Galactic struggles.<\/p>\n
I don’t do ‘doing nothing’ and being very unwell, and confined to no more than ten very rapid paces from the toilet (which rules out the whole of downstairs, obv), I have to find something with which to keep the mental animal occupied, in between the frequent bouts of violently squirting green\/black water out of my poor little bumole (which feels, as a result of all this, that it probably now resembles a boxer’s ear).<\/p>\n
I realise that’s less than perfect English, but as a tool for summing up my feelings and frustrations and experiences right now, that paragraph does the job.<\/p>\n
Anyway.<\/p>\n
So my mental attention, in between unplanned visits to the throne room, needs distraction.<\/p>\n
We don’t have Freeview in the bedroom, having just an Amazon FireStick. We’ve never been big watchers of TV in here, so there’s never been a need to have more than the Internet-based viewing.<\/p>\n
In an attempt to find something enjoyable yet wholly escapist, I have stumbled upon the remake of Battlestar Galactica (2006) on Amazon.<\/p>\n
We shall now discuss this show.<\/p>\n
Synopsis:<\/strong> Even though the humans are significantly more technically advanced than we are, they get their arses handed to them on a plate by the Cylon robotoids. Except wait, wait, wait, there’s a new breed of Cylon running the whole Cylon race (do robotoids have a race? Or is it more of a procution line? Yes, I like that). Cylon robotoid v1.0 is now being ruled by Cylon robotoid v4.0.<\/p>\n But, and here’s where it gets tricky, the ruling Cylon robotoid v4.0 are not identifiable as Cylon robotoids any more. They look like you and me!<\/p>\n IKR?<\/p>\n Well, they don’t actually look like me because even in my struck-down state I look devastatingly handsome and gorgeous and Greek Godlike and everything.<\/p>\n The Cylon robotoids v4.0 look like normal people. If normal people looked like Dean Stockwell off that show with time-travelling Sam and Ziggy and all that other stuff going off. And good-looking women with incredibly badly-coloured hair (seriously love, talk to your stylist and get them to change the seeing-eye dog they use at work).<\/p>\n But I digress.<\/p>\n The humans, in full receipt of their badly spanked arse from the technically superior Cylon victors, jump aboard a ramshackle collection of space hardware (hereafter called ‘the fleet’) and in the company of a badass Commander at the helm of the last surviving Battlestar (it’s a really big spaceship that can take punishment and dish it out, as well as being home to squadrons of rudimentary yet nippy and physics-defying one-person fighters (Vipers).<\/p>\n That’s about all you need to know but be honest, you prolly knew all that anyway, right?<\/p>\n Yeah, I thought you did.<\/p>\n So, the fleet, every vessel in the entire collection of ramshackle pleasure\/leisure\/cargo\/haulage spaceships (and the Battlestar too, obv) has FTL (Faster Than Light) drives. The FTL is a handy piece of Einsteinian theoretical umm theorising, that allows objects (the fleet – but don’t worry, because all those Cylon spaceships have FTL drives too) to pass instantly from one point in space to another pre-determined point in space. FTL is basically a method of traversing immense distances instantly. If you’ve seen But you can’t just jump around using FTL, like some hyped up millenial istening to their Dad’s copy of Jump Around by House of Pain.<\/p>\n Oh no, FTL only works when you know the coordinates of where you want to go. And also, for reasons not well explained, you have to make a series of jumps to go r-e-a-l-l-y long distances.<\/p>\n So you can’t just jump in to your spaceship and say ‘Computer, take me to a place that nobody has ever mapped; because<\/p>\n Except the Cylons, v1.0 and v4.0 can, and they are way smarter than computers.<\/p>\n This is the first logical hole in the Battlestar Galactica universe.<\/p>\n Voice control:<\/strong> Even very early Star Trek got vocal interaction on Federation vessels.<\/p>\n I’ve got vocal interaction on my mobile phone. And on my tablet (which is what I’m typing this epic post on, in case you were wondering).<\/p>\n How come Battlestars (or any other human vessels) don’t have this handy little function? Did the programme writers lack the imagination, in 2006, to see what the Star Trek writers saw was coming, even way back when?<\/p>\n Knockers:<\/strong> You get outside the boss’s cabin and…<\/p>\n Bang on the steel bulkhead door with your bare fist (or maybe you kick the steel door with your steel toecapped boots or, if you are an engineer, perhaps you hammer on the steel door with a number three wrench which you carry in your back pocket for just such a visit?<\/p>\n Really?<\/p>\n No doorbells? No handy little push-button devices to announce your presence? Or maybe there is such a thing, and when you push it, it sounds like someone is hammering on the door? Yeah, could be that.<\/p>\n Distance:<\/strong> WTF?<\/p>\n You are so technologically advanced you have this awesome spacepower around you, yet the imaginations of your collective of writers is stuck back there in the 1980s?<\/p>\n Do you know how stupid this makes you look (or how stupid this lazy writing makes your writers look)?<\/p>\n Booze:<\/strong> The writers of Battlestar Galactica glorify excessive alcohol consumption.<\/p>\n People waking up in the morning and saying ‘Never again’, and then doing the same thing that very evening. That is alcoholism.<\/p>\n The writers got a lot of things right. But everything they got wrong was schoolboy error\/writer 101 stuff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Galactic struggles. I don’t do ‘doing nothing’ and being very unwell, and confined to no more than ten very rapid paces from the toilet (which<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12386","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff","two-columns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12386","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12386"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12386\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12386"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12386"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brennigjones.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12386"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nFifty years after the last Cylon war in this nearaway\/faraway, futuretime\/moderntime\/historicaltime, war breaks out again (as the series relays to us) with a sneak attack on all 12 planets in the human\/federation\/whatever\/collective of planets.<\/p>\nStairgate<\/del> Stargate you’ll know the general theory of instantaneous travel across very large distances..<\/p>\n\n
\nThe computers on Galactica don’t talk. Also, the computers don’t listen.<\/p>\n
\nYou want to go and see the Commander, right? You get your number 1s on (or maybe number 2s, but definitely not number 3s, unless you are an engineer because they just seem to wear orange overalls like they have strayed off the set of OITNB).<\/p>\n
\nI’ve heard the following measures of distance used by the same collective of (human) people in the same season (S3 if you’re interested):<\/p>\n\n
\nIf you are unable to unwind without having ‘a little drink’ every single day, you are not a fun drinker. You are not a funny drunk. There is no academic distinction, no playing with words. You are an alcoholic. You have a massive drug dependency.<\/p>\n