Daily Musings of August 31, 2018

I like this new blogging method so far. It’s working so well that I’m now writing this from yesterday, to give me an idea for tomorrow (er…). Slapping down thoughts 100-200 words at a time works better for me than long-form articles or short tweet-style grunts. I don’t know whether the results are any good, but at least it got me writing. I’ll worry about quality later.


Good grief. I was just updating the St. Rose calendar, which I do by taking the same entries from last year and editing them for this year. And I see one says “First Firday.” The feast of pine trees? Guess I wasn’t using a spellchecker on that one.


Some nerds on reddit were talking about why Disney Star Wars went back to the same old Rebels-versus-Empire idea of the original trilogy, without even giving a decent explanation why. The reason is pretty simple. The people who now run Disney and Lucasfilm still think of themselves as the counter-culture. They’re Boomers, so that’s part of their generational identity. It’s always 1968, and they’re always fighting against The Man, with no self-awareness that they are The Man now.

Someone suggested that they should have had the New Republic turn lazy and corrupt over the 30-some years between movies, and then the heroes could have been some rebels within that banding together with elements of the old Empire to revolt against it. While that’s a great idea, think about how it would look from the creators’ perspective.

The heroes in which they see themselves won the day in the original series, but then they became so corrupt that other heroes rose up to fight and defeat them, including some of the enemies they thought they’d wiped out the first time. Now look at them in real life: they rebelled and won in the 60s/70s, taking over major corporations like Disney as well as academia and much of government, then they became lazy and corrupt, and 30-odd years later heroes rose up to overthrow them…. Who are the heroes in this scenario, and who is their leader?

Yeah, that’s not a movie they would make. It’s not a movie they could even think of.


Someday soon I’m going to start a series of reviews of Farscape, the best TV show ever made. It starts out with a guy going into orbit to do nerdy science stuff, and 88 episodes later we’re getting scenes like this one. It’s a show made of puppets and leather and bodily fluids that turns into an exploration of the human mind and the nature of reality (and unreality). But now I’m getting into it, so I’ll save the rest for the reviews. Just have to get the DVDs first.

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