I finally watched Prometheus.

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It was a sub-optimal viewing, as in order to convince my son that he didn’t want to watch it, I had to let him watch part of it. Not every movie with spaceships is Transformers, but he won’t believe me. Fortunately, the movie was just enough like a real movie that I could tell when shit was going to go down, and got him out of the room just before it did.

I probably need to watch it again, but I am going to start a stream-of-consciousness critique, which I may or may not edit before posting. In fact, I probably should edit, because I’m going to need to separate my indulgences in lit-crit goofiness like “Prometheus as a retelling of The Wizard of Oz,” “Each character in Prometheus mapped to a Famous Sacrifice,” and “Why there weren’t Prometheus Happy Meal toys.” from the real analysis. Also I think the movie might map to the Major Arcana.

The TL;DR version: It fails as a cinematic narrative in much the same way Finnegan’s Wake fails as a literary narrative. It’s obviously a philosophical mythopoeic work, but it’s a crappy science-fiction movie. Of course, no one’s tried to make The Golden Bough or The White Goddess into a movie before, I don’t think.

The long version, with spoilers:

It was GORGEOUS. I agree with those who say that it was as much a Blade Runner prequel/sequel as an Alien prequel…and I think the Kubrick discussion isn’t far off either. In fact on some levels it can be read as a response to Kubrick.

I had no idea Ridley was a pastafarian, but it does seem to be an argument for the Flying Spaghetti Monster and His Noodley Appendage.

I don’t think I’ve seen that many penises and vaginas in a movie since Caligula.

There are a TON of references in this film to other works of art, most of which you should pick up on (Lovecraft, 2001, Yeats, both Shelleys, etc.) That might be a post in itself, if no one’s done it. I’ll add two that didn’t inform the film, but which are related:

The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson
The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi by Pat Cadigan

Ultimately I think Scott (and his writers) are too mired in Christianity as a base state to really work with their theme well, and while Alien was held up as a feminist touchstone, this movie reminds us that that was totally accidental. I wish that instead of trying to revisit Ripley and have a Final Girl, they’d just gone ahead and made David the main character that he so clearly was, thereby stitching Alien and Blade Runner even more closely together and really underscoring Scott’s career question “What does it mean to be human?”

Bit by bit:

1. The opening. All the reviews I read prior to seeing it seemed to indicate that hyper-muscled bald dude was CREATING life on EARTH. Sure, it looks a lot like the uber-myth of the god-king being sacrificed willingly to create life. I concur that the myth is present, but I don’t think he was creating life…based on the story, I think he was destroying a human-like life (maybe humans on Earth, maybe humanish on Earthish) in favor of tentacle life. I’m not sure any of the myths say that the king took out the dominant life-form with him at the end of his term and replaced it with cephalopods, so I think this scene is best understood on two levels – it gives us the symbolic basis for the film (sacrifice of self to create and destroy) and it gives us the story resolution (the Engineers are editing their work).

2. The anthropologists. Looking forward and looking back. Mostly this introductory scene seems designed to call back to the intro via the landscape and foreshadow the exploration of the Engineers WMD base via the chipping into an underground cavern and reading the art.

3. Suddenly we’re on a space ship. Massive narrative disconnect for all audience members; this isn’t how stories are told. Why is David being a creepy memory-Peeping Tom on Shaw out of all of them? Mostly her memories tell us she’s Christian by choice not by default, that she married a guy who looks like her father, and that this movie is still about death and belief. Also that David’s a creepy bastard.

4. David. Nice Michaelangelo shout-out in the name. Also an interesting flip in revealing the Replicant on the crew right away. Might as well call him a Replicant even tho they call him a robot in the movie. If Holloway had ever called him a skin job I would’ve been very happy not only for the BR nod but it would’ve helped explain why David chose to slip Holloway a mickey.

Oh. Crap. David’s in love with Shaw. That’s the only explanation for his actions in watching Shaw TV and impregnating her via Holloway while removing Holloway. That’s lame.

Totally awesome that David resonates with Lawrence of Arabia. I had to have the hair-bleaching scene explained to me. David’s identification with movie Lawrence explains his motivations later, so this works. Plus it introduces the B theme, “Who’s the alien here?”

Nice “Hello David” HAL nod from the language teacher.

5. Wake up and meet the crew. Shaw has morning sickness already? Otherwise why is she the only one barfing? Does cryosleep interact badly with Christianity? (Many jokes possible about that). Vickers does push-ups before cleaning off the after-birth, so she’s “more human than human?” LIFE and WET are clearly associated symbols in this movie.

As in all of human myth, so OK.

It would’ve been nice if we actually, you know, MET THE CREW during this “meet the crew” scene. I never figured out who anyone was except Idris Elba and the anthropologists and Vickers. But then, I didn’t care either. I miss Harry Dean Stanton. Too bad I’m spoiled for Vickers’ identity, because I bet we were supposed to think she’s a Replicant also…oh, no, she’s TRYING to be one to please the old man. Who is, quite obviously, her father. And has bought out Tyrell Corp and moved into Tyrell’s offices, apparently.

I guess Vickers picked some of them? Which ones? Why not all? Who picked the others? Did David hire them from craigslist? WHAT IS HER JOB?!?

Why does Weyland bother lying to the crew about his death?

And who is running Weyland while the ruling family is away on Dad’s spa day?

6. Tour the ship. Why are there two piloting stations? Why are there normal planetside sinks? Drinking game starts for how soon and with whom the med-bed becomes an important plot point. Vickers’ quarters are the old man’s bedroom from 2001.

7. Explore the new planet. Let the Stupidity Games begin! Of course we brought dudes who want to bring weapons, but of course the anthos say no. Because no anthropologist in the history of ever has brought spear-carrying bearers just in case. Why wouldn’t you bring weapons? Maybe because then everyone will say later “Oh, the Engineers think humans suck because they always have weapons” and it will be as deep as the Dagobah tree scene in The Empire Strikes Back? Or maybe just because Scott wanted to red-flag that characters will now start making totally unrealistic and bewildering decisions? Or to force me to link to TV Tropes with every sentence if I recap the action? I don’t know.

8. Explore the tunnel system. As a long-time Lovecraft fan and Call of Cthulhu player, my first reaction is “Cthonians!” Turns out I’m not wrong. My 8yo son’s comment is “They’re in a spaceship?” and he’s not wrong either.

I so totally want those probe scanner things. Someone make those already! But have them have a unique signal for “I’m at a door and need help by something with thumbs.”. Also I’m curious how they can differentiate between a door like that and a wall…but they do.

I don’t think it really counts as “terraforming” but okay…as long as you understand it was just this underground installation and they didn’t intend to do the whole planet and you don’t take–

–your helment off. Oh well, dumbass. Fortunately no one else is dumb enough to follow your lead without observing the effects over more than 30 seconds.

OK, you all deserve to die.

Also, why aren’t you noticing all the writing on the walls? IT’S OKAY DAVID’S ACTIVATING IT. Oh good, the CCTV still works. Why are you running after them? I’m so confused. In the future people don’t think right. Maybe it was the cryosleep.

9. I can’t go on. From here on out, other people have done a far better job than I can at pointing out the painful plot and character nonsense. Let’s just get into

10. MEANING and SYMBOLISM. Other folks somehow think the black goo reacts to the nature and intent of those wielding it, but I’m not sure I see that. Maybe I could buy that it reads souls, but I really think it’s just ichor. When it senses life, it activates, unstitches the life’s DNA into something else, and starts reproducing into tentacles. So little worms turn into penis-vagina cobras.

I’m not being overly Freudian here btw. Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Not So Smart refered to the snake as “he” when it was a tune with a knob head. When the labia cobra hood unfolded they called it “she.” Also shot comp, as it rises up from between Tweedle’s legs, and it’s appearance intercut with two sex scenes.

Hey, maybe this film has a life-reproduction-creation theme?

I’m also not sure I buy that Jesus was an Engineer and they got pissed off because we killed him. If I accept (and I do) the film’s theme of “sacrifice creates life” then I have to believe the Engineers would be down with the Jesus story – it’s just another sacrificed god whose death grants life to others. Also, I don’t see ANY textual support that Jesus was an Engineer. Yes, something happened two thousand years ago…I guess…actually I have to talk about crap science again here.

Shaw and crew find the decapitated Engineer, stick a skewer in him, and say “He died 2000 years ago.” I guess that’s Earth years, but we don’t know how many Earth-years it took for the Prometheus to get from Earth to LX-Whatever. (OK, checked Wikipedia, 2089 is discovery, 2093 is arrival. Assuming Shaw and Holloway got to talk to Weyland immediately, the connection to “live forever” was made immediately, and ship was created, funded, crewed, etc. immediately, trip took 4 years. Seriously? Science fail AGAIN. In fact, I can’t believe all that would’ve taken less than 4 years so whatever, my brain hurts). And wait, I was going to focus on SYMBOLISM AND MEANING rather how nonsensical this story is…But if we go with 2093, that would mean Jesus would have been killed in the Year of Our Lord 93, and simultaneously the Engineers ran into the urn room and one got decapitated…

Nope. We’re back to “Narrative Mess,” not “Thematically Persuasive.”. I also don’t see the on-screen connection between “thing Earth humans did” and “Run for the urn room right now.”

(This reminds me…due to the multiplicity of Erth cultures the Engineers apparently husbanded, and due to the existence of Aliens in space but not Earth, I assumed that the Engineers made humans on lots of planets, or, any that would work. I also saw multiple planets in the navigation rock band room, and they had to highlight Earth, so same assumption. Apparently I’m in a minority with that assumption.)

I forgot the one writer wrote the ass-pull that was Lost. WHERE’S THE POLAR BEAR?!?!? But Scott doesn’t film what the writers write – just ask the Blade Runner writers. So I think I need to get back to WTF are you trying to say, Ridley?

So far I’ve got themes of sacrifice to create life, refusal to die causing destruction, creators editing their creation, fertility and moisture and cthonian primordial ooze vs. Arid and barren and Apollonian straight lines, who is the alien, and under/over everything, What does it mean to be human?

I also see a real and painful tension between a longing to believe that the Romantics were right, and humans have value…and a paralyzingly fear that we don’t. That there isn’t anything special waiting for us, and that we were created just because someone could.

And any day now, that creators “Human Period” may end, to be remembered only in retrospective exhibits and art history classes, and the creator will move into his “Tentacles and Teeth Period” which everyone will agree comprises his masterworks.

Re-scoping Druid’s Glass

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This was my quasi-work blog, where I focused on virtual identity in its various roles, but I’ve decided to split my blogging more effectively between personal/creative and professional/analytic, and this space wins the personal/creative gig.

With that in mind, I can’t really predict what you are going to find here. I’m going to move some of my old personal posts and life-logs here, and there will probably be some fiction (flash and otherwise) and some aggregating of what I call “the amusing and questionable” from around the internets.

I’m also going to move the identity stuff out to the other blog, but I’ll try to leave a trail of breadcrumbs when I do that in case anyone cares to follow.

Yup, gun control is OBE. New plan.

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To the current Presidential Administration and the Congress of the United States of America:

Credit: Michael Thad Carter for Forbes

Alright you primitive screwheads, listen up! You see this? This… is my boomstick!

A gun is a tool that is specifically and efficiently designed for killing another living creature, usually another human, while putting the killer at the least risk possible.  Mostly gun owners use their guns for killing their own children, spouses, and significant others, sometimes accidentally, and for fantasizing about killing people like me and you, who work for the federal government.  Some of the guns are used for killing innocent animals for “fun.”  This is completely creepy and disturbing, but it’s also normal primate behavior.  Some humans, like some chimps, enjoy killing.  These humans would probably throw their poo at me for writing this, but they can’t get to it through their Realtree camouflage waterproof hunting pants.  Also they are too drunk to find their own ass.

I know you are sort of thinking about gun control legislation, in a way that will be nonspecifically and inefficiently designed for appeasing some voters, while putting you at the least risk possible.   You’re not going to touch the people who use their guns for hunting, because they are poo-throwing drunks who demand their right to participate in their “sport” (although come on, it’s not a sport if the other side doesn’t know it’s playing).  We’ve already got murder and manslaughter laws to deal with the people who kill their spouses, significant others, enemies, random individuals who got too drunk hunting and walked into the wrong sprawl-home,  and children. I honestly don’t care about the people who kill their own kids accidentally.  I’d like to think that was punishment enough, but I have never seen any statistics on how many of those people continue to be gun owners and NRA members.  The way I look at it, the kids of idiots like that are better off dead, and that means fewer future NRA members.  Gun safes are not a particularly difficult concept.

What I’m concerned about, and what you claim to be concerned about, are the few individuals who haven’t adapted well to being human, and who would be the crazy (usually young male) chimps that the other chimps tear to shreds.  These are the people who can use all the freedoms the NRA has bought for them to bear more arms than they have arms.  These are the people who then go and kill lots of people who couldn’t kill them back, even if they too had guns.  These are the people who will never stop trying to kill our babies, our defenseless children, and they should be easily identifiable because they are crazy.

I think it says something that, as difficult as meaningful gun control is in America, you think it’s easier to try for THAT than to fund science that would help identify and treat crazy people.  I think it should be achievable to have a background check for crazy, even based off a very fast and non-intrusive test.  You guys believe in the polygraph, you should believe in guns that read physiological indices (such as blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and skin conductivity) and won’t let themselves be fired.  I would like to see you, our leaders, take a pro-active rather than reactive stance for once.  Use all that money the NRA gives you to pay some big brains to create guns that can’t be used by crazy people.  And yes, you’re going to have to define “crazy.”  And yes, that’s hard.  But if you ran for the job you have on the belief that you would never have to do anything hard, you should quit now.  And don’t pick up a gun, because you are crazy.

It’s hard, but it’s possible.  Because this is America, land of arm-bearers, elected leaders who serve the people, and really amazing innovators.

By the way, I know you guys don’t read the Internets, but your whole gun-control thing?  Made totally moot this week.  Some of those amazing innovators have made it possible for anyone to print their own gun using a 3-D printer.  Those are available in lots of public places, and the price is coming down.  They’ll cost less than $2000 in a couple years.  If this doesn’t scare the poo right through your hunting pants, you aren’t thinking.

So yes, as usual you guys are half-heartedly debating legislation that is already OBE.  But you, like the country you serve, can change quickly if you decide to.  You can’t keep guns from getting into anyone’s hands.  But you can help keep crazy people from going on shooting sprees in public places.  You may have to ask the American public to step up and help you with this, but you know what?  WE WILL.

For Those Who Don’t Want To Believe

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Excellent article from Jon Evans at TechCrunch about a month ago, relevant to the Nym Wars.

Cheap and/or ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition make surveillance ever more omnipresent; the dangers and uncertainties of other new technologies, like hobbyist UAVs, lead to calls for even greater scrutiny; and eventually online anonymity/pseudonymity will be the only kind there is. That isn’t entirely a bad thing. It’s because of crowdsourced surveillance that New York police lieutenant Anthony Bologna faces two investigations after apparently gratuitously pepper-spraying protestors. But it means the ability to remain pseudonymous online will only become more and more important in the years to come.

Do the services that connect people online seem to realize this? Sadly, the answer mostly ranges between “No” and “Hell, no.” Twitter is the only major social network that doesn’t have a real-names policy, and the only one with a history of going to bat for its users’ privacy. But while the online journalists in Mexico who dare to report on its brutal drug wars are beheaded after their real identities are connected to their online bylines, while Syrians are detained and interrogated because of their Facebook accounts, Vic Gundotra has idiotically compared Google Plus’s real-name policy to “wearing a shirt to a restaurant,” and both Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi have called for real identities to be attached to all online activity.

Security via clarity

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Check out this NYT article about yet another person who was erronesously placed on an USG watchlist. In this case, he exonerated himself to the FBI by providing them an abundance of information about himself…then kept that going.

“You want to watch me? Fine. But I can watch myself better than you can, and I can get a level of detail that you will never have.”

This is probably an excellent answer for people who can be open about their identity, only have one identity, and would like to make sure that they aren’t confused with any of the other 7 billion people on the planet. For those who need to maintain multiple identities without making it clear that they ARE maintaining multiple identities (like, oh, FBI agents), I’m not sure that the level of effort required here would be feasible.

Grab a byte to eat

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One of my colleagues is upset that she can’t order delivery from her favorite Thai place. They don’t have a website, but they have a Facebook page you can Like, and she wants to be able to order via Facebook.

Facebook could offer this; I figure they probably only have to flip a couple switches. It seems like adding a commerce portal would be the logical next step for them.

I expect that you’ll have to put money into FB credits, then use those to pay for what you order though.
How’s this for a business plan? If you grow the ingredients in FarmVille, you can convert them to credits and use those to buy dinner.

I think we call it “A Byte to Eat.”

FBI launches facial recognition database

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I wonder how well this is going to play with social media photo tagging, because you know they will try to integrate it.

I can’t wait until someone gets arrested because their Facebook photo looks like a criminal’s photo.

(via NextGov)

The FBI by mid-January will activate a nationwide facial recognition service in select states that will allow local police to identify unknown subjects in photos, bureau officials told Nextgov.

The federal government is embarking on a multiyear, $1 billion dollar overhaul of the FBI’s existing fingerprint database to more quickly and accurately identify suspects, partly through applying other biometric markers, such as iris scans and voice recordings.

Often law enforcement authorities will “have a photo of a person and for whatever reason they just don’t know who it is [but they know] this is clearly the missing link to our case,” said Nick Megna, a unit chief at the FBI’s criminal justice information services division. The new facial recognition service can help provide that missing link by retrieving a list of mug shots ranked in order of similarity to the features of the subject in the photo.

Today, an agent would have to already know the name of an individual to pull up the suspect’s mug shot from among the 10 million shots stored in the bureau’s existing Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. Using the new Next-Generation Identification system that is under development, law enforcement analysts will be able to upload a photo of an unknown person; choose a desired number of results from two to 50 mug shots; and, within 15 minutes, receive identified mugs to inspect for potential matches. Users typically will request 20 candidates, Megna said. The service does not provide a direct match.

Michigan, Washington, Florida and North Carolina will participate in a test of the new search tool this winter before it is offered to criminal justice professionals across the country in 2014 as part of NGI. The project, which was awarded to Lockheed Martin Corp. in 2008, already has upgraded the FBI’s fingerprint matching service.

Local authorities have the choice to file mug shots with the FBI as part of the booking process. The bureau expects its collection of shots to rival its repository of 70 million fingerprints once more officers are aware of the facial search’s capabilities.

Thomas E. Bush III, who helped develop NGI’s system requirements when he served as assistant director of the CJIS division between 2005 and 2009, said, “The idea was to be able to plug and play with these identifiers and biometrics.” Law enforcement personnel saw value in facial recognition and the technology was maturing, said the 33-year FBI veteran who now serves as a private consultant.

NGI’s incremental construction seems to align with the White House’s push to deploy new information technology in phases so features can be scrapped if they don’t meet expectations or run over budget.

But immigrant rights groups have raised concerns that the Homeland Security Department, which exchanges digital prints with the FBI, will abuse the new facial recognition component. Currently, a controversial DHS immigrant fingerprinting program called Secure Communities runs FBI prints from booked offenders against the department’s IDENT biometric database to check whether they are in the country illegally. Homeland Security officials say they extradite only the most dangerous aliens, including convicted murderers and rapists. But critics say the FBI-DHS print swapping ensnares as many foreigners as possible, including those whose charges are minor or are ultimately dismissed.

Megna said Homeland Security is not part of the facial recognition pilot. But, Bush said in the future NGI’s data, including the photos, will be accessible by Homeland Security’s IDENT.

The planned addition of facial searches worries Sunita Patel, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, who said, “Any database of personal identity information is bound to have mistakes. And with the most personal immutable traits like our facial features and fingerprints, the public can’t afford a mistake.”

In addition, Patel said she is concerned about the involvement of local police in information sharing for federal immigration enforcement purposes. “The federal government is using local cops to create a massive surveillance system,” she said.

Bush said, “We do have the capability to search against each other’s systems,” but added, “if you don’t come to the attention of law enforcement you don’t have anything to fear from these systems.”

Other civil liberties advocates questioned whether the facial recognition application would retrieve mug shots of those who have simply been arrested. “It might be appropriate to have nonconvicted people out of that system,” said Jim Harper, director of information policy at the libertarian Cato Institute. FBI officials declined to comment on the recommendation.

Harper also noted large-scale searches may generate a lot of false positives, or incorrect matches. Facial recognition “is more accurate with a Google or a Facebook, because they will have anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen pictures of an individual, whereas I imagine the FBI has one or two mug shots,” he said.

FBI officials would not disclose the name of the search product or the vendor, but said they gained insights on the technique’s accuracy by studying research from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
In responding to concerns about the creation of a Big Brother database for tracking innocent Americans, Megna said the system will not alter the FBI’s authorities or the way it conducts business. “This doesn’t change or create any new exchanges of data,” he said. “It only provides [law enforcement] with a new service to determine what photos are of interest to them.”

In 2008, the FBI released a privacy impact assessment summarizing its appraisal of controls in place to ensure compliance with federal privacy regulations. Megna said that, during meetings with the CJIS Advisory Policy Board and the National Crime Prevention and Privacy Compact Council, “we haven’t gotten a whole lot of pushback on the photo capability.”

The FBI has an elaborate system of checks and balances to guard fingerprints, palm prints, mug shots and all manner of criminal history data, he said.

“This is not something where we want to collect a bunch of surveillance film” and enter it in the system, Megna said. “That would be useless to us. It would be useless to our users.”