Category Archives: Uncategorized

Little To Say This Morning

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The rains have returned to San Diego and with the fluctuations in barometric pressure so have my headaches. Not with the force that would require me to stay at home and endure the stink of painting as the contractors continue to reconstruct our condominium but enough pain that conjuring a subject for an essay seems to be an impossible task. So, once again, here a few bits and bops on my mind without any particular theme or connection.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returns for season 2 on June 15, 2023. Yay. I am an old fart and for me when someone mentions Star Trek my mind flies instantly to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. I watched most of TNG and very little of the other series offerings, but SNW seems to scratch that ich quite well and I am happy to have it back.

A new short story idea. For the first time in a few years a short story idea has popped into my head. It is mystical supernatural horror. Inspiration struck while I was giving a rewatch to The Last Wave an arthouse horror movie from down under.

I am annoyed that Disney+ has released no behind the scenes/making of documentaries for the Star Wars series Andor. Andor is the best thing to happen to the franchise in The Empire Strike Backand I desperately want that bonus material. I suspect, without evidence, that since the decision has already been made that there will be only two season they are going to hold off on that stuff until the series is finished.

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Bits and Bobs

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So here are some quick thoughts on various subjects some with fuller elaboration to come.

Bad Sisters: an Apple TV+ comedy/drama series about the five Garvey sisters and how four of them plot to murder the brother-in-law who is crushing the life out of the fifth. We have one episode to go to finish the first season and I adore it. I marvel at how every scene in which the brother-in-law appears makes me more and more appreciate the sister’s motivation. I suspect that they will stick the landing, but I have been burned by endings before. (Looking at you Game of Thrones and The Rig.)

The Thaw: Polish police procedural following a female detective, recently widowed after the suspected murder of her husband, thrown into a case with political implications and a missing newborn. We are one episode in on this one, but the writing and production values are quite good. Streaming on HBOMax.

The Mandalorian: Season three is airing on Disney+ and while I thoroughly enjoyed the first two seasons this one feels a bit off. It is not bad, but the narrative seems to wander about, and it lacks story momentum. Pedro Pascal continues to be quite good, and the puppeteering is outstanding but after the outstanding drama that was Andor the bar has been raised and the writers of this show will need to step up.

I have run my first role playing game via Zoom and aside from a sore throat that manifested during the game, things went quite well. In some ways this is superior because with my desktop computer and two monitors it is far easier for me to use all the spreadsheets that I have created to manage FGU’s quite elaborate game system.

Our condominium remains in a state of partial disassembly following the water damage from February, and we are still without a functional kitchen or able to entertain friends.

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A Return to Role Play Gaming

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Saturday evening saw the return of my Space Opera RPG campaign as the players, and I reconvened on Zoom.

While during the heights of the pandemic many people took their role play games virtual with online tabletops given that Space Opera, a game system that has been out of print for nearly 40 years, has not dedicated online support system, we kept our game, once it restarted following vaccination, in person at my friend’s office. Sadly, my friend had moved away and the had to move to Zoom or simply stop. This weekend, after the prolonged chaos of moving, and missing a player who was unavailable, we resumed exactly where we had left off.

I had concerns about my ability to run a game in a virtual meeting space, but it turned out fine. Granted, the session ended earlier than I had wanted when I developed a sore throat but overall, it was a success.

In the words of Vision and The Scarlet Witch ‘This works.’

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My Online Absence

 

 

This week I returned to my blog after a bit of an extended absence.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a wet spot on the floor of the dining area of our condo. when I went to get some napkins from the counter separating the kitchen from the dining area to clean it up, I discovered that all the napkins were soaked.

The unit above ours had sprung a plumbing leak in their kitchen and the water had invaded our kitchen, walls, and dining area.

For 10 days my sweetie-wife and I lived in a hotel with only so-so Wi-Fi while ServPro tore out kitchen, walls, ceiling, and flooring. We returned home just last Friday but as the studs had not completely dried, we endured all weekend loud blowers and de-humidifiers, and it was only yesterday that we could hear ourselves think in a living room.

Sadly, the adventure is not over. Now, the contractors have to arrive and schedule their work to rebuild everything. At some point I expect we’ll be forced out into a hotel again, hopefully one with better Wi-Fi.

Still, no one is injured, sick, dying, or dead, so while annoying it is all tolerable.

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Movie Review: Top Gun: Maverick

Late to the party I watched Top Gun: Maverick the sequel to 1986’s Top Gun. I did not rush out to see this acclaimed piece of cinema last year because I had watched the original in 1986 and found it lacking. I can say that the sequel is better, with a more defined arc and plot but hardly the sort of the movie that leaves a lasting positive impression.

36 years following the events of Top Gun, hotshot pilot Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell, whose career has stalled at the rank of captain, is called to train and select a team for a daring nigh impossible mission to destroy an enemy Uranium enriching facility before it can come online Paramount Picturesand disrupt the delicate balance of nuclear power in the region. Complicating his task is that one of the pilots is Bradley Bradshaw the son of the man Maverick got killed in a training accident. Faced with a nearly unachievable mission and the deep personal resentment of his dead friend’s son, Maverick must find a way to seize success and get all the pilot home alive.

Unlike the first film, this movie presents us with a clear plot objective, destroy the enrichment facility, and a clear story objective, heal the rift between Maverick and Bradshaw. It’s easy to see why this move was such a hit in the theater. The aerial cinematography is fantastic and thrilling. On a massive screen it undoubtedly induced motion sickness for some of the audience. The writers, including long time Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, avoid anything that might offend any member of the audience or close a foreign market. The enemy state is never named, the pilots are concealed under full-face black flight gear, and even the region is left unspecified. The enemy exists only conceptually.

Top Gun Maverick is a perfectly acceptable ‘popcorn’ flick with enough action to be thrilling and just enough character to have some emotional weight but hardly deserving of the industry’s top accolades for writing or Best Picture.

The rest of this review contains spoilers for the movie.

Many people have pointed the similarities between the mission in this movie with the climatic attack on the Death Star in Star Wars; a high-speed run down a narrow valley/trench to hit a small precise target. My mind went to a classic WWII film that inspired George Lucas, The Dam Busters, based on an actual mission that had those requirements. (Undoubtedly Top Gun: Maverick upset Peter Jackson because if he gets his remake of The Dam Buster produced, he will seem to be derivative rather than the other way around.)

I was bothered by some of the logical lapses in the story. There is a nearby enemy airfield that the US Navy kindly puts out of commission with a number of cruise missile strikes. That’s all well and good, but the SAM (Surface to Air) missile sites along the rim of the valley/trench, a very serious threat to the mission, are left utterly untouched. Once the cruise missiles hit the runway the Navy fails to fly any sorties to distract or confuse any enemy CAP (Combat Air Patrol) as cover for the real mission.

Thew entire third act, with Maverick and Bradshaw shot down and trying to escape the incognito enemy is far too fantastic to be believed. I had really hoped that they had killed Maverick when he used his own plane and its countermeasures to save Bradshaw. That would have a nice symmetry to it, Maverick got Bradshaw’s killed by being reckless but died saving Bradshaw. I wonder if Cruise’s ego refused such an ending.

Top Gun: Maverick while superior to the original remains essentially a brainless film well suited for popcorn and fun.

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Watching Common Knowledge Morph into History

 

As I have mentioned before one of the things I like doing on YouTube is watching younger people reacting to films that they have never seen before. It’s always interesting to see which scene and moments are commonly and sometimes universally selected for their review videos.

A side-effect I has not anticipated when I discovered these videos is the bluntness with which I would come to understand just how much the world has changed in my lifetime.

My 50s are behind me and a lot of these films that are reacted to come from the 70s and 80s containing references that were understood my nearly everyone in the audience but are now strange cryptic moments to younger viewers.

For example, in the 1973’s The Exorcist Father Merrin, Max von Sydow under fantastic old-age make-up by Dick Smith, frequently with shaky hands opens a tiny tin and take a small white tablet. People of the time and well into the 80s and 90s understood with any expositions that this was medication for a heart condition. Merrin has server heart disease and is in poor health. Younger viewers have no comprehension of this and Merrin’s heart attack, which is not called out as one on-screen, comes as an inexplicable surprise.

The Legal Framework for South Africa’s Apartheid was passed into law in 1948 and remained enforced until the 1990’s creating as oppressive, racist, regime the disenfranchised, abused, and subjugated the majority population of that country by the white Europeans. The 1980s saw significant outrage and international protest about the South African government and its racist rule. This naturally bled into entertainment and 1989 the sequel to the hit Lethal Weapons utilized this wide-spread disgust at Apartheid to craft villainous South African diplomats as their antagonists.

And this intuitive understanding of the evils of Apartheid has sublimated away from morning dew. A millennial watching Lethal Weapon 2 was confounded by the inclusion of racism into these already despicable foreign diplomats. (Undoubtedly had they been from the American South wearing the ‘stars and bars’ it would have failed to be shocking. The Confederate Flag is an internationalsymbol of racism appearing in Icelandic Television as that signifier.) The widespread knowledge, disgust, and repulsion to South Africa’s apartheid is a subject for history textbooks and not popular media.

The world is forever changing and what is something that ‘everybody knows’ is tomorrow’s obscure trivia.

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My Favorite and Least Favorite Horror Genres

 

My earliest memories are of horror film playing at a drive-in theater. Fragments of the film, vivid color, brains in jars, stay with me to this day so many decades later. It is not surprising I grew up with a taste for horror movies. Over the long years those tastes focused and resolved into my best-loved types of horror cinema.

Ghost stories are without a doubt the horror I love best. I can’t explain why this genre appeals so strongly to me but from classic cinema and literature such as The Haunting/The Haunting of Hill House to more recent fare like The Night House, or Last Night in Soho, ghosts have fascinated and occasionally terrified me. Ghosts hold no terror for me in reality. I do not believe in ghosts and spirits. Life is a bio-chemical reaction and once the reaction stops, we are gone from this Earth. The emergent properties from out brain that we call ourselves vanishes with the cessation of life. But despite this firm, mechanistic view of reality and life, it is the ghost story that fascinates and compels me.

At the other end of my horror preferences lies the genre of Slashers.

What makes it strange that slashers so often are uninteresting or laughable to me is that they bear a close evolutionary relation to a genre I do very much care for the giallo. What differentiates the giallo from the slasher, at least to me, is that the Italian films are more centered on the mystery, the macabre, and flamboyant cinematic style while the latter is more focused on the kills, the more gruesome and outlandish the better. This is not to denigrate or belittle those who love, adore, and flock to the slasher movies. The beauty of the arts is in their diversity. We should always love what we love with shame or apology.

It is my apathy towards slashers that made films such as X difficult for me to suspend that vital disbelief that transforms a movie from something you watch to something you experience.

Each of us has the stories and genres to speak to something deep inside each of us and it the artists that bring us these fantastic fantasies I am continually in awe of.

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A Beautiful Sentiment

 

One of the things I learned this year is that the traditional Jewish condolence upon hearing of a person’s passing is “May Their Memory Be A Blessing” which I think is an interesting and beautiful contrast to the more common “Rest in Peace.”

Neither is bad but they have very different focuses.

Rest In Peace is focused on the person who has left the mortal realm. It recognizes that life is rarely peaceful, and that we struggle and work until death’s grip ends that turmoil.

(A darker and wholly unintended interpretation is wanting the person who has died to remain in the friggin’ ground. No Vampirism for you.)

May Their Memory Be A Blessing is centered on the effect the deceased had on the world around them and the friends and loved ones grieving the loss. It speaks to the hope that while life is often red in tooth and claw, we each have the capability to make life better for others. To be the blessing that this tired world so desperately needs. It points us not only towards the blessing the person may have left for others but also the blessings we may still give before out time comes.

I am so enriched to have learned this tiny fragment of another culture this year.

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I Failed My Players

 

Saturday Afternoon/Evening I ran my Space Opera TTRPG for my dear friends and sadly my brain betrayed me, and I achieved none of the tone or mood I has hoped for.

It was not a lack of preparation. I had worked my spreadsheets and gotten all the data collected I would I need, I wrote up an outline of the adventure, the characters, and the goals.

(A brief word on the spreadsheets. Space Opera from FGU came out in the 80s and is a very computation intensive game. Now, in the second decade of the 21st century I have crafted 9 spreadsheets to track the dates, the training, the distances traveled, the fuel used, and many other factors. I am quite proud of these sheets.)

However, when I got to the game, my brain failed completely. I was unable to sequence events properly and barely remained coherent as I ran the session. I ended the session early — was particularly disappointing as we had an unavoidable late start — and barely made it home awake.

I don’t know if it was a rejection, I received earlier in the week that had undermined my morale or a lack of good sleep due to apnea mask issues or some other factor, but it really hurt my weekend. Even more than the migraine I suffered the next day.

I shall have to make sure to not repeat this piss poor performance. I care too much for my players to want to ever have that happen again.

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