Category Archives: movies

December 14, 2020 · 02:09

Over my head

I have a simple setting, I keep what I kill (actually, I got that from Vin Diesel), I keep what I get, I just had the weirdest mindset, a sort of day dream at 01:15, something I do not understand and as such I cast it aside, so I make the IP public domain, yes, I have idea’s, for the most they are fantasy and Sci-Fi, which I like, but this, what I saw in my mind was horror, and I don’t do horror. Or to state it differently, I am not much for horror, as such this brain drain was not in the mind of me. In the setting I am an older man, 70’s, optionally early 80’s. The town of the event is Orleans, it is a new building on St. Joseph Blvd, there the man finds a girl near the entrance, the girl is around 25 and badly beaten up. He cals for an ambulance and notifies the police, she lives nearby, she lives there alone. Later he visits her in hospital. He makes a quick phone call. The wounds are fresh and ghastly. He offers to look out for her and takes her to his apartment, and she happily agrees. In the apartment is a middle age lady, the cook, she had made a fresh bouillon with lots of beef and rice. They both eat it whilst enjoying fresh warm croissants. She begs him to stay there the night, she will sleep with him if she can stay, he turns down the invitation, but tells her that she can sleep in the bed, he will take the sofa. The next morning she is awake and looking refreshed, the cook was already there, with hot sandwiches with pastrami and cheese for both, the woman is clearly scared, really scared, but she is happy to see the food. The man looks, but does not ask. She tells him that she never saw who did it, merely that she was beaten again and again in her apartment. He asks her is she can inspect the apartment, she agrees, clearly she is too scared to go back to her place alone. Out of the drawer he takes out two unusual gloves, if you can call them that. They are a wristband, with wires to every finger, two rings for the thumb and three for every other finger, the rings are connected to each other by metal wires and the end of the gloves are thimbles. She puts them in the pocket of his coat, one for the left pocket, one for the right. He grabs a small torch and they walk to her house, it was a mere 10 minutes. As they are about to go into the house, they see a young couple checking the both out. The door opens and the darkness in the house on clear daylight is almost frightening. The man quickly puts on the gloves and shines the torch into the house, before he knows it a man, or what seems to be a man comes for him, but this time the attacker is in for a surprise, the elderly man, our hero grabs the man and pulls him into the sunlight, this is something the attacker was unaware of and it was even harder to resist, the screams from the attacker were deafening and in all this, the attacker starts to fade, until the darkness is replaced by a strange light and the attacker dissolves. At that point the house starts to become less dark, not light but the darkness is no longer swallowing the apartment. 

The woman starts crying, the fear is clear on every part of her body. He takes another look and then he walks into the apartment, there is a larger setting of darkness in the apartment that was not normal, not part of any shadows, and as he looks he sees it all fade away, this was the effect of something else. He had seen the original writings from ancient Greece on Tartarus, but to see what might be a Ghastly, or a Shade in Tartarus. Yet these were writings, this was something he saw, he witnessed and that was a first for him, but this was France, so what was going on?

This is as far as I got in less than an hour, the images were so vivid I wrote them down as quickly as I could before the images faded, they are already starting to fade, it is rereading the writings I just put down to make the images reappear. It has happened before but before today I never wrote them down, most of those events are lost to me forever, but this one I have, yet my IP is based on science, my other creations are Sci-Fi (some are historical fantasy), to get a horror image is quite disturbing, and I can say that my night rest is now over and it is getting towards 02:30, another night without sleep, oh joy!

Not sure what is going on, but it is a bit over my head (for now). And I just realised, today is exactly 16 years ago when I left Europe, perhaps it is related.

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December 11, 2020 · 11:07

Tripped by a thought

Yup, this happens. We watch things, we read things and it mixes into an idea. The first element in this was the movie Kingdom of Heaven (by Ridley Scott). I love this movie, for some reason it feels more real than any of the other movies that are founded on the crusades are. There are a few other reasons, there is always a good reason to watch any movie with Orlando Bloom and Alexander Siddig and the fact that it also had Liam Neeson, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons and several others did not hurt that cause either. I was struck by the charisma that Ghassan Massoud brought to the screen in Kingdom of Heaven. That movie is pretty much forever in the back of my mind. The second element was something I read. The quote “An ifrit can further be bound to a sorcerer, if summoned”, as well as “In the latter account, the “ifrit among the jinn” threatens Muhammad with a fiery presence, whereupon the archangel Gabriel taught Muhammad a Du’a (Islamic prayer) to defeat it”, this struck a chord as it is the only reference I have seen at present where Christian faith and Islamic faith crosses (perhaps there are more). But it got me thinking. What happens if an Afreet, a dweller of the sands is confronted by the invasion armies of the west? The Crusaders, the Templars, the Teutons, and some of these organisations still exist today. So what happens when an Afreet goes on a quest to understand the enemy of its sands? The idea is not entirely new, the Afreet made an appearance in True Blood and in American gods, but in both cases it is less seen from the view of the Afreet, and as a demon they are part immortal, or at least can exist for thousands of years, anyone with that level of timespan has a different view on matters. As such the Afreet can be in the past and the present giving us a very different stage.

We have been so obsessed with the western folklore, that we forget that there is a large area of folklore that has almost never been tapped into and when we consider that Netflix is present in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, I wonder why we get this oversight. Of course they can also go for the other movie I came up with ‘How to kill a politician’ which optionally might be a big hit in the Islamic world, it might not be something that a person like Geert Wilders likes, but it is a door he opened himself and France added spice to that soup. 

All options I did in mere hours, as such I wonder what is keeping some so called creators in creating actual new stuff (instead of a new version of old stuff). It is as I personally see it the difference between iterative and innovative. A stage that America is shifting in, they are moving more and more towards iterative because they can no longer find the innovative people. A sad state of affairs as I personally see it.

Is it me? Am I tripped by a thought, or am I seeing it correctly that we are missing out on true innovation in both movies and TV series? I am not ignoring the stage where we are told that there are “In 2019, the number of original scripted television series in the United States hit 532”, I am not doubting that, I am merely noticing that other places in the world, these series are missing, or not shown. And to be honest, I have my doubt on all 532 series being actual innovative series. There is nothing wrong with iterative series, but they are a prolongation of something else. Another CSI, another NCIS, another Star Trek, another Superman. I will agree that there are plenty of fans for them, but at times we need to offer something so new people gasp at the notion of difference. I get the setting that this does not always ends up being positive (Firefly, Dollhouse) but they were true innovations, they were different and they have scores of fans, but it was not meant to be. I get it and perhaps my ideas will never become reality either, but I remain innovative in my thinking, it did lead to several 5G IP parts and I expect a few more in the coming year. 

Yet in this I do not pursue a path, I let it was over me just like the Afreet did, just like the soon to be dead politician (in the Movie) and the stage of being between two universes (Keno Diastima), a stage I found in mere hours, yes I agree they are not finished, yet I did most of the work by myself in mere hours. So I wonder what others are capable of making, even if we do not see these results on Netflix, Stan, Youtube or TV. I wonder what became of the 532 series, because so far what we get to see is “Find Out Which Series Will Return for Another Season”, a stage that we accept, but there is more then returning series, they are an accepted and essential part of TV (and streaming), but where is all the new stuff? 

It is a thought that is tripping me and making me trip (to coin a phrase).

And all this is happening whilst I am trying to find a new and original way of levelling up a character in the RPG I have been writing about. We tend to see RPG’s in missions, kills and achievements. I want the levelling to be different, but I am still seeking a way, perhaps I will return to the mission stage of levelling up, but I am trying to avoid it, an RPG can only stand on its feet when it offers more and different stages, not merely more of the same, we have all seen that and as such I am considering other methods, yet the thought of how is not clicking into the frame of mind and the frame of gaming, yet I hope that to be a temporary thing for now.

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December 7, 2020 · 00:19

Salmon in the cinema

Yup, there is a new setting, not for food, but towards the entertainment. Even as we see Google allegedly miss the plank, the streamers are setting the stage to a larger degree. In streaming nature there is Disney, Stan and off course there is Netflix, so when the BBC gives us ‘Dune and Matrix 4 streaming plan prompts urgent talks from AMC cinemas’ is was not overly surprised, the Movie machine is on a tour and Corona slowed it down, but did not stop it and in this stage, too many vacant chairs remain in the cinema. We can feel for the cinema, but there are many places where the pain is coming, so the cinema is merely one of most. As such when we see “The move will enable film fans to watch the forthcoming sci-fi epic Dune and the Matrix sequel on HBO Max at the same time as their cinema release” (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-55180055), we see a stage where the movie makers are maximising whatever they can, and I cannot blame them.

Consider that Cale Boyter, Joe Caracciolo Jr., Mary Parent and Denis Villeneuve allegedly pumped $200,000,000 into that movie. This I a risky business, moreover as SCI-FI made their version with Alec Newman in 2000 and it was an amazing piece of work, I still watch the BluRay nowadays at least twice a year. That does not mean that this Dune will not be seen, I look forward to it and I do prefer the big screen, but any next lockdown and Netflix or BluRay might be my only option, and I am not alone in this. The average number one movie in the US after the Cortona lockdown made 4 million, before the coronavirus lockdown $100 million (Bad Boys for Life), as such the sentiment of the producers of Dune and others are well understood. $200 million is nothing to sneer at and whatever deal they can make, they will. At present in 2020 Bad Boys for life leads the revenue charge wth $200 million, It should have been at least double that and as such Dune is in a dangerous place, not by choice and not by effort, the trailer blew me away and the stars involved make it shine even more, it seems only fair that the makers try to get the best deal possible. This is the stage here we merely see impact, we do not get to have too much choice in the matter, no matter how angry Glossu Rabban (Dave Bautista) gets. In the end I feel slightly less for Adam Aron than I do for the actors and actresses that put their sweat and blood into this movie, in other news, when did the cinema adjust (temporarily) their prices? In this setting as we currently see it, why would anyone take a chance at AU$18, when streaming is $15 a month and at present safer. 

We want to be protective of the moviemakers, but in the end, at present, we are merely a Salmon that goes up against the streamer. In this setting I understand why AMC Cinemas wants to talk, yet in the present condition we face, is it a realistic step to take? As such, there is truth in the statement “We will aggressively pursue economic terms that preserve our business”, but consider that billions of people have been denied access to entertainment, I want to start that Adam Aron has the right setting and he has a right to be in this setting, yet in the stage we face, can he push for a setting that is not entirely realistic?

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December 5, 2020 · 00:40

Twists of the mind

It started last month when I decided to create a new TV series out of thin air, well, it is in space, so air was not a factor. It was a little homage to RendezVous with Rama, yet I added a twist, as one does. I started that journey in ‘And that was a hard sell?’ (At https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/09/21/and-that-was-a-hard-sell/), whilst I was exploring a few ideas, I stumbled (for more than one reason) on Thalia, the muse of comedy. Leave it to me to seek out the history and optional origin of my bad sense of humour. Now, when we consider the origin of humour, or better stated the muses, Their origin goes back 7 centuries before there was even a christ, and even then there was some correlation to comedy (the muse Thalia) and her mother Mnemosyne the goddess of memory. The heralding of the muses starts (as far as I can tell) in 800BC when the poet Hesiod makes mention of them. Over the three millennia two of his works survived. The first is Theogony, the second one is called Works and Days, describing the peasant life. The Theogony is basically a story of crime and revolt (by Zeus) and set the story of gods and titans, yet I do not want to digress, it is not bout the gods, it is about Hesiod. He sets the stage of muses, he sets the  indication of Mnemosyne and her 9 daughters Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania. They are the depiction of Epic poetry, History, Love poetry, Music and song, Tragedy, Hymns, Dance, Comedy and Astronomy, in all this, we merely whisk them away as the stories of those with angst and superstition, yet in all this Hesiod was apparently a native of Boeotia, a district of central Greece. It is said that he had mastered the technique and vocabulary of the epic by memorising and reciting heroic songs. He himself attributes his poetic gifts to the Muses, who appeared to him while he was tending his sheep. So a sheep herder focussed and learned the setting of entertainment to an almost eerie level of precision in a time when none of it existed (or mostly none of it). In this no one is wondering how that happened? 

I was wondering about the setting of comedy, about the stage of dance and what christianity broke and almost destroyed. Is no one wondering why? A stage of entertainment and insight into the mind and we are seemingly dumb do the notion, I was, and I was this to the largest degree, schooling made me this way. We have been said to a stage of moving forward, all whilst we ignore the past, the past that leaves us with more questions and not a lot of answers. You see, Hesiod did not merely have a muse of poetry, he had two, Calliope the muse of epic poetry and eloquence and Erato, the muse of love poetry. She was also part of the Aeneid almost 750 years later. So consider that we have lost the texts of most of the events between 1250 and 1400, a lot of it destroyed, yet this work survives. It also sets another person, the writer of that work Publius Vergilius Maro, who before there was a christ created three legendary works, the Aeneid, Georgics and Eclogues. In one of hist works we see the growth of tension as a forward momentum and hist work would be the larger inspiration to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, where Virgil becomes the authors guide. 6 notable legendary works in a stage where works mostly did not exist. More important, these works were kept safe, in an age where we now are swallowed by trash, spam and fake news, we disregard deeper works of optional philosophical nature and are left in the dark on their existence. 

Yet in this age, in the age of streaming entertainment, it seems natural that we take a deeper look at the old works, we might have to, even as the Vatican did it best to remove as much of the Rhaetian language as possible, they did not remove all and when we see these old works, we might ask actual questions that matter. You see, if a man herding his sheep sets the stage of entertainment to a much larger degree 3,000 years ago, even as his own audience (the sheep) had no clue what he was on about, he sets a larger frame, that frame is seemingly important, because of the goddess of memory had a sense of humour (Thalia), we better figure out what that is and how it affects us. 

It is perhaps best seen in:
“Do not, I pray thee, do not weep for me, neither pursue me thus ominously as I go to the stern shock of war. Turnus is not free to dally with death. Thou, Idmon, bear my message to the Phrygian monarch in this harsh wording: So soon as to-morrow’s Dawn rises in the sky blushing on her crimson wheels, let him not loose Teucrian or Rutulian: let Teucrian and Rutulian arms have rest, and our blood decide the war; on that field let Lavinia be sought in marriage”

Now consider his assumed past “Virgil was from an equestrian landowning family who could afford to give him an education. He attended schools in Cremona, Mediolanum, Rome and Naples. After considering briefly a career in rhetoric and law, the young Virgil turned his talents to poetry”, which I do not debate, yet consider that he died at the age of 50, he was at home the first 10 years, yet after that he attended 4 schools, over a distance of 1100 KM, which would have taken at least a week per part and in that setting he would have been exposed to all kinds of issues. And when we see this work (one of three important ones) over 12 books, hundreds of words per book, we forget the important question, how was this created? There was no typewriter, this is the work on scrolls, likely several per book and now consider that this would have to survive well over a thousand years. Each fact gives us something more to consider, and when we look at then, perhaps we are doing something really wrong now, have you even considered that part? 

If we consider merely these two writers and the massive impact that they had, what did we lose over time and more important was was removed from sight since the 11th century? These are part of the questions that were plaguing me as I was setting the tone in my idea for a TV series, but here I am, I already forgot the title, but not the setting. And in all that there is the choice, but what happens when we never had a choice? Did you consider that? Some might have seen the movie How It Ends, but did you consider it? Basically Theo James had a lot less options than he thought he had, and we merely see that ending come to us as the movie ends. Yet what if Hesiod and Publius Vergilius Maro were telling us about the fight, the fight that is coming in the only way that they could grasp and we wasted 90% of 2750 years and 99.9% of the 47 years that followed, with the last 3 years 100% wasted due to spam. We consider and we accept that some (in the most weird corners of life) can be the stage masters of life and creativity (JK Rowling being an example), but we have something to look back to, we have (to some degree education), as did Publius Vergilius Maro, yet what about Hesiod, who pasturing sheep on Mount Helicon? Shall we write it all to ‘imagination’?

I am happy to do that, but from what we know now bout then, his work leaves us with all kinds of questions, questions that we (for the most) cannot answer. How many people (of non noble origin) had the ability to write? Were versed in all kinds of manner? And consider that Mount Helicon was close to 150KM from Athens, not a trip sheep herders tend to make. So where did the refinement of his work come from? We are left with questions and some people (academics) will give bright answers that make total sense today, but 2000 years ago, a lot less so.

As such, when I was considering memory and humour as I was trying to find a scientific narrative in season one of Keno Diastima (I had to name it again) and that is where I find myself. A station of choice where the choice is an illusion, because the option of choice was only valid for a while and we decided to waste time and options, as such what would we face then? 

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November 16, 2020 · 02:44

Have at it

I just had an idea, it happens, we all do. It happens whilst I was watching the Downton Abbey movie, for some reason my mind wandered about time travel, the time travel stories we have seen in the cinema, the TV series and the stage of altering the past, yet what if this was different (it always is), I remembered a line in some Star Trek novel giving us “How can we set any station to something that never happened?”, or something of the sort. It gave me another notion, one I am not exploring in the story I was writing, so I am putting it here. What if aliens came to alter history, our history, not to do us harm, but to prevent us from harming them. Consider that we find the setting to dimensional travel (which is done by altering the vibration speed of the electron), it would allow us to see another dimension, this is not new, It has been done before. Yet what happens when we visit an alternative universe where we embraced MASER technology and during the 70’s we used masers to carpet area’s, that technology was not in our reality, so as it comes here, we see a much more powerful and less peace driven people use it as a weapon. When that time is changed, the victims of a maser mine take matters into their hands and decide on a timeline change, one that stops the dimension gap from being explored. So we get in the first  setting an alien invasion, in the second setting our technological advancement in the form leading to invention that were never ours and the stage that we have to be stopped, so how to go about it?

It was  simple application of drive, fears and expectations to set the brief in motion. Ah well, feel free to tinker with it. In light of what is written here, it takes some work, a lot more than the field I designed when I set towards meeting nowhere where we see 8 couples meeting on some kind of a station and no-one has a clue why they are here, or where they are. A setting that has us wondering the bottom of the sea and the vastness of space, so far I have the setting up to the cliffhanger of season 3, but I will admit that season three is still empty. Like season 1 where I set the option of what they did not see coming (and I know what is on the other end), so as they are in a stage where they are on a third between here and the sombrero universe, they went into season 2 and ending the season we see the second way station which is a lot larger and a lot closer to the sombrero universe. A vast connection of what might be, and why not?

So as we look into the IP I casually throw away (mostly undone IP), I see another setting of where we are, we are in a stage of ideas that are flowing over us like a waterfall (it is in my case), I would gladly hand that part over for some sleep, yet there is still the other part, how can we create original IP? Even as Netflix is throwing $17 billion this year alone at new series and the continuation of existing series. I am wondering if there is anything truly original left? When we see the old series and the originality that the set as well as the foundation for other series, I merely wonder, is there anything left? It makes sense for others to grasp at what DC and Marvel have and soon other comics will find their materials in a much stronger movie setting, but that is for another day. For now I need to ponder on original choices, even as my idea seems original, it is founded on the original story RendezVous with Rama, I openly admit that and even as I made a lot of it original, there is a link because my work is an homage to the original thinker Arthur C. Clarke. It is not always good what we make, but when we see the errors we design, we also tend to see around them, or to improve upon them, at least I expect that is what most of us tends to do, the rest? That is up to them.

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November 3, 2020 · 23:31

A streaming war

Yup, this is about to come to larger blows, you see, there is Netflix (of course), Apple, Amazon Prime, Canal Plus/Foxtel and Disney Plus. There are a few more, but in many cases HBO is added to the film channels of Foxtel, and so on. Yet these players never took a serious look at the treasure of the east, Japan particularly. Yes they all look at the manga, yet there is a lot more. The Zatoichi series, which was followed by an amazing movie with Takeshi Kitano. There are a lot more, and even as there are some really good movies around that are done in
Japan (Earthquake bird with Alicia Vikander), Japan has a lot of original non manga material to offer. In the horror section there is the Audition and Oldboy, the second one is also seen as a remade English version, but it is nowhere near as good as the original, perhaps it was the atmosphere. There is of course the setting of Ju-On and that video that kills within 7 days, but those are the visible ones that made the press. A lot of people got interested in Japan as a provider of entertainment after Kill Bill part 1, that is fair enough, we all have our moments. For me it was the 1980 TV-series Shōgun with Richard Chamberlain, based on the novel by James Clavell with the same name. A series where we see giants like Toshiro Mifune, Yoko Shimada, Frankie Sakai, and Hideo Takamatsu (and many more). Not just that, even the Middle-Earth trusted Gimli (John Rhys-Davies) was already amazing 40 years ago. I reckon it might be time for a remake, if only the 1980 version was not so darn perfect. Yet there is more in Japan than just remakes. To see that we merely have to look at the Playstation 4 and the almost perfect Ghost of Tsushima. Until the game was there, I know nothing of this place and the setting it had. And I know I am not alone. We might want to travel back to 2006 when Clint Eastwood release the second part, Letters from Iwo Jima. As Flags of our fathers showed us the American side, Clint took a gander and showed us the other side as well. What we ended up with is a near complete view of a war no-one really wanted, but we were all forced to fight it, because there was no other way. 

Yet as we see the roll call of movies in Japan, we see the western view of it and some of it is really good, there is the Forest with Natalie Dorner who is pretty amazing (for those who merely know here from her ways to excite Henry VIII, or be the sweet dear in GoT), this is the movie to watch her in). We need to acknowledge that a movie about Japanese in Japan can only be made by the Japanese. We do not deny that Lost in Translation is a gem, yet who knows of 100 Yen Love, and before you think that this is mere love movie, think again, in this particular case it is Billion dollar baby on steroids. A slob turning her life around and it is that underdog fight that for some reason is a lot better when it is done in Japan. There is another example, The Ramen Girl, underestimated and a little shallow, but it shows us a side of Japan we rarely see, their strife for excellence, a spiritual side perhaps, perhaps not. But there is a multitude of sides to Japan we always seem to ignore. The technologists look at Japan, because what we see there now will hit our borders in about 5 years. Yet in all that, we seem to forget that Japan has a soul and even if we do not understand it, some wall parts are shown in their movies and TV-series. With the world wanting more and wanting something different, there is every chance that Japanese entertainment goods will b e fought over by the streaming giants. And if these parts do not convince you, take a look at Gokusen (2002) and I can tell you right now, the plot twist that hits you at the end of season one, is one you we’re never ready for. 

You could say: Only in Japan!

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September 25, 2020 · 18:27

The new disaster movie

Yup, we all have seen them, buildings on fire (Towering inferno), silly snappers with appetite (Jaws), Catching your stones (Deep Impact), shaking your love (Earthquake), warming up the neighbourhood (Dante’s Peak), or solving the greenhouse effect (The Day after tomorrow), yes we have more likely than not seen at least one of them, especially when we still have our 2012 diary set to that day in December. And we all love these movies, especially when it is a fight of man (or woman) against nature, the person becomes the automated underdog and we know the we really do not have a chance, especially those who remember Will Yun Lee in San Andreas. Nature is a bitch any given day of the week.

So what happens when we take the premise and really give you a nightmare scenario? The idea popped up when I was looking to the absolute lack of intelligence coming from the Oval Office. So when we got the quote “Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster”, it was at that moment when I remember a situation in history, you might have heard of it, a guy named Nero and what he decided to do to Rome. It was at that moment when the mind started to think things through.
For your consideration

The setting is given to us in a stage where a person is opted to join Google and offers for sale all his 5G IP (let’s just pretend that is me, it is an ego thing) and it goes better than the main character ever considered. He is promptly paid the initial fee ($25,000,000 post taxation up front) and he hands over the IP, all of it and it is a winner, Google learns where they forgot to look and the main character gets a hell of a lot more than even he considered ($12B pre taxation), so as the IP becomes all Google, the main character heads for a nice early retirement with the largest golden parachute in history. Yet the people around him take notice, Russian organised crime, greed hungry bankers (a reference to HSBC) and they gang up on him, in this even American politicians and members of the CIA take care to snap up what they can and he ends up with nothing. This sets in motion a wave of rage never seen before and the silly criminals are all laughing, because they got the cash. But the creative mind goes to town and vows vengeance. He sets the stage with access to a larger NBC arsenal. Into the stage where he unleashes 13 nuclear sites, most of them near the spaces of the criminals, now suddenly everyone is crying like little bitches and how unfair it all is, but the main character is beyond caring, he sees the ultimate equaliser, it is loss, when the criminals and the corrupt are confronted with the loss of everything THEY care for, the need for a compromise by the criminals and politicians alike. He then sets on a larger binge, even as some think that they have a handle, he starts with the Nuclear bombing of Grand Coulee, Palo Verde, W. A. Parish, Monroe, Bath County, and Peach Bottom. These 6 changes the power options to the largest extent and no matter how great their protection was, having a 2 megaton bomb explode next to it renders such a place decently useless. At the same setting he sets of the 4 bombs near the goons responsible for being playing bad Santa to the main character, taking care of Chicago, San Francisco, San Antonio and Miami, the last to go off in Virginia setting the FBI and the CIA in a stage where they have nowhere to go. It is not the end, the Russian criminals are now in a stage where the law and a few hundred thousand Americans are hunting them down. As the rage in the main character goes on, we see the he had set the stage before the first nuclear bomb went off, where he had ‘liberated’ a few really nasty bedfellows. The bombs made reporting the issue a non-option, but as the nation is learning what had happened, the main character had seen everything taken away from him. He releases the diseases in Washington DC, Boston, Los Angeles and Jacksonville. The panic is now complete, as all plead for a compromise, we see the person put a gun towards his mouth, whispers ‘I will all see you soon’ whilst in the background a mustard gas bomb the size of a fuel bomb goes off, he swallows the barrel and pulls the trigger. We will vows that this will never be a reality, yet when we sit at home and we see ‘HSBC Stock Pummelled by Financial Crimes Report’ with the additional “hit by the fallout from revelations of the bank’s involvement in facilitating criminal activities” which happened three days ago. Crime and opportunity seekers tend to go after the people they think are weak, so what do you think happens when they go after the wrong person? This is not nature that you cannot stop, that opponent is still for the most predictable, it is the person that loses his or her mind, that person becomes unreasonable and unpredictable.

It becomes even more fun when we realise the HSBC was not alone, it is not. The Guardian reported three years ago ‘British banks handled vast sums of laundered Russian money’, am I still dreaming? Greed is like mother nature, it is predictable, and I do believe that insurmountable loss is the only thing the corrupt and the greed driven truly fear. The corrupt tend to think the it is for a greater good, you only have to blow away their children in front of a corrupt person to see their armour dent permanently. In that do you think that a person losing billions will listen to reason? Especially when government officials are involved? You might think that this will never happen, did you? But that is probably what you thought of banks as well. Greed has no limits, neither does rage and in this it tends to be a fight to behold, especially as unbridled rage equals a volcano or a meteorite that is on a path, neither of them ever wavers.

So yes, we can all agree with President Trump on “we’ll have to see what happens”, however do you want to be there when things go ballistic? I certainly don’t, but then this was merely a small movie idea, just like ‘How to assassinate a politician’, which I wrote about in ‘Sweden has it too’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/08/30/sweden-has-it-too/), I wonder if the people in the Critical Incident Analysis Group – CIAG (University of Virginia) the people who give us “But we are wrong about that. Mass shootings are not unstoppable, and there are people trying to stop them. They are not even inexplicable, because every time Trunk hears of one he understands why it happened and who did it”, I wonder where they were when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold decided to throw a little party at the Columbine High School on April 20, 1999. 12 students and one teacher did not make it out and there is every indiction that the damage could have been much worse. So what happens when you push a person over the brink, a person that designed a solution the 114 thousand people at Google had not considered. Sundar Pichai might be one of the 100 most influential people n the planet, but no one will blame him for not considering everything. So when the person with the one original idea goes nuts, what will the impact be? I believe it could be the disaster movie of the decade, a step on the chessboard that none of the hundred think tanks in the US can consider, they are not ready for the parameters and in that meantime the most damage is incurred.

Well, that is my sense of humour satisfied, have a nice weekend and sweet dreams, don’t think too much of the power station near you, any of them have at least 4 flaws that they all forgot to report on.

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September 24, 2020 · 18:59

The stage of a game

We all have an idea, some have the idea of a life time, but I cannot make that claim, not because I do not have one, but because I have too many. Yes there is the call to make remasters (Knights of the Sky), there is the call to reinvent the wheel (System Shock by Nightdive Studios), or there is the need to take it to the next level, a next level that was not possible in the past, mainly because technology did not allow for it.

This is how I always saw Pirates (by Sid Meier), there was a chance where Black Flag was a nice tribute, but it was the dawn of PS4 and Xbox One and Ubisoft took a cowardly way to progress a franchise on a lack of factors. So as I initially played Black Flag, my mind went racing. And then I remembered another pirate game, a board game with additional bluff cards. So what happens, when w take the foundation of Black Flag and make it more towards the original the Sid Meier made? The map would be well over 20 times the size, a lot more like the actual map of the Caribbeans in those days, the game would not be some fruity assassin, it would be your version and you get to live the life of a cutthroat, a buccaneer, a privateer, it is up to you, to go from a small skiff to a full-grown galley or slave ship if you are good enough. You see, there is something totally awesome about the way the game Elite Dangerous is designed (by David Braben). There your life does not matter, the game does not care, nor should it and it is time to set that stage to RPG and a pirate RPG makes a lot of sense. You cannot always be a captain, you start as a simple sailor. And in this you could get to a rank if you are good enough. 

So how do we go about it, we tend to look towards the wars of adjustment, yet there are so many wars the were never on the radar, the Dutch independence wars (which took close to 80 years), the age of piracy and lets not forget the Sudan wars (Mahdist War 1881-1899), all places that seem to be forgotten. Who remembers the siege of Khartoum? Some are so set in a stage of winning, the we sometimes forget that half the fun is surviving, so how far will you get? The original siege went on from 13 March 1884 to 26 January 1885, so what happens when you are in charge, how long will you last? Games are so much about winning, the we forget the enduring is nothing less. To make it to the date or even past it would be a victory and a half. It is so American to be the victor the most of them do not understand ‘the Last Samurai’, it is not about winning, it is about not losing, or better stated, the way you live towards the final days matters more, we forgot about that part, didn’t we?

We can set any gaming stage, but it is how we play where we see if we measure up, not if we merely tap the mile poles in a game. I reckon that the achievements made us all a little complacent in games. We can go in any direction, a Hindenburg flight simulator, yet in there we will always come up short against the Microsoft flight simulator, it makes more sense for them to add the Hindenburg. Yet what happens when we turn the script? What happens when we set the stage to a simple thing, what if the player is a no one, yet his/her grandfather was Hades, Poseidon or Zeus? What happens when we map a place like Monte Carlo completely and get him to retrieve a relic that one of the 2,261 millionaires or 50 billionaires has. Is it in a house, is it on a boat or is it somewhere else (like a museum)? We can simplify any game for as much as we can, but in the end we need a healthy story and for the most Wars tend to do that (an unhealthy endeavour if ever there was one). I saw the need of a game on mines, and remembered some bomb defusing game on the CBM-64, so where to go from there? The stage of a game is important, because it sets a vested interest of the gamer, Ubisoft had the down to perfection in Assassins Creed 2 and Brotherhood and after the they lost the plot, they almost won it back in AC4 Black Flag and they definitely got it back in Origins. I would think the a Battlestar Galactica RPG is one the would be favourable with the BSG fans, but not much outside that, the same can be said for Babylon 5, the Star Trek fanbase is huge, so that tends to be a close win any given day of the week, but that does not guarantee a good game, the issue is seen when an idea with a small base entices a large following, that is the stage we all seek. CD Project Red did so with Witcher and seemingly is about to do it again with Cyberpunk 2077.  It is the setting the fuels the story, and the story is everything, I have always believed that, it is the power of an RPG. It is because of the that we see out the great stories (Tolkien), yet I wonder what happens when we try this with Herbert on a larger scale with Dune, not merely on Arrakis, why if all the other places become involved? Perhaps a visionary will see that option with the next Dune movie (2020). In this books have been the strongest source of inspiration, mainly because there are so many of them. Yet most of us go to the same source, why? I agree that it is appealing, but there are so many nations with alternatives. That is something we saw when someone created the Untitled Goose Game, brilliant t in its foundation, as such I wondered if someone had considered the same thing with a cat (Minoes, Annie M. G. Schmidt), a writer the has a following of millions in the Netherlands and Belgium. In that same setting, as Skyrim became such a hit, did anyone ever look towards the famous Spanish Comic books of the Mercenary by Segrelles? It has all the makings of a much larger game, a stage where some are set not in multiple games, but one game with a season pass and several DLC’s.

Then there is the comic hero Rork, by Andreas, or even the Trigan Empire by Don Lawrence. I remember growing up to these stories and the stories of Ravian (Valerian), I am a little surprised that the Trigan Empire never made it to the silver screen or the computer, Don Lawrence has a flair for imagery and the computer always needs this. So what is the stage of a game that will be set next? The is the question and the is where players like Sony and Google/Apple will find themselves. Microsoft might be acquiring the brands (Bethesda), yet they do not have the stage alone and the next innovator might be just around the corner. For me, the idea that the $7,500,000,000 lemon the Microsoft acquired (not Bethesda mind you) would backfire largely and loudly and the would be OK with me.

As I personally see it, Microsoft pissed of true gamers and that group of people doesn’t pull punches when they play with their idols, we do not fault Bethesda in any of this, but aligning with Microsoft was not the best idea, as some say, you are only as good as your next game and Bethesda had plenty of winners, but what is next? We look not merely to the stage of the game, but to the next stage of gaming and I believe that they are too often hiding behind terms like ‘hype worthy games’, yet that is a setting from the mind of a marketing department, they predict that people who play games, will think this is a hype. Yet true hypes come from games the are on the edge of what is possible in gaming, the Witcher 3 is the perfect example there. Cyberpunk is also on the stage, neither of them are Microsoft games. Yet it was brilliant to buy Bethesda, but the also means that those who do not love the Microsoft console will look to the borders and see what else is possible, optionally setting the stage for the $7,500,000,000 lemon, not because of Bethesda, but because gamers have a lack of trust in Microsoft and the fact that some had the numbers that only 1 out of 3 considered the new Microsoft console, the gives me the impression that Microsoft has a much larger problem and buying software houses will not solve it, making visionary games do and the is the lesson Microsoft has not learned. They opened the door for Sony to look what else is out there, what else could become an exclusive and the is where Sony will win and gamers will win. Because it is on the edge of possible gaming where new gamers will be born, new games will be born and at the end of my life I see that there are options coming towards gamers, games the will create new gamers, it will create new creativity and new thinking through gaming and this is a good thing. The simple truth is the there is real gaming beyond Ubisoft and Microsoft, true gaming is never soft, it is challenging and the is where we need to look, we need to look where they are not looking. That is how I got most my IP in several fields. Not by being some bullet point presenter like all the others, but by looking in a direction they decided not to bother looking. That is how most revolutionary IP is created, and it is funny as this is the way Microsoft and Ubisoft started, to look where no was. Too bad they forgot about the part of the equation and I reckon the Sony is waking up to that lesson at present.

 

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September 21, 2020 · 23:28

And that was a hard sell?

OK, we all have these moments where we think ‘I can do that’, in my mind I can be an NHL goalie, becoming the wall in a goal that no one can pass (Wayne Gretzky eat your heart out). I can be as delusional as I want to be thinking that I could be the goalie of the Edmonton Oilers, the San Jose Sharks, or perhaps the Vancouver Canucks. Yup, nothing wrong with my capacity to dream, but what happens when we truly believe that? When we create something bigger than ourselves? I have created the IP of 5G, of videotapes that have not yet released and the other day I came up with the concept of a new TV series, based on an all time classic. Yet what happens when we add our own spice to the equation? In my case it is a space station, it is about 500 meters, roughly vibe shaped and when the 8 people wake up, they realise that they are no longer home, but they do not know where they are. It is that setting that I used to create a new series. So far 8 episodes per season. 

As I started, I got to (avoiding spoilers as much as possible)

Introduction, backstory

Here we start the introduction of the 8 people, it seems a little familiar, because that is how introductions tend to be. We see it from the first person, then the second person, all are confused and all are a little scared, both the males and females alike. The 16 represent different people, the pragmatic lady where we see flash backs where she is a bag lady in Chicago, now cleaned and like the others in some kind of a white overall, the African American who is on the flashback a hedge fund manager, cold and calculating, a mechanic from Paris Texas, looking at the rooms around him, having his own thought. The story continues and as we see the rooms who are all spic and span, we end the episode where they see a large window with fish, corals and no light in sight. The fish are according to one of the man, really deep sea fish.

Where are we? (+ continuance backstory)

The story continues, but more focussed on the where they are, with here and there a small back story recall. We see the icons on the doors, the coloured icons on the wall, the 3d maps and icon based settings of the rooms, as they are setting in their new environment, three groups form, two groups of 5 and one of 6. At that the groups start to focus on the icons on their overalls, speculating on the icons of gender and trying to work out the meaning of colour.

Symbols, iconography, Rosetta Stone (+ continuance where are we?)

One of the 5 groups finds a stone, The icons that are around them and on them and the stone gives three other versions of the symbol, the gender, the setting mechanical, financial, medical, logistical, and many more, they all reflect on what is on the station in one way or another. It is the that another group finds a tablet, and group three finds another display tool. When they unite they compare notes and they united in the rosetta stone room to share the knowledge they have found and what they think things are.

First breakthrough, water

They are still in the setting that thy do not know just how deep they are, there is nothing to set the stage of how deep they are, the entire setting is a little unnerving. Yet they start to identify icons and when they see the icon for water, they all rejoice, their first stage of survival is found, they now have water, thirst and the need for a bathroom.

That was a bidet. second breakthrough food, first 24 hours passed

As they approach the first 24 hours in their new environment, they find the food stash, the C-Rations give light to them being in a military experiment. 

The map room, memories, the last hour of some

In this episode they find a map room, giving them status, giving them a view of the size of the station, and we see the last moments of some of the members, their abductions are in a stage where they were in a bad place.

Coffee corner with coffee, the map room continuance, more water

As they are outside to the map room, the corner there is a place where they relax a little. The setting is one where they discuss what some of the systems are, and as they are somewhere deep in the ocean, they are not willing to test the devices that much, fear sets in, but everything looks OK, they sit together translating the icons as much as they can. It leads to a different water symbol, one that turns out to be the showers, they have found a place where they can clean up.

Almost 48 hours, the view of a lifetime, where are we? and what is that?

This starts in the so called coffee corner, there is a button that was out of sight, one of the women finds it and presses it, the wall moves up and they get to see the vast blackness of the ocean, or so they think. So as the stare t the blackness, they see the light come from the side, it is bright light, and as the view becomes more in sight, they all realise that they are staring at the sombrero galaxy, almost a dozen times bigger than the Hubble telescope can project. Then one of the men realises something and they run through the corridor to the other end of the corridor, where a similar wall is, they press the button and they get to see the spiral galaxy, it is absolutely huge, they are not in the ocean, they are in space and they are far from earth, the view ends season 1. So far I got most of season 2 designed with a rather spooky cliff hanger towards Season 3 and I got to be a little eager beaver when I set up the cliffhanger to season 4, but left the rest of season 3 alone.

Yup, that was my creativity, and I reflected on the Rendez-Vouz with Rama, a book by Arthur C. Clarke, a book he wrote in 1973. My introduction to the book was a video game produced in 1996 by Sierra On-Line. It was my introduction to the story, it is what drove me to make my version of it whilst trying to embody the thoughts of Arthur C. Clarke (based on 2001). 

So when will you design something unique to you? I got my creativity with me, the list is long and distinguished. And I do not care where this ends, I have a plan with my 5G IP and it will more than set me right for life. The direct way to deal with greed is to make the other thoughts public domain, so that no one can claim them and they are basically free to use, that too is an option in IP, only the greed driven forget about that part of the equation. Should you deny that part, then have a little look at the HSBC bank and the FINCEN document leak, look at that level of greed and consider where we are. When we see the facilitation to crime to this degree and we realise that governments are basically doing nothing, you know where you are and I bet you haven’t even realised that you are without a paddle. I think that Arthur C. Clarke got it right when he named the vessel the Rama. He got it right 47 years ago, so how wrong have we been for the last few decades?

Just a thought to consider.

 

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September 18, 2020 · 22:27

Not merely another movie

This is not the now, previously (1-2 years ago) I came up with a new idea for a movie, it is not an action movie and it is not a documentary. In the movie a really wealthy entrepreneur (played by Chris Hemsworth) witnesses an event and it sticks with him, as he goes through the day he sees movies about lobsters, all whilst he eats one, he has half a dozen screens in his office and he is bombarded with data upon data. As this man is considering things, an event sets his mind towards seaweed, in this stage he creates a new seaweed farm outside of Chennai, where he farms seaweed, in his setting he also starts replanting seaweed to keep the balance, but it is during this stage that India gets hit with a massive tsunami, even as he has little damage, the eastern coast is hit harsh and that is when he sets up large crematoria to facilitate for the massive deaths and the people are exempt for payment, the receive the ashes in an urn. It is a few weeks later when the media is getting a breakthrough on affordable seaweed and the drying methods that allows for a setting to feed the world, in the end titles we see the presentation where he presents Soylent Green.

OK the twist is a little naughty, but who remembers Soylent Green, the movie that propelled Charlton Heston in 1973 to even greater heights than ever before. Even as it was merely loosely based on Make Room! Make Room!, the movie had a profound impact on me. And there is a precedence for this. When we consider that seaweed grew from 13.5 million tonnes in 1995 to just over 30 million tonnes in 2016. (at http://www.fao.org/3/ca0191en/ca0191en.pdf), there is more information besides the numbers on page 10, there is a larger impact that seaweed has on corals, as such farming where possible for seaweed is not the worst idea. 

We need to start looking in the outer margins not for what we want, but for what does the trick whilst we find ways to overcome other issues. To see this we need to take heed of the words by Douglas Rasher, who gives us “The important takeaway is that competition between corals and seaweeds can cause dramatic changes in seaweed physiology, both in terms of their growth and their defense”, so even as I take sides with the coral, there is both an upside and a downside. The question becomes, am I on the right side? The coral bleaching gives rise to the fact I am, but nature is a stage of balancing seesaws, you set the balance on one, the others go out of alignment pretty quickly, and messing with them all tends to be disastrous, as such the rule of torts law come into effect, small steps, small steps to the end goal and in case of nature the steps need to be smaller still. 

So as I remember the idea I had on the prequel of Soylent Green, the stage we find ourselves in is not the movie, but the original it was based upon. The book explored the consequences of unchecked population growth on society and what the book envisioned in 1966 ended up being almost here in 2020. There is a rare setting of foresight here, even as the numbers are not on the level yet, the movie played in 2022 and this is not that far away, even as the numbers are still a little off, the need to feed the world remains, the UN gives us “An estimated 821 million people in the world suffered from hunger in 2018”, so even as we need to accept the cannibalism is still way off, the idea of adding seaweed to the global food source is not, and we need to consider it in a serious way to add seaweed to every supermarket there is. Yet we also need to take heed on life in the oceans, when a billion people rely on the same plants that feeds the herbivorous fish of the ocean, something will give way and our record on accepting the consequences is not that good, but all we can do is d the best we can, yet is it enough?

Our lives, our exploitations, our shortages and our needs are not a movie, yet we tend to think it is, because our lives are easier this way, when we blame it on the silver screen, or set the watch towards a reality TV show, but reality is less sweet, has less honey and a lot more vinegar. And our sour setting will come home to roost soon enough, when the hunger facet goes beyond the 800 million mark and hits 1.2 billion, it will pour into the realms where the media actually looks, I wonder how the shortage will be introduced, or better stated how those controlling the media would like it to be explained. 

 

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