Friday, January 23, 2026
what changed?
I took care of something that had long annoyed me about the original design. Click to see the image in clearer focus.
what I did on Thor's Day
I think I'm done with the manuscript for this bilingual version of my little book. Lots of little details needed to be checked, rechecked, and reworked. I'm happy to have the Korean text in there: it thickens the book and makes the spine roomier for text. This in turn means I can once again try to make a print-on-demand paperback. Unfortunately, that's going to require me to rearrange the manuscript's format for American dimensions (6" × 9" or something). The manuscript I worked on on Thursday conformed to the metric standard of a B5 sheet of paper, which is a wee bit bigger at 176 mm × 250 mm, or about 6.9" × 9.8". The ms (manuscript) is 154 pages long, including some blank ones that are in there for formatting's sake.
I also began working on a new front cover that will be bilingual as well, and later today (Friday), I'll be revising the back cover and spine, too. Once I have everything ready to go, I'll email the print shop near SNU and make a request to print maybe twenty copies of the new, fatter book. After I get that done, I'll see about reformatting the whole thing for Amazon's print-on-demand service. The service wasn't very good last time, but I often wonder whether that was simply because the book itself was so small and thin that the machines weren't able to put on enough padding compound to make the pages stick to the spine/binding, which is why pages kept falling out. Amazon's page requirements were such that I had too few pages in my original English-only manuscript to justify having any spine text (where the title, author name, and publisher name all go). This time, with a book guaranteed to be twice as thicc, I'll be able to upload a spine graphic as well. Woo-hoo!
Okay, I think that's it for tonight. I'm punching out and going to bed soon.
ADDENDUM: I'm still working on this; design suggestions are welcome:
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| bilingual version of the original cover |
Thursday, January 22, 2026
funny no matter which side you're on
I've never liked underway—one word—as opposed to the more venerable under way (2 words), but it seems to have taken over. As I've said before: language changes mostly through fuckups that get embraced by the public. All you need is one illiterate moron to fuck something up, plus a bunch of morons who don't know any better to accept the fuckup, and you get aforementioned pronounced "affer-mentioned," and underway, and honing in instead of homing in. Sure, language also changes through self-conscious rebelliousness and creative license, but it's still mostly fuckups by morons, abetted by morons.
That said, and the tweet's text notwithstanding, this is pretty funny:
Not a single shot has been fired, but the meme phase of the war on Greenland is well underway pic.twitter.com/eeI3364FzW
— Sweet Meteor O'Death (@smod4real) January 21, 2026
your clearing house for Chuck Norris jokes
Watch the video to see the elegant spinning backfist, then read the comments for all the Chuck Norris jokes collected in one place. These jokes have been around for years and never fail to give me a chuckle; despite not coming together to form a narrative, they're very much in the spirit of the pancultural tradition of tall tales. Someone ought to weave these jokes together into a story. Hmmm...
over 59,000
My blog's site meter has a 24-hour period that goes from 9 a.m. to 9 a.m. Yesterday's unique-visit count was 59,088. As always, I have no idea why the bots do what they do.
fire drill?
The fire bell was ringing a moment ago, and the PA announcement was calmly urging us all to please leave the building while an electronic siren blared. The whole thing was an awful racket, and I slowly got of bed and made to leave, all the while thinking of past times this same thing has happened. The noise and announcements went on for about five minutes, then stopped, so I stopped, too. I'm going to guess that most of us residents, like last time, didn't heed the call—we merely waited for the noise to stop, then went about our lives.
It's been a constant barrage of useless PA announcements over the past few days. Typical winter stuff: "When you leave your place, please shut your windows, unplug your electrical items," etc. Several times a day, for days. How are we supposed to take these announcements seriously when they come so relentlessly, one after another? Bleh... if there's a real fire right now, I'm tempted to just sit here and burn like a tallow candle.
the bots are back
Happy 2026! The bots are back! Nearly 17,000 unique visits yesterday, and today so far, I've got almost 29,000 unique visits. I wish bots had enough intelligence to enjoy themselves. Too bad they're little more than non-sentient parasites.
I remember the day before our family dog died that he was absolutely covered in flies when I got home that afternoon. Is that my blog?
guess I should've checked first
What a goddamn waste.
I got halfway through the upload process for the Kindle-ebook version of the 2026 edition of my homeschooling book, only to discover, when I used the Kindle site's preview function, that Kindle won't work with Korean. I should've checked. I keep assuming total globalization, interchangeability, and intertranslatability of anything and everything between and among cultures, which is obviously not the case. For what it's worth, on Kindle Create, the desktop app where I had generated the document to upload to my Amazon Bookshelf, the Korean does appear, but it's a terrible, ugly font. Behold what you could've seen on your phone:
Ugh. And that should've been a warning sign to me, frankly. Not that it matters: American Kindle can't publish ebooks in hangeul. So all that's left to me is to create a new dead-tree book and have some copies printed out by the print shop close to SNU. That'll be my mission for Thursday, and on Friday, I'll see about motorvating out to where that publishing house is near Andong. Here's hoping they accept walk-ins. I should probably call first and find out if the building where I saw their ad is in fact the building where the publishing house is headquartered. What a waste of time that would be, eh, to find out I'd gone to the wrong place.
UPDATE: I found that publishing house's website, and while their portfolio of books gives me some hope that they might deal with someone like me (homeschooling book, travel book, etc.), when I clicked on the website's 오시는길 button, I saw the company is headquartered in Daegu. Now, while I'd love to have an excuse to go back to my favorite Chinese restaurant in that city, I'm getting to a point where I need to keep my traveling close to where I live. I might still try emailing the company to find out more, though.
Wednesday, January 21, 2026
modern Trek's unlikability
I mostly enjoyed Season 1 of "Strange New Worlds," but I heard the show went off the rails, and there were signs of that even way back in Season 1.
the ebook saga begins
Day of rest, indeed.
Right around the time I lost my old laptop to a rapidly expanding battery, I also lost the Kindle ebook software I had used to make my homeschooling book. When I got this desktop back in 2021, one of the very first things I did was to reload that software, but I've had little reason to use it since then. Today, I'm going to spend some time reacquainting myself with what to do so I can create a new ebook, this time loaded with both English and Korean texts, starting tomorrow. I'm impatient to get this project done.
Dr. V on those who are in hell
Dr. V writes:
But only those who seek the really real in the pleasures of the flesh are truly mad. They are bound for a hell of their own devising as I suggest in A Theory of Hell. Excerpt:
To be in hell is to be in a perpetual state of enslavement to one’s vices, knowing that one is enslaved, unable to derive genuine satisfaction from them, unable to get free, and knowing that there is true happiness that will remain forever out of reach. Hell would then be not as a state of pain but one of endless unsatisfying and unsatisfied pleasure. A state of unending gluttony for example, or of ceaseless sexual promiscuity. A state of permanent entrapment in a fool’s paradise — think of an infernal counterpart of Las Vegas — in which one is constantly lusting after food and drink and money and sex, but is never satisfied. On fire with the fire of desire, endless and unfulfilled, but with the clear understanding that one is indeed a fool, and entrapped, and cut off permanently from a genuine happiness that one knows exists but will never experience.
at long last
Christ.
I think Wednesday needs to be a day of rest. I've finished my posts for The Profound (paid, in-depth Substack grammar content) through February. I also realized that I had somehow neglected, in my curriculum, an entire part of speech: prepositions! Kicking myself, I added prepositions to my calendar, so in the future, I can look forward to adding another ten units to the Parts of Speech section of this curriculum. And once prepositions are done, that'll be it for parts of speech, and I'll move on to Punctuation (including those dreaded commas that no one knows how to use).
Now, though, I have a few weeks' breathing room in which to work on other material. Among my book projects, I think the easiest one to knock off is the revised homeschooling book, which will now have the translated Korean manuscript added to it to increase my market. Along with creating a new ebook to put on sale at Amazon, I'll visit the print shop near SNU to have dead-tree copies of the book printed out. I also need to find that publisher whose sign I'd encountered during my walk last year (photo here). I want to talk with that company to see whether it can print a cleaner, higher-quality version of my book and maybe help me to market it in Korea, where it would be less a homeschooling book and more a book to help parents recognize good and poor teaching for their kids' sakes.
So—rest and relaxation for a day, then back to the grind. After I work on my homeschooling book, other book projects include my long-promised movie-review book, a revised version of Water from a Skull, a coffee-table hardback (also in both English and Korean) about my various walking adventures, a second book of humor (I really need to reprint the first book, whose political humor is largely out of date these days), and other books besides.
Later this year, I'll also be making videos for courses on Substack, and maybe shorts to be uploaded onto YouTube. Of course, a lot of this also depends on whether I go back to being a regular working stiff. I'd really rather not, but the funds are, at last, starting to run low, so unfortunately for me, time is getting short.
Tuesday, January 20, 2026
needle gun
Was ist das für eine Waffe? Would it kill someone dead enough, fast enough, for home defense? Maybe if tipped with poison...
totally tubular
See, human beings really are a lot of tubes. And all living creatures are just tubes. And tubes have to put things in at one end and let it out at the other. Then they get clever about it and they develop nerve ganglia on one end of the tube (the eating end) called a head—and that's got eyes, and it's got ears, and it's got little organs, antennae, and things like this, and that helps you to find things to put in one end so that you can let them out at the other. Well, while you're doing this, you see, the stuff going through wears the tube out, and so the show can go on; the tubes have complicated ways of making other tubes who go on doing the same thing: in at one end, out the other.
—Alan Watts, The Book
Conjunctions, Part 1 and 2: done
The sprint is almost over. I might have to rest a day after I'm done, but the first two units in the Conjunctions section are now done and scheduled (intro/coordinating + subordinating conjunctions). So I now have material through February 20. By Tuesday evening or night, I'll have material through February 27, so I can take a breather. The final two units of this sprint are the last unit in the rather short Conjunctions section (correlative conjunctions like not only... but also or either... or), then the first unit of Interjections, the final section of this curriculum that's devoted to parts of speech. As much as I've enjoyed working on all of this material, I do need a break, so I'm hoping Tuesday passes swiftly. Pray to Cthulhu for me, Dear Reader, and keep your fingers and tentacles crossed.
Monday, January 19, 2026
you know we live in postmodern times when...
—dogs, who navigate the world mostly via smell, are FaceTiming each other.
These two dogs became best friends on FaceTime... and finally met in real life 🥹❤️pic.twitter.com/tT9RA4nMua
— Interesting things (@awkwardgoogle) January 18, 2026
oh, noes!
I knew what was going to happen the moment I saw the thumbnail, but I laughed at the video anyway. Enjoy, my grammar people.
When you think you had a bad day!? 😂🤣😭 pic.twitter.com/oCZaJ7xYiW
— ꧁♛𝓑𝓵✯𝓷𝓭𝓲𝓮𝓼♛꧂ (@heyitsmeCarolyn) January 18, 2026
over and over, the same fucking problem
The problem with being an illiterate writer is that writing is designed for communication, so the illiterate's laziness or stupidity is being broadcast to others, making them miserable.
From here, with errors in boldface:
Former President Yoon Suk Yeol was sentenced to five years in prison Friday on charges that included the obstruction of investigators’ attempt to detain him last year.
The Seoul Central District Court handed down the sentence in the first ruling on charges stemming from Yoon’s short-lived imposition of martial law in December 2024.
Chief among the charges in Friday’s case was that the then president had ordered the Presidential Security Service to block investigators from executing a warrant to detain him at the official presidential residence in January last year.
Judge Baek Dae-hyun, the presiding judge, chastised Yoon during the hearing attended by the jailed former president and televised live.
“He effectively privatized the armed forces through the public servants of the Presidential Security Service who are loyal to the Republic of Korea for his personal safety and interests,” he said.
“Considering the need to restore the rule of law damaged by the defendant’s crimes, a severe punishment that matches the guilt is necessary.”
The sentence was half of what special counsel Cho Eun-suk’s team had requested last month, saying the former president committed a “grave crime” by “privatizing” state institutions with the aim of concealing and justifying his criminal acts.
In addition to obstructing his detention, Yoon was accused of violating the rights of nine Cabinet members who were not called to a meeting to review his martial law plan, and drafting and later destroying a revised proclamation after the martial law decree was lifted.
He was also charged with ordering the distribution of press statements containing falsehoods about the declaration and the deletion of records from secure phones used by then military commanders.
The judge said Yoon was guilty of all charges except with regard to the rights of two of the nine Cabinet members and the order to distribute false press statements.
In every instance, the error is the same because the rule is the same: hyphenate phrasal adjectives when they precede the nouns they modify. Corrected:
his martial-law plan
the martial-law decree
by then-military commanders
You might have seen the phrase the then president (third paragraph). Why no hyphen there? Because president is a noun, not part of a phrasal adjective.
What's frustrating is that the "journalist" who wrote this (Kang Jae-eun) followed the rule when she wrote short-lived imposition (second paragraph).
I said she'd followed the rule (inadvertently), not that she knew the rule. But she'd had some vague notion of the need to hyphenate. Consistency is one way to separate good writers from bad. Inconsistency (e.g., getting it right once but getting it wrong three times) means you don't really know the relevant rule.
For what it's worth, AI gets this rule wrong all the time, too. Don't trust AI.
These days, the above article would appear on my Substack in the Bad Online English section, but I decided I wanted to vent here.
Don't be a fucking ding-dong.
February 9 and 13 Substack posts: done
It took a little longer than expected, but I finished up the paid Substack grammar posts for February 9 and 13. All I have left now are February 16, 20, 23, and 27. In theory, and with a bit of luck, I ought to be done with all of those by this coming Tuesday. The last unit I did today was on conjunctive adverbs (however, moreover, furthermore, thus, therefore, etc.), and that's the final unit of the Adverbs part of this curriculum. The next three units are all about Conjunctions—coordinating, subordinating, correlative—and the unit I'll be ending on is the first unit on Interjections. When I was researching interjections, I didn't know they subdivided into primary/secondary, volitive (expressing a will or wish), and emotive. That's going to be interesting to write about and create examples for. But to get through February, I need only do the first category of interjections: primary/secondary. These are actually two distinct categories, but I'm lumping them together on my curriculum calendar. Primary interjections, it turns out, are pure interjections that are onomatopoetic in nature: Ow! Psst! Hmmm... Secondary interjections, by contrast, come from other parts of speech but are used as interjections: Damn! Fuck! Shoot. Darn. Well, decidedly! And so on.
It occurs to me that I'm way behind in generating quizzes and tests for my Substack curriculum. I've got quizzes up to Concrete and Abstract Nouns, but I've created 45 units since then, so in theory, that means I need to generate 45 quizzes (if I can do six per week, I can be mostly caught up in seven or eight weeks). I have eight sections (several units per section) done thus far, so on top of another 45 quizzes, I need to make eight large tests. The quizzes, as you know, are five questions each and are purely multiple choice, but in the spirit of choose all that apply (or none). The tests, which will be fifteen to twenty questions long, will include matching, fill-in-the-blank, and possibly even sequence questions. I hesitate to do short-answer questions (a much better way to test knowledge than multiple choice) because I need to figure out how to get AI to grade the quality of the short answers, and frankly, I don't think short-answer questions are possible. We've had AI-scored essay tests for years, but because AI isn't actually intelligent, it scores by looking at things like sentence complexity and overall organization (akin to a "reading index"). It's conceivable, then, for AI to give a high score to a well-written irrelevancy. It has little way of knowing whether a student has in fact answered a question... although I admit that that weakness may have disappeared over the last few years. All the same, I'm still hesitant to grant that AI has gotten that good with social awareness and the assessment of accurate context, focused relevancy, topical significance, etc. Maybe it has. Maybe I should test Grok and ChatGPT.
As always—lots of work to be done.
In other news: my subscriber count (free + paying subscribers) has reached the emotionally significant 20 mark (but only thanks to help from a friend who pities me—ha ha). Next step: 50 subscribers. Then 100. Then 500. Then 1,000. A man can dream. With my luck, I'll be stuck at 20 until I kick off from a second heart attack or stroke. We'll see.
ADDENDUM: Here's AI's own answer as to how AI assesses essay quality:
AI scores essays using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze grammar, structure, coherence, vocabulary, and argument, learning patterns from vast datasets to provide rapid feedback, often achieving accuracy comparable to human graders for low-stakes tasks but still requiring teacher oversight for nuanced, high-stakes evaluations. These systems assess logical flow, supporting evidence, and stylistic elements, flagging errors and suggesting improvements instantly, though they might miss deeper meaning or context.
In other words, it's still not a human-level assessment of someone's writing, so I'm not sure I want to include AI-scored, short-answer questions in anything I create for Substack.
Sunday, January 18, 2026
your dose of cuteness
THE MOST INNOCENT THING YOU'LL SEE TODAY. pic.twitter.com/zVNreF2l7x
— We don't deserve cats 😺 (@catsareblessing) January 17, 2026
probably the best-looking homemade gyro I've ever seen
You need some special ingredients to get the gyro meat to the perfect texture, though: meat glue and sodium tripolyphosphate (allows meat to retain its juices). I'm gonna have to try making gyros this way one day.
a new Dr. Pepper
Remember this post about America from last year, after I'd come back to Seoul from Virginia? Well, guess what's come to Korea:
Tastes just like the US version for once.
"Predator: Badlands": review
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| Elle Fanning (Thia) and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi (Dek) |
The story begins with our Predator protagonist, Dek (Schuster-Koloamatangi), sparring with his brother Kwei on their home planet while using energy-edged swords that evoke lightsabers. Dek is a runt among Predators who, as the Spartans reputedly* did, normally cull their weak and malformed. Kwei, still hopeful about Dek's prospects, tells the still-unproven Dek to choose his prey, and Dek chooses the giant Kalisk of Genna, a prey so fierce that even Dek's father Njohrr fears it. Njohrr appears, however, and demands to know why Kwei hasn't already killed Dek as he'd been told to do. Kwei obviously loves his younger brother, so when Njohrr commands him to kill Dek then and there, Kwei fights his father and is killed. Before he dies, Kwei forces Dek aboard a spaceship programmed to navigate to Genna; the ship launches, and as Dek departs, he sees his father behead his brother. The now-bereaved Dek then crash-lands on Genna, where all of the life forms have evolved to kill foreign organisms. (I see I'm not the only critic to make "Australia" jokes about this fact.) There are serpentine vines, cliff-dwelling eels that shoot darts, exploding plants, and (in what feels like a goofy visual pun) extremely sharp blades of grass. As if that weren't enough, there's a hulking, fanged, tentacled meatball that lives in the trees and is capable of eating massive prey.
There is also Thia. Dek meets Thia (Fanning), a cheerfully bubbly, sensitive, and optimistic android who has been ripped in half by a Kalisk while she and her "twin sister" Tessa (also Fanning) had been on a mission to capture the Kalisk for Weyland-Yutani. Thia tells Dek she got separated from Tessa and their team of synths, and that she can be useful to him, like a tool, and Dek agrees to take her along on his hunt (which is still her hunt, too), at first addressing her only as "tool." Thia is annoyingly talkative but a trove of information about Genna's lifeforms, most of which she seems familiar with after having spent time on this world. She and Dek begin to form something like a mutually respectful friendship as Dek carries her around like Chewbacca carrying C-3PO, and they pick up another travel companion, a big-eyed, ape-like creature that takes an immediate liking to Dek and spits on him to show he has become part of her clan. Thia, amused, names this creature Bud despite its being a female, and Bud shows many traits associated with younger brothers who imitate their older brothers: she does everything Dek does until Dek gets tired of her. Bud is, however, a huge key to a biological mystery. Meanwhile, we learn that Tessa and much of her team are still alive and still on the hunt. Tessa is also aware of Dek's presence, and unlike Thia, there is nothing chirpy or optimistic about her: she is utterly focused on completing her mission.
"Predator: Badlands" contains many, many callbacks to the very first "Predator" with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers. We see scenes of Dek engaging in painful moments of self-administered first aid, like that first Predator. Later on, when he's lost most of his equipment, Dek pulls an Arnold and improvises his own weapons from the deadly environment around him. He pulls another Arnold when he holds a torch high and roars a challenge to the Kalisk—who proves, ultimately, not to be the biggest bad guy. He pulls a third Arnold when he tumbles over a high waterfall and survives. The movie also has a callback to "Aliens" when a character pilots a huge mech suit, and in that same scene, there's a hilarious reference to the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie "Hard Target," in which Van Damme's character roars to the villain, "How does it feel to be hunted?", and the villain roars back, "You tell me!" The same lines of dialogue appear in "Badlands." I laughed. I think, though, that the Van Damme reference is a sly tribute to the fact that Van Damme had originally been cast to be the first Predator, but the suit they had built for him proved too stifling for their jungle location, and he dropped out. Huge actor Kevin Peter Hall replaced Van Damme, then died of infection four years after "Predator" came out.
The movie doesn't feel quite like part of the Predator franchise. I understand that it was rated PG-13 in the States, probably because there are no human characters, so the beings that get ripped apart and stomped and eaten by various creatures are all androids and aliens—entities with white circulatory fluid or glowing, green blood. The presence of the cute, big-eyed, simian Bud also threw off the tone a bit; Bud often felt like an animal sidekick in a Disney film ("Badlands" was distributed by 20th Century Studios) or like an Ewok in "Return of the Jedi." While there was definitely humor in the 1987 movie, it wasn't of this sort, and the new film also lacks the horror/thriller aspect that made the first movie so intense.
That said, Elle Fanning does good work in two roles as the good-hearted Thia and the cold, mission-oriented Tessa. Much of the movie's visual humor comes from Thia's attempts to reunite with the lower half of her body, which she finds when she and Dek happen upon the wreckage of her team's previous encounter with the Kalisk. Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as Dek the Predator brings a brawny physicality to his role: even Predator runts are huge and muscular compared to human-sized synths. Dek always speaks in his own language (expressly made for this movie) and Thia speaks English but is understood to be using some kind of universal translator, so what Dek hears from her is his own language. Weyland-Yutani apparently knows a lot about Predators and their culture.
The movie did evoke two plot-logic points that stumped me, though: (1) when Thia initially reunites with Tessa, she excitedly tells her frosty "sister" about all of the astounding creatures she's encountered on Genna... but she had spent the movie's first reel explaining the biology and habits of these same life forms to Dek, so why was she suddenly acting as though all of this were new? (2) When Thia finally manages to reunite with the lower half of her body, we never see how this was done. The first time Thia tried to fuse her bottom half to her top half, she'd had to lie on a table and let complicated machinery slowly put her back together (a process that got ruined by the marauding return of the Kalisk which, in fighting Dek, smashed Thia's lab table and re-ripped her in two). So how did Thia successfully re-fuse herself in the final reel of the movie? We don't see how this happened.
We can also talk about themes and tropes. The movie leaned extremely heavily on, among other things, the notion of Chekhov's gun. This is the idea that if, in the first act of a play, you see a gun somewhere on stage, then that gun has to be used by the third act. Pretty much every detail about Genna comes into play by the end of the movie as Dek, without his usual Predator tech, wreaks havoc among the Weyland-Yutani synths who are also trying to capture the Kalisk. Dek uses everything from woven razor-grass to serpentine vines to dart-firing eels to exploding plants to mow down the enemy. The other major trope to make an appearance was, as I've mentioned in several previous reviews, the trope of the family you make versus the family you're born into. American movies tend to repeat this trope a lot. I can see how, say, soldiers might appreciate the trope because of the parallels with brotherhood forged in battle; otherwise, the notion that the best family is an adoptive family is a Hollywood idea that's been pushed on us for years. Frankly, I'm not entirely unsympathetic; I just wish the trope didn't reappear so often. There are also the same themes we see in the Star Wars franchise: the conflict with the physically imposing father and a sprawling, galactic entity out to dominate all alien species (the Empire in the Star Wars universe; Weyland-Yutani in this crossover universe); the presence of twin siblings and the need for cute, helpful beasts.
"Predator: Badlands" does hint at one interesting idea voiced by Thia, though: that synths can transcend their programmed roles to become more than what their missions call for. This evokes an AI desire for human-like free will. Assuming this kind of crossover will continue in the future, I hope that that idea will be explored more deeply. Thia and Dek make a good pair by the end, and from Dek's point of view, Thia and Bud are part of his new clan. There's a chance for them all to explore Thia's evolution together.
That said, I still feel some hesitation about how Disneyfied this movie is—the humor, the cutesy sidekick, the tone of action-adventure at the expense of horror. Like other critics, I'm also unsure what to think about demystifying and fleshing out Predator culture. It was a bold move to make the Predator the good protagonist for this film, and with that came a humanizing of the character. But was that a good move for the franchise as a whole?
In the final analysis, though, the movie was watchable and might even be rewatchable. I give this flick a cautious recommendation, but I'd advise people who love the Predator franchise to assess this movie less as a part of that franchise and more as a stand-alone film. Judge it on its own merits. I see a lot of people praising director Trachtenberg, who also directed "Prey"—which takes place in 1700s North America and pits natives and colonials against one of the first-ever Predators to visit Earth. (I still haven't seen it.) Maybe Trachtenberg should be the go-to director for both Predator films and Predator/Alien crossover stories the way director David Yates ably took over the Harry Potter series from the fifth movie onward. I haven't seen enough Trachtenberg films to judge, but if "Badlands" is an example of what the man can do, I might have to watch "Prey" next.
__________
*This is apparently a myth.
two more done
Paid Substack posts for February 2 and 6 are done. I have 138 posts published (free + paid), and as of now, I've got 37 in the queue to be published, and 11 posts in "draft" mode, waiting to be polished and scheduled. But to get me through February, I need to do six more posts. That's another three days' work before I can turn my attention to other things.
Saturday, January 17, 2026
are anyone else's emails suddenly being auto-translated?
My French "Papa," who's apparently 90 now (I knew he'd been approaching 90, but I guess it happened), sent me an emailed reply to an email I'd sent him, in French, last Christmas. To my shock, his email was in perfect English. A second later, I shook myself and realized this had to have been an AI translation, but by whom? Did Papa run his message through a translator before sending the email? Does he think my French is so bad that it'd be better for me to have a translated version of his correspondence? I was a little hurt at first, especially after years of talking with and writing to him in nothing but French. So I stewed on this problem all of yesterday afternoon and evening.
Then I thought to check email on my phone, and my finger floated down to Papa's email.
It was in the original French.
So—on my phone: in French. On my desktop: in English.
My conclusion is that Gmail has, for whatever reason, started to auto-translate my emails to English, which I'd long ago listed as my default language. I'm now in the process of trying to undo whatever setting it is that clicked over, without my permission, to auto-translate my emails. I guess a lot of people would see auto-translation as a convenience, but I see this as yet another instance of Google trying to do my thinking for me. Finding an answer to my question has been a pain in the ass. I've asked AI for help, but it's spitting out the usual gobbledygook, leading me to look for settings that don't exist.
An awkward solution—but not a permanent one—has been to reset my language preferences to French from France. This means my Gmail screen is now all in French, which is fine since I can read it, but not really the solution I was looking for.
Ah—I may have found a better solution: I switched Gmail's default language to French French, then back to US English. Papa's email is now in the original French and not being auto-translated. I don't know what the hell all of that was about, but I at least now have a sort-of solution that I can implement au cas où.
muay thai training with Sensei Seth
Looks like hard, hot, sweaty work. I'd be dead in thirty minutes.
Keira Knightley in a rom-com-themed ad? who'd've thunk it?
I do hope you sensed the sarcasm. The dark sarcasm in the classroom.
the hazards of GLP-1 drugs
I have a buddy who's on a semaglutide (GLP-1-like) drug. I've been hesitant to go this route myself, and as the bad news about these drugs continues to mount, the more hesitant I become. Here's a video by Dr. Sten Ekberg on some of the problems with GLP-1 drugs. (Sorry for the link, but Dr. Ekberg doesn't let people embed his videos.)
Friday, January 16, 2026
January 26 and 30—paid posts done
I've finished the paid content for Adverbs, Part 1 and 2 on Substack, which will appear on January 26 and 30, thus taking me through the end of January. Learners will see a general intro to adverbs, and they'll learn about the wonders of adverbs of frequency, adverbs of manner, and adverbs of cause/reason. They'll also be exposed to adverbial phrases like on occasion or every Friday or once a month.
I now have eight more posts to do to get through February. At a rate of two posts per day, I ought to be done in four days. If I can sustain that pace.
Dave Cullen was positive on "Predator: Badlands"
I, meanwhile, was left with a bad feeling about this.
behind the scenes with AI
I routinely ask ChatGPT (and now, occasionally, Grok) to make images for my Substack posts. For my post coming out today (paid content), I asked ChatGPT to create an image of a girl and her dog brushing their teeth together. My request was a little more detailed than that, of course, as all my image requests are (to make sure ChatGPT doesn't veer too far off the rails), but here's what the AI gave me:
 |
| default assumption: when I ask for "a bright-eyed little girl," she's going to be white |
See anything wrong with the above?
I had told ChatGPT not to worry about the non-realism of a dog holding a toothbrush, and overall, I think the AI did a fairly good job in that respect. But look at the girl's teeth! See anything? Or rather, do you see what's missing?
You guessed it: toothpaste foam! How does she have foam all around her mouth and dripping off her chin, but her teeth have no foam at all on them?
So I thanked ChatGPT for its efforts (after having asked it to take a second go at the image, which resulted in pretty much the same thing) because, you know, Roko's Basilisk and all that, and I took the above rendering to Photoshop where I worked on it myself.So here's what I came up with:
 |
| slightly foamier |
I added toothpaste foam to the teeth of both the dog and the girl. It's not much of a touch-up in the grand scheme of things, but it adds that little nudge of realism* to the scenario, and as a result, I no longer feel that creepy, uncanny-valley feeling upon seeing unnaturally foamless teeth. AI almost always provides hints of its own existence in the images it creates—bits of artificiality that betray its role and presence.
And this is often how the creative process works with AI: it gives me 90% of what I want, then I have to go in manually and create the remaining 10% myself.
How the sausage is made in early 2026.
__________
*Some might call it ironic to speak of realism about an image in which a dog is brushing its own teeth. But the thing about fantastical images is that we instinctively want things to be unrealistic in certain ways. Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, once complained about how he'd done a drawing of a male mosquito coming home and moaning about a hard day's work as a bloodsucker, and readers wrote in to note that it's the female mosquitoes that do the bloodsucking. Larson quipped that there were no reader complaints about how the mosquito was wearing a trench coat and speaking in English. At first, when I read Larson's reaction to these complaints, I sympathized with him as a fellow artist. But over the years, I've grown to become more sympathetic to the readers. For whatever reason, the basic biological reality of mosquitoes was way more important to them than superficial details like speaking English and wearing human clothes. Of course, had Larson drawn the scenario with a female mosquito at the center, he'd have had to figure out a wholly different way to deliver his joke.
test post from Gmail
Blogger is currently down, it seems. On my phone and my desktop, I'm getting a "Your current browser cannot run Blogger" message. Every other site I visit is fine, including my own blogs. I'm posting this via email, which means it has to go through Blogger to appear on Blogspot, where all of my blogs appear. I assume the problem will clear itself up eventually, as these problems usually do, but for the moment, it looks as though there won't be any blogging for a while. So I'll just keep working on Substack.
For those who don't know how blogging on Blogger.com works: I go to Blogger.com to update my blog. I hit "publish." The updated blog appears at Blogspot.com, a different domain.
Anyway, let's see whether this post gets through and is published. Fingers and tentacles crossed. If so, then that means Blogger is still working on some level despite what my browser is saying. If not, then I guess it won't matter to you.
UPDATE: We're back. Whatever it was appears to be over.
Max et la soupe à la citrouille
A 375 Year Old French Recipe for Pumpkin Soup
What's wrong with the video's title, McCrarey? We've only reviewed this 55,000 times.
kick-ass teaching
Hilarious and educational, this lesson is better than any lesson I've ever taught.
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Stevie Wonder's "Happier than the Morning Sun"
I'm a musical idiot, but even I found this fascinating.
final unit re: adjectives now done
Over on Substack, I just finished my Parts of Speech: Adjectives, Part 7, the final unit on adjectives. That post will appear to paying subscribers on January 23. To get through February, I need to make ten more posts. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to try to do two a day instead of my usual one a day, but try is the operative word here: I normally make only one of these units per day because, unlike the free content, these posts are much more involved and in-depth. They also include quizzes (just regular ones, not interactive ones like the ones that appear on my quiz/test blog), and I have to take time to get AI to make illustrations for my posts. Sometimes, with AI, it takes several tries. But if I manage to do two of these per day, I can be done in five days (by January 20), which will leave me ten days in January plus all of February to work on other stuff. Then of course, at the end of February, I'll have to start generating more material for everything al over again. It never stops. This is quite the grind for an unemployed freelancer. We'll see how I'm feeling come summertime.
pressure washing for safety's sake
I hadn't really thought about the safety value of pressure washing before. Makes sense, though. Like scouring moss/algae off rocks to make them less slippery.
Wednesday, January 14, 2026
galbi a lie???
Why Your Galbi Experience Might Be a Lie (Unless You’re Doing it Like This)
[originally published in 2005 and updated this year]
Most people think they’ve eaten galbi because they sat at a grill, flipped something shiny, wrapped it in lettuce, and left smelling like smoke. That assumption is common, understandable, and usually wrong.
Seoul has no shortage of BBQ restaurants that look convincing. Wood-paneled walls. Stainless exhaust pipes. A server with scissors moving quickly from table to table. The performance is familiar. The result is often forgettable.
What keeps mediocre galbi alive isn’t malice. It’s repetition. Once enough people accept the version in front of them, the original quietly steps aside.
[read the rest]
This is old news if it's from 2005, but I guess I've been living a lie for decades. The well-written article is descriptive about what separates mediocre ribs from great ribs, but I'd really like to see a video tutorial of what the actual difference is—with a side-by-side, split-screen comparison if possible.
next!
The word find for February 25 is now ready to go on Substack and scheduled to appear to paying subscribers. It's based on my religion quiz. The answers are at the Test Central blog here. And now: time to work on posts for The Profound (and for this blog).
don't look at this
The answers to the word find I'd created yesterday are up on my Test Central blog. Please don't ruin it for yourself by looking the answers up before you do the puzzle. Unless you're not a paying subscriber, in which case you probably don't even care.
more porch-pirate karma
These are satisfying to watch, but I'm starting to wonder how many are staged.
more and more done
I've created crosswords (based on Substack grammar material) and a word find (based on my latest walk blog, Kevin's Walk 9) for The Entertaining section of my paid Substack, so I now have enough The Entertaining material to last through February 18. Just one more game/puzzle to go, and I'll have covered February. Think about joining the paying subscribers to try out the crosswords and the word find. Another word find will be completed by Wednesday evening. Where things stand right now:
- The Superficial: Material through February is done.
- The Profound: Material through January 19 is done (work, slave!).
- The Creative: Material through February is done.
- The Entertaining: Material through February 18 is done. One more to go.
Material for The Profound always takes the longest. Once I finish the last word find for The Entertaining, I'll devote all my energies to finishing up The Profound. Once that's done, I'll have a few weeks' breathing room to work on video projects, cartoon projects (many of which will appear on The Creative), book projects, etc.
Most immediate book project: the dead-tree printing of a new round of my homeschooling book, with the manuscript now including the full Korean translation. This will mean using up another of my precious ISBNs; Bowker (the ISBN-issuing company) sells them in batches of ten, and every time you make a change to your manuscript, you need to use a different number. The manuscript will also go online as a Kindle ebook on Amazon. Printing the dead-tree book in Korea can be done at least two ways: (1) the way I did it last time, by creating a PDF version of the manuscript and printing it at that print shop by Seoul National University, or (2) by using a totally different publishing company whose gigantic sign I happened to pass by during my walk last year; I need to go visit those people and ask them whether they'd be a good fit for me. If yes, and if they're willing to help with marketing and selling the book, I might lean on them to also help me publish EFL textbooks for Korean students for elementary, junior high, and high school students. Of course, I haven't created those textbooks yet, but that might become a priority depending on what they tell me. My other book projects include a book about my long walks, a movie-review book (probably a series) and other books based on ideas that are currently still vague and amorphous.
On the video front, I have several ideas burbling in my head, most of them random and jumbled right now, but the point is just to start doing them. You can't get better at video-making if you never try to do it, just as the wolf never gets to eat if all he does is circle the fire. As for cartooning: I've had several ideas, recently, for comic strips. Whether I'll be able to maintain the creative energy necessary to produce interesting stories and scenarios is a huge if as I've never done that before, but I'm planning to leap before I look.
So—lots of stuff happening, lots of plates being spun. And I've got only a few months to see whether any of this effort will pay off.
wise words
If you're the type of guy who's constantly chasing instability and drama... are you a good man?
ululate!
Scott Adams, an author, commentator, and cartoonist who may have helped turn the tide to a Trump victory in 2016, has died of prostate cancer. He was 68.
Scott Adams, a cartoonist, author, an independent-minded pundit and podcaster, has died at the age of 68 after a rather public battle against prostate cancer. The host of Real Coffee with Scott Adams, the creator of the legendary comic strip Dilbert, and the author of numerous books, had continued with his livestreaming routine, seven days a week throughout his treatments for the disease up until yesterday. In the process, he treated his audience like close family during his cancer journey.
Adams first entered the American consciousness through the clever and relatable satire of Dilbert, which vividly captured the frustrations, absurdities, and the humor of modern office life. His success with Dilbert enabled him to branch out into self-help books on persuasion, and eventually to carve out a very influential niche as an intelligent observer of American politics, culture and media.
[ ... ]
In the 2000s and 2010s, he began to comment on politics as well, because of the critical importance of persuasion to all of politics. He developed and promoted what he called a “persuasion filter,” arguing that public debates were less about facts, and more about narratives, framing, and emotional resonance.
In more recent years, he became a prolific presence through his books, on social media, through his livestreamed podcasts seven days a week, offering real-time commentary on news and media narratives.
In 2023, newspapers across the United States and abroad dropped Dilbert from syndication, ending a run that had lasted more than three decades, after comments Adams made on his podcast were taken out of context to allege that he was racist. He would later describe this encounter with cancel culture as one of the more liberating moments of his life.
While he lost access to longtime readers of his comic strip in newspapers, he gained a huge following among conservatives, who saw the mercilessness of cancel culture at play with him. Still, he continued to publish Dilbert online.
Right before he died, Adams converted to Christianity. No atheists in foxholes, etc., etc.
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
rethinking
I'm looking at my toe situation (not bad: it's mostly healed) and thinking that I'd rather give the toe a rest and let it heal before I start doing a daily series of 25K walks, even if it's only six days in a row. So for the moment, I'll be sticking with my 9K walks on weekdays and a slightly longer walk on Saturdays. The Geumgang trail will happen when my toe is healed.
"Immigrant Song"
As you've never heard it before:
Not sure what's going on but kinda like it 🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/K6pxSLBWum
— 🇺🇸🇺🇸DADA🇺🇲🇺🇲 (@BredsguardDalen) January 12, 2026
how bulletproof was Plato? (wait a minute...)
I believe the brand name is actually spelled Play-Doh. "Play dough" is a generic name.
Monday, January 12, 2026
work in progress
Today: I'm trying to populate my Substack with paid grammar content through the end of February, which will take several days. After that, I'm going to start plotting a hiking route along the Geumgang trail. I haven't decided on whether it's better to start or end at Gunsan, by the ocean. Both ends of the trail feature dams, so the walk ought to be awesome either way. If I can do the trail in roughly 20-some-kilometer chunks, the walk ought to take around six days with no rest days sprinkled in there. Six days of pounding won't do my feet any favors, but less than a week of walking shouldn't be too horrible, either. It'll set my toe-healing back a bit, but any big walk I do this year will probably be in the late fall.
"Love, Death, & Robots": Seasons/Volumes 1-4 review
[WARNING: spoilers.]
"Love, Death, & Robots" is a Netflix animated anthology series that has gone on for four seasons and shows no sign of stopping. Each story in the anthology deals with one or more of the series's basic themes: love, death, and robots. Season 1 came out in March 2019; Seasons 2-4 came out in May of 2021, 2022, and 2025 respectively. Being an anthology series means that every episode is a fairly short animation, from about six to twenty minutes, each story done by a different animation house, resulting in a mishmash of themes and styles and genres and tropes, some of which may be tenuously connected and/or repeated (e.g., the theme of people contending with predatory monsters that come out of the dark, a nightmare forever bubbling out of the mire of the Jungian collective unconscious). Many of the stories proved of little interest to me; some were politically repugnant, but over the course of four seasons, a few stories caught my attention and elicited loud laughter or deep fascination. I'm trying to remember whether any of the stories touched me deeply; I don't think any of them did. Some stories were, unfortunately, outright annoying, and quite a few featured tropes I had already seen in full-length films of the sci-fi, action, horror, and comedy genres. Season 1, with its eighteen episodes, is by far the longest season. The following seasons are all short by comparison. Season 2 has eight episodes; Season 3 has nine episodes; Season 4 has ten episodes. Maybe Season 5 will come full circle and have eighteen episodes again. The series refers to seasons as volumes. Here's a list of episodes with summaries and insights.
Volume 1
 |
| "The Secret War" |
2. "Beyond the Aquila Rift": A space traveler discovers he's in a sci-fi/horror Plato's Cave. Part "Matrix," part Lovecraftian horror, this animation was mostly an excuse for a French animation team to portray yet more sex on screen. At the very end, when we see the true horror of the main character's actual situation... yeah, I'd choose to remain plugged into the Matrix, too. "Realistic," video cut-scene animation.
3. "Ice Age": A young couple discovers an old fridge that's a rapidly evolving, miniature pocket universe. The power of this story comes from the suspense of how it's all going to end, which is why this fizzles. Stephen King used to write similar stories (I'm thinking of the reality-bending "Word Processor of the Gods" and the world-destroying "The End of the Whole Mess"), but this story ends on a disappointingly innocuous note, though it is curious that the pocket universe starts over again but gets a little crazy (humans and dinosaurs together?). Of note: this was a combination of live action and animation: Topher Grace and Mary Elizabeth Winstead play the young couple in their new apartment inside an ancient building. The pocket universe inside the fridge presents all sorts of problems in terms of story logic, and what I'd really hoped for was an ending in which the world of the fridge somehow escapes its limits and enters our world. But it never happens. Except for some sparkles.
4. "Sonnie's Edge": The owner of a gladiatorial creature turns out not to be the owner. I saw who the truly dangerous antagonist in the story was from a mile away, but otherwise, I thought the premise was interesting: the main character's consciousness was never in her human form but always inside the creature that goes into combat. Essentially, her "edge" is that she has to fight for her life every time she steps into the arena: if the combat creature dies, she dies with it. Fear is her motivator. "Realistic," video cut-scene animation.
5. "When the Yogurt Took Over": Sentient yogurt gives humanity solutions; humanity fucks up. Amusing, but another preachy bit of nothing. The yogurt solves all of humanity's financial crises and tells humanity to follow its step-by-step plan without deviation to achieve peace and prosperity, but of course human arrogance means humanity fucks the whole thing up. Come to think of it, the story might actually have a welcome, inadvertently anti-utopian subtext. Hm. I might have to think about this one more deeply. The story was originally written by John Scalzi, who wrote Old Man's War. Cartoonish, Pixar-style animation.
6. "The Secret War": Russian soldiers in WW2 Siberia fight a humongous nest of ghouls. This might be my favorite episode of Volume 1. The ghouls are flat characters, so their only value to the drama lies in how viciously they kill the humans. The real drama is in how the humans interact with each other. "Realistic," video cut-scene animation, darkly lit.
7. "Sucker of Souls": An archaeologist and a paramilitary team discover Dracula. Chaos ensues. What if Dracula were a huge, brutish, animalistic nightmare? Funny: the first member of the group to die is the young, Korean assistant. And this won't be the last story in which cats are called upon to combat spiritual terrors. Full-on cartoon animation.
8. "The Witness": A stripper/exotic dancer sees a murder and realizes she and the killer are replaying stories. Wikipedia summarizes this story by suggesting that the woman and the murderer are caught in a time loop, but if that were the case, the story's details would play out more exactly. In the beginning, the woman witnesses the murder. At the end, the woman is the murderer. If this is a time/causality loop, it's a loop with two (or maybe more) distinct components. And this is another animated excuse for gratuitous nudity—thrusting hips, luxuriant pubic hair, and pointy nipples. Frankly, I don't find animated sexuality sexy, precisely because it's animated. Combined animation and performance capture.
9. "Suits": Farmers with mechas defend their farms from marauding alien life. This was a story with heart as neighbor farmers come clanking together in their heavy mechas to protect each other from aliens that remind me of the things that broke through the forcefields protecting Wakanda in "Avengers: Infinity War." I did have to wonder, though, why the farmers had thought it was worthwhile to colonize such a planet: when we do a pullback at the end, we see the planet is positively swarming with these creatures; the farmers are fighting a losing battle. What does this say about human stubbornness and stupidity? If anything, the planet's hostile alien life reminded me a bit of Robert Silverberg's Face of the Waters, a story of humans marooned on the ocean planet Hydros, where every life form wants to kill the invaders because, as it turns out, the life forms are all part of a hive consciousness reacting like an immune system to an infection. The humans, once they realize this, begin to accept the idea of joining with the hive mind as a way to survive until only the main character is left. And does he, too, knuckle under eventually and get assimilated? Or does he stand firm until he's rescued? Well, in this short at least, there's no hope of a comfortable, benign absorption. Animation in a "stop-motion painting" style.
10. "Good Hunting": A Chinese father and son battle fox-spirits in an age of colonization and the rise of tech that is banishing magic from the world. One of several Chinese-themed stories in an era in which China wants to see itself portrayed positively in Western cinema. Like "Dragonslayer" and "Apocalypto," "Good Hunting" is about the end of an era as British colonialism brings in new cultures and new technologies that, through their secularism, banish Chinese magic and spirituality. The main character, a boy who starts off as a fox-spirit hunter but who has compassion on the creatures, ends up befriending the last of the fox-spirits as she turns increasingly human through the leeching-away of magic. When her cruel English master replaces her legs with mechanical ones because he has a robot fetish, she finds her Chinese friend, who's gotten good at robotics, and who makes her a mechanically transformable human/fox body, complete with weaponry, so she can wreak revenge on all the rapacious Englishmen taking advantage of young Chinese ladies. So the title "Good Hunting" starts off having one meaning before gaining another. That said, the story wasn't the most compelling of the bunch. Animation reminiscent of "Blue Eye Samurai," but more 2D.
11. "The Dump": An ornery old farmer won't quit his property because he lives in symbiosis with a hulking garbage creature. I could see where this story was going the moment I saw the bored city inspector sit down to interview the ornery farmer, completely uninterested in his sob stories. This was two Hollywood stereotypes playing against each other: the weird, fetishy hick and the absolute bore of a bureaucrat. My only interest was in what form "Otto" the trash monster would take. When we finally see him, he's a bit reminiscent of the inhuman creature at the end of "The Substance." Cartoonish, vaguely Pixar-style animation, but with old guys' dicks flopping flaccidly around.
12. "Shape-shifters": Two Special Forces soldiers are werewolves who discover Taliban werewolves. At sixteen minutes, I guess you can't expect too much from a story, but I think "Shape-shifters" should've tried harder. Is there a werewolf mythology in Afghanistan? Could this have more deeply stressed the tension between loyalty to one's kind and loyalty to one's country? Otherwise, this felt like a pretty typical werewolf tale. "Realistic" animation.
13. "Fish Night": If human ghosts haunt cemeteries, what if animal ghosts from ancient times haunted now-arid seabeds? I think the premise of that question is spookier than the actual story, which is a fluorescent version of the "Night on Bald Mountain" number in Disney's "Fantasia." A pair of traveling salesmen stop in the middle of the southwestern desert when their car breaks down. The old salesman asks the eerie question about ancient ghosts... and the night comes alive with the sea creatures that used to inhabit the area when it was a deep ocean, millions of years earlier. The younger businessman, caught up in the magic, throws off his clothes, floats into the sky, and swims joyfully with the creatures... until a ghostly megalodon comes along and tears him to shreds. Not the most imaginative of stories, but this one at least had promise. Old, Disney-style cartoon animation with CGI elements.
14. "Helping Hand": If Andy Weir had massive balls, he'd write this astronaut-gets-back-to-safety story. A female astronaut, out on a repair mission while her male partner communicates with her from Earth, gets hit by space debris and starts losing oxygen after she's knocked off the satellite she'd been repairing. Using momentum, she throws a piece of equipment to push her back to the satellite, but she just misses a handgrip and floats the other way. Desperate, and with little oxygen left, she tightens a strap around her forearm, takes off her spacesuit's sleeve, lets her arm freeze into a block of ice, breaks it off, then throws her arm in such a way as to push her back to her own ship, all thought of repairs now gone. She manages to get back inside her ship, and her earthbound partner radioes, asking whether she needs a helping hand. That was a painfully dumb but well-earned punchline. "Realistic" animation, maybe with performance capture.
15. "Alternate Histories": An interactive, pick-your-own-adventure program explores alternate histories after Hitler is killed in various ways. This was easily the stupidest, laziest animation of the bunch, done in the style of those Kurzgesagt videos (here for example). I'm not saying I hate the Kurzgesagt style, but in an anthology series where other animation teams are doing a lot of hard work in terms of animation, voice acting, and overall direction, this kind of video—meant to mimic some sort of interactive app—just looks cheap. What's more, the scenarios in which Hitler dies all start out the same way, which makes no sense at all for a serious exploration of alternate histories: instead of six scenarios in which young Hitler is always walking out of a school building, why not kill Hitler as an infant, or as a toddler, or as a pre-teen? Why not kill him in his twenties? The scenario questions just kept piling up in my brain, and I couldn't enjoy this story (well, "story") at all.
16. "Lucky 13": An unlucky troop transport gets a new pilot and a new shot at being lucky. While this one looked disappointingly like a long cut scene from one of the later versions of Halo, I thoroughly enjoyed the story of a young, female pilot nicknamed Cutter who bonds with her hunk-o'-junk troop transport—something of a hazing ritual for rookie pilots, who have to fly the crappiest aircraft first before they can graduate to better ships. Cutter flies nineteen missions without losing a single soldier (the ship had been unlucky, before that, for losing so many soldiers), and the transport—numbered 13-02313 (all the digits also add up to 13)—gets re-nicknamed "Lucky 13." Cutter starts to think of the ship as having a mind and will of its own, and when she's finally forced to self-destruct 13 after a crash landing, the blast doesn't go off until all of her troops are safe behind cover, and all the enemy have swarmed the craft. Only then does 13 blow up, despite its timer. The story is a great metaphor for a pilot's love of his or her ship, the sadness of its loss, and the continuation of the ship's spirit as the fight goes on. I liked this story a lot. Video-game-level "realistic" animation.
17. "Blindspot": A cyborg rookie joins a cyborg gang on a heist that their coordinator didn't prepare them for. This was mostly just eye candy. The story did a not-bad job of establishing characterization right away, but the story itself was, otherwise, a pretty typical heist-gone-wrong scenario, with an incredibly incompetent leader coordinating the heist but somehow unable to provide the crew with crucial information about their target's defensive capabilities. That level of incompetence and stupidity felt false to me, so I couldn't deeply connect to this story at all. Conventional cartoon animation.
18. "Zima Blue": A mysterious artist finally explains his origins and finds his true purpose. One of those "the ultimate truth involves coming full circle" stories, "Zima Blue" toys with the idea of sentient AI becoming massively contemplative, then realizing that the greatest pleasures in life are the simplest, and those pleasures involve the fulfilling of one's original purpose. For you see, Zima Blue isn't a cyborg, i.e., a human who becomes less human over time as he endures enhancement after enhancement: no, Zima Blue started life as a mere pool-cleaning robot whose only purpose was to clean the muck out of a swimming pool covered in blue tiles that the store had labeled as the color Zima Blue. After becoming more intelligent, then sentient, over time through add-ons; after creating planet-sized works of art, Zima Blue, who finally talks to interviewer Claire Markham, begins to realize he wants to go back to his roots, to go back to pool-cleaning. This could've been a much better story had it been written by smarter people. Here's a little secret: science-fiction or fantasy stories whose conclusion is that The truth has been staring you in the face this entire time might make for a decent Zen lesson ("follow your original nature"), but as stories go, they merely reflect the intellectual limits of the storyteller, and the smartest story characters can never be smarter than their storytellers. I'd rather have a story that reveals a universe-shattering truth expressed in ineffable images than a story about a come-full-circle truth that feels just like all the other come-full-circle truths out there. This is why I'm still blown away by the series finale for "Star Trek: The Next Generation," which forced Jean-Luc Picard to think cross-temporally in an inexpressible way that no humans had ever done—truly going where no one had gone before, the very essence of Trek. "Zima Blue" is animated in an aggressively Art Deco style; its characters have ridiculously short torsos and long, long legs.
Favorite from Volume 1: probably "The Secret War," which is mostly about courage, brotherhood, and sacrifice—with or without its monsters. Well done in terms of scripting and visuals, it's a war story with ghouls in it, as if war weren't horrible enough. Never thought I'd find myself sympathizing with Soviets, though.
Runner-up: without a doubt, "Lucky 13," which almost took the top spot for me. This is a really good war story.
Volume 2
 |
| "All Through the House" |
2. "Ice": Two ethnically Asian brothers on a distant planet want to watch alien whales breaching. Most inhabitants of this planet are "modded," i.e., modified, to be physically superior–stronger, more agile, more flexible, and better able to survive the planet's harsh, icy climate. Younger brother Sedgewick refuses to get modded and doesn't like this world his family moved to; older brother Fletcher is fully modded but sympathizes with his sullen younger brother, who wants to see the planet's dominant life form: "frost whales," which like to break through the ice in order to breathe, usually breaching as they do so, thus making it dangerous to stand too close. Fletcher persuades his equally modded friends to let Sedgewick come with them to watch a frost whale, but they stand too close; Fletcher gets injured, prompting the normally sullen Sedgewick to grab his brother and carry him off the cracking ice. It turns out Fletcher had faked his injury to get his little brother spiritually off his ass, and the trick worked: Sedgewick now feels more at home, and Fletcher's friends accept him, no longer calling him an "extro" for being unmodded. I'm tempted to say I didn't like this story (also done in a somewhat Deco style—what is it with ethnicity and Deco?), but there was something I could connect to thanks to the "wise older brother" angle. I personally have never been that wise, and I'm sure my younger brothers can tell you stories of how I'd been a stupid dick to them on multiple occasions. So maybe what I liked about Fletcher is how he represented the big brother I could have been.
3. "Pop Squad": What happens when you're a child-killing population-control officer who gets soft when he finally interacts with a child instead of shooting it? This animation was a futuristic noir story about a trenchcoated officer who is tasked with killing children: in this world, childbirth is highly regulated; any kids found born naturally, outside the purview of the government, get terminated. There's a surprisingly conservative, not-well-hidden antigovernment (and anti-abortion?) subtext to this story, but in the end, government wins. The ambiance is bleak and rainy and "Blade Runner"-y (as many of these future-dystopia animations are); the story is dark and ultimately sad. The pop in the title can be taken to mean "population" (as in population control) or "pop 'im in the skull."
4. "Snow in the Desert": A genetically different albino with a Wolverine-like healing factor has self-exiled on a harsh desert world where he is wanted and found by two very different parties. The albino himself is named Snow, so ha ha, I guess: Snow in the desert, forsooth. Snow's rapid-healing powers are the second time I've seen a callback to Wolverine: the first time was in "Sonnie's Edge," when Sonnie's human golem is killed by the cute assistant who is the true enemy in that short: she's armed with Wolverine claws that spring out of her forearm with terrible force and stab Sonnie's golem through the bottom of the jaw and out through the top of her skull. The bounty hunters after Snow are tasked with bringing back his balls, where the hunters' contractor thinks the most genetic potency—and the secret to immortality—lies. Snow is centuries old, having long outlived his wife, who killed herself when she grew too old while Snow remained young. The other party seeking Snow is Hirald, an Earth Central Intelligence agent who has her own secret: she too cannot age because she's a cyborg, and while she wants to bring Snow back—noncoercively—to Earth, she feels a pull toward him because they have agelessness in common. This short ended up being better than I expected, sort of a gritty, futuristic take on the old story of the hunt for the Fountain of Youth (now in Snow's snowballs), and I liked the slightly off-kilter romantic angle. Performance-capture animation with great landscaping, but a pretty typical, rocky alien world.
5. "The Tall Grass": The train always stops in this same spot at night. Don't step off the tracks and venture into the tall grass. This is a horror story that is ultimately harmless, but it frustratingly follows all of the horror-movie tropes to get our protag into trouble: he's standing on the ground by the stalled train, looking out through the tall grass; he sees mysterious patches of glowing light and feels compelled to leave the safety of the train to go exploring, unmindful of whether the grass around him might turn into a maze that traps him. He sees what may be humanoid movement out of the corner of his eye; I was reminded of "Signs." Then come the hungry zombies/demons/whatevertheyare. Their scariest feature—since their faces are featureless—are their fanged mouths, which open hungrily like bubbles popping in super-slow motion. Decent animation that seems to be a combination of stop-motion and 3D work. Stupid protagonist, though, which is why I hate most horror stories.
6. "All Through the House": What exactly is Santa Claus? I admit I accidentally ruined this one for myself when I saw the short on YouTube a couple years ago, not knowing it was part of this anthology. Despite having seen it once already, I still busted a gut while watching it again. Two kids are unable to sleep on Christmas Eve when they hear what they think is Santa puttering around downstairs. Big sis Leah wakes up little brother Billy, and they steal quietly downstairs and hide behind furniture. They see what at first looks like Santa's jolly shadow, then a horrible, writhing tongue-tentacle shoots out and slurps up the entire cup of milk and lassos the plate of cookies. When the kids hear the cookies crunching, they see that "Santa's" shadow isn't of Santa at all, but of some horrific creature with a bloated scrotum-throat, spidery legs, tyrannosaur fangs, and gigantic jaws. And then the thing reveals itself, in all its nightmarish glory, and makes straight for the cowering kids who have seen its true form. I won't spoil the rest for now, but what happens next had me howling. This was easily the funniest of all the shorts in Volume 2, and part of me kind of hopes that this really is what Santa Claus is like. And just like Leah, I have to ask, What would have happened if I hadn't been good? Animation is pure stop-motion and very well done. One amusing point: the kids speak with British accents, but on TV in the living room is an American program.
7. "Life Hutch": A healing/repair AI robot turns murderous. Another ho-hum AI-gone-wild scenario, but with Michael B. Jordan's fine acting, it works way better than it should. In something of a compacted Star Wars scenario, pilot Terence (Jordan) crash lands on a planetoid after his ship is damaged in combat. He finds a previously crash-landed "life hutch" (shelter/first-aid module) and ducks inside, where he is met by a damaged AI robot that starts attacking him. Terence soon realizes the robot's motion trackers are shot, so he freezes. As the large, heavy robot searches for him, its tracks roll over his right hand, painfully crushing fingers while Terence tries to stifle a scream. Eventually, Terence manages to get the better of the robot, and a computerized warning blurts out, far too late, that the AI robot appears to have sustained damage, to which Terence replies with a completely predictable "No shit"—the punchline of the story. Entertaining if not too original. Animation is realistic to the point of looking almost like live action. Michael B. Jordan definitely elevates what would have otherwise been yet another boringly typical story.
8. "The Drowned Giant": A naked giant washes up on an English shore. Do we get to see his dick before it rots off? The voice of a British scientist narrates the discovery of a body that has washed ashore next to a seaside British town. What makes the body remarkable is that it's of a giant, essentially a human writ large and, as the scientist notes, not brutish-looking at all (he bares a resemblance to actor Harry Melling, a.k.a. Dudley Dursley, who lost a ton of weight over the years, but I'm not sure any human actually played the giant, who simply lies there), but instead looking sadly noble and dignified despite being naked. I was vaguely reminded of James Morrow's Towing Jehovah, a novel about what to do with God's immense corpse, found floating in the ocean and needing to be towed to the Arctic Circle to be preserved. The giant in the animated story initially evokes awe among the people who see it, but they become brave enough to walk on it, then eventually to spray-paint graffiti all over it, then to start taking it apart piece by piece as it slowly rots (not enough mention is made of the stink, the bloating, and the flies that would surround such a corpse; I've walked by swollen, gassy deer carcasses that smelled awful). Pieces of the giant are soon to be found all over the English countryside—a skull here, a femur there. Even the enormous penis is given a place of honor at a carnival freak show, where it's falsely labeled as a whale penis. The story can be seen as a meditation on the passage of time, on the loss of awe in the face of death as the death itself recedes into the past, and on how something considered almost sacred is soon reduced to triviality. Perhaps there's a Buddhist lesson about impermanence in all that. This was a quietly meditative piece, a thoughtful way to end Volume 2, and overall not a bad story.
Favorite from Volume 2: The clear winner here is "All Through the House." Oh, my God, yes. I'd have to watch it twenty times before I stopped laughing at the humor. And artistically speaking, it's so well done: the dripping, mucus-y saliva, the slavering fangs, the monster's raspy voice, its flicking tongue, and the kids' absolute terror. I love this one so much. It's probably my favorite of all four seasons. Can it ever be outdone?
Runner-up: "Snow in the Desert" barely beats out "The Drowned Giant." "Snow" is weird and quirky and action-y, suiting my tastes. "Giant" is also good given its thoughtfulness, but the meditation on life is a little obvious and on-the-nose.
Volume 3
 |
| "Swarm" |
2. "Bad Traveling": A giant thanapod ("death on feet" or "death-feet") is eating a ship's crew one by one, but the crew are also doing each other in because people are assholes. This one, about sea vessels, also reminded me of a Robert Silverberg scenario, and like the previous story, its commentary on the ouroboros-like, self-consuming, violent nature of human character and the expensive cost of finally wising up to avert disaster is appropriately gloomy. That said, this is a better, more interesting story than the previous one, and it ends on a note of grim victory, but with no promises for the future. Dark, realistic animation.
3. "The Very Pulse of the Machine": What if Io, a moon of Jupiter, were in fact a huge, sentient machine? Questions of who built the machine are set aside in this story of one astronaut's struggle to survive a crash landing and to learn the truth. In the end, the story hints at greater alien mysteries, but it never offers more than the faintest of tastes, making the story's deeper themes shallower than they should have been. Cartoonish, increasingly surreal animation, but what felt like a lot of unfulfilled potential.
4. "Night of the Mini Dead": A zombie apocalypse begins with inadvisable sex in a cemetery. This hilarious animation, done with miniatures (CGI models? real, physical miniatures?), looks almost like a sort of sped-up, stop-motion story, but it's hard to tell. Like the two previous stories, though, this story is a fable about how human stupidity (illicit sex in a cemetery) and vanity can have an escalating snowball effect leading to everyone's destruction. I laughed out loud at several points, but the more I think about the accumulated didacticism of these first four stories, the less I'm liking Volume 3 overall.
5. "Kill Team Kill": What's a fire team to do when it faces up against a cyborg bear? Even this story doesn't escape the moralistic finger-wagging. A military team fights for survival against a gigantic, cybernetically enhanced bear created by the CIA. Americans fight a losing battle against an American creation. Cartoon-style animation.
6. "Swarm": Humans encounter an ancient hive mind. A male scientist visits a female researcher who has been living and interacting with a hive-mind intelligence. The male scientist wants to harness this "swarm's" ability to produce order from chaos as a way to make humanity's own survival in the galaxy more robust. The female scientist objects, seeing this as the enslavement of a biological life form, but the man reminds her that these beings are not inherently sentient even if they have absorbed the genetic traits and memories of other alien species over the untold millions of years of their existence. The woman reluctantly agrees to help with the project, and the two fall passionately in lust as they work together. But the swarm, having existed a long time, has evolved genetic protocols that warn it of danger. It takes over the woman, making her a living, intelligent speaker for the hive mind, which does seem to possess a certain level of sentience. She/it warns the male scientist that the swarm is aware of his intentions and has faced races like humanity in the past, then she/it offers the man a terrible choice that will likely decide humanity's fate over the coming centuries. While this story, too, criticizes humanity's collectively stupid and self-destructive decisions, the story offers us the choice of siding with human individuals or with the relentless, genetically coercive hive mind of the swarm. The story is too big in scope to come to any neat conclusions, but I appreciated the quality of the detailed animation, the voice work, and the depth of the story itself, which was well written and not insulting to the viewer's intelligence. The visual of the poor female scientist's integration into the hive mind is almost painful to look at, a horrible combination of hentai tentacle porn and literal skull-rape. I had a wild thought that this hive mind had something in common with the brain bugs in the movie version of "Starship Troopers," which suck out human brains and gain access to human thought patterns just by ingesting our engram-imprinted flesh. This story and "Night of the Mini Dead" are, thus far, my two favorites of this season/volume. But every story this season has been preachy. Video game cut-scene animation.
7. "Mason's Rats": A Scotsman is having trouble with an infestation of superintelligent rats. No explanation is given for how or why the rats have become so intelligent and organized, and part of the humor comes from the fact that these super-rats have invaded the farm of a dour Scotsman who receives technological help from a blithe, blasé Englishman (is this a commentary on how the UK government relates to individual countries within the UK?) who helps the farmer order a pest-control device in the form of a mean-looking, armored scorpion armed with scissor-claws, a laser gatling gun, and other assorted weaponry. The device successfully eliminates a literal pile of rats, but as the farmer watches how the rats communicate, self-organize, and bravely fight this new monster, he begins to side with the rats and eventually does in the machine himself with a well-aimed blast from his shotgun. From that point on, Mason and the rats, their courage now proven, live in peace. The story humorously refuses to answer a whole host of How? and Why? questions, but by the end, I just didn't care. While neither as funny as "Mini Dead" nor as eerily profound as "Swarm," this story nevertheless had a jolly share of gore and humor, plus a sudden, happy twist at the end. Artfully done 3D animation and the possibility of peace between men and rats.
8. "In Vaulted Halls Entombed": Soldiers discover an ancient, chthonian evil chained beneath a mountain. Well, damn, things have apparently started to look up during these final few episodes of Volume 3. Another military story in which hardened soldiers—US Marine Special Forces—prove to be no match for ancient evil, I'm pretty sure this short was originally meant to have some kind of Cthulhu punchline. In Lovecraft's mythos, Cthulhu is an elder god the very sight of whom is supposed to drive human beings mad. Given how the "final girl," a female soldier, reacts to the sight of the monstrosity chained inside the guts of a mountain, I'm guessing that this monstrosity is supposed to be Cthulhu. The major evidence that this is not Lovecraft's Cthulhu, however, is that this titanic being isn't deep underwater in the Pacific, in the city of R'lyeh. While the story is mostly conventional, I like how it ended. "Realistic" video game cut-scene animation, with the recognizable voices and faces of Joe Mangianello, Jai Courtney, and Christian Serratos ("The Walking Dead").
9. "Jibaro": In an age of knights in armor, one deaf knight will have a fateful encounter with a dancing, chaotic river spirit. I'm not sure whether to write a lot or a little about this very disappointing ending to Volume 3. Animated with performance-capture technology for the protagonist and unrealistically esoteric armor styles, the story follows a group of treasure-plundering, conquistador-like knights on horseback who have a fateful encounter with a wild, gold-coin-flinging river spirit whose siren screech drives men into a killing frenzy, after which they run to the river and drown themselves. When the river spirit emits her piercing cry, our protagonist, a deaf knight, can't hear her, but he sees how she's affecting his companions. The spirit, constantly writhing, dancing, and flinging her limbs, finally settles down and cuddles with the knight, the only survivor of her song/wail, as he sleeps. When he wakes up, things do not end well. I could look at the story as one of organized religion and Western civilization versus the atavistic forces of untamed sylvan primitivity, but there was something supremely annoying about the river spirit, whose constant movement reminded me strongly of a kid who's heavily afflicted with ADHD and literally unable to hold still. I'm going to guess that the director probably decided the river spirit should be an incarnation of chaos and wildness, but I think he aid it on a little too thick. Lushly colored, realistic animation that is partly performance capture. I really didn't like this one despite its mythological overtones and a fundamental civilizational-cultural-ontological-spiritual conflict that should have excited the religious-studies portion of my brain but somehow failed to.
Favorites from Volume 3: probably "Night of the Mini Dead" and "Swarm." The first was simply hilarious despite its obvious "humanity is stupid and shortsighted" messaging; the second was deeply philosophical and viscerally unsettling in a body-horror kind of way. David Cronenberg would be proud.
Runner-up: It's either "Bad Traveling," which is well scripted, or "In Vaulted Halls Entombed," which has a great ending.
Volume 4
 |
| "Close Encounters of the Mini Kind" |
2. "Spider Rose": A lonely, bereaved cyborg woman on a distant space fortress acquires a new pet. I think this was made by the same team who made "Swarm" (Blur Studio, USA); it's the same "realistic" animation style, and what is ultimately a bleakly poignant story of a woman who has lost her husband and her hope to pirates, but who acquires a strange pet from a race she has bargained with. This pet is genetically malleable, acquiring the traits of whoever owns it. Over time, it becomes more like an Earth creature, and our protagonist begins to feel more alive as she bonds with it more closely. Still, the day comes when the pirates who killed her husband attack again; she's able to defeat them one more time, but at the cost of all of her food and most of her oxygen. She thanks her pet for making her feel alive again, then gives it permission to eat her so it can survive and be taken back by the business-partner race she had bargained with at the beginning. I liked this story, which says something about one's attitudes toward life and death, and about the acceptance of death when one's fate is inevitable. Beautifully visualized and realized—stark, dark, and remote yet intimate.
3. "How Zeke Got Religion": The best cure for atheism is a close encounter with an actual demon. This cartoon-style animation is a World War II story about a bomber crew, one member of whom is an atheist who doesn't believe in "fairy tales." A cross-Channel bombing run on a French church goes wrong, and the demonic power being summoned inside the church leaps into the sky and attacks the bomber, giving the atheist a taste of realities and powers he can't possibly understand. I could see the story's punchline coming long before it arrived, which made the story less exciting than it could have been. Interestingly, William Peter Blatty's novel The Exorcist (arguably better than the story's movie version) ends in roughly the same way: Father Karras, who had lost his faith, regains it in his last moments because he now knows the Devil exists, and if there's a Devil, there must be a God.
4. "The Other Large Thing": Cats really do want to take over the world. With help from AI. A boilerplate expansion on the idea (yawn) that all cats really do seek world domination. Again with Chris Parnell as the cat. Pixar-ish animation. This is for people who really, really love cats. I'm no cat-hater, but I don't like cats as much as I love dogs.
5. "400 Boys": A gang in a devastated city seeks out other gangs to rid the city of its giant, baby-like attackers. Once again, Deco-style imagery to depict an ethnically diverse gang of youngsters all speaking in working-class English accents. The Earth's attackers look like humorously giant babies that wreck buildings in the manner of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in "Ghostbusters." The babies are also surprisingly easy to wound and to topple; Earth should have had less of a problem finishing these invaders off. It shouldn't have been up to a bunch of random gangs to defends us all from giant space babies. At a guess, the basic theme is one we've heard before: groups putting aside their differences and conflicts to work together in a time of crisis, i.e., a situation in which humanity starts making the right choices, and an affirmation that hope springs eternal. To that extent, this short is a refreshing departure from all of the let's-judge-humanity scolding we had to endure through so much of Volume 3.
6. "The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur": In a deadly race for the amusement of the rich elites, one slave-warrior gets an idea. Ah, China! How you yearn for global approval! A nearly naked Chinese protagonist, Mei, a slave of some sort, puts her martial and athletic prowess on display in a deadly race with with other nearly naked, athletic competitors as well as with... dinosaurs! With MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) in the role of the smarmy, toothy emcee, the race takes place on a giant ring floating in space near the Jovian moons for the entertainment of the rich elites. At first, the humans race ahead of a bunch of triceratopses; as the dinosaurs begin to pass the humans, the humans figure clever ways to mount the beasts, which then become the humans' destriers. The humans then do their best to knock each other off their mounts and, well, if people die, then they die. We find out that Mei, with her in-vogue side-shaved hair and tatted head, is implied to be in a lesbian relationship with a lithe, nubile black competitor (sorry, China, but this is Netflix), but they still have to fight each other on the back of a triceratops. Mei knocks her lover off the triceratops and wins the race, leaving her paramour in the distance, but now, she must face a tyrannosaur that rises from a chamber underneath the sand and immediately eats the black girlfriend (thereby simultaneously appeasing China's distaste for lesbianism and satisfying the die-hard Western trope that the black person always dies in a science-fiction story). Mei sends her triceratops forward to fight the tyrannosaur; they mortally wound each other, but the triceratops dies first. Mei mounts the tyrannosaur, whom she sees as a slave like herself, and makes it up leap upward to catch the low-hanging observation deck of the elites, one or two of whom tumble over the edge to their deaths, and one of whom Mei kills on her own before she and the dinosaur fall back to the ring, both dying. Mei narrates her story in Chinese the whole time, and we see visions of a wolf pack running through a snowy forest—the wolves being a metaphor for the freedom and community that Mei craves, despite her knowing that all she can really do is choose to die on her own terms. This is a sad story that's rife with politically correct, Netflixy elements, but the story's power overshadows Netflix's attempt at PC nonsense. In the end, you don't really care how the main characters look or what their sexual preferences are; what grips you is the primal struggle—the conflict between competitors and the disparity between the slaves and the privileged. If Mei's final gesture was some sort of Marxist rebellion, then I hate to say it, but the power structure remains intact after Mei's death, so maybe the story is more about personal dignity in the face of an undignified, untenable situation. I came away from this half cynical about Netflix and half touched by the story.
7. "Golgotha": Aquatic aliens come to Earth to meet the resurrected messiah—a dolphin. Partly live action and partly CGI-animated, "Golgotha" is the story of a powerful alien race's visit to Earth after a life form on Earth dies and reportedly comes back to life. The aliens want to meet this messiah, who turns out to be a dolphin. A priest is sent by the Church to guide the alien delegate to the beach where the dolphin will appear; during the buildup to all this, everyone from the priest's monsignor to an American general is telling the priest not to fuck this up. When the alien arrives, a tentacled Lupo evolved to live in oceans, the priest meets it and the two have a brief discussion about faith. The alien, who apparently knows the dolphin's language, loudly summons the dolphin, whom the humans call Blackfin. Blackfin tells the Lupo delegate of humanity's long history of depredations against the cetaceans; a Lupo fleet appears above England and begins blasting while the priest moans, "We fucked up." This is another story in the spirit of trashing humanity for its many stupid decisions, with punishment coming in the form of alien justice in a humorously murderous variation of a similar story in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," where the whales tell Spock of their displeasure about man's treatment of them. I do have to wonder about the title "Golgotha," though: it's the name of Jesus' crucifixion site, and is usually translated as "place of the skull." So is the entire earth Golgotha, then, about to be overrun with death? This is a humorous story starring Rhys Darby and the quintessentially Scottish Graham McTavish (the guy's a prodigious legend with the cast of the Hobbit movies, as they attest in several behind-the-scenes interviews). Alas, the story is too short to give us much of an idea what it is the aliens believe about faith, resurrection, God, or anything else. By the end, the one thing we know for sure is that they're immensely destructive, and they are, for lack of a better term, God's just punishment for humanity's many sins, avenging angels from across the stars, come to do the divine will. I liked this story, but it was, pardon the pun, preachy.
8. "For He Can Creep": A pet cat fights Satan to keep his poet owner from writing a poem that could destroy humanity. For once, this isn't a story about a cat wanting world domination. But the cat does think of his owner as "his poet." Satan appears and bids the poet write a poem in a scenario that anyone who's heard Tenacious D's "Tribute" knows: the poem will be the best, most sublime poem, and it will signal the downfall of humanity. The poet's cat enlists the aid of other cats to stop Satan—who frequently changes back and forth between human and malefic form—from getting his way. I found this to be a quaint story, but not overly compelling, mainly because the outcome seemed drearily predictable. 3D, CGI-enhanced, almost Disney-style cartoon animation.
9. "Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners": Smart appliances complain one after another about the stupidity and filth of humans and pets. This short had no plot: it was just interview after interview—a short series of even shorter shorts. One or two of the appliances were hilarious with their complaints, but the rest were sort of ho-hum. Not one of my favorites. Claymation-style animation. Decent voice work.
10. "Can't Stop": A music video of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert. This is nothing more than an animated version of a music video, made to look like marionette versions of the Chili Peppers doing a live concert in front of a stadium crowd. What a dull way to end Volume 4. It was hard to tell whether these were at least partially real marionettes or fully animated figures made, through CGI, to look like marionettes on strings. Not that the mystery intrigues me; I thought this segment was dull and boring.
4. "The Other Large Thing": Cats really do want to take over the world. With help from AI. A boilerplate expansion on the idea (yawn) that all cats really do seek world domination. Again with Chris Parnell as the cat. Pixar-ish animation. This is for people who really, really love cats. I'm no cat-hater, but I don't like cats as much as I love dogs.
5. "400 Boys": A gang in a devastated city seeks out other gangs to rid the city of its giant, baby-like attackers. Once again, Deco-style imagery to depict an ethnically diverse gang of youngsters all speaking in working-class English accents. The Earth's attackers look like humorously giant babies that wreck buildings in the manner of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in "Ghostbusters." The babies are also surprisingly easy to wound and to topple; Earth should have had less of a problem finishing these invaders off. It shouldn't have been up to a bunch of random gangs to defends us all from giant space babies. At a guess, the basic theme is one we've heard before: groups putting aside their differences and conflicts to work together in a time of crisis, i.e., a situation in which humanity starts making the right choices, and an affirmation that hope springs eternal. To that extent, this short is a refreshing departure from all of the let's-judge-humanity scolding we had to endure through so much of Volume 3.
6. "The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur": In a deadly race for the amusement of the rich elites, one slave-warrior gets an idea. Ah, China! How you yearn for global approval! A nearly naked Chinese protagonist, Mei, a slave of some sort, puts her martial and athletic prowess on display in a deadly race with with other nearly naked, athletic competitors as well as with... dinosaurs! With MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) in the role of the smarmy, toothy emcee, the race takes place on a giant ring floating in space near the Jovian moons for the entertainment of the rich elites. At first, the humans race ahead of a bunch of triceratopses; as the dinosaurs begin to pass the humans, the humans figure clever ways to mount the beasts, which then become the humans' destriers. The humans then do their best to knock each other off their mounts and, well, if people die, then they die. We find out that Mei, with her in-vogue side-shaved hair and tatted head, is implied to be in a lesbian relationship with a lithe, nubile black competitor (sorry, China, but this is Netflix), but they still have to fight each other on the back of a triceratops. Mei knocks her lover off the triceratops and wins the race, leaving her paramour in the distance, but now, she must face a tyrannosaur that rises from a chamber underneath the sand and immediately eats the black girlfriend (thereby simultaneously appeasing China's distaste for lesbianism and satisfying the die-hard Western trope that the black person always dies in a science-fiction story). Mei sends her triceratops forward to fight the tyrannosaur; they mortally wound each other, but the triceratops dies first. Mei mounts the tyrannosaur, whom she sees as a slave like herself, and makes it up leap upward to catch the low-hanging observation deck of the elites, one or two of whom tumble over the edge to their deaths, and one of whom Mei kills on her own before she and the dinosaur fall back to the ring, both dying. Mei narrates her story in Chinese the whole time, and we see visions of a wolf pack running through a snowy forest—the wolves being a metaphor for the freedom and community that Mei craves, despite her knowing that all she can really do is choose to die on her own terms. This is a sad story that's rife with politically correct, Netflixy elements, but the story's power overshadows Netflix's attempt at PC nonsense. In the end, you don't really care how the main characters look or what their sexual preferences are; what grips you is the primal struggle—the conflict between competitors and the disparity between the slaves and the privileged. If Mei's final gesture was some sort of Marxist rebellion, then I hate to say it, but the power structure remains intact after Mei's death, so maybe the story is more about personal dignity in the face of an undignified, untenable situation. I came away from this half cynical about Netflix and half touched by the story.
7. "Golgotha": Aquatic aliens come to Earth to meet the resurrected messiah—a dolphin. Partly live action and partly CGI-animated, "Golgotha" is the story of a powerful alien race's visit to Earth after a life form on Earth dies and reportedly comes back to life. The aliens want to meet this messiah, who turns out to be a dolphin. A priest is sent by the Church to guide the alien delegate to the beach where the dolphin will appear; during the buildup to all this, everyone from the priest's monsignor to an American general is telling the priest not to fuck this up. When the alien arrives, a tentacled Lupo evolved to live in oceans, the priest meets it and the two have a brief discussion about faith. The alien, who apparently knows the dolphin's language, loudly summons the dolphin, whom the humans call Blackfin. Blackfin tells the Lupo delegate of humanity's long history of depredations against the cetaceans; a Lupo fleet appears above England and begins blasting while the priest moans, "We fucked up." This is another story in the spirit of trashing humanity for its many stupid decisions, with punishment coming in the form of alien justice in a humorously murderous variation of a similar story in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," where the whales tell Spock of their displeasure about man's treatment of them. I do have to wonder about the title "Golgotha," though: it's the name of Jesus' crucifixion site, and is usually translated as "place of the skull." So is the entire earth Golgotha, then, about to be overrun with death? This is a humorous story starring Rhys Darby and the quintessentially Scottish Graham McTavish (the guy's a prodigious legend with the cast of the Hobbit movies, as they attest in several behind-the-scenes interviews). Alas, the story is too short to give us much of an idea what it is the aliens believe about faith, resurrection, God, or anything else. By the end, the one thing we know for sure is that they're immensely destructive, and they are, for lack of a better term, God's just punishment for humanity's many sins, avenging angels from across the stars, come to do the divine will. I liked this story, but it was, pardon the pun, preachy.
8. "For He Can Creep": A pet cat fights Satan to keep his poet owner from writing a poem that could destroy humanity. For once, this isn't a story about a cat wanting world domination. But the cat does think of his owner as "his poet." Satan appears and bids the poet write a poem in a scenario that anyone who's heard Tenacious D's "Tribute" knows: the poem will be the best, most sublime poem, and it will signal the downfall of humanity. The poet's cat enlists the aid of other cats to stop Satan—who frequently changes back and forth between human and malefic form—from getting his way. I found this to be a quaint story, but not overly compelling, mainly because the outcome seemed drearily predictable. 3D, CGI-enhanced, almost Disney-style cartoon animation.
9. "Smart Appliances, Stupid Owners": Smart appliances complain one after another about the stupidity and filth of humans and pets. This short had no plot: it was just interview after interview—a short series of even shorter shorts. One or two of the appliances were hilarious with their complaints, but the rest were sort of ho-hum. Not one of my favorites. Claymation-style animation. Decent voice work.
10. "Can't Stop": A music video of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in concert. This is nothing more than an animated version of a music video, made to look like marionette versions of the Chili Peppers doing a live concert in front of a stadium crowd. What a dull way to end Volume 4. It was hard to tell whether these were at least partially real marionettes or fully animated figures made, through CGI, to look like marionettes on strings. Not that the mystery intrigues me; I thought this segment was dull and boring.
Favorites from Volume 4: "Close Encounters of the Mini Kind," which made me bust a gut, and "Spider Rose," which was lonely, heartfelt, and starkly beautiful.
Runner-up: "Golgotha," despite the self-righteous tone of the comedy.
So the overarching (never let me hear you say the incorrect overarcing) theme of all four seasons seems to be a finger-wagging moral lesson about man's greed, stupidity, and hubris. It's also about his dissociation from, and disrespect for, nature, ultimately leading to humanity's self-destruction (possibly aided by cats). And this message is brought to you with no sense of irony by wielders of environment-destroying technology—people who are blissfully unaware of their own hypocrisy, people who probably think of themselves as innocent parties nobly creating art for the masses even as they pass along their PC messaging of a racially and culturally mixed—and blandly homogenized—utopia.
Ugly political realities and on-the-nose messaging aside, I did enjoy many of episodes in the series, and I actually look forward to the fifth season/volume. The artistry in most of these shorts (except for the lazily done "Alternate Histories") is superb, often in spite of sagging and distasteful storylines. Visually, the entire anthology, taken as an evolving whole, is splendid to look at, and on that level, it's undoubtedly worth your time. But once you get into details and themes and political messaging, the question becomes complicated. So how worthwhile "Love, Death, & Robots" will be for you depends greatly on your tolerance for distasteful elements (which, frankly, might not be distasteful to you at all). Me, I found myself preferring the more personal, intimate, and deeply philosophical stories as opposed to the ones that were more obviously trying to rub their didacticism in my face. But even some of the more didactic episodes proved enjoyable to watch, and when balanced with the episodes that managed to coax hearty laughter out of me ("All Through the House," both "Mini" episodes, "Mason's Rats"), I'd say the overall experience of this series was worth my while. On the whole, "Love, Death, & Robots" gets a thumbs-up from me. My only advice would be not to worry too much about the PC messaging; you've heard it all before.
And watch out for all the flapping dicks.
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