#anarosa is a whole other character

[rosescries]

Is Anarosa who the reader in Writer wheb turns into Lost Ones

Oh, no! Anarosa is the OC in my very first Bendy fic "Inked Roses."

That fic is kind of old and I don't like everything in it or the way it was executed much anymore. But Anarosa holds a special place in my heart.

The only "name" reader has in the fic is Missy and that's just a nickname.

[bloodgulchblog]

A Whistle-Stop Tour of the Fractures Anthology: Pt 3

It has been... a while, oops. It's time for me to pull this out of my drafts and finish it off.

On the docket for today: "Into the Fire", "Saint's Testimony", "Rossbach's World", "Oasis", "Anarosa", and the bonus untitled end piece.

Sit tight.

Into the Fire by Kelly Gay

I won't linger too much over this one, because it's actually the opening act of Smoke and Shadow and I intend to talk about that book more Soon.

Rion Forge is a salvager, someone who follows leads to recover scrap from the wrecks of the many lost and dead ships that litter the galaxy in the wake of the great war. She's a tough and resourceful woman who takes care of her little crew and who has one of the best success rates in the business.

She also has a deep-seated personal reason for taking on this work: Her father was Sgt Forge, a character in Halo Wars. Her dad has been missing since 2031 when the UNSC Spirit of Fire got tangled up in conflict with the Covenant for Halo Wars reasons and had to sacrifice its slipspace drive to make a big explosion, also for Halo Wars reasons. Forge, unfortunately, did in fact die during Halo Wars, but the rest of the crew has been traveling the slow way home for over 20 years. No one knows what happened to the ship except the people on board.

ANYWAY.

Rion gets a tip about a ship and, while investigating it, she discovers the first lead she's had on the Spirit of Fire in... pretty much ever.

I like the short story, I like the novella, and I find Rion to be a genuinely likable protagonist with interesting thoughts and feelings. This is a great accomplishment for Halo, so I looked forward to reading the rest of the novella and I was right.

Also: I liked the re-use of Venezia as a setting, which was mostly set up in Mortal Dictata. Kelly Gay uses it here and Troy Denning also used it in Retribution, so it looks like it's going to stick around as Halo's most essential hive of scum and villainy.

Saint's Testimony by Frank O'Connor

This was another one initially given a separate digital release, like "Shadow of Intent," but this one's a lot shorter.

So, do you remember Halo: Blood Line? The comic where Black Team and their AI have to form a temporary truce with some Covenant troops in order to escape from a Forerunner Monitor? This one's about the AI, Iona.

Iona has reached the end of her seven year operational lifespan as a Smart AI, but instead of merely being put down, Iona is making a legal appeal against her own deactivation.

The story mostly follows Iona's interactions with the judge and her legal counsel in a public trial where she strives to prove to the judge that she is, you know, a person who should be permitted to continue to live.

There are a lot of pieces of interest in here if you want to dig in on Smart AIs. Iona talks about her life, how she chose her name and her avatar (she wanted to be approachable and her choices reflected that.) She talks about the closest thing she has to spiritual feelings (the hope that intelligence will triumph over entropy.) She admits to feelings of frustration with humans, but not more than humans feel for each other at times. The fact that Iona has dreams (during her inactive cycles) comes up and she describes dreams of flying.

In the end, when the judge rules to delay Iona's deactivation (but that they will place her into stasis in the meantime) Iona accepts the decision with grace.

After the trial, it is revealed that the whole thing was a simulation run by two other AIs. The judge was Black Box (the ONI AI that features heavily in the Kilo Five stories) and Iona's counsel was Roland (the second, and current, AI for the UNSC Infinity.)

(It's not remarked upon, but a this point (January of 2558) Roland is about a month old, while Black Box is almost six years old. I feel like knowing this adds a little to the texture of the thing.)

Roland regrets lying to Iona, but Black Box has hope that studying this simulated trial will encourage people to legally accept AIs as, well, people at some point in the future. It ends with the two of them watching Iona's stasis dreams, where she continues to dream of flying over a human city.

Overall: I thought this one was pretty okay. It's competent, but also I wasn't particularly stunned by anything. Then again, I might also be influenced by how irked I've been with Frank O'Connor generally.

I like that they put this story ahead of the next one specifically, though, because it gets you thinking a lot about AIs while you're on your way into...

Rossbach's World by Brian Reed.

Reed first worked on Halo when they brought him on for the comic adaptation of the Fall of Reach. He was the lead writer of Halo 4's Spartan Ops and for (oof) Halo 5: Guardians. He was then lead narrative director until he stepped down in 2017, and I'm pressing F in chat because I can only reasonably assume that's because of how.... How. Halo 5 was.

That out of the way, I actually did kind of like this one. I really did not expect to, because it's about Admiral Serin Osman.

You guys remember Osman, Karen Traviss's very favoritest OC from the Kilo Five books? Osman comes up a lot in lategame Halo canon because she finally becomes head of ONI. However, she's usually more of a plot device or a signifier of how serious a situation is than a person when she appears. It's actually nice to see someone getting into her head again, and having that someone not be my least favorite Halo writer.

(The fact that my least favorite Halo writer is not the one responsible for 5 really does speak volumes, huh?)

In this short story, we get a recap on Osman's origins as an abducted Spartan-II candidate, then washout, then ONI rising star. Then we're with Osman when Cortana sends a Guardian to attack Bravo-6 (the UNSC High Command HQ in Sydney, Australia.) Osman and Hood make it out because of the quick thinking of Black Box, who responded to Cortana's offer by kicking off an emergency plan: He locked down himself and all of HIGHCOM's other Smart AIs in their chips. Through fake orders from one of his many false identities (this one being Spartan Commander Rossbach) he arranged for a Spartan-IV to give Osman the briefcase containing them, and for transport for Osman, Hood, and the Spartan to a planet whose existence Black Box had been hiding for years (once again using the Rossbach identity.) On Rossbach's world, there is a safehouse where Osman and Hood can maybe weather this storm and try to figure out what the hell to do.

It's a very short story, but if I have to deal with stories told in the wake of the Created conflict and the destruction of Cortana's character, then at least it's one that actually thinks about some of it? Osman talks to Black Box about why he didn't take Cortana's offer, why he helped her escaped (he thought it was fair), and how it's up to her now whether or not she destroys the AIs in the briefcase or... whatever she might do with them, including potentially releasing them to Cortana.

(I'll note that the timing works out weird on this because Black Box is absolutely several months past his rampancy expiration date if we follow what was known about him on Waypoint, but I already know that nobody writing Halo cares about precise dates and especially nobody writing Halo cares about Waypoint.)

Hood is having a rough time and drinking about it, he blames himself for not forcing the Master Chief to take leave after the events on Requiem in Halo 4. (I'm not sure this makes sense, because it's not like whether or not John went after Cortana impacted whether or not Cortana wound up with the Guardians? But okay, Hood.)

Osman finds a quiet place to sit and make a decision. She draws parallels between the lack of choice given to Smart AIs and the lack of choice she had as a Spartan conscript. It ends ambiguously with her sitting with her thumb on the button that would purge the AIs in the briefcase, thinking about how Black Box has always been kind to her.

It's not flawless, but I'm always a sucker for caring about characters' feelings and regrets in Halo. I also liked Black Box a lot (sometimes) in Kilo Five even though I hated Kilo Five overall. I found his genuine care for Osman to be sympathetic and fun, and I like getting to see Osman struggle with something without the weird venom that comes from Traviss writing her.

The Created conflict is a very messily implemented part of the canon built on a foundation I absolutely hate, but this is one of the parts of it that makes me wonder what it would've been like if it hadn't sucked.

Oasis by Tobias Buckell

THIS ONE SLAPS because it's a prequel to Envoy, which I hold in high regard. It's not an especially happy story, but hang in there.

...It's also a story where a plague is a major part of the plot, so that sure was interesting to read in Current Times. 8,)

Dahlia is a teenager living on Carrow. Carrow, for those of you who don't remember a book I talked about back in february or so, is a planet that is being re-colonized after the war by both humans and Sangheili at the same time due to neither of them knowing the other was going to start doing that. Shit's tense. The major cities for the two species are separated by the unforgiving desert, and they prefer it that way.

Dahlia's family was part of a group that was originally intending to settle an oasis, but by the time they arrived the Sangheili had already claimed it. So, the humans had no choice but to apply all their stubbornness and set up in the desert.

So, Dahlia. She's finally starting to come around from a battle with a horrible illness. Her parents put everything they had into caring for her, and when they became sick too there was no medicine left and no one to care for them. They're alive, but if the settlement (which has all fallen ill, people are already dying) doesn't get medical help... well.

The problem? Everyone's been trapped inside their homes by a vicious sandstorm (a regular occurrence out here) until right now, and their communications are down because of damage.

Dahlia takes her dad's rifle (because it's dangerous out there) and sets off on an old Mongoose to try to reach the Sangheili settlement in the oasis. She might be able to make contact with human traders there. It's a desperate move and she's in awful shape, but it's the only chance.

Out in the desert, Dahlia chances across a shoot out between a Sangheili and... someone? He looks like he's about to kill whoever it is so Dahlia intervenes, thinking it might be a human. She ends up distracting the Sangheili long enough for the figure on the ground to get up... and drive an energy sword through him.

The other one was a Sangheili, too. And now Dahlia's down a quad bike because a stray plasma shot wrecked the Mongoose, so she can't just roll out.

Dahlia, after surviving the Covenant attacking her home planet once and then going on to live on a planet where relations with them are very tense, is incredibly not cool with Sangheili.

This brushes up against the conflict in Envoy, where the division between Rojka and Thars's factions has gotten to the point of space warfare. (Rojka is a good character with a whole arc, you should read Envoy.)

Jat, committed to repaying his debt to Dahlia, takes her to the oasis. Unfortunately, as soon as Dahlia breaks off to look for the traders, she gets captured by Thars's loyalists and locked up with two surviving human traders. They explain that things have, as is obvious, gone very very south very very fast. The three of them hear fighting outside, some of it with human guns, but it turns out it's just Sangheili vs Sangheili and a group has arrived to finish business by killing the humans.

It's about to get very bad when Jat appears and saves them. The traders break off to find transport, not trusting Jat to help them, but Jat insists on protecting Dahlia and she goes with him.

They flee from Thars's people, who want to kill Dahlia because she's human and Jat because he's a wtiness. Jat and Dahlia get to talk a little, and Jat explains how he came to Carrow with Rojka and helped found the Sangheili city (Rak) after they lost their homeworld. (Which, you know, is something he has in common with Dahlia and is something we get way more about in Envoy.)

When they get pinned down, the two resolve to go down fighting and almost do. Then, human gunfire tears through Thars's Sangheili. Jat and Dahlia drop flat as the traders, backed up by members of Carrow's human militia, roll in. The day is saved.

...But someone notices Jat is still alive, and before Dahlia can say anything to save him, the militia kills him.

When Dahlia protests that he was her friend, a militiaman tells her that Sangheili are not our friends and alludes to the militia's desire to drive them off Carrow.

The final scene has Dahlia with her parents as they finally start to recover from the sickness, which is a relief, but immediately the conversation turns to the increasingly armed tensions on Carrow. Dahlia's father recalls that the UEG is supposed to be sending an envoy to hopefully settle that situation peacefully...

Dahlia, thinking about her time with Jat, says that a friend taught her she should die on her own terms and that if anyone comes for her home, she's going to make them bleed for it.

SO. A happy and normal Halo story that ends on fantastic terms for everyone! (I want to go read Envoy again aaaaa)

Anarosa by Kevin Grace

Kevin Grace was the one who wrote the short story The Return in the Evolutions anthology (the one about a Sangheili shipmaster visiting a planet he himself glassed.) More recently he was responsible for the terminals in the two Anniversary editions, and the plot of Halo Wars 2.

Anarosa Carmelo, age 26, has died in a fire suppression system accident in the cockpit of a training shuttle. An ONI agent (Prauss) and his AI partner (Leo) are attempting to convince Anarosa's only living relative (her brother Michael) to donate her brain to the UNSC's smart AI program.

A great detail is that they already have a team prepped to go in and recover Anarosa's brain (this is the same day she died, mind) and are really determined that they're going to get what they want here.

Unfortunately for Prauss, his first attempt gets the door shut in his face. Then, as Prauss and Leo try to decide how to proceed, Michael eventually comes out to the car and asks if he an talk to Leo. Just Leo.

Leo answers Michael's questions about what it's like to be a smart AI, and in particular about whether a smart AI has any real connection to their donor. Leo tells him that if his sister's brain is used, he will not be allowed to make contact with the resulting AI and cannot even be told if the procedure works or not. The AI will not be his sister, and will not be permitted to know who the donor brain came from.

Leo admits to Michael that he sometimes does get tiny flashes of his donor brain's memory, and thinks that maybe the man had a child.

The final scene ends with Prauss and Leo discussing that conversation, how the brain is important because they desperately need a good candidate for an AI for the research outpost on the Ark (Halo Wars 2 connection: Anarosa is the basis for the AI in Halo Wars 2.)

Prauss asks Leo if he just told Michael what he wanted to hear. Leo says yes, of course, he learned from the best.

I feel like you could make a solid case for a reading about whether you think Leo was honest or told the truth, but I don't put that much effort into Halo short stories and I think I'm pretty safe if I call the ending ambiguous.

It's okay, I think it pairs well as an inclusion with the anthology alongside Saint's Testimony for AI stuff.

SECRET BONUS UNNAMED SHORTSTORY, uncredited.

This one's weird, gang.

We are once again, after such a long time, in first person Bornstellar perspective. This is an epilogue for him. Bornstellar and Chant-to-Green have settled on a world outside the galaxy. They live simply, as farmers, and are raising a son together. Bornstellar tells their boy stories from his life as if they are ancient legends he was not involved in. He thinks about how his wife is lovely and their years of hard farm labor together have not made her any less so to him.

At night, Bornstellar takes a long walk to where they've abandoned the ship Audacity with their armor still inside it, and thinks about what they've given up to go back to the roots of Forerunner existence as they allow their kind to die out. This, he concludes, is to be the end of their great journey.

I don't.... know if I'm supposed to find this wildly depressing or not, but allllll I can think about is what happens to that kid. How does his life play out? Isn't it kind of weird to choose to raise a child in permanent exile, because you are the last of your species? To bring a whole person into the world just to leave them as an endling when they outlive you?

I don't know, man. Wild.

Someone write me a fanfiction about the last Forerunner finding the old ship and something crazy happening.

ANYWAY. That's Fractures. Finally, the deed I promised has been done. I still have other Summaries of Things to complete in my drafts, but this one shall haunt me no more.

[weekendwarriorblog]

Weekend Warrior Home Edition – April 3, 2020 – Slay the Dragon, Tape and More

Well, things sure have gone to hell since I last wrote this weekly column that I’ve now been doing in some form or another at one place or other for over nineteen years! For the first time in those 19 years and probably a good 80 or 90 years before that, there were no movies in theaters. In fact, there were no movie theaters. Because of this, the last two weekends have been the first in history with ZERO BOX OFFICE. It’s kind of tough to write a column about the box office and theatrical releases when there are none, n’est ce pas?

So I’m going to try to evolve for the time being, and we’ll see how that goes. I’m not too thrilled about having to watch movies as screeners, let alone writing about movies that will probably never get a theatrical release, but I’ll try to make the best of it. (Oh, and Disney’s Onward, which opened in theaters less than a month ago will be available ON DISNEY+* tomorrow.) (*corrected)

This week’s “Featured Movie” that you absolutely must see, especially if you’re reading this from one of the “red states” and feel like government just isn’t doing things the way you’d like them to do, is Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance’s political documentary SLAY THE DRAGON (Magnolia).  It covers how gerrymandering is being used in census years (like this one) to maintain a Republican majority in local and state government.  Goodman’s doc begins in Michael Moore territory of Flint, Michigan and shows how gerrymandering was used to create a Republican majority that led to the town getting water from the nearby Flint River which contaminated the pipes and leaked lead into the system.

The film does a good job explaining gerrymandering in an easy to understand way by following a few specific cases of people fighting against the policies.  Counties and voting districts in different states aren’t just a straight grid on a map. Instead, the districts are drawn up to cause an unfair advantage to a party. This was especially true of the REDMAP program instituted in 2008 by the GOP after Barack Obama was elected President to make sure Republicans could dominate Congress as well as politics on a state level.  

Much of the film deals with Katie Fahey’s group Citizens United that has decided to take on the politicians with its grassroots campaign to allow the people’s voices and votes to start counting. (One of the programs that grew out of REDMAPping was that thousands of voters were not able to vote since a few states passed a law that ID was required to vote, thereby keeping black and brown voters from the polls.)

Yes, it’s a rather complicated situation but it’s one that people in the primarily liberal states like New York, California and others really need to know about, since it’s why we have a reality TV host as our President right now as well as why we have a Republican Senate that just prevented him from being impeached. All of the bigger politics goes back to the individual state politics and how gerrymandering and REDMAP unfairly sways the vote against those who win on the state level in census years (essentially every ten years including 2020). Originally, this was going to get a theatrical release in March but now it will only be available on digital and On Demand, so you can find out how to see it on the official site.

I also want to give a little extra attention to Deborah Kampmeier’s TAPE (Full Moon Films), which skipped its theatrical release instead to do an interesting “virtual theatrical run,” playing every night On Demand via CrowdCast. It’s available every night at 7pm eastern followed by discussions with the filmmakers and then will be on Digital and VOD on April 10. Again, these are changing times, but this is a haunting and powerful thriller based on true events, starring Anarosa Mudd as a woman trying to catch a sleezy casting agent (Tarek Bishara) who is preying on actresses and one in particular, played by Isabelle Fuhrman (Orphan). Both of their performances are pretty amazing, Mudd playing a shaven-head whistleblower and Fuhrman playing an ambitious young actress who think she’s finally gotten her much-needed break, but finding out there’s a lot darker side to the business than she expected. While a lot of people have raved about The Assistant as a response to #MeToo, this is a much starker and direct look at the abuse of power to take advantage of young women. The movie is not going to be for everybody, because it takes some time before you realize what Mudd’s character (who could just as easily be Rose MacGowan) is up to, but the way how things play out in the film makes it unforgettable. It’s a fantastic new movie from Kampmeier, who famously had an underage Dakota Fanning have a rape scene in her earlier movie, Hounddog.

A movie that was released last week that I didn’t get to write about (but it’s still available On Demand and Digitally, as many movies currently are) is Lorcan Finnegan’s VIVARIUM (Saban Films), starring Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots. It’s a virtual two-hander in which they play a couple who look at a house in a suburban housing complex where every house looks the same. They soon learn that they can’t escape and things get weirder and weirder from there. I can’t say I loved the movie, because it just got weirder and weirder, almost to a fault at times.

Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska’s THE OTHER LAMB (IFC Midnight) is another movie about a religious cult, this one a group of women that live in a remote forest commune led by a man they call “Shepherd” (played by Michiel Huisman from Game of Thrones and The Haunting of Hill House). It follows a teenager named Selah (Raffey Cassidy) who begins to question her existence when she starts having nightmarish visions. This was okay, but I really have hit my limit in terms of movies about religious cults. They’ve just been overdone.

Mike Doyle’s rom-com ALMOST LOVE (Vertical) is about a group of middle-aged friends trying to navigate love and relationships with a cast that includes Scott Evans, Kate Walsh, Patricia Clarkson, Augustus Prew and more. Some of the characters are having marital issues, others are dating or getting into early feelings of possible love. It’s a nice distraction from all the serious stuff going on in the world today.

A great music doc now On Demand, digital and other formats (Blu-ray/DVD) is Brent Wilson’s STREETLIGHT HARMONIES (Gravitas), which takes a look at the early doo-wop vocal groups of the ‘50s and ‘60s that predated and formed the basis for Rock & Roll, Rhythm & Blues and other music genres as we know them today. It deals with acts like The Drifters, Little Antony and the Imperials, The Platters, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It includes interviews with some of the more recent acts influenced by it including En Vogue and N’Sync as well as Brians Wilson and McKnight. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this despite doo-wop not being my preferred music style. (For the sake of transparency, I helped out with a little bit of publicity on this film.)

Also, Olivier Meyrou’s fly-on-the-wall doc Celebration (1091) is a movie that was commissioned by Yves Saint Laurent’s former lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé, more than ten years ago but was shelved for being too revealing. It was filmed over the course of three years where Laurent was at his most frail and mostly separated from the world as we get a look inside one of the last great haute couture houses. It’s now available On Demand and digitally.

Jon Abrahams directs and co-stars in Clover (Freestyle Digital Media) opposite the great Mark Webber, playing bumbling Irish twins trying to pay off their father’s debt to local mob boss Tony Davolo, played by Chazz Palminteri. Things get more complicated when a teen girl named Clover (Nicole Elizabeth Berger) shows up and the brothers need to protect her from Tony’s “hit-women.” Looks like a fun dark comedy.

Unfortunately, Saban Films didn’t offer advance review screeners of the action sequel, Rogue Warrior: The Hunt (Saban Films), directed by Mike Gunther, but it stars Will Yun Lee.  I’m not sure if this is a sequel to 2017’s Rogue Warrior: The Hunt, but I haven’t seen that either. It involves the leader of an elite team of soldiers being captured by terrorists, so his team needs rescue him. Oh, and Stephen Lang (Avatar, Don’t Breathe) is in it, too.

STREAMING AND CABLE

This week’s Netflix offerings include the streaming network’s latest true-crime documentary series, HOW TO FIX A DRUG SCANDAL, directed by Erin Lee Carr (Dirty Money), which covers the 2013 case of Sonja Farak, a crime drug lab specialist who was arrested for tampering with evidence but also accused of using the drugs she was supposed to be testing.  (It’s on the service as of this writing.)

Stuber and Good director Michael Dowse helms the action-comedy COFFEE & KAREEM, starring Ed Helms as police officer James Coffee, who begins dating Taraji P. Henson’s Vanessa Manning while her 12-year-old son Kareem (Terrence Little Gardenhigh) plots their break-up. Kareem hires criminal fugitives to kill Coffee but instead ends up getting his whole family targeted, so the two must team up. Also starring Betty Gilpin, RonReaco Lee, Andrew Bachelor and David Alan Grier.

Also on Friday, Disney Plus will stream two Disneynature docs, Dolphin Reef and Elephant, in honor of Earth Day taking place later this month. Previously, one or both of these movies might have been released theatrically but hey, earth is going to hell right now.

Now playing on Hulu is the latest installment of Blumhouse’s “Into the Dark,” Alejandro Brugué’s Pooka Lives, which ties in with “Pooka Day” (no idea what that is) but apparently, Pooka is a fictional creature like “Slender Man” that was created on Creepypasta  by a group of friends that goes viral but then manifests into creatures that become real. It stars fan faves Felicia Day, Will Wheaton, Rachel Bloom and more.

Next week, more movies not in theaters!

By the way, if you read this week’s column and have read this far down, feel free to drop me some thoughts at Edward dot Douglas at Gmail dot Com or send me a note on Twitter. I love hearing from readers!