20 January 1998: Moving Forward

Tuesday, 20 January 1998:

Moving Forward

Today was a very busy day at work, but it was sort of a fun-busy rather than a crazy-busy. I spent (or tried to spend) most of the day trying to get a running Visual Basic 5 executable of our software, now that we've done the first conversion pass of all the modules. It's not done yet; it might not be done tomorrow. It's a huge task, because so much is different. But it's fun, and I'm learning some stuff about the system.

In the midst of all that, I had to tackle some fix issues for our current release, and since De Boss was travelling today, I had to keep watching over the junior programmers. Mainly I had to make sure they had enough to do, which was a good trick. But I think I kept most of them busy. Hard to tell; I didn't have a lot of free time to organize my thoughts in the later afternoon!

After work, I stopped by the Official Editor's house to pick up the latest issue of The Turbo-Charged Party Animal APA. But it wasn't ready, so instead I spent an hour talking to the OE's wife, and petting the OE's cats, and, circumstantially, getting a lead on a birthday present for a friend of mine (said friend will have to keep guessing should said friend read this entry).

Then I came home and watched Babylon 5, packed up some comics to ship tomorrow, and continued my hard drive reorganization. I also continued the work of getting my "new" e-mail address and Web page updated in various places, such as mailing lists I'm on and Webrings. What a pain. But hey, at least it's all backed up now!

Oh, yeah; I also received the latest mailing of APA Centauri, which was also my last. I had a brief twinge of nostalgia, remembering opening my first mailing, a decade ago, and being welcomed in the "business pages", but it's not the same place. Nor should it be, but it's time to move on nonetheless.

Today's B5 episode was "By Any Means Necessary", which is a labor-strife episode written by creator J. Michael Straczynski's significant other. It's a slightly transparent, feel-good episode, albeit with some good dialogue. It was around this point in the first run of the series that I started feeling like too many episodes had the "clever plot resolution of the week". "Midnight on the Firing Line" had one, "Born To The Purple" had one, "Deathwalker" had one, "And The Sky Full Of Stars" had one. A CPRotW is basically an "everything falls into place to save our heroes' asses" resolution, and although, for instance, "Stars" had an ending which moved the overall story forward, most of these episodes just started feeling a little stale after the third or fourth time.

Fortunately, better episodes aren't far off; by the end of the first season, the main story really gets moving. Some of these earlier episodes are better in retrospect, since we see things that seemed like standard "noise" in the background of a typical TV episode, but which represented undercurrents that would be developed more later on. For instance, President Santiago's pro-alien legislative initiatives, and of course the Pro-Earth groups.

The worst episode so far? "Believers", an incredibly trite piece about alien belief systems, which only partly redeemed itself by refusing to allow its characters to survive unscathed. But it was still just a shallow Franklin vehicle. Season Two's "Confessions and Lamentations" covered similar ground, pulled fewer punches, and was just generally more effective. I think the upcoming "TKO" is worse, though.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)