Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Stephenson vs. Gibson

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Maybe everyone else in Christendom has already read this, but I don’t read Slashdot as a rule, so I hadn’t. Via Rachel Caine, I read a great interview with Neal Stephenson, which happens to include one of the funniest answers to a question I’ve ever read. I had tears in my eyes:

#4: In a fight between you and William Gibson, who would win?

You don’t have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson’s Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson’s arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head.

Read the whole thing. Trust me.

Van Helsing: the review

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I have a new criterion for evaluating someone’s critical taste. I will ask, “Did you see Van Helsing?” If the answer is “Yes,” I will ask their opinion of the movie. If they say anything other than, “Wow, that was irredeemable trash, wasn’t it?” I will have no respect for this person and need never listen to a damn thing they have to say on the subject of movies, stories, or the best way to spend two hours of one’s life.

Good God, what a bad, stupid, insulting movie. Seriously. Terrible script. Terrible. No story. Awful acting—and not in a fun sort of way either. No sense of pacing. Nothing fun to do with the beloved monsters of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolfman. Nothing makes sense—and not in a fun sort of way either.

Ugh. Unbelievable that this made any money at all.

Later: I posted on a mailing list more details about why this movie bugged me so much. Here’s basically what I posted (edited a bit):

(Sorry if there are any spoilers in what follows, but seriously — if
this movie can be spoiled for you, it should be.)

The movie wants to make use of the Big 3 Universal monsters: Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolf Man. Okay, that lends itself to diluting the overall thrust, so we’ll divvy them up: one will be the good guy, one will be the bad guy, and one will be…hmmm. Something.

Dracula will be the main bad guy. It’ll turn out that he can only be killed by the Wolf Man. That’s kind of an addition to the mythology, but since other things we know about the Wolf Man—how you turn into one, for example—are the same, we’ll allow it. Also, this allows us a reason why Our Hero becomes one of the three monsters. So, while the Wolf Man isn’t good, he’s necessary to kill Dracula. Frankenstein’s Monster will be a good guy. He’s intelligent, he’s scared of Dracula, he wants to help Van Helsing.

So far, it’s okay. Nothing terrible, nothing special.

Then the movie goes off the deep end.

In Van Helsing, Dracula desperately wants to get his hands on Frankenstein’s Monster. Something about how Frankenstein’s Monster was raised is important, which is why Dracula needs to get his claws on him.

And why is that? Turns out Dracula needs the tech used to make the
Monster in order to create his offspring.

I’m sorry…what the fuck?

We all know vampire mythology — we know how Dracula makes his “children.” We know, in fact, that that’s how he does it in this movie too, because one plot point involves Dracula threatening to turn Princess Black Latex into one of his wives. So what’s all this crap with electricity and Frankenstein’s Monster and sacs of bats (seriously)…? Why was that again?

(When we saw the sacs of batlings, Darin said, “I know the queen Alien is around here somewhere.” It was that obvious a rip-off of Aliens. I responded, “What are we supposed to use, harsh language?”)

So the entire point of this movie, ostensibly to use the three stars of the horror movie canon, comes up with a stupid and completely unnecessary addition to vampire lore as the engine of the story.

Oh yes: and everything else about the movie sucked too. But it’s hard to rise above complete stupidity, so that’s not that surprising.

Weird ATM occurrence

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I went to the ATM today, as I haven’t been in a while. The branch of my bank I went to had a snazzy new ATM setup, with Hi Tech Graphics and touch screens and everything but a back massage. Neat. I put my card in, I type in my PIN, I go through the rigamarole.

While the ATM counts out the money and prints my receipt and all, I glance at the picture of the ATM card that they put underneath the card slot and I think, “That’s not the card I put in there.”

The cash door pushes money at me and the receipt prints out and then my card comes out. Indeed, I did not put my bank card in there; I put my regular ol’ Visa in there. I have no idea what my Visa’s card PIN is; I have never used it for cash. The receipt in no way mentions that this was a Visa cash advance, although of course it doesn’t have my bank balance on there either.

What happened?

  1. Dude! You got lucky! Free money! Where’s that bank?
  2. In fact, you have beaten the 1-in-10000 odds (probably slightly less than that) and, in fact, your bank card and your Visa card have the exact same PIN.
  3. The bank could frickin’ care less as to whether you have the PIN for a Visa card. Have Visa card, get money. In which case: where’s that bank?