Happy Thanksgiving & After

On one of the more obscure public diary sites where I hang out, I wrote, a little while ago, Some lessons & reflections on Kickstarter. It contains a little laundry list of things I think I did right and wrong during the fund-raising portion of this project. In the comment thread I had occasion to link to a little blog post I wrote some while ago, Through Keanu, Darkly, to which my friend Kellnerin replied, "You, know, that's the kind of thing you should have reposted to your Kickstarter diary." Great. Now she tells me. Also in that thread I described, to a fan of Acts of the Apostles, the kind of book I intend Creation Science to be:

I will try to make it a page-turning thriller of the "Hey, I can just imagine Keanu in the lead role!" variety. Or even, "Hey, I can imagine Matt Damon in Jason Bourne mode in the lead role" or whatever. So it will be pretty much straight-ahead.

I don't think I can totally turn off the moderny/post-moderny thing however; that's just part of who I am. But there was that kind of stuff in Acts too, and nobody even noticed it, much less complained about it.

For example, in there's a scene in Acts when Nick meets Monty & Monty tempts him which is patterned nearly line for line on the scene in Matthew where the devil tempts Jesus. I did a lot of that in Acts, but like I said, nobody even much noticed.

In my other two books, that kind of literary fancy stuff ran wild. So I'm definitely going to reign it in in Creation Science. But there will probably be some of it, somehow or other.

I'm a bit occupied with family stuff and house winterization activities at the moment, but within the next week I expect to be neck deep in writing Creation Science. I'll posting a weekly summary of activities here, and for those of you who opted for the "watch it grow" prize, please stay tuned. I'll figure out a way to make the sources secure and accessible soon & you can keep an eye the project from there. Meanwhile, here's the little story about Keanu, lifted from my blog.

Through Keanu, Darkly
I saw A Scanner Darkly the other night in a giant, un-airconditioned, run down, smelly theatre in Burlingame, California. It was affected, disaffecting, funny, intriguiing, and depressing. And that was just the theatre. Wait 'til you hear about the movie.

Well I'm an ostensibly technoparanoid guy and my little corner of Wetmachine is an ostensibly technoparanoid site, and A Scanner Darkly is a Philip K. Dick story, right? And PKD is the patron saint of technoparanoaics, right? So, naturally. . . um. . . whatever. Or in other words, ergo. . . kumquats. Hey, are those aphids crawling out of you? What was I saying? I think I was going to say something about the movie, but, I mean, what do we really know about reality, anyway? (Other than that, y'know, giant, smelly run-down theatres smell a lot smellier when the air conditioning isn't working. (I mean, they do, don't they? Don't you agree? When it's all hot and you think you're going to suffocate in a nearly empty hall the size of a NASA hangar? (And will you kindly keep those aphids to yourself?))).

So at work the next day some guys were chatting across the bullpen. Now, I work at Laszlo Systems, creators of OpenLaszlo, and the guys & gals I work with are ubergeeks. They're the sharpest software developers I've ever worked with, and I've been in this biz since 1980. Which is to say, my fellows are part of the prime target audience for cyberpunk movies, which Scanner Darkly kinda is. Not as cyberpunky as The Matrix, mind you, but moreso than "Speed", with Sandra Bullock. So they want my verdict on the film.

"Well it's got Keanu in the lede role," I starts. . .

"Ugh," says Scott.

"Keanu!" says Adam, joining the conversation from about ten yards away.

"I can't believe you're such a Keanu fan," Scott says. "You're serious about that."

"I am"

"And you studied film at Harvard."

"I did." (Adam is one of those annoying universally brilliant people. He's a world class software designer who studied film in college. Taught himself programming on the side. . .) "I think Keanu is the best actor of his generation."

I observe that since Keanu stars in every cyberpunk movie ever made, maybe it's impossible to make one that does not star him. In other words, maybe it's not just an unwritten law of Hollywood that you cannot make a cyberpunk movie that does not star Keanu Reeves. Maybe it's a fundamental property of the universe, like the speed of light or Plank's Constant or something. Adam and Scott are too busy arguing about Keanu-as-actor to take any notice of my new (and I think quite insightful) hypothesis about this fundamental property of the universe.

"He was perfect as Neo", Adam says.

"Perfect as a two-by-four" Scott says. Scott is busy writing code as we're having this conversation. He's typing a mile a minute.

Adam meanwhile stands up and puts his hand out directly in front of him, like Neo stopping the bullets. Adam is wearing Neo-style shades, natch.

I say something about Keanu being like Bogart. Bogart acted like Bogart, not like a real person in the world. Yet he often was perfect in his roles. Meanwhile Adam and Scott have changed gears and are having a mini code review by proxy. Scott is verbally serializing some data structures across the room; Adam is catching and responding.

Anyway, I liked Scanner Darkly a lot, but cannot give it an unqualified recommendation. First of all, it's about drug addiction. It's also about technoparanoia and all that other patented Philip K. Dick stuff about the nature of reality and so forth, but fundamentally it's about drug addiction, and drug addiction in this movie is presented honestly. It can be interesting to watch people's minds and lives fall apart; it can have its funny moments too. But it's really, really depressing.

Two other comments: I think the rotogravure animation was a mistake. Not a bad mistake, but a mistake. And also, Robert Downey's performance was brilliant. I'm going to see the movie again just to watch it. Some snotty reviewers -- several that I've read, actually -- have tsk-tsk'd about how over-the-top his scenery-chewing performance is. (Note to self: what are these same critics saying about Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow?). I wonder if these people have never been around anybody who's really smart and also stoned and tripping? Well, anyway, I loved Downey in this movie. And I loved Keanu too. And Winona Ryder too. Well, everybody was good in this flick.

The theatre added to the verisimilitude, but you can get nearly the same effect without it, I expect, so you can skip that part.