The Secret Lair

• What if Ian McKellan were The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air? [Video]
• We want to see War of the Worlds: Goliath. Now. [Video]
• PulpFest is July 30 – August 01, 2010 in Columbus, Ohio.
• Captain Kirk is climbing a mountain. Why is he climbing a mountain? [Video]
• We cannot imagine the string of events that would lead up to the image below, but we’d love for someone to tell us just how Batman came to possess a lightsaber (one that works underwater, no less).
  

In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer.
— Buffy the Vampire Slayer, intro voiceover.

…one girl in all the world…
— Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), explaining Slayers to Xander and Willow and somehow not breaking into song.

When people ask me why I’m watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer now, thirteen years after the series originally aired, I say it’s because I want to retain some Geek Cred amongst Whedonites, but really I’m just tired of not “getting it” when my friends compare me to Xander.

Episode 102: “The Harvest”
Original Air Date: 10 March 1997

When last we left our Slayer-in-denial, she was on the losing end of a fight with Luke (Brian Thompson), apparent leader of the vampire clan¹ attempting to raise The Master from torpor or whatever long nap vampires take in the Buffyverse, and that’s just where we find our hapless heroine at the beginning of episode two. Luke’s got Buffy at a distinct disadvantage: she’s in a sarcophagus with a skeleton and he’s looming over her, all ferocity and fangs and facial appliances, and…ACTION!

Buffy is spared an untimely demise by her cross pendant,² which is revealed in her struggles with Luke and sends the vampire running for the Neosporin.

Buffy exits the mausoleum just in time to save Willow and Xander from more vampires. Unfortunately, she’s batting a less-than-stellar .333³ and only one of the trio of bloodsuckers gets staked. To make matters worse, Jesse seems to have been abducted by Darla, The Little Blonde Vampire.⁴ Cue theme music, roll opening credits.

Regrouping at (where else?) the high school library, Willow and Xander get a little lesson in the history of the Earth⁵ and how vampires came to be. Thankfully, the whole “vampirism-as-blood-disease” bit wasn’t in vogue back in ’97, so Whedon’s vamps are the good old supernatural kind, born when the last demon left the Earth eons ago. Xander comes across like Joey Tribbiani in this scene, something I’m really hoping he grows out of in the near future; preferably right around the next episode.

Meanwhile, in the Hall of Justice beneath the cemetery, Jesse’s in a bit of a tight spot. Darla and Luke⁶ offer Xander’s best bud to The Master⁷ as a sort of warm-blooded petit four. Unfortunately, Darla’s had a taste of what Jesse has to offer and The Master isn’t interested in sloppy seconds. In fact, he’s downright torqued; “three score years” of waiting in a hole haven’t left him particularly cheery. Darla is saved from The Master’s wrath by the revelation that the rest of his intended victuals were saved by a girl who just might be a Slayer.

Giles recruits Willow to help him research The Harvest and Xander mopes around feeling useless and inadequate while Buffy sets off to save Jesse. Principal Flutie isn’t at all keen on Sunnyvale’s newest student skipping class and leaving school grounds on her second day, so he locks the campus gate.⁸ Not a problem for the superhuman Slayer; Buffy just leaps over the gate and scampers off to the cemetery, where she has an encounter with the Mysterious Stranger (David Boreanaz). Mr. Stranger introduces himself as Angel and tries to talk Buffy out of walking into the vampires’ lair. When it’s clear she’s going in anyway, he provides some directions and then offers to come along and help her rescue Jesse. Well, except for the whole “offers to come along and help” bit. I don’t know if Angel is a vampire⁹ but he knows an awful lot about the bloodsuckers. Maybe he’s the vampiric analog of Casper the Friendly Ghost or something.

Naturally, Buffy soon learns that Xander has followed her¹⁰ but there’s no point in trying to talk him out of helping, because Xander is in full-on Bros Before Hos mode and it’ll take more than one Slayer to turn him back. Either that or Buffy has a soft spot for Joey Tribbiani wannabes. In any case, they stumble across Jesse, chained to the wall, who tells them that he’s been left as bait. Buffy super-strengths Jesse’s leg iron and then bait boy leads them right into a dead end, where he reveals that he’s been…dun-dun-DUNNNNNN…turned!

Buffy throws Jesse at the approaching mob of vampires and she and Xander escape through a grate in the ceiling. They rejoin Willow and Giles, who have dug up the straight skinny on The Harvest, and it ain’t pretty. The short version: The Master is stuck in a hole between dimensions and tonight happens to be his once-in-a-century opportunity to not only get unstuck, but to unleash all kinds of bad on Sunnyvale. That’s what you get for moving to a Hellmouth.

The Master performs a ceremony¹¹ to make Luke his Vessel, then sends Ye Vampirick Container out to get filled to the brim with blood. Did I mention that vampires love nightclubs? Because they do; everybody knows it. Luke and his long-toothed posse head to The Bronze¹² and the Vessel starts to chow down on the locals. Buffy and crew show up just in time for the showdown. Willow douses Darla with holy water, Xander (accidentally) stakes Jesse, and Buffy dispatches Luke. Giles…well, Giles watches. Because he’s a Watcher.¹³

The meddling kids have won the day, but Giles cautions that The Master will likely try again, and there will be other supernatural terrors to deal with as well. That’s what you get for moving to a Hellmouth.

The second episode is about on par with the first. My major complaint (apart from some rather stilted dialog) is the awkward fight sequences. Action Sarah Michelle Gellar isn’t terribly convincing, and anytime the shot switched from Flipping Buffy or Spin-kick Buffy to Fighting Stance Buffy I felt like I was watching one of the Naked Gun movies, with Leslie Nielsen’s obvious stunt double leaping behind a couch and Leslie popping up a half-second later. Still, I’m entertained; I’ll give the second episode a solid three cross pendants out of five, and you can expect a recap of the third episode next week.

1. Surely we can come up with a better name for a group of vampires than “clan”. Crows have an infinitely cooler group name than vampires, and that’s just sad. Alas, “a murder of vampires” isn’t terribly catchy, nor does it get at the meat of the matter. Perhaps “a vein of vampires”. [↩]
2. As regards the cross pendant, I’m compelled to digress for a moment to address a common misconception: a cross is not a crucifix. A crucifix is a cross with Jesus Christ nailed to it. The word “crucifix” literally means “fixed to a cross”; without the crucified, there’s no crucifixion and, thus, it’s not a crucifix. In this instance, Buffy is saved by a cross pendant, while I am being a crucifix pedant. [↩]
3. Great for baseball, not so much for vampire slaying. [↩]
4. Julie Benz, featured more recently in Showtime’s Dexter. [↩]
5. Millions of years ago, the earth was a molten mass… [↩]
6. …up in a tree, S-U-C-K-I-N-G… [↩]
7. Octomus? [↩]
8. Perfectly legal, right? [↩]
9. If he is, I’d like to know how the hell he manages to get in and out of the mausoleum in broad daylight; the door leading into the lair is chained and locked, which leaves only the front entrance. [↩]
10. Did he leap over the campus gate, too? Worst. Gate. Ever. [↩]
11. Light as a feather, stiff as a board. Light as a feather, stiff as a board… [↩]
12. It’s Ladies’ Night. [↩]
13. But not the creepy, hanging around in the hedge outside your bedroom window kind. [↩]

That shrieking, agonizing wail you just heard was all the clocks at The Secret Lair springing forward. We are now free from the vile grip of Daylight Saving Time, but at what cost? All this bouncing around backward and forward in time takes a heavy toll on mind, body and soul. Not to mention minions. The clocks in the Lair are all perfectly synchronized, but synchronizing with an atomic clock is terribly pedestrian. Cesium atoms may have been fine for 1955 but this is the twenty-first century, and we have standards. We also have a tachyon transference array that may or may not be of extraterrestrial origin. This gives us heretofore-unprecedented chronometric accuracy…so long as you never change the clocks. And so, twice a year, we cross our fingers and hope that the temporal slingshot effect won’t send all or part of the Lair hurtling anywhere from a few seconds to a few thousand years past the mark as we spring forward and fall back. If you’re reading this in the spring of 2010, it means we’ve survived another time change more or less intact, and it’s time for another gripping and informative episode of The Secret Lair.

St Urho’s Day is a celebration of a fictional fellow who drove all of the grasshoppers out of Finland. From Wikipedia:

The legend of St. Urho was the invention of a Finnish-American named Richard Mattson, who worked at Ketola’s Department Store in Virginia, Minnesota in spring of 1956. Mattson later recounted that he invented St. Urho when he was questioned by coworker Gene McCavic about the Finns’ lack of a saint like the Irish St. Patrick, whose feat of casting the snakes out of Ireland is remembered on St. Patrick’s Day. In fact, the patron saint of Finland is Henry (Bishop of Finland).

Promo: The Command Line podcast.

Discussion: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross

• The Atrocity Archives is the first book in Charles Stross’ Laundry series; it contains two stories: “The Atrocity Archive” and “The Concrete Jungle”. The second novel in the series is The Jennifer Morgue. The third novel, The Fuller Memorandum, will be released later this year.
• Overlord Johnson really enjoyed Glasshouse and Saturn’s Children, but felt that The Atrocity Archives was essentially a pulp novel that explains too much.
• Overlord Miller recently reviewed Halting State and is currently reading Iron Sunrise. He classifies The Atrocity Archives as “hacker pulp”.
• Our friend Gus has a review of the audio edition of The Atrocity Archives on his blog.
• The Atrocity Archives may not be the best introduction to Stross; the Overlords recommended checking out some of his non-Laundry novels first.

Promo: Kronos by Jeremy Robinson.

Lairkeeping

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• On our next episode: A special preview of Project Truth from Evil Overlord Games.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:55 — 28.3MB)

Magnatune, the online music label sporting the tagline “We Are Not Evil,” announced this week that their all-you-can-eat membership program has been so successful that they are shifting their business model to take advantage of it. For $15 a month¹, you can download as much music as you like from the service.

From founder John Buckman’s blog:

Why the change? Simply put: membership today accounts for 74% of our revenue. Over the past two years our album download sales have declined while the unlimited downloads memberships have grown.

The two graphs below spell out a clear message from our customers:

We don’t want to buy your downloadable albums one at a time, we want unlimited access. And we’re willing to pay.

  

You can see that download revenue has decreased in both relative and absolute terms. In contrast, revenue from memberships has grown 80% in the past year alone. I don’t know of any other long-lived Internet music services that are experiencing our kind of revenue growth.

Magnatune was founded in the spring of 2003 with the goal of being a music label that treated both the artist and the audience fairly; often the label is referred to as a “pioneer in the fair trade music movement.”  Users are able to stream and sample the music on the site before buying, and in recent years, Magnatune has become a the friendlier replacement for the iTunes Music store in Linux-based music players like Rhythmbox.

Magnatune was also one of the first commercial companies to make use of Creative Commons licensing, and is credited with helping the CC movement take hold.  They make non-exclusive agreements with their artists, and gives them fifty percent of the proceed from the online sale of their work. Sound familiar?  One of the inspirations for Podiobooks.com (founded in 2005) was Magnatune.

For the last several years, Magnatune has offered the work of artists using a “name-your-price” model, where the buyer could specify how much they wanted to pay for an album. The customer could order the music on CD, or via download of high-quality mp3 or .wav files.  With this change, they are ending the name-your-price concept (all albums will be a fixed $12 for non-members) and the CD distribution.

Below: Music from the game Braid, which was licensed from Magnatune:

Music from Braid by Sieber, Kammen, Fulton and Schatz

1. less if you buy time in bulk [↩]

• Surely we can come up with a better name for underwater skyscrapers.
• The Periodic Table of Sci-Fi Film and Television.
• If you own a portable MP3 player and you’re tired of the manufacturer’s firmware, you might try Rockbox, the open source jukebox firmware.
• We fully intend to utilize Cajun Crawler technology in our next-generation multi-terrain assault vehicles.
• Finally, we are very curious about Sea Bear & Grizzly Shark, if only because we’re always on the lookout for Lair guardians.
  

Confession time: Until last night, I’d never seen a single episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’m pretty sure I saw the movie once upon a yesterday (I vaguely remember Rutger Hauer being in it), but the television series came and went and had absolutely no impact on my life. The name “Joss Whedon” wasn’t part of my entertainment vocabulary until some folks in the geeky Internet circles I frequent began wailing about Firefly (another Whedon show I wasn’t watching) being canceled. In some respects, I’ve led a very sheltered life.

Despite enjoying Firefly after a friend loaned me the DVD box set (the same friend who got me into a preview screening of Serenity), I wouldn’t call myself a die-hard Whedon fan. I liked Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, to be sure, but I didn’t bother with Dollhouse (except to poke a little fun at it). My only regret in being largely ambivalent about Whedon’s body of creative work is the gap in my pop culture encyclopedia between 1997 and 2003, a time I spent focused on my Prime Geek Passion, Star Wars.

Thanks to Overlord Miller I have an opportunity (in the form of the first several seasons on DVD) to begin closing that particular gap, so last night I took my first step into the Buffyverse.

Episode 101: “Welcome to the Hellmouth” (Original Air Date: 10 March 1997)

We open with a couple breaking in to the high school, presumably for a little romantic interlude. What does it say about a guy who thinks the ideal place to put the moves on his new lady-friend is anywhere in his old high school? I think what happens next may be Darwinism in action: the timid girl turns out to be a vampire and dispatches Mr. High School Hookup with all haste. Guys, you may have been the cock-of-the-walk in your Senior year, but once you’ve got that diploma the more you linger at the old alma mater, the more you look like a creepy skeeze. Unless you work there. Maybe.

Now that the bloodsucking has begun, it’s time to meet our heroine. Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) wakes from a nightmarish series of vampire-related images to face another nightmare: her first day at a new school. This works about how you’d expect it to: Buffy’s arrival at Sunnydale High causes distraction leading to skateboard chaos; Buffy meets with the principal who reveals hints of her unusual past; Buffy meets the cool, popular girl (Claudia, played by Charisma Carpenter. OMG, total bitch!) who advises her to stay away from the geeky, awkward girl (Willow, played by Alyson Hannigan. OMG, cute nerd!) if she values her social standing; Buffy meets the geeky guy (Xander; Nicholas Brendon) and the even-geekier guy (Jesse; Eric Balfour); Buffy meets the librarian (Rupert; Anthony Stewart Head), who turns out to be a Watcher;¹ Buffy meets the corpse of Mr. High School Hookup, who turns out to be a vampire snack.

Evil’s afoot in Sunnydale, but Buffy wants nothing to do with it; she’s done killing bloodsuckers. In the library, she tells Rupert as much (unwittingly revealing herself as a vampire hunter to Xander in the process), but the Watcher isn’t buying it: Buffy’s the Slayer, after all; it’s her destiny to destroy the various forces of evil. Am not! Are too! Am not! Whatever!

Meanwhile, the vampires are busy trying to raise The Master,² who is probably some sort of über-vampyre.³ Anytime you’ve got to jump through supernatural hoops to summon a master vampire, you can be sure of one things: he’s gonna have the munchies, the kind not even Snickers will satisfy.

After a rather trying first day, Buffy heads out for a night of clubbing.⁴ On her way, she encounters a Mysterious Stranger (David Boreanaz), who warns her that she needs to be ready for…The Harvest.⁵ Buffy isn’t interested in ominous warnings, she just wants to get her swerve on, so into the club she goes.

If I’ve learned anything from the Blade movies, it’s this: vampires love nightclubs. Maybe this wasn’t the case in the late twentieth century, but here in the twenty-first you can’t wave a crucifix on a dance floor without hitting an undead abomination. Long story short: Willow leaves the club with a vampire, but not before Buffy’s bloodsucker-sense starts tingling. Buffy (and Xander) follow Willow and her new friend to (where else?) the cemetery, where the vampires are making ready to turn the cute, nerdy girl into The Master’s Resuscitation Supper. Buffy arrives in the nick of time, staking the prettyboy vamp, but getting the fluff kicked out of her by Luke (perennial baddie Brian Thompson), and then…TO BE CONTINUED!

Yes, the first episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a cliffhanger. The nerdy girl has escaped, but our heroine is in Dire Peril! How will she ever escape the clutches of Sunnydale’s remarkably robust vampire population? Tune in next time!

“Welcome to the Hellmouth” is a decent beginning. The vampires are a bit too reminiscent of The Lost Boys for my liking (Brian Thompson looks downright uncomfortable with all those prosthetics pasted to his face), but other than that I have no real complaints. I’d say Buffy’s television debut rates a solid three and a half out of five stakes to the ventricle.

1. Uatu? [↩]
2. Derek Jacobi? [↩]
3. nosferatus maximus [↩]
4. A school night! Madness! [↩]
5. Whole grain bread for everyone! [↩]

(New to the series? Start with Episode 1)

The dead girl was still on the bench when her assassin opened the door. He tucked the pick into a slot in his vest and looked around. A tattered, faded tapestry, the girl, a low wooden bench; these were all the tower presented to an incoming visitor.

The tower lied; it insinuated something which the unobservant might allow to pass, but the assassin was no fool. He’d seen this trick before. And now he was curious about what lay up the stair that hugged the inner wall.  He checked to be sure the girl was actually dead; she was, and he could collect his fee.  Satisfied, he climbed the stairwell.

The study at the top of the stair was a series of wonders. A desk made of a wood that was not native to the Duke’s realm. Books written in a language he had never seen before. Costumes. Shoes made of something that was not leather with soles that were not the hide of any beast he’d ever seen. Cloaks with sleeves and metal fasteners whose teeth would mesh for a secure seal with the pull of a metal tab. Odd. Wonderful. Possibly lucrative.

What were these two? Wizards?  Priests?  Some odd sort of tinkers?  He could not tell.   He did know that certain nobles would pay well for something novel, something unique. He crossed the room to the desk and opened drawers, looking through for anything that might sell for a decent price.  He found a long silver metal tube which shed light when a button was pressed…that was tucked into his belt, along with four short tubes which wrote like quills but needed no liquid ink.  Walked over to the bookcase and pulled down a good-sized tome and tucked it under an arm. He grimaced, wishing he had more time to explore the room.   He crossed back to the desk and ducked down to look beneath it. He straightened, smiling. Pulled out a small chest with a brass handle, hinged and locked. He spent a moment trying to pull one of the four small drawers open but to no avail. He sighed and, lifting the small chest by the handle, he hurried back downstairs.

It was tricky, but the assassin managed by the end to hoist the dead girl over one shoulder, carry the book under one arm, and hold the chest by the handle. He fled the tower, leaving the front door hanging ajar, already mentally counting the coin he would gain from this single job. It was a good day, a very good day indeed.

• In our experience, there’s just no way a yeti would defeat a griffin.
• If you can read this: get me a sandwich.
• A five-seven-five-hour tour.
• “I sold my (2009) NaNoWriMo novel!”
• Foomp! There it is.
• Overlord Miller is getting his remake of The Rockford Files. But who’s playing Jim Rockford? It’s not Alan Tudyk (Firefly), he’s playing Rockford’s cop buddy, Det. Dennis Becker.
• Last but not least, Overlord Johnson would love one of these Iron Man MacBook decals, but unfortunately they’re currently sold out.
  

Ah, the future. I remember it well: spaceships and rayguns, hovercars and one-piece silver jumpsuits. And robots. Robots that mow your space grass and bring you the space paper while you relax in your space lounge with a nice space bourbon on the rocks. Robots that cook and clean and do all of the shopping and other errands that humanity finds so dreadfully tiresome. Robots that could turn their death rays and crushing titanium-alloy pincers upon their masters at the drop of a circuit, eliminating the entire human race in a years-long mechanical uprising.

Fortunately, Isaac Asimov had the good sense to anticipate the rise of the machines (well before the idea was a glimmer in James Cameron’s bearded eye) and take steps to prevent it. Three steps; or, more accurately, Three Laws:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Thanks to Asimov’s foresight, human beings are safe from intelligent machines wholly capable of squashing us like four-limbed, Abercrombie and Fitch-wearing insects. The Three Laws ensure that robots will remain subservient and, if one subscribes to a particularly broad definition of what constitutes “harm” to a human being, that our space bourbon will never be watered down.

Alas, though Asimov ensured that humanity would never be threatened by robots, no number of cleverly-constructed logical conditions could possibily save us from ourselves. Ultimately, we need not fear that our mechanical constructs will bring about our destruction, for humans have an uncanny knack for destroying ourselves and we will, one day, bring about our own extinction. And what will the robots, designed to serve and protect human beings, do when human beings are no more? That’s the major premise of Charles Stross’ Saturn’s Children.¹

Freya Nakamichi-47 is a humanoid (or, as Asimov would have said, humaniform) robot² who lives in a universe completely devoid of human beings. This is particularly troublesome for Freya, who is hardwired to not only serve humans, but to love them (and love them, if you know what I mean). What’s a sexbot to do when her “True Love” died out a year before she was brought on-line?

Unfortunately for Freya, not all robots in Stross’ futureverse are created equal. As an arbeiter (or worker), Freya is of a lower class than the aristos, robots who were created so humans wouldn’t have to deal with the tedious business of telling the arbeiters what to do. In other words, aristos are robots who boss around other robots; and in the absence of human beings at the reins, the aristos have established a caste society in which arbeiters are treated as second-class citizens at best and slaves at worst.

Even more unfortunately for Freya, she manages to earn the wrath of a particularly nasty aristo on on Venus and finds herself in an awkward position: if she stays on Venus, she’ll almost certainly be killed, but the cost of leaving the planet is well beyond her limited means. To make matters worse, one of Freya’s sisters sends her a message urging her to come to Mars.³ Nearly broke and desperate to leave Venus, Freya accepts a job on (and free passage to) Mars, and so begins her intrastellar journey.

Aside: I’m taking some artistic license with the word “intrastellar” as (1) it doesn’t seem to be a proper word just now and (2) if were a proper word, the strict definition would likely be “within a star”. In Stross’ future, there is no faster-than-light travel, and though Freya spends the better part of a decade aboard one space vessel or another, she does not travel outside of the solar system. As such, I am using ”intrastellar” to mean “within a star system”. There are several ways in which you can express your righteous indignation at my mistreatment (or perhaps downright abuse) of the English language, the most immediate and simplest of which is to leave a comment on this blog entry. I do not recommend rioting.

Space travel, Freya insists, is shit. Stross uses Freya’s intrasteller travels to emphasize just how ill-suited human beings are (or were) for interplanetary exploration, especially when FTL travel is not an option. Our bodies simply are not designed to withstand the various forces involved in moving mass from one planet to another, even within the confines of a single star system. Nor are we long-lived enough to make the trip worthwhile; Freya spends months and even years at a stretch aboard space ships, sometimes free to move about as one might on an ocean-going cruise ship, sometimes crammed into what amounts to little more than a shipping container.⁴

Humans may not have been cut out for colonizing the solar system and the stars beyond, but that didn’t stop them from sending their faithful robots out with that very intent, and so there are cities on Mars and Venus, on Jupiter and Eris and even tiny Pluto—cities occupied and maintained entirely by robots of various form factors who continue on with their chores though their creators died decades ago without taking more than a few baby steps toward the stars. The more of these extraterrestrial cities Freya visits, the more she learns just what the robots have been up to in the absence of their masters, and the answer isn’t what you might expect.

Saturn’s Children is a fun romp (in every sense of the word) around the solar system, but Stross explores more than just a handful of planets (and dwarf planets); he also delves into questions of identity, creation, and evolution. His robots flip some notions we take for granted upside-down and show that the nature of mythology is entirely subject to perspective. Recommended.

1. Known in these parts as “the one with the cleavage on the cover”. [↩]
2. In Stross’ universe, the term “robot” is actually derogatory. [↩]
3. Freya’s sisters are all gynoids who—like Freya herself—are essentially copies of the same original. Several of Freya’s sisters have died, and she carries a box containing their “soul chips”, which she can use to access their memories and experiences. [↩]
4. Despite having no humans upon which to exercise her considerable carnal talents, Freya manages to make with the busy-getting on a shockingly regular basis. Machines, humaniform and otherwise, are ever eager for a good bonk, and Stross does not shy away from explorations into Freya’s primary function. Sex, as it happens, is an excellent way to pass the time on those long, interplanetary trips—or even just the jaunt from planetside into orbit. [↩]