Trivial Matters

According to Wiki, there was a comic book for Fringe released around the time the show started. It was supposed to be a 6-issue mini, but they shelved it after the first issue because they wanted to integrate it better into the show’s mythology. It’s supposed to be re-released in January.

I’m so far gone from the comic scene, it’s kinda sad. (Or maybe not, depending on your point of view about comic-book nerds.) Normally, I would have been all over this when it came out, and I’d be bugging Richard (my old dealer) about it every week. Lately, though, I’ve been getting my books from either Fred Meyer (think somewhere between Wal-Mart and and Target) or Barnes & Noble (think somewhere between… nevermind).

I’m sure that I’m missing quite a bit. And once I get back on my feet and back into a routine, I don’t know if I’ll be able to catch back up without putting myself back in serious debt (both time and money-wise).

Back to Fringe… I watched last week’s ep last night and I was a little miffed by the way the “tank” scene turned out. If Olivia and Walter’s intention was to bring John’s memories to her concious mind, why did Olivia stop it at the first “lead” she gets on the current case. Woudn’t it have made more sense to continue and get all of the answers before jumping out of the tank. Yes, I understand that if she gets all of the answers, the show won’t be as interesting, but I can only suspend so much disbelief.

Also, William Bell needs to make an appearance and soon. At this point I’m expecting him to be nothing more than Massive Dynamic’s AI program in the basement. The real Bell, Walter’s lab partner, having died in a freak accident. The AI Bell is using the pattern to find a way into a human body, or some such nonsense.

You would think that a guy with Bill Gates money and power, and 10-times the IQ, would be more of a public figure.

I realized earlier that it has been awhile since I last meditated. Many, many years ago, meditation was a normal routine for me. I used to be more spiritual then, and this was one way of expressing/accessing that.

It’s hard to meditate when the space you occupy is not your own. When I moved back out here, I moved in with two other people, and I never felt “at home” there. During the Great Upheaval, I found temporary accommodations which are just as bad.

I’m hoping that next weekend I’ll be able to go look for an apartment in Corvallis and be moved by the end of the year. Until then, I’m not sure I can find the space in which to meditate again. Which is sad because I think that is what I really need to be doing right now.

Life, as it tends to do, has sped up and passed me by. Events have unfolded outside of my control. And while it is not as dire as I make it sound, I do like having control over my life. Control only comes with concentration, and concentration (at least for me) comes from meditation.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to do my best and hope that it works out in the end.

As I was driving home from my friend’s house tonight, I noticed that a billboard (for lack of a better term) was not quite right. As you head west on I-84, just before entering downtown Portland, there’s a giant mural advertisement for a local HMO/hospital system. The basic idea of the ad is “Together we can: __________.” They change the blank, and the color scheme, every once in a while.

So I’m coming around the curve and I notice that the building is half-and-half, like they are in the process of changing it. And as I get closer I notice the scaffolding hanging down the side of the building. Just as I’m passing it, I see that there are two guys with paint rollers on the scaffolding. This is about 10:30 on Thanksgiving night. Is it really that important to change a billboard on a holiday? Couldn’t this have waited until Monday?

Many of my friends left early (or earlier than they’d like) because they have to work tomorrow. Only one of them is in the retail industry, which I can understand. The rest are doing it because it is not considered a “holiday” by their employers. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the military, but Thanksgiving has always been a 4-day weekend for me. But I suppose that if I worked Fridays as part of my normal shift, I’d be getting up in 6 hours to go to work too.

As it stand, though, I have all day off tomorrow, including no class, and all day Saturday, like normal. So, hopefully, I can finish some of these papers that are due Tuesday and Thursday of next week. I should probably be working on them right now, but then I couldn’t tell you all the billboard story, now could I.

Exile is finished. I got my other homework done this morning and managed to finish the book by noon. I’m still not sure where the “climax” of the book was. Either in the middle (when I thought it was dragging) or in the last chapters. I could see the number of remaining pages and thought: surely this is going to be a new series. But, it ended. There were no loose ends (as far as I could tell) and it just leads right into Speaker for the Dead (sort of).

Of course, I now know of all of the short stories that fill in gaps and reveal more about the minor characters. I’ll have to search those out at some point.

Three more papers to finish and then I can get back to the Trek books.

http://tv.ign.com/articles/931/931067p1.html

So the creator of Heroes has admitted thatall of the time-travel-BS is finally coming back to bite him in the butt. I understand that the strike threw everything out of whack. And with an actor’s strike pending I fear that TV (as a whole) may be doomed to a fate worse than the digitizing of next February… more reality shows.

I also understand that you can’t plan out a show indefinately. Obviously, you want it to continue as long as possible (or as long as it is still fun/profitable), but I can’t believe networks are approving shows with no idea of where they are going. Is seems like Heroes took off like a rocket, and somehow veered way off course. But after reading this, I wonder if the pilot even knew where he was going in the first place.

The title of this post is not a joke, either. I think one of the strongest factors in the success of Buffy and Angel was that both the actors and the fans knew that anyone could die at any minute, permanently. Sure, characters were brought back in flashbacks, or several seasons later, but it was ok. There’s a difference between killing someone and leaving them behind for a year, and killing someone just to bring them back the next week like nothing changed.

I think he (Tim Kring) should run with the idea of starting over with a new cast. The new players introduced in the viral marketing campaigns, and the ones who got dismissed by the fans (like Maya and Alejandro), might have worked on their own, out from under the shadow of Hiro and Peter and Claire.

I’d like to see the older generation when they were young. Or see if there were any people with powers at the same time Adam discovered his.How about a story in the future with people discovering their powers. Not some post-apocalyptic one either, or one shaped by current “Heroes” events. Just the idea that 500 years ago, these powers would be dismissed as magic (as opposed to naturally occuring). Currently, we have to find a scientific reason. What if in the future, people dismissed it as technology. Would humanity “evolve” depite being augmented by science?

(I think I just found a new hook for my Borg story.)