TV musings: Bones

This show is a good example of the Netflix Effect: there are other things I’m more interested in watching, but they’re not available as streaming video, and Bones is. Laziness being a mighty thing, I end up watching the one that is more easily available. (This has its limits; I’ve streamed things where I’ve watched an episode or two — or in one case, five minutes — and promptly given up. But if a show is decent, and also immediately available, it wins.)

Anyway, I wanted to talk a bit about the show, because it’s a story and I can’t not think about stories when they’re in front of me. So far, I’ve watched two seasons, and the first few eps of S3.

As with most ensemble shows, the big appeal is the supporting cast: I am totally there for Hodgins and Zack and Angela, and Goodman (in S1) and Camille (in S2). I am absurdly fond of characters who combine geekiness + gruesomeness, so all the banter about dead bodies and such? I’m there. Given the kerfuffle I saw a little while ago over the plans to axe 2/3 of the female cast from Criminal Minds, I should also give props to the people behind Bones for bringing Camille in at the start of S2, making for a 50/50 balance in the core cast — only it’s more than that, really, because the lab scenes are often dominated by Brennan, Camille, and Angela, with Zack and Hodgins more playing support, and man, it’s nice after all these shows with their one token female character.

Of the two protagonists, Brennan* may be the more important one, but Booth is the one I enjoy. David Boreanaz is capable of less wooden performances than his stint as Angel led me to believe, and I like the way they handle his backstory angst: the scripts rarely wallow in it (at least in the two seasons I’ve seen), but it’s there, and gets brought up when it should be. (My favorite instance probably being an ep where Brennan said of a character, “I wish I had killed him.” Booth’s response: a very curt, “no, you don’t,” and then he got up from the table and left.) Their interactions are reasonably entertaining, and if I have one macro complaint on that front, it’s that I’d like a little more drama to leaven the comedy. But halfway through S2 they had a nice little run of eps that gave me exactly that, so maybe I’ll get more in the future.

My real macro complaint, though — and my real problem with Brennan — has to do with the way the show handles anthropology.

Forensic stuff first, because my comments here are fairly brief. I don’t know much about this field beyond some very basic elements of osteology, but it looks reasonably solid to my eye. The only thing that makes me roll my eyes is when they glance at a skeleton and instantly rattle off its sex, age, and race; that requires measurements, and even then the answer is often a matter of statistical probability, not certainty. But it would get old really fast if every episode showed the characters checking for fusion of the epiphyses and measuring the angle of the greater sciatic notch, and besides, the basic demographic facts of a the corpse du jour are usually not the interesting part of the story. So I’m fine with the scripts eliding that part and getting on to the more complicated questions.

What does bug me is the cultural anthropology. Oh, good lord, the cultural anthropology.

Cut to spare your flists

Manute Bol

I don’t have a lot to say about this. I don’t really follow the world of sports — basketball or otherwise — so I’d never heard of Manute Bol until that Slacktivist piece and another article, posted just a little while before he died. (Sadly, I lost the link for that one; it included more in the way of quotes from Bol, giving his feelings on basketball and the Sudan and the intersection of the two).

But I wanted to post this because I don’t get the impression many people knew more than a passing bit about him, whether they follow the world of sports or not. And that’s a great tragedy, in my eyes. Here’s a guy who didn’t spend his newfound wealth on big houses, fast cars, drugs to inject or snort or smoke: he kept enough to live on, and poured the rest into bettering the lives of people back home.

I don’t demand that all sports celebrities (or all celebrities of any stripe) wear hair shirts and take vows of poverty for the greater good. But when a guy comes along who sees his fame and wealth as a gift to be shared with others, then I want to do my tiny part to spread his story, as a counter-effect to all the tales of Athletes Behaving Badly.

I hope that, with Manute Bol gone, the good he fought for isn’t forgotten.

game ideas I don’t have time to run

Changelings (in the Changeling: The Dreaming sense) strike back against the Banality of the modern world by adapting to a mythology modern Americans are prepared to believe in:

They frame themselves as superheroes.

Wind Runner to fly, Flicker Flash to teleport, Quicksilver for super-speed . . . Skycraft to throw lightning, Pyretics to throw fire . . . the troll birthright for super-strength . . . you can’t duplicate every power ever given to superheroes in the comics, but you don’t have to. You just have to get far enough, and then let the bright spandex costumes do the rest. Clark Kent turning into Superman is just a question of calling upon the Wyrd.

(Nockers as gadgeteer heroes. Holy crap, does that make Batman a nocker?)

I so don’t have time to run this, but. The idea amuses me.

Updated with ideas, from kniedzw and me wandering around the farmer’s market:
Batman’s a Dougal sidhe, not a nocker, provided you can find a good physical flaw. Iron Man is ABSOLUTELY a Dougal. Superman’s a troll; he even wears blue! Spiderman, maybe a spider pooka. Catwoman, cat pooka definitely. Cyclops as a Balor who’s trying to be good? <g> And the Incredible Hulk fighting against his ogre nature’s worst instincts. Aquaman as merfolk. Swamp Thing as a ghille dhu. Gambit as an eshu with Legerdemain. Mr. Fantastic maybe has Metamorphosis (Go Ask Alice, applied selectively); Human Torch has Pyretics. Storm has Skycraft, obviously. Can’t really do Rogue, or Professor X’s telepathy. I could see Wonder Woman as a Gwydion, maybe. I’d probably make Wolverine’s claws a Treasure, implanted in him by a crazy nocker.

short-notice research!

Apparently I need to Know Stuff about the early history of photography for the Victorian book. Any buffs out there who might know a good book I could read about it? I pretty much only care about nineteenth-century technology; later developments are less relevant for my purposes.

Hollywood Plays It Safe

A lot of people rant about the fact that all Hollywood seems to be putting out these days are sequels, adaptations, and remakes. While there’s a grain of truth to that, I decided recently that I’m going to stop being angry at them for it — for the simple reason that if I were in their shoes, I’d probably do the same.

Because making a movie is expensive. Sure, if your story is about hipster twentysomethings having relationship dysfunction, or a suburban family gathering for the holidays, then you can make your film for twenty thousand dollars on a handheld digital camera. On the high end, it might cost a few million, depending on the paycheck your actors demand. But my favorite genres are SF, fantasy, action, etc, and the price tag on those is a lot higher. So when it comes to those genres — surprise! — Hollywood plays it safe.

Remember, the definition of “a risk” is that it might blow up in your face. That’s one thing if your ten-million-dollar romantic comedy only makes back seven million or so . . . but apply that same ratio to a two-hundred-million-dollar sci-fi extravaganza, and the losses become a lot more appalling. A big-name director might still have a career on the far side of such a failure; anybody below their rank might never work in that town again.

And one way to hedge your risk is to film stories that have already been test-driven. Sequel? If people enjoyed the first one, you’ve already got a built-in audience, and so long as you don’t massively screw it up they’re likely to turn out for a new installment of the same. (Human nature; I also don’t blame audiences for acting that way. Especially since I do it myself.) Adaptation? There are differences between storytelling on the page and storytelling on the screen, but allowing for those differences, you know in advance that the story resonates with people. (Plus you can cross-promote, which is always a plus.) Remake? Take something people have a nostalgic fondness for, and update it for modern aesthetic sensibilities, that want something better than forgotten ’80s B-list actors and rubber monster suits. It may not save you; sequels and adaptations and remakes have all tanked. But at least you have some basis for guessing how they’ll do, even if that guess turns out to be wildly wrong; with a new story, you might as well throw darts at a dartboard. And when you have to justify to a studio how you lost so much of their money, I’m betting it helps to be able to point to good book sales or something else in that vein, see, we had reason to think it would work, as opposed to admitting you flung yourself off a cliff with a parachute that had never been tested before.

There are kinds of playing-it-safe-ness that I don’t excuse. “Our hero has to be a Standard Beefy White Guy, because we don’t trust that audiences want to see women or minorities do cool things” — no. And god knows I would like to see original films be original, with plots I haven’t seen a million times before, even though I realize that’s a lot more likely at the Moon price tag than the Avatar one. But a Hollywood that made a lot more big-budget original films than sequels, adaptations, and remakes is also a Hollywood that would rapidly run itself halfway out of business: pretty soon Moon would be the biggest thing they could afford to make. Hollywood isn’t and never will be the home for daring experiments. That’s what the smaller studios are for, the people outside the main system.

So for my own part, I’ve stopped complaining about the conservative game Hollywood is playing. I like the big-budget FX extravaganzas; I admit it, they’re a weakness of mine. So what I do is this: I see the ones that really do appeal to me, the ones that play off a source I really love, or sound like they’re actually decent. I avoid the ones that seem like exploitative crap (Transformers 2, I’m looking at you). And I also go see things like Moon, thereby doing my small part to say that hey, there’s an audience for this, too. Because the small studios are part of the greater film ecosystem, and they’re the place to go if you want to see people taking risks.

Maybe in the long term, it will have an effect. Coming to a theatre near you, in 2021: Moon: The Remake, starring Jaden Smith And A Lot Of Explosions That Weren’t In The Original! With Bonus Sexy Alien Chick!

What Cat said (which I seem to be saying a lot . . .)

yuki_onna on the decline of LJ, and the fact that the first step in getting back to the “glory days” is to pony up and be interesting.

I can’t promise 30 straight days of engaging blogging — in fact, since I’ll probably be sans Internet for a few days in mid-July, it’s quite impossible — but comment here and tell me some topic you’d be interested in seeing me write about, and I’ll see what I can do. Writing is of course fair game for requests, but so is anything else: entertainment, politics, my hobbies, anything where you have reason to think I could say something substantive about it.

The whole reason I’m not interested in Twitter and Facebook is that I prefer content-full posts of moderate length to brief snippets of humour or what have you. Anything I can do to encourage that over here, in my main Internet home, is worth a try.

not what I would do

I know why I’m stalling on tonight’s scene. It’s because the thing Eliza’s about to do is very, very stupid. And it’s not that she thinks about it and decides she’s got to do it anyway, for one reason or another; she doesn’t think about it at all. She just snaps and does it, for no better reason than because her temper gets the better of her.

Which is so profoundly not me, I’d probably find easier to get into the headspace of an alien. I keep trying to figure out how to make the necessary moment happen — but my thoughts keep going in the direction of finding a rational reason for it, something that she hopes to gain, when that isn’t what this scene is about at all. Then when I try to hit it from another angle, figuring out what makes her snap, I come up blank, because my subconscious can’t imagine anything that would make me do the same. My temper can get the better of me, yes, but not to the extent of doing something this ill-advised.

And yet, I know people like this exist. What I want to write isn’t unreasonable; it’s only going to seem unreasonable if I fail to represent it right. Which means I need to figure out the inside of her head, what mixture of emotions produces this explosion, and what its precipitating factor is.

But like I said, an alien might be easier for me to figure out.

Cover time!

This is the extra bit I alluded to yesterday, when I posted my research book list: I finally have a version of the cover that I’m allowed to post. (There may be minor tweaks before it hits the shelves, but they’re along the lines of fiddling with the text, rather than image changes.)

In honor of that, I’ve started putting the page for the book into proper order. Enjoy!

Also: since my image-manipulation skills end at being able to crop and shrink pictures. I will be grateful to anyone who can make a nifty icon out of this, so future book posts can use that rather than the comet image I’ve been employing.

My birthday comes early this year . . . or late

Early because the news comes a couple of months before my birthday, late because it won’t actually become a reality until a couple of months after: the historical thesaurus to the OED will be going online in December.

It feels kind of like a sign from On High, that this won’t be available until after I finish drafting and revisions on the Victorian book (though copy-edits will likely still be ahead of me, and page proofs definitely will). i.e. the universe is saving me from what might otherwise happen, which is that my progress would slow to a crawl as my obsessiveness in checking my word choice shot through the roof.

Anyway. Yes. I’m an enormous geek. Not that this comes as a surprise to anybody who’s been reading this journal. But some of you are enormous geeks, too, so I thought I should share.

Driftwood in your ear

That header sounds painful, now that I think about it.

Anyway, if you would prefer to listen to a story about Driftwood rather than read it, you can now download the audio from BCS. (Which also has a new Aliette de Bodard story this week, one of her Aztec pieces. I haven’t read it yet, but I am very much looking forward to it.)

I’ve also put up an extra tidbit for the Driftwood fans: “Smiling at the End of the World.” It’s a piece of flash fiction from Last’s point of view, but since Driftwood flash doesn’t stand on its own very well, I’ve chosen to just post it to my site as a freebie. Enjoy!

Do you like superheroes? (Or supervillains?)

Jackie Kessler and Caitlin Kittredge are doing a pretty sweet contest for their upcoming book Shades of Gray (sequel to Black and White, their first superhero/urban fantasy collaboration). Due to legal restrictions, the contest is open to everybody, but the general idea is to get people to pre-order Shades of Gray, so as to help ensure it will actually show up on bookstore shelves. (There’s been a problem with the situation there, but I don’t know if the details are mine to share.) Ergo, if you like the idea of superhero fiction in non-comics form, check out that link, enter the contest, and spread the word!

doing the math

The good news is, I don’t think I’ll have to completely replace every Dead Rick scene from Part One.

Just a bit more than half of them.

Seriously, I feel like a book or two ago, somebody sneaked in and replaced my writing process with another author’s. I used to write relatively clean first drafts; now I flounder through writing wrong scenes left and right, inventing Spanish nymphs that may not even show up in the final draft, and generally failing to figure out what one of the villains is doing. Some concerted effort on my part has at least begun to sort that last bit out, which is why my pessimistic guess of “all Dead Rick scenes” has been revised downward to “five of the nine, with revision on the rest,” but it’s still disheartening. (Oh yeah, and I’ll probably need to write at least one entirely new scene, aside from replacing half of those already there.)

I’m glad I noticed the growing pattern from Ashes and Star, and gave myself extra time for this book. Otherwise I’d be screeeeeeeeewed.

I’m also very glad that I figured out most of Eliza’s PII while in London, as it gives me something to do while I figure out where I went wrong on the Dead Rick end. If I can manage to do his scene replacements while moving forward on her part, I’ll be in good shape. But first I need to finish sorting out him and Nadrett — and figure out if La Madura’s staying in the book or not — so I know what to replace those scenes with.

Best of Talebones semi-TOC

I’m calling this a semi-TOC because unless Patrick intends to organize the stories alphabetically by their authors’ last names, this is not the order the anthology will have in the end. But if you’re curious to know what’s going in the Best of Talebones collection, here’s the list:

Barth Anderson, “Landlocked”
Jennifer Rachel Baumer, “The Forever Sleep”
Marie Brennan, “The Twa Corbies”
Mike Brotherton, “Jack in the Box”
Jack Cady, “The Parable of Satan’s Adversary”
Stephen Couch, “The Dandelion Clock”
Aliette de Bodard, “Safe, Child, Safe”
Eric Del Carlo, “Nothing But Fear”
Alan DeNiro, “Comachrome”
Charles Coleman Finlay, “Hail Conductor”
James C. Glass, “Robbie”
Anne Harris, “Still Life with Boobs”
Barb Hendee , “The Winds of Brennan Marcher”
Nina Kiriki Hoffman, “Snow on Snow”
Kay Kenyon, “The Acid Test”
Mary Robinette Kowal, “Death Comes But Twice”
Jay Lake, “Tall Spirits, Blocking the Night”
Catherine Macleod, “Seepage”
Nick Mamatas, “Your Life, Fifteen Minutes from Now”
Louise Marley, “Night Shift”
Sandra McDonald, “Bluebeard by the Sea”
Terry McGarry, “God of Exile”
Paul Melko, “Ten Sigmas”
William Mingin, “From Sunset to the White Sea”
Devon Monk, ” Sugar ‘n’ Spice”
William F. Nolan, “Wolf Song”
Patrick O’Leary, ” 23 Skidoo”
Tom Piccirilli, “Caucasus”
John A. Pitts, “Three Chords and the Truth”
Sarah Prineas, “The Dog Prince”
Ken Rand, “Song of Mother Jungle”
Mark Rich, “Zothique Mi Amor”
Uncle River, “Love of the True God”
Patricia Russo, “Swoop”
James Sallis, “Roofs and Forgiveness in the Early Dawn”
Ken Scholes, “Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk”
Jack Skillingstead, “Two”
Bruce Taylor, “Spiders”
Steve Rasnic Tem, “Cats, Dogs, and Other Creatures”
James Van Pelt, “The Yard God”
Carrie Vaughn, “The Girl with the Pre-Raphaelite Hair”
Ray Vukcevich, “The Next Best Thing”

I’m very flattered to be in the company of some of those authors. Congrats to all, and especially to Patrick Swenson, who is making this happen!

more linky

Because, having cleaned out my browser, I don’t want it getting cluttered again so soon:

Miss D.C. body-slams groper

So, it’s worth mentioning that responding physically to someone groping you is not necessarily a good idea; it can escalate a situation that might have otherwise stayed minor, to the detriment of the woman trying to protect herself. But what I love about this is a) the hilarious contrast of a beauty queen slamming somebody into a wall, and b) more importantly, the way that hilarious contrast has helped make this incident news: Miss D.C., Jen Corey, now has a chance to talk about the truly unacceptable way women are often treated while engaged in such provocative activities as walking down a public street. And she isn’t letting that chance go to waste. To which I say, well-done, ma’am. The more we talk about this, the better.

If you missed it over the weekend . . . .

I posted a new excerpt from A Star Shall Fall (beginning of the whole is here).

And while I’m tidying up my browser, I might as well make this a linkdump post and add in two other things:

Cat Valente on the power of the suit — which I note mostly because, as I was saying to a friend recently, I have essentially no fashion registers between “jeans and t-shirt” and “formal wear.” I’ve sort of acquired a degree of business casual, left over from the year when I was teaching my own (non-archaeology-related*) classes, which you can see in action at ICFA and other warm-weather cons, but most of the time I default to a higher degree of slobbiness. But I really enjoy dressing up, i.e. actual fancy wear. It’s just the middle registers I don’t have much use for.

The Pleasures of Imagination — what struck me in this was a bit near the end, where the author said,

I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don’t care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet’s friends are coping with his death because these friends don’t exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction.

And I immediately thought, “hello, fanfiction.” Because the aftermath of trauma is one of several fertile areas out of which derivative works can sprout.

This has been your not-at-all-regularly-scheduled schizophrenic link post.

*My theory was that when you’re assistant-teaching intro to archaeology, you’ll actually get more cred by showing up in jeans and a flannel shirt than a skirt and heels.

80 days and counting

The other writing-related bit of news I promised is another excerpt from A Star Shall Fall. This one introduces Mr. Galen St. Clair, first of the novel’s two protagonists — with a bonus cameo appearance by a Famous Historical Figure. (Who, like Newton, and indeed most of the FHFs that show up in this book, is not so good with the social graces. I guess that’s what happens when your book concerns itself with scientific history.)

If you missed the earlier excerpts, the beginning is here. Enjoy!