There's been a plan floated where there's a Palestinian "state", but actually UAE or another Gulf State runs it. My guess is that this news is along these lines - Saudi Arabian leaders don't give a shit about Palestine (look at the Abraham accords).
Non-amp link:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/11/tesla-tsla-stock-drops-in-premarket-after-cybercab-robotaxi-reveal.html
Good call. I gave up halfway through S3 of umbrella academy. It was just weird and goofy, the tone didn't match S1 at all.
I just watched this pretty good, long essay about exactly this:
https://youtu.be/lAB2U46N06Q
Oh damn, I forgot that part about "Earth being the control". That's hilarious!
My favorite one of them is Excession. I found the relationships / culture between the ship AI's so interesting and frankly, better written than many human relationships in the series overall.
Thanks for writing about the Godzilla movie. I had heard some buzz but didn't know about the depth to it's concept. I'll have to check it out!
Have you ever read the Culture novels, by Iain M. Banks? They explore a somewhat similar idea to "intelligence agencies of fascist post scarcity interstellar empires".
I can't remember if the contacted civilizations are ever socialist, although there's definitely a more feudal one and the overall themes may be interesting to you nonetheless.
I have only a passing familiarity with Falun Gong, so I looked up the Wikipedia page for it and damn, there's a lot to get through.
From what I can tell, it's a new age cult with surprisingly authoritarian / right wing leanings.
Because I'm here on Hexbear, and familiar with the lies / omissions commonly in wiki, I'm curious if you'd be interested in telling me more about your perspective on the group?
Not surprising - I watched this video about France's ongoing colonialism in Africa a few months ago, showed a side of them I never considered, at least in the modern era:
https://youtu.be/fiD24uEvY1U?si=kqH-ixnhSvc4S_HG
Suddenly, the Libyan adventure last decade makes more sense.
I went in with really low hopes, but ended up liking the new Alien Romulus movie, due to some of the reasons you outlined.
It's not perfect and has its dumb choices (uncanny valley de-aged android from Alien, stupid callback lines). But the characters are generally all solid, and there's just enough world building without getting too expository. And there's a new twist on alien morphology that was interesting and straight up good horror.