Rui CarmoBeing dead tired and nursing the beginnings of a flu, I skipped Star Wars (wait, what?) and watched the first four episodes of The Expanse wrapped in a cozy blanket.
And it was perfectly fine to skip the movie – after all, no matter how much I love the original trilogy and spent a fair amount of my childhood basking in it, it’s just a movie. One that I still hope to watch “properly” in a theater, but the continuation of a story arch that is still being put back together after Lucas took the plot, savaged it and eventually lost it somewhere around Naboo.
Still, the contrast between the two universes couldn’t be more interesting. As it happens, I came across the Expanse novels a couple of years back and have been enjoying them thoroughly as part of my relentless absorption of reading material, and the TV series so far hasn’t disappointed.
Instead of a massive story arch with messianic undertones, fruitless drama and a fair amount of almost completely unrelated swashbuckling, we get gritty, “hard” Sci-Fi that is reminiscent of the re-imagined Galactica (at least until it devolved into its own brand of mysticism and political drama). I have high hopes for the series, both in terms of plot (hopefully it wasn’t too tweaked for TV) and entertainment value, and heartily recommend giving it a go.
That said, my hobbies (other than photography, which got a nice boost from my carrying around a Lumia 640 XL as a secondary phone) have been put aside for the moment in favor of machine learning refresher courses and a lot of Microsoft-related stuff. Rebuilding this site is still ongoing (at the rate of a dozen lines of code a week, if at all), and I’ve been even laxer than usual with my personal e-mail, so apologies to all concerned.