We all have these moments when we recollect a movie, a movie that had an impact when we saw it. It might not have been a great movie, but there was something about the setting. In this case I was considering the 1984 movie Runaway. In it was Tom Selleck, Gene Simmons and Cynthia Rhodes. The idea of killer robots (spider edition) was not unique, not new, but there was something about it that had something. I reckon that in todays world, the idea of rogue systems, hacked systems with a killer result is actually a lot less weird than it was in 1984. The movie had more, but consider what this diamond in the rough could contain. Even if it merely holds a reference to the original, the stage of remote killing a person is appealing to a lot of people, and when we consider that in those days the smart bullet was a figment of science fiction, we now have the setting that in 2008 the EXACTO program began under DARPA to develop a “fire and forget” smart sniper rifle system including a guided smart bullet and improved scope. Even as the systems is seemingly not working, or not well enough, we got there or close to it 40 years later. We have zero day issues, we have hacked systems, and in 2019 the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) gave us “In late March, the agency warned that computer hackers can easily gain access to implanted cardiac defibrillators made by Medtronic.” In this we optionally got to the scenario that we saw in movies. In this, there is now a reason to consider that movie as the foundation of something new, whether it is a movie or a mini-series is up to the maker. I merely hope that Gene Simons will get to reprise his role as the evil party in this case, he really was a lot better then I thought he ever would be.
Whether it would be called Runaway (again), Remote by Rogue or merely Zero Day Kill would be up to the makers. Yet anyone in that field should take a look at that movie and see what was a figment in those days and what might be a lot less delusional in this day and age. And when we consider the impact of electronics, the right chip might give us a lot more options in that field and there would be all kinds of people interested in that, as such there are plenty of avenues to walk. I reckon that it might make a decent mini series (in 3-4 parts) but that is merely my view on the matter.
Yet what I didn’t know until today is that the movie was originally reviewed by Neil Gaiman (the man behind Good Omens, American Gods and the Sandman, He gave us “The race to outwit the cybernetic psycho is gripping stuff, mostly, with a terrifying showdown atop an unfinished skyscraper; and as the hero cop with no head for heights, Selleck is fine. In between, he spends too much time just being a heart-throb.” OK, I can see that view and it is in that that there is a much larger stage that could be walked by the right visionary (not me). I will leave it up to others to do this. I merely hope that this Michael Crichton original is not overlooked in a race for mediocre streaming series. There is plenty out there that could make for awesome stories. That is the nice side of what we can do today compared to what was created in the 80’s.
Yes, it is part of a sequel. Yet the stories are not linked. It is a view that grew whilst contemplating the previous story, but it is not linked to that story. It is actually a spy story. In these stories the timeline is important, but the facts can be jumbled to add to the suspense in the story. We can use Anna, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the Night watchman as examples. Of hand I will tell you now that the thought of equalling anything John Le Carre has written is ludicrous from the start, it is the delusion of a lifetime and if the writer did not work for a serious intelligence organisation, any dream of equalling Le Carre is plain folly.
Yet there are a few things we can learn from the master. I loved both Tinker Tailor as well as Smiley’s People. Not in the least for the fact that they were played by Alec Guinness, but the setting of the story was real, it was more than an exercise in nitpicking. Information and in that stage intelligence is about verification. I personally reckon that is why the CIA has failed more than once. We all want the setting of a mind boggling conspiracy, but what if the cogs are small? What if we have a setting with a former president and allegiances with other governments and that becomes a larger hindrance?
You see if the man was indeed a former president, governor or senator there is a larger field. You cannot be certain that the people verifying the information can be trusted, so how to go about it? Smiley took a small team of people HE trusted, but they were in the cold, their allegiance was everything (as well as their love of country). We can mimic this to some degree, but too much makes for a copy and we want our own laurels. So we have two options. We can seek another player, in the light of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Yet there is a problem. You see whomever is that person has their own agenda. In this case we can fall back on the Art of War by Sun Tsu and seek the wisdom of applying a setting of Reverse spy, inside spy and a few dead spies. The latter needs to be multiple and all but one get exactly the same story, one gets a slightly adjusted truth. When this is done we create a form of verification, what is the reverse spy playing? What is his or her personal agenda and more importantly how trustworthy is that data. The longer the dead spies are intact, the more reliable the data is seen and that is why one will have adjusted intelligence. In the mean time, the inside spy awaits certain information sources to ring or not ring that becomes the setting. Yet to apply that to a script is massive and time consuming. I reckon that the watchmaker approach is the best (but this is a personal view). We insert cog after cog and adjust the stories for each cog if needed, if a new cog is added we look at the timeline, we look at the interactions and we test the story and even better, if we have a person we truly trust with that story, we ask that person to read and test the logic of the approach. It is a way and if someone tells us that this is not the most efficient way, I would wholeheartedly agree, but re writing a spy story is murder on several levels, as such I personally believe that a slow and steady testing of all elements is the best way, moreover, as we see certain elements fall over, we can decide to add another cog, or perhaps join two cogs into a larger cog. The larger cog tends to need a much larger backstory, yet that is the smallest consideration. Consider the secret agent Demons Jab. What would that agent be without a support and information setting?
Is there a reason? Well consider that there needs to be a reason to off a person (see previous article), the setting could be vengeance, the reason could be spy related, terrorist related or national security considerations? The latter part is often better served through smear campaigns and the media is always up for exclusive information, and they do not always properly vet that information, so there are alternatives. Yet the alternative might not be enough and then that act becomes a cog in the machine we need to build.
Anyway these are the thoughts I had on creating a spy story and perhaps I am no good at it, but I reckon that I might give it a go when the other book is done, at 65000-70000 words I am well over half way at present, so whilst I await certain players to consider a few options (as well as a 5G solution) I might as well remain creative. Personally I would love to write one book in every genre but I am clueless on romance (Jane Austen) scared to death on Horror (Neil Gaiman), too present for Science Fiction (Arthur C Clarke) and optionally a little too dim for intelligence stories (John Le Carre), all masters in their own field and there are so many more fields to consider, but as life goes, I might not be bored until the day I die, which suits me just fine.
That is a stage we find ourselves in. There is no real reason, it was a stage I moved into as I was contemplating a few ideas. You see with any erotic tainted movie it is about how it starts (and for some do they get married at the end). With spy stories it tends to be jumbled, to maximise the impact of the story the movie Anna is a great example. Yet with assassinations it tends to be about timelines, and it needs to start in the middle, a great example is Colombiana with Zoe Saldana.
You see it adheres to a few items. A good assassination adheres to the golden three.
Separation Segregation Isolation
You separate the target from his support system, we do not need to comedy capers to involve themselves making matters worse, the career person likes to get away from it all before it is too late. You segregate the person from the people that know and trust their insight, their family, it is a separate cog in the machine and not always required, but it should always be considered. Isolation is the kill moment. It is best to have that person apart when you perform the deed. I do not believe in the Jason Statham method (the Mechanic), it is nice, it makes for good movie suspense, but too many things can go wrong and they tend to go wrong at the wrong instance.
So in all this when we look at the Saad bin Khalid Al Jabri case, I just have to laugh. 12 people? I am still decently convinced that he got out (with the money) by setting up an attack and warning the US of that attack, but that is me. It matters because now we see (source: Reuters) “A former top Saudi intelligence official who is living in exile accused Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Sunday of targeting him, and made an unprecedented public plea to the Biden administration to help obtain the release of his children jailed in Saudi Arabia”, a larger stage as he is in Canada, so why is he not pleading with Canadian authorities? Did you consider that?
It matters in this stage as we look at ending the involuntary heartbeat of a person. He has to some degree isolated himself, he is decently segregated, but not completely and there is the mere need of isolating him, that never required 12 people and any intelligent person would see that, lets be clear MBS is not stupid, so the entire song and dance that the media gives us does not make sense.
But back to the story. When the golden three are adhered to the decimation can begin. The important first part is information, in case of the person we discussed earlier, he is in Toronto, a city. This means that there are more options to get to him. The opposite is that he got there with hundreds of millions, so he can afford all kinds of security. The second consideration is given by The Star “It is alleged one of the companies, Sakab Saudi Holding Company, “had no operational business” despite receiving $8 billion US in government funding and was used “almost exclusively” as a vehicle to funnel money to the other companies, which did carry out legitimate business, as well as to Aljabri and his co-conspirators”, so in what universe do you get awarded $8,000,000,000?
The stage for any target is to understand what is going on and this implies that he is more than an exile, he is optionally a US intelligence taskmaster (Middle East minder of intelligence). Using him as an example is nice, for a few reasons. He has Canadian protection and he gets American protection, in Canada it will be the CIA, optionally the CSIS is involved. The problem for any target of this size is that the Canadians have their own Navy Seals, they are extremely capable and on a person like this, they are somehow involved. There is no way that stakeholders walk away from a $8,000,000,000 jackpot.
So why does it matter? Well the story is about more then suspense, it will be about realism. So how to get to such a target? Well we could ask Saad bin Khalid Al Jabri and that is where we get to the good stuff. You see, the foundation of this was seen in a comic book in 1978.
It was the first Franka, a comic made by Henk Kuijpers. The researchers researched a crime for a movie, which then was soon thereafter done by criminals. The stage to get the experts to solve the problem for them, simple and brilliant. You see there is nothing wrong with a silenced .50 from the top of any building, but when you see what you are up against, the stage changes soon thereafter. I saw the premise of a c4 loaded drone, which allows for a few settings, but that pesky CSIS. These people get awfully cranky when you trespass on their soil and if you think the CIA is trouble, wait for the CSIS to get creative and nasty. So you need two options. The first is that you were never there. The second is that you need to vanish with a clear path (to your fake alibi) that can be tracked on the other side of the world. Like what they did with the RAF, spending some of their money in a place like Buenos Aires, all whilst the missing people were already laid to rest (mom, dad and the three children). When a large enough pile of cash goes missing people will find you, unless the money is burned (apart from the cash spend in BA) and the bodies can not be found, not in decades, not ever.
That setting when united gives a much larger stage to play and when it is done, I reckon that it is better if the assassin is a she. (Zoe Saldana made good on that in Colombiana). So whilst we wonder what more we can do, I personally believe that simplicity is best. It is the one stage I did not like in the Mechanic. Even it all seemed simple. The air-vent scene showed how things turn sour in an instant. Simplicity is key. What is simpler then flying a DJI drone three buildings away straight into the open window and boom? After that it becomes a mere exercise to vanish, which in Toronto is still a massive undertaking, unless they look for the wrong person, it becomes a little easier then. You could join an Oracle event in Mississauga, or take across lake Ontario and vanish via Rochester, at which point you are in the US.
That script is easy enough to write, it will be about the details and about how the details play out. There is no use if the event results in a global hunt by the CSIS and their seal equivalent giving you less then a 1% to survive for any decent amount of time, a number no career person wants to consider. And these are the thoughts before the script is made. If you can pull it off you have the making of a new Hollywood (or Netflix) blockbuster.
Darn, it is only 06:36, what ever will I do the rest of the day?
I had a decently weird dream last night. It might be a movie, but I think it is not good enough for that. It might be a popcorn movie, merely for streaming and DVD sales and that would be fine too. The setting is that the dream started a few other things and I wonder where we are in less then a year.
It started in Toronto, I was there for whatever reason. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of shooting and a lot of damage. It was primarily in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal. It is around February 2022, the US has defaulted on its loans. The people lost almost everything they ever owned and the stage is that ultra right angry people are whipping up the others who are coming to terms that their politicians are as useless as everyone expected them to be. Canada suddenly has to deal with 30-50 thousand invaders all angry and all taking whatever they can, they have nothing left. I saw police officers in Yorkville getting shot, store windows were getting crashed and houses are overrun. The American had turned into rabid dogs. The army was trying to create bottlenecks but an army spread over Canada having to deal with three clearly way to large fire points and a lot more in the rural areas is not an army that can get a whole lot done. And nearly all Americans were wielding firearms. It is then that I see the army starting to shoot to kill and I wake up.
Now, that was merely a dream, but the larger station remains. Everyone is in this ‘lets hope’ phase, but America has been utterly broke for well over three years. And every time the debt ceiling is raised. A political system that cannot take responsibility, that uses the blame game and points at the previous party if it is a different political party. They both failed and they both refused to overhaul tax laws for well over over 25 years. In the 90’s the idea of a trillion dollar firm was ludicrous. Now they have 2, maybe 3. These firms did NOTHING wrong. They adhered to tax laws and they did what the tax laws demanded that they would do. So every time I see another tax the rich, whilst these people look at three parties (ignoring 15 others), I get nervous. The larger station is not that they refuse to overhaul tax laws. It might be that they are too stupid to overhaul them.
And this too is nothing new. What will be new is that the US government will take a look at their patent office and make (forced) deals with any isolated (registered in America only) patent and demand a financial deal with that owner. So lucky my IP is not registered in the US. A setting of grab it whilst you can will start soon enough and whilst the US will be in denial, there will be behind the scene deals with Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Alcatel-Lucent, Microsoft and IBM. All to get a little more use and traction out of the failing US economy. All whilst it has been clear for decades that the tax laws need a complete rewrite, a setting where everyone is taxed fairly. But that will not likely happen. That will upset the large donators and political friends they have and they would lose them, so nothing will happen and the dream that I have will come closer to becoming an optional reality.
Is it a wish or a dream? No one wishes for this. Not when you consider all the innocent lives struck by American stupidity, but the larger station is that a lot of Americans are close to desperate and the default will push them over the edge, I feel certain of that. Even as the news (mainly media) is now flaming their need for digital advertisement, hiding behind the announcement that the US of A could default next week, we also get a mere 16 hours ago that ‘U.S. Senate passes bill to avert government shutdown, sends to Biden for signature’, but that is not the same is it? A shutdown is one thing, a default is something else. There are paths that they could walk, set up a massive loan with JP Morgan, Blackrock or Morgan Stanley, the turnaround will need to be massive and that is how the slippery slope becomes a diagonal sheet of ice. A timeline extended and extended, all whilst the premise of stopping this going from bad to worse is ignored.
It was but a dream, I realise that, but perhaps my brain is working out a few financial items covered in nightmares.
We all do them, I do them a lot. On any course from A to B, I tend to take detours every day. For one, I walk a lot and I like the scenery to change, it might not make much sense if you are the avid automobile fan, yet when you walk it makes a lot of sense. It can be that one route has a cinema and I want to see what is coming. That thought makes less sense nowadays, but in the past there were windows with photo’s of movies coming and movies playing. Then thee are the detours the mind makes. Those tend to make a lot less sense, even to the wielder of that brain. The Brain wants to let you know something and it tells you in its own way. Through the dream state when you are asleep, through a day dream or even through a small jump away from what you were thinking. We all have them, we pay attention (at times), we will it away or we ignore, we tend to take different strides with any mind jump.
This happened to me today when I was doing something meaninglessly simple, mind-numbing and the brain just took over. I was at a school, not sure which one, or where. The kids spoke English, but I did not connect to the location and I have no kids, so I am at a loss on that part. The kids were eating food and a I saw a ‘pretend it is Mexican day’ sign. The sign was troublesome in a few ways but that does not matter. It was then that I noticed the food. I thought they were all enjoying enchiladas. The rolled or is that wrapped food in a thick tortilla, it was then that I took notice of the smell, the sweetness, the stuffing and then things started to make sense. The kids all had rolled up pancakes, rolled like a tortilla and the stuffing was not that of an enchilada. It was filled with fruits. Then I saw others with some kind of chili, but it was I think cranberry mash with berries, bananas and stuff, the enchiladas had some kind of jam, dried fruits, tangerine parts and I think apricot slices. They were all having fruit dishes all shaped and imaged after Mexican food, the sign made more sense now. And it makes sense, the detours allowed me to design the 5G solution I created, this is not the same, but set to a similar premise. The mind can fill voids, but it can also label and identify things it is aware of. So what if kids see the same shape as a bowl of chili, as a enchilada yet not the same. What if the apple served can no longer hold the attention it once had? What if the premise needs change? It is not unheard of, it is not even that weird. The detour can serve as a journey marker and that is how we get to the actual stirrer of the trouble I saw.
Two headlines needs to be shown. Once gives us ‘Amazon is ‘nearing a deal’ with EA to produce a Mass Effect show’, the second one is ‘Ex-Bioware Writer Explains His Concerns About a Mass Effect or Dragon Age TV Series’. They matter, but not the way you think. There is one clear truth that I never steered clear of. The Mass Effect series (1-3) is one of the 10 best stories to ever grace the ENTIRE video game industry. In 2007 they started something that had not ever been shown before and the universe of gamers took notice. It was a few years later that we were treated to a sequel which was nothing less than one of the best games that would ever launch on a console. Yes, Mass Effect was big and even as there were rumblings on episode three, I never joined them, the story as a whole was amazing and that story can still compete with almost anything today. They screwed it up with Andromeda, but the original was and will remain a legendary achievement.
Soon on console and TV
So whilst I do not know if there will be concerns, if there will be issues, if there will be larger ‘fears’. Consider the first game, when we go beyond the game, the setting that we forget is that the Citadel is well over 4 times the size of Manhattan, optionally a bit bigger and that implies that there are 3-4 seasons ready to be made.
Consider Doctor Michel, getting extorted, running supplies to a merchant in the Lower Wards in order to avoid a “secret” of hers getting out. A 5 minute mission, easily converted to a full episode, or as a sideline in larger storylines over two episodes. Now consider that the first game alone has over 60 side quests, all optional stories in their own rights. We might not care about some of them, but the truth is we were never given to goods so that we would care and that matters. Just consider that we remember the stars of a show, yet how many can give us the sidekicks in Buffy? The sidekicks in Bones? The sidekicks in Battlestar Galactics? Dexter? Now consider that Spike (from Buffy) was supposed to get killed off in the beginning. Yet he stayed around for 7 seasons. The writers had something to work with and they were handed time to show value in a character. That could happen to Mass Effect as well. The benefit (for Amazon) is that they get handed something with a proper foundation, a story that can go places. And in this we see a larger stage evolving, the games are starting to set the need for TV and movies. We knew about movies, we all saw Jolie (aka Mrs Smith) in Tombraider, but the stage is now altering, games are making a larger headway into TV and the solver screen. I wonder if this is to the well of creativity drying up, or is it that games bring optional a million plus fans to the TV screen and that startup is interesting to producers. I am not sure what the answer is, because I never really considered that setting before. Yet if that is true, then the settings for Bethesda will alter a lot over the next few years. And that too matters for gamers, because the franchise that grows tends to evolve and gamers love a game that truly evolves (not iterates like Ubisoft). In this there is no telling what Ubisoft can do with their AC franchise.
Yet in all this, I wonder what we will be treated to next. I am not siding with the worry population, I will see and judge when it hits the TV or big screen. I have seen enough on both sides to worry up front, and we all saw our fill of ‘failed’ series. Yet plenty of those ended up being true gems (Dollhouse 2009, Firefly 2002, Rome 2005, Star Trek 1966) and it is interesting that Star Trek ended up with 9 spin offs and 10 movies. So taking the word of the critics is debatable from the start.
I hope that Mass Effect will get the proper audience and get the right stage for people to care about a good story, because the story is everything, especially in TV.
So why this detour? You see, what we see and what we perceive is not the same. What we see is what we are offered to see and what we perceive tends to be based on the presentation of others and the ‘critics’ as well as ‘critics’ who have other venues to promote are the fake news bringers, especially in this day and age. Some of these ‘critics’ know that people have one purse, they can only spend money ONCE, so they are getting more and more careful on what they spend money on and Amazon Prime knows that (its a Netflix issue), so they need to get the larger population on board sooner, and some ‘critics’ have friends at Netflix and other places too, so they are eager to promote one and push down the other for whatever reason they hand us and they have a larger digital market to push their view, their need and the need of their friends. That is the stakeholder game and it is hitting TV series as well, yet only now will the push be more pronounced then ever before. But that is merely my view on the matter.
Will Mass Effect succeed? I cannot tell, I will not give my answer one way or the other, but take notice. It comes from one of the truly great stories in gaming and that matters. I reckon we will see something real in 2023-2024.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lawrence van Rijn - Law Lord to be 