So I went out in the world and found a new reader. Okay, let’s be honest, I asked a friend who works at Google what all the Google-ites were replacing Reader with. (He said mostly News Blur and The Old Reader, maybe Feedly.)

So I looked upon them and News Blur and Feedly were flashy at me and promised to keep me updated. Everywhere I went! With shininess! And social networking! And a slew of mobile platforms! And pay us money for the excessive number of feeds you have!

But then I looked upon The Old Reader and it appeared almost suspiciously like Google Reader. And I decided it was good. 

Accordingly I went forth, exported and imported my feeds. It took entire minutes.* But eventually green pacman** went away and there my feeds were. And it had alphabetised them. Which was just uncalled for. But in time I rearranged them and learned its secret ways. I even found out that it can count over a thousand. Which is cool. Google Reader had trouble with that.

It won’t give me the same level of statistical analysis but in all other ways so far it’s pretty decent. I mean, I object fundamentally because it’s not exactly the same. But it’s pretty much the same. It does all the things I really want it to except you know be Google Reader. Which I don’t think I can hold against it.

So. Not the end of the world. Thought you’d like to know.

* I am told I should not whine about this as in the days after Google Reader’s demise was announced it could take up to a week.

** For some reason he is the guardian of time a.k.a. the ‘wait’ symbol.

As an added bonus there is a robot battle in this video clip!

Playlist link here.

Hopefully they will say something nice like, I’d read that. Hopefully they won’t say things like, I don’t understand or Who’s this Jamie guy?. Probably they will say both. And you will stare at them in dazed confusion. And you’ll peer over their shoulder as though looking at it again from this perspective will make everything clear.

And then you’ll say, So there’s this thing in the first paragraph I just noticed, maybe it’s just me… And they’ll squint at it and say, No, it’s not just you. And you’ll realise you have to rewrite it.

And rewrite it you will. You will try every approach. You will demand of an unresponsive screen: Which version do you want?

Universal themes? It’s about a friendship. High concept? Wizards in space! The point where magic meets science and technology and stuff blows up! The story? Two very different people meet accidentally in a bar. When a fireball bursts through the window they both assume whoever is out there is after them and run together. Gray gets a crash course in magic and Jamie finds a fellow adrenaline junkie in the sartorially challenged drunk with alcohol in his hair.

Eventually, staring at the words on the page, you’ll realise you’re accidentally writing blurb copy instead of a synopsis and you have to start again.

Later one of your beta readers will say of the final paragraph: Oh, f*ing YEAH! Chills, shivers, puppies. Another will start a brain-storming session in dissatisfaction at your use of the word ‘unpleasantness’. You will sit there wondering if there is a way to cram more implicit death into a single word. You will wish you could figure out how to show the perspective of both main characters —

RKS: You have to show who Gray really is otherwise —
Me: Otherwise the synopsis reads a bit like ‘Mary Sue meets the wizard’? Yeah, I know.

 You will rewrite it.

Okay. So. If what you’re looking for is a movie with lots of explosions and chase scenes — sure, go for it. This movie is your baby. If you were maybe hoping for character development, genuine emotion, coherent plot… not so much.

I know, I know that a part of my disappointment comes from the fact that I really liked the first movie. Star Trek introduced an ensemble cast, offered homage to the original material, provided great action and adventure, powerful emotion and spectacular characterisation and relationships.

This movie… used the same actors?

Okay, that’s a bit harsh. But let’s work through it:

First off, the thing you’d think would be hard to get wrong — the explosions. They were pretty, sure. But a number of the action sequences seemed to go on too long without developing into anything new or advancing the plot. It was flashy but it was hard to stay invested.

Homage? Well, like last time it had quite a few references to the original series, however instead of being well-incorporated nods like in the first movie they felt rather artificial. And almost invariably provoked laughter from the audience. Which, given they were mostly meant to be emotional moments, was maybe not what they were going for.

Which leaves us with characters and relationships. And, okay, this was the biggest thing for me.

Firstly, this film didn’t really use the incredible characters it introduced so beautifully in the first film. They’re all still there but several of them don’t seem to really do anything. At the same time they introduced a new character to the crew who was really irrelevant to the plot and rather two dimensional. It’s like the film makers forgot what these characters are supposed to mean to one another, how they’re supposed to work together.

Instead, the film highlighted the developing friendship between Kirk and Spock and the ongoing relationship between Spock and Uhura and largely ignored everything else. As if they decided this was going to be the Kirk & Spock show, and sense and practicality could fall by the wayside.

Seriously. In one instance where Kirk is injured those on the scene called Spock (who was busy captaining the ship) to come down and help instead of, oh, I don’t know, Bones, who is a doctor. It made about as much sense as — no. No sense. It made no sense.

Not only is Bones not in that scene I am actually having a hard time remembering if there’s ever a point where Kirk, Spock and Bones are all in the same scene together. And yet the intersection of these three characters is what made Star Trek work so well and what made the original version of that scene so powerful.

“I always thought about it more like it was the dialectic of a human being,” Pine says. …. “You have Spock as the cold reason, you had the passion of Jim Kirk, and then you had the ironic sarcasm of McCoy, which gave the whole thing levity. That dynamic was beautiful.” (Chris Pine, who plays Kirk in the Star Trek reboot, quoted in Out)

This: ⤴

To add insult to injury the two relationships that they did choose to highlight were mismanaged. In each instance the interactions between them started out with a light touch, which was working well. And then they stopped everything and had a monologue.

The first time it happened I winced and thought, Well, they could have handled that better. And then they did it again. And again. And I wept into my popcorn.

Okay, not really. I didn’t have any popcorn. But I made a number of sarcastic remarks to my seat mates that perhaps did not aid the intended gravity of those scenes.

In the end though, you know what really bugs me about this movie? It didn’t get us anywhere. The last movie ended in a position that led us to believe our characters had grown up, moved forward, achieved something. Kirk had his captain boots on. Bones had overcome his fear of space. Spock had reconciled himself with his half-human side. They’d all made a new life for themselves. A new family.

This movie… Bones had very little screen time so it’s hard to say what his character journey might have been. Spock was incredibly emotional for a Vulcan. Kirk… had apparently retreated from responsibility and was back in the land of arrogant denial. And the fact that events worked out okay — more or less — was the result of sheer dumb luck and punching people rather than ingenious strategy or Kirk’s gift for interacting with people and using their talents in a collaborative fashion to achieve goals that would be beyond individuals.

Not only did they not get anywhere it felt a lot like they went backwards in the time between movies.

It has some lovely moments, it really does but basically the feeling I left the cinema with was: WTF?

I’m gonna live, I’m gonna fly,
I’m gonna fail, I’m gonna die.

Alternate visuals courtesy of multiKitten and Sherlock this time.

Link to playlist here.

Sometimes I write things and I have no idea what I’m doing and the second draft is me finding something in the text I had no intention of putting there, polishing it up and making it look like I planned it all along.

Sometimes the second draft is me cutting everything I can’t fathom why I included in the first place.

Most often though, the second draft is me laughing myself silly. Because I made an egregious typo. Because I stumbled over a joke I don’t remember writing. Because I managed to use the same word six times in a chapter or repeat myself entirely on the next page. Because I made a plot clue so subtle I forgot it was there.

If I am ever tempted to take myself seriously… yeah, no. That’s just never going to happen. I simply cannot take myself seriously when I find myself laughing so hard at something I accidentally wrote that I fall off the couch.

So if you’ll excuse me I have to go figure out a way to rewrite that to remove the really inappropriate double meaning.

And because someone made this fanvid for it that’s the bestest thing ever. If you’re a sci-fi fan — hands up and touch the sky.

It also has an actual video clip of it’s very own (which is totally freaky weird, so you should watch that too because of the lols). See below:

Also, as usual, playlist link here.