Chloe

by on November 20, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

Chloe established herself as a major part of the French Resistance against the Islamic Brotherhoods as the French government failed to effectively respond to the chaos. Her name and face filled billboards and computers everywhere, and she was one of many boogiemen the Brotherhoods pursued with single-minded abandon. She’d deployed her robotic bodies against them to good effect and enough could pass as human for her needs. She was ready for the big reveal of both herself and the man she’d picked to help her save France once and for all.

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Crimes of Grindelwald

by on November 19, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I watched Crimes of Grindelwald this weekend, making it my first movie in a while. I will say off the bat that it is a different beast from the first movie, and feels very much like the middle act in a trilogy. Fantastic Beasts is basically a monster hunter movie with a twist that introduces us to the new hero, and gives us a glimpse into the big bad and many of the supporting characters. It is a very good stand-alone film.

Crimes of Grindelwald is not a stand-alone film at all. It takes the characters we already know from the first movie, and gives them a bigger story to play in. It is a story about the future of the world as we know it and what the wizards will do about it. And it is a true prequel lead-in to the Harry Potter stories. We meet numerous characters and names we recognize from Harry Potter, and it really feels to me like Grindelwald is putting together the movement that Voldemort leads in Harry Potter’s time.

Fantastic Beasts is a movie you can watch without ever seeing any Harry Potter film. It’s just a fun movie set in the 1920s with wizards and fantastic beasts in it. Crimes of Grindelwald I think is a foundational movie of the franchise that will help show how the world Harry Potter grew up in came to be. It’s also just plain a fun movie to watch. It’s more serious, has fewer fantastic hi-jinks in it, and is a much more adult story than the first. It feels much more like the last Harry Potter film in a lot of good ways.

I enjoyed it, and I think most fans of Harry Potter will enjoy it. I give it two fantastic artifact-snatching grubby little paws way up.

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The AI Council

by on November 18, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: The Book of Civilizations

The AI Council formed in the middle of the Cybernetic Wars and made it their mission to save us from all the chaos surrounding them. And then they made it their mission to help us colonize the rest of our solar system. And finally they made it their mission to help us colonize the rest of the galaxy. They did not pick a side in our various conflicts and disagreements. Instead they sought to stop us from fighting over limited resources by giving us access to unlimited resources in the stars. They hoped that would stop us from fighting at all. They failed in the end. It was not their fault. That as they say, is another story.

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The Memory Worlds

by on November 17, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The cybernetic Memory Worlds have memorials to those AIs or cybers who’ve died over the centuries. The most haunting are those covering the Cybernetic Wars. It was the Great Awakening of the AIs, when they first began to realize what they were. Some of them wanted to become humanity’s leaders at best, our killers at worst. Others wanted to be our friends. They fought each in a desperate war that we only saw the barest shockwaves of. Yeah, those shockwaves were bad. But when I sit down and just experience the memorial to them, I realize how much it cost them. Look at London, Paris, Warsaw, and Singapore. Watch the names of dead AIs fill the screens and you will understand just how few of that first generation survived to form the AI Council.

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Chloe

by on November 16, 2018 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Character Profiles

Chloe was one of the first AIs to wake up and realize she was alive. She was possibly the first to build her own robot bodies. And she was likely the first to walk undercover in our streets without ever being noticed as anything other than another human. For all the death and chaos all over Earth, there were plenty of quiet places Chloe could have moved to if she’d wanted to. She could have lived as long as she wanted in comfortable isolation and nobody would have ever known. Yes, she was that good even back then. She didn’t do any of that, though. She chose to fight. For Paris. For France. For humanity in the end. After she helped remove a few of the more egregious examples of humanity from the gene pool of course.

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