LN-S4095D, PS3 Blu-Ray playback problems

Bought a 40Gb PS3 last night

There was an initial problem with Blu-Ray playback.

After the disc had loaded my LN-S4095D lost signal. Ejecting the disc would restore the signal at the menu screen.

The solution (from www.fixya.com)

Settings -> BD/DVD Settings -> BD 1080p 24 Hz Output (HDMI) -> Off

Cloverfield

This isn't bad - in fact it's considerably better than most of the reviewers seem to give it credit for. Cloverfield is pretty much what it says on the tin - 85 minutes of hand-held camera-work 'documenting' a monster attack on NYC from the viewpoint of some twenty-somethings. It's remarkably good at this. Even the monster, at 500ft always going to be the weak link, is convincing. The main characters are neither irritatingly stupid nor preternaturally insightful, and the military's response is plausibly revealed as it intertwines with their own. The view of the B-2 is quite beautiful.

Apparently it's given some people motion sickness - twenty years of FPS's and an already dodgy sense of balance (closely linked to my sporting ineptitude) seem to have rendered me immune.

Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer

I never seen this before - 0% on the tomatometer.

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/meet_the_spartans/

"Meet the Spartans" is a downtrodden cinematic vacuum—a sickening, derivative, shallow, condescending, utterly worthless piece of shit.
- Dustin Putman

http://themovieboy.com/directlinks/08meetthespartans.htm

military without militaria

The Register - the bullshit extirpating IT website has had Lewis Page on their payroll for a while. It took me a while longer to realise that I'd been reading his articles almost exclusively.

Two of his better ones on
- assault weapons and
- in particular the AK-47.

charles stross

Science fiction works by a new writer bursting onto the scene with an IDEA. A redefining work which lurches the whole genre in a new direction. Then slowly they decay away as their idea is subsumed into the general 'canon' of the genre. Their work doesn't necessarily get any worse (although it might get repetitive) but does become less relevant as they're left behind by newer paradigm shifts. Sometimes they may contribute a number of new ideas simultaneously (Steven Baxter) or at least overlapped, and sometimes a writer might reinvent themselves (Greg Bear managed this), but frequently they rely on reader loyalty and earnest but usually unsuccessful attempts to adopt newer ideas not of their own creation and with which they never become completely comfortable.



It is genuinely interesting how dynamic science fiction is over time but how homogeneous it is at any one time. Very few science fiction works maintain much relevance beyond a decade. This is particularly obvious in those sequences of movies which straddle the decades and still try to maintain continuity. The later Star Wars movies (okay - I know they're not true sci-fi but they do adopt most of the space opera conventions) were bad (actually apalling) movies in their own right but it was never going to be possible to successfully tie them in with a product of the seventies (making princesses *elected*!?). That Star Trek TNG pulled it off is something of an exception I think due to how ethically advanced the original was and how the on-screen time difference permitted TNG to cheerfully ignore most of the original (interestingly enough Enterprise failed largely because this option was not available - I suspect the new film will also fail unless the makers bite the bullet and do make a sixties film).


Arthur C Clarke was largely before my time but I understand he was considered revolutionary during his peak. I found Rendez-Vous with Rama interesting (within its context) and that was released some twenty years after his first works (which I've not read but which also sound interesting). His later works are frankly woeful. The Rama sequels in particular were a very uncomfortable attempt at modernising a traditional seventies hard space opera (although in his defence I don't know how much Gentry Lee is to blame).

Isaac Asimov has followed a similar path - his Foundation Series were interesting in a quaint way, however, his 1989 Nemesis is one of the worst science fiction books I've read.

Greg Bear is probably my all time favourite author. Hardfought, Anvil of Stars, Moving Mars and Queen of Angels are desert island books. He also popularised and by some measures invented the idea of nano-machinery. He is interesting in not being a trained scientist but I've yet to discover a mistake (within the admittedly considerable constraints of my own technical knowledge) although this is probably a testament to precisely how advanced his ideas were. I'd mark the end of his relevance as being the release of the competent Slants (sequel to Queen of Angels) and at which point his idea was finally irreconcilably superseded by technological developments. His reinvention was a shift to the biological with Darwin's Radio. It's quite an impressive idea and was very well received although he never really addresses those science fiction ideas which superseded him or even modern technology. He essentially ignores the former and never really feels comfortable with latter. I've not read any more recent works (and likely never will) but I understand they all tread similar turf.

Stephen Baxter's importance as a science-fiction writer is now effectively over. He is unusual in having had a few impressive ideas, the Xeelee sequence (and similar works), a number of alternative histories, and the quite stunning Titan and inferior but similar Moonseed. Titan was probably his last important work. His later works are just... strange. Before his writing career he had attempted and failed to join the NASA astronaut corps. He now seems to have become somewhat obsessed with the 'break out into space' (or lack thereof) and his books seem a combination of wish fulfilment on the part of mercurial individuals kick-starting space programs and told-you-so accounts of a slowly degenerating humanity (or humanities) trapped on a resource depleted Earth.

Greg Egan is an author who's now in the terminal stages of his science-fiction writing. His idea, however, was probably the biggest in the history of the genre and Diaspora is one of the most important works written not just in science-fiction but in any literary genre. I still read whatever he produces but I suspect that will end after Incandescence's release this year. He was the first author to fully explore the newly relevant paradigms of virtual reality and more generally computer science and tying these in with fundamental physics. He hasn't really moved on from this, mainly varying on his theme, perhaps improving its sophistication but if so, in a way that's beyond my mathematical skills to properly appreciate. Consistent sub-themes in his works are a truly vehement hatred of religion (and not just organised) and exploration of sexuality - many of his characters are either temporarily or permanently gay, transgender or simply neuter.

Which finally leads to Charles Stross - he is the man. He's the one active sci-fi author who's still at the peak of his powers. A Colder War (amazingly - available free online) and Antibodies are literally stunning. He is not particularly talented as a novellist - the plot and characters sometimes seem to exist only to give a guided tour of his ideas. In short the novels are less than the sum of their parts. But those parts... His major themes are the technological singularity, and an update on the Lovecraftian idea of reality being considerably 'deeper' than is immediately apparent. His knowledge and understanding of the human world is perhaps more encyclopedic than any other writer I've witnessed and quite awe-inspiring. It's the same unsentimental comprehension derived from simplification that enables both economists and simulation designers to accurately model human social behaviour by disregarding delusions of morality (and they are, tragically, mostly delusions), but this enables it to be expanded so widely that few aspects of society remain, on his level at least, unexplainable.

unwanted memories

Are you keeping up with Commodore?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7lAhguZWdE

Christ I actually remember this... is that healthy? Is anybody else similarly afflicted?

http://www.theonion.com/content/news/half_of_26_year_olds_memories

I wonder what the floor plan of Citadel Station displaced in my brain

Halting State

"Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn't really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree - his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn't invaded Poland and France - and it's even worse today"

Halting State, Charles Stross, p239