Author: Domonic Riley
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Why is “binge watching” so popular?
One of the things I hate most about streaming is the ‘binge drop’, where an entire season’s worth of episodes are dropped all at once on streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video. They are bad for storytelling, bad for building fandoms, and don’t even seem like the most logical…
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‘Star Wars: X-Wing: Rogue Squadron’ Book Review
The next step of my journey into the old Star Wars Expanded Universe takes me to the popular X-Wing series, by Michael A Stackpole, which begins with Rogue Squadron. The story is set a couple of years after the Battle of Endor and destruction of the second Death Star. Rogue…
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Don’t harm human creators with AI restrictions
AI, Artificial Intelligence, GenAI, Large Language Models, or whatever else you want to call them, or they want to be called. There’s a lot of talk about it, whether we might end up fighting Terminators, or trapped in the Matrix. Whether they are secretly in charge already, if they are…
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‘The Sea Beast’: A Disappointingly Good Movie
While browsing Netflix, I came across The Sea Beast. I’d heard about this movie before, and was looking for something animated to watch and the preview looked good, so decided to give it a go, and was surprised and disappointed by it. The film is a kind of historical fantasy,…
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‘Star Wars: The Last Command’ by Timothy Zahn Book Review
With The Last Command, Timothy Zahn brings his infamous trilogy of Star Wars novels to an end. Released in the early nineties, these books, known as the Heir to the Empire trilogy, went on to become some of the best loved examples of Star Wars literature. At the time, the…
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‘The Bounty’ (1984) Review
Of all the stories that could be told of the Royal Navy in the 18th and 19th centuries, one seems to have captured the popular imagination more than any other; the tale of Captain William Bligh and the infamous mutiny on HMS Bounty that saw him put off in a…
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Nostalgia and Self-Reference in Movies
Watching any recent sequel to a legacy franchise can feel like you’re playing nostalgia bongo, with the amount of references and callbacks to previous moments from the franchise’s history. Think the mini Stay Puft marshmallow men in Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Frozen Empire, or the reuse of famous quotes in Alien:…
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‘Dark Force Rising’ by Timothy Zahn book review
After reading Heir to the Empire a while ago, I was eager to continue with this trilogy, and so started on Timothy Zahn’s second installment Dark Force Rising, and can say that it lived up to my expectations. The story follows Han, Luke, Leia and the former Rebellion as they…
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‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’: A Sad Ending to the Sequel Trilogy
When I think of The Rise of Skywalker, I can’t really be as hard on this movie as I might. Yes, it’s bad, but it came off the back of something even worse, The Last Jedi. It had to try and fix that movie’s problems and bring the whole sequel…
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‘Jurassic Park 3’ is an Older Kind of Sequel
Hollywood loves a sequel and so do fans, so it’s no surprise that when a movie does well enough at the box office, it inevitably leads to the studio making a follow up, keeping fans engaged without having to go through the trouble of starting a completely new franchise and…
Films and Fiction 