Issue 13:
Don't Bother Me, I'm Thinking
By
Medulla Vesuvius
There’s a tradition in the stand-up comedy world in which comics are given a three word critique if they choose to tell jokes about recent tragedies that are still at the painful stage of memory: “It’s too soon.” The idea behind this tradition is obviously that people need time before it feels “right” to laugh and make light of something that seemed so world-crashing at the time. It seems dishonorable to the event. But what of entertainment material that isn’t comedic? What if an entertainer wants to tell a “sad” or “poignant” story about the same recent tragedy? How can there be a “too soon” in that situation? On August 9, Paramount Pictures will release Oliver Stone’s movie about the true story of some rescue workers as they dealt with the disastrous effects of the September 11 terrorist attacks. As we quickly approach the five year anniversary of that awful day, I wonder, is it still “too soon?”
My opinion as of late has been that it will always be too soon for this kind of movie. I’m sure that Oliver Stone and the studio would say that their movie was made with the utmost of care and respect for portraying the heroic deeds of the rescue workers on that day. They probably might even go so far as to say that this movie will be the first painful step in the necessary healing of a nation.
But I think that is just the problem I have with this film. No matter how faithfully it portrays events from September 11, no matter how “honorable” and “respectful,” there is still a little unresolved business…namely, the business of the movie. Filmmakers, studios, and actors make movies as a profession-that is, to make money. That is really the goal of any business, to make money.
It’s downright spooky for me to think of Nicolas Cage taking a cell phone call from his manager while lunching at some expensive Hollywood restaurant, discussing how many millions of dollars it will take for him to be in this great new Oliver Stone movie about one of the worst events in American of maybe even World history. For, as you know, there is a lot of money wrapped up in movies-just watch E Entertainment television for five minutes, just long enough to see the box office returns. There are millions upon millions to be made by releasing a successful film.
And in this situation, all involved are making money off the memory of the dead. The studio and filmmakers would probably say they are honoring the memories of both the dead and the heroism that flourished on one of the darkest days in recent American memory. If only we all could be compensated so well for paying homage.
For proof of just how seriously Paramount takes the business side of the movie, one need only look at how viciously they protected their interests as they sued a Yale University master’s candidate back in June for producing a 12-minute film from an illegally-obtained copy of the screenplay. (Click here for the story from The Smoking Gun.)
So I’m left wondering: is there truly nothing sacred? Is it ever right to profit from telling true stories from real life tragedies? Should I have the same uneasiness with Saving Private Ryan? The Longest Day? War movies in general? Do movies and other entertainments about tragedy perform a necessary function for the human psyche? Is the bitterness of life made more manageable by storytelling? Probably. But it’s the profiteering that really bothers me.
At least when Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, he asked to not be paid and started the Shoah Foundation and all sorts of charitable activities. The last I heard about World Trade Center was that 10% of the first five days’ receipts would go to September 11 charities. This is also known as “throwing a bone.” Look at it the other way—90% of the first five days’ receipts will go to the filmmakers, after which 100% will go to the filmmakers, not to mention the profits from DVD sales.
However, we look to the entertainment industry for righteousness at our own peril.
And those who would decry “hypocrite” for expecting of Hollywood moguls what we are unwilling to do ourselves, have missed the point completely. Those who are critical of this film’s intentions are not the ones exploiting the nation’s need of some kind of nicely-packaged ode to heroism so as to help them forget the underlying tragedy.
A little over five years ago, the World Trade Center towers were a symbol of the power of American capitalism. Along with the New York Stock Exchange, they were monolithic reminders of the American consumerist drive. I’m deeply afraid that with World Trade Center, the movie, we can now add “exploitative greed” to the list of what they symbolized.
Issue 13:
Life in Space
By
Mr. Atoz, The Librarian
One of my pet peeves is when worlds collide. For those of you who aren’t Seinfeld aficionados, what I mean by “worlds colliding” is that I hate it when one friend or group of friends is around me at the same time another group of friends is around me. In a perfect world, we would all get along. Everyone would be just one big happy family. We could bring our wife or girlfriend out with the guys. We could hang with our wife or girlfriend when she’s with the girls (if you really, really wanted to). Dear old friends would get along swimmingly with dear new friends.
Sometimes it happens. In the case of the Star Trek Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton, worlds collided and all was right. Star Trek, a dear old friend, collides with Las Vegas, a dear new friend, and a strange yet beautiful relationship takes off. Star Trek in the middle of Las Vegas is a sight to behold. Imagine this: eating one of the best Italian sandwiches you’ve ever had, drinking one of the strongest yet tastiest drinks you’ve ever had, while Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is playing on a big screen while you’re sitting under a canopy of artificial stars. It was, no joke, heaven on earth. The little restaurant inside is called Quark’s, and while the food and beverage was excellent if not a little overpriced, the ambience was some of the best, coldest vanilla ice cream on a sweet, hot apple pie. While my companions and I didn’t actually go into the Star Trek Experience show, we stopped off at the gift shop before embarking on one of the most marvelous dining experiences I ever had.
I thought I would share with you a few of the more fascinating items I saw in the Star Trek Experience gift shop:
6-pack bottles of Romulan Ale
This was one of about 2 or 3 items that I had a really hard time passing up. In the Star Trek universe, Romulan Ale is the equivalent of a Cuban cigar. It is outlawed. That gives the product enough of an air of mystique alone. My companions and I could never figure out if the Romulan Ale offered at the gift shop was alcoholic. It wasn’t offered in the beverages menu of Quark’s. I couldn’t justify purchasing a product without knowledge of how it tasted or whether it was alcoholic or non-alcoholic. I didn’t want to purchase a beverage that was both horrible tasting and non-alcholic. The novelty of the item wasn’t enough for me to purchase it. I want to be able to pull out a beverage on very special occasions and tell people that it was Romulan Ale that they were drinking. It would be worth the price paid alone just to see the “Man, you are a nerd” looks on people’s faces for just owning something like this. But after that, what are you left with: a glorified turkey & dressing-flavored Jones soda? I want it to be something I can enjoy after the novelty is gone. Next time I’m in Vegas, I plan to see if I can get a sample tasting of Romulan Ale. If I were to guess, Romulan Ale is an exotic-sounding wine cooler.
“I’m With Illogical ——–>” t-shirt
One thing I loved about the Star Trek Experience gift shop was its inventory of products for the Trek fan who makes fun of himself for being a Trek fan. Most of the t-shirts I saw were of this ilk. When I came to the green t-shirt with the words “I’m With Illogical” with an arrow pointing to the side, I laughed out loud. I almost bought it, but novelty clothes aren’t my thing at all. Plus, I don’t know that non-Trek fans would be in on the joke of my t-shirt. This was my favorite item of clothing in the whole place.
Federation Communicator
This was the hardest item to pass up in the whole gift shop. Among all the coffee mugs, action figures, and t-shirts, this was what really caught my eye. I would have sweat bullets trying to keep my wallet in my pants pocket if I knew that the toy made that little noise the communicators make when you open it up. I’ve been wanting my cell phone to make that little chirping noise when you flip it open. Similarly, they had a phaser you could buy. I’m not as intrigued by the phaser simply because it doesn’t make a chirping noise.
Yeah, simple pleasures for simple minds.
Ladies of Star Trek mural
Remember what I said about the gift shop having items for Trek fans who made fun of themselves for being Trek fans? Well, they also had products for the Trek fan who took his Trek fandom over the edge. This was a prime example. This was a painting of all the different ladies of Star Trek, from Uhura to Tasha Yar to Captain Janeway. Nurse Christine Chapel even made her way into the mural. Based on the price for it, I’m guessing this falls under the “Collector’s Item” category, but I still thought it was really weird. When I saw it, I just shook my head and said, “Wow.”
Vulcan teddy bear
I’m not into teddy bears, but I thought these were pretty cool. They were funny because they had the ears, eyebrows, and the horrible Vulcan haircut. They also had Borg teddy bears and other alien race teddy bears available.
Issue 13:
Spotlight on Technology
By
Dr. Roger Korby
You just made a sweet podcast or shot a video with some friends and you’re excited about showing it off. The webby goodness of interconnectivity that is the Internets is a great way to get this new creation out to potentially millions of users. As we have all recently learned though, the internet is not a truck that you can just dump stuff in. It’s a series of tubes and it costs money to move stuff through those tubes and in the case of large files (such as that movie you just made with your friends), it can cost a LOT of money. Assuming you’re going to host it from your own site you would have to foot the bill for the extra bandwidth your files use. It’s not hard for these bills to reach the hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month.
What is BitTorrent?
Back in 2001 Bram Cohen saw this problem and sat down to come up with a solution. The solution he came up with is BitTorrent. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (p2p) protocol that allows you to decentralize the load from one server, (yours), and distributing the load across all the computers trying to download your file. Since fewer people are downloading directly from your server, you can cut your bandwidth usage drastically. This link contains a thousand more words worth of explanation in picture form.
To download a file through BitTorrent, you need a BitTorrent client. This is an application you download and run on your computer that manages your BitTorrent downloads. Cohen wrote the first client and released it and the source code on the internet for free. There are now dozens of clients that can use the BitTorrent protocol. On Windows, the best client I’ve seen is µTorrent. It’s really small, free and has just about the perfect number of features.
A file shared through BitTorrent starts with a seed. The seed is the original file on the file creator’s server. When the first person starts downloading this file, their BitTorrent client downloads the file in small chunks that they in turn share with additional downloaders. Basically, if you and I were both downloading a file through BitTorrent your client would check with me to see if I had any chunks that you don’t have and if I do, then you would download some chunks of data from me and some from the seeder. As more downloaders join in, there are just more potential places for you to download chunks of data from. In theory it’s a great idea and, for the most part, Cohen’s implementation actually works. There are some, (kind of), technical things you have to do to get it to work really well (like open some ports on your router and firewall), but once you do this, you can easily get download speeds above 100 kB/s and often much faster.
BitTorrent is relatively new and doesn’t really have very widespread usage, (read: my aunt or grandma aren’t using it yet). And, honestly, it has some hurdles to jump before it’s as widely known as, say MP3’s, (primarily the port issue in the last paragraph). Despite its current membership in the nerd-only club, one traffic monitoring service announced a few years ago that it accounted for over 30% of internet traffic. This number always seemed high to me, but I guess it could be accurate. In general the size of files moving through BitTorrent are huge compared to most traditional downloads.
Legal Uses
There are plenty of legal uses for Bit-Torrent. Linux distributions are a great example. These are large files, (usually at lease 700mb), and are usually put together by groups of volunteers that do not have a lot of money to put towards distributing their product over the internet. Most Linux distros are available as BitTorrent downloads. I’ve downloaded a few over the last few years using BitTorrent and have always gotten really good speeds.
It really came as a surprise to me, but recently at least one movie studio, (Warner Bros), announced that they would start selling, (or renting?) movies through BitTorrent. I’m assuming the movie files would be DRM’ed (which kind of blows, but is to be expected). It’s nice, though, to see the MPAA embracing this new technology instead of just labeling it as a tool for pirates. Really, using Bit-Torrent just makes good financial sense and it’s kind of funny that it’s taken this long for companies to start utilizing it.
Some game companies use BitTorrent to release patches and updates. World of Warcraft is an example of this. Also, a lot of small companies or individuals offer BitTorrent versions of their downloads to keep bandwidth usage and bills to a minimum.
Illegal Uses*
Unfortunately, a ton of people use BitTorrent for not so legit purposes, such as downloading pirated movies, music, TV shows, computer games and applications. This really irks the content providers and some of them, (specifically the music and movie industries), are fighting back. Unfortunately, instead of coming up with a legal digital distribution system that still allows for fair use, (which is what people want), they have been suing their users. This is pretty effective way to drive-off potential customers and I’ve always found it a bit counter-intuitive.
The argument can be made that BitTorrent should be shutdown and/or Cohen somehow held responsible for all the pirating that has been going on. I think this is a pretty lame argument. If you are going to blame BitTorrent for piracy, why not just go a step further and blame the Internet as well. We wouldn’t even be in this mess if not for the Internet. For that matter, computers and the digital age they brought on could be made the real criminals here. If not for them, we’d still be making copies of movies and songs on analog tape in slow-as-molasses real time.
It would be a real shame if BitTorrent got shut down on account of its efficiency. I don’t think this will happen. The big content providers have done some lame things lately, but I think they’ll eventually come around. Big industries like the Recording Industry change slowly and are especially resistant to new disruptive technologies. In the case of BitTorrent, the technology is compelling and works great so I think it’s only a matter of time before they realize they need to adapt and embrace it, or face irrelevancy in the new age of legitimate p2p distribution.
*Nerd City does not support the use of BitTorrent for illegal activities.
Issue 13:
Tournament of Villainy
By
Rascal Stallion
| Name: Godzilla |
|
Name: Initech |
| Occupation: Monster/Dangers of Nuclear War Allegory |
vs. |
Occupation: Software Company |
Origin: Godzilla
|
|
Origin: Office Space |
8:30 AM on a Thursday and at first glance this day would not be unlike any other day at Initech. Sure, it was Hawaiian shirt day, so there was a slightly perceptible buzz of excitement in the air but for all intents and purposes it was business as usual.
Bill Lumbergh surveyed the room over his steaming cup of coffee and all seemed to be in place. Drew was just about to show the new temp in accounts payable his o-face when the building gave a slight tremble.
The building shook a second time and everyone immediately began scurrying around to find a safe place to ride out the earthquake. The shaking continued, but it sure didn’t feel like an earthquake. The rumbling continued and not only did it seem to be following a palpable rhythm, with every beat it grew stronger.
Suddenly, a shrieking roar pierced the still morning air. Fear gave way to pants-pissing terror as people on the East side of the building looked out the window and saw Godzilla’s 400 ft tall, silhouetted form marching towards the building.
Godzilla had a major case of the Mondays and was intent on taking it out on Initech. His dorsal fins began to glow as he let loose a concentrated blast of radioactive plasma at the building.
Fortunately for Initech, the blast bounced harmlessly off the building. After the last building burned down the new building was constructed with a revolutionary new substance that made it impervious to fire. Unfortunately, the merry squirrels that lived in the tree outside the building were not flame retardant and their charred remains were nothing but a sooty stain on the pavement.
Enraged, Godzilla jumped to conclusions, leaping high into the air and dropping down onto the building. His 20,000 metric tons crushed everything and everyone beneath him. He then swung his tail about around him, leveling what little was left of the building.
Godzilla’s destruction was complete. Initech had been destroyed.
View Tournament Bracket
Issue 13:
Tournament of Villainy
By
Rascal Stallion
| Name: Freddy Krueger |
|
Name: Bobby “The Brain” Heenan |
| Occupation: Mass Murderer |
vs. |
Occupation: Professional Wrestling Manager and Announcer |
| Origin: A Nightmare on Elm Street |
|
Origin: Various Professional Wrestling Organizations including WWF & WCW |
Bobby Heenan found himself in an empty wrestling ring and he couldn’t remember how he got there. The only light in the room was a single spotlight shining down in the room and the arena was eerily quiet.
He frantically tried to discern where he was and how he got there when he heard a screeching sound coming from one of the ring posts. “Who’s there?” he cried out but the only response was more of the scratching followed by the steadily rising sound of self-satisfying laughter.
As Bobby’s eyes adjusted to the low light he was finally able to make out the macabre, disfigured madman standing before him. Freddy Krueger entered the ring across from Bobby in his filthy red and green sweater, dragging his razor-fingered glove across the ropes as he entered. Freddy taunted him, “Are you ready for a Survivor Series of your very own, Bobby?”
Bobby’s heart quickened as he was paralyzed with fear. He used his mighty brain to try to discover a way out of this situation. Freddy approached him and said, “There’s no way to tag out of this one, Bobby. I’m going to gut you.”
“Wait, wait, wait just wait a minute, mister” Bobby said as he scampered around the ring trying to bide his time as he devised an escape. He recognized Freddy and knew he must be trapped in a dream.
Bobby pulled an old wrestling trick and challenged Freddy to a test of strength. When Freddy accepted Bobby poked him in the eyes and kicked him squarely in the balls. He then jumped around behind Freddy and grabbed hold, willing himself awake.
Suddenly the two of them were lying on the floor of the locker room, Bobby still holding Freddy from behind, only now they were out of the dream and in the “real” world.
Freddy turned and slashed at Bobby with his glove, drawing four deep wounds in Heenan’s abdomen. Bobby fell back as Krueger stood over him, readying himself for the final strike.
However, the final strike never had a chance to fall as Freddy found himself surrounded by Bobby’s “family” of wrestlers.
Andre the Giant bellowed “Hey! You leave him alone!” and delivered a massive chop to Freddy’s back that sent him sprawling. The Brooklyn Brawler leaped across delivering a crushing elbow drop, which was immediately followed by Rick Flair giving Freddy numerous head shots with a steel chair. Jake the Snake Roberts then scooped Freddy up and delivered a DDT onto the chair which now lay on the floor. As Freddy barely clung to life, Mr. Perfect held Freddy in place as King Kong Bundy leaped high into the air and stomped Freddy’s neck, breaking it.
Freddy lay dead on the floor as paramedics rushed in to stop Bobby’s hemorrhaging.
View Tournament Bracket
Subscribe to Nerd City
6 Comments