Author: Ryan (Page 14 of 16)

How to Build a Paver Patio on a Cement Slab: Step 2 – Prepare

October 30, 2013 / Ryan / 0 Comments

In my last post on patio building, I destroyed the small concrete step that was interfering with my grand plans. Now it’s time to prepare for the actual construction of the patio. The first thing I had to do was get rid of the concrete rubble where the step was and fill it in with something to make a surface level with the concrete slab.

The typical way to build a paver patio is to put down a thick gravel layer with packed sand on top of it, so I figured that’s what I should do for my busted-up step area. I used as much of my crushed concrete as possible: it seemed silly to remove all the concrete gravel that I had just made so that I could fill it back in with… more gravel. On top of the gravel base, I dumped several bags of “Paver base sand” from Home Depot. This is just sand with some gravel mixed in.

For a full-sized patio with this gravel+sand base, you rent a plate compactor to make the base as firm as possible, but it seemed a bit impractical to rent a massive machine that I would need multiple people to help with, just to compact a 4 foot by 8 foot area. So Instead I opted to get a hand tamper and just go to town. The hand tamper is just a square metal plate on a wooden handle, and you use it to pound the sand flat. It works, but it is surprisingly tiring. Here’s what my mostly-compacted area looked like:

You might notice the stylish plastic edging material in the foreground of this photo. This is what is used to keep the bricks in place on a normal patio, and I thought I would need it too. But as you’ll see it turns out this just got in the way of my edge blocks.

With the step area filled in, it was time to do some planning. For a cement slab base, the consensus on the internet seemed to be that you glue down the border with thick pavers and then choose a thinner type of paver for the middle area. The difference in height is to allow for a layer of sand on top of the slab: this is there to help seat the pavers firmly and to squeeze up between them, locking them into place. We decided to use Rumblestone pavers for the border and Domino pavers for the main area of the patio.

I spent a really long time playing around in GIMP (a free photoshop-like tool) to figure out exactly how many bricks of each type I would need. The goal was to (a) not buy too much, and (b) minimize the amount of brick-cutting. I ended up cheating a bit by allowing the edge bricks to hang over the edge of the slab slightly. This made it so that the only cutting I had to do was one row of the domino pavers along the wall of the house. There is also a light pole in one corner of the patio that required a simple cut.

With my plan in place, I calculated how much additional sand I would need, and then took yet another trip to Home Depot, where I ordered a whole lot of bricks and sand. When buying supplies for such a big project, you get to saunter up to the “contractors checkout” area as if you know what you’re doing. The guys there helped place the order but it turned out that they didn’t have all the bricks I needed in stock so it was going to be a few days before I could make much more progress.

Finally, the bricks and sand came in! The truck arrives with a forklift, so they can maneuver the pallets of supplies as close to the area you’re working as possible. Unfortunately tree branches prevented the forklift from getting much beyond the sidewalk…

To secure the border bricks, I had originally been planning to use normal construction adhesive that you apply with a caulk gun, but I found this weird stuff that comes in a can that claims to be equivalent to eight tubes of the normal stuff. It worked out to be cheaper so I figured I would give it a try.

I used a stiff-bristled brush to scrub the cement slab clean before applying the adhesive and sticking the border bricks down. It takes a while for the adhesive to set, and the edge of our concrete slab was slightly sloped to help with runoff, so I had to use other bricks to keep the edge bricks level while the adhesive hardened. Small pebbles placed between the edge bricks and the slab were also useful as shims to make the edge bricks sit level.

As you can see in the above picture, I used a variety of levels to make sure the edge bricks were level and in a nice straight line. You may also notice that I removed the wooden step from the deck. It was not in great shape anyway, and this again made the patio layout much simpler than it would be working around it.

it ended up being extremely difficult to make the border bricks for a perfect rectangle with straight sides at right angles to each other, even though I was working on an existing slab. I also found that the domino pavers seemed to be a tiny bit shorter than advertised, so when I laid them out there was a little bit of extra room. In the end this turned out not to be a problem (the sand between the pavers helps take up this extra space) but I agonized over it for a while. Finally, I just decided to glue down the edges as well as possible and deal with the consequences. I had to cut the very final brick of the edge to make it all fit, but in the end it looks fine.

The other cut i had to make for the edge was to deal with a small pipe that sticks out from the wall of the house. I was worried this would make things complicated but it was surprisingly easy to deal with. I just used a masonry blade on my circular saw to cut notches in the brick whose corner I had to remove, and then tapped it with a chisel to finish the job.

That’s all for this episode of patio-building. Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion!

How to Carve a Mars Rover Pumpkin

October 21, 2013 / Ryan / 0 Comments

Over the weekend we had some friends over to carve pumpkins. While others went a more traditional route, I decided I wanted to do a Mars rover-themed pumpkin. The trick was, making it recognizable and not too complicated. I ended up finding a nice silhouette of Curiosity that worked well as a template for a pumpkin, so I thought I would share it here:

It’s not super high-res, but then, pumpkin templates really shouldn’t be. I just printed this out in landscape mode, stretched to fill a full sheet of paper, and then attached the paper to my pumpkin with a few toothpicks. Our friends bought one of those cheap pumpkin carving kits, which included a little tool that looks like a cowboy’s spur. The idea is that the little spiked wheel punches through the paper and transfers the design to the pumpkin’s skin. You could also just use a needle or pin. (I tried a toothpick, but the point bent after the first few holes so it didn’t work very well). I left out some of the more intricate details of the silhouette to make carving easier.

Once I had the design transferred, it was pretty simple to just carve along the outline (though a skinny knife is helpful for some of the details. Here’s the finished product:

How to Build a Paver Patio on a Cement Slab: Step 1 – Destroy the Step

October 20, 2013 / Ryan / 1 Comment

As you may have heard, the government was recently shut down for 16 days. I’m a government employee so that meant I suddenly had a lot of unexpected free time. My first instinct was to fill the time with video games and catching up on TV shows, but after a few days of being a lazy bum, I decided that I should take on a project. A big, time-consuming one. Looking out the sliding glass door to our patio, I decided it was time for it to get a face lift.

Here’s why:

Our patio was a boring cement slab. Functional, but not particularly nice. I decided that it was time to make this into an attractive feature of our back yard rather than just a tolerable place to keep the grill.

Before doing anything, I read a lot about the options on the internet. I had tons of free time, remember? My first instinct was to do a paver patio, but I quickly ran into a problem: there was a 2″ tall step outside our door before the full patio began. Our best theory is that the step was poured when the house was built and then the rest of the patio was poured later as an add-on. Unfortunately, the step gave us very little room to work with before hitting the frame of the sliding glass door:

So for a while, I was considering doing tiles instead of pavers. Tiles would be nice and thin, so they could just be applied to the existing step and still leave room for the door frame. Unfortunately, we live in Flagstaff, where it get very cold and the temperature swings pretty drastically from day to night, meaning lots of freeze-thaw action. I was very paranoid about laying tiles only to have them pop up after going through a winter. The same concern applied for the option of just mortaring a layer of bricks down.

With tiles I would also have to worry about the control joints in the concrete slab. These are notches that are made in the slab when it is poured in an attempt to guide the inevitable cracking that occurs as a slab cures and settles. When laying tile on a slab, you pretty much have to line up a seam in the tile with the control joint or risk damage down the road when the slab shifts and cracks any tiles that span the joint.

Tiles are also expensive! And if you mess them up, well, they are stuck to the concrete slab surface so you pretty much have to tear the whole thing out and start over from bare dirt.

After reading as much as I could stand on the internet and consulting with my dad, who has a lot of experience with home improvement projects, I decided that pavers were the way to go. There are still plenty of mistakes possible with pavers, but they tend not to be as irreversible as with tiles.

But what about that step? There are thin pavers on the market, but not many. Most pavers are 2.5″ or 3.5″ thick: too thick to go on top of our little step and leave room for the door. So, the step had to go. My first idea was to rent a concrete saw, cut notches into the step, and then break off the chunks until the step surface was roughly the same height as the main patio surface. I asked the guys at home depot what they thought of this plan, and they recommended just destroying the step entirely. My dad concurred, suggesting that it might even be possible to pry the step up and bust it with a sledgehammer.

It turned out Home Depot’s rental masonry saw was missing a part, so I decided to try just getting masonry blades for my circular saw and cutting it myself. The blades are cheap (~$3) and they are designed to gradually grind away as you cut, so I bought three of them. I also purchased an 8 pound long-handled sledgehammer and a “San Angelo Bar“, which is basically a 17 pound, 6-foot steel bar with a pencil point on one end and a chisel tip on the other. I also purchased some decent safety equipment to protect my eyes, ears, and lungs from the concrete dust and shrapnel I was about to produce. I already had some sturdy leather gloves.

Fully encased in protective equipment and ready to demolish a concrete step!

So, armed with my new tools and protective gear, I set to demolishing the step. I quickly discovered that, while masonry blades on a circular saw will cut concrete, it is an incredibly slow, loud, dusty process. It was going to take hours to destroy my little 4 foot by 8 foot by 5 inch thick step. I also tried just using the sledge hammer to start cracks and then a combination of the San Angelo bar, a masonry chisel, and my rock hammer to break it up. Here’s what I managed to do in an hour:

An hour's worth of work with circular saw, sledge, and chisel.

An exhausting hour’s worth of work with circular saw, sledge, and chisel.

You’ll notice the cardboard in the above picture. That was there to prevent fragments of flying concrete from breaking our sliding glass doors. I may have been a bit optimistic about how well it was going to break up. Clearly, I needed a better tool if I was going to finish breaking up that step in less than a week. Enter: the Jackhammer.

I rented the jackhammer for 4 hours from Home Depot. Did you know that jackhammers are really heavy? They basically rely on their own weight to break up the concrete, so the hardest part of using one is not when the thing is turned on. At that point, you just have to keep it from falling over. The hard part is extracting it from the hole in the concrete that it just made and re-positioning it to repeat the process. The one I rented weighted 70 pounds, and it was not long before all the muscles in my body were very upset with me.

There were a few times when I moved the jackhammer a little bit too far into unbroken concrete so instead of breaking off a chunk, it just drilled a hole in the slab and got stuck, looking like a giant had thrown a 70 pound jackhammer-shaped dart at the step. Then I got to smash away at the surrounding concrete with my other tools until the jackhammer came loose again. Moral of the story: slow and steady wins the race. Only move the jackhammer a little bit so that each time you turn it on, it breaks off a chunk instead of getting stuck.

I ended the day sore all over, bruised, and dusty, but the jackhammer did its job and destroyed that step. Inside the step, there were several meshes of reinforcing steel wire, so it turned out to be a good thing I rented the jackhammer instead of just trying to tough it out with lesser tools.

Chunks of concrete still clinging to the steel reinforcing mesh that I dragged from the rubble of the step.

At this point I was committed. I had made a giant mess, and had to see the project through because a pile of rubble is even worse than a slab patio! I still had to figure out what to replace the step with, what type of pavers to use, whether they should be laid on sand or directly on the concrete, and a million other questions. But those are questions for another post. Stay tuned for the continuing saga of the patio project!

Game Review: Red Dead Redemption

September 16, 2013 / Ryan / 1 Comment

One of the nice things about being a few years behind the curve on gaming is that you can wait and see what the best games are and then just play those. That’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since I got my XBox 360 a few years ago. I’ve played the “Game of the Year” editions of Fallout 3 and Oblivion, and deeply discounted versions of great games like Dragon Age:Origins and the Mass Effect series.

A few months ago,I felt the hankering for a new (to me) game, and after poking around online and reading reviews, I decided to try Red Dead Redemption (Game of the Year Edition). Red Dead Redemption is made by the same people who make the Grand Theft Auto games, which always are heaped with accolades, but which I’ve never been particularly interested in. But instead of inner city crime, Red Dead Redemption is set in the old west. It’s a much more interesting setting to me, especially since I now live in northern Arizona.

I have to admit, I did not love the game at first and I have a lot of criticisms. Before launching into my negative comments, I want to say up front that eventually I ended up enjoying the game, and I really enjoyed the expansion “Undead Nightmare”.

First of all, the control scheme is not especially intuitive, and there are so many different things to do in the game, each with their own special controls, that for quite a while in the early part of the game I didn’t have a good handle on how to make my character, John Marston, do what I wanted him to. The clunky controls and the fact that the game allows you to do just about anything led to some unfortunate events, like when I tried to take a ride in a stagecoach and instead hijacked it.

On top of that, I ran into a lot of frustration with the game’s auto-aim system. I’m not complaining that it was there: to be honest I usually wouldn’t be able to hit anything without it. The problem is that I found myself sometimes auto-aiming and then inadvertently killing things that I didn’t want to, such as my allies, or my horse. (I can’t count how many times I inadvertently shot my horse in the head in the course of the game when aiming at an enemy in the near foreground.)

Saving was another major nuisance. For some reason, you can’t save the game anywhere. You have to either sleep in a bed, or ride out into the wilderness and set up camp somewhere that is flat and not too close to roads, towns, or water. And then from camp, you can save. For reasons I don’t fully understand, you also have to go through this process to fast-travel to distant locations. I learned to live with this, but it struck me as an unnecessary annoyance.

Ok, so those are my issues with the controls and interface of the game. But what about the rest of it?

Well, the voice acting was mostly very good, with decent writing and nice cutscenes. Many of the missions involve riding along and talking to other characters and I am pretty sure these were written by a different, less-skilled writer. The dialog in these transit scenes always felt much more clunky than the dialog in the main cutscenes.

The characters mostly did not have much depth, but were memorable and generally amusing. The player character, John Marsten is of course the best-developed character, and they did a pretty good job with him. The problem I ran into was that the guy he was supposed to be (a badass former criminal forced to revisit his gunslinging days to save his family) did not always fit with his actions in the plot. Much of the plot involves him going and fetching this or that, or helping certain characters with side tasks in hopes that they will eventually help Marsten with his quest. Marsten always complains about these things and even threatens the other characters, but never does what you would expect from him, which is to actually put his foot down and stop being used by others and instead start using them to get what he wants. If he’s supposed to be a dark sort of guy, then it would have been better if his threats were a little less empty.

I played the game as a good guy, so it was more plausible for him to go along with the main plot points that are there to make the game last longer. But if I had been playing Marsten as a bad guy, I think it would sometimes have been very hard to suspend disbelief. Maybe the cutscenes change if you are playing as a bad character, but as far as I can tell, there’s only one path for the main plot to follow, no matter what you do.

Maybe I play too many RPGs, but I found that I kept wishing my choices had more impact. The plot itself is linear, and there is not much in the way of customization possible for your character. There is no leveling up system. Marsten has the health that he has, and he shoots as well as the player can aim. There are three levels of dead-eye (a sort of bullet-time aiming mode), but you go through them and reach the max level very early in the game and then the only thing that is similar to leveling up is acquiring new guns. It would have been nice to be able to make some choices about the character’s skills instead of having him just be great at everything. Maybe sacrifice skill with pistols to become better with rifles. That sort of thing.

There were also moments where the game suffers from the same problem that I see in shows on HBO or Showtime, where there seems to be a need to do things just because they can. This typically comes in the form of gratuitous violence or nudity, and Red Dead Redemption falls into this trap too. One cutscene in particular has nudity in it and the only reason I can think of is to maintain Rockstar’s reputation for “mature” games. The writing was good enough that it had already telegraphed that the character in question was sleeping around, so showing it didn’t add anything, other than a sense of embarrassment to be watching the scene with my wife in the room. Likewise, most of the time the swearing in the game felt natural, but occasionally it was jarring and too harsh for the context.

A lot of the game is spent roaming around in the wilderness, and as you do so, randomly generated events occur. The problem with this is that there are only a handful of randomly generated events, so very quickly, you are running into the exact same things over and over. There are some actual side-quests, but just about all of them are very shallow. In games like Skyrim, I loved how what began as a minor side quest could end up leading to its own mini-story line. Unfortunately the side quests in Red Dead tend to just be fetch quests without much else to them.

Ok, but I said above that I actually ended up enjoying the game, so let’s stop nitpicking it apart. What about the good stuff?

The best thing about the game is the ambiance. There is a lot of attention to detail in the environment and it’s fun to just roam around the wide open west, hunting, or chasing bandits, or just watching the sunrise. As much as I love a video game with a good story, ambiance can make or break a game, and in the case of Red Dead Redemption, it absolutely makes the game. Let me put it this way, when I found myself walking around in the Ponderosa forests here in Flagstaff, or looking at the historical markers on the old downtown buildings, I found myself thinking about Red Dead Redemption. When a game gets in your head like that almost entirely based on its ambiance, it is doing something right.

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The environment and ambiance in the game are great. Sunrises are particularly nice.

The main story of the game was also quite good. Yes, I nitpicked it above, but all in all it is well done. The voice acting and writing are both very good and in particular I thought the end of the game was great. It was predictable and telegraphed to an attentive player well beforehand, but still, it had a much greater emotional impact than the vast majority of other games I’ve played.

Another aspect of the game that I really came to enjoy were the challenges. These are arbitrary accomplishments that range from simple things like shooting a certain number of birds in flight, to ridiculous challenges like killing cougars and bears with your bowie knife. I was annoyed by these things at first: they are transparent attempts to make the game last longer by rewarding the player for doing weird things. I tend not to like things that remind me I’m playing a game, but once I got over my initial annoyance at these, I actually had a lot of fun with them.

And finally, I should mention the expansion to the game: “Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare”. This expansion was a blast. I really, really enjoyed it. It is best played after the main game because it is full of cameos from the memorable characters encountered in the main story. But it is just a ton of fun to ride around the old west killing zombies. The auto-aim in the game targets the chest, so killing zombies by shooting them in the head is nice and challenging. And unlike the main game where the world is very empty in some places, the roaming herds of zombies make the expansion more fast-paced. Also, you can tame and ride the horses of the apocalypse.

The main game of Red Dead Redemption is Very Serious, so it was just a lot of fun to revist the same world and the same characters, but in a tongue-in-cheek B-movie setting.

So, overall, Red Dead Redemption has its flaws, but its great ambiance, memorable characters, above average production values, and its excellent expansion still managed to win me over.

Diversity in (my) Speculative Fiction

September 11, 2013 / Ryan / 0 Comments

As an aspiring author and a science fiction and fantasy (SFF) fan, I follow a lot of authors and science fiction and fantasy fans on twitter. Twitter is a great way to feel connected to the fandom community and to well-known authors. And despite its reputation, twitter is also a place where, from time to time, really important conversations happen.

Last week, the SFF twitterverse exploded with the hashtag #DiversityinSFF, and it was great. The stereotypical SFF fan is a socially inept straight white male, but in reality all sorts of people enjoy science fiction and fantasy. That’s because… are you ready for this? All sorts of people enjoy good stories!

Lots of others have opined about this, and done it far more eloquently than I can. I encourage you to go take a look at the #DiversityinSFF hashtag and start reading. But the conversations on twitter made me think a bit about my own writing and that’s what I’d like to unpack a bit here.

With the help of the Magic Spreadsheet, I recently (finally) started writing a first draft of the novel I’ve been thinking about for a long time. So far it is terrible, of course. I am out of practice as a writer, and it’s a first draft, so the most important thing right now is to get the words on the page. But despite its many flaws, I am happy to say my novel is doing pretty well on the diversity front.

This is intentional, but it has nothing to do with the recent #Diversityin SFF tweetsplosion. I have had the seed of this novel idea for years, and it goes back to the realization that the overwhelming majority of fantasy novels are based on an extremely narrow range of time and place. That is: western Europe in the late middle ages. When I started to think about what I liked in fiction, the common denominator was “something different”. I like novels where cultures clash, where I get to experience new ideas, new cultures, and new places. It would be easy to write yet another Tolkien rip-off fantasy, but they say to write the book you want to read. I love me some Tolkien, but I want to read something different, so that’s what I’m trying to write.

My novel is based loosely on the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire, but is set in an alternate world, which gives me flexibility that true historical fiction doesn’t allow. Although I had the vague notion of an Inca-inspired historical fantasy for years, the idea was kicked into high gear when I visited Peru earlier this year.

On the flight down, and while we were there, I read the book “The Last Days of the Incas” by Kim MacQuarrie. It’s a very readable historical account of the end of the Inca empire, and I was fascinated by one detail in particular: When the Spanish conquistadors first arrived, they took two young boys with them back to Spain. Those boys learned to speak Spanish, and when Pizarro and his men came back to Peru, these two Inca boys served as the only translators between the Spanish and the Inca emperor. Can you imagine being put in that position? The fate of two empires depending on how well you translate a language you’ve barely learned?

One of my main characters is based on those two translators. The other main character is his twin sister, who remains behind and sees the ravages of smallpox and civil war on the empire while the conquistadors are preparing to return.

With the #DiversityinSFF tweetsplosion last week, I paused and took stock of my novel. The main characters are not white. The main setting is not medieval Europe. It passes the Bechdel test by the second chapter (this was completely inadvertent, it just tends to happen when you have real female characters). So yeah, while it is the steaming pile of suck that all proper first drafts must be, it at least has a bit of diversity going for it,

I should say that I am well aware that I am playing through life on easy mode and have benefited greatly from doing so. I have never experienced the inability to see myself in the characters in fiction that I read because straight while males are vastly over-represented in fiction. For my first novel, it would be easy to write about someone like me, in a familiar setting. They say write what you know, but you know what? That novel would be boring. As Charles Stross said on twitter:

“The biggest argument for #diversityinSFF —monocultures are BORING. (Even if the monoculture is your culture: still tediously unchallenging.)”

I agree, except I would amend that to say especially if the monoculture is your culture.

I am going into this novel-writing thing with my eyes open. Of course I dream that someday the novel will be really good and I will sell it and it will be read by millions. But in reality the most likely outcome is that I will write it and it will not be as good as I want it to be and it will not be published. Even if that happens, I will learn something, and I’ll learn more by challenging myself. I’m well aware of the challenges and possible pitfalls of writing the other and cultural appropriation. But for now, the important thing is to try something different and learn as much as I can in the process.

Movie Review: Elysium

August 12, 2013 / Ryan / 1 Comment

It’s been a long time since I went to see a movie in the theater. The last one was Les Miserables; since then nothing has really piqued my interest enough to carve out a couple hours of my weekend to go see it. But Elysium looked awesome, so I made time today to go check it out.

The premise behind the movie is this: all the rich people have left the earth and live on an orbiting space station paradise called Elysium. Up there, everything is wonderful, and every house comes equipped with a magical machine that can instantly cure any ailment, from cuts and bruises to terminal cancer and catastrophic injury. Meanwhile Earth is overcrowded and everyone lives in slums with little or no access to health care. The story centers around Max (Matt Damon), a worker from Earth who gets into an industrial accident and has days to live. So he needs to find a way to get to Elysium to get cured. On the other side, Jodie Foster plays the evil lady in charge of security on the station, and she is hell-bent on keeping “illegals” from coming up. She wants even more power, and so she hatches a scheme that will place her in full control of the station. From there, a lot of fighting and blowing things up ensues.

There was a lot of pressure for director Neill Blomkamp to make something that lived up to District 9, but Elysium had a vastly larger budget, and so inevitably, felt much more like a popcorn-munching big summer blockbuster, which is exactly what it is. Still, Elysium borrows a lot, stylistically, from District 9. It has the same gritty, dirty-looking future, and a proclivity for futuristic (but not too futuristic) guns that blow people apart in creative ways.

The design for the Elysium space station itself borrows heavily from early NASA plans for space colonies from the heady days just after Apollo, when it felt like we could do anything in space. Just take a look at this concept art from NASA:

Now, compare it with these screenshots that I took from the trailer:

I went into Elysium expecting some heavy-handedness in terms of the message and got exactly what I expected: the movie is unashamedly a parable about inequality, particularly as it relates to health care, income, and immigration. Other than Matt Damon, the good guys are almost all Latino, so when they infiltrate Elysium and Jodie Foster is shouting about catching the “illegals”, it’s not exactly subtle.

But really, that’s ok with me. At least the movie has something to say underneath the heavy layer of special effects and action. Instead, my two main gripes with the movie are: 1.the science fictional ground rules aren’t established well enough, and 2. The villains aren’t fully developed characters.

I’ll warn you, I am going to get slightly spoilery at this point, so if you don’t read on, here’s the bottom line: Elysium is a fine action movie, and you should go see it, especially because it is not a comic book or a sequel to anything, and lord knows we need more originality in Hollywood. Just don’t expect profound philosophical examination of the issues raised by the premise. Do expect people being blown apart in creative ways and exciting fight sequences.

Ok. Now, on to my two main gripes. First: the science fictional ground rules. What I mean when I say this is that, in speculative fiction, the audience needs to know quite clearly what rules have been changed. What can happen in the fictional world that cannot (at least not yet) happen in our world. So in Elysium some things are clear: they have small car-sized craft that can launch into orbit, they have technology that can identifying every human being alive, they have medical pods on Elysium that can cure anything. The problem that I had was with the medical care on Earth. We’re told in no uncertain terms that they can’t “just cure” people on Earth, but it’s not exactly clear what they can do.

This ambiguity was frustrating when the main character got injured. For example, at one point he gets stabbed in the stomach. He stumbles to meet with the love interest, who is a nurse, and she slaps some gauze on his wound and hooks him up to an IV, and by the next day he is up and fighting again. That’s some pretty miraculous medicine in my book! Likewise, when he gets an exoskeleton installed, we are shown some wince-inducing views of staples and screws and bolts being tightened into his flesh and bones. Next day, he’s up and about!

But other characters on Earth don’t seem so invincible. Early on we are shown a pair of “illegals” who sneak onto Elysium to get the little girl’s broken legs fixed. So… broken legs require Elysium’s miraculous medical pods, but when Matt Damon breaks a limb, or has massive, body-wide surgery, he is fine in a matter of hours.

Likewise, much of the plot centers around technology that allows computer programs and other sensitive information to be stored in people’s brains. There is a security protocol activated on one of these files that has major ramifications for the plot, but it is not well explained, and if you think about it too much, it doesn’t make much sense.

That said, on to my other, more important issue with the movie: the villains. Jodie Foster did her best with what she was given, but we are given zero backstory on why she is such an evil person. Why does she want to use excessive force on “illegals”? Why is she so hate-filled? Spending even a little time exploring this would have made it easier to see things from her point of view, and the best villains are always the ones who are not just mustache-twirling caricatures, but actually have a method to their madness. A good villain is one who you can almost sympathize with, who you find yourself wondering what you would do in their shoes, given their past experiences. Alas, Jodie Foster’s character mostly just is evil so that the protagonists have someone to oppose.

The second villain begins as Jodie Foster’s henchman and if anything he is even more poorly developed. He basically just seems to be a crazy guy with access to military weapons and a desire to use them on people. It’s not clear why Jodie Foster likes using him and it’s not clear why he does what he does. Considering that he eventually takes over as the main villain, any backstory at all would have been helpful.

Both of my major gripes could have been easily addressed with just a little bit more time, and would have made the movie more satisfying. As it is, it feels like the movie is in a rush to get to the action scenes at the expense of the backstory that makes those scenes meaningful.

Still, I have to admit that I enjoyed the movie. Despite its flaws, it’s an above-average summer blockbuster. It may be heavy-handed, but at least it does have a message. And most importantly, it is not yet another freakin’ comic book movie or sequel or franchise reboot. By my count, 7 of the 12 movies at our local theater are sequels. Given the astonishing lack of originality in Hollywood these days, I was happy to do my little part in supporting some original science fiction. If you like dystopian sci-fi, and can handle gore and profanity, I encourage you to go give Elysium a try. It’s not perfect, but it’s at least something new.

Book Re-Read Review: Shogun

July 30, 2013 / Ryan / 2 Comments

For those of you living under a rock, Shogun is an epic historical fiction novel about an Englishman who is shipwrecked in Japan in the year 1600 and goes on to become a samurai and adviser to one of the most powerful lords in feudal Japan. I first read Shogun about 5 years ago and loved it. I don’t re-read books very often, so it has to be a very special book for me to want to read something again. (Warning, this review is slightly spoilery. If you haven’t read Shogun, go do that. It’s awesome, and it has pirates fighting ninjas. But I repeat myself. If you like giant epics that you can fully immerse yourself in, with lots of political intrigue and a large cast of characters, then you will like Shogun.)

Last time, I read the book the way most people do: silently, to myself. But this time, I convinced my wife to come along for the ride. We read aloud before bed, and have tackled books of similar epic proportions (for example, the full Lord of the Rings and Song of Ice and Fire series), so we knew what we were getting into. Years ago after I read the book, we had watched the miniseries, but it did not do the source material justice, and I wanted to experience the book again.

I’m happy to say that Shogun remains one of my favorite books, and serves as the Platonic ideal in my mind of what historical fiction should be. It is so huge and intricate and detailed that it really sweeps you away to feudal Japan. The plot is a familiar one, shared by Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, Avatar, Fern Gully, and many others. But for all of the problematic aspects to this plot template, I still love it because, when done well, it introduces the reader to a culture that they are not familiar with, and helps them to understand and sympathize with that culture.

Of the examples of this familiar plot, I think Shogun succeeds the best. The book is long enough and detailed enough that the reader comes to understand the Japanese culture along with Blackthorne. At the beginning of the book, the Japanese people that he encounters are strange and brutal and utterly different from what Blackthorne views as “normal”. But by the end, it is almost painful to ride along in Blackthorne’s point of view as he reunites with his former crew and realizes how rude, filthy, undisciplined, and pitiful they are compared to the Japanese characters we’ve just spent 1000 pages with.

What impresses me about Shogun is that the disturbing parts of the Japanese bushido culture are not swept under the rug. They are just put into context. So the first merciless killing of a peasant by a samurai early on is horrifying to both the reader and Blackthorne, but placed into context, with the strict codes of conduct that are a part of feudal Japanese culture, such killings begin to make a sort of sense, even as they remain disturbing to western readers. This cognitive dissonance is one of the more interesting parts about reading Shogun.

Of course, Shogun is fiction, and it would be foolish to think that it is a purely accurate depiction of feudal Japan. I, sadly, don’t know enough to say which parts of Shogun are accurate and which aren’t, but as I understand it, much of it actually holds up pretty well. In writing this post, I came across the interesting site Learning from Shogun, which has a nice (free) book in PDF form written by scholars in Asian studies and history as a companion to the novel, just before the 1980 miniseries came out. In the introduction to the book they write:

“In sheer quantity, Shogun has probably conveyed more information about Japan to more people than all the combined writings of scholars, journalists, and novelists since the Pacific War.”

In fact, it is sometimes odd while reading Shogun when the author takes time to define Japanese terms which are now so commonplace that the definition is superfluous. For example, he has to spell out what samurai, katanas, and ninja are. Shogun is not solely responsible for this increased knowledge about Japan, but there’s no denying it played a big role.

I think one aspect that saves Shogun from some of the pitfalls that plague other works of fiction that follow a similar plot is that the white, western main character is very much just a pawn in the great political game that is being played. Although he does gain in power and prestige over the course of the novel, Blackthorne is still at the mercy of the daimyos he is working for, particularly Toranaga. Even having read the book twice now, some of the political intrigue was still over my head. Let’s just say that if you want to be Shogun, you need to have a deep understanding of your rivals’ family trees and how to use them to your advantage. Winning battles is the easy part.

Re-reading the book, and particularly in reading it out loud, I was struck by one aspect of the writing that I did not even register the first time I read it. Clavell is constantly jumping around with the point of view. Not many books (at least not many that I read) do this successfully, but in Shogun it feels very natural. It’s a clever trick to allow to reader to get to know many of the dozens of characters much better than if the point of view had been stuck inside Blackthorne’s head.

My main complaint after re-reading it, is that the book is really extremely long and could probably lose 200 pages and still be great. The length was fine when reading it to myself, because when doing that I could go much faster and so I never felt like the book was slow. But reading out loud, and particularly because our out-loud reading was disrupted for a few weeks, it started to feel like a drag toward the end until we got to the final climax. I strongly recommend reading this book silently to yourself rather than listening to it as an audiobook or reading it out loud, just because that way you it won’t seem to drag as much.

Interesting side note: As we were nearing the end of the book, we decided to get a bottle of sake to sip as we read the final chapters. I had only had sake once years ago so I wanted to try it again. Turns out I really like it a lot! Erin doesn’t, but that just means more for me!

Bottom line: Shogun is awesome, if a bit long. The plot is a familiar one, but it tells a great story and you will learn a lot about Japan in the 1600s even if the book is not 100% factual. Also, there are scenes where pirates and ninjas fight. If you have not read this book, you should probably go do something about that.

Worldbuilding in GIMP

July 17, 2013 / Ryan / 3 Comments

It’s no secret that I like to write (hence this blog), but what you may not know is that I have a long-standing interest in writing fiction. Note that this is different from actually writing fiction: I rarely do so, for a variety of reasons that really deserve their own post. But several years ago I did manage to successfully participate in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), churning out 50,000 or so words of rather awful fiction. One of the key steps in preparation for NaNoWriMo that year was doing some basic worldbuilding.

I have a really hard time writing a story if I don’t know the lay of the land…literally. If my characters have to venture off into an undefined world, then I don’t know what their options and limitations are and so I am paralyzed with indecision. A map provides the framework on which the events of the story can play out, and I find that the constraints that it provides are crucial for understanding everything from the placement of cities to the boundaries of nations to the history of empires. So much is influenced by geography that without it I’m lost.

I am trying to get back into fiction writing: I have had the nebulous idea for a novel rattling around in my head for years but to really write it, I needed a world. For my NaNoWriMo map, I used the program AutoRealm which had some nice capabilities, but didn’t make very attractive maps. So for this new worldbuilding effort, I decided to use a proper image editor: GIMP.

GIMP is an open-source program similar to Photoshop. I use it all the time for work to make figures, so I know my way around it, but I haven’t used it much to just draw. And to be honest, I didn’t want to just draw continents because it’s actually quite difficult to draw natural looking coastlines. I needed something more random.

After searching online, I found an excellent site called the “Cartographer’s Guild”, where lots of worldbuilding enthusiasts share their tips and tricks in very helpful tutorials. I won’t duplicate all of that effort here, but I will point to their helpful collection of tutorials. In particular, I found the one entitled “Using GIMP to create an artistic regional map” very helpful.

It turns out GIMP has a tool that renders a cloud-like texture, and by stretching the black and white levels on randomly generated cloud textures, you can make random continent-shaped blobs. For most people, this would be enough, but since I know way too much about planets, I wanted to make my random cotinents more realistic, with things like island arcs and shapes that could conceivably come from plate tectonics. So I made several sets of random blobs ranging in size from continents to islands, and selectively merged them together to make what I thought were more realistic (but still mostly random) continents. Here’s what the end result looked like:

I played around with some of the other tips in the tutorials to make attractive oceans and land colors and got this:

From here, the next step was adding mountains. I went back and forth on whether I wanted to try to make realistic looking mountains or line-drawings like you might see in a map in the front of Lord of the Rings. In the end, I decided to go with the line drawing option. I alread had some idea of where I wanted my mountain ranges, the trick was drawing the actual mountains. I am too lazy to draw them individually, so I looked up how to create a brush in GIMP that cycles through a set of simple images with each click. The term for this is an “image pipe” and it’s actually pretty simple: you just make a small image in GIMP with multiple layers and draw a different image on each layer. They you save it as the appropriate file type and voila! Choose that brush and then each click draws one of the layers. Here are my mountain layers as an animated gif:

With mountain ranges in place, the next logical thing to add was deserts. So I thought a bit about what the prevailing winds are like on an Earth-like planet, and the placed deserts in the rain shadow of mountain ranges. I also added some nice white shading toward the poles and gray shading around mountain ranges.

At this point it was looking pretty good if I do say so myself! The main missing natural features that might be relevant to any stories set in this world are forests and rivers. For forests, I decided to just use one of the built-in brushes in GIMP, along with the “apply jitter” option to paint scattered dark green specks for trees. Rivers were a bit trickier. Just like the continents, I didn’t want to hand-draw them because they would not be naturally random enough. For this, I found a simple free program that can draw fractal lines and export them as vector graphics. I drew a bunch of fractal lines then loaded them into my GIMP project, colored them blue, and placed them where it seemed appropriate. The end results? Realistically random-looking rivers! Here is the final map:

I’m pretty happy with this map, and I’m eager to start adding cities and countries and figuring out how the geography that I’ve created here influences the seed of a story idea that I am trying to develop. And even if the story that I write set in this world doesn’t end up being very good, I learned a lot of fun GIMP tricks in the process of making this map!

Jupiter as the Moon

July 9, 2013 / Ryan / 1 Comment

Have you seen this awesome set of pictures depicting what it would look like if you replaced our moon with each of the planets? I particularly like the images for Jupiter and Saturn – they absolutely dominate the night sky:

Jupiter, as it would look if it were our moon.

I always enjoy pictures like this: they are a great way to illustrate the relative sizes of the planets. But the following tweet made my skeptic senses tingle:

Now, Ezra Klein is a smart guy, and I have followed his blog for a while for his excellent political coverage, which is nice and wonkish, with lots of graphs and charts. I’m a scientist, I like me some graphs and charts. But as much as his blog loves to factcheck political stuff, he failed to fact check this fact check.

The tweet in question says that the Earth and Jupiter would collide if they were the same distance apart as the Earth and the Moon. it’s not that this is wrong, but that it doesn’t state its assumptions and so it is misleading. I was tempted to reply on Twitter, but this is the sort of thing that, alas, involves lots of caveats so I thought it would be better to tackle it here.

The main question is what the motion of the two planets is when you suddenly replace the moon with Jupiter. If both planets are stationary relative to their center of mass, then yeah, they’re going to collide. But the same would be true of the Earth and the Moon. If the two planets have any angular momentum at all, they will orbit their center of mass rather than simply falling toward each other. So that means that in all cases except that in which the planets start at rest, they won’t hit each other.

But not quite. Because planets have some size. If they don’t have enough angular momentum, they will follow a very narrow elliptical orbit and will crash into each other. To avoid collision, there has to be enough angular momentum for the periapsis of the orbit to be greater than half the sum of the planets’ radii. I tried switching Jupiter for the moon, but otherwise keeping the angular momentum and orbital eccentricity of the system the same and I found that the periapsis is about 4400 km (I did this calculation quickly – my numbers might be off so feel free to check me!). This is too small to keep Earth and Jupiter from colliding, so the tweet is correct, given the assumption that the angular momentum and eccentricity of the system stays the same when you swap the moon for Jupiter.

But what bothered me was that the tweet could be read to imply that an Earth-sized object and a Jupiter-sized object could never comfortably orbit each other, and that’s just not true. With enough angular momentum, an Earth-sized object could be in a stable orbit around Jupiter.

So, let’s say the system has enough angular momentum for the Earth to stay in a stable circular orbit at the specified distance. What other misfortune might befall us? One possibility is that we would be inside the Roche limit and the powerful tides from Jupiter would tear us apart. I calculate the rigid-body Roche limit for Jupiter and Earth to be ~108,900 km, which is safely less than the Earth-Moon distance.

That’s not to say the tides wouldn’t do some weird things of course. Jupiter’s tides would still be huge and so it would raise enormous tides in our oceans and in the solid rock of the Earth itself. The friction generated by these tides would heat up the Earth’s interior (and probably trigger volcanoes and earthquakes in the process) and gradually slow the Earth’s rotation until one side of the earth was permanently locked facing Jupiter (the same thing has already happened to the moon, which is why we don’t see the far side except from spacecraft).

We would also be pounded by the intense radiation of Jupiter’s magnetosphere. Our magnetic field might protect us for a while, but as our spin rate slowed, our magnetic field would die, leaving us exposed. It’s possible that the radiation would then strip away our atmosphere, leaving the earth a desiccated and dead world. I’ll leave that calculation as an exercise for the reader. Correction: our orbital period around Jupiter would actually not be much more than a day, so our magnetic filed would probably survive.

So, bottom line: the tweet in question is only sort of right. Earth could stably orbit Jupiter, just not with the same orbital parameters as the current Earth-Moon system. If we were in a stable orbit, there would be some… interesting side effects, which might prove to be deadly, but nothing as dramatic as crashing into Jupiter.

Liquid Hot Magma

July 1, 2013 / Ryan / 0 Comments

Well, technically lava since magma refers to un-erupted molted rock. And technically technically it’s not erupted, it’s melted in a big furnace, so it probably isn’t lava either.

But yeah, bottom line: here’s a video of synthetic lava poured over a slab of ice. Science is awesome: