The Adventures of Captain Arcolier, Part Nine

(Welcome back. In our last installment One-Eye got the Marines back in Assault Pod One while the crew of the Beauteous Revenge prepared to cripple the Cantrellan ship. If you're new to our tale you'll want to start here.)      One-Eye fired the small lasers on the Assault Pod at the portal for almost a minute, yielding nothing more dramatic than a dull red glow. He shut off the beam with a growl of disgust. "That isn't going to work." One-Eye frowned for a few precious seconds as he thought. "Sergeant! What kind of explosives do we have left. Enough to blow a hole in that hatch?"      Sergeant Riker frowned in turn. He stared into space for a moment as he mentally ran an inventory of their supplies and what he had used earlier. "Maybe. If you give it a little tap with the lasers." Anticipating the order he unstrapped and stood up. He clapped Rodriguez on the shoulder as he passed, heading to the small arms locker by the access hatch. "Once more into the breach, eh Rodriguez?"      Rodriguez unstrapped and shot an impish grin at One-Eye. "If it's all the same to the commander I'd prefer to get back in the ship and then make a breach. But I'll go out and help blow things up, that's always a good time."      One-Eye chuckled grimly. "Hurry back and I'll save you both ringside seats. Hopefully the Cantrellans will be too busy to attend to us." He craned his head to peer around the bulk of the pod. "If not . . . I might be able to rotate this bucket of bolts enough to shoot down the access hatch. Teach them to tractor about the First Marines, what? More trouble than any scruffy pack of Cantrellans can handle, that's for damn sure."      Riker and Rodriguez moved out of the pod with alacrity and grabbed explosive packs from the arms locker as they went. One-Eye took advantage of the pause to catch up with the Beauteous Revenge. "Captain? We're trying to bust out but they didn't leave the door open. We're going to knock politely but it's possible we'll need a hand."      Captain Arcolier nodded brusquely, her attention focused on the tactical display before her. "What do you think Pete? Can we get a shot on their hatch without losing the solution for Port Battery?"      Stinky Pete studied the wireframe model of the destroyer and rotated it several different ways. "Negative Captain. We breached the hull opposite the bay in question. We can blow that door out for One-Eye, but we'll have to orbit the target to do so." He squinted at the display and tilted his head to the left. Captain Arcolier repressed a fond grin as she watched his eyes dart to and fro while his lips silently moved. Stinky Pete talked to himself inaudibly when he was calculating something that rode the razor edge between brilliance and recklessness. She gave him the moment he needed to work his concept through.      A new pane blossomed onscreen, the now-familiar wireframe of the destroyer centered. On this one a dotted oval sketched out from the simplified icon that represented the Revenge. Stinky Pete grinned as a timeline at the top of this display began to move forward. "We could preprogram an attack in. If we automate we can whip around the ship and fire a double blast while orbiting. We should be back on position within a minute, before Port Battery would have even recharged. Total downtime in our main firing solution would be only two minutes."      Captain Arcolier grinned savagely and nodded. "Program it in." She returned her attention to One-Eye. "Slave your detonation and laser codes to Stinky Pete's remote. We'll orbit and hit the bay with all our weapons synchronized. Let us know when your crew is safely aboard."      A second orange arc sprang out from the ship as the Revenge's orbit expanded slightly. Stinky Pete looked questioningly at Captain Arcolier. "Captain? We can do even better than that. If One-Eye will accept this flight path he can dock with us at high speed. With the slightly slower orbit Port will be recharged before we cross the firing solution. We can disable them and then slingshot right through the jump point."      One-Eye guffawed as the flight schematic came up on his display. "I love it Cap'n."      Captain Arcolier nodded, her eyes twinkling. She turned to the young helmsman who shifted nervously in his seat. "William lay the course in from Pete's console."      One-Eye scanned the stubborn bay doors, watching Riker finish attaching the detonators. Riker and Rodriguez came back to the ship in the fast and low movements of hardened zero-g combat veterans. They boarded and closed the airlock. "Good work boys. Wait 'til you see what Stinky Pete came up with to get us out of here."      Riker grinned as he feigned faintness, pressing the back of hand melodramatically against his forehead. "Let me strap in first XO. You know I'll face off the entire crew of this mangy destroyer if you ask me, but a plan of Stinky Pete's? I'm liable to wet myself right here!" Throughout his banter he and Rodriguez prepared for departure and he nodded decisively at One-Eye just as the Stinky Pete's mock-anguished cry of "Hey" echoed back from from the Revenge.      "We're ready to go, Captain. Execute at will."      Captain Arcolier nodded at Stinky Pete, "Now put the destroyer comm through." She smirked at Stinky Pete as he complied and the priggish face of the Cantrellan Captain appeared onscreen.      The Cantrellan took a deep breath and launched into an obviously prepared speech, "Jaimie Arcolier. That was a clever little trick with your engine, but we are far from defeated. Surrender now or we will be forced to destroy your ship and execute your marines who were apprehended attempting to illegally board a commercial vessel."      "Oh my, whatever shall we do?" Captain Arcolier drawled derisively. "I sure wish we had another 'clever trick' we could use." She turned theatrically to the left which moved her arm out of the camera pickup. As soon as her hand was offscreen it pointed straight at Stinky Pete in clear command of execution. Stinky Pete jabbed a button on his console and Jaimie grabbed the arms of her chair as the Beauteous Revenge sharply accelerated to the side.      One-Eye let out a sharp whoop aboard the Assault Pod. "Hold on boys, this ride is going to be fast and probably a little bumpy." The pod fired attitude jets and backed up to the rear of the bay, crunching into repair consoles as it went. The Revenge continued to accelerate, engines always firing at an angle to their travel and continually reshaped the orbit. As it reached the far side of the destroyer both main batteries fired. Multiple cinnamon beams stabbed out from both sides of the ship and converged on a single point on the destroyer's hull - the precise center of the hatch trapping Assault Pod One. Aboard Assault Pod One the smaller lasers fired in perfect synchronization fired and the explosive charges detonated. A gigantic explosion erupted as the bay doors melted away in the savage energy interplay. The explosion would have engulfed Assault Pod One except the sudden exposure to vacuum sucked all the fuels out into space. The fireball traveled outward as the vacuum smeared the oxygen out and snuffed the flames. Assault Pod One followed microseconds after, using the pull of the decompression as a launch and firing all engines at the same time. Inside some of the Marines groaned as the ragged edges of the destroyer's hull slide by a scant foot from the observation window. The Beauteous Revenge continued to accelerate as it described a taut arc of orbital physics around the destroyer. The smaller lighter Assault Pod flew an even tighter arc as its relative mobility let it fly a closer orbit. The closer orbit meant the Pod gained ground relative to the Revenge and the Revenge's tractor beam quickly grabbed the Pod and hauled it back into the proper docking bay.      The maneuver came to a close as the Revenge lined up on the jump point. A quick spin with attitude thrusters faced her towards the destroyer and Captain Arcolier delievered her final taunt as Port Battery fired again. "We need to run, so I'll have to say ta-ta Captain. We'd ask you to go with us, but I think you'll find your ship will need some emergency repairs before being jumpworthy. Give my regards to the Empress!" The shot struck true, right on top of the hole where the engine had impacted. The destroyer bent as a key piece of the superstructure gave way.      The Beauteous Revenge spun again and this time began furiously decelerating. With precision only available to computer pilots she came a precise stop at the jump point, just for a moment at rest relative to the theoretical line between two distant stars. An eerie iridescent glow limned the hull and then the ship shrank into an infinitely small and bright point which winked into nonexistence.
(That brings our first episode to a close. I'll post more soon about my future web serialization plans!)
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Kingdom Hearts II

I should talk a little about my latest single-player gaming. Admittedly a bit late to the party but I recently rented Kingdom Hearts II from Gamefly It's interesting in that I like the Kingdom Hearts line much better than any other Square title you'd care to name. I finished the first PS2 title, and I made it to the final few boss fights of the GBA game before losing interest. Everything you might have read about KHII is true - the prologue is ridiculously long - I played for three hours and forty-five minutes before I got to play the main character of the story (Sora). There's a whole bizarre storyline about some sort of strange computer simulation designed to keep Sora submerged in some alternate personality - to be honest I only about half-followed it. I'm now at something like 32 or 33 hours of total play, and I'm closing in on the end, I'd guess it's going to track pretty close to 40 hours, plus any extra time spent finishing "Jiminy's Journal" for the good ending. Many of my readers read Penny-Arcade as well and they will be asking "But what about this?" and it's a fair question. I don't know yet. I would have originally told you that I wasn't even bothering with getting all of Jiminy's Journal. I do have the obsessive "gotta get all the stamps" personality that gets wrapped up in this sort of thing, but I'm used to Square demanding insane levels of obssession and devotion to finish a game. However I did notice that many of the worlds were in fact getting finished as I progressed. It's close enough that I might go ahead and make the final effort, we'll see. It's sort of weird that I like Kingdom Hearts as I always get annoyed at Final Fantasy games and I'm pretty derogative of the Disney properties. So if I don't like Auron, Leon, and Yuffie, and I've never even seen The Lion King, or Aladdin, or The Little Mermaid you wouldn't think I'd like some strange mash-up of the two. But it turns out that I do. The younger focus of the Disney side reigns in the Square "let's have endless random encounters and some obscenely elaborate character leveling system", and the Square side puts a reasonably engaging RPG story on top of the endless Disney merchandising tie-ins. The combat is pretty simplistic, it's really just mashing X a lot to progress though most fights, but the camera isn't quite as insane as the first Kingdom Hearts. KHII has some really neat parts - there's a flashback level to Steamboat Willie where the Disney character revert to their old appearances, the level is black and white and there's even some grain and film scratches simulated to really feel like you're playing in an early days cartoon. The Tron level was entertaining in the first pass. (Most of the worlds appear to have two story arcs - you open them up and do the first stories and then revisit them to finish off the big bad boss. I've only done the first pass in Tron.) It is sobering to remember seeing Tron as a kid. Those graphics were amazing at the time but now they are doing a pretty faithful recreation in real time on a home game console and my jaded, sybaritic response is "that looks sort of low-res and dated". Ah progress. Anyway, I'd recommend a rental, assuming you like RPG's at all and (and this is a biggie) you can see putting in four hours of play before getting to the "real" game. I think that time will be dramatically important to the story eventually, the clues are building. But it was about a week for me of playing it every couple of days and basically just saying "WTF is going on here?" I thought it was a tutorial, and certainly part of it was, but four hours is a bit much for that. If you're the sort of player who can only manage an hour every couple of weeks I think KHII will lose you before you ever cut through the intro to the interesting parts.
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ST:TNG

So in between discs of Babylon 5 I've been watching random episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And I really want to like it. But I can't. It's just bad people. Not because I'm a Star Wars fan - I fully expect the upcoming Star Wars TV show will suck way worse. But that doesn't make ST:TNG good. My relationship with ST:TNG is . . . complex to say the least. Here's the scoop (going from memory, so I could have it wrong) - the first two seasons of TNG I was in Germany, attending colleage at the U of M, Munich campus. Somehow (I have no idea how I was working this) I was getting bootleg tapes of TNG. I'm pretty sure that I saw all of season 1 this way and some part of season 2. (My confused memories even claim some of these tapes were Betamax, and yes I did have a Betamax VCR while I was in college - long story.) I think I watched season 3 after returning to the States, during the Dark Year(tm) I lived in New Jersey. I was really upset by some cliffhanger or another - Data getting his emotion chip or some such. Anyway, I think once I went away to finish college at College Park I could no longer see TNG and so I gave up on it. I have this jumbled impression of A) Wesley Crusher - supa-genius!(tm) plus the B) belief that almost any problem could be solved by Geordie running some sort of experimental particle through the deflector dish. So fine. Now I'm older, my genre tastes are more mature, yadda yadda. So I've watched a half-dozen or so episodes from Spike TV or G4 repeats. And y'know - it's just BAD. They are bad, bad, bad sci-fi. I just watched an episode where Wesley's science project was studying medical nanites, but he fell asleep and they "escaped" and took over the Enterprise's computer. Because, y'see, Wesley being a supa-genius(tm) came up with the radical step of having two nanites . . . cooperate (gasp). This led to a complete defeat of the military computer running Starfleet's state-of-the-art flagship vessel - because nobody could anticipate rogue nanites who actually communicate in the future. Yes, the terrorists nanites took hundreds of people hostage, but it's all good because they are a new life-form and Prime Directive, blah, blah, blah (yawn), blah. It's bad sci-fi. It gives the genre a bad name. When people say "I don't like sci-fi" they really mean "I don't like shows where Geordie/Data/Wesley makes technobabble shit up in the last ten minutes of an episode and saves everyone". ST:TNG was popular because it aired in a drought period of no competing SF - not because it was good. Sanders' rules of picking out the ST:TNG bad episodes are as follows: 1) If it involves the holodeck, it sucks. The holodeck was always a literary cheat, a goofy deus ex machina that got way-the-fuck overused to justify whatever crazy plot point they wanted to tell. Plus - the only thing goofier than Kirk fighting Abraham Lincoln is to make a fake Abraham Lincoln and then have the computre go berserk and refuse to let people out. I wish that wasn't the description of a half-dozen or so ST:TNG eps, but sadly it is. 2) If anybody routes anything through the deflector dish, it sucks. 3) If anybody spouts anything that sounds scientific, but makes anybody who has read a science book in the last fifteen years grind their teeth in annoyance, it sucks. This will include tachyons, deuterium, nanites, or anything involving strange energies. 4) If it introduces new characters that we don't care about, then explains their dilmemna, then resolves their issues within one episode and we never see those characters again, it sucks. This is admittedly a literary complaint, not a sci-fi one but I feel it's still valid. These four rules cover every ST:TNG episode I've watched in the last month, and most of episodes are hit by two or more rules. It's bad science and it's bad fiction. There are moments of good acting (Patrick Stewart especially), and there are several characters that look hot in the silly uniforms. Everything else is just terrible. Are there any fans who read my blog who can actually refute any of these points?
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The Internal Critic

"Hey," the Internal Critic said, "don't cockblock me, man. I'll tell you when it's working and when it isn't."
WWdN: In Exile: Real Love / It's Only Life I've had a bit of a frustrating day, creatively - and the astute will notice I've missed a post for the impulsive Captain Arcolier. Tuesday was a holiday, and Karin was leaving town, and the cats hate fireworks, and blah, blah, blah. Point is I'm off-balance domestically and that means I don't work smoothly. I spentwasted a large chunk of the day surfing ye old Internets, and the only thing that got a real chuckle today was the Internal Critic saying "don't cockblock me, man." Anyone who has ever attempted anything creative has to appreciate that. Everyone knows I'm not the "hey let's have kids" guy, but this spoke to me. Not the having kids part but the whole sort of "recognize where you are, and recognize that you're there because that is where you wanted to be be you lucky son-of-a-bitch" thing, that resonates. Amen, brother Wheaton! I never really was a fan of Wil-Wheaton-the-actor*, but Wil-Wheaton-the-blogger is very insightful. One day I'll get around to reading his books and then give you an opinion of Wil-Wheaton-the-author. Remind me. *Not that I dislike him, just was never that into either Stand By Me or ST:TNG. (I wrote this in Flock, but it refused to post properly to my blog. I copied and pasted and fiddled and ultimately it would have been easier to write this in TextMate like normal. Frowny face, but that's not really the point now is it?)
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