Unfortunately, two decades later, the show's flaws are more evident. The "Rubber Science" of Star Trek is, of course, a long standing joke. But what's truly striking to me now is how pervasive the problem is. In literally every episode, some dramatic new technological event occurs. I've just watched two episodes in a row where eternal life gets invented. In the first, the ability to download brains to computers! In the second, the ability to use the transporter to filter out old age!

These are interesting and deep ideas, well and truly explored throughout the sci-fi literature. But in Star Trek, they're just part of a fusillade of the sci-fi smorgasbord that's being hurled at us. In a good sci-fi, these kinds of ideas are used as a backdrop, and what becomes interesting is the exploration of the societal impact. But Federation culture is impervious to change. The Prime Directive seems to apply more to the Federation itself than to the noble savages they continuously encounter. Disruptive technologies assault the crew of the Enterprise on a daily basis, and yet they rise above, serene, impermeable.

Perhaps this is why Babylon 5 was so attractive; it was arguably the first modern sci-fi show that acknowledged that change happens. Re-watching Firefly in the past few days (in between discs of ST:TNG, since Firefly was so mournfully short) also demonstrates a sci-fi universe where technology has cultural implications.

Here are some examples in the past two decades of ideas that would have been throw-away plot devices in ST:TNG:

• laptop computers
• pervasive high speed networking
• dramatic improvements in visual rendering
• the web
• pervasive mobile access to data

For example, seven years ago, the iPod was just coming out. Now, iPhones, Droids, and Pres have dramatically changed the way we look at computing. Where, in ST:TNG's seven year run, is the impact of ANY of their throwaway ideas shown? I'd argue the closest Star Trek ever comes to this is the Holodeck, a technology introduced with the first episode, and which ends up having great impact on the social interactions of the crew.

The show is nice to re-watch, largely because it does harken back to a simpler time. After a stressful year, it's nice to watch a fairly low-impact and innocuous fantasy, where people are just fundamentally trying to be nice to each other. But the elephants in the transporter bay are hard to overlook.

No, I'm here because I want to share about a game that wants to crush your soul.

So, I keep hearing about this game, "Demon's Souls." I keep hearing that it's hard, it's unforgiving, and then -- my favorite useless piece of information -- that "failure just means your strategy was wrong." Nobody actually described what any of this stuff means. So here's first impressions, if you're wondering about this game. Sneak preview: it's cruel, but captivating.

First off, this game does not want to be your friend. There are absolutely no story breadcrumbs in the first few hours that I've played. At some point, when the game wants to introduce you to a particular gameplay mechanic, it just puts a boss that will one-shot you in your way. "But Eric," you say. "OMG spoilers!" you say. To you I say, shut your damn pie hole, this information is not going to actually help you in any useful way.

Character creation is terrible -- you have lots of sliders, all of which affect other sliders in obscure ways, and all of which basically turn your character from Moon Boy into The Kid From Mask with the merest flick of your wrist. There is literally no setting of the face sliders that doesn't result in a deformed creature from beyond the widdershins dimension -- which, now that I think on it -- may just be another metaphysical statement the game is trying to impart.

The game prizes exploration. Almost nothing is explained. Any explanations you find are going to come from your fellow players. Because, in a way, this is the most lonely MMO you will ever, ever play. Did you die? Your bloodstain will show up in my game, and if I see it and click on it, I can watch you vainly fighting against an unseen foe, and perhaps gain insight from it. You can leave me messages. The messages are from a heavily templated menu-driven system, so your messages will actually all be grammatically correct, and filled with thees and thous, but if your message is helpful, I can send you a heal. Sometimes your ghostly form will appear on my screen, going about ghostly and mysterious tasks.

So when we play, we play in the same world, and we see each other -- but only in dim echoes that remind us purely of the futility of our own struggle against the demons. Also, there's no /trade chat, and that's pretty cool.

The game kind of starts when you're dead. Dying causes you to leave a bloodstain on the floor and restart life as a ghost -- a ghost that can basically do everything your living self can do, but just has half the health to do it in. At this point, the game will remind you of when you played Rainbow Six, because you'll have to venture through this dungeon to kill the big bad at the end. And on your way you will die... a lot. And when you respawn, you'll re-fight through the same dungeon with the same enemies doing the same things. So when people talk crap about how "dying means your strategy was just wrong," they basically mean "dying means you didn't remember that the one guy with the flaming eyeballs jumps out from behind the wall when you get to step 413, and you didn't counter with the witty repartee maneuver... GOD."

Should you manage to win your way back to your bloodstain though, well, good news: you can get the XP back that you left in a puddle on the floor.

So, nothing is explained. The manual is useless. Mana doesn't even regenerate unless you start out as a coddled Royal, who's looted the royal treasury for some nice gear. Progress is a combination of exploration, experimentation, and memorization. At any moment you could be set back to where you started and have to replay 10-15 minutes of your ghostly life again. Why the hell would you even play this game?

What can I say? The combat is BADASS. Blocking, riposting, parrying, combo moves, some magic thrown into the mix -- it's exactly the kind of fake-fantasy combat RPG model I've always wanted. The inner loop of this game is more fun than the cruel outer loop, and that's what drives me on.

Also, I think about that poor ghost still wandering around that castle and I feel bad -- maybe this time I can win through and re-unite my avatar with her mortal coil. Maybe. I'll probably just get pissed again though and play something else.

And I wasn't. But they put a videogame inside my car, and it's not my fault.

I've had Saturns since I've had cars. This is my third car, and the first two were both variations on the Saturn sedan of the time. At first, I really liked the philosophy of Saturn, but over the past several years Carrie & I have both become fairly disillusioned with the increasingly poor customer service. After spending several hundred dollars to get an issue fixed with my Ion that ended up not being fixed anyway, requiring further repairs, I pretty much gave up. The Ion had been a Fine Vehicle, but I was ready for something... sexier. Cooler. Dare I say... Nerdier.

When I went shopping for the Ion in the early part of the century, we test drove the first version of the Prius. Regrettably, it kind of sucked for such tall and leggy people as ourselves. That, plus the incredible waiting lists for hybrids at the time, caused me to put the idea on the shelf of wistfulness. But now that a car replacement was on the table, Carrie's research found that the current cars had been substantially re-worked inside. We went to go test-drive a second generation Prius, and were pleasantly surprised. It felt roomy and awesome, handled well, and it was full of status displays and readouts.

Far forward to a month or two later. Research had been done. Pondering had been pondered. Hate for current car had escalated. Remaining administrative details necessary in order to unload old car had been dealt with. My car title was in hand, Apple stock was reasonably up, and I was ready to enter the future.

Technological Terror

Those who know me will be unsurprised to know that I'm a fairly pragmatic liberal. My general rule of thumb is "try not to suck." I'm also probably the very definition of technocrat. So ever since I first heard about hybrid cars, my first thought was, "well, duh, that seems obvious -- why doesn't every car do that?" I mean, when I was 12 and didn't understand about things like entropy, I didn't understand why a car couldn't just run off the friction from spinning the wheels.

Well. Happy day.

It's important to note that the futurecar is not a magic bullet. Despite being rated at something like 50mpg, it'll still perform in fine mediocre fashion if you're spending lots of time between stoplights, accelerating a lot. (Where "mediocre" here is defined as "still better than my Ion" -- but more like 30mpg than the advertised 50mpg.) It'll also be totally happy to perform like a dancing pig if you drive it like one.

But they put this videogame inside my car, see.

It's a little bar. And when I accelerate, the little bar fills up. And if I can keep that little bar in the lines then I get more experience points! Or something like that. Maybe my combos fill up faster. All I know is that suddenly my car has a competitive angle.

I can also flip to this other display where I can find out how fast my XP is piling up:

Yeah -- a bar graph that breaks down my XP gains over the five minutes, or even by every minute. Honestly, I don't know why they didn't make the graph continuous like a CPU meter. Oh right -- it's because I'd never watch the road, and crash into a bus full of school-children who were on a science field trip. Because irony works like that.

So like I said. It's not my fault. They put a video game in my car. And now I'm determined to do better than that lame-ass 30mpg showing I have from the first 200 miles. Seriously -- what a noob.

Geek Luxury

But like I said, that's not actually why I bought the car. Remember that picture from the top of the entry? I bought the car because it looks like a goddamned spaceship. I seriously feel like I should be able to dock with a Federation starship in this thing. I'm continually searching for the laser beams.

My favorite feature -- especially in light of a problem I had with the Ion involving keys -- is that this thing is essentially keyless. I have the little keyfob, but in day-to-day operation it never comes out of my pocket. Here's how you unlock the car, assuming the keyfob is near the car:

Yeah. You pretty much just put your hand on the handle and pull. Here, then, is how you lock the car:

Words cannot describe how giddy this makes me.

Inside, the car looks like a spaceship as well:

You can't really see it in the picture, but there's actually a fair degree of three-dimensionality to the console display. Including, if you hold down buttons on the steering wheel, you get a little heads up display around the MPH readout:

Generally, the car just feels comfortable to ride in. It feels spacious on the inside without feeling like an SUV or a truck. The driver & passenger seats feel like little spacepods... but in a cool, comforting way. The built-in bluetooth smoothly picked up my phone when I sat in the car, and flipped it over into the car's speakerphone. The car starts by depressing a big power button, instead of making me mess around with juggling keys in addition to whatever else I'm carrying.

Seriously, it feels like I bought a laptop I can drive. I keep wanting to find some website where I can download new software for it.

The fireworks over the castle were incredible:

Followed soon after by a light show:

The next day, we took the train back home. On our way back through King's Cross station, we saw Platform 9 3/4, of Harry Potter fame:

Jan 2nd:

Attempted to return home -- faulty plane and many annoying travails caused the 2nd to slip into...

Jan 3rd:

...in which we got up at 3:30am to catch a 7am flight, and finally got home. Hooray!

Except for the travel bees at the end, it was an awesome trip. I'm very glad to be home though, now :).

Tonight is Hogmanay -- and we're in Edinburgh for it. And it's frickin' cold.

We wandered around today. Edinburgh is an amazing city. The combination of centuries-old architecture and a vibrant city core is enthralling to me in a way that London and Paris haven't been.

I don't have a lot of text for this entry; just three pictures I took today.

Dec 28th:

Our afternoon was mostly taken up in the the British Library.

I would have loved to have shown you pictures of the "National Treasures" exhibit, which included jotted down Beatles lyrics, a Gutenberg Bible, the Magna Carta, and Jane Austen's writing desk; or the provocative "Taking Liberties" exhibit, which showed interesting British historical documents and the context in which they led to modern civil rights, but the British Library didn't allow the taking of photographs :(. Suffice it to say that it was all pretty amazing.

I did snap this shot of The King's Library, which formed the original core of the British Library, and is still apparently expected to be held separate under the terms of the original donation. I wish I'd had a fish-eye lens, because it's much much bigger than this.

This is an iconic sight in the London Underground -- mind the gap!

We went to see a burlesque Sunday night -- La Clique. It was very, very gay. A good time was had by all.

Dec 29th:

Our last full day in London. I had trouble sleeping, but we hit the ground running and spent the day seeing the sights. This was really the first non-holiday weekday of our trip, so we got to see the city in more of its natural state.

First off: Trafalgar Square. I will spare you most of my pictures of statues and fountains.

Next up: we took a "Duck Tour." World War II amphibious landing craft/troop carriers have been repurposed into tour vehicles. Half of the tour was on the streets of London, and the other half was on the River Thames. Our tour guide was replete with bad jokes, and it was a cheesily awesome good time.

Passing another "Duck" on the river:

House of Parliament and Big Ben:

After lunch, we headed over to the Tower of London. On our way, we passed this odd church archway on Seething Lane:

This is the entryway to the Tower. While it's not in this picture, I found it interesting that the gatehouse to the tower was where the security folks were doing bag checks and checking tickets.

The actual Tower was somewhat disappointing, because it was jammed full of people, and the exhibits were somewhat lackluster in providing information and context. Still, the architecture was fascinating, at least partially because it covered so many different eras within a very small amount of acreage.

I found "The Line of Kings" to be impressive:

And this elaborate arrangement of guns in the royal armoury:

We passed on waiting in line to see the Crown Jewels, though. This picture shows part of the incredibly long line, and also some of the architectural whiplash:

This picture has three interesting things in it. First, a tower raven (in the left). Second, a really old-ass wall. Third, a representative queue of people waiting to get into one of the many tiny tower exhibits.

Here's a close-up of that same raven from the last picture:

Some more architectural whiplash -- it's the London Gherkin in the background!

And here's Tower Bridge and the oddly shaped London City Hall in one shot:

Finally, Tower Bridge at night:

From the Tower of London, we headed to Newham to catch a panto. However, the guide we used steered us wrong, and this one completely failed to have any of the sly subversive humor we were promised. Instead, it was a pretty straight up kid's show. We left after the intermission and spent a quiet evening in the hotel room.

And this morning we're on a train to Edinburgh! More on that in the next post.

Our hotel is just around the corner from the British Museum, which is quite an impressive edifice. The interior courtyard gave me a uniquely 21st century bit of deja vu, because I'd seen it before -- in Hellgate: London (note: this is the only part of London I've actually placed from this game). I remember quite distinctly battling some evil yet nondescript creature up and down the stairs that encircle the reading room in the center of the courtyard.

Our first stop was the Egyptian exhibit. As we wandered around, we overheard a gentleman translating the hieroglyphs to his companion. He noticed our interest, and began walking us through some of the basic details of the offering formula featured on the piece we were observing:

We also particularly enjoyed this statue of Ishtar as war goddess:

The drinking horns, and the room of Viking stuff they were contained in, got The Immigrant Song irrevocably stuck in our head:

Possibly the most depressing aspect of the museum was the exhibit of Parthenon statues:

The tone was oddly defensive -- "hey, if we hadn't bought these statues off of a dissolute English lord who picked up their pieces out of the rubble of wars and explosions, I mean, heck, they'd be destroyed by now!" Which, while probably true, didn't make it feel any less like we were viewing the corpse of the Parthenon, laid out on the operating table for us to view.

I'm not entirely sure why this exhibit in particular felt worse than the others in this regard. I think it might have been the sad history of the Parthenon -- it was used as an ammo dump in a 17th century war, and a shell lit off the gunpowder stored inside, which did much of the damage to the structure. It might have been the horrible shape most of the statuary was in, compared to the other pieces on display.

For me, though, it was seeing these statues that are meant to loom over us, sitting stacked one next to the other at eye level, battered and beaten. It's not how I pictured the place. In a way, the Carnegie's display of plasters of these ancient statues had more of a sense of the grand scope I expected.

Still, that hall aside, we found the British Museum overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Our feet hurt, but our heads are full. Also, we took high tea in the museum's cafe, and that was both tasty and delicious.