(no subject)

Worldcon's in two weeks! I'm excited.

I bought my attending membership last September. My sister got engaged in November and set her wedding date for Worldcon Sunday (the nerve!), so I had to rethink my plans a little, but I decided I still wanted to go to the con because of a few reasons. First, because I have friends in Seattle I almost never see, and this gives me an excuse to visit them before the Con. Second, because I'm not planning to attend MidAmeriCon next year, and I didn't want to miss two Worldcons in a row. Third, because even an abbreviated Worldcon is going to be full of awesome stuff.

So I fly into Seattle Sunday before the con. I'm going to a Seattle Sounders game, then wandering around downtown seeing touristy things like the Space Needle, then meeting friends for dinner. Then Monday I'm doing more time intensive touristy stuff, probably the Underground Tour, probably EMP and a few more museums, probably some stuff on the water, then meeting friends again for dinner. Tuesday I'm renting a car and driving to Spokane, probably stopping along the way for a hiking adventure of some sort.

Wednesday I'm at the con. I've volunteered to help man the audio theater program for some time in the afternoon, the remainder of my time will be seeing awesome programming stuff and meeting people. Thursday morning I'll do Stroll with the Stars, then the Preliminary Business Meeting, then a couple panels, then more audio theater volunteering, then hanging out and Worldcon parties.

Friday morning I fly home. Wedding's on Sunday. Sheva brachos on Monday. More sheva brachos on Tuesday. More sheva brachos on Wednesday... #BlueFringe #sorrynotsorry

I'll have to watch the Hugos on livestream. I'm frustrated to miss as much of the con as I am, but I'm planning to enjoy as much as I can while I'm there.

(no subject)

A couple nights ago I watched the Moneyball movie as a followup to the book. It was um... in some ways it was worse than the book. In some ways it was more interestingly bad.

The filmmakers reproduce a scene from early in the book where Beane sits in a room full of his scouts and listens impatiently as they talk about 'tools' and physical attributes rather than about statistics. Lewis's version is subtly more interesting in a million ways: Lewis captures the mix of older and younger scouts, adaptable scouts and inflexible scouts, thoughtful scouts and intuitive scouts. The movie shows a room full of old men, emphasizing this by having one of the most outspoken ones wearing a hearing aide. It is lazy and ageist and it is not as interesting a story as the reality, or even Lewis's botched reality.

But basically the plot of the film is Regression to the Mean: The Movie. The Oakland A's jump out of the gate slowly, underperforming as compared to what their statistical output as far as run creation would predict. Fans are unhappy, players are unhappy, media is unhappy, ownership is unhappy. Billy Beane and [Pseudo-Paul DePodesta with some Sandy Alderson thrown in] tell them not to worry, the team will regress to the mean. Gradually, it happens. Everyone is happy. The end.

This is phenomenally boring. The movie tries to deal with this problem by obfuscating its own thesis. Beane's trade of Jeremy Giambi for John Mabry is, pretty clearly, an emotional overreaction by Beane that worked against his own theory of run creation, but in the movie it's positioned to suggest it somehow played a role in changing the team's fortunes. Beane tries to maintain separation from his players to maintain objectivity early in the film, but after the Giambi-Mabry trade, the film starts to show Beane and fake-Depodesta lecturing the players on sabermetric tactical principles, suggesting that it was selling the system to the team's players, leadership on Beane's part, that caused the turnaround... even though the movie's whole thesis is that the turnaround was just regression to the mean. This tension between sports movie tropes and moneyball's mathematical truths is inharmonious at best.

But it is interesting how much the movie is committed to not looking like a sports movie. We barely see any baseball being played in the movie, and when we do, it's shot in explicitly trope-subversive ways. The trope of the players fading off the field to leave an empty stadium at the end of the season is used particularly effectively in this regard.

Unfortunately, instead of baseball imagery we get weird, fetishy number imagery. Tables of data shot out of focus, shot with the column headings cut off, scrolled through too fast to make sense of. Math as magic, whee! Never in the movie does Sorkin trust the numbers to actually tell a story. People have to tell the stories for the numbers, and they usually do a pretty poor job of it.