Happy Thanksgiving y'all. We have turkeys running around the neighborhood. That's what you get in the country.
I don't have a picture of the local ones, so here's one from my personal archives from the Bay Area in my apartment complex with all the murderers and rapists. Sigh. The Bay Area is a bad place.
We got snow yesterday, but then it melted within a couple hours of it stopping. Unfortunately, it got COLDER afterwards so there's black ice on many roads. As we were out visiting a friend for dinner, that meant driving home on the icy roads. I did not slip, and there was a lot of mist rising, but we got home safely. I still have decent night vision, but Dad does not.
Normally we do a public charity walk on Thanskgiving, called the Turkey Trot, however it is so cold we're not going. In a couple hours it will warm up enough for a walk. And later, we'll be cleaning up all the leaves brought down by the storm. There's quite a lot of mess.
Turkey will be roasted this afternoon. And I'll make broth from the innards. And we're making mince pie, since we had pumpkin already. Good times! Hope everybody reading is spending time with their families today. My ancestors were at the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth Colony.
So I just listened to the autobiography by Felicia Day and its good. She's very nerdy and maintains that through her narrative. Home schools, internet gaming addiction, how difficult it was to force herself to write The Guild script, and the troubles with funding additional episode. She's big about retaining control of your creative efforts. I can see that. And she explained further about her position on the whole Gamer-Gate mess, and the creepy stuff that happened to her after a blog post on it. They published her home address on her twitter account. Creepy and stalkerish.
I am not a fan of this "Pray For Paris" nonsense. France was attacked. I have cousins in Paris. This makes me angry. Prayer is what caused the problem. Tolerance of non-French zealots in their borders is what caused this. This isn't the first incident, and won't be the last. France's national identity is similar to America's, because we influenced each other's development as modern democracies. France wants to make everyone French. Islam wants to make everyone muslim, not French. The Muslims are allowed to deny being French and still live in France. France has, essentially, failed to convert them. If you allow an enemy, which muslims are, at your back, you must not be surprised when they stab you. And this is what they did. Islam hates all Westerners, by definition. This is why they attack our institutions. Islam is anti-civilization, and its entirely zealots. If you allow them in your community, they will eventually attack.
Prayer and Tolerance of Evil caused the attacks. Don't Pray for Paris. Urge them to expel Muslims from France, using maximum force. Terrify Islam. Because if they don't respond with force, next time it won't be a concert hall. The Muslims will set off a backpack nuke. Islam is ambitious and violent. That is its nature. They want to kill or convert everybody, and then tax them to keep the cult going. Islam is violence. They don't respect anything or anyone. Treat them with respect, as an enemy should be. and then apply violence to fix this situation. When there are no more Islamics in France, there will be no more terror attacks there. All civilized countries are going to have to come to terms with this reality. You can't negotiate with them. You have to expel them, remove them, with maximum force. If you don't, ISIS will buy Iran's nuclear weapons and nuke Rome, London, Paris, Rotterdam, New York City. This is what happens when you tolerate evil. Islam is evil. Islam with nuclear weapons is evil with greater ambitions, and terrible consequences result.
Don't Pray For Paris. Remind France they have nuclear weapons. Respond in the way that Islam understands. Islam is violence. Give them violence a hundred-fold in return.
So I finished watching Korra (Avatar). Good series. Similar approach as the American anime we see in Justice League and Marvel cartoons shown to teens on Cartoon Network. They do a good job of not sexualizing the heroine, while her friend the inventor remains a babe during the full course of the story.
They even get mecha robots, and inventions, unlike in Star Trek, stay invented and impact the setting and plot. That always irritated me about Star Trek. A useful invention in one episode is forgotten in the next one. In Star Trek they're always recalibrating the big deflector parabolic dish into a weapon of some kind. Why not leave it that way? Meh. This is why Star Trek is BAD scifi. So is Star Wars, btw. Most of the plots of star wars are about planet destroying space guns. And moichindizing.
Korra isn't like that. Korra is a world with some quirks, with a small percentage of the population having super powers that are useful for building and destruction, and even industrial purposes. They've got scary portals that rip through to different dimensions with spirits inside, and the spirits come out, and live around the people, with their own peculiar motivations. The series is about Korra gaining awareness of the parts of life she wasn't born with. Its a proper coming of age story, and by the final episode she understands things enough to know what's right, what is worth fighting for, and the cost of losing.
Having recently read some Avatar-Buffy fanfics, one called Big Brother, where Xander becomes Aang's adopted older brother at the Air Temple, and gets frozen with him to help him through their adventures and keep him on a tighter leash than the kid normally does in the series. If you saw the third episode of the first series, Aang announces he wants to ride on various beasts as he travels. It is important to point out that he actually DOES all those things. Its the only plan he's got that worked.
Xander is the friendly version of Iroh, the only wise character in the original Avatar, and one worth watching because his approach to the civil war, to avoid the stupidity, was a great counter to Zuko, so passionate at attempting to regain his honor against a king so evil he burned his own son's face. Zuko has a great character arc, completely unlike Draco Malfoy, who was merely an opportunistic racist parasite. Rowling wasn't very skilled at writing villains. Avatar is better in every way, and so much more satisfying by its conclusion.
I wondered if having Xander around Korra would allow him to activate his superpower. In the fanfic, Xander becomes the obsession of Zuko's insane lightning shooting sister. In Korra, would he have stopped the mecha being built by distracting the Metal Empress from finishing her purple-maser weapon? Probably. Xander's superpower is being irresistable to monster-women. Kuvira is relentlessly ambitious as well as competent. Republic City wouldn't have gotten so damaged if Xander were giving her a creepy smile and a funny limp. Would Xander have been able to offer better advice to the love triangle of Korra, Asami, and Mako? Probably.
As for the ending, I totally understand the implied result of the series, of Korra and Asami becoming a couple, presumably lesbian. However, I am uncertain if that's the sort of thing that will last. At their young ages, early to mid 20s, it probably is convenient, but when the burn for babies comes, they'd drift far enough for husbands and families of their own. Even Toph's situation (ending up a single mom whose kids resent her) proves that the implications of the adventure (Sokka is NOT the father of her kids) don't last when things calm down again.
And finally, Korra ends the use of the setting because too much technology was invented to allow the charm of the contrasts between magic-bending and manmade tool-technology to work anymore. The first Avatar was mostly peasants, with the Fire Nation having metal steamships used for war, but little trade, everybody else limited to peasant living and the spaces between towns largely wild and untamed. The common high-tech was the wheel on a cart, and cities had stone monorails. That isn't so magnificent, and all required lots of benders to keep things going.
By Korra they'd figured out tools to manufacture things, and knew enough to have lots of airships and steam trains and good steel. They had cars and stoplights. Things were 1920's civilized. Anything more advanced than that and you'd lose the charm. So Korra ends the Avatar series, and it was a satisfying ending.
So I have finally gotten around to seeing Legend of Korra (Avatar) and I'm most of the way through season one. I have to say the city is interesting, largely consistent with the sort of injustice we saw in the previous Earth Kingdom cities. It is interesting to see that the Benders (a sort of element controlling wizard martial artist) ruling close to a million people, with skyscrapers, cars, and airships and trains (mass transit) and an organized police force and justice system don't understand how the non-benders feel terrorized and abused by the superpowered benders. The core arc is that the new Avatar is good at three of the four kinds of bending, has no spiritual connection, which is significant in this setting, and there's a serious imbalance in this world because it is modernizing but losing track of its roots, namely that spirits aren't myths in this place, but actual beings that show up and wreak havoc when they are unhappy. They can also be killed, which is a major problem too.
Worse, there's a rebel leader who picked up the trick that Avatar Aang used to end the threat of mad Fire King Ozai, who killed his wife, burned half his son's face off, and was planning to kill pretty much everybody and rule what was left of the world. Avatar Aang takes away his bending power, reducing him to a human. The villain in the new series has the same ability, and it is interesting that the adorable bouncy girl from the first series has spawned her martial art system of pressure points that stop benders from using their power is now going to the rebels. And there's other mad kings making things worse, right up till the abused normal humans have become convinced that war is their only chance. And unfortunately, the mad kings made that true. The little bit of industrial heaven, of progress, where people mostly got along despite goons threatening people with their power... well its fallen apart.
The art in the show is still flat, like the first series, but it remains nice looking and the buildings are really interesting and gothic, with a Hong Kong flavor to them. The cars are sort of pagoda carriages with engines, what you'd get if the automobile had been invented in China rather than Germany, Britain, Italy, USA, and France.
The city gets points for being modern, and for making use of their common talents, but it also reminds the viewer that the biggest problem our species faces is tolerance of Evil. We let evil beings hurt us, and turning the other cheek is the coward's answer. Then we put those same beings in charge, so they can hurt more of us at a time. This is a major flaw in our species, and it is important to see that it explains so MUCH of what is wrong with Asia in particular, and how its depicted in this show remaining as a problem despite a hundred years of prosperity and peace. It is sad how this just doesn't matter. And I applaud the honesty of the creators who included this. It's people who deny natural human cruelty that create and elect the monsters that hurt us in the first place. As long as we allow evil to persist in the open, we deserve what we get. That seems to be the primary theme of the first season, and is a great way to teach us that the spiritual connection, the driving morality and connection with the Earth/Nature (in this setting), is crucial to sanity and humanity.
The F1 grand prix in Sochi Russia was this morning. The track temp was cold, so even the sticky tires offered poor grip and there was a fair number of wrecks associated with this. Eventually, someone is going to figure out if Mercedes is cheating. Their cars corner faster than other cars do, and they are much faster on the straights as well. How are they getting so much more horsepower than the other teams? Even teams running Mercedes engines don't hold a candle to the Mercedes team. Its very suspicious.
Rather than be ingenius, the current hybrid cars used in F1 just plain suck. They aren't reliable. They're too quiet. They suffer from all sorts of reliability problems and its not fun to watch a race where the leader pulls over because his computer went wonky or the brakes failed because his battery overheated. That's not safe either. Nearly kills someone every few races when they hit the brakes at the end of the straight after using the battery, now hot, and the rear brakes, which are electric motors and supposed to pump power back into the battery don't engage, which overloads the front brakes and you get tire smoke and the car goes into the barriers at 150 mph. Not cool.
Why don't they bring back the V12? I'm okay with them fuelling at pit stops. Yes, they'd take longer than 2.8 seconds, but that plus wider rear wing, keep the moving flap for passing purposes, that would be the kind of race worth spectating. Also, cheaper tickets so people could afford to go. Fill the stands. The obsession with billions of dollars only makes Bernie Ecclestone rich, and while the drivers get tens of millions a year, they are the ones risking their lives. I just don't buy that you need batteries to pass in an F1 car. The flap in the wing drops the drag enough for that, and there's these things called turbochargers which gives a serious boost to power when they spin up. Having a button for that would be useful for passing. And they're hundreds of pounds lighter than batteries. So yeah, this is a very fixable problem. It means dumping the annoying hybrids as a bad deal, and getting back to loud and powerful engines, but loud and powerful are what the fans want, and drivers can get back to driving instead of fiddling with computers on their steering wheel.
Avatar the last airbender, the only avatar that really matters (not blue!) other than the one in Snow Crash, was a wonderful TV show, created by American TV network Nickelodeon for kids, but found itself popular with adults and teens because the writing for the show was so good and regular TV was so bad. It generated buzz online and I eventually watched it, and was genuinely impressed.
Legend of Korra wasn't nearly as popular though it has its good points too, though I won't know till I watch it myself. Since Korra isn't available on streaming, I had to buy it, much like Invader Zim, but it will give me something to ponder during the interregnum between anime seasons.
Particularly since this Fall isn't showing much potential. Wagnaria is over, unless they can give us a season about the hero's creepy mom, which is unlikely to be more than an OVA.
Non Non Biyori season two wasn't as adorable as season one, though it was interesting seeing the teacher was a teenager only a few years ago, so is probably not triangle mouth's mother as I'd suspected.
Triangle Mouth (Renge) of Non Non Biyori
Adorable determination makes me want to get married and have kids. Pity that the local women are either married or crazy or leaving town. So no hope there. I need better choices to invest in a family. I've reached an age where I'm looking at the stacked teachers in these shows, since they are drawn all chesty and have hilarious personalities, usually disaster zones. Often drunks, but hilarious.
There were some comedy aspects to Avatar which fans really liked. They enjoyed Sokka, the un-powered brother who keeps up with the superpowered sibling.
There's Toph, a blind 12 year old girl who is a Master of earth bending.
Turns out I married her. Pity the laughs don't last when it comes time to clean the bathroom or pick up her clothes off the floor or pay the rent. Humor isn't enough to save a marriage. Still, fans loved her, and she gets some great lines in the series. And a crowning moment of awesome. She's also a character in Korra, as an old lady. I am looking forward to seeing that.
Avatar is one of those cartoons which is better than it had any right to be, and you keep trying to switch it to Japanese to see if its different then you remember it was always in English, and isn't an anime after all. It's just that good.
