Plutonic Rainbows

Plutonic Rainbows

Ash (2025)

Ash, directed by Flying Lotus, is a bold and atmospheric sci-fi thriller that blurs the line between horror and psychological mystery. The film opens with astronaut Riya (Eiza González) waking up on a distant research station to find her entire crew gruesomely murdered, her memory in disarray, and a strange life force haunting the facility. As she attempts to make sense of the chaos, her isolation is broken by Brion (Aaron Paul), a fellow astronaut who answers her distress signal. Their uneasy reunion stirs up more questions than answers, as the film skillfully cultivates paranoia and distrust between its two leads.

Eiza González delivers a gripping and vulnerable performance, grounding the film’s surreal tone with emotional authenticity. Her chemistry with Aaron Paul adds dramatic tension, especially as their characters grapple with fragmented truths and personal histories. Flying Lotus, known for his musical innovation, brings a visually stunning and sonically immersive style to the screen, drenched in neon and laced with dread. The cinematography, sound design, and pacing draw clear inspiration from sci-fi staples like Blade Runner 2049 and Event Horizon, yet the film never feels like a copy — it embraces its influences while carving its own strange, cerebral path.

Though it leans into familiar genre tropes, Ash stands out for its ambition and commitment to mood over exposition. It explores themes of memory, identity, and the fragility of perception in the face of cosmic horror. Some viewers may find its narrative elliptical or its visuals overpowering, but that’s part of the film’s unique allure. Flying Lotus doesn’t aim for mainstream clarity; instead, he crafts a haunting, hypnotic experience that lingers in the mind. Ash isn’t just a film — it’s a plunge into the eerie unknown, where nothing can be trusted, not even yourself.

Final Two Stories

I’m down to the last two stories of You Like It Darker by Stephen King. I’ve always been especially fond of his short story collections, so this feels a bit disheartening. However, there are plenty of other books to explore.

I have the last third of Holly to still read, as well as Fairy Tale and Billy Summers. I still have not read Elevation either. In addition, there is a new novel out in May.

Agents

My current set-up for composing and editing in Cursor uses:

  • Claude Sonnet 3.7

  • Claude Sonnet 3.7 Max

  • Gemini 2.5 Pro Max

  • OpenAI o3-mini

I also sometimes use Claude Code on the command line.

Two images, shown here and here, were created in the style of John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836) using ChatGPT-4o.

Gemini 2.5 Pro

Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro represents a significant advancement in artificial intelligence, featuring enhanced reasoning and coding capabilities. This “thinking” model processes tasks step-by-step before responding, resulting in improved accuracy for complex prompts. It excels in creating executable code from concise prompts and leads in benchmarks like GPQA and AIME 2025. With native multimodality, it interprets and generates responses across text, audio, images, and video, supported by a 1 million token context window, soon expanding to 2 million. Developers can access Gemini 2.5 Pro through Google AI Studio, with broader availability forthcoming.

Studio Ghibli

OpenAI has released an update to its image generation service. The AI model's ability to create images remarkably faithful to the style of the Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli, appears to have generated both excitement and frustration among people.

Here are two I created, (using two iconic images from history).

National Geographic and Calvin Klein.