Pixar gave a strong wink to all us queers celebrating pride month in their June release of Luca

I watched Pixar's Luca this week. Just like other films from the Pixar Animation Studio, I liked how bold and beautiful it looked. The main characters of Luca and Alberto were pure and innocent, and they were very relatable in context, because this is the first movie that really broaches gay love. The fact that they are fish people (merfolk?) becomes a pretty strong metaphor by the end of the movie, when the grandma declares, "There will be people who won't accept him for who he is. But I don't think it will be a problem, because he seems to know how to find the right kind of people."

It's not the first movie that broached these kinds of topics. Call Me By Your Name, which was a wonderful coming-of-age story clearly meant for adult audiences, was also set in Italy and about two males who spent their summer together (and who got to know each other very well). Luca though is a children's movie...so the subtext is extremely subtle with jealous looks given by Alberto when his friend Luca seems to be bonding with the female in the movie named Giulia, who becomes a crucial part of their adventure. But in the end, Luca expresses the purest form of love for his friend by letting go of their dream to escape on a Vespa together to see the world. Instead, he sells it, and he uses the money to grant Luca's wish to go and attend school so that their one summer together just becomes a memory.

I think it's nice that Disney is starting to tell queer stories after decades of being in the zone of telling stories about white, straight characters. It's a baby step in the right direction to embrace on-screen diversity and representation. It's too bad it didn't make more of a splash. Pixar/Disney hardly marketed it at all. So people will essentially just have to stumble across it as a stealth-released Pixar movie on Disney+. The queerness of the story is subtle enough that those who don't look very deep will undoubtedly miss it, which will probably save Disney from having too much of a headache from the likes of Tucker Carlson. But the wink from the company is there. I saw it, and for a brief moment (at least) it brought me joy.

When people slow the pacing of their stories they end up better in almost every circumstance.

In thinking about Star Wars from my Monday post, it struck me once again how frenetic each episode of Star Wars is, whether it is in cartoon form, live-action, or in movie form. It's very much a hallmark of the way a Star Wars story is told. And I wonder why. I have a deeper appreciation for slower stories these days. I just finished a book wherein the main characters essentially got together to go and investigate a swamp and have a conversation with an immortal woman who could tell them all about the lands of the dead. That's it...that was the whole book. These days, most people might expect the travel to the swamp to be one chapter, the conversation with the woman who had knowledge about the lands of the dead to be another chapter, and then we are onto something new. Maybe an investigation of the lands of the dead for chapters 3 and 4?

Anyway, I'm glad that didn't happen in the book I read. It took all twenty-six of its chapters to do the above. And that would probably piss off a lot of people. But sometimes (I think) storytellers suffer from too much get up and go. Why do we need to visit three or four different planets in a Star Wars movie? What's wrong with just staying on one planet and that's it. I see the same thing in other franchises too (mostly kid stories...which may explain things as to why they are so frenetic). Why do we need so many characters? What's wrong with just having two or three? That seems like a good number.

I learned quite some time ago that sometimes I can get in a rush to want to get all of my ideas out in front of me. Whether I'm writing or talking, I can feel like there's a bottleneck happening, which can cause me to rush things before I think they are ready. What ends up happening is that the idea gets lost, or the thing I wanted to accomplish does not resonate like I thought it would. Pacing is everything to a story, and I've discovered that (for the most part) one should take it slow. It is better to err on being too slow than I think it is to err on the side of being too fast. However, I only say this because the kinds of stories that I like to read these days have to do with the character connections. Those need time to be nurtured in order to grow strong, and if the author tries to move along too quickly, then the whole thing ends up not making sense. Ultimately, it becomes unsatisfying.

As a result, I think I know why many movies written for kids now annoy me. The pacing is off...there is always too much going on. It makes me wonder why kids need all of that. Their brains should be in a place in life where they are actively seeing out causal relationships, which take time to build. So it's either kids are asking for this, or its a content generator's idea of what kids want to watch or listen to. And somewhere in this train of thinking, someone decided that throwing ideas like tennis balls coming from a machine was the right thing to do. That's how we get movies where a gajillion things are going on at the same time. The Transformer movies are nigh unwatchable because of this.

TL/DR version: The slow burn is good y'all.

That's my two cents. Any of you care to weigh in on pacing?

Star Wars: The Bad Batch is basically an enjoyable A-Team in space but it doesn't take many risks with its world-building.

Is anyone else watching the Star Wars series called The Bad Batch, which is on Disney +? I watched a few of the episodes this weekend, and I really like them. The story follows a group of clone troopers who have a bad microchip in them that made it possible for them to ignore Order 66 given by Emperor Palpatine, and to set off on their own in a galaxy that has gone full fascism to the max.

Thus far in the series, we have seen cameos from Bib Fortuna (Jaba the Hutt's MajorDomo), the Rancor that Luke killed (in adolescence it was playful and called "Moochie"), and the bounty hunter Fennec Shand (who is in the Mandalorian). In The Mandalorian Fennec is friends with Boba Fett and is played by Ming-Na Wen (who was also in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.).

I don't have many nitpicks with the series. The ones I do have are centered on the same complaints that I had with The Mandalorian. For example, the architecture of different areas of the galaxy more or less repeats itself. People (no matter what planet you happen to be on) still put the most important computer consoles out on these rickety things with no railing that are suspended over a huge drop. And the same old planets that you've seen before get to be set pieces yet again for another series. Tatooine is the worst of these. We can't ever seem to be able to get away from Tatooine. I suppose that we can chalk this up to world-building, and the fact that it is hard and complicated. Using characters and sites with which viewers are already familiar is much easier. However, they are taking small steps. We've seen a small village and another side of a Correllian city that we didn't get in the Solo movie. 

As for the subject matter of Star Wars, it seems spot on. Star Wars has always been pretty heavy and dark. In my opinion it started out as a commentary about American imperialism as pulp science fiction. The only thing that made it kid friendly was the tone. But the moral scales of the show has always kind of circled around killing Nazi-esque soldiers who are just following orders. And when you went one layer deeper, in many of these cases it was slaughtering genetic twins (which reminds us of some Concentration camp stuff). In The Bad Batch we have one clone in what I can only describe as "The A-Team in space" going 100% evil because the Kaminoans (who made him in a test tube) are amping up the malfunctioning genetic chip in his brain. We have yet to see where that goes, but I can hazard a guess that it won't be good.

Anyway, the series is obviously not done airing its first season. I took a much-needed break from other things I'm dealing with in my life to watch the show. I'd recommend it if you are a Star Wars fan, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on the show if you are watching it.

Titans season 3 is coming and it will probably leave me disappointed yet again.

Titans season 3 is coming. I've watched the other seasons of Titans, first on DC Universe and later on HBO Max (DC Universe didn't last very long). That being said, I'm always disappointed. I was pissed last season when they killed off Wonder Girl. The actress's name is in the credits for filming season 3, so I think that we'll see her come back. However, this show consistently bites off more than it can chew.

In my opinion, there are too many characters and too many storylines to juggle in the ten episode season. They like to throw a lot of Batman stories into the mix, and (don't get me wrong) I do like the Batman. However, this isn't his show even if Dick Grayson is the star. Now we've got Jason Todd being cast as the Red Hood, and the trailer for season 3 seems to hint strongly at the Death in the Family storyline, wherein the Joker killed Jason Todd and essentially created "the Dark Knight," which was his decades long brooding phase where Batman was grim dark and the storylines were brutally violent and dripping with evil. The Death in the Family storyline was also very bonkers as Joker became a representative for Iran and received diplomatic immunity for killing Jason Todd. Then he used that status to try and gas the UN. Oh and Superman stopped Batman from going to kill Joker because Supes may not like diplomatic immunity, but he honors it. I'm like...what?

I guess we are also getting Barbara Gordon who I guess will be crippled ala the Joker so that she's Oracle (which goes along with the comic books) but it is also a dark storyline. And then there's Tim Drake (the third Robin), Blackfire, Superboy, and Krypto the dog. And that's not mentioning the Titans that we've already seen. Nobody gets any time and the ending of the season is always a low-budget mess.

Anyway, that's my rant. Below is the trailer for season 3 of Titans. I'm gonna watch it. I just wanted to bitch at something on a Friday.

Once you understand how a transporter in Star Trek works the use of it seems horrifying.

This was Robot's human form in Invincible. He helped the Mauler twins escape prison, because
they were experts at cloning. Once they were out, Robot asked them to create a body for him
and then when it was done, he had them transfer a copy of his complete brain to the new body.
Then the old body was taken off life support and allowed to die, but its death was very real.

I've been thinking of the transporter lately. I'm sure you've seen it. People in the multiple television series step into it and get "beamed" to another location almost instantaneously. What is actually happening is that a person is killed (disassembled) and their memories and personality and everything up to and including the moment of their death is reassembled in another location. To the person being reassembled it is fine. To the person being killed...that is their final moment of life. So the only one that notices it is the person who is being killed. In other words...it still sucks for them.

The reason I embarked on this thought exercise about the transporter has a lot to do with Amazon's Invincible. I was discussing with a friend the idea of the intelligent clones that are in that show and how they invented technology to create an identical imprint of the mind into the living tissue of another body. This effectively creates an immortality scenario, because the new person is equipped with all of the memories of the old person. Every single one. Only, it isn't quite so simple. You see, the old person is still alive trapped in their body, and when they die in that body...it is for real.

So, my friend and I had a discussion centered around this question: knowing that the transporter in Star Trek actually kills you, would you be okay using it knowing that the other clone of you would be identical to you in the same way? The clone would not be able to tell it wasn't the real person. Only the person who died at the proverbial hand of the transporter machine would actually know. He said that he would make the choice very easily and use the transporter. I said I probably would not. To me, it would be no different than dying with a bullet through the brain. It would be final death. Sure, my clone would have all of my experiences and my memories and would be identical to me. However, I would not be a part of that consciousness.

It's a strange mental exercise to imagine cloning and transporting in this manner. So, now that I've explained to you how all of that works...would you choose to use a transporter? Would you choose to be killed so that a bunch of time could be saved by recreating you in another location, even if that re-creation would be you down to the most minute detail? Your consciousness would end with your death and a new consciousness would be born in the transporter a great distance from you. The new you would not have any break in consciousness as the memories would exist all the way up to emerging on the other side. It would be the old you that no longer created memories (because you were dead). It's a strange question (I know), but I feel like it's worth asking.

And now I fully get why Bones (Dr. McCoy) did not like transporters.

I finished reading the Riftwar Saga of thirty books. It was mostly good even if it may have jumped the shark quite a while ago.

This weekend, I finished reading the Raymond E. Feist Riftwar Saga that spans thirty books while 100 degree temperatures settled in over the very parched western states. The last book in the series, Magician's End, was a bit of a slog of a read in the sense that it had a saggy middle. Feist was clearly wrapping up a lot of plot lines and had decided to devote his last novel to the politics of kingdoms, i.e., who gets the throne of the Kingdom of the Isles, etc. All of this while a greater threat from outside the world was happening under everyone's noses. While reading, I kept asking myself how I would have ended this series were these my characters. I suppose I wouldn't have done anything different. And I think that means that the series went on far too long, and it was really (in the end) dried up of any new stories to write about.

The Riftwar Saga in itself is quite an accomplishment. Thirty books means that the author and all those who participated in this magnum opus felt very strongly and passionately for these characters. Their origins may have been in Dungeons & Dragons games, but they got the full respect and treatment one would want for labors of love minus an actual movie from Hollywood. The author's stories were good, but the continual characters that were the backbone of the series all suffered from clear "power bloat," which is also a thing that plagues high-level D&D games. "Power bloat" is a phenomenon wherein a character gains so many powers, levels, and abilities over the course of play that they sail into retirement, because a story creator can no longer come up with ideas to challenge these mind-blowing and powerful characters. I never thought I'd see such evidence of this phenomenon in written books, but by the end of Magician's End, the main character was essentially a god. Rather than just "be a god" the author decided to kill off the main character in a most spectacular and very heroic way. I guess this was his method of letting go, so that he could focus on other projects and other stories. It would have been very difficult to write stories that involved an essentially omnipotent being anyway, so death in a heroic blast off was a solid way to say, "I'm stepping away from this project forever, and I'm glad you enjoyed the ride."

When I think of the Riftwar Saga, I'm kind of amazed at how much Feist decided to blend modern concepts of science into his epic fantasy. His characters in getting to know the universe leave few rocks unturned, learning about (essentially) quantum mechanics, ever expanding space, the fusion that drives stars, and other such things. Some of his characters proclaim loudly that magic doesn't really exist, even though there are magicians a plenty in the world working magic. But then as time goes and you delve into the story, you begin to see that what might be magic may be just another kind of physics that involve particles changing what they want to be at an atomic level and how magic just may be a way to encourage those particles along a pathway.

He even overexplains his bad guys, kind of taking away the mysteries of them. His demons that he introduces you to in earlier books are at first terrifying. But in later books, you just come to realize that they used to be the same host as angels and were separated in the ancient past. Hell (where the demons come from) is just another universe. And the demons have cities and their own people. They raise young and fear an ever increasing blackness at the center of their dimension. Demystifying all of this made the demons less like this evil force, and more like just another fantasy race like elves and dwarves. The big bad itself, which was this void thing called the Dread that wanted to eat all life in the universe was explained away too. Apparently, in the beginning of Feist's cosmic creation there were these two entities. One was curious and the other wasn't. The curious entity left the incurious one and started to investigate all of its ideas that it had. It created time as an organizational tool so that all of its ideas would not happen at the same exact moment. So time was literally this thing that allowed other things to be spaced apart and be organized instead of chaotic.

Well, all of this preoccupation by the curious entity made the incurious one lonely. So it attacking everything in reality to eat it and destroy it was really just its attempt to unravel time so that the curious entity would come back to its state of being and be peaceful in a kind of timeless bliss (as it had been before) with the uncurious entity. It was a weird concept that did make sense. However, it removed all of the horror to know that this was fundamentally what was going on. I felt like the big bad had been overexplained. It was still as annihilating as a black hole is, but by knowing exactly what was going on, it somehow became less interesting than it would have been were it some awful monster. Ah well. Were these choices that I might have made? I don't know. The only thing I do know is that thirty books is a lot for any one person to accomplish, and I suppose he did all right when it comes to that kind of dedication. After all, these super powerful characters needed something to figure out, because "big monster go smash" had happened so many books ago that to be original, the author needed something that would be different and justify all those pages.

He-Man in the Masters of the Universe Revelation trailer from Netflix looks like a blond superchad and I loooove it.

The Masters of the Universe: Revelation teaser trailer dropped yesterday. From the mind of Kevin Smith, I didn't expect to be so smitten by it. But the nostalgia is strong with this one! Also, they went full 80's. I've embedded the trailer below for your viewing pleasure. I mean...talking 80's here...but could you ever go wrong with Bonnie Tyler's I need a hero? The delivery on "I have the power" gave me chills, and Orko looks awesome.