The Agrinautica

July 18th, 22:54 - I was writing that last entry starting while waiting at the gate and finishing literally as we began to taxi down the runway. So it was a bit rushed at the end and didn't include some pictures I've since added.

   Flight was with United, direct from LAX to Sydney. It looks like they'er building a monorail or at least light rail connection at LAX, that would be pretty rad if they actually connect it to the national rail network. I was surprised there was no passport control to leave the United States through the United terminal. Flight was mostly full, but got lucky, had the window seat with an empty seat next to me! 40ish woman on the aisle and I high fived when they closed the door and the seat between us was still empty. Place to dump all our junk! / I totally made use of sticking my feet under the seat in front of that seat for added room. Dinner was a cheeseburger, which I thought lol how very American of United, but it was actually very good. Seatmate remarked on it being surprisingly good. She was a paramedic from Florida, headed to Australia for the women's world cup, was going to potentially visit whichever cities the team she was following (USA?) was playing in.

In Flight Movie Reviews
The D&D Movie - you know, it was actually quite good. I'd heard it was good, and I'd gotten in to D&D the other year, but I was put off from seeing it any sooner because that actor Chris Pine seems extremely hateable to me. I just have this uncontrollable loathing for him. He looks so punchable. I can't even say his acting was bad, I just can't get past how much I hate his appearance. Anyway, I think part of what made this movie so good is that, very much like D&D characters, almost formulaically so, they gave each of the main characters as basic backstory-motivation. I say almost formuliacally because it really seemed like each one had the paragraph one writes when creating a character, almost down to being like the pre-written suggested ones, but it totally worked in the movie and it had me thinking that most movies don't really bother to do that with anyone other than the one most main protagonist. And each of the characters had a meaningful character development story arc. Plot was interesting and had a lot of clever references to D&D things without seeming like it was awkwardly trying to jam them in or in danger of boring people who weren't familiar with the game. In fact I think someone unfamiliar with the game would enjoy it perfectly well purely on its merits as a fantasy movie. I might have given it an A if it weren't for Chris Pine but god I hate him. B+

Avatar: Way of the Water - So the original Avatar didn't exactly have a mind blowing plot, everyone roundly made fun of it for being "dances with wolves with smurfs." Well this one somehow had a worse plot. At the end of the previous one the bad human colonists have to leave the planet Pandora. This one establishes that after (10 years?) another human expediiton arrived with greater force and established a bridgehead on the planet called... Bridgehead City. Our protagonist has been leading guerilla partisan warfare against these colonists, which has been successul in being a huge nuisance to them but not stopping them. It's now (5?) years after the return of the humans. Okay here's where it gets mind bendingly dumb. The colonial authorities want to kill Protagonistface because he's the leader of the resistence, so what does he do? He stops fighting, but leaves his tribe because he fears the colonials will strike his people, and he joins some other tribe, which immediately becomes the target of colonial strikes. Like, what did that accomplish other than the obviously intended meta goal of changing to an ocean based setting? But in universe, why would he stop fighting? Why would the colonials necessarily know where he specifically is? How would he justify really making some other tribe the target for persecution, considering he's supposed to be such a Good Guy and just causing a different innocent tribe to suffer instead of your own doesn't seem like good guy behavior.
   None of this is really spoilers btw, its pretty much established as exposition as soon as they can. And then what I thought was really lame is they have the exact same guy as the bad guy. They're just like "lol look we cloned him before he died!" I think that's a pretty piss poor excuse just to make the same movie again in a different setting. And then, spoiler alert (but really its too lame to be much of a spoiler) they make it clear that the apparently defeated main antagonist has survived, clearly setting up to have him once again reprise the same role (groan) in a third installment. I give this movie a C-, it would be less but I do like all the cool CGI animals they've made and some of the humantech vehicles too.

Banshees of Inisherin - The official plot summary of this movie is "Two lifelong friends find themselves at an impasse when one abruptly ends their relationship." Which doesn't actually sound that exciting but the movie is actually very amusing. There's a subtle humor to almost every line and it moves along quite well. Unfortunately I only started the movie near the end of the flight and we reached the gate when I had just about exactly half an hour left of the movie. Now I'm quite wrapped up in wanting to know how they resolve their plot arcs! It's apparently on Disney+ but I was getting Disney+ through my former roommmate Trent and it appears he has changed his password. And after he moved out he started being kind of a dick to everyone and only hanging out with his 18 yr old girlfriend so I'm not terribly inclined to beg him to give me his new Disneyplus password. Guess I'll need to fly on United again so I can finish the movie. (But note to self its literally on the 30 min remaining mark I left off!) A-

/End In Flight Movie Reviews

   At Sydney in the baggage claim I had some confusion, because as I had checked my checked luggage the handler had said it would go through all the way to Melbourne and the luggage tag I was given reflected that, indicated pick up at MEL, but conventional wisdom would be that I'd have to retrieve my luggage on arrival from international flight, go through biosecurity/customs, and recheck for domestic, and an employee I asked said yes I would have to collect it here. Aggravating things was the fact that it continued to not come out onto the belt until I was really starting to wonder if it wasn't coming out here at all and had indeed continued on automatically. But then finally it came out. By now I had an hour to catch my connecting flight (only half an hour till boarding!), deja vu of the JFK debacle!
   Emerging from international arrivals it was entirely unclear where to go for my domestic flight and I couldn't even find an airport employee, until I asked someone at a currency exchange desk who pointed me in the right direction for the inter-terminal shuttle. Arriving there a airport staffmember was advising us that if we had a tight connection to make it would be faster to take the train, so I rain in the direction indicated, down the two flights of stairs to the subway. Train came within a minute (unlike th NYC JFK train that took ten minutes to arrive!), at this point it was only about half an hour to departure (8:30) and I was afraid they wouldnt' check me in but they did, got through security and arrived at the gate just in time to board the plane.

   Once again had a window seat with an empty middle seat behind me. This time the woman in the aisle seat was matronly and threw her purse into the middle seat in what felt like an unfriendly hostile manner. We never spoke. Looking out the windows as we flew over the mountains of the Great Dividing Range there was an impressive amount of snow.



   Stepping out of hte Melbourne airport it was indeed coold! 9c (48f) "feels like 4" (39f). I had just missed the earlier Gull shuttle bus to Melbourne, would have to wait an hour for the next (which was the one I had expected to catch anyway). Changed into some more layers in the restroom while waiting. Bossman picked me up from the shuttle stop in Geelong, filled me in on some of shenanigans that had occurred while I was gone, sounds like an eventful two months!
   Kind of expected the car to need to be jumped but it started right up. Went and got lunch at the schnitzel-wrap place nad then some groceries since I obviously have no perishables from before I left. Then headed home.
   Just on the edge of my village I pass a police car, which I see promptly do a u-turn behind me. Which isn't a normal place to do so so I was bracing myself for what came next which was the reds and blues behind me. Remember my car? Having collided with a cow on the road? Well, I was waiting for their insurance to pay me for my damages, finally finally after taking seemingly forever (literally 7 months) they emailed me while I was in Africa saying they (the insurance company) found their client was not at fault because the fences were in good order and a cow jumping over a fence is an "act of god." I responded by sending the photo of the numerous cows on the road, and reminder that the farmer had admitted to owning the cow I hit, and they responded that it was unprovable that those other cows were also the farmers, which in my opinion stretched credulity beyond reason. So now that I'm back I've made an appointment with a lawyer to sue them for the damages. But long story short my car has not been repaired yet.
   The copper, who it turns out is the local Birregurra copper, was relatively friendly, said he wasn't going to ticket me or condemn my car with a "canary" (yellow ticket making a car officially unroadworthy), but he would if he saw me on the road with it again. Soo I was going to go to work tomorrow but I think I'll instead take the day to buy another car. As I've mentioned before I hate hate hate hate hate shoppinig for cars. But I think, though I innately feel like one "should" shop all around for the best car, I'm literally going to buy the first reasonably priced reasonable car I find because did I mention I absolutely haaaaate shopping for cars?
   Anyway, welcome home ey?

   Arrived home at 15:45 local time, which I think would have been 22:45 July 19th back in California, ie right on about 24 hours after my flight took off from LAX.

   My neighbor who i left my house key with wasn't home just yet, which presented a bit of a pickle. But weirdly, considering I recall having a hard time finding a house key to lock the house with at all before I left, on this occasion I went to where I felt my spare key should be and lo there was a key tehre that opened the house. I don't know why I couldn't find that key before I left? Or maybe I knowingly put it there at the time in addition to giving one to my neighbor and have simply forgotten.
   Anyway, the end.

   So today I went into Melbourne town to go to the German consulate and apply for a German passport, which seems to have been successful, then I met up with my Ecuadorian friend Michelle in an eastern suburb (Michem?); and then I found that the theatre that was showing the new All Quiet on the Western Front was at that point on my way home! So I decided to go see it.

   Got off the train in this suburb called Hawthorne that questionmark was just beside a university? Anyway leaving the train station one proceeds immediately into a cute laneway full of little shops and then the street outside was also full of cute little shops. The cinema seemed to be possibly an independant one, specializing in indie films and stuff. It appeared to have a full bar and coffee-bar in the waiting area.


   Anyway, on to the movie. I had seen the next-most-recent All Quiet on the Western Front (which I guess must have been the 1979 version?) as well as read the book in I think my junior year of high school so like 23 years ago. So the memories I'm comparing to this one to are a bit faded.
   This version had some great cinematography. And they did some clever things such as, it starts with fighting in the trenches, we see a soldier afraid to go up over to make the attack but finally he does and we see all the typical craziness of no man's land, and then we see the dead being collected, and their uniforms and boots being stripped off of them, then we see cartloads of bloody uniforms being cleaned, and repaired, and then we go to the actual protagonist of the film, Paul as a just-graduated schoolboy signing up to join the army with his friends, he receives a uniform, it has the name of the soldier we saw at the beginning on it still.
   What I didn't like about this version compared to what I remember of the last one is they tried to give it more of a plot, which I think actually took away from the point of the film. In the 1979 version, like in the book, the "plot" is mainly just that war is hell and we see the protagonist experience the war until he (spoiler alert) dies. And the story as written does a great job of carrying this to its conclusion. In this version they introduced a parallel storyline of the guy trying to negotiate the armistice, and by cutting between that and the protagonist they kind of make it seem like a race against time -- which, I can see why they thought that might be a good idea but I think it just cheapens the story as originally written. It takes attention off Paul's perspective and kind of eliminates what would be a more "this is never going to end" feel you'd have without it. Another similar decision they made is they also cut to the general or field marshall commanding Paul's area frequently, and he's eating a lavish meal with elegant settings nearly every time he's seen -- he's pointedly not once portrayed being out among the troops or doing anything militarily useful, but he does frequently speechify about how he doesn't want piece because he wants to win glory like his forefathers. I think this also really cheapened the film, in waht is otherwise a very serious film this character comes off like a comic book villian. His comments about how the peacemakers are betraying them did foreshadow the rise of nazism which was nice but the whole thing was too heavy handed. Also when he orders his troops to attack in the literal last fifteen minutes of the war, I couldn't help but be aware that while I've seen no record of the Germans doing so, the AMERICANS were noted to have done that -- having arrived late to the war there _were_ reportly American commanders who were so overeager to win some glory that they pushed futile assaults up until the minute of the armistice (see also, in the book / prev movie, Paul dies a month before the armistice, this one in their wholly unnecessary attempt to increase the tension has Paul die at the minute of the armistice).
   So altogether I enjoyed it though I think it would have been better if they had just had faith that the story as originally written didn't need to be hollywooded up. Ii give it a B+ If you're a connoisseur of war movies definitely give it a watch when it comes out on netflix later this month.

   Picking up right where I left off, which was immediately prior to boarding my flight to Dubai: so of course I was in the last boarding group, Group F. I don't know how the boarding groups get chosen but I am somehow always always in the last one. Which meant there was no room for my backpack in the overhead bins so my feet had to cohabitate the already meagre foot space with my backpack for the 14 hour journey. Airplane was a double-decker airbus thing, which is apparently a thing these days. Had a middle seat, got excited when the guy with the window asked if he could trade seats, but apparently he only was interested in the seat on the aisle ("because I'm gonna be getting up to go to the bathroom a lot"). Which she declined and then I'm like oh great. But he ended up only needing to get up four (maybe five?) times which I suppose isn't terribly unreasonable on a 14 hour flight
   I don't generally make a habit of asking my seat neighbors what they're up to any more, but eventually I asked the slightly older caucasian woman to my left where she was headed, because she seemed friendly.
   "Lagos, Nigeria"
   "Lagos?? What are you doing in Lagos??" I asked, surprised
   "Oh a development project, you?"
   "Ghana... for a development project."
   Turns out she's working with this organization called Nigerian Montane Forest Project. And they'd been in fact thinking of doing a project to promote beekeeping! So I gave her my card and I'm sure we'll talk more about this -- good thing I didn't never talk to her!
   The other guy, the one with the window seat, was on his way to see family in the Czech Republic, whom he hasn't seen in four years.

   And now it's time for a return of our classic segment:
In Flight Movie Reviews
The Courier - The Courier is about a British businessman who was recruited to help smuggle Soviet secrets out of Moscow to, as the movie portrays anyway, prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis from resulting in nuclear annihilation. I really liked it, it was well acted, well done, a true spy story (it assures us). I give it an A

Rogue - Next even though even from the brief summary it didn't sound very good (something like "A mercenary leads a unit of soldiers in a mission in Africa of rescuing a government official's daughter, who has been held hostage. Starring Megan Fox") I watched this movie just to see how Hollywood is portraying Africa these days. It was so bad I only kept watching just to see how the trainwreck would go. Aside from a generally dumb plot and the "elite soldiers" utilizing tactics even I could see were idiotic, and it goes from guns-blazing shoot em up to everyone-gets-picked-off-one-by-one-at-night-by-a-badky-CGIed-lion horror flick halfway through but my main impression is that I found it wildly racist. Not in that it actively portrays black people as inferior but in that it's set in Africa and yet the only actual Africans in the movie are the bad guy soldiers who die by the joblot -- and one member of the good guys who is just an emotional basketcase who is easily emotionally bullied by anyone and everyone including a teenage girl. And the leaders of the bad guys are all Middle Eastern despite that this does not appear to be taking place in north Africa. Because the one good guy African mentions he's maasai, and the baddies are referred to as Al-shabaab, I assumed it takes place in Kenya or Tanzania, but, the text at the end about lion farming in South Africa implies its supposed to be set there. Most likely all of Africa is a much of a sameness to the producers of this terrible movie. Also while Al-shabaab is Muslim, they would look like East Africans and I think the directors of this movie just thought all Muslims must look middle eastern. Also their mission is to rescue this white girl because she's "the governor's daughter" ... but neither Kenya nor any other African country has any white governors so I think the filmmakers assumption that the local governor must be white is also a fundamentally racist misunderstanding of Africa. F and everyone involved should be "cancelled"

I'm Your Man - now this is, I believe, a romance, which is not the type of movie I usually watch / review but the woman sitting beside me was watching it, and conveniently had closed captions on so I ended up watching it too and despite being a romance I found myself being kind of into it. I think because it was very existential / philosophical -- the plot involves a woman (who is incidentally an archeologist) apparently agreeing to help test out a robot who has been designed to be her perfect partner, so as you can imagine it involves lots of philosophical/existential "yes but you're not real" "you're only saying that because your algorithm says to" stuff. So like, I dunno, as far as romances go I give it an A.

Hive - "A woman who's husband has been missing for seven years since the war in Kosovo turns to beekeeping despite local resistance to a woman working." Or something like that (is what the blurb would have said). Or as the google blurb says "Hoping to provide for their families, struggling widows start a business to sell a local food product. Together, they find healing and solace in the new venture, but their will to live independently is soon met with hostility." I actually really liked it BUT there's a weird bit of false advertising going on here. The movie heavily implies that "local food product" is honey. I mean it's called Hive and there's a picture of her in a beekeeping suit as the cover image. Well there's about a minute of beekeeping in the movie, it really barely has anything to do with the movie. She's seen having a go at it twice, both times she seems to be struggling and gets stung, and the local food product she ends up producing and marketing appears to be some kind of Balkan salsa -- it's definitely not the honey she barely sells. Despite not being about beekeeping I found it to be a compelling story about the community dealing with the loss of so many of their husbands and menfolk in the war, not knowing if they're alive or dead, and women trying to support themselves in a community that frowns on it. If I give another movie an A am I perhaps being too lenient in this batch of reviews??


      Having departed Melbourne at 9:15pm, arrived (14?) hours later in Dubai at 5am, whereupon it was already 35 degrees celsius there. Layover in Dubai was uneventful, except in checking my email I finally had an email with a pdf of confirmation of my Ghana visa-on-arrival which is pretty last minute as far as those things go. Flight from Dubai to Ghana (nine hours?) 7:40am to 11:35am. I rather fancied I wouldn't even bother to redeem my visa-on-arrival since I already had a visa, but as I came down the escalator into the passport control hall a young man hailed me "Are you Kris Fricke?" and it turned out he'd been arranged to sort me out with the visa on arrival. I tried to explain that I probably didn't need it but he was undeterred so I just decided to go with it and he walked me to the visas on arrival counter and facilitated talking it through with them. He was apparently an airport employee not presently on shift who had been arranged by our contacts on the ground here to help me through a friend of a friend of his or something. This is how things work in Africa. On the plus side then I got to walk right past the big passport control cues with him and he stayed with me until we met the hotel's driver out front. I had cynically expected the hotel driver to fail to show up but there he was with a sign with my name on it. So altogether my arrival in Ghana was unusually smooth. Never before have the people I'm workign with managed to have someone meet me inside the secured part of the airport so I'm usually on my own until I get out of the baggage claim.

   Hotel was a short distance from the airport. Initial impressions of Ghana are that it's not nearly as undeveloped as Guinea (which literally has raw sewage in gutters just outside the airport and shanties), but doesn't give me that trying-really-hard-to-be-cool vibe I get from Nigeria. Nigeria is like trying to jump from undeveloped to the French riviera. Not that I've been to the French riviera. Or Nigeria in over ten years now so maybe I'm out of date who knows!

   And hotel as usual is ridiculously fancy compared to what I'm accustomed to. Due to it being relatively cheap to employ people they're gratuituously overstaffed. I come down here by the pool (which has really over the top faux rock formation decorations all around it and several fountains) to sit and be on my laptop (Because my room as nice as it is only has a small window so it feels a bit confining to hang out in) and even though there's no one else here there's three bar staff on duty who jump up to assist me. And then I poke my head in the hotel restaurant just to see what it looks like and even though there's no guests currently in there, there's three staff who jump up to assist me.

   And that's the latest. Just relaxing the rest of the afternoon, recoverign from the long journey, and tomorrow I travel onward to the inland Ghanaian town of Tamale.

Greyhound
   I had really wanted to see Greyhound when it came out in theatres but then.. it didn't, due to being released at the height of the pandemic. I made a concerted effort to try to watch this movie a few weeks ago but I could not find any legal way for me to watch it (it appeared to be available via some television channel but I don't have a TV and am not about to subscribe to a whole tv channel service to watch one god damn movie). Then I tried torrenting it but was unsuccessful in even this. It's hard to be a pirate any more. Then I asked my friends, among whom are several leet haxxor IT professionals -- my birthday was coming up the following Saturday so I dropped that somehow acquiring this movie for me would be a nice present that should be easy and free for them to accomplish. Yeah no no one came through and I spent my 40th birthday eating pancakes by myself.
   So instead Ii watched Dunkirk since it was on Netflix.


Dunkirk
   At first I thought something was wrong with my sound system and actually fiddled with the nobs and the settings before realizing the movie actually begins with a few minutes of complete silence as some soldiers walk through (the town of Dunkirk?). Not even footfalls or other small noises. I guess they thought they were being artsy but I thought it was stupid and distractingly frustating. It would have been more poignant I think if it was _mostly_ silent but with some small noises like their footsteps and maybe occasional and increasing distant gunfire.
   The movie plot is simple, this one protagonist soldier (do we even get his name? I forget) is trying to escape Dunkirk even if it means cutting queues, stowing away, impersonating others, etc. He has no backstory. No character has any backstory. No character has any character development. Everyone just does what they do. It also follows a fighter pilot and the civilian crew of a rescue boat. These different story lines are ostensibly ongoing simulteniously but disconcertingly it will be the middle of the night for one set of characters then we flash to another set who are experiencing daylight and back to the people who are experiencing nighttime, all within what 50 miles of eachother?
   Altogether, it was a bit fun in as much as I always like WWII style settings but being that it was actually a pretty insipid movie imo. I give it a C+


Topgun II
   Opening scrawl: "The Navy has established a training school for its elite 1% ... they call it ... Topgun: Maverick" and here's me thinking to myself uh what, yeah maybe they call it Topgun but I don't tihnk they call it Topgun Maverick. Okay mate we're 10 seconds into the movie and you're killing me with this grammar/syntax crash.
   Saw the movie in the theatre with my friend Trent (who had already seen two other movies in the theatre earlier that day???). The movie was in a lot of places very predictable, harping on obvious themes (we get it he's getting older, has friction with superiors because he's a "maverick," and his former colleagues are all admirals now), and obvious homages to the original. A lot of scenes that made most of the audience laugh out loud had me rolling my eyes, maybe I'm too cynical.
   Weird decision I'm puzzling over, so they homaged the infamous "homoerotic volleyball scene" from the original with a homoerotic beach football scene, but their one female fighter pilot is barely glimpsed in the background and was wearing a very conservative bathing suit. Were they trying to go out of their way not to sexualize her? If so its kind of weird to do so as they're overtly sexualizing the entire male cast in that scene.
   Also I thought it was funny how adamantly ambiguous the movie remained about the baddies to be faced at the end. They're a "rogue state" but no location is ever given, there's no flags or other identifying features. And even their fighters are not MiGs but "fifth generation fighters." One helicopter seen is clearly a Soviet designed Mi-24 but then again they also have US designed F-14s so its hard to say they're anything other than Baddyland. The snow and pine forests seem to rule out the middle east, and its obviously somewhere adjoining carrier accessible sea. The remaining options then are coast of China, North Korea (actually this is quite plausible), Russian coast, or somewhere in Scandinavia/Baltics. This obviously is sort of an exercise in futility since they clearly want it to be an entirely fictional place, which I think is kinda a cop out (what afraid of hurting film sales in North Korea?).
   Ultimately the movie does deliver on its trademark chair gripping action scenes, and I enjoyed that there was kind of a twist to the final mission rather than it simply being a success. Then I walked out of the movie theatre feeling like shit I'm 40 and I'm not even a washed up fighter pilot what am I doing with my life. Altogether I give it a B

   So Pandora finally figured out how to block my VPN a bit ago, and spotify quickly showed itself to be so awful at predicting music I might like that about 90% of its choices were awful, and then Ii discovered that youtube does a pretty good auto-mix predicting music I might like. Well that was good for awhile and I actually discovered a fair number of songs I liked, but what it's not good at is anticipating when I've heard a song I like _too_ much and now I'm starting to become a bit frustrated with youtube always serving me up the exact same selection.

   But the other consequence of this is that I've been logging into youtube on the daily, primarily for the music, but its always optimistically suggesting other things. So I rediscovered my love of Stephen Colbert, and then tentatively branched out to other stand up hosts: I found Jimmy Kimmel bareable, Jimmy Fallon can get a chuckle if one is really bored but somehow his demeanor comes off like he's skulking in a corner like a chastised dog, and this guy Seth Myers, is it just me or is he like 0% funny? He's like a guy reading the news in a desperate trying-too-hard tone with the occasional dead-on-arrival joke punctuated by a "that was funny wasn't it??" expression. It's painful to watch.

   Anyway what I came here to write about was that so I got served up this compilation of scenes from a movie:

   So last night I finally saw the Han Solo movie, on netflix. Altogether I found it really disappointing. The following review will contain lots of spoilers.

( Spoiler alert! )

   It's time for another episode of netflix show reviews!


Star Trek Discovery
   I had previously reported optimistically on the new Star Trek Disco after the first few episodes. Now it's on a "mid season break" (when did that become a thing??" so it's a good time to look back and how it has or has not lived up to expectations. I still find it interesting and watchable but I think it's fallen short of being The Next Big Thing.
   Character Development: In the first few episodes they were of course introducing characters left and right and trying to rapidly round them out. This was exciting at the time, but it appears to me that they've done the lazy thing of having a character appear one way in the first episode they'er introduced, "show them changing" in like one episode, and from the third time they show onward oh look they're such a changed person! I put also into this category the terribly written romance that I feel isn't even a spoiler because from the moment the two characters are first in the same room together it's obvious we're looking at a terribly written romance on our hands. This "romance" takes about an episode to result in their inevitable getting together. I hate to read the speculations as it sometimes comes awfully close to feeling like a spoiler, but for my part I feel like it seems unlikely they plan to keep a cutesy relationship going for the rest of the series so I reckon the guy gets killed or betrays them all or something otherwise unfortunate interrupts this entirely contrived romance. Thus leaving our protagonist with a broken heart, oh how cute ... and subtly done as hammer.
   Continuity Problems: I think the consensus with the way the series fits in with the other shows in the franchise is that it either is in or sends itself to an alternative dimension. Star Trek is nerdy enough, and all these alternative timelines are hard enough to swallow for normal Trekkies, it seems like that explanation would be really off-putting to non-Trekkies trying to watch. "So how does this fit in with Captain Kirk and all that? Alternative dimensions whaa? ::eyes glaze over, clicks over to Top Chef::" And that explanation still doesn't explain why technology is somehow across the board better than in the Original Series, or the uniforms wildly different. The Original Series uniforms look tacky sure but they could have made them at least vaguely reminiscent. One particular technology that has been bothering me is I feel like in the other serieses they would get messages that clearly had reached them from somewhere else at much-faster-than-light-speed, but it still seemed like it wasn't easy, they wouldn't just casually call someone up for high definition real time hologram conversation. Even if this is a divergent timeline, technology would have generally proceeded at the same general rate wouldn't it?
   General Context of Things: this may sound a bit more quibbling, but because their new technology allows them to pop up anywhere instantaneously, and with the added instant communication to anywhere. The feeling that they are anywhere specific has been lost. When they're in a situaion I don't feel they are alone far far away trying to deal with it, like you feel in OS or TNG, but rather they are a button press from home. There's no sense of contextual location. And I find that bothers me.

   What I do like though is when characters from the original series wander into the story. I suppose that's why they set it at this time. Though even this they mess up frequently, like I think it hasn't been adequately explained how she's apparently Spock's adopted sister and yet has somehow never come up before.

   So anyway, as you may have gathered, I'm not wholly impressed with the show so far, though I'm sure I'll keep watching once they get back from their break to see where they go with it. Now as it happens, when they left me in the lurch for this random break, my attention has been caught by something else, a show I have come to love!





The Expanse
   I hadn't really heard any mention of this from my friends or usual sources of hub-bub about shows you really ought to watch, so it was kind of blind luck I guess that it caught my attention on netflix. I started watching it, quickly found myself binging straight through with an episode a night until I got through all of the two current seasons.
   THe show takes place (200?) years in the future, where people have thoroughly colonized mars and some other locations, but by and large haven't learned to break any currently known laws of physics and as such are confined to the solar system. Interestingly I had been wishfully thinking such a series already existed and thinking about it months ago! In the series the Earth is governed by the UN, and an independant Mars is the major rival. There's many colonies in the asteroid belt that don't have independence themselves but really want it.
   Character Development: As you may have noticed, I am big on character development and complex characters. In this series many of the characters slowly and extremely believably develop throughout the series. There's even a romance that I actually _liked!_ -- it was NOT something you'd expect in the first many episodes with the two characters but slowly you started to see how it might happen and actually felt pleased when it finally did. Also complex characters -- many characters who aren't entirely good or entirely bad despite what your first impression might be.
   Compelling Storyline: man I can't wait until next season to find out where this is all going!! and I don't know who to root for!
   Literary Allusions: if I wasn't sold on it already, the moment the group of main-est main characters named their ship the Rocinante you know I was sold for sure!
   Plausible future: I also just really love how it's not the basically kind of fanciful future of Star Trek and/or many other sci fi universes but everything you see is an entirely plausible extrapolation of where we might be without breaking the rules of physics as they are currently understood, as well as plausible political and societal developments. In my own vague idea of a series set in the 100-200 year future I ALSO had always thought of the UN being the world government and big corporations being major political players. Oh that's another thing I liked, where a lot of shows go to great lengths to not call the world governing body the UN but rather something understood to be the same but different, or won't name any current corporations or organizations, in this one you see "fedex" written on shipping containers in space and there are mormons. Space mormons!

   Shortcomings: There's really just a few shortcomings I can think of that prevent the show from potentially being GoT-level good (I discount the most recent GoT season in my consideration of "GoT-level good" ;) ) -- (1) while characters who have been well developed and you thought were gonna have a larger role DO very occasionally die, by and large I feel pretty confident that the main characters aren't about to die, and I really think that uncertainly that someone will survive a given incident is part of the magic with GoT. (2) now, I am not craving gratuitous GoT level nudity in order to approve of a series, but when, for example, as a major plot development a character was discovered naked and dead, when they used contrived camera angles or object placements to preserve the body's modesty, it just makes it feel a bit stilted and prudish, and takes your mind out of the storyline itself back into thinking of it as a tv show. Storyline-pertinent nudity souldn't be contrivedly avoided! Don't be so American!

   But in conclusion, I gosh darn love this series and if you are remotely into sci fi you should watch it!!


   ...also is it just me or does that main character James Holden remind me a lot of Jon Snow? (Edit: haha while googling for an official Expanse picture to include here I came across this)


Random Picture of the Day


   A donkey in Kyrgyzstan. I don't think I've shared this one yet? It's actually my desktop background. At the time, having gotten a new computer just before this project I didn't have much to choose from and it was a picture I had just taken, but I quite like it. Though man I know I recently saw a picture I had taken of a rocket shaped monument out in rural Kyrgyzstan which would be perfect here, but considering all my pictures from more than a month ago have been lost I can't think of where I had seen it, maybe I'm just remembering having seen it before The Loss. ):

   Hello from Paris, France.

   I will be attending the world beekeeping conference in Istanbul and due to the vagaries of airline
pricing I am taking a very convoluted route there and back. So now I'm in France.

   Departed Melbourne Sunday after I believe not quite even two weeks back. The equinox and therefore beginning of Spring (by my reckoning anyway -- Australians are barbaric heathens who just consider the season to change on the first of every third month), which, normally I don't travel much during Spring and Summer because the beekeeping season is on, but hey this conference is Kinda A Big Deal.


And now another episode of...
In Flight Movie Reviews!
   I've watched just about everything worth watching and Etihad has an unusually bad selection (and a huge amount of auto playing advertisements! I remarked on this last time but it bears commenting again, I thought you were supposed to be classy Etihad!) so this is really down to scraping the bottom of the barrel for crumbs.

X-Files Season 10 - I've had to turn to the "TV Shows" section of the in flight entertainment I've gotten that desperate. Anyway this is the new season of X Files after something like a ten year hiatus! Ah the memories of watching that intro (they didn't change it!) back in high school! Of the three episodes I thought the first one seemed a bit more there's-very-definitely-a-alien-related-government-conspiracy than I think I remember there being but then again I'm not sure how accurate my memory is. Episode 2 was good and a bit in a different direction, glad they're starting out running through the paces. And Episode 3 was really quite funny and I really liked it. Not to give away any spoilers but it was in the strange small town happenings / cryptids / monsters category.

Arthur: Legend of the Sword: I really didn't even want to watch this the trailers had looked ridiculous but eventually during the 14th hour of the flight or so I gave in because I do really like Arthurian stuff and thought I'd at least have a look at it, and.... it's utterly ridiculous!!! Like. WTF. It seems to take place in a not-England fantasy land except London is there. There are giant (giant!!) elephants with castles on their backs, the bad guys have an army of pleather-clad ninjas, for some reason all references to druids have been replaced with "mages" lest any semblance of the actual historic context seep through and just... really ridiculous. I don't have enough internet access just now nor quite the interest to look at its critical reviews but I hope it got the shellacking it deserved. I only got about halfway through before in-flight entertainment shut off (again, WTF Etihad, the entertainment system doesn't work until you're at cruising altitude and shuts down again as descent begins, leaving us sans entertainment for a good forty minutes at the beginning and end for no clear reason), and I do not feel any need to watch the rest of this film whose underlying idea seems to simply be "so we take a few key words from the story of king arthur and just cobble together from there a super CGI heavy fantasy drama from the cheapest script writer we can find."


   Will post about Paris itself in another entry.

   If I may be so bold, I'd like to combine two fairly unrelated things in this entry. First I just wanted to post the pictures above and below of Cato posing particularly dramatically. And as long as I'm posting I've been wanting to rant a little bit about the Viking television series so I'm going to go ahead and do that. (Though I'll point out that viking cats are definitely a thing, we can call Cato "Bjornekatt Loðstjärt."(Bear-cat shaggy-butt))

   Now if I have a bunch of criticisms of the Vikings show it's not because I loathe and despise it but because vikings are near and dear to my heart and the show is almost excellent, except for a few things that really grate upon me, which is why I need to get it off my chest.
   I don't intend to include any spoilers in here except for maybe general comments on the personalities of main characters.

   (1) First of all, worst of all, that friggen "seer" is totally fantasy cliche and stolen whole cloth from the movie 300. I like that supernatural things occasionally happen, but I prefer it when they're portrayed kind of ambiguously like it could have just been a coincidence or someone's imagination, but this permanent character who doesn't look like a realistic normal human, doesn't act like one, and I cant' forget that I saw him looking and acting the same way in 300 is just a huge affront to my willing suspension of disbelief and enjoyment of the film.
   (2) What's with the awful haircuts? I googled around about the historical accuracy of the series before writing this and found some stupid puff pieces about how "yes they did have hair braids like that!" ... conveniently ignoring that I'm prrrrretty sure no one could be bothered to painstakingly shave fashionable portions of their head with the tools at hand (which is to say knives and water that would have to be heated over a fire). I feel like in later seasons they toned this down but in the first season it looked like a bunch of bikers with too much time on their hands escaped from hair design school. Also, it's one thing to have it shaved clean but Ragnar's son Bjorne looks like he has his hair shaved evenly at like a no 4 setting on a clippers, which would also be very hard to maintain without, you know, a clippers.
   (3) The immortality of main characters. It's a classic failing of MOST series that eventually you come to realize none of the main characters will ever die. Without giving too much away, several times main characters appear to be killed in battle, shot up with arrows, hacked and then run over by horses, limp corpse carried away... then it turns out they're alive! And walking talking frolicking about in the next scene. Instead of being on the edge of my seat when it looks like a main characters is about to die in battle, as you'd think they'd want the audience to feel, I just roll my eyes and when sure enough it turns out they're actually alive I groan aloud -- not because I specifically want any of the characters in question to die so much as just, come on man.
   (4) the world revolves around them -- it's also a weakness in a series when you start to feel like there's no world outside what's presently on set, and that they're the most important people in the world. In particular, when the viking king comes and hangs out for most of a season or two and has no retainers, seemingly nothing better to do, it seemed pretty odd to me. Doesn't he have at least a town of his own, and I don't know, a best friend? He just floats around like the secondary character he is and it starts to feel like they haven't filled out the rest of the viking world at all.
   (5) I really think they should have cast said king as Ragnar instead of the guy they did. He actually does seem to have the force of presence expected. The guy playing Ragnar seems like he's trying to channel Johnny Depp but it doesn't work for him. He doesn't have a forceful presence, he has a weird retreating twitching not-making-eye-contact not making decisions presence that doesn't seem to me to fit the part.
   (6) Ragnar Lodbroke means "Ragnar shaggy pants," WHERE ARE HIS SHAGGY PANTS
   (7) The tattoos. Did you know, there IS one reference to vikings "being covered in green drawings," by the Arab diplomat Ibn Fadlan who encountered a group of Varangrians (that is to say Norsemen who had settled in what is now Russia) in Bulgaria. Being as this is the only reference in any record, it is far more likely they picked it up in Russia (there's Siberian tribes known to tattoo -- seriously check out these cool tattoos) than that somehow no one in Europe ever thought to mention it and no tattoo implements have survived among the many oddments that have (I call this occam's tattoo needle).
   (8) This doesn't really bother me like the other things, but while I'm mentioning things, despite the two human sacrifices in the series being portrayed as voluntary, and indeed the priests refusing to take a non-voluntary sacrifice, and there are historical references and evidence of sacrifices, there is no historical reference or evidence of a single voluntary sacrifice.
   (9) Cato reminds me that there's no cats. Hmm that's a good point there really aren't.

   But other than the above points I must say I do find it rather enjoyable. I do really appreciate that they make a lot of references to the sagas and historical events. Presently once a week my friend Billie and I get together and I bring a bottle of mead and we watch a few episodes.

Sunday, August 23rd - The day before the trip I found myself particularly stressed, not so much about packing so much as a number of things that needed to be sorted out before I left. Among other things, I bought my tickets for the October trip to East Africa. The group in Tanzania I've been planning to work with, the main contact has been extremely difficult to get ahold of and when I finally had a friend in Nairobi call him (he always asks me to call him in the afternoon, which is the middle the night for me) he apparently said "call in September" to find out if everything is ready for the project ... which as you can imagine increased my frustration with trying to plan it. But then I got a nice email from the Beekeeping cooperative of Pemba Island, the northernmost of the Zanzibar islands. I had contacted them as a backup plan to Tanzania but they seem so much easier to work with...

   I'm thinking of trying to fit both in though.

   I took most of the evening off though because my dear friend Asli was passing through LAX with a seven hour layover, on her way to Fiji to take up a position as a third mate on a ship there. It's funny because last time I was her was a little less than a year ago when I myself had a ten hour layover in Istanbul.
   It was interesting to note that for her to legally immigrate or even visit the states would be a huge process, but, without even dealing with the US embassy or consulate she was able to get a transit visa on a ticket from Istanbul to Fiji, get stamped for a "transit visa" on arrival and walk right out of the terminal to disappear into Los Angeles.
   As it happens of course she has no intention to illegally immigrate and to do so would throw away her huge investment in time and money in her merchant marine licensing (US authorities who are reading this please take note and keep it in mind when granting her a tourist visa eventually!)

   We had just time to drive down to the Santa Monica Pier and stroll about there for a bit before rushing back to the airport. Unfortunately didn't have time for In-N-Out as we'd hoped -- the line was around the building. I feel well satisfied though that we made the most of the time, the pier and surroundings were suitably emblematic of the LA area.



Monday, August 24th - Got up at 5:30 for my 8:45am flight. And then began packing ;D
   Last time I was really freaked out because I didn't seem to have forgotten anything, which just seemed wrong. Well I don't have that worry this time. Despite distinctly remembering unplugging my phone charger and picking up the solar phone charger that would have been so useful on this trip, I can't find them in my luggage. Very irritating, I guess I must have set them down somewhere between retrieval and putting them in the luggage. ):
   And before anyway says "you wouldn't have forgotten anything if you had packed the day before! I'll point out that I needed my phone to be charging that night so the one tihng I forgot I couldn't have packed earlier anyway.
   As it happens I have another charger that's for the in-country phone I've been provided with, but it doesn't seem to charge my phone very fast, charging overnight last night (in country now) didn't even get it about 80%.
   Also it means I can't transfer pictures from my phone to my computer. :-/

In Flight Movie Review Intermission!
The Hobbit III: Battle of Five Armies - D+ I loved the Hobbit book, though granted I was in elementary school when I read it, but I'm going to wildly guess there was just a chapter or two dedicated to this battle, and there's a reason for that. While an important event if you dedicate an entire novel / feature-length-film to one battle, we've really gotta care about it and/or it needs to be done extremely well. You could make a movie about Gettysberg or Waterloo or such, but I think almost any entirely fictional battle is just going to be a lot of pointless killing in movie form. And that's what this was, CGI orcs and dwarves and elves throwing eachother around for 2+ hours. On top of this the orc commander suddenly appears on top of another mountain that wasn't there before, and though it's snowy on top everyone seems easily able to teleport there from the battleground and/or see what's going on there? Or how about when characters trekked to some other fortress presumably hundreds of miles away and returned, also during the battle? I'm not talking about the wizards going to renamed Dol Guldor in the south, but that made up place in the West. Anyway, I thought it was pretty terrible, probably the only reason I didn't give it an F was out of my tremendous respect for JRR Tolkien's original story.
The Water Diviner - A and I don't give many As! Russell Crowe as an Australian farmer and water diviner sets off to look for three sons, all of whom failed to return from the Battle of Gallipoli four years prior. Also his wife commmits suicide, which I guess really bummed him out, but obviously opening it up for him to fall in love with a Turkish woman, which I'm not even calling a spoiler because who wouldnt' see that a mile away. Anyway for some reason, despite not having had any relatives involved to my knowledge, the Battle of Gallipoli always seems particularly poignant to me, maybe it's because I lived in Australia, have been to Gallipoli, and fell in love with a Turkish woman myself (and whom I'd seen just the day before). Anyway I think the movie was well done, and did a good job of portraying the Turks of the era as a rich and dignified culture torn between a disintegrating empire and Turkish nationalism.
Gunman - B- A solid running-around-shooting-pepole of the "trying to find out why they're trying to kill me" variety. Noteworthy aspect to comment on, in the beginning the protagonist and his compatriots are working as private security for aid agencies in Congo, and then most of the action occurs eight years later, where we find him digging water wells in the Congo (an interesting random parallel to the Water Diviner, which involves some well digging), and all of his compatriots are now filthy rich running their own aid agencies. I had no idea aid work was the path to the swanky life! ;D


Tuesday, August 25th -Other than those movies, nothing much to remark on about the flights. Orange County -> Minneapolis -> Paris CDG (where they still don't know how to queue for security check, but I got randomly waved into the flight crew line, where I think security was much more laid back and friendly) -> Sierra Leone (didn't de-plane) to Conakry. Arrived in Conakry at 17:30, which if I'm doing the math right is 25.75 hours after my plane had taken off in California. It took another hour and a half to wind through the narrow crowded streets of Conakry to my hotel at the end of the peninsula.


Wednesday, August 26th - For my own reference, this is the Golden Plaza Hotel that they've put me in this time. It has a nice restaurant in it, the food is downright good, and the internet works better than it does at home (that being said, it's been down this last hour, but hey). Generator kicks right on when the power goes out, AC works ... but my room is a cell with no window. There's a window, on the side wall of an adjoining utility closet which I have a curtained window that looks into. So the level of outdoor light and fresh air in here is dungeon status. And the bed takes up most of the space in the room so it's very dungeonesque. I'd ask to be put in the hotel I was in last time, which is right around the corner ... but internet is lifeblood and it mostly works here. When I get back into the city I'm definitely requesting a room with an actual window though. I don't care if it gets street noise, that's preferable to being in the Bastille here.

   Speaking of when I return, usually there's a day or two of lollygagging about upon my return to the capitol, which is generally not very fun because, like today, I end up with nothing to do but sit in my cell. But I google image searched the islands off the coast here and ... wow! And then looked at the tripadvisor comments on them and they're totally doable in a day trip! I'm so doing that when I get back!

   But back to the present, today I spent way too many hours cooped up in this cell. Oh I went out and walked around a bit, but this town isn't entirely safe even in broad daylight (last time I was year one of the other volunteers got picked up by some soldiers allegedly for photographing buildings he wasn't supposed to photograph, and they took him back to their barracks to pressure him into bribing them. Though ultimately they let him go not terribly worse for the wear, I'm still particularly leery of soldiers in this town. I did find my favorite Turkish place from last time I was hear and had lunch there.

   Also exchanged money for 8300 Guinean Franks to the dollar, thus making me once again a millionaire (1.8 million franks to my name at the moment). I always find it novel that the official exchange rate (7300:1) is just an average and you can actually beat it. In industrialized European countries I don't know how one can do that, usually everywhere that'll exchange money will only do so at a rate significantly advantageous to the broker in comparison to the exchange rate, but dealing with individual money exchangers in Africa I've frequently been able to significantly beat the rate (and by me, I mean the savvy Winrock staffmember assisting me).



   It is presently Wednesday evening. Tomorrow morning I head up country to the project site in the field. Immediately prior to beginning one of these projects it always feels a bit like walking to the front of a big lecture hall with no idea what you're about to say. Getting to the podium, turning around and seeing all eyes on you ... and you just start talking. By which I mean, it's impossible to plan what I'm going to say/teach/do, every situation is different and I won't know until I get there. But thousands of dollars have been spent to get me here so there's certainly pressure. And I don't feeeeel like I have anything that valuable locked away in my head to share. I think I would have been more terrified before my first project if I'd known what I was getting into. I think I would have been more terrified on my second project, except I knew by some miracle I had made it through the first one ... seemingly with flying colors. It still marvels me that it works.