It’s Almost Wednesday, So It’s A Post

Start on Tuesday, so the title is legit

Job – things are progressing in a weird and uncomfortable way. Should probably start looking around for a spell, at least I’ll know where I stand. Too bad I’d have to start going to some office or something – kinda like this working from home thing.

On the other hand, I don’t think I have time to have my own career to stagnate for another couple of years. I mean – it’ll probably recover at some point, but we’ll see where we stand way sooner.

Life Drama – not much is happening there. I kind of started recovering from all the shit that was happening between 2015 and 2019, so that’s a good thing. Start noticing this when you have time and desire to do little personal projects or just fix things around or do some exploration. Should start reading them books, I guess.

Photography – also, drama. One model thought another model thought wrong, so she have her a piece of mind. Which the other one returned. And I almost ended in the middle of it. Thankfully, that shit wrapped up real quick and I was able to avoid participation. We’ll see if this comes back in any way, but for now – it’s over. In the meantime, I am slowly editing some images here and there and actually enjoying it again.

Posted another shibari picture on Reddit and got a couple of responses from people wanting to do the scene. Not sure how I feel about it.

But i feel good about this picture

Thursday – I Don’t Care About You

So even the weekly posting is in jeopardy. Monthlies, start worrying.

Reposting here since the /r/Stargate post didn’t pick up.

This is something I wanted to share with /r/Stargate and see what the feedback would be. I read through comments at a previous discussion and listened to the whole podcast episode. I probably am not going to win any awards here but just wanted to share my 2 cents. Disclaimer: I am just a SG fan, no affiliation with anyone. I am not even from Canada, but I plan to visit it this Summer/Fall.

– studios are large corporations, who excel at corporate double-speak (CDS). TV/film studios are doubly so. It makes sense that what they’re saying and “what they’re really saying” are two different things.
– keep in mind that three things coincided here – wrap up of Travelers and availability of a large creative crew, a downturn in interest in SG franchise (after an abomination of a SG:O, which to my surprise holds a 4.8 star rating for the Stargate Origins: Catherine release and 4.0 for series proper) and a chance to invite Brad Wright to the podcast. If you listened to the podcast – he’s clearly talking over landline phone, so it’s just a schedule window where he can dedicate an hour to participating in the podcast. I.e. – not like a huge convention or event. Just people talking.

– if I can decipher the CDS that Brad is using – he is saying he is a little upset that the studio went ahead with plans for Ronald Emmerich reboot. Dude officially said he wants the SG-1/A/U out of the window and studio was running with it for some time. Don’t know if I remember correctly – there were talks about a three-movie deal that would bury the canon for good. For someone of Brad Wright caliber, it must be throwing piss in his face. I’d remember I was mighty upset too, but I am a sucker for continuity.

– once they have reconsidered and Emmerich was out of the picture (at least, officially) – that’s what he calls “they’ve reconsidered”. Which means the canon is not out of the window, which means the “acknoledgement” of “hours and hours” of his contribution. Which is what he is, apparently, happy with.
– the “we’re talking” can literally mean anything in CDS. It could mean – they are calling him daily, but he purposefully not picking up the phone. Could be the other way around. Could be they’re working on a schedule of meetings to actually sit down and brainstorm what can be done with this IP.

– from the studio management point of view, I think I understand the dilemma. On one hand, the overall landscape of the TV shows has changed. You have Game of Thrones, you have House of Cards, you have Better Call Saul, Orange Is The New Black – huge hits based on original material. And there’s definitely a different mood in those shows, they are more intense, there’s more drama, more of everything, really. And then you have reboots of old top-level shows, like McGyver, Lethal Weapon, Lost in Space, Star Trek: Discovery, that are not doing as good. So the problem is – how to make a powerful show, but not alienate existing fan-base (which is what almost happened with SG:O). How to please existing fans and get new ones invested in the show. It’s a serious problem and someone’s got to solve it. And, to me, Brad Wright is a much better solution than Emmerich – because Independence Day 2 isn’t anywhere near Independence Day the original and because Brad Wright has a lot of experience catering to the audiences that like SG-like shows.

– one more thing Brad had mentioned was that he’s working with many new people in addition to people from Stargate teams. What I think he’s saying is that things have moved on and there’s very little chance we can see same cast/ensemble we saw in SG. Individually certain people can appear, occasionally, but not as a rule.

– and now, the most important question – because everything else could be resolved with enough money, experience, patience, and ass-kissing (just like anything else in the corporate world) – what would the show be about? If it’s a prequel – we aren’t capitalizing on the canon, because it didn’t happen yet but it’s already limiting us should the show run for more than a season. If it’s a sequel, like “20 years later” – then we’ll get either a Star Trek or BS:G, depending on if we’re winning or losing to bad guys. The interesting idea (don’t hate me, I am just thinking out loud here) would be along the lines of the original rebooted Star Trek – where things are positioned in another “dimension” or “reality” so you can start fresh while still capitalizing on the canon. Same way, like ST brought over Spock – new SG can bring over Teal’c or Harriman 🙂 They can even pull a GoT here and consistently kill off characters as they live (and die) through dangers of missions of Stargate Command. Or not. But this ultimately need to feed both the old fans (do not break the existing canon but give me something new and fresh) and new fans (give me something I will like given the current show landscape/competition).

– the last, but not least – SG is one of the very few franchises that has aged well. SG-1 launched 22 years ago yet, despite the crappy resolution of first 7 seasons, you can still watch it today and not be distracted by sub-par special effects or things that don’t make sense to you anymore. Another few years aren’t going to do a significant amount of damage to the property, so MGM can sit on it a little longer and assess more options.

Junk Food Sunday

Okay, I actually did something productive today – in addition to buying junk food and eating it all by myself.

Started the day by reading Reddit – at least there are more fresh topics than in Russian FB groups. I am pretty sure people enjoy those 3 topics immensely and I would have too – if I had more time and less intellect, but I just can’t go over same 3 topics over and over and over. Seriously, I understand how they are being used just as a conversation starters, but really…

Got that stupid idea into my head about figuring out what’s a Reddit bot and how one would go about building one.

Tried to dissuade myself from spending any time on the bot – my thought was that it’s probably some sort of Python script that needs to talk to reddit’s API and blah-blah-blah. Spent almost an hour making bacon for breakfast and thinking up all the crazy use cases for a bot. Turkey bacon is awesome.

Checked with the model that I had sent 20 edited pictures yesterday instead of 15 she was asking for. She was pretty good about me being an asshole of a photographer and delivering images from the August shoot all the way in January. I did apologize, of course, but still – I shouldn’t have sat on these for so long. Got a good 20 images from that shoot, and she seems to be happy – even remembered she promised to pay for them. Which is always welcome.

And of course, I gave in to temptation and went to figure out the Reddit bot thingy. I was right about API and of course, someone has already put together a sample bot script in Python. I’ve decided that I am extremely lazy and don’t want to look up the code in other languages, I set up Python on my desktop, googled a couple of Python things I never knew (hey, I am not a developer) and went to have a lot of fun with BDSMpersonals subreddit.

While driving around during a second part of the day, decided to start reading Stargate books (a.k.a. Stargate Novels) – officially sanctioned fanfiction set in Stargate universe. I’ve finished the SG-1 book a couple of days ago and decided to switch it up a little and go for Stargate Atlantis. I am on a fence for now. It isn’t first-class literature, but it’s better than some of the official Star Wars drek I ended up reading at some point.

Finally ended up home and re-watched a couple of episodes of Stargate Atlantis – The Ark and Sunday. It’s a part of my rewatch anyway and this time around I went all in with books too. That’s where the junk food came in – I haven’t eaten Pringles in 6 months and I just had to eat two cans of that shit with ginger ale.

Next couple of hours were all about cleaning this blog and making the entries. Good day to start as any. Also, /r/ListenToThis is not half as bad as I thought.