Month: August 2025

The Library is Full of Them

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , , , , ,

As I mentioned in an earlier post Disney (and by extension Hollywood) realizes that they’ve alienated the male half of the human race.  And as I gleefully mentioned this is all their own fault and it’s hilarious that it’s a surprise for them.  And after torching two of the most valuable male-oriented intellectual properties (Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe), instead of trying to fix the problems and repair the damage to these brands they’ve decided to bury their losses and start from scratch with brand new franchises.

Well, you’ve got to admire their optimism.  Maybe they haven’t heard the old saying about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.  But it’s their money (or their stockholders anyway).

But in a sense, they’ve got it half right.  Half of their problem is that sequel after sequel has drained all the life out of their franchises.  So new stories and characters is a good direction to go in.  People like to be entertained and meeting new characters is part of that entertainment.  And even though there are only a few overarching plots to an adventure story it helps to change the names of the heroes, villains, magic rings, super-weapons and princesses from story to story.

So far, so good.  But now comes the tricky part.  Listen up Disney:

DON’T MAKE THE HERO A GIRL-BOSS.  THE GIRL IN THE STORY IS THE LOVE INTEREST OF THE HERO.  SHE IS THE REWARD FOR THE HERO SAVING THE DAY.  SHE MAY TAKE UP A BOW OR A DAGGER IN A PINCH BUT SHE’S NOT THERE TO SAVE THE HERO AND SHE’S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN CHARGE.

I hope I was clear there.  Use the traditional hero saga as the backbone of the story and find a writer and a director who can work with such a story in a creative and entertaining fashion and you will make billions of dollars.  Just as a for instance Joss Whedon directed the first Avengers movie.  It made $1.52 billion worldwide at the box office.  That’s a lot of money.  And part of the reason for that enormous sum is because Whedon knows how to make likable characters in a movie.  He blends humor, action and drama in the correct proportions and at the right moments.  In other words, he’s not a hack like all of the DEI directors that have bungled the last several years of your franchise flops.

Now, granted he is demanding and sometimes slightly abusive toward the “talent.”  But they’re getting paid millions of dollars to dress up in spandex and fool around in front of a green screen.  The least they could do is take a little hectoring from a prima donna director to earn those millions.  So anyway, my advice for Hollywood is to find the few creative talents out there; directors like Whedon and Christopher Nolan.  And purchase the film rights to books that millions of people love.  And don’t mess with the stories and characters.  Put them faithfully on the big screen and then instead of trying to recreate success with endless sequels move onto another story!  Did you know there is more than one book in the library?  There are several.

I know it’s a radical departure. But it’s just so crazy it just might work!

What Keeps Us Human

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I’ve been reading the latest analyses of paleolithic hominin DNA and from what I’ve gathered it seems to be the case that the present human population is a non-homogeneous collection of various hybrid populations between Homo sapiens (“modern” humans) and Homo neanderthalensis, Homo denisovensis and very likely Homo erectus.

Of course, human evolution is such a hot-button topic today that getting paleontologists to use words like hybrids to describe human lineages makes them squeamish and nervous.  Everyone is afraid of the accusation of racism to erupt if someone hints that human beings of different ancestries aren’t all exactly the same.  But they really should all calm down.  Hominin species have been walking the Earth for something like seven million years and during that time various groups have become isolated, evolved different characteristics and then just as easily recombined and formed hybrids that in turn become isolated and start the process all over again.

The latest information I’ve seen shows that there is a strong correlation between Neanderthal DNA and modern populations in northern Europe and northwesten Asia.  And there are strong correlations between Denisovan DNA and modern populations of Australian aborigines and Papuan New Guineans.

The ancient DNA that has been found is restricted to specimens that existed in cooler climates so the complicated story of hominin mixing and isolating in Africa and other tropical areas may never be reconstructed (although recent work with fossil protein materials may change that in the future).  But I think it’s clear that humans have in the past and will continue in the future to recombine their populations in various ways in reaction to local conditions that select for fitness.

Of course, those selection pressures have changed drastically over the geologic time our genus has existed.  Human society has also evolved and culture has as much to do with evolution now as climate had in the past.  Human behavior is now dictated by things like propaganda, government policy, industrial planning, resource scarcity and even internet influencers.

But hopefully men and women will still try to find mates that will allow their offspring to have the best chance of surviving and carrying on the race.  It still makes sense for a man to want a woman with empathy for his children and enough sense to teach her children to obey their parents and follow the simple rules written on those stone tablets that have guided our civilization for the last several thousand years.

And it makes sense for a woman to want a man who isn’t too lazy or selfish to provide for his family and who enjoys coming home from the hunt and retires to the fire in his cave and tells his little tribe about the mammoth that he hunted and the saber-tooth tiger that hunted him.  And draws a picture on the walls of his cave to celebrate that story.

And the most important trait that both men and women should be selecting their mates for is their minds.  Our brains have been our hallmark for millions of years.  Homo habilis; the tool maker.  That’s us.  We’re the monkeys that came down from the trees, stood up straight and looked at the world straight on and began changing it to our liking from day one.  Fire.  The wheel, the wagon, the chariot, the ship, the saddle, the plow, the heat engine, automobiles, airplanes, rockets. Stone weapons, saws, knives, hammers, axes, levers, firearms, lasers.  Gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, steel, uranium, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb.  Wheat, oats, millet, rice, maize, cattle, horses, sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens, ducks, white mice, guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys, yeast, mammalian cell culture, CRSPR gene editing, bioengineering.

Let’s just hope that our “civilization” never forgets what keeps us human.

A Light Bulb Turns On at Disney

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Movie Reviews , , ,

According to Variety magazine:

Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles

Disney has realized that young men are tired of their girl-boss inhabited movies.  And now it’s a problem because Disney needs their money.

And I quote:

“Numerous studies show that Gen Z men in particular are a lonely, gaming-obsessed group who were hampered in their formative years by COVID-19 lockdowns — not the easiest segment to grasp.”

So even when their desperate to attract an audience they can’t help but mock and belittle men and boys.

Rather than rant on my own I’ll borrow the Critical Drinker’s rant.  He is much more amusing than I am.

 

 

What We Need is a Baby Boom

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family, Trump

There are fifty million Americans between the ages of twenty and thirty (ball park).  That’s twenty-five million couples to provide the next generation of Americans.  The problem is they won’t get married and have kids.  Why?  Well, several reasons.  Feminism, internet porn and the cost of living.  The first two are more in the way of being negative drags on the process of marriage.  But the last is more like a road block.  The cost of housing is too high and the mortgage rates are too high.  Okay, that is the current situation.  But this has to be fixed and right away.  The clock is ticking and all those twenty-five million female biological clocks are winding down.  And this is the last chance to fix this before America just sort of fades away.  What’s needed is a baby boom.

How do you make that happen?  Well, it’s quite simple.  We need a moonshot for a baby boom.  The government has to do a bunch of things:

  • Bring back good paying jobs for men (Trump is actually working on this one already).
  • Make houses affordable (this involves two separate things; lower interest rates for young couples buying their first house and incentivize home building)
  • Government incentives to married women staying home and raising kids.
  • Federal tuition vouchers to allow parents to take their kids out of the public schools.
  • A propaganda program to convince young women that working in an office is slavery and that raising kids is the most important job in the world (because it is).
  • Get rid of no-fault divorce.
  • Tax incentives to corporations to hire married men.

I call this a moonshot because it will cost trillions.  Between the mortgages and the tax incentives it will be as expensive as the GI Bill of Rights after WWII and the Great Society rolled into one.  But it’s a matter of necessity.  This country is bleeding out.  We’re already shrinking from the point of view of children and that’s even considering all the immigrant kids walking around today.  Another generation and immigrants will be all that’s left and that won’t really be America anymore.  It’ll be post-America.

So that’s the direction our leaders have to be going if they want to keep this experiment going.  Some of this stuff is being put in place by Orban in Hungary.  Trump is working his way in the right direction but it will take more than a few years to institute.  But first it has to be on the radar of the people in charge.  I know there are people aware of the critical problem of population loss.  But unfortunately, the millennial generation is the biggest part of the problem.  They’ve been brainwashed into thinking there are already too many humans.  So, it’s not clear which side will win this fight.

Personally, I hope to see as many great-grandchildren as possible in my family.  Maybe I’ll have to start an incentive program of my own.  Maybe I’ll sell the Compound and buy a multi-family that I can turn into condos for the grandkids.  You’ve got to start somewhere.