the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
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NEWS AND VIEWS - MARCH 2024
WRITING NEWS My latest novel, Sam Fortune and the Hazards of the Game, is available now on Amazon. Check it out! I'm making steady progress on City of Strange Gods -- I've got the book up to 57,000 words now. If I can keep up this pace I should be able to finish it by the end of June. (Paid subscribers can read the first chapter on my Substack, but it's kind of expensive and honestly probably not worth it unless you really want to support my work.) Still haven't decided what my next book will be. Leaning towards a short, steampunkish fantasy novel at this point, but I've been thinking about writing a straight-up romance, too, because I'm unemployed right now and romance is the one genre that still sells pretty well. I'd rather write more fantasy, Signalverse adventures, and Playground Noir stories, but sometimes you just have to follow the money, you know? * * * * * * * * SAILING THE HIGH SEAS Earlier this month Nintendo sued the developers of the Yuzu emulator, which emulates Switch games, for copyright infringement. It only took a week to get a settlement: the developers agreed to pay Nintendo $2.5 million, take the emulator offline, and dissolve their business, Tropical Haze LLC. Personally, I'm not too broken up about it. You have to assume most of the people using the emulator were using it to pirate games, and pirating games for currently-available consoles like the Switch has always struck me as kind of unseemly. I can see why Nintendo might have been a little irritated with these people. That said, while Nintendo's heavy-handedness in protecting their copyright is understandable, it tends to annoy gamers, and for good reason. If it was up to Nintendo, the only legal way to play a game like 1992's Little Samson, for the NES, would be to shell out $5,000 for a copy on the secondhand market. If the only legal way to watch a movie from 1992 (say, Batman Returns) was to pay $5,000 for an old VHS tape...well, you can see why so many people resort to piracy, and why so many people resent Nintendo's super-aggressive anti-piracy policies. 
Video games are an interesting medium. They haven't been around very long, only about fifty years, but according to the Video Game History Foundation only about 13% of commercially released games are still commercially available -- the rest, like Little Samson, have never been rereleased in any form, meaning the only way to play them is to pay collector's prices for original copies, visit one of the handful of video game museums out there (yes, these places do exist), or pirate them. Most books and movies, in contrast, are readily available either commercially or through the library system. I suppose you could make the argument that video games, especially comparatively primitive games like Little Samson, are mere ephemera, intended for children, and aren't as worthy of preservation as books or movies. There's maybe something to that. I mean, let's face it, having to defend the artistic merits of something like Battletoads is kind of embarrassing: "This game about giant toad-people fighting monsters and sexy bondage chicks on other planets is part of our cultural heritage!" But as a video game fan from way back, it does bother me that so many of these games are so hard to get, and that the video game industry as a whole, including Nintendo, seems to have only a passing interest in preserving them for future generations. * * * * * * * * PICKING NITS I'm not really a nitpicky kind of guy, in regards to movies, books, and TV shows. Possibly because I'm not very smart, I tend not to notice plot holes or plot problems unless they're really, really obvious, and when I do notice them, well, they usually don't bother me all that much. (I had a roommate in college who was the opposite -- he couldn't get over the fact that "the Jedi didn't use their powers right" in The Phantom Menace, and would happily spend hours talking about it if you let him. He could never just enjoy a movie; he had to pick it apart as he was watching it. I felt kind of bad for him.) Unfortunately you can't "unnotice" a plot hole in a movie or TV show -- once you've seen it, you're kind of stuck seeing it forever. Here's some nitpicks that I've had stuck in my own brain for years. Back to the Future Part II. I love the Back to the Future series. Who doesn't? The first movie handles the time travel pretty well and pretty consistently, but the sequels, even though they're a lot of fun, are full of problems. For instance, in the first movie, when Doc is first demonstrating the time machine, he explains that when he sent his dog Einstein one minute into the future, he "skipped over that minute to instantly arrive at this point in time." Okay, that makes sense. So, in Back to the Future II, when Doc takes Marty and Jennifer thirty years into the future, they've skipped over those thirty years, just like Einstein skipped over that minute...right? Wrong! Instead of arriving in a future in which Marty and Jennifer have been missing for the last thirty years, we find older versions of them living in Hilldale. Huh? How did that happen? Another thing that's always bothered me: when Biff went back to 1955 with the sports almanac and changed the past, why were Marty and Doc somehow immune from the effects of the new timeline? The movie never explains it. The biggest plot hole, however, is the time machine itself. Whenever anyone uses the DeLorean to go backward or forward in time, they always end up in the "same spatial location where they departed" (quoting Wikipedia there). For example, in the first movie, Marty and the time machine vanish from the Twin Pines Mall parking lot in 1985 and appear on Peabody's farm, where the mall will be built thirty years hence. The reason this doesn't make sense is that the Earth is constantly moving, not just spinning on its axis but orbiting the sun. If you were to jump, say, six months into the future or six months into the past, at the exact same spatial location you departed, you'd find yourself floating in outer space, on the other side of the sun. The only way to explain this is to suggest that the time machine was designed to travel not only through time, but through space as well. But if it can travel through space as well as time, why is Doc so concerned about avoiding obstacles that may have existed in the past? Batman (1989). My dad doesn't watch a lot of movies. When he does watch a movie, though, he always surprises (and amuses) me with his commonsensical nitpicks. My favorite was a comment he made during a scene in 1989's Batman -- remember the part where Jack Napier is smashing things up at Axis Chemicals in an effort to evade the police? At one point he takes a fireman's axe and swings it at a big metal tank, instantly puncturing it. 
My dad scoffed. "There's no way he could break that thing with an axe," he said. And if you stop and think about it...yeah, in the real world, an axe would probably just bounce right off a tank like that. I mean, those kinds of tanks are usually made of steel; there's no way you could puncture something like that with an axe, and certainly not on the first swing. A very minor nitpick, perhaps, but I think about it every time I see this scene. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Speaking of my dad...years ago, whenever my brother and I asked him to rent a movie for us on his way home from work, he would always pick up Star Trek IV for some reason. We could never figure out why. Neither of us had any particular interest in Star Trek, and although I think he did have a soft spot for the original series, my dad wasn't really a fan of the franchise either. And yet, he must have rented this movie for us at least four or five times. It got to be kind of a running joke. Fortunately it's a decent movie, so we were never really all that upset when he rented it. I do have a nitpick, though: after the Enterprise crew go back in time, they find that the dilithium crystals have been drained and that, according to Scotty, even in the future they don't have the technology to "recrystallize" them. Spock solves the problem, however: he suggests using "high-energy photons" collected from a fission reactor to reenergize the dilithium. And it works! Now, of course, Star Trek is famous for its technobabble solutions, but this strikes me as a particularly egregious case. In the original Star Trek series dilithium is a rare and precious commodity; the Enterprise crew always seemed to be running out of it. Now they're saying it can be reenergized with a simple fission reactor? Why haven't they been doing this all along? Kirk does moan that nuclear fission produces toxic byproducts, but why should that be a problem in the far-flung future of Star Trek? Just build the reactor on an uninhabited asteroid or something. Anyway, there's a few nits for you. I hope I didn't spoil your day. |