allan 🌾 @control@scifi.fyi

I started watching Luke Cage for the superheroing but I've stayed for the good music and fantastic suits.

I just finished Autonomous. I liked it, I think it balanced the whole mess of conflicting threads pretty well. Though the dramatic resolution of all the conflict was brief and largely offstage in a way that felt like having ones cake and eating it too (happy endings for all! (well except for the dead))

I did appreciate the robosexual love story. I did not appreciate Eliasz's internalized homophobia that's only resolved when his genderless robot switches pronouns. Practical but also ☹️

I'm watching DS9 and at one point Garak, while defending his constant lying, says "the truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination"

I love this guy.

This movie is not good.

I am watching "Cell Phone" on Netflix, a 2016 movie in which John Cusack and Samuel L. Jackson are hunted through the streets by cellphone waving millenials

Like a lot of early Gibson is like this too. It's the future as seen from the 80s and it will always read like that.

I #amreading Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. It starts off pretty explicitly gathering all the threads for a future full of modern day dreads. Future capitalist hellscape of megacorps, runaway IP law, cyborgs, robots, ambient global internet. Very of-its-time cyberpunk.

Nothing wrong with that, but there are stories that you can tell will be dated in 10yrs when technology has gone in some new and unexpected direction, this is one of them.

So far the plot is still spooling so I reserve judgement.

I #amreading Borne by Jeff VanderMeer, I just finished.

I really really liked this book. It's very much New Weird material. But also Borne, the character, was so funny and silly, and I nearly cried.

It reminds me of The Situation by Jeff VanderMeer, which I haven't read in probably a decade, hence why it didn't leap to mind immediately.

The company, the creatures, they feel like they exist in the same universe. The Situation preceeding Borne, perhaps Savante is Wick? Savante designed beetles, Wick builds beetles...

Wikipedia is silent on this.

I #amreading Borne by Jeff VanderMeer.

It's right up my alley of weird, but there's something about it that seems so very familiar and I can't quite put my finger on it.

Everything is strange, fantastical, and occluded. The world has a gauzy and insubstantial texture with a solidity, a resistance, something underneath made of dread. I'm not sure what to think.

Georgio Tsoukalos is a style icon, tho'

​I think this might be another UFO episode, just from the title.

Which, if you've been following my obsession with Ancient Aliens (and as a government agent, how could you not?) you would know is not really my bag.

I mean I'll watch, I have laundry to fold and this is what I have on while I do that, but I may not have much to say.

(I know, disappoint)

The scheme was completely unworkable, and obviously so, right from the get-go. This is a bad movie plot, not a sensible bank robbery plan.

Marjorie wasn't a master manipulator, clearly, because everyone turned on her immediately. She also failed to manipulate her way out of things. She came off as manipulative and untrustworthy to virtually everyone, hence why she was convicted.

I don't doubt for a minute that they believed that they were geniuses, it is not an uncommon personality flaw, but I wasn't convinced that they actually were.

Which matters, somewhat, because the whole narrative thread of the documentary was that this was an elaborate plot by a genius, by a master manipulator, and I don't that's at all true.

This is the crackpot scheme of someone who thinks they are a genius, thinks they are outsmarting everyone, when they really aren't.

I just watched Evil Genius on Netflix and, honestly, I'm not convinced that either Marjorie or Bill were geniuses.

I've met a few people who talk like that, are adamant that they are the smartest person in the room, and in my experience they rarely are. The smartest people in the room don't need to tell you.

* me -> men, durp tpyos

This is vintage inclusiveness. This is what SF writers did in the 90s because they just discovered that women had brains and gays existed.

I expect a hell of a lot better from something written in 2017.

Hell I've seen a lot better in books written in the 70s.

Ok, some of my thoughts about Artemis consolidated over the night. One part that seemed really jarring was the sexuality of the characters.

The main is a woman who spends way too much time telling people that while, yes, she sleeps with me, she isn't, you know, a slut or anything. Which, after the first time, is just wtf?

There is a secondary character who is gay, this is remarked upon any time he enters a scene. This. Is. The. Gay. Guy.