Thoughts – Page 2 – Erik Owomoyela

Black holes and the trouble with science fiction

I should be really excited for the movie Interstellar. I think part of why I’m not has to do with my growing skepticism about movie plots in general, which I’ll have to get into later. But regardless, this sort of thing is really impressive:

In short, in order to accurately create a visual for the story’s black hole, Kip Thorne produced an entirely new set of equations which guided the special effects team’s rendering software. The end result was a visual representation that accurately depicts what a wormhole/black hole would look like in space.

What really impressed me, though, is that apparently nobody thought to do this before. And that kind of says a lot about the state of both science and science fiction.

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Erik Owomoyela October 23, 2014 Space, Storytelling, Thoughts Read more >

Mass Effect 3 Revisionism

What's your favorite color?

Okay, when I saw that someone had come up with a 400-page plan to rewrite Mass Effect 3 I was a little annoyed that I hadn’t done it myself, because it seems like a fun project for someone who has too much time on their hands, as I occasionally do. On the other hand, the whole project seems based on exactly what I thought was so off-base about the whole Mass Effect 3 freakout in the first place.

Part of the problem is that the complaints tend not to acknowledge the constraints that arise when a script needs to be paired with the expense of creating an interactive 3D environment and pairing it with actual enjoyable gameplay and making it all work on a budget. But the bigger issue involves whether total freedom of choice is a realistic goal to begin with.

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Erik Owomoyela January 21, 2014 Games, Storytelling, Thoughts Read more >

Argue the law

stone I didn’t start seriously watching Law & Order until the show (and the police procedural in general) were pretty much played out, so it was a revelation when Netflix enabled me to start watching from the beginning. As cliché as the show’s promise of ripped-from-the-headlines stories would get, it really did a terrific job of capturing the cultural mood of its era.

One very early episode, “Subterranean Homeboy Blues,” presents the case of a white woman who shoots two black men on the subway, and gets through her trial essentially on the argument that the shooting was justified because black men are scary. It was apparently based on the case of Bernhard Goetz, and I got to thinking about it over the weekend as the George Zimmerman trial was wrapping up. And I think there’s more than the obvious parallels worth considering here.

I deliberately didn’t pay much attention to the actual Zimmerman trial, because I think turning one particular case into a cultural event does a disservice to basically everyone involved.

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Erik Owomoyela July 15, 2013 Government, Thoughts Read more >

Keeping a republic is hard sometimes

Egypt rally

For the past few years, I’ve tended to commemorate Independence day by watching an episode of the HBO miniseries John Adams, since it combines two things I generally like doing: Fairly superficial intellectual exercises and watching TV. Normally, I go with the obvious episode — “Independence,” the one about the Continental Congress — but this year I had something else in mind.

A major thread in the show’s later episodes is the impact of the French Revolution on the new United States. It’s an especially timely look now, since just yesterday Egypt’s first-ever democratically elected leader was forced out in a military coup, and there’s a lot of mixed feelings about whether it’s a good thing or not.

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Erik Owomoyela July 4, 2013 Government, ThoughtsEgypt, John Adams Read more >

The war on buses

A bus.

The Washington state legislature doesn’t exactly make Congress look good, but sensible governance isn’t exactly a thing here either. To wit: the state Senate chose to ignore the transportation bill that passed the state House of Representatives last week, threatening huge cuts to local transit services and making the case against bicameralism in one stroke of inaction.

Here’s where it gets really silly: The part of the now-dead transportation bill that might have held off those giant cuts would have given King County the authority to submit a ballot measure asking voters to raise the vehicle registration fee in order to fund Metro transit service, as well as county and city roads.

In other words, the county needs the state legislature’s permission to ask local voters to approve a local tax. And the state legislature won’t give it.

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Erik Owomoyela July 2, 2013 Government, Thoughts Read more >

Star Trek’s Khan Problem

I maintain that if the producers of Star Trek Into Darkness truly wanted to recycle an adversary from the original series, they should have gone with the Doomsday Machine. Not only would the thing have been VFX gold, but it would have helped them avoid what’s become one of the most common traps in the franchise.

Most of the Star Trek movies that came after Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan tried to replicate its success. It’s not hard to see why, since TWOK is arguably the best movie in the franchise. (The Undiscovered Country is my personal favorite, but whichever.) What’s frustrating is that none of the people who’ve tried to replicate it over the years have demonstrated a clear understanding of why it was so good in the first place.

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Erik Owomoyela June 27, 2013 Storytelling, ThoughtsStar Trek Read more >

Joss Whedon’s death problem

Maximum tragedy

I think it’s great that Agent Coulson will be a major part of S.H.I.E.L.D. and isn’t actually dead despite all the evidence from The Avengers (spoiler! …double spoiler?), but something struck me while I was reading Joss Whedon’s rationale:

The idea of the Little Guy is something that I am very fierce about, and there has never been a better Little Guy than Clark Gregg. That intrigued me, this world around the superhero community. It’s the people whose shop windows get blown up when the Destroyer shows up.

My immediate, cynical response was that he might have thought of that before he killed the guy in the first place. And that’s actually a problem I have with almost everything Whedon’s done, because an important corollary to his penchant for killing off characters is that it’s almost always the little guys who take the fall.

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Erik Owomoyela March 10, 2013 Storytelling, ThoughtsJoss Whedon, S.H.I.E.L.D., The Avengers Read more >

Realism is hardest with the fake stuff

This YouTube video is actually a really clever idea. Obviously the alien spaceships are fake, but that just serves to distract you from the fact that the entire video is CGI — everything else is fake, too.

It’s impressive work, but I’m not actually surprised to read that, “making the photorealistic car and desert environment was even more difficult than crafting the alien crafts.” Because, honestly, the photorealistic car looks more photorealistic than the UFOs.

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Erik Owomoyela February 7, 2013 Thoughts Read more >

Gerrymandering is still a problem

The original Gerry-mander I generally think Wonkblog is an excellent public service, especially compared to most of what passes for political coverage, and the fact that they feature perspectives from actual political scientists is excellent. That said, John Sides’ piece on why “Gerrymandering is not what’s wrong with American politics” feels a bit like it’s missing the forest for the trees.

Sides’ thesis, that the polarization of elected representatives in both the House and Senate seems to have very little to do with the ideology of their electorate and a lot to do with their political party, is a bit surprising, but I wouldn’t dream of criticizing an argument with so many graphs to back it up. But even if you accept the premise, that doesn’t necessarily mean that gerrymandering isn’t a factor.

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Erik Owomoyela February 3, 2013 Government, ThoughtsCongress Read more >

Seattle’s pro-transit mess

monorail-hummer

I’m still trying to get a handle on the mess of disjointed reasoning that stands in for transportation policy in Seattle, so Knute Berger’s paean to some unused offramps for an expressway that never got built is actually really instructive. It’s also kind of nuts.

My first reaction to the piece, which describes the “Ramps to Nowhere” as a symbolic reminder of a time when Seattlites came together and blocked a massive ring road, was that it’s kind of telling when you measure your city’s history of urbanism by the infrastructure projects you’ve blocked instead of the ones you’ve built. My second was that if you’re looking for monuments to Seattle’s urbanist heyday, you really don’t need to go all the way up to 520; there’s a much better one cutting straight through downtown. And you can even ride on it!

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Erik Owomoyela February 1, 2013 ThoughtsSeattle Read more >