Author: mdhughes

HomePod/Alexa

HomePod/Alexa arguments all week:
Rosencrantz: Big Brother is terrible digital Stasi, that's why I use HAL 9000!
Guildenstern: HAL 9000 has muddy audio. Skills in Big Brother are more useful, and surely there's no profit in spying!
Repeat. ?

The Devil Does Drugs Saturday Music

Insufficient sleep and all screwed up on Monster (Zero Ultra). Let's have some Satanic dance music, and then maybe the machines can kill us all.

Darkpony: "Killbots want peace too but programs must complete"
(art by Darkpony)

What I'm Watching: Get Out, Atomic Blonde

  • Get Out: '60s-'70s horror movies could start with a girl walking alone in risk of being murdered, because it was the Golden Age of Serial Killers; now post-Trayvon you feel just as tense for a black guy walking in fucking suburbia, or at a roadside police stop, or at a white country house, just as justifiably.
    The "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" parents and sibling are spine-crawlingly uncomfortable. The black servants are weird as hell. Even if there was nothing scary going on, this is one of the most socially terrifying things ever.
    And when someone screams at you "GET OUT", you get the fuck out.
    ★★★★★

  • Atomic Blonde: Based on the graphic novel "The Coldest City". MTV-era music, good period props & sets. But the 21st C cancer of teal-and-orange film tinting part 2 is hideous and grossly offensive to my '80s-era eyes. Occasionally a shot is in period hot blue and pink neon, or a weird gel like green & yellow, but not enough. '80s colors POPPED.
    Charlize is a competent ass-kicker in the dancer-doing-fight-choreography style, not talkative or an especially convincing actress, her clipped South African accent can't pass for English or anything but maybe Dutch or German. But this doesn't require much more than action. Chick version of Arnie.
    The lesbian sex is perfunctory, unattractive, and uncommented on; that's not plausible for anyone in that era, who would've used it as lethal leverage against a spy.
    The McGuffin of a list, the spy plot barely matters. It's a bunch of cool scenes. The two fake ending scenes after the interrogation room are so brain-damaged stupid and unnecessary I have to assume they were written by Hollywood producers (who never had a bowl of soup they wouldn't "improve" by pissing in it), not the original writer.
    ★★★½☆ mostly because the tinting so offended me.

Altered Carbon

Altered Carbon is now on Netflix, based on the cyberpunk books by Richard Morgan (which I read about 15 years ago and am somewhat fuzzy on). I'm up to ep 5 of 10 now; time for binging is hard to come by but I'm trying.

"Avoid blunt force trauma to the base of the brain, and energy weapons fired at the head!"

Good story adaptation. Doesn't flinch from any of the gross biology, the casual homicides and "organic damage", the sex and nudity. It's some good old-fashioned porn and torture porn at times.

So first, the weird premise: Everyone has an alien-tech chip in their spine which backs up the brain, lets them transfer to another "sleeve" (body). I have problems with this: Alien tech shouldn't interact with Human biology, and how did they get interstellar travel in the very near future? The show doesn't do much to establish the year or future history, but best I can figure:

  • Now? Interstellar travel.
  • 2050? Find alien tech, get brain chips.
  • 2100: Protectorate vs Envoy war.
  • 2350: Present.

I don't remember how much was explained in the book, but it's way too fast up front and then nothing happens for 250 years.

There's too many physical hardware devices, when almost everything should be software projected on any flat surface or into your optic nerve.

The Methuselahs, rich assholes who can't die, don't really show off how debauched they are until a few eps in, but it's pretty tame compared to Caligula.

The Neo-Catholic and Muslim fruitloops who don't want to be resurrected never made any sense to me in the book, and of course they're committing demographic suicide, there shouldn't be any "believers" this long after the chip.

I don't like the goomba actor they "sleeved" Kovacs in, but Ortega, Elliott, Poe, and most of the others are fine. Kovacs' Hello Kitty backpack full of guns makes me laugh every scene. The fight scenes are great, very bloody and physical, up-close combat. The hotel fight was excellent, once the mooks realize the hotel's killing them.

Visuals are sometimes very derivative of Blade Runner, which wasn't at all the impression I got from the book. Later it gets more of its own look, more gutter SF. The trash areas look like Richard Stanley's Hardware, but not as dirty. The upper city has pneumatic tubes for cars like Futurama, and flying cars with manual controls which seems so implausible it may as well be a sleigh with flying reindeer.

But it's well-shot, the CG mixed into the world constantly as you'd expect from neural-interfaced brains.

Should be ★★★★★ because they made a show of guns, fucking, and brain-fucking for me, but the stupid timeline knocks it down to ★★★★☆