Saalon Muyo

I got a challenge from my friend Kim to solve a programming problem they give new hire candidates.  Basically, the problem is to build something that takes a string of Morse code and returns all possible translations for it.  I did my solution in Ruby.  This is pretty much a first pass,  so comments are appreciated.  This is, I think, the first time I’ve ever solved a problem with recursion when I wasn’t specifically told “use recursion” for an assignment.

def morse_code()
  morse = {'a' => '.-',
              'b' => '-...',
              'c' => '-.-.',
              'd' =>'-..',
              'e' => '.',
              'f' => '..-.',
              'g' => '--.',
              'h' => '....',
              'i' => '..',
              'j' => '.---',
              'k' => '-.-',
              'l' => '.-..',
              'm' => '--',
              'n' => '-.',
              'o' => '---',
              'p' => '.--.',
              'q' => '--.-',
              'r' => '.-.',
              's' => '...',
              't' => '-',
              'u' => '..-',
              'v' => '...-',
              'w' => '.--',
              'x' => '-..-',
              'y' => '-.--',
              'z' => '--..'}

  # This is a hack; I reversed the hash when I typed it and didn't want to retype
  # just for a proof of concept
  morse.invert
end

def read_morse_code(input, morse)

  # Initialize some arrays
  code_matches = Array.new
  matches = Array.new
  translation_list = Array.new

  # If we've been passed a nil input, it's at the end of the search.
  # Return an empty array
  if input.nil?
    return translation_list  << ''
  end

  # Collect any matches with the morse code at the start of the string
  # and delete the nils; the collect block returns nil values when there's no match
  code_matches = morse.collect {|code, letter| input.match('^' + Regexp.escape(code))}
  code_matches.delete(nil)

  code_matches.each do |code_match|
    temp_input = String.new(input)

    if temp_input == code_match.to_s
      translation_list << morse[code_match.to_s]
    else
      matches = read_morse_code(temp_input.gsub!(Regexp.new('^' + Regexp.escape(code_match.to_s)), ''), morse)
      # Stick each match into the translation_list
      matches.each do |match|
        translation_list << morse[code_match.to_s] + match
      end
    end

  end

  # Remove any nil matches and return what we've got
  translation_list.delete(nil)
  return translation_list

end

# Grab the morse_code hash
morse = morse_code
translations = read_morse_code(String.new(ARGV[0]), morse)

translations.each do |translation|
  puts translation
end

Dear Rep. Altmire,

I am deeply disappointed in your vote on health care reform tonight. If there was ever a reason to have a Democrat in office in your district, it was this vote. At this point, I see no reason to support your campaign in any way come the fall.

I am not one of your constituents, but I worked to get you elected nonetheless. As I did in 2008, I was planning on working for your campaign again. No longer. I am loathe to see a Republican in office where we once had a Democrat, but better a Republican than a Democrat who votes like a Republican.

This was the most important vote in my lifetime, and you were against me.

Now I am sorry to have to say that I am against you.

Sincerely,

Eric Sipple

Digging through the library’s graphic novel shelves, I came across two well regarded Batman stories I’d never gotten around to reading: The Killing Joke and The Long Halloween, both of which were cited as inspirations to the film The Dark Knight.  Reading them back to back, it’s interesting how that film merges a major plot thread from each story into its script.  The Joker’s plot in The Killing Joke is not unlike his games in the film,  just as the film adapted The Long Halloween‘s origin of Two Face mixed with a noir mob story.

When it comes to Batman, my favorite graphic novel is, hands down, The Dark Knight Returns.  Besides being one of the best told Batman stories, it nails a version of the character that balances the many, turbulent pieces much better than anything else.  In film, it’s The Dark Knight, both because it’s an incredible piece of cinema and because, like Frank Miller’s work with the character, it just gets everything right.

Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke is regarded as one of the best – if not the best- Joker story in print.  Though at this point, it feels like everything that Alan Moore writes getting regarded as the best thing in print, so set your expectations somewhere near realistic.  For a short novel – I read it over a single lunch hour – it managed to paint a portrait of the Joker that’s stuck around ever since.  You can feel the Joker of The Killing Joke lurking in much of the really great Batman work that’s come since, and that’s because Moore’s Joker is a terrifying, distinct brand of psychopath.  If there’s something you like about the Joker in The Animated Series, The Dark Knight or any modern Batman comic, it probably gasped its first breath here.

The basic hook is perfect: The Joker believes that all that separates a good, sane man from a madman like himself is one bad day.  That’s it.  A single bad day is all that separates us from madness.  To prove it, he targets one of Gotham’s best men: Commissioner Jim Gordon.  He shoots and paralyzes Barbara Gordon (an event that would stay a part of Batman continuity), kidnaps Jim and subjects him to tortures both physical and psychological.  It’s ending is also a classic.  I don’t want to spoil the final joke that the Joker shares with Batman, but it’s memorable.

Yet for all of that, it’s not a classic graphic novel.  A lot of what makes it great is the impact it had.  But as a story, it’s lacking.  Compare Joker’s attempt to break Gordon with the far more horrifying escalation of terror and violence in The Dark Knight‘s version of the theme.  In The Dark Knight, you reach a point where you honestly believe the Joker might be right, that he might show Gotham that they’re all as sick and twisted as he is.  In The Killing Joke that never feels like a threat, since other than shooting Barbara the best the Joker’s got left is dressing Gordon up like an S&M slave and showing him naked pictures of his daughter.  A couple of weeks of that might smash him, but a day?  C’mon, now.

It also makes the odd choice of giving the Joker an origin.  This is probably not a good idea in any case, but when your origin is the least interesting part of the book, it’s become a liability.  The Dark Knight‘s play with the idea of his history being “multiple choice”, as the Joker says, is far more effective. Do you want to know how I got these scars?

The Long Halloween is technically a sequel to Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One, which I have not read.  Nothing in the book refers directly back to it, though, so there’s no danger in picking this up first.  I need to get to Year One soon, though.  More Frank Miller Batman.  w00t.

Written by Jeph Loeb with art by Tim Sale, The Long Halloween is a sprawling tale of the fall of Gotham’s old school mobs and the rise of the freakshow that is Batman’s rogue’s gallery.  More than anything in the book, I liked that The Long Halloween showed how Batman’s presence might be changing the city without just saying, over and over again, “Hey, do you think these people are showing up because you did?”  There’s a distinct moment of transition near the end of the book that nails the change so well that perhaps people should consider the point made and move on.

It’s also the story of how Two Face came to be, and though there are shades of the Harvey Dent we see in The Dark Knight, this version of Two Face’s origin is as lacking in punch as the Joker’s plan was in The Killing Joke.  It works, I guess, and it plays some important notes that make you question if Dent has problems well before his face is scarred, but something about the break that sends him over the edge doesn’t have the impact I wanted.  It just doesn’t compare to to the horrifying trial the Joker puts him through with his fiancee in The Dark Knight.

Like The Killing Joke, this novel has a lot of great ideas and texture but misses something in the execution for me.  With The Killing Joke it was the thin plot.  In The Long Halloween, I think it’s the actual character writing.  Especially the dialog.  It’s not bad, but there are enough times when Batman’s morose narration seems overdone to break the illusion.  It’s a good version of Batman, but not a great one.

What is great is the use of Batman’s mob villains, Carmine Falcone and Salvatore Moroni.  I have to image a lot of what they did in this bled into Chris Nolan’s films, though to be fair I don’t know how much of this was set up in Year One.  Frank Miller may deserve more of the credit than Loeb, but nonetheless The Long Halloween uses more run of the mill organized crime very, very well.  It also sets up the Harvey/Gordon/Batman on the roof promising to take down the mob motif that worked so well in the film, and it works here almost as well.  It also has a great version of the Batman/Catwoman and Bruce/Selina relationship insanity, which it uses as character texture and not a brute force plot device.

I’d check both books out, flaws and all, though.  They’re strong Batman stories and they set up a lot of things other stories recycle mercilessly.  But then I’d probably watch The Dark Knight again, because dude, it’s awesome.

Code comment of the day:

// for better or worse, if we have a main image, but no homepage icon, then
// set the homepage icon to point to the main image …. and pray!

Minority opinion time.  Mulan is a really good movie.  You know, the Disney one set in China about the girl who pretends to be a boy to keep her disabled father from having to be killed or dishonored when he receives a conscription notice? It gets ignored, I think, because it came out around the same time Disney animation started actively working to destroy itself.  It came out in between Hercules and Tarzan, so I can’t blame people who wrote it off along with all of its peers.

Unlike so many of the other Disney films of the late 90′s and early 2000′s, Mulan‘s got an actual plot and characters with personality.  It has a legit villain in Miguel Ferrer’s yellow-eyed Hun badass, mostly non-annoying side characters and some of Disney’s best design work.  Yes,  it’s also the one where Eddie Murphy is a dragon named Mu Shu, but watch how well that character works despite how out of place it is.  Mu Shu should sink the film, but he comes out as kind of likable.  The same can be said of the songs, which are not particularly great but don’t feel perfunctory like the ones in Hercules.

Mulan herself is perhaps Disney’s strongest female character in their entire filmography.  When she struggles to fight with the men, it’s less because she’s a woman than that she’s never done anything like this before in her life.  By the end of the film, she’s fighting with and outsmarting Hun warlords and saving the empire without a boyfriend coming to her rescue.  In Mulan, the heroine rescues the hero.  Even though Mulan kinda sorta becomes a princess at the end of the film like every Disney heroine, she earns it by saving the Empire, not by marrying a prince.  She comes home not with a dress but a sword as a trophy of her victory.  Mulan kicks ass.

Mulan is the film I wish Disney made every time up to bat.  It has character development, a great story without the pathetic emotional manipulation Disney tends to trade in and the thing by which I’ve always judged a great Disney film against the rest: a fantastic climax.  Look at, say, Hercules, which isn’t a horrible film by any measure. But look at how it ends:  The Titans beat up everyone, then Hercules gets a power-up that lets him easily slay them.  Mulan ends with a well paced action scene, ending with Mulan decisively beating a stronger opponent not through luck, but cunning.

Mulan should be on the list of great Disney films, but I fear it’s too far off the beaten path to get recognized.  For all people’s complaining about Disney movies having too many princesses and not enough role models, I see an awful lot of frilly lace and not that many Chinese swords.

Been thinking more about my utter lack of motivation to write lately, and it hit me that I haven’t been entirely honest with myself.  I mean, I’m a lazy ass.  That’s just truth.  That’s just not all of it.

There’s a thing that I keep pretending like I can get away with not doing, though, and I’m about at that point where I need to stop pretending.  It kind of sucks.  But it’s something every single writer who talks about the work says they had to do.

I need to start saying no to friends and stay the hell home and write.  I need to say no to hanging out, no to getting drinks, no to anything that means I don’t get something out onto paper.  All my talk of needing to buckle down is kind of shit, because when you get down to it, there’s always a friend I haven’t given enough time to that I should go grab a beer with.  Drawing a line at this point is cutting something off that I don’t want cut, or at least that I feel guilty about cutting.  It’s easy to put down a Playstation controller.  It won’t get hurt when you tell it that Dragon Age can wait for a bit.

I don’t mean saying no to obligations, like, “Hey, I can’t help you with your fundraiser,” I mean saying no to friends. Saying your faux-career that hasn’t paid you a cent is more important than their emotional needs.  It makes me feel like a shit just thinking about it.

I don’t know where to draw the line on this one. I just know that right now it’s in the wrong place.

Sue me for the pun later.  First, let me tell you about Lensman.

I’ve been on this run of serial fiction lately, picking up collections of stuff that originally came out in Astounding Science Fiction or The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  I started with the original run of Elric stories, if for no other reason than that Amazon gave the Kindle edition away for free.  Something about the raw rush of energy really hit me, even through the dripping-with-emo aura of Moorcock’s albino hero.  It was something fantasy had not been to me in a long time: a really, really good time.

So I wanted more, naturally.  I considered Conan, but Brennen suggested something else: “Doc” E. E. Smith’s Lensman books.  Sure, I thought, why not? I have a severe Science Fiction deficit in my reader-ography, so why not start with the grandaddy of space opera?  I always thought the title Lensman sounded a bit goofy, but it wasn’t like that was a fair criticism of anything after I just finished four novellas about an albino with a soul stealing sword called Stormbringer.

I decided to start with Galactic Patrol, which isn’t exactly the first story in the series, but is the first with its central character, Kimball Kinnison, and covers his first battle with the Boskone pirates.  I wasn’t sure if it was even going to hit me, so rather than try and read the whole series straight through and end up potentially bored, I did something I usually don’t and started in the middle.  I’m glad I did.  Galactic Patrol is just a great, great time.  It’s filled with strange planets, bizarre creatures and insane space battles.  There are spy-beams and projectors and screens and all kinds of other pseudo-scientific things on display, most of which barely makes sense at first but eventually becomes part of the rhythm of the language.  Spy beams flicked out.  Screens gave off rainbow color under the force of the projectors.  Wacky stuff.  Fun.

If you liked Star Wars and can give some really clunky 1930′s dialogue a pass, I think you’d have to work not to have fun reading Galactic Patrol.

Now I’m onto the first book of The Chronicles of Amber, Nine Princes in Amber.  After that, I’ve got both Grey Lensman, the next book in Smith’s series, and The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane by Robert E. Howard.  Solomon Kane just got made into what’s supposedly a pretty awesome film, so before it hits in the U.S. I thought I should read some of the original stories of Howard’s Puritan demon hunter.  I mean, really; Puritan demon hunter.  That’s almost all you have to know.

Light month due to the Olympics.  In fact, everything on this list I watched on Sunday night, so they got in just under the wire.

Fletch

Thanks to Community, I’ve had a hankering to go back and check out old Chevy Chase stuff.  You know, from the days before he stopped being funny and started being banned by the Geneva Convention as an instrument of torture.  Fletch popped up on watch instantly and it seemed like as good a place to start as any.  Maybe it’s because of where Chase was in his career as I was growing up, but I expected one of those Buffoon-Who-Lucks-Into-Success plots that I hate.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that the main character of Fletch was clever, imaginative and witty.  If Chase had played more characters like this and less like Clark Griswold, he might not have needed Community to resurrect his career.  Also, this film was written by the guy who did the original The In-Laws, so you know it’s going to be funny.

Un Chien Andalou

Yeah, we’ve all at least heard of one shot of this movie.  You know the one, where the guy grabs the woman’s head and slits open her eyeball.  This is that film.  Salvadore Dali and Luis Bunuel partnered to create what is probably the single most famous piece of surrealist film (and one of the most famous surrealist works ever).  It’s only fifteen minutes long, and I doubt it could have gone on much longer without wearing out its welcome.  There is nearly no plot to speak of, though the film does center around two characters whose relationships as portrayed makes a weird sort of emotional sense.  There are a number of classic shots – apart from the eye slicing, there’s also a creepy bit with ants crawling out of a hole in a guy’s hand, and a sequence where he rubs a woman’s clothed breast, which then becomes unclothed, then becomes her butt – but the real impact comes from seeing how intricately it’s all strung together.  This is probably seen as a film school kind of thing to watch, but anyone who enjoys film at all should see what the medium can be like if it’s pried out of its typical narrative structure.

Excalibur

A lot of fantasy films came out around the time I was born, and I managed to see very few of them until I grew up.  I think the things that come out when you’re alive but too young to understand are the most awkward to pick up later, though I don’t know why.  We see older films and we see new films, but something about the familiarity of a film that you vaguely remember coming out but didn’t actually see breeds disinterest.  Excalibur gets a lot of praise as one of the few really good fantasy films, but after seeing it I cannot for the life of me see why.  It’s essentially a boring CliffsNotes version of the Arthurian legend, except when it veers off into straight out goofiness.  Over and over again I wondered if the director realized how open he had made himself to Monty Python and the Holy Grail jokes with his too-serious, overblown take on King Arthur.  When Mordred shows up in gold armor with nipples, it was clear nothing could save the movie.  This one hurt to watch.

Note, I’ll be getting into spoiler territory eventually.  I’ll give you a warning before I do, but in case you were going to start skimming: Be warned.  Also, this is kind of long.

It’s been a while since I plowed through a fantasy series.  There was a time when it was a huge part of my life.  Even the oft-encountered disappointment didn’t slow me down.  I love to read; mostly I love to read stories.  But most of all I love to read long stories.  Big stories.  Stories that took on pivotal events, that gave me more than the mundane, daily crap I found at school or work.

Before I sat down to write this review, I thought about all of the series’ I’ve got under my belt.  The good ones, those never really leave the mind.  But there are dozens of other ones. Books that I powered through years ago but left a sour taste, or that unshakable feeling of disappointment.  Like Stephen Lawhead’s The Song of Albion, or Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Darksword Trilogy (which were, oddly, lesser novels than their Dragonlance books),  or Mickey Zucker Reichert’s Renshai Trilogy and its sequel.  The interesting thing about them is, despite their flaws,  despite the disappointment, there are things that stuck with me from these books.  Things that were unique to them, that I never got even from more accomplished novels.

Which brings me to Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn.

Mistborn: The Final Empire has a great sounding hook: What would happen if the hero of prophecy failed? What if, at the pivotal moment, the Dark Lord killed him and took power for himself?  The idea of Mistborn’s first novel is an interesting amalgam.  Part turning the genre over on itself with a triumphant Dark Lord, part heist novel as a group of thieves set out to steal a cache of power so important that it could lead to the overthrow of the empire – even if all they’re in it for is the profit.  Cool, huh?

Though the series’ strongest novel, there’s a critical problem that haunts the rest of the series.  Within the first few chapters it becomes clear that the hook – a hook that the author himself says was his starting point – is either a spoiler or a misdirection.  And, for a series’ whose primary theme is trust, it’s disappointing that it betrays its readers’ trust in the first novel.

Still, Sanderson is a good writer, and having read the annotations for the books on its website, it’s clear he really thinks about what he’s doing.  I’m going to get into spoilers, now, and as I do I’m going to be pretty critical of my problems with the series. But let this be known: I had a good time reading it, and I think that Sanderson has the right stuff to make some killer fantasy novels. Hell, if you liked Mistborn, then he’s writing killer fantasy novels right now.  I admit that much of my disappointment in Mistborn is an entirely personal reaction to the conclusion of the series.

Now, let there be spoilers.

Mistborn begins in the city of Luthadel, the seat of The Final Empire.  Yes, the empire is called the Final Empire.  No, it’s not as silly as it sounds.  The empire has been ruled for 1,000 years by a man who seems to be immortal and omnipotent, who took the power of the Well of Ascension and became as a god; he is, as his church proclaims, the Sliver of Infinity.  In other words, this empire is the last one the world will know, for it will last forever; it is, literally, The Final Empire.

And it’s not a pleasant place to live.  By day, ash is spewed into the sky endlessly by volcanoes.  By night, mists that flow like water chase the superstitious into their homes.  And most of the population, known as skaa, work as slaves for the Lord Ruler’s nobility.  Though rebellions are attempted, how do you kill a man with seemingly endless power who can be burnt to a skeleton yet regrow skin in seconds? How do you bring down an empire with a god at its head?

To its credit, Mistborn answers these questions in the first book.  The trilogy is not about killing the Lord Ruler; it’s about the power that he wielded, and the worse danger the tyrant held back.  Even the seeming main character, a powerful but impulsive thief named Kelsier, doesn’t survive to see the end of the first novel.  The hand off to his protege, Vin, is so smooth that I should have seen it coming earlier. We get a trilogy’s worth of plot development in the first volume, which makes for an exciting novel.   Even despite the misdirection/spoiler of the hook – everyone believes the Lord Ruler is the hero of prophecy, meaning you spend all of book one wondering if they’re wrong, or if the book jacket lied to you – The Final Empire is a great read.  It has its problems, mostly in a clunky, implausible opening where a bunch of thieves just kind of decide that taking on a 1,000 year empire is good business, but is very worth the time.

Things get dicier from there. Like many great fantasy series openings, the follow-through has problems.  There’s a great set up, some interesting characters, but the further it goes the less tight it all feels.  With Mistborn, significant pacing problems and an odd lack of scope kill the second book’s momentum and it never really recovers.  And it doesn’t help that the set-up of the first book – that the hero lost – is less interesting than what initially appeared to be the case: that the hero had won, taken the power, then turned into at tyrant.  As the series progresses, I got the feeling that Sanderson was actually more interested in this idea, and he does his best to split the difference with the Lord Ruler’s motivations.

The Well of Ascension takes another fantasy trope, that of the Prophecy of the Hero, and flips it on its head.  The basic idea around it is great, but getting to the end requires slogging through 500 pages of indecision, inaction and inner monologues about indecision and inaction.  There’s an interesting idea of nation building embedded in the book’s structure, but it never gets any momentum.  Yes, the idea of how you hold together a people that are used to a God ruling them is great, but it was disappointing that the best Sanderson managed was a protracted siege of Luthadel by squabbling warlords and a game of musical chairs with the throne of the Empire.  Eland, the man who tries to make the Empire into a better place, spends the entire book thinking about how he wishes he was a better leader.  And Vin, his lover and protector, worries that she’s nothing more than a killer. That’s about it.

Still, the climax of the book had a great moment: Vin begins to believe she’s the true Hero of Ages, the thing the Lord Ruler failed to be.  She makes her way to the Well of Ascension, the source of the Lord Ruler’s power, only to learn that the prophecy of the Hero was a lie, manipulated by a chaos god the Lord Ruler took power to try and contain.  And Vin, trying to fulfill the prophecy, lets it out.

That gave me hope for The Hero of Ages.  Perhaps with one book left to go, Sanderson would set a brisker pace.  I hoped in vain.  Instead of the heroes stuck in a single city defending against a siege, they take an army to another city and…begin a siege.   Mistborn‘s problem is common in Big Stories: a lack of scope to the story’s actual events.

I think authors get wrapped up in the scope of their setting and miss the needs of the story.  Yes, The Hero of Ages deals with a godlike power of chaos trying to end the world, and yes, the actions of the heroes are meant to save the world.  That’s not scope, though. That’s setting.  Constructing a plot that matches the scope of the setting can be difficult, and I think that Sanderson got lost trying to create understandable plot points.  In The Well of Ascension, it was resolving the Siege of Luthadel.  In The Hero of Ages, it was the artificial need of finding the Lord Ruler’s hidden supply caches, left to combat the chaos-god Ruin.  At the start of the story, there is one left to claim, and the bulk of the book is spent with the heroes trying to get this one supply cache.  By the time the plot twists come, there are only 100 pages left and the story feels too small because of it.

Scope is a tricky thing, and I’m coming to believe it has more to do with the impression of movement in the plot than with the actual size of the events.  The world ending doesn’t, on its own, give a novel scope.  Scope demands, I think, objectives and motivations to constantly evolve, for goals to be achieved but prove to be only a piece of the story.  Keeping characters mired in indecision for 2/3 of the a novel means, essentially, that nothing happens for 2/3 of a novel, and that kills any sense of scope.  When battle for the fate of the world comes, it feels out of place next to a story about a group of insecure people refusing to make a decision.

This is especially a concern in The Hero of Ages, as while the characters are doing very little, massive chunks of plot revelations are given through the quotes that precede the chapters.  Things like why the world is covered in ash, where the various magic systems of the world are from and the very nature of the villain himself are all given here, and not in the body of the story.  I started to wonder if Sanderson had simply held too much back for book 3 and decided to dump his world notes into the book to catch things up.

Mistborn made something clear to me, though, that I had not noticed before.  Many of the fantasy series’ of the past, the ones that I liked but left me cold at the end, share an important similarity.  They all end with some mixture of the end of the world and the mysterious pseudo-deaths of the main characters.  I don’t mean that the main characters died.  I mean they sort of died but really became gods, or returned to their world, or people thought wait, maybe they didn’t really die and will return again and the audience is left to wonder.  It’s a really, really common ending in fantasy and science fiction.  You can see it from The Matrix to Evangelion to every book series mentioned above.  And I’m starting to think that, as a rule, this kind of ending is simply an unsatisfying cheat.

Mistborn ends with not one but two characters ascending to godhood within 50 pages of each other.  It ends with the world becoming so blasted out by the battle that only two options are possible: an utter remaking or the death of mankind.  And I’m completely unsure of what to make of one of its major character arcs, in which a character teaches hundreds of religions, then becomes an atheist, then becomes god.

I think the problem is that, despite Sanderson’s opinion that allowing his characters to monologue about how insecure they are is character development, in the end he cheats by not giving an actual character ending for them.  It’s just really, really hard to relate to a character whose culmination is and then I remade the world in my image.  I can buy into a character  dying for his cause, or because he failed, or because of bad luck.  But how many more character deaths can I hope to relate to if their death is not really a death and might lead to their eventual return outside of the actual story? I don’t know. Maybe I never had it in me.

And I’m tired of the ambiguity. Did the character die, or not? Did the world end? When it was reborn, do the characters remember what happened? How do they feel about it? Even with omniscience, how good of a god would even the best of humans make, anyway?  If ascending to godhood is the goal of your story, set that up earlier.  Don’t give me the gritty story of people trying to create a government, only to spend 100 pages at the end making everyone turn into gods. Serial Experiments: Lain is maybe the only successful version of this story, and that’s because within 2 episodes “god” is showing up telling Lain that she has the power to change the world.  That is the point of the story, and the character.

I’ve gone all this time without mentioning Mistborn‘s intricate magic system, and that’s on purpose. Every reviewer has said how cool and well done Allomancy is. They’re right. It’s neat. It’s consistent. It’s well used.  It’s just that a magic system can’t save a book, even if it makes the battle scenes more interesting an readable. Sanderson did a great job on it, though, so let that be noted.

Yet, despite all my complains, there’s something here. Just like The Darksword Trilogy’s totally batshit last book where the guy with the magic canceling sword has to fight tanks, I came away with something I didn’t have before.  The image of the Ashmounts and the mists will stick with me.  The sad sense of a world being smothered to death by ash will haunt me.  The thought of a world broken by the heroes of old so that it could survive destruction will remain.  And, despite the inordinate amount of time they spent whining and doing little else, many of the characters will stay by my side as well.

All that reminds me of something  important that I shouldn’t forget: Sanderson made me feel like a teenager again, shut up in my bedroom with a book, ignoring the world around me.  I missed that feeling.

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory is based around a question which does not need answered. When the answer arrives, it proves neither interesting nor plausible.  It meanders for the majority of its 13 episode run, never finding an engaging idea that can support the series.  Its main character never stops being a miserable, talentless whiner and its villain is a poor imitation of the franchise’s best.  If it’s not the most pointless Gundam series of all time, I fear the day I watch the one that’s worse than this.

The question 0083 poses is this: What led to the formation of the Titans, the elite and fanatical military force that served as Zeta Gundam‘s primary antagonists?  At first, this sounds like a neat idea, until you realize that you don’t need to know why the Titans were formed.  The One Year War against Zeon was so destructive, so terrible, that it’s believable that fear of Zeon’s reformation would enable the rise of a unit dedicated to their annihilation. And really, why do we care how the Titans came to be? It’s not like they were a complex and multifaceted bunch, anyway.  I’ve seen Nazis with more nuanced motivations.

I’d like to describe the plot for you, but I’m a little cloudy on what it was.  Yet another remnant of the Principality of Zeon enters stage left and steals one of two experimental Gundams the Federation is testing.  Why one and not both?  Well, besides the fact that stealing Unit 1 would leave the hero would nothing to pilot against Unit 2, it’s not really the Gundam they’re after.  They want the nuclear weapon system it carries.  Why the Federation is building a nuclear weapons system in violation of treaties when there is no enemy to fight is perhaps a question for another OAV.

This kicks off a convoluted series of events known as Operation Stardust. It involves a series of unconnected military actions designed to, I guess, spontaneously reconstitute the Principality of Zeon by use of a nuclear weapon attack followed by a colony drop.  Maybe picking apart the plot isn’t fair.  The Gundam universe portrayed in 0083 is one in which a single nuclear warhead can take out 2/3 of the entire Federation fleet.  If the sky was also purple in this world, it wouldn’t surprise me.

It might have all been worth it if they could have either given us some interesting characters, or ended it with an insane mobile suit battle.  They do neither.  In fact, this might be the only entry in the Gundam franchise not to end with a mobile suit battle at all.  This is not a distinction to praise.  After what felt like fifty hours of pointless skirmishes and indecisive character whining, to end without a couple of characters tearing each other up in big robots was downright heartless.

Kou, the “hero” of 0083 takes the worst parts of every Gundam hero ever but never delivers on the change into someone you can cheer for. His nemesis, Gato, meanwhile, dances around in Char’s shoes for a bit (he is quite literally portrayed as the other best Zeon pilot from the One Year War) before finally getting so bored with the series that he goes on a kamikaze run. Since actual mobile suit combat has little to do with Operation Stardust, the presence of an ace pilot seems like a waste of resources. He gets to pilot the beefiest Gundam this side of SEED‘s Providence Gundam, though, so maybe that was worth the trip for him.

There’s also some romance that you’ll want to ignore.  Even with the revelation that the main character and the villain are actually engaged in a love triangle with the same girl, you still won’t care. That the girl in question’s name is Nina Purpleton does not help. Purpleton. Seriously.  It makes you yearn for the days of Seabook Arno, doesn’t it?

By the time you get to the postscript telling you that all record of the events of this series were deleted you’ll be wondering why they couldn’t have told you that the series literally had no point back in the first episode when it would have made a difference.

On the bright side, the mecha designs were done by Shoji Kowamori, he of Macross Plus fame, so there’s a lot of pretty to look at.  And the one decent mecha battle that takes place about 4 episodes from the end is actually worth the time you spend watching it; it’s just not worth the time you spent watching the rest of the OAV.

I hate to be so glib about this, but watching 0083 was a chore and I want to take out my frustration on it somehow.  It tested my patience in a way only one other Gundam series ever has, and at least that one had its bright spots.  This was, frankly, a total waste of time on every level.  The time you spend watching this could be better spent doing almost anything else.  Even if you’re a Gundam completist, I suggest lying about having actually watched this and responding with a few generalities like, “Kou sucked” and “Why the hell wasn’t there a mecha battle at the end?”

I am not joking when I tell you that one of the space ships in this OAV has a wooden steering wheel like the ones on boats in pirate movies. That’s the kind of series this is.

I didn’t even put a video at the top of this review like I do for the rest of my Gundam reviews.  If nothing else has made my spite for this clear, I hope that does the trick.