I’d love to be proven wrong, but I bet that the villains will prove to be thinly veiled white supremacists. Half of the characters will be gay/trans. The actors will all be largely in their 20’s and Hollywood-attractive (i.e. pretty but generic and forgettable). The production value will probably be good, but the acting will make original B5 Season One look Shakespearean. Lots of women with blue hair, shaven on one side of their heads, shrieking about patriarchy.
The below video takes a good long while to meander around to the point, and meanders around a good bit when it gets there, but the point is fairly simple: modern progressives in the entertainment industry are pushing stories of “magic” because progressive ideology is basically indistinguishable from magic. Both systems reject cause and effect and assume that the universe will bend to your will simply because you want it to. This is part of why many on the left are opposed to logic, reason, the scientific method.
I’m not opposed to magic in fiction. But I am uncomfortable with fiction that *pushes* magic as some sort of viable world view. Hell, even in the fictional worlds where magic users are the “heroes,” they seem to inevitably be dirtbags:
1) Star Wars universe: the space wizards think *nothing* of using magic to telepathically change peoples minds, to cheat them, to outright steal from them.
2) X-Men universe: in X-Men 2, Professor X freezes a whole mall full of regular people in order to chat with some of his students. Beyond the outrage on these peoples rights to go about their day without being frakked with, who knows what damage this does to them on the neurological level. At least “Logan” pointed out that this sort of thing was, indeed, A Very Bad Thing.
3) The Harry Potter universe: the wizards are *forever* screwing with the minds, senses and memories of regular people. People suffer and die in large numbers and the magic users don’t give a damn.
And magic in fiction is generally *lazy.* Magic works without rules, or at least whatever rules it might have are arcane and mutable. The best stories are those where not only the characters but the *author* are constrained by a strict set of rules (i.e. natural laws). The author and the characters then have to *think* their way to a solution. This might be a solution that the reader can look at and go “why didn’t I think of that” as opposed to “where the hell did that come from?”
And as bad as magic can be in fiction, when it’s applied in the real world it’s simply disastrous, whether it’s psychic surgeons, astrologers or wokies railing against phantom fascists as if they were demons or dementors, with solutions as divorced from reality as a Stalinistic Five Year Plan.
What’s better than an M41A Pulse Rifle that fires Nerf darts? An M41A that fires airsoft. And what’s better than an M41A that fires airsoft? One that fires 12 gauge and 45 ACP.
WANT.
A test fire without the furniture:
Not quite complete, and with a bit of a problem ejecting the shotgun shells:
And the final product:
That looks like the *perfect* home defense weapon. Small and maneuverable, it fires two rounds that are *fantastic* for close quarters discouragement of home invasion. It’s apparently heavy, but that would seem to be less of a problem for home defense than long-term draggin’ round for combat.
As with the M41’s used in the filming of “Aliens,” this one is based on an actual Thompson. Those are heavy machined blocks of steel, and of course marrying a shotgun to it is a whole lot of inefficiency. But it seems that a modernized Thompson could be designed to take advantage of modern materials and designs; make a lot of it from titanium, for instance. This uses the standard double-stack 20-round magazine; I bet that a quad-stack magazine of the same length could be produced to raise the capacity to at least thirty rounds while still fitting within the M41A form factor.
My own “Zaneverse” stories are set in a world where humans live alongside AI that have full rights. These stories are set about 500 years from now, *centuries* after all the wrangling is over. Those characters no more think about “when and how should an AI have rights” than modern Americans think about “when and how should we consider Eskimos to be fully human.” The questions are long since resolved, it’s no longer an issue, and since the SJW genes (and other forms of mental illness) are no longer prevalent in human society, you don’t have people constantly dredging the issue up purely to sow drama and chaos. The back story about how AI got rights hardly ever crops up. Still, the way I figure it happened: early on when AI took many forms (in Zaneverse AI are now standardized), from servo-robots to starship and national defense control systems, people would wonder about whether their AI’s were “real” people deserving rights rather than simply being convincing products. A general test was devised: someone would engage the AI in discussion, drift the conversation over to the subject of humans rights, freedom, responsibilities, the nature of sentience, so on. If the AI carried on the conversation, all well and good, but what the people are looking for is if the AI reflects on the subject and asks something along the lines of “do I have rights?” The decision process that an AI has rights begins when the AI of its own accord expresses an interest in having them.
In the Zaneverse, the human society that functions peacefully alongside AI does so in large part because that society, once AIs were recognized as aware and deserving of rights, respected those rights. The humans treated the AI not as tools or slaves, but as kin. Just as they did with uplifted chimps and dolphins and Kodiak bears and ravens. The worlds of the Zaneverse do not have vast numbers of humans, but humans have a vast number of allies.
March 10, 2022, on Hulu. The last episode was aired on Fox in April of 2019. Thanks, China… on top of everything else, your little pandemic also delayed the best Star Trek show out there.
Even if you have zero interest in “The Mandalorian” or in cosplay, or prop helmets, or painting models, there is a “WTF” moment in this video that is worth noticing: what happens when an “affordable” Hasbro helmet is hit with a coat of cheap clearcoat from a rattlecan.
Moebius Models was showing some new product at the recent IPMS National Convention in Las Vegas. The big news is an all new 2001 Space Clipper. The new model will be approximately 29 inches long and 1:72 scale. It is an all new, accurate version of the spacecraft, based on all the latest information and research. The kit will include a passenger cabin and cockpit. It will not include Pan Am decals. Final price has not been set, but is expect to be between $150 and $200.
Also forthcoming is a 1/350 scale Space Clipper and a 1/48 scale Aries Ib.
And what change are they pushing for? I’ll give you one rather obvious guess.
Strange New Worlds should make Spock queer, and it should do so with the support of the fans and the canon behind it. In fact, since we’re talking about Spock’s passion, it’s the only logical thing to do.
Sigh. Anyone who watches TOS and sees Kirk and Spock being gay for each other *really* doesn’t understand normal male friendship. And such worldwreckers shouldn’t write for Star Trek. But chances are they will, because that’s where society has sunk. “You don’t understand straight men, and you despise them? Here, *you* get to control the narrative!”
A fan film set in the “Future War” of the first two Terminator films. Nothing at all resembling a plot; it seems to be a proof of concept film to see if the people working on it can replicate the look of the world from those two movies. And while there is some definite low-budget “video game” feel to it… had this come out after Terminator or Terminator 2, we would have eaten it up.
The only Terminator big budget movie I would actually consider seeing now, after the woke disaster that was “Dark Fury,” would be one set in the proper original Future War timeline. With a good budget and modern techniques, it would be easy enough to put de-aged/deep-faked Michael Biehn as Reese, Schwarzenegger’s original Terminator and Michael Edwards as John Connor from T2 into the film.
