News You Can Bruise for 2014 September

Another month full of major progress on major projects, but I managed to squeeze in four features:

• The Women (1939): This was pretty fun! It brings together every single 1930s stock character of women in film and lets them duke it out. Just when you think the film is too classy to feature a Margaret Dumont-esque gold-digger, too middle-aged to feature a showgirl ingenue, and too urban to feature a profane cowgirl, BAM! Gold-digger, ingenue, cowgirl! I did not appreciate how the film started by comparing every major character to a different domesticated animal, but that was over quickly enough. Recommended overall. Oh yeah, the ending is super creepy and so over-the-top that I can only hope we're supposed to read it as the filmic equivalent of sarcasm. "Come back to me, male gaze!" Geez. Gimme a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ending any day. Still recommended.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): The nerd favorite. I had a really good time. The fact that it's based on an established comic book world meant that they crammed in a bunch of cool stuff without really explaining it, which is exactly the right speed for me. It still strains under the weight of its canon--there were a lot of proper nouns I didn't care about, and I thought the main plotline with its supervillains and its revenges was dull. But in the interstitials there is so much great stuff. Cute semi-humanoid aliens! Improvisational violence! Using a mech to control another mech!

  As usual, I would have done things differently. This time I did do things differently, and you will eventually be able to read the result as Situation Normal. But just as an example, consider "Four Kinds of Cargo", the acorn that became SN. If the POV character of that story were the Captain, it would be a by-the-numbers space opera, like Guardians of the Galaxy, because that's how the Captain experiences life. So instead the POV character is Kol, the guy who is just trying to survive, who is trying to make the Captain's space-opera fantasy work, simultaneously intrigued and frustrated by her ability to change everyone's minds with an inspirational speech.

  In GotG terms, the correct POV character is Rocket. You can have the doofy white guy who brings everyone together, but he shouldn't be the POV character. The American people understand this. I've seen people talking about this movie as if Rocket is the lead, because that's the right way to do it. But that's not the way it happened.

  The one place my ignorance of the comic book let me down was when the unaccountable police force/military/governing body led by Glenn Close with her big swoopy hairdo and Peter Serafinowicz with his creepy British accent turned out... not to be evil? Not guilty of anything worse than imposing the bourgeois values of its Federation-type civilization on a band of criminals? That was unexpected, and I'm not sure whether my cognitive dissonance was the intention or if they're just saving the evil for the sequel.

  PS: there's a lot of tasing in this movie. I guess that's how horrifying violence becomes comedy violence.

• The Phantom Tollbooth (1969): I was pretty sure I'd seen this before. I remember telling my great-aunt Lejeune about the book when I was six or seven, and the next time we went to her place she'd found a VHS copy for me to watch. But now I've actually seen The Phantom Tollbooth and I don't remember one frame of this movie. So I think I've conflated it with the time Lejeune showed me Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings.

  I'm not going to accuse this movie of 'ruining my childhood', because it's just a dumb movie, but... it's a dumb movie. I am a fan of Chuck Jones's fluid gag-packed animation, but it's a bad fit with the cerebral subject matter of The Phantom Tollbooth, except in a couple cases like the integration of typography into everything in Dictionopolis, and the ever-shifting bodies of the Demons of Ignorance. The demands of the animated-feature-film medium require changes to the plot that frequently undercut the message of the book. An example will suffice: as Milo sinks into the Doldrums, the Lethargians stop being lethargic and become very enthusiastic indeed about sneaking up on Milo and violently killing him. Why? Because a book may vividly describe procrastination and laziness as perils in themselves, but when you're watching a cartoon all the evil things have to have pointy teeth and nasty Grinch faces.

  Other examples: Milo permanently screwing up the sky when he takes over for Chroma (don't experiment, kids, you might destroy the world!), Tock dying and being resurrected for no reason other than that's what happens in the third act. It's obnoxious. One addition I really liked is that the Mathemagician's castle includes a wall of digital computers—something that probably wasn't on Norton Juster's mind when the book came out in 1961.

  In the "don't really care" file, movie Milo lives in San Francisco instead of what is almost certainly New York in the book. The only reason I could think of for doing this was ease of obtaining filming permits, but this was after John Lindsay made it really easy to obtain filming permits in New York, so who knows. I guess San Francisco was a more magical, kid-friendly place in 1969 than New York.

  Oh yeah, there's songs in this movie, they're all very 1969, and I'm not a big fan of 1969 music.

• Popeye (1980): This was one of the movies for which I forever saw promos on Comedy Central in the '90s. Like all the rest of those movies (Meatballs, M.A.S.H.) it looked like a classic 'unfunny 1970s comedy' so I gave it a wide berth. Heh heh, 'berth', get it? Little nautical humor there. You don't think that was funny? Now you see how I feel about these movies!

  I decided to watch Popeye after hearing the Laser Time tribute to Robin Williams, where it was mentioned that Popeye was directed by Robert Altman. I thought "I've never seen an Altman film before, I'll give it a shot." I brought it up to Sumana, who was even more skeptical than with Celine and Julie go Boating:

  S: Altman does ensemble films. Aren't there like four characters in Popeye? Popeye, Olive Oyl, Bluto, and I'm leaving space for one I don't know about.
  L: Swe'pea.
  S: Who is Swe'pea?
  L: A baby.
  S: Can a baby really be a 'character'?
  L: How about J. Wellington Wimpy?
  S: What?
  L: Poopdeck Pappy?
  S: Are you just making up names?

  I pressed on without Sumana. Imagine my surprise when a screenwriting credit for Jules Feiffer showed up! I knew I was in for a treat. A treat that was not forthcoming.

  OK, yeah, honestly, I knew this wasn't going to be a good movie, no matter how many big names were attached. I watched it out of morbid curiosity. I would compare this movie to 1941: an unsuccessful experiment made while Hollywood was figuring out the parameters of the summer blockbuster. It looks great! There are some hilarious sight gags. But the action scenes were overwrought--maybe they should have brought in Steven Spielberg to direct the action scenes in Popeye and had Altman direct the comedy in 1941. There are a lot of characters in Popeye—more than I could have ever made up names for—but they're all pretty shallow and there's not a lot of good character comedy. I'm also disappointed that they never dramatized the time Popeye spent living in a garbage can.

  The songs are a big problem. I mentioned to Rob I was going to see Popeye and he went on and on about how great songwriter Harry Nilsson was, so I'm not gonna say they're bad, but they're... really avant-garde for a musical adaptation of a Popeye cartoon? They play fast and loose with meter and rhyme and are generally not catchy. The problem is deepened by the inclusion of the insanely catchy theme from the cartoons, which tosses all the other songs under the bus. I do like that Shelly Duvall sang her songs slightly off-key.

I've been waiting for all the pieces to go into place before writing about this on NYCB, and now the pieces are in place. The lightning strikes my castle laboratory and the Minecraft Geologic Survey rises! (See Fig. 1.)

Back in May I announced that I'd downloaded 65,000 Minecraft maps from the official Minecraft forum, and used the data to make my @MinecraftSigns bot. Later I took over Allison Parrish's defunct @minecraftebooks and revitalized it with _ebooks-style quotes from the books found in Minecraft worlds. (Plus, as of a few days ago, command block outputs that incorporate the names of followers, Exosaurs-style.)

But all the while, in the background, I was downloading. Worlds, screenshots, mods, player skins, texture packs... everything with a URL. I ended up with about two terabytes of data, an amount that here in 2014 is not difficult for me to store but is very difficult to transfer or process.

To get the signs and the books for my bots, I had to load every Minecraft world into Python and go through every chunk looking for entities. I ended up with about 180,000 worlds, and iterating over them all was a very time-consuming process. Fortunately, I had two more projects that would amortize all that computer time.

Both projects required that I take "core samples" of each world, extracting individual chunks that were likely to be interesting and forming a new world (like the one pictured above) containing only those chunks. The resulting dataset is representative of the full more-than-a-terabyte package of original worlds, but because it's just a very tiny sample, the whole thing weighs in at a comparatively slim 12 gigabytes.

That's small enough to go on the Internet Archive, and small enough for you to download it and use it in your own project. I wrote a detailed guide to the data, which includes not only 170,000 synthetic Minecraft worlds but a big JSON file (also available on its own) containing all the metadata and sign text and other things you'd need to do a text-based project.

The other project is The Reef, a series of Minecraft maps that combine the chunks obtained from the survey into mashup maps that incorporate designs from many different authors. For instance, you've got The Reef #1, which sticks spawn chunks from 10,000 different maps together to form a (mostly) naturally-sprawling terrain. Or maybe you'd prefer the Skyburbs, a thousand Skyblock maps jammed next to each other.

I've got plenty more ideas for Reef maps, but now that the data is available I think this is a good point to put the project on pause for a while. I will be publishing the code I use to make my Twitter bots and the Reef maps, to encourage you to play with the data and do your own thing.

I'm concerned about the Minecraft servers that have been shutting down since Mojang changed their EULA to include strict rules on monetization. People have been giving a lot of attention to the Microsoft buyout, but the EULA change is what's affecting servers right now. I would really like to offer an archive service for Minecraft servers that are being shut down (plus just original worlds that people have lying around on their hard drives), but I don't see a good way to get the word out. It's not like the typical Archive Team project where you can go into a server that's shutting down and download everything. The server owner has to take the initiative. Also bandwidth and storage become a problem for me at this point. So this is more of an open question than something I know how to solve. It may not get solved.