Author: photog

16APR2025 – Wednesday Coffee Walk Zoom Call – To Boldly Go Where No Hag Has Gone Before

photog Current Events, Fake Science, Science, Star Trek , , ,

It’s always good talking to the boys.  What will be the topic for the week?  What will be the funniest or the craziest or the most annoying topic for the Left?  There were several candidates; NYC subway necrophilia, General Flynn’s call for Obama’s arrest and NY AG Leticia James’ real estate fraud scandal.  But everyone’s favorite by a lot was “Leftist Hags in Space!”  We all got a good laugh out of the likes of Gayle King, Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, washed up pop star Katy Perry and nobodies Aisha Bowe, Kerianne Flynn and Amanda Nguyen squealing around on top of a comically phallic “Blue Origin” rocket that rose to an unimpressive 62 miles above Earth and then parachuted back.  The whole roundtrip took place within a ridiculously short 12 minutes.

This all female “crew” followed in the footsteps of 90+ year old fake rocket man James T Kirk, (AKA William Shatner) as he also failed to reach Earth orbit in the painfully underpowered suborbital rocket.  It was the opinion of all on the zoom call that a better effect could have been achieved if Bezos had instead equipped the ship with a female crew composed entirely of professional strippers.  There was disagreement as to whether weightlessness was a problem or a bonus from the point of performance.  Also, it was debated whether a stripper pole would be a safety hazard in the “cockpit.”

I noticed Camera Girl looking disapprovingly at me as she walked by at this point during the zoom call but free speech is a cherished right of the coffee walk tradition so I ignored the implied censorship and laughed along with the rest of the jackasses.  Ah, good times.

So, we compared the press coverage of this absurdly unimpressive publicity stunt and compared it to Space-X planning and executing a critical rescue of actual astronauts from the orbiting space station where Boeing’s failure stranded them for over half a year.  Basically, other than Fox News the rest of the media performed a virtual black out of the Space-X mission while the Bezos stunt was given 24/7 coverage by all the news stations as if it were something worthy of discussion.

And it’s impossible not to come to the conclusion that Jeff Bezos has managed to make space travel uncool.  Now I’ll qualify this.  Suborbital rocket flight is not really space-travel.  It’s really just air travel of a very inconvenient and useless kind.  But he has managed to attach a taint to rocket flight which I wouldn’t have thought possible.  And I should have expected nothing less from the founder of Amazon.com.  After all, the company who has his annoying trucks delivering things at my house seemingly before I order them would obviously be able to make rocket ships annoying too.

Well, I can always hope that the next all female crew will be Democrat politicians.  Let’s say Nancy Pelosi, AOC, Hillary Clinton and Maxine Waters.  Put all four of them in blue jumpsuits and at least for ten minutes I can hope against hope for some real excitement.  Engine, O-ring, parachute, whatever.

Learning from a Harsh Mistress

photog Current Events, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner ,

Today was a good day on the novel.  I figured out a plot device to externalize the main character’s decision making.  I’m going to have one or more conversations between him and the AI.  Now this may sound like a faddish decision because of all the AI-associated jibber jabber we hear about lately.  But actually, I can think of a very famous usage of AI friendship in classic science fiction.

In Robert Heinlein’s novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” the human protagonist is friend to and conspiracy partner with a self-aware computer named Mike.  The conversations between them are a good chunk of the story and critical to the plot at many points.  Now I don’t need anything that extensive for my plot device but I need a sounding board for my character’s decision making.  I can turn a soliloquy into a dialog and that works better for the dramatic aspect of it.  And since the AI is “female” it provides a different emotional feeling to the talk.  It’s funny, I had added a scene where the protagonist is mediating an armed standoff between two military groups and without realizing it, I had decided that he would follow up by surrendering himself to the US government.  But once I did that, I realized that I had not foreshadowed this move anywhere in the story and no one would have expected it.

So, I decided I needed to build up some of his thought process in advance for the readers to see.  What I’m still working on is the reaction to his “capture.”  I’m thinking about something like a general strike with the Teamsters and other truck drivers shutting down the supply chains for everything and the country grinding to a halt.  I haven’t thought all of that out yet.  I need to up the ante and bring the book to an end on a high note but so far it doesn’t have enough drama and excitement.

Maybe I’ll introduce an external threat to provide a reason for unifying the splintered Americans.  Or maybe I’ll have the protagonist provide a stirring speech to the nation that will galvanize a movement to strip the federal government of its oppressive powers and reassert the freedoms in the Bill of Rights in all of their aspects.

And I have to do all of this without it seeming too much like a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moment.  And that means I’ll actually have to figure out what practical changes would be made to the current state of the federal government.  Some of the things are easy.  I’ll abolish the FBI.  I’ll cancel the Patriot Act and the FISA Courts.  The CIA will have to be reformed so that it can’t touch American citizens at all.  I’m tempted to eliminate the IRS.  In many ways the second Trump administration seems to be stealing a lot of my thunder.  Maybe I should strike back by eliminating the Education department and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  No, I’ll be big about it and stay in my lane.

So today was a good day.

She-Hulk X

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

I was watching the 1930s King Kong movie yesterday and thought, “That was a damn good idea for a motion picture.”  It had a love story, a damsel in distress, prehistoric monsters, an ocean voyage to a tropical island, a battle scene involving the latest weapons technology of the time, a strange culture, a scantily clad pretty woman and the capitol city of the world as a backdrop.  It was a fantastic story and considering the special effects technology of the time it must have been a truly exciting movie to watch.

Now I compare this to what passes for adventure movies today and what have we got?  Most of what is out there are superhero movies.  One or more characters dressed up in spandex running or flying around battling each other to cause or prevent mayhem to the human population around them.  And after two hours of this, usually nothing much has happened.  Some space jewel or other has been found or lost and some bad guys have been captured or chased off.  But to all intents and purposes nothing substantive has been achieved or lost.  For the most part no one even dies.  It seems rather pointless.

I think something has been lost from the art of storytelling.  Now this isn’t completely the case.  There are still movies with a beginning, middle and end.  I guess a decent example would be Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.  Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises; beginning, middle and end.  We see why Bruce Wayne became Batman.  We see him defeat his greatest adversary and we see him walk away when he can do no more.  It’s not Shakespeare but it is decent story-telling and effective spectacle.

Now compare this to the Marvel “Avengers” series.  There have been dozens of these movies if you count all of the sequels, spin-offs and television productions.  Each “hero” has a sequence of movies and then there are the ensemble films and basically nothing meaningful happens.  And now they’ve gotten to the point where they want to swap out the older white male heroes with black and female successor heroes.  The most laughable one I’d say is “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law.”  I have to assume that if she loses a case she hulks out and rampages through the court building until her client can escape the pulverized masonry.  Basically, these people have no conception of story-telling and are just building boring envelopes that they can fill with CGI effects.

Even something as absurd as the John Wick movies is better than this.  At least it started with an original movie that had a character and a plot.  Granted the character is a cartoon and the plot is as simple minded as any imaginable but there is an arc to the story and things definitely happen; mostly flying bullets and dead Russian mobsters but within the confines of the story it keeps your interest mostly.  Now it is almost unbelievable that they’ve been able to turn this into a series.  The body count in the first movie was in the high two figures.  In the second movie, which was the last one I watched, the action was so frenetic I couldn’t even tell how many people he killed.  The automatic weapons fire was almost continuous for ten minutes at a time.  I don’t even know how we’re supposed to believe that the guns don’t start to melt from the heat.  But even this absurdity is preferable to the boring Marvel movies.

I understand that Hollywood is solely driven by return on investment and pumping out sequels to existing intellectual property like the comic book characters is one of the only allowed pathways to getting a film made.  The exception is someone like Christopher Nolan whose reputation for success will allow him to make a movie like Oppenheimer.  But you can count those trusted movie-makers on the fingers of one hand.  And they’re getting old.  What happens when they’re gone?  She-Hulk II or III or X?