Cuties, An Honest Look

The advertising campaign for ‘Cuties’ in America appears to be working. I doubt I would have watched it if not for the calls to boycott by right-wing extremists. It’s been in both the top 10 of most watched movies and overall titles on Netflix in the USA. I felt I should watch it to see what the fuss is about because I have a film degree and could offer some objectivity. SPOILERS Ahead.

Revisiting Star Trek Picard

Remember the hype? There was such anticipation and buildup for Star Trek Picard last year; it was touted as both a groundbreaking ten episodes of new television and a continuation of an old character. It seems so long ago because it first dropped around the time the Covid-19 pandemic hit America. I had high hopes for Picard myself, and I planned to review it but never got around to it. Maybe that alone speaks volumes, but the show is still on my mind along with many ideas about where Star Trek has gone these days, so I thought I’d finally make good on my promise to write a review here. 

On Being White

There’s a notion in my head lately that hasn’t become part of a conversation, and I wonder how it might be received if I spoke it. The notion is “I don’t consider myself white.” Or perhaps it might be better to say that I don’t think of myself as “white”.

In Defense of the Colour Orange

This isn’t about politics, it’s simply as the title says In Defense of the Colour Orange. A little creative writing that came out of a recent hike in the desert….

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Omicron Andromedae (Dream)

People are having strange dreams during this time of isolation. Here’s one I had on April 21.

Crossing the Borderline

My sister has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). It feels facetious and flippant to write that in a blog, but it’s something I’ve been dancing around for a while now. There’s a few reasons it feels wrong, the least of which is an ‘agree to disagree’ situation I had with my mother over psychology. A deeper reason is that I mostly managed to escape the cauldron of that behavior (or so I thought), and the term is somewhat archaic — it’s 25 years on since I heard that explanation from a psychologist.

The CoronaVirus Scare, An Old Time Writer’s Perspective

March 20, 2020 at 12:59 AM — As part of a writing education, students (used to) learn all about how humans communicate including about communicable diseases, epidemiology, vaccines and genetics, and government responses to these things. This supposedly helps us to write better fiction and do better research for documentary. Of course, these days most of us are sidelined into other pursuits so the sons and daughters of real estate folks and former television stars can share their ignorance, leaving us scared and wondering ‘what TF now?’ Anyway, I thought I’d write some thoughts that come out of my old curriculums in these matters that some people may not be understanding.

Conversations with a Bigot

February 26, 2020 at 2:38 AM — I been planning to write this blog post for a long time, but it seems to have gotten stuck. So much so that I feel my current health problems of gut pain and back pain come from this same stuck place. Writing about the concept of a ‘bigot’ isn’t easy, as I found when writing a blog post looking into the origin of the word in my other blogging space. This post here is more of a personal look at the conversations with a bigot going on in my own imagination. I feel like I’ve gained an insight worth sharing with writers, but I’m unsure if I can get it across in the space of a blog post.

Predicting Star Trek Picard

Today is the premiere of Star Trek Picard. It’s available in the US on CBS All Access right now. I plan to wait till the ten-episode run is almost complete before I start watching, but I wanted to predict what the story is going to be and see how close I am to what the writers dreamt up. Just having a little fun.

Empathy, DNA Testing, and A New Year

December 31, 2019 at 11:34 PM — Here’s to things looking better in 2020. This year of 2019 ends not only a trying year but a whole decade, and it seems so much more is ending or transitioning in my life. It’s a bit strange to mark a meaningless moment astronomically as the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, to place so much significance on one passing piece of time, but it allows a chance to reflect back and look forward…to process the changes now in motion.