The following post is by regular Big Bad Blog contributor, Pete. It has, as requested, been heavily edited.

Have you heard of 1% Monopoly?

It’s a variation on the traditional game of Monopoly, inspired by the Occupy movement. It consists of a house rule that will make a frustrating bored game (not a spelling error) infuriating for all but one player – if you pass GO while having the most money, you get to “Lobby the Government”, allowing you to change one rule. The richest player will quickly gain a huge advantage and more money, while everyone else will be disadvantaged, losing everything. I doubt playing with this rule will make anyone happier in the long run, but it will illustrate the unfairness of our current political/economic model.

(Editor’s note: I’m not entirely sure if this 1% Monopoly is a creation of Pete’s mind, or something seen elsewhere. I hope it’s the former. Though there are rules online for another Occupy-inspired Monopoly ruleset: Occupy Boardwalk.)

Today’s blog post has been provided by Pete, who has graciously ensured that the Big Bad Blog not be empty during Mr. Topp’s vacation. Management disavows any knowledge or approval of the content of the following message.

With Mr. Topp heading out on vacation I figured he could use some low quality filler for his blog. To that end, here I am once again providing you with my amateur reviewer’s opinion. My chosen topic this time is The Hunger Games.

(Spoiler Alert: I don’t want to be limited to what I can and can’t say because someone reading this may not be as up to date on current trends as I am. Seeing as I am practically a Luddite at this point if you are behind me in the times you should be ashamed of yourself. To that end I will be talking about what I have read (which is all three books and associated Wikipedia pages) and what I have seen (which is a few movie trailers) so I might ruin some endings if you aren’t careful.)

(Editor’s note: There weren’t any spoilers for The Hunger Games so in an attempt to preserve the tattered remains of Pete’s integrity we have added spoilers for other books and movies. We wouldn’t want Pete to be a liar.)

Editor’s note: The previous note was just Pete talking to himself. We’re not editing this for him.

Editor’s note: Except to break it into paragraphs. Paragraphs are good.

Editor’s note: And change “ladder” to “latter”. But that’s it. We’re done now.

Why the odd title? Suzanne Collins stated that she comes from a background of writing three act plays, something I noticed before I read that on Wikipedia. If you ignore the chapter and section breaks in the books, it is still very obvious that each book is three parts. Since I haven’t seen the movie I am going to mostly talk about the books, but I am going to mention the movie at the end. (Darth Vader is Luke Skywalkers father.)

I said before that I am a fair bit behind the times so the first I heard of this franchise was the buzz about the impending release of the new movie. Like any annoying buzzing sound I attempted to isolate the source and found that The Hunger Games was a book series that had replaced Twilight as the hot new teen drama. Once I had that fact I was ready to turn my back on the whole thing and pretend I was never interested, there was only one problem. I was still interested.

Something I found amusing about the Twilight series was the near universal scorn it received from anyone I considered a respectable source. The Hunger Games on the other hand was receiving moderate to positive reviews from the same sources. That caught my attention. (The Titanic hits and iceberg and sinks.)

I should come clean about something at this point. I read a fair bit of children’s fiction. As a kid I wasn’t much of a reader. Outside of the books I had to read for school I almost never read for fun until the latter half of high school. The reason for this was I was never given anything to read for fun that was actually fun to read. Adults were encouraging me to read books they thought I would enjoy, but I didn’t, so I just learned that books weren’t entertaining. When I started to have friends who read they were able to recommend books that were actually fun to read and I have been reading more and more ever since. Having missed out on some highlights of children’s literature I have made an effort to go back and see what they were like. Also the really good children’s books make adults wish they were kids again.

(Harry Potter kills Lord Voldemort in the end.)

Given that I am a parent it is somewhat obvious that I don’t have an infinite amount of time and money. So my investigation into The Hunger Games was going to have to be done in a way that fit my lifestyle. Usually I try to see the movie first, and then read the book. It has been my experience that the book is usually better than the movie so if I see the movie first and like it I will like reading the book too. If I do it the other way around I like the book and am disappointed by the movie, giving me one pleasurable experience instead of two. I have been to the movies exactly once since my son was born two years ago so I didn’t want to risk a rare movie going experience on something that I might end up hating, especially when there is a new Batman movie due out this summer. I also didn’t want to buy the books because even if I didn’t hate them the odds of me rereading them were pretty low. The left me trying to obtain a free copy of the books. Again Luddite, I went to the library, only to be handed a new challenge. The upcoming movie meant a lot of people were trying to read the books for free, at a time when the Toronto Public Library was on strike. When I check there were 2400 holds on the first book in the series. When I told my Dad this story he directed me to www.epubbud.com. A website that is self-described as youtube for books. There I was able to find a free, grey market, eBook version, which works well in a house with both a kobo and an android tablet. (Batman is really Bruce Wayne.)

I really enjoyed the first book, it was by far the best in the series. You are introduced to the fictional world by learning about life in District 12. Life in 12 is hard, so you feel sadness and pity for everyone, but you also sort of admire someone making it under those conditions. Once the story moves to the capital and pregame starts you get caught up in it and start to feel the anticipation of what is to come. And then the games begin and you get lost in the action. All in all a good span of emotions that work together to provide an engaging reading experience.

The second book is where the problems start. Book two actually feels like a copy of the first. Life in the districts is bad, prepping for the games is scary, and the games are intense. It seems like Collins wanted the story to be a trilogy so bad that she made a second act that was all filler. There was some information that we needed to learn and characters that we needed to meet, but we didn’t need to do so by going through a cheap knockoff of the first book.

Thankfully Book three did break some new ground. After the ending of the second book it was impossible to keep the same formula so changes had to be made, and change is good. I am a sucker for a good tale of rebellion, and book three hit a lot of high notes. Stirring speeches, fighting impossible odds, vying for freedom, what’s not to love? The climax of the series was a bit of a letdown, but I am used to that by now. I guess a climax is really hard to write because it keeps happening over and over to me. A story keeps getting cooler and cooler until you wonder “how can they top that?” only to learn, they can’t. Oh well let’s sum up and get out of here. The aftermath and epilogue were kind of lukewarm but they were believable. They went to war, there was trauma and loss, and then they had to get on with their banal existence for the rest of their lives. Dramatic or not, it is true. (Tyler Durden is hallucination of the narrator, part of his insomnia and MPD)

That is actually a good summary of how I feel about the series in general. It was very believable. The emotions that you felt, the events that were played out before your eyes were what you should expect from people in those situations. The main characters do grow and develop, but are still flawed like real people and sometimes do dumb things, like real people. I think whether or not you will like the series will be determined by whether or not you like the characters. If you find them annoying you will likely not like the story. One thing Collins does well is vilify the enemy. It is very common in storytelling that you have to make the bad guys “BAD GUYS”.

Personally, I hate wishy-washy villains. If you are going to be bad, then be bad. If you are going to be bad for the greater good, then be an anti-hero. What Collins does in The Hunger Games is take aspects common to decadent western life and push it to a grotesque extreme, and then set them against the poor starving and oppressed. It is an enjoyably stinging satire of the divide between the haves and the have nots, until you remember we are the haves.

(John Ritter is a robot.)

(Seriously I don’t know why I told that joke. It was 10 years ago and there are like 8 people in the world that will get it. At least most of them read this blog.)

I am glad I read the trilogy, I will find the time to watch the movies, but not in theaters, and I likely won’t opt to buy either the books or the movies. I have a feeling the movies will proceed similarly to other recent trilogies. The first one will be amazing, the next two okay but not as good. Think of The Matrix, or Pirates of the Caribbean.

All of that being said if you did ask my opinion, I would suggest that you read the books.

The good outweighs the bad, and who knows, you may find sixteen year olds less annoying than I do and like it even more than I did.

Today’s article is a guest post by Pez Minotaur. You can check out his old LiveJournal here, but these days he just writes an article for the Big Bad Blog once every few months.

Today he looks at Star Wars. Pez’s opinions are his own, and do not necessarily reflect those of the blog.

I am a big fan of science fiction, and tend to enjoy most science fiction. I feel that statement is not redundant because we all know people who use being a fan of science fiction as an excuse to hate most science fiction. Whether or not science fiction is good or bad tends to have little effect on whether or not I enjoy it. Sometimes bad science fiction can be a lot of fun.

All that was a lead up to my next confession, I am a Star Wars fan. I can say unashamed that I enjoy watching all six Star Wars films, and yes there are six. We can’t exclude films from the franchise just because they disappointed us. For anyone reading this at home, whose blood pressure is going up after reading the starting of this paragraph, I have some homework for you. I did something similar to this on a ski vacation many years ago.

Step one is to watch Armageddon and The Core, and try and point out all of the bad writing and scientific impossibilities in these movies.

This is a warm up round. It is good to stretch before exercise. Also coincidentally this is also part of the NASA management training program. Seriously, Wikipedia said so.

Step two, now that you are warmed up, watch Star Wars Episodes I, II, and III, doing the same thing. Point out all the bad writing, bad science, and if you wish, bad acting. At this point if you wanted to you can start keeping some kind of score but it isn’t necessary.

Step three is the important part. Now that you have built up all this hostility watch Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI. You have to let yourself go and allow yourself to mock a childhood icon, but it won’t be hard because you prepared for it. Once you start pointing out all of the bad writing, bad acting, and bad science in them you will
realize two things. First they never were that great, they were good and fun to watch, but not worth of the esteem you held them too.

Second you will realize that when compared back to back the prequel trilogy isn’t that bad.

I do realize that I have just asked you to watch 8 movies, and if we assume an average of about 2 hours that is 16 hours. So you should break it up over a long weekend or something, but it is important to watch all 8 movies within a relatively short time span otherwise you lose your critical momentum.

Now everything I have said so far is not what I wanted to talk about. All of that was to set up how I quantifiably and dispassionately rated the Star Wars movies so I could answer a question.

Who was the coolest Jedi?

Here is how the ranking was arrived at. The first criterion is how many movies the character appears in, a number between 1 and 6. The second criterion is in how many of those appearances was the character cool, another number between 0 and the number of appearances. The number off cool appearances is divided by the total number of appearances to determine their cool percent. Then you take this list and put it into order twice. The first time based on the number of cool appearances, and then assign each character a rank. The second time based on the cool percent, and again assign each character a rank. Take these two ranks and added them together, a number theoretically between 2 and something much higher. Finally take your list of characters and rank them based on this sum to give you an accurately weighted list of how cool your favourite Jedi are. I did this and got this result.

The definitive number one was Obi Wan Kenobi. He was the only character in the franchise to have six appearances and always be cool.

Second place was a four way tie between, Yoda, Darth Vader, The Emperor, and Mace Windu. All very cool guys.

Third place is a tie between Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul. Also cool dudes, but lost points for only having one appearance in the series.

Fourth, fifth and sixth places are filled out with Count Dooku, Luke Skywalker, and Anakin Skywalker respectively. Now it is important to note I prepared this list twice. One time with Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader scored together, and a second time scoring them separately. I liked it a bit better scoring them separately, the alternative brings Vader down two spots and Anakin up two where they meet in fourth place. Also although Luke Skywalker does appear in Episode III he is a baby and cannot be judged and either being cool or not. Hence he is only credited with 3 appearances. However further analysis has revealed that if you do making his total appearances 4, he was still only cool once so his rank does not change.

Disagree that Episodes I-III are that good? That Episodes IV-VI are that bad? With the Jedi Cool Metric?

Let us know in the comments!

Regular guest blogger Pete wrote the following for the Big Bad Blog, and sent it to me prior to the space shuttle taking off on its final mission.

Mr. Topp

Today is the beginning of the end of an era covering almost exactly 30 years. Today the Space Shuttle Atlantis will launch on the last ever space shuttle mission. I can’t speak for other science and technology geeks out there, but I was struck with a strong sense of nostalgia. The shuttle program really feels like it is “my” space program. Just
like how the Apollo program was the space program for my Dad, and the generation that came before me. Growing up I had at least 3 space shuttle models. I can tell you where I was when I first heard about the Challenger disaster. I know that manned space flight is going to continue, but it won’t be the same. When I won’t be a child when it starts, so it won’t seem quite so grand. All the previous space flights were historical, they seemed far away. All the future space
flights I will be able to understand the technology, in essence seeing the strings behind the magic.

Here are some quick facts for you. The Enterprise flew the first test flight was done on August 12 1977, the year I was born. The first actual mission was on April 12 1981. So we can round off a bit and say the program was 30 years and 3 months long. As nostalgic as I am for the shuttle program you have to remember that 30 years is a long time. Think about the safety and reliability of a 30 year old car, now imagine taking that into space.

Some people criticize NASA as a waste of money, and I have to disagree with them. First off I agree with Stephen Hawking when he said that the only future for the human race is off earth. If we all keep living here we are going to destroy the planet so we have to move out some time. Also here are some more facts for you. The most the US ever spent on the space program in was in 1966 when they gave NASA 4.4% of the federal budge. In 2008 it was 0.6%. A little more than half of one percent. Even if NASA is a waste of money it is a small waste when you compare it to how much the US spends bombing the Middle East.

Even with all I have said so far I still admire Barack for cancelling the Shuttle Program, and it’s follow up, the Constellation Program. At least he acknowledges that the US has some problems at home that they need to fix before they go back into space.

Photo by Trey Radcliffe.