Three Body Problem

I keep waiting for somebody to joke about a ménage à trois in the Netflix adaptation of Three Body Problem

Let me say how much I enjoyed the books and the Chinese TV show.

The Netflix version reminds me that, like Avatar, they're not afraid to change scenes up.

In this case the result seems a bit like Friends, but they're attractive physicists who argue about working for the military industrial complex and don't have threesomes!

Actually, I think it's obvious the American version has removed everything Chinese except the bits the Chinese originally buried in the book to appease censors.

In particular the scenes from the Cultural Revolution are foregrounded at the expense of detailing the character that starts an alien invasion.

The Panama scene was everything I hoped to see, but the opportunities to show phsicists grappling with questions of science has been diminished.

It's not surprising, they've shrunk 30 hours of the Chinese adaptation into eight hours for the Netflix version and ended up covering ground from the second book.

New art

The theme for the Leeton art competition this year is "dust and rain"

I find their themes irresistable and, unfortunately for me, there's was a change of plans while making my artwork and it ended up being disqualified from competition.

It's great to be part of the exhibition.

Nova Lisa

This image appeared in my Facebook Memories today 

It was shared six years ago but I've got a new appreciation for this dissection of Da Vinci's masterpiece after reading a biography of the artist last year.

Leonardo spent years working on the Mona Lisa and during that time he also made a number of discoveries about the human anatomy. 

The artist might be Hannes Kreuzer and I appreciate the way he's captured some of the diversity in Da Vinci's output.

Are you being served?

David Henry Taylor recently returned to the counters at Taylor Brothers Store in Griffith Pioneer Park Museum

This building is a replica of the first business in the main street displays many of the items that were sold during the early days in our city.

It's a reminder of the times before self-service supermarkets and a recent visitor shared their recollection of working downstairs to package stock for sale.

Avatar the latest story bender

There's a lot to like about the live-action Netflix adaptation of The Last Airbender

The show feels like a remix of the original cartoon story.

It works for me in a way like the Zelda games all begin to blur as the story is retold over and over again.

These days that deja vu-like telling is explained by a conceit like the multiverse, but I wonder if it hints at a Dreamtime sense that these things have always happened and will always happen.

It might be that dramatic arc that's laid out with Sozin's comet and other celestial movements that accompany the arrival of the Avatar.

The story always had a grandeur beyond the Nickelodeon format back when I first started watching the animated series with my firstborn son nearly two decades ago.

I've revisited the series with successive children and there's been a pleasure in rediscovering the characters who populate the universe of the elemental kingdoms.

My kids didn't take to the Netflix series but I thought the action sequences were a massive improvement on the animation.

They bristled with sacrilege in the mergings of half-hour stories into the new hour-long episodes.

Yet every reworking of the characters seemed to make sense within the grander scope of the live-action drama.

At first the casting of Katara felt wrong and then I realised it made more sense for her to be closer to Aang's age.

Likewise Uncle Iroh took a little getting used to but, in the subtle details like when he handled the game tile, I gained a new appreciation for the role of Pai Sho in the Order of the White Lotus.

I didn't think I'd like the Netflix version after being horrified by the film version, yet now I want to see a seriousness taken with the political subplot in the Earth Kingdom.

And now I want to see the Library in the desert fully realised and there are so many other stories that I can't wait to see retold.