scifi

The Runelord

There has been something going on this week that quite took my breath away when it first showed up in my facebook feed. I've been holding back and watching as the days have unfolded, afraid to watch, and in a minute I'll tell you why.

David Farland is one of the authors who follows me on twitter and I have him in my author list at https://twitter.com/PinkyGuerrero/authors-illustrators/members. I have been thinking for a couple of months that I'd like to get his Million Dollar Outlines since I'm in the middle of preparing my own material, hopefully to publish later this year unless I flop on my face or something. I have bantered lightly a couple of times with him on his twitter, retweeted a few things because he says cool stuff, etc. I automatically list authors who follow me, but I crossed over and also followed David Farland on his facebook awhile back because I like him.

So I was stunned when this scrolled through my facebook feed on my droid very early Thursday morning during one of my fairly common insomnia stints. This will click to the post.

We have some experience in my family with head injury, so I held my breath over the next couple days' updates about surgery to remove Ben's skullcap for the swelling and stuff, along with multiple other injuries, but when this picture came through I lost it.

I knew when that picture was posted on Sunday that Ben had squeaked past the most critical part and had been stabilized enough to dare hold onto some hope, but I also knew it was with the question- for what future?

On Tuesday David announced A Book Bomb for Ben, where everyone with any kind of social media account passes along info on where to buy David's Books to help with the medical bills that are obviously going to overwhelm their family, which was very encouraging, and I started to breathe a little again. They also created a facebook page called Ben Wolverton Recovery as a central information page for people with questions. On that page is a link to Ben's Recovery Fund for people who would like to help in another way than buying a book. On Wednesday there was a t-shirt fund announced, along with other fundraising events.

Today there is a link to a really nice article.

Army of Friends Rally Around Best-Selling Author David Farland

Now I'll tell you why I had flashbacks and trouble dealing with this, because I certainly didn't jump on board commenting my support. I've been on the other side, and since I don't have the social skills to deal with the public very well in situations like that, I just couldn't. Here is my niece after she was hit by a car just before Christmas 2011, and it's one of the nicer pictures. I didn't see her the first 24 hours, and didn't take pix of her bandaged up, you can't see the staples in the back of her head. Her whole head was swelled up like a melon, and they did brain scans several times a day at first, and she went through several surgeries on a leg she nearly lost.

I know from her experience that even a slight amount of brain trauma has far reaching consequences, and that the network of family and friends is affected for a very long time after the injury, sometimes the rest of their lives. I also know the stress and strain that comes with hanging around hospitals for endless hours and days, the follow up surgeries and checkups months afterward, the physical and emotional therapy that comes with brain trauma, etc. She still has no memory of the accident.

So because of that, I can imagine a little bit of what it's like for Ben's family. Ben has a VERY long road ahead of him if he makes it out of the hospital, as does David Farland and all their loved ones. This is something they'll be dealing with long after the book bomb is over, long after things go back to 'normal' on facebook. Updates disappear so quickly in social media, I wanted to make something that helps me find it more easily if I want to go back to it and follow Ben's recovery process, and I'm sharing that in case other people would like that, too. This is the latest picture of Ben from Wednesday.

If you are a fan of David Farland's books and would like to send him a message, you can leave comments at the above links, and if you would like to help personally you can also go through the above links to buy his books and donate directly to the recovery fund. Learn more about David Farland at Dave Wolverton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and find him on facebook by clicking the picture below.
- 5:10 pm
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The Lexx Revival Project

I've taken part in a few of the debates over whether there should be more Lexx. I think there should be, if for no other reason than to breathe life back into Lexx merchandising. I'd even be happy (there, I said it) if Disney paid Abrams to do it, and I'm not exactly his biggest fan.

One of Lexx's biggest fans is uber geek Kirill Yarovoy of Russia, and he definitely thinks there should be more Lexx. In fact, Kirill has been conducting his own research into whether fans want more Lexx, and exactly what they'd like to see in more Lexx. Years of polls and forum debates point overwhelmingly to removing season four from canon and simply returning Lexx to its season one roots that started it all, along with creating spinoffs and prequels in similar fashion.

This is nothing new among the Lexx fandom, but what is different when Kirill starts discussing Lexx is that he's dead serious. While a number of Lexx fans have created a variety of fan fictions, artwork, actual literature, comics, and even short film, Kirill has gone the next step trying to contact producers, studios, and investors, and he's done some impressive research into cost and hiring and what fans desire to see in more Lexx.

So what is stopping him?

Aside from needing to get licensed from the Lexx copyright holders, basically the only thing stopping this project is funding. It's easy to scoff at this point and blow the whole idea off, the big nail in many film project coffins, but Kirill has an idea, and surprisingly, that idea is actually working for other filmmakers. In fact, American fans might not quite appreciate how well this idea has been working for some time around the world.

Crowdfunding is the new fan wave. We've all recently seen the wild success of The Veronica Mars Movie Project on Kickstarter. Basically, an account is set up for donations to a specified project, info and links are tweeted and posted around social networks like facebook and youtube, and, fans pretty much help filmmakers nickel and dime their way through production. A sweet reward for this fan loyalty is getting to see the production process as it happens, step by step through filming and editing, and then submitting to film festivals. I've been watching two projects in particular the last few months- "COLD" by Eoin Macken and Stolen Light by Andrew Lee Potts. Both filmmakers (we know them as actors in Merlin and Primeval, along with other shows they've been in or helped to create) use twitter to alert fans in real time to the daily work they put into their projects, supplementing with image and video media such as instagram and vimeo (for example), and they are very open with fan interaction, which is smart when they solicit fans for production funding.

This gives fans much more access to the entire process than was available even just ten years ago. If fans want to see a project get done, they now have the power to help make that happen, which is so much more fulfilling than waiting for studios to find investors that often cancel the projects before they see completion. (So many shows I love have been canceled in the first or second season because an investor or studio deemed it not worth finishing, even though fans are very vocal about wanting to purchase a completed product.)

Kirill recognizes that fans would like to have an impact on the outcome of the show they love, in this case, Lexx. Kirill set up a forum where fans could discuss the future of Lexx, and asked specifically what they'd like to see, what direction should Lexx go if there is more. He has years of documentation and discussion (mostly in Russian) under his belt and has spent considerable time and effort on trying to develop the idea of a centralized world fandom through "LexxTV", a site that could become a broadcasting fan forum (it's not developed yet due to licensing restrictions), strongly reminding me of a metacafe style website, akin to the original Babylon 5 dotcom, only bigger.

This sounds cool, right? So why isn't it happening yet? Well, mostly because much of this process has been happening in Russia, and despite our wonderful technology, translator programs are still cumbersome and inaccurate enough to make a lot of work for non Russian fans to keep up. Also, international crowdfunding is limiting with U.S. and standard European tech and money exchange. But it certainly hasn't been for lack of trying.

Kirill started with paypal a few years ago and received between $700-$800 in donations, but since that wasn't enough to get the project off the ground, he gave all the donations back. Kickstarter was only allowing U.S. funds, and Amazon required U.S. ID. In order to sell the idea (and this is how new projects generally get their start), Kirill needs to make a top-notch promo video with original cast and a lot of VFX to show to producers and studios. This is a delicate process before getting licensed, as fans who have already tried writing books and making videos have discovered. The main thing is to have an idea that a producer can show to the license holder that convinces them what you're doing is worth some money to them.

I got a little tough on Kirill and asked a list of questions about cost, crew, and production, mostly to see if I could trip him up and discover whether this was all a big-worded dream. What I got back was an impressive mix of information, enthusiasm, and the kind of frustration that comes with hitting walls for a few years, and I believe if anybody outside the U.S. could actually get Lexx back into space, it would be Kirill.

Along with a short lesson in budget issues and the substages of preproduction, Kirill has adjusted his cost estimate a couple of times based on production cost then and now. For example, a quote from his correspondence- "I can tell you about CGI production cost made about a year ago based on price of Toronto-based Spin-VFX Studio with which I have some contacts and plan to use for Lexx CGI (btw this studio has some former CORE digital employees, that was the studio which worked on CGI in the first season of Lexx). Since Lexx is CGI heavy, my estimated calculation was about $10 million U.S. dollars for CGI alone (minimum), but it's not a perfect calculation and a little old. After that I found out that the guys from Energia made great Iron Sky CGI for about $2 million, so I guess there is a chance that CGI could be cheaper in terms of production cost and very good in terms of quality."

Kirill went on to say that the cost needed for a 20-25 episode season five would be $20-$25 million, with $1 million minimum per episode, but preferably having $2-$5 million available per episode, which is the standard price for most U.S. TV dramas these days, totaling anywhere from $40-$100 million for an entire season. He noted some episodes would naturally be less production heavy and therefore not as costly.

But what Kirill is aiming for is at least one promotional episode that would not be directly aired, but shown to more producers and investors, kind of like Paul Donovan did in 1992. So that is where the fans come in, helping to get the initial project off the ground so bigger investors can be pitched. A good example of how this works is CGSociety - Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome.

Kirill told me he has pitched a script synopsis to several producers and studios, and it sounded like a lot of work. He seems to be pretty familiar with the process, but thinks it's becoming outdated. "What I think is better about crowdfunding is the direct relationships between the people who make the product and the customers, so that customers pay directly to the team that makes the product, and get the products directly once they are made", and there is a refreshing paragraph on how he feels ratings let everyone down because they're inaccurate for today's tech access to the industry, which I agree with. Now that fans around the planet can live stream their favorite shows, regional broadcaster programming and scheduling may have to be dramatically revised if they are to thrive. But that's going off topic.

This is a lot of stuff. There was quite a lot more. I mentioned to Kirill that some fans are confused about Lexx being an international production, and that Americans in particular don't understand (I've seen this) why Russian fans are interested in Lexx. Why is Lexx meaningful to YOU?

Besides him comparing Putin to His Shadow, Kirill said Lexx was the challenge that started him thinking about society around him at the tender age of ten when Lexx premiered. He stopped taking things as they were for granted and started questioning everything from politics to education to social life. To quote in part-

"Why is Lexx meaningful to me? It's really hard to tell, it's a love from first sight, I guess. Once I saw the opening of the first episode with that charming dark space ambience, the rotating legs of the Foreshadow with the purple nebula behind, that speech of Kai's, the last of the Brunnen-G, about a victory in the war against an Insect Civilization, and a Time Prophet who predicted he would be the one to destroy the Divine Order, and that someday this will happen, but not today as today is the day of his death, the day his story begins- I realized that I already loved it, and every next minute doubled my love. Soon after this episode I started to read everything about protein, DNA, amino acids and space, black holes, fractals, and so on. Lexx influenced me a lot and made me believe in science, instead of the god I was forced to believe before. I was so addicted to protein and gene themes after Lexx that I almost became a microbiologist. Also, the idea of time cycles swayed my philosophical views on the world, as did many other themes of Lexx. Despite it looking like a purely entertaining show, Lexx in fact is quite educational, and education with Lexx was real fun."

And, again, there was much more. Kirill Yarovoy has a passion for Lexx that has already spanned twenty years and will undoubtedly span twenty more. He's been persistent and amazingly patient in his quest to keep Lexx growing. If you'd like to contact Kirill directly, he can be reached through a link on his site. Click this pic to go there.

Want to know more about Lexx? You can find Kirill's Lexx blog at http://vk.com/iwhds, and the links near the bottom of my own Lexx Index will take you to lots more sites about Lexx.

Want to know more about what could go into more Lexx before you help fund the filming process? Kirill has put together a summary for me that he compiled from his research into what fans want. He would ultimately like to have the original producers and directors back, or at least to do a review of the script. He has spent the years since 2005 on development of the complex concept of the scripts for season 5 and three prequels about the Insect Wars. This is the summary, with a couple of things in parentheses added by me.

1- carefully preserved style, atmoshpere and feel of old lexx, with a lot of dark satire and philoshopical themes about problems of modern society

2- well-developed and finished plot that ties all seasons and prequels together with natural feel like everything was planned from beginning by supreme beans

3- all plot holes of previous seasons patched, no new holes created... perhaps

4- every old question answered and even more new brain-drilling questions asked

5- possible production issues and workarounds taken into account

6- well balanced compromise between the desires of all kinds of old Lexx fans and fans of other scifi series and movies

7- very intriguing epic finale that will turn the entire Lexx story upside down and will leave you wondering "WHAT THE HELL THIS ALL SUPPOSE TO MEAN?" just like the David Lynch movies and Twin Peaks did

8- and before its does, it will return LEXX to fan-favorite season 1 roots, which includes 2 hours episode format with more lexxploration of violent dark zone and enigmatic origin of Prince, less sex and more romantic dreaming with Eva Habermann as Zev and Michael McManus as ALIVE but still deadly Kai. But don't worry! Xenia Seeberg as Xev will not be replaced by Zev, and still present with Brian Downey as Stan and hopefully Jeff Hirshfield as 790, which wants to make love with 2 persons this time (Zev and Xev? intriguing), so you will still have your passion and sexual tension. Also you should not worry about the aging of actors, as with the magic of make-up and today's VFX you will barely notice the difference, however if you will do, even aging already explained by plot. (I would point to the movie Surrogates as a good example of the magic of makeup.)

A crowdfunding account is still in process of being created that satisfies the exchange structure for a world fandom. I will edit here with a link as soon as that happens.

Please share this article on facebook and twitter http://grandfortuna.xanga.com/772146269/the-lexx-revival-project/

:edit: 4-2-13

Want to see how Lexx was made the first time? Click the button!
How big is the Lexx?

When you watch Lexx, sometimes it's hard to grasp just how huge that big bug really is. We see other living ships, another fave of mine being Moya from Farscape, and we see other really big ships and space stations, like Imperial Destroyers from Star Wars, the Earth Alliance Station from Babylon 5, and even that great big creepy cube styled Borg ship from Star Trek, but the question comes up- whose is bigger? How does the Lexx compare to these other space faring constructions?

There is actually quite a bit of discussion about this, but let's start withLexx - Wikipedia. Scroll down past the plot summary to the actual description that starts with this sentence- "The Lexx is a bio-engineered, Manhattan-sized, planet-destroying bioship in the shape of a giant wingless dragonfly." Excuse me? Manhattan??? Well, how big is that? How big is Manhattan I don't know if that 13 miles length is from the furthest out buildings on either end or invisible lines surveyed with an astrolabe, but if you think a little differently about it, it's about the same distance that Felix Baumgartner went last year to break the skydiving record. Skydiver jumps from 13 miles above Earth in test run for record attempt So if the Lexx were pointed upright with the tip of its tail on earth, this guy would look like a tiny dot against its face. THAT is how big the Lexx is.

From Just How Big Is New York City? | Accidental Hedonist

"I can remember my first time on Manhattan, and looking up and down the Avenue, and my brain going “pop”, because it was unable to grasp the evidence directly in front of it. If you’ve never been to Manhattan , it’s impossible to imagine what 1.5 million people sitting on 22.7 square miles looks like. If you have been, many of you will understand the awe that this borough presents to you inspires." When you click the map on that page a couple of times to enhance the size, you can see that Manhattan is the orange part, looking very Lexxy... I'm sure fans will understand what I mean. But if you can imagine Lexx landing on Earth the way it did on Brunnis, that is how much room it would take up.

I recently had fun tweeting to Craig Engler, senior exec at Syfy, which might actually help with our perspective here. This brief interaction was too big to get in one screen shot, but you can click on either one of those pix to see his short video of the Manhattan skyline hosted on his vine account. Be sure to follow him on twitter for cool Q&A with fans (click both his name and Syfy for his accounts).

Back to how big the Lexx is.

The guy who does The Conservation Report (Buck Denton, uber nerd) puts it in perspective for us. He was also curious about side by side comparisons of scifi spacecraft and made a blog post about it at SCIENCE FICTION: Spaceship size comparison charts, complete with a pop out chart that reminds me of those big posters you see in science buildings across college campuses. This is serious stuff.

(Note- the original page for that chart is at BuzzFeed- Spaceship Size Comparison Chart [PIC], originally posted on 1-14-09. The original pop out click no longer works on BuzzFeed, so thank you Buck Denton for saving that for us!) (edit 3-5-13: found the chart creator, linked in comments below)

At the lower right on that chart we find the Lexx. (Have you clicked that up to big size? Good.) Whoever made the chart asigned a size of 10,000 metres to the Lexx, which I'm not sure is right. Vague descriptions about the size of Lexx say it's the size of Manhattan, from interviews with the creators to description copy in nearly every article you find, but you really don't find anyone saying how big Manhattan is unless you look it up, like we just did above and discovered that it's around 13 miles long, whereas this chart puts the Lexx at about 6 miles long. So I guess take the specs with grain of salt. (Scifi enthusiasts will sometimes enjoy sizzling debates down to the micron on fictional details, a happy little rush you can't get from real life.)

When you scroll around on that chart you can see that the Lexx is about a mile longer than the Babylon 5 station, three times the length of a Borg cube ship, roughly the same size as a Voth city ship and the Earth Spacedock (all three of these from Star Trek), and dwarfed only by the Emperor's executive destroyer and the Death Star (the Death Star obviously doesn't fit on the chart) from Star Wars. The Lexx is also the largest living ship on the chart.

There is also a cool graph chart at 100 Pixels per meter that shows a few more ships that are bigger than Lexx, including the whale probe and V'Ger from Star Trek, and it does have the Death Star on it, plus a number of other much smaller ships. You can see the Lexx still ranks right up there in the top twenty largest space constructions between the two charts.

You can also find 'blueprints' for the Lexx housed at LexxZone Gallery - Lexx blueprint, which pops up to gigantic size when you click that pic. They're not complete blueprints in that labeling dimensions and known structures is sadly deficit, but it's still cool to look at.

Some years ago I could have linked you to the original original sources, most of those are gone now and the fastest way to find this stuff is by playing around with phrases in search engines and clicking for image listings, which will in turn link back to sources. Old sites abound with broken links and removed pages, and other sites abound that have very poor search engine access or none at all, and I accidentally find those in the strangest ways. There are sites containing copyright material from sources that no longer exist, so many sites use Fair Use disclaimers (as do I), but thank goodness there are multiple fan sites that also cache what they find, otherwise some of these things might be lost forever. I daresay there are Lexx fan sites outside of the U.S. that vigorously collect everything they find and none of this stuff is lost at all, except to the northwestern hemisphere where we strangle ourselves silly with stacks of regulations that even politicians have no time to read. "Copyright protects the particular way authors have expressed themselves. It does not extend to any ideas, systems, or factual information conveyed in a work". But still, I lament that sourcing Lexx is becoming harder and harder as years pass.

Readers are welcome to link more sources on the comments area.

Here is a good example of a broken link due to a lost source page. I found this in an image search by pure accident, it clicks from the search engine list to the page, but the page no longer warehouses the picture. You get this a lot with Lexx. You can see how old this page is, I'm surprised it's still around at all.
You Can't Handle Watching LEXX

I ran into this old post archived on my private blog on August 31, 2006. I'm pretty sure I wrote it quite a bit earlier, possibly back to 2005. I didn't save anything else that I know of before I kaboomed my old Lexx stuff, so this is a rare blast from the past. Images click back to original sources.

In my opinion, Lexx is the only scifi show that never wimped out. All the rest deal with humanity against evil, and I was always disappointed in the endings. Stargate truly wimped out when the Ancients AND Anubis all turned out to be humans. They had me hanging on to the edge of my seat until then, and suddenly it was just ordinary again. Babylon 5 stuck with their aliens, Vorlons and Shadows, but in the end they were just lonely children and made up and left the galaxy after a few words. All that tension built up, and they just reconciled and went away. Same with all the Star Trek shows. It's always humanity against some other race, or Q, and humanity always reasons its way to the side of right and good. Battlestar Galactica, yeah, humans created their own problem and now it's turning on them and they are barely surviving. Boring, boring, boring.

Lexx was never afraid for the bad guy to be truly TRULY evil, so awful that humanity was losing for millenia, and not only losing, but going along like sheep to the slaughter of the masses. And the humans that were evil, were evil, no reasoning with them, no fighting them. Mantrid actually destroyed an entire universe. Throughout Lexx there is no compassion for the ones who lose, no whimpering and moaning about what it's doing to humanity, no noble attempts at morality and happy endings. The more minor evil characters are still really evil, into cannabalism and perverse tortures and selling their prey to the highest bidder. That our main characters survive at all is hair raising, and then accidently making things worse as they go is the perfect ironic twist. Actually meeting Prince and discussing the afterlife (seeing Stanley fail to escape from Prince!) was a step above and beyond everyone else's false gods and technoweenie explaining away of human myth and religions, and then coming to earth in the 4th season and being absolutely real with just how nasty human nature can get (Xev nearly losing her organs to the black market, for crying out loud!), and still everything goes horribly wrong but somehow they survive...

Is it any WONDER that Kai and Stan and Xev are latched onto as the ulitmate 'heroes'? They are so real, like us. They are up against everything all by themselves, with no guide of any kind, no Federation to fall back on, no Q to reset the balance, no one to tell them how they are doing in all of this. In the end, they are the only ones they can count on to get each other's backs against two whole universes.

Anyone who doesn't like this show, in my opinion, is afraid of facing the sheer high cliff of hopelessness and making the decision to go on anyway. This show doesn't hand out answers to the problems in life, just slaps you around with them and makes fun of it all, and then dares to throw you right off the cliff when it's done, case in point, what happened to Kai in the last show, hate to spoil it if you've never seen it. If you are a wimp, you can't handle watching Lexx.
- 10:25 am
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Lexx and psychological health, perhaps

This is a graphic discussion about sexuality from the point of view of Asperger's and synesthesia. I've been seeing my psychologist for 5 1/2 years (initially to tackle communication problems), and this year I finally cracked on my sex life, thanks to getting back into Lexx. Other hints can be found throughout my writing here and on bluejacky, but for the most part, I've never told anyone this stuff. And now it's public.

It's gonna get weird with my psychologist, but here we go. Lexx always brings out the weird with people, and I may as well splat my brains on him. I know a huge part of psychological health is one's sexuality, and he's lately been trying to get me to talk about mine. This kind of stuff will wind up in my bio if I ever write it.

Between the asperger's and synesthesia, I'm like a bowerbird. I'm not turned on or titillated by anything humans do, say, wear, etc, or very rarely if I am, it usually has nothing to do with what other people think of as sexual. Bowerbirds are funny things. The male has to work very hard constructing an artwork of structure and color, and if the female likes it, he gets to mate. This structure has nothing to do with building a nest or getting food, seems like a huge waste of time, and the male rarely helps the female with the kids after copulation, so it's a twisted scene of the male pimping his place out with stimulating visuals that the female somehow responds to just by looking at it.

That's me. All it takes is walking into a building and seeing a certain pattern, a certain arrangement of colors, certain lighting, I'm *ready*. There might not be another human in sight, nothing at all sexual about the decor, but it works for ~me~. I am mesmerized by colors, lighting, patterns.... I could be in a car looking out a window at the sky and trees and suddenly there it is, that spontaneous compulsion to be swept up and taken by the gods. I've often wondered if some of the ancient gods of earth and sky were dreamed up in an aspie mind that was overwhelmed and took it far too literally.

So I realized, as I was going back over my "Dare" Lexx Sex Survey post on bluejacky for typos and coding mistakes before I made it public, that *none* of it turned me on. At all. Never has, not even years ago. Except one shot. Stan wired up in all that electronic stuff, I could get off on thinking about being wired up like that because I'm weird. And it sure wouldn't take me that long.

One thing I've been trying to get across to psyche guy is that growing up with stim compulsions and spontaneous orgasms (my nervous system is screwed) is nothing like masturbation. Sex is usually a conscious decision thing, even when it begins with a flood of hormones. Sex of any kind is like a day at the beach in its variety of things to see and do. Spontaneous orgasms are like being caught in a sudden undertow, unintentional and overwhelming, somewhat terrifying in public. I've been having those since I was at least 4 years old, or earlier. Kindergarten and first grade were nightmares. Holidays in my 20's were nightmares. Being at work sometimes was a nightmare. If all it takes is colors, lighting, and patterns to set off sudden waves of unstoppable unacceptable taboo in public, then my life is a nightmare of sensation. Got a little scary driving, too.

I have never been able to duplicate that with another human. I am repulsed by the mere thought of being touched anyway. Even if something about another human could possibly turn me on, is that a good thing? Look at all the fans around the world who become obsessed with actors and musicians, so obsessed that they'll spend large amounts of money to obtain clothing worn by those people or to travel great distances to be near them, to touch them and smell them in person. Can you imagine a person compulsed with spontaneous orgasms having an obsession with another person? I don't know if that's how rapes and sometimes murders happen, but I know it's not a cute thing for me to think about.

So psyche guy is finally getting somewhere with my take on sexuality, thanx to Lexx. None of it turns me on, and he calls me the porn queen of Lexx, unphased with what I'm doing to the fans. (Years ago, my most wildly popular post was called 'Tied Up'.) I know it's unimaginable for him that entire Lexx sex survey post isn't much different from any other action sequences I see in sci-fi shows, except in content. I know it's unimaginable to fans that I would actually love the show so much without one whisper of sexual stimulation in my brain after all the work put into that by the creators and actors. I was never sold on the sex of Lexx. It's just simply a brilliant show, regardless, and the irony and sadness embedded into all the sexual innuendo is part of that brilliance, because that is really real life for a lot of people. Our sex lives are ironic and sad. The human condition is absurd. And I will be exploring all of that in detail.
- 10:13 am
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I Worship His Shadow- part 6- The Big Bug
This is part 6.
Go back to part 5.
Go on to part 7.
Return to The Lexx.
Go to main blog.

Images from photobucket.com/lexxpix. Thumbnails click to original size.

I suppose I should put a caution up- you're about to see a really graphic bloody scene from a tv movie called Lexx: I Worship His Shadow. There is a 'basic guidance' age rating up on this post, but unless you're really into stuff like Walking Dead, maybe you should close your eyes until you get to the end.

Stanley's day has been sucking since we left him. Seriously, having to turn yourself in to a detention center for punishment on the Cluster is NOT something you can console yourself over a bottle of beer later, and Stan is locked up in a sickening dread bordering on a headache and sour stomach. No more silly pot shots to pass the time, how to make time stop now is the big question.

Notice the robot is now facing the disembarking prisoners. Well, I say that like they can actually step out, but they're still bolted to those heavy slabs and being moved along on a rail like an assembly line.

I wonder what these robots actually do. Poor Stan....

Can you imagine being moved around like that? No telling how long those prisoners have been bolted to those slabs, and I bet they haven't had a drink or bite or been to the restroom in many hours. One old guy recognizes Stanley. "You! I know you! Stanley Tweedle!", and starts calling out, "It's him! Stanley Tweedle!" Stanley starts sinking down in his chair, one of those weird omg nighmare moments on top of an already very bad day.

But while the old prisoner is still calling out Stanley's name, a bolt breaks loose and his slab tips off and heavily bumps the other slabs around it (that would suck, you think someone kicking a seat behind you is bad) before it slams down to the floor and squashes him like a *bug*. (Ironic....) I would love to take a guess in a contest over how much those slabs must weigh to make that kind of splat, and I can't help thinking that even just mentioning the name Stanley Tweedle must be synonymous with cosmic bad luck. I wonder who that old guy was calling out to. Would the other prisoners know or care at this point who Stanley Tweedle is? Apparently someone does and yells out "Traitor!" while Stanley hides behind his desk. Seems they're taking Stanley kind of personally for some reason.

That scene intrigues me. Stan isn't happy at all that someone recognizes him and knows who he is after years of being a prisoner stuck on the Cluster. These prisoners are being carted away to unknown fates, why would Stanley be mortified enough to actually get down and hide? He must have done something ~really~ bad. We find out later he's pretty famous.

We don't see how far the slabs get railed into the docking center, but prisoner processing is efficient and quick. And we never find out what the person in blue is all about, but I love that outfit.

Woe to humans the day they develop a holographic court system run through an automatic computer program. Oh, wait, that's happening.... They get the equivalent of a court appointed attorney, a prosecuting attorney, and a judge who passes sentence, all holograms running on preset programs. I'm not sure why bother is even made over protocol, unless it's to pound home the humiliating and very terrifying inhumanity of the ordeal, like layer after layer of nightmarish theatrics. Argon Protopi, Pie Maker is first up. As his slab rolls into place, the hologram program comes up and one of the robots starts dialing on a machine. It's freaky that the robot has human arms, but not a human head.

An elaborate headgear assembly lowers and clamps onto Argon Protopi's head. There's a nasty looking red stained spike thing aimed at his right parietal lobe. The slab locks into place with a jolt and Argon Protopi can't so much as nod his head. The defense argument starts immediately without preamble. "My client", and here another automated voice says his name, like it's filling in the blank -Argon Protopi, Pie Maker, Class 2, Orbital 5- "is innocent of the charge of" insert glitch and accusation from a preprogrammed list "failing to pay money owed to the temple and throws himself upon the mercy of this court, secure in the knowledge that His Shadow's wisdom will prevail upon these proceedings." And here the robot presses a button with his thumb and the spike jabs into Argon's brain. I'm not sure if it's a mechanical voice from the robot or the machine he's working, but we hear "memory search commencing".

A screen hooked up to the memory search gear starts showing blips of scenes that look vaguely like Argon may have been involved with some temple prostitutes, but as it digs deeper into his memories, he cringes and clenches down into his immovable slab, obviously in some kind of weird sickening pain. Whatever that spiky probe is created to do, one thing it seems to be good at is using radio signals to forcibly prompt the brain to show specific memories that will reinforce whatever accusation is made, because the next thing we see on the screen is Argon refusing to give money to temple clerics begging for alms. I can't think of a more convenient and successful self incriminating method to run people through a 100% guilty judicial racket, because the human brain naturally focuses in on the very thing that will get it killed, especially when prompted with a suggestion. And if that's all it takes to get you removed from society and whisked off across a galaxy to this hellhole...

The judge immediately finds Argon guilty and adds "You are therefore sentenced to have your individual life terminated; however, His Merciful Shadow will allow many of your vital organs to live on as components used in the making of robotic drones." Argon has started sputtering and whimpering as the judge goes on. "Your unusable flesh will be contributed to the Protein Bay where it will be recycled for purposes that serve His Shadow." Poor Argon is rolling his eyes around to the frozen defense attorney still smiling at him.

The robot flips a switch, the rail switches to a different track, and Argon's slab turns and rolls toward a wall with patterns cut into it. His fear consumes him and he starts screaming, "You can have whatever you want! I'll pay! I'll pay!" As his slab moves away and the next prisoner advances into place, his defense attorney turns into a hologram of a Divine Cleric that quickly says "In the execution of this sentence you are hereby cleansed of your crimes against the League of 20,000 Planets. May His Merciful Shadow fall upon you."

As Argon's slab approaches the wall with the die cuts, rotary blades snap out from the grooves and start whirring and moving along their tracks, which are in the familiar shapes of human organs. Just before he reaches the wall, two robots monitoring his progress salute him, saying "I worship His Shadow."

His slab presses against the die cuts, he screams as a bowl with two nozzles of spraying water moves into place, and the prisoner next in line gets caught in the face with a spray of Argon's blood escaping through a gap around the slab. If she'd been able, I think she would have thrown up, but she was already too starving and exhausted from being on her slab so long. The way she looked and sounded when that happened made me feel really bad for her, because you know she knows she's next.

It kinda hits you that this woman is his only connection to anything human during his horrible death, and she suffers through it with the kind of anguish only humans feel in such brief moments of terrifying clarity and sickening horror. I think her face perfectly captures the human condition that philosophers go on about, caught up in the absurdity of being in a place of utter hopelessness. George Orwell's Big Brother is starting to look pretty good, isn't he? Like rainbows and kittens compared to His Shadow's rule over the League of 20,000.

Argon has already stopped screaming and his brain plops out into the bowl. After the bowl with Argon's brain moves away, a big plastic sack moves into its place and the rest of his organs fall into it as the razors keep cutting. We never see where the rest of his body goes, limbs and spine. The bag gets sealed and dumped down a chute to fall onto a conveyor to join more packages... Wait, a conveyor??

Which is alongside other conveyors...

..which are alongside other conveyors...

..all streaming packages filled with what is presumably freshly removed tissue from other prisoners all over the docking center, which means this is being carried out continually by the hundreds of prisoners per hour, maybe even thousands. How do you measure something like that? Where do they get all those people? What in the world are they being harvested for? Because that's what this is- a harvest.

O!M!G! It's. a. big. bug. *Big*. I would faint if I saw that in real life.

The handful of you that have read through my survey blog and know I can't do bloody scenes in shows any more are going wtf, but it's ok, I'm immune to this one because I watched it so many times back when it was new. And I want to congratulate you, you've made it through the sickest part, and everything else from here out is a piece of cake. I could be lying. But maybe I'm not. Or I might be. It's hard to tell.

I just can't imagine what the crap any of this might have to do with Stanley Tweedle...

If you are getting interested and I'm moving too slowly, The cult sci-fi series LEXX comes home - Dallas TV | Examiner.com says All four seasons are now available through Echo Bridge Entertainment. For more information head over to https://www.echobridgeentertainment.com I'm not being paid to link that, I just love this show.

(Ignore this part, this is pre-server migration.) I'm sorry if the like button is posting over as generic Xanga instead of this post, Facebook's platform updates have recently gone through some changes, and I'm still wrangling with it, but I'm taking a break and I'll work on it later. If you want to link this to your facebook, manually input this post address directly into your facebook status and you'll get it. Sorry for the inconvenience. Ok, that's pulling through only the generic Xanga, too.
Like Buttons and Stories to the Right Audience
We're updating the way you restrict the audience for the Like button, as part of the Like Button Migration, and resulting stories to give you more control. Going forward, in order to limit the distribution of age gating stories to people in the appropriate country or age group, you must include a metatag on your URLs indicating the restriction. Please review our documentation on how to do this. For more details, see the blog post where we announced this breaking change. -"Facebook developers will have the option of testing this migration before it takes effect permanently on November 7, 2012 for all Like Button social plugins." Yes, that is today, and since I age restrict my Lexx posts to basic guidance, that seems to break my internal Xanga like button or something and I have to make my own. That or all the major web hosts will update their facebook platforms and it will all magically get fixed.

This is part 6.
Go back to part 5.
Go on to part 7.
Return to The Lexx.
Go to main blog.
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My first tracker was installed in 2004 and broke several times before moving to a new server, which lost a few months of stats, and then Xanga moved to new servers and I lost more stats for more months before the page came back up, so I've lost a total of about two years' worth of stats. The second was installed 2-22-14 and is considered very conservative by business owners who use analytics, which itself is very conservative, estimates being that roughly one third to one half of hits by real live people aren't even counted, most likely due to javascript discrepancies. Actual hits on several posts here are in the thousands now, and the Lexx Index in the ten thousands. I've got pingbacks turned off, so spam isn't counted at all within the Xanga internal tracker, and most direct post hits can be correlated to my real time linking activity on twitter and other social media. When I did Google Analytics beta testing I got to see how search engine performance compares to tracking. I believe live feed linking sources to various social medias are key to a future where search engines are more about performance than cataloging, which has been confirmed to me by coders who create bot algorithms as I was beta testing paper.li. I've fought hard through redundant age-old stacks to make my way to the google front lines again, so my Lexx work shows up faster on Chrome searches now. This has been a really interesting ride. At any rate, my point is, I can still go back 6 years on my original tracker and I can still see that in 2013 just before the last big blog server move, I was getting traffic like this (and since then, the tracker may have been abandoned, we can't tell). Click the thumbnail to see full size.

My original tracker also still lets me see the latest 500 visitors on a map. I once counted over 80 countries among the total visits. You guys are not alone. Click the map to see it better.

Besides Lexx, the most common search phrases that bring new visitors here are variations on 'huge spaceship'. The most seen post from a phrase search is How Big is the Lexx? My biggest Lexx referrer is Lexx Domain. Most of page views per person count comes from the Lexx tag on Tumblr. Visitors who stay the longest come through URLOpener and are pinged through the Google translator server in Mountain View, CA.

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