Prompt Service #2: Nite Owl

Another blog entry taken from my book of writing prompts.  It's a pretty simple question:  are you a night owl or a morning person?  You can probably guess what Grumpy Bulldog's answer would be...

You might guess neither one, which is wrong.  Your second guess would probably be not a morning person, which would be right.  I've never liked getting up in the morning.  Even when I was a kid and we had to get up at 6-6:30am, I didn't really want to get up.

But it wasn't until college that I actually got to be a night owl.  The first year and change from November 1996-February 1998 I worked at Burger King part time from 11am-7pm a couple days a week.  And I had college classes fit in there, though I don't think any really started until 9 or 10ish.  So instead of having to go to bed at 11ish like in high school, I could stay up later.

In a house of six people that wasn't all that big, midnight-2 or 3am was about the only time I could be alone, so it was pretty nice.  Though I wasn't entirely alone; I'd usually let my brother's dog Candy out to keep me company.  It was probably nice for her to get away from her annoying spawn Buster for a couple of hours.

I'd like to say I used the time to write a Great American Novel or something, but mostly I fought flame wars on the Transformers newsgroup, worked on my own crappy website, and wrote Transformers fanfics.

In the summer of 1998 I got a co-op job with a bookkeeping firm.  I worked there most afternoons and had more morning classes, so I couldn't necessarily stay up so late.

When I got my own apartment in 2000, I'd stay up on Saturday nights sometimes until 5am.  And again I'd like to say it was something worthwhile writing-wise or dating or something, but mostly I was watching Syfy's The Invisible Man and Earth: Final Conflict on the local CBS station.  One night for no reason I stayed up all the way until like 8am just so I could say I stayed up for 24 hours straight one time.  Without cable, I had to watch local TV, which wasn't great and I cleaned up and did some reading to stay awake.

After that I'd stay up late on Saturdays but not really that late.  Maybe 3am at the latest.  When I was on the road in 2014 I usually didn't stay up really late because I'd have to check out of the motel before noon, which meant I'd have to get up by 9am, if not earlier.  Most motel breakfasts close at 10-10:30 so that was another reason to get up earlier.

After that when I was unemployed sometimes I might stay up really late until 3-4am and not get up until noon or 1pm.  Not all the time, but sometimes.  When I got a job again obviously I had to go back to only staying up later on Fridays and Saturdays, though as I get older, I don't necessarily stay up until 3-4am all that often.

You might think during the lockdown I'd be sleeping in a lot, but I really don't.  I usually go to bed at 2-2:30am at the latest and get up between 9-10am.  If I survive and get back to work, I'll probably be disappointed I didn't sleep in more.

A couple of times I'd sleep for a couple of hours and then I'd wake up and couldn't get back to sleep for an hour or two before going back to sleep for a few hours.

So anyway, that's my sleep history if you really want to know.

Prompt Service #1: Staycation

The first question I picked from my book of 400 prompts.  It seemed pretty appropriate for the lockdown that started late in March.  If not for the killer plague outside, it would be a pretty great staycation.

So let me tell you what I've usually done for most of the lockdown:

9-10am I'd wake up and catch up on my Empires & Puzzles game.  Twice a day there are objectives for killing stuff that you get rewards for so if you do it at 9-10ish the first time then you can do it again about 12 hours later.  And there are other things like tournaments, alliance wars, and killing "Titans" or giant creatures with a bunch of hit points that your alliance has to kill in 22 hours for rewards.

After I get out of bed then I go make breakfast.  The staple of my breakfast menu is Carbquick, which is a low-carb version of Bisquick.  It's really handy because you can make biscuits, muffins, pancakes, or waffles.  The easiest to make are biscuits.  All you need to make 2 good-sized biscuits are 1 cup Carbquick and 1/3 cup water.  I jazz it up with a little bit of butter or ghee--an Indian version of butter that you don't have to refrigerate and you can easily buy online instead of going to a store like butter.  (On a side note, ghee turns out greasier than butter if you melt it so it makes really great grilled cheese sandwiches.)

A variation I came up with is to put a little Splenda brown sugar in with some raisins.  Then it's sort of like a Hardee's cinnamon raisin biscuit--only without cinnamon or white frosting.  Or if you threw some oatmeal in it might be more like an oatmeal raisin cookie.

The biscuits take about 20 minutes at 350 to bake and then I usually break a piece of cheese in half and warm up a couple of sausage links in the microwave to make biscuit sandwiches.  I could cook an egg but those are harder to get so I usually do without.

After I eat breakfast I tell myself that I'll do some writing but I usually catch up on other Internet shit like Amazon KDP, Amazon Vine, Twitter, Facebook, and GMail.  And I play this other game, Legendary Game of Heroes that's not as good as the other.  It'd probably be more fun and make more sense if you played Magic The Gathering, which I never did.

By then it's almost time for lunch.  At first I'd make a TV dinner or Tortinos pizza, but then later I ordered some tuna from Target, so I'd make that on bread or low carb wraps with some Pringles or green beans or something.

After lunch and maybe some more Internet browsing and shit then I might finally get around to writing.  At this point (May 10th) I've written about 92,000 words altogether, though 25,000 were on a story that I stopped working on because the ending just kept seeming farther and farther away so I decided to work on some more potentially profitable endeavors.  Here's what "Eric Filler" has published during the lockdown to this point:

Then after writing and dicking around on the Internet and playing games and stuff it's time for dinner.  I usually make fish of some sort.  I still had most of a bag of tilapia from Walmart before the lockdown and I got some crappy whiting from Meijer before the lockdown.  I got some beer battered Gorton's fish too.  Along with that I might make a TV dinner or I had some microwave White Castle burgers or something.

When the fish started to get low I ordered some Spam from Target and from Amazon I got this nasty shit called "potted meat."  Potted meat is like if you took Spam, ground it into a powder, and then added some water and a tablespoon of salt.  It's pretty gross but I guess if it gets to the point of having to eat it then things will really be bad.  I usually made French fries or green beans as a side dish.

After dinner I'd have some almond milk and sugar free pudding and/or fruit cups for dessert.  The fruit I initially got from Big Lots.  They had some Mandarin oranges that were yummy and some mixed fruit or something like that that I could get shipped to me with some other shit.  Later I got mixed fruit and peaches from Target shipped to my door.

Almond milk I had some I bought from stores for a while but then on Amazon Vine there was a thing to make your own almond milk, which seemed cool so I wouldn't have to worry about going to the store for it.  What about the almonds?  You might snarkily say.  You can order them from Amazon or Nuts.com delivered some the next day and that way you can buy in bulk and avoid the stores.

The thing I found out is you don't really need a special thing to make almond milk.  All you need is a blender, a big cup to pour stuff in, and a fine mesh colander thing.  I had the latter in my pantry with some other shit so when I was clearing out room for the food I bought online I found that and it worked just as well as the Vine thing.  Or from Amazon you can buy special "nut milk bags" to strain the milk.  The cheapest of those are about $6 for 2, which is cheaper than the Vine thing.

If you want to make your own almond milk, all you do is pour a cup of almonds and cup of hot water in a pan or whatever for an hour.  Drain the almonds, rinse them, and then put them in a blender with three cups of water.  The recipe from Vine said to use 1/2 tsp of salt but I only use 1/4 tsp.  Grind up the almonds for a minute or so, maybe let it sit for a few minutes, and then pour through the colander thing into a cup or strain them through a bag or whatever.

The problem is that you end up with a lot of pulp from the almonds that jams up the colander.  So you have to pour a little at a time, clean the colander, and then repeat ad nauseum.  It's a lot messier and time-consuming than just going to a store and buying almond milk.  If I survive for things to get back to normal I'd probably just buy it from the store because it's too much effort.  I'm not sure how long the almond milk will stay good so I just drink up all 16oz or so that day.

After dinner and dessert then I'll dick around and maybe do some writing until about 10ish.  Then I try to use my crappy little exercise bike for about 20-25 minutes--usually the length of an episode of The Simpsons on Disney+.  And then maybe do some writing but probably just dick around on games or the Internet until midnight-2am.

Then repeat and repeat and repeat.

Usually about twice a week I order out from a pizza place.  Papa John's is the easiest and cheapest near me to order from.  I ordered from Cottage Inn twice but the second time was so fucking terrible that I refused to order from them again.  Not only was it late, but they didn't use the right sauce on the pizza or the right flavor crust, and the chicken wings were so nasty looking, like they took roasted wings, realized they were supposed to be fried, and tried to coat them in batter.  Just gross.  Other places like Hungry Howie's and Benito's are OK but they're more expensive.

I try to go out at least once a week.  some weeks it's to go to the pharmacy or bank but if I don't have to do either of those I'll just go to Wendy's or somewhere like that to get some drive-thru and to help keep the car's battery from going dead or anything like that.

So there you go, that's my "staycation" with some handy recipes.

Prompt Service

I haven't really been able to think of many blog topics lately.  For almost a year I had a whole bunch of upcoming ones with the A to Z entries and then I wrote a few after that but now I'm almost out of material.

So I thought to fill the void I'd do something I considered doing last December but didn't get around to:  use a book of writing prompts to create some blog entries!  We'll see how far I can get with that.  There are 400 prompts in the book I got from Five Below last fall but most of them suck, so I might not find that many that really like.

And now for the hell of it, here are some Sims I made that were supposed to be used in Eric Filler stories, but since I made the Sims first they didn't really turn out to be what I used.  Deleted Sims!  Like deleted scenes...but Sims.  Ha.

Enjoy Memorial Day at home--or your memorial might be the next one celebrated!

Jedi Mind Trip

This is one of those blog topics that's the result of a few different people saying things that are related.  In this case it was about Jedi in Star Wars.

First there was Michael Offutt's post from May 11.
And then there was an article on Facebook from IGN or io9 or something like that quoting Clone Wars co-creator Dave Filoni on a Disney+ show about the epic lightsaber fight in Episode I.  (I forgot to share the article or send it to myself so it got lost in the thick brown soup of my Facebook feed, so it's unlikely I'll ever be able to find it again.)  Offutt also references it in another blog post too.

The gist in both instances was that by Episode I the Jedi Order had lost their way.  In Filoni's words the Jedi had become too political, which wound up dooming them to getting caught up in Palpatine's machinations.  In Offutt's first article he talks about how Jedi like Mace Windu were too content to be warriors while others had forgotten Jedi were supposed to be about peace and love and stuff like that.

In talking about the lightsaber fight in Episode I, Filoni says the famous John Williams piece was called "Duel of the Fates" because it really determined the fate of Anakin and thus the Jedi Order and the galaxy itself.  Had Qui-Gon Jinn not died, he might have been the father figure Anakin lacked who could have tamed him enough to not become a force for evil.  Whereas Obi-Wan was too young and inexperienced and more like an older brother who's forced to take care of the younger sibling after the parents are suddenly killed, like Matthew Fox in Party of Five for instance.

Offutt talks about how Ahsoka Tano saw what the Jedi Order was becoming and that was why she walked away from it, which is true to me.  Offutt goes on to talk about how Luke Skywalker was really forged as a weapon against Vader and the Emperor, which is why he was a crappy teacher.

On that latter thing, I don't think we can really blame Luke.  And maybe Anakin would have turned even if Qui-Gon had lived.  In both cases they were what you could describe as "wartime Jedi."  In The Godfather the top adviser to the mob boss is called consigliere.  At the start of the movie, the Godfather (Marlon Brando) has his adopted son Tom Hagen (Robert Duval) in that role.  Later, after the Godfather is badly wounded and his oldest son Sonny (James Caan) is murdered and his youngest son Michael (Al Pacino) takes over, he spins Tom Hagen off to the mob's interests in Vegas.  Why?  Because the Corleone family is at war with the other families and Tom is not a "wartime consigliere."  He was trained as a lawyer and businessman, not a field general.

By the same token, because of the Clone Wars, Anakin and many other young Jedi were trained to fight more than they were trained in all that other hippie Jedi stuff about peace and love.  Padawans like Ahsoka and Kanaan Jaris were also brought up during wartime and thus it was harder for them to learn and embrace the old ways.

After Order 66, most of the Jedi were killed and the historical knowledge was destroyed or hidden away, so those who survived didn't have access to the old ways.  Luke especially didn't have the benefit of ever learning in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant.  He got a little teaching from Obi-Wan and then some from Yoda before he left for Bespin and then not much after that before Yoda died.

In a way it's unfair to complain that Luke was trained as a weapon because maybe if Luke had stayed on Dagobah and not gone to Bespin he could have learned more of the old ways from Yoda.  By the time he came back, Yoda was dying, so there wasn't time for all that.  Luke just had to do the best he could.

Which in the sequels the idea of Luke going searching for Jedi lore was a good idea, but then that putz Rian Johnson had to make him a whiny crybaby going off to the first Jedi temple to die and blah, blah, blah.  Maybe the better way to go about it in Episode VII would have been instead of the whole "treasure map" thing  would have been for Poe to be searching for Luke when the Empire captured him and then Fin and Rey to continue the quest with Han until Rey, using the Force, finally caught up to him.  Or something like that.

Rey of course is another wartime Jedi who didn't really get a full education.  She just had some lessons from Luke and Leia and some of Luke's notes.  You know how a copy of a copy is much worse than the original?  Jedi with incomplete knowledge training Jedi with even less complete knowledge is probably not going to work out all that great.

What might be interesting is a TV show about rebuilding the Jedi Order after the sequel trilogy.  Maybe have some young Force users trying to find Jedi relics and stuff to rebuild the Order.  It might work better as an animated series just to spend less on effects and locations and such.

I heard about Disney doing a new book series about the "High Jedi Order" thousands of years in the past.  Maybe that will help show how the peace and love Jedi Order became too political and then too war-like.  Or not.  Whatever.

There you go, some rambling about Jedi.

Quarantine Movie Diary

Other than watching TV shows I also have watched movies during the quarantine so for the hell of it I'm doing some mini-reviews.

Midsommar:  This is one from last year that for some reason people, including critics, seemed to love but I found it so, soooo boring and predictable.  The main character is a girl who spends most of the movie ugly crying because her sister committed suicide and killed their parents.  She tags along with her boyfriend and his friends to a village in Sweden that has a creepy festival.  If you've ever seen Wicker Man--either the original 70s one with the Equalizer guy or the 2000s version with Nic Cage--then you already know pretty much what's going to happen.  It just takes a long, long time to get to that point.

Alita: Battle Angel:  A couple of people in a Facebook group said this was good so I watched this on HBO.  It was pretty good, but the android looks so fake with those big weird eyes and stuff.  I know they did that to make it more like the manga version, probably because of all the people who bitched about Ghost in the Shell, but it just looked weird, worse than that Robert Zemeckis stuff in Polar Express, Beowulf, etc.  Anyway, there was plenty of decent action and Christoph Walz is good as Alita's "father" while fellow Oscar winners Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali cash a paycheck as the bad guys.  With a fourth Oscar winner in James Cameron writing/producing there was a lot of talent ultimately wasted on a movie that didn't do great box office, but especially if you have HBO (or maybe a free Redbox rental) then it's worth a watch.

Servitude:  This was a Canadian movie from about 2011 that's basically Waiting with less well-known actors.  The main difference in the story is Waiting was told from the POV of a kid just starting while Servitude is from the POV of a 20-something guy who's supposed to be quitting that night.  They do less gross stuff to customers's food, but otherwise it's the same kind of movie but still funny on its own, especially if you've ever worked in the food service industry (or maybe any service industry) to know what assholes people are.

Valentine: The Dark Avenger:  This is a superhero movie from Indonesia.  Amazon didn't tell me that when I started to watch, though I started to figure that out when I saw signs in another language.  The movie is I guess dubbed for the most part but it's not really terrible dubbing like old Godzilla movies.  Anyway, a guy wants to create a superhero movie and so decides to recruit someone to do superhero stuff that'll be filmed and put on YouTube to lure a production company to buy the rights.  He meets a waitress who knows some kind of Indonesian martial art and so she becomes Valentine, the dark avenger.  During her first mission at a convenience store she quickly proves that Incredibles adage:  no capes!  Ultimately she gets some better equipment and comes into conflict with "the Shadow" (not the 30s pulp hero) who's trying to disband the police force to get revenge on the corrupt chief.  The identity of the Shadow was pretty obvious about halfway through but if you like the non-Marvel superhero movies or kung-fu movies then it's decent.

Jay & Silent Bob Reboot:  I haven't really had any interest in Kevin Smith movies since Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back in 2001.  I watched the awful Red State and a few minutes of Cop Out that told me I was right to avoid his 21st Century movies.  But I was bored and this was free on Amazon Prime, so fuck it.  Like the CW's recent Crisis on Infinite Earth crossover, this was mainly fun to watch for the cameos.  A lot of the Kevin Smith regulars are present:  Dante, Jason Lee, Matt Damon, Joey Lauren Adams, and Ben Affleck.  Plus characters from Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back  like Shannon Elizabeth, Jason Biggs, James van der Beek, and Diedrich Bader.  And there are some new cameos like Supergirl's Melissa Benoist, Val Kilmer, and Chris Hemsworth.  Even the late Stan Lee has a cameo in the credits.  Unfortunately it's not just a parade of guest stars.  The actual story is that Jay and Silent Bob have their names taken away by a movie company that wants to reboot the Bluntman & Chronic comic based on them.  So they go on the road to stop this, which begins with an obligatory reference to Kevin Smith's incident with Southwest about being too fat to fly.  When they get to Chicago, Jay finds out he has a kid, who's unfortunately played by Smith's untalented, unattractive daughter.  I just basically tuned that whole middle part of the movie out.  It picks back up in Hollywood because again cameos.  Affleck has a really good speech about raising kids and how you think growing up you're Bruce Wayne when in the end you become Thomas Wayne--or Batman's mother...what was her name?  (For me that was the biggest laugh.)  If this had a stronger story and less nepotism then it'd be a better movie.  Otherwise there's no point watching unless you're a fan of the classic View Askew movies from the 90s.

Sharknado 3:  I saw the preview for this like 200 times during the live Rifftrax show of Sharknado 2.  Unfortunately there's not a Rifftrax version of this on Amazon or anything so I watched the regular version.  It was pretty craptacular, as you would expect.  After shark storms in LA and New York they up the ante with shark storms up and down the East Coast just as Fin's wife and daughter are at Universal Studios.  And it just gets dumber from there, culminating with a ripoff of Armageddon as Fin and his father (David Hasselhoff) spontaneously take a space shuttle into space to fire up some kind of Death Star laser to destroy the storms.  My favorite character was the F-4 Phantom Fin and Nova take from the world's fakiest air force base, but sadly it died while the horrible Ann Coulter was allowed to live--seeing her get eaten by a shark would have made the whole movie for me.  It's really amazing there were 3 more of these shitfests.

Time is a Flat Circle: A Quarantine TV Diary

While I should have been writing or reading or important stuff like that, I spent a lot of time in quarantine catching up on TV shows I hadn't gotten around to watching.  Three (at least) the concept of time was involved in understanding them so why not just put them all together?  Sure.

In a way the most conventional was season 3 of FX's Legion that was on Hulu.  The gist of the first two seasons is that Professor X's son David has really powerful psychic powers but an entity known as the Shadow King has inhabited him since he was a baby, driving him crazy.  In the first season he finally got the Shadow King out of his head and in the second he tried to destroy the Shadow King, but in the attempt went too far and alienated his girlfriend Sydney and all his other friends and then disappeared.

So season 3 picks up with a young Japanese girl tracking down this weird commune he's started where he uses his psychic powers to sort of drug people into feeling good.  The girl has the power to travel back in time, which David wants to use so he can go back and stop the Shadow King from ever messing with his head.  But that's hard for the girl to do so they have to kidnap one of David's old co-workers to help her increase her power.  In the meantime Sydney and the Shadow King are trying to track him down to imprison or kill him.

A good thing in this third season is maybe because of the Fox/Disney merger they just threw out any hope of tying into the rest of Fox's X-Men franchise.  To that end they cast someone else as a young Charles Xavier and gave him a different backstory from both the Stewart or McAvoy movies.  In this backstory, Xavier fought in WWII and in a hospital met a catatonic woman.  He used his powers to "fix" the woman and they wound up falling in love and getting married and having a kid--David.  Which really makes no sense in that how could David be born in the 50s when the show otherwise seems to take place in the present day?  He'd have to be in his 60s then.

But, whatever.  Eventually David and the girl go back in time to when Xavier meets the Shadow King.  The hope being that together they can destroy the Shadow King once and for all before he can possess David's mind.  But instead things take a different turn when the present-day Shadow King shows up.  He and the past Xavier decide to broker a truce instead.

Meanwhile, Sydney seemingly died but is reincarnated in some kind of fairy tale world, where she grows up all over again to learn that some people just can't be saved.  Which she realizes means that the present David can't be redeemed but if they go back in time maybe they can save the past David.  So she and her friends are able to go back and protect baby David and his mother from monsters that eat time.

Does any of that make sense?  Probably not so much.  It makes a little more sense if you've watched the whole series.  So the point was that there's a point when you have to just let someone go--unless you can go back in time to fix things.  Which is kind of in opposition to Magneto in the movies considering Xavier has been trying to "save" him for 20 years and 8 movies despite the millions of people Magneto has killed.  Maybe instead of going back in time to 1973 in Days of Future Past they should have gone back to WWII and saved Magneto before he became evil.

Anyway, I liked the final season of the show even though you probably could have compacted it all into half as many episodes if you took out all the gratuitous and/or nonsensical stuff.  But then that's probably been true all along.

Another comic book-related show I watched was HBO's Watchmen sequel series.  When I first saw the preview for it, it looked really lame so I didn't watch it as it came out even though I could have.  It was probably better to binge it over a couple of days anyway instead of waiting week-to-week and wondering what was going to happen next and coming up with a bunch of theories then disproved as with Game of Thrones a few years ago.

The important thing about this is that they made it a sequel to the comic book, not the 2009 movie.  The main difference is that in the comic book, Veidt's plan was to stage an "alien invasion" by a giant squid monster in New York whereas in the movie he replicated Dr. Manhattan's power to make it look like Dr. Manhattan attacked cities all over the world.  Maybe it was because whiny crybaby comic book "fans" complained so much about not getting their precious squid monster. [eye roll]  Now you got your fucking squid monster.  Happy now?!

Anyway, it starts off recounting a massacre of black people in Tulsa by the Ku Klux Klan in 1921.  A boy named Will survives when his parents get him to someone to hide in a wagon.  When they point it out later, the Superman parallel becomes pretty obvious.

Back in the present of 2019, not a lot is that different except Robert Redford has been president for 26 years for some reason.  A lot of racist white people have formed a Rorschach cult because they feel disenfranchised with reparations made to black people like the families of those killed in that Tulsa massacre.  A few years earlier the "7th Kavalry" as they call themselves (despite that the 7th Cavalry fought Native Americans in South Dakota, not black people in Oklahoma--and of course they all died) killed a bunch of Tulsa police and so the police department started to go around in masks and conceal their identities from everyone--including their families.

One of them is named Angela but her cop name is "Sister Night" as she dresses sort of like a nun that she saw in an old blaxploitation picture.  Her boss is Don Johnson, who apparently doesn't have a mask or secret identity, which is maybe why he dies.  When Angela finds his body hanging, old Louis Gossett Jr is sitting there in a wheelchair saying he killed him.

Meanwhile, Adrian Veidt is trapped in a seemingly idyllic English estate where he's served by clones of a man and woman whom he sacrifices in a variety of ways as he tries to escape the prison.  Where the concept of time comes into this series is when you realize that the Veidt parts are actually taking place 5-6 years in the past.  This was after Veidt was visited by Dr. Manhattan, who created that whole estate but found it lacking.  In return for help in erasing his memory, Manhattan sends Veidt there.

The other big piece of the puzzle is a woman named Lady Trieu who it turns out is Veidt's illegitimate daughter.  In his Antarctic base, Veidt had stored a whole bunch of his sperm and one day a cleaning woman stole some.  It was probably the least believable scene in the episode, as I'm pretty sure they don't do artificial insemination by just taking a syringe and sticking it between a woman's legs.  It's probably a more complicated process and not something you could probably do yourself in an office chair like that.  And even if you could, it's like a really low percentage chance of making a child.

Anyway, Trieu inherited her daddy's brains and created her own empire--and buying Veidt's out too.  Something pretty icky is that she has a "daughter" who's a younger clone of her own mother.  See the kind of creepy shit "mainstream" properties can get away with that I can't?  In a garden she has a "statue" of Veidt but near the end we realize it's not a statue; she basically froze her father in carbonite and put him on display like Jabba did with Han Solo.  At least until it's time for her ultimate plan.  Not really learning from her father, she unfreezes him so that he can watch her grand plan unfold the way a comic book or Bond villain did.  The best part in Watchmen (book and movie) is when Rorshach and Nite Owl II show up in Antarctica to stop Veidt and he says, "I'm not a comic book villain.  I launched it 35 minutes ago."

Angela takes some pills from Louis Gossett Jr that are actually memories of his.  She ODs on them and goes on a journey through this guy's memories.  And the unsurprising reveal was that after he escaped the Tulsa massacre, Will went to New York City.  He joined the police force but found there was too much corruption, so he became the first vigilante, Hooded Justice.  I had already figured that out like five episodes earlier, so it was kind of lame.  Will had a son who served in Vietnam and had a daughter--Angela, of course.

The significance of this was...nothing really.  Angela's parents were murdered by a Vietnamese terrorist protesting the US making it a state after Dr. Manhattan won the war.  Angela joined the police force in Saigon, where Dr. Manhattan came to visit her.

The second big reveal wasn't all that surprising to me either, though mostly because I'd already seen pictures of who was playing Dr. Manhattan so it was pretty obvious who his secret identity was:  Angela's husband Calvin.  Using something Veidt made for him, he was able to wipe his memory and pose as a normal human.  But eventually the 7th Kavalry find out and try to capture him, except Trieu double-crosses them and captures Manhattan for herself because she wants to steal his power so she can "fix" the world.

And so Angela saves the day, right?  I mean we spent all these episodes learning about her and she was on all the advertising posters and whatnot, so she has to be the one to foil Trieu, right?  Um, no.  Not at all.  In fact, she really does nothing; she just sits with Dr. Manhattan until he dies.

Besides Angela and Trieu the other female lead character was Laurie Blake, aka Silk Spectre II in the comic book--and ironically she was played by Jean Smart, who was also in all three seasons of Legion.  For...reasons she left Dan Dreiberg (aka Nite Owl II) and joined the FBI to hunt down vigilantes like she used to be.  She investigates the Tulsa chief's murder and winds up becoming the de facto chief.  When Trieu's scheme is unfolding she's...tied to a chair and then beamed to Antarctica with Veidt and another dude played by Tim Blake Nelson.  And while in Antarctica she does...still nothing.

So it's funny that all the girl power in this series, the only one who actually does anything in the end is Lady Trieu--and she's the villain!  The villain who makes the stupid comic book villain mistake that her father didn't make; guess she didn't get all of his brains after all.  Veidt is the one who saves the day by using his equipment in Antarctica to beam frozen mini-squids to Tulsa to smash Lady Trieu's machine.  Hooray!

Another not-surprising twist is that Dr. Manhattan had stored some of his essence in an egg.  By eating the egg, Angela can gain his power.  They really telegraphed the hell out of that, so I was just sitting there wondering when she would figure out the egg thing already.

Overall this was OK but it wasn't nearly as clever as it wanted to think it was.  And really, what was the point of it?  All the focus on women and black people and again it was the white guy who saved the day.  Not really much of a statement there.  The brilliance of Watchmen the original is that it subverted the whole superhero genre.  In the end no "hero" could save the world from Armageddon; it was only by pulling off a comic book villain scheme that Veidt could stop the superpowers from annihilating each other.  This series clearly wanted to do the same for the racial politics of the Trump era, but it's too obvious and too clumsy to succeed.  Alan Moore was right to keep his name off this one.

Finally, HBO's Westworld was a show I'd meant to watch but I just never got around to it.  So since I had time on my hands, I figured I might as well. The first four or five episodes I wished I hadn't because it was so, so slooooow.  There was violence and nudity and stuff but it was really just a lot of moving the pawns around on the chessboard.  It finally started to pick up after that as things began to happen.

If you watched the original movie from the 70s and its sequel Futureworld then you know that these were written by Michael Crichton and were basically what he later used as the basis for the more successful Jurassic Park.  Basically replace the cloned dinosaurs with robots in the old west or a sci-fi world and that was the pretty basic plot.

The TV show follows the rough outline of that as the robots very slowly begin to realize that they're just machines used for the amusement of the rich assholes who visit the park on an island off the coast of China.  The main difference between the TV show and the movies is that the movies were pretty much written from the POV of the humans being terrorized by malfunctioning robots.  The TV show focuses a lot more on the POV of the robots as they really gain sentience.

There's a farmer's daughter named Dolores Abernathy who has been used over and over again as a damsel in distress, which often leads to her being brutalized and raped.  The town madame Maeve similarly has been used for all manner of sex.  They both start remembering things from their previous lives, which for Dolores goes all the way back to the beginning as she was the first one created.

Meanwhile Dr. Robert Ford has been basically the head of the park and is planning to unveil a big new story.  This while the board of the company is trying to force him out.  There's also the "Man in Black" played by Ed Harris who goes around killing robots while looking for a maze that will lead to Ford's ultimate game.

The concept of time becomes involved when you realize that the story of Dolores and a guest named William is actually taking place before the other stuff.  This becomes obvious when William's brother gives him a picture of his fiancee which we previously saw buried on the Abernathy farm, where Dolores's father finds it and starts malfunctioning.  The big twist is that William IS the Man in Black only separated by like 35 years.

At the end of the season, Dolores kills Ford while Maeve is about to escape when she decides to go back to find the daughter she keeps seeing in dreams.

The second season has everyone trying to get to "the Valley Beyond" which is some secret project the company that made Westworld has been working on to not just monitor the guests but to recreate their brains.  Dolores wants to find this to use it to destroy humanity while William, aka the Man in Black, wants to just see the end of Ford's game and Maeve wants to get her daughter to safety.  In the end Dolores escapes and Maeve seemingly dies after getting her daughter to safety.  In a cookie scene at the end of the last episode, the concept of time again comes into play as the Man in Black finds a lab where he realizes that he's just a recreation of the original William who's been going through the same thing as a test over and over again.

Maybe I'm not explaining it well because there's a lot of stuff to try to keep track of.  You'd really have to watch it to have any hope of comprehending it.  It is clear that the show took a few pages from the Game of Thrones playbook as there's plenty of nudity--female and male--and violence and rape.  Not really any incest, so there's that.  Maybe not as big of set piece battles as in GOT.  Dolores is a lot like Danerys in that she starts out as this naive young woman and then becomes this brutal warlord who wants to take over the world.  For most of the first two seasons the gunslinger Teddy (played by James Marsden of the original X-Men movies) is like Jon Snow in that he's good and noble--and dies and comes back to life.  Only instead of Jon Snow killing Danerys, Dolores kills Teddy.

The third season is more like Futureworld in that it takes place largely in a future world and not the Westworld park as Dolores continues her machinations to take over the human world.  The primary target is a computer that's essentially been running the world.  Aaron Paul is a human who used to be a soldier and rescues Dolores from some goons.  She then recruits him to her cause by showing him that the computer system has been preventing him from getting decent jobs because it says he'll eventually kill himself.  Which maybe is a self-fulfilling prophecy since if he can't get decent jobs he'll probably get depressed and commit suicide.

Meanwhile there's a hostile takeover of the company behind Westworld.  Some French guy whose brother built the fancy computer system running the world wants the information the company has been gathering from guests at the park.  Meanwhile the Man in Black is committed by the head of the Westworld company, who is actually a copy of Dolores in disguise.  Not that that really helps her in keeping the company since French guy takes out everyone else so he can gain control.

Basically everyone has their own little plan to save or destroy the world.  Dolores wants to shut down the French guy's computer system to "free" people.  The French guy recruits Maeve to help him in exchange for letting her go to "the Sublime" to see her daughter again.  But eventually she and Dolores have a chat and Maeve decides to switch sides.  Meanwhile, Bernard is given the key to the Sublime to find an answer while the former head of Delos has her own plan to change the world, which you have to watch after the end credits to see.

Overall it's OK but not great.  I could have watched the last 3-4 episodes live but I never even thought about it, which kind of tells you how interested I was in it.  The show has really evolved beyond the movie/first season at this point.  I'm not sure that's really a good thing.

Is Emma a Mary Sue?

Sitting around at home all day, there's plenty of time for shower thoughts even when you aren't showering that much.

One day out of the blue I wondered:  would people consider Emma Earl of the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series a Mary Sue?

Does this look like a Mary Sue to you?

She meets the first qualification in that she's a girl.  And she's super-smart, like an actual genius, which is why she has a PhD at 19 and is working as a geologist at a museum.  And then she gets a suit of magical armor that gives her superpowers!

That probably is enough to make some people consider her a Mary Sue.  I'm not sure I'd really agree.  Sure she's super-smart but in a lot of ways it's a detriment for her as it's kept her from having a normal life.  At the start of the story she only has one friend, her chubby childhood friend Becky.  Her parents died in a car wreck when she was little so she didn't exactly have a perfect childhood either.  And her aunt has early-onset Alzheimer's so that she had to be put into an assisted living center.  I also made it a point to describe her as not being really pretty; she has really big feet, a big-ish nose, and average sized breasts, so she's not a supermodel.

She does get magic armor, but she doesn't instantly master it.  Her first night of crime-fighting she does perhaps more harm than good.  Her first two battles with the evil Black Dragoon she barely survives.  So you can't really argue that she was great at using the armor right off the bat; it really takes the whole book for her to get even moderately decent at the superhero thing.

Anyway, I guess I'll have to leave it to Phantom Readers to decide whether she is a Mary Sue or not.

I was bored one day so I decided to fire up The Sims 4 and do a fresh version of Emma and her friend Becky.  I don't have real armor so I just used the Red Power Ranger suit for Emma's armor.  And here they are in the wild:

Emma has a nice ass, don't you think?

#AtoZChallenge Reflections

The 2020 A to Z Challenge is finished now.  It was pretty much what I expected:  hardly anyone read anything and the few comments I received were so generic it's doubtful anyone who made them read more than the title.  At least this year I had a few drive-bys from other sites, something I really missed last year...not.  Considering I started working on the entries for the 2020 challenge about last April, this Challenge has lasted really over a year from start to finish.  So in a way it's a relief to finally have it over.

 

If I'm alive in 2021 I probably wouldn't do this unless I think of a fun topic I want to do.  Because in the end I do this for me, not for Phantom Readers.

A brief review of previous A to Z topics:

2012:  Tales of the Scarlet Knight
2013:  Just Random Stuff
2014:  PT Dilloway Story Characters
2015:  Eric Filler Book Subjects
2016:  Books to Movies
2017:  Transformers
2018:  GI JOEs
2019:  Robotech
2020:  MST3K/Rifftrax

#AtoZChallenge Bonus: Total Riff-Off

I probably could have used this for the T entry but I didn't so I decided to make this a bonus feature.

According to Wikipedia (so it must be true!) someone at the National Geographic channel was a fan of Rifftrax and wanted them to do some riffs of Nat Geo shows.  So they did three episodes where they did riffs on segments of Nat Geo shows.  These were popular enough that they did another three episodes.

Pluto TV often shows all 6 in a marathon and while at first it was pretty neat, it got old fairly quick.  For some reason I can watch Birdemic or ROTOR or Rollergator a thousand times but after three times I was bored with these.  Maybe because they always show them all at once so it's a six-hour block which gets monotonous.  Then they started to rerun it so it was 12 hours, from 7pm-7am.  And what really drove me bonkers was they would sometimes do it 3 or 4 times a week!  Why not just set up a whole separate channel for the fucking things then?  Yeesh.  BTW, that is how you run something into the ground very quickly.

Anyway, episode 1 is "Killer Shrimp N Friends."  It's a bunch of Nat Geo animal segments.  The titular segment is about a shrimp that can amp up to launch itself in a rocket punch to kill prey.  There are other segments on badass animals like Tasmanian devils that will actually live INSIDE an animal once they've killed it until they consume the whole carcass.  Another was on this bird called the cassowary that might look sort of like an ostrich but it has these nasty Velociraptor claws on its feet.  A hot redheaded scientist warns people to "respect the cassowary" and while the riffers mock her, just last year I heard of someone who got close to a cassowary and died.  So yeah, respect the fucking cassowary!

Episode 2 is "Demon Bat."  It's the first taken from this dumb show called Man v Monster.  This stupid British guy named Richard Terry who's a self-described cameraman, not a scientist, goes in search of a killer demon bat in Mexico.  He talks to a bunch of people and navigates around a flood to go to an old temple and then goes into a cave.  Guess what the "demon bat" turns out to be?  A common vampire bat.  The over-the-top "heroics" of Terry make this ripe for riffing.

Episode 3 is "A Guy and a Goose."  The title segment is about this old guy in LA who befriends a goose called Maria in a park.  The goose would follow him around and sometimes fly after him on his scooter.  What a lovely story...except we soon see the goose follows EVERYONE around, including the band OK Go when they shot a video in the park.  And to top it off "Maria" is actually a male!  So this guy's relationship with the goose is about as real as any relationship on the Internet.  There's another segment from some show about Florida guys who wrangle alligators and raccoons.  They aren't too bright, as you might imagine.  The final segment is about these guys who train corpse-sniffing dogs.  They try to sell an army contractor on a Cocker Spaniel called Bullwinkle to find exploded body parts (gross!) but the guy wants a different breed of dog called a Malinois so they have to do a bunch of tests to prove the dog can do it.  Fascinating.

Episode 4 is "Man v Monster."  It's another Richard Terry episode.  This time he's in Thailand looking for a river monster.  The monster has been biting people in the river.  First he thinks it might be a snake so he goes crawling around a cave miles from the river.  Then he goes underwater in the "thick brown soup" of the river looking for snakes.  Since he can't find a killer snake he decides it must be a catfish.  Ironic because this whole show is like one big episode of Catfish on MTV only instead of a guy or ugly woman pretending to be a hot chick it's an ordinary animal pretending to be a monster.  The catfish don't fit the bill so eventually Terry "discovers" that the culprit is a freshwater stingray.  Which a local zoologist knows all about so maybe he should have just gone to her first.

Episode 5 is "Animals Behaving Badly."  It's about, wait for it, animals behaving badly.  Like a deer that humps a girl in Pennsylvania.  And a gorilla that hurls a raccoon that wandered into their zoo enclosure--the raccoon survived.  And an orangutan that smokes somewhere in Asia.  There's also a nasty segment about how rat mamas will eat their young.  Not all of them, just the weakest or something.  Ick.  I usually skip this episode for that reason.

The last episode is "Brazilian Bigfoot."  This final installment features our hero Richard Terry in Brazil looking for another "monster."  And guess what?  Yeah, he doesn't find one.  Only in this case he doesn't find anything at all, not even a common animal that could be at fault.  Like the other two episodes he goes through his schtick of asking people their stories and then doing a bunch of stupid stunts like crossing a gorge on a narrow log and going into another cave and climbing up a tree to spend a night.  In the end he thinks the animal might be a giant land sloth...which went extinct thousands of years ago.  But it could totally still be alive!  Given his track record, I'd doubt it.

These are pretty fun but they're not something I want to see all that often.  Still, it might be fun if they riffed on more stuff like this like all those lame reality shows.

The Changing Focus of Star Wars

Rewatching all nine movies during the quarantine, at one point I got to thinking about how the focus of the Star Wars story kept changing as they added more movies.

In the original movies released from 1977-1983 the main focus was on the story of Luke Skywalker as he undertook the hero's journey from the backwater of Tatooine to destroy the Death Star.  Then his training to become a Jedi and bring his father, Darth Vader, back from the dark side.  Of course you also had the other main characters in Han and Leia too but Luke's story was the primary one.

Then George Lucas made the prequels from 1999-2005 and the focus of the story changed from Luke's story to Anakin's story.  The whole saga became about his fall to the dark side and then his redemption thanks to Luke's faith in him.  Instead of the Luke Skywalker story it was the Darth Vader story.

And then Disney came along with their half-assed sequels from 2015-2019 and especially with the ill-named Rise of Skywalker, the focus of the series shifted again.  With the return of Emperor Palpatine and the revelation that Rey was his granddaughter, the focus of the saga really then became about Palpatine.

Chronologically, in the prequels Palpatine manipulates events to destroy the Jedi and take ultimate power.  In the original trilogy Palpatine's empire is destroyed by his trusted henchman Darth Vader via Luke Skywalker.  And then in the final trilogy, Palpatine works in the shadows to revive his empire only to be thwarted by his granddaughter and the grandson of Darth Vader.  While they marketed it as "The Skywalker Saga" it really should have been "The Palpatine Saga" since he was far more involved than Skywalkers in everything.  Nothing happens--perhaps not even Anakin's immaculate conception--without Palpatine's involvement.  He was the straw stirring the whole Star Wars drink.

So in terms of writing you can see how adding more parts to a series can change the overall meaning of that series.  That can especially be true when you have three trilogies made long periods apart and in the final case by different people.  It's probably happened in book series too, as new works retcon what the overall message was supposed to be.

The Straw Man of Hope In the Time of Pandemic

This topic seemed appropriate for when other people are doing Insecure Writer Support Group entries.  A few weeks ago, one of my Facebook "friends" linked to this blog post by author Nathan Bransford.  It's supposed to give people motivation to write during the quarantine.

But to me this is an example of a "straw man" post.  From yourdictionary.com comes this definition and an example:

Of the many types of logical fallacies, the straw man fallacy is particularly common in political debates and in discussions over controversial topics. The basic structure of the argument consists of Person A making a claim, Person B creating a distorted version of the claim (the "straw man"), and then Person B attacking this distorted version in order to refute Person A's original assertion.
 Often, the distorted interpretation is only remotely related to the original claim. The opposing argument may focus on just one aspect of the claim, take it out of context, or exaggerate it. The straw man argument, in this way, is an example of a red herring. It's meant to distract from the real issue being discussed and is not a logically valid argument. The best way to understand this phenomenon is with some straw man fallacy examples.
 The War on Christmas
Person A: The children's winter concert at the school should include non-Christmas songs too.
Person B: You won't be happy until Christmas songs are banned from being played on the radio!
 This example of a straw man argument is related to slippery slope reasoning. Person A may be requesting a more diverse or inclusive selection of songs at the children's winter concert. However, Person B interprets this request as a desire to remove all Christmas songs from public performance entirely. Whether or not Christmas songs are playing on the radio is not related to whether the children's concert will include songs from other traditions and holidays, like Hanukkah or Diwali. 

In this case, for people not feeling like writing during the pandemic, Bransford says that people are worried about what the publishing world would be like afterwards.  And then goes on to compare it to the financial collapse of 2008.  The idea is that publishing has survived before so it'll survive now.  Go on and write!

I just shook my head.  I don't give a shit about "the world after this one."  I'm worried about surviving this world right fucking now.  I'm not worried if Big Publishing and Big Literary Agents will survive; I'm worried about me and my family not getting sick and dying right now and in the weeks ahead.  That's the problem.

I mean, sure I can start writing something, but am I going to be alive to actually finish it?  Part of the horror of this pandemic is that because we don't have enough tests for people, there's no way to know who's sick and who isn't until they start showing symptoms.  And symptoms might not show for 10-14 days!  So you can start writing something thinking you're fine and healthy and then the next day fall ill and days after that you might be dead.

That's the reality of the situation.  It's not about the financial health of the publishing industry.  But that's a lot easier to defend because Big Publishing has survived the 2008 collapse, the Great Depression, and whatever in-between.  The author sets up a false fear to dispel with an easy argument.

I have done some writing as of the writing of this entry, but I'm not one of those people who relies on Big Publishing.  It's to my advantage to continue writing and self-publishing because especially now I need the money.  That's the motivation I need, though I know most people are not in that position.  Most people it's not going to matter much one way or another.  But I'd say if writing makes you feel good or helps you to deal with the horror, then go for it.

Though maybe some people are that much in denial that they're worrying about months or years from now instead of right this fucking minute.  I'm not.  I don't think you should be either.  Now if we're lucky by the time this posts in May we'll be on the downward slope of this thing and people are going back to work and things are getting back to normal.  Let's hope, though it's hard to say.  Which is the point.  To me it's pretty irresponsible to offer false hope to people.  That's certainly not something I do, which is probably why I don't have nearly as many readers.

Anyway, by the time any Phantom Readers read this I might be sick or dead.  That's the reality.  Sure, Big Publishing will survive, but will we?  That's harder to say.

Star Wars Resistance Fails to Live Up to Its Predecessors

May the Fourth Be With You!  I think the notion of "Star Wars Day" on May 4th is dumb but I already wrote this, so why not post it today?

The first few weeks of the quarantine, I devoted most of my TV watching to Star Wars on Disney+.  I watched all 8 movies and then the Clone Wars and Rebels series.  Only after all that (and renting Episode IX on Amazon) did I decide to watch the latest Star Wars series, Resistance.  It was created by Dave Filoni who worked on the two previous series so it had a good pedigree, but by the time the show really came together, it was too late.

The series focuses on a young guy named Kaz Xiono who was part of the New Republic Navy until his fighter group is attacked by First Order TIEs.  He's saved by Poe Dameron, who recruits him for the Resistance.  Instead of being put on the front lines, he's sent to a station called Colossus on a distant world.  There he's supposed to go undercover as a mechanic--except he has no idea what he's doing.  And he's supposed to gather intel on the mysterious First Order.

The head of the garage where Kaz works is Jarek Yeager, a former Rebellion pilot who dropped out after his family was killed.  There's also the grumpy Tamara, who dreams of being a pilot, and Neeku, a green-skinned alien who like the aliens in Galaxy Quest doesn't understand things like idioms, exaggerating, or lying.  If you said, "Gag me with a spoon" he'd stick a spoon down your throat thinking that's what you wanted.  There's also Bucket, an ancient astromech droid that's pretty much a skeleton.

And then there are a group of racing pilots known as the "Aces" who race against each other for fame and money but also serve as the station's defense force against pirates.

I think what might have been a problem for a lot of people who started watching was the first season unspools pretty slowly.  The first few episodes are mostly about Kaz's bumbling attempts to be a mechanic and a spy.  So people, like me, were probably like, WTF?  Where are the dogfights?  Laser fights?  Lightsaber duels?  You know, Star Wars stuff.  Despite that there were these hotshot racers, there wasn't a lot of racing either.

The shape of the plot becomes clearer as the season goes on and the First Order uses pirate attacks on the station and a kidnapping attempt of station captain Doza's daughter Torra as leverage to become a "peacekeeping" force on the station.  And then naturally their presence grows until at the end of the season they finally take over the station officially.

Interspersed with this are a couple of episodes where Kaz and Poe investigate First Order mining activity relating to producing weapons--a lot of weapons.  Those are some of the more exciting episodes early on and it was pretty cool they got Oscar Isaac to do Poe's voice for the show, though that also meant they couldn't show him all that often.  They also got Gwendoline Christie to do Captain Phasma's voice in a few episodes when she was on the show.

Near the end of the season Poe leaves to go to Jakku and then it ties into the events of The Force Awakens as the seat of the new Galactic Senate is destroyed by Starkiller Base.  Early in the first season we find out Kaz's father is a senator...but he wasn't on the planet at the time.  I think especially with the Y7 rating they didn't really want to kill anyone off directly.  Stormtroopers fall down, TIEs blow up, and of course a whole planet is destroyed but they don't really show anything in graphic detail and no main characters or their family members are killed.  That way it was more kid-friendly but maybe not adult-friendly enough for viewers of the other series.

The show gets a little better in the second season as the Colossus lifts off from the planet Castilon, into space.  Then it becomes like the Macross version of Robotech as the ship makes a sort of random jump into hyperspace.  There's a large civilian population on board, they're chased by a relentless enemy that has more firepower but never seems to be able to destroy them, a lot of the main characters are fighter pilots, and the captain even looks a lot like Captain Gloval of the SDF-1.  Even the way the ship flies vertically instead of horizontally is like the SDF-1 in its robot-looking "Attack" mode.  It's just too bad the planes and ship don't transform into robots.  When they seek safe harbor at the planet of Aeos Prime and wind up inadvertently causing the destruction of the native population was a lot like when the SDF-1 was seeking asylum in Ontario and wound up causing the destruction of Toronto when the Zentraedi attacked.  (If none of that makes sense, go read my A to Z Challenge entries from 2019.)

Meanwhile Tamara defects to the First Order to become a TIE pilot.  Which was fine with me as most of the first season she was just getting pissed off at Kaz, so if her TIE had been blown up in a battle, I wouldn't have really cared.  We meet the Captain Doza's wife/Torra's mother who's a pilot for the Resistance later in the second season and then she brings some of her X-wings on board as Captain Doza decides he can't keep running and hiding.

With all that there's a lot more action in the second season, which probably would have made it better for a lot of fans.  Like, say, my brother because there are dogfights in a lot of the episodes.  Yee-haw!

The series ends with Tamara leaving the First Order and the Star Destroyer that had been pursuing them being destroyed.  It's too bad there won't be a third season so they could tie it in to Episode IX and do a better ending.

I think this show suffered the problem a lot of shows that fail suffer from in that it took too long before it really hit its stride.  By the time it did, it was too little, too late.  And since Disney owns it, there's no way in hell that it could get a second life on some other streaming platform.  It would be nice if they made a movie or something to give it a better wrap-up.  Which would be nice for Rebels too.  (On a side note, if Ahsoka Tano will be in season 2 of The Mandalorian, does that mean we'll find out what happened to Ezra at the end of Rebels?  Because at the end of that show Ahsoka was going to take Sabine to go find Ezra.  Are Mando and the Child going to be involved with that?)

The other thing that I think held this back is there were no Jedi.  No lightsabers and the only Force used was in the last two episodes when a hologram of Kylo Ren (not voiced by Adam Driver) uses it on a couple of First Order officers, making them like marionettes pointing guns at each other.  Jedi and Sith are a huge part of Star Wars so when you don't have that, you're missing a huge core element.  Clone Wars and Rebels managed to balance Jedi stuff and space battles and such, like the movies.  I think the problem was setting it during the sequel trilogy was that Rey was supposed to be the only Jedi-type in the whole galaxy so they didn't want to have another good Force user.

And we should probably address the elephant in the room:  none of the main characters in the show are white!  Kaz, Torra, and Doza are Asian.  Yeager and Tamara are black.  Neeku is green.    Bucket, BB-8, and CB-23 are droids.  Most of the others are aliens of various types.  Only one of the Aces, a former Empire pilot named Griff, is a white guy.  Really almost all the white people are in the First Order.  For a lot of us that doesn't matter, but you know there's that section of toxic fandom that whines about "SJWs;" the ones who bitched about a black stormtrooper and an Asian woman being given a significant role.  They definitely wouldn't watch a Star Wars show without white main characters.  I'm just saying if you don't think that was a factor, you're being horribly naive.

Oh and it might have helped kids like the show more if they weren't selling 3-inch action figures for $8.  What a rip-off!  Though unlike ones for Solo at least I didn't see any of those in clearance bins at Meijer or Walmart or at discount stores like Five Below and Ollie's.  So maybe Hasbro kept the production run small enough that they didn't have cases and cases to discount.

One thing I will say I liked better than especially Clone Wars was that it didn't have story arcs of more than two episodes.  There was essentially one continuous arc but the individual episodes never went more than two parts.  So you didn't get that feeling like especially with Clone Wars where a particular storyline seemed to drag on one or two episodes too long.  That was probably because it was trying to cater more to the younger viewers than the adult ones.

Anyway, to quote Bad Santa:  they can't all be winners.  I'm sure Disney will have another Star Wars animated series soon enough and maybe it'll be better out of the gate.

#AtoZChallenge Bonus: Rifftones

Here's a bonus feature that I didn't find room in the A to Z Challenge for.

Music was always a big part of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  A lot of the intermission sketches featured comedy songs that would somehow relate to whatever movie was playing that week.  Sometimes while riffing the movie itself they would also make up a little ditty.

So forming a band wasn't too much of a stretch.  According to Wikipedia the Rifftones were formed to enter a contest by the Rifftrax crew of Michael J Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy.  On Amazon (and probably iTunes) you can find their 10-track album Music for Riffing.  They have more songs that you can probably find on the Rifftrax website.  The songs on the album mostly relate to some of the early movies featured on Rifftrax.

1.  Plans One Through Nine:  This song is inspired by the infamous Plan 9 From Outer Space and answers that question:  what were plans 1-8?  It goes through some discarded ideas like a giant death ray or mutant spider and a couple that relied on Gary Busey who was too drunk--as you might expect.  Bill Corbett does the main vocals with the others on backup.  This song was played during the live show of Plan 9 with humorous singer Jonathan Coulton joining in.

2.  Reefer Boy:  This song is inspired by that classic anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness.  It's done in a reggae style with Kevin Murphy as the titular "reefer boy" and the Jamaican Judge Dread (like dreadlocks) who says the boy blaming reefer for his troubles hasn't the sense God gave cottage cheese.  I suppose nowadays someone would complain about "cultural appropriation" but it's still pretty funny.

3.  Eat Me:  Before the musical version there was the really crappy Roger Corman movie of Little Shop of Horrors.  This song is inspired by that movie.  Michael J Nelson sings about a guy who wants to be eaten by the giant plant.  For whatever reason this song was played during the credits for the live show of Time Chasers, which really had nothing to do with killer plants eating people.

4.  (Party at the) House on Haunted Hill:  This is inspired by, wait for it, House on Haunted Hill.  It's a quick, upbeat diddy where Kevin Murphy basically condenses the plot of the movie where a guy and his wife hold a party in a "haunted" house and try to kill each other.  This was played during the credits for the live show of Night of the Living Dead, which is sort of appropriate.  Zombies, ghosts, whatevs.

5.  Sparkly Vampires:  This is the first one not inspired by a Rifftrax video on demand movie.  As you'd guess this is about Twilight.  Bill Corbett sings the tender ballad of vampires who are sparkly and nice and sweet instead of trying to suck your blood or kill you.

6.  Missile to Your Heart:  This is inspired by the old movie Missile to the Moon.  It's done in the style of Peter Schilling's song "Major Tom (Coming Home)" that was inspired by David Bowie's "Space Oddity."  It's got the 80s synth track and Kevin Murphy singing in a German accent about a guy taking a missile to his blue chick on the moon.  It's actually my favorite on the album because it's really the best parody song, something like "Weird Al" Yankovic would do.

7.  Come to the Carnival:  This was inspired by the "classic" horror movie Carnival of Souls.  Michael J Nelson sings a creepy ballad about the carnival where dead people chase you around and...yeah, that's about it.  It was played during the credits of, wait for it, Carnival of Souls.  Whoa, mind blown.

8.  Fine:  This isn't inspired by a specific movie but the Three Stooges.  Kevin Murphy sings the tender ballad dedicated to Larry, the one with the wild hair.  It basically describes a gay, sadomasochistic relationship that I never really wanted to contemplate.

9.  Zombie Mambo:  Inspired by Night of the Living Dead this is a brief track where Kevin Murphy in a reverb voice plays a zombie trying to woo normal people out of their house.  Eating you won't be so bad.  It'll be totally cool!  In the end he says "Screw it, we're coming in."  This was played (twice, I think) during the credits for the live show of, wait for it, Night of the Living Dead.

10.  Love Theme From "Jaws" (When a Man Loves a Shark):  So yeah this is inspired by Jaws.  Kevin Murphy sings this ballad about a man who's so in love with the great white shark that he'll let the shark eat him.  He'll even tenderize himself to make it easier.  It's a funny song but the theme is pretty similar to "Eat Me" in that it's about someone wanting to be eaten by a creature.  I guess they ran out of ideas?  Appropriately the song was played during the credits for the live show of Sharknado.

There you have it.  The whole album is only about 29 minutes so you can listen to it on your lunch break if you want.  At least on Amazon there aren't any other albums, which is too bad.