Size Matters

Erik5 Comments

150621NewfaneWe got married in my small home town in New England, population about 3,000. In preparing to go get our license at the town office, we had gathered all the necessary documents to prove that we were who we said we were, that we were old enough, that we weren’t already married, and so on. We were all prepared to fill out paperwork and turn the slow gears of bureaucracy. When we walked into the office, though, the town clerk looked at us and said: “Oh, Erik, I saw your mother the other day and she said you’d be coming in for a marriage license. I’ve got it right here for you.” That’s life in a small town for you.

Small societies and large societies work in different ways. Historians and anthropologists have terms for categorizing different sizes of societies: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states. Like all such divisions, it’s a simplification, but it’s a useful one for getting a handle on how cultures of different scales work.

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Some Random Thoughts on Jurassic World

Erik

In no particular order. Spoiler warnings in effect.

150621Jurasic

  • There is a point at which running from killer dinosaurs in the jungle in heels crosses the line from “This character is a professional businesswoman who isn’t at ease with the wild nature of the animals she supervises” to “This character is a moron.” That point is: the very moment you start running from killer dinosaurs in the jungle in heels.
  • The only time Claire actually seems to know what she’s doing is when she’s coordinating things in the control room. This movie could have been much better if Owen had stayed out in the field doing what he’s good at and Claire had stayed in the control room doing what she’s good at. Or maybe have Claire in the field and Owen in the control room, each of them desperately trying to coach the other through a job they’re not prepared for. As it is, it feels too much like the script is saying: “Silly woman, stop trying to do a man’s job.”
  • Kids are annoying. Badly-behaved kids are even more annoying. Badly behaved kids who run away from the adults who are supposed to be taking care of them (even if those adults are doing a crummy job of it) are annoyinger still. That said, these particular kids were a tiny bit less annoying than they could have been. They were still pretty annoying, though.
  • The nods to the original Jurassic Park were for the most part nicely done and not too obtrusive. I have a fond nostalgia for the original movie (not so much the first two sequels), and I was touched.
  • That said, what made the original Jurassic Park work so well was that the dinosaurs were not characters. They were animals. They didn’t have motivations beyond the animal drives to hunt and defend their territory. The raptors’ stealthy pack hunting was the limit of their intellectual abilities. They were easy enough to understand; what made them scary was mass, speed, claws and teeth. It didn’t matter if you were smarter than a dinosaur. All the smarts in the world didn’t make you any bigger, faster, or less squishy. The sequels have turned the dinosaurs into characters and it has not served them well. Jurassic World is the worst yet in this regard. When a giant dinosaur starts just messing with the humans (decoy tactics, camouflage, velociraptor subversion), it becomes less scary because it’s entering a contest of smarts, not power, and that’s a fight Indominus rex can’t win, no matter what genes they spliced into that thing.
  • Either that dinosaur is bulletproof or In-Gen is recruiting straight from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Either way, bad move, guys.
  • Rolling fields full of Apatosaurs, Stegosaurs, and Triceratopses can still send me straight to six-year-old bliss land, and this movie delivers.
  • I’m of two minds about the Mosasaurus-ex-machina ending. On one hand, it was well set up and executed. On the other hand, after bringing the old T. rex onto the field, it feels like a Hail Mary too far.
  • If ever there was movie calling out for a “sudden but inevitable betrayal” joke, this was it. We got robbed.
  • Watching the trailers, I nursed a hope that Bryce Dallas Howard’s character was a grown-up Lexie from Jurassic Park. Nope.
  • The movie is better than The Lost World and Jurassic Park 3 and feels like a worthy successor to the original. It’s still one competent professional woman, one hurricane, and one Samuel L. Jackson short of measuring up.

Image via comingsoon.net.

In the Seen on Screen occasional feature, we discuss movies and television shows of interest.

 

The Black Widow Movie We Have

Erik2 Comments

I know I’m not alone in wanting a Black Widow movie, but it seems pretty clear that we’re not getting one. Marvel films have been announced out to 2019 and there’s nothing in sight with our favorite red-headed assassin in the lead. So, since we’re not getting the Black widow movie we want, we will have to make do with the Black Widow movie we have. Here’s what we’ve got:

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DIY Portal Mirrors

Eppu1 Comment

Reddit user corttana and her husband dahburbb have a pair of Portal-themed mirrors in their basement den:

Reddit User corttana Imgur Portal Mirrors
Reddit User corttana on Imgur

They were DIY-ed with mirrors, LED rope light, and wood, plus glue and various attachment / hanging supplies. There are some detail photos on Imgur, and dahburbb provides a list of materials and a how-to. This project is four years old already, but still oh, so good. 🙂

In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.

Food Production: The Original 99%

Erik

150615FarmingWe have some berry bushes and a few fruit trees in our back yard. Every spring I plant a few vegetables in a couple of small patches (some years they produce; other years they just wither under the care of my brown thumb). It’s nice to be able to go out back and pick a cucumber or a handful of raspberries, but it doesn’t sustain us. If we had to feed ourselves on what we can produce, we’d be dead in a matter of weeks.

The same is true for most of us in the industrialized world. In the modern west, only about 3% of the population is engaged in primary food production, which is to say: actually producing edible things from nature. Farmers, ranchers, and fishermen (along with some more niche specialists like bee-keepers and salt miners) are in a very small minority today. That 3% manages to feed all the rest of us, but only because of a host of modern technologies: mechanized farming, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, antibiotics, refrigeration and canning, cheap long-distance transport, and so on. Pre-modern societies had to feed themselves with none of these advantages, which means that food production required a huge amount of labor.

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The Martian Release Date Pushed Forward

Eppu

A film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, written by Drew Goddard and directed by Ridley Scott, is being released ahead of its original schedule. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the movie will now debut October 02, 2015 (instead of November 25).

It’s unprecedented for the opening date of a science-heavy SF film to be pushed forward only a few months from release. There must be sufficient buzz about the movie to warrant the move. The announcement has certainly made me more excited to see it!

In case you missed it, here’s the first trailer:

The Martian official trailer from 20th Century FOX

“I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this.” Oh, yeah!

Two Fan-Made Black Widow Videos

Eppu

These two fan-made Black Widow videos are professional grade! First, there’s a fantastic, stylized, graphic title sequence for an imagined Black Widow movie:

Black Widow title sequence by Christopher Haley

Then there’s this trailer for an imagined Black Widow origins movie created from existing movie snippets:

Black Widow: The Origin trailer by unknown; uploaded by Elinor X

I heartily second the sentiment in the origin trailer’s end “credits” – rather than an Ant Man story or another Spider Man re-launch, I’d sooooo much prefer a movie focused on Black Widow. Given the traction that action movies are currently enjoying, it’s a better time than ever before to bring women-lead superhero stories on screen.

But here’s the secret – and I’m going to say this with the emphasis it needs – THE STORIES NEED TO BE GREAT. With solid storytelling (including visuals and pacing), well-rounded characters throughout, and excellent casting. Half-hearted attempts will not cut it.

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

On Viking Warrior Women

Erik

Kathleen O’Neal Gear and Michael Gear have an excellent post on Tor.com today discussing the evidence for warrior women in the Viking world.* It’s a really great summary of the evidence as we know it and I encourage you to read it.

As a historian, I wanted to note that this is an excellent illustration of an important but tricky historiographical principle: many weak but different arguments can sometimes add up to a strong argument. As Gear and Gear note, every individual piece of evidence for Viking warrior women is problematic:

  • Sagas are works of fiction, or at least fictionalized history. Many of the warrior women who appear in saga literature are clearly mythical.
  • Ethnographic commentary by outsiders, especially by outsiders with an explicit cultural agenda, is highly suspect.
  • Artistic representations of women bearing arms might represent the fictional Valkyries rather than actual warrior women.
  • Bioarchaeological evidence may not be able to distinguish the bones of a woman who routinely wielded a sword from those of a woman who routinely chopped firewood or cut grain.
  • Weapon burials do not necessarily indicate warriors, because weapons were status markers that might be put in the graves of people who had never used them in life.

The important thing is that all of these pieces of evidence are from different sources that were unlikely to have influenced each other. While each one on its own is equivocal, put together they add up to a convincing argument that at least some individual women in the Viking world armed and fought as warriors.

The tricky thing with this kind of argument is to make sure that the individual pieces are actually separate. If, for example, we could show that artwork, burial customs, and outsiders’ perceptions were all influenced by fictional saga stories of warrior women, then the argument would be much weaker. The wide separation of the various pieces of evidence in time and space, however, makes them more convincing. When 10th-century Swedish burials, 11-century German ethnography, and 14th-century Icelandic sagas all point in the same direction, we can be fairly confident that they’re showing us something meaningful.

* Note: There is an ongoing debate as to whether the word “Viking” should be capitalized or not. I have no dog in that fight. I have capitalized it here because it makes sense to me to do so, but I have no interest in arguing the point.

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.