Why carbon-freezing on The Mandalorian doesn’t bother me

When the trailers for The Mandalorian were doing the rounds only one thing bugged me about them.

Casual use of carbon-freezing people.

It was an oddity in The Empire Strikes Back that Han Solo was being frozen in carbonite, Boba Fett was concerned he was going to die and C3PO reinforced the uniqueness of the process with his running commentary.

So to see carbon freezing a standard tool just struck me and some others as odd and not well thought out.

Well not well thought out (by me) until I actually watched the show and considered the situation.

The Mandalorian takes place after Return of the Jedi and therefore well after Han Solo had been frozen and delivered to Jabba by Boba Fett (who fell into a nasty bum hole in the desert – classy way to die).

The head canon that I’m applying is that upon seeing the relative ease and success of Han Solo’s transportation and storage, the Empire probably started requesting this as a standard which then became the bounty hunter guild standard.

Hence when we meet up with our Mandalorian it has probably been in practise for a year or so and has become the captured target storage and transportation method of choice.

I was going to mention my general thoughts on the show as well which are all extremely positive but I might save that for another day.

So what do you folks think, is this a reasonable assumption to make or have they already addressed it somewhere else?

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TV Shows to watch on Mars

Thunderbird 5

If you’ve been following my odyssey on social media you would know that the last twelve months have been my “year of hell” and just when we thought it was over something great happened at the worst possible time LOL.

With my wife in Hobart on the very day I booked what was supposed to be my flight down there to join her for good I got a great job opportunity.

On. The. Same. Day.

Got home, booked my flight, checked my messages, found out about the new job that started almost immediately, here in Brisbane.

Financially it couldn’t be ignored even though my heart was breaking.

The thing is I organised a lot of things to happen including the shutting down of our broadband internet up here and organising it to get activated down there.

Whilst I could cancel, it seems silly considering that the house is still going up on the market and hopefully in a couple of months I’ll be moving out and staying with my father in law for the duration of the project.

Which brings me to this question.

Having limited access to internet means no more streaming hours of shows, plus all my blu-rays are already boxed up and I’m not unpacking them so I need a significant amount of time’s collection on one of my 3 TB hard drives – how I get them is my business but I’m curious what are essential shows that should be taken with me. Imagine you’re going to Mars and coming back but you needed to preload a bunch of stuff to watch on the way and back what would you include?

To give you an idea of the flavour of what I’m keen to catch up on during this time here is what I currently have:

  • The Prisoner
  • The Outer Limits (TOS)
  • Lost in Space (TOS)
  • Land of the Giants
  • LEXX
  • Kolchak The Night Stalker
  • Star Blazers
  • Spartakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea
  • Voltron Legendary Defender
  • Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea
  • Star Wars Rebels
  • The Twilight Zone (TOS)
  • Battle of the Planets
  • Firefly
  • Killjoys
  • Space 1999
  • The Mysterious Cities of Gold
  • Star Trek TOS
  • Thunderbirds
  • Voltron Vehicle Force
  • Farscape
  • Babylon 5

So ignoring films for the time being I’m curious what shows you would include if you had no access to any streaming services (I’ll have limited access but I’ll probably want to conserve the data where I can).

Leave your suggestions down below or on Twitter or on Facebook.

I’ll add suggestions that I think I might add to the drive below – don’t be offended if I don’t add one of yours – I’m focusing on stuff that I know I might be in the mood for – there’s a bunch of stuff I’d want to keep to watch with Tracey.

  • Battlestar Galactica (all 3 series)
  • Sarah Connor Chronicles
  • Caprica
  • Stargate Origins

I miss blogging

Around fifteen years ago, give or take a few years I was unbelievably proud to claw my way into the Top 100 Australian Blogs (I think I might have gotten to 75th or so).

It was an amazing period to be involved in blogging.

A grassroots, exciting time where people from all walks of life were blogging about all kinds of different topics.

During these early days, I met friends who I still talk to regularly and some I don’t but will occasionally think of and wonder what they’re up to and sadly a few no longer with us.

In the “old days,” it was an extremely supportive environment, even I ran a collaborative blog (the coalition of awesomeness) and a site about pop culture heroines that invited bloggers to submit articles.

I used to write a blog about home gardening of all topics LOL.

Before social media, I’d regularly write long-form musings on all sorts of things. One of my first pop-culture blog posts was about who could play a younger Sarah Conner, years later at least two women have played the part (neither of which I predicted – one of them I wouldn’t have even had heard of!).

Blogging moved along and everyone’s personal blogs slowly dwindled as the ease of social media took over. The reward of likes against 140 character posts versus slaving over daily mini-essays that will be read by few and commented on by even fewer.

Blogs became wrapped up into bigger blogging networks who became the faceless powerhouses. But lately, I’ve seen the trend changing, maybe not so much the community which has definitely shifted to social media but there are people blogging again (or continued to do so and I’ve noticed again).

And this has made me nostalgic for when I used to spend more time writing.

I don’t expect to get a huge amount of external acknowledgement, I genuinely think to be successful when doing this is doing it for yourself.

Of course, it’s not like I haven’t tried something like this before this, the blog itself has been restarted several times and I think over the last three years I’ve written all of ten posts. So no promises, we’ll just see how it all goes.

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