Weekend Roundup - March 31

Articles I read this afternoon. Sources in parentheses. Comments from me.

Nine of the Best Ways to Boost Creative Thinking (Lifehacker)

How Can I Downsize My Ridiculously Large Wallet? (Lifehacker) - I'm happy with the way my wallet is, and I still read articles like this. I like seeing how people organize their things.

On Keeping a Notebook in the Digital Age (Medium) - I go back and forth on this topic, but I still feel most comfortable with pen and paper, most of the time.

The Spark File (Medium) - I like that the emphasis is on recording bits of stuff and ideas, without necessarily thinking of the big picture or end product.

Feedly Updates with 10 New Features to Help Ease Your Google Reader Transition (Lifehacker) - Right, Google Reader is shutting down in July. That's the thing in the back of my mind that keeps making me sad. I have a few alternatives to check out, and Feedly is one of them.

You Don't Always Have to Give Two Weeks Notice When Leaving Your Job (Lifehacker)

When It's Okay to Write for Free (Lifehacker) - Be sure to check out the comments after the article for various viewpoints on when it is (and isn't) okay to write for free.

Is Clara the New River Song on Doctor Who? (io9) - Spoilers for "The Bells of St. John."

Goodreads and Three Alternatives for Soical Bookworms (PopSugar) - You may have heard that Amazon purchased Goodreads this week. Not a big deal for me, since I'm hardly even on Goodreads, but some people are worried that Amazon will negatively affect the Goodreads community. This article reviews three similar social sites.

What Extremely Successful People Were Doing at Age 25 (Business Insider)

Doctor Who companions as puzzles, not people

For a while, something has been bothering me about Amy and Clara, and I finally figured out that it's because they're fundamentally different from the companions that came before them.

Amy and Clara are the Doctor's companions because he notices something special about them and then he asks them to travel with him. He is drawn to a mystery that surrounds each woman.

Amy is the "girl who didn't make sense"¹ and Clara is an impossibility. After "Asylum of the Daleks" and "The Snowmen," the Doctor realizes there's something strange about Clara. He says:

The same woman, twice. And she died both times. The same woman! […] Something's going on. Something impossible, something.

The Doctor asked Amy to travel with him so he could figure out what was going on with the crack in her wall, and now he's pursuing Clara to figure out how she could be alive in different places, in different times.

This is different from Rose, Martha, and Donna.² Each of these women started out ordinary, not tied to a larger mystery, and the Doctor met them while he was investigating an alien problem on Earth. Rose, Martha, and Donna became special after traveling with the Doctor because he showed them other life and other planets. Rose sums up the change in the season 1 finale, "The Parting of the Ways":

The Doctor showed me a better way of living your life. You know, he showed you too. That you don’t just give up. You don’t just let things happen. You make a stand. You say no. You have the guts to do what’s right when everyone else just runs away.

Rose, Martha, and Donna travel with the Doctor because he wanted a friend along for the adventure and not because there was something special about them.³ But Amy and Clara start as puzzles. They go on adventures with the Doctor too, but at the same time he tries to figure out their strange circumstances.

Why the change?

I feel like Rose, Martha, and Donna are stand-ins for the audience. They travel with the Doctor and through them, we go on adventures in time and space.

It's not like that, though, with Amy and Clara. They are not stand-ins for the audience because the Doctor is trying to solve them. It has nothing to do with us, but we're asked to be interested in Amy and Clara because the Doctor is interested in them.

The other odd thing is, Rory follows the same pattern as Rose, Martha, and Donna, even though he comes to the show after them and at the same time as Amy. Before meeting the Doctor, Rory was an ordinary nurse in a small town. After traveling with the Doctor, he becomes the Roman Centurion (his own version of the previous companions' Defenders of the Earth). Traveling with the Doctor made Rory special in the same way it made Rose, Martha, and Donna special.

I don't know why there's this shift in how the Doctor meets new companions, but we've lost something important to the series. An ordinary, everyday person as companion served as our tether to the Doctor and his adventures. But now that the companion is a mystery for the Doctor to solve, she isn't our tether anymore. Losing that Normal Person Connection distances us from the Eleventh Doctor in a way that did not happen with the Ninth and Tenth Doctors.


¹ The full quote is "The Girl Who Didn't Make Sense. How could I resist?" ("The Big Bang", series 5, episode 13)

² I can't say anything about the companions in the classic episodes because I haven't seen many of them.

³ Each women ends up being special: Rose is the Bad Wolf, Martha saves the world, and Donna becomes the Doctor-Donna. These are results of (not causes for) traveling with the Doctor. None of these things would have happened to these women if they hadn't met him.

Grimm's Sandman: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

Spoilers for 2.15 "Mr. Sandman."

Temporary blindness is a common plot device in TV: How does the hero cope without his sight? It's been done on realistic shows—like M*A*S*H, MacGyver, and Monk—and in sci-fi and fantasy series too, such as Doctor Who, Charmed, and Smallville.*

This week, we saw Grimm's take on this trope, and the good thing about fantasy shows is, anything goes. When Nick loses his sight, we don't know if there's a cure. And that means when Nick lost his sight, I immediately thought, what if he doesn't get it back?

When the gang is in the spice shop looking for a cure, we notice that Nick's hearing has become more sensitive. He can hear Rosalee whispering across the room, and he listens in on Hank's phone conversation. One sense goes away and another becomes stronger. That's nothing new.

From that point, I imagined two paths: Nick regains his sight by the end of the episode and goes back to normal OR Nick stays blind. What would Grimm be like with the second option? Nick couldn't be a detective anymore, but he still might be a grimm. The fight scene later in the episode proves that Nick can fight well, even without his sight. Wouldn't that be a brave move for a TV show, to make the hero permanently blind and keep him fighting? I don't think that's been done before. It would be a huge character development, and season two is probably too early to do that to Nick. But still, I couldn't help thinking about the possibility.

The actual outcome of the episode is good, even if it's expected. Nick regains his sight and he's fine. But oh, there's a bonus—he keeps his enhanced hearing.

Nick has become a better fighter over the course of the series, and that makes sense: the more he fights wesen, the more experience he gains, and the better he fights next time. But this is the first time he has come out of a fight physically changed and stronger in a specific way. Besides being able to see the true forms of wesen, this is the first super-human ability that Nick has.

This episode brings up two questions: Have past grimms been changed by wesen? And what other changes are possible?

Hopefully this is something the writers will explore in future episodes.


* Check out TV Tropes for more examples of temporary blindness.

Predators and Prey in Being Human

I like that Being Human keeps playing with stereotypes for werewolves, ghosts (well, now re-animated corpses), and vampires. Sometimes the usually-accepted supernatural rules apply to Josh, Sally, and Aidan, but sometimes the writers flip those rules upside down. "Of Mice and Wolfmen" (3.09) is a great example of this rule playing.

Spoilers for the episode below.

Josh

The main reason Josh doesn't want to be a werewolf is because he is afraid he will hurt someone. That was true the first time around, and it's true again this season. He constantly worries about what he might do, and he copes by coming up with ways to distract the wolf (chicken on a rope) or contain the wolf (the storage cell). In this episode, Pete shows up and shows Josh how to connect with his wolf through meditation. It isn't a way to control the wolf and it's certainly not a cure, but Pete seems at peace with his situation. So Josh adds meditation to his coping mechanisms. Wolves are natural predators, but Josh doesn't want to hurt anyone, and it seems like neither does Pete. Pete goes against his (supernatural) nature by accepting that he is a werewolf and not using his condition violently, and Josh is working towards that same acceptance.

Sally

Sally figures out that she can eat live creatures to restore her body. She freaks out, but Nick rationalizes it: normal people eat meat all the time. But Sally sees it quickly escalating to consuming people, not just animals, and she decides her survival isn't worth killing people. She chooses to constantly fight her hunger. The predator-prey relationship falls apart, and it's progress for Sally's character too. Last season, she shredded ghosts when she thought it meant her survival, but now we see that Sally would rather die than hurt people.

Aidan

Aidan recovers from the flu virus, and the group realizes that it's because he drank werewolf blood. Werewolf blood acts as a vaccine for vampires, and Aidan knows that werewolves would be in danger if other vampires found out. But Aidan tells Blake about it anyway. Aidan the Friend says that Nora and Josh are off limits, but Aidan the Vampire is tired of weakened vampires running away from werewolves. He revives the predator-prey relationship between vampires and werewolves.

Josh and Sally go against their predator natures, but Aidan doesn't. In the larger picture, vampires usually hunt werewolves, but when the flu virus killed most vampires, roles switched. Werewolves hunted down and killed the weakened vampires. Aidan's discovery about werewolf blood switched the roles back: now vampires hunt werewolves again, but this time for blood.

Who knew we’d be publishing pixels?

Yesterday I went to the library to check out a few books on marketing (apparently I read those for fun now), and I saw a book called Cover Letters That Knock 'Em Dead by Martin Yate. The whole book is sample cover letters.

I get bored looking at samples online so I thought Hard copy is better. Might as well check this out too. I looked on Amazon today and there are more recent versions of this book, but this one was published in 1992. Not to alarm anyone, but that was 21 years ago, which means this book is more amusing than useful.

For example, Chapter 5 has a few paragraphs that discuss if you should use a typewriter or a computer to compose your cover letter. The author insists that typewriters just don't cut it anymore.

But my favorite is from a sample networking letter:

It was fascinating to learn about the new technology which is beginning to play a major role in the publishing field today. I have already been to the book store to purchase the book _______ which you highly recommended. I look forward to reading about his "space age" ideas.

We retired the Space Shuttle but at least we have Kindles.

Worse than a book cover with the movie characters

When a movie comes out that's based on a book, I'm always annoyed to see the re-released book with the movie poster as the cover. The actors don't necessarily fit the character descriptions and even if they do, most readers do not picture those actors as the book characters. The movie-poster-as-the-book-cover is a marketing device and that's frustrating enough, but I found something worse: re-naming the book to match the movie title.

I watched Limitless, which is a great movie because it explores what it's like to have full access to your mind—learning, memory, and critical thinking skills—but doesn't expect its viewers to fully use their minds as they watch the movie. Great, because it contradicts itself and yet remains entertaining.

I like the ideas in the story, so I looked up the book. If you go to bookstores now, it's called Limitless by Alan Glynn the cover looks something like this:

  

 

That's Bradley Cooper, the lead, in the middle panel. The movie came out in 2011, so if you look for the book before then, the cover looks like this:

Still a novel by Alan Glynn, but it's called The Dark Fields. A perfectly good title and a perfectly good cover, so why does a movie based on the book have to bring on these changes?

Anyone can find a book that a movie is based on. Search for it online. (Wikipedia is especially useful in this matter.) Or, hey, movies based on books say so in the credits.

Let the book title stay the book title and it's okay if the movie is called something else. I prefer a different title on the movie, actually, if the movie is only a loose interpretation of the book.

I know for marketing purposes, it's easier and more effective to have the movie and book titles match. New book covers to match movie posters is cross-advertising and you draw the movie goers to the bookstore and the readers to the cinema. But people can link the book to the movie (and vice versa) on their own. Give the audience a little credit.


Image sources: Limitless cover | The Dark Fields cover

Being Human: Twisted déjà vu in wonderland

Being Human is at a point where the show could feel stagnant. We've known the characters for two years and the writers have thrown them in situations that go from bad to worse. But instead, the writers changed the circumstances and opened up new stories to explore.

The writers' willingness to change the characters continues to be my favorite aspect of Being Human. This week's episode threw a few twists at Josh, Sally, and Aidan. Spoilers below for episode 3.08 "Your Body Is a Condemned Wonderland."


"Wonderland" gave us a taste of reset television without actually resetting any of the characters.

Josh started the series as a werewolf, cured himself, and now he is a werewolf again. In the coming episodes, we'll see round two of how he deals with being a werewolf. His life fell apart the first time. Now he knows about the supernatural world and he had a system down for what to do on full moons. Things will probably be different this time around, but we don't know how yet.

By the end of "Wonderland," Sally and Aidan switch roles. Sally realizes that when she's hungry all the time, it's for raw meat. The preview for next week shows her eating a mouse, so she'll figure out that she has to eat live creatures to restore her body. It's a level up from vampire survival. Sally is now the one who has to destroy life in order to survive.

Liam injected Aidan with the flu virus, and now Aidan is this close to death. So far in the show, vampires have come back as hallucinations but not as ghosts, so death is probably the end of Aidan. He said he has "so much to make up for," and he's probably worried about dying before he can make amends for all the people he has killed.

The writers reset the characters, but each character has his or her own twist that will lead to new stories for at least the rest of this season.

Elementary: Joan gets to do her own thing

I've been watching Elementary sporadically. I want to like it, but the cases feel like they're dumbed-down, as if the writers or the audience (or maybe both) don't want the show to be too intellectual. That's too bad, because there's definitely an audience for shows that are shamelessly smart. (Ahem, for example, Fringe fans who now have nothing to watch.)

But Joan and Sherlock are really good. I like their characters, and I like that Joan gets to do her own thing. It would be  easy for the writers to write her as a bystander who gets lucky occasionally and notices something that helps Sherlock solve the case.

Instead, Joan contributes to the problem solving. She offers medical knowledge that Sherlock doesn't have readily available. She pieces together facts and evidence along with Sherlock. Every now and then, she picks up on something that Sherlock doesn't see. So yes, she's an assistant but she works with Sherlock and not for him.

None of this is any good without examples, so I'll pull three from episode 1.14 "The Deductionist." Spoilers below.

1. At the hospital crime scene, Sherlock looks at the blood around the room and figures out that the spot of blood on the bed must be Martin's (the serial killer). The blood looks thinner and lighter in color than normal. Sherlock knows that's because the anesthetic was mixed in with that blood, and he asks Joan for the most common chemical in anesthesia. She answers him immediately, and then they know what lab should look for.

2. At Patricia's house, Joan notices the beef jerky and cheese balls on the counter and knows that someone with kidney problems could not eat those snacks. That's the first clue that something is strange about Patricia's illness. Sherlock finds the second clue, the essential oils, and realizes that Patricia poisoned herself to fake her kidney problems.

3. Joan notices inconsistencies on the video with the electrical tape on the register in her apartment. Sometimes it's there and other times it's not. That means that her landlord was in her apartment to fix the problem before, and he unlawfully evicted her. Joan confronts him about it and convinces him to help her while she looks for a new place to live.

The episodes that I've seen haven't interested me enough to consistently watch Elementary, but I do like the show's take on Sherlock and Watson. Elementary has four regular characters, three of which are male, so it's good to see that the only regular female character is a colleague and not relegated to a minor role.

The end of Alphas

Spoilers for the season 2 finale of Alphas after the cut.

Fringe Season 5: All of my posts in one place

Below are the links to:
- all of my season 5 reaction posts. These are my thoughts I wrote on Tumblr after watching each episode.
- pieces on this blog after season 4 and during season 5
- an article I wrote for Hypable.com

Needless to say, each post has spoilers.

Reaction posts on Tumblr:
5.01: Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11
5.02: In Absentia
5.03: The Recordist
5.04: The Bullet That Saved the World
5.05: An Origin Story
5.06: Through the Looking Glass and What Walter Found There
5.07: Five-Twenty-Ten
5.08: The Human Kind
5.09: Black Blotter
5.10: Anomaly XB-6783746
5.11: The Boy Must Live (and a second post)
5.12 Liberty and 5.13 An Enemy of Fate (and a second post)

Blog posts here:
Becoming Human Through Rebellion: September’s Character Development - Spoilers through the end of season 4
Pushing Boundaries: Morality and Justified Science in Fringe - Spoilers through the end of season 4
Fringe theory: the Observers already had the red universe
Basic Reset TV in a Seralized Show

On Hypable: 
Five reasons you should watch ‘Fringe’ now that the show has ended