Older posts. I maintain the right to disavow any opinion I previously held. Because hey, people change.
Presented Without Comment
Something that becomes quickly apparent when roaming the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is that the placards accompanying the pieces are quite sparse. They give the name of the work, the artist, the year, and the medium. Nothing more, unless the work is on loan then in says where from. But there’s no explanation of the art or artist, no details on the importance of the piece and why it belongs in a museum. Instead it’s all just…
Museum Day
Y’know, I did plan to write something today. I also planned to go to the newly-opened Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. What I did not plan on was somehow spending nearly five hours there and only leaving since it was, well, closing. That does leave much less time to blogging the intended. But in light of that, shout out to museums. Especially this one that’s really bold in its curation and what it decides is museum-worthy art. Dude, I…
Human Error
After a couple weeks away, we’re back! And we’re talking about corn. While away, I had the chance to eat some fancy food, one dish of which was steamed egg with corn. Alright, so the dish itself isn’t that fancy; it was at a fancy place and it was a prelude for fancier dishes. Anyway. While eating, I realized that the corn kernels weren’t all perfectly cut. While most kernels were separate, some of them were still attached to…
Unoriginal Originality
I will admit that when Star Wars: Zero Company was announced I neither needed to hear nor see anything beyond “it’s Star Wars XCOM” to know I was going to buy it.I love the XCOM strategy games and I love Star Wars. Mixing the two together is a dream for me. The game came out this week and, yes, the moniker is apt. It’s a strategy game, you’ve got a ragtag band of heroes, and there is permadeath. I’m…
A Side Project
I’ve taken on a side project lately. A year or more ago I came across a website that sold official recreations of Star Wars props. Among sets of Stormtrooper armor and more, a helmets caught my eye, in particular a plain rebel X-wing pilot helmet with a few sheets of decals for the owner to apply as they wished. Now look, I love the pilot helmets and the customizations on each one. Luke’s helmet is iconic, the big grey-green blocks…
Price of Greatness
An aspect of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey that I found so very striking was how it reinterprets Homer’s epic poem. The classic is an epic adventure: wily Odysseus outsmarts his foes and wins fame and fortune on his decade-long journey home. It’s the story we know, the story we read in school, the story we argued about in essays (and rants!). The movie by Nolan, et al. takes the familiar and explores it through a different lens…
The Death Star Makes No Sense
The Death Star makes no sense. This super-advanced military installation built to obliterate entire planets has absolutely baffling design choices. There are bottomless pits aplenty. There are walkways without guardrails (some of which can retract without a failsafe to make sure anyone on said walkway is safe). The controls for a tractor beam are only accessible by shimmying around a narrow ledge (over a bottomless pit, without a guardrail). A vent in the detention block leads to a trash…
That Quadrennial Occasion
We’re at that once-every-four-years occasion when I get really into sports, an occasion so predictable my friends can set their clocks to it. And man, I love the World Cup. As someone who does’t typically follow sport much at all, it’s hard for me to explain why the World Cup captivates me so, and why it has time and time again. Maybe it’s something about the athleticism on display and the dance of the players. Maybe it’s the way…
Voices
Ever late to the party, I finally watched KPop Demon Hunters. But this is not really a post about KPop Demon Hunters. This is mostly a post about Kubo and The Two Strings. I really, really enjoyed Kubo and the Two Strings when I saw it ten years ago. I’ve always loved stop-motion (some of my earliest filmmaking attempts were with that technique) and the Japanese setting and stylings was an added bonus, especially for someone like me who…
With New Eyes
I’m reading Meet Me By The Fountain by Alexandra Lange, a book that traces the architecture and cultural history of shopping malls in the United States. It’s been a fascinating read; malls are something so very common place but also one that is taken for granted by the popular imagination. In her foreword, Lange describes malls as “…ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing as the object of serious study” due in no small part to it…
A James Bond Game
I started playing the new James Bond video game, 007: First Light over the last week, my interest piqued by it being described as Hitman meets Uncharted (and Hitman being a cousin of sorts to the stealth action of Metal Gear Solid1). A few hours into the game, I’m glad to say that in addition to the game being incredibly fun, it’s also an impressively good James Bond game. What do I mean by that? That’s a question that’s…
Encyclical
A couple weeks ago, the Pope issued the first encyclical of his term. An encyclical, as I’ve found out, is something in between a dissertation and an epistle from the New Testament where the Pope elucidates the Catholic Church’s stance on a topic. Now, I am not Catholic; an encyclical does not affect me (aside from the soft power wielded by the Papacy’s incredible cultural cachet). But this encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, did pique my interest. The central thesis of…
Sunsetting
Last week news broke that June’s update would be the video game Destiny 2’s final update. After nine years of Destiny 2 (in addition to three years of the first Destiny), the game’s wrapping up. On the one hand, a game ‘ending’ shouldn’t be anything new. Game’s end all the time — usually on release. Clair Obscur got a couple post-game updates, but the story was done on release. Before every video game console was connected to the internet…
Pigeons
I usually claim the day I fully became a New Yorker as the day I swore at a pigeon that flew way too close to my head. My swearing wasn’t at the incident but instead a futile string of profanity directly targeted at the dumb pigeon. I don’t think the bird registered it. Pigeons are ubiquitous in cities and disparagingly called (including by me) “rats with wings.” But lately I found myself wondering: why are pigeons everywhere? I’m not…
Forest For The Trees
There’s an article on the AV Club right now about how Andy Serkis didn’t know who Snoke was while making the Star Wars sequels. Which doesn’t really feel like as much of a revelation as it sounds like — sometimes the cast and crew know more than what’s revealed in the piece/on the script, sometimes what’s there is all that’s there1. But that the mystery around who Snoke is warrants a headline a decade after The Force Awakens was…
Scroll On
I cracked open Instagram the other day for my once-a-day-if-I-remember foray into social media. I flicked through the photos on a friend’s post, seeing what she was up to, and then scrolled down only to be greeted by an ominous question: I was, initially, confused. This is the sort of thing I would see on ads and duly select not interested in a futile attempt to cull invasive advertising from my life. Why was this showing up below the…
A Brief Respite to Craft a Justification
Not much of a post today, been busy doing chores and playing Clair Obscur. It turns out your thirties is a lot of doing the adult thing while also making space to do those things you enjoy, like poking around a costume store on your way to get groceries. Or buying a robot vacuum to do some housework for you so you’ve more time to cook and play Clair Obscur. If it’s not eminently obvious I’m really enjoying Clair…
A New Old Fashioned Comedy
My text editor is filled with around a half-dozen starts to this blog post, so I’ve decided to forgo an elegant opening and jump right to my point: this is a post about Pizza Movie. Pizza Movie has a fairly simple plot, summed up in a Variety article as “a group of college students who order a pizza to their dorm, but after accidentally ingesting a homemade drug, their simple journey down two flights of stairs to retrieve it…
Antifascist Star Wars
I’ve seen Star Wars so many times that sometimes my mind glosses over its deeper themes. Like how the story is inherently antifascist. It’s easy to point to Andor as when Star Wars got radical, but all that fighting authoritarianism, the crackdowns on personal freedoms, and what would motivate a bystander to join a rebellion have been part of the franchise from the jump. The opening crawl of A New Hope comes out and describes an evil Galactic Empire…
An Overabundance of Expertise
I am in the market for a robot vacuum. I’ve been thinking of getting one for a while and have decided that I’m tired of having to deal with the dustiness of LA and would like the machines to do things for me. So I did what’s become par the course for any purchase of a fancy thing outside my usual interests and turned to the internet. The New York Times’ Wirecutter had a recommendation, of course, and one…
Three Things
Time for another one of these because the week was hectic, the news is depressing, and I want a weekend of relaxing. So here are three things that I’ve particular enjoyed as of late: The Proteus Operation, book I picked up James P. Hogan’s 1985 novel at a used bookstore while looking to pick up a copy of Inherit The Stars. The blurb’s description of the book as taking place in an alternate reality where the Nazis won the…
News Alerts
There are times when I really don’t like having news notifications on my phone. I was playing video games last night, a Friday night relaxing after the work week, when my phone buzzed. I glanced over and promptly learnt that Israel and the United States had launched missile attacks on Iran. Perhaps I was naive to hope that this wouldn’t happen. To hope that the amassing of warships was just saber-rattling. That the rhetoric was just bloviating by a…
Virtual Worlds
Remember the Metaverse? Touted in 2021 (and into 2022), it was this groundbreaking new technology that was going to change the way we interacted online. No more would it be websites and chatrooms — it would be a digital world. Cyberspace. We would be like Tron, like The Matrix, like Mega Man Battle Network. Millions of dollars were poured into it by companies like Facebook and proponents of Web3 proselytized about digital ownership in Decentraland powered by digital currencies…
Anonymity
In a purported effort to ‘protect the children,’ Discord has announced that all accounts will be given the safety settings assigned for teenagers unless the user can prove they are an adult. This proving-you’re-an-adult will be done with an ‘age inference model’ that guesses if you’ve an adult based on your activity on the platform. But what if this algorithm doesn’t infer that you’re an adult (perhaps you don’t swear enough, perhaps you swear too much)? How then do…
Sometimes I miss making bad art.
Doodles in the margins of homework; angsty teenage poetry; amateur sketches and cartoons. I spent a lot of my teenage years making that (and more!) and, every now and then, I really miss it. I miss just making stuff, showing it to friends in the real world and friends online, and then doing something else. Sharing what you’d made was so important, it felt like you were making stuff for people to see, stuff that would be appreciated. With…
Long Seasons
I’ve been watching some of Star Trek: The Next Generation lately and besides continuing my realization that Star Trek is very much my jam, it’s making me realize how much I miss long seasons of television. Television used to run in consistent 22-24 episode seasons (at least in the States; shows in the UK and elsewhere often had shorter seasons for a bevy of reasons). There were, of course, exceptions — you had your miniseries or premium cable shows…
Adapted Enough
Last weekend’s rerelease of The Lord of The Rings highlighted that Fellowship of The Ring first hit theaters twenty-five years ago. Fellowship was released closer to Star Wars than to right now. Beyond making me feel very old, I can’t help but to wonder how long it’ll be until someone else takes a stab at adapting the books. I’m not sure what all a new adaption would be able to accomplish that Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens’ trilogy didn’t. Sure,…
Weekend of Movies
The Lord of The Rings is being re-released in theaters this weekend: The Fellowship of The Ring on Friday, The Two Towers Saturday, and The Return of The King Sunday. Naturally, it’s how I’m spending my weekend, having never had the opportunity to see the first two during their initial release. Two movies down, let me tell you, they hold up and they are so, so very good. There’s so much love and care in them — and a…
Nine Things from 2025
It’s a new year and time for my semi-regular list of Nine Things! As ever, it’s nine because I like to leave a room for something I missed this year. Though I think maybe that speaks to a need for lists like these to be exhaustive due to the implication that the writer has, in fact, seen everything this year and thus can make a truly definitive list. But that’s a ridiculous task; maybe a list like this should…
2025 In Review
And here we are with another year done so it’s time for the annual posts of the year. Three Most Popular / Viewed Posts #3: What’s Next? Ugh, I love Andor. I don’t know where Star Wars is heading next (2026’s The Mandalorian and Grogu looks like a lot of fun), but I hope there’s not going to be an attempt to make a new Andor since Star Wars is often at its best when it’s trying different things.…
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