StrangePegs: November 2019

Friday, November 29, 2019

Settling (pictures I like)

Occasionally, I try a sunset in black and white, as I did with this one. It never seems to work. So much so that I'm not even showing it to you. A black and white photo of a sunset loses so much, all of the depth and character of the moment.
I think this is a metaphor for life and how you can't reduce life to black and white. Well, obviously, some people think you can, but you lose all of the things that make life worthwhile when you do that.
Here's to a life (and sunsets!) lived in color.

Wednesday, November 13, 2019

The Mandalorian (s1ep1) (a review post)

--"I can bring you in warm, or I can bring you in cold."

Well, I didn't really intend to do a review for this show. I mean, I figure they're going to be everywhere and that anything I say will be more than redundant. But we, the kids and I, just finished watching the first episode, and... well, all I can say is

😲

Should I feel this way? I don't know. Maybe if I kept up more with fan stuff leading up the releases of things, I would have known some of this stuff, but I actively avoid reading about the production of all sorts of things these days because I want to experience what I'm watching without knowing all the stuff ahead of time. For this show, that meant lots of 😲 moments.

No, I'm not going to tell you. Maybe once the series is over, we can all sit down and have a chat. For the moment, though, I can talk about the production value: amazing! The show looks incredible. And it feels, well, incredible, too. A little bit of western, a lot of sci-fi. In some respects it followed formula, so there's a lot of familiarity to it. But, then, it does things that push it to the edge of the familiar space and you're not quite sure what's going on. AND MAN I WANT TO SAY THE THINGS THAT 😲 but I'm not going to do that.

Which doesn't leave me much to talk about, but I do have two things I can say: one a "dislike" and one a "like."

At the beginning of the episode, during a very familiar-feeling scene (both Star Wars familiar and western familiar), a "guy" gets caught in one of those metal doors that close to the center and it cuts him in half. This door was the entrance to a bar, by the way, not that that matters. All I'm saying is that we have elevator doors that reopen if you get caught by them, so I find it a little difficult to buy into the idea that a bar -- you know, where you have drunk people stumbling around all the time -- would have an entryway that would cut you in half if you happen to get caught in the doorway. Seems bad for business to me.

Then there's the scene with the assassin droid. I need to go watch that again. It was amazing. So far beyond IG-88 standing on the bridge of a Star Destroyer. Yeah, I'm definitely going to have to do a re-watch.

Honestly, I don't really have a good idea of how I feel about the show or what I think about it. What I know is

😲

and that I'm ready to watch the next episode right now. All of us were.

And, well, what more is a show supposed to do than have you slavering for the next one everytime you finish an episode?