Binge-Review: Legend of Korra: Book 3: Change

My latest binge-watching target was The Legend of Korra: Book 3: Change. I found it somehow... unsatisfying.

It had plenty of good beats that are core to the Avatar style, but it just felt... rushed. Unfocused. There were too many points where I questioned either the motivations of the characters or the intentions of the storytellers. The story certainly contained a lot of change, but spent close to no time on the change still happening from the events of the previous season, which occurred only weeks earlier. Further, the new changes introduced in the new season were not given the attention necessary to feel like anything more than your standard action movie destruction.

There will definitely be spoilers in the rest of this post, so be weary if that matters to you.

There were a few places where characters make uninformed or unwise decisions, and I chalked those up to being an artifact of the show being, ultimately, a children's cartoon on a children's network. These sorts of things allow the characters, who really should know better, to take actions, fail, and then learn a lesson from them.

The biggest example here is Tenzin's early enthusiasm for rebuilding the Air Nation to the point where he just assumed the new airbenders would abandon their existing lives to join him in rebuilding a completely different culture. He believed this to the point that he was apparently willing to take people away from their established families. And none of the other characters with him, including his wife nor usually-empathetic sister Kya, nor the entirety of Team Avatar, thought that this might not work. And, of course, it didn't.

But instead of Tenzin realizing this wasn't going to work, the mechanization of the Earth Queen provided him with an entire crop of recruits who were perfectly willing to follow him, but mostly because they already had everything taken from them in the Earth Kingdom, so they had nothing else to do anyway. There was no lesson learned about Tenzin's desire to rebuild a dead culture against the wishes of those he would have carry the burden.

One issue like this would be a minimal note. But there were many more, at various levels of nitpicking. Since I am unable to leave well enough alone, here are several of them that occurred to me when I sat down to write this summary:

• There was lots of actual change in this book, but it didn't really feel like it. Instead of dealing with the fallout of the spirit/human worlds remixing, societal or political, it dealt with the assassination plot and the attempt to rebuild the past. It did end with Tenzin's shift in focus for his new airbenders... from "rebuild the past" to"forge a new future"... but he didn't even put it in those terms.
  
  I would have liked to see more exploration of the erosion of the concept of elemental-based Nations. Not in the way of the Red Lotus who wanted to tear down all government, but in the sense that the world had divided itself up very cleanly among elemental allegiances before the Fire Nation's war. Now, two generations later, many places on the central continents are becoming increasingly mixed.
  
  Republic City is the most diverse, as it was founded from the mixed Earth and Fire peoples of the Fire Nation Colonies. The Fire Nation probably second-most so, as they have had dealings with everyone else for so long. The Earth Kingdom's isolationism and protection of its own culture is interesting, as it never (fully) fell to the Fire Nation, so it may be pretty close to Earth-only in both culture and ethnicity. The Water Tribes are fairly isolated geographically and didn't experience much forced integration under the Fire Nation, but they've also been more politically open. The Air Nation/Nomads simply don't exist except for a single family, and their rebuilding efforts have ended up with them being "citizens of the world" more than as a Nation.
  
  The appearance of airbenders EVERYWHERE mirrors the mixing of the elements even within bloodlines. I guess maybe this theme will be explored more in Book 4: Balance.
  
• The sudden appearance of Airbenders among non-benders... what impact did that have in the other nations? Earth Kingdom decided to round them up... what impact would this have on the still politically raw "non-bender" movement from Book 1? That the underlying complaint of the bad guys in that Book was actually VALID has yet to be addressed.
  
  It's understandable that this wasn't investigated too closely, and was covered well enough considering the parts of the world directly viewed in this season.
  
• Why, exactly, would airbenders be a good "elite fighting force" for the Earth Kingdom? Because other benders don't have experience fighting them? Simply because they were a exploitable minority that could be press-ganged / brainwashed? They certainly weren't being taught any techniques that would be taking special advantage of Air... unless the point was to specifically fight against Earth benders, and thus the "elite army" was really meant to be a pacification force for the Earth Queen's own people. Which actually fits, somewhat.
  
• The Korra era's focus on "advanced techniques" of bending continues, which is unsurprising. Metalbending has been in heavy use since Book 1, but this wasn't really tied in with Change at all. Bolin's Metal/Lava bending thread was part of his personal arc. Ultimately Mako defeats the waterbender Ming-Hua via lightning bending.... but no deal is made of this, and it's the first time he did it at all in the season. He'd gotten a job at a power plant in Book 1 (2?) where he bent electricity into dynamos, so we know he can do it... but it was NEVER mentioned as being especially noteworthy, and he never does it in combat before this final fight. It was a MAJOR accomplishment for firebenders in the first series.
  
  The Legend of Korra runs with the idea that, in two generations, "advanced" bending has become so incredibly common, you can find/hire benders at the "laborer" level in many cases. Hell, there's an entire city of metal benders, in addition to a large number of them employed in Republic City's police department. And if only one in a hundred Earthbenders can Metalbend, then just how many Earthbenders are there? And what's the percentage of non-benders, with Book 1's focus on the conflict of non-benders being subject to the whim of an implicit bender "nobility" class.
  
• Lin uses Toph's "Earth Radar" once as a neat sort of reminder that it exists, but also for a reason that serves the plot. I forget if she's done this in the past or not. Didn't Toph need to be barefoot to do it? Either way, this was a back-reference that felt more appropriate than fan-service.

• Bumi getting airbending was incredibly convenient. There was no investigation of why people were gaining airbending beyond "harmonic convergence" so there's no exploration of why these specific people gained the ability. Was it that people with an existing potential, but one that did not meet some invisible threshhold, found the barrier to entry reduced? That would make sense for Bumi... but then why would Opal, whose entire family are (very nearly)  all earthbenders, gain AIR bending? A weak bloodline from her father? Maybe.
  
• Suyin Beifong's children get very little screen time beyond Opal. I'm not sure if the eldest son (who was most architect-like and really only seen once following his father) is a Bender. Even if not, he and Opal would have been non-benders while the other three sons were all earth benders.... so Opal suddenly becoming an Airbender would have been pretty damn noteworthy. What was Opal before she was "the new airbender"? But this aspect of things are never mentioned, even in a "whatever, we don't pride benders above non-benders" sort of way.
  
• Iroh did not need to be in this season. He really didn't need to be in Book 2 either, but he was more vital to the path the plot took, so fine. But his appearance in Book 3 was entirely because he's a popular character. Literally any other (adult) character could have told Korra the exact same thing he did, which wasn't especially spiritual or enlightening.
  
• We see Lord Zuko in this era for the first time (I think), though he really doesn't do much, so he's just there to be seen. He's apparently not Fire Lord, his unnamed daughter is.That's interesting, but not relevant to the action or theme of the current season.
  
• Toph's current status is mentioned: she's wandering the world, and hasn't been heard of for years. I expected she'd show up, but she never did (other than in a flashback). I was pleasantly surprised by that. It felt like someone decided they needed to pull in all the original season references they could whether they made sense or not. Toph's family makes more sense than shoehorning her into the story in person. Even though Toph is awesome.
  
• We don't actually see Katara this Book. That is actually somewhat surprising. We do get more of Korra's father Tonraq, again mostly because he could be there and to have Korra think he's dead for a short time.
  
• Asami had a couple chances to kick ass and a couple minor character moments, but otherwise she was just there to be the Other Female on Team Avatar... Lin and Suyin had more screen time than her. Hell, Opal probably had more character development than Asami. She had a nice moment with Korra early in episode 1, gets one episode of agency in the middle of a desert, but mostly exists just to play the straight man and for occasional jokes about awkwardness between her, Korra, and Mako. Speaking of which...
  
• The convincing of Mako to join in the expedition was... weak. Yes, only Bolin could do it, but it felt like this was something they had to resolve quickly, so they could get back to status quo and get on with the actual story they wanted to tell. This is doubly evident because the awkwardness that almost prevented Mako from joining in the first place was effectively a non-issue starting in the next scene.
  
• I had heard that the show runners wanted this season to move a bit closer to the "explore the world" sensibility of The Last Airbender... and in this, it was a bit hit-and-miss. We see two new locations, one of which was revisiting one we saw in the earlier series, Ba Sing Se. This would have been an excellent opportunity to highlight Change, but instead we get an Earth Kingdom being run by a cruel and oppressive ruler.... which is what it was when we first see it in TLA as well. So... change!
  
• Have we seen female Airbender masters before, even in the original series? None of the other female acolytes have shaved heads, which I find interesting. Just an idle thought during the final scene.

In the final two episodes, I found myself hoping that someone important would die, though I didn't think it would be incredibly likely due to the Nickelodeon thing. I felt like there needed to be something at the character level that would drive home the idea that "nothing will ever be the same again".... i.e. Change. You know, like the season title. The story more skirted around Change than explored it.

However, ending with a possibly paralyzed Korra was interesting and had a hint of this "not the same" mentality.  Korra was presented as being mentally broken and depressed, though it was never made clear whether this was just due to her physical injuries or something deeper. I feel this may have been a missed opportunity for explaining her attitude. Imagine if her father had died in the battle, perhaps with someone else. As is, Korra fought another major fight and eventually won with the help of her friends. Her body is broken from the fight and the poison, but she was still victorious. Is she simply broken that she's too weak to move, since she's always expressed herself physically? Did the poison affect her mind? Is she worried that, in her current state, she can't function as the Avatar and is letting the world down? No idea. Leave that open for the next season to explain, I guess.

My greatest fear, however, is that this cost will be glossed over quickly in the first episode of the next season. Book 4: Balance takes place three years after the end of Book 3, so it's the biggest time jump in the Korra era yet. Speculation is that it starts with Korra finishing her recovery from this ordeal, being exactly that "narrative reset" I am apprehensive of . The first episode is actually on Nickelodeon as I write this, so I guess I will find out shortly.


I did, honestly, really enjoy this Korra story. It didn't suffer from the problem of requiring multiple layers of new mythology to explain the various motivations that Book 2 did. It was refreshingly straightforward but, perhaps, too much so. In reflection, it just felt a bit flat. Too compressed. Lots of interesting ideas implied, too few explored.

When the game removes itself from the game

When the Diablo III development process was ramping up, I liked the sound of a lot of their more controversial changes. I found many of the attempts to streamline gameplay positive and refreshing, while others lamented that Blizzard was "Dumbing Down" the game (the universal battlecry of the vocal and easily startled).

Of all of the changes (removal of stat points, auto-identify of magic items, addition of Health Globes, shared stash, etc.) there is only one that I ended up changing my mind about. Unfortunately, that mechanic ultimately led me to realize that there was no reason to continue playing the game. And that mechanic is: the ability to change your skills at any time. I suppose I have to give an honorable mention to a related mechanic: that skills unlock automatically at specific levels as you progress through the game.

I made this realization months ago, and have tried a couple times to put it in writing. Here is my latest attempt to distill my thoughts into largely readable bits:

• There is never any reason to level more than one character of each class.
• The only thing that makes characters unique from each other is their equipment... and equipment therefore becomes exceptionally specialized.
• Once you've reached max level and unlocked all your skills, your sense of "progress" is tied entirely to gear upgrades.
• You can change your skills out at any point, but since you probably want a whole new set of equipment for the new loadout, you really can't .

A few points about each of these.

Episodic binge-watching has ruined me. Maybe.

The Age of Netflix has made watching TV shows a completely different experience from the traditional TV Guide method. Over the past several years, I have burned through the entirety of several complete series, and played catch-up for one long-running show.

It was the new version of Doctor Who (and the spinoff Torchwood) that I caught up with last year, watching through Season 6 until I suddenly found myself waiting for new episodes just like every other poor schlub. The transition wasn't particularly jarring, because I still had most of a year to wait for new episodes anyway, and I started grabbing classic episodes on disc.

Most recently I watched through the entirety of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It wasn't until I finished the first season of Buffy that I realized what I'd gotten myself into. The show was originally a mid-season replacement, so I didn't realize that unlike the first season's 12 episodes, seasons 2-6 were each 22 episodes. Plus 5 seasons of Angel. Each episode is 45 minutes.

I'm the kind of person that has a very hard time putting down a book I'm in the middle of. Now factor in that I was suddenly wary of  the casual "spoiler" dropping that is entirely kosher for a show that has been off the air for 10 years. This was not going to be an easy process.

Watching an entire series in one (months long) marathon is a very different experience than getting it one episode at a time, at the original pace. In the traditional model, you have more time to digest each episode on its own. Each single episode means more. You're more likely to dwell on things you didn't like, and you have more time to savor the things you did. On the flip side, watching several episodes a day can cause all sorts of events and impressions to start bleeding into each other in your memory. I had to start taking notes so I remembered when specific important events happened relative to each other.

The biggest thing I missed was discussing the show with other fans who were at the exact same point in the story. The last time I had that in any major way was back during the run of Babylon 5. (I still have a prominent link to the Lurker's Guide and its awesome episode summaries on my custom browser homepage.) Discussion of theories and opinions was always half the fun of the thing. At the same time, there would always be some synchronization of those opinions. You might adopt someone else's dislike of a character you didn't particularly care about, just because that person really didn't like them... and insisted on pointing out every tiny reason.

So you end up with the good and the bad of the group dynamic. It's a shared experience and a way to expand your enjoyment of the topic, but there's also some measure of groupthink that develops.

I mention this because I thought the marathon approach had accentuated this difference. Having finally reached the series finales of both shows, I felt safe searching the web for information akin to the Lurker's Guide, to help pick up on things I may have missed or check on my assumptions at which plot points were due more to production process than pure storytelling. This eventually led me to /r/buffy on Reddit.

Within a surprisingly small number of posts I picked up on the General Fandom's collective major Things They Don't Like. Very few of them surprised me much, beyond the initial "huh" moment. To me, the Story I was watching was the entire Series... or maybe one Season at a time. As such, individual things that didn't sit right were small compared to the whole, and didn't chafe me any. To most of these fans, though, specific actions or characters were elevated almost to Jar Jar levels of scorn. To them, these pieces loomed large in their individual experiences, and either though natural process or adopted groupthink, they became a pillar around which everyone could gather and communicate in the universal language of the Internet: ridicule.

Almost universally, I disagreed with the sentiment. In most cases, though, I could at least see the reasoning behind the opinion. I had the big-picture perspective to see how things fit together overall, but not the detail view to be irritated by every perceived flaw, legitimate or otherwise.

Back on the other side, I've been watching the current season of Doctor Who along with the rest of the world. Well, generally the morning AFTER the rest of the world due to broadcast timing and distribution deals, but close enough. I'd started checking on /r/doctorwho/ long ago, but the dynamic was very different than the Buffy subreddit. Since this show is still running, it has a much higher volume of posts, and the vast majority of them are random TARDIS sightings and cosplay pictures or various fanart. Even after the new season started, there were only one or two threads that appeared specific to each new show, and those were quickly swept away by the usual content.

So it took me a lot longer to start seeing the community groupthink to start showing itself for Season 7. And once it started to surface... I found that I almost universally disagreed with the sentiment. This was a show I was watching at the same time as everyone else, and I was witnessing the collective opinion being formed in real time... close enough for the presented opinions to influence my own. Instead I found that, with very few exceptions, the growing consensus was exactly opposite my own as far as the relative quality of individual episodes. I was seeing the show at the same rate, with the same ability to digest my experience, and rarely coming to the same conclusion. Even the presented reasoning for their impressions didn't do much to sway me.

And so I learned a valuable lesson. Everyone else's opinions are stupid. Genre fiction is in the eye of the beholder. Never watch more than three hour-long episodes in a row or your butt will fuse to your chair cushion. ...But I've completely forgotten what it was.

Mods I'm using in Skyrim

Mostly, I'm playing Skyrim on PC because I just built a new box and I haven't had a real gaming computer for years. But an awesome side-effect is the customizability this opens up. I'm not a big fan of the cheaty mods or total conversions unless I've thoroughly orked through all the content of the game proper. However, I've found reason to run some mods fairly early in my adventure. I thought I might document what mods I'm using right now and why. These are not in any particular order.

A use for Scroll Lock... but not on a keyboard.

Back when I first bought my e-ink Nook I kept trying to put into words everything I was thinking about ebooks as a concept. There was always something nagging at me about the format and I couldn't exactly place it, though I knew it had something to do with the "page " metaphor.

Now that I'm reading a couple books on my full tablet, I think I'm realizing the issue more: "pages" make no sense to an ebook. My problem before was that they DO make sense for current e-ink devices, since they update so slowly and can't handle scrolling well.

Books have pages because that's the format that was convenient for the medium. When I'm reading a novel on a computer screen, why can't I just endlessly scroll? It's annoying to have to "flip the page"... *there is no page*.

I understand the desire to keep page numbers to compare with the physical book, but that's also part of the problem. Since you can adjust type size and other elements in e-readers, it might take you several "next page" to advance to the next displayed page number... it's all very arbitrary for the format. An e-reader "next page" is actually a "next screen" command... which works like the "Page Down" key on a keyboard...

Luckily, this is something that can be addressed in the reader without having to alter the books themselves. Now if I could get someone at Barnes and Noble to add an "infinite scroll" option to their Android reader, perhaps with some sort of "scroll lock" feature to prevent accidental scrolling...

Of course, this still assumes that a "book" is a single-directional flow of text in one giant progression, which is barely less shortsighted than forcing the page metaphor in the first place. Ultimately, "e-books" can and will be more like websites, with internal cross-referencing, and large scrolling "pages" that may (or may not) progress in a fixed order one after another. For example, it might make sense to break apart each chapter in a novel into separate sections. Or how about one long epic story following multiple characters, where you choose *which* characters to follow, and you see only the appropriate chunks?

Oooh. That one's good.

Already regretting it?

I've been using Linux as my primary OS for a good number of years now. However, a series of events has convinced me to use Windows as the OS for my next computer. I feel a little dirty about it, but now is not the time to discuss my reasons.

Now is the time to discuss my comeuppance.

Since the soon-to-exist Windows box will be my primary (or, at least, most powerful) box, it is of course necessary that all my data be accessible on that machine. I've been doing occasional backups of all my data from my Ubuntu box onto an external drive formatted as NTFS, so it would be possible to recover to Windows if necessary.

Today I started the process of moving things over, and figuring out how to live within the file structure chaos that is Windows 7. And that's when I hit my first "... Really? I mean... really?" moment.

Linux filesystems allow for more characters than NTFS does, both in length of file or path names and in individual characters. While copying a folder with hardware user guides, I hit an error.

"Right," I thought, "Windows doesn't allow quotation marks in the filename. I'll just fix it."

Only... I can't. It's impossible. Windows won't let you do it.

See, in order to rename a file, SOMETHING has to specify the OLD name. And when you try to give it a new name, it fails because the old name is invalid. Of course, Windows Explorer has no trouble SHOWING you the supposedly invalid name; it just can't DO anything with it. The error dialog even TELLS you to use a different name. Notice that it doesn't give the option to "specify a different name" RIGHT THERE.

In the end, I had to power up my Ubuntu box, find the same file, rename it on that box, copy it to a shared drive on the Windows box, and then, finally, move it to the proper place.

Other things I copied over were my music files. Several album names (ad downloaded via Amazon) were too long, and a few others contained invalid symbols ( : " ). Before tonight I didn't even know that WinMerge could compare directory structures. I don't know what I should have expected from an operating system that thinks you're too stupid to understand file extensions.

I haven't even started shopping for what will become my new Windows box. Already I wonder if I've made a poor decision. But it's the only way I'll be able to take full advantage of Diablo 3, so...

Edit: Oh, and of course the perennial favorite: Windows can't handle filenames with "only" extensions like, say .htaccess ... Right. Good job.

Managing Simplicity on Mobile Devices

I finally figured out what really bugs me about the way you're expected to use mobile devices (Android, iOS).

You're limited to one application, full-screen at a time (widgets and such not withstanding) but you must deal with EVERY app installed at once when not using one particular one.

There's no nice little organization unless you specifically create one on your home screens. The Android "app drawer" is the worst combination of the Windows Start Menu and your desk's junk drawer; everything's in one place regardless of their purpose, how often you use them, or whether they're related to each other.

Even running apps work this way. Android has a method to switch to recent apps, which roughly means ones you may have been in recently. But since there's no way to technically *exit* apps, there's no distinction between ones you're done with and ones you may have just switched out of for a minute.

A standard desktop has multiple states: Not running, active (windowed/fullscreen), and inactive (minimized to various places or just not the active program). Android has equivalents, but no control over any of those states except Active.

Usually this isn't much of a problem, honestly. But just now I accidentally clicked a link in a Twitter client that sent me to my browser. Normally, the global "back" button would send me back a screen/app, except that the Browser intercepts that as "back in history", which OFTEN makes sense, but not here. Since the browser never actually closes, I would have to Back though tons of pages to get the expected behavior. So instead, I hit the "recent apps" button and see 18 apps, very few of which I would consider "running". Some I haven't accessed for 20 hours!

I realize these aren't meant to be desktop replacements, but management of application state would be wonderful.