Franchise Mythology

I saw Superman last week. 

(Picture from here.)

 

It’s a pretty good film—probably the best Superman film since Christopher Reeve’s first attempt. There are those that have said it even bests that since it doesn’t attempt the birth/Krypton origin story. It’s based, in part, on All-Star Superman and more than a little resembles HBO’s My Adventures with Superman. 

 

Spoilers after this.

 

But—it still has all the Superman beats: Superman is a good guy. He’s just trying to do good deeds. Perry White still runs the Daily Planet. Jimmy Olson is still a junior reporter. Supes loves Lois Lane. Ma and Pa Kent are still the loving parents from Kansas. Print journalism that works. I have some issues with Ma Kent’s accent which sounds more like Deep Ozarks than Kansas to me but that’s a quibble. 

 

In other words, the mythology is retained and some—but not too many—new wrinkles added. 

 

On the surface, this shouldn’t be too unexpected. It has a long tradition back to Parzival and Tristan and Isolde, where the poets take existing material and redisplay it from a new point of view. God knows how many Arthur and the Round Table stories there have been. But, this is a problem over time and especially in our money driven culture. These stories accumulate over time. How many Romeo and Juliets have there been? How many Hamlets? Superman, himself, has undergone many reboots. As have other Marvel and DC comic characters. Each time, the beats remain the same.

 

Sometimes, they mythology is broken. A good example of this is Red Son, which tells the story of a Superman whose rocket had not grounded in Kansas but 12 hours later in a Ukrainian collective under Stalin. That broke the mold. It had many of the same character: Lex, Jimmy, Lois, etc. But there was no Ma and Pa Kent. No Clark Kent. The Daily Planet of Jimmy and Perry is in the US while Superman is half a world away. Lois is married to Lex and never really meets Superman at all. 

 

Red Son was a critical and commercial success but it was a what if? sort of story. An alternate history of an alternate history. Reboots of Superman inevitably seem to return to norm: Superman and Lois, Clark, Jimmy, Perry. Superman loses his powers but regains them. Gets different powers and return to the same set. (As an aside, super breath? That freezes? Come on!) Sometimes he starts as a super baby. Others, he gets his powers as a child, a middle schooler, a teen. But he always ends up the strongest guy on the beach. Let’s be clear, too. It’s not artistic forces that cause this. The forces are financial. Superman makes money. He makes money fulfilling the mythology, not breaking it.

 

One of the interesting things about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is that it broke a bit of the mythology in the very beginning. This began in Iron Man, when Robert Downey Jr. said “I am Iron Man” as an ad lib that so captured the producers they said, let’s go with that. I do like the MCU better than I have (up to now) the DCU in the sense that Marvel made an attempt to have the heroics be an outgrowth of the character of the heroes rather than the characters subsumed into the heroics. DCU went the other way. Also, the MCU is often funny. The DCU (again, up to now.) was not. 

 

That said, in both the DCU and MCU, the mythology drives the story. There are always twelve labors of Hercules, Leda is always raped by Zeus in the form of a swan, Medusa is always slain by Perseus. 

 

Except when there isn’t. 

 

The YouTube channel of Jun Chiu has an interesting take on Medusa. There is Medusa, the Prequel  and Medusa, the Stone Kingdom. Essentially, it’s told in a series of beautiful paintings of a quasi-cartoon style along with music. There is no dialog of any sort but that doesn’t make any difference in the telling. The Prequel has a take on the Perseus story. The Stone Kingdom comes later. These are quite compelling pieces that break the mythology and in the breaking find something quite new.

 

Parzival didn’t break the mythology. Parzival still fails at his quest and then returns and succeeds. But Wolfram von Eschenbach had a bone to pick with society and embedded his response to chivalry in it. The story of Parzival hits the beats but Gawain is included also as an interesting counterpoint. Von Eschenbach didn’t break the mythology but he bent it pretty strongly. 

 

My point is that the best material dealing with these mythologies are those that tackle the mythology itself rather than just a retelling. Some break it (Red Son) and some bend it (Parzival.) The degree of reshaping can create something new. It may, of course, just be tin foil rather than gold. I recently saw a discussion of a new Batman where he is the son of Aztec royalty bent on freeing his people from Spanish rule. And it was advertising all the beats: the Joker, Catwoman, Two-Face. Since it hasn’t been released, I have no real idea on the nature of the take. But the fact that they are advertising the beats doesn’t bode well.

 

Which brings us to the problem of franchise mythologies these days: they are businesses. They can be the product of a singular talent but that talent is in the service of corporations. Artistic endeavors that do not turn the expected profit are rarely continued merely because they are artistically successful. Remember Firefly?

 

Mythologies are stories burned down to essence in refining fire. They are the bones of stories. Putting flesh on those bones makes for actual tales. What we see in these franchise mythologies are stories that are built to emphasize those bones, those highlights, those Cliff notes, with pretty lights, quick banter, and big explosions. The first of the franchise might be good—Reeve’s Superman. But there is money to be made so Superman II, III, and IV were made, each progressively less interesting, with prettier lights, and more stupidity. 

 

This is a problem with the whole franchise mythology. They get progressively worse as sequels pile onto sequels or novels pile onto novels. I think it’s in part because the mythological bones aren’t enough to sustain the franchise on their own. And a lot of the time, those left to continue the project aren’t talented or creative enough to keep it alive. 

 

Sometimes an individual or team’s spirit is enough to keep the franchise going for a while. The MCU was pretty good at keeping it together from Iron Man (2008) to Avengers: Endgame (2019.) Eleven years and twenty-two films. There were a fair number of duds in that list—you can pick your own—but the arc was sound. They have had trouble since. They had a rich mythology within the Marvel comic universe to pull from but that mythology, itself, grew thin over time. Both Marvel and DC tend to get bound up in their own canon to the point that they have to break their structure to keep the cash cow flowing.

 

The Star Wars franchise has a worse problem. Marvel and DC both have experience in tearing down a structure and rebuilding it in a “new” way—it ultimately returns to the original mythology but at least the journey back can be fun. Star Wars has no such mechanism. It just churns on, feeding on itself, until understanding the projects requires deep understanding of its minutia. Game of Thrones, I think, suffered similarly. 

 

Ultimately, franchise mythologies suffer from a basic defect: they have no ending. Parzival had an ending. Star Wars does not. The MCU does not. As long as there is money to be made, that horse is going to be flogged, dead or not.

 

News today: The current USDA is requesting names, birthdates, and social security numbers for those receiving SNAP benefits. What could go wrong? RFK Jr is likely to destroy the US Preventive Services panel just like he destroyed the vaccine panel. And the president is claiming Beyoncé broke the law for doing something that didn’t happen.

 

Arts and Crafts VIII: The Dancing Lady

About three years ago, I was in the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. It is a wonderful little museum filled with unexpected treasures. I found this lovely lady. She is a piece of pre-Columbian Costa Rican pottery about which I know very little. I tried to find out more but didn’t get much of a response from the museum. So it goes.

 

Fast forward a couple of years. I’d been doing pottery a bit and kept coming back to her—I’d begun to call her the Dancing Lady. She’s clearly not a girl. This is a woman familiar with child bearing. She is not going to be left out of the dance. She will make her aging body follow the steps if it kills her. How could I not be entranced?

 

I decided to attempt to make a likeness. I was not going to say copy or reproduce since I didn’t have the skills. That didn’t say I couldn’t try.

 

I decided to throw two semi-closed bowls and then seal them together, adding on the face, legs, and arms afterwards. This is only not how the original artist did it since they did not have wheels nor did they use high fire glazes. But I’m still learning hand building.

 

But I had trouble with the proportions. I threw the two bowls but they were way too close together in size. I redid them into different pieces.

 

I had a similar problem with the next two—the top bowl much too large. I decided to make a single vase from it. The shape suggested the Venus of Willendorf so I incised the figure into the side of the vase and made the hair shape the throat of the vase. Then, I used some underglaze to highlight the figure and oxide to bring out the detail.

 

Behold Vasa de Willendorf.

 

 

 

My third attempt came closer. The head/body ratio is still not right but it’s closer. I used a burnt orange underglaze that looked more like the original. The top was a bit too tall but I wasn’t willing to cut it down.

 

 

But disaster! Severe crawling when the true-clear glaze was applied and fired. Instead of Dancing Lady, I got Leprosy Girl!

 

This was enormously discouraging. But, after a bit, I tried again.

 

This time I did a little better on the face. I decided to give her a smile—which gave her a sort of Pillsbury Dough Girl effect but I decided to go with it. One of the problems with Leprosy Girl was how the glaze made the face indistinct. I tried to fix that by using a little black underglaze on the mouth, nose, and eyes. Also, we used the same burnt orange underglaze with some resin treatment suggested by my instructor.

 

Better. I still think the proportions are wrong. The underglaze didn’t crawl but it still has the brushed look. In retrospect, I might have done better not to glaze the outside at all and only glazed the inside. Also, the black didn’t work as well as I would have hoped.

 

For the moment, I’m done with the attempt. But at least, she looks like she is having a good time.

 

Oh, yeah. Remember all that food that was intended to be shipped as aid overseas? Rather than distribute it, they let it expire and will burn it. See here. 

 

 

Cheese Ends 2025-07-02

We’re going north to our cabin to do some work. It’s time to get out the blog entry early.

 

And I think it’s time for Cheese Ends.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

The Most Ancient Boomerang

Scientists have uncovered an ancient boomerang made from a mammoth tusk. The age is still indeterminate but it appears to be on the order of 40,000 years old. 

 

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it’s made from mammoth tusk in Poland. This puts it at the very beginning of Homo sapiens invasion of Europe. Given that it’s a mammoth tusk, this means we were able to drop big animals very early on—which is one more piece of evidence that a good deal of the loss of these megafauna is attributable to us.

 

But it’s a boomerang—a sophisticated piece of hunting weaponry that is most famously used by the aborigines in Australia. Experiments have shown it works smoothly and doesn’t return—similarly to the hunting versions used by the aborigines. This indicates a couple of scenarios: 1) humans in Poland and humans in Australia figured out the same weaponry at nearly the same time. (There’s a depiction of a boomerang in rock art that is 50,000 years old.) 2) The boomerang was invented long before humans invaded Australia (for the first time) and carried there.

 

Both scenarios are extremely interesting.

 

Neural Speech Implant

This is a different approach than has been done previously. Before, the attempt was brain->text->speech. The accuracy was first a problem but even when that was licked the latency was a big issue.

 

This approach attempts to create sounds rather than text. I.e., the human provides enough neural data that can be interpreted as sound and, since the human is attempting speech, what comes out is intelligible. Or, at least, that is the intention.

 

The impulses that come out go through an AI interpreter (see? A good use for AI!) in order for a sound to be created. Training had to be done between the human and the AI to get anywhere close to a speech output. But progress has been made. 

 

The exciting feature is that it can do this work in near real time. Right now, it’s a proof of concept. But it does tend to verify Niven’s Paradigm: “You don’t get down off an elephant. You get down off a duck.” We don’t always have to do things the hard way.

 

Mice Regeneration

Mammals don’t regenerate much. I mean salamanders, some fish, spiders, and other species have the ability to regenerate significantly lost components such as legs, tails, and fins, while we have to be satisfied if the cut on our fingers heals with too much of a scar. I mean, imagine if miter saw amputations were just a few weeks therapy? (I had a close call. It’s in the forefront of my mind.)

 

It turns out that mice and rabbits heal differently when a hole is punched in the membrane of their ear. (Remember, rabbits and rodents are only distantly related. Rabbits are Lagomorpha and rodents are Rodentia. Never the twain shall meet for the last fifty million years.) In rabbits, the hole greatly reduces in size. But in mice, the hole heals as a hole. The idea is that this difference might be a step in the direction of regeneration.

 

The difference was traced to a specific gene which activated in rabbits and remained idle in mice. This gene triggered the production of retinoic acid, which appears to be important in cell positioning and differentiation in embryos. 

 

Mice given regular injections of retinoic acid regenerated the ear pinna just like the bunnies did. 

 

Watch this space for new developments.

 

Axions: Now With Quantum Chromodynamics!

There’s a lot of missing mass in the universe. It’s been demonstrated time and time again. Galaxies rotate too quickly. We see gravitational lensing where there is (apparently) nothing there. And the larger structures of the universe seem to lie out there like beads on an invisible string. 

 

Unless there’s something wrong with gravitational theory, (I’m looking at you, Modified Newtonian Dynamics) there’s Something Out There We Can’t See. This is what is called “dark matter.” 

 

We’ve been looking for whatever makes up dark matter for decades now with nothing much to show for it. We were looking at WIMPs—Weakly Interacting Massive Particles—but they wimped out. MOND is still in the works but they have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do. 

 

Now, it’s the axion’s turn.

 

Axions (named after a laundry detergent) were invented to handle a different problem. The strong nuclear force obeys symmetry rules but there’s nothing there to enforce said rules. We could say the strong force is pure at heart but no one thought that likely. The idea of a new field in the universe to enforce that symmetry was born. Like the boll weevil needs a home, the field needed a particle and the name axion was slapped on it.

 

The axion is a tiny, tiny thing. Much, much smaller than a neutrino, which is, itself, much, much smaller than a proton. In fact, it’s so small it’s not clear that the word “particle” fits. All particles are also waves and the wavelength is inversely proportional to the particle size. Axions are so small that their wavelengths could range from meters to solar system size. 

 

But, if they exist, they are bosons which means they can group together to form a condensate that resembles a single massive particle. This is one hypothesis regarding their role in dark matter. It’s not a bunch of weak particles out there making up the missing mass. It’s a huge collection of condensates. 

 

Maybe. After all, there is at present absolutely no physical evidence that axions (or their corresponding field) actually exists. Just an inference from a gap in the model. This is something those who favor MOND gleefully like to point out.

 

Earth Sized Planets Found Not Where We Want Them and Here

Stars come in all sizes. But we would like them to be like our own sun. Big stars burn out quickly and, if big enough, end their lives in spectacular supernovae. Tiny stars burn nearly forever but have problems. Medium stars, like ours, last for billions of years and don’t try to kill their planets. At least, not often.

 

The most numerous stars we’ve found are Red Dwarfs. These are the most common kind of star. They’re called “red” because they put out a bit redder in their spectra. They’re tiny—less than 10% the mass of our sun. But, because of that, they sip hydrogen like fine wine and last for trillions of years.

 

This makes them interesting candidates for life.

 

Except, there are problems. Red dwarfs flare often. Really big flares. Flares that might scorch the atmosphere of one of their planets. And the planets in the Goldilocks Zone, where there is the possibility of liquid water, have to be very, very close to the star. So close that they get scorched. In addition, typically their so close they are tidally locked with one side perpetually facing their star. (The Moon is tidally locked so we only see the near side.)

 

So, not only do they get scorched regularly, one side gets all the heat while the other side gets zip. There is evidence life isn’t possible under these circumstances.

 

So, it is with a heavy heart, that Earth sized planets are much more prevalent around red dwarfs. 

 

We can find rocky planets like us around red dwarfs. But they’re probably dead. 

 

Yay.

 

GOP Crushes Solar Energy

There are a lot of reasons to despise the new budget bill. I consider the second B in the BBB is “butt ugly.” But that’s just me.

 

Regardless, one of the things in the bill is rescinding the energy subsidy for solar installations. There has been some suggestion that there is actually a tax on solar in the bill but I haven’t found that part so it’s speculation as far as I’m concerned.

 

I don’t understand the calculus here. The issues with fossil fuels are numerous and well known: CO2 caused global warming, mercury from coal, pollution in the air and water from burning all this stuff. Even if you believe global warming is a Chinese hoax—a very damned effective one, if so—the rest is pretty much settle fact. The sun spills over everyone. We don’t need to drill for oil, make pipelines, or spill it all over. 

 

There are engineering issues with cutting away from fossil fuels—well, none, as far as I’m concerned, regarding coal. Shut that one down. But those are engineering issues. Work on them long enough and they will be solved. The rhetoric about energy takes on a cult like fervor. As if it is our duty as Americans to burn as much oil as we possibly can in service to the shortened lifespans of future generations. 

 

The rhetoric calculus is idiotic. But the political calculus is inescapable. Exxon and its ilk do want us beholden to them. They like having us by the hanging bits.

 

I don’t like giving money to Exxon, either at the pump, in the monthly bill, or in my taxes. 

 

So, now we have a dog in this race. Thirteen years ago we put solar on the house and it has paid for itself three times over. We’re looking into more—hopefully, to have it in place to take advantage of subsidies while they’re still here. But we’ll manage it if we can’t.

 

The reason is energy independence. Right now, we have to rely on the good nature of fossil fuel companies for some percentage of our yearly energy costs. That’s expensive and will get more expensive—if you don’t think so, I have some land in Florida to sell you. Waterfront property, twelve hours every day. 

 

Eventually, we’re not going to be in debt to the fossil fuel companies for running our house. Transportation is next. 

 

Oh, and want to see how NIH cuts are hurting important research worldwide? See here.

 

Used to be American exceptionalism was about accomplishments. Now, it’s just talk.