(1) SITH PACK. Michael J. Martinez continues his Star Wars rewatch reviews in “Star Wars wayback machine: Revenge of the Sith”
It’s the final piece of the Star Wars prequel trilogy and — perhaps unsurprisingly — Episode III: Revenge of the Sith is the best of the prequels and, if I may be a touch heretical, on a par with Return of the Jedi. It very much echoes what made the original trilogy special, despite having many of the problems that plagued the other prequels.
(2) DIY STORMTROOPER. At io9 Andrew Liptak reports progress on making his own Stormtrooper armor in “So You Want To Join The Empire: Finishing Touches”. Some of the lingo is a bit specialized…
Greebles
I ended up trimming down the greeble on the abs plate – I didn’t trim it down enough the first time. The paint was also slightly off color after it dried, so I ended up picking up the correct shades,
(3) BARRIS FUNERAL. “I was wondering why there were so many cool cars in Glendale yesterday,” remarked John King Tarpinian. The answer: Batmobile designer George Barris was being laid to rest at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale. Barris passed away November 5 at the age of 89 — click on the link to see Comic Book Resources photo of Barris’ casket, which features an airbrushed ’66 Batmobile on its side and specially-made fins on top, in honor of the creator’s work.
(4) DOCTOR STRANGE. Did they really want to work together? “Clea-ing The Air: Neil Gaiman And Guillermo del Toro Have Differing Memories Of Their Nixed ‘Doctor Strange’ Movie” at ScienceFiction.com.
What if… Neil Gaiman wrote a ‘Doctor Strange’ movie and Guillermo del Toro directed it? Sadly, that’s one tale that will never be told, but could it have been? Well, at least according to one of the creators involved, Gaiman, who tweeted a lament, expressing:
“I still wish Marvel had been interested in a [Guillermo del Toro] & me Dr Strange movie, because I wanted to write Clea so badly after 1602.”
(5) SEED BOMBAST. RedWombat cut loose with a mighty rant about the seed bombs entry in yesterday’s Scroll that is too good to be missed, so I am repeating it in today’s Scroll….
Part I: Okay. Seed Bombs. *clears throat*
Seed bombing is super-duper popular with “guerrilla gardeners,” with Girl Scout troops, civic-minded crafters, basically with all sorts of well-meaning folks who think that you can turn a vacant urban lot into Eden by throwing a ball of clay full of seeds over the fence and walking off with the warm glow that you have given nature a helping hand.
Except they don’t work.
There’s a couple factors at work here. #1, very rarely do people research the plants–like those wildflower meadow mixes in a can, they’re often dumping invasive weeds or short-lived annuals…because those are the only things that might survive under those conditions.
Which leads us to #2 — even assuming the seeds germinate (a big if, as we’ll see below) they will be packed in incredibly tight in the seed bomb, compete with each other for root space, the ones that die will rot intertwined with the others, etc. There’s a reason we thin seedlings. Your only survivors are going to be the hardy souls who can stand intense root competition, and frankly, those plants don’t need your help moving around…
…because #4, there is a massive seedbank in the soil already. Billions and billions! Japanese stilt grass seeds can survive up to seven years in dirt, waiting for the moment to strike. Wind, water, animals…there are seeds there already. If humanity vanished tomorrow, half our cities would be forests before the decade was out. So if nothing is growing in that vacant lot, the reason is probably…
#5 – Compacted soil is shit soil. I have been fighting for years with a hillside where the builders ran earthmoving equipment over it, and Nothing Grows. Not even weeds. Not even kudzu or stiltgrass or Japanese honeysuckle. It is hardpan. It is dead clay. Nature could fix it, but in a century or two. There are no worms, no microbes, no LIFE.
I’ve made great inroads, but not with plants. I had to fix SOIL. I tried seeds first, and what self-respecting seed would grow there? I dug in plants by hand, grimly. Most died. A few lived, but the toughest clay-busters nature can provide could not do more than occupy one small, hard-won clump.
I brought in dirt, compost, raked in leaves–not much, just an inch or two over the clay and that was enough. There are worms and microbes and the layer keeps the dead stuff moist and slowly it gets dug through and aerated by roots. It felt more like terraforming than gardening. A seed bomb on compacted soil is useless, unless you can find the very toughest pioneer species, the sort that are first to grow in abandoned quarries, and those don’t need help from guerrilla gardeners.
And even if you DID get the right seeds, it won’t matter because #6–seed bomb construction is desperately flawed. (Can’t speak to the one above, this is just the standard method.) The standard method is to pack seeds in damp clay, let them dry, and then throw them. Congratulations, you have killed a bunch of seeds!
The vast majority of seeds germinate when moist. A dry seed is a live seed, unless it gets wet, then it is a growing seed. If you dry it out immediately, you have killed that seed. You get one shot at germination if you’re a seed. No do-overs. Seeds can live in the pyramids and be viable, seeds can live in the fridge and be fine, seeds that get wet are done unless planted pronto. (Exceptions: those that require other, more specific triggers–fire, animal digestion, cold stratification, etc, and some few plant species adapted specifically to floodplains.)
Those paper cards with seeds in the paper, plant them, yay earth? Dead. Seeds are mixed with slurry pulp, get damp, dried out. Unless they pick the seeds very carefully, it’s just feel-good crap.
And now I have to go to breakfast, so part two: Why It Looks Like A Seed Bomb Worked will have to wait for a bit.
Part II: Ok, so Round Two!
“But RedWombat!” you say. “I made a seed bomb and stuff grew! Also there is no #3 in your rant!”
To which I say “shut up and let us troubleshoot your miracle.”
If you made a bomb and ran out the same day and flung it, the seeds didn’t dry out. If you threw it on soil that didn’t completely suck, that was not already overgrown with weeds, that was then gently watered by either moist ground or rainfall, if your seed bomb was not too densely packed or was a variety that tolerates close competition, then you may indeed have successfully grown a plant. If you picked your seeds carefully, there is even a chance that it’s not a corn poppy or some other short lived annual. This is basically why stuff sprouts under the birdfeeder.
Alternately, if you don’t specifically recognize the seeds you planted, then it was quite possibly stuff already in the soil bank and you’re taking credit for its hard work.
Now, nature is a mutha, and some seeds will survive terrible treatment through dumb luck or a tiny pocket of dryness or are a floodplain species or whatever. Or they land in the one tiny pocket of hard pan along the fence that’s loose because of the post-hole digger, and it rains at the right moment or whatever. But a seed would have ended up there ANYWAY. You could get the same effect dumping safflower over the fence, as above, except that the safflower has a far better chance of sprouting.
So, in conclusion, this is feel-good crap that lets nice but wrong people and smug Eco-bros feel like They’re Helping, when they aren’t, and there’s a dozen things you could do that DO help, but most of those are work and also don’t pay extra for the cards with seeds in them. If you’re going to green the world, there are very few quick fixes.
The end.
And there’s extra credit reading about working with hardpan soil in RedWombat’s third installment!
(6) RING MUSIC. Deborah J. Ross confesses “My Love Affair with the Music of The Lord of the Rings”.
When at long last it was my time to embark upon piano lessons, as a first-time older adult student, I grabbed a copy of the easy piano versions of The Lord of the Rings music. My goal was to play “Into the West.” I was one of those folks in the theater with tears down my cheeks as the song ended. But I was just starting out, I had zero self-confidence, and I wanted to make sure I had the skill to play it well. My teacher and I selected “In Dreams” (which is also the leitmotif for the hobbits) as one of my early pieces. Even in the easy version, it was a challenge. And it had words, words in a key within my limited vocal range.
Like others of my generation, I got caught in the folk scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and even taught myself a few chords on the guitar. Although I enjoyed singing in a group, I had become convinced I had a terrible voice. I remember being told as a child that I couldn’t sing. So of course, my voice was strained, thin, unreliable in pitch. With the piano to support my voice, however, along with lots of practice when no one else was in the house, not to mention having an encouraging teacher, I learned how to breathe more deeply and relax my throat. The higher notes became easier and more clear. I added other songs and vocal exercises, which helped my confidence. “Wow,” my teacher said after one class, “who knew you had such a voice?”
(7) Today In History
- November 29, 1972 — Pong, a coin-operated video game, debuted.
(8) Today’s Birthday Boy
- Born November 29, 1898 — C. S. Lewis. Leah Schnelbach’s Tor.com post “C.S. Lewis: Moral Fantasist” concludes —
We’re still not sold on Turkish Delight, but thank you for Puddleglum and Mr. Tumnus, Mr. Lewis!
(9) Today’s Birthday Girl
- Born November 29, 1918 — Madeleine L’Engle. Ryan Britt also has a feature at Tor.com.
Today marks the birthday of an author who forever changed the way we feel about time travel, alternate dimensions, and dark and stormy nights. Madeleine L’Engle was born on November 29th in New York City and started writing almost right away. Her first story was composed at age 8, and she went on to pen a universe of novels, poems, and non-fiction throughout her amazing and inspirational career.
(10) STAMOS OR SCALZI. John Scalzi’s poll “Does Teenage John Scalzi Look Like Teenage John Stamos?” crowdsources the answer to a question that has plagued John since he was a high schooler with a rock idol haircut.
In comments, David P. provides disturbing evidence that young Scalzi looked more like Snot from American Dad.
I can only hope David P. isn’t out there researching my look-alike….
(11) STARFLEET. At Future War Stories, a blog devoted to explaining the world of military science fiction — “Future Military Profiles: STARFLEET”.
Considering its size and complexity, Starfleet has a relatively straightforward ranking system for non-commissioned and commissioned personnel. For commissioned officers at attend the academy, they achieve the rank of Jr. Ensign, then Ensign, and by the time they graduate, they are Jr. Lieutenants.For the bulk of their early years in service, a majority of officers will remain within the Lieutenants grades. Once achieving the rank of Commander, it is a short trip to the big chair (well…not if you are Riker).
(12) JESSICA JONES SPOILER WARNING. “The 13 Most Epic Marvel Easter Eggs in Netflix’s ‘Jessica Jones’” at Yahoo! TV. The first Easter egg should be okay to quote, it’s not very spoiler-y.
- “And Then There’s the Matter of Your Bill”: Right off the bat, you know showrunner Melissa Rosenberg and the Jessica Jones team are going to provide plenty for comic fans to geek out over. One of the first scenes of the series is a shot-for-shot recreation of Jessica’s introduction in Alias #1, by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos.
(13) X-MEN SPOILER WARNING. From ScienceFiction.com, “James McAvoy Hints At How Professor X Loses His Hair In ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’”. If you don’t want to know, don’t read! If you do want to know, well, I’m not sure this is really going to help…
But in ‘X-Men: Apocalypse’, McAvoy’s appearance will bring him more in line with Stewart’s. Back in May, the actor tweeted a picture of himself having his head shaved for the film, indicating that even though he is a younger Xavier, he will actually go bald to more closely resemble his comic book counterpart.
How does this come about? Well, as is the norm, details about this super hero flick are being kept tightly under wraps. But while promoting his new movie ‘Victor Frankenstein’, McAvoy appeared on ‘The Graham Norton Show’ and did spill a tease about his character’s follicle metamorphosis:
“He ends up going through something so horrible and physically painful that he literally half pulls his hair out/half it falls out. Maybe, or maybe not…I just shit myself because I know Fox Studios who own me might be angry with me for sharing that.”
(14) CHARLIE BROWN. Since it’s a big favorite of mine, I hesitate to think about the Bizarro Charlie Brown special contemplated by the original producers. From “It’s your 50th television anniversary (and your 50th TV Christmas), Charlie Brown”.
Imagine “A Charlie Brown Christmas” with a laugh track and with adult actors providing the children’s voices. Now imagine it without Vince Guaraldi’s jazzy music and without Linus quoting the Bible, telling Charlie Brown what “Christmas is all about.”
Hard to imagine, isn’t it? There goes the charm. There goes the magic. And, perhaps, there go all of the animated Peanuts specials that followed this first one, including “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
But if even some of the producers’ early suggestions and the network’s preferences had been followed, the version of “A Charlie Brown Christmas” that first aired on Dec. 9, 1965, wouldn’t have become a cherished classic. And, good grief, it would have been an hour special, rather than a half-hour
[Thanks to Michael J. Martinez, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Iphinome .]
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Well, that’s just a stopgap until Lucasfilm hires me to completely rework the prequels. After which, I’m approached by Peter Jackson to address issues with Lord of the Rings and (especially) the Hobbit movies.
A quick question for British people familiar with earlier generations:
If I am reading an old British paperback and it has a price marking of 1/- , how is that to be read?
One Shilling.
12 real pennies, 5 of the newfangled variety.
1 shilling, 0 pence. There were 20 shillings in a pound, and 12 old pence in a shilling.
@Anthony, @James Moar:
Thank you.
@Piece.
/ is shorthand for a shilling, the – is that there is no pence. d is pence. So, for example 1/6d is 1 shilling and sixpence. 12d make 1/-, 2/6d is a half crown, 5/- is a crown. 3d is a thruppence. A halfpenny is 2 farthings. 21/- is a guinea, 20/- is a pound.
HTH!
Peace:
That’s 1 shilling in pre-decimal currency (i.e. before 1971) – 12 old pence, or one-twentieth of a pound, which was equivalent to 5p post-decimalisation.
ETA: Slow, wasn’t I? (But not slow enough to be fifth response.)
Permaculture magazine had an article on it in this quarters issue.
Began Moffett’s Children of the Comet over the weekend (I won a copy). It’s his last book and in some ways he’s improved since I first read him. In others, he hasn’t. In one scene I literally said “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!” Really. Does he always have to have his protagonists betrayed to prove how good they are? Anyway, interesting hard SF. Reminds me of Niven’s Integral Trees.
Got Scorpion Rules and The Fold from the library’s e-book service. And A Succession of Bad Days and City of Stairs because they were available on special.
And I get to work late tonight. Wheeee!!!!!
And to think people were against decimalisation, for fear of it being too confusing.
@Ed —
To be fair, the pounds-shillings-pence with 240 pence to the pound system had been in use since Charlemagne. Something that thoroughly ingrained in a culture is confusing to give up, no matter how much simpler the decimal currency is from a standing start.
I remember decimalization (although I was only a kid at the time), and frankly I’m still unconvinced of its merits… 240 has more prime factors than 100, and if I had a thorough grasp of how many pence to the shilling and shillings to the pound there were, back then at the age of eight, it can’t have been that complicated, can it?
(I also observe that most of the “decimal currency is so much simpler” talk seems to come from a nation that’s obstinately sticking to 12 inches to the foot, 3 feet to the yard, and 1760 feet to the mile… leading me to conclude that objective complexity is not the issue, it’s just a question of what you’re used to.)
Or even 1760 yards to the mile. See? Confusing.
That’s a misspent youth? I spent Saturday in the basement of my local comic shop making Gundams with my friends!
The current plan is that there’ll be a Defenders crossover series in a year or two, featuring Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist teaming up (naq ng gur engr gurl’er nqqvat punenpgref, znlor gur Chavfure naq Uryypng). That aside, Matt Murdock was Jessica’s lawyer in the comics, and she sometimes acted as his bodyguard so there’s a precedent if they wanted Charlie Cox to show up for an episode or two next year.
JJ: Yes, Martha’s my sister. Actually, I’m visiting her at the moment. Shall I tell her you said hi? She’s hasn’t been writing SFF prose for a while; she’s been writing one-act plays.
I have heard rumours that Netfix might ditch Iron Fist, apparently they are struggling to adapt the character, and may go with The Punisher.
The Punisher is appearing as a guest in the 2nd series of Daredevil, and everyone is raving about John Bernthal’s performance.
Personally I would prefer to see an Iron Fist series.
There’s been a few carefully worded responses from Marvel about that, along the lines of Iron Fist still being in the planning stages. Given how well Cage worked in Jessica Jones, I think my idea would be for Netflix to do 2 Marvel shows per year using characters from the street-level New York roster, but mix and match depending on the story’s needs. So one year we’d have Daredevil solo, and then, say Heroes for Hire; and the next year maybe Daredevil and Hellcat in one series and Jessica Jones teaming up with Moon Knight in the other, or whatever.
@Kyra: “My headcanon is three completely different movies.”
I would like to subscribe to your streaming service.
@Peace: “Darths and Droids”
Hahaha, a successor to DM of the Rings. Cool!
@Simon Bisson: Wait, 20 shilling for a pound and 21 for a guinea? These are just one off; why on earth did they each get a unique name? Also, how does “d” mean “pence” when there’s no “d” in “pence”? Gah, so confusing! 😉
@me: “I mean, fall in love with the sample and buy it while it’s a great deal!”
Whoops, guess what happened? 😀 Despite evil present tense, it sucked me in with a nice-sized sample. I’m putting No Return aside for now. (shakes fist at everyone and everything) I forsee late nights ahead (I mean, later than usual).
Portman was 16 when she started filming The Phantom Menace. That’s actually pretty close to the 14 year-old child in the storyline, and certainly not “an adult actress” by most definitions. An experienced actress (since she’d been performing on stage since the age of 10) yes, but not an adult.
@Kendall:
The abbreviations for old-style British currency come from the Romans.
£ stands for “librum”, s for “solidus” and d for “denarius”, the smallest coin.
And now that I have looked it up, apparently the / in notations like the 1/- I asked about above is a simplified form of a long “s”.
@Kendal —
The guinea was a gold coin; at the time it was introduced, the pound (pound sterling!) was a silver-backed currency. The value of a quarter ounce of gold fluctuated against silver, as these things do. The settled value of 21 shillings is a side effect of the UK switching to a gold standard from the silver standard at a later date. And then — keep in mind a guinea hasn’t been minted since 1813 — it was a customary way to quote posh prices, either to make the price seem less than quoting in pounds would make it seem, or to build in a dealing-with-toffs surcharge/tip, take your pick.
And starred with Jean Reno and Gary Oldman in The Professional when she was 12.
Late in 1964, I spent a month in London and had to quickly get used to both the coinage and the count-by-twelves-and-twenties arithmetic. (And watch out for prices in guineas.) But I had come from Italy, where tracking how much things “really” cost meant remembering that a 100-lire coin was $.16 and a 10,000 lire note (a “bedsheet”) was $16 (and O! the power of the dollar back then!). It’s possible that this exercise might have helped when, years later, I had to wrap my head around octal and hexadecimal arithmetic.
SI all the way. It will be nice when certain places start realising that too, not to mention it will save a lot of hassle with landing on Mars as well.
Joe H. on November 30, 2015 at 5:49 am said:
I must be too tired because when I first read that I thought how cool and nerdy it was they released the movie with a Mandalorian audio track.
In Farquhar’s play The Recruiting Officer, much is made of the fact that a guinea is two and twenty shillings and sixpence, which was very confusing to one who is used to a guinea as 21s. Clearly it was written before the coin’s value was stabilised.
Regarding ‘solidus’: the motto of the University of Aarhus is Solidum Petit in Profundis; this must really mean ‘it seeks solid ground in the depths’, but when I first saw it I could not help reading it as ‘it seeks a shilling in the depths’.
Brian Z: In the UK, it was called Leon:The Professional.
Next up: Fun with groats
I’ve heard that one of the things marvel/Netflix is somewhat worried about with Iron Fist is that is is a pretty classic case of whitewashing an otherwise Asian story. That was less of an issue when it was first created, and in the comics they have grown since then with their own history, but if you strip it back to its original premise, what you get is still a white guy being more skilled and heroic than the Asians who train him, many of which get cast as the antagonists. That’s a tougher sell these days.
@Ryan H —
It has a trivial fix, though. Cast an obvious Asian-American as Iron Fist. Pretty much all the traditional storyline issues work fine with “American” substituted for “white” and you can talk about colonialism, post-colonial experiences, immigrant identities, and so on that way. With nuance and subtlety, even.
@Graydon
I don’t disagree. But it does require a pretty substantial re-working of the character that then has implications for the comics and other adaptations. Besides which, if they did make that call, you know that that’s what all the press surrounding the show would focus on.
They have such a deep bench of potential characters to work with, that once you get into these kinds of politicized decisions it must be very tempting to just switch to options b,c or d.
Peter Jackson to direct Dr Who?
Prediction: It’ll be a trilogy of episodes, filmed in New Zealand.
Some people have talked themselves into the idea that if they just recast Danny Rand as Asian-American they’re perpetuating a “They all know kung fu” stereotype. This does not seem to be the reaction of Asian-American fandom itself, which can be summed up more as “Oh hell yeah! We’ll take Iron Fist!” but of non-Asian and mostly white second-guessers (and concern trolls). One Asian-American fan site even had an article suggesting a dozen possible lead actors.
@Ryan H —
Any decision involving more than four people is political. It’s really hard to do anything good if you aren’t willing to grapple with that.
Making Iron Fist something other than white is a big change to the character only if you’re deeply invested in whiteness as a thing. It’s otherwise pretty much nothing. (Making Iron Fist Chinese would be a big change.) Invested-in-white is totally not the market that will watch anything with Luke Cage in it, so I wouldn’t think that’s a problem. Plus there’s so little not-white stuff out there that if you’ve got the sense of an addled gecko on toast, you make damn sure the writing team is a mix of the character ethnicities and let them go to town because you can get a major hit that way.
(Look at how well Jessica Jones and Carmilla are doing by being about actual women.)
@Graydon
You might as well use Shang-Chi or Cat then. Yes it is a Mighty Whitey story at the start but Iron Fist grew a pretty good history as he went on and with the advantage of hindsight the TV writers can bring that in from the start without having to use Retcons.
I can remember being baffled at old British novels when people paid guineas for clothing, or in the adverts in old British magazines. It seemed to be a special currency just for clothing.
Also common in auctions. You bid a number of currency units, paid in Guineas if you won, the seller got pounds, and the auctioneer kept the shillings as commission.
Making Iron Fist a Chinese American seems no big deal.
Way less than making Thor a woman, I should think.
@Anthony:
That’s tidy, anyway.
@Magewolf —
Retcon? It’s an entirely new continuity. The … can’t even really say TV shows, can I? Live action visual adaptations Netflix is doing are their own thing, required (I suspect) to have something to do with some story bible somewhere, but possibly not even the MCU as such.
There are famous one-mile horse races in England called the One Thousand Guineas (for three-year-old filles) and the Two Thousand Guineas (for three-year-olds of either sex), presumably reflecting the purses at the time the races were established. But other countries have similar races on their calendars that also get referred to as the French 2000 Guineas, the Japanese 2000 Guineas, etc. When I was a kid it took me forever to figure out that it had anything to do with any one country’s currency.
(And then when I did, it was “what do you mean, they have a separate word for £1.05?”)
Yes, that’d get me to buy the entire set of films yet again.
Someone on FB pointed out that the video clip also shows a copy of “The Silmarillion” with multiple bookmarks in front of Jackson…
I’m baffled why British cooking went metric – metric’s fine for chemistry, but Imperial’s easier when you have to adjust recipe serving counts on the fly.
But if the origin story involves him learning kung fu…? Back when I taught karate in Texas, we’d get the occasional prospective student who’d gravitate to one particular half-Thai instructor with an “ooh, they have a real karate instructor here” look on their face (or even outright say that *eyeroll*). Came as a big shock when he’d say “Howdy, y’all” in as thick a Texas accent as you can find – he’d learned it in a strip mall karate studio, same way any of us did.
@Graydon
What? I meant that the TV writers could use the stuff that was Retconed into Iron Fist’s history right from the beginning since they are getting a fresh start.
And I think Iron Fist is character that is tied to his race more then most. I mean for a long time his main reason for existence was to be the white martial arts guy.
SITH PACK, Henley
I dislike using the phrase Stockholm Syndrome to discuss fannish works, as their are so many truly awful examples of the real things. So is there a word for that desperate desire to find something good about a particular piece of fandom that over-rides reason? My ability to even minimally tolerate Episode III ended the day I had my first Domestic Assault-heavy city calendar (schedule). Because, dear readers, Hayden Christenssen is actually a good actor. He gave a real bravura performance of man-child who will end up hitting his spouse if things go bad. And Sith was what got a younger and less enlightened me his first explanation of what “fridging” was.
I seriously snarfed some coffee at Henley’s description of the final battle. And now I can’t un-see it…
Re STARFLEET
Interesting article. It’s interesting to see Starfleet as originally the Federation’s Mamelukes or Gurkhas, the reliable hitters from an out of the way planet. Makes one wonder how they ended up in charge, eh?
The older I get, the more I think that the reason Starlet must stress its diplomatic aspects is because a huge amount of its job has to be “soft” counter-insurgency. Think of it – hundreds, if not thousands of worlds, a huge amount of culture, and each world with its compliment of assholes. Cooling down revolts whilst not doing so must be a huge part of the day to day of anyone not going to strange new worlds. And cooling them down in a way that dots the is, crosses the ts, and doesn’t make anyone secede. Dazzling the locals with the benefits of Federation membership… and possibly offing the hardcore. Or finding the way to off the hardcore non-lethally, persuasively – this is still the future after all.
You know what? If they’re reviving Star Trek, they should really do it as three shows that occasionally cross over, a la Marvel.
There should be the classic Trek show. Duh.
There should be the darker, more political show. Have it be Federation Intelligence – or even Section 31. These are the people who deal with the existential threats, the foreign intelligence plots, the truly insanely dangerous and unknowable allies tech. This is the noir show.
And there should be the show that is Star Trek: Picard Made Peace Four Weeks Ago And Now They Want To Kill Each Other Again. Better title needed. This can have more of the social science fiction, and potentially a lot of comedy of varying levels. Kind of like what early Scrubs was to a lot of medical dramas.
(I see they finally took the Oscars out the small cupboard in the corner of the Weta boardroom.)
(A room that has the most impressive table of any I’ve sat at – a huge slab of Kauri retrieved from a trunk that had been buried under sand for a couple of thousand years.)
The thing about guineas and pounds is quite simple: one is gold, the other siver. A pound sterling was 240 silver pennies, literally.
The £1.05 value for the guinea was the result of the UK going off the gold standard…
(And yes, it was the posh money, the pound – the paper pound! – was what you paid bills in. Guineas were prize money and patronage…)
@Peace Is My Middle Name —
It seemed to be a special currency just for clothing.
Well, it’s the posh currency; good tailors quote their prices in guineas. (Lord Peter Whimsey may never have seen a clothier’s bill in his life that gave the total in pounds.) And if the good tailors quote prices in guineas (which is already a falsehood; truly good tailors don’t quote prices) anybody quoting prices in pounds is declaring, ipso facto, that they are not good tailors. So they go out of business. And after awhile, everyone selling suits does so in guineas. It becomes tradition.
Andrew M: Or perhaps “It seeks a petite shilling in the depths”. Dammit, I’ve dropped my spare change down this hole.
The guinea never made any sense at all except as a class signifier, IMO.
——————————————–
I’m not up on my comics, but the various Marvel adaptations haven’t been afraid to go their own way with characterization and characters. Either changing, adding, or subtracting. Jane Foster’s a physicist, not a nurse in the MCU. There are now comics with everyone’s fave Phil Coulson. Nick Fury went from white to black and it’s a great improvement.
So I don’t see why they couldn’t make Iron Fist a Chinese-American. Emphasis on the American, as in completely assimilated. He eats tacos and plays lacrosse. Like @Jamoche’s karate pal (Who was half-Thai but learned a Japanese martial art; very American).
It would make for a nice ironic riff on “they all know kung fu”… nope. His teachers would wonder how he could look so Chinese and be so American, with the rap music and the baseball caps and the improper filial attitude. Heck, they could directly lampshade it when he’s all trained up and someone in NYC comments on his ancestral ability — then he says “Heck no! I’m from (white bread place). It took me X years to learn this. We aren’t all born knowing kung fu!”
If his dad’s white and mom’s Chinese-American (also emphasis on the American, let’s not have “Joy Luck Club” redux), you don’t even have to change his last name. Or the name could even come from his father’s father and he’s 3/4 Chinese ancestry. Whatevs.
It would neatly sidestep the Mighty Whitey thing, allow for some humor (not a lot of laughs in Daredevil and JJ), and allow us to look at a hunky Asian guy.
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I have seen the hay bale thing work with my own eyes. Keeps down the weeds, you can plant a cover crop of something leguminous and edible, then plow it under and start with better tilth.
So I finished NaNoWriMo yesterday, at 50, 257 words. Of course the thing is only half finished- in this far-future fantasy travelogue, it was 37,000 words into the story before I managed to convince my main character to poke her nose out of her home town. Note to self- next time, set city on fire to get characters to move faster.
Seriously- my characters chatted and drank tea more than they actually did anything else. Reminds me of some rpgs I’ve been in.
Also, fantasy is harder to write than urban fantasy, if you’re not just going for generic European-medieval EFP. Had to invent or rework names for SO much stuff. Distance terms, money…
On the other hand, setting it on the actual Eurasian continent instead of some silly fantasy squiggle-map meant that I could get Google Maps to do quite a bit of my legwork.
On the other other hand, Google Maps meant I have a lot less room to fudge some distances. It took my heroine HOW long to travel down a twenty mile canyon? Admittedly, she wasn’t taking the nice road on the other side of the canyon, but still. Also, I had the devil’s own time even figuring out if the damn river was navigable. And could I even fit a city of 10,000 in that valley? There’s limited information on the mountain range south of the Caspian Sea. Ah hell with it, I’ll blame it on 30,000 years of climate change.
Hopefully, tons of map referencing of canyons and towns in Northern Iran didn’t put me on any watch lists…I’d hate for them to get bored.