Revenge Is A Dish Best Served A Decade Later

When I was a kid, I was a fan of a sitcom called Silver Spoons. It didn’t make a big pop-cultural impact, so it doesn’t get the nostalgia of a contemporary like, say, Diff’rent Strokes.

It was about a single man-child father trying to raise his estranged son. I should explain that this was when man-child meant a man with a child-like nature, rather than the current definition which would evoke images of Charlie Sheen or President Trump. In today’s terms I’d describe it as a Disney Chanel show back before there was such a thing: aimed at tweens, with a silly but not entirely fantastical premise.

I think one reason I liked it was that it was kind of dorky. I mean, it was a show about a kid trying to survive junior high while also living in a house that had a giant toy train. Somehow I could relate to that better than portrayals of kids happily diving headlong into the world of the teenager.

Of course, dorky doesn’t sell. Well, it didn’t sell in the 80’s. So they introduced a new character. Again, with the wisdom of experience, I can see that they were adding a Scrappy-Doo/Poochie character: someone who had what marketing wanted, but didn’t really fit the show. In this case, it was a cool character that captured the zeitgeist.

And that character was played by Alphonso Ribero. At that time, he was a precocious young teen determined to carve out stardom as a triple-threat, even if no one actually used that term anymore. This was at the height of Michael Jackson’s career, and it really seemed like a he was being promoted as a junior version, a fact underlined in this Pepsi commercial featuring them both.

You’ve probably already figured out the ironic ending to this tale. Silver Spoons and Ribero’s early career faded into obscurity, but then he got another job in another decade. That was on Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, playing the exact opposite character. Fresh Prince would be popular enough to grab a big estate on nostalgia island, and now that’s what he’s remembered for. So now my inner ten-year-old gets some revenge: I was annoyed by Ribero at the time for being shoved in my face as the cool kid, but now he’s remembered for dorkiness. It’s another example of how pop-cultural entities may seem all-powerful and unavoidable at the time, but will end up as fallible as the rest of us in the end.

Unready Player One

My very first post on this blog was a joke about Facebook games. I mostly stayed away from them, as they felt more like psychology experiments than recreation.

Since then, I've been playing a lot of mobile games. They have some of the same qualities, since free games need to make money somehow. But fortunately, they lack that hard sell you have to keep playing and paying to cheat. But they still have a structure that is built around at least the possibility of selling things. For instance, they’ll have some sort of power-up concept, because it will be easy to sell a power-up to the gamer when they get frustrated. And that’s becoming the accepted style for free mobile games.

It's weird how games can develop their own cultures. I first noticed this in university when some of us found out there was a 3d Tetris. Thing is, it was put out by Nintendo, and they had, well, Nintendified it. In contrast to the original Tetris, which was simple and minimal. When we tried playing it, it prompted the player to choose a character. That just seemed kind of childish. Sure, for a lot of folks this was natural, because they were Nintendo fans who were introduced to the original Tetris that way. But those of us who had loved the game as a work time-waster just felt stupid.

Now I sometimes find myself experiencing a similar clash of gaming cultures. For instance, I’ve wasted many an hour playing the Cell Connect game app. It's a simple abstract puzzle game. After playing it for a while, it was updated, and they've clearly decided to make it more in the style of app and social media games. The changes aren't too intrusive, but they are confusing.

Power up cards? Um, okay. Getting 5% bonus is nice, but it's not as exciting as invulnerability or something. The second card is a raccoon, what the hell does that mean? And now I've leveled up. This isn't an RPG, so I’m not even sure what that could mean.

In short, all these changes have made gaming rather complicated. Ironically, I just came across this article from Wired in which they examine the huge popularity of Fortnite, and argue that it is surprising since it is a fairly complex game,in contrast to lowest-common-denominator games like Angry Birds or Candy Crush. But it seems to me that even games aimed at the mass market have their own complexity, but it is within a culture of its own.

Chuck Berry

You’ve probably heard that tomatoes are technically fruits. Perhaps you’ve also heard the saying that knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, but wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. And that brings up an important point: there’s a limitation to these technical classifications.

It gets much worse the more you look at these terms. Technically, a berry is “a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary.” Yes, plants have ovaries, try not to think about that right now, there are bigger things to worry about. So the following are not berries:
Strawberries, raspberries, blackberries

...but the following are:
Oranges, tomatoes, bananas, eggplants, grapes, kiwis, avocados, pumpkins, watermelons

Vegetables are plants, and so are herbs. The only difference is that herbs are just to taste, rather than a main ingredient. But basil is usually a herb, but pesto isn’t pesto without basil, so does that make it a vegetable. Or a part-time vegetable?

This is turning into one of those pedantic, meaningless, non-trivia pieces of trivial information like the names of groups of animals. I (and others) argued that if no one uses the term, then the term doesn’t really have meaning.

I’m not one of those people who insists that scientific classifications have to conform to popular ideas. (Sorry Pluto, I’m with Neil Degrase Tyson on this one.) And it’s fine when we try to put some scientific rigour behind common definitions, only to find that there are exceptions we didn’t previously think of. I will still correct you if you try to call whales or dolphins, “fish.”

But if the scientific definition turns out to have nothing at all to do with the popular definition, then it’s time to admit that we need new words. How about we define "berry" as, "sort of fruit-like, but smaller." And then the scientific concept that they're calling "berry" — even though it isn't — can be something else; I don't know, name it after a great berry scientist or something.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, #42

There will come a day when you no longer hear the traditional phone ring, as all phones — whether cell or cordless — are fully electronic. At first, they just use artificial beeps; then later they can use a recording of whatever sound the user wants to notify them of an incoming call.

And then there will come another day, about twenty years later, when you’ll hear that traditional phone ring all the time in all sorts of places, because lots of people thought it would be ironic to use a recording of the phone ring as their ringtone on their cell phones.

Check Republic

So Croatia has made it to the World Cup semi-finals. Good for them; I don’t have a connection to them, other than a Croatian community in KW, but it’s always good to see a country punch above their weight.

But watching them today, I found myself wondering: how did they come to own the checkerboard? They’ve kind of made it their thing. It’s on their uniforms — however subtly — and their flag, and their crest. They’ve decided that it is their symbol. Talk about punching above your weight: there are only so many patterns in the world, and they’ve decided to claim one of the basic ones.

I know, every country has its symbols. But a lot of the time, it’s something rare or unique. Here in Canada, we put the maple leaf on everything, but that’s something that you only get here or in the northern United States. There’s no one off in Burkina Faso who’s feeling cheated because they wanted to use it as their symbol.

It’s a wonder more countries don’t try this. Like why hasn’t anyone claimed polka dots? That might look weird, but you’d be distinctive. Surely that would be worth it to someone who doesn’t get a lot of the world’s attention. If you’re, say, Paraguay, you might figure it would be worth it to look a little ridiculous if it means that people think of you when they see polka dots.

I guess a few countries have just grabbed basic things as their symbol. Like Japan has taken the sun. Yes, there are lots of other countries that have the sun on their flag, but Japan just took it as their whole national identity. We’re the land of the rising sun. Yes, we know the sun rises everywhere, but we’re just going to put in on our flag and make it our nickname.

Now that I think about this, it could work. There are about 200 independent countries in the world, so I’m sure you could find 200 basic patterns and common elements that everyone could find one. Sure, Croatia acted first and grabbed checkerboards, but someone else can have lines. Okay, that’s too much like stripes, and everyone has stripes. How about wavy lines? Laos, do you want wavy lines? Papua New Guinea, you can have dotted-lines.

And someone could take clouds. They don’t have the life-giving worship-inspiring importance of the sun, but they are pretty universal. They could be like, we’re Estonia, and we’re the land of clouds. We re-drew the flag with a cloud on it, so now, when you look into the sky, you’ll think of us. Or Japan, depends what kind of day it is.

Where I’m Coming From

Just before the World Cup started, I was trying to make small-talk, and mentioned that I have an English background, so that will explain why I may be in a bad mood for the next month. Bringing up that topic, I had assumed that others would chime in with their own reasons for cheering for a particular country. This being KW, I would expect that several people would smugly announce German heritage. Possibly one or two would just burst into tears, and I would assume they are Italian.

But instead, everyone seemed unsure. Rather than proudly state the allegiance, they were non-committal. People would say, yeah, I guess I have English roots so I could shout for them.

To be clear, I wasn’t expecting that everyone would be a fanatic for the source of their DNA. But I did expect that there was an understanding that in sports, particularly out-of-the-ordinary events, you pick someone to cheer for, and put on the die-hard fan act. Getting behind the home of your maternal grandfather for a month fits the bill. But no one I talked to looked at it that way. Having temporary allegiance to a country you have a flimsy connection to is a, well, a foreign concept.

Ethnicity is a weird thing here in Canada. You’ve got some people who are wrapped up in their family’s country of origin. But others have been here for generations, and don’t think of themselves as having any connection to other lands. I first noticed this in school when we were given an assignment to find out about our personal heritage. We had to list an ethnicity for each of our four grandparents. For me, the assignment was trivial: I just wrote “England” four times and handed the paper in.

Of course, I realized that most Canadians have a more diverse background. But I hadn’t realized that it would be much more difficult for others. The teacher had to encourage the students to ask around their families. He also had to explain — like he’d been through this before — that you can’t just write down “Canadian,” however far you have to go back to find something else.

I get the same sense watching all these commercials for genealogy services and genetic testing. They promote it as discovering your roots, with examples of people who have no idea what their heritage is. Sure, I had been shown that young kids were often pretty clueless about their origins, but I had naively assumed that by the time people got to adulthood, they had been filled in on their ethnic background. But apparently it’s enough of a mystery that people will pay good money to find out.

Of course, there’s a flip side to this: many people who take their heritage as a major part of their personal definition, often to the point of displacing their Canadian identity. Again, soccer is a place where we often see this. For years we’ve seen national flags on car windows during every World Cup. This year, I noticed that a kiosk in a mall was also selling hood flags. That is, a flag that wraps across the hood of your car, so you can show your allegiance even more forcefully, with the added benefit of not compromising your aerodynamics. I wasn’t sure if this idea would take off, but I’ve been seeing more of them over the course of the World Cup.

Canada’s national soccer teams — at least on the men’s side — are notorious for having difficulty getting home teams to cheer for them. Fans often cheer for the team of their ethnic origins, rather than the country they’re currently living in. That’s a situation that’s been debated to death in the past, so I won’t do it here. Instead, I’ll just point out how this illustrates Canadians’ diverse ways of dealing with ethnic affiliations. Some of us have completely lost touch with our roots, while others hold onto them no matter what.

I’m not sure what this means, or where it’s going to go in the future. I feel like Canada’s sense of identity is slowly getting stronger, despite the persistence of strong connections to other countries. Clearly it’s more complex than I had assumed.

Good Whill Hunting

In a recent interview, George Lucas revealed some of his plans for the third Star Wars trilogy, had he been the one to make it. He didn't make it, of course, having sold the franchise to Disney. And after hearing his plans, people are thinking that’s a good thing.

He revealed that the third trilogy would have gone into the microscopic world, looking more in depth at the midi-chlorians that no one liked from The Phantom Menace. He would have introduced another bunch of microbes, the Whills, who really control The Force and the universe.

At this point, I have to say that I’m not entirely sure that Lucas is being honest with us. Part of me believes that either:

1. He’s so tired of people criticizing the prequel trilogy that he’s trolling us by taking what people didn’t like about them and then expanding on that. If we discover that one of the Whills is a whiny teenager having an unconvincing romance with an older Whill royal, then you’ll know I’m right.
2. Like any decent Star Wars fan, he’s alarmed by the bigoted criticism the new trilogy is getting, so he’s running interference by putting out truly bad ideas for how it might have gone. Racist “fans” will be quicker to accept non-white-male stars when they realize that they could have gotten microbe stars.

But assuming that Lucas’ ideas were genuine, this stands as the most extreme example of a principle I heard once about why sci-fi/fantasy franchises often disappoint over time: that the creators probably have different ideas of what the story is about than the fans do. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who said that, but I think it was someone on a Battlestar Galactica after-show. That was another show that deviated from expectations as it went along. It became a convoluted origin story for the human race, rather than the parable of post-9/11 America that attracted many fans.

The midi-chlorians were a good example of this. It struck a false note with fans because:

1. The concept of The Force had seemed like a statement of mind over matter. The idea that great power could come from patience and understanding was an inspiring meek-shall-inherit-the-galaxy idea. The 98-pound weakling could watch the movies to escape from a world where he gets beat up by the school bully. But by introducing the midi-chlorians, it made it seem like just another genetic lottery. Now the 98-pound weakling realizes that in the movies’ universe, he’d just end up getting force-choked by the school bully.
2. Although Star Wars has always played fast and loose with science, at least it avoided using technobable as an cop-out story device, unlike a certain other Sci-Fi franchise.

Supposedly Lucas had the midi-chlorians in mind right from the start, so he perhaps didn't realize that the fans were building up a different mental image of the story's world than he had.

Ironically, another example of this is the aforementioned bigot fan contingent. A variety of incidents have exposed the fact that there are a lot of alt-right crossover in the sci-fi community. That’s a surprise to many, since Star Wars and Star Trek have, in their own way, made morality into a key ingredient. How that could possibly be compatible with tormenting a person for being of a different race is a mystery to most of us. And yet, these folks evidently have a great deal of passion for a franchise, despite not sharing some of its key values.

I guess you could make the argument that we all pick and choose what we want from a media property. After all, a lot of people are fans of Star Wars without being a fan of, you know, wars. We can absorb the story’s themes while glossing over the message that comes from the movies’ action, perhaps because action and violence are so ubiquitous in our media. There’s a similar concept in video games called Ludonarrative Dissonance, which is when the gameplay and the story have different messages, such as a violent game that tries to have a pro-peace moral. And I guess this can be a solution to my long-standing question of why far-right politicians often listen to music with a liberal message. Lefty lyrics often come with aggressive delivery, so you might well absorb one while ignoring the other.

That’s not to say that everyone has a right to get what they want out of our favourite media. We simply can’t all expect to get something out of it when we each see such different things in it. And if your experience is very different from either the creator or the rest of the audience, then you’ll be disappointed.