I never read the Harry Potter books, I just watched the movies. The last three or four Harry Potter films suffered from a serious case of taking themselves too seriously. What started off as a somewhat silly story about a boy living in a cupboard who discovers he’s really a wizard turned into this totally silly story about that boy saving the world. The first Fantastic Beasts was kind of fun. It was like the first couple of Harry Potter films, where Harry could worry about House Points and walk around with a stunned look on his face all the…
Serpentine by Laurell K Hamilton
Serpentine is the first Anita Blake Vampire Hunter book in quite some time that is a good 90% Anita Blake Vampire Hunter. The sex scenes are brief and limited to less than ten people. The talk about the joys and heartaches of being Polyamorous are present, but not omnipresent as they have been in other books. Anita doesn’t add a new lover, doesn’t enslave anyone, and doesn’t outright murder anyone. Though she does come close. There’s less talk about sex and vampire politics. There was more descriptions of The Circus of The Damned and the blue waters around…
Netflix’s Maniac
Maniac tells the story of a group of people involved in a bizarre clinical trail.We focus mainly on two subjects and two of the doctors conducting the study. And a slightly insane Artificial Intelligence. Maniac is the kind of show that would have never been made just a few years ago. It’s chock full of special effects, all of them flawless in their execution, and has a story that is a story in the loosest sense of the word. From the very start we are never sure of that these people live in the real world. There are none of…
Remembering September 10th, 2001
I was in Fort Leavenworth, near Kansas City. I’d been there three or four times before, shooting the yearbook portraits for the Command and General Staff College. It was a good account. We all made money, the people at the Fort were all nice, and it’s beautiful in the area at this time of year. The Wife and I would often take a weekend and go to the KC Ren Faire, or eat at one of the many great barbecue joints the city is famed for. Our favorite spot was KC Masterpieces, which sadly is no more. This was a…
Deadnaming
Deadnaming is the practice of calling someone by a name they no longer go by. A common trivia question might be who is Marion Morrison or who is Reginald Dwight? Stage names like John Wayne and Elton John are common in the entertainment world. And yet, when Prince died and several people in the media announced that ‘Prince Nelson’ had died, I found this totally offensive. Prince is Prince, full stop. If Price couldn’t keep from being deadnamed, what do you really think your chances are? The media likes to deadname people, because using aliases is usually the practice of…
BlackKklansman
Set in the early 1970s, but very much about right now, BlacKkKlansman tells the story of a black man who becomes a cop in a time when black men were not cops. This is not a docudrama. This is a film inspired by real events, but not based on them. Spike Lee is plainly preaching to the choir. Klansmen are vile and evil mouth breathers who are clearly incapable of rational thought. Black people, the only group shown to suffer from the klan’s attentions, are uniformly beautiful. The men are well spoken and well dressed. The women have perfectly spherical…
The Outcasts of Time By Ian Mortimer
The Outcasts of Time starts off in the The Reign of King Edward III. Our heroes speak of events by the year of the King’s rule, since the way we count years had not yet been invented. We follow two brothers as they wander around a Plague infected world. Death is all around them. Bodies lay where they have fallen in the street, people hang themselves in despair, great pits are filled with dead bodies. In short order, the brothers have the Plague themselves and death is nigh. Then our hero hears a voice. It tells him to go to…
A Quiet Place
We start off with a black screen that says Day 89. A family of five is quietly sorting through the contents of an abandoned pharmacy in standard post apocalyptic fashion. We see that one girl has a cochlear implant. There is a small boy who walks quickly through the store, searching for toys. An older sister followers him and stops him from making noise. The boy finds an electronic toy, the kind with flashing lights and beeping noises. His father panics and his eyes go wide. He gets the toy from the child before it can make any noise and…
The Outsider by Stephen King
The Outsider tells the story of a small town Sheriff trying to solve an impossible murder. The problem is that he knows who the killer is, only the killer has an airtight alibi. The first part of the book spends a lot of time with the man arrested and the man who arrested him. Things are not as clear cut as they at first appear. The monster the Sheriff has to deal with is not the normal human variety, but something different. There is death and violence and things that go bump in the night. Like all Stephen King books,…
Toxic Fans
Or as they used to be known, ‘fans.’ I was a bit shocked a few years back when the creators of Breaking Bad said that fans such as myself, ones that wanted Walter White to ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after, were toxic people who didn’t get what they were saying. No, we got it all too much. Walter was the hero of the show and we were willing to follow that hero wherever he went and cheer him on in whatever he did. Yeah, he was a bad guy, but so was Spike in Buffy…