Jul 152023
 

Photos have emerged from the next Disney live action remake of one of their classic animated films, “Snow White.” You know, the one about the Germanic princess with skin so white it looked like snow, who ended up running around with seven dwarves? Well… about all that, Disney has decided to continue the unprofitable trend of de-whitening European folk tales.

There are claims that these *aren’t* the actual “dwarves.” But given that “Snow White” is to be played by a Hispanic woman… why assume that these *aren’t* an accurate depiction? And remember, Hollywood is hardly above lying to the public’s face. Remember when Benedict Cumberbatch *wasn’t* playing Khan? Or when all the remakes and reboots of classic animated series were supposed to be faithful continuations that the existing fans would recognize, love and appreciate? Yeah… lying liars who lie have a tendency to lie.

And… it turns out that those claims of “fake” are probably themselves fake:

‘Snow White’ Set Pics Stir Anti-Woke Criticism

Asked for comment on the brouhaha, a Disney spokesperson initially told The Daily Beast “the photos are fake and not from our production” and added that the Mouse House wanted a correction from the Mail.

Hours later, however, Disney’s PR shop completely backtracked and said the photos were from the production but were not official “photos”—chalking up the earlier statement to a misunderstanding.

 

Dear readers, consider this: somewhere out in the multiverse there’s a version of the Disney corporation that decided to do a live action remake of “Snow White,” and decided to try their hardest to make it look like the original animated classic. And somewhere else out there is another Disney that decided to do a “Snow White” remake that was faithful to the Grimm tale as written. And somewhere further down the multiverse line is a version of Disney that decide to say “Fark it” and make a truly messed-up remake that swaps out all the “disneyfication” for hard-core “let’s make this thing like Germans a thousand years ago would have made it, with friggen’ terrifying monsters and death and horror straight out of Teutonic legends and myths and folk tales,” likely directed by del Toro with the aid of the ghosts of Lovecraft and Giger.

Any one of those is something I would have been interested in. *This* worlds Disney? Nah.

 

Note: the “dwarves” from Norse/Germanic folk tales weren’t just short humans. They were a different order of being entirely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)

Anyway, Hollywood is basically on strike now, with writers and actors on the picket line. I imagine this might effect “Snow White,” as well as every other movie and TV show out there. But you know what? Who friggen’ cares. Things have gotten so slow in Hollywood that people have come to expect *years* between seasons of shows… seasons with a tiny number of episodes. long gone are the likes of *good* Star Trek series where you could expect 20+ episodes every year. now… Eight? Ten? And with many shows, the gap between seasons lasting a number of years. When did season 3 of “The Orville” end? When will season 4 start… if it ever does? And let’s face it: there are a metric fark-ton of old movies and shows available for streaming, more than enough to tide most people over for the most extended of strike. And beyond even that… YouTube and the like are loaded to the gills with lone creators who are far more entertaining than quarter-billion-dollar productions. So you go right ahead and shut down production, Hollywood. if it strangles nonsense like “Snow White,” so much the better.

 

How long before I’m able to say “Hey, AI, make me a four-hour faithful adaptation of ‘Snow White’ Using the production team from “The Lord Of The Rings” and starring Marylin Monroe as Snow White’?” Because that’ll be the end of Hollywood.

 Posted by at 10:14 am
Jul 132023
 

I have no idea if it has been apparent or not based on recent blog/Twitter postings that the last few days have been frazzling for me. But the short form is that Buttons has been quite sick… and terribly miserable. Several days of vet visits finally culminated today in the conclusion that he *probably* is suffering from another bout of pancreatitis, though the initial symptoms were quite different from the earlier bouts. This time it seemed as if he was plugged up somehow, but a X-ray showed that he’s clear. Blood work revealed the infection markers of pancreatitis, so he was treated for that today… and he has shown improvement.

A vocally miserable cat is not something I recommend. Especially one so miserable that he chooses to remain inert and just wail. AAAARRRRGH.

 

This was him yesterday, looking hopeless.

 

This was at the vet today prior to the doc coming in. You can see just how absolutely thrilled he was.

 

X-ray of his innards. It reportedly shows that his intestines are largely empty. To me is seems to indicate that his abdomen is infected with a space-squid of some kind.

 

And this critter is “Ziggy” the French bulldog who was in the vet clinic waiting room as I was checking out. Friendly little guy even if he looks like he aught to be gnawing the foot off of a selfless dark age princess of Urland.

 

Buttons seems to be on the mend. He does not appear to be in agony anymore; instead he simply seems to be wore out. He didn’t eat or drink for several days; he has recent eaten and drank *some,* though not a lot. Progress, anyway.

 

This has cost a *lot.* I need to put a ton of stuff on ebay, both to cover this and my other rather voluminous bills,  but if you’re of a mind to, feel free to hit the tip jar below…

 


Feline Tip Jar


 Posted by at 9:37 pm
Jul 102023
 

Disney has done some amazing things with Star Wars since buying the property. In short, Disney turned Star Wars from a license to print money into a series of disappointments and flops and failures. These are generally well known… how “Solo” was the first Star Wars movie to actually lose money, how the sequel trilogy PO’ed the fans and got progressively less profitable, how “Galactic Starcruiser” shut down after only a year, how the various TV shows have ranged from occasionally quite good to generally awful.

But then there’s “The High Republic.” This was a brand-new income stream for Disney, set 200 or so years before the movies. The Jedi were supposedly at their prime, the galaxy was at peace, everything was awesome, and Disney would make a mountain of money from the books, comic books, movies and TV shows set in that timeframe. Disney spent something like a billion dollars promoting “The High Republic”

Chances are pretty good you’ve either never heard of THR, or you’ve forgotten that it existed.

The video below goes through the sales numbers for the books and, wow, they’re bad. The best seller – the first book – sold over 150,000 copies. The latest book sold less than 10,000. Now, I’d be pretty pleased if one of *my* books sold a mere 9,000 copies. But then, unlike Star Wars, nobody knows who I am. Unlike Disney, a billion dollars wasn’t lavished on publicizing my books.

Even that initial 150K seems pretty sad when you consider that Timothy Zahn’s “Thrawn trilogy,” novels published in the early 1990s which revitalized Star Wars at the time, and which were “de-canonised” when Disney bought Star Wars, have sold five million copies. Specifically, they’ve sold five million copies *since* Disney bought Star Wars. The Thrawn trilogy sold something like *fifteen* million copies before that.

The thumbnail image chosen for the video below is appropriate: it shows what I presume to be one of the main “High Republic” characters complete with a  modern Mental Illness Haircut. That’s who they marketed to, not the existing Star Wars fanbase. So they didn’t get the fanbase interested. One of the main authors actually told the potential customers that if they didn’t like her hyperactively leftist politics, don’t buy her books. “Okey-doke” the fanbase said.

Me? If you agree with or disagree with my politics… buy my books and other publications. If you like aircraft and/or spacecraft, you’ll like what I’ve produced. My politics and your politics will barely enter into it.

 Posted by at 11:22 pm
Jul 092023
 

‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Introduces Another Love Interest for Kirk That Still Isn’t Spock

The whole thing is some weirdo perv’s bleating demand that Kirk and Spock be made gay, because reasons. These people are sad and pathetic, but unfortunately they often have the ears of those in charge. Consequently, they often have the power to see to it that beloved cultural icons – Luke Skywalker, Jean Luc Picard, Indiana Jones – are converted into sad pathetic wretches, their legacies trashed and trod upon. The purpose of doing so falls somewhere between “the narcissism of a mentally ill person” and “the need to see civilization destroyed.”

One of the “arguments” that is made is that Kirk was a “lothario,” a “womanizer” who was nailing any female alien who wasn’t nailed down. And that is kinda the reputation the character has. However, if you look at his actual history of romancing the women on the show, there’s a whole lot less of it than you  might remember. From HERE: a list of Kirks love interests. I’ll trim out the non-canonical stuff from the nuTrek movies:

Ruth (Star Trek: TOS, “Shore Leave”): she’s not real, but a robot made in the image of a *past* romance of his.
Dr. Janice Lester (Star Trek: TOS, “Turnabout Intruder”) : a *former* interest of his. No interest in the episode.
Dr. Carol Marcus (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan) : a *former* interest of his. No interest in the episode.
Doctor Janet Wallace (Star Trek: TOS, The Deadly Years) : a *former* interest of his. No interest in the episode.
Lt. Areel Shaw (Star Trek: TOS, “Court Martial”) : a *former* interest of his. No interest in the episode.
Lenore Karidian (Star Trek: TOS, “The Conscience Of The King”) : ok, kinda
Edith Keeler (Star Trek: TOS, “City On The Edge Of Forever”) : Ayup
Miramanmee (Star Trek: TOS, “The Paradise Syndrome”) : Ayup, though his memory has been wiped. Is it really *him?”
Shahna (Star Trek: TOS, “The Gamesters Of Triskellion”) : Ayup… but is it real romance, or a means of escape?
Antonia (Star Trek Generations): his off-screen wife. Is it “womanizing” to get married?

Not in that list:

Dr. Gillian Taylor (Star Trek IV): Flirts, but seemingly goes no further than that. For the purposes of saving the world.
Yeoman Janice Rand (TOS: “The Enemy Within”): Sorta. the “evil” Kirk assaults here. So, ummm…
Lt. Marlena Moreau (TOS: “Mirror, Mirror”): Kinda. Alternate universe, he plays along with the Mirror Kirk’s relationship as a way to survive/escape
Sylvia (TOS: “Catspaw”): not really… he puts the moves on her as a way to escape
Dr. Miranda Jones (TOS: “Is There In Truth No Beauty”): Naw… he flirts a bit, but gets nowhere.
Rayna Kapec (TOS: “Requiem for Methuselah”): Ayup: he falls for and puts the moves on a robot.
Elaan (TOS: “Elaan of Troyius”): Not really… he is *drugged* and mind controlled.

So by my count, there are approximately four “Ayups” in all of Star Trek. Does getting lucky four times (and it’s not entirely clear he actually got *that* far with any of them) over a span of 20 or so years make Kirk a “womanizing” “lothario?”

But more than that: there are around a dozen and a half examples of Kirk being interested enough in a woman to do something about it. In all those episodes and movies, there are zero incidents suggesting he had any such interest in a *male.*

 Posted by at 11:44 pm
Jun 262023
 

Clothes are throwaway items now. Back In My Day, socks with holes in them were repaired; now, often enough, shirts are worn only a few times then tossed. Sometimes sent to thrift stores and the like, sometimes simply thrown out. But thrift stores have more clothes than they know what to do with. So often these discarded shirts and shorts are boxed up and shipped to third world countries where the trainloads of discards can be used to eliminate the local indigenous clothing production industry; this is why you often see some illiterate tribesman wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some midwestern high school baseball team. At some point I suppose this global traffic in clothes might end, but likely not before many places lose the knowledge and ability to make their own clothes.

Anyway, it seems to me the obvious solution for this is so obvious that it’s obvious: FIRE. Clothes are largely made from plastic and cotton; these will happily burn. Sure, some unfortunate fumes will be generated, from the toxic to the CO2;  but if incinerated in a large and modern facility this can not only be done fairly cleanly it can also generate a lot of power. Use the combustion to boil water, run the steam past turbines, shazam, electricity. But for whatever reason we don’t much burn our garbage these days, preferring instead to burn rocks and goop we dug up out of the ground. So what happens to all these discarded garments?

If you’re Chile, you dump them in the desert. There it can be picked through by locals and by a company that is trying to separate out the various materials and make something of them.

High fashion! Mountain of discarded clothes in Chilean desert is visible from space (satellite photo)

A recent satellite photo shows the pile:

It’s a little difficult to judge scale from that. At lower left you can see an urban area; the pile is clearly a number of city blocks in expanse.

An article from 2021 shows the pile (from the ground) as it existed in 2021. It was *huge:*

Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers

Here’s the location on Google Maps, satellite view:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Giant+Pile+of+Unsold+Clothing/@-20.2353681,-70.0930992,836m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m15!1m8!3m7!1s0x91523e70293c5633:0x671ff739632f5660!2sAlto+Hospicio,+Tarapac%C3%A1,+Chile!3b1!8m2!3d-20.2686722!4d-70.1049169!16zL20vMGd4cjc3!3m5!1s0x915215426eb9ae75:0xbb5867ab02cd19a1!8m2!3d-20.2350799!4d-70.0911125!16s%2Fg%2F11styh04ds?entry=ttu

Interestingly, the Google Maps satellite photo, which seems to have been taken in July of 2022, shows just bare Earth. It seems that there was a huge pile in 2021, it was dealt with in 2022, and its huge again in 2023. So processing seems to be keeping up. Or… when the photo was taken in 2022, the pile had been buried in the dirt.

 Posted by at 8:36 pm
Jun 252023
 

I believe I am unanimous when I say…

An army – a *small* army – of poorly trained, ill-equipped chuckleheads managed to get within range of Moscow without getting kerploded by the Russian Army and Air Force. There is no getting past the fact that this makes the Russian military and leadership – especially Putin – look even more like incompetent ineffectual corrupt and cowardly boobs. Hell, at this point it might be best for everybody if we just have Finland send a few hundred drunken bums into Russia to conquer the place.

This was not something I expected to see anytime soon, but here we are. What’s next? The President of the USA hosting a bunch of half naked perverted weirdos on the White House lawn?

 Posted by at 1:49 am
Jun 212023
 

As is well known by now, Disney has been making a mess of many of the properties they’re in charge of. The Marvel movies/shows have plummeted downhill; Pixar movies stink; the endless CGI “live action” remakes are soulless cash grabs at best, and to all reports that forthcoming Indiana Jones movie is gonna be *terrible.* And then there’s the smoking ruin of Star Wars. Why is this happening? To an outsider, it looks a lot like sabotage… a vast organization that wants to tear down not only its own legacy, but poison the culture as a whole. That’s crazy conspiracy theory talk, of course. But then… there’s this:

Disney’s Chief Diversity Officer Latondra Newton Exits

The fact that Disney – or any corporation – has not just a “diversity officer,” but a *Chief* “diversity officer” is of course a stinging indictment about their wisdom and sanity. But there’s one line in the article that jumped right out at me:

Disney HR chief Sonia Coleman’s note to staff announcing Newton’s departure … She has been dedicated to ensuring every person sees themselves and their life experiences represented in a meaningful and authentic way.

Ah. No. That’s just… NO. Bad storytelling company. Bad. BAD.

I don’t want to see myself and my life experience in *any* sort of way in any sort of movie that Disney might make. I want to see stuff that would inspire me to emulate. I don’t want to see what I am; I want to see what I can become. Once again, there are two world views:

1: “Look, Captain Kirk is on TV. I want to be like Captain Kirk.”

2: “Look, Captain Kirk is on TV. I want Captain Kirk to be like me.”

Worldview #2 is the one known as “representation.” It is cancer. It should be mocked, spat upon, driven from polite society out into the wasteland to die shriveled and alone, huddled against some broken forgotten ruin of a statue of a long unremembered tyrant. “Representation” does not inspire people to greatness; at best, it inspires smug complacency. It does not bring people together; it only divides. Because if Person A finds themselves represented by Character A who shares all the “important” weird little identity politics quirks of Person A…  then Character A does *not* represent Person B who doesn’t share those quirks. Character A will only appeal to a thin slice of the audience… and then will not inspire those people to much of anything, because Character A tells them how awesome they Already Are. You don’t need to change, because you’re perfect just the way you are. (Unless, of course, you need to go on a risky series of hormone treatments and lop off your dangly bits.) And if Character A *doesn’t* share your identities, and in fact is quite different or even opposed, then you will feel outraged that someone isn’t catering to you.

So, yay for Disney getting rid of this one little symptom of the larger problem. Now get rid of the entire department, and let not the precepts of DEI ever be spoken of again.

 Posted by at 6:07 am
Jun 152023
 

In the appendix to the Lord of the Rings, Tolkein included a short story about Helm Hammerhand, a serious badass and one man wrecking crew who lived hundreds of years before the events of LotR. A few years ago Warner Bors annlunced that they were doing an animated film about the events described in that story… and as spinoffs of lotR go, that one made sense. it’d make a fun action flick, animated or no.

But wait. There’s less.

New Report Shows ‘The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim’ Will Inject Feminism Into Tolkien’s Classic Tale Of Helm Hammerhand

Basically: Helm Hammerhand, main character of the story… isn’t the main character of the story. Instead, it’s a female character who was so unimportant in the story that she didn’t even merit getting *named.*

The producer, one Philippa Boyens, claims that this effectively all-new character (named Hera, because the writers are such spectacular Tolkein experts that they know that the characters in Rohan are named after Greeks, not northern Europeans) is based largely on “Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and daughter of Wessex king Alfred the Great.” OK, sure, great. It’s quite possible that a movie about Æthelflæd would be a spectacular thing. So… why not make a movie about Æthelflæd? Oh, right, because it’s easier to ride the coat tails of an existing property.

Who is this for? A movie about Helm would bring in the existing fans. This thing is likely to turn a lot of them away.

 Posted by at 8:01 am
Jun 062023
 

“Woke” has becoming an ever-present word in recent years, especially since the BLM/Antifa riots and city burnings of 2020. But what does it actually mean? The original meaning, apart from “past tense of wake,” as given by dictionary.com is this:

having or marked by an active awareness of systemic injustices and prejudices, especially those involving the treatment of ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities

 

That meaning was used for some decades by those on the left, in particular black people. But recently the word has been taken up by people on the right as a term of disparagement, the second definition at dictionary.com:

Disparaging. of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially promoting inclusive policies or ideologies that welcome or embrace ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities.
It’s that second definition that interests me. As written, it’s fair as far as it goes… but it doesn’t really go far enough.
“Woke” is kinda like “obscenity:” you know it when you see it. But a proper definition, reasonably accurate and objective, is important for all things especially when it comes to things that will be important for policy decisions. If some classroom assignment or book is “woke,” what does it really mean, especially if “woke” is meant to mean that it should be disallowed? The fact that some statement or book or person is an “inclusive progressive” is not sufficient to be defined as “woke.” To me, this seems better:
Disparaging. of or relating to a liberal progressive orthodoxy, especially promoting policies or ideologies that preference ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities and focus to an obsessive degree on largely or entirely imaginary oppression, threats, enemies or slights
A near-universal feature of someone that most regular people would look at and call “woke” is that they are multicolored, unhinged and divorced from reality. Often shrieking about how oppressed they are while their flags are flying from every government building for an entire month out of the year and they get to dominate any and all discussion, threatening the lives and livelihoods of those who not only express differing opinions, but who use “unapproved” words. it’s not about “inclusion” and “welcoming,” but domination and madness.
Thoughts?
 Posted by at 12:02 pm
Jun 052023
 

It seems that the issues that caused me to both ramp up use of Twitter and get the “backup blog” continue. It now appears that every weekend the servers at the hosting service get overloaded and I can’t log into the blog until Monday morning when the staff get in and clean things up. Last weekend was a three-day weekend, and the problem persisted until Tuesday. Consequently… no new blog posts on the weekend, it seems. So if you want to make sure to keep up with my thrilling adventures and opinions, this isn’t really the place for it. Instead:

https://unwantedblog.com/

The Unwanted Blog Twitter

 

 Posted by at 9:10 am