Stuff Josh Likes: WHYY Commercial

Since starting my new job, I'm listening to my old Public Radio station out of Philly in the car again. I'd probably be better off listening to my local affiliate, as I'd get traffic updates that pertain to me, but I just can't quit you, Marty Moss-Coane!

I don't know if it was a deliberate choice, or if they were short of underwriters for the slots before the show, but instead of getting something like "Hipster Table is brought to you by Archer Daniels Midland. Archer Daniels Midland, supermarket to the world!" we get a brief promo for the station itself.

We open on a young couple, with the young man meeting his girlfriend's family for the first time at Thanksgiving Dinner. Everybody's getting along, everything's delicious, they start talking about what they're thankful for. Everything is going swimmingly, until their gelatinous, offensive uncle warbles "I'm thankful that ISIS hasn't destroyed us with their Ebola bombs! They're massing at the border!"

The new boyfriend shuts him down by asking him if it's the border we share with Syria.

Obligatory

Uncle Racist backs off, and mumbles that he guesses that he's thankful for pumpkin pie, while boyfriend drops the mic and walks away.  The ending voiceover exhorts, "Be informed. Be the hero."

All right. I don't talk politics with my family. I can't talk politics with them, because they're proceeding from an entirely different set of assumptions, and we usually even disagree on what the facts are, so there's no point of departure to get an exchange going. If I'd offered a bon mot about "Which border?", I'm sure the answer would be "The BORDER with Mexico! ISIS has infiltrated the country! Didn't you hear about the Muslim Prayer rugs on the border?! That's why Barack HUSSEIN Obama wants to let them into our country!"

Also, I don't know about my fellow totebaggers, but I generally avoid picking fights with members of my significant other's family. I certainly wouldn't do it the first time I met them, as was the case in this commercial. I might be dumb, but I'm not that dumb.

The thing, the commercial cracks me up every time. The delivery and the statement from the uncle are both so wonderfully ridiculous.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: Collector's Fever

Collector's Fever is one of those stories that never worked for me. I think it's the only one of Roger Zelazny's comedy works that I really don't enjoy. It's almost entirely dialogue, which is a bit gimmicky, but not so much that it ruins the story on its own. I think the problem is that there's not much more to the story than the joke, and I just didn't think it was funny. Remove that, and there's not much left.

It's the story of a young man who visits a plan with a sentient rock

"What are you doing there, human?"
"It's a long story."
"Good, I like long stories. Sit down and talk. No--not on me!"
"Sorry. Well, it's all because of my uncle, the fabulously wealthy--"
"Stop. What does 'wealthy' mean?"
"Well, like rich."
"And 'rich'?"
"Hm. Lots of money."
"What's money?"

I think that's another thing that I didn't like about it. The alien that speaks perfect, grammatically correct English, yet needs every other word explained to it. Our protagonist is bitter that his uncle sent him to college, rather than Space Academy. His uncle collects rocks, so he's going to bring Stone home to his uncle, knowing that it will "deeble", or undergo a type of fission, and kill his uncle.

Stone threatens to deeble on the spot, but our hero took its mass when they first met, and knows it hasn't reached point critical yet. So he crates up Stone, and takes it on board his spaceship. Unfortunately, he removed most of the shielding, and Stone absorbs a bunch of stray material, and blows up on the spot. 

He mushroomed upwards, then swept in great waves across the plains of Dunghill. Several young Stones fell from the dusty heavens wailing their birth pains across the community band.

"Gone fission," commented a distant neighbor, above the static, "and sooner than I expected. Feel that warm afterglow!"

Ugh. That was awful. And not even in a good way like the fit hit the Shan.

It's hard to say if the story doesn't "work", or if it just doesn't appeal to me. Any opinions out there from my fellow Zelaznians?

Meeting Kim Possible at the Allentown Comic Con

I was just about done with the Allentown Comic Con after the debacle in July. We'd had a couple good times before. It was Lily's first con in 2012, and we returned in 2013, where we had some memorable experiences, but even a year ago, I was thinking, "This is getting way too big for its venue."

It all came to a head in July. Parking, always bad, was worse than ever before, and the Summer heat was intense. The line wasn't moving at all, and the rumor was swirling that the hall was already at capacity at 10:30 in the morning and they wouldn't let more people in the hall until other people left. I wasn't sure if that was true, but we didn't stick around to find out. We went back to our car and went home from there, and the whole experience was frustrating and disappointing, and I decided not to return until they took some steps to correct the problem.

We had gone up to Rhode Island Comic Con last year with some friends, We couldn't make it this year, and I was kind of disappointed, because Christy Romano was going to be there, and it would have been nice to meet her, as we're all huge Kim Possible fans.

As if in answer, a friend posted to my wall on Facebook that she would be at the Allentown Comic Con, this weekend, as a last minute addition. We didn't have anything planned, and I decided to suck up whatever vicissitudes the con would throw at us.

I started with Kim Possible before Lily was born.  I caught it for the first time when my niece and nephew were just little kids. We were watching it at their house a couple years back and my nephew said, "I love that backflip she does," to which I replied, "It's actually a back handspring", because, you know, kids love pedantic corrections. It had a fun, sly sense of humor.

I shared it with Lily as soon as she was old enough, and she loved it, because we're all about the girl power around here.

So, of course, we weren't about a miss a chance to meet Kim herself.  And the difference between this con and the previous one was night and day. I had seen on Facebook that they were making some changes to address the crowds (expanding the con to two days, tweaking the hours, allowing for overflow parking, and opening four lines for ticket sales/redemption) and they really paid off. We had no trouble parking despite arriving later than previously, we sailed through ticket redemption and the crowds were much more manageable.

We found Christy Carlson's table pretty easily. Lily had a sudden attack of shyness and I was trying to psyche her up when Christy called us over! She talked to Lily for a while, though I had to serve as an intermediary at first, because Lily was still feeling shy. Christy was engaged, she was attentive, she talked to Lily without talking down to her, she was everything you hope someone your kid idolizes will be if your kid gets the chance to meet them. She was, in a word, nice. She even played along and answered some Kim Possible trivia. (We gave her an easy one, Kim's middle name.)

Here's our picture with Kim:

The whole experience was great. Lily also picked up a Loki Charms t-shirt from Level-Up studios, which she really enjoyed, as well as some posters from the very talented Angela McKendrick, whose work can be found and purchased at her Deviantart page.

"So long, suckers."

We'd had a very negative experience with the Con previously, but I'm glad we gave it another chance.
 Special thanks to Frederick, for telling me about it before it was too late!

Choosing My Own Adventure

I think Choose Your Own Adventure books are as close to universally loved as anything in geek culture.  Geek Culture is notoriously contrarian, and you don't have to look hard to find those within who actively hate Harry Potter, Star Wars, and even, as hard as it is to believe, Firefly.

But I don't think I've ever met anyone who actively disliked them. I was first identified as "gifted" in the first grade, and I got to pick one of two books to read instead of doing regular classwork. My choices were some generic YA novel or the CYOA book, Your Code Name is Jonah. I picked Jonah, and that began my lifelong love affair with the books.

The creator of the series passed away earlier in the month. He seemed like a genuinely nice guy. His obit said, "Montgomery, who was passionate about education all his life, felt that interactive fiction was critical to reluctant readers in achieving reading fluency, which is the final stage of achieving true literacy."

He credited the actual authors of the books in the series, rather than forcing them to use an in-house pen name, a la Lester Dent, which helped some of them launch successful careers. He continued writing books in the series himself, almost until his death. He really, genuinely believed in what he was doing. The world is poorer for his absence.

Not to conclude on a down note, two CYOA links of note.

Mapping the outcomes: Maps of the outcomes of many of the CYOA.

You Choose Wrong: A Tumblr commemorating some of the more memorable CYOA deaths.

Review (Part 1 of 2): Big Hero 6: Or, Robots, the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems

We saw Big Hero Six over the weekend, and we all enjoyed it a lot. I tend to divide a lot of my movie reviews into two posts. The first post is primarily an introduction, a review of the previews we saw, and a little bit of context and observation, with the first part of the first act at the bottom.  Scroll down to the section labelled "The Movie", if you read movie reviews for the review. There is one spoiler in this review, but it's a minor one.

Link to the second part of the Big Hero Six movie review.

The Source Material

I was aware of the Big Hero 6 comics, but I never read them.  I thought, "Hmmmm...A team of Asian superheroes, created by two white guys, composed of heroes who have names like Wasabi-No-Ginger, and superpowers based on Western stereotypes about Asia. That sounds like it could be anywhere from a tiny bit insensitive to AMAZINGLY RACIST."

Skimming the Wikipedia article, it seems like I made the right choice in not reading them. But that's neither here nor there.  The movie is here, and it's much better.

Previews

Paddington:  Seems mostly harmless, but entirely bland. Hugh Bonneville is wasted here, though if the movie had taken place in Downton Abbey, I'd probably watch it. Nicole Kidman plays an evil taxidermist, which is just what the Paddington franchise needed.

(Untitled Christian Rock movie): It actually has a title. I just forgot what it was. It's a documentary about Christian Rock. It looks slickly produced, but I feel I'm not the target audience.

Annie: They've been advertising this forever. We went to see How to Train Your Dragon 2 over the Summer, where we first saw the trailer for Big Hero Six, and saw a trailer similar to the one we saw at this movie. A couple bigots online lost their shit on learning that Annie was going to be played by an African-American girl, but fuck them.

Sorry, bigots. It's a hard knock life.

It looks cute, the leads look engaging, and I hope it does well. Lily won some movie passes, and she planned to use them to see Annie. The only reason we used them for Big Hero 6 is that it came out first.

Spare Parts: On one hand it's a plucky underdog story, which tend to be inspiring in theory, but deathly dull in practice, and it's got what has to be the worst title imaginable. On the other, it's got George Lopez, an actor towards whom I'm always kindly disposed. (However, I see he's fourth-billed, so I'm thinking the trailers have probably exaggerated his role.) Jen will probably see this on her own with a friend, and I'll stay home playing video games.

Tomorrowland: There is no a lot of information on this one out there (compared to other blockbuster). The trailer is very intriguing, showing a girl being released from juvie, where she finds a magical token in her possession. It could be good, it could be bad, but the marketing definitely has me interested.

Penguins of Madagascar: It's hard to imagine anything worse than this trailer, except for the movie it's advertising. It was like listening to nails on a chalkboard, while chewing tin foil and watching a video of a kitten getting punched in the face.

Minions: Despicable Me is one of those series that doesn't really appeal to me, but I respect the craftsmanship employed in making it. I don't like it, but I don't hate it either. Minions is probably going to be more of the same. I was briefly excited when I saw that it was a period piece set in 1968 and Jon Hamm would be doing a voice. I thought he might be doing a cartoon version of Don Draper, but the summary suggests he's not.

Inside Out: It's Herman's Head, but animated! Pixar is almost always good, so this should be, too. I really like the design on Sadness.

Animated Short - Feast

This avalanche of previews was followed by Feast, in the vein of Paperman, from Wreck-It-Ralph. It was cute, and had a nice PSA in the end credits about adopting strays.

Casting

Aunt Cass: She was voiced by Maya Rudolph, and her expressions and mannerisms seem to mirror Rudolph's. The character really didn't work for me at all. She was frenetic and wacky and stream of consciousness and making her Maya Ruldoph face, but she just grated.

Hiro and Tadashi: I'm not a fan at all of white actors playing POC, so I think it's pretty cool that both characters were voiced by actors of mixed Asian and European ancestry, like their characters. Wikipedia claims (but does not cite references. Bad Wikipedia!) that Ryan Potter's (Hiro) first language is Japanese, which is impressive, because his English was flawless.

Alistair Krei: Ugh. This guy again. Alan Tudyk has stolen Walt Disney's frozen head and is blackmailing the company. Until he returns it, they will have no choice but to cast him in every movie they make.

Fred: I wound up liking Fred, and I didn't think I would. I gave him the benefit of the doubt due to his voice work on Gravity Falls, but he eventually grew on me on top of that.

Baymax:  Like Vin Diesel as Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy, Scott Adsit infuses what could have been some one-note voicework with some real emotions.

And a spoiler-ish one too, but if you were surprised by this, you weren't paying attention.

Professor Callaghan: James Cromwell has a very distinctive voice. It took me about three seconds to peg him as the villain, using this handy flowchart.

The Movie

The movie opens by panning over the skyline of "San Fransokyo", which, as the name suggests, a a futuristic amalgam of San Francisco and Toyko. We zoom across the city, before closing in on an underground Battlebots-type robot fight, which is of course a thing in San Fransokyo.

A big scary bot controlled by a big scary man demolishes another bot, and then young Hiro steps up. His adorable bot

Awww...

gets crushed. He begs for a rematch, and after he antes up, he gets it, whereupon his bot shreds the other machine easily. It's the second best hustle in cinema, right after the time Huey Lewis scammed a guy by pretending not to be good at karoake in Duets.   The champion is pissed about being hustled, and sends his goons after Hiro, who is rescued by his older brother on his motorcycle. Everybody's caught, the kids are thrown in jail and bailed out shortly thereafter by their Aunt Cass.

Aunt Cass gives us the infodump on the ride home. She's excessively quirky, and her characterization is of the few things that I dislike about this movie. When How To Train Your Dragon 2 came out, I was discussing it online and I observed that the characters tended to emote excessively and banter rather than speak. A friend agree, saying, "I was reading a Kung Fu Panda review awhile back that nailed it. Basically, Dreamworks' cartoons (and the vast majority of modern animated fare) are very uncomfortable with silence in the films."  I think that's the core of my dislike. Her mannerisms strike as those of a Dreamworks character. (And, to be fair, she gets better in later appearances.)

Tadashi is a great character. More on him a little later, but he's really trying to be a good guy and a good brother. Like the other characters in the movie, he's just fundamentally decent. He tells his brother that Hiro is wasting his potential, and Hiro wants to run off to another bot fight. Seeing he can't dissuade his brother, Tadashi offers to take him there, as it's safer than letting him go alone. He just needs to stop by his lab to pick up something there.

This is just a ruse to intrigue Hiro with all his cool friends and tools at the lab. I thought this was a pretty decent way to introduce the rest of the cast too.

In order, Hiro meets

GoGo Tomago

GoGo didn't really do it for me. I like badass action girls as much as anyone, and the creators said they looked at bike messengers for her look and personality. I liked the design, and her mannerisms with the gum, but I didn't feel a lot of personality.

Wasabi

Wasabi was Lily's favorite character. She liked that a character could be strong and smart, and we talked about how a lot of people are like that in real life. I liked him too. He's fussy and particular, and out of all the supporting cast, he felt the most authentic.

Honey Lemon

Honey Lemon. She's enthusiastic, but not in an annoying way. Another minor gripe is that the background information suggests that she's Hispanic,  but you'd never no it by looking at her. (Yes, there certainly are light-skinned Hispanic people, but Hollywood never seems to portray the Hispanic community as anything but light-skinned, and I'm somewhat disappointed that Big Hero 6 is contributing to the problem.)

Fred

I was extremely leery of Fred when watching the previews. Did we really need a second comic relief character? However, he's a lot less grating than I had feared. All the characters move in distinct fashions, but Fred's seem especially well-mapped to his character. Below there is some footage of how each character enters a room.

Tadashi shows him Baymax, the healthcare companion robot he's building, and also introduces him to Professor Callaghan, who's so smart that he doesn't even spell his name like a normal person. (Okay, some quick googling shows it's not that terribly uncommon, but I'd never encountered it.)

Science fiction is often technophobic. It seems strange to say, but "Science run Amok!" is a common theme. It's really nice to see a positive portrayal of both scientists and technology, particularly in something aimed at kids.

Hiro decides he absolutely needs to get into the school, so he builds a nanotech swarm, here called microbots, and shows them off at the school's annual exhibition. He wins and this guarantees him entry. (I assume there are other avenues as well, otherwise they'd have a pretty small student body.) He impresses Callaghan, as well as the needlessly sinister Alistair Krei, who's all like "I'm very impressed with your robots after that two minute scripted exhibition, and would like to offer you eleventy billion dollars." He then twirls his mustache and ties a woman to some railroad tracks. Callaghan warns him that Krei is not to be trusted, and Hiro turns him down.

Everybody's happy and they're going to the cafe to celebrate, but Tadashi wants to spend a few minutes alone with Hiro first.

This is a good point to stop.  For the second part of the review, click over to this post.