• A Look Back,  Inside Entertainment

    A Look Back: The Lord of the Rings

    I grew up reading JRR Tolkien. I read The Hobbit (1937) in 1982 (and played the adventure game for the home computer). That summer break, I read The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955). I fell in love with Middle-earth and high fantasy to the extent that I then read all the supporting material that came out, such as The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales, etc. Tolkien’s Middle-earth opened up a world of magic, heroic quests, and history that delved into the beginning of time. It also taught me the importance…

  • Inside Entertainment,  Media Rants

    Picard’s Big 3 Issues

    Credit to Star Trek: Picard (2020 – ). I went in expecting nothing. They’ve delivered less. This is such badly constructed storytelling – objectively bad storytelling – that it’s hard to believe anybody could think it’s good. There is no way anybody should be taught to tell story this way, should perpetuate telling story this way, or think this way is good storytelling. There are issues that range deeper than Star Trek: Picard‘s premise, characters, or plotting – issues that run rampant in the methodology of how the writers here have decided to tell the story (and how they tell it in Star Trek: Discovery [2017 – ], as well as…