Tori Vega Diary: Solo

So Garza told me that the former head of Havoc Squad had managed to steal some super-duper cloaking device that was the most wonderful cloaking device ever … and then gave it to the Imperials.  And we wouldn’t have been able to find it, because it was such a good cloaking device … except that someone smarter than, well, pretty much all of us decided to include a tracking device on the cloaking device that we could use to find it.  Well, okay, I guess it’s kinda stupid to put a tracking device on a cloaking device, because the cloaking device would make it so that we couldn’t find any ship that it was installed on, but then obviously we could use the tracking device to find the cloaking device and then find the ship, but it sure worked out handy when someone stole the darn thing.

So for the first time we were sent out into the field completely on our own.  Well, okay, maybe the Wraith thing was, too, but this was the first time we were sent out on our own when it wasn’t just me and the disapproving and more qualified Jorgan around and were, in fact, an actual squad.  So I was kinda nervous that I’d screw all of this up.

Anyway, we found the ship and boarded it, and got all ready to meet Tavus … and he wasn’t there.  He did decide to send a message to the Imperials on the ship telling them to prepare a warm welcome for me, which was oh so sweet.  But Dorne’s training’s really, really good, and I guess my training took, and so we won and retrieved the cloaking device.  Yay!

And then it was off to another planet after another one of the old Havoc Squad members.  Hopefully it’ll be a nicer planet than the last one!

Vicious Circle (Chapter 7)

That evening, the environment in the house was incredibly subdued.  Where the previous night had been full of unabashed hedonism, this night nothing like that was happening.  In fact, pretty much nothing at all was happening.

In an interview section, Leroy commented, “I’m not doing anything.  I’m not gonna get caught being drunk again.”

It then cut to Kameron.  “Hey, I’m not gonna let any of these other <bleeps> get any more of an advantage over me!  Even if it means being doin’ nothing all night!”

So then the camera panned over the house, noting what everyone was doing … or, rather, were not doing.  Aside from perhaps a very light workout and perhaps a light snack, no one was doing anything that might tire them out or leave them unable to properly perform if Gavin sprung another surprise challenge on them.  The only one who was doing anything at all organized was Christian, and all he was doing was reading a book.

“So, everyone’s just waiting around for somethin’ to happen, ” T.J. said in an interview section.  “Except for Christian, who’s reading instead.  And to be honest, it looks like that’s what he really wanted to do anyway!”

After a sequence of about a minute that showed all of them doing absolutely nothing and looking extremely bored, Hope came on in an interview section.  “This is ridiculous!  I like partying as much as the next person, but there are other ways to have fun!”

It then cut back to the house, where Hope was dragging out some board games and organizing everyone into playing them.  Once she started doing that, other people started doing other things as well.  Blythe dug out a guitar from somewhere and was organizing a sing-along out in the backyard by a fire pit they had out there.  Soon, the house was filled with laughter … except in one corner, where Joss and Christian were playing chess.

“Now, I’m a really good chess player, ” Joss said in an interview section.  “And when I found out that Christian played chess I knew I had to play him.  It’s the best way to figure out how he thinks.”

T.J. came on next.  “Joss is trying to show Christian that he’s the big man on campus, ” he said.  “It’s not going well for him.”

And, indeed, it looked like Joss was being handily defeated.  “Mate in three, ” Christian said, followed by Joss tipping over his king.

“Well, he did manage to barely beat me, ” Joss said, “But I got what I wanted from the game.”

Tony then came on in an interview segment.  “Joss is going to say that he got inside Christian’s head and learned so much and all of that <bleep>, but we all know that he got his ass kicked!” he said.

Later, Christian ended up playing a board game with Hope, Leroy and Amanda, and everyone was wandering around doing similar fun things.  Eventually, as the clock struck midnight, Christian excused himself to go to sleep, and soon after everyone else followed.

“When the only guy who isn’t an asshole leaves, there’s no point in my staying when I’m sober!” Amanda commented in an interview section.

“We were all expecting something to happen, ” T.J. said.  “And nothing did.   This game’s messing with our heads!”

“But you know, I had a lot of fun!” Hope said.  “I wouldn’t want to do it every night, but it was fun this once!”

And then the camera returned to show a dark house with all the lights off, and then focused in on everyone in the house, sleeping peacefully.

Thoughts on “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

When I read “Beyond Good and Evil”, one of the issues that I had with it was that it seemed to be rather light on philosophical argument and seemed to replace that with rants against the people the Nietzsche didn’t like.  So it was quite a frustrating read, as it was difficult to even glean what philosophical positions Nietzsche actually held from it, let alone what the basis of those positions was.  I was hoping that this book would be more philosophical and so would clear some of this up.  These hopes were dashed when I discovered that it was a highly stylistic work, similar to various works that count as “Dialogues” in philosophy, focusing on the titular Zarathustra and his encounters with other people, his animals, his followers, various spirits and himself in his own wanderings.

Now, that wouldn’t necessarily disqualify it from being strong philosophically.  In fact, early on I thought that presenting it like an erstwhile gospel, following the journey of Zarathustra as he gains his wisdom and attempts to share it with others could work quite well.  But the problem is the same one that I had with “Beyond Good and Evil”:  the focus is far more on attacking what could be called established wisdom instead of developing his own replacement philosophical view.  While he talks about the Superman, we never meet the Superman and Zarathustra is not established as ultimately being the Superman, even if he hadn’t realized it until the end.  At the end, we get a number of supposed “Higher Men” who are nevertheless by Zarathustra’s own standards flawed, and so are not the Superman.  Having an example of the Superman who would presumably be the culmination of Nietzsche’s philosophy here would go a long way towards make what that philosophy actually is far more clear.

Without that, all I got was rants about the things that he saw as wrong, and a little about what he thought was right, with no real argumentation about why those things were wrong or right.  Thus, he came across to me as someone who felt he was denied things that he wanted and wrote a tract to express that he thought he either should have had them or attempts to show that it wasn’t something someone should reasonably want.  His rants against women reflect both of these, as he often expresses desire for women but then expresses the idea that women are at least distractions from what is really important, and usually with at least an undercurrent that they are full of vice themselves.  This, then, would lead to the “Will to Power” being the will to think of what one wants and seek it out without guilt, given that he does indeed talk about removing things like pity and compassion.  I wonder if his popularity is that he gives voice to the concerns of people who want to reject “established wisdom” in an Egoistic way, and seems to be speaking to them and for them, justifying their feelings.  It didn’t appeal to me in any way, though.

One of the main reasons for that is that it seems like his basic idea of “The Will to Power” clashes with my idea of the proper application of the Will.  He somewhat mocks Jesus’ sacrifice at one point, but for me that shows that Jesus is an exemplar demonstrating the proper application of the human Will.  Nietzsche seems to take the “Will to Power” as being a reflection of the human striving to will themselves the things they want, as his view seems fairly selfish and focusing on self-reliance, especially with his arguments against pity and compassion.  But to me this sort of will isn’t all that impressive other than through struggling to overcome others and wrest those things from them, and so mostly as a show of strength as opposed to a full application of the Will.  Because to me, the full application of the Will is to resist doing things on the basis of one’s own interests and comforts and at least hedonistic desires and be willing to give that up for what is moral or for others.  This is precisely what Jesus did.  As presented, He likely had the power to avoid being crucified and it was clear that He wanted to avoid being crucified and yet he acted as an exemplar to demonstrate that properly application of the Will in the service of morality:  even unto giving up His life for what He saw as being the greater good, which was our salvation.  That, to me, is a greater application of the Will than anything the “Will to Power” could be.

To be fair, it is possible that there is more to this work than I think there is.  I did not delve deeply into it, and in reading it there were some points that seemed interesting.  But all of that was buried under the rhetoric and I couldn’t tolerate the rhetoric enough to, again, dive deep into it.  Up next is “The Will to Power”, which I had started once and recall as being a bit better in terms of philosophical argument but no more convincing.  We’ll see how I feel after getting through that one.

Thoughts on “Abraham’s Boys: A Dracula Story”

Another Shudder exclusive here.  Originally, they tended to be hit or miss for me, but as I’ve gone through the list at Shudder I’ve obviously watched more of them and ultimately found them to be, well, meh at the very best.  Still, I had some hope for this one as the premise seemed interesting.

We pick up with Abraham Van Helsing and his two sons … and his wife, Mina.  Yes, the same Mina that was married to Jonathan Harker and had been one of Dracula’s victims.  At any rate, they fled to America to get away from the vampires, it seems, but Abraham senses that they have come here as well and is trying to train his oldest son to combat them, but ends up being frustrated by his intellectual shortcomings.  At the same time, the younger son is more bold and more intelligent, and clashes with both the older son and his father at times.  At any rate, Mina gets sick and eventually dies, and the younger son sneaks into the father’s study and they find out that he had kidnapped a woman — likely one that we saw getting kidnapped at the beginning of the movie — because he thinks she’s a vampire, and then forces the two of them to “kill” her by driving a stake through her heart and cutting off her head, which the older son will do but the younger one refuses to do.  They then come to believe that Van Helsing is insane, using the excuse of women being vampires to kill young women, and a visit from Lord Godalming suggests the same.  Eventually, Van Helsing goes out to kill a young woman whose brother he had treated in the past, and the older son stops him from doing that by killing him, and the two of them leave.

I’m not going to look it up now, but in my reading of the posts at The CRPG Addict I recall at one point he talked about getting his wife — a “Pride and Prejudice” fan — to read “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and being surprised that she not only didn’t like it, but seemed positively offended by it.  Having watched the movie, my comment was that the more you remembered the story the better it would work because you would remember the original lines and then note how things deviated from them.  As someone who liked the book myself, I had wished that I could have re-read it first and did enjoy how the original lines and story were slotted into this radically different world.  However, I can totally understand his wife’s reaction, as when one loves a work one gets attached to its characters and its world and seeing it transformed into something so radically different — and in this case so different that it can seem like deliberate mockery — can be rather offensive.

The same issue applies to this movie.  The idea that perhaps Van Helsing was insane and that there really weren’t such things as vampires is an interesting one, but it recasts the original novel in a completely different light, and no more so than his character.  People who liked that character might not be willing to look past that complete recasting of that character in a much more sinister light.  And as with “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, the more familiar you are with the work the more you’d be able to see how that deviation might work … if the movie itself took care to build that out properly.  But it doesn’t.  Most of the movie is spent on the sons themselves, and even that is developed rather shallowly, with a few scenes and mostly with Van Helsing being demanding or mean and a bit shady.  Not only is all of that boring, and not only does none of that pay off, it takes time away from the movie setting up the idea that Van Helsing at least at some point has become insanely obsessed with vampires to the point of seeing them everywhere.

Now, if that was the plot they’d gone with, that would be one thing and it could have worked, but again they try to imply that Van Helsing was insane from the beginning, but the only hints they make about it are that only Mina and Van Helsing ever saw Dracula’s “true face”, and then Godalming coming to Van Helsing to ask about whether there ever was a vampire.  But while it might be the case that the two of them were the only ones to see Dracula’s true vampiric state directly and so no one else could confirm that he was really a vampire, I seem to recall that the events that Godalming is referring to — Lucy walking around and draining the blood from people, requiring Godalming to terminate her undead life — were things that people like Doctor Seward had observed, and the fact is that I believe that Seward called Van Helsing in because of those oddities.  And I’ve only read the book a couple of times and watched the Universal movie once.  Someone who was a bigger fan of the work and so more likely to be interested in this recasting will probably be able to find all sorts of other reasons why it simply doesn’t make sense for the events of “Dracula” to not have happened.  Again, if they had used the quote they used at one point that Van Helsing believed that if left unchecked vampires would infect everyone and take over the world, and then refused to believe that he had defeated the vampires, then that wouldn’t be an issue and the movie could proceed the way it did without doing anything like that, and it likely would be a take on Van Helsing that even his fans could possibly appreciate.

Without that, the movie is generally boring.  We don’t get much of an exploration of any of the characters, or of this new take on Dracula and Van Helsing, or anything else, and there isn’t a plot beyond that here.  Thus, the movie really, really dragged.  I also knew that Van Helsing was being set up to not really be chasing vampires quite early on, mostly because of his personality, which took the sting out of the revelation and spoiled the mystery.  Given all of that, there’s just nothing here of interest.  I will not watch this movie again.

Some Musings on the Latest State of “The Old Republic”

So I’ve just finished my second playthrough of all eight classes — and the first one that I will have fully documented in the “TOR Diary” — and some things have changed in the game, so it seems like a good time to talk a bit about what I think of the game in its latest state.

One of the issues that I’ve always had with the game is that it is a game that is best played when no one else is on — to avoid having too much competition for those quest and bonus quest elements that are in the open world and not in an instance — but playing when no one else is around is also annoying, for the same reason.  See, the reason you want to be running the missions in the open world when no one else is on is so that they won’t have cleared out all the enemies and the like and so you won’t have to wait around to get your quota.  But the game does tend to spawn enemies at fairly regular intervals and often in a lot of areas — especially open-world dungeon areas — there are a lot of them.  This means that if you have a mission to kill some enemies you will usually find more than enough if no one else is hunting them, but if you don’t have a mission to kill them then you end up having to kill them anyway just to get to where your actual mission is.  So for the most part I spent my time street sweeping to pick up bonus missions and then trying desperately to avoid any enemies I could, but still having to kill an awful lot of them.

One of the reasons that this is annoying is that while combat is relatively fast, it’s also a bit boring.  There’s really not much more to do most of the time — especially on the “Story” mode that I normally play on — than to cycle through a few abilities until the enemies you are fighting are dead.  Even the things that could add some strategy — interrupts, healing packs, healing abilities, and the ability to free yourself from stuns — have far too long a cooldown to be used more than once, at most, in any battle except the really tough boss fights.  Yes, there are some ways in which different abilities work together to make things easier, but once you’ve identified it for the most part your strategy is the same:  hit one ability first, then the next one, then the next one, and so on and so forth.  So it’s not particularly thrilling, and the enemy abilities rarely surprise you and so force you to take desperate measures to bail out of trouble (like I recall happening in “City of Heroes” with my controllers, who had fairly set moves but if one of them missed you needed to quickly fall back on another ability to help keep you alive).

That being said, some of the abilities are fun to use, mostly the group attack abilities that would fire off bombs, or have the character fly up in the air and fire rockets at them, or shake the earth or launch lightning at them.  Some of the mechanics are interesting as well, like the Sith Warrior needing to build “rage” by attacking and then using that to power his abilities.  But overall, the combat is serviceable, not thrilling, and thus the more there is of it the more annoying it is, and if you are playing when no one else is on there is a lot of it.

What does drive my interest in the game are the class and planetary stories, which while limited as per most MMOs do still have some freedom to react as you’d like to react, in a way that is consistent, mostly because there’s usually a Dark Side option, a Light Side option, and a neutral option to choose from.  This is what made my Ruby Jades run so interesting, because she was able to take some of the snarky and mean options and yet had a personality that let her take some Light Side options as well, and there wasn’t really any punishment for mixing the choices up that way, while for my Katrina Ballou and Tori Vega characters I could simply choose the Light Side options and it aligned with their much nicer characters, for the most part.  And the stories are all different and focus on different things, but are complete stories, whether or not someone was fond of them.  And for me, at least, playing once a week and alternating characters between the Republic and the Empire meant that when I returned to one set of Planetary Stories I was familiar with them but wasn’t simply thinking “Yeah, yeah, this again”, which is unique for, well, pretty much all games.  There’s a reason that I was able to play TOR pretty much steadily for likely almost five years now.  And now with Rest XP and Major XP boosts you can, at least as a subscriber, play the Class and Planetary Stories and have enough XP to get comfortably through the game, again especially on the easier difficulty that I play on.

A number of things are being added to the game, most of which I didn’t explore because I was pushing to get through the class stories.  The big one I noticed was the various events that cropped up, but I have been avoiding them because the one time I got involved with one — on Hoth — a set of manageable enemies ended with a massive Mech that I simply couldn’t do anything about until someone else joined in.  Some of the other events seem safer — like having to gather up some wild animal kittens — but I simply don’t trust them anymore.  Also, a number of the flashpoints have story modes and I always run the very first one in story mode, and have always been tempted to try some others, but generally haven’t had the time to do them and didn’t want to look up which ones are now in story mode or are soloable.  And then there are the things like the Galactic Seasons and other similar events that I’ve never really bothered with but probably should explore at some point.

However, my plan is to take a break from TOR for a while and explore games like Dark Age of Camelot and Star Trek Online for a while.  We’ll see how long it takes for me to get back to TOR.

Thoughts on “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”

So after watching “WandaVision”, the way was clear to watch “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness”, the Doctor Strange movie with the excessively long title.  Which fits, because the movie itself is full of too much stuff that doesn’t really add anything and doesn’t play well together.  Anyway, be prepared for lots of spoilers for this movie, as I will need to talk about all the various plotlines to give my thoughts on the movie.

The movie starts with a Doctor Strange from a different multiverse trying to get America Chavez, a young woman with the power to hop multiverses, but sadly not the ability to control that, to the Book of Vishanti, which is supposed to grant a sorcerer the spell necessary to defeat their opponent.  They are being chased by a demon, who prevents them from getting to the book, which then prompts that Doctor Strange to try to take Chavez’s powers for himself because he figures that he, at least, will be able to control it, which she sees as a betrayal.  Fortunately, the demon kills him, and her fear triggers her power, which brings the demon to this world where Doctor Strange and Wong — who is the Sorcerer Supreme — engage it and manage to defeat it, Strange having left the wedding of Christine to someone else to do so, where she comments that it wouldn’t have worked out with them because he always had to be the one to hold the knife, although it is implied that the five year gap because of Thanos caused most of the problems.  I do need to mention this because this is, in fact, an important point later.  Anyway, Chavez doesn’t trust them at first, but eventually explains the entire issue and proves that she came from another multiverse by showing Strange the other Strange’s dead body.  Strange and Wong then decide to take her to the place where he was trained to protect her.  Strange then goes to recruit Wanda to help protect her as well, but after a rather short bit of repartee Wanda accidentally uses Chavez’s name before being told it and is then revealed as being the one who is going after her, because she wants to steal her power to go to a multiverse where her never existing children actually exist.  The implication is that she learned about all of this from studying the Darkhold. somehow, and the idea is that the Darkhold corrupted her, again somehow.  She then gives Strange about a day to give her Chavez or she will come for her herself, which she calls being “reasonable”.  Or, rather, that sending demons first was being reasonable.  She then shows up at the appointed time at the place where they all are and talks to Strange, and is momentarily taken aback by his asking what happens to the mother to the twins in the multiverse where they exist, but ultimately she attacks and defeats all the guardians, and Chavez’s power kicks in to take her and Strange to another multiverse.  Left behind, Wanda tries to use the Darkhold to keep doing the things that she wants to do — basically, dream walk to the dimension where Chavez is, where she would temporarily possess the body of her counterpart in that multiverse — but one of the people who came in to help defend Chavez stabs it and destroys it, sacrificing herself instead of Wong.  Then Wanda threatens Wong into helping her find the power she wants by threatening to kill some of the survivors, and he tells her that the Darkhold was a copy of runes on some mystic mountain, and she forces him to take her there.  At the same time, in the other multiverse, Strange seeks out that multiverse’s Sorcerer Supreme, which is Mordo, who drugs them and has them imprisoned in some kind of scientific facility run by that multiverse’s version of Christine … and sponsored by a group of heroes known as the Illuminati.  When they finally meet with him, they note that for some reason they aren’t afraid of The Scarlet Witch — as Wanda is to be known — and are in fact more afraid of him, as it turns out that their Strange dream walked in a bad way and caused an “incursion” that wiped out one multiverse, and that it seems like Stranges tend to do things like that.  Meanwhile, Wanda has forced Wong to accompany her to the mystic place where the spells of the Darkhold were inscribed on the walls, and when the guardians awaken they don’t attack her but instead decide to serve her, with it then being implied that that was all done for her and that she can rule the multiverse.  Wong gets tossed off a cliff and she prepares to dream walk to world where Chavez and Strange are, and then attacks the facility.  The Illuminati then decide to confront her, assuming that Black Bolt — who killed their Strange — would be able to kill her easily and so try to reason with her first … but she makes his mouth disappear, taking away his powers, and then basically mops the floor with them.  So much for Strange being the bigger threat.  Strange needs to confront Mordo to get free, and does that and then escapes with Christine and Chavez through a tunnel.  One thing to note is that Charles Xavier goes into Wanda’s mind and discovers that the Wanda that is attacking is an alter ego and the original Wanda is trapped in the mind, but he can’t free her before his neck is snapped.  At any rate, Wanda pursues them but they make it to the Book of Vishanti — that multiverse’s Strange had left a portal to it — but then Wanda destroys it on arrival before it can be used, and then Chavez’s ability is triggered by Wanda trapping Strange and Christine in a destroyed multiverse — maybe the one that the Illuminati multiverse’s Strange had broken? — and taking Wanda and Chavez back to the main multiverse where Wanda is planning to take Chavez’s power.  Finding that multiverse’s Strange, they discover that he protects the Darkhold but has been corrupted by it.  The two fight and our Strange ultimately defeats him and then has the Darkhold, and plans to use it despite the idea that it always exacts a price, and then asks Christine to protect him because he is going to dream walk, but there is no living Strange in his universe, but the dead body of the Strange from the start of the movie is.  However, dead spirits will not approve of that, but with Christine’s help he ends up being able to use them to attack Wanda.  He does manage to defeat her at least somewhat, but the big climax is her being physically sent to the multiverse with her twins … and having the twins reject her for attacking their mother and the Wanda from that universe pity her.  As part of this, Strange is told by Wong to take Chavez’s power to defeat Wanda, and ultimately refuses, noting that whenever she “panicked” she ended up in the dimension that she needed to be in, and so should be able to control her powers and that he trusts her to do that, which she tries to do and succeeds, and is responsible for a lot of the defeat of Wanda.  Anyway, after the encounter with her alternate Wanda decides that she needs to close the door to the Darkhold and collapses the mystic place on herself, supposedly killing herself.  Strange then notes that he and the Christine from the other dimension can’t be together and things return to something like normal.

So, that’s about a thousand words just describing the important plot points.  Some of them might not seem all that important, but they will be important to my analysis of the movie.  So let’s start with the idea that watching these Marvel movies requires doing “homework”.  If you came to this movie directly from “Endgame”, the sudden change in Wanda’s personality and status makes no sense.  Heck, it doesn’t really make sense if you stopped to check out “WandaVision” first, but at least then you’d know about the twins, about the Westview incident that Wanda says that Strange would want to talk to her about, and why it is important that Strange comments that the twins never existed and that she can find an existent set of twins in a different multiverse.  So in that sense you would at least need to do the “homework” of watching “WandaVision” first, but it’s not the case that the MCU lore has just gotten so complex that you need to have watched things that you might not be able to or want to watch to understand it.  The wound of needing to do homework is self-inflicted.  As noted in the summary, in Wanda’s first appearance there is a brief conversation that hints at but does not in any way properly describe what happened, and then Wanda is revealed as a villain who is behind everything in the span of less than five minutes, with her motivation mentioned but not summarized or developed.  How did she become a villain?  Later it is implied to be the influence of the Darkhold, but then if you didn’t watch “WandaVision” you have know idea why or even how she came to study it, nor does it explain her specific madness here.  So, again, you would go from grieving Wanda in “Endgame” to evil Wanda in “Multiverse of Madness”, with only a hint of an alter ego and corruption from that book that you don’t know much about to explain it.

So in order for that to work, we needed to take more time to set up Wanda’s fall.  The easiest way to do that is to not have her be behind the original attacks, but instead to have her actually want to protect Chavez and be genuine about wanting her to come to her place to be protected.  Then, while there, they can talk about what they lost, as Chavez’s first use of her powers got her mothers lost in some multiverse, and so they could talk about how they lost their loved ones, and then Chavez could mention that the twins would be in some multiverse, which could give Wanda the idea to try to take her powers to do that, which then could trigger the powers and then get Wanda to use the Darkhold to try to dream walk after them.  This would give time in the movie to set up what happened in “WandaVision” and so set up the emotions needed for that arc to work, and then show Wanda’s thought process, which then would provide a proper bridge from either “Endgame” or “WandaVision” to get us to accept — if perhaps not like — Wanda’s turn.

So who could be the initial villain?  How about the Strange they meet at the end of the movie?  This would work well because it would justify the claim in the Illuminati multiverse about Strange — and Stranges in general — being bigger threats, since not only would they be doing that sort of thing frequently, but the Scarlet Witch would only be doing it because of the influence of Chavez, which is an external influence.  This would make the Illuminati merely wrong as opposed to incredibly stupid given the powers that she had already shown and would justify the thread of Stranges being an issue and our Strange being different.  This, then, would have a better payoff for the running gag of Wong saying that bowing is traditional to the Sorcerer Supreme with Strange never doing it until the very end, as one big difference with our Strange is that he would be one of the few if only Stranges who is alive and yet is in a multiverse where he is a sorcerer but is not the Sorcerer Supreme.  That, then, could give him a reason to finally “give up the knife” and trust Chavez to do things herself, proving that he’s different.  It would also justify the battle with the final Strange, as they would need to deal with him before finally finishing off the new threat of Wanda.

But as noted above one of the main issues is there there are a lot of threads here that are not properly developed.  We have Wanda’s arc, which takes up a lot of screen time and ultimately doesn’t work.  There’s the thread of the Doctor Stranges being threats to the multiverse that is mostly ignored and not used for all that much.  There is the thread of all the Doctor Stranges wanting to take Chavez’s power except for ours, but again we don’t really get a good sense of why our Strange is different . There is the thread of all the Stranges loving but losing Christine.  There is the thread of the watch she gave her which could be part of the previous one but also seems to be being used as a symbol for Strange himself (he breaks his version at the beginning or notes that it is broken and fixes it at the end).  And there is the idea that the Scarlet Witch is an alter ego of Wanda and the real Wanda is buried in her own mind that is never developed, as there is no implication at the end that the reason Wanda “reforms” is due to her real self being freed as opposed to it reflecting the discussion from the beginning of what happens to the mother of the children which presumably impact the alter ego.  So that point was entirely irrelevant, and yet it was there and gave us something to thing about that nothing was done with.

And when we think about things, things get more confusing.  How was Wanda corrupted by the Darkhold?  Not answered.  How did she learn of Chavez?  Not answered.  How could her non-existent twins really exist in another multiverse?  Not answered.  On that one, it is possible that she could have have a relationship with someone else, but they wouldn’t have been Vision’s children, would they?  After all, as an old “What The?!?” comic expressed, Vision wasn’t all that surprised that he, a synthezoid had fallen in love, but when he was told that he, a synthezoid, had fathered children, then he was surprised.  Sure, maybe a different multiverse could have had technology that made it work, but it’s also notable that Wanda only wants her twins and doesn’t want Vision, and Vision is not present in the multiverse or multiverses where she seeks out the twins, or at least not where we see it.  And there are more of these questions that get raised, which means that the more you think about the movie, the more confused you are.

Another big wasted opportunity is with the Book of Vishanti.  This is introduced and talked about as being the key to saving the say, but ultimately once it is found it plays no part in, well, anything, being wiped out almost immediately.  Far too much time is spend on it for it to not be used at all.  Sure, you can subvert expectations by building up the Macguffin and having it not work or be destroyed before it can be used, but if you do that you must have that be a crowning moment of despair before a new solution is discovered.  That’s not really done here, especially since that happens too long before the ending for us to really get that emotional connection.  And the thing is, the book is actually a wonderful plot device that is entirely wasted.  It is not the Darkhold, that contains all sorts of knowledge that a seeker can use to do various things.  It is explicitly stated to give you what you need to attain victory.  What things like this always do is give you something that doesn’t seem like it will help you attain victory but ultimately allows the attainment of victory because of the other plot points, with the climax arising from how the spell facilitates the resolution of those plot points.  So it could have given Strange the dream walking ability into the dead body that would have eliminated the need for the use of the Darkhold, and it is unlikely that the spirits would be any happier about a non-Darkhold possession spell, and it could also have caused an incursion that would require Clea to arrive without making us wonder just how much cost Strange paid for using the Darkhold.  Or it could have done other things that would have built towards the ending they went with, with him allowing Chavez to use her own ability to end things.  That’s what that kind of plot device is for!  If they weren’t going to use it for that, then they shouldn’t have introduced it as that or shouldn’t have introduced it at all.

Ultimately, the biggest failure of the movie is as I said above:  it tries to do too much and doesn’t do that all that well.  Wanda’s arc could have been its own movie, and would have worked better as a more general “Avengers” movie so that her story could have been the big specific plot instead of having to handle the Doctor Strange arc.  The Doctor Strange arc could have been its own movie without bringing in Wanda at all.  The potential Doctor Strange arc of Doctor Stranges being a threat to the multiverse could have been its own movie.  We needed more time to explore the Christine arc.  And then we had the little things like the attempts to do the cool fights — like the music fight at the end where they use musical instruments against each other and the notes appear in the air — and the other cool things they are trying to do in the movie that take up time that could be better spent elsewhere and don’t work all that well on their own.  There is a complete lack of development of these ideas and that indicates a failure on the part of the writers and editors and directors.  They should have been able to see the problems with cramming all of this stuff in and not developing it.  If they can’t, they really need to get some people in who can see these issues and especially tell them when things aren’t developed or clear enough to work.

I was not all that interested in watching this movie when it came out, and only did so because it seemed like a cool thing to do after watching “WandaVision”.  As it turns out, it was a good idea that I didn’t watch it back then because watching it without watching “WandaVision” would have made Wanda’s shift even more inexplicable than it was.  Even here, skipping it really was the better plan, as I didn’t particularly enjoy it, but not for the reasons why I didn’t particularly enjoy “Doctor Strange”.  I will not watch this movie again.

Thoughts on “The Player’s Championship”

So this is the last Grand Slam of Curling event this season, which is odd because normally the season ends in April.  I’m not sure if this is what they’re doing now or if this is special due to the Olympics, but I guess I’ll find out going forward.

At any rate, the final was between Sylvana Tirinzoni and Kerri Einarson, with Tirinzoni having made the final in every single event this season (and also this very event last season) for an incredible record of making the final, but not necessarily a great record of winning them.  It was also pointed out that when you look at the finalists over the past couple of years Rachel Homan had made more finals than Tirinzoni, but each of them had made it to more finals than all the other finalists combined.  No, that’s not if you combine Homan’s and Tirinzoni’s appearances.  If you took either of them and compared them to everyone else, they’d have made more finals.  That’s pretty dominant.

Anyway, Tirinzoni won the event that started out looking like it wouldn’t be close and ended up a lot closer than expected, and afterwards commented that this might be her last Slam.  On the other end, Einarson put in a good performance after struggling a bit early on in the season, which is a good sign for her team heading into the Scotties, especially since she’s not going to have Rachel Homan in the field since she’s going to the Olympics.  It will be interesting if they can return to their dominance of that event or if another team will give them a run for their money.

And if you are cheering for Team Canada at the Olympics and looking at this event to see if Rachel Homan can overcome her demons of having gone to the previous two Olympics and not winning a medal, you were given lots of room for optimism or skepticism.  It was noted that she struggled a bit early on and had to beat Einarson cleanly to solidify a spot in the playoffs.  But then she ended up with one of the top two best records and so went straight to the semi-final.  Which she then promptly lost to Einarson in an extra end.  So she may not be in top form, and certainly doesn’t seem as dominant as she was earlier in the season and over the past couple of seasons.  So we’ll have to see what she can do at the Olympics.

So, the Grand Slam of Curling’s season is over, but that’s not it for curling, and so I’ll be following the Scotties, the Olympics, and the Women’s Worlds for the next couple of months.

Tori Vega Diary: Toucha, Toucha, Toucha, Touch Me

So it was off to Nar Shaddaa, where I’ll be perfectly safe unless I run into Hutts.  And, of course, the local Republic forces are working with the Hutts.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The main mission here was to track down a rogue war droid that was committing crimes.  Now, you’d think that this would be a job for, well, someone other than me, but everyone thought that it was related to the old Havoc Squad so, well, here I was.  And then she said, again, that I was supposed to help out the local forces as much as I could.  So when some official flagged me down and told me to retrieve some stolen passcodes, I agreed to help.  That led me on to the local ambassador who was … working with a Hutt.  Fortunately, the Hutt didn’t seem all that concerned about me, but then the first thing the ambassador said to me was that I needed to get some implants.

…

And I says “Pardon?”

…

It turns out that what he meant were combat implants that had been stolen, so I went out to recover them and turned them in to the guy working for the Hutts who was supposed to keep them.  And as you might expect he almost immediately said that if I reported that some of them had already been used he would sell them and give me the credits.  Like, even if I was the sort of person to do that, the last thing I wanted to do was risk ticking off a Hutt.  Again.  So I said “No” and he took it well, and then the ambassador told me that the guy who was doing all of this stuff — called “The Mountain” and so probably compensating for something — had kidnapped some Republic citizens.  Well, okay, that was bad.  But they were Force Sensitive children that he was going to sell into slavery, and that was really bad.  So I went there and saved them all, and then got challenged to come and take him down.  And, yeah, I was so there, despite the fact that people said that he simply couldn’t be beaten.

Well, it turns out that the reason that he was unbeatable was because he managed to surprise people by, well, not being one person, but by being a bunch of them.  The thing is, one of the big things that we learn in the army is to use these funny things called “explosives”, which can hit more than one person.  So dive into cover and toss bombs at them!  Worked pretty good.

So after that, the ambassador told me to go to .. the Red Light District.  First, he said I needed to get implants.  And then he told me to go to the Red Light District.

…

And I just realized that the ship they gave me is called the “Thunderclap”.  Just what kind of army did I join?

Anyway, the issue there was that some Imperials were using the old “seduction” trick to capture some Republic soldiers.  Turns out that they were trying to replace them using some kinda deep plastic surgery things to create spies.  Yeah, another sick freak was running that, so I guess Needles fit right in with the Empire.  Anyway, I broke it up and now that everyone’s warned that should be settled.

So then it was off to an area where some aliens were working in some kind of labour camps, but the Imperials were trying to slaughter them.  Well, that’s something that I really, really felt the need to stop, and I rescued a Republic agent who was working on it to discover their chemical production and shut down their extermination factory.

And I thought the criminals were bad.

Oh, and then the next place I was sent was to an Imperial prison!  Seems that a Jedi was captured there and the Republic wanted to break him out.  First I had to get the codes from the Imperials outside the prison, and then break into the prison.  Why does everyone think I’m good at these sorts of things?  Oh, right, commanding officer of the most elite squad in the Republic.

Anyway, I got in there and freed a bunch of prisoners, but it turned out that the Jedi had been turned to the Dark Side or something and was running the place.  After I defeated him, I sent him back to the Jedi to be saved and … we’ll see how that works out for him.  I hope it works out, because I can’t imagine the terrible things that were done to him there.

Now, you have noticed that I didn’t say much about the droid.  That’s because that was just going to the places where it had hit or was in the process of hitting and seeing what I could turn up.  It turns out that the droid was loyal to the Republic … like, really loyal.  Like obsessively loyal.  But it was being convinced that it was working for the Republic.  But when I convinced it that it wasn’t the guy handling it activated a special fail-safe that let him take control of it anyway.  Finally chasing them down, I killed the handler and then managed to take down the droid, and then it was repaired and that fail-safe was removed so that it could join Havoc Squad!

And then I could finally leave Nar Shaddaa!  Yay!  But things aren’t settled yet.

Magic Circles (Chapter 8)

Things were not going well.

The four of them had tried to work together as their supposed team, and had ended up failing miserably every time.  For some reason, they simply couldn’t work together, and Rafael kept expecting that they’d be broken up into teams that better suited them.  But that didn’t happen.  In fact, they had been taken off all other studies and given what Professor Vermillion had called “a very basic team-building exercise” to hopefully bring them together as a team.  Basically, they were all to take control of one light on a small device and make the lights light up appropriately in a simple and not all that lengthy pattern that the device spelled out for them first.

They had been trying for hours for three days, and hadn’t even come close.

The pattern changed each time they tried, sure.  And so they couldn’t simply memorize it and act accordingly.  And sure, they needed to move fairly quickly to replicate the pattern and so had to go more on instinct than to think it out.  But this seemed very much like a children’s game, and yet they couldn’t succeed at it.  They were always simply out of sync, with someone going early — usually Rachel — or late — usually Brock, oddly enough — or out of turn, which Rafael had to admit was usually him if Kitty didn’t beat him to it.

“Why do you keep screwing this up?!?” Rachel demanded on one of the occasions where he’d messed it up.

“You screw it up just as much as we do!” he retorted.

“I do not!” she retorted.

“You do too!” he fired back.  “You were the one who screwed it up last time!”

“I was not!” she fired back.

“You were so!” he fired back.

“I was not!  The only time I even make a mistake is when one of you yahoos breaks up the rhythm!” she fired back.

“That’s not … ” he began, but then he was interrupted by Kitty breaking down in tears.

“What’s wrong with you?!?” Rachel demanded.

“Hey, hey, chill out!” Brock said, putting his arm around her.  “Bellowing at her’s not gonna help!”

“Neither is blubbering about it!” Rachel fired back.

“Kitty, honey, ” Rafael said soothingly.  “It’s okay.  There’s nothing to cry over here.”

Kitty sniffed.  “It’s just … just … just that we keep fighting and yelling and screaming and … I don’t like fighting and yelling and screaming, ” she said.

Rachel scoffed.  “Some mage you’ll make if you break down over a little argument!” she said dismissively.

Kitty looked at her, and then looked really, really hurt, and then broke down even more.

“Nice one, Rachel, ” Brock said, comforting her again.

Rachel had the grace to look a little apologetic instead of dismissive, but then asked, “Why did that bother her that much?”

Rafael leaned over to her and motioned for them to talk a little aside from the others.  “Come on, Rachel!” he said.  “You know that she admires you!  Being told by someone you admire that they don’t think you can cut it has to be upsetting!”

Rachel looked puzzled.  “What makes you think she admires me?” she asked.

Rafael rolled his eyes.  “If you’d taken any time to talk to her, you’d know that, ” he said.  “She gushes about how strong and capable you are all the time!”

Rachel looked completely surprised.  “I … I didn’t know that, ” she said.

“Well, now you do, ” Rafael said, perhaps a bit more harshly than intended.

By that time, Brock had calmed Kitty down, and then asked, “So … what’s next?  Wanna call it a day?”

Rafael sighed.  “Do you really think it would help?” he asked.

Brock hung his head, knowing that it probably wouldn’t.

“So, what do we try next?” Rafael asked.

Rachel spoke up.  “Let’s let Kitty be the focus here, ” she said.  “We can centre our awareness on her and see if that helps us keep in sync.”

Rafael looked at her, surprised.  She’d never wanted to let anyone else be the focus, or let anyone else be in any kind of guiding position.  In fact, she’d always insisted on being the leader, which was frustrating everyone with a task like this where there really wasn’t any room for a leader.  So either they all did their own thing or she tried to dominate everything.  Neither worked.

Rachel noticed Rafael looking at her.  “Why not?”  she said.  “Can’t hurt to give her a chance!”

Kitty looked anxious, but Brock encouraged her and Rafael gave her an encouraging look, and even Rachel managed to not look disdainfully at her and in fact looked at her in what was probably as close to an encouraging look as she ever got.  So Kitty smiled, stopped, and began to focus on the lights, while everyone else focused on her.  Once the pattern was completed, that sense of focus remained as they then activated the light when she thought they should, not when they thought they should.  This might not have seemed like the best idea given how flaky she normally was, and Rafael had expected that it would fall apart pretty quickly.

But it didn’t.  Instead, their confidence built as they matched the pattern exactly, and finally they had completed the pattern and the device lit all of its lights to indicate that they had, indeed, passed the test.

“How … how did that work?” Rafael said.

“Yeah, it’s not like I’m all smart and stuff to remember all of that!” Kitty said.  “It felt more like I was relying on you guys than you were relying on me!”

“By the end, ” Rafael said, “It felt like we were all one unit instead of individuals!”

“A focus like that only works if everyone is in harmony, ” Rachel said.

“And that harmony starts from the focus person, ” Brock said.

They all stopped and thought about it for a moment, but then the device burst into light.  “Is it … supposed to do that?” Rafael asked.

And then a voice boomed from the device.  “The Implacable One knows who you are!” it said, before all the lights went out again.

The Second Coming of Kahless: Worf’s ‘Will to Believe’

The next essay in “Star Trek and Philosophy” is “The Second Coming of Kahless: Worf’s ‘Will to Believe'” by Heather Keith.  This essay examines the issue when Worf attends a Klingon monastery and is surprised at the revelation that the legendary Emperor Kahless has returned as has been prophesied.  Worf is skeptical, and eventually proves that it’s not a reborn Kahless, but is instead a clone of Kahless, and then has to decide if he will go along with the deception or reveal the truth, even though revealing the truth might harm Klingon society and will certainly foil the reason for the clone, which was to unite Klingon society and give it something to believe in.

Keith’s analysis contrasts William James and Charles S. Pierce.  James coins the phrase “Will to Believe” and argues that perhaps for pragmatic reasons we can accept believing something that we seem to have insufficient evidence or “intellectual grounding” for, especially if it would benefit us to do so.  Pierce, on the other hand, might be the patron saint of the modern skeptic/atheist movement, arguing that we should generate our beliefs using some sort of scientific method and refusing to accept beliefs for which we don’t have sufficient evidence.  He, then, would be advocating to Worf’s approach of skeptically examining Kahless in any way possible until he finds the truth, while James might argue that Worf should have just gone along with it for now.  Putting aside the issue of whether Worf should allow the deception to go on once he discovers the truth in order to protect Klingon society, there is an interesting discussion of whether we should be more open to belief like James or more skepical like Pierce.

To discuss this properly, we do need to introduce some terms from James that Keith does reference, which is the idea of a “genuine” belief, which is a belief that is open to this sort of approach.  For a belief to be “genuine” in that sense, it needs to be “living”, “forced” and “momentous”.  Living means that it fits in with what we already know or believe; a belief is not living if one already knows it is false or at least ought to believe it false based on what one already believes.  Forced means one cannot simply be neutral on the matter; one will either believe it true or believe it false.  And momentous means that believing or not believing has important consequences.

I think that James’ approach of “believing” might apply even if these conditions don’t apply.  Obviously, a dead option is not one that one can apply it to, but in some sense simply believing is easier and more important for trivial beliefs than for momentous ones.  If the belief is important, someone may well be inclined to take a more skeptical approach a la Pierce and make sure that one has all of the information one can before choosing a side.  The only reason to consider forced a limitation is because if one has the chance to be neutral it might make sense to simply stay neutral until one gets more information.  So perhaps a belief doesn’t quite need to be “genuine” in order for us to decide to belief it or not, although James would have a point that we wouldn’t need or find it desirable to have some sort of “Will to Believe” if it is not “genuine” in that sense.

Psychologically, though, it seems dubious that we could have a “Will to Believe” anyway.  We don’t seem to be able to simply will ourselves to believe something.  We tend to simply develop beliefs as we go along, or might be able to condition ourselves into believing something, but in evaluating whether to believe or not believe something we don’t seem to be able to just intellectually choose one for pragmatic reasons.  But this would not make the idea useless, as it can be used to evaluate our existing beliefs to see if we are justified in maintaining them, which has been a major issue in, as I noted above, the modern skeptical/atheist movement.

The skeptics, again, took Pierce’s tack and argued that we ought not believe anything that we don’t have sufficient evidence for, and in general argued that that evidence should be at least aligned with the scientific method (giving rise to the debates over “scientism”, where anything not sufficiently scientific could not be believed and had no value).  This then was contrasted with religious faith as per the faith Worf is supposed to have which was then declared to be “irrational”, with the declaration that it was “unevidenced” when what was meant was that it didn’t have enough of or any “real” evidence.  So we could see the debate as being between strong skepticism and strong faith.

However, with the “Web of Belief” model and the discussion above, I don’t think that has to be the case.  As noted above, we don’t seem to really or usually choose our beliefs, but have them form as we go about in the world from a number of sources.  And beliefs exist in order for us to act on them in the world.  If a belief has been “working” in the sense that I have been able to act on it in the world without contradiction, am I really obligated to abandon it because someone points out that the belief was formed by something, say, that my parents told me and they weren’t experts on the matter?  The extreme skepticism model would seem to suggest that that is the case, and yet it seems reasonable for me to say that I hold the belief and the belief is working, so why should I abandon it just because it wasn’t formed “properly intellectually”?  In fact, I’d argue that since we form and have so very many beliefs, an insistence on skeptically examining each one before accepting it would be overwhelming.  Thus, it seems like it would be a benefit to in general openly accept beliefs as long as they are at least still “living” and then let acting in the world based on them provide evidence for or against them and settle the question.

Now, as noted above, if it is particularly important that we know whether a believe is true or false, we definitely would want to take Pierce’s approach.  If we have to get it right, then an approach like Pierce’s is indeed the more proper approach.  So perhaps it is easier to accept this model for trivial rather than momentous beliefs, which then might leave religious faith out depending on how momentous one considers it.  But it is true that for trivial beliefs, Pierce’s approach is overkill, and for forced beliefs we have to choose something, and one can argue that sticking with what we already have is as good an approach as any, as long as we don’t have to be right.

So I am skeptical that we can really have a “Will to Believe”, but disagree with Pierce’s exceptionally skeptical approach.  It’s a terrible way to build the Web of Belief that we need to function in the world and, in general, the world will correct us eventually … and non-fatally, if we are careful.