Okay, it turns out I forgot to post to Livejournal for exactly a year. Oops.

Real talk, I don't know what to do with this thing anymore. I started up a few tumblr blogs, and adopted a strategy of adopting a specific topic to each one. The problem is that I don't really have anything left over for LJ. I suppose I could use this space for more personal matters, but I've never had much interest in that.

Anyway, I'm not sure it matters much, since I'm pretty sure LJ's traffic has declined considerably. I'll confess to being part of the problem, but I don't think I'll be part of the solution any time soon.

That said, I don't really feel like shutting this thing down. I sort of figured some guy in Russia or that goat would take the decision out of my hands, so I never really thought about how/when/if this blog should end. So this is me kicking that can down the road.

I suppose I should give a status update, if only for recordkeeping purposes. My duties were changed at my job, so instead of doing shift work, I'm working straight days. The only catch is that I have to cover vacations and other absences, which is why I'm writing this at work at 11:45 at night.

The hours don't bother me so much, and there's a certain unpredictability to it, but that isn't bug me either, really. I think what's eating me is that I've gotten a sample of everything this job has to offer. Is this all I have to look forward to? It pays well, but at what point is that not enough? Am I already past that point and I'm unwilling to face it, or am I just looking for an excuse to walk away?

Not that I'm making any decisions right now. My personal goal has always been to make this job last as long as possible, so I'm erring on the side of caution. It's just that Year Four hasn't been quite as fufilling as I had hoped, and that makes me wonder how Year Five will play out.

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So I wrote this a little over a year ago. I'd finished a big-ass chemistry book, and I was at a crossroads on which book to read next. I've been on a mission to actually read the books that have been gathering dust on my shelf, you see.

Well, about an hour ago, I finished the last of the six, The Chemical Tree, and I'm pretty jazzed about actually completing an entire list of books I had set out to read. It shouldn't have taken this long, but one of them was a physical chemistry textbook where I resolved to work the problems and learn the material in addition to just reading, so that took a long time. And I read some other books in between, so it's not like I was idle. In all, it was like those six books, Theodore Gray's coffee table book about the periodic table, The Casual Vacancy, Death Rat!, Movie Megacheese, A Year at the Movies, and a buttload of Captain Marvel comics. Maybe some other stuff I forgot about, but that's the gist of it.

To celebrate, I'm cooking a frozen pizza and popping in a Dragon Ball Z movie. Probably Lord Slug, because the disc is still in the machine.

I suppose I held off on Chemical Tree for so long because it was so hard to read, and I attributed this to a lack of chemistry expertise. This is probably true, because I found the easiest parts to understand were the ones that covered topics I was familiar with: element discovery, the Haber-Bosch process, parts of Linus Pauling's career, the discovery of oxygen, etc. These are all things I learned about after getting the book, and there's still a lot more to research. In a way, Chemical Tree is more like an index of topics than a history of chemistry in itself. The author was so focused on condensing the material into one volume that he tends to ignore explaining the scientific principles that underlie the important discoveries. By his own admission, he assumes the reader is already up to speed on these things, which is kind of dumb, since a lot of the instrumentation, terminology, and practices of 19th Century chemistry are so obsolete that not even professional chemists would recognize them.

Put simply, a lot of chemical research is done with computers these days, and yet a lot of this book covers work done before electric lights were a thing. I have a vague idea how chemists used to figure out molecular structures, but I don't understand the techniques because I never had to use them myself, and the book doesn't offer much insight. I can research it, but that was kind of why I bought the book in the first place, and it turns out it's really a compass instead of a map. Well, at least I've finished it, so I know where to look when I'm ready to go through it again.

There's still some books to be read, but this is kind of a milestone, and I wanted to observe it. I tend to overlook accomplishments like this, to the point where I'd look back and go "Crap, I've barely read anything for the last few years." Well, I have electronic records that prove otherwise.

I watched the Rifftrax Live show last night, the one where they did "Starship Troopers". I didn't understand the movie when it first came out, and now that I've watched it, I think I understand it less.

Someone on Twitter objected to the Rifftrax treatment, since "Troopers" was supposed to be a satire to begin with. I had a hard time believing this, but I looked it up after I got back from the theater, and it turns out that the movie is a satire of the book it was based on. The novel presents this pro-military, possibly fascist society, and apparently Robert Heinlein considered this scenario to be a nice place to live. The movie is constructed to make this attitude as campy as possible. All the characters play it straight and love the world they live in, but the audience is supposed to recognize this as a farce.

This hurts the movie a lot. I haven't read the book, so I thought the movie was a faithful adaptation of Heinlein's anti-war sentiments. Now that I know better, it turns out that the novel has been criticized for being little more than a political commentary disguised as a story. The characters are little more than a mouhpiece for the author, and the plot is pretty thin without Heinlein's editorializing. Peter Verhoeven comes along and makes the movie version, but he mocks Heinlein's opinions, which means stripping out the only compelling part of the book.

What you're left with is this wafer-thin plot about an interstellar war fought by ciphers. We never find out what the enemy aliens think or feel about the war, and all of the human characters unanimously agree that the "Bugs" are an existential threat to the human species. The only real twist in the movie is when the humans are defeated in a major battle, because they naively assumed the Bugs were unintelligent. Otherwise, we know nothing about the nature of the war or the relative strengths of the opposing sides. I'm fairly sure the humans are losing, just because they refuse to give the enemy any credit, and they rely on machine guns even though the Bugs can withstand dozens of direct hits at pointblank range.

I don't know if Heinlein's politics would have improved any of this, but the movie's only message is that this is all really stupid, which isn't enough to carry the film. Ancilliary characters are routinely dismembered or killed in gruesome fashion, but when the hero sustains an enormous gash in his leg behind enemy lines, he's miraculously rescued and has his leg regenerated completely. Meanwhile all the other wounded veterans are amputees or cyborgs. When Denise Richards' starship blows up, she only has a nasty cut over her eyebrow, which is absent in the next scene. I'm pretty sure these are intentional jabs at war movie cliches, but they look just as stupid as if they were committed unironically. Neil Patrick Harris wears what looks like an SS uniform, which is supposed to hammer home the Nazi comparison, but it doesn't get reflected in the plot. How is Neil Patric Harris' character like a Nazi? There's no moment of betrayal or catharsis, where a character suddenly realizes that their society has been corrupted. Neil doesn't act differently than he did at the beginning of the film. They do horrible things to the Bugs, but we have no context for this. As far as I can tell, the primary resemblence to the Nazis is the way they overestimate their advantage over the Bugs.

This all reminds me of the latest "Tropes vs. Women in Videogames" episode. Anita Sarkesian addressed "ironic sexism", pointing out that a lot of video games will present sexist ideas as a "parody" of their prevalent use in other games. The problem is that a lot of these "parody games" are just repeating the trope, and using self-awareness of the trope to justify it as satire. "Starship Troopers" makes the same mistake. The movie assumes you recognize the tropes it's making fun of, but there's no other substance to it. They saw all these stupid elements in Heinlein's book and other science fiction/war stories, and found them so absurd that they... repeated them all over again.

Peter Veroeven also directed Robocop, and there are some similarities. Both movies present absurdist future worlds, where characters and the media take the absurdities for granted. Both use ultraviolence to parody violence in movies. Both use inane news broadcasts to provide exposition. The difference is that "Robocop" had a compelling story beneath the surface. It also had the advantage of satirizing more relevant situations. "Troopers" basically pokes fun at fascist elements from a decades-old novel. "Robocop" carries privatization to a horrifying extreme, which actually made sense to audiences living in the 1980's. The moral of "Robocop" is that OCP could claim to own the Detroit Police and Murphy's remains, but their cynical attempt to program a cyborg for justice would create the most noble lawman of all. The moral of "Troopers" is that it sucks and it knows it.

I kept expecting the movie to do something with that self-awareness, but no soap. There was an episode of Futurama that borrowed heavily from the themes of the movie, but it ended with an actual twist: Fry learns the aliens he's been fighting are the good guys, and he and his comrades have been the evil invaders all along. "Troopers" could have benefitted from something like this. Even if the characters failed to appreciate the situation, at least let the audience have that chilling feeling of a humanity beyond redemption. But no, the hero saves the girl, Neil Patrick Harris captures a strategically important Bug for experimentation, and that's it. I guess that's what passes for satire. But I'm pleased to report that the movie was still eminently riff-able, regardless.

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