Ready Player One was a near perfect book for me. Ready Player Two, not so much. Ready Player One was filled with all the nerdy nonsense that I loved when I was growing up. It was set in a world much like our own, but a few years down the road. The tech that made the books’ virtual reality work, was not that far off from the tech of today. Virtual Reality has been popular in science fiction for some time. The real world stuff, the MetaVerse type stuff, has never lived up to the worlds imagined in stories like…
The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)
Katie Mack is a theoretical cosmologist and Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University. She’s also a fan of Science Fiction and popular culture. She does a great job of covering the various ways that our Universe, as we understand it at the moment, could come to an end in a few billion or trillion years. Or in the next few minutes. She has a friendly way of talking about the most esoteric and abstract concepts. I was reminded of Sheldon teaching Penny about physics by starting with ancient Greece on a warm Summer evening. We all know a bit…
Sucker Punch (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter)
Number 27 in the long history of Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter. Anita Blake lives in a vast and complex universe and you can never be sure what you’ll find between the covers. Some are thinly disguised porn, some are slasher films, some are masterclasses on polygyny, and some are rather dry textbooks on the legal system of this alternate reality. In the beginning we had a handful of important characters, but the cast has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Half a dozen or so people make cameos in Sucker Punch and I have no idea who the hell…
Thinking About Writing
When I was in the 7th grade a teacher gave me a bag filled with old copies of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I was already a fan of Star Trek and Lost in Space and just about every other clunky sci-fi show I could find. But these stories were something different. They demanded more from me than passive viewership, they made me think. Many of them made me think, hell, I can do better than that. Turns out after lo these many years, well, I couldn’t do better than punished writers from forty years ago. I stopped writing short stories.…
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
I’m a photographer and every once in a while a movie will get my attention with a particularly beautiful shot. This image of Melissa McCarthy sitting alone at the end of a long bar as her character’s world reaches one of its many low points is a great shot. I like everything about it. The leading lines, the strong shadows, the darkness of the bar while the world outside the windows is clearly light. The different tones from the light shadows to the subtly illuminated bottles. Great imagery. Of all the great actors on Gilmore Girls, Melissa McCarthy was not…
Dallas Cowboys Rant
Rams 30, Cowboys 22. I remember the days of Roger Staubach, Too Tall Jones, and Hollywood Henderson. Those Cowboys went to the Superbowl on a regular basis. The great Danny White took the team to three NFC Conference Games. Things went downhill from there, but even during the last few years of Tom Landry’s reign, his teams still often lost by a field goal or less. There was always hope that they could make one more play. Then there was the Jimmy Johnson juggernaut whose game plan was to score 40 points in the first half and protect the lead.…
Welcome to Marwen
The special effects in Welcome to Marwen are on display from the first scene. Our Hero, the brave toy Cap’n Hogie, is shot down during World War II and immediately has a problem. He shoes catch fire. It’s a setback, but luckily, he finds a crashed Nazi car with a truck in the back seat. Inside he finds a pair of black and white wingtip…women’s pumps. He likes wearing the high heel shoes, finds that they help him to understand dames, and he wants to make it clear, he likes dames. We then meet Mark Hogancamp, a man with serious…
Mary Poppins Returns
Mary Poppins Returns is CGI on overload. Special Effects cranked up to 11. But they are very good special effects and very good computer generated graphics. But I didn’t love Mary Poppins Returns. We open with a song and there will be plenty of song and dance to follow. Soon enough Mary Poppins shows up to help Michael’s children in a moment of crisis. A villain in the piece is the Bank Manager, who wants the Banks house so he can sell it and add a few more pounds to the coffers. The original Mary Poppins was the last of…
YouTube’s Origin
In space no one can hear you say Wait? What? Space travel is often depicted in one of two ways. Everything is clean and perfect or everything is gritty and dirty. Origin goes for the Star Trek model of everything in its place. Which is a bit odd since it is filled with murder and mayhem like Alien. Origin helps itself to bits and pieces of lots of SciFi plots from the past fifty years or so. A handful of people trapped on a ship they can’t control. Inscrutable aliens being inscrutable.…
Wreck It Ralph 2:Ralph Breaks The Internet
Wreck It Ralph was a surprisingly good movie. It was a classic Hero’s Journey and there was no need for a sequel. So naturally, Wreck It Ralph 2 is not that great. But it was still fun. The premise was a little thin to start with. An old guy runs a video game arcade where the game Wreck It Ralph, a kinder, gentler version of Rampage, has been sitting for thirty years. Ralph is a bad guy who learns that being bad doesn’t define who he is. We flash forward about six years and discover that the arcade still has…