There was a story a few months back where a whole bunch of people got mad at CostCo, I think, because the Bible was put in the "Fiction" section. After my usual disdain, I thought a good joke would be that it was only put there because there isn't a "Metaphor" section. Then I remembered that people would get mad about that, too. Then I got sad again.

Fundamentalists frustrate me. Yes, they're hilarious, but the idea that people can live in one of the most advanced countries in the world and be willfully ignorant of science is incredibly depressing. A literal interpretation of the Bible goes against everything we can witness in the observable universe and is therefore frankly preposterous. Yes, science is complicated, but at the end of the day 1+1 always, always equals 2.

And I keep coming back to that line by Clarke: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". This is how scientists view fundamentalists. They just can't dumb down reality far enough for them to understand, so it gets written off as preposterous. But this is also how fundamentalists view science. It's all just miracles, happening, it's just another belief structure. And when you think of evolution as just another person's belief system, the "convert" switch in your head goes off. This is why taxpayer dollars are funding creationism in public school science class.

And the bullshittiest thing about it is that there doesn't even have to be a conflict. And the reason for that has always been blatantly obvious to me: fire. Man creates and harnesses fire. it's the beginning of science (ok maybe not the very beginning but man harnessing fire is very evocative so go with me [remember metaphor]).
The Greeks have the whole Prometheus story for it: man acquires a power of the gods. That's what science is, it's man slowly and deliberately and purposefully assuming more and more power over the world he exists in. It's inexorable. Palahniuk said (I don't know if he stole it), "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate of everyone drops to zero". well the opposite is also true. Science keeps fixing things that kill people. On a long enough timeline, sooner or later, they're going to fix death (probably later).

And this has always seemed to me to not conflict with religion at all. Becausew where is the Off button on technological advancement? If God didn't want us to grow replacement organs in a 3D printer, why the fuck did we ever discover fire? Couldn't He just give us a column of it like He did while the Israelites were fleeing the Egyptians?

Religion is great. It provides a sense of unity in a community and a comforting belief in a grand scheme that we, as the only phenomena in the observed universe that seek order instead of entropy, find comforting (brief segue, this is also the reason for the prevalence of conspiracy theorists). Until it conflicts with common sense. Then, the person advocating religion appears to be behaving like a preposterous child, and the person advocating common sense appears to be behaving like a condescending bully. And there is no remedy forthcoming. Religion an science are both businesses and a good fight is good for business. They're both going to try and convert the other, and, like any arguing people, the more the other side tells them they're wrong, the more they're going to dig in their heels. A tug of war only ends with somebody in the mud. And it doesn't matter if you're right if everyone thinks you're an asshole.

This post was brought to you because I thought of a funny joke: "Some people(bigots) think that Islam is stuck in the Middle Ages. 100% of these people fail to realize that Christianity is stuck in the 1950s."

Twitter

Everybody thinks the concept of Twitter was invented in the early 2000s. Not so! There has always been a medium for brief, pithy statements that, aside from the person making the statement, absolutely no one anywhere gives a fuck about. What is it? Bumper stickers. Bumper stickers are the pre-Twitter Twitter. It's the medium you used before Twitter to tell everyone the most bullshitty uninteresting statement you can. Seriously, do you walk into a room full of strangers and announce that you love your dog? We don't even know you. Why would we care whether or not you love your dog? And even if we knew you, and knew you HAD a dog, wouldn't we assume that you loved it? Twitter is the exact same fucking thing. Little bits of information that are relevant only to you, that you share with the world to get that little tiny rush of endorphins that your body gives you when you think about something you like. Like how I can mention a big, juicy, medium-rare steak, and you're suddenly salivating. It's cool to love your dog. It's cool that your kid is an honor student. It's cool that your kid can beat up my honor student. It's cool you support Mitt Romney. Or Barack Obama. Or John McCain (seriously though take that one off, it's been years since it was relevant). It's cool to do anything you want to do. Just don't walk into a room full of people and shout it. Nobody cares, unless they're your friend, and if they're your friend, they already know.

In which I bitch about Star Wars some more.

Ok, more about Star Wars, which I think is going to become a running theme on this blog.

Here's something interesting: You remember in the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, when they have to crashland the spaceship on the runway? Ok, obvious question: Corusant is a planet wide city, yeah? How many runways are there on it? How many could there be? And one big enough to land a battleship on, not your average rinkydink airport. The answer is that there have to be a shitload for them to find one with no problem. It wasn't even a question of emergency landing in some patch of ground or body of water, becuase there aren't any on Corusant, because it's a fucking planet-wide city. We saw what Corusant is like in Attack, and in the scene in Sith itself: there are skyscrapers fucking everywhere. But whoops, hey, without any steering or directing, or even the part of the ship that has the engines, they're able to bullseye a huge fucking runway. Why is there a huge fucking runway in the middle of skyscrapers?

How about this, though: have you ever seen any vehicle in Star Wars use a runway? Ever? Aren't they all vertical takeoff and landing? All of them?

Want your mind blown even more? In the Star Wars movies, how many things even have wheels? Hm? What craft uses wheels, WHEELS, the fucking most basic form of transportation and probably one of the earliest things ever invented? Can you think of anything? I can think of one or two, not counting droids, and let me tell you none of those things were even near that fucking runway.

EDIT: Because I just realized and it made me mad enough to come back and edit: even the fucking WHEELCHAIRS don't have wheels. In Attack, Owen Lar's dad is all crippled by sandpeople and he floats around in a fucking hoverchair.

So if all of your ships are VTOL and none of your craft even have wheels, why is there an enormous runway (and by extension, tens of thousands if not more for them to be able to find and hit one so easily) in the middle of your goddamn planet-wide city?

So I wrote this for a couple of reasons. First of all, the excellent webcomic Darths and Droids (www.darthsanddroids.net), which goes through the Star Wars movies as though they're an RPG adventure, have just hit that part of Sith. Also, Harry Plinkett (redlettermedia.com) is about to review Sith, and I wanted to toss this out there because if he doesn't mention it, I'll be surprised.

So yeah.

Star Wars is boring. Incredibly boring.

Hey everybody, watch this:



What part did you like best? The part with the guy that looked just like Darth Vader, or the part with the CHICK MANDALORIAN! WHAT! Or how about that sweet random shot of a R2-esque droid that had NO BUSINESS BEING ANYWHERE IN THAT FUCKING TRAILER?!?!?!?!

Or how about re-using Duel of the Fates? I'm sure John Williams appreciates the royalty check.

How crazy was that?

Isn't it great that Lucasfilm and its liscenees are mining the same handful of ideas over and over and over again? This is not new. This isn't even interesting.

You know what I liked about this? The guys using Force powers (however slightly) in the midst of combat. And the Jedi clocking the Vader-expy with the hilt of his lightsaber. And the two or three actual swordfight bits (but I'm a fan of blades like that). Seriously, what can you glean from this trailer? That Sith are fighting Jedi? Oh, so it's only like those six movies and two cartoon series they made? And every piece of expanded universe crap ever? I'm shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Okay, perhaps I'm wrong in all of this and this is a brand new look at a classic sci-fi world. But I doubt it. It's an MMO, which means it's exactly like WoW.

I've been through this before, most particularly when Warhammer Online came out. I was excited about that game, because at the core, Warhammer is about the man on the line, brandishing his halberd in the face of unspeakable horrors. But that's not how the game turned out and that's not how this game is going to turn out. There are dozens of articles already about the stupid aggravations of MMOs, so I won't go into it here, but suffice to say, if that's your bag, The Old Republic will probably offer you more of that mindless repetitive grind you crave. Enjoy it.

'Cause I won't. There's nothing new to experience in the Star Wars universe. It's all been done, and for the most part, it's all been done in A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

Goddammit, Stephanie Meyer, read the play. All of it, not just II:ii.

I've been bombarded with commercials for the latest film adaptation of the Twilight novels, which is pretty obvious, considering it opens at the end of the month. I know it's getting to be gauche to talk about how hard Twilight sucks, but holy Christ it's getting to the point where I want to murder myself. Oh, you like to read, do you? Anything besides R&J? Especially because R&J isn't really a romance, it's a comedy?

Twilight is another entry in a long tradition of using Romeo & Juliet as an ideal romance between two people destined for each other despite incredible hardships, family disapproval, pain, and death. But it's not. It's nothing like that. It's a comedy, all the way up to Act 3 scene 1 when Mercutio bites it. And it's a hilarious comedy.

Romeo's not a cultured lover, he's a stupid ponce who hangs out in the woods all day writing crappy poetry about a girl who won't fuck him. His dad and Benvolio don't know what to do with him because he seriously does this all the time.

Juliet's a 13 year old girl who's being wooed by a wealthy and prodigious nobleman. And by woo, I mean that Paris is bartering with her father for her (incidentally, I think Paris kind of gets the short end of the stick, because not only does he never really do anything wrong, he's gets killed while just trying to keep this crazy murderer away from the body of the guy he murdered. And on top of that they usually cut that scene for performance. Just saying). Being a 13 year old girl, she doesn't do terribly much in the play except insist that Romeo marries her before they bang, and bitch about how she should hate him for killing Tybalt, but doesn't.

They meet at a party Romeo's crashed, which he goes to to see the aforementioned girl who won't fuck him. And then he sees Juliet, and waxes lyrical about how beautiful she is. The only issue here is that it's a masquerade, so she's wearing a mask, so apparently the 13 year old has a slamming body. And then he proceeds to talk about how beautiful she is for four more acts. Seriously, that's all he freaking does when she comes up. Even in the tomb, when he's getting ready to kill himself, he takes a couple minutes to mention that even dead she's still really, really good looking.

How terribly romantic. Really, aside from the balcony gag, it's pretty much just dick jokes and swordfights until it turns into women complaining and murder-suicide.

So next time you go see Romeo & Juliet, you can duck out after 3:1. Everybody fun dies, vanishes, or stops making jokes and starts complaining. Plus they usually put an intermission right there anyway.

Oh, and Stephanie Meyer: stop writing. Seriously. You're bad at it, and you're making little girls think it's okay to be in a horribly abusive relationship as long as the boy tells you he loves you so much it hurts. They should find that out for themselves when they get to high school.