Schlock Mercenary

Schlock Mercenary is one of my (many) favourite webcomics. Like many of the others it turns a gag-a-day format into a rich world: in this case a Draco bar or Mos Eisley Cantina style 31st century galactic culture, with many roughly-human-level species with their own little empires, and space bars, and mercenaries, but a few lesser-advanced and more-advanced species in there too.

The early comics are more rough, and make a few assumptions which are difficult to integrate with the story as-you-wish-you'd-written-it, but on the whole it progresses smoothly from them into the more professional comics later. But I was recently rereading the archives, and made two realisations I don't know how I didn't see before (which will only make sense to other people who know the characters):

1. Kevyn joined Tagon's company in his sister's takeover bid and then chose to stay, rather than coincidentally working for the company when he invented the Teraport. That makes much more sense, but was just never spelled out.

2. At the start of the comic, the company has about 30 members (at one point, they hire taxis for all of them). The number of foot-soldiers has to be a glossed over a bit to accommodate different sized stories. But what I hadn't realised was that by the time of the first big recruiting drive on Ghanj-Rho, we've met 20+ out of 30 (possibly including Pronto and Pi, who only show up after the drive, but are as likely to be newly-promoted old members as new members.).

Wikipedia plot summaries

Wikipedia plot summaries seem almost exactly the wrong length. A one-paragraph summary would often be really useful for people who haven't seen the film, but want a general idea of what it's about. A one-sentence summary would be useful for people like that with really short attention spans. These sometimes show up in the opening blurb of a wikipedia article, and are the norm for films on imbd.

A 2000-word summary could describe enough detail that you could refresh yourself of any details you'd forgotten but wanted to check. The average summary is nearly but not quite long enough for that. Longer summaries would be much too detailed for an average reader, but very useful for someone wanting to study the book or film in detail (this is what Spark Notes do).

But wikipedia articles seem to shoot for 500-1000 word summaries, too long to be of much use for someone asking "what sort of film is this?" and just a little too short for someone asking "how did XXXX find out about YYYY in scene 3 again?"

Also, they seem to virulently suck the life from any scene they describe. Inevitably, there's a list of "A does blah, but then B importunes them and they change their mind", with any question of why that was important to the characters stripped away. Presumably that's an over-scrupulous urge to keep the description neutral, even though in most films the emotions are pretty explicit (you might be able to analyse WHY he's in love with her, or whether there was another explanation, but it's normally pretty clear what the obvious meaning is).

Presumably most individual people could write a reasonable summary, but hundreds of them grind the summaries smooth. Maybe it would actually be better to have an explicitly one-paragraph summary, and then a 2000+ word summary on a separate section/page where people can vent their "must add this detail" urges.

James Cameron's Avatar

Summary

You don't need this review, what everyone else said was quite right. The reviews I've seen of Avatar have been the broadest and most comprehensive consensus on a movie I think I've ever seen :)

In short, it's an obvious idea (white explorers conquer natives for resources, one explorer falls in love with the native culture and joins it, and leads them to repel the invaders) done really well. The plot and characters and script are so-so: several funny moments, several uplifting moments, several exciting moments, no massive bloopers, but nothing very surprising.

But you have to see it. The 3d gave me a headache but is very impressive, as much for ordinary scenes with a touch of depth as for the whizzy flying bits, which for once are done with restraint, rather than every other 3d film's "wooohooo! look, another whirly-round glowing thing" approach.

Incidental good things

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