The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is, for my money, one of the greatest short stories in American literature. You might have read it back in school a time or two. It's about this smart house, or at least a proto-smart house that could be conceived back in 1950, in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. The house rings alarms, announces calendar events, prepares meals, keeps itself clean, and plays music and reads poetry, completely unaware and uncaring of the fact that it has been uninhabited for years. The story's as clean and efficient as they come, taking you from "what's going on here?" to "oh no" to "yeah, this all seems like a fairly logical conclusion" in the span of, like, eight or nine pages. It's as simple as a Dr. Seuss allegory but the images it depicts without explicitly spelling them out - like the horrifying death of millions of people in a fiery blaze, or a mangy dog being torn to shreds by robotic mice - are the kinds of horrifying things that'll stay with you forever. (I think I was seven or eight when we first heard this in school. Understood it, but couldn't grasp the urgency and foreboding of it. Read it late in high school and it hit closer to home. Could probably revisit it in my old age and lament how little things have changed in a hundred years.)

Anyway, I bring up "There Will Come Soft Rains" because even though it's a complete story that stands alone perfectly, it hints at this global disaster that you can only really imagine. The Martian Chronicles, one of those novel-like collections of tightly knit short stories, fills in a few of those gaps, but only barely; most of the action takes place on the planet Mars as humans attempt to colonize it and, after succeeding, do their best to live there without making the same mistakes they'd made on Earth. But the long and short of it, well, yeah, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is the second-to-last story in the collection. This was not an inciting event that led people to flee for Mars; this was the conclusion of a human race that had already made it to Mars. (The last short story focuses on the few people remaining on Mars after, we are left to assume, everyone on earth is dead. It's bittersweet but hopeful - the perfect note to end on.)

So, yeah. This is a cynical and glum portrait of humanity, albeit not an especially deep or profound one. In fact the criticism here is subtle. Not present are the wacky one-dimensional characters of, say, Kurt Vonnegut, nor is there any judgment or humor in the tone of the narration; everything is told in third person without any flair or humility.

The rest of the stories in the book touch on all kinds of warts found throughout human history - colonialism, genocide, folly, hubris, tribalism. Blink and you might miss it, but maybe the biggest tragedy of all is that toward the end of the book, a thriving human population on Mars ends up wiped out not Mars is engulfed in any warfare, but because to a man they almost all decide to return to Earth once nuclear war breaks out there. Idiots!

Last note, more of a side note, I always love going back to these seventy-year-old science fiction stories and seeing what aspects of the future these authors got right and what they totally biffed on. I mean, yes, sure, these are allegories that belong in their own times and aren't necessarily attempting to predict anything, but it's amazing to see that Ray Bradbury essentially predicted a smart house (although he wasn't alone in doing that - isn't that essentially what the Jetsons live in?) but not, say, communication advancements that would allow Earthlings and Martians to communicate with one another by any means faster than handwritten letters. And the gender and racial dynamics in these stories from another time are always something to behold. Still, does this hold up? This absolutely holds up.

Okay, actual last note, way more of a side note, I couldn't pick up this book without singing this old chestnut in my head:

Yeah, remember that one? You do now.

Easy: Season 1

Chalk another one up in the "shit I didn't get to in 2016" column. Netflix, as so often seems to be the case. This is an eight-part anthology series about a bunch of different couples and relationships in modern-day Chicago. You've got the power mom and the stay-at-home dad trying to navigate their gender roles and how that affects their sex lives. You've got the girl trying to impress her new vegan girlfriend by going vegan as well, to terrible results. You've got the couple trying to spice things up by inviting their baby's sing-along group leader over for a threesome.

None of the eight stories depend on the others for any context, save for the last one, which serves as a second part of sorts to the third. Instead you've got a bunch of loose little half-hour stories. They were all over the map for me, some of them total duds and some of them pretty entertaining.

All in all, I can't say there's any real reason to look into this one, but if you do, it's only four hours long. So.

Love: Season 2

I didn't love (ha!) the first season of Love, but it was a passable, low-stakes, well-made Apatow comedy that felt perfect for Netflix. (Two seasons in, I can't imagine watching this show any other way than a few episodes at a time over the course of a week or so.) I liked Season 2 a little more, even if it started out stronger than it ended. The show's about a blossoming relationship between two very different people in Los Angeles - one a nebbish and sort of neurotic guy working as an on-set tutor for the child star of a shitty CW-esque series, the other a messy and free-spirited self-described "sex and love addict."

The first season mostly existed to show us who these people were, and why they really shouldn't be in a relationship with one another (or possibly with anyone at all) but ended with the pair of them making out in a gas station parking lot as if to say, yes, sure, let's do this. The second season sort of continues down that road, repeating some of the same beats in a stronger way by making it clear that these two need to take some time apart before the season ends with them making out once again, committed to being a long-term exclusive couple.

If it sounds like it moves slow, well, holy shit, it does. But that's okay! This is also largely an LA hang-out comedy and it's very easy to watch these two and their misadventures like a fly on the wall. There's an episode in Season 2 where the two of them just trip on mushrooms with another couple. No zany camerawork or CGI; the trip is seen entirely from a third person perspective, and it's low-key hilarious stuff, just listening to their insane babblings.

I dunno, it's Apatow. Every single one of his movies has been about half an hour too long, so isn't longform TV storytelling a perfect venue for him? I think - and I'm not positive, but I think - that only like three months have passed so far in the show to date. But I'm content to ride this one for a while. It might be slow, but it feels deliberate and carefully planned, unlike something like Modern Family that just feels like its spinning its wheels year after year so its actors can collect their millions. There's a story here, and there are some characters, and I'm invested now, dammit.

Get Out

Finally saw this and liked it a lot. There's a lot to parse here if you go in ready to dig into an exploration of race relations, obviously, but even that's just gravy if you want it to be; on a shallower and more basic level this is just a very well-made horror movie. A little better at the beginning than at the end, but aren't they all? Kudos to Daniel Kaluuya for shouldering the load here so well; almost everything takes place from his increasingly frightened and unsettled point of view, and he crushes it. Kudos as well to Jordan Peele, because holy shit, this is a directorial debut? And lastly, small-time kudos to Allison Williams, who between this role and playing Marnie on Girls is just so willing and able to play the worst characters imaginable.

But yeah, see this one at some point. It is pretty good.

Workaholics: Season 7

Workaholics just finished up its seventh and final season, and not a moment too soon. I think this show has struggled for years now. Of course, this begs the question - was it always really not so funny and pretty stupid, or did I simply outgrow it? I think the problem is that the show didn't grow alongside me, so to speak.

Workaholics debuted in 2011, the same year I was a year out of college and into the workforce, and I absolutely related to the hijinks of three slackers in their twenties treating professional life like a dead end. What's the work week, after all, but the time that passes between the evenings and the weekends? The series peaked early with a Season 2 episode called "Old Man Ders" in which Anders - the oldest of the trio - turns 25 and, sensing that he's getting old, spends the day drunk and making an ass out of himself at a Chuck E. Cheese knockoff, much to the anger of a father there for his own young son's birthday. It's one of the show's funniest episodes, but it also pokes at something deeper - this idea that, at 25, Anders is too old to be acting like a college freshman drinking booze for the first time. "Grow up."

But the show never really did; that Season 2 episode is the closest any of the guys came to accepting, embracing, and adapting to the idea that life can slow down a little as you approach thirty. And don't get me wrong - a show about three roommates who watch Netflix after work and feel like crap after too much pizza and beer would be a terribly unfunny show. But the older these guys got - and the older I got - the sadder it was to see them living like frat bros.

This final season at least started out like it was going to reflect that. The boys' boss calls them out for being in their thirties and still acting like idiots constantly, and a new batch of fresh-out-of-college kids show up as if to really drive home that "you're gettin' old" point. But the newcomers are dispatched in one episode, and the rest of the season unfolded like any other Workaholics year - occasionally funny, always unnecessary, generally lazy. This wasn't as bad as, say, The League got in its final season, when the entire cast and writing staff went full-blown "who the fuck cares?" and burned everything to the ground. But there was no uptick in quality here at the tail end of Workaholics. Oh well! That's Comedy Central for you.

This Is Us: Season 1

Here are my personal five stages of watching the first season of This Is Us:

1. Early fall, 2016

Watching ads and thinking "wow holy crap they made Mike and Molly but as an earnest melodrama about how painful it is to be fat as hell."

2. Late fall, 2016

Hearing from multiple people that, no really, this is a decent show despite all the cheese, so really, why not give it a go?

3. Christmas break-ish, 2016

Taking the dive and doing the catch-up binge, agreeing with friends and family that this really is an enjoyable show, by no means a cool or trendy new show, but something to put on and enjoy and feel feelings about, at least.

4. Winter, 2017

Straining more and more to care each week now that the rush of the binge is over, and starting to wonder if they'll ever give Kate something to do that doesn't directly deal with her weight, and wondering how much longer the flashbacks will hold my interest given that we know where everyone in the family ultimately ends up, and oh boy does this seem like a one-season wonder that everyone is just going to turn on viciously next year, but it's still not... bad?

5. Post-finale, 2017

Oh fuck that. I'm out.

The Selfish Gene

So here's a book. A book! And a nonfiction book at that. Hell, it's the second-oldest book in my backlog! Checking a lot of boxes today, yessir. This is a pretty famous one for popular science, as it's Richard Dawkins' first book and the one in which he developed or at least popularized the gene-centric view of evolution.

It's got a misleading title, so let's start there. This isn't about a gene for selfish behavior. Rather, on the contrary, it's about the idea that each gene "cares" more about its own propagation through a population and future generations than it does about whether or not its own "host" lives or dies; in that sense, it is "selfish," willing to sacrifice the particular creature it inhabits in order to allow more copies of itself to survive. Basically, it's a biologically consistent rationale for altruistic behavior, like when mothers sacrifice themselves for their young, or how brothers are more loyal to one another than cousins, who are more loyal than distant cousins, and so on. You might as well call the book "The Selfless Gene" - or as one of Dawkins' contemporaries suggested, "The Immortal Gene."

Take, for example, when a bird gives off an alarm call to indicate that a predator is nearby. This individual bird is putting itself at a slightly higher risk of being killed, but it's drastically lowering the flock's overall chance of losing a member. Thus the gene for this sort of altruistic behavior, as much as it exists, is more likely to survive than a gene for selfish behavior would in a similar population.

The meat of Dawkins' theory is played out in nonzero sum games and computer simulations, which I enjoyed a lot. "You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" is a win-win, assuming it takes more effort to scratch your own back than someone else's back. Of course, the biggest win would be to have someone scratch your back without you returning the favor. Dawkins plays out all kinds of simulations to find the ideal stable population models with different simple behavior patterns (strategies) like "cheater" (never returns a favor) and "sucker" (always returns a favor) and "forgiving" (stiffs a cheater once or twice, but then resumes trusting) and "grudge-holder" (never returns a favor to someone who's cheated him in the past) and "wild card" (either scratches or doesn't scratch at random). This is all just an expansion of prisoner's dilemma game theory, and what Dawkins found was that stable strategy distributions will have most individuals acting altruistically and fairly, with a few cheaters in the mix - mostly mirrors reality, no?

There's also plenty of "relatedness" math at play that sounds like the trolley problem - is it better to sacrifice one of your own children, or two of your own brothers? - with entire chapters related to the subtle ongoing power balance between children and parents, hosts and parasites, and males and females of the same species.

The book was written in 1976 (though my own edition is from 1989 with a small expansion) and it still holds up after more than forty years (or almost thirty), albeit with a few very dated computer analogies and some very old fashioned language and perspectives in the "Battle of the Sexes" chapter.

The book's not without its detractors, whose rebuttals mostly focus on how the book doesn't give enough credit to the many other factors responsible for evolution - environmental factors, inter-species and intra-species competition, gene expression, and so on - but I didn't take the book to be a be-all, end-all take on evolution boiled down to 260 pages. That would be a crazy thing to do!

Oh, and lastly, and how did I almost forget this - memes! Right here in this book, Richard Dawkins invented the term "meme" to serve as a behavioral analogue to a gene. A gene mutates and propagates down through future generations; a meme spreads through populations too, with the best memes outlasting the worst ones in their own "survival of the fittest" competition. For instance, there is nothing "genetic" about the idea that priests should be celibate - how could such a gene propagate through children? But the "meme" that priests shouldn't have sex - a rule, a law, a custom, a practice - is one that we've collectively and consistently found sensible enough to continue to propagate. On the other hand, a meme like, I dunno, disco music? That meme boomed and then almost disappeared, like an algae bloom that has immediate short-term success but burns out just as quickly. The forms of disco that flourish today are bastardized, mutated forms, like R&B. (This is my own example; Dawkins wrote this in the 1970s, before disco even was a meme, let alone a dead one.) But that's Dawkins' point - that some memes are trends while others are mainstays, and some are these long unchallenged traditions that will struggle to adapt to radical changes (look at social views on gay marriage, for instance). Hell, even the idea of what a "meme" is has mutated from what I've just described to "a recurring JPEG or GIF on the Internet." Ha!

But yeah - great book. Dense reading, but easy reading - it;s a slow 260 pages, but it's also only 260 pages. And I should really read more of Dawkins' stuff in the future, having already enjoyed (even more than this) The Ancestor's Tale back in college.

O.J.: Made in America: Season 1

First things first - fuck the Oscars, this is a damn TV show and I've tagged it as such.

Okay, second things second - was it the twentieth anniversary of the verdict that made 2016 the year we revisited the O.J. trial wholesale? I was six for the Bronco chase, seven for the verdict (yeah I'm dating myself here) so most of the grizzly details of the case weren't things I was aware of the first time around, but still - I've spent more time in the past calendar year learning about this case through documentaries and dramatizations than I had in the twenty years prior. And I'm sure I'm not alone in that. What the hell?

Third thing - yes, what a story. Worthy of a seven-hour documentary for sure. So many things made it such an interesting case, but it's the context surrounding the case that has become the real story, obviously, the race relations in America and in Los Angeles in particular in the '90s, and come on, of course this still rings true today. In some regards, it's worse.

Fourth - the most fascinating part of the miniseries for me was the fifth and final installment, which spans from the trial verdict to the present day. Here's the lowkey fall from grace, from O.J.'s neighbors turning on him, to his loss in civil court, to his bankruptcy, to his eventual arrest for just the dumbest Vegas heist where he stole his own memorabilia back after losing it in his financial ruination. One thing the docuseries never quite touched on that I'd be fascinated to know is whether or not his own kids ever turned on him for, you know, murdering their mother. (Gotta be a horrible situation to be in. Can't even imagine it. Respect their privacy, no question. Still! I wonder...)

Last, and certainly least, my own two cents on this whole damn mess. Of course he did it. The prosecution fucked up on a few big things. It's almost like Hillary and the election - do you blame the electorate and jury for Trump and "not guilty," or do you roll your eyes at the opposition for biffing on such a slam dunk? Ito is Comey in this metaphor, making things harder but by no means improbable, let alone impossible. And black anger in Los Angeles here parallels white anger in rural America, sort of. Okay, election metaphor over. Let's talk real politics. It's possible to see O.J.'s trial victory as an individual miscarriage of justice that also metaphorically serves as a victory for a black community that had just endured the Rodney King verdict and riots in stunned sadness. This is, of course, the most tepid take I can imagine having. It's a shrug and a "let's change the subject, this bores me." But to bring it back to Trump and Hillary - Jesus, will I be doing this forever? - I can see how the Trump win was a weird victory for the disenfranchised white people of Middle America even if Trump doesn't do a damn thing to help them. It's not so much "yes, this is the best thing for everyone involved" as much as a big old middle finger and a "fuck you" to the existing establishment. And that's maybe what the O.J. verdict was.

But again - not a movie. Not at all. And that's what's really important here!

Once Upon a Time in the West

Hey, it's a Blu-ray viewing! I took an actual physical disc out of its case, popped it into my PS4, and navigated my way through a brief menu in order to play this film. Imagine that!

This is how I know I'm not a film geek, but rather just a bored guy who likes watching movies. True film geeks lose their shit over this thing. No joke! It has a 4.4 out of 5 on Letterboxd, where all the film geeks go, and where I just pretend to fit in, doing my thing, hoping not to get called out for, say, not popping a big old boner for this Spaghetti Western. That's higher than the 4.3 held by Star Wars, The Shining, Casablanca, and Alien - hell, The Godfather only even has a 4.6. I don't think I've seen a 4.7. Whatever - my point is, nerds go apeshit for Sergio Leone. (Also a 4.4? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.) Even Wikipedia says, "The film is now generally acknowledged as a masterpiece and one of the greatest films ever made." High praise!

What I'm driving at here, in case you couldn't tell, is that I just don't see it. I liked this movie plenty - like to the tune of a 3.5 or maybe even a 4 - but I'm not fully understanding the "greatest western of all time" praise. What gives? Someone, please - Trev? - enlighten me! Is this one of those cases where I need to take a hard look at everything that came out prior to 1968 in order to fully appreciate what I just saw here? I mean, I won't lie, the final showdown, the payoff, is real fuckin' great. The way Ennio Morricone's score swells to this climactic crescendo before going silent, the way Bronson and Fonda stare each other down with this ridiculous tension - I get it. It's awesome. But that's ten great minutes in a two-and-a-half-hour movie. A two-and-a-half-hour movie full of silence and staring. Ambience? Sure, but man, there's a limit to how much stress you can milk out of a series of tracking shots.

It also bugs me - I'm just gonna say it - that some of the actors here are clearly speaking Italian or something else and that they've been dubbed over in English. Grinds my gears. Same thing happened with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Alright, so maybe my nitpicks are only nitpicks.

The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages

Jesus, time has a way of slipping away from you. I thought I played through Oracle of Seasons just a year ago. Nope! That was The Minish Cap. Okay then, must have been in 2015. Nope! Went Zelda-free that year. We're looking at a full two and a half years, folks. Yowza!

I've got the same complaints and faint praise for this game as I did for that one. Amazing that these were co-developed as frankly they're probably the "fullest" games on the Game Boy Color, Pokémon notwithstanding. But they're also just Game Boy Color games, which means switching between items was agonizing and the dungeons could only be so varied. I saw a set of Zelda rankings recently that had these two games tied for third on the list, and that's admittedly a head-scratcher for me. Why? How? There's nothing exceptional about these. They are eminently forgettable. Before starting Ages I had to double-check just to make sure that what I'd already played was in fact Seasons. Maybe it's easy to shrug these off in 2017, and perhaps I'd be much more impressed playing through them when they actually came out - I did already say I thought they were among the best games on their handheld, so there's that. But yeah - just nothing to love here. Three stars out of five here. That Minish Cap followed this pair just a couple of years later is astonishing, and if anything makes me like that game even more. (These, by comparison, didn't feel like a huge step up from Link's Awakening graphically or otherwise, and that game came out eight years prior.)

Oh, lastly - if I had to pick between Seasons or Ages, I'd say Ages holds the slight advantage. I liked what it did with two time periods more than I liked what Seasons did with its four environmental tweaks.

Anyway, Four Swords Adventures aside, this leaves me all caught up on Zelda games through the early days of the Wii. Why not bust out an ill-thought and very preliminary ranked list?

1. Twilight Princess - It's everything you all think you loved about Ocarina with less of the tedium and fewer design flaws and control issues.

2. The Wind Waker - Light on dungeons, but still possibly the best-looking Zelda I've played, and holy shit, nothing's like that feeling of taking to the high seas.

3. Ocarina of Time - The classic's a classic for a reason, and I loved it too, and I ain't here just to stir shit up with baldly controversial takes! I'm sure the 3DS version is even better.

4. Majora's Mask - I've come all the way around on this one; was an early adopter of the "it's actually better than Ocarina" mindset but in spite of its darker, cooler, deeper vibes it was still a pain in the ass to play. Same 3DS comment holds, though.

5. A Link to the Past - I always want to jack this one higher up my list, but there's something about it that always left me just the tiniest bit cold. Can't put my finger on it. 

6. The Minish Cap - Latecomer here, but what a beautiful fucking game! Mixes the gameplay of Link to the Past and all the other top-down games with the bigger vibe and feel of Ocarina and nails it.

7. A Link Between Worlds - Feels so much like an updated port of Link to the Past that it loses some credit for unoriginality; I actually had more pure fun with this one than anything but the top two or three, but story and memorability matter, and this lacks both.

8. Spirit Tracks - The rails were annoying but this was plenty of fun. Never had the same issues with the pan flute the rest of you seemed to struggle with.

9. Phantom Hourglass - Honestly can't distinguish between this and Spirit Tracks all that well, but I know I preferred Spirit Tracks to this one - could be the central dungeon gimmick that annoyed me a bit.

10. Oracle of Ages - See above.

11. Oracle of Seasons - Likewise.

12. Link's Awakening - Definitely the Zelda game I remember the least. That's my fault and time's fault, not its fault, but still.

13. Four Swords - Is this canon? Four Links? Whatever - made for an easy fun evening a year ago that I still remember fondly. Wait - [checks] - okay yeah, whew, only a year ago.

14. The Legend of Zelda - Iconic status in gaming history aside, we all agree that this is a nightmare to play now, right?

15. The Adventure of Link - Legitimately a mediocre game, even for its time.

Those are my takes. Come at me with yours! (Yeah, I smell a Rank & File alright.)