So what did I do in May? It’s hard for me to remember, since it’s now almost the end of June. But June has been so busy that doing the little extra thing like blogging have fallen by the wayside. What has made June so busy? We can save that for me to write the next edition of this series. For now, a photo on my phone reminds me of this…
…a Thursday late in May where I ended up wearing these two mismatched socks, but which spelled out a message appropriate for the time.
And now that that is out of the way, let’s try to remember what I was watching, reading and doing that month.
Well one thing is that I got to the cinema, twice. this is a rarity for me nowadays (although with Supergirl, Spider-Man, The Odyssey and others coming out soon it might be repeated shortly.
The Sheep Detectives
So first of all, there was The Sheep Detectives, directed by Kyla Balda, featuring Hugh Jackman as a shepherd who gets himself murdered. Jackman’s character George Hardy is a good guy who love his sheep and whose sheep love him in return, and so the sheep decide that it’s up to them to solve the murder (Hardy was in the habit of reading mystery novels to his sheep so they are familiar with the tropes of the genre).
There are lots of famous people voicing the sheep, including Chris O’Dowd, Bryan Cranston, Patrick Stewart, and Rhys Darby, but the main sheep is Lily, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Basically what we’ve got here is a classic English whodunnit-style mystery with the twist that the main detectives are all talking sheep (at least, sheep that talk to each other, not the humans). They find ways to provide help to the seemingly inept police constable Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), pointing him in the right way in his investigation.
The movie also offers an interesting bit of world-building for the sheep, in that they have the ability to make themselves forget things at will. This gives Lily the chance for a bit of personal growth, as she has to decide whether to face the problems of her community, or just to forget about them.
The human cast also includes Emma Thompson as George’s lawyer, and Tosin Cole (Ryan from Doctor Who) as another shepherd, who is one of the suspects in George’s murder. My wife successfully guessed who the murderer was very early in the movie, which undercut later reveals for me, but I still enjoyed watching it, and I could almost imagine a quirky series about the sheep continuing to help the police officer with other mysteries.
The Mandalorian and Grogu
The other movie that I went and watched at the theatres was the latest Star Wars outing, a follow-up of the The Mandalorian TV series. Time was a new Star Wars project was big big news, but I’d say that’s not been the case for a while. And with something like The Mandalorian and Grogu, directed by Jon Favreau, it’s easy to see why.
The movie isn’t bad, exactly, but I’d be hard-pressed to call it actually good. As many have commented, it’s really like watching an extended episode of the series, although more accurately, it’s like watching two extended episodes that are related to each other, but each tell their own story. Wisely, none of it requires knowing much about The Mandalorian series to follow, but this also makes it feel a bit inconsequential.
The first part of the movie is about Din Djerrin, the titular Mandalorian, with his force-sensitive surrogate son Grogu (aka “Baby Yoda”) in tow, going on a mission for the New Republic to bring a former Imperial officer-turned warlord to justice, which in turn requires him to fulfil a significant side-quest of convincing Jabba the Hutt’s son Rotta to give up his dream of being a professional gladiator (I know that sounds like nonsense, but it really is the plot of the movie’s first half). The second part shows the fallout of this, as Rotta the Hutt’s evil Hutt relatives capture Mando, and Grogu has to find a way to rescue him.
Both stories are “fine” but not better than that. I found the second half of the movie to be more interesting as the stakes were more personal, but by the time we got to it I was ready for the movie to be over. So in general it’s definitely too long (even though it’s “only” a little bit over two hours), but I would have thinned out the front half to craft a tighter story.
The biggest casting addition to the Star Wars universe is Sigourney Weaver as the former X-Wing pilot turned New Republic commander who gives Mando his orders, but while it’s fun seeing such a sci-fi legend on screen, her role is nothing special, which befits the whole movie.
The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
I also read some books! One of them was The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which was a book that a friend of mine recommended as something she didn’t like but that she thought I would. It’s a murder mystery with a giant twist: the detective-protagonist finds that he is repeating the events around a murder (a big party at a fancy manor), time-loop style, and each time, he inhabits the life of a different person at the event. In other words, he is present at the party eight different times, experiencing the same events from different perspectives.
The book uses this wacky concept to unpack all the clues and context associated with the mystery in a way that simulates how it would work in a book with a more conventional format. So it all works as a whodunnit, and it also works as a wacky high-concept fantasy. And nicely, there is some decent character and thematic work as well.
In the end the book explains just what is going on here, including both how and why he is experiencing the loop. I guess I appreciated that, even though I don’t know if the information
Last One to Leave and Find Us, both by Benjamin Stevenson
These two books were both packaged into a single “double-book”–where you read one, then flip it over and you can read the other one. Both were entertaining but short little thriller-mysteries.
Last One to Leave is a murder mystery about a big streaming stunt where contestants have to stay in a house with their hand along one of the walls, with the last one to leave winning some huge amount of money. Somehow, under the scrutiny of all these cameras, someone is stabbed to death. The whole story is told from the perspective of another contestant, who ends up as the story’s detective. Because of the situation, he can’t be sure if murder is even real, or just part of the reality show that they are on.
Find Us is more of a thriller, with the story being about the apparent kidnapping of a couple of children of a woman who’s undercover law-enforcement job makes her particularly concerned about being targeted by criminals. This story has a twist which is one of the most effective I’ve ever read (I won’t spoil it here) but that results in the book being a far darker thing than I generally enjoy reading.
Both books are gripping and their brevity (less than 150 pages each) makes them easy reads, but also prevents them from going deep into any of the ideas being dealt with.
Deadshot: Beginnings
Speaking of dark storylines, I recently got this Deadshot-related collection. The Batman villain was turned into an anti-hero in the pages of John Ostraner’s Suicide Squad back in the 1980s. Ostrander and Kim Yale wrote a four-issue Deadshot (my autocorrect keeps changing this to “headshot”) miniseries in the midst of that run, which tells a story which unpacks a bunch of Floyd Lawton’s (aka Deadshot’s) backstory. A dark and heavy storyline is fitting for Ostrander’s take on Deadshot, but this series is also a bit flippant in the way that it does this. A lot of the story is about Lawton’s newly revealed son having been kidnapped, and the boy ends up dying tragically but kind of pointlessly at the end. I love Ostrander’s Suicide Squad and thought this story fit in well, but it feels like the son is killed off just because he’d be inconvenient to have to keep dealing with him in the future, which feels sloppy.
The collection also includes a handful of earlier stories from the 70s and 80s when Deadshot was primarily a Batman villain, just to bulk out the page count and add some context to the character.
Archie volumes 3 & 4
Finally, I’ll quickly mention the next couple of Archie volumes by comic superstar Mark Waid, which I read sometime in May. Originally published in the mid 2010s, Waid’s approach to the Archie universe is to give the characters and world a lot more depth than the Archie books I read as a kid, while still attempting to retain the franchise’s sense of whimsy and fun. In general, I’ve got a lot of enjoyment out of his run. Volume 3 introduces Cheryl Blossom to this continuity, and volume 4 contains a storyline in which Archie partly responsible for a terrible accident that leaves Betty Cooper paralysed. There are two more volumes of collected editions that Waid wrote for this series that I still have to get ahold of someday, which presumably continues that storyline.
Another First Chance
Also in May I traveled to Thailand to go to some work-related meetings, and while I was there my friend Jason and I worked on a movie that I wrote recently. Entitled Another First Chance (at least as a working title), it’s basically a romantic comedy which might or might not be a science fiction film as well, about a former couple who come to suspect that they are both from parallel universes, and thus are not the actual people that they both originally broke up with. Does this mean they might have another chance at their relationship? Or is the truth just that neither of them really understood what was going on with the other when they were dating.
We only gave ourselves a day to shoot this thing and we ended up losing several hours in the morning because of unavoidable delays. Thus we didn’t film everything we wanted to and had to slap on a bit of an ending before we really finished the story. It’s still to be edited and so we’ll see how this actually works out, but I enjoyed the experience. I we manage to make something out of it I’m sure that I’ll share it here!
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.
