Oi, putting this together was a nightmare. This post should have been up yesterday, I mean it isn’t really very long or anything but I’ve been having problems with one of my computers and I only started writing it after work etc… etc… excuses and more excuses.
Now, all that above is true and the damn rootkit virus found on my system whilst I was finishing a write-up for something almost had me go another day without posting. Almost - until I saw Andrew’s post which was angsty and forlorn. With one fell swoop he finally guilted me into posting. I told him that we live in a Guilt Society damn it!

Which is an interesting topic, but not what I wanted to talk about. Basically, I have half-written, part-edited, mostly-thought-up, almost-posted, critically-destroyed and kinda-pretended about writing so many posts that I finally just had to post something. Not anything, but definitely something. Or someone… and something.


Anyway, R. Scott Bakker is the author of The Prince of Nothing and The Aspect-Emperor trilogies informally known as The Second-Apocolypse is a man I highly admire and respect. He is, to me, one of the foremost authors in fantasy at the moment and his novels are truly compelling stuff.

I should now admit that I have only finished up the Warrior-Prophet and taken a Cursory glance at his Sci-fi thriller Neuropath which is strange stuff from anyone that knows me because if I really like a series I tend to gobble it up pretty quickly. However; this is for one of the reasons I love his work so much - it is very dense. The time I started reading his series I was full swing into the heaviest reading for school I have ever done, which is a lot of boring textbook material and thought-provoking articles, but I also had to critically deconstruct numerous texts historically, philosophically, sociologically, mythologically, or symbolically depending on my course. So, when I read for fun it tended to be light and fluffy. This is a horrible phenomenon that seems quite common for University and College students with many who stop reading all together until they're finished.

As I was saying, Bakker's novels are not light and fluffly. They are dense and dark and covered with spikes like a mace. His apocalypse feels world ending, his oppression that feels truly crushing and characters that feel live and believable. But also his themes and ideals are explored carefully and with real literary depth and not just in a "death of the author fantasy fans love to deconstruct, evaluate and analyse novels" kind of way (which is obviously true too) but a real "I write literature with a purpose even if it is fantasy" kind a way. With a background in literary criticism and philosophy and a penchant for D&D this makes perfect sense.
What all this amounted to is that I stopped reading the series, but thoroughly enjoyed the two novels I did read and planned on picking it up after a certain time. With his latest novel The White-luck Warrior released recently and being badgered to read it by an internet colleague I decided I would do just that and pick up the book this Friday. I also happened to luck into an interview with him whilst lurking the web which sparked this post.

Without further ado - the man himself (or his text). This wonderful interview is brought to us by fantasy hostlist:
http://fantasyhotlist.blogspot.com/2011/06/new-r-scott-bakker-interview-part-1.html

If you read the interview I’m sure you’ll understand what I said. He certainly answered those questions like a smart man. He also answered in a way that echoes my ideas of "critical" thinking in University (also known as a hate-on for rationalization), the intellectual or pseudo-intellectual, strong-versus-weak characters and the nature of human failing as well as death of the author. All of this means that he basically wrote up (and edited and made thoroughly enjoyable and thought out) many of my half-written, part-edited posts for me. Not only that, but it was done in the self-deprecating, outwardly friendly and cynical tone typical of Canadians which is just a bonus. It doesn’t mean that I won’t write about them at a later date because they are all topics worth exploring, but I don't have the mind-to-page exactness needed to write about them at the moment.

I should say much more about Bakker (not about me, technically this whole thing was about me) as he is not without faults. Firstly, I should say he is not as challenging as I made him out to be. I think he is that interesting and there is depth to his work, but looking at what I typed up there makes it seem as if he is unreadable, which he is not. All I meant was that there was more mind-work involved than most fantasy novels.
His work is sometimes buried beneath to many philosophical red-herrings and his themes sometimes railroad the actual narrative. Once in a while he gets a little too holier-than-thou (which I think, is accidental) and his attacking of human flaws (hubris, weakness) seem to piss people off a little too much. That and he has that special kind of personality that seems to get panties in bunches, which I might write about another time but either way that is that.

So, what was this post for? Mostly guilt getting the best of me and an endorsement of R. Scott Bakker, if you haven’t read his novels at least give them a chance they are wonderful even if they aren’t for everyone.

It’s been a hard week

Gotta admit I don’t really have any news today, and the last week has been irritating me, so today’s post won’t be relevant to anything in particular. Things have just been coming together to make things a bit difficult. Work, home, poor luck, etc. It’s the usual list of things that can go wrong all deciding to go wrong at the same time. If the universe and everything is controlled by some entity then it’s both A) very organized and B) somewhat of a sadist. Though I suppose there’s enough proof out there of such that I’m not needed to swing the vote.

To exasperate my griping tendencies we’ve slowed down our plans for any real content. I still have ideas for videos but I don’t know if there’s really much of a spirit to get into them at the moment. I’m still the only poster while Josh revises his story, and lord knows if/when Trevor will ever cobble something else together.

I don’t know, nothing really terrible has actually happened, I’ve just been struck by one of those annoying moods that highlight all the things going wrong. The depressing thing is those moods are usually brought on by things actually going wrong, so they tend to have a lot of ammo to throw at you. It’s really easy to feel how much the whole world sucks when you keep thinking about all the things that have failed recently.

The past plan to deal with situations such as these always was to acknowledge that I’m in such a mood and power through them while actively trying to see crappy thoughts coming and diverting them before they affect me. It’s not actually that bad of a plan. I have, in the past, turned my entire day around by simply seeing that I’m making things out to be worse than they really are. There’s just so much this time that acknowledging them loops right back around to rethinking about it all.

Vexing. Vexing enough to warrant using the word vexing; usually reserved for dire circumstances indeed.

Ah well, onto some semblance of news then, because if I couldn’t make a liar out of myself inside one word page it just wouldn’t fit the theme of the day. I’ve been encouraged to retry making a spoof of a kung-fu movie courtesy of both my course and, yes, watching Kung Fu Panda 2. Sure, it’s a family flick so the point isn’t the action, but watching any form of Kung Fu has that affect of me. I see punching, I want to punch. Now we don’t even know close to enough about Kung Fu to make an actual well made choreographed out fight scene, but I figure we can do a silly little run of it and post whatever the results are. Dignity is for suckers anyways.

Once again, please have no expectations of quality. It won’t be pretty. Also it probably won’t happen anytime soon since we’ll need to get everyone together to do this. I’m still determined to turn us into a development team of sorts. It’s just so difficult when everyone gets distracted the second they sit down in my house. Maybe we’d see some more success if I dragged everyone out to some other place to make the plans, like Chapters or some such. I’ll think of something.

Kung Fu Panda 2

Ah-ha! I knew I’d find a way to sneak another Kung Fu post in, even if it’s in movie review form.

As per internet regulations, I’ll start off with a short form. Kung Fu Panda 2 is a pretty good film with an intended kids or family audience. It’s got a bunch of laughs for all ages, it has good acting, and the animation is well done even if the 3D is superfluous. The story and characters got a good showing and it didn’t just rehash the plot from the first movie. They’re still plugging away at the ‘heroes journey’ arc, so no terribly original concepts – but they execute it well, so it’s worth applauding anyways.

Right, onto to the nitty gritty details.

I’d like to start by congratulating Dreamworks on making one of their only sequels ever that didn’t suck, and one of the few out there in general that lived up to the original. I don’t think Dreamworks could stand toe to toe with Pixar yet, but the good news is they’re definitely learning.

There was a rumour floating around that the main villain of the first Kung Fu Panda movie wasn’t intended to be near as sympathetic as he turned out to be. In fact, it’s not so much a rumour as directly stated in the commentary. They hoped to make another run of the mill ‘muwahaha’ villain to be killed at the end of the movie without any cause for concern. This was actually the source of the mildly odd ending of the first movie, where it looks like from the characters involved they’d aim for an ending in which they redeem the villain in some form – but instead they opted to have the titular character obliterate the bad-guy (of course not on screen, but all the same, no trace remains). A lot of fans found the background they included for Tai-lung, the nasty in question, a large plus of the movie because it wasn’t painting things quite so black and white, main character aside. It turns out Dreamworks heard of all this and incorporated it into ‘Lord Shen’, the new nasty. It works well, especially because they didn’t rehash any of the reasoning for why he was sympathetic.

A further thing they picked up on was how well received the original 2-D opening was. Thus we see a return of that art style in a number of scenes in the movie and it flows well with the whole piece, creating an interesting visual distinction between things that are taking place in the past (or imagination) and things in the present. This made the transitions clearer in a story where they’re meant to be jumping between past and present frequently.

Now it’s the nature of the past elements that truly impressed me; it’s surprisingly dark. Dreamworks has always been more prone to using words like ‘kill’ or ‘death’, and even visual presenting them in what are primarily kids-and-family movies than most of their competition, but it’s a rarity to see a concept like genocide and mass murder crop up in a film of that nature and not seem horribly out of place. Even typing it now it seems like it shouldn’t work, and even if it does from a narrative angle it should’ve been hell on earth trying to push that past a board of investors. But none the less they managed to do it and in a manner that I feel is remarkably good for the genre. Exploring some of the more dark concepts in films targeted at kids doesn’t make them scary or incomprehensible to the audience, it just means you need to be clear in how you present them. And if done right (see Up, How to Train your Dragon, Mulan) it can allow the narrative to be both more diverse and include valuable lessons and morals.

I’ve honestly never been entirely certain how many kids are likely to pick up on those morals, but that just brings me to the second benefit of taking this route. If the movie explores those aspects it can reach a broader audience and I feel animated film needs a helping hand in doing so. They’re definitely capable of being enjoyed by all ages; they just need to be made with the level of dedication expected of every other movie. The lower standard that seems to exist for ‘kids movies’ needs to disappear if we want to both have the pleasure of seeing good movies more often and knowing that the younger generation isn’t being spoon-fed crap because the industry can get away with it.