Author Archives: Jean-Paul

Book Review: The Last Colony by John Scalzi

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 Stars

“The Last Colony” is another excellent book in an excellent trilogy.  The others being “Old Man’s War” and “The Ghost Brigades”.  This book is the least hard science fictiony of the three.  There are still cool new technological gadgets and such, but the book mostly draws on the science from the previous books for the most part.  It is missed because John Scalzi describes cool science gadgets really well, but it also gives Scalzi ample room to shine in his other writing talent, sarcasm and biting rejoinders.  This first half of the book is packed with them.  I found myself chuckling more than a few times and smiling throughout.

This book also delves into the internal politics of the Colonial Union much more than the other two.  Much of the plot surrounds the way the Colonial Union manages its colonies and uses them as pawns in a six dimensional chess game against the other colonizing races.  With each book, it becomes harder and harder to excuse the actions of the Colonial Union and this book actually had me rooting for the Conclave.

Like the other two books in this series, I thought the first half was quite strong, but the second half was missing something.  I think my issue is that, with each book, John Scalzi creates this complex series of events and then the solutions just seem to work themselves out in a simplistic way.  Unlike the other two books, I found the ending to this book quite satisfying, if a little far fetched.

And the “Old Man’s War” trilogy comes to an end.  There are other books set in the universe, but these three apparently stand alone.  Though I will read the other books, I will sorely miss John Perry and Jane Sagan.  I wish John Scalzi had spent more ink talking about their relationship.  It is an interesting and complicated one.  There are hints of love and hints of problems.  Neither are well explored.  None of this takes away from the story, but it’s one of those road not traveled things.  I wonder how much John Perry/Jane Sagan romance fan fiction is out there.  Not enough to actually look, but just wonder.

 

Three Blind Mice

The Republican Comedy Tour just finished their Egypt gig.  Louie “Terror Babies” Gohmert, Steve “Calves the Size of Cantaloupes” King, and Michelle “Pray the Gay Away” Bachmann recently traveled to Egypt to impart their democratically styled principles upon the lucky inhabitants of Egypt.  What followed is exactly what you’d expect when the three craziest members of the House get together to talk about something they clearly don’t understand.

With dreams of American coups dancing in their heads, they praised the Egyptian military for following the will of the people and ousting the democratically elected President Morsi.  Comparisons were made to George Washington leading the Revolution against England.  They also praised the military for the brutal crackdowns on protesters which led to the death of at least one thousand protesters (just like George Washington did. Oh, wait.).  They then seemed to suggest the Muslim Brotherhood was behind the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, because, you know, the word Muslim is right in their name and Muslims attacked us ergo the Muslim Brotherhood attacked us.

The only real lesson for the Egyptian people is this: Sure you elected Morsi and he really sucked.  People in the United States elected these three screwballs too, some of them multiple times, and we’ve been a democracy for hundreds of years.  Luckily for the U.S. their power is pretty limited to saying stupid things in foreign countries.  You can be forgiven your Morsi election, just try not to let it happen again.  If you ever actually get another election.  Here, have some weapons.

Gendered Pronouns: Great Evil Or Greatest Evil?

I have long despised gendered languages.  Partly because it makes them more difficult to learn, having to memorize both a word and the gender that goes along with that word.  Mostly, though, because it’s always struck me as fairly sexist.

The language we speak has been shown to change the way we think about things.  There have been studies of gendered languages which show that if a noun is feminine in one language and masculine in another, it actually changes the words individuals use to describe the noun.  As a made up example so you understand what I’m talking about , take the word “chair”.  If “chair” is a masculine noun in a language, people were more likely to use more masculine descriptions like “sturdy” or “solid”.  If “chair” is a feminine noun in a language, people were more likely to use more feminine descriptions like “elegant” or “dainty”.

Because of the lack of gendered nouns, I have always thought of English as superior to other languages.  English is illogical, self-contradicting, and phonetically unpronounceable, but at least it doesn’t have gendered nouns!  It does have gendered pronouns, though.  They’re really just as bad.  Maybe worse, even.  At least gendered nouns aren’t talking about an individual. Gendered pronouns change the way we think about an individual and reveal our own prejudices.

Think about this sentence: She jogs in the park every morning.  The word “she” in that sentence offers zero pertinent information into the forming of the sentence.  What it does is form a picture in your mind of a female jogging.  Chances are, if you’re a cis male, that female is also shapely and well endowed and bounces in all the right places.  It’s certainly a pleasant image to have, but it is also likely nothing close to reality.  The sentence itself has altered our reality.

It’s a fairly benign example.  Try this experiment, though.  Take a sheet of paper and a pen and write down the first things you think of when you read this sentence:  She was raped.  Get it all down before you go any further.  What did you write?  If you’re like me, it would be a laundry list of victim blaming nonsense interspersed with some sympathetic words.  I am one of the least likely to victim blame, but our culture is so infused with victim blaming that they’re the first words that come to mind.  Now try the same thing with this sentence:  He was raped.  For me, it was much more difficult to come up with things to write.  Did you have the same experience?  Maybe you wrote something about prison or dropping a bar of soap?  Why does the altering of a pronoun so greatly change our view of an unforgivable act?

I wonder how completely neutering our language would alter the way we think about things.  I’ve spent some time trying to come up with genderless pronouns for the English language but everything just sounds weird.  Making up words is harder than it sounds.  ‘It’, as a pronoun, already has connotations of non-humanness that would make it impossible to use as a replacement.  I’m somewhat partial to using the Italian word ‘lei’ because I’ve always been fascinated by it being both the word for ‘she’ and the formal word for ‘you’ and I like the way it sounds.  I also like the word ‘ser’ which is ‘to be’ in Spanish because it sounds English-y and already has a etymology of being built into it.  What words would you be in favor of?

It would be a fascinating experiment to take public domain works and replace all the gendered pronouns and nouns with genderless equivalents and see how it changes our thinking of the stories.  Imagine a love story where you’re never quite know who is the male and who is the female character.  Imagine a poem where you’re not sure if it was written for a male or a female.  I think we would find that our gender prejudices are much deeper than we suppose them to be.

A Little Bit Of Progress

We finally got the city inspectors to come out and approve the sewer and water lines. The good news is that we didn’t have to dig up the sidewalk. The bad news is we had to dig up the street. The other good news is the city didn’t charge extra for digging up the street. Now we are waiting for another inspection for the drain tile before laying the concrete floor in the basement. Fun.

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Google Voice Is Hilarious

Those of you who use Google Voice for your voicemail system know that much hilarity can ensue when comparing the voice message to the Google voice-to-text message.  I have never seen one quite as bad as this though.  A colleague from work called me last night while I was on the phone trying to resolve a work problem so I missed the call.  This colleague is of Indian descent and has a medium Indian accent.  His accent takes some getting used to, but it is perfectly intelligible.  Unless you’re Google Voice apparently.  Check out this verbal vomit and see if you can guess what the message is about:

Bye. Hey J. P Agreement that I love you. I do see that you’re okay. I just received a call. I think it Love You do need a job names. Although I’m not very much. I was not showing up, but I thought he said something about. I haven’t had a lot. So, I think maybe we could not get the file from the clean the icon, system messages 5 so I don’t know the I don’t know what the contact is bad and stuff like that. Daniel Pick a quick look at it and let me know if you need anything else but we did lower work and I think I’m going back home from work right now. I should be at all, and of FedEx played he put it on the small. I just. I don’t have the train so if you could use. I don’t hear back from you, but I’m not as I have a lot and then see what I can book work alright. Thanks. Bye.

 

Oh, The Horror!

This past Monday, in honor of Labor Day, I did what every other Real American was doing.  Not work.  It’s a Labor Day tradition.  Unlike most American, I decided to memorialize the current sorry state of Labor in America by watching a couple of horror movies.  Both movies were less scary and contained less blood than working at McDonald’s.

The first one was “Tucker and Dale vs. Evil”.  This has been on my suggested viewing Netflix list for a long time but I never really gave it much thought since it didn’t seem up my alley.  Boy, was I wrong.  This is one of those movies that has an idea so great you’re surprised no one has ever thought of it before.  The horror is comedic and the blood is over the top.  If you’re expecting a serious horror movie, look elsewhere, but if a horror movie with lots of laughs sounds about your style, I highly recommend it.

The second one was “Dead Snow”.  This one’s foreign so those of you who don’t like subtitles should look elsewhere.  If you do look elsewhere, though, you’ll miss the Nazi zombies.  And the Nazi zombie entrails.  And the dude hanging off the cliff by Nazi zombie entrails.  And many other cunningly creative blood and guts play.  This one quickly turns into a gore fest and doesn’t let up.  Fun for the entire family.  If your family’s idea of fun is smashing in Nazi zombie heads.  What’s wrong with your family?

Book Review: The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

Jean-Paul’s Rating: 4/5 stars

“The Ghost Brigades” is the second book by John Scalzi set in the “Old Man’s War” universe.  It is a very fun read, but parts of the story just didn’t connect with me.  While “Old Man’s War” was a very high four stars, “The Ghost Brigades” rates a very low four stars.  There are plenty of scenes of the Scalzian brilliance that made “Old Man’s War” so memorable, but they are muted somewhat by a plot that seems forced.

The biggest problem for me was the motivations of Charles Boutin.  John Scalzi is usually very good at describing characters in such a way that makes them both unique and believable.  Aliens seem alien yet still relatable.  Special Forces soldiers seem like kids in grown peoples’ bodies.  Charles Boutin seems like a paper cutout character who, despite being a brilliant scientist, makes very hard to understand choices which just happen to further the plot.  I imagine John Scalzi had a bunch of great ideas that could be thrown into a story about the Ghost Brigades but then struggled mightily to tie all the great ideas together.  The result being a great book with a passable plot.

Those bunches of great ideas are pretty great, though.  The Ghost Brigades are infinitely interesting.  Reading how they are created and trained, how they relate to each other and to others, the ethical and practical implications of their existence is some fascinating material.  You are not going to find much better sci-fi out there than the inner workings of the Colonial Defense Force and the aliens that they fight.

I am definitely hooked on the “Old Man’s War” universe.  I’ve already started reading the next in the series, “The Last Colony”, and am already enjoying it immensely.  If John Scalzi put the “Old Man’s War” tag on a coloring book, I’d probably read it.  Heck, I’m likely to read everything Scalzian in existence at this point.  Not only does he write incredibly well, he also seems like a pretty cool cat.  Check out his Whatever blog if you get a chance.

You Know, I’ve Never Won The Lottery Before

I’m just throwing that out there because I was commenting to a friend last Friday about how there doesn’t seem to be any mosquitoes around this year and that I hadn’t been bitten even once.  That all changed on Saturday.  With a vengeance.  I believe I have a mosquito bite on every tender spot of my anatomy.  Ankle?  Check.  Knee?  Check.  Finger?  Check.  Even worse, the one on my ankle is at exactly the right height to be irritated by my shoe every time I move my foot.  You win this round, mosquitoes!

The weird thing is they are these tiny round red bites.  I don’t remember mosquito bites being this small.  Maybe mosquitoes are more immature than usual this year.  And by immature, I mean “Hey Joe, I dare you to bite that human on his ankle so that when he walks the bite gets irritated by his shoe!” immature.

Coming Soon To All Fifty States: Marriage Equality

The Federal Government took a huge step in recognizing marriage equality today.  They IRS has stated that gay married couples would be able to file jointly on their Federal tax returns regardless of whether couples’ home state recognizes the marriage.

This bureaucratic change could all but guarantee every state recognizes gay marriage.  Why?  Paperwork.  Most State taxes borrow heavily from the Federal 1040 form.  State forms, as a result, are fairly straightforward and easy to fill out.  If State governments continue to not recognize the marriages, they will have to create new tax forms for everyone.  That would entail completely revamping the State tax codes.  Equality by papercut.  Brilliant!

Give ‘Em What They Want!

Kevin Spacey says something that I’ve been saying for a long time:

[youtube http://youtu.be/P0ukYf_xvgc]

People, in general, don’t want to steal.  They want to reward artists for their efforts.  They won’t do so if you put too many requirements on their purchases.  Most of what the music industry sells is crap and the package it with one good song and expect people to buy the whole crappy package.  Most of what the movie industry sells is crap and they want to dictate to you how and when you can watch their crappy product.  That’s why Netflix has been so successful.  Sure, a lot of their offerings are crap, but you can watch their crap at a time and place and device of your choosing.  People love watching crap, just look at how many Anime fans there are.  They will even be willing to pay for crap if you give them the freedom to watch it their way.