Middle Earth 90210, or 'binge watching Shanarra on Netflix'

"This magic tree holds a thousand demons imprisoned. When the tree dies, an army of demons, each as mighty as 20 men, will march on the capital."

"Yes, I remember the warning. I have an army of 20,000 soldiers trained & ready."

"Oh. OK then. Tea?"

****

"Go sneak into the capital, steal the magic stones, and kidnap the half-elf."

"If I fail, I'll be imprisoned for the rest of my life."

"It'll be worse if you fail. Also, don't even think about double-crossing me."

"Oh, good thing you mentioned that last bit, because double-crossing you would be so much easier! Good talk!"

****

"OK, so there's a traitor in the palace, and our lives are all at risk. For the last time, I'm begging you to institute a 'no-cloaks' dress code!"

"Nope. Cloaks are cool."

"Would you at least even consider a 'no wearing the hood on your cloak up to hide your face inside' rule?"

"Sorry, but that's part of the whole cool look."

****

I'm guessing the director or producer said to the actor playing Allan-on "try to sound like a young Sean Connery".

****

John Rhys-Davis seems to deliver each line with a silent prayer that the script never asks him to say anything snarky.

***

"OK, how about a compromise? Hoods, but no cloaks?"

"What?"

"Yeah, that rogue girl, she's got a hood, but no cloak. That's a totally cool look!"

"You are really bad at security."

****

Apparently, flashbacks are filmed through a really bad instagram filter.

****

Gnomes have ninja stars?

****

About that Minecraft movie...

So you may have heard that Minecraft, the video-game sensation that's basically Farmville without microtransactions, is being developed into a movie. The challenge, of course, is that Minecraft is also a lot like World of Warcraft, but without quests, NPCs, other players, or any kind of story line, which makes the idea of a movie treatment a little.. odd. Nevertheless, I'm a good sport. So I present a single act play: The Minecraft Movie Pitch!

PITCH MAN: “OK, so the film starts with our main character. He appears in the world, naked and alone.”

STUDIO EXECUTIVE: “So he’s like, an everyman? Like, the audience surrogate?”

PM: “Sure, OK, whatever. Anyhow, Steve is-”

SE: “Steve?”

PM:“Yeah, that’s his name. The guy in Minecraft is named Steve.”

SE: “I’m not really feeling the name ‘Steve’. I think we’re going to focus test some other names…”

PM: “The name’s not important! Our hero, he’s alone in the world at sunrise. So he does what anyone would do. He looks around, explores a little. There are trees and animals, hills and valleys, streams and ponds. But there are no people, anywhere, no buildings or roads or structures of any kind, just raw untamed wilderness. And then night falls…”

SE: “This isn’t exactly captivating me so far…”

PM: “Bear with me. Once night falls, all kinds of monsters come out, and they all want to kill Steve.”

SE: “Mark? Do you think Mark would test better than Steve?”

PM: “Focus! Monsters!”

SE: “What kind of monsters?”

PM: “Zombies. Skeletons with bows and arrows. Giant poisonous spiders. And Steve-”

SE: “Edward? Jacob? No, those names were ruined by that other series. Go on.”

PM: “-he has to protect himself using only the weapons he’s made himself.”

SE: “So it’s a kind of survivalist theme? Like a reality TV version of The Gray or The Edge or something like that?”

PM: “...OK, sure, for the first 20 minutes yeah. But here’s the thing, our guy-”

SE: “-Gregory? Victor?”

PM: “-our guy survives, and prospers. He finds seeds to plant, he captures and raises chickens and goats and cattle and pigs. He builds a house, mines for iron, and makes armor. At this point, he’s like John Galt.”

SE: “Who? Wait, you said his name was Steve? I mean “John Galt” is a kind a catchy, but-”

PM: “-no, no, the Ayn Rand character. The self-made superman. The guy who makes his own life, makes his own fate. Didn’t you read any of that stuff in high school?”

SE: “Ayn Rand… oh yeah, that book with the freaky sex scenes between the people who are supposed to be beautiful, but the book keeps calling them angular. I always pictured it like a couple of Picasso portraits screwing…”

PM: “Sure. OK, point being, our hero-”

SE: “John?”

PM: “Our hero has reached a level of success-”

SE: “-which we’re going to show as a montage, right? Building fences, hoeing fields, breaking broncos, that sort of thing?”

PM: “Yeah, about five minutes or so.”

SE: “OK.”

PM: “But as he looks out over his ranch, with his tamed wolf by his side-”

SE: “Tamed wolf! Yeah! That sounds cool! You think we could tie in some merchandise on that?”

PM: “I think there’s a lot of branded merchandise already.”

SE: “Well, you never know…”

PM: “He wonders if there’s something more. So he loads up on food and supplies, and goes to explore the world. The world is huge, from open plains to rolling forested hills to craggy mountains with streams of lava flowing from the sides of cliffs!”

SE: “So, a five minute montage then?”

PM: “Yeah, about that.”

SE: “OK.”

PM: “Finally, after all his wandering, he discovers a village of people!”

SE: “Thank god! This was starting to sound too much like Castaway, but without Tom Hank’s humor and charm.”

PM: “Have you actually watched that film?”

SE: “What? Castaway? No, but he was hilarious in Joe Vs. The Volcano and Big and Splash. I mean, that’s the work he does, right?”

PM: “Anyway, Steve finds a village, and do not interrupt me about the name again right now, but the villagers are like Randian ubermensch themselves, they’re perfect Capitalists. They aren’t interested in socializing or making friends, only in what he can offer them in trade. Then comes the big end-of-act-2 twist!”

SE: “Wait, when did we start act 2?”

PM: “We’ll go back and clear it up later. The twist is that as soon as night falls, the monsters appear and attack the village. The village was peaceful before this. No fences, no walls, no torches lighting the night. They had no idea there were monsters in the world, but once Steve shows up-”

SE: “What was the name of Bruce Willis’ character in Die Hard? < snaps fingers repeatedly > Ah! John McClaine! John! How does John strike you?”

PM: “Focus! Steve realizes that the monsters only appear around him. So first he tries to help the village by building a wall around it, but that’s when the strangest monster of all shows up: the Creeper!”

SE: “That sounds kinda strange. What is it, some kind of vine?”

PM: “No, it’s a weird green thing that’s totally silent when it moves, and when it gets close to Ste- our protagonist, it hisses and then explodes! Like a bundle of TNT! Destroys the wall he was trying to build, and tears a hole out of the ground. And Steven puts to together: he’s cursed!”

SE: “Steven, not bad. Not sure that it’s better than Steve, but-”

PM: “So he mines deep in the earth, for diamonds to make the sharpest sword, the hardest mining pick, the toughest armor. Then he mixes water with molten lava to make obsidian, and uses that to build a gateway into a realm of fire and evil called The Nether.”

SE: “So we’re showing this with a montage?”

PM: “Yeah, like five minutes or so.”

PM: “So he enters the Nether, which has all kinds of horrible new monsters in it. Zombie pig-men, clouds that spit fireballs, and Endermen-”

SE: “Endermen?”

PM: “Tall, slender, dark, scary figures that you’re not supposed to ever look directly at.”

SE: “Oh, you mean like the Slender Man?”

PM: “No, for copyright purposes, I do not mean anything remotely like or infringing upon the copyright of the Slender Man.”

SE: “Ah. Got it.”

PM: “So he travels through the Nether, to a huge fortress, where he has to fight and kill a giant dragon!”

SE: “And that lifts the curse?”

PM: “Well, actually… no. But he can keep going back to his home and building more stuff. And he can make circuits, and trains, and do basic sorts of programming...”

SE: “How much did we pay to option this property?”

Rant: the web is not biodegradable

I had a blog some years back, but I realized I wasn't blogging regularly (something about getting a divorce, then working two jobs, then getting unexpectedly promoted at one job and quitting the other, then lots and lots of work from the promotion, then eventually dating again...) TL;DR version - life happened, so I folded up the blog. Specifically, I actually shut down the blog. I removed the content, archived it, (1) and released the URL back into the wild to mingle with it's own kind.

Lately I've been watching The West Wing, which always puts me in the mood to expound in a smug and self-righteous manner about politics, life, liberty, and how decent human beings ought to behave. So I thought I'd start a new blog, to rant about issues that I want to rant about, and explore ideas that I think are worth discussing. 

When I went back to re-use my old blog URL, it wasn't available. Not a big deal, it's a decent name and I assumed it might get taken. So I started looking at other URLs that might work: like "DokTalks" (2) or "ChrisDoggett" or "Chris Rants".

I wouldn't mind if those URLs were in use by active bloggers writing about their interests, or even just re-blogs of other, better content. But Doktalks.blogspot.com has a grand total of three posts. ChrisDoggett.blogspot.com has a little more content in the form of six posts, but the last post was August 2005. And chrisrants.blogspot.com? 

Sunday, November 28, 2004
The king of pork
My first blog will be posted tommorrow, on the above stated topic 

That's it. That's the entirety of their content. And it's still there, bothered only by an annual comment-spammer probably selling porn, boner pills, and/or stock tips. ("just the tip!") 

This stuff is the internet equivalent of plastic grocery bags in landfills: it never goes away, never leaves the environment. It's actually worse than that; it's like buried building foundations of concrete and rebar; you go wandering and stub your toe over it, but you can't dig it up or get rid of it. You can't build on that ground, you can't improve on that ground, there's just an ugly stub sticking up just high enough to trip over, useless otherwise.

Services that are meant to increase access to the web (blogger, tumblr, twitter) become more and more choked by the undying remnants left abandoned by bored or busy users. It's a gruesome paradox: the longer services like these are around, the more successful they are, the less appealing they become to new users. Users want to be ThatBeerGuy or 'dok'; who wants to be ThatBeerGuy227 or Dok1976Beaverton? Names like that scream 'compromise' and 'late-adapter', and names (on-line names especially) can be a reflection of the identity we want to have, our idealized selves. No one's idealized self is a compromise with some unknown stranger who signed up eight and a half years ago, got bored, and never cleaned up after themselves. 

Watch this space

So I may be taking up the blogging thing again.

I need to build a backlog of content, and sketch out some topics in advance so this won't become a bit of internet wasteland .(a topic I'm already working on) I may revise and migrate some posts from my old blog, like the FATAL deconstruction and game theory discussions.

Unlike my old blog, I may rant about issues that catch my eye. Some may be political or social. You're welcome to disagree, as long as you're willing to cite your sources, use logic, facts, and/or evidence, defend your position, and follow Wheaton's Law.

This blog will have NSFW language.