www.aimlessdevelopment.com

It’s currently bare of content, but I’m in the process of writing the first article. Since I’ve finally got a spot of spare time in the near future, I should be able to post my first article soon: a detailed overview of 2D skeletal animations and my own design decisions in that regard. Hopefully, it’ll be a better read than my contributions on this blog were.

I may still occasionally update this blog with topics well off-topic in the Aimless Development blog. I’m not sure yet precisely how focused I want that blog to become on game and software development. However, my attention will be swinging almost totally towards my new site.

With luck, this won’t explode in my face. That’d be nice.

To sum it up:

• The benefits of waking up early and at a specific time each day are great independent of the sleep schedule. This depends on actually waking up at the specified time… which has proven to be my biggest problem.
• The extra hours in my day take a lot of time pressure off my back. I’ve found that my productivity is variable from 1-3am, however… sometimes I’m alert enough to be useful, other times I just need to drop into unconsciousness.
• Naps, once you acclimate to using them (which happens quickly) give a great energy boost in the middle of the day. The only downside is that you need to remember to have them on this schedule, or you’ll suffer for it later.
• Managing the core sleep section has proven the most difficult to me, since my brain does not function properly immediately after waking up. Adjusting my schedule to coincide with that of others helped a great deal, but it remains the biggest potential problem going forward.
• It’s all surprisingly flexible. Sleep and nap times can be changed easily, and you can swap in and out of monophasic sleep without much trouble as the situation demands.

My verdict: I like it, and I’m gonna keep on it! I might monkey with the amount of core sleep, but this is actually working very well for me. For a more disciplined individual (or perhaps one more aware of their surroundings!) adapting to this schedule would be much less problematic. Going forward, I won’t be following it strictly, instead occasionally going back to monophasic sleep as needed. Tonight, for instance, I’m considering a full nights rest due to the intense workout from my Taekwondo class.

I’m calling this experiment a success.

I wish I had good news here, but I pulled another 50/50 adherence to the schedule over these last two weeks. I’m not giving up yet, and will be looking for was to improve my discipline at 2:30am, but at least for tonight I won’t be trying any of it. I’ve started to come down with something, so my body will need the sleep.

So, what do I do if this doesn’t work out?

Well, I like waking up early, I like the naps, and I’ve had good results in terms of alertness and productivity. And even if I end up waking up at 6:00am instead of 2:30am every second day I’m still waking way earlier than I ever did before. So continuing the way I’m going, warts and all, still seems like a great idea to me.

Another option is to go all the way and try out the Uberman, since I’m able to consistently manage the 20 minute naps. My class schedule actually lines up with it pretty well, so this is a distinct possibility.

The fact that I’m even considering the possibility is cast-iron proof that I’m batshit crazy, by the way.

This, of course, raises the question of “where do I go from there?” The first element of that is what I do with the animation editor and system. I’m inclined to put it in the public domain, and I plan to dig through my options in that regard. More than a few people have already come up to me asking for help implementing their own 2D animation systems, and being able to give this to them for their own uses or reference would be great.

Of course, I designed this with the intent of using it in a game, so I’ll have to start working on my game engine once more. Initial integration shouldn’t be too difficult, since it’s all been designed to port nicely, so the real difficulty will be managing a data driven way to drive these animations in a useful manner. That means that I need to have a working scheme for managing behaviour trees (my current editor may prove too unstable/unfriendly, though I certainly hope it holds up to extended usage), and the logic for them must work in-game.

After that we get to the fun stuff.

Looking back at the John Smith prototype from before, I want to ask myself the question: what was fun about it? What stood out? To me, these were the elements that stood out as enjoyable:

1. Manoeuvring about the environment for tactical advantage
2. Ebb and flow of combat, constraints that have to be taken into account (recharging health, limited ammo, etc)
3. Exploiting or creating a flaw in an opponent’s position to do them in

Now, how can I use the animation system I’m building to get the most out of that?

I’m thinking that taking the environmental interaction to the next level is really the way to go. Focus on really cementing the player character into the world and giving him options to exploit it for his benefit. In the prototype, the player felt pretty disconnected from everything… he was basically just an accelerating brick that could shoot bullets around and collide with the world geometry. What would it take to improve on that?

Here are some preliminary ideas:

1. Previously, players would walk through cover like it wasn’t there, and it would only block bullets. So lets have players collide with the cover and:
1. Hop, vault, or clamber over low obstacles without forcing the player to jump, so long as you’re standing and moving
2. Sidle up against it when using it as cover. When supposed to be completely protected, huddle in close. When popping up to shoot, present a minimal target profile.
3. Be able to lean a shoulder into it and push it forward, like the box puzzles in Legend of Zelda.
2. Have more meaningful interactions with the static geometry than “this stops you from moving forward or falling downwards forever”
1. Be able to treat low walls in the geometry the same as any other piece of cover, as above
2. Being able to cling to a ledge and pull yourself up, or hang there. Possibly be able to shoot overtop while clinging
3. Advanced manoeuvres
1. Diving and rolling (hitting crouch while running) to avoid fire
2. Wall jumping

Okay, not the least ambitious thing I’ve ever planned, I’ll give you that. But I think the behaviours listed above would make moving throughout the world more fun, more kinetic, and give you many more options!

It sounds like a barrel of fun to me, so that’s the direction I’ll be heading.

1. I really like rising early and having more time in my day.
2. The schedule, when it works, really works
3. Midday naps are awesome
4. I can’t keep the schedule for shit.

Okay, that last one requires some explanation.

I possess the necessary self discipline to go to bed or nap at all the correct times, and I very rarely oversleep on naps. In fact, I’ll quite often wake up from naps just before the alarm would go off. However, where I’m failing is waking up from my 3 hour core sleep, and I’m failing hard. Only 6 of the last 13 days have avoided falling back asleep after the alarm goes off or missing the alarm entirely. That’s more than a 50% failure rate. As a result, I don’t think my data is accurate in terms of how well the schedule works is sufficiently accurate. I’m not sure I’ve been able to correctly fall into REM sleep during 20 minute naps.

So the obvious course of action is to chalk this up as a failed, if informative, experiment and return to a sane sleep schedule.

Ahahahahah. No.

The obstacle I’ve run into is that I’ll wake up and then neglect to get out of bed before I fall asleep. This very irritating: I’ll wake up, hit my alarm, and lie down, and then I’m DONE. At 2:30 immediately upon waking up, I am NOT thinking straight, so it’s not a matter of willpower. However, this isn’t an insurmountable obstacle.

I found this article, and like most of the advice on this guy’s site, it strikes me as very sound advice. In general, I’d recommend reading the articles on StevePavlina.com, since they’re free and he got good, common sense advice and nothing really sets off my bullshit detector.

The gist of this particular piece of advise is that since you can’t trust yourself at the moment of waking to make the right decision, you instead make it a habituated response. The moment the alarm goes off, you pop out of bed by habit. The way to do this is simple: practise.

So I’m going to be making a conscious effort to change how I wake up. This means more than just practising in the mornings, though that’ll happen too, but to practise throughout the day as well. Since I’m already scheduling 20 minute naps throughout the day, that provides me an excellent opportunity. For the most part, nothing will change, except that I’m now going to be trying to simulate real sleeping conditions when possible (same alarms, lighting, etc) and to bolt up and get moving the moment that alarm rings! Again, since I’m already on the Everyman, this shouldn’t be quite so difficult as it sounds.

So lets see if I can’t get this thing on track.

Of course, it’s all too easy to oversleep. Even if I DO hear the alarm, which isn’t guaranteed at all, I need to find the willpower to get out of my comfortable, warm bed and get moving. This’ll become easier with practise, I imagine, but I’ll still be increasing the volume of my alarm anyways!

Other things of note include an increased appetite. Waking up early means I’m hungry early, which means by the time 9:00am rolls around I am STARVING. I’m going to need to develop better eating habits, since my old tendency to miss meals altogether if something shiney distracts me will get me in trouble here.

I’ve also slightly tweaked my schedule for naps: my third nap has been moved forward to about 6:00pm to coincide with my ride home. Since I’m either hitching a ride with someone else or taking public transit, this’ll mean I’m making good use of a great deal of wasted time each day that would otherwise just be spent twiddling my thumbs. All I’d ever do on the bus is think, anyways, and I can do that with my eyes closed, too!

So.

It’s been a week since I started sleeping on the Everyman schedule. So, what’ve I noticed? How have I felt? How well does it work?

My initial impressions of it are quite positive. I’ve remained alert… and people have commented that I’m more alert than usual, even. The extra time is well spent and the nap schedule is easy to maintain.

On the other hand, while keeping time for the naps is easy I’m still not actually going unconscious. I’m just lying there getting bored for 20 minutes… though I admit I feel well rested at the end of them! The 3 hour sleep, though, is another story… I’m getting knocked right out, but I’ve been having trouble setting up an adequate alarm that will wake me up without waking anyone else in the house up. Several night in the last week I’ve woken up at my “old” time, or slept in a couple hours. I’m not sure if that invalidates my results so far, but it certainly isn’t ideal.

What I’ve eventually settled on is the alarm on my phone, which is surprisingly effective. It’s disruptive and persistent enough to rouse me from sleep, but quiet enough not to wake up someone in the other room. If I place the damned thing out of reach from my bed, I should have no trouble keeping the schedule from here on out.

I’m enjoying it so far. No major ill effects so far, but I’m seeing longer days. I’ll keep you posted.

Most people I’ve run this past (including my friend Matt, who has declared me a “crazy bugger”) aren’t really sold on the idea, but I was sold on “cut your sleep in half”. I’ve never been a fan of sleeping taking up a third of my life… there’s always so much to do! So a sleep schedule that allows me to cut that down and still be able to operate is immediately appealing to me. Besides, I’ll be keeping a log (details forthcoming). That means that it’s FOR SCIENCE.

The schedule I’m going to attempt involves a core sleep of 3 hours, with three 20 minutes naps throughout the day. The idea is that the body adapts to more quickly fall into REM sleep, especially in those 20 minute naps. A more extreme version (the “Uberman”) is a 20 minute nap every four hours, though that schedule makes you completely out of line with everyone else and is very vulnerable to even slight disruption. The everyman, in contrast, gives you about an hours flexibility in either direction on the timing of any given nap, which seems like a more reasonable way to manage it and still not characterize yourself overmuch as a crazy anti-social nut.

Not saying that it wouldn’t be accurate, but let’s try to keep up appearances here!

So the schedule I’m going to try to manage goes like this:

1. Sleep from 12:00am – 3:00am. Go to bed late, get up early.
2. Nap around 8:00am. This coincides with the lengthier bus ride in my transit schedule.
3. Nap around 1:00pm. This coincides with my lunch break.
4. Nap again at 8:00pm. The one hour of flexibility I have means that if I have Taekwondo practice from 6:30-7:45, I can delay the nap. If I’m heading out to meet friends at 8:00, I can have the nap early.

This appears to be minimally disruptive. The main question is whether Bioware will accept me messing about with my sleep schedule like this. It’s a pretty permissive workplace, so I’m not too worried, but if my boss isn’t up for the idea of me adjusting to my new, crazy sleep schedule, or napping midday during my lunch break, then I’ll back off. If the sleep deprivation ends up being too severe and impairs my functioning normally, then I might stop it myself.

Otherwise, FOR SCIENCE.

In other news, I love dual monitors. Makes my life so much easier.

As usual, I’ve taken the necessary steps to keep my 5 second attention span on track—ooh, hey, that’s shiney—by giving myself a nice todo list with reasonably small tasks. It’s one of the few things that can keep me focused and productive for long periods of time. This list was aimed at getting animations going so that the animation editor actually lives up to it’s name:

1. Implement creation, selection, and deletion of individual animations on a skeleton
2. Implement a single keyframe on each animation.
3. Sync the number of joints in the animation data with the number of joints in the skeleton data to allow for editing the skeletons after having created animations
4. Allow a keyframe to pose a character… this includes the editing controls and the rendering.
5. Build and evaluate constraints on the skeleton during the editing phase to ensure the skeleton doesn’t do things that the joint constraints don’t allow
6. Give keyframe editing control to the user: create, select, move, duplicate and delete
7. Allow animation keyframes to be played sequentially
8. Implement interpolation between frames
9. Additional features of animations like tying an event to a keyframe for the game to process (for things like sounds, particle effects, etc)

I’ve already made progress, as you can see. After all those points have been hit, the animation editor will have its primary feature set, and I’ll be able to move onto the skinning section of the editor. After that’s done and the file format is (hopefully) finalized, I’ll turn my sights on building a small utility for converting my old skeletons and animations to the new system. After all, I don’t want to lose all the work I did animating those damned things!

Through all of this, I’m starting to get the hang of .NET and managed C++. Despite some of my issues with the syntax and base structures you have to work with, managed C++ isn’t that horrible… and the access to the .NET components is worth it. This is the easiest that GUI development has ever been for me. The issue comes in when I want to interface my work-in-progress C++ animation library with the managed C++ editor, and that stuff can be incredibly irritating. Fortunately, most of the frustrating work there has already been done, so I can procede on the rest of this damned thing without incident.

Oh, shit, I just invoked Murphy’s Law, didn’t I? Oops.

-Ian

FYI, if you haven’t figured it out already, this is going to be spoiler-TASTIC. If you haven’t seen the series finale yet, or heaven forbid, have never seen the series, I encourage you to ignore the rest of this post. Seriously.

The finale really appealed to me on the first go, and I was thoroughly entertained the whole way through. It’s safe to say that I loved it… right up until the point where the gears in my head started turning and I started thinking about it. My opinion now is that it was a frigging stupid way to end the show… thematically inappropriate, abrupt, and arbitrary. The only saving grace was that, as always, the character arcs were beautifully done, which might have allowed me to forgive minor issues with the plot.

As you are no doubt beginning to suspect, I in no way consider the issues with the finale to be anything REMOTELY “minor”. I won’t spend too long harping on it, since I’ve got a running gripe with the series since season 3 to get to (Boomer), but I’ll sum it up:

I can take Lee and the “head characters” preachy tone. I can kinda stomach the very literal deus ex machina ending. I can even somewhat tolerate the dropping of the political aspect of the show, which was a cornerstone of the series from the get go, when Lee and Adama arbitrarily decided the fate of the entire human race on a whim with (apparently) no dissent from the varied and contentious group that was the colonial refugees. What I absolutely cannot tolerate is that that final decision that Lee made for humanity was in utter, direct opposition to the stated aims, and wouldn’t withstand cursory scrutiny in real life.

“Let’s stop the cycle of human-cylon violence” he says. All well and good, an admirable goal. But then he somehow thinks that throwing away technology, culture, history, education, medicine, and civilisation away and flying the fleet into the fucking sun was the best way to accomplish this. His logic is “we don’t want humans to fight and enslave machines anymore, so lets doom our children to short, violent lives of poverty, ignorance, and malaria”? I’m sorry, but where does that BEGIN to make sense? Sorry, Lee, but those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and your “clean slate” for humanity just kickstarted the next cycle, and you aren’t even leaving behind something like the prophecies of Pythia that guided the Colonials… there IS no “learning from past mistakes” within your genius master plan. Especially since the tie- in to modern day earth also has the nasty implication of his decision resulting in human history as we know it: brutal, ignorant, and savage.

Now, if they didn’t do that, you wouldn’t have your pretty little “the cycle starts again and oh hey we’re the descendants of Hera” ending that wrapped up everything in a pretty little bow, but you know what? This is a perfect example of writers wanting to get somewhere specific for an arbitrary reason but having absolutely no idea how to get there, and then making plot decisions that make absolutely no sense in the world they’ve created. If they were FORCED to abandon their technology? Okay, then MAYBE I could buy it, even if it would have been a huge downer of an ending, but I think they were too caught up in being clever to realize that their ending made no fucking sense.

I could mention other peeves with the finale, but I’ll only deal with one, and only because it leads right into the main part of my rant (oh yes, I’m just getting started. Tremble with fear.) This is, of course, the way they decided to off ol’ Boomer.

Yes, on a certain level, it made sense, it was poetic, and it was undoubtedly well-deserved. Boomer leaves the stage with a chestful of bullets and a tiny sliver of redemption, and the knowledge that for probably the first time in the series she made a choice of her own. So it was completely appropriate, if abrupt… and certainly more than a little cold blooded. It was also completely inevitable… the only question in my mind was whether Helo, Chief, or Athena would get to her first, because SOMEONE was going to kill her.

Quite frankly, there was no way out for her, since her survival would have to depend on a superhuman show of restraint and mercy… and if there’s one thing the show never failed to hammer home, it was that all the characters were incredibly human. That display of mercy was never going to come after the vile things she did to Helo, Chief, and Athena in the previous episodes.

It wasn’t satisfying though, and certainly didn’t do justice to the character. She’s there one moment, and then Athena unloads an assault rifle into her torso, and we get a little flashback that supposedly explains motivation. Yet that didn’t even REMOTELY explain the lingering issues and interesting questions that Boomer posed. Sharon Valerii was perhaps the single most interesting character in seasons 1 and 2, yet somehow the writers reduced her to a plot device with a familiar face. This has been a LONG time coming… basically since the start of season 3. So lets jump back and see exactly where the writers fucked up.

For the first two seasons,  Boomer was my favourite character. She was certainly the most sympathetic; she was a major character that stole the spotlight most of the times she was on screen, and the writers seemed to get some perverse glee out of torturing the poor girl, almost like they had some kind of internal contest going where they would compete to see who could make her the most miserable. Here she was, a loyal, talented member of Galactica’s crew. Her colleagues were family, Commander Adama was like a father, and she and Tyrol were madly in love… but as time wears on, it slowly falls apart.

The miniseries ends with the revelation that she is a Cylon agent within the fleet, but shortly into the first season we find out that Boomer is completely unaware of this, and thinks that she’s as human as everyone else. Underlying programming, however, causes her to black out and perform acts of sabotage… and from there on out she goes through hell every episode she appears in. Unexplained blackouts, circumstantial evidence, unexplained knowledge, and an ominous feeling that she’s going to hurt someone takes a tremendous toll on her psyche, along with all the other fun stuff that goes with it, like the Cylon witch hunt and Tyrol messily breaking up with her. By the end of the season, she’s already tried to commit suicide, forced Baltar to put her through the cylon detector (where he selfishly hides the results), and tried to break her concerns to the Chief only to be reassured that she’s mistaken, that she’s being set up. In the season finale, she’s given a mission to plant a nuke on a Cylon base ship in which she’s confronted by a dozen members of her own model. She flies back to Galactica only to have her programming take over and force her to shoot her beloved commanding officer twice in cold blood. She lasts a short time into season 2, being interrogated, beaten, rejected, and despised (a picture of her decorated the target range), until finally the woman who is for all intent and purposes her little sister guns her down in a hallway. Fast forward to the season 2 finale, in which Boomer finds herself in a resurrection chamber and promptly freaks out. She isn’t integrating smoothly, and her fellow Cylons are considering boxing her personality and memories.

And you know what? All of that was brilliant. It felt horrible watching each new indignity fall upon the character and each new knife get stabbed into her back and twisted around, but Grace Park did a fantastic job of bringing the character to life, and Boomer was perhaps even more interesting than she was before. The performance in the season 2 finale was particularly good, and I’d seen the potential for Boomer’s character just open wide up. There’s no longer any hiding from what she is: she knows she’s a Cylon now, and yet she utterly refuses to relinquish her humanity and assimilate! She plans to teach the Cylons the wrong in what they do, she saves the life of Sam Anders, and she befriends a kindred spirit in Caprica 6. Now we’re getting to the good stuff, I thought. There were so many interesting questions to be asked! How would she reconcile her human self with the knowledge that she was a machine? Where would the story with the unwilling betrayals she visited on Tyrol and Adama go? What relationship would she have with her own model, and the rest of the cylons? What relationship would she now have with humanity, and the people she loved in particular? What would her relationship to Athena be, as Athena was a copy with her memories and thought processes, but without the delusion of being human? Was her subconscious programming still there, ready to take over?

And from there on out, the writers decide that answering those questions is for chumps.

The invasion of New Caprica is where it starts to fall apart with the character. You see that she’s still trying to help humanity, and that she’s dedicated herself to trying to find a way for humans and Cylons to live together peacefully. You also see that she still wants to help her family. At the same time, though, her motivations seem to have become… selfish. She goes in to talk to Cally, hoping for acceptance, but she is unable (or unwilling) to take the steps necessary to free her old friend from a death sentence. Yes, I can imagine that her political power is marginalized by how badly the occupation she encouraged is going, but she’s going to let her little sister be arbitrarily executed just because she’s too afraid to rock the boat? Sure, Cally was full of hate and anger, and had shot and killed her on Galactica, but we’re talking about family, here… and we’re also talking about Sharon Valerii, a woman who tried to commit suicide because she was worried that she would hurt someone she cared about. So why didn’t she do more? Where the hell did THAT come from? Sharon might not have been the most selfless person ever born, but she gave up far more easily than expected.

…and then that’s the last we see of her until the algea planet and the temple of the five. And even then, you only get two things out of her: one, she’s really, REALLY bitter about being treated like a machine, and two, she’s apparently so messed up at this point that she’s ready to SNAP A BABY’S NECK because she’s upset. Oh yeah, and her best friend sucker punches her and snaps her neck, which must have helped her state of mind tremendously.  And then that’s it for season 3. My reaction after that episode was: “holy shit! What happened to Boomer?” but that was never really answered. So all we get is a previously major character suddenly reappearing after a long hiatus, doing something completely out of character with no explanation of motivation or character development, and then we don’t see her again until a quarter through season 4. What the hell.

And then the same thing happens in season 4, and we see she’s gone COMPLETELY off the deep end, again with zero explanation or character development. She’s now Cavil’s willing pawn and completely abandoned everything she knew and loved. The closest you get to actual explanation is Cavil talking about how angry she felt about being made to think like a human. And then she “rescues” Ellen, wraps Tyrol around her finger, spectacularily betrays him, kidnaps Hera, and does absolutely vile things to Helo and Athena. Hera unearths a tiny bit of her humanity in transit, but it’s only JUST enough to convince Boomer to switch sides at the last moment, save Hera, and walk into the muzzle of Athena’s rifle. And then the writers try the bold, exciting new strategy of foreshadowing something AFTER it’s been done. Boomer says she did it for Adama, because she “owed him one”, a statement that is only explained in a flashback as she bleeds out on the floor.

I’m sorry, but that’s just shitty writing there. If they’d shown that flashback at the start of the episode? Maybe. If they’d shown it far earlier into the season? Even BETTER. But no, they ad lib a motivation for her right at the end, completely arbitrarily and COMPLETELY in the face of her ACTUAL motivation: that she couldn’t let them dissect Hera like a biology experiment.

And this just drives me crazy, because my favourite character was reduced to a plot device once the series was past New Caprica. She was there as a handy way for the writers to make other people’s lives worse. They never explained, foreshadowed or otherwise notified the audience of her new motivations, and they CERTAINLY didn’t answer the most important questions her character raised. What happened to the entire issue with her programming dictating her actions? That’s freaking PERFECT for exploring the idea of nature versus nurture. The writers obviously went to great lengths to humanize the cylons… and Boomer was the perfect vehicle for that, yet was never used. If you wanted a human perspective from the inside of the Cylon war machine, you couldn’t ask for a better point of view. She NEVER talks to Adama again, despite the fact that in season 2 Adama is still being eaten up by the betrayal, and so is she, and THAT of all things demanded resolution. Her family is completely cut from the picture, she never even grieves when they die off over time.

And for gods sake, she only meets Athena FOUR TIMES: once to deliver a message to Athena, once to threaten Athena’s baby, once to brutalize Athena and have sex with her unwitting husband while Athena was forced to watch, and finally in the hallways of The Colony for Athena to gun her down in retribution. And here you had the potential for probably one of the more fascinating relationships in the series: Athena was Boomer! At the very start of the first season, they’ve been based off the same memories, with only one crucial difference: Athena knew what she was, Boomer didn’t. The two of them were so incredibly interesting as a contrast, and it would only have gotten more interesting after Athena became a full officer, won the respect of the crew, married Helo, and had a kid. So, basically got everything Boomer ever lost or ever wanted. Those two characters were always most interesting by CONTRAST, but they practically never met and the writers certainly didn’t play off those themes. The closest they ever got to addressing the issue was the vile, nasty things Boomer did to Helo and Athena… since they were completely unnecessary to the mission Cavil had given her, the only explanation makes sense is Boomer having a perverse sense of jealousy. Even that was left to the audience’s imagination.

Also, while this is possibly completely contrary to the goals of the BSG writers (ie, do terrible things to your characters and then keep doing them), I can’t be alone in thinking that the poor girl could have used at least a tiny bit of justice. She’s victimized for being something she isn’t aware of and can’t control, is blamed for things she never did (the rebel cylons wanted to try her for treason? Really?), is forced to betray the people she loves by the programs in her head, and has every attempt to do the right thing fly back in her face and punish her for the attempt. She never really gets a chance to choose her own fate, since it’s always being dictated by circumstance or programming or complete lack of opportunity, right up until the end, where she makes one bad choice (the nasty things she did to Tyrol, Helo, and Athena) and one good choice (rescuing Hera… after getting her into the mess in the first place). Nothing ever went her way, and she could be forgiven for going absolutely batshit crazy after all that.

Quite frankly, she’d built up enough karma by the end that she could concievably flip off a box of kittens while simultaneously burning down an orphanage and kicking a stray dog and she’d STILL come out fairly even.

This is getting long, so I’ll wrap this up. Boomer, as a character, was completely sidelined and completely mishandled starting in season three, and it just got worse the more it went on. It was utterly ridiculous… they had such a strong character and so many options, yet they chose to pursue NONE of them. I can think of a half dozen scenarios that they could have thrown in anywhere in the third or fourth seasons that would have been more dramatic, more interesting uses of the character that would have actually made SENSE. After season 2, the Sharon Valerii that we knew was gone for no good reason, and that was a huge shame. I could even have been fine with her going hopelessly evil if it had been fucking foreshadowed.

As much as I loved Grace Park’s performance in the season 2 finale, perhaps it would have been kinder to just let Boomer die and stay dead.