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 On Avatar Being the Next Star Wars or Marvel Maybe Star Trek is a better comparison. It's the twentieth anniversary of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The not-quite-new Avatar Studios under Nickelodeon has announced their next series, Avatar: Seven Havens. Avatar Studios was established in 2021 to make more Avatar shows. A few years ago they announced there would be some movies too. As for any of these pieces of media to actually materialize, it feels like they've been frozen in an iceberg. Over the past twenty years, there have been books, comics, games, and an ongoing Netflix adaptation of the original show. There were even Lego sets around the original run of Avatar. What's missing are more actual movies and shows. Basically, Avatar is getting the franchise treatment, but for some reason really slowly, almost hesitantly. The original Avatar show is perhaps the greatest animated show of all time. It's the greatest I've ever seen, but I admit that's a limited samp...

 On A Story About People Falling Over on a Family Trip After some political posts, I want to get back to some funny stories. A few years ago, my family took a road trip through Pennsylvania. Along the way, we stopped somewhere in the middle of nowhere at a covered wooden bridge. That was apparently the big thing to see in the area. An old bridge, but this one was covered with a roof. Very historical. Anyway, we weren't the only intrepid explorers of rural Pennsylvania who made the trip to see the old covered bridge. A group of twenty or so Vespa-riding tourists pulled up after us. Now, these were American Vespa riders. They were middle-aged and older, and not one of them had experience controlling a small moving vehicle traveling at medium speed in their lives. By the looks of them, bicycling was right out. When they had finished their tour of the covered bridge, they got back on Vespas, something that took some coaching from the tour guide. One lady, in an attempt to remain uprigh...

 On MAGA, Thought-Terminating Cliches, Cults, and the Real Meaning of "TDS" I recently had a very negative interaction with a MAGA supporter online, the details of which I won't go into here but are all still public on my Facebook page. Rather than focus on the hatred the person had toward my Jewish ancestors and myself, I want to focus on something he kept repeating, and something I've seen repeated recently by MAGA supports about anything critical of them, trump, or nazis. Funny how they already lump all those things together even if not relevant to the conversation topic. They write, or rather shout by typing in all caps, "trump derangement syndrome is real." The phrase is sometimes shortened to TDS, though that will always be The Daily Show to me, and The Daily Show is very, very real. If you want a more detailed explanation of the phrase, see its Wikipedia page here:  Trump derangement syndrome - Wikipedia . The short version is that it's used to di...

 On Felon 47 Being the New Pharaoh Akhenaten It's easy to make parallels of trump to Hitler and other evil dictators of the modern world as many have, but what about the ancient world? There are plenty of terrible kings of old that he can be compared to, but perhaps the one most associated with extreme change opposed by their subjects is Akhenaten, an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh that ruled from roughly 1353 to 1336 or 1351 to 1334 BCE. Already you can tell what we know about the guy is fuzzy. Some of that was intentional on the part of the ancient Egyptians who were slightly less ancient than him. Akhenaten is known for making quite a few changes in Egypt during his reign. He abandoned their traditional polytheism that was welcoming of lots of gods and instead forced a monotheistic worship of a god called Aten onto his people. He even changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten, which meant "One Who is Effective for the Aten." Worshipers of other gods were persecuted und...

 On Bothering to Watch Star Wars: Skeleton Crew The latest Disney+ Star Wars show has just finished up. Here's the spoiler free review: It was decent, a lot of fun 80's references, and it was better than most recent Star Wars shows. That's all there is to say about that. What's most noticeable about the show and what this post is about, is what's not there: the audience. Skeleton Crew is one of the least watched Disney% shows made. Scrolling the Reddit comment section, there were quite a few reports of Star Wars fatigue, plus uncertainties about the marketing. It's definitely a kid's show, especially compared to the other Disney# content they've made, but I do need to give them credit for making it an exciting adventure for kids, not a Star Wars show that tones it down to be kid-friendly. As for the rest of Star Wars being toned down, my explanation about how economics affects stormtrooper aim will need to be another post. The audience fatigue comes on t...

 On TikTok Getting the Ban I've never used TikTok. For me, social media is about following just people I'm interested in following, usually because I know them in real life or I like their work and not a means unto itself. I do use Instagram and every once in a while I get sucked into their TikTok knockoff, Reels. I've heard it's not as good as the real Made in China thing, but I get the idea. Lots of short bursts of dopamine. Creators eking out a living. The argument for banning the platform is that it's foreign and could be used against us. I don't dismiss that one out of hand. A social media platform being used against a group of people to further the interests of those who control it is a legitimate threat and should be dealt with. However, that applies to all social media platforms. The TikTok ban only serves to help their competitors like Musk and Zuckerberg. It does little to address the underlying problem. A few large companies have monopolized the socia...

 On AR Glasses It's the middle of CES, the tradeshow where companies show off technology that will fall into one of three categories: Stuff that will never actually come to market, stuff that will come out but is completely useless, and stuff that will eventually become a product but won't do half of what was promised for several decades and by then an entirely new technology will have been developed that will make it obsolete. Anything labeled with "AI" will fall into all three categories at once. One piece of technology that's been promised for decades that I am both interested in and have no hope for being practical for a few more decades is AR glasses. AR, short for augmented reality, is where you can see through the glasses and they have a screen on them that you can use like your phone. That's different from VR glasses, which stands for virtual reality glasses. That's just a screen in front of your face, like your phone. The reason I'm curious ab...