Author Archives: Bob Evans

A Little More WorldCon

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So, here is a bit of the vacation that went well.

The World Science Fiction Convention, WorldCon, had loads of good and interesting programming. Over the five days of the convention, I primarily attended panel discussions on horror (both prose and film), space science, and writing strategies.

The Con was well-run and well-organized, taking place in the Seattle Summit convention center, a massive building with five floors and loads of open-air spaces. The convention program was available on the app ‘Guidebook,’ which allowed users to browse the offerings, mark which were part of their personal schedule, and then add those panels and events to the calendars on their phones. This made it easy for my sweetie-wife and me to stay in the loop about each other’s panels.

Also, unlike some conventions, there was adequate cell coverage throughout the center, so there was never an issue with not being able to get a text to someone to arrange dinners and the like.

The con committee also deployed an interesting, if not entirely ready-for-prime-time, bit of tech to help members who suffered from hearing issues. Each room had a monitor that displayed live text of the panelists’ discussion. The AI tech employed did not always understand the words, particularly if they were from a foreign language or were unusual, and in those cases it guessed wrongly, but overall, I think it was a boon for any hearing-impaired fans.

Now, the convention is history, my vacation has ended, and in just a few minutes I will be returning to my day job and wading through an outlandish number of emails that await me.

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A Vacation of Woe and Wonder

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From August 12th through the 17th, I was on vacation from the day job and enjoying my first World Science-Fiction Convention since 2018. Sadly, while the convention itself was quite nice, with nearly every hour presenting me with multiple panels that I wanted to attend and having to sacrifice panel time just to have dinner with my sweetie-wife, the entire time was also the most stressful vacation I have taken.

We flew from San Diego to Seattle on Alaska Airlines, using miles accumulated on my credit card to reduce the cost of the flight to mere taxes. While transitioning through TSA security I screwed up royally but was unaware of the mistake until I deplaned at SeaTac in Washington. I discovered that I had left my wallet, with all of my identification, and my key ring at the security checkpoint in San Diego.

Thanks to Apple Pay, I was not without the ability to pay for things and could function at the convention, but the loss of the wallet weighed heavily on my mind for the entire duration of the convention.

Every morning I telephoned Lost and Found at the San Diego Airport and every morning their answer remained unchanged, no wallet, no keys. I researched how did TSA deal with this issue as I could not be the only person who had some terrible event cause them to lose all of their identification while traveling. TSA deals with it, I learned, by additional security screening, but it is not assured that you will pass it and be allowed to fly. So again, for the duration of my vacation my mind was bedeviled with the possibility that at SeaTac I would be turned away and have to find an alternate method of getting home. Amtrak had only sleeper remaining with costs of over a thousand dollars and Greyhound reported travel times of more than 48 hours.

I was so stressed that in the evenings instead of socializing at the open room parties, after my sweetie-wife retired for the night, I would just go to the hotel lobby and watch videos on my laptop.

The final morning of the convention, not only did Lost and Found not have my missing items, but a neighbor texted to alert us that my car had been broken into, the passenger window smashed with glass scattered everywhere.

Luckily, I made it through TSA enhanced screening and boarded the flight for home, though the flight was delayed a good twenty minutes, so we only got back into our home about 9:00 pm instead what of I had hoped for something more like 8:30pm.

My brilliant sweetie-wife produced spare keys for my car, our front door, and our mailbox. I took my Kia Soul to the dealer to have them replace the smashed window, but they wanted an astounding $1200 for that repair and that amount I was not going to pay. I found an independent service who was able to schedule an on-site fix for my car the next day, today, and do the job for under $300.

So today, I have finally, mostly, rebuilt and recovered from the disaster of losing my wallet and keys. Though a few more issues and details need to be addressed, I am ready to return to work in the morning and put this stressful ‘vacation’ behind me.

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Not The Best Day

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Yesterday, Tuesday, was by far not my best day. The night before I found it impossible to get decent restorative sleep, waking constantly throughout the night, suffering nightmares, and finding the air from my CPAP machine had suddenly become far too warm and wet.

It was no surprise that when my alarm sounded to rouse me for a day of work and writing, it brought me into a raging migraine headache.

I called in to the day-job, took my medications, and waited for nine hours for the pills to finally quell the headache. They normally get it done in two hours, but this stress-induced attack proved stubbornly resistant.

Needless to say, in addition to missing a day of work, I got nothing done on my novel, which only made me feel emotionally even worse.

I still have high hopes of completing the first draft, this very rough draft, by the end of September and perhaps having a completed manuscript before the end of the year—provided the evil migraine demons are not too vigorous in their assaults.

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode — A Space Adventure Hour

CBS Studios

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Let me say that in general, and with the exception of a single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Hollow Pursuits,) I detest stories centered on the damned holodeck. In order to make the story have any stakes at all and to avoid the dreaded trope of “it was all a dream,” something has to go disastrously wrong so that the ship is in terrible danger, and the safety features have to fail so disastrously that the troublesome piece of equipment cannot simply be turned off.

Putting a holodeck episode into Strange New Worlds is particularly offensive. The damned thing was new when it would be installed in the Galaxy-class cruisers some 80 years later—so new that Data had to instruct Riker on what the room actually was.

Wait, someone might be screaming: weren’t you the person for whom canon is more like a guideline than a rule? Yes, I said I don’t mind breaking canon to create a good story, but that is a very high bar for a holodeck-centered tale to clear.

So, we have one of my favorite characters, La’an, thrown into a fictionalized setting and plot while the rest of the crew faces death due to the poor engineering of the device. The episode was meant to give us a deeper look into the Spock/La’an relationship, but with a story—the murder mystery—that has no stakes and a B-plot that is predetermined to resolve happily (no way the Enterprise is getting crushed or cooked by a neutron star), the episode is left with absolutely no tension or drama.

Add to that the fact that the story La’an is thrown into takes serious time to puff up the chests of Star Trek writers by proclaiming how special the entire enterprise was for ’60s television, and you have a self-important, narcissistic piece of writing that has all the emotional depth of a dry riverbed.

Don’t get me wrong—Star Trek, in the ’60s particularly, was very important and has had a profound cultural impact, but to take time out of your own script to crow about your own important influence is just downright tacky. It is the job of others to analyze the effect and influence of a piece of art, not the creative artists themselves.

The most enjoyable aspects of episode three of season three were watching Anson Mount have tremendous fun burying himself in yet another role and hearing Jess Bush get to deliver some lines in her native accent. Aside from that, watching the episode was a chore.

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Cartoonishly Incompetent, but Still Dangerous

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So, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) revised its report on employment and job growth, reducing the number of jobs created in the reported period (May 2025) from about 129,000 to a mere 19,000. The correction was quite large, but it is not unprecedented. However, since this is well within the chaotic, on-again, off-again tariff merry-go-round of Trump economic activity, a weakening of job growth is bad news for the current administration and the allies that have slavishly lashed themselves to it. I’m given to recall a scene from The Godfather.

Tom Hagen had been sent to Hollywood to bend a studio mogul to Vito Corleone’s will. Acting out of personal pride and stubbornness, the mogul refuses Hagen to his face. Hagen thanks the man for a pleasant evening and meal and excuses himself because Vito Corleone insists on hearing bad news immediately.

This is competent, intelligent leadership. Crises cannot be handled well and the best possible outcomes cannot be obtained if full and accurate information is not at hand for the decision makers. Every two-bit serial villain that kills an underling for delivering bad news is sabotaging their own operation with such shortsighted and idiotic measures.

Trump is idiotic and shortsighted.

He fired the head of the BLS, made wild and unsupported accusations that the bad report was an orchestrated conspiracy to make him look bad, and insisted that the news was, of course, “fake.”

This nation is facing its most critical crisis since the Civil War, and it is only by our actions today and tomorrow that we can save it.

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Movie Review: Siberian Lady Macbeth

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A Polish film from 1962, Siberian Lady Macbeth is an adaptation of the 1865 novel Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which has been adapted into an opera and films since 1962.

Kino Video

Katarina is an unhappy wife living on a large estate with many serfs, ruled by an overbearing “master” Boris, to whose son she is married. Childless and joyless, with her husband away dealing with some far-flung emergency, Katarina begins an affair with a recently hired serf, Sergei. Katarina and Sergei conspire and murder Boris when he returns so Sergei may become the “master” of the estate. Their idyllic future is threatened by the arrival of distant relatives with a claim on the estate. Burdened by guilt and with suspicion against the couple growing, their relationship frays, leading to the story’s inevitable tragic conclusion.

 

 

Siberian Lady Macbeth is not an adaptation of the classic play but rather takes its title from the central conceit of a woman manipulating the men around her into murder. The story is presented more as a film noir, with characters driven by their base desires and greed into inescapable situations. While this film was produced in Poland, it in many ways adheres to America’s Production Code, both in the depiction of onscreen sexuality and violence and the compelled moralistic ending.

The copy streaming on Kanopy is not restored and displays many scratches and blemishes due to its age but is still quite watchable.

Overall, I am glad to have seen this film, but I can’t say that it ranks very highly among my favorite noirs nor my favored adaptations of Macbeth. There are several shots, particularly of the windswept and foggy estate that serves as the story’s central location, that were reminiscent of 1957’s Throne of Blood, my favorite non-Macbeth adaptation of the tragedy.

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Epstein, Trump, & the Conspiracist’s Trap

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The first rule of being a conspiracist is that you were never wrong. No fact, no evidence, can ever be admitted to have undermined in any way the fantasy you have told. A conspiracy fantasy is forever treated as fact.

The second rule is that having the secret knowledge of the conspiracy makes you special. You are wiser than those naive yokels believing what the system and the man tell them. Your cynicism against the system is proof of your wisdom. This reinforces the first rule because you can never be the naive one, and as such, your adherence to the “truth” is further evidence of your intelligence.

The third rule is that you are always on the side of the angels. The system and the man are lying to everyone for their own terrible and evil purposes. The conspiracy fantasy “exposes” the truth that the powerful are hiding, and your fight to tell this “truth” makes you heroic. You aren’t an idiot who accepted a fantastic tale of space lizards invading the world—you are the archetypal hero freeing your fellow people from that space lizard tyranny.

These three rules have trapped Trump in a snare of his own devising, and one that he may find terribly difficult to escape.

It is an accepted legal fact that wealthy financier Epstein, with the assistance of at least one person, Maxwell, groomed and sexually abused young girls. It is a matter of record that when faced with legal repercussions, he first received suspiciously lenient treatment and, following that, died in prison before a more serious legal hammer fell upon him. It is also a historical fact that Trump and Epstein enjoyed each other’s company for a number of years, as did numerous other wealthy and politically powerful people. These facts are not conspiratorial fantasy but are its foundation.

The fantasy is that there is a vast and organized group of selected powerful people who engaged with Epstein in the sexual and ritual abuse of children. This cabal includes some of the world’s most influential people, who all happen to be opposed to the political posturing of the conspiracists. Epstein’s lenient treatment is taken as evidence of the shadowy cult’s power and not simply the sad fact of life that in modern America, the rich are never held to the same accountable standard as the rest of us.

Trump, and his surrogates, fed this conspiratorial fantasy to energize their base of voters against the Democrats. The more the base believed, the more energized they became, and the more likely that Trump and company would be swept into power. The fact that it is fantasy would be irrelevant.

Except the rules say otherwise.

The conspiracy cannot be untrue, and Trump supporters know this. It has to be true, and he and his squad of righteous people were going to expose all of it.

Only they didn’t.

They tried to sweep it under the rug. The released information fell far short of what they promised. They lied about it, and for the first time, Trump told them lies that they did not want to hear.

The conspiracists are on the side of the angels. They are defending and saving children by exposing the “truth,” and that is why this story will not die like so many other examples of Trump’s blatant corruption. For the base to accept that there is nothing there and move on to something else, they must accept that they were the naive fools and that they never were on the side of the angels. People don’t work that way—hence the trap.

Maybe Trump will still squirm out of it. Like Clinton before him, he’s proved an evolutionary marvel at escaping political pitfalls, but every story comes to an end, and maybe, just maybe, this is his.

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Star Trek and Changing Social Mores

Paramount Studios/CBS Home Video

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I become Medicare-aged next year, and so to me Star Trek always means the original series and the original crew. Amid the adding and subtracting of cast and the morphing future history of the United Federation of Planets, one of the constants was the friendly combative relationship between Spock, the reportedly unemotional half-Vulcan, and the ship’s chief admitted sensualist and emotional heart of the crew, Medical Officer Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy. McCoy continually needled Spock over his unemotional nature, his strangely colored green blood, and his distinctive appearance as the alien among humans. Spock usually responded in kind with a simply delivered but devastating remark that any observer could judge as victory in their mutual burn contests. Underneath the jibes and jabs was a foundation of deep respect, loyalty, and friendship, displayed most clearly in “Amok Time” when Spock invited McCoy, along with Kirk, to the very private Vulcan wedding ceremony.

What has fascinated me of late is watching younger people, usually those born in the early 90s, discover and react to the original series episodes and how they interpret Bones’ behavior toward Spock. They see it as inappropriate and borderline racist.

They aren’t entirely wrong.

The fact that Vulcans are fictional gives us some distance from the nature of Bones’ ribbing and cutting remarks, but the truth is that if he said similar things about real people and real races, we would be horrified. Denigrating comments about someone’s appearance or culture are something that is far less acceptable today than sixty years ago.

Growing up with these characters, we understood that there was and is a deep respect and love between them. We knowthat McCoy or Spock would lay down their lives to save the other, and that this surface tension is mere “play fighting.” It is not unlike comments my friends and I have made to each other over the years, but when it slides into observations based on biology, that crosses the line.

It gives me hope that the past is seen this way by the generations replacing us.

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The Terrible Chaos of Migraine Triggers

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While I suffer from migraine headaches, I recognize that mine are generally far less severe than many people’s, but that does not alleviate the pain or the unpredictability of my triggers.

Yesterday morning I had a quick follow-up visit with my dentist for her to check the sutures from last week’s minor surgery. Sitting in the office waiting to be called, I passed the time playing games on my phone when a mother and her little girl came in. The little girl, a strange child, was excited for “the doctor to look at her teeth,” and when told she had to wait, shrieked in frustration. Yes, from what I saw, it really looked like the little girl was upset because she had to wait to see the dentist and not from fear of the exam.

However, her single piercing shriek instantly ignited a migraine attack in my head. For me, this is one of the most difficult things to manage: when and if a migraine trigger will actually start an attack, warn that an attack may come, or leave me untouched as though I do not suffer from this condition.

There are times when the triggers, and they are nearly always audio triggers, start a process deep in my skull that I can feel and now recognize as a potential migraine. In those cases, I can flee the stimulus and often avoid the attack itself. Sadly, for me the triggers can be as mundane as the mere sound of someone eating. (I have never watched The Substancebecause I know that there are disgusting shots of people eating and talking as they eat, and the risk of a migraine is simply too great to ignore.)

Other times there is no warning that the trigger will ignite the attack, and from the very first moment of the trigger, the migraine starts. Pain exploding inside my skull, the sensation of pressure builds in my head, and a slowly growing dissociative detachment takes hold.

Yesterday I suffered for most of the workday with a minor to moderate migraine, moved slowly through my tasks, and had very little cognitive ability once I returned home to my sweetie-wife.

If these were more predictable, life would be more manageable, but as it is, I simply have to deal with the triggers and whatever they decide to do on a case-by-case basis.

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Movie Review: Fantastic Four: First Steps

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After three previous attempts and a merger of studios to bring the film rights back to Marvel Studios, there is yet another shot at bringing the exploits of comics’ first family to the larger-than-life screen. The Fantastic Four is this time titled Fantastic Four: First Steps.

First published in 1961, The Fantastic Four is a quartet of heroes with very public identities and celebrity status in the comic book continuum. Though a popular franchise for over 60 years, the group has struggled to find a successful silver screen adaptation. The filmmakers with this reboot have elected to jettison more conventional approaches for a bold vision.

Marvel Studios

Fantastic Four: First Steps drops the audience into a parallel universe where the family of superheroes are already not only known but honored globally for their exploits and bravery. It is an alternate 1960s, and the production is drenched in retro-futurism—a future that people of the 60s envisioned but never came to pass, colorful and optimistic. The team’s ‘origin’ is quickly recounted as backstory for a television special. How scientist Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), pilot Ben Grimm (Eben Moss-Bachrach), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), and her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) ventured into space and returned changed, imbued with amazing powers. In addition to eschewing recreating their origin, the filmmakers also steered clear of the team’s most notorious opponent, Dr. Doom. Instead, they are confronted by the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner), Herald to the god-like being Galactus (Ralph Ineson), whose insatiable hunger drives him to consume planets teeming with life. Galactus is presented in the film as he was in the source material—a kaiju-sized humanoid in fantastic armor. The Silver Surfer has selected Earth as Galactus’ next victim, and the Fantastic Four attempt to negotiate with the god-like being. But when Galactus demands a price too high for the team to personally pay, Earth is set as his next target, and the world turns on its former heroes.

Fantastic Four: First Steps, in my opinion, is a mid-tier Marvel Cinematic Universe entry. Not as weak as some of the franchise films, but also nowhere near the excellence of its best. The script has four credited writers for both screenplay and story, and the final product is a bit muddled, showing what was likely a turbulent development and production. The cast is good, with Pascal and Kirby being outright terrific. Julia Garner plays enigmatic well and has one of the best ‘cheer’ moments in the feature. I think most of my issues—and why this film did not enthrall me completely—stem from the world-building of the alternate Earth failing to convince. It is not the retro-futurism that I found unconvincing (that I looked forward to), but some of the human aspects that were baked into the world that I found beyond my ability to accept. In Iron Man 2, it was stated that Stark ‘privatized world peace’—one moment of hyperbole that could be and should be ignored. Here, a similar concept is baked into this world’s canon.

Still, I did not regret venturing out to the theater for a fun, bright, and optimistic superhero film far from the dark and grounded miasma of cynicism.

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