So What Are you Reading?: Generations

[Christopher]

I had originally just decided to read it that way as best I could, and hope I didn't miss significant in the missing pages, but then I decided to check the collection on Hoopla, and since that has all of the pages, I decided to just read that instead.

I just recently discovered Hoopla. It's got a ton of digital comics available for borrowing, which is great. Between it and Overdrive, I've spent the past couple of days catching up on all the Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra comics I haven't been able to afford buying for the past few years.

However, I'm not crazy about its format. The only options are to view a full page in one screen or to zoom in on one panel at a time, or to use a "magnifying glass" thingy to enlarge a small circle. I wish it would just let you enlarge the whole page and scroll through it, like in a PDF.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Sounds like they tried to reinvent the wheel. And like a case of "The more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

 

[Christopher]

Sounds like they tried to reinvent the wheel. And like a case of "The more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

I think it's probably designed with mobile devices in mind, so you can zoom into a single panel at a time on a small screen. In that context, it makes sense. Unfortunately it doesn't always work well with more creative panel layouts, e.g. vertical panels that are a full page high. I get the impression that it's done automatically, that the software is programmed to recognize things like panel borders, text, voice bubble tails and the characters they point toward, etc. Sometimes the decisions of what to zoom in on seem more algorithm-driven than human-driven. It usually works pretty well, but it doesn't always adapt to the unusual. It's not a bad system for what it is, but I wish there a simpler alternative.

Kindle comics have something similar though a bit simpler -- it shows a full page, but you can double-click on individual panels to zoom in, and move between zoomed panels with the arrow keys. Unfortunately it doesn't let you zoom wider than the page borders, so full-width panels have the edges cut off and you can't zoom in on everything. I found it preferable just to put on my bifocals and lean in close to the screen to read the full pages, though that wasn't a comfortable posture.

I did download one comic through a system that uses the Adobe Digital Editions e-reader, because I thought that was the only place I could borrow it. It had the format I wanted, letting you choose your zoom size for the whole page and scroll through it, but it took forever to download and was very slow to scroll through. Fortunately I found that they had that one on Hoopla after all, just not indexed right so it didn't show up in the series list. Of the three formats, Hoopla is the easiest one for reading digital comics. It's not perfect, but it loads a lot faster (since you're reading online instead of downloading) and is the easiest to navigate through once you get the hang of it.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Being between The Gospel According to St. Luke and The Gospel According to St. John, and therefore several pages ahead of quota, I'm finally getting a start on The Higher Frontier. I've already spotted a few Easter Eggs; most notably, does an Escherite by any chance look anything like the creatures depicted in M.C. Escher's House of Stairs? Also, has there been any previous mention of the V'tosh ka'tur?

 

[Christopher]

I've already spotted a few Easter Eggs; most notably, does an Escherite by any chance look anything like the creatures depicted in M.C. Escher's House of Stairs?

Yes; to quote my Ex Machina annotations:

I based the Escherite species on creatures seen in M. C. Escher’s engraving Trappenhuis (House of Stairs). They were originally from the same abandoned novel project for which I created the Shesshran.

Here is my old illustration of an Escherite (or actually Escherician as I originally called it, but the design is pretty much identical):


Escherite art by Christopher L. Bennett

Also, has there been any previous mention of the V'tosh ka'tur?

Yes, they were introduced in the Enterprise episode "Fusion." Spock being mistaken for one after his V'Ger epiphany is another idea I introduced in Ex Machina.

 

[Christopher]

My Sherlock Holmes reading has gotten up to The Valley of Fear, which contains probably the biggest continuity error in the series so far -- Holmes and Watson working a case involving Professor Moriarty sometime in their early years together in "the '80s," when "The Final Problem" established that Watson had never heard of Moriarty until shortly before Holmes's faked death in 1891. I wonder -- if we assume the Watsonian intepretation that these accounts are based on actual events but modified by Watson for the sake of drama and to alter incriminating names and details, then presumably one of the two accounts involving Moriarty has been fictionalized more than the other. So the question is, which one is likely to be closer to the truth regarding Watson's knowledge of Moriarty?

Discussion of the two options follows in spoiler box:

Spoiler: "The Final Problem" and THE VALLEY OF FEAR

Hypothesis 1: "The Final Problem" is the more accurate account, with Holmes keeping Moriarty's existence secret from Watson (no doubt for his protection) until his secret battle with the mastermind reached its climax. Many years later, Holmes made Watson aware that their early case involving the murder of John Douglas had actually had Moriarty behind it. When Watson then dramatized the case in The Valley of Fear (perhaps inspired to dredge it up from his old notes by that revelation), he combined the events of the time with Holmes's later explanations about Moriarty into a single sequence of events for the sake of clarity, telling the story as if he had known at the time what he only learned in retrospect.

The problem here is that Holmes also speaks openly of Moriarty to Inspector MacDonald in Watson's presence, and unless that portion is entirely fictionalized, it's hard to reconcile it with this model. Although perhaps it was a conversation that Holmes and MacDonald had out of Watson's presence, and Watson learned of it from both men much later and inserted himself into it for dramatic convenience. He had no problem abandoning first-person narration for omniscient third-person in other chapters of the novel, but he chose to put this scene in a chapter he was relating in first-person.

Hypothesis 2: The Valley of Fear is the more accurate account; Watson did, in fact, know about Moriarty in the 1880s, but he was careful to avoid any mention of the professor in his first 25 published tales. Thus, when the truth about Moriarty finally came out after Holmes's apparent death and Watson chose to tell the story at last, he prefaced the story with a fictionalized conversation that summarized everything Holmes had previously told him about Moriarty as if he were informing Watson for the first time, as a means of condensing it clearly for the audience and perhaps of maintaining continuity with the previous tales (not that Watson ever cared that much for continuity).

The problem here is, I think, rather larger. Watson professed to write "The Final Problem" out of a desire to get the full truth about Moriarty out in the open, in response to the attempts of Moriarty's brother to posthumously clear his name. So one would think that for that purpose, and out of respect for his "late" friend's commitment to truth and accuracy, Watson would have attempted to tell the tale as authentically as he could, with a minimum of the dramatic embellishment that Holmes so deplored.

So I'm inclined to go with the first hypothesis, for the reasons stated above, and also because, as TVoF is many years more removed from the events it chronicles, it's reasonable to expect it to be more inaccurate and dramatized.

Now, if only I could figure out what happened to Mary Morstan Watson between Memoirs and Return. Wikipedia says she died, but all the stories in Return treat it as if Watson was never married and had never left Baker Street. You'd think that if Watson were grieving her loss, he'd have paid some tribute to her in the later stories; this total redaction of her existence seems more consistent with a messy divorce.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Well, I'm now up to the Interlude section-break of The Higher Frontier, and until I finish The Gospel According to St. John, I'm out. And I hear the first of the online Palm Sunday services I'm attending today beginning, so adieu for now.

 

[JD]

I just recently discovered Hoopla. It's got a ton of digital comics available for borrowing, which is great. Between it and Overdrive, I've spent the past couple of days catching up on all the Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra comics I haven't been able to afford buying for the past few years.

However, I'm not crazy about its format. The only options are to view a full page in one screen or to zoom in on one panel at a time, or to use a "magnifying glass" thingy to enlarge a small circle. I wish it would just let you enlarge the whole page and scroll through it, like in a PDF.

I read the stuff on my tablet at the full screen, I just don't trust that zoom in panel by panel option not to miss stuff.

Sounds like they tried to reinvent the wheel. And like a case of "The more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

Not really, it's pretty close to how most of these kind of programs work. Pretty much all of the readers give you an option for full page, manual zoom, and the animated zoom that goes from panel to panel. Hoopla is probably one of the more limited ones, although the magnifying glass is one I haven't come across anywhere else. Google has another one that's kind of cool, if you double tap on a speech bubble, the bubble will pop out of the panel and get bigger, The only problem is that it just enlarges it, so tends to make it all pixilated.
Pretty much all of the comics I read are digital on Hoopla, Google Books, Comixology, Kindle for Android, and Nook for Androdid.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Uh, the "wheel" they're all trying to reinvent is the PDF. Which is silly, since you no longer need Acrobat or Distiller to create PDFs (unless, like me, you're using antiquated typesetting software, like Xerox Ventura Publisher, and have to generate it from a PostScript dump).

 

[Christopher]

I read the stuff on my tablet at the full screen, I just don't trust that zoom in panel by panel option not to miss stuff.

You either have a large tablet or better eyesight than mine.

Uh, the "wheel" they're all trying to reinvent is the PDF.

As I said, the design is probably meant to accommodate reading on mobile devices like smartphones, where a full-page PDF view would not work as well as on a computer screen or a decent-sized tablet. So it's not reinventing the wheel, it's more like inventing the hovercraft -- something that can work in the same context as wheels but also operate where wheels can't.

 

[Christopher]

I'm done with The Valley of Fear. Either I'm getting better at solving mysteries from reading so many in a row, or Conan Doyle made this one really obvious, telegraphing everything pretty blatantly so that I figured it out well in advance. I'm pretty sure it's the latter. (It's been so long since I've read the book or seen any adaptation that I doubt I remembered the solution.)

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Well, it is the least popular of the four novels. So much so that it was the last canonical Holmes book I found out about, and I suspect I'm not alone in that.

 

[Reanok]

I'm reading a new mystery novel The Dog who knew too much by Krista Davis.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Second Corinthians.

 

[Christopher]

Second Corinthians.

As the old joke goes, "Did the Corinthians ever write back?"

 

[JD]

Uh, the "wheel" they're all trying to reinvent is the PDF. Which is silly, since you no longer need Acrobat or Distiller to create PDFs (unless, like me, you're using antiquated typesetting software, like Xerox Ventura Publisher, and have to generate it from a PostScript dump).

These are in a totally different format from PDFs, it's a much higher quality, more detailed format than PDFs. Most of the ones I've read in PDF format seem to more or less be pictures of the comics, but the format that most digital comics use is the actual comic itself in a digital format. It's basically the different between a video of a TV or computer screen showing a video, and the actual video itself.
Last night I finished up ST: Year Four: The Enterprise Experiment, and started the digital version of the Justice Leauge comic miniseries Justice, which has a story by Jim Krueger, and Alex Ross, a script by Krueger, and art by Doug Braithwaite and Ross.
I really enjoyed The Enterprise Experiment, I honestly forgot all about DC Fontana's death until after I started it. I liked the way it explained why the Organians weren't involved in the conflicts between the Klingons and the Federation after TOS, and there was some interesting stuff with the Preservers too.

 

[Christopher]

These are in a totally different format from PDFs, it's a much higher quality, more detailed format than PDFs. Most of the ones I've read in PDF format seem to more or less be pictures of the comics, but the format that most digital comics use is the actual comic itself in a digital format. It's basically the different between a video of a TV or computer screen showing a video, and the actual video itself.

I think you must be referring to things like the DVD-ROM collection of scans of old Star Trek comics. Newer digital comics on PDF are not scans of printed comics, they're the actual digital art saved directly in PDF format. The PDF comic I downloaded recently has the same image quality as the digital comics I've read on Hoopla and Kindle -- possibly even better, which could be why it took forever to download.

Again, though, a full-page format like PDF is better suited to reading on a large screen. As I've been saying, the format that lets you zoom in on individual panels is presumably meant for smaller mobile devices.

I really enjoyed The Enterprise Experiment, I honestly forgot all about DC Fontana's death until after I started it. I liked the way it explained why the Organians weren't involved in the conflicts between the Klingons and the Federation after TOS

I don't get why people think that needs to be explained. It was explained extremely clearly in "Errand of Mercy" itself. The Organians could barely tolerate contact with corporeal life forms and wanted to avoid it as much as possible, which was why they ended the war once Organia became a flashpoint. They weren't activists, they just wanted the noisy kids off their lawn. It should've been self-evident that as long as both sides left Organia alone, they wouldn't intervene. After all, '60s TV demanded that episodes stand on their own with no larger continuity, so naturally Gene Coon built in an explanation for why the Organians would only intervene once. I'm surprised that Fontana, who was presumably in the loop when it was written and made, didn't see it that way.

 

[JD]

I get what you're saying, but I thought she still worked a good story around it.
One thing that was a little odd that I forgot about in my other post, is that she has a big reveal that The Preservers created the barrier around the Milky Way Galaxy to protect it from some extra galactic threat they knew about.
I've never understood the obsession some people seem to have with making The Preservers some all powerfull godlike race, when there wasn't really much evidence for that in the episode they were introduced in. All we really knew about on the show is that they moved some people from one planet to another and set up the machine to protect the planet from asteroids, and neither of those really require technology much more advanced than what the Federation already has by the 23rd Century.
I liked pretty much everything else about it though, the art was pretty nice, and we did get some good stuff with the Enterprise crew, Kang, and the Romulans.
I was a bit surprised that Fontana actually brought Section 31 into it, since that was something that came into the franchise long after she was no longer involved with it.

 

[Christopher]

I've never understood the obsession some people seem to have with making The Preservers some all powerfull godlike race, when there wasn't really much evidence for that in the episode they were introduced in. All we really knew about on the show is that they moved some people from one planet to another and set up the machine to protect the planet from asteroids, and neither of those really require technology much more advanced than what the Federation already has by the 23rd Century.

I've been saying that for ages. Not only that, but if their idea of "preserving" a population was to stick it in the middle of a dangerous asteroid field with only one defensive beam, that makes them seem pretty damn incompetent. (I mean, what if the asteroid comes in from the opposite side of the planet?)

Plus there's the tendency to assume that the Preservers had to be incredibly ancient, even though their transplantation of Native Americans requires them to be quite a recent civilization. The three tribes Spock mentions as their antecedents are from entirely different parts of the country, and the only time they would've all been endangered at once was after European colonization, the 17th or 18th century. Plus one of them, the Navajo, didn't really exist in a form Spock would've recognized prior to the 1600s.

While we're at it, why does everyone assume the barrier surrounds the entire galaxy? All we know is that it exists locally, on the part of the edge that is reachable to the Enterprise. And the Kelvans are the one and only extragalactic species we've ever known to be affected by it; there were plenty of other extragalactic entities that got into our galaxy just fine, like Sylvia & Korob, the Mudd androids' builders, the space amoeba, the "One of Our Planets is Missing" cloud creature, and the Nacene. So this notion that the barrier is some kind of impermeable shrink wrap around the entire galactic disk doesn't make any sense. The only reasonable depiction of the barrier I've ever seen is in The Wounded Sky, which explains it as an ephemeral, local feature, the shock front of a massive extragalactic supernova or something of the sort.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I've got the full Acrobat (albeit a very old one) with Distiller on my "bionic desk lamp" iMac at home; given a well-formed PostScript dump file, with any bitmaps therein at a reasonably high resolution, I can make you a PDF at any resolution level from screen-quality to press-quality.

And as I recall, I have no difficulty at all zooming in on well-formed PDFs on my cheap-ass tablet (a Nexus 7, and an early version of it at that).