Consortium of Seven

Premiering this past Tuesday (Oct. 6) on Fox was the sci-fi action series Next . Starring Madmen alum John Slattery as tech billionaire Paul LeBlanc, and Fernada Andrade as FBI agent Shea Salazar, an unlikely alliance as LeBlanc warns that the company he founded and was recently ousted from has apparently unleashed a digital monster he'd once worked on then locked away with explicit instructions to never restart the project. Well, what should one expect a tech company, now bereft of its brilliant founder's daily input, to do if it's trying to perform for the next quarterly report and knows there's a potential financial bonanza possibly mostly completed, and only sealed away because the former boy genius had just gone off his meds?   When I started watching it I had more than simple deja vu, because the show was originally scheduled to be a mid-season replacement for the 2019/20 season, and promo material had been out in a timeframe appropriate for that. Thi...

 Welcome to Thursday, everyone.  Time to see what random nonsense I picked up at thrift stores, resale shops and Little Free Libraries this week.   Laurell K. Hamilton is a nice author from Missouri who generally writes a lot of urban vampire and shapeshifter novels set in the St. Louis area, but I'm more a fan of these, the Merry Gentry novels.  They're set in a world where the Seelie and the Unseelie Courts have always been visible to humanity and they were essentially expelled from Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, taking refuge under the Thomas Jefferson administration in the serpent mounts of Missouri as long as they kept fairly quiet.  But now Merry, who is both Unseelie and Brownie, is starting to wake up the old magic and that opens a whole raft of political troubles in the fairy and the human worlds. Also, there's a lot  of sex.  Like, Damn. I'm an absolute sucker for exploration stories, and one of the weird joys of Hidden Figures ...

  "Lilith, Adam's erste frau"  Ernst Barlach, 1922 When your computer is giving you trouble, blame Eve, the first woman. (Except she wasn’t.) Here is what a prolific author on Christian theology, philosophy and apologetics advises:  “By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.”   Peter Kreeft The myth of Adam and Eve is pervasive in our culture; no matter what our religion. It affects our beliefs about sin, knowledge, and women. It is a primary excuse for misogyny and underlies the fear of women’s power, women’s bodies, and women’s innate knowledge. This creation myth is powerful. Myths are not lies, as we sometimes think they are; they are stories created by humans to explain the vast inexplicable universe and humans’ place in it.  Creation myths are important in every culture because they help us make sense of where our world began a...

Reading is great. I was always a reader. I don’t remember what it was like not to be able to read. I’m lucky. Not everyone finds it as easy to read & not everyone enjoys it. That seems like a great pity. As a reader, you learn, you empathise, you grow. Added to that, you’re never bored. There really is something for everyone. So many genres, subjects & formats exist for you to get into, now more than ever. There is more representation, although that’s still necessarily evolving as awareness & possibilities expand. Whilst traditional print format magazines & newspapers might be dying out (not helped by lockdown: RIP my beloved  Q magazine), technology dictates that there are more devices & platforms for reading than before.  For my most recent birthday & in part due to the inability to trail endlessly round bookshops (thanks again, Covid), I did what I said I never would & bought myself a Kindle. There are advantages & disadvantages of course, n...

    We made it to October somehow. I'm not feeling it yet, but I'll try to lean in on more horror themes somewhere this month.   Another odd mix this time. I could claim subjective reality as a linking theme, but, really, wouldn't that apply almost every week?    I'll start with the weakest of the recently-viewed items; this one I found on Hulu .     As if Australia wasn't naturally teeming with things out to kill you, writer/director Sandra Sciberras brings us a space-bourne menace with The Dustwalker (2019; 95 min; Unrated? I couldn't spot one. There's some violence, blood, and some marginally gory remains, but all fairly tame. No sex scenes. I'm fairly unresponsive to profanity these days, so, what may be there I didn't notice.)    A small town in the desert-bound outback, where the sheriff and her family are within days of leaving for a new life in The City, something falls from the sky overnight. Damage to the local cell t...

  Consortium of Seven: Year 2 Seven writers each take a day of the week to say something.  Happy Thursday, everyone.  Settle down with your coffee and a danish and let's check out what weird stuff I found this week. Troll 2: The 20th Anniversary Nilbog Edition .  Now, look, I have a weird love of absolute trash movies.  Sometimes, that leads me down the weird of watching something like  Velocipastor  (tagline: "He's A Man Of The Claw") and sometimes it leads me to weird semi-sequels like  Troll 2 , a movie that is barely a sequel and more of a weird continuation that involves creatures named Nilbogs (work on that anagram for a second) and a cast of really enthusiastic amateurs, including the local dentist.  So I was real happy to find this edition, in far more hi-def than this movie might deserve. I'm a sucker for steelbooks.  If you're not familiar with them, they're (usually) limited editions metal cases that you can find at Best Buy o...