I’m probably well past due to pontificate on this season of Lost now that it’s back for the final run. Seasons one and two came out last summer on Blu-Ray and I convinced Karin to watch all of it up to date so I watched the first five seasons again last fall and therefore I’m pretty current on events in the show. I would imagine there might well be spoilers below, consider yourself forewarned.
I was really unsure about the new “flash sideways” at first and as usual it took a couple of episodes to put my finger on the issue. I found it difficult to care about this new storyline. They’ve changed enough that we can’t really assume anything carries over, and although the characters seem to be similar I think that’s a false assumption: something the writers are deliberately lulling us into thinking. For example: if Locke isn’t angry at his father and is still seeing Helen then is he at all the same character we already know?
Then as a few more episodes aired I began to see what was happening. The “LA timeline” is showing us what happens to these people if the island doesn’t exert any influence on the world past 1977. At first I was thinking that we were just seeing them without Jacob’s influence (the visits we saw at the end of season five), but it goes deeper than that. Hurley didn’t meet Jacob until after the plane crash for example but if the island sinks then the numbers aren’t broadcast and therefore Hurley never hears them and won the lottery through random chance, not because he (thinks he) is cursed.
Jacob’s influence on some of the characters can be seen as major and when I reflect on those visits they begin to look a little sinister. Buying Kate that lunchbox means she doesn’t learn consequences. Giving young Sawyer that pen means he finishes his letter: a letter that warps and dominates his entire life. Maybe Jacob saved Sayyid’s life but it seems at least as reasonable to say that Jacob caused Nadia to be in the intersection. Others are less clear. His interaction with Jack seems perfunctory and Locke is debatable. Karin thought Locke was dead and Jacob brought him back to life. I’m less sure that happened but otherwise it is difficult to read much into the Locke/Jacob interaction. I’m tempted to say that Jacob told Locke everything would be alright and that caused Locke to not accept his new situation but I think that might be looking too hard. Certainly in the “LA timeline” Locke is more accepting of negative events and I think he is clearly happier than he was otherwise.
I’m really curious to see Kate’s story in the alternate timeline: my guess is that she’s on the run for something less grim and possibly that she really is innocent (as she asks Claire if Claire would believe).
One thing I’ll guarantee you: this is about good and evil but I don’t think Jacob is all that is good and the Nemesis is pure evil. Jacob is smug and manipulative and seems perfectly willing to sacrifice people to advance his goals. Meanwhile the Nemesis makes an argument that all he wants to do is leave the island and Jacob is keeping him prisoner. There is in fact quite a lot of evidence that points to Jacob containing the Nemesis on the island. For the first few seasons it appears the Nemesis was contained in the cabin, ringed in by ash. Of course, the smoke monster was able to roam the island freely and in guises as Yemi and Christian Shepherd but perhaps he was more constrained then. (As an aside that’s a rule that works wonderfully: The Nemesis is able to assume the appearance of people who died off the island and had their body brought there: Yemi, Christian, and later John Locke.)
My last theory? I think both Rousseau and Claire actually died before they went feral. I think it happened to Rousseau offscreen, and it happened to Claire when Keamy’s men destroyed the house she was in. She seemed remarkably unharmed from that incident but she was weird and distant after that and soon disappeared. For some reason the Nemesis has the ability to raise the recently dead in some conditions. I think we’ll learn more about that soon. This means Sayyid, Claire, and Rousseau all have the same sort of condition applying to them. This is pretty clearly drawn with Claire looking and acting so much like Rousseau and the explicit connection Dogen makes between Claire and Sayyid.
Those last two theories bring one interesting point: the Nemesis seems to have taken the form of Alex when Ben was in the temple. According to my taxonomy Alex wouldn’t be a form he could assume, Alex would be somebody that possibly got brought back to life and was “infected” – thus more like Sayyid or Claire then Yemi or Christian. I’ll be interested to see if we see any more of Alex in season six. (If we do it will likely be in a Ben-centric story. A “live” Alex would probably cause Ben to switch allegiance from the Illana camp to the Nemesis camp.)
Look, there’s a standard for what happens when you buy a software upgrade. Either that’s just done on the honor system or the upgrade install asks to see your original software disc. Not so Windows 7 (which I’m learning to hate just as much as you might think). No. The plan for installing a Windows 7 upgrade on a freshly formatted hard drive is to install XP or Vista first and then install Windows 7 over top of it.
The product key is for an upgrade version of Windows 7 and a previous version of Windows wasn’t on your computer when Windows 7 was installed. To install an upgrade version of Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP must be installed on your computer. If you formatted the drive before starting the installation process, you won’t be able to use the upgrade product key to activate Windows 7. To activate Windows 7, you’ll need to install your previous version of Windows, and then reinstall Windows 7. For help with the activation process, go to the Microsoft Support website.
If only XP and Vista had a bullshit registration system such that Microsoft could identify product keys for those products … then this could simply ask for two 25 character strings – the original license and the upgrade. But nooooo.
I’m going to try copying an old XP virtual machine and see if I can upgrade that. We’ll see. Grrr.
If you’re interested in D&D I think this interview has a lot of interesting tidbits in it: discussions about what they changed and why.
AM: What is the audience for today’s Dungeons and Dragons, and how is that different from the audience for my Dungeons and Dragons, growing up in the ’80s and early ’90s?
AC: One thing we certainly saw over the course of 2nd edition was the audience did tend to age along with the game. The game was a very playable, a very entertaining system, but it didn’t necessarily speak to the people who were coming up into the optimal RPG age category through new ways. When we were all playing 1st and 2nd Edition, we didn’t cut our teeth on MMOs or console gaming or Facebook or any of those things. At best, maybe we had experience playing Monopoly or games like that, Risk, so that D&D was a totally foreign thing. That’s just not true anymore.
Are you somebody who has been running the Windows 7 RC until its last gasp like me? Were you troubled to find out that you can’t upgrade from the RC to a release copy of Windows 7? Well, here’s a site explaining how to talk the release version into upgrading a RC machine. This saved me several hours this weekend as well a probable trip onsite to get domain & admin stuff sorted out. (And a hat tip to Lifehacker, where I saw the link.)
If you did go read that you might be shaking your head to yourself and going “it can’t be that easy”. It is – I just finished the upgrade and everything is working fine. I had to reinstall some system-level tools – the VMWare Fusion tools and the Cisco VPN client but after that it looks great.
The reason you can’t upgrade Windows 7 RC to a legitimate purchased copy of Windows 7 is that there’s a text file listing a minimum version number that blocks it. Edit that text file to include the RC version number (7100) and there’s no problem at all. Microsoft deliberately chose to screw over the RC users.
Note that even as it was it took several hours to install. I bought a legal copy of the software, my RC install was completely patched. It really should have been a simple “Oh OK here’s a legitimate license key that I paid for. We cool?” five minute thing. Really the whole mess is just hostile. Fuckin’ Microsoft ….
If you’ve registered as a user (in order to comment) and never received a password please try the login link again and click “Lost your password?” and hopefully it will work. If it doesn’t let me know. I don’t think there’s anybody registered who doesn’t know my email address, or you could DM me on Twitter.
Turns out that it was working for me but if your mail host was restrictive on the domain name of the mail sending machine the mail would get bounced. But now you’ll get an email from Gmail so it should work fine.
I posted before about the new Muppet video so I imagine I should as least point out this new one.
I don’t know, I’m of mixed mind. I chuckled but I don’t know that all that thrilled about Muppets becoming internet commentary meta-memes. I just think that’s ultimately limiting. I was hoping this was starting somesort of bigger comeback for the Muppets but I don’t think making fun of YouTube will lead to anything bigger.
There’s no way we’re already one month into 2010. That’s just crazy talk. Part of the reason why everything seemed to go so fast was that SF Sketchfest this year had a crazy-good lineup. Toss in a couple of good concerts and I’ve been to six different shows in San Francisco already in 2010 (and I’m heading back for trip #7: MC Frontalot next week). I haven’t done the math but I’m sure my average for trips to the city is less than one a month so six in less than three weeks is a bit of a personal record. (Well. Five trips. One day we saw Weird Al at 2 PM and then Jonathan Coulton with Paul & Storm that night, so that was two shows in one trip.)
So yeah. February? WTF 2010? Is this how we’re going to play it? Look I have a PS3, and it has fast-forward of 120x, so don’t thing you can faze me with your fly-by Januaries.
One of the stranger artifacts of working from home is that Heisenberg has decided that I should throw his little ratty ball-toy down the hall at least four or five times every day. He has a special little cry that amounts to “Hey, come play with me” that he often makes while holding the ball in his mouth to get my attention. What’s funny is that he makes the same call sometimes when he just wants me to watch him play with the ball and doesn’t actually want me to do anything. Sometimes I can just talk to him about what he’s doing and sometimes I need to come throw the ball myself. I haven’t been able to figure out the difference so far.
My first reaction is sometimes to be annoyed and to say “Hey I’m working here”. It takes a conscious effort to remind myself that he won’t be here ten years from now and I won’t care about what esoteric Python feature I was reading about, but that I will remember the two minutes I took aside to play with one of my cats. Which is weird because I’m used to thinking that Heisenberg is a stupid little idiot but sometimes he reminds me that I can learn from him. Speaking of which I hear him calling now. I’d better go throw that scruffy little ball of junk down the hall for him while I have that privilege.
If you liked that one, here’s the creator’s main site. He did this with three different lenses and thus has three different videos. I liked this one the best with the tighter focus on the trees, but they are all worth a watch.
Can Lost Pay the Piper?
March 6th, 2010I’m probably well past due to pontificate on this season of Lost now that it’s back for the final run. Seasons one and two came out last summer on Blu-Ray and I convinced Karin to watch all of it up to date so I watched the first five seasons again last fall and therefore I’m pretty current on events in the show. I would imagine there might well be spoilers below, consider yourself forewarned.
I was really unsure about the new “flash sideways” at first and as usual it took a couple of episodes to put my finger on the issue. I found it difficult to care about this new storyline. They’ve changed enough that we can’t really assume anything carries over, and although the characters seem to be similar I think that’s a false assumption: something the writers are deliberately lulling us into thinking. For example: if Locke isn’t angry at his father and is still seeing Helen then is he at all the same character we already know?
Then as a few more episodes aired I began to see what was happening. The “LA timeline” is showing us what happens to these people if the island doesn’t exert any influence on the world past 1977. At first I was thinking that we were just seeing them without Jacob’s influence (the visits we saw at the end of season five), but it goes deeper than that. Hurley didn’t meet Jacob until after the plane crash for example but if the island sinks then the numbers aren’t broadcast and therefore Hurley never hears them and won the lottery through random chance, not because he (thinks he) is cursed.
Jacob’s influence on some of the characters can be seen as major and when I reflect on those visits they begin to look a little sinister. Buying Kate that lunchbox means she doesn’t learn consequences. Giving young Sawyer that pen means he finishes his letter: a letter that warps and dominates his entire life. Maybe Jacob saved Sayyid’s life but it seems at least as reasonable to say that Jacob caused Nadia to be in the intersection. Others are less clear. His interaction with Jack seems perfunctory and Locke is debatable. Karin thought Locke was dead and Jacob brought him back to life. I’m less sure that happened but otherwise it is difficult to read much into the Locke/Jacob interaction. I’m tempted to say that Jacob told Locke everything would be alright and that caused Locke to not accept his new situation but I think that might be looking too hard. Certainly in the “LA timeline” Locke is more accepting of negative events and I think he is clearly happier than he was otherwise.
I’m really curious to see Kate’s story in the alternate timeline: my guess is that she’s on the run for something less grim and possibly that she really is innocent (as she asks Claire if Claire would believe).
One thing I’ll guarantee you: this is about good and evil but I don’t think Jacob is all that is good and the Nemesis is pure evil. Jacob is smug and manipulative and seems perfectly willing to sacrifice people to advance his goals. Meanwhile the Nemesis makes an argument that all he wants to do is leave the island and Jacob is keeping him prisoner. There is in fact quite a lot of evidence that points to Jacob containing the Nemesis on the island. For the first few seasons it appears the Nemesis was contained in the cabin, ringed in by ash. Of course, the smoke monster was able to roam the island freely and in guises as Yemi and Christian Shepherd but perhaps he was more constrained then. (As an aside that’s a rule that works wonderfully: The Nemesis is able to assume the appearance of people who died off the island and had their body brought there: Yemi, Christian, and later John Locke.)
My last theory? I think both Rousseau and Claire actually died before they went feral. I think it happened to Rousseau offscreen, and it happened to Claire when Keamy’s men destroyed the house she was in. She seemed remarkably unharmed from that incident but she was weird and distant after that and soon disappeared. For some reason the Nemesis has the ability to raise the recently dead in some conditions. I think we’ll learn more about that soon. This means Sayyid, Claire, and Rousseau all have the same sort of condition applying to them. This is pretty clearly drawn with Claire looking and acting so much like Rousseau and the explicit connection Dogen makes between Claire and Sayyid.
Those last two theories bring one interesting point: the Nemesis seems to have taken the form of Alex when Ben was in the temple. According to my taxonomy Alex wouldn’t be a form he could assume, Alex would be somebody that possibly got brought back to life and was “infected” – thus more like Sayyid or Claire then Yemi or Christian. I’ll be interested to see if we see any more of Alex in season six. (If we do it will likely be in a Ben-centric story. A “live” Alex would probably cause Ben to switch allegiance from the Illana camp to the Nemesis camp.)
Tags: Lost, Television
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