We’ve been doing family stuff this week, meaning the whole family got all-hands-on-deck to move some of the family to a new place.
This involved getting together with rarely seen in-laws, people who are not particularly political (though generally non-leftist.) Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember where most Americans who aren’t politically engaged live. Mostly because our ravingly sane cohort here has seen the stuff headed down the pipe from so long ago, that we’re sort of jaded by it now. Take the Lesbian Space Witches of the Star Wars Acolyte (Please. You might be the only one). I’m not a Star Wars fan (Sorry. I’m not much of visual medium fan and it just never did it for me, period. For a while there I wondered if Dan and I would make it. I was Heinlein, he was Star Wars. Anyway…) so this does not affect it with rage for the intricacies of the story and precisely everything they’re violating. Instead I think of all the crazy Lesbians I knew in the seventies, (oh, please. I went to college in Europe. As a liberal arts major. In a college filled mostly with women. Of course I knew Lesbians. Most of them were professors and ten years older than I. My generation had decided we liked boys. But hey!) who piously waited the time they could reproduce by parthenogenesis and do away with men, who were “defective” by not being women. And then I laugh like an hyena. Because you have to have a heart of stone not to. And I think, “Well, of course, these people are now the financiers and senior producers and everything.”
But it’s sometimes refreshing to be with people that still find it strange and outre that the producer of Bridgertons really thinks eighteenth century England had a sort of apartheid system, with black aristocracy and white aristocracy. That she also believes a German queen was “black” and NO ONE EVER MENTIONED IT, and that she believes the Queen was black because she had a “Moorish” ancestor 500 years earlier. I mean, they don’t particularly object to the series as a fantasy — as I don’t — and alternate universe. They just find it strange that not only does the producer think this was real (all based on rumors of a “Moorish” ancestor — more likely to be a redhead than black and FIVE HUNDRED YEARS BACK — and a bad portrait of Queen Charlotte) but also that people who watch this series also believe this is true. (This is our cue to close public education and possibly forbid it. If we can’t graduate people with a better idea of history, biology and … humanity (who wouldn’t gossip about a black queen in Regency England, among the most prolific diarists in history?) the schools are counterproductive.)
This was the same week I caught Jeff Goldstein (late of Protein Wisdom) sighing on Twittex about “must every hero be gay and in an interracial couple?” and I thought “you’ve noticed now?” Five years ago I stopped watching British Mysteries, which are one of my guilty pleasures, because, dear Lord, after a while it became impossible to ignore that every couple — EVERY COUPLE — was mixed race.
Look, I don’t have anything against gay heroes. It would be really funny if I did. While I don’t write legions of gay vampires (rolls eyes) as a friend accused me of doing, I did write A Few Good Men. And I’m writing No Man’s Land. (In which the gay protagonist is possibly the least “abnormal” thing.) Both of those books have gay protagonists because it’s needed for the book (more obviously for NML.) Which is one thing over “every couple we can we make gay” where it’s not even remotely needed.
And some people — mostly insane people, but then again I have a very low respect for American-born perception of race. It’s not race. It’s just insanity — would think Dan and I are in a bi-racial relationship. We even sort of look it, since he’s paler than pale, being a programmer, while I spend considerable portions of time outside bothering plants. So obviously I have nothing against people dating or marrying outside their race.
What I object to is — outside the framework of this is obvious fiction — using demographics to try to play with people’s perception of the world.
I know why leftists do it. The people who tried to levitate the Denver Mint with the power of — ah — their minds, and who believe things like if we abolish the police there will be no more crime are not…. what is the term? sane? in contact with reality? capable of rational thought?
They are so overpowered by their fantasies, that they believe they can wish cast those fantasies onto the world.
You can see that with Biden’s new EPA regulations, which follow the path of Europe meaning, we’ll all be without electricity for long periods of time and have to burn every tree in sight not to freeze in winter. But that’s not really what Biden (or whatever passes for Biden, probably a brain trust of ivy league graduates) thinks will happen. No. These people think they can wish-cast science into happening. (This is another reason to abolish all schooling in its current form, because, seriously, they think that science is something that happens by the power of their pure thoughts and good intentions. The schools have taught them nothing, not even, arguably, how to read.)
They really think that lesbians will look at Star Wars Space Witches, and go “Oh, so that’s how one gets pregnant without a male” and then DO IT. And if you think I’m being silly, no. Not really. They really think that. For years now they’ve been telling us things like “the future is female” and this is what they’re basing it on. Their strong belief that if they believe strongly enough, it will happen.
And that’s the thing behind all heroes are gay and if possible in an interracial relationship. Because, you know? If they show it often enough, most people will become gay and get in interracial relationships. (Forget it, Jack, it’s liberals.) There is this account on Twitter called “The Queer majority” that is like the craziest bits of libsoftictoc, but they really believe it, and it makes me quirk my brow and go “The what now? You what?” I mean if the majority engaged in non-reproductive sex only, the world population would be nosediving in a way no one could avoid seeing. (Yes, it’s possible to define “queer” in such a way that everyone is but that is meaningless. I mean, now they’re adding the ability to tan. No, really.)
And they think if they rewrite history, the past will change, or at least most people will believe in the new past — because apparently they’re going to engage in a written material burn on the scale of Fahrenheit 451 or something — and then the future will be exactly as they scripted, with all couples being interracial and ushering in a new tan race (That’s not how any of this works, and among Ursula LeGuin’s stupid ideas that might be the dumbest. If everyone had the same skin tone, people would pick other things to be tribal about. Heck, if everyone looked exactly alike, you’d start signaling tribe by styling your hair. Seriously. Have leftists EVER met a human being?)
My objection to this stupid idea of storytelling, used as sort of word-spells to change reality is that it’s stupid. It’s cringe. Because it’s impossible, sure. That’s part of it. You can nudge people slightly in one direction, if it doesn’t cost them too much, and the direction is something they were already heading towards.
The fact that for almost a century the left controlled all the mass communication ability in the world gave them the very weird idea that they could control reality. But in fact, it’s just propaganda, which only works if it’s absolutely pervasive, never lets up, and it’s never disproven.
So, you know, you could convince people that Covid 19 was a plague on the scale of the Black Plague…. for a short time. As long as you kept them all locked down and unable to communicate with each other. Once people saw that there were no piles of bodies on street corners and that the people around them were just pretty much normal, the spell broke down and — get this — it’s impossible to cast it again.
More importantly, the words and the fear mongering, and the insane propagandizing didn’t change reality. It allowed them to steal an election, sure, but they know they stole it, we know they stole it, and every day it becomes more obvious they stole it. It’s not a fiction they can maintain.
In reality, all their devout belief and spell casting does nothing but create very cringe art. Which is okay, as it might speed the emergence of new pathways for creativity and distribution of media.
When even people who aren’t as sensitive to cringe as we are have become aware of it, it’s over. The propaganda will never work again.
And the only response we can make to their stompy attempts to make us believe is to laugh like an hyena.
According To Hoyt 
I wouldn’t even mind Lesbian Space Witches(tm) if the the story was good.
Or at the very least, done in HD 🙂
VR360 or else!
One of the snarks circulating around right now about the third episode of The Acolyte is –
“Apparently even in a galaxy far, far away, black kids still don’t have a father.”
If the Leftroids even give a hint that “two parent family” might be better, they would essentially admit to having perpetrated genocide against blacks, their “social programs” having destroyed such families, thus such folks, with gusto.
forgot the clicky box
I had a silly conversation a few years back on Baen’s Bar about “Hate Speech Legislation”.
The pro-Banning-Hate-Speech crowd seemed to believe “if we make Hate Speech Illegal, then Hatred would disappear.”
What The F*ck??????????????????
Out in the same region with ‘hate crimes.’
If the unfortunate Reb Tevya is coshed in an alley and robbed, is he more injured if the assailant used a slur against Jews, or a slur against whites, or is someone who just hates hats or beards? Same battery and robbery no matter if the robber said anything or was motivated by anything other than money.
Punish the actual crime; offer enhancements if particular actual additional acts occurred to increase damage to the victim.
When “hate crime” includes driving over a mural painted on a street it’s pretty much over.
I think at this point there are more fake self-inflicted hate crimes done by leftists for attention and sympathy than actual hate crimes.
The demand for hate far outstrips supply.
😆😆😆 I never thought of putting it that way, but it certainly fits!
And you can replace “hate” with just about any “-phobia” or “-ism” that the left is so fond of and be just as accurate. 😉
Seems to me the Leftroids have more than enough hate to go around.
Sensible people do not put things in the street if they don’t want people to drive over them.
Especially when it’s bait for trouble-makers. “Touch this and you will do WRONG!”
There’s a reason why flags were burned a lot more often when you could be arrested for it.
“I mean if the majority engaged in non-reproductive sex only, the world population would be nosediving in a way no one could avoid seeing.”
Well…. that actually might be happening. 😐
Seems there are consequences to straight sex becoming non-reproductive too. But yeah, we could be here all day looking at all the growing panic of everyone waking up to demographic decline.
Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus had a debate. Smith won it. And the overpopulation dystopias that have suffused science fiction for the last 75 years are as wrong as Communism.
Leftists seem to only believe in positive feedback.
The early part of that, predicting overpopulation was reasonable. At least if you approached it from the “if this goes on” mindset.
Post-war, especially 1950 and beyond, the pre-fertile death rate went WAY down. Taking the average number of children born, the trend curve was geometric.
At least some writers (RAH, for example) said that “Yes, it’s going to be crowded – but the human race will figure it out and cope, one way or another.”
https://fee.org/articles/billions-have-suffered-the-handmaids-tale-in-reverse-thanks-to-overpopulation-myths/
I find it enormously good fun in my own books – just about all set in the 19th century – to give the contemporary beliefs of good progressives a good kick in the pants as I pass, and to do so with an innocent look on my face and an explanation that after all, I am really only reflecting the authentic beliefs of the time in my characters. That marriage between a man and a woman was a good thing which most women desired above all, that her duty was to be a good wife and mother and support her husband in his livelihood. That love of country and patriotism was a good thing, and the US of A was the best thing since the invention of sliced bread … that and a hundred other little things.
Well then, take my jaded howling as laughter, because the only part of this I didn’t see coming was which witches they used. Marvel beat them by a few dozen decades anyway, having the Scarlet Witch marry an android and then use magic to have children, and I covered on my substack why that was a bad idea. Tch. They have no idea how irrelevant they are.
:rolls up sleeves: Time to get writing. I can’t do worse than the NuStarWars crowd has!
The Reader looks forward to enjoying the results of you rolling up your sleeves.
:tips hat: Thank you. I shall endeavor to please.
*Cheers!*
It is reported that Dave Filoni’s wife identifies as a witch.
Who did she turn into a newt?
Does she weigh more than a duck?
Bob Iger. He got better.
How the hell can you tell he got better?
He stopped licking his eyeball when giving interviews.
For the life of me I can’t understand why anyone would use eye of newt in a spell or potion, unless of course you are trying to fix a newt’s eye sight. Which brings up the question of why you would be trying to fix a newt’s eyesight in the first place?
<makes sign of aversion to strange story idea.
It’s from an Idea I am trying, a couple of elves from a magical world get displaced to a non magical world, they’re trying to find two other younger elves that were also displaced. The world is a non magical world, so the two other teenage girls from that world they meet and they try to guide the elves around to find the other two lost elves. When they start discussing magic the human girls bring up the old eye of newt tail of bat thing and the lead elf asks why anyone would steal the eyes of a newt or tail of bat to make magic and are aghast by the suggestion? That’s not how magic works, unless of course you are trying to repair a newts eye sight.
Phew! Good, you are already writing it…
There was a Heinlein story (was it Glory Road or Magic Inc. ?) where it was made clear that the various ingredients mentioned by Shakespeare in Macbeth were actually a mnemonic for something else. So at least in that view no newts were harmed in the making of the potion. That is of course all the newts that are fit to print.
Glory Road
😁
As part of a bargain.
Because the newt’s your friend, either because you befriended it or because your good friend turned into a newt, under curse, or to avoid a curse that does not affect newts, or what have you.
I think it’s funny that E.E.Smith (of all people) did a really good job of portraying a “matriarchy,” where biological women are simply, “persons,” biological males are, “males,” and considered a necessary evil and the society has some tech, but almost no art or music. The “persons,” are utterly humorless, literal-minded and convinced their way of life is the only perfect one.
Mind you, this is partly because there’s extreme sexual dimorphism – Lyranian males are hyper-aggressive, near-mindless dwarfs forming about 1% of the population. But when Kinnison asks his contact why the persons didn’t try breeding aggressiveness out of their males, she’s forced to admit, “We tried, but the race began to deteriorate.”
But other than servicing about 100 persons, males have no role in Lyranian life. And they’re snuffed as soon as they’ve filled their fatherhood quota.
The persons also hate the young, conventionally feminine woman who has inadvertently led Kinnison to Lyrane, along with the very concept of “female,” as opposed to, “person.”
Sounds like these ladies’ dream culture.
Doc Smith was a MUCH better writer, and a far more perceptive observer of society, than people realize. He recognized that Western Civilization had taken sick in the 1930s…almost nobody else had picked up on it.
I’ll add that “Second Stage Lensmen” is vastly underrappreciated. It’s a counterpoint to the planet-demolishing dramatics of “Gray Lensman”.
One of Smith’s Alien Lensman was very alien but Smith made “him” very relatable.
That would probably be Nadreck the Palainian. Of course Worsel and I a pretty weird just not as outre as Nadreck.
That may be my favorite book in the series. I read it first, because my dad left it out. I think, “Galactic Partol,” came next, then “Children of the Lens,” and then – oh, ecstasy! – I discovered I could order books via mail order and have them *deliverered*. I still remember when, “Triplanetary,” and, “First Lensman,” and “Gray Lensman,” came in the mail and I retreated to my room to devour them.
I really need to find time to re-read the Lensman series. It has been such a long time.
They’re now on Gutenburg, along with, “Masters of the Vortex.” The magazine serials have subtle differences from the paperbacks and I think they’re better.
The SF Book Club did a two-volume omnibus, but for reasons known only to God, they got a guy to write the introduction who thought Smith was a fascist. (Beats head on desk. My head, not his).
To the left EVERYONE is a fascist. When everyone is a fascist, no one is. Which prevents them looking at their own beliefs and policies.
They are very good at projection. It is the people who support the unholy union of government and nominally private oligarchical companies, and there “useful idiot” brownshirts in groups like Antifa and SJP that scream fascist the loudest, while emulating both the Italian and German fascist game plans step by step.
Being called a fascist by such morons is both slander and a badge of honor. F’em.
I had/have that set. My paperbacks were getting really worn as they were LONG out of print in the mid ’70s when I started finding them at used bookstores. Never read the preface I just wanted the stories, and my copies of Galactic Patrol and Gray Lensmen were seriously dog-eared and falling apart when I got them. after 2-3 readings and loaning them to various buddies, the paperbacks were in really BAD condition.
Glad you said “almost” nobody else, because that way my citing C. S. Lewis does not come as a counterexample to your thesis. Though That Hideous Strength was published in 1945, so Smith definitely got there first, while Lewis benefited from another decade+ of observing the trajectory of the world.
The Boskonians, being the only asexual intelligent race, had to pick a bisexual one for their front men. They wanted one where one sex was as close to superfluous as possible — reproduction only — but they did not care WHICH sex was.
I never liked Star Wars. Seeing it first-run in theaters, my initial reaction was, are you kidding? this isn’t science fiction! this is a bratty punk teen who is carted about the galaxy by a tag-team of over indulgent grandpa, an equally bratty girl and an arrestedly developed ship driver. Lets not even talk about the overgrown dog. The vaunted Imperial stormtroops who couldn’t hit their own butts with a blaster if it was, ahem six inches inserted? And they attack this giant space station, and he has to put on blinders to hit the target and use his FEELINGS?? Really?
I hated Alien too, but we’ll leave that one for another day.
Ah, but Lucas’ goal was just to create a 1940’s style Flash Gordon type serial with better effects. I had the same reaction you did when Star Wars came out and couldn’t understand why serious SF writers like Harlan Ellison celebrated it.
It took my wife to explain it to me. You see Disney had been in the grave (or cryostasis for the crypto minded) for over a decade. Disney used to put out G-rated family musicals and other wholesome fare at the rate of 3 or more movies per summer. The new leaders wanted to make films that weren’t for kids. If you look at the box office champs from 1976 Bugsy Malone, The Omen, Taxi Driver–not movies you could take the kids to. Star Wars was a good old wholesome shoot ’em up space adventure with a spunky space princess, a really menacing bad guy, a rogue hero love interest for the princess, and a young man finding his way to adulthood–all tried and true wholesome tropes. You could take your kids to it, and they could hiss at the big baddie, and cheer for the underdog heroes. (Also explains the otherwise inexplicable success of ET.)
It was not a serious drama unlike the Empire Strikes Back, which was a much more interesting film thanks to Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan I’m convinced. Then, of course, Lucas created the Ewoks to make millions with silly cuddly aliens, got bitter about his divorce, and turned Princess Leia from a spunky young woman into a damsel in distress in an eye-catching costume. At that point, we were done with Star Wars, and from what I hear, it’s only gotten worse from thee.
I darn near had a religious experience seeing it, but I’m also an E.E. Smith fan. When the Star Destroyer appeared, and appeared, and appeared, my response was, “My God, they got it right.”
Let’s also add it’s a very archetypal movie, and the next two films built in that. (The Lost Prince, hidden and raised in secret, guided by wise mentors, brought into the open to perform a task only he can do, temptation, a near fall, then fulfilling his potential).
Yup. The opening to Star Wars (the original) needs a theater to be really appreciated. It’s one of the two best openings in film. (FWIW, the open to Patton is the other).
Star Wars helped get me out of the funk I was in in 1977 over the dissolution of my 1st marriage.
Not a marriage going bad (obviously, I was only 17) – but I was having a bad time myself.
That was the thing about those three movies, actually (not really any of the other ones, though). They were fun, and were good people winning out over bad people, however implausibly.
2001, Silent Running, etc. had better production values – but they were not fun. Rather misanthropic, actually. Certainly not “human wave.”
I had the opposite experience. I had already read the Smiths, (EE and Cordwainer), and a few hundred other writers, plus got blown away by “2001” in the big theater re-release beforehand, so “Star Wars” was just a fun summer movie. It ranks with “Top Gun” in my personal ratings.
Besides “2001”, “The Expense” was the other top visual experience that met my expections of what the genre could be. But it’s really not fair to compare Lucas to higher quality writers and directors. But then again there aren’t any “2001” or “The Expense” toys.
Same, coupled with my not being really into movies, period, and…. well. It was okay.
I’ll be honest I understood it in the vein of the Republic serials and Flash Gordon and was overawed by it at 16. I will admit that 19 year old Carrie Fischer prancing about sans support garments appealed to the prurient side of a 16 year old boy’s psyche. With its Force and other mystical accouterments it was clearly fantasy not even soft Scifi, but given everything that Hollywood was giving to us at that time for Scifi was craptastick Dystopia like Logan’s Run or Planet of the Apes this was a MAJOR improvement. You take what you can get. Also its innovative Special effects (all of course practical) were jaw dropping.
I was just a year older – but, oh, YEAH! Dress (or lack thereof) aside, though, I liked her character better in that one. Wrapping her chains around Jabba’s throat didn’t do all that much more than distract him, but it was such a badass move!
Unless she was subconsciously running a Force choke at the same time. I could see it either way.
Oh, true. For some reason, didn’t even think of that…
Because it would be completely undetectable?
I saw it as a kid, and gobbled it up. It was fun, easy to play-act in backyards, and had just the right blend of drama and scares for someone my age. The lack of kissing? Meh, I was too young for kissing.
Exactly. You were the perfect demographic for Star Wars. I was trying to break into SF publishing at the time, and it annoyed me greatly originally because I haughtily viewed it as trivializing SF.
I was too old, in the sense that I’d seen better special effects in m mind and the story wasn’t “enough” for me. But I’m weird.
I was the same.
It really struck a cord with those that were a few years younger and usually less read in the genre or just not readers at all. They had all the toys, I had bookshelves.
But then again, growing up the the country, we were more likely to want guns and dogs than toys.
I think part of this is that I didn’t have TV to the age of eight. I think it conditioned me to like books more. The movies I like — say Galaxy Quest, or Men in Black — have enough jokes/references in dialogue to keep me tuned in.
Weirdly, I loved Star Trek and tolerated Space 1999 which I KNOW is wretched. The difference is that I ot to watch those while reading and usually embroidering, so the level of engagement required was WAY lower.
Space 1999….
What might have been. it was originally planned as “UFO:2000” a sequel to the earlier “UFO”. SHADO becomes overt, with a renewed and greater organ-harvesting aliens threat. That actually would have been a rather awesome setup for a Sci Fi show. Alas…
The “Mark IX Hawk” from one 1999 episode would have been the “Interceptor” replacement. They would have based on the moon-orbiting station wrecked during the 1999 “Breakaway” episode.
Why, yes, I was a fan…. (grin)
So was I. Yes, there was Space:1999 Fandom. Yes, I knew it was, ahem, not very good. But I enjoyed it anyway.
I didn’t know there was fandom, other than my 8th grade class… 😀
More wretched was Lost in Space – but that show, I was at the right age to absolutely love. (Okay, definitely identified with Will Robinson.)
You and me both—we didn’t get a boob-toob until I was nearly eleven, by Dad’s choice. Now even my pocket Screen (the phone I’m typing this on) is more often an extension of the bookshelf or the magazine rack—or of the writing computer—than of the telly.
Hand waggle. I was a voracious SF reader long before Star Wars. But it was fun. (No, I didn’t have the toys, being a teenager. I did want a real light saber, though. Definitely a good thing I couldn’t have one, at that point in my life.)
I have a picture, from Christmas 1978, of myself (3) and my little brother (1.5) in footie pajamas, holding the old flashlight style, black and yellow lightsaber toys, with an inflatable R2-D2 weeble-wobble in the background.
StarWars was bigger than life, and told a story that captured my tiny little imagination. (Not that I wanted to grow up to be Leia, I wanted to be Han Solo and drive the cool ship and shoot things with my blaster.) SW holds a special place in my heart and in my childhood, and I really, really hate to see what’s been done to it.
After suffering through such uplifting works as Silent Running and Logan’s Run, Star Wars had the nerve to be a fun movie. (For a somewhat snarky take on SW, look up Pallet Swap Ninja’s Princess Leia’s Stolen Death Star Plans, with the plot illustrated by Sargent Pepper tunes with, er, somewhat changed lyrics.)
The radio commercial for the movie was brilliant; I heard it the Friday when it opened and figured it was going to be a fun movie. So did a couple thousand other geeks in San Jose, so I saw the second showing that afternoon. Watched it a few times (usually in theater; I was surprised to see I still have a VHS tape of it, but I really don’t trust the player any more), and it was still fun.
It ain’t a great movie, but it stole enough from the precursors to make it worth watching.
Made it through two of the prequels; at least the first in a theater. Pretty sure I saw the second in the theater, but life was getting interesting at the time. Saw #3 at 2X on DVD. One of these days, I’ll watch it at normal speed.
The Palette-Swap Ninja stuff is some of the most brilliant work I’ve ever seen. Hysterically funny, highly recommended.
For the prequels, it’s usually better to watch a fan-edit like The Phantom Edit. It shows what a debt we have to the editors of the original trilogy.
Marcia Lucas for the win, and most of the profits after the divorce, the timing of which also explains Return of the Jedi’s bad edit.
And the prequels suck becuase by then Lucas was a SooperGenius and nobody he would let hang around could tell him “George, that’s stupid, do this instead…”
I watched the prequels on DVD at home, just to say I’d done them. The visual effects were great. Plot and actors? Blah. I was rooting for the lava just so the whining would stop.
I decided to not look for a DVD of Ep 2, what with Lucas’s mucking with details. Dammit, Han shot first!
Er, Episode 4, not 2. Long day.
Han shot, period. 😉
Seriously, Greedo’d already made it clear what was happening next…
Absolutely! Preemptive self defense against a clear and confirmed threat is self defense. Even in the Empire.
The fact that Han shooting the guy who was pointing a blaster at him bothered him enough to mess with it explains much about George Lucas, or whatever pod person replaced him in the stretch between Return of the Jedi and those reissues.
And then there was the ‘Jabba, the Slimfast Years’ scene….
Certainly explains why he felt comfortable killing off near all the Jedi without giving any of them a chance to fight back.
Yep. That was obvious. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have lived that long.
I got dragged to the 1st prequal by a “friend”, almost walked out, and refused to see another.
“Meesha, want a Red Stripe…”
RCPETE said
Honestly don’t bother you have the plot points and even that is a bit painful.
Oh and do NOT for any reason view the sequel trilogy, It makes Revenge of the Sith look like Casablanca …
I think I got suckered into watching the first via a podracing game that was a freebie install on the shiny new Pentium 2 I had purchased. Thought the movie would be worth it. Nope.
(Further thought: I think I saw Episode 2 on DVD, rather most of it. Not sure I saw the second half. Not sure I want to. I have <i>Return of the King</i> in my DVD TBW stack.)
The parodies around TPM were more fun than the movie. (Recalls a segment from the AfterY2K web comic: “Anakin does the queen.” PG rated, and Jar Jar got portrayed as a Sith. Weird Al’s “The Saga Begins” was also fun.)
Alien? hopefully not Aliens, the 2nd movie. Alien could have been better. Aliens was a typical military cluster, by the numbers.
I saw Star Wars in my third year of college. I loved it. Sure I could (and still can) discuss the lousy engineering, bad science, silly tactics, and mostly bad swordsmanship. Didn’t really matter. It was King Arthur meets Buck Rogers in the 25th Century with a healthy admixture of John Wayne westerns and The Three Musketeers.
I suspend disbelief all the time for the sake of enjoying a good story well told. Do I come here and lecture Sarah on Thermodynamics? Conservation of energy? Mass/Energy equivalence? Nope because, despite what you may have heard, I’m not a complete asshole. I just read the shifter stories for what they are — stories.
Yes, Disney has effed up Star Wars beyond all reason. The fat dancing girl at Jabba’s palace was when I realized just how bad it had become and it is only getting worse. So Disney destroyed Star Wars. I’ll deal with that but I’m not letting a bunch woke fellatrices ruin my enjoyment of what came before.
My brother who is older than I loved it. I think it might have to do with how visual one is. I’m not very not for entertainment.
I built a Lego X-wing from 1977-available bits and pieces. (about 9″ long). I made detailed drawings of how to build it, and sent the plans to Lego. Got back “We don’t do war toys”.
lol.
I wish I still had that letter from Lego. Would have been an epic conversation piece.
I do still have the model somewhere in storage. Bricks, plates, some angled bricks, and two hinges. More of a “K-wing” because only the uppers moved. But quite recognizable. Not bad at all for a kid.
When the ‘space set’ came out, they had pieces that would let you make the Falcon, with a little ingenuity. We’d all make one, and then ‘fly’ them around the house ‘shooting’ at each other.
The guy who does the ACOUP blog showed off the present from his wife, the multi-thousand piece Star Destroyer. I looked at the item on the ‘zon and figured it was so far out of my budget it was crazy, and I don’t have the 3′ x 2’ space to show it off.
OTOH, the Lego Apollo 11 moon lander…
They (Lego) must have changed. I built a model of the USS Enterprise (the floating one, not the one with warp drive), and won a ninth place prize when I was, hmm, somewhere between 8 and 10. Along with about 10,000 other kids, of course.
May I make A Modest Proposal? Burn the socialists and anti-Semites to generate electricity!
As long as it doesn’t interfer with the plan to turn pedophiles into compost, the addition carbon will be good for the soil.
Woodchipper goes “BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPT!”
I had in mind harnessing them up to cars. Convertibles, especially. Put the top down, ply a buggy whip mercilessly.
They would be exercising for self-improvement, right? As an added benefit, it would get all the bicycles out of traffic.
Sadly some of the SOBs would probably like that…
You know, I had a realization just a day or two ago which I think illuminates the whole social breakdown we’re beginning to see.
The wokista cohort really isn’t a political or social movement. It’s a religious one. That’s why they can’t talk coherently or rationally to anyone not part of their faith–they don’t see us as being rational people like they believe themselves to be, who just have different opinions about various topics. Instead, we are blasphemers, evil, devils incarnate. We must be expunged from the world for the good of all creation. It’s a very extreme, fundamentalist religion. It would also be a very violent one if it allowed itself to be, and it might try that at some point. But till now it tries to distinguish itself from the evil others (us) as being better than we are and eschewing the violence they believe we perpetrate constantly.
If you think about it, this take on the woke mindset explains an AWFUL lot of what we see in the world today.
…Now I want to link to all Foxfier’s “Heresy!” memes….
G Nice!
I seriously got Twitter *just* so that I could spam memes. ^.^
Ooo, a new one!
Been saying that for a while. The fanatics in all these groups are religious zealots, filled with a sense of their own righteousness.
That would explain the lefties I saw wishing each other “Happy Pride”. It’s a very creepy religion, masquerading as secular.
OK, that takes me back to the eeriest episodes of The Third Eye I ever saw. “Happy day” was the chant of the people who were caught in the loop curse on the village.
Yep, nobody ever asks, “Why are you *proud* of having a particular sexual preference?” Why is that the center of your life?”
“Pride,” is very different from, “I just want to be left alone.”
The Leftroids want to be the Bene Gesserit.
lol
Okay, I am a Bridgerton fan, and have always approached it on the “this is an interesting AU fantasy world” (which, let’s be honest, 99.9% of Regency romances ARE anyway). But…I had no idea that the producer truly believes this. That’s just…so stupid, I can’t even. Then again, there’s the group of idiots that insist Cleopatra was black, because they probably can’t spell Macedonian, let alone know what it is…
Go back half a million years, everybody’s ancestors were African. Everything since then has been local variations.
I would bet cash money that any one of those idiots would actually be DEEPLY offended by this 😀
Indeed. After all, they’re the ones who foam at the mouth when you say that Elon Musk and Charlize Theron are African-American.
Probably. Much of modern leftist racial theory is looking for excuses to discriminate against certain racial groups.
And I find that the “white” ones in particular secretly (or not-so-secretly) feel they are ackshually superior to everyone else, and everyone else requires their so-wise guidance.
Note the absolute condescending stupidity of classes they hold in Germany/Europe to teach Middle Eastern “immigrants” not to rape women (and similar crap here in the US, yes). Because of course, the only reason those men do that is because they just don’t know any better and are ignorant children, not grown men from a culture that seeks to dominate those alien to their own culture/religion, and who view/treat women as lesser and a commodity. While I despise any culture that has that attitude (whether it be towards women, children, or anyone, really), it is NOT because they just don’t know any better. They are thinking, intelligent adults capable of making their own choices, and it is beyond ridiculous of the (usually white) leftists to believe that they are just poor dumb brown people who must be taught better. If those immigrants want to assimilate, they will either choose to do so of their own accord–or need to be made so unwelcome if they do not that they either choose to or leave.
Leftism is sociopathy by choice. The Leftroid matters. Sometimes the Lefttroid’s associates matter. The “others” are meat puppets, entertaining and/or useful as desired. Never seriously valued beyond the two categories.
Malignant form of “white man’s burden.”
Saw an amusing story last night about a black couple in Detroit. A white savior stopped them on the street to tell them to be very careful – all of those MAGA people were swarming.
They were on their way to see Trump speak.
Unless you read “America Before,” by Graham Hancock, where he proposes that human civilization began in the South America and spread to Africa. The cradle of human life is the Amazon.
I have come to believe that every trope that I was taught as a child, from “Lucy” in Africa to the idea that hunter gatherers came across the land bridge and wiped out the megafauna in America with stone tipped spears, is subject to grave suspicion.
Being suspicious of everything kept me from myocarditis, for example.
That’s a…fantasy? A delusion? Whatever it is, it’s not supported by any of the evidence. Leave aside all the hominid fossils and consider the animals butchered with stone tools in Africa more than 2 million years ago. There’s no evidence of human presence in South America prior to 20,000 years ago. This Hancock is as silly as a Flerfer.
Be careful. Recent evidence from the Chiquihuite Cave in central Mexico does lend support to pre-Clovis human habitation in the Americas. Maybe as far back as 33K years. Yes, it is controversial and may turn out to be wrong but the close agreement between radiocarbon dating and optically stimulated luminescence is pretty compelling.
That said, the notion of humans originating in the Amazon Basin (if it’s the guy IO am thinking about) has less support than Velikovsky, von Daniken, or the Exodus story.
Sounds like my favorite bad movie, 10,000 BC.
And a lot of other stuff, way south, yep. I haven’t evaluated closely, but there’s enough of it hitting that, well…..
Australia got colonized before the Americas. The difference between 20K, 33K, and 50K is so very minimal when talking about these timelines. Even if just considering Homo sapiens it’s just a blip
It’s actually very recent evidence. At least of VERY ancient civilizations in the Amazon. I’ve been seeing it cross my radar. Extensive road work, etc. So much for “this forest has always been here>”
The recent finds might change the “settle” point by ten or twenty thousand years or so. So far, no one has produced half-million year old hominid fossils or tool evidence in South America.
There may have been several “North American Arrivals” in the distant past, that either failed to survive or where the survivors were absorbed by subsequent arrivals.
When one considers the “Ra II” voyage of Thor Heyerdahl, on a bundled-reed raft crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and Kon-Tiki crossing much of the Pacific , it doesn’t take much tech (at all) to cross surprisingly large distances.
I’m not sure a lot of archeology has been done in the Amazon or, and this is very important, that it could be trusted if it were, by reason of Brazilian culture. Seriously, look up recent sightings of dragons, and it’s all Brazil.
Anyway, it might be open, simply because the hominid finds are being blown out of the water every other week seems like, because we find ARTIFACTS that are older than what’s supposedly pre human.
So, you know…. it’s possible the carefully constructed time line is insane and one of those 20th century things and we should perhaps hang loose and see?
On the Amazon the “cities” etc is all aereal photogrpahy, not local. I really DON’T think you can trust local, and unlike African tribes, they won’t just give the permission and step out of the way. They’d want their “scientists” to do it.
Its entirely possible “humans evolved in Africa” is looking for the keys under the street light.
Note, I’m not saying it IS, but it could well be. There have been some seismic shifts just with things discovered that coudn’t be denied, and I swear to you in ten years we’ll have pushed modern humans back to a million year old.
40k years is a really long time, and there’s solid evidence now for hoomans with pointy sticks in this hemisphere that far back.
Recent confirmed Dragon sighting:
There is DNA evidence for the last two distinct waves, with the tippy-tip of South America people having the strongest older wave traces.
There is no reason why there could not have been more prior waves for which they haven’t yet teased out the traces, or that prior waves caught a killer crud or lived on the coasts on seafood and got Tsunamied or whatever, falling below the viability threshold.
Kind of like how, when the Polynesians first settled Hawaii, they found stone walls and artifacts even though all the islands were unpopulated, yielding the Menehune stories to explain that stuff.
The ones who blame the extinction of western hemisphere megafauna on “Evil Hoomans with their Pointy Sticks!!!” Never seem to have an explanation for the coincident widespread tiny melted glass bits across only the western hemisphere.
Sure, it could have been “Ever since the fire in the sky there’s only those three Mammoth left – we could let them breed more, but instead let’s eat them before we starve!!”, but the pointy stick theory fails to explain the non-extinction of the same critters in Asia.
There were likely several factors involved in the extinction of western hemisphere megafauna but I suspect that human hunters were a factor.
But as you said, megafauna survived longer in the eastern hemisphere.
Megafaunal extinction gets worse the farther away from Africa you get. Eurasian megafauna had some experience with earlier waves of humans before hungry H. Sapiens showed up, the Americas and Australia didn’t.
Always like to remind people that the great horse culture of the Amerindian plains would not have existed but for Europeans coming over to the Western Hemisphere, because horses had gone extinct, and were absent until reintroduced by Europeans.
That bit of history is of course utterly ignored by the “Turtle Island” crowd.
Which is why the myths of sooper-advanced civilizations thousands of years ago are bunk. We spread invasive species everywhere we went, both deliberately (cats, dogs, horses, pigs, chickens, cows) and not (rats, insect pests and diseases). None of the above existed in the American continents before Columbus sailed here.
Polynesian sailors might have spread chickens to South America before Columbus and took sweet potatoes back home with them. They left behind some of their DNA in the bloodlines of Native South American too
”…left behind some of their DNA…”
Sailors.
Camels are native to the Americas too, Llamas are camelids. If Horse and camels hadn’t crossed the Bearing Straight opposite of people they would have gone extinct. Imagine a human history without horses and camels.
And some of what is kicking up “great past civilizations” unrest again is that there is some seriously weird stuff in the genetics of both horses and cats, implying taming, then referalizing a few times.
Look, so many things are opening up at once, it’s a bit of wild west. It’s great for writers, because I can justify ANYTHING at this point. But for real science…. it’s going to take longer than I have remaining in this world for things to shake up. Which annoys the living daylights out of me, because I’d like to know.
I really think good writer(s), Iike the Gears could take the knowledge that Amazonia was once home to a flourishing civilization and the fact that Polynesian sailors reached South America before Columbus and spin it into a really good couple of novels. Or just go full on what-if alt-history.
We were already being indoctrinated in government schools to believe that humankind is destructive and bad, back in the 70’s. Probably before. I was taught that hunter gatherers with pointy sticks came across the land bridge during the Ice Age and wiped out mammoths, giant sloths, the short-faced bear, the giant beaver, the dire wolves, the saber toothed tiger, (takes a deep breath), and the mastodons.
Now we know the “silly” Graham Hancock was right about the Younger-Dryas meteor event that, gosh, happened right when the above list of mega fauna were wiped out all at once in the North Americas.
Be suspicious. As Graham writes in “America Before,” the scientists that debunked the Clovis Point theory of America’s settlement simply dug further down than where they found the Clovis Points, and found much, much older evidence of human occupation.
And if you believe humans are a problem in this world, wake up to the poison the left has been feeding your during your whole life.
Without taking a side in this particular bit, I will note that even Poul Anderson bought that idea.
“Clovis first” has been dead for years, if not decades, but I still think the impact humans had on on the megafauna extinction was huge, (but not total), because it happened in other places outside of the Americas. Africa still has big animals because that’s where we evolved, and they learned to stomp two legged pointy stick first and ask questions later. Eurasian animals are effected less because the they had experience with previous waves of humans hunters, erectus, denisovan, neanderthals etc. It can be hard for modern people to grasp but animals can be astonishingly naive and vulnerable if they’ve never been exposed to humans before. The Maori have stories about being to walk right up to a Moa and club it to death. Visitors to Mauritius wrote that if you wanted to catch a bunch of dodos all you had to do was grab one and get it squawking and all the others would come up to you to see what was going on. Even Charles Darwin lamented being able to get close to and touch animals on certain isolated islands he visited and noted less scrupulous people would take advantage of this.
The pointy stick theory also fails to explain the absence of human activity along the eastern seaboard for a chunk of time right after the ash layer
“…ashes, ashes, we all fall down…”
The Egyptian government Hated that mini-series that had Cleopatra as black.
Didn’t they file a lawsuit over it?
Don’t remember that. Wonder what came of it?
They did, and if you believe their news paper were demanding 2 billion dollars over it. Our Archologists and historians may be amused that Hawass (He is apparently a persistent pain in various portions of the anatomy) came under a fair bit of fire from the pro-black-Cleopatra crowd for not being willing to consider that Cleopatra might be black.
I haven’t been able to find the results of it. I suspect that it didn’t go anywhere.
It might be tough for them to find a venue where the current guys in charge could get standing for an insult to the last pre-Roman rule queen.
No doubt a “Hawaiian Judge” might be found to Writ some topical incoherent idiocy on the matter.
From a Hawaiian judge wouldn’t it be a Tropical Incoherency?
“Hey! How about a nice Hawaiian Putsch?”
Cleopatra was almost pure Macedonian Greek, and the Arab Muslim colonizers who rule Egypt today and oppress the native Egyptian Copts are upset that she’s being portrayed by an Black American woman. Okay.
Arabs look down on black Africans, to put it mildly. So saying that Cleopatra was that kind of African was taken as a gross insult.
I’ve heard that too. It’s always hilarious when the leftist white savior complex runs headfirst in third world unabashed racism.
Yes, that’s how I approached it too, until I stumbled on her running her mouth online over and over and over.
Thankfully, I have NOT seen those, and now know to avoid them like the plague so I can continue to enjoy the fluffy nonsense 😀
(I mean. This IS the woman who did Grey’s Anatomy, which is a piece of utter, ridiculous drek that has probably less than 0% accuracy on either the medical front OR healthy human relationships front. So, you know, perfect for doing something based on Regency bodice-rippers, less so for anything resembling emotional intelligence :D)
Yeah, like you I noticed the same thing with British mysteries. Don’t the advocates of cultural marxism realize that by portraying the past as a racial paradise, they’re undermining their own argument? That is rhetorical of course.
As to your point about tribalism, I remember a Bradbury story from the 50’s or early 60’s positing that we had encountered an alien species. The white narrator didn’t understand why the black wait-staff was celebrating (I said it was the fifties) until the character explained that now humanity could come together without worrying about race because the identity as a human was much more important.
It was Frederick Pohl 1967 “The day after the Martians came”.
I thought it was Frederick Brown not Pohl.
Thanks!
I’m not that big a fan of the Agatha Christie novels, but one of the PBS Miss Marple series (Geraldine McEwan’s) seemed to have an extraordinary number of lesbian finales and/or relationships in the middle. After all that, I started to warm to the Hercule Poirot stories, especially as played by David Suchet.
Christie did, in fact, have lesbian couples in at least a few of her novels. A Murder Is Announced comes immediately to mind. There was nothing overt or virtue-signally about it, but it was there.
Dorothy Sayers’ Accidental Death has a couple of implied lesbian threads. The victim is the surviving member of a pair of “best friends,” who told everyone they weren’t interested in getting married and ran a successful horse-breeding farm together, and there is a young woman who develops a crush on another woman and fantasizes about living a similar life with her. .
I’m sure it’s all over British mystery fiction of the time. But since the complaint was about Christie adaptations, I just wanted to note that including such was not entirely unfounded in her work. Granted, I’m certain that they’re overdoing it and clumsily, but unlike black royalty in Britain, it has some basis in the original texts.
Yes, but they decided that _every_ Marple book had to have lesbians, and _none_ of them could be murderers. (IIRC.)
Fair. Though in A Murder Is Announced, one of the couple is a victim, and the other is not the murderer. Again, not defending, just pointing out that it’s not sui generis.
That one they might or MIGHT NOT be lesbians. It’s the Nemesis? Where the Lesbian kills her adopted daughter who wants to get married, and pins the murder on the boy the daughter loved that’s inescapable.
Um, in A Murder Is Announced, if they aren’t lesbians (granted that it’s only implied), then the one’s reaction when the other is killed, and more so when she learns who killed her and why, doesn’t make nearly as much sense.
THIS.
The series …. no. Like the chick who continued Poirot novels and made it all about gay. It was so bad I returned the book!
I mean, having the non-original author continue a series is kind of always a bad idea. Even the James Bond continuations went from “not at all bad” to “James Bond gets taken hostage at EuroDisney and forced to ride one (or more?) of the rides, and then tells the park administrator later how good the ride(s) was (were).”
Oof! I read the first couple (Licence Renewed) and they were OK, but didn’t look for any more. I’m glad I missed the descent into greyslop.
I have an omnibus of the earlier Bond novels, though it came out when Moonraker was a movie, so that novel wasn’t included. As memory serves, it was enjoyable, even excluding a mild desire to see the London mayor’s office getting a missile attack. (Hmm, can’t recall if it had a warhead. Makes note to look for eBook of it, and Thunderball.)
And Moonraker is on Kindle for $1.53, while many of the others are $8.99 to $10.99.
Interestingly, From Russia, With Love is not available in the US for Kindle. No idea why.
That is strange; I was able to buy it a couple years ago and it’s on my Kindle now.
So, because he died more than 50 years ago, and prior to 1971, everything Fleming published is now public domain in Canada.
The original Fleming novels are a bit variable, but his prose style is far, far better than he ever got credit for, and he is due for a re-evaluation as a writer.
Original Authors do some stuff like this, too.
Series Decay, it’s a thing…..
If the author does it, I have far less problem with it. But estates virtually always tarnish the authors legacy in search of the quick buck.
I’d break myself in two, even though it would be VERY bad for my mind, to write sequels to Heinlein’s juveniles. But chances of getting the chance are…. zero.
Very few of them are really open to sequels. I mean the characters survive, but the story told in each is tied off, and any “sequel” would be a totally different story with the same characters.
Not that I wouldn’t chop an arm off for the chance…
Have Spacesuit….
Yeah, there’s LOTS of room to play with that one. But still, different story.
Definite difference of view, there– too many years of authors Jossing stuff, breaking the story because it hurts someone.
Farmer in the Sky could be continued without much changing.
Starman Jones V2.0 would be rather different but could work as a couple of followup novels.
Like I said, not impossible, but most of the stories are tied off very well. Tunnel in the Sky could follow the main character making his way through the society presented in the opening chapters, or possibly going out to pioneer for real, but those are both very different stories than the original. Citizen of the Galaxy 2 could follow Thorby’s attempts to manage the company he inherited but, again, while you can bring the anti-slavery angle back into it, and revisit the family ship he spent time on, and so forth, it’s a very different story.
So, again, not impossible per se, but the books would, mostly, and of necessity, be quite different than their antecedents.
So far as the juveniles go – I think that a sequel could be written for any of them.
But it would be very, very hard, if not impossible, to make them “growing up” stories.
Sayers’ estate had Jill Patton Walsh finish Sayers’ last Lord Peter book (“Thrones, Dominions,”) where she worked to Sayers’ finished outline. She then did three other “sequels,” all using Sayers’ notes and essay on where she would have taken the Wimseys if she had continued the series. Walsh was faithful, on the whole, to those notes and did her best to duplicate the tone. Only, “Thrones, Dominions,” comes close, though, “The Atterbury Emeralds,” is enjoyable in its own right.
There are some continuations that are not dreadful. I feel sure Brandon Sanderson did Robert Jordan’s series some justice, but then again, I never cared for Robert Jordan, so I’m not the one to judge. Similar situation, though, in that he was working fro Jordan’s outline, and was a fan.
There was somebody whose name I don’t recall (and am not googling just now) who did an official continuation of the Nero Wolfe books after Stout’s passing. They were… fine. Not Stout, but not offensive, though only one little detail felt both right and clever. (Nero had the elevator fixed so it did not squeak anymore, to Archie’s consternation, since the squeaking was a signal he unconsciously relied on.)
Sandberg….? Goldberg? No, they weren’t fine. Both men were leftist, but the continuator was a PREACHING leftist.
I read them long enough ago that that does not remain in my memory.
The whole reason Christie killed Poirot was so no one could continue to write him.
Talk about ignoring the author’s wishes. Sheesh.
Estates do not honor the original author’s wishes, with very few exceptions. And those exceptions do not last beyond the death of the author’s children. Like Tolkien.
I assume that’s why Amazon did Da Rangs of Powah. Sorry, JRR and Christopher.
Partly. Christopher’s death greatly diminished the resistance they had faced from the estate, because the Tolkien descendent who is in charge of it now basically sees it as a source of money for himself.
The title I was thinking of was, “Unnatural Death.” My bad. But yes, it did show up in period, usually in a very “discreet,” fashion.
I’m afraid the only Sayers I’ve read is Murder Must Advertise, and I’ve long meant to correct that lack.
Highly recommended. Some are better than others, all are, at least, decent. For a bunch of Lord Peter in small bites, there’s Lord Peter, a collection of short stories.
I have the short stories (offered as a PBS promotion decades ago) as well as a book club edition of The Nine Tailors. I don’t recall ever reading that book, so the physical TBR stack just got a little higher.
The Nine Tailors is one of her finest books. That’s a favorite, along with Gaudy Night, Clouds of Witness, Unnatural Death and Busman’s Honeymoon.
I’ll second the recommendation. (And the Sayers’ Montageu Egg stories aren’t bad either.)
Georgette Heyer wrote a number of mysteries, and the one she considered her best*, Penhallow, had a couple of the relatives coded as gay/lesbian for the times. (Male was the whole “limp-wrist” and fancy dress type, while the female was butch.)
*I certainly don’t. The character with the most integrity of the whole sordid bunch was driven to suicide. Chalk it up to the “realism” of the day, which decided that fiction couldn’t be true if it were uplifting.
yeah. I hated that book.
My mom has them all, but I never felt any desire to read Heyer’s mysteries. There’s only one of her historicals that didn’t bore me to tears (an Infamous Army, maybe? Can’t remember the title, but I know it was a Napoleonic war story). The Regency romances are where it’s at. Pure joy. Every couple/three years I spend a few months reading through all of them again.
I’m crossing my fingers and ordering the latest seasons of Vera and Midsomer Murders. We watched all that PBS had shown, and have never-seen shows in the queue. Some of the obligatory adverts for new Brit-Mysteries look like they were taking South Park’s KK advice to heart. Sigh.
The British “creative class” has been insane for quite some time, but seem to be working strenuously to make the old idiocies seem tame by comparison. There are no words for how disappointed I was when I learned that Stephen Moffat contributed a script to Nurse What (formerly Doctor Who).
Roku and other streaming services have all the Midsomer Murders on them, other than the current season. Bribox as well but Roku is free for most of them. They also are starting to carry more of them, A touch of Frost, etc.
Streaming isn’t in the cards. Satellite via Dish has limited bandwidth, and their non-sat broadband isn’t in play out here. Yet. Fiber is available, and our neighbors have it, but it’s a lot of cable to be buried to link up the house.
I did a 2 year re-commit for Dish (worth $20 a month), but after that, I’ll look into Starlink.
Most sights you can stream on your PC.
I technically could, but can’t afford it. My basic bandwidth is 50gB per month between 2AM and 8AM, and 10gB per month the rest of the time. A movie might be 5gig.
The last I looked, addtional bandwidth cost $10/gig in case of overflow. Nope. (OTOH, when I’m traveling, I’ll be happy to use their bandwidth. Seldom watch long videos, but a few minutes here and there fits with the basic WiFi allotment.)
You know, I had a realization just a day or two ago which I think illuminates the whole social breakdown we’re beginning to see.
The wokista cohort really isn’t a political or social movement. It’s a religious one. That’s why they can’t talk coherently or rationally to anyone not part of their faith–they don’t see us as being rational people like they believe themselves to be, who just have different opinions about various topics. Instead, we are blasphemers, evil, devils incarnate. We must be expunged from the world for the good of all creation. It’s a very extreme, fundamentalist religion. It would also be a very violent one if it allowed itself to be, and it might try that at some point. But till now it tries to distinguish itself from the evil others (us) as being better than we are and eschewing the violence they believe we perpetrate constantly.
If you think about it, this take on the woke mindset explains an AWFUL lot of what we see in the world today.
Yes, this… maybe a secular faith instead of a sacred one, but surely a faith and not a gentle or happily co-existent one. “Cult” is unkind but not inaccurate, maybe applicable in the full, classic H. P. Lovecraft sense too.
This could also explain the (otherwise extreme) reactions to people like Elon Musk now or Donald Trump then, as he turned the corner from pop-culture presence to political figure. No true believer likes an apostate to the faith; and the zealous convert absolutely hates the living embodiment of the possibility he, too, may wake up one day and Just Get Over It likewise.
I agree with this approximately 179.9 percent. My best high school friend was from a fundamentalist family on the Bill Gothard/Bob Jones axis. A lot of the things I saw in that family, I see writ larger and more toxically in today’s left.
I learned about virtue signaling in 1990, when she picked up an album called “The Innocent Age”, sniffed “There’s no such thing,” and dropped it, with this weird “aren’t I being a good girl?” vibe to her body language. It just took someone ELSE to articulate what it was.
The fact those two turned, also tells you the cult is one the wane.
There are a lot of costume fans who watch Bridgerton for the pretty stuff and laugh at the racial stuff – or just assume it is set in some alternative Earth. I haven’t seen it and have no interest so I can’t say more.
I read the books back when I read modern romance. I have no interest in the series; I really dislike racebending.
Yeah, choice of magical thinking is a bit of an important thing. Among other effects, peace.
One set or pattern of magical thinking makes you tend to assume objective truth, and a rational knowable universe.
Another set, you think any spell is an admissible way of manipulating surroundings, and effective, so long as you have consensus. They don’t have any way of ruling out that any particular disappointment is not ‘bad’ people witching them. It is then easiest to assume bad people witching one, and that the answer is to counter spell them, or murder them, or both.
If you have one theory of magic, that claims carefully and exactly that X spell is possible, and Y spell impossible, the theories of magical action that you formulate by living your life can be tested against that.
If you have no theory, because you are certain of the theory that no magic can occur, then you have no basis for discarding the emotionally important theories of magical action that you find yourself convinced of.
This gets a wee bit important when it comes to theories of behavior.
If you start from the individual assumption, then you can build reasonably sound theories by focusing on information transfers, and choices.
But, what if you start from the assumption that the fundamental unit of people is larger than a person? It is very easy to go from there to a model that has an analogy in computer science.
That analogy is understanding a network of computers, with no understanding of ‘information content of signals’, and no understanding of ‘number of operations to do…’ . clicky buttons and blinky ligths on the magic box.
These people have a consensus that they can use the label ‘not magic’, but that does not mean that they are not barbaric savages running on superstition.
There is also substantial reason to think that they are a minority, and a majority of people do not think that the spells of the communists are that important, because no magic can be more powerful than Jesus.
They do still feel very strongly about ti. Like, they may be very convinced that racism is real, and a problem for them personally, because someone told them about racism when they were very young, much younger than beign equipped to reason about much.
Our guilty pleasure of late has been BritBox – I mostly found their treatment of race (and alphabet people) pretty good – seldom seemed gratuitous box-checking, even though fairly common (exception was Hope Street – I had to give up.) ‘Death in Paradise’ was very comfortable that way (and the formulaic nature was actually fun.)
We’ve had BritBox, but switched over to Acorn after having watched most of what we wanted to see. Up until the last couple of seasons the race thing wasn’t too bad. But it seems like the last couple of seasons of nearly everything is interracial and/or gay/non-binary.
Yeah, Hope Street was hopeless. Started well but (vomit emoticon.)
The various incarnations of ‘Death in Paradise’ have been ok – set in the Caribbean, so interracial is normal, and that’s exactly how it was treated, as just people. Alphabet was occasionally introduced but not as some kind of heroic character. Father Brown was at similar, though without the Caribbean setting, but the random race/alphabet characters were generally just characters, and not flagrantly virtue signalling box checking. Before that we watched ‘New Tricks’ and ‘Silent Witness’ and others.
The Father Brown series diverged so far from the original stories by G. K. Chesterton that, well, let me put it this way. Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers movie was a more faithful adaptation of its original source material.
And don’t get me started on what the BBC did to Cadfael.
If you’re interested in a good Father Brown adaptation, may I recommend this one? Alec Guinness looks a little odd without the Obi Wan beard, particularly in certain lighting, but I still found it a delightful movie with the *best* Flambeau I’ve ever seen. Granted, even they weren’t able to get the height right – the book character is both enormous and acrobatic – but I’ll forgive it.
https://archive.org/details/father-brown-the-detective-1954-mys.-detec.-alec-guiness
That’s the movie that got him started toward becoming a Catholic, IIRC. He was walking around in priest costume, and a kid came up to him for help.
Downloaded, and watched the first ten minutes or so. Thanks; this one is definitely going on the to-watch-with-my-wife list.
We’ve enjoyed Death in Paradise, but it has its own quirks. If fancy British visitors to the island are suspicious, twisted characters, who should be at the top of the list of suspects.
Unlike many long-running series, the continuing cast have distinct identities, and they have realistic career trajectories.
We also liked Shetland.
Note to Sarah Hoyt: I’m changing the email I use to leave comments, as the old one gets too much spam.
THIS.
c4c
Flyby c4c.
*Whoosh!*
Waves.
*(waves back)*
The idea of “magical words change reality” is hardly a product of the 20th Century, it is as old as humanity. Indeed, it is likely, along with mysticism in general, an unavoidable byproduct of conceptual thinking.
It also keeps popping up in pop culture fads every decade or two, including Richard Bachman’s novel Illusions, or the 1990s new age love for The Secret. (The Secret was, think a thing, and it will become reality. Wow, so original.)
That being said, the left has some examples they can point to that are not utterly absurd.
In media, there is the myth of Rod Serling. After working most of the 1950s in New York City writing live television dramas of “hard-hitting” “social value”, he got weary of battling with sponsors and network censors who didn’t want to offend the South by portraying racism, Jim Crow, or anything else that might offend. So he moved to Hollywood, and made The Twilight Zone, claiming strenuously that nothing about it had any social import, while delivering subversive stories about individualism against conformity, the perils of hatred and mass panic, and many other things that the left has always interpreted as only supporting their world view. This, somehow or another, Changed The World. (All of this has some relation to the truth, but is hardly the entire story. Serling himself believed he had zero impact on the world.)
More recently, there was Steve Jobs, and his “reality distortion field”. Jobs was an asshole and a terrible human being, but he was also a genius who made reality conform to his whims. Or so the myth goes. The truth is far more complicated, but what the Elite learned was: “be an asshole and terrible human being, then reality will bend to your will.” This myth was so powerful that Elizabeth Holmes built a multi-billion dollar fraud on it, Theranos, and to this day seems not to understand that what she did was wrong. She emulated Jobs in every way except being a genius, and making a product that worked. Those parts were supposed follow like day follows night, so why didn’t they?
This, in part, is why the left has gone apeshit over Elon Musk. He seems to fit the Steve Jobs mold, but he’s Doing The Wrong Things. He doesn’t hate humanity, he loves it. He doesn’t yearn for a virtual world forced onto everybody by suffocating bureaucratic reality, he wants to set people free. And when he says he wants to set people free, he actually means it, which might be the most unforgivable sin of all. Reality is bending to his will not because of his words, but because he is hacking the way idiot bureaucrats think, and also because he’s a genius and understands how to make things that work. And the left cannot understand that. He is supposed to go to Davos every year and listen to the word-wizards of the World Economic Forum, and enact that vision for humanity. He is Not Allowed to have a different vision, nor to make it real.
And they have no idea how he is managing to do it.
A lot of corporate executives seem to have the belief that the Techs know how to do a whole lot of things they won’t admit to, but a suitably scary or charismatic leader can convince them to produce any product that the leader wants by sheer force of will.
And then there’s marketing people.
Marketing people think reality is generated by clever advertising.
Just like MBAs think reality is generated by their business models.
A lot of government regulators and pro-government-regulation activists seem to believe that corporations could easily produce unicorn-rainbow-wonderful products with, at most, only the teeniest insignificant unnoticeable tradeoffs and drawbacks, but have to be made to do so by government regs because the corporations are lazy, greedy, and otherwise evil.
Which is why we now need MAGA: Make Appliances* Great Again
* Also Automobiles
Ergh, that really rolls into RDJ’s portrayal of Tony Stark and a variety of his mistakes in the films. “Be a jerk, make lots of money, change the world” – only every time he invents a thing to “Change the World” (cough Ultron cough) it backfires. And then he flips his lid (cough the Accords cough) and makes the mess worse.
:sighs: And that might be one reason why they gave him the sad ending for his arc in the movies. It’s probably one of the reasons they character-assassinated him in the comics (without somehow realizing that’s what they were doing – Cap was their main target in the Civil War comics but it was Tony who came out looking like a monster there….).
RDJ’s Tony Stark can be seen as a variation on Steve Jobs, sure. But the important thing there is his jerkness is not a precondition to his genius, it is enabled by the fact that he is a genius (and rich). And the sad ending is probably something RDJ wanted, much like Charlton Heston did a second Planet of the Apes film on the condition that the planet got destroyed, ending the possibility of any more sequels. (Little did he know…)
Didn’t mean to imply Tony 1v1 Steve Jobs. RDJ actually said that he based his performance off Elon Musk (cue the hyperventilation). But his performance in the latter stages – not the genius part – fits the formula even though he should have more sense than to fall into it (he’s human, he’s forgiven, but boy does it make me want a cluebat).
Well, they are talking about bringing RDJ back, they’re that desperate for money….
And the fact that RDJ hasn’t flat out denied it has been giving the rumor mills the vapors. I think he’s got all the money he could want, and would only do it if the story was good.
Which it isn’t going to be, so let them swing in the wind, hoping he’ll come back.
To be fair, if I could get in charge and hire the entire crew to voice act parts in an animated series…..
They need to mothball the whole thing for five years, minimum, then reboot using Fantastic Four in the 1960s. Then they can have a multi-generational epic from the ’60s to present, done in 10-15 years, and if they plan the thing, it won’t be the half-assed improvisation that the first version was.
Even improvised, the first one was fine until they punted Perlmutter in 2015 and Trump won in 2016. Once that happened – that was when they went nuts. Phases 1 & 2 were fine and Phase 3 kicked off pitch perfect. But Civil War and Dr. Strange were both Perlmutter-approved and Feige wanted to go woke and Iger backed him…..
Entertaining, yes. Fine, not to me. But then, I’m a structural editor, so when stories are half-assed I notice and it bothers me.
And I would, in fact, say that Civil War was the start of the real problems, since that was the start of undercutting Cap.
If you say so. I didn’t think that Cap was undercut there, particularly in comparison to the comic book version of the story. (Seriously, you want Cap undercut? The only reason comic Cap didn’t come out of that comic arc worse is that they turned Tony into a supervillain and apparently thought people would like that. Ooooo.) Tony in the film at least has reasons to go berserk and, personally, I think that Steve did just fine in the movie. Even his admission that he knew the Starks were murdered is an admission he knew they were murdered, not that he knew Bucky was used to kill them. He admits flat out that he didn’t know that. Lots of fans assume he did.
He didn’t. He just couldn’t find a way to tell Tony that HYDRA murdered his parents, probably due to guilt and in an effort to protect Tony, especially from Tony himself. That temper Iron Man turned on him and Bucky being cut loose on HYDRA would not have been good for him….
One of Cap’s most famous speeches in the comics is from Civil War. In the movie, they give it to Peggy Carter, to “inspire” him. Because he apparently didn’t have the character to know it already. It’s small, and I still like Cap in that movie, but it’s undercutting who he is.
I’d have preferred he give the speech – or that Sharon admit later that she knew he’d given a version of it in the War and that Peggy quoted him on it, which was what she was doing at the funeral. But since they didn’t have Spidey switch sides, I’m not sure when they could have fit the speech in for Steve. I’d have loved to hear him give it to Wanda but I don’t think there was room in the plot for that – they had to cut Sharon’s part enormously to fit in more time for RDJ and Tony as it is. She was supposed to join Team Cap in the battle at the airport but due to RDJ lobbying for more screentime they had to cut her (so rumor says, anyway). If it was a coin toss between which film I wanted another hour on, Civil War or Age of Ultron, I’d have to go with CW. I want more Cap and Sharon, dang it!
They didn’t have to use the speech at all. Or, better yet, have Steve give a version of it to Tony at the end, explaining why he Just. Won’t. Stop. Not with rancor or even rebuke, just “You’re wrong, and I’m not going to pretend you’re not” between brothers (which was the one really smart decision made in the adaptation).
I don’t particularly care about fealty to the original story, but they diminished Cap’s character. (And I say this as a healthy straight male who would watch Sharon Carter read the phone book for three hours without complaint.)
Having him give the speech to Tony at the airport would have been better. Sharon’s scene would have worked just fine without it, I agree. I’m not sure I agree that he’s diminished in the film, but he definitely is in Endgame, and that DOES make me mad. THAT shouldn’t have happened, at all. There are decisions about his character in Infinity War I dislike, too. But all told, I still like Civil War as a film and for the characters. I can always edit in, “Yeah, Aunt Peggy loved reciting that speech to me when I was a kid. Said you really inspired those boys wondering if they were doing the right thing at (X battle) with it.”
“That why you brought it up now?” Steve asked.
Sharon (looks down shyly): “She would have reminded you of it, too, if she were here.”
Steve (smiling slightly): “Actually, she’d have taken Tony off by the ear and yelled at him, I think.” :tilts his head at her as she looks up, startled: “You’re not the same as her, Sharon. I don’t see Peggy, when I look at you.”
Yeah, you can tell I’ve really been throwing “how I wanted Phase 3 to go” at the wall too long, can’t you? :sweat_smile:
RDJ was glad to stop playing Stark.
But the character has a lot in common with him. So I could see him wanting to play Stark again after having taken a break.
Could be on the sad ending. OTOH, you can argue they foreshadowed it in the first movie, when he barely survives after taking the bomb through the rift. They implied he came out of that with a genuine fear of death -not only for himself but for his friends and the world as a whole – and this drove him into his mistakes.
I didn’t read the comic but apparently Thor had “words” (& more than words) about Tony’s actions in the Civil War comics.
Oh, one thing that Tony did in the comics (with Reed Richard’s help) was to create a “clone” Thor that killed one former Avenger.
When Thor returned to Earth and found out all that had happened (IIRC including Cap’s death), he wasn’t pleased when Tony shows up and tells him that he had to register with the US government. Especially when Tony calls Thor a friend as Thor knows what Tony has done to his other friends.
Thor gives Tony a nice speech on what he thinks of Tony’s “Great Idea” and tells Tony that he doesn’t accept the authority of the US government.
Tony says “OK” and tries to arrest Thor.
Even though Tony has a set of armor that he thought could match Thor’s power, Thor just takes what Tony gives without physically budging.
Then Thor destroys Tony’s armor without killing Tony and Thor wants Tony to give a message to the US government.
Basically Thor declares that he alone could destroy America.
Tony tries to save face and Thor leaves with Tony wondering how he can return to base (since Thor destroyed his armor).
And Thor did that in New Orleans, which had been wrecked by Katrina, specifically because the wreckage meant his not-holding-back-as-much-as-normal wouldn’t hurt anyone. Yeah, that happened, pretty much word for word as you described it. Tony was rightfully terrified. Thor was righteously furious.
Give me film Civil War any day over that crap. Crossover has an entire post where we filled her in on the comic book mess. Short version: Comic Tony needed to be tried and shot for treason and as a mass murderer. Steve probably needed a trial and might have even gotten off despite the questionable things the writers had him do, because he was essentially resisting a Fascist in personal hi-tech armor.
:spit: Is the Civil War film perfect? Hardly. But it is much better than the comic that inspired it.
Pretty sure that New Orleans arc was when JMS was writing Thor.
Cap was arrested, and was on his way to be arraigned when he was shot and killed (by his secretly hypnotized girlfriend).
The death didn’t stick, obviously. But he was dead within the comics for a while. That’s when Falcon became the new Cap.
No, that’s when Bucky became the new Cap. Sam/Falcon becoming the New Cap occurred around 2017. When Cap was shot by Sharon, Bucky took over the mantle for a few years.
This tweet thread is really interesting about Elon Musk: https://x.com/seanpk/status/1800146370143354892
I’m clearly not the intended audience for any of the new Disney stuff. I want to watch something entertaining rather than “representative art” so I don’t feel the need to watch their tripe.
The hilarious thing is, there is no intended audience for the new Disney stuff. Not in reality, only in their fantasies of what reality should be like.
Their take will be that the Star Wing thing is over, so is the Super Hero thing. Not that the wonderfully magnificent Lesbian Sky Witches was some how a failure to read the audience’s wants and desires. The good thing is whenever reality pokes it’s ugly head, they double down on stupid and fail even harder. Their time will be short, the treasuries of most companies are already empty and they will soon no longer play those games, or be bankrupt. As with everything the choice is theirs, I hope they choose well, if not they will be replaced. You either aid society, or society will purge you. No matter your wants, feelings, or belief’s, society and reality doesn’t care. You either assist society, or it gets rid of you one way or the other, and that is reality.
No, Disney is starting to realize that their entire brand is damaged. Because “things kids like” can never be over, and they have Universal’s animations (Despicable Me, Super Mario) to show that, no, it’s not the kids, it’s THEM.
I thought that Despicable Me was IIlumination? I didn’t think they were part of Universal. Dang, now I have to go check….
It is Illumination, but I think Universal distributes and has theme park rights and such.
Some are, but the leadership is still steering the USS Disney straight into the Ice Berg at high speed. The proof is they made Lesbian Sky Witches in the first place and are shocked no one loves it. I think it was John Nolte that pointed out that there was enough liberals and feminists to make it a success without men and other hated groups going, or watching. All their movies and attempts would turn a profit if those same liberals went to the movies or watched. They are not, so they bomb even with the people they supposedly made the movie for. Because they just suck. You make a decent movies about Lesbian Sky Witches with a decent plot and decent charterers instead of DIE Cut Outs, people would go see it and it would be a hit.
P.S. Hollywood if you make a movie were the whining liberal harpies get killed early and often and people would love it, just saying.
Green Inferno, 2014. The Hunt, 2020.
Examples are rare, but not nonexistent.
“Have leftists EVER met a human being?”
Leftists tend to deal mainly with other leftists. So possibly, no.
Or if they did, they tried to ignore the breach in their worldview with all the intensity of a sand-buried ostrich.
…Yeah, I’m bitter. I’m a Heinlein and Andre Norton fan, yes, but I’m also a Star Wars, Star Trek, and Doctor Who fan, and what they’ve done to those, Scooby-Doo, Mulan, and She-Ra-
There’s something wrong with these people.
There really is. Like the sickos who wanted more erotica, and more outre erotica, in YA fiction. ICK!
I look at the changes in some novel genres, and demonic influence really seems more and more like a viable explanation. Likewise some rock sub-sub-genres, although the occult was always part of those (for example, pagan metal is what is says on the box, and yet people act surprised.)
*Wry G* You may be amused to know I actually did run into pronoun trouble in a bit of recent writing… because the characters in one scene are tossing three different languages around, and only one of them has he and she.
The variant of Chinese in question? Has ta, which doesn’t specify beyond “you’re speaking of someone in 3rd person”. Middle Korean? Nope, you refer to someone’s title or how they’re related to you, either family-wise, in space, or in the hierarchy.
Medieval Latin, however, does have he, she, and it, and a poor character who just recently acquired it has been hit with a mental stun effect….
I admit I’ve only studied classical Latin, so I don’t know what changes they might have made by the Middle Ages, but does the linguistic BSOD happen before or after the concept of “declension” is introduced?
is, ea, id
eius, eius, eius
ei, ei, ei
eum ,eam, id…
The poor guy didn’t get the technical specs; that would probably hit him even worse.
Just make one of them a Texan.
“Y’all” covers a lot of bases.
*Snickers*
Chinese does have different characters for he and she. But as you noted, in Mandarin they’re both pronounced the same way.
Yep! And, well, Beijing accent is exactly what became Mandarin….
Working with native Mandarin speakers you get used to pronoun faults, and amazingly in all my years in cubeland since 1988, nobody ever rioted and burned down the building due to such.
Agreed, one hundred percent. Some of this stuff and the people peddling it – I would not at all be surprised to find they are possessed or have made deals with the devil in blood. There is too much wrong with them not to signal Bad Things Beyond This Point that would make Cththulu run in terror.
It may just (just!) be that they’ve convinced themselves evil does not exist and morals are just conveniences. Augh.
“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.”
Most Leftists live in a hermetically sealed bubble of rarified intellectual existence, often in large urban/metropolitan areas or university/college cities. The existence of actual humans in their life, if they’re lucky, is either in the form of freshman students (who they view as larval Leftists to be given an injection of Woke Jelly to properly molt) or the little people that provide all of those icky services like making coffee or cooking their food or cleaning the sewers.
If at any time, Reality in one form or another intrudes, they will either deny it or destroy it immediately. Before it causes a seperation from the herd.
Because the moment they separate from the rest of the Leftist herd, the herd will turn on them and destroy them utterly.
I am quite sure you are talking about meeting unenlightened human entities who clearly are on the wrong side of herstory and are probably MAGA adjacent, if not part of the orange cult itself.
Why would they EVER deign to sully their selves by meeting beings who will soon go the way of the neanderthal?
The only real human beings are the ones who agree with them. Obviously. Anyone else needs to be deluged with right-think until they get with the program, or die in a fire. Whichever.
*also a bitter fan of what used to be entertaining fiction.
Neanderthal DNA is still here, you louts….
Ahem. Yeah. I think, as I get funds available, I plan to get hardcopy of all the good older stories I can. Because.
Read a short story once that basically theorized that Odds were Neanderthals, from the POV of a scientist who thinks he’s hot stuff and spends most of the story being mildly rude about his Odd female coworker… and ends with her saying something that indicates she’s aware that she’s a Neanderthal, and that “his kind” effectively wiped them out the first time.
It was creepily effective.
If that ‘s the one I am thinking of it’s a good one. She follows up with they are concerned about the pure HomSaps, since they are all about socializing and status games and such, and are not nearly as good at really focusing, aka being odd, and doing the hard engineering and math and tech things very well, so the remaining Neanderthals are worried as they dwindle the HomSaps might not make it.
Tangent: You just reminded me of a short story I read where a scientist was trying to develop a compound that would cause miscarriages in pregnancies where the fetus had any number of genetic or physical disabilities. He didn’t seem to notice that his assistant had one of the targeted syndromes (may have been something like spina bifida or other prenatal physical issue.)
Because she was concerned about the eugenic tendencies of his thinking, she sabotaged the experiment so that only one fetus died—the one with premature balding, like the scientist in question. Which made him rethink his premise…
Amusingly enough, there was apparently talk recently of doing a new She-Ra show, and making it similar to the original. And that got the fans of the remake up in arms, and accusing the would-be creators of committing the heinous crime of ignoring the remake… which apparently did exactly that to the original series.
What gets me is how they can make some of these shows, throw in some fun characters – and then drop the ball by smothering it with Badly Written Messages. The She-Ra show had some good moments, along with The Owl House on Disney (a fun bit of world-building, which came to a screeching halt every time they decided to Make a Point).
I think I figured out one of the reasons for this– they didn’t think it would work.
They “let” someone do a “lame” job of making a show exactly like those loser fans keep asking for, heck evne the producer will often be one of those loser nerds.
And then… it works. The show is heckin’ popular.
At which point the power hungry swoop in and try to take that popularity which is OBVIOUSLY theirs, by right.
And…huh, it doesn’t stay popular. What the hey?!?!
Bingo. This. ALL of this. :sigh:
The Mandalorian?
I admit, it doesn’t do a lot for me (came to it late and am still in season 2), but it’s entertaining in it’s own right.
That, and Witcher, and…well, My Little Pony is notable because it DIDN’T happen, basically.
They (not Disney, but the Powers that Be) did the same thing to season 2 of The Witcher (and reportedly were doubling down on season 3 when Henry Cavill’s “Nope” stopped it) as they did in season 3 of The Mandalorian, i.e. shifting the story focus to non-title female characters while the title guy stood around.
Basically that’s similar to the consensus on the main reason the reasonably well reviewed Mad Max Furiosa origin story movie recently bombed – the title character was Sir Not Appearing In This Film, and the audience noticed. Gee, maybe make a Mad Max movie with Mad Max in it. It has likely been long enough that they could do it with Mel Gibson, even.
And one of the commenters on the current The Acolyte mess noted that in The Mandalorian, Disney Lucasfilm had a hugely popular strong female character, Cara Dune played by Gina Carano, but they fired her for incorrect thoughts tweeted during the vax witch hunts.
And Carano’s lawsuit on that just had Disney’s attempt to dismiss firmly denied. I hope she gets a lot of their money.
They should have done an origin story for Aunty Entity, not Furiosa.
Amen.
They had an actually strong female character… and dumped her.
They dumped her *after* announcing that she was getting her own show.
Which was immediately announced as cancelled, of course.
And they did a pretty food job writing her. Yes, she gets into a physical fight with the Mandalorian…which ends with them holding blasters on one another. From that point, most of her derring-do involves superior firepower and/or wit, and she knows how to use them both.
On The Mandalorian the entire production of season 1, and to a certain extent season 2, was so far under the radar, with KK distracted by other stuff (Indiana Jones and the Disdain for White Males, or whatever it was called, among other projects) and the budget held under control by the use of the live virtual set/location tech, that Jon Favreau basically got to do what he wanted, which was OG Star Wars.
But it was a massive hit, which drew the scavengers, who picked it apart while it was still alive.
And she wasn’t nasty.
Gina Carano is one of the few actresses who can succesfully pull off the “woman who can fight” thing, mostly thanks to her time in the ring.
The current trope is 90lb actresses kicking huge stuntguy’s butts, but most of the women they put in fight scenes really just look comical no matter how well choreographed.
The exception, which includes Carano, is if they have real honed skills. There was a vid a while back of a group of young women being accosted by a group of guys in a pedestrian tunnel somewhere where one of them had obviously taken her Krav Maga seriously, and she just tore through those guys – but she did what that discipline teaches and used unrestrained explosive precise violence to make an opening for her group through to the other end of the tunnel to escape.
Don’t get me wrong, the choreographed fights can look great – see anything with Summer Glau, who while being quite waifly (totes a word) makes her martial arts stuff look like dance.
But Carano has both the skills and the physicality to (and in The Mandalorian, she did) believably pull off a bar fight scene.
I only watched the first two seasons. Reportedly, the third season of The Mandalorian starts to have issues.
“There’s something wrong with these people.”
Very. And they want to spread that wrongness to the rest of us. The Borg really work as an analogy for these people, even when it comes to the Borg Queen. A certain first lady act an awful lot like she did…..
They’re like the little kid kicking over the block tower because it isn’t THEIR block tower.
Frustrating enough to deal with when kids. Horrifying as an adult.
Oh, in very deed.
My theory is a combination of environment, and environment as a function of age.
I have noticed that some of the American culture folks of (1) sixty or seventy years or older, who are left, or who are atheist, are sane, or functional. Not must be, can be, and I have not really been exposed to any older sane left in the last few years, so my sampling may be wildly off.
Basicaly, stuff is a combo of religion and of culture, and the culture they grew up on exposed them to values that they hold to, despite having made religious or political choices that would not strengthen those values.
Down to about forty, it is quite possible to have incidentally grown up in an environment that was not curated hard left.
Some of the younger cohorts are left atheists, and have grown up in a subcultural bubble that is determinedly hard left. Public schools, yo. They haven’t built their minds in the same way, are not the same culture, and do not have the underpinning for sane.
Sane can be said to be defined for the older American culture, but it is not clear that it can be a real thing for a pure hard left culture.
The thing about insisting that all cultures are valid, and also that so-called-primitive belief in magic is purely an alternate psychology, with ‘other ways of knowing’? It is then admissible to suppose that left culture behaviors are this same sort of alternate psychology, and that a Christian labeling it demonic could be ‘an other way of knowing’.
Anyway, the woke Education majors could also simply be understood as abusers, who were harmful enough in what they did to public school students, that some are both badly damaged in these ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’ ways, and also have not shaken it off.
(1) I’m probably doing this estimate wrong, but it is what feels correct.
Once upon a time, I hung out with a lot of lesbians (San Francisco kink scene in the mid-to-late 1990’s, what can you say?). And short of some kinds of Bored-Again Christians, you have never met some of the most self-loathing people in the world, ever, that you could meet in urban lesbians.
And because I wasn’t someone anybody talked with on a regular basis, I usually found somewhere to listen to conversations.
I learned very quickly that they were self-loathing and not very introspective. Despite every claim otherwise. Unable to really create or make things, but very good at breaking things that worked, one way or another. Almost always clamped onto a cause that genuinely needed some help and made it a vehicle for their own needs and desires.
And ugly-not just physically (most Lipstick Lesbians, IMHO, are trending-lesbian bisexuals rather than “pure” lesbians), but there was that. They were also some of the most banal, rude, frustrated, and delusional people I’d ever met. Massively self-destructive, as well. Absolutely convinced of a conspiratorial world that would have done better with a tinfoil cap, a red Che beret, or belief in some sects of Islam-that it was never their fault, but the massive conspiracy of the Patriarchy and White Men in particular, “breeder” females who were Traitors To The Cause Of Women’s Liberation, Third Wave Feminism, that SCUM didn’t go far enough, hatred of transsexuals because they were “men trying to be women” to steal their power, etc, etc, etc…
Now, many of these people are in charge of too many things…and have brought those attitudes with them. I can see in people like Leslie Headland and Kathleen Kennedy those attitudes. I can see them in a lot of places and the choices they make-to break the White Male Christian Patriarchy-in the entertainment that I watch and read and see.
And they are good at assimilating new people via the university system, especially if you want to go into a “soft” field like the social sciences or art/entertainment. And demanding proof-like any good cult-of joining the cause by burning all of their bridges otherwise.
Yes, I am cringing at the damage they’re doing. All I can do right now is defend what is mine, as hard as I can.
One of the big questions in all the comments is where did that $200 million go? It sure didn’t go into effects or costumes or makeup or sets, nor writing or editing or directors, or even lighting and cinematography, or even publicity.
You can SEE that stuff. The first of the new Dune movies cost $165 million, Dune 2 cost $190 million, and you can see that money on the screen. Nobody can see where the $200 million was spent on The Acolyte.
So where’d the stockholder’s cash go?
This was something that people had been asking ever since last year and how much was being spent on a series made by someone that had no experience and didn’t have any real “story.” Especially since the story was originally set in the “High Republic” era, which nobody outside of the Lucasarts Story Group liked.
I’m still of the theory that the reason why nobody is willing to get rid of Bob Iger is that he’s sitting on something that if the lid was to ever come off…a lot of people in Hollywood would get into the sort of trouble that involves Federal charges and time in a medium-security prison if they were lucky. And that Kathleen Kennedy has some of the keys to those secrets, which is why nobody has gotten rid of her yet.
Hollywood Accounting.
Fess Parker never got a dime of profit sharing for “Davy Crockett”, because that eternally-rerun series never officially made a dollar of profit.
Ditto James Garner and “The Rockford Files”.
And Hollywood was ever brought into conformity with sane accounting of other businesses, there would be -epic- tax implications. Not to mention enough litigation to keep Hell’s army of attorneys happily busy for a century.
I remember a story about when Sigourney Weaver threatened Columbia Studios with a horde of lawyers and accountants about her money from “Ghostbusters II.” And she got…something but had to sign an NDA as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there was outright money laundering, “round robin” funding, and similar things going on at Disney right now.
Every writer who has lawyers and forensic accountants crawl down their publisher’s books. They never get less than six figures, at any level of writer. BUT they never get hired again. EVER. And yep, NDAs. It’s usually the last gambit of elderly writers.
Sports franchises are notorious for creative accounting so that they don’t show a profit. A past owner of the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles had sued Caesar’s for allegedly getting him so drunk he lost millions of dollars in their casinos. He then claimed the loss impacted the finances of his sports team. During discovery, it came out that Tose was basically showing paper losses by having family members in what were nominal or no-show jobs for millions upon millions of dollars, among other things., Add payments to related companies, and it was very clear the team and family was making a substantial profit but for the bookkeeping shenanigans.
But the IRS wants what it considers the serfs to report everything that adds up to over $600.,00 annually. They are certainly not going after the ABC/Disney’s or other “friends of the program”.
There’s a reason why in A Season for Slaughter, David Gerrold had a wonderful rant/exposition scene where a writer finally snaps and the end result is very…interesting for Hollywood pre-pandemic.
But yes, I suspect that unless you’re a Big Name Writer, your publisher is screwing you and screwing you badly. And even if you are a Big Name, there’s still a bit of shaft coming around.
When Chapel rather suddenly got fired and replaced by the returning Tiger, there was a theory that he was on the verge of uncovering something that could have gotten Iger into a lot of legal trouble. Thus the reason for Chapek’s sudden removal.
But it was just speculation. No evidence available so far.
…
Chapek and Iger.
Not Chapel and Tiger.
*censored* auto-correct!
”Wait, Nurse Chapel gets replaced by a Kzin?”
I mean, I’d watch that. A Kzin trying to serve as a crewmember on a human ship, cultural assumptions getting in the way… It’d be like a reverse Pride of Chanur scenario.
Well, the animated Star Trek series did have Lieutenant M’ress. Of course she was a Caitian, and Caitians and Kzin tend to get annoyed when the obvious connections between the two species are mentioned.
Money laundering?
Essentially, yes. Epically, yes. See above comment.
I’ve honestly been wondering about money laundering since I heard about Ahsoka.
Money laundering and entertainment productions are a long-standing tradition, in the same way as young nubile starlets of both sexes and the proverbial casting couch.
Just this time…I think it’s gotten to the point where even the civilians outside of the industry are noticing it.
A fan broke down the numbers and pointed out that at $200 million, each episode of the Acolyte cost more than the whole of Gozilla: Minus One.
…Yeah, no, something’s hinky there.
And nobody cares as long as they get their gold from the pot at the end of the rainbow.
It’s when something interferes with the rainbow that there’s a problem…and Disney hasn’t had any good rainbows in a long, long time.
I hadn’t seen this comment when I wrote my 8:13 PM comment just down the page (because it took me more than a half hour to write it). But yeah, I agree. People who don’t pay attention to this sort of stuff normally are starting to hear about Hollywood accounting, and I think it’s having an impact on Hollywood’s revenue. It’s a lot easier for people to justify torrenting a movie instead of paying for it if they believe that their money wouldn’t go to the people who deserve it for the work they did, and will instead go to thieves who are cooking the books. So the more people learn about Hollywood accounting, the more Hollywood’s revenue trends downwards. (The “don’t give money to people who hate you” effect is another cause of Hollywood losing revenue, and I think probably greater than the Hollywood-accounting effect, but I couldn’t prove which one of those two concepts has reached more people.)
Hollywood accounting along with the vulture business behavior in the entertainment industry has been an wide open “secret” for decades.
As far as “don’t give money to people who hate you” many people didn’t follow that advice until their own budgets got tight. Then they justified either pirating the product or paying less downstream.
I do recall that many critics of Hollywood behavior just had to see their favorite series while demonizing the industry about the politics and behavior.
But don’t you dare call them out on their hypocracy! At least they aren’t as bad as those ignorant sports fans!
The effect of the internet and streaming has really screwed up their plans. Instead of people going to their new preachy movies because that is all that is in the theaters. People are indulging in the classics and old shows, to escape at home. A line from Steely Dan comes to mind, “Hollywood kids making movies of themselves you know they don’t give a F*ck about anyone else, It’s Outrageous” , and now they are losing billions and destroying everything their Fathers and Mothers built including Hollywood itself. Be interesting to see what comes after. They aren’t even filming in Cali if they can avoid it and others are talking about starting their own studios outside of Hollywood and California.
Before streaming, they were losing some sales to people hoisting the black flag, but not enough to make a huge impact. Most people were either not technically savvy enough to know how to use Bittorrent, or else they wanted to do the right thing and actually pay for the movies they watched.
But then, two things happened. First, streaming, as you pointed out. The other thing that’s happening, I think, is that more and more people are starting to lose their belief that paying for movies is the always the right thing to do. I attribute this partly to more people knowing about Hollywood accounting, and realizing that if they do pay for it, the money won’t go to the people who deserve it, but to the thieves in charge of the system. It’s a lot harder to feel that that’s the right thing once you know how the system works. Secondly, the “don’t give money to people who hate you” concept is catching on, and I think that’s having a larger effect than the “they’re thieves so they don’t deserve to be paid for what they stole” effect.
Between the people losing willingness to pay at all, and those turning to streaming where old movies and shows are still available, it’s starting to hurt Hollywood’s sales. (Oh, and that’s a third reason why some people torrent movies: to get their hands on movies that have been pulled from distribution for political reasons, or that they fear will be pulled soon. Or to bypass things like Disney’s vault system, where the copyright holder just refuses to sell you the movie at certain times, to create artificial scarcity and inflate prices. That used to work, but with Bittorrent as an alternative, it doesn’t work nearly so well anymore.)
Pretty much every character in a BBC show is either a visual minority or gay. And they make sure to show the few characters who are white are defined as being gay within the first scene or two.
Nothing against gays, but it’s as if they are trying to erase straight white characters from their shows.
Have you seen what’s happening in Ireland recently (and likely in GB longer)? Ath Cliath is minority Irish, Galway is damned close, and it’s likely the same across the Sea, and SF, FG, and FF are all pushing the plantation efforts of getting a new Irish people.
Yeah. It’s horrifying.
I am having a hard time thinking of any BBC-created show in the last ten years that wasn’t a vanity project by someone with a white male heterosexual protagonist. I know that almost every show I’m seeing on BritBox and PBS has either a Strang Waman Prataganist or a Person Of Color as the main character, short of hard-core historical dramas that they can’t do either of these things.
Even the hard core historical dramas have gone stupid. See Anne Boleyn as a black woman.
To a very limited extent, I can KIND OF see this. Anne Boleyn (if I remember correctly) was very MUCH an outsider in the English court.
A competent production team would have show this by careful dialog and shot placement and costume design.
Considering that competence is the last thing these people are hired for…
Waggles hand. Kind of. She was an outsider, but also higher class in a way, because she was raised in the French court. This would be like say someone raised in NYC moving to Connecticut. In the seventies.
Makes sense. And trying anything less “subtle” with these people than a sledgehammer between the eyes isn’t going to work…
Sorry “visual minority” representation made me think of a production meeting in a dimly lit conference room:
”Okay, that’s the budget update. Now how many characters with astigmatism do we have in this script? How many with presbyopia? And what about strabismus – I got slammed for no strabismus characters in my last struggle session – how many with strabismus?”
LOL
I read a lot of cozy mysteries, or at least I did. I am getting to the point of reading other mind candy because every single cozy mystery seems to need to put in a gay couple, or less often a mixed race. I don’t mind either one, but having the gay couples shoved into my mind aggravates me, I know they are not nearly as common as these books would suggest. And I do actually know one, childhood friends of my son, and very nice men.
I notice my hometown has many mixed race, meaning I live in South Texas, guess who’s been mixing it up since before we were a state. Including my own parents, my father was half German Brethren heritage and half Mexican. (His family and my mother’s actually from Midwest.) Nothing new here about that, we have very few blacks but many seem to have mixed with the children I see, precious and beautiful. As my mother always said hybrid vigor. Her children have all done very well in life and live long lives.
Anyway, I am fed up with the forcing of gay marriage or partnerships in every cozy mystery unless it is a Christian cozy or frontier romance, so guess what I’m reading for my eye candy now. It works very well to relive the mind of the Biden administration and missteps of the Republicans. And no real sex of any kind, just sweet and innocent romance, just like we read as teenagers, at least when I was a teen in the 1950’s.
I have a gay couple in the Dyce mysteries, but in my defense, the character is in that sort of background she would have a gay best friend. Eh.
There is a difference when it makes sense to the story character but when you feel it, or climate change, have been thrown in gratuitously it just rankles my nerves. It is amazing how some people can drag both into the same story. Cringe, Cringe, Cringe.
Yeah. I wanted Dyce to have a best friend, for reasons of discussing mystery, but frankly most women would murder her. OTOH I didn’t want it to be confusing who was the love interest. So…. Ben
BTW, finally finished, A Few Good Men and enjoyed it. (I seem to take a lot longer to read new books lately). Yes, Lucia’s is gay, and so what? It’s important to the story.
Right. Hopefully the same with Skip in No Man’s land, where his orientation is somehow both more relevant and far less…. Mostly because he ends as undefinable.
Off topic, but aside from the Writing Hoyts, who else is going to be at LibertyCon? I start my trip tomorrow. Yes, I take the long way around, Chattanooga by way of Cooperstown, NYC, ATL. 6,000 miles in two weeks. Gonna’ be fun!
I’ll be there.
The writing Hoyts this year is just Dan and I. Not even younger son. It’s sad.
While I’ll be happy to see you and Dan. Young’uns these days, just so gosh darned busy! Also I look forward to meeting you Mr. Fleming. I’m likely to be the tall guy in the ten-thousand dragons shirt on Saturday.
Well, older son is starting his fellowship and younger son is up to his neck in comic editing responsibilities. Both HOPE to make it next year, depending on jobs, moves, etc.
I’ll be there. My Saturday panels are a Dr. Pepper schedule – 10,2,4. Someone knows me a wee bit too well. [NTT in-joke]
I seem to remember reading some weird post-apocalyptic novel decades ago that had a group of women who were clones that required sex with small burros to stimulate parthenogenesis.
Still a better romance than Twilight.
blink blink blink blink
Hey. I read a lot of stuff from 5 and 10 cent carts/tables outside bookstores. And just as much stuff with no covers scavenged from dumps and deserted buildings. If there is a reading equivalent to eating’s ‘glutton’, then I’m one of them.
Sigh. I used to be an all-reading speedreader. It conked out sometime in my late twenties/early thirties, but I have a suspicion that lack of vitamins was a big part of it.
I conked out after the second concussion. Has been coming back slowly. I think it was eyes.
lol, “small burro” in Spanish is burrito 🌯. I love burritos, but I don’t love them THAT much 🤣
Well -that- kills my lunch plans….
When I break out in guffaws when the young lady in front of me in like at the taco truck orders the Super Burrito, it’s Mike’s fault.
Is that a burrito in your pocket, or are you just happy to see her?
Sounds like Suzy McKee Charnas. Horses. Obnoxious for the most part, but did have the tiny good point that 1) the women were not Saintly Saints of Saintdom and 2) paradise did not immediately ensue when they turned the tables on Teh Evul Menz.
Motherlines, by Suzy McKee Charnas, and they weren’t small burros. Post-apocalyptic, where the protagonist has escaped an enclave composed of the descendants of scientists, all, “women are things to be owned and raped,” types, and is rescued by the matriarchal Motherlines. I will give Charnas some credit, in that her protagonist realizes she doesn’t really belong there, either and goes forth to found some other form of society. I think there are two more books in the series, but that’s the only one I read.
Charnas has a THOROUGHLY unpleasant imagination and a hatred of humans. She’s one of the people I had to stop reading, or learn to shower inside my head.
If it’s any consolation, I never did seek out the rest of that series.
The kind of author that gives new meaning and purpose to Ray Bradbury’s “Firemen”.
Charnas… well, she had a knack for steering away from something cool and popular that her brain had come up with, and turning it into something ugh or something meh.
It was really really frustrating.
She was a filker and a linguist too, so I felt an obligation to keep up with her career. But it just kept petering out, petering away. Very weird.
As a person, I gather that she was very nice.
Whoops, I just conflated Suzette Haden Elgin (the filker and linguist) with Suzy McKee Charnas.
Well, they had similar problems, and their careers covered a similar span.
I will say that Charnas’ YA trilogy had some really good bits, but I don’t know that it was suitable for YA readers. Just kinda gloomy. And “Boobs” was kinda hateful, when it could have been witty and thoughtful.
I don’t think I ever subjected myself to Charnas’ Seventies feminist sf quadrilogy, because I really never found any of those series that I liked and enjoyed.
The Vampire Tapestry is supposed to be really good, but I never have run across it. Guillermo del Toro apparently loves it.
Charnas passed away last year. She and her husband apparently brought her estranged father to NM to live with them for many years until his death, and she wrote a memoir about it. That all seems like a good thing to have done.
Oddly enough, that’s not outside of the weird tricks Mother Nature has pulled. There’s a species of lizard that has at least two complete genomes and mates with males from closely-related species, then has all-female offspring composed of just the genome mixes from her own body. (And I say “at least” for the genomes because apparently, some of them have three or more.)
I suppose it’s not portentous, merely interesting, but battleship New Jersey is out of dry dock and has tied up at a near by pier to offload ballast. There might be tickets if you want to ride the ship back to her berth at Camden. They are kinda pricey; as in, could get a 14-year old car for that money pricey ($5,000).
Nah, I got enough rides on a Navy ship for free. 😀
Same here.
I have people in my life that will not mention cruises around me, just because I will list all the issues that can go wrong with ships and boats. Or spin out some damage control experiences…
I did a manuscript evaluation once for a young lady whose book had a very different alien culture. Most details unnecessary, but their biology made both polyandry and homosexuality pretty normal.
I tried to explain the problem I had with her homosexual character and she immediately defaulted to “You’re a homophobe.” Nothing I said made any difference. I objected, therefore I was a homophobe, end of story.
The problem I was trying to address, unsuccessfully, was that the MC, a very young and very naive young lady, was surprised when she found that another peripheral character was homosexual. Rather than seeing it in the cultural context of the book, the periferal character immediately went on the defensive and started a rant about “Stay out of my bedroom.”
Culturally, in the context of the society, the MC should have blinked and let it go. The other character wouldn’t have made a big deal of it. In a culture where men outnumber women more than 10 to 1, simply based on biology, it was pretty inevitable.
Instead the author inserted a screaming rant based on her perception our own society, and it just didn’t fit.
I don’t know if she ever changed it. I doubt it.
Precisely. Men are more sex-oriented, and in such a culture most men would be deprivation homosexual. Or perhaps “opportunity bisexual.”
In No Man’s Land the rediscovered, modified humans are hermaphrodite, but because the designers built them to survive in a relatively low-tech society they look more like men than like women. (with a wide variation in “pretty” but NO BOOBS, so to us they read as male.) I needed my character to have emotional involvement (the romantic involvement surprised both of us, particularly since at the start the love interest is rather bratty and reads “young”) unlike the weird clinical detachment of Left Hand of Darkness, so the main character, the “normal human insert” through whose eyes we see the culture is a gay male. (That and he showed up that way.) Or by the end, a bonded, very much monogamous male who despite himself is all but married.
could some kind soul give me some idea what Ursula k leguin did? I only know a little if earthsea, no idea of anything else.
Oh. Lathe of Heaven.
Lathe of Heaven is the one that takes the idea of, “What if dreams really did come true?” The main character had dreams come true and the shrink/researcher he’s seeing begins influencing the dreams to solve society’s problems. Things like he dreams, and wakes up to a world where plague has wiped out hald the population. PBS actually had a program based on it that was both faithful to the original and pretty good.
Honestly, I gave up on Leguin with, “This Dispossessed,” and she was never a favorite.
I was thinking of the one iteration where everyone was the same color.
That may have been in there as well. The protagonist finally manages to put everything more or less right and loses his ability to “dream true.”
Just realized it was a variation on the fairy tale where the fisherman saves a wish-granting fish and his wife keeps asking for more and more grandiose “wishes,” until she goes too far and all the wishes are revoked (to the fisherman’s relief).
yep.
Yes, everybody the same color was in Lathe. Grey, perhaps. It was a long time since I read it–it was a Science Fiction Book Club edition, which had a lot of proof of Sturgeon’s Law in its selections. I stopped reading fiction when I was getting an MS part time, and after that was finished, decided that SFBC didn’t need any renewals.
Thought so. Although that story’s really about “be careful what you wish for” – none of the edits to reality come out as the characters intended.
Really, for a Leftist, Le Guin was uncommonly in touch with reality and humanity. The cultural meaning of shadows in LHoD always struck me as more central to the book than the speculations on human hermaprodites … and it cuts against Leftism, though Le Guin may not have recognized that consciously.
When she let herself deviate from cant she saw. See the Tombs of Atuan, book 1
But yes, I have opinions. TLHOD got me so mad ON THE BIOLOGY at 14 that I started writing sf/f. (Badly.)
You got better!
(says the addict; for those wondering how much better… It’s one of the things that’s being put on Chapter House, and Sarah had never heard of Things Skippy Isn’t Allowed To Do!)
I will put up more today. Also write more. Today. Because it’s LOUD. And it’s grown horse nomads. If I let it sit another week, it will grow weirder stuff.
Which is impressive, but….
But this book is already very long. I don’t need it to grow more, in an effort to get my attention.
:pictures Sarah pulling out a manchette made of a keyboard, charging into the overgrown story:
The Reader suggests someone unleash the AI on this mental image.
No. This one is annoying. What it grows, works. It just can bloody well save some of it for book two.
Gag.
Lathe of Heaven is one of the books that all the younger educated folks are taught is some kind of Sci-Fi masterpiece by the Left at universities.
I’ve read so much horrible dreck in my life, but I couldn’t struggle my way through that tome. Like watching static on an old B&W television while your dog farts.
yep.
The reference here is to the novel The Left Hand of Darkness. It’s about a human who is the first normal (to us) human to visit a planet that’s populated by hermaphroditic humans who frequently switch back and forth between male and female.
Sorry. Is this on a chain to my comment on LHOD? I can only answer in backpannel and it doesn’t show it.
A response to Doug’s comment asking about Le Guin. Though I thought you had mentioned Le Guin by name in the comment above it, which mentions LHoD, and now I see that you didn’t. So I might be confused on which reference Doug was asking about.
my reference to LeGuin in the post was The Lathe of Heaven and “everyone is grey skinned now” like that would solve race issues.
Okay. That’s a Le Guin book that I don’t think I’ve ever heard of.
And yes, the idea sounds silly. If skin tone, hair color, and eye color are all the same, we would probably see attempts to discriminate based on height.
And not just “You must be this high to ride” signs. 😋
Okay, you all are probably completely up to date on this, sorry, I guess I am just behind the curve, so apologies for covering old ground.
But because I don’t watch pretty much any historical Brit stuff these past few years – I think the last thing I watched was the Henry VIII thing that changed whatever they wanted, which pissed me off – I was not aware, until it came up in one of the recent glorious hammering reviews by some Brit, that the actress playing the head Communist Lesbian Space Witch in The Acolyte had previously been cast in a full-on production as… the historically accurate Anne Boleyn.
I mean, I had seen comments about race swapping actors in Bridgerton, and the whole Cleopatra thing, and various asides, but… I am just…
?!
The Acolyte is probably simply Disney embezzlement.
As for the morons, they would probably think that the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists were black (1) simply because they were black (2).
(1) the skin color
(2) metaphorically black (3)
(3) the paint color
–
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner!
Like the scheme in “The Producers” or a mafia crew doing a “bust out”.
And cousin Ira will get his 10% by overcharging for some service while giving lip service to the Alphabet People.
Yep. I’ve talked about that. It’s mentally broken levels of stupid.
On the issue of historical dramas, I watched “the Serpent queen” on Starz and thought it was good. They didn’t race-swap anyone and the only nod to “woke” was that they tossed in a dark-skinned maid. It’s probably not terribly accurate for history, but I thought it was good. (Also it has Colm Meany, who I would watch in anything)
“must every hero be gay and in an interracial couple?” We recently discovered “Vera”, the British, Northumberland-sited, police mystery. After watching about 4 seasons, I found myself asking ChatGPT for a racial demographic breakdown of the UK. Answer: 3.5 % Black.
Ah! Gotcha.
David G Terrell Round Hill, Virginia USA
Yep. I asked a friend who lives there and got pretty much the same answer. A few more people of Indian (dot, not feather) ancestry. But still, certainly not 50%