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There is a trailer out for The Book of Boba Fett, and I’m pretty sure I’ll want to watch it when it starts streaming on December 29. It doesn’t look like a prequel to his appearance in the films, but a sequel. I’m not one of those people who obsesses about the story potential of […]
I wanted to love Loki, but it was really just okay. Only six episodes, and it kind of jumped the shark from the beginning. In retrospect, possibly the best thing about the character Loki is his relationship with Thor, who does not appear in this series. At least I know what the alligator is about, […]
The fourth and allegedly final season of Goliath was released yesterday, and I binged through the whole season last night and into the early hours of this morning. I was surprised that there was a fourth season, because the third season had so spectacularly run off the rails. To summarize, the first two seasons were […]
Isaac Asimov was well aware of the natural human tendency to fear things that appear kind of human, but aren’t quite. He went out of his way to show that robots wouldn’t be dangerous, simply because the people who made them would ensure that they aren’t. His Three Laws of Robotics aren’t the result of […]
For a while, I was watching a series called Stacked. It was as bad as you would expect a show to be that centered on a character played by Pamela Anderson. It was supposed to be a humorous contradiction that a woman with fake boobs would work at a book store (yeah, check the title […]
I am reading, or rather listening to, The Lying Life of Adults. It is a departure from what I usually read, but I was interested in it because it is read by Marisa Tomei. I’m about two-thirds through it, and I’m enjoying it very much. There is a whole cast of characters, and each one […]
A couple years ago, out of desperation to find something entertaining to watch on Netflix, I watched (the first season of) The New Legends of Monkey. Overall, I didn’t care much for it. However, before I gave up on it, a character appeared who caught my attention: Sandy, played by Emilie Cocquerel. She was hot, […]
Short films are short because they skimp on components that are required in feature-length films, or they cut them out completely. Character Development: This is the most common omission. We often know just enough about the character to be able to tell the story. In a bad short film, we know even less about the […]
N.K. Jemisin is a three-time winner of the Hugo award for best novel. I very much enjoyed The Broken Earth series. I assumed I would like The City We Became, more or less. The blurb hadn’t particularly interested me, but when I saw that it was nominated for this year’s Hugo, I figured I should […]
You have probably heard the assertion that there are really only a few stories, and every story is just a variation on one of them. They will usually list several of them, starting with, “boy meets girl.” One story pattern that is never mentioned is, “protagonist stubbornly sticks to some principle through to the end.” […]
