Category Archives: movies

October 21, 2021 · 16:45

Political tools

We all daydream and I am no exception. Yet I believe that my brain is bonkers (probably related to the casing it is in). This all started last week when I saw Official Secret (2019), now I need no encouragement to watch anything with Keira Knightley, so when I saw the name, I picked up the title. I saw it was a spy story based on actual events. It was seeing the film that overwhelmed me. The movie was amazing, one that John Le Carre would have ben proud of if he had written it (it was written by history). It was still in the back of my mind when it crossed tracks with an event that started to play out two weeks ago. A man named Sywert van Lienden had allegedly “send a series of critical tweets to ensnare the Dutch health ministry, the tweets were arranged to create pressure”. From my side (not the most popular one) I believe that the Dutch Health department was foolish on a few levels. In the first Twitter is not a reliable source, so ego driven politicians jumped up fast and they did not do their homework by testing the tweet origins. Trolls have been using that method for years, so I think that Sywert was aggressively creative, some will call him deviously sneaky. Yet the two parts gave me an idea. In the proposed setting of all these honourable military complex vendors. You see, hackers are always the ones copying data FROM servers. Now consider the setting that an ammunition maker has devised a new kind of shell, a .50 shell that works like a drill, it might only in part get through bulletproof glass, but the delay and impact pressure will change the course. So the inner part like a mercury exploding bullet, there are a few items that [secret patent content deleted from story] 

So here we are, a manufacturer who has the inside track that no one else has. However, the Pentagon is not willing to buy it, because there is no need. So the maker engages with hackers to insert a secret file into the RFARP (Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects) server. The department also known as “Фонд перспективных исследований” will be hacked (the makers arranged that via another channel), so the hackers upload a similar but not identical one, it even has a fixed flaw that the makers left untouched. So when the CIA makes enquiry the report is given (a little) praise with the setting that they will incorporate that design in the next batch for testing. Now with the Russian data the maker secures an initial order of 50,000 bullets with a larger order coming if the first order proves its worth (and of course it does). A station where the CIA is ‘used’ as a tool for selling hardware the Americans never really needed. 

Now consider the setting as the hackers overwrite the server with an inserted trojan over a seemingly empty damaged file. Now they are in the clear and it becomes a CIA versus GRU game. The stage of what some think they need whilst the deciding players never correctly did their homework. A setting that could make for an entertaining (thrilling) 97.2 minutes.

Just an idea.

P.S. To any Russian investigator, I have no idea how this story got on my blog. (Nudge nudge wink wink)

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October 18, 2021 · 03:47

As fiction becomes real

Who remembers George A Romero’s Dawn of the dead (1978)? I remember seeing it in the cinema. And the idea stuck with me. Dreams of having an entire shopping mall to myself. The idea stuck for a long time and even as games entered our lives, the setting was never close enough. The idea that we had an entire City centre to ourselves, preferably without the zombies. Not some game where the enemies spawn again, but a stage where there is a city centre, complete with 35000 zombies, a finite number and as we secure our place, grow our place, we renew the settings of security, safety and goods. And I voiced it before and now we seemingly have the game ‘The day before’ a game that seemingly is close enough to my dreams to make it a reality. The game can be played single player (a must for me). And the idea that the game will grow appeals to me. Consider that the mechanics, once they are ready allows for the game to seek us in other ways too. An alien invasion (Skyline, 2010), a pandemic (Contagion, 2011) and the list goes on. Now, I have no idea on how The Day before is set or how it works, but I saw a small play video and my old thoughts of Day of the Dead returned. The idea that you need to stamp out your safe space. Get goods, get sustenance, get ammo, find weapons and so on is very appealing. You wonder how far you get, how long you will last and none of that respawn shit. One life, and between 35,000 and 350,000 opponents. How will you fare? I wonder how far I will get. And for the makers of that game it offers a new kind of DLC/Expansion. We might have 3-5 locations to start, but the appeal to see how far you get in London, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, Munich, Paris, Moscow and so on, the chance for the makers of The Day before (Fntastic) are close to endless and it does not stop there. The setting of a real final number is appealing on several levels. The idea to redo Day of the dead in Harrods London will be appealing to thousands if not millions of gamers. Setting up the New York City Police Department – 5th Precinct as your own fortress (Assault On Precinct 13 anyone?) is close to intoxicating. And from there the world of us getting close to the movies we watched will be enticing and I reckon for a large audience. In previous years it was merely a ruse, now with the PS5, it becomes an achievable reality. And as I see it 2022-2025 could optionally become great gaming years. 

And when the survival part in us is quenched we can return to our normal daily routine of being a sniper (Ghost warrior), or perhaps a racer (Gran Turismo) some will prefer their daily life as pilots (MS Flight simulator), no matter to what life we return, we do so knowing that more and better games are coming our way, preferably less glitchy then Ubisoft is making out to be. 

P.S. WordPress still has not fixed colours.

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October 16, 2021 · 10:15

Funky mushroom pizza

Did you ever wake up from a dream that was so surreal that it was stamped with ‘weird dream’ by your brain? I do not mean ‘after contemplation’, but a stage where the forefront of every part of the brain is rejecting it upfront and in capital letters. It has happened to me before, but this was surreal. This was not some wild and passionate night with a Canadian goddess, or a threesome with two ladies from Hooters. Those are dreams you know are not real, but the mind keeps a sign in the back of your mind stating ‘perhaps…..if…..’, no this was outright weird.

It all starts on the moon, Procellarum to be more precise. Service agents have taken to the moon, there is a reason for this, the moon has no timeline, the sun is always there, yet the close to the sun’s rim the better. Even as there are settings that work, the edge is colder and the quantum computers with all their locking and cooling stages work better where there is a lot of cold (a lack of heat) and the cost of having larger systems on earth was pushing the cost stages. Also, hackers were more easily controlled. These systems are on-site only. No hacker can get to it and any hacking person on the moon gets thrown into space, no trial. 

In this there was a weird setting (yes, this was not weird enough). Taking a 5 year job in the moon is well rewarded, like really well rewarded. So I was there doing technical support. One day all the systems go nuts, reason unknown and whilst I was checking system after system, node after node we see a change in one of the ‘overseers’, he is suddenly a lot stronger than usual, I mean weirdly strong. He is complaining about headaches and starts referencing systems on a quantum level (no person can do that), but the headaches are massive. We get him to the infirmary, we continue work. We hear alarms and things are going wrong over there, but we do not know the extent. In the mean time we are trying to keep our heads cool and some posh bastard (A UK boss) is throwing his weight around. The UK has set up lines of nobility on the moon, they are larger players and have all kinds of legal based rights, so whenever one shows up we keep as clear as possible. When they leave we see that 2 boxes are gone, but they were never ours, so we do not care. As we go on, the alarms are of a larger concern. But we are all compartmentalised in our tasks and duties. 

In the mean time we notice a UK buggy outside near an old abandoned storage, which is odd to say the least. As out work is done for this region we check it out (from a distance) and there we see the two boxes. The rest is foggy, it was an hour ago when I woke up and the dream is already facing. But the short and sweet I that we had alien visitors, the overseer had something we do not, there is a segmentation in his brain that allows for a different kind of storage and segmentation of knowledge, I do not know how to better put it (a lack of neural education I reckon), one box has an arm, a left arm of a space suit, it looks like ours, but this is different, it is not from any design we ever saw and the elements are like an advanced form of quantum selection. The arm is unusually cool and the inscriptions on the arm are like nothing I had ever seen. The second box had a visor, almost like ours but this too is way more advanced than anything I had ever seen on the moon. Er notice another buggy in the distance. I grab several rocks and place them in the box, so for the other one, we make clear before the buggy returns. There is another foggy patch. The overseer gets to our place, he looks out of his mind, his head hurts and he seems to be grasping at his left arm and his actions do not seem to make sense. Then we get the idea to give him the other parts. We are cautious, he knows that we are good people, but his headache seems to be overwhelming him, we give him the arm which is more solid than the fabric suits we wear, but it is weirdly flexible, almost like a solid resin arm that is pliable like water. I never saw anything like it. Then we give him the visor and suddenly things change, he calms down, he is looking at his visor like the inside has some form of HUD, he starts speaking. “The headaches are fading, data conductors 17-34 are not transmitting data, magnetic instability is crashing the conducting drives”, we report the message exactly, but we are not aware of what it means, the magnetic coil rooms are off-limits. Way above our pay-grade. 

The central office gives us the option to look and fix, we will get a promotion as well as a massive bonus, so we agree and we set foot towards a corridor we have never entered before. 

Thats when I woke up. 

It was so surreal, corridors, the moonscape, I have no idea how my mind got there. I think it is in part the old series like Space 1999, in part levels from Wolfenstein, the new order. It has a moon segment. Whatever it was, I need to get another slice of that pizza, even as I had no pizza in weeks. I think I blew a gasket in my mind, So I need to get some groceries now. No matter what, it was one of the weirdest dreams I ever had.

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October 12, 2021 · 19:10

The creative mind

The mind is a weird thing, in this that I went in the stages I write about today. The first was a video about thieves using a relay device and stole one of them keyless cars. It was done in under a minute in the dead of night. This made me think of what could be seen as a Faraday box. A box, optionally looking like an Apple mini with the logo of a car on it that will block any signal, as such the relay device will no longer work and consider the idea, will a car buyer stop spending the $50 to keep a $35000 car more safe? The benefit is that you can put your company phone there too, out of office means out of office. The process took less than 2 minutes to consider. There was the minute I took to consider a multi layer (Outside Aluminium, graphite and copper versus Aluminium, a graphite fabric weave and plastic inside but it became too detailed and I instructed the mind to move on.

The mind then considered the take on a female bond. My mind was dead set against it and me too. I have nothing against female leads (evidence coming shortly). You see this comes from the 60’s, it is the legacy of Ian Fleming and in all this 007 was a male agent. The 007 brand is as such and so far I like it. Daniel Craig upped the brand by a lot, so we need to keep the setting the same. In that same setting I thoroughly enjoyed True Lies (1994) the team, including Bill Paxton as the BS artist was fun and a good play was created, one worthy of remaster, remake and sequeling.

The first is Adele Blanc Sec, to be honest, I only NOW found out that Luc Besson used that character for on of his movies, I never saw it, so something else I need to seek out. The second is a Dutch comic I read in my youth, it was about a girl named Franka who got in al kinds of trouble. Last but not least there is Modesty Blaise from the 60’s. All options to consider. Yet when we dig deeper there is so much more to find. And even as they might not be the ‘great’ role models, when we think back to the origins of Elektra, an assassin created by Frank Miller. There are numerous routs to take, but not unlike Ubisoft, they are ‘mauling’ their franchise into something different and they are in danger of destroying their creation. All whilst creating a new franchise could be so much more rewarding. Adèle Blanc-Sec might be taken, yet the world of books and their comic variety have created dozens of options, so why not dig into them? There are some that claim that there are more than 1,500,000 comic books created (globally), in this is it so hard to find one with a strong female character in the lead? The 70’s had more but they are too non-usable, yet some might find options. There are also male comic books that lack a franchise identity and is it so hard to create the franchise set to a female character? I got you one in less than 30 minutes, so how much time do you need? Dr Spektor, Cradle of Filth, Olivia Twist. Then there is Daimon Hellstrom, son of Satan. There is no reason that our level 9 demon created a sister too, that is before you seek out Lillith. All options that require strong Female leads, so are producers such cowards that they prefer using and endangering one franchise, just to optionally create a less strong new one? And history has something to teach us as well. Margaretha Geertruida MacLeod, later known as Mata Hari was active for most of WW1. In WW2 the SOE created a whole flock of female agents, many of them French. The list goes on and on and in all this, we are stuck with a female edition of a male boiled down version of a male agent by a writer made from 1952 onward? There is more and we need to seek it out, or create it and for that you need to ask a woman. I have nothing against a man making one, but if she is going to be realistic finding a creative female writer would be my first bet. And this I all found in under an hour. So what are the chances I might be better than Kevin Feige, David Heyman or Jerry Bruckheimer? I am not stating I am, but they allegedly never came up with that, did they? Well, Jerry Bruckheimer has a decent excuse, he was one of the minds behind the creation of the NHL Seattle Kraken team, so I will give him a pass (but only just). 

So if my creative mind can come up with all that, can we assume that Hollywood has lost the plot? In a race to create more and more (because of streaming) they overlook that there are many ways IP can be created. There are several ways to set the stage towards a female lead, we have seen them in the past, so why not now? It can’t be the money, with almost 4 billion women on the planet there should be enough options, you merely have to create a good movie and that is up to Hollywood and their siblings in Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and a few more places. So what is stopping them?

The creative mind tends to find a way, a side-road a parallel main-road and at times a whole different mode of transportation. All paths towards optional success. I cannot tell which one would be successful, yet my mind was willing to explore, so am I alone here? It can’t be, not in this day and age.

So be creative lets your mind steer the ship and see where it takes you, it might be a fruitful shore you never saw before.

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October 8, 2021 · 17:17

Paradoxical thinking

This is not reality, this is not what is happening, but it could have been. Surprised? I actually was when my mind (the back of my mind) came up with a third idea for a TV series. Perhaps that is the wrong setting, a mini series is better. You see any story needs to have a beginning, the substance, optionally with twists, plots and loads of question marks. After that we get an ending, the satisfaction of any story is that there is completion. Now, I love the works of Terry Gilliam and as such I loved 12 monkeys and Brazil, they leave question marks. It is not a fine refined story from beginning to end. A setting I homaged to in the third season of Keno Diastima. The series needs to keep a question mark or two in place, let the watcher, the reader, the appreciator of any story find their own epilogue in this. If a story draws in the person taking notice of that story continues and sparks their own imagination, the story goes beyond success. That is how I believe that stories need to go at times. Here I giggle towards Jimmy Carr who stated more than once that women watch porn movies to see if they get married in the end. Or as I see it an alternative to ‘Try before you buy’ or is it ‘Fit before you commit’?. So in any paradoxical setting we need to take the stage of ‘a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true’, here we see the use of ‘perhaps’ and that is fine, only history is to some degree is set in absolutes and even those are at times debatable. You see, in the two elements of what could be we need to see the stage of what could be possible and that is where we need to go. A stage where it is not about what happens when X and Y do not happen, but a stage where we see what is happening because X1 and Y2 never did happen, and we can set a stage to adhere to this and that was the stage my mind was tinkering with the last 2 days (it might have been longer but I was not aware of it) and seeing this come to pass is important. 

It does not interfere with any of my IP, so I have no issues making that public now. Yet is it interfere or inter phere? Weirdly enough it is a larger setting that applies and there my mind keeps me out for now. 

So when I stated in the past “being able to test” there is a stage where we see what happens, but because some elements are in play it did not happen. So when I talked about the assassination of a fictive character named Marty Walsh there was a larger stage, that stage was that fictive character Patrick Pizzella would have served longer and he would have given his seat to a person named Julie Su in 2024. Because that is no longer happening certain labour adjustments were never made and that is the rub, for some players that change would have been detrimental to their profit margins. Yet how can you set the stage of what never happened? Well if you think of the Patents in play, if the change happened, the stage for 2026 would alter slightly, not a lot but enough. Because of a stage Julie Su favoured, 3 students would enter the halls of ISG, they started having lunch together and they come up with an idea that would set the foundations of 5G in a new direction, it would create 4 patents setting a new direction that creates the partnership of Rogers Wireless and Amazon and that 5G goes into new directions, this never happens but the changes towards that were really small and even if you cannot prove it, the stage was close to alter economic boundaries and more important Technological settings on nanotechnology and 5G, three people were essential to that part and as Marty Walsh the threshold is shifting towards the not happening. A paradoxical stage that becomes a non-event and Julie Su would never know, because she was not where she needed to be for the events to happen. 

So when we see the story evolve we do not merely see when did not happen, but we get a glimpse of what else was never a reality and what more is on the stage to be considered an option. Paradoxical settings are never the stage of one stone in a pond and watching the ripples, they are the second, third and fourth stone that interfere with the ripples seen. The caster will hope that the second stone will create enough chaos, but that person knows that more might be required. The story is then an almost given certainty, and the story evolves as it had the caster, the stones and the ripples to focus on, and as such the paradoxical parameters are set to the audience. Yet in all this there is a finite amount of actions that we can take and that too sets the stage towards a maximum stage that any story can hold. I believe that this is a stage that American producers can never comprehend, they watch the story and see how the spreadsheet goes green, yet that part had nothing to do with either the caster, the stones or the ripples. That person needs to trust the finite approach to the storyteller and so far they either over manage or merely cut off hoping to get better grounds elsewhere. A sad stage, but in this the storyteller does not care, that person can revert to books to tell the story for those who care, for that person the story was everything and in this FX has always been right from the moment they gave that slogan to their audience.

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October 6, 2021 · 23:03

What sells better?

That is the question that was racing through my mind today. We all know (or have heard of) the expression ‘Sex sells’. It is used to market, to advertise and to entice (usually the men). But what if that is merely the setting? What if in actuality fantasy is the part that sells better? I had a small daydream this afternoon. I was in Toronto and I was chosen to be the backup goalie for the Toronto Maple Leafs (yes, the dream is not very realistic). I was sitting in some cafe, the staff was nice and suddenly addressed by Sheldon Keefe (their coach) and he said to me “Lawrence, today your most desired dreams becomes a reality”, my dry response was “What? You arranged a weekend of wild and passionate sex with Laura Vandervoort?” The team was howling with laughter and the coach deadpan response was “Well almost most desired then” and I was given the 62 Jersey to be the backup goalie that week, and lets face it, not unlike my blog name, if we want to have a fantasy, lets go for the really satisfying ones. 

So there I was with my jersey there were a few other jokes and giggles after that I woke up from my daydream (without the LV special), such is life. But the dream stuck and when I was watching someones drawing of Alice in wonderland I started to put things together. What if we are not looking at a porn or some sex movie, but what we used to call in the old days a soft porn movie (all innuendo and little or no show, except for the boobies). What if the movie is a new take in Alice in Wonderland? We go through the motions (or Alice does) and the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, the rabbit, they are all men with masks and onesies. A movie that is like not some cheap movie, but high end special effects (not unlike The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) and a storyline that does follow the book, but with a twist at the end. The end being that [CENSORED]

A stage that reminded me of a movie that impacted with me, Jacob’s Ladder. So what happens if Virtual Reality takes over our lives too much? There are settings (Elite Dangerous) where I would love to have the hardware to do just that, but the hardware for now is too expensive and (for now) not immersive enough. So when that changes (most likely in 2-3 years) what are the applications? What happens when we can dig into the fantasies of any person (like The Cell) 

So what can we learn? I am not merely thinking healing, but interrogations, information retrieval and a few other avenue’s. So when we take the stage and turn on the fantasy, what could be achieved? We have seen this in the past but always as the end goal, as far as I can tell it was never used as a mere waypoint. Why was that? It cannot be the limit of Hollywood, it could be the limit of any producer yet I believe that this path could lead to a load of green as the faith of Americans go. I believe that there is a host of options here, and as streaming channels are competing more and more, whatever we can do that is truly original is one that streamers will entice, I merely hope that they wake up before they cancel the series too soon (way too many examples) because it is the slow start and the deep story that entices a crowd and engages them. Not the Marvel versions. This is not me having a go at Marvel movies, because I love them, but there is more and that part is not explored, or perhaps explored too little. I personally would have loved where Dollhouse season 3 would have taken us. Eliza Dushku, Dichen Lachman, Enver Gjokaj, Tahmoh Penikett, Fran Kranz, Olivia Williams, Harry Lennix and Amy Acker were all beyond good, the story was engaging and enticing, yet we were sold short, a cancellation after season 2. So will a new approach to Virtual Reality as a weapon make it? I honestly do not know but as far as I can tell no one took that route and in a stage where games can almost take us there, the lack of such a direction seems like a loss.

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October 5, 2021 · 16:44

Netflix beware

I have been in a bad place. It was not because tools like Gerard Ryle and his ICIJ are playing a presented game to misinform the people, to set a stage of abuse and deception. It was because things suddenly sounded very familiar. This had happened before, it happened before in Europe. In famine and in a stage of utter poverty. Yes, it had happened before and as my mind was taking the road from the past, I suddenly realised that I missed something on TV. Among the sully of reality TV (which I happily avoid), the setting of filtered information and the change of settings to take what is not theirs to take, only because the people who had the option were too cowardly and the US has seen 5 cowardly administrations, but they are not alone. The EU is in precisely the same place. 

So what did I miss? Well, when I was young (in the age of B&W TV) players like the BBC had educational programs. And then it hit me, what I had written about in the past and now I see a new TV series. A sort of mini-series in 6-8 parts. Not drama but as real as it gets, as historically accurate as possible, whilst still pleasing the people. It will not be for all, but it will be for a lot more than too many could contemplate.

Auvergne
France was a different place in those days and change was coming, it wasn’t coming in a carriage, not on horseback. It was nothing less than a Tsunami that would change the landscape in under 100 years. 4 generations would change everything and close to entire Europe. It was 1095 and from the 17th to the 27th of November a meeting was held. Yes we know about the Crusades that followed, but it is not about the Crusades, it is about the meeting the created the Crusades. There were a significant amount of players who heeded the call of Pope Urban II. And there is a need. I grew up with a misplaced feeling of pride being a Catholic. We stopped the barbarians in the holy land and for decades I grew up with that lie, a lot of us did. And it is time to give the people the real deal. The meeting had amongst others:

Joannes, Cardinal Bishop of Porto
Dagobert, Archbishop of Pisa
Richard, Cardinal Priest and Abbot of S. Victor in Marseille
Teuzo, Cardinal Priest of SS. Joannis et Pauli
Albertus, O.S.B., Cardinal Priest of Santa Sabina
Joannes Gattellus, the Pope’s Chancellor
Gregory Papiensis, deacon
Hugo of Verdun, deacon
Hugues de Die, Archbishop of Lyon and Papal Legate
Amatus, Archbishop of Bordeaux and Papal Legate
Rainaldus, Archbishop of Reims
Bernard de Sedirac, Archbishop of Toledo and Legate in Spain
Geoffrey of Vendôme, cardinal-priest of the titular church of Santa Prisca on the Aventine
Ivo, Bishop of Chartres
Joannes, Bishop of Orléans
Roger, Bishop of Beauvais
As well as: 

Fulcher of Chartres (optional spin off). He is important as he wrote ‘Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium’ (1101-1127) giving us a real rundown of the first Crusades. The series should focus on a few people, not all. 2-3 per episodes with Fulcher of Chartres as a red line through all the episodes. With a part of every episode around Joannes Gattellus and Pope Urban II. 

A real rundown of what happened there and there is plenty of documentation. It strikes a chord as we see the games some are trying to play on us. There might be enough of a reason to give the people the interactions and the consequences of the acts by Alexios I Komnenos requesting assistance to fight the Seljuk Turks we should, but it is not essential.

And consider the setting, when was the last time we had the option to see a real history lesson on TV? Is that not weird?

Anyway, the BBC used to be a real power player there and I reckon that new players could pick this up. And when you consider that the Gesta Francorum Iherusalem peregrinantium has not been published since 1913 makes one wonder why not. There is no conspiracy theory here, just the idea that one of the best and likely most accurate writings of the Crusades was taken from the publication shelf is a little weird, almost offensively so.

So whilst this is merely an idea consider to reject it, yet it came as I realised that I was lied to in primary school and secondary school, I and many others were educated with a false set of stories, in this, does the entire Pandora Paper situation start making sense? It has been done before and I am not stating that the documents are false, but the players have a different game in mind and the ICIJ and its connected journalists were all too eager to adhere to that play and claim some digital click bitch money in the surplus. And their game is not finished yet. 

So consider the setting of Pope Urban II and a war that lasted for almost 2 centuries and took the life of 1,000,000 people and this was the lowest estimate. Yes, I agree in those days killing 1,000,000 people would solve poverty and famine. In a world that had roughly 325,000,000 million people at that stage. When we see a death count that high would it not make sense to take a long hard historic look at how we got there? There is a second voice in my mind to have two narrators, one with the story, one who give the dissenting views at the time (like the Gesta Francorum, an anonymous piece written in 1100-1101) and there are a few more, those views should not be ignored. But it is merely an idea, and it feels good to feed the creative side in me.

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September 20, 2021 · 21:18

Taking and making what it gives

Yes, we seem to think that this is the stage we need to be in, and at times you are correct, that is what there is. It dawned on me that at times innovation, or innovation alike can drive creativity. In the past there was an option to get into movies required a fortune, so you either tinkered by the side of the road, or you were some rich kid, that was the reality. Now consider that this is no longer the case, the stage is set to two elements (three actually).

1. GoPro Hero 10 ($600)
2. Mac Airbook (up to $4500)
3. Software (up to $500)

So for $6000 (max) you could have all you need to become a cinematographer. The laptop idea is expensive, there are cheaper solutions, to under $6000 there is a stage where you can make all kinds of movies and there is no cost for film or development. As we were in lockdown, the mind wanted to travel, so I started to watch the walking tours, a lot of them in 4K and most of them made with older GoPro devices. You might laugh, but some of these walking tours equal decent TV and in some cases cinema trips. I saw Portofino, Cannes, Monaco, Vancouver, Montreal, Buenos Aires, London (several), Riyadh, Jeddah and a few things stood out. The movies were well above average, the streets in Canada are amazingly clean, Portofino was worth the watch for a few personal reasons and so on. I believe that we are one step away from a ‘small’ company like GoPro to put a massive dent in Hollywood and that is before you realise that we will be drowning in amazing movies, the stage is already there that amateur film makers can make ‘their’ version of the Blair Witch Project. Another version of Cloverfield and we can go on in all kinds of directions. I myself was entertaining an idea in another direction (no matter what), but I am an idea man, not a movie maker (not yet anyway). 

And even as GoPro is making headway into setting the dynamic movies to a new height. I predict that they will corner the market in several ways within the next 2-3 years. I believe that the information given here is incorrect “The number of GoPro devices shipped worldwide has been decreasing since its peak of 6.58 million units in 2015, to around 2.8 million units in 2020”, there is not a decline, mainly because some people STILL use the GoPro 4, a lot are still using the GoPro 8, so there is a market of well over 15,000,000 film makers and I believe that with the additions on the GoPro Hero 10 that group will increase (a lot). And when you consider that this can directly be spread via YouTube channels, for GoPro the sky is the limit. Whether the film maker will decide to rely on GoPro tools, on Adobe Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro or iMovie, there are several solutions and as people tart to become more and more active there is a new market evolving. A market of services, critical evaluation and creation, all working in some form of symbiosis. And as the makers set out there options of short movies, I wonder when it will be a GoPro Hero user who in the near future will be the first to win a Academy Award for Best Short Film (Live Action) using a GoPro because the hardware is now definitely up for it, we now only need to wait for the creative soul to make that step (it will not be me), and I would not be surprised that thee will be more evolutions in this direction before the end of 2023, a stage that (as I personally see it) evolved and came to a much larger live during lockdowns and curfews. 

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September 5, 2021 · 06:09

Eradication

There are moments where we are all contemplating it, what if I was alone in the neighbourhood (get work done), what if I was alone in this mall (no queues), what if I am alone in this area (quiet), the list goes on and we have all had these moments. Nothing bad, we merely needed a moment. Yet some have a much larger need. Eco terrorists, extremists and so on. We also have a good degree of extinction movies and my issue is that in these cases (with a few exceptions) it is glued together on the premise of the averting hero. One such exception is Contagion by Steven Soderbergh. It is a clinical view of how bad tit could get and 10 years later we see COVID, the movie is a little more pessimistic yet all the markers seem to apply and it got me thinking. What happens when an eco terrorist sees his (or her) species become extinct, how angry could that person get? So what happens when that person decides to do something about it? Governments make the claim and they are getting us nowhere, but this person sets a new premise. As such I got to think on how that person could succeed. I took the DNA of one woman, one man and one female Bobono and I came up with a new spliced DNA (see image), this is as good as keynote would give it to me and as I have no access to Mathlab, this will have to do. It is merely a premise to a story mind you. 

This DNA virus would be 100 times more efficient than COVID, eradicating 96%-98% of the entire population, but in a stage where we pretend it could happen, what if it plays out, not unlike a story that Dutch writer Anne de Vries wrote in 1951 in her story of Journey Through the Night which is a WW2 story. I loved that book when I was a kid, it was a great book to read and the settings stayed with me. Now it is not in four parts, but three. The start of the unleashing, the ravaging of the disease and the aftermath. A story that gives us close to a decade (or two) on how it all unfolds. How the disease is left to the greed driven and left to the academics, the eco terrorist had done its homework and like the chest of Pandora, someone ends up opening it. Yet nothing happens and the people looking at it find nothing and that was exactly how it was intended to be, the five boxes are sent and four end up getting opened. The infected are unaware of what they had wrought and as they travel from place to place they become the infectors, from 5 spots we get to 25, then 125 and close thereafter close to two million infection spots, the point of no return has been reached and as people go on with their daily life people start getting sick, but at first there are no indications of what is wrong. Cases of Bloom’s and Werner’s syndromes get out of hand, they are moving from one in millions to one in 10,000 and there are other changes as well, explosions of cancer cases all over the globe and it takes a while before someone decides to look into genetic testing. The deed is done and as people are transferring it through touching things, through handshakes and other means, the population is infected before anyone has a real clue what is going on. So whilst we look at some crowd images and wonder ‘Who would be this stupid’ (well, they obviously), we start seeing that it is already too late, the eco terrorist got his or her wish.

As we see stupid people panic and others in the dark on what is going on, we see a much larger stage for part 2, how governments are in hiding, how politicians try to get to that isolated place, all whilst they cannot tell whether they or a family member is infected, as cities die off over the term of years we see the move into part three where the few surviving members are wondering how to survive, a planet with all the goods there reduced to a population of 253,000,000. Suddenly the tailor, the doctor, the farmer and the butcher are worth their weight in gold in any community. 

And that gets us to part 3 which I cannot yet tell as I have been focussing on part 1, the issues leading to part 2 are clear, the parts in part 3 less so. Yet the foundation of a story is set, the foundation of a premise exposing the useless factor of a stakeholder is naught. So whilst we look at some source giving us ‘how a narrow focus on air pollution limits can backfire’, as far as I could tell, none of them took a look at the EEA report from last year and took a hard look at the 147 locations causing 50% of ALL pollution, so can anyone consider that premise? 147 is a real number, an environmental agency gave us that and the media ignores it. They do not attack it, they do not question it, they ignore it. Why is that? And is it then any wonder that someone will think “If 98% of all the people are dead the pollution goes away as well”? It is the premise to a larger story, one the stakeholders do not want to hear about, because in the end they are merely unofficial lobbyists to those who decide where to spend their money and where to keep their profits. 

A stage we enabled and now that it is here, too many are in doubt of what to do next. Me, I merely write stories, like I come up with new games, new TV series and new movies. My mind is creative what others do with it is not my concern. 

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August 23, 2021 · 20:19

Watch it again!

There is a nice side to the 90’s. We all had a go at new things, there was the start of a new side of gaming, there were new frontiers in IT, there were all kinds of approaches to marketing and there were all kinds of new movies, movies that before that were never pushed to the larger extent. It gave us David Cronenberg, it gave us comic books and there was a new side of horror, at times more playful, but for the people who loved the comics, it was just awesome. One of these makers (Clive Barker) was already pushed into a few realms, but one side was to often ignored, I cannot tell whether it was because of how the non knowledgeable try to sell it, perhaps the review line of “a commercial and critical failure” was linked to it. Yet the story of the Nightbreed, Cabal and Median has potential, not as a slasher movie, but as a horror thriller that needs to be really dark. The kind of story that will make any average psychiatrist decide to retire on the spot. The story has so much to offer, that I am a little bewildered how movie makers 32 years later are ignoring that gem. Craig Sheffer played it decently (considering that there were the 90’s). And. Personal speculation is that he might have been chosen as he more roughly resembled David Boreanaz in Angel (and Buffy) and the makers knew how excited the ladies got over him. Yet I believe that Craig played a decent Boone, the rest of the cast was OK. That is not against them, but against the film makers who were all about slashers and posturing and not about maximising the impact of the large amounts of side stories that Cabal represented (as did Median). I reckon that Nightbreed might too large for a movie, and a miniseries (4-6 episodes of an hour) might make it a lot better and lets face it, this station is ruled by Clive Barker, wasting material that excellent should be considered a crime in TV and tinseltown land. 

Is there more?
Well yes and it is not limited to Clive Barker (although if I can ever revitalise Lords of illusion, I would). Consider the amazing result that IT became and what we saw in the works of Anne Rice in other movies. Now consider the challenge that the Mayfair witches leaved the film makers with The Witching hour. Anne Rice drenched the story in all levels of controversy and that works great in most horror, now add new levels of darkness that we can push for today and you have three books that could ultimately be a next generation focal point of fear for decades, I reckon that the film makers can push into this when the film maker looks at the colour black and considers it to be too light. That is where the boundaries are pushed and there is a larger station, the books of Wes Craven, Clive Barker and Anne Rice have shown them to be masters, they were used for quick revenue fixes and discarded, yet the people at Netflix, Amazon and Disney can make that into a realm of options with 3-5 movies, or larger miniseries with several movies in 5-7 parts, not as a cash cow, but as a station of creating new levels of fear. We can see Neil Gaiman stories making it into that realm, yet he need not be alone (even though he might like it), there is plenty for a while range of stations and now, 30 years later it is time to drill into those treasure troves again, the darker film maker is the most likely winner here and you only have to look at successes like American Horror Story to see that I have a decent case here. 

I wonder if someone in Tinseltown wakes up to that part of the equation, first come, first chance of becoming an accomplished winner. The 90’s produced a whole range of excellent ideas for the big and the 75” screen. 

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