Dawn

by on September 24, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

Dawn DeMarco grew up on a planet that lived the voluntary illusion that some people were royalty and most were not. She knew how to act in an environment like that. The Chinese had filled the Hyades Cluster with billions of people by shipping their excess slave populations out of Greater China to labor in the outer colonies. Most Western Alliance citizens simply don’t understand how fundamental the difference between the Chinese overlords and their slave populations was. The locals knew they were being dragged into new and strange worlds when we liberated them, but as much as they wanted that, it terrified them. Dawn made it easier by playing the illusion with them. She played the superior their culture demanded had to exist, even as she quietly subverted every teaching of that culture. And the really interesting bit is that the locals knew what she was doing and helped her at every opportunity.

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Dawn

by on September 23, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

The Western Alliance and the Republic of China wanted to bring the Hyades Cluster into our world of human rights and democratic elections and equality for all. But they underestimated how foreign those concepts were in the Hyades. They had forgotten what it was like to be taught from the moment you were born that some people were more equal than others. Dawn DeMarco was our answer to that. She walked into their world as a visiting royal, a princess of a high family, and she inhabited a place in the highest caste the locals could accept at a gut level. Then she valued their opinions and suggestions as if they were equals without requiring that they stand up as equals to people they’d been trained to never stand up to. Dawn made the first crack in generations of programming by simply treating them well and allowing them to place her in a position they could comfortably stand next to.

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Andor

by on September 22, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I watched the first three episodes of Andor, and I have to admit that it is a good series. Filmed well. Very dramatic. Good stuff. Just like Moon Knight, Kenobi, She-Hulk, WandaVision, and the other recent Disney TV series. I’ve generally liked all of them, though my like has always been with reservations. I could point to individual issues, but an overall issue nagged at me that I could never nail down. I finally nailed it down with Andor. The Disney TV series are serious. Like Rogue One, they are telling a serious story and they do it seriously. The problem is that the movies that made those franchises great all had a certain amount of humor in them. Most of them had plucky heroes mouthing off and joking as they fought the bad guys. Coming up with pithy comments and jazz. The movies did not take themselves seriously. They were telling a serious story, but they did so in a light-hearted manner. I enjoy that. I do not like losing that joy when watching the shows.

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Moon Knight

by on September 21, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I recently watched Moon Knight, and I have to say that it is not at all what I expected. I’m a total newb to the Moon Knight franchise, so went in with a blank slate. The end result is that I was impressed. It was a very good origin story for a hero who was already a hero. It works because Oscar Isaac plays a man with multiple personalities, and is mostly shown from the viewpoint of a personality that has no idea that another of his personalities has sworn an oath to a moon god. We discover the depths of that oath throughout the series, and Oscar is what makes it work. He is an amazing actor. You can tell what personality he is by his facial expressions, his accent, and a dozen other subtle clues he emotes with perfection. He carries the series and nails it from his first confused look at the world to the very last final act as the camera fades to black. If nothing else, the series is worth watching just to see him show everybody else a master class in portraying characters.

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Thor Love and Thunder

by on September 20, 2022 at 12:01 am
Posted In: Diaries

I just watched this movie and I enjoyed it more than I thought I would based on the reviews. The story narrator is a bit of a jolly idiot, an unreliable narrator telling a campfire story to children. Because of that, a lot of stuff is ramped up to stupid levels of funny or dumb, but things that would look or sound cool to a child’s sense of humor. It’s definitely not a story for everybody, but enjoyed it. So for me, Thor Love and Thunder easily gets one thumb up. Maybe two, but the second one is situational, depending on what kind of movie I want to see.

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