The Looooong Night. Zzzzzzzzz…

It may surprise some to learn that I do watch media other than Star Trek. One of the shows I watch is a little underground show called Game of Thrones. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

Much is being made of the episode that aired on April 28th 2019, “The Long Night”. And many of the grievances being aired are dead wrong. This is the result of our narrative illiteracy as a culture. We are to blame for this deficiency, but we are also victims.

Before continuing here’s a healthy SPOILERS warning. Ahead are some spoilers. Do not continue if you have not seen the episode.

Continue reading “The Looooong Night. Zzzzzzzzz…” →

Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels; hers was the most… robot-headed.

Ok, am I seriously nuts and missed how important Robot Head Lady was on Star Trek: Discovery? I’m not being cynical here. Was she properly introduced and fleshed out in an earlier episode I skipped or zoned out during? Continue reading “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels; hers was the most… robot-headed.” →

Kill Them Space Injuns

I started watching the Netflix series Love, Death & Robots. It’s interesting. The episodes are pretty short and so far there’s no over-arching theme, so you can watch them in whatever order, I suppose.

Episode 4, Suits, focuses on a group of technologically advanced settlers who’ve carved out a bunch of land in an area inhabited by a less advanced group. The original inhabitants then fight savagely to try to take the land back from the settlers whose very presence has altered the land to a point of no longer being sustainable for the original inhabitants.

And the settlers are the heroes of the story.

Well, it helps when you replace the Native Americans with horrible faceless alien monsters.

Ok, it’s not a bad episode, and I probably would have gone much easier on the “western settler” allegory if I wasn’t immediately put off by the animation style.

The wife has “3D Disney look”: monkey face + gigantic eyes. I just want to drive a spike into her head to deflate it. I don’t imagine anything bloody or graphic. It would just wheeze the air out when I did it. The other thing that bothers me is the character size disparity. The husband character is easily four times as large as the neighbor’s wife. At the end he puts his hand on her shoulder and it’s easily big enough to engulf her entire head. Unless you’re talking about abnormally large or small people; humans don’t vary that much in size. It’s off-putting.

Remember that picture of Simone Biles and Michael Phelps that went around? There’s a reason we find that so hilariously weird. Only look at it again and imagine Phelps being twice as wide (not like fat, just… bigger). If you’re not thinking “How… how would such a pairing mate?” then you’re obviously more mature than I.

Alas, poor Robot Head Lady! I knew her, Burnham.

One of Star Trek Discovery’s greatest strengths is that it focuses in on a main character and branches out into only a few side characters, typically in a way to expand that character’s relationship to our protagonist.

This doesn’t stop Discovery from having a huge cast of background characters who, for all intents and purposes are over-glorified extras, albeit extras who are there in every episode. Continue reading “Alas, poor Robot Head Lady! I knew her, Burnham.” →

Star Trek Voyager’s Badly Written Role Model

I read an article stating that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Stacey Abrams are big fans of Star Trek Voyager.

Ocasio-Cortez’s reasons for liking the show are less obvious, having been revealed during an interview with her mother, but Stacey Abrams singles out her reverence for Janeway.

This is not exactly a “hot take” and no doubt this is going to come off as gate-keeping, but when people talk about Janeway being a great role model I question how much of the show they watched. Janeway was a criminal. She made questionable decisions from start to finish; decisions that violated her oath to Starfleet. Continue reading “Star Trek Voyager’s Badly Written Role Model” →

The Idiotic Data Math of Ready Player One

I had a bunch of stuff queued up (in my brain) to put up here, but laziness took hold. However now I have something that’s really eating away at me and it’s sort of screenplay related, but… well it fits in with the theme anyway.

I’m reading the book Ready Player One. Not because I think it’s good, but because I decided to go back and read along with the earliest episodes of the podcast “372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back“. I read along with TekWar (their previous book) and it was marvelous, so I thought I would get maximum enjoyment by going back and doing the same for Ready Player One. I will have more thoughts on this book later. It’s complete and utter garbage, but I want to point out something ludicrous.

At one point Marty Sue… sorry, Wade… uploads 10 Zetabytes of data (from a portable device) in 3 hours. Shall we do some math on that?

Data Size

Data goes like this: B (Byte), KB, MB, GB, TB, PB, EB, ZB (Zetabyte). Each increment is 1024 times as big as the previous.

So 1 Gigabyte is 1024 Megabytes is 1,048,576 Kilobytes is 1,073,741,824 Bytes

1 ZB is 1024 to the 7th power bytes. 1.1 Sextillion bytes.

An average Bluray is 25 GB. That external backup drive you bought from Wal-Mart is probably in the 4 TB range at most.

10 ZB can hold almost 440 billion Bluray discs or 2 billion of those backup drives you bought from Wal-Mart.

The book takes place in 2044 (a scant 33 years after it was written). In the 33 years prior to 2011 disk space had grown quite a lot. Home computers, what few existed, didn’t even come with hard disks at that time. And the earliest consumer hard disks were in the 5 MB range. By 2011 an upper end consumer physical hard disk (SSDs are another matter) was in the 1 TB range. This is a 210,000 times increase.

Extrapolating that out over the next 33 years would see an average consumer drive storage be somewhere in the 200 PB (Petabyte) range… not Zetabyte, not Exabyte… Petabyte.

Also, let’s not forget that in between 2011 and 2044 global warming and rampant capitalism resulted in a Mad Max type apocalypse taking place. But still we managed to improve on our pocket drive storage billions of times over?

Transfer Rate

To understand transfer speeds in a way that is relevant to your home internet connection we need to convert from bytes to bits (the 1s and 0s). This is simple. There are 8 bits in a byte.

10 ZB is 94 Sextillion bits. (94,447,329,657,392,900,000,000 if you’re interested in the actual number)

Internet speed is typically measured in seconds: 25 Mbps (Mega bits per second), 50 Mbps, 100 Mbps, etc.

Go to https://www.speedtest.net/ and check out your own internet speed. I’ll wait…

My download is 180 Mbps. Upload is much slower, 11 Mbps. This is my internet provider’s method to stop me from running a server out of my house. You can pay more for a faster upload, but I digress.

So how fast is 10 ZB in 3 hours?

Well, we just need to divide 94 Sextillion by 10800 (3 hours in seconds) to get the average bits per second:

8.7 Quintillion bits per second. To put that into your home internet terms it’s 8.7 Trillion Mbps. Or roughly 48 million times faster than my home internet download speed.

To put that in a more manageable number: 8.75 Ebps (Exabits per second).

Today, 25 years from the time of Ready Player One, and pre-Road Warrior savagery, the upper end of Fiber Optic networks is around 100 Gbps. It seems completely unreasonable, given the limitations of, ya know… the laws of physics and how light travels, that we’ll improve network bandwidth 100 million times what it is now. Not without running cables the size of tanker trucks, bristling with millions of fiber optic cables, into every single building. This is in addition to the Titanic sized cables that would be running from one city to the next connecting all of this. Those would make for a great target for the gangs of assless chapped villains in football pads roaming the wastelands.

All he had to do was scale those numbers down and they would still sound exotic to the layman and plausible to someone in the know.

How about he steals 10 Petabytes of data from IOI on a portable drive and it takes him 10 hours to upload it? That works out to 2.5 Tbps (Terabits per second). Sufficiently futuristic without being stupid.

What am I saying? The whole book is just an exercise in stupidity.

Introduction

I decided to start yet another blog focused on my awful writing and, as the name would suggest, reviewing the flaws of established works, particularly screenplays.

Is this just a more sophisticated way of me getting my fan-fic out there? Maybe. But who else is going to write the definitive Frodo/Harry Potter love story?