Interesting Links for 12-12-2011

[andrewducker]

• First Private Spaceship Flight to the ISS now has a date.
  (tags: space iss Spacex )
• Motorola secures Europe-wide sales ban on iPhone, iPad - oh for goodness sake.
  (tags: patents germany law europe apple iphone motorola )
• This Banana Alien Might Have Ascorbic Acid for Blood
  (tags: banana alien sculpture awesome )
• The Evolution of Fictional Characters
  (tags: Character Comics tv comic )
• If Tarot Cards Actually Predicted the Future
  (tags: funny tarot webcomic )
• D&D;: More accurate than you think
  (tags: roleplaying dnd reality )
• Problems with anti-Mormons and anti-Adulterers - will the demographics hurt the Republicans?
  (tags: republicans voting usa )
• 57% of people thought that David Cameron was right to use the veto, with 14% disagreeing and 29% don’t know.
  (tags: europe uk opinion )
• Alternative Engineering - the future of architecture!
  (tags: architecture Alternative funny satire )
• Why Spotify can never be profitable: The secret demands of record labels
  (tags: spotify music business )
• AdBlock Plus to allow "acceptable" ads by default soon. I'm actually in favour of this.
  (tags: advertising adblock firefox )

Comments

[simont]

I was disappointed by "The Evolution of Fictional Characters" turning out to be a cartoon parodying visual changes. I was hoping for a thoughtful essay on the gradual change in characters' personalities and natures over long-running series, along the lines of the case studies of Star Trek races in the essay "Brain Bugs" but widening its focus to look at fiction in general rather than Star Trek (or any other specific work) in particular.

(I think the thing I disagree with most in the brain-bugs essay is the comment that simplification of a once-complex character or race into a one-note parody is a consequence of a game of Chinese whispers between successive writers working in the same canon. To me, the clear counterexample is Rincewind, who suffered exactly the same fate in spite of having the single guiding mind of Pratchett in charge of him throughout – he started off as a complex and interesting main character, whose surface layers were a mix of character flaws such as cowardice, greed and largely unjustified pride in his wizardhood but if pushed too far his underlying core of strength and conscience would be revealed, but in later books he became more and more one-dimensional until he was simply The Character Who Always Runs Away From Everything.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm sure character decay is excacerbated by multiple successive writers, but it definitely happens all over the place. (Conversely, the opposite also happens, an originally one-note character developing facets -- again I don't know if that may be helped or hindered or both by multiple writers.)

[andrewducker]

I can't read the article from here, but I agree that it's not as simple as the message being lost between writers. I got very fed up with Pratchett forgetting that the Wizards of Unseen University were more than a collection of annoying tics, and had a modicum of personality once upon a time.

I think there's a general principle of refinement that goes on, where people remember the character's distinguishing characteristics and everything else fades into the background. Fighting against that can be really hard. See, for instance, treatment of Xander in Buffy, who never manages to break out of his original role.

This is actually highlighted in the strip I linked to by The Sitcom Character.

[simont]

Yes, I agree that the UU wizards were more fun in the old days. The personality quirks of a collection of elderly dons were a much richer source of surreal comedy when combined with the cut-throat environment of the old-style UU, in which a lovable doddering character would suddenly turn round and be totally badass in the face of a would-be assassin. After Ridcully showed up and basically put a stop to the backstabbing, they had nothing left but the quirks, and ended up just shuffling around being collectively confused.

(And yes, the Sitcom Character did strike me as being a close visual analogue of the gradual-oversimplification trope.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

See, for instance, treatment of Xander in Buffy, who never manages to break out of his original role.

Indeed. Although to be fair to Xander, the character does start off pretty simple, and makes several efforts to grow, but always ends up falling back into the inneffectual comic most of the time. So I agree the character gets short shrift, but at least it's a "failure to grow from 2D while other characters do" rather than "started interesting but became self parody".

I think it's that the show always needed a comic relief, and couldn't find a way to make Xander consistently competent and still interesting, so he ended up always being a klutz (despite isolated moments of competence).

[simont]

And I recommend the Brain Bugs article, if you can read it at a later stage. My Star Trek knowledge is too limited to actually check all the facts in the detailed dissection of the Klingons and Ferengi and so on, but I definitely approve of the later part where he has a go at more general SF tropes such as spaceships being powered by fusion reactors that blow the whole ship up at the drop of a hat.

(Paraphrased: we've tried to build fusion reactors, and it's incredibly hard, and the reason why it's hard is because it's very difficult to persuade stuff to start fusing in the first place or to keep it doing so once it's started. So why on earth would you expect a fusion reactor to even be able to suffer a runaway acceleration of the reaction culminating in explosion, let alone have that as its most common failure mode? Surely you would expect fusion reactors, should we ever get one working at all, to be devices which at the slightest provocation simply stop, and refuse to start again, ever.)

[andrewducker]

Aaah. I simply do not expect the physics in a show like Star Trek to map onto the real universe in any meaningful manner. I don't expect it from most SF novels either, unless they explicitly aim for that. I grew up with the likes of Lensman, and am quite happy with people turning solar systems into massive laser-death-weaponry because it sounds cool, without working out the physics behind it.)

(I will read the article though)

[simont]

Sure, there's nothing wrong with silly physics done on purpose for the sake of coolness or plot dynamic. The article's complaint is that a lot of these things aren't done on purpose any more: they've become unquestioned traditions of SF-in-general, and now ships' fusion reactors blow up all the time not because a particular show has decided to adopt a counterfactual premise for the sake of the plot but just because that's what writers in general think fusion reactors do – they probably don't even realise it's a counterfactual premise.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, gotcha.

I shall hold fire until I've read the piece!