This clip from Strange New Worlds season 3 is really funny.

About a month ago, one of the conventions (I don't know which) aired a clip from season 3 of Strange New Worlds that I really liked. It's funny if you know the characters. Otherwise the humor probably doesn't land right. But given that this is season 3, I'd think that the people who watch said scene are probably invested in this show and will get the humorous sub-context that underlies everything that you're seeing in it.

It's only a clip here, so there is little context to the details of the mission. Additionally, a lot of questions are apt to pop up in the minds of viewers like myself (or you). For example: Why is Pike carrying a weapon? Is there some threat that awaits them? Another hidden gem is the serum not working on Pelia. Played by Carol Kane, Pelia is a delight as the chief engineer. She has fantastic comedic timing, and it's just wonderful to see her again as I've very much enjoyed the other roles in which she takes.

Also, Pike's hair as a Vulcan is pretty epic. It's been a note of discussion on Reddit forums at how good Anson Mount's hair looks when he's playing the role of Christopher Pike. So to see his hair get this kind of "do" is a real crowd pleaser. I love it. And Ethan Peck (Gregory Peck's grandson and the actor who plays Spock) does an amazing job in the clip showing an "internal scream." His look seemed to me to say, "This is high school all over again. Shit."

Anyway, if you get a moment (or five) take a look at the embedded clip below. It's great.

Bear McCreary scored the Old Tom Bombadil song from Fellowship of the Ring and made it a masterpiece.

Some inventions emerge perfect into the world just the way they are, and they shouldn't be messed with. One such example is the button on a shirt. There is nothing wrong with the button, whether it snaps or gets pushed through an eyelet. One way in which this is getting messed with in modern times is people making clothing that has magnetic buttons. So you have these buttons on the placket of the shirt and they come together via magnetic force. Whoever thought of this is someone who doesn't wash clothes. A magnet will stick to the drum inside a washing machine and keep the shirt from getting clean. The same goes for drying them out. If you have a shirt that has magnetic buttons, it will have a more difficult time getting dry because it will stick to the inside of the dryer.

However, there are other inventions that absolutely get better when someone takes a stab at them and decides, "I can improve on this."  Take for example the old "Tom Bombadil" song that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. Here's a few of the lyrics that appear in Lord of the Rings:

Light goes the weather-wind and the feathered starling.

Down along under Hill, shining in the sunlight,

Waiting on the doorstep for the cold starlight,

There my pretty lady is, River-woman's daughter,

Slender as the willow-wand, clearer than the water...

I hated coming across all of these songs in Tolkien's fantasy works when I was a kid. Sometimes, I would skip them completely and just go on to the next place where the story picked up. But, I'm glad that Bear McCreary did not think the same thing as me. He took this Old Tom Bombadil song and scored it, and the results are below (you should give it a listen). When I heard it for the first time, I was like...okay...this is amazing. It is a brilliant and beautiful use of Tolkien's words.

If there's a lesson to be learned here it is this: not everything can be improved upon, but sometimes it is desperately needed.

In the September IWSG post I reflect on my most frustrating educational tidbits that I struggle with when I write.

The band Greenday has a song with a line in the lyrics that says, "Wake me up when September ends..." I've also heard of the term "the September Scaries," which I don't quite understand. I think September is a wonderful month. The days aren't as long, which means that I'm not prematurely awakened by sunlight peeping in through my curtains (I'm pretty sensitive to light) in the morning. The intense 100 degree heat of the summer has cooled to something a lot more moderate, and the nights aren't so cold that you need to turn the heat on (at least around here they are not). I love September.

And with expressing that sentiment, I'm moving on to the Insecure Writer's Support Group post. This is a blogfest that I participate in and the rules below come from their website, which you can find HERE.

What is the purpose of the IWSG?: It is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds.

When do y'all post?: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. This is when you should post your thoughts on your own blog. Alternately, you could talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. You could discuss your struggles and triumphs, or offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. If you want to grow your own blog, this is a great time to network.

The X (Twitter) handle for the IWSG is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the September 4 posting of the IWSG are Beth Camp, Jean Davis, Yvonne Ventresca, and PJ Colando!

Now, every month, the IWSG announces a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.

Remember, the question is optional!

September 4 question - Since it's back to school time, let's talk English class. What's a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?

I'm pretty old, so I'm going to answer this not from an English class per se, but as one who learned to type on a conventional (electronic) typewriter. A thing that messed me up for a long time was two spaces after a "period" and using the "tab" key. You should never use "tab." However, there are some things from my English class that I've since tossed as well. One of these is "never start a sentence with the word 'And.'" Another is to avoid the use of 'very.' I agree that it is a weak adverb, but people use it all the time. I also think that avoiding weak writing doesn't matter as much as it used to (dangling preposition which is also okay now). Readers don't seem to care anymore unless you are writing for a certain standard of reader (a highly educated one). So, know your audience (I guess) is the best advice I have to give on this. 

Thank you for coming by my blog, and I look forward to networking with you.

Sauron is an incredibly interesting character and I'm glad Rings of Power is exploring him in depth.

With the return of Rings of Power today with three episodes on Prime, I want to talk about the thing that I liked the most from the first season: the portrayal of Sauron. Peter Jackson's Sauron is much the same as what you get when you read the books. He's this menacing ancient foe that is more of a force of nature than anything else. But any of us that read deeper and took on the other writings know that Sauron was a person. This is even hinted at with his alliance that got struck between Isengard and Mordor. Saruman talked to someone on the other end of the palantir, and whomever he talked to wasn't scary enough to make Saruman hang up the phone. Additionally, that person made sense, and thus was Saruman deceived.

Now, in Rings of Power...we got a pretty smokin' hot Sauron (not gonna lie on this). At least that was my interpretation by the end of season one. I'm sure he shall become a lot more menacing as time progresses (and probably a lot less pretty), but for now color me intrigued. In the Silmarillion, I'm pretty sure that Sauron takes on the forms of vampires and werewolves. But, he's still a person, admittedly a powerful one. He was Galadriel's friend, and it's so telling that he deceived her (because that is what he does). Sauron deceives, he lies, and he tells people what they want to hear so that he can manipulate him. If you're being that kind of a sycophant, you can't really be all that menacing because you don't want your audience to be scared of you. So, I'm on board with this very human take on Sauron. The menacing guy in armor that we see at the beginning of Fellowship of the Ring is probably way down the road.

And that's just the thing, right? By the time The Lord of the Rings story unfolds, Sauron is just a faceless, reclusive, oppressive entity who is holed up in his fort doing who knows what. He doesn't even ride into battles anymore or interact much with his subjects. He only showed up once during the peak battle of the last alliance, and that is after ignoring the whole skirmish for seven years or so. In the third age, no one really saw him save for Gollum when Sauron tortured him. Everyone else who had interactions with him only spoke to him through the palantir. He never came out or showed his face. His looks were left to the imagination.

The great thing about Amazon's first season (I think) is it got people thinking about Sauron as he could have been. He saved Galadriel from the ocean. He's a talented smith and craftsman capable of great beauty. He's charismatic and persuasive. It makes what he becomes all the more evil knowing that he didn't have to be that way. It was a choice he made. From the books:

"[Sauron] repents in fear when the First Enemy is utterly defeated, but in the end does not do as was commanded, return to the judgment of the gods. He lingers in Middle-Earth. Very slowly, beginning with fair motives: the reorganizing and rehabilitation of the ruin of Middle-Earth, 'neglected by the gods', he becomes a reincarnation of Evil, and a thing lusting for Complete Power--and so consumed ever more fiercely with hate (especially of gods and Elves)."

All in all, Sauron is an incredibly interesting character, and you just don't get any of that in either The Lord of the Rings or in the film adaptations. But in Rings of Power, we are getting it. And thus far, I'm really liking this exploration of who Sauron really was, and I'm definitely looking forward to more this week.

Are movies obsolete?

I never thought that I'd be saying this, but here we are. Do we actually need movies anymore? I went to the theater three times thus far this year. The first was to see the Dune sequel. The second time was to see Deadpool & Wolverine. And the third movie I saw on the big screen was Alien: Romulus. I used to love going to the theater and seeing movies. However, now it just seems more comfortable to watch them at home. At least there, I can control the subtitles and when I want to go and use the bathroom. I guess I might be showing my age here too. But...here me out.

Let's take a look at my beloved Star Trek. First off, Star Trek TV looks amazing, and it borders on movie quality. If I didn't know that I wasn't watching a movie, I'd assume that an episode was a movie. That's how good it looks. The same goes for Star Wars, Foundation on Apple TV, and Game of Thrones as well as its spinoff, House of the Dragon. All of these shows look ridiculously good, and by having a greater length (cut up into bite-size snippets of one-hour), you end up with a much larger canvas on which to tell your story. By contrast, it almost feels like "movies" with a run-time of two hours have become...obsolete...is it cruel to say that?

Anyway, I'd like to pose that question to you, if you want to answer it in the comments. Do you think movies have become obsolete? What was the last movie you saw in a theater, and was it worth the experience and the expense? What do we lose as a culture if we all agree that the common experience of attending movies in a theater is no longer worth it?

Furiosa does a great job to set up the events of Mad Max Fury Road.

Dementus riding a chariot towed by motorcycles was awesome.

I saw Furiosa this weekend by watching it on Max. I'm a casual fan of the "Mad Max" apocalyptic universe. This post will have some spoilers in it, so here is your official "spoiler warning."

First off, Chris Hemsworth is fantastic in this movie. I'd like to say that Anya Taylor Joy was also fantastic. But even though she occupied a lot of the scenes and it was her story, she had no dialogue. Most of the movie, people just thought she was mute. What she did do was act like an angry woman nearly all of the time. But just to be fair, she had a lot to be angry about in this story.

I think what Furiosa tried to do was to set up the struggle that we saw in Mad Max: Fury Road, and it did this really well. The movie runs right up to the exact moment when Furiosa hits the "Fury Road" to try and save some women from the death cult of Immortan Joe. Leading up to these events was a wild ride, and the most important player in this was the character of Dementus, played by Chris Hemsworth. Chris was so damned goofy, but in a dangerous "cult of personality" way.  I loved how there was a sort of crumminess to him compared to the other warlords. The peevish little whine in his voice, always having to spin failures.... When he finally got a face-to-face with Immortan Joe (who had made himself a god in his own death cult), watching Dementus's bravado falter before Joe's war boys was fantastic.

George Miller has a unique perspective when it comes to the post-apocalyptic world. The road wars, the violence, the raiders...places like "Gas Town" and "The Citadel" are unique and striking locations. The world breeds its own kind of crazy, and you get these cultish types like Dementus and you see that they are really good at destroying things, but they have no ability to rule. It turns out that ruling is much different than just conquering. With Immortan Joe, you see something different. He used a bunch of religious rhetoric to manipulate his people, yes, and his motivations were cruel and utterly self-serving. But, he found and built an empire in the wasteland, because he controlled a freshwater aquifer and he was using it to produce food, grow green things, and had some sort of bizarre nightmare breeding program going to try and have "full life" offspring. Gross, yes. But a civilization of sorts?

In a way, I also think that Chris Hemsworth has a bit of Kurt Russell in him. If they ever do a remake of Big Trouble in Little China, I think Chris Hemsworth would be a natural fit in the role of Jack Burton. He's got just enough goofiness and self-awareness that I think he could really pull off a "Jack Burton" well.

All in all, I loved Furiosa. It does have its issues of course. For one, the world portrayed is way too barren to have the amount of people it has living in it. I just can't make the story work. I mean...it's obvious that there are plenty of cannibals feasting on human flesh as we saw in the maggot bunker (and eating maggots as well). So, I guess people did what they had to do to survive. But even with all of that, the population didn't make sense. And the second thing that doesn't make sense is how these people can be so stupid, yet they build things like the War Rig or they create prosthetic limbs. And by "stupid" I mean things like using flame throwers around petroleum or gasoline (guzzolene in the movie) and other such nonsense. I don't know how you go from being that dumb to being able to build these incredible machines. However, these kinds of questions don't serve Furiosa well. I think what you should do is just sit back and enjoy it. Honestly, this is the most metal movie I've seen in a good long while. 

 

Rings of Power returns for season two in less than seven days.

Let's talk about Rings of Power which is returning next week on Amazon.

I watched the first season, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, and this is despite things like Galadriel having physical invincibility and for diversity to be injected into a story that (for the most part) has no diversity in it at all. None of these things bothered me, and I eagerly consumed the episodes and the songs, and by season's end I wanted more. Fantasy shows and movies like Rings of Power are a great way to pretend that we don't actually live in a world where everyday human beings are actually cruel and even revel in their cruelty to others. We don't like that part, and we try to hide it. But sometimes we cannot deny this thing, because it is at the core of what it means to be human. People (including our "leaders) want to remind us to be "better than." Better than what, exactly? I got no answers.

Well this next week, I get my wish because Rings of Power is returning with more beautiful episodes, and it's my guess that the story is building toward the war of the elves with Sauron. There are also (probably) some real world parallels to this particular tale. As powerful and wonderful as the elf civilization was, this evil literally came out from underneath their noses and just kind of blossomed in a devastating way. You can see what I mean, right? If not, that's okay...I'll move on.

There is one frustrating thing about Rings of Power that I don't like, and that is its online community. It's next to impossible to have a discussion about the show because the weirdest nerds alive decided years before it came out that they'd hate it no matter what. It's a good show with its problems, but a nuanced take like this is next to impossible online. I sum up nearly all of the grievances I've seen as, "preconceived notions of what the show would be like did not meet expectations." Part of the problem is that Tolkien has become a sacred thing to many people. But why do humans keep putting things on a pedestal? Why has Tolkien become sacred. The truth is that he's a long dead author who made his family rich and who was as flawed as all people are in what they like and what they hate.

However...and here's the weird thing...I bet a lot of nerds who hated the show will tune in for season 2. Now, think about that for a moment. People who hated the show will probably "hate watch" the show so that they can continue to be mad about it. That's gotta be weird, right? I mean...what kind of person would do that?

Maybe you have some answers for me. But if not (and if you're reading my words) will you let me know if you're excited for season 2? Or are you going to pass?