonish fantasy about white saviors and square-jawed heroes; it should be called Independence Gay.

There’s lots more like that. Do not see this film. Do not support it, do not give it your money. Do not participate in this travesty. Simply. Do. Not.

You know you’ve got a decent rep as a supervillain when a Dalek comes to you for help finding parts. I mean, I don’t mean to brag, but screw that, actually, yeah, I’m kinda bragging. I’d say that depends, cyborg – whatcha got for me?

On a not-entirely-unrelated note, I decided over the summer that I’d give the new series of Doctor Who a chance, after last year’s trainwreck. I’m not convinced – it’s got a bit too much fanservice and we are again retreading old ground, even if they do acknowledge it outright – but it’s still better than anything I saw last year. I quite enjoyed the first 15 minutes, which is something I couldn’t say about last year at all.

Regardless, it looks like they’ve backtracked on a few bad ideas, and I do like Michelle Gomez’s take on Missy/The Master – particularly with these rectons – so… we’ll see. Modern Who is back up to probationary status, at least for the moment.

Hey, everybody, sorry for going all silent like that. It’d be cool to say that I have big news, or supervillainy adventures to report, but I don’t. The best I’ve got is that a college radio station in the midwest threw me a note that they want to play some tracks from Bone Walker, so that’s definitely cool.

This video of 13,000-odd marbles flowing down many levels of a giant marble-cascade machine is… oddly soothing, actually. Enjoy.

Also, I made a custom 404 page for the website. I used the real page URL for that link, but, of course, you can use any URL you want as long as it hangs off crimeandtheforcesofevil.com. That is, after all, kind of the point. XD

A couple of weeks ago, the retro-SF blog Galactic Journey talked about SF television from 1959 – in particular, Twilight Zone and Men Into Space. Everyone is familiar with Twilight Zone – it’s iconic enough that even now most people have at least heard of it. Men Into Space, not as much.

Meanwhile, we’ve been playing Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas again at the Lair, like y’do, in anticipation of Fallout 4 coming out soon. When I was playing before, I’d never yet seen any episodes of Men Into Space. I’d heard it mentioned, but never watched it.

What do these works have in common?

MiS feels very strange, as a viewing experience. It’s extremely-near-future SF of 1959; it started maybe a decade into that future. They’ve more or less got the science as understood at the time acceptably right, thanks presumably to the very close cooperation with the American space programme of the US Air Force. And it was shot very much like a radio drama with pictures; there’s lots of narration voiceovers and talking.

The resulting combination makes it feel like a series of short military documentaries, rather than fiction. Which is good, because it’s pretty dull, and you need an angle to make it interesting. That one works for me.

And where that ties into Fallout is that if you take the Fallout universe and have them get into space exploration with gusto rather than nuclear power and robots… this becomes a documentary about the history of that Fallout AU. If Fallout is specifically about the imagined future of the late 1940s and early 1950s, this is background clips for an almost identical world, based on the imagined future of just a few years later.

In some ways, Men Into Space feels more like Fallout than Fallout itself does. No, that’s unfair; it feels more like Fallout than does Worlds of Tomorrow: Science Fiction with a Difference, the collection of short SF stories cited by the creative team as possibly the largest single source of inspiration for the game world.

Fewer robots and more spaceships, but nuclear armageddon nonetheless

I never really expected to have a headcanon for 1959’s Men Into Space, but – apparently, that was going to happen, because it has. It’s not a world I’d want to visit; wow, sexist much? and, again, 1959, so it’s Whitey! Into! SPAAAAAAACE! which is a name I originally came up with for When Worlds Collide but certainly applies here.

But it’s kind of neat, just the same.

Aside from the Norwescon recruitment effort, I’m up to my neck in Day Jobbe. That will go on another week before things calm down to normal. So, yeah. Not romantic or musical or creative or fun, but that’s why I’ve been kind of quiet.

Anyway, I took this picture in the main library downtown a few weeks ago. I’m not actually fond of the building from the outside – I call it the Glass Anvil – but it has some interesting things going on in the interior, particularly around the edges, up near the top. Which is where I took this.

Many Intersections
(Seattle Public Library)

Norwescon 2016 (the 39th Norwescon) is spinning up, and projects are well underway. I’m not part of it this year, but the festival I started – nwcMUSIC – absolutely is, and needs all the people it can get. I’ve talked about this before in some depth, of course, but in short form, it was time for me to step away and hand the reins to someone else, so that’s what I’m doing.

Now, they’ll be dividing my job up into many nice bite-sized pieces, so you don’t have to go all in at once. They’ve filled a couple of positions – daytime programming director, for example, which is a big one – but are without doubt still looking for more. The first all-hands meeting is September 19th, just eight days away, in SeaTac. It would be really great if anyone and everyone interested would show up. Or, if you’re interested but can’t make that meeting, let them know that, too.

Also, as I’ve said before, I will totally dump information at you. I will be a resource. I have a lot of institutional knowledge and I want to share it in order to keep this thing going. So, hie thee off to Norwescon and volunteer with Programming (for daytime events) or Special Events (for concerts and other large event items). Opportunities are available now.

To speak honestly: while it is definitely time for me to step away from the organisational side for a while, I’ve had some amazing experiences building nwcMUSIC, and met a lot of awesome people running events at Norwescon. It seems pretty damn likely you will too. Give it a shot, and find out for yourself.

Facebook event – Convention Event Page

Hey, music people! And, for that matter, anybody else interested in being an Attending Professional or Performer! NOW IS THE TIME TO CONTACT NORWESCON! Right now as in today – this week is in fact last call.

Here is the direct link to the contact form. There’s also a separate page for suggesting programming items, and you don’t have to apply as an attending professional or performer to suggest panel ideas, those are generally welcome.

So, yeah! Now’s the time. Go, now!