Recently, I was linked to a delightful Register piece on a PCIe cache card with a heafty 4000% markup on parts, turning $1000 worth of flash memory into a $40,000 Permformance Accelerator Module.

Humorous, but of little interest outside of the two hundred people who care deeply about enterprise disk arrays. But bouncing around la Reg, I discovered something truly horrendous. An interview with the science advisor for Battlestar Galactica. It's bad. Oh boy, it's bad.

First off, let's get this straight. Science fiction, broadly, is when you take a piece of new technology, and see what it does to society. What does cheap life extension do? What does strong AI do? What does a really complete physics textbook do?

Science fiction is about technology and it's effect on humans. In science fiction, the details are really absolutely critically important, since they are the point of the fucking story. If the details are different, then you end up with a different story.

When the Star Trek Technical Manual says the red bits on the warp nacelles are actually Bussard Ramscoops, this is an amusing bit of trivia, but utterly pointless, since this has absolutely no effect on the story. They never run out of power because the concentration of interstellar hydrogen is too low, their collosal external magnetic fields never have unexpected effects on the anomoly of the week. They don't matter, they are trivial in the most literal sense of the word.

Star Trek, remember, is the show where "warp factor" is pointless. It has no fixed canonical speed the show can agree on for more than one episode. Depending on what you cite, Warp 3 is either 39 ly/hr, or 487 ly/hr. The Enterprise literally travels at the speed of plot. The Stardate at the beginning of every captain's log? It's not an actual date. The numbers aren't even consecuative. It's pointless. It's a random number the writers make up for every episode.

The Enterprise doesn't care about physics. They didn't design the ship to limit surface area, or calculate the loads on the girders to the pylons. It's designed by a producer telling an art major to design a cool looking spaceship, the art major saying "sure thing", and then making a whole lot of shit up.

As Charles Stross, actual science fiction author,[1] famously pointed out in a blog post almost as vitrolic as this one, the Star Trek writers used their "science advisor" as a macro expander. Geordi would say, "We can't leave the anomaly because TECH TECH, and we need TECH TECH TECH to fix it" and they'd pass on the script to the "science advisor" and he would fill in the blanks with bullshit.

This is bad. Star Trek is a bad show because of it.

However, noting down this one single flaw, paying off La Reg to do a piece of PR puffery about it, triumphantly crowing about how much better you are than Star Trek, and proceeding to make every single other mistake, is not actually any better.

Battlestar Galactica is, and I am being very, very generous here, magical realism.

This is because the origin story of the Cylons is so magnifcently retarded, so utterly, monumentally stupid, that I cannot believe it is supposed to be taken literally. If the last episode was supposed to be taken seriously, then I am forced to conclude that the lead writer is a drooling moron who penned the script in green crayon in his padded cell while watching Bill O'Reilly and voting for Sarah Palin.

Fuck everything!

1: Extended aside: I am what you could chairitibly describe as a fan of Charles Stross. I read A Colder War for free, online; then Accelerando for free, online; then proceeded to buy every single one of his books, one of them twice, thanks to a lapse of memory.

You might incorrectly attribute this to the free book, though it would make the Creative Commons people happy, the real reason is that Stross appears to be me from twenty years in the future, and he writes like he's got a direct line to the inside of my skull, except he knows what the fuck he is doing.

But even a world-class badass like Stross stumbles occasionally. Case in point: The Merchants War, which is a remarkably shitty book.

I don't know about you, but I don't think it's half bad. It's of classic illustrated story form, with drawings accompanying text. The hyperbole is overwrought, but overall, it's competent. There are definitely worse webcomics.

With the comic before that, everything falls to shit.

A specific criticism: The punchline doesn't make any sense. The punchline that is telegraphed wasn't particularly funny, but made a certain kind of har har, Reagan rapping, sense. But in the same manner that reverse stupidity is not intelligence, adding a shocking reversal to a not terribly funny punchline causes it to make no sense at all. Just what is Winston saying here? That Reagan was literally a twenty foot tall rapper, and Margaret Thatcher was a space alien that could summon ICBMs?

Seriously?

A general criticism: There are too many words.

Let me start this off[*] by saying that I have only contempt for people who complain about verbosity. As a person who regularly churns out huge doorstoppers, I cannot help but be a fan of talking a lot. It is certainly possible to be overly verbose, but some ideas are just plain complicated, and have to be explained at length.

But certain mediums are brutally unsuited for long form writing. Viz, the visual ones; movies and comics.

In movies, this is plain to see, inherent in time constraints. A movie is primarily limited by the bladders of the audience. Someone reading text out loud, at a moderate speed, will average something like 3500 words an hour.

This is slow. The audiobook version of Harry Potter 5 is 27 hours. Cryptonomicon is 42. (One can immediately see that Cryptonomicon is the superior book.) You can save quite a lot of time by just panning across a scene, instead of devoting a couple pages to it, but you still have to have actors talking at each other.

And so, in the conversion to screenplay form, a novel will usually end up as about 8,000 words, by excising subplots, redundant characters, the hundred page rant about the evils of capitalism that brings the second act to a halt; as well as subtlety, theme, or anything that made the novel good.

This, incidentally, is about the length of a short story, which, incidentally, is why the short story market imploded around the time Hollywood took off. All the short story writers became screenplay writers, and all the people who read short stories started watching movies instead.

But we're getting away from the point, which is that Subnormality is far, far too verbose for the comic form. It's just got too many words per panel.

This has a number of knock-on effects. For one, the emotional tone of all the words in a speech bubble have to remain about the same, or else the expression on the face of the character becomes incongruous. This can be seen in the third panel of this Penny-Arcade strip. What is being said conflicts with what the character is showing.

Winston appears to be aware of this, jiving with his general competence everywhere else. Unfortunately, the only way to work around this is to write bland dialog. This can be worked around by putting all the talking characters off-screen, like this one but that is of... limited utility. (Full disclosure: I laughed so hard at that one that there may have been some drooling.) You can also just have one character delivering a monologue, with no actions, and no dialog, like this one. That works, and works fairly well, but there's just not a whole lot you can do in that format. And, again, there's no emotional range, which is why all the characters tend to end up wearing expressions of dull surprise.

Note: This is not at all the same thing as "talking a lot". Watchmen probably has an entire novel's worth of words in it, that's cool. Because it's in comic form, with a sane number of words per panel. As I have already said, I like Subnormality page 514, which happens to have a lot of words in it. What's the difference between page 514, which is good, and page 513, which sucks?

Paragraphs. The text in page 514 is in prose format, with line breaks, and paragraphs. The text in page 513 is in giant blocks, in tiny squint-o-vision font. When Winston crams tomes of text into speech bubbles, he is not being verbose, he is being inept. End note.

The second problem is that this results in wasteful storytelling. For an example, look dis.

Wow, that's a lot of words. Let's count the number of words in the eighth panel... and I get 317. Just counting the dialog-heavy panels, and rounding down, that's 2500 words. Uncondensed, since Bruno (No seriously, that's his name!) is summarizing, that's maybe 6000-8000 words. A full short story, a hundred page graphic novel.

In one page. What the fuck? Why are you doing this?

Think what it would be like! First ten pages, you're in orbit with the spess mehreens, some worldbuilding, some subtle backstory, next ten pages, they go down to the surface, introduce the planet itself, some speculation on how a dead world would end up with so much oil, maybe a hint that All Is Not As It seems, next ten pages, the first night, all hell breaks looks, psychedelic horror dreamscape, (which Winston loves drawing etc, etc. That wouldn't be bad!

It wouldn't be good, though. I've got some problems with the story. For one, it's eye-crossingly retarded, postulating a number of incredibly stupid things, most notably, that transporting oil over interstellar distances is profitable, a position that is, to put it lightly, inconsistent with reality. (1.3 MiB pdf. Punchline on page 10.)[**] Plus, he implies we're using an oil-based economy, even after said oil runs out. Ha ha, really?

An aside: What's with Winston and the "there's a lot of ghosts" theme? Also, assuming there's an even twelve billion of baby chick ghosts, outnumbering the human race 2 to 1, then that's one ghost every 42.5 square meters. Not exactly a "carpet". Also: "a level of death unprecedented in nature"? Are we not counting entropy, death by old age, the inevitable death which awaits us all? Because that's a fun one.

Getting back to the story at hand...

Asteroid impacts are rare, but the Earth is old. Over its lifespan it has been repeatedly smashed with terrifyingly huge asteroids, an event that is so common that evidence for it is hard to find, each wiping out trillions of lives at a time. There's been five events where half of all species alive at the time went extinct, were entirely wiped out, and that's just the ones we know of, because before 542 million years ago, they didn't leave behind bodies for us to count!

Yet there are no legions of ghosts carpeting the Earth, furious at how their lives were cut short.

The basic foundation of fantasy (because this sure as hell isn't science fiction) is internal consistency. If something happens for a reason, then it has to happen for the same reason, everywhere.

And this isn't counting that you wouldn't get oil this way. Oil formation is kinda complicated, requiring a few more things than "dead animals", such as suitable rock formations, a certain kind of anaerobic decomposition, etc, etc.

And and this isn't counting that the proximate result of sticking a planet in a time acceleration field is the mother of all ice ages. Accelerate time by a million times, and you reduce the intensity of infalling light by a million times.

First the water would freeze out of the atmosphere, then the oxygen, then the nitrogen. A snowball world, far too cold to sustain any atmosphere at all. Does this sound like the kind of place where mudslides happen?

This all takes place while the planet gently drifts out of the solar system. Accelerate time by a million times, and you reduce inertia by a million times. This "plan" doesn't even begin to make sense.

Speaking of basic factual errors, this comic. 18 years? If you're going to make a joke based on the speed of light, check to make sure that the solar system isn't 36 light years wide. Or how this comic assumes that technology can be banned. The example used in the comic, and I am not kidding, are nuclear weapons. Which nobody has ever misused, right?

He then goes on to assume the existence of both free will and predestination, simultaneously!

This isn't even mentioning Winston's habit of making bizarrely pointless comics. Ha ha, reusable envelopes are hilarious! Except for the point where you forgot to actually write a joke. That makes even less sense than it would in context, since it's part of an extended riff, but even when even considering it as a whole it just isn't funny.

But since Winston obviously wants to be a political cartoonist, what with his taste for captions and subtle humor, he could do well by emulating the greatest political cartoonist in the history of the world, Tim Kreider, who has a habit of appending multi-thousand-word artist's statements to cartoons.

That way you get the best of both words, saving the complex ideas for the essay, and the luscious breasts for the comic. (Apparently Winston liked that idea so much he did it twice. What's the punchline for either of these? Ha ha, attractive women are attractive?)

Another webcomic that operates using this model is the venerable Penny Arcade, where indeed the first thing you see when you visit their site is the essay, and then you have to click a link to see the comic.

A webcomic along those lines is a webcomic I'd read. Heck, I might even buy a printed collection, a monumental act of faith I have invested in very few comics. Subnormality could be one of them!

If only it didn't suck.

*: "No offense, but those pants make you look, like, super fat. Five thousand calories a day fat. Medical emergency fat. Fatty fat fat fat fat."

**: See also: The Myth Of The Starship, by Charles Stross. Punchline: Sublight starships as we think of them do not, can not, and will not ever exist, without really startling breakthroughs in quite a lot of fields.

Let the nitpicking begin.

Firstly, as noted by Shamus, the co-op implementation and GameSpy "integration" are incredibly incompetent. The multiplayer lacks basic, basic features, and the decision to use GameSpy networking code is brain dead. If I was a Gearbox shareholder, I would be suing right now. I know half a dozen people who own Borderlands, but I have given up on co-op play entirely. It's just not worth it.

But if the mentally deficient multiplayer is worthy of a lawsuit, then the Claptrap is a crime.

People. Did you play this game, at all, before releasing it? Do you have ears, with which to hear the unendurably bad dialog? Eyes, to gaze upon the "groin thrust" animation?

The animation?

Of a robot doing groin thrusts?

So you make desperately unlikeable character, and then you make interactions with e required for inventory upgrades, (which are critical in a first person looter like Borderlands) and also have e call you up whenever you enter a new area, to inform you that quests are available.

This happens a lot, since Borderlands has a fast travel system, but doesn't integrate it with the map at all, and lists them by order of discovery in the fast travel menu. So when you're at point A, and are trying to get to point B quickly, you have to hop at random around the world map, hoping you'll end up near your destination. And so, at every hop, Claptrap informs you that you have quests available from NPCs Alice, Bob, Charlie, and Delta.

Every time you fast travel.

Of course, the only way to clear the new quest notifications are by accepting them, at which point they'll clutter up your quest log, since there's no way to delete any of them.

When you give up on fast travel, you'll end up driving around a lot, which means you'll be enduring the zanily broken vehicle physics and overloaded "vehicle collision" noise. Tap a mailbox while just barely moving? Mild crunch. Smash into an enemy vehicle while afterburning? The same mild crunch. Scrape along a wall? Crunch, crunch, crunch.

And then there's the ending. Let's recap the plot:

You are one of four vault hunters, hunting, unsurprisingly, the Vault, a fabled treasure trove full of alien technology and untold riches. While on the bus into Fyrestone, an "angel" appears in a really lo-fi vision to the player, informing them that the Vault is really real, and that she will lead them to it.

The four different playable characters have no backstory, and pretty much no character, besides a shared enthusiasm for murder. They get off the bus in the starting town, and immediately start killing at the behest of the quest givers. Which is cool, I'm down with that. It's a Diablo-em-up, it's supposed to be about the loot, not the story.

The vault hunters rampage across the land, killing dudes and taking their stuff, incidently picking up pieces of the Vault Key, which is needed to enter the Vault.

Very, very incidently. This, is, without a doubt, the best part of the game. The humor is actually fairly well done, with the monstrous exception of the Claptraps. Most importantly, the plot stays out of the way. There is quest text, and careful examination can reveal which quests advance the main plot, but there's no point in reading the text, since there's zero roleplaying, and you really, really don't want to advance the plot, since that gets you closer to the end of the game.

After the player assembles the vault key, interplanetary jackass Commander Steele of the Crimson Lance shows up, takes the key, shuts down the FTL radio network, starts blowing up various towns, and heads off to open up the Vault.

The game changes tone entirely at this point. It stops trying to be funny, and mostly succeeding, and instead tries to be dead serious, failing entirely. The player is supposed to care that the inhabitants of Pandora, a collection of one-dimensional jokes and murderous sons of bitches, are being terribly oppressed under the jackboots of Commander Steele. It doesn't work, at all.

After reactivating the ECHO network, and fighting their way through the Guardians defending the perimeter of the Vault proper, the player arrives just in time to watch Steele open the Vault.

This is a terrible cliche. Just, ugh.

On opening, the Vault releases a tentacled horror called the Destroyer. The angel informs you that it is immortal in its native realm, but can be killed here.

Apparently, the point of the entire game was to kill the Destroyer... except it was already imprisoned. If it was such a threat, why not just leave it alone? Or find one of the pieces of the vault key, and destroy it, preventing the key from being reassembled?

After defeating the Destroyer...

This is a really trivially easy bossfight. Hang out at the side of the arena, where its shockwave can't hit you, and dodge into cover every time it charges up the beam attack. It's pretty much five minutes of poking it in the eye with rockets. It also drops crap loot. Seriously, seriously, weak loot, I tell you what.

... the Angel congratulates you on your victory, and the camera pans out, way out, to reveal that the Angel visions originate from a Hyperion satellite. Fade to black, credits roll, but not without a brief cameo by a claptrap, as a final "Fuck you for playing".

Hyperion is one of the arms manufacturers, like Atlas. Atlas runs the Crimson Lance, who Steele is a member of. Concordantly, this can be interpreted as a proxy war between Hyperion and Atlas, except that doesn't make any fucking sense. If the Vault was actually full of riches, then Hyperion would have a plausible reason to block Atlas from gaining it... except that all it contains is a Cosmic Horror, something Hyperion already knows. They would directly profit from Atlas sticking their nose into the vault, and indeed that is what happens. Hyperion doesn't prevent it at all!

So, what, Hyperion goes to the great trouble of leading a group of adventurers to the Vault, just out of pure benevolence? How does defeating the Destroyer profit them at all?

So, in conclusion. Great game, hampered by an incomprehensible plot, and moronic multiplayer "support".

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Gerard Figurelli wrote on Mar 5, 2007 at 10:25 PM
So I was thinking about the difference between a lands ruled by only right-wingers vs. a land ran by only the left. So here was how I picture a left wing ran nation:

On my way to the local 7/11 to pick up kitty porn and marijuana, I pass a drive through abortion center with drug addicts getting offered the daily special of 2 baby murders for the price of one. Then after I finally reach my second destination which is the welfare line, I will be able to pick up my government pay check when I am unemployed from a Mexican immigrant working the counter making 10.50 an hour. But I am not done yet, I decide to stop buy every QFC from Shoreline to Everett in hopes that one checker will say "merry Chrisman" instead of "happy holidays" so I can sue a successful American business for something that I pretend to hurt my religious moral views. So in order to protect those views I go to church where I show my two adopted Chinese children that two men having sex is very natural and should be adopted as an act of normality by mainstream society. While two homeless American children are outside digging in the trashcan for lunch. Then I drive my gas guzzling Dodge Durango LE because American corporation no longer have the need to technologically advance because the entire country has adapted to communistic ideals. In turn we emit more CO2 emissions and hope Japan can adapt to our ways with what will become "Eastern hypocrisy." All in which will take place in between OPEC controlling our economic market and the Taliban working American immigration with the hopes of improving foreign policy.