Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Dave: We’re getting toward the end of our time here, but why don’t we run through some of the best channels and videos that we haven’t mentioned yet? We have this whole big list here, but maybe I’ll just mention a couple of the people that our listeners recommended. You’ve got How It Should Have Ended, they make fun of movies, point out plot holes, or have an improved ending. The one that sticks in my mind is its “Lord of the Rings: How It Should Have Ended,” and they just have the eagle fly them to the volcano, and they drop the ring in, and they fly home, and they’re like, “Imagine if we had walked that whole way, how hard that would have been.” I think there is stuff in the book that says why they can’t do that with the eagles, but it’s still funny. A couple people said Red Letter Media; have you guys seen the seven-part takedown of The Phantom Menace?

  Matt: It’s almost as long as The Phantom Menace.

  Dave: It is epic and amazing. The part that sticks in my mind from that is that they ask people on the street to describe the characters from the original movies: Princess Leia, Han Solo, and they say all this stuff about their personalities. Then they’re like, “Now describe the personality of Princess Amidala.” People are like, “Umm, she’s a princess?”

  Matt: Exactly. In terms of Star Wars-related content, one of my all-time favorites is Star Wars Uncut. Star Wars Uncut was this crowd-sourced fan film where this guy asked his viewers to film fifteen seconds of Star Wars: A New Hope. He got hundreds of submissions of all these people putting together these tiny little short films.

  Dave: This is in their backyards with cheap costumes.

  Matt: Yeah, some of them are animated, some are spoofing old video game styles, a lot of them are people in bathrobes in their backyards with painted sticks. He then assembled them all into the film, and had them edited, smoothed out, used awesome sound effects, and blended it all together until he had a brand new version of Star Wars: A New Hope. I remember when I first watched it, I was like, “Oh, I’ll watch five minutes of this.” I got to like fifteen minutes in and was like, “I’m in trouble. I’m going to sit here and watch this whole thing.” And I did. It was like watching the movie again for the first time, because it gives you this new sense of discovery. You know what happens in Star Wars, but you don’t know how it’s going to happen again. They’re working on an Empire Strikes Back one now. I cannot wait to watch it. I think that there should be more stuff like this. If there is a leader orchestrating really quality, crowd-sourced content, I think the result could be amazing.

  Dave: I don’t know if you ever saw ASCII Star Wars, but someone was trying to do all of A New Hope using ASCII art. He did forty-five minutes of it or something, but you look at this, and you’re like, “Oh my god, how long must it have taken to do this?” It’s funny, because if you look at the FAQ, the first question is like, “Why? Oh, for the love of god, why?” His answer is, “Eh, it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  John: That reminds me, I totally forgot about this, and I’m ashamed that I didn’t include it on my list of favorites, but speaking of things that took an ungodly amount of time, that makes me think of Claymation, but there is this great Claymation video called Chainsaw Maid. It’s this ridiculously over the top, violent zombie thing. It’s about a maid who’s in this house, and the zombies start coming in, and she ends up getting a chainsaw. It’s so ridiculous, but it’s so gloriously violent. It’s a lot of fun. It’s hilarious, and so ridiculous and over the top. Actually, on the subject of Star Wars, though, there’s a lot of great Star Wars content that’s sort of spoofing things. On Geek and Sundry they have Space Janitors, which is basically a comedy show that is spoofing Star Wars. The main characters are space janitors on the Star Destroyer. Also the Auralnaughts, that’s another channel that has a whole ton of stuff, including some of my favorites. One of them was a show called Jedi Party, and it’s a parody of Phantom Menace: Instead of going to stop the trade federation Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon, they’re just there for a party and they’re jerks. It’s really funny.

  Dave: We should say that that’s Auralnaughts, a-u-r-a-l, not o-r-a-l.

  John: Right, that would be a different channel.

  Dave: Speaking of Star Wars, it makes me think of Star Wars Kid, and like the dark side of YouTube. I don’t know if you guys have read what happened to him, but he was bullied, and he had to change schools, and was in therapy, and all sorts of crazy stuff.

  Matt: It’s sad. You should have a choice if you’re going to be posted on YouTube yourself. I think that this technology has appeared very quickly, and faster than societal norms and ethical questions can be defined and answered. It happened before it could become publicly accepted that that kind of thing is not okay.

  Dave: Cate, do you have any favorite channels or videos you wanted to mention?

  Cate: We’ve mentioned the Vlog Brothers, and Hank Green of the Vlog Brothers has a show called Scishow, which kind of talks about popular science and debunks some of the myths, and I think that is very enjoyable to watch, and it’s very interesting. Also, Feminist Frequency by Anita Sarkeesian, she analyzes tropes in science fiction and games, and that’s always interesting. Those would be my two recommendations.

  Dave: Speaking of science, some people wanted us to mention Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson, which is a video show on the Nerdist network.

  John: We mentioned Ze Frank in passing, but his True Facts series is pretty great. It’s definitely one of my favorite things on YouTube. It’s like he takes some weird animal, and there’s video of it, and he just narrates like it was a nature documentary, but it’s very sarcastic, and he kind of sounds like Morgan Freeman being sarcastic, which is great. He does the anglerfish, the mantis shrimp, and the dung beetle. They’re just hilarious. They’re all like two minutes long, so they’re the perfect length for YouTube. That’s probably my favorite science thing.

  Matt: I have a lot of favorite channels. I’m really big into [the] video game [show] Let’s Play—I already mentioned Machinima, but Let’s Play is more of you can actually sit and watch somebody play through a video game. So, if it’s on a system that you don’t have, but you want to sort of have the cultural experience of playing the game, you can watch it kind of like a movie.

  John: Dave, you do that all the time, don’t you?

  Dave: I forget where I heard this, but there was a guy, he says, “I beat it on YouTube.” That just means I just watched through the game on YouTube, and then you didn’t have to pay for the game. I did that all the time. There was just a zombie game called The Last of Us, which is actually really well written, I thought. I started watching the Let’s Play, and after maybe an hour, I was bored with the game play section, but I was still interested in the story, so I just found someone who had cut all the cinematic scenes together into basically an hour-long movie, and I just watched that whole thing, and I loved it.

  Matt: It’s an awesome game. I’m really kind of getting into e-sports, like pro-gaming, and one of the things about that that I really like is that there’s so many, not just like ESPN-style produced competitions that you can watch online, either recorded videos on YouTube or streaming live on a site like Twitch.tv, but some of the shout-casters, or commentators, that come out of that world become internet celebrities themselves. Day[9], aka Sean Plott, is one of the biggest. He has a series that just has so many viewers, even though he’s not even a professional player anymore of StarCraft, he is probably the most famous person to come out of that e-sports world. There’s a Magic commentator that I really like named Marshall Sutcliffe, who runs a podcast called Limited Resources about playing limited Magic: The Gathering. He’ll do not just strategy conversations, but also gameplay videos where he’ll take you through a game and talk about all of the decisions that he’s making. If you’re interested in learning to play either a game like Magic better, or a video game like StarCraft, or even something like The Last of Us, you can find that on YouTube, and experience it, and learn how to be better.

  Although, I
will say that my all-time favorite show on YouTube is from this pro-gamer named Frankie on PC, and there was this mod game, and John, you and I might have talked about this at some point, a game called Day Z. The way it works is it’s a mod of a very realistic military shooter, but the game was modded so that it all takes place on this one enormous map, and you spawn on the map somewhere with an empty backpack and your shoes, and you have to survive the zombie apocalypse. There are zombies all over this map, and you have to scrounge for food, guns, and supplies, and then meanwhile the zombies are all trying to eat you, and the other players—it’s sort of an MMO, a persistent world—but the other players are even more dangerous than the zombies because they may find you, and think, “Oh, this guy’s got a backpack full of food. That’s much easier than going into a grocery store filled with zombies. I’ll just murder this guy and take all of his stuff.” There’s permanent death in the game, so if you die that’s it, it’s over. What this guy Frankie does, is he just plays the game, and sort of comments his way through it, and because the social interaction between the other players is so relevant to the game, it takes on the feel of this serialized zombie survival horror show, where you have to watch him stay alive in this game. The series itself spans dozens of episodes and hours of content. It’s so gripping even though it’s just gameplay videos of a video game.

  Dave: This came up in the interview with Felicia, but the Ultima series, there’s a whole series where Warren Spector, the legendary game designer, he interviews different game designers. There’s one called “Warren Spector interviews Richard Garriott,” about his game design career, and it really covers his whole career and a lot of stuff about the Ultima games. It’s really interesting. That’s the stuff that, if there was no YouTube, it isn’t going to be on Netflix or anything, it’s way too specialized. There’s a lot of stuff like that. My favorite author is Roger Zelazny, and for years and years and years I looked for some video of him online. I could never find anything. Finally on YouTube this video pops up, it’s called “Book V: Roger Zelazny Reads at 4th Street Fantasy Convention, 1986,” and as far as I know, this is the only video of Roger Zelazny online, at least the only one I could find after years of searching. It’s just amazing that stuff like this pops up on YouTube, and you can actually find it.

  Matt: There was an old French Saturday morning cartoon show, and I couldn’t remember what it was called, I just remember that when I was a little kid I used to wake up very early in the morning, sneak downstairs, and watch this cartoon with my brother at five-thirty or six in the morning. It was a syndicated thing, so it wasn’t even anywhere close to being on the original network that it was on. I couldn’t remember the name of it, so eventually on YouTube, just typing in search terms, trying different combinations, and trying to guess at it, I finally found it. It was so amazing to think that YouTube is this amazing resource for archiving childhood memories that people have.

  John: Actually, on the subject of video games, I just had one other thing I wanted to mention because it’s so amazing. There’s a trailer for this video game called Leviathan Warships. It’s so hilarious. The trailer goes for pure humor, and the game isn’t humorous at all, as far as I can tell, it’s just a warship strategy game, but they do this weird sort of Barry White-type voice, and there’s music in the background, and it’s like, “Leviathan Warships.” And they make all these ship puns, so they’re like, “Ship just got real.” They’re describing the gameplay and stuff, but it’s so hilarious. You’ll have to go check it out because it’s like, at the end, “You’ll ship yourself.” So many ship puns, and it’s just so beautiful. It’s a work of art. I feel like if every trailer could be that entertaining, we’d really be in business.

  Matt: The problem with advertising is that, because companies have to put so much money behind a campaign, it’s terrifying to try and make a daring experiment like that commercial, but on the web the risk is so much lower that you can take chances and end up creating a hit for yourself just out of a daring ad campaign.

  Dave: I also want to mention a couple other listener suggestions. I don’t know anything about these, but people recommended The SlowMo Guys, I think they just shoot stuff and show it in slow motion or something.

  Matt: They’re awesome.

  Dave: The SMBC Theater and Cinema Sins are somewhat similar to How It Should Have Ended, where they go through movies and say their problems with it and count them off.

  John: Cinema Sins is entertaining. I like that. I didn’t know about it either, but I watched some because of this.

  Dave: Let’s wrap this up because we could go on all day with YouTube videos. We’ll probably post some more of these on our Facebook page, and if there’s anything that we didn’t mention that you think we should check out, then mention it on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Otherwise, I think we’re going to wrap things up there. Matt, thanks for joining us for the eighth time.

  Matt: Great to be here.

  Dave: Cate, thanks for joining us for the first time.

  Cate: Thanks so much for having me.

  John: No thanks to me for joining us for the ninety-first time?

  Dave: [Laughter] And thanks to John for joining us for the ninety-first time!

  John: Oh, thank you, thank you. And thanks to Dave for hosting for the ninety-first time!

  Dave: Yay.

  The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy is a science fiction/fantasy talk show podcast. It is hosted by:

  David Barr Kirtley has published fiction in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, Intergalactic Medicine Show, On Spec, and Cicada, and in anthologies such as New Voices in Science Fiction, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, and The Dragon Done It. Recently he’s contributed stories to several of John Joseph Adams’s anthologies, including The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, and The Way of the Wizard. He’s attended numerous writing workshops, including Clarion, Odyssey, Viable Paradise, James Gunn’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction, and Orson Scott Card’s Writers Boot Camp, and he holds an MFA in screenwriting and fiction from the University of Southern California. He also teaches regularly at Alpha, a Pittsburgh-area science fiction workshop for young writers. He lives in New York.

  Artist Gallery: Mark Zug

  Mark Zug was born in 1959 in Indiana. He attended the Pennsylvania School of Art and Design. He has worked as a freelance artist doing illustration for works by authors ranging from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Harlan Ellison, and Isaac Asimov to Diana Wynne-Jones and Tanith Lee. He has created cover art and fantasy game book and product art in the Dune, Star Wars, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Battletech, Shadowrun, and Magic: The Gathering universes, among others. His work has been featured in magazines such as Popular Science, Dragon, and Dungeon. He is the illustrator for the bestselling Septimus Heap series of fantasy novels by Angie Sage. His work has won a Jack Gaughan award, a Chesley award, and an Illie award, and is regularly featured in Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantasy Art. He lives in Lewisberry, Pennsylvania. His website is www.markzug.com.

  [To view the gallery, turn the page.]

  Artist Spotlight: Mark Zug

  Henry Lien

  The influence of Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth and the Brandywine school of illustrators is apparent in your work. The sense of adventure and optimism in their work reflects a lot of the viewpoints and values of Romanticism in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century and strikes me as particularly American in feel. Somehow, you’ve managed to capture and transplant that sense of brightness and potential in your works depicting very different times and places. How are you achieving that? Is it the light, the composition, the breathtaking sense of expansiveness and scale in clouds and vistas? Even for viewers who are not familiar with Pyle and Wyeth, there is a sense of excitement your works convey that viewers naturally respond to. What are you doing as an artist to trigger such response?

  First of all, I believe in that romanticism myself. The frontier romanticism, which is often seen a
s American, is really a siren song that unknown spaces sing to humans down through all ages. And your question is really how to compose a romantic picture, which requires a very long answer. But I think I can boil it down to a couple of things: The painting must be concerned with the problem of being alive, and so include some sort of actor who is motivated. Second, the environment is a star in its own right and must be rendered as multi-dimensionally as the main character(s)—whether that environment is a vista with mountains and clouds, or a dark prison cell illuminated by a single shaft of moonlight. The environment is like a “Dungeon Master,” setting terms and possibilities for the actor. I think this is the sense of immersion emanating from Pyle’s or Wyeth’s work, which you interpret as expansiveness—because the environment is rendered truthfully enough to seem to extend way past the edges of the canvas.

  Are you familiar with the work of N.C. Wyeth’s grandson Jamie Wyeth, who explicitly embraces a sense of otherworldliness in his paintings while still showing the clear lineage of the Wyeths and Pyle? And the book Wondrous Strange that collects the works of Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth, emphasizing the sense of otherworldliness that characterizes the works of Pyle and the Wyeths?

  I’m not familiar with that book, though of course I know Jamie’s work. He was firstly always a fine artist, with the perpetual freedom to explore a kind of idiosyncratic wit through odd juxtapositions and unexpected perspectives. His mission was different from N.C.’s—he never had to imbue a potboiler with an aura of excitement to please a recalcitrant art director, for instance. And Jamie was, like his father and grandfather, preoccupied with the luxurious texture of his paints. N.C. did it with meaty smacks of broken color, Andrew did it with a meticulous “hair” of fine tempera brush strokes, and Jaime seemed to be running a perpetual skunkworks experiment in how to apply oil paint. In style, the three generations of realists could not be more different from each other. And yes, N.C. is my favorite—though I do enjoy the work of both son and grandson.