Timely Reminder

They had this new thing on Facebook today that showed me a post that I'd made on this day two years ago, then asked me if I wanted to re-post it. While I think it's annoying when posts show up from years earlier because somebody liked it or something, I did find it to be somewhat timely. The old post was a picture of my tulips with snow on them, and me complaining about how spring wasn't supposed to include snow. Oddly timely because this is what we had today:

Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

I Recently finished Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

It was different than the space opera-type books I've been reading recently, like Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey and Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Wake is a story about an artificial intelligence coming into being. It's the first volume of his WWW trilogy, which includes the books Wake, Watch, and Wonder. The other two are in my queue, and I'll get to the rest of the story eventually. I've got myself reading too many trilogies or series right now. I have to admit, the WWW thing, I think, is kind of cheesy, but it fits, so I guess that's fine.

Anyway, the book is about a girl named Caitlin Decter, who is blind. Her blindness has a rather rare cause. At the beginning of the book, she is approached by a Japanese scientist who has developed an experimental treatment for her particular form of blindness, and needs a test subject to try it out on. She agrees, and, by way of this experiment, becomes instrumental in helping an artificial intelligence that has been developing among the internet come to learn about itself, the world, and its place in that world.

The book was fun, incorporating a lot of the things that I've always liked about Rish Outfield's writing into this serious and significant storyline. Things like high school dances, teen love/heartbreak, and so on. Those kind of things that, no matter how old you have become, still seem to sit right there in the middle of your heart, which I suppose is why there's so many movies and books and TV shows and so on (video games, comic books, puppet shows) that have those elements worked into them.

I've heard that those memories, the ones from childhood through your teenage years, are the ones that sit right at your core. I suppose it's maybe because they're the first ones your brains lay down on the neurons. It's like when you make one of those soft serve ice cream cones. The stuff you put in last is what gets eaten first, and that first bit of ice cream is the very last thing to go. Even people like my dad, who is now almost eighty years old, still like to talk about their formative years, but if I ask him about the time when I was born...or any other time since then...well, he's kind of foggy on the details.

Anyway, I'm getting off course here. What I was trying to say is that I like to have my sci-fi draped in familiar trappings. It helps to make me understand and relate with it better. So, this book worked for me. I enjoyed it. And it ended, as the Ian Syndrome says, right where I wanted it to begin. Except that it was supposed to, because it's not really the end. It's only a third of the story. So, I look forward to the next one.

Oh, one other thing I wanted to mention. I listened to the audiobook version of this one, and they did something really cool with it at the end. There was a part where Caitlin is told to check out the words that a particular astronaut recorded and sent back to earth when he was on his visit to the moon. Sawyer, when he wrote the book, transcribed those words. But for the audio version, they actually got the original recordings, and cut them into the audio. I suppose that they are public domain, because I think anything generated by the government is, but still, I would never have thought somebody might do something like that. It's the kind of thing we'd do on the Dunesteef, but professionally produced audiobooks usually tend to shy away from Dunesteef-like things. I guess they're too afraid to upset those people who expected blandness in their audiobook. If it wasn't bland, they might not take a second drink. They might just walk away.

You know, it's like when you have a drink in front of you, and you think it's milk. And you bring it to your mouth without actually looking at it. You take a sip, and it's not milk. And even though it's Pibb Extra, which is really, really great. Because you thought it was going to be milk, it seems like the worst thing ever. Unless you have really great manners, you may actually spit it out all over the place. But, if you look down, and realize you drank from the wrong cup, and what you took was actually something really, really good. Then you can just enjoy it, and maybe broaden your palate.

I think the Dunesteef is one of those kinds of things. Something different enough that it only appeals to a small minority of the people who might otherwise enjoy it if it were packaged in a more familiar form. It's too bad. But the coolest things are always the things that are underground, not mainstream. So, I guess I can feel good about being cool, right? I am cool, right?

Anyway, I think I'm getting off course again. What I wanted to say was that it was really neat that they went the extra mile like that in their production. It gave the whole thing a bit of added worth in my mind. So, I guess I doubly recommend it.

It's a cyberpunk story, but it's not very cyberpunky, which is exactly how I like it.

Now it's back to Space Opera. My next read is part two of The Expanse. James S. A. Corey's Caliban's War. See you soon when I report on that one.

Give Me A Little Break Here

This is how I spent my spring break.

We've been building a flagstone patio in our backyard for a while now, and we were going to finish it off this week.

It looked like the end was finally in sight, then we ran out of stones just short of being done.

This patio has Murphy's Law written all over it.

Not A Good Plan

Some birds have been trying to build a nest...INSIDE MY BARBECUE!!! I've taken their pile of stuff out twice, the second time I burned it with the barbecue, figuring that would keep them from coming back a third time, but I was wrong. This morning, they were in there again, piling up weeds to make another nest. This time, I'm going to leave the lid open, so that they don't feel protected inside. We'll see how that works. Also, my cat is sitting in the window right beside the barbecue, maybe that will help, but probably not. My cat is really useless.

Dunesteef Episode 170: Be Progressive, Be, Be Progressive by Rish Outfield

New episode of The Dunesteef available!

Hey! It’s another barbecue sketch! Hope you’re up for it. This time we get to see a bunch of guys try to one up each other on just how amazingly progressive they are. Enjoy?

Afterward, Rish and I try to apologize for the sketch, oh and we talk about a few other things too.

Special thanks to Johnny Fiesty and Dave Thompson, Ex-Podcastle Enforcer for lending their voices to the sketch.

Check it out! (EDIT: Now that the feed is gone, the only way to hear the show is over on the Dunesteef Podcast YouTube page, which I am embedding below).

Six Seasons and a Movie

You may have noticed or will possibly notice in a time to come, that I have been making a lot of references to an out-of-the-limelight show called Community recently. I generally reserve bingeing to eating. It's how I got the name Big Anklevich, after all. Nobody calls me Trevor after I weighed in at three bills for the first time. So, I can't say that I have been binge watching Community, but I have been watching a lot of episodes of the show in a short period of time.

It started a while back when I noticed that all the back seasons of Community became available on Hulu Plus. I first came to Community in the middle of the second season, back in 2010. I managed to see a few re-runs from earlier that year, as well as seeing all the episodes from that point forward, and Rish loaned me a couple of episodes from the first season. But, my experience with Community couldn't be said to be anything better than spotty.

Then, after the end of the third season, which looked like it would be the last season (after all, they even had a final episode and everything), we jettisoned our cable in favor of Netflix, and I no longer could follow the show. But it wasn't cancelled after all. It turned out to go on to the fourth season, which was weird, because they fired the creator, Dan Harmon, from the show, and tried to run it without him. Rish continued to watch for a few episodes, but told me that the show went drastically off course, and he quit watching.

But, like I said, now it's on Hulu Plus, from season one all the way through season five. So, when I walk the treadmill in the morning, I punch up episodes of the show, and forget all about the pain in my feet and legs, laughing along with Jeff, Britta, Troy, Abed, Shirley, Annie, and Pierce.

And I'm here to recommend the same thing to you. If you've never seen this show, let me tell you now that you would love it. If you're reading my blog, then you are the kind of person that would love this show. It's so clever and fun, and does things that no other sitcom would dare to try. My wife watches a lot of sitcoms. She puts them on and uses them as background noise while she cleans the house. Usually, I do the piggish-man thing and don't help her at all. It's not because I'm a piggish-man, though. It's just that the shows she chooses are so awful that they drive me from the room. Just the laugh tracks alone are enough to push me out, and that awful way that the characters pause to wait for the studio audience to finish their forced laugh before they say their next line. In an episode in season 4, Abed imagines that they are in a sitcom with a laugh track, and it only serves to point out just how awful laugh tracks are. Why did any show ever do that?

Um, I got off track. Oh, yeah, my wife watches these shows like Last Man Standing and Baby Daddy, which I see as the normal fare you might get on television sitcoms. And then there's Community. It got low ratings, because it doesn't always play to the lowest common denominator, and it gave things time to happen. For example, check this out:

They said Beetlejuice three times, and in the background, Beetlejuice walked by...but each use of the word Beetlejuice was from episodes in three separate seasons!

Also, Community does things that other shows would never try. For example there was an episode in season two, where one of the main characters, Abed, makes almost no appearances in the main stories of the episode. But if you pay attention, in the background, he has a whole storyline in which he helps a pregnant woman deliver her baby in the parking lot of the school. Check it:

And there's so many other fun things. I noticed in the third season they started a running gag with the song, "Daybreak" by Michael Haggins. It began in their Halloween episode. Each character was telling their own messed up version of the man with the hook for a hand urban legend. When Abed told his version, he insisted that it would be unlikely that the people in the story would turn on the radio at exactly the time that the pertinent news broadcast came on to inform them about the hook-handed man who had escaped from prison. So, he had them listen to "Daybreak" for a while. The other characters were frustrated with his inability to get on with his story, but he really started something. They just kept playing, singing, and humming that song again and again from there on out.

And it goes on and on and on like that. But it's not just that. Sure, the show rewards you more than any other show I can think of if you pay attention, but each show is enjoyable and funny all on its own. They do a lot of really fun themed episodes...or meta episodes as some call it.

There was the mob movie episode. The bottle episode. The Dungeons and Dragons episode. The Ken Burns-style documentary about the pillow fort/blanket fort war. The claymation Christmas episode. The singing glee club Christmas episode. The Law and Order episode. The flashback clip episode made up entirely of clips from shows that didn't exist. And the season finale of seasons one and two involved some of my favorite television of all time, the paint ball episodes.

And, of course, there was the episode called "Remedial Chaos Theory" in which they explored all the different alternate dimensions created by rolling a die to see who has to go downstairs and get the pizza. Apparently, it's won Splitsider's award as the "Best Sitcom Episode of All Time". What's a Splitsider? I don't know. But my cousin Butch says it's also way funnier than that Baby Daddy show, which is for lamos.

I'm completely enamored of this show. I recommend it to anyone who wants hours of fun and enjoyment. The first five seasons are streaming on Hulu right now. Check it out.

Now, for the happy ending of all this stuff. Remember when I mentioned that the show's creator got fired off the show after season 3, and the show went drastically off course? Well, weirdly, the show's creator was brought back after season 4 to reinvigorate the show. The first episode of season 5 was called "Re-pilot". They sort of started it all over, and got things back on course.

But then, after season 5, NBC cancelled the show. But wait there's more! The show's still not dead. Instead of letting the show die off, Yahoo picked the show up for it's online channel called Yahoo Screen. So, now you can see the sixth season of the show too. It started on March 17th. I'm tyring to catch up to the present, so I can start watching those episodes too.

There's a catch phrase that started on the show in season 2, where Abed wanted that show, The Cape to last for a long time. When Jeff said it wouldn't last three weeks, Abed proclaimed it would go for "Six seasons and a movie." The phrase was brought up again and again throughout the run of the show, referring to how Abed wanted other shows, like Cougar Town and the like, to have long lives.

This year is Community's sixth season. And what's cool is that Sony is now talking about making a Community movie.

Anklecast 25

It was a hard month, with a lot of setbacks. I did still manage to accomplish a few things, and I also got motivated. I'm going to turn April into the best month ever. Just you wait and see...oh, and enjoy the show.

Music was "Crossing The Divide" courtesy of Kevin MacLeod of Incompetech.com.

Right click HERE to download the episode, select Save Link As, and save the file to your hard drive.

Related Links: That Blog Post That I Was Talking About