Endgame spoilers and where do we go from here?

I'm going to assume that most people will have seen Endgame now.  It's probably going to be the biggest movie in decades, it's breaking all kinds of records for ticket sales and attendance, and it's been out for... well, depending on exactly who you ask and exactly what you count as the opening day (last Wednesday? Or Thursday?  Or are you a stodgy traditionalist who just says Friday) for nearly a week.  Even the slower of my acquaintances to get to the theater mostly saw it by yesterday evening, and those who haven't are the ones who've only seen some of the Marvel movies anyway and tend to just not really be movie people and don't care and don't follow them.

HOWEVER, if you're one of the few people left who still hasn't seen it yet, by all means, avoid this post.  I'm not going to make any effort to avoid spoilers.

And... for that matter, I'm going to assume that if you want to read a review where we discuss whether or not the movie is good, fun, well-crafted, etc. that you can find dozens of them within seconds without any problem.  I'll mention that yes, it is most of those things, and that I highly recommend it (I've already got tickets for a second showing with my wife later this week).  The movie is fun.  The plot is pretty good.  But, as always, it's less about the plot and more about 1) the interaction of charismatic characters who have good chemistry and are fun to watch together, and 2) slam-bang superhero action scenes.  As long as the movie has those two things, the only thing that we require of the plot is that it be serviceable, not necessarily that it be brilliant.

And that's probably true.  I tend to not like time travel story lines very much, and this clearly is one, so the plot has already got issues from my point of view, but they do a good job of not making that too strange and bizarre and full of deus ex machina, which are major concerns for time travel stories.  But honestly, the plot kind of takes a back seat to just going along for the ride for large chunks of the movie.

It really is divided into three acts which are very, very different types of movies; the first is a solemn, somber, and rather slow drama as characters come to terms with the fact that half of all people, randomly selected, are dead.  When a possible solution presents itself, the movie turns into a heist movie, as various teams time-travel about gathering the Infinity Stones so that Thanos won't be able to get them.  This does work, and the people are brought back, but of course there is something that is overlooked, Thanos gets wind of what's happening, and shows up with his whole army to put a stop to it at the rural Avengers headquarters in New York.  This third act is the huge, big, superhero action movie, and it's spectacular, long, features lots of characters, and giving many of them at least a brief moment to shine.  Although "everyone" is brought back by the magic of the stones, that's not literally true, of course, and a few characters have to sacrifice themselves heroically—something that today's entitled, self-absorbed generation probably doesn't get; the idea of two or three soldiers dying in a war of defense doesn't make sense to a generation who thinks that everyone should win without any personal sacrifice.  I was a bit worried that they'd drop the ball on this, given the recent Captain Marvel movie and it's focus on exactly that—that she never earned anything, she just always had it handed to her.  But here, that's not the case, luckily—MAJOR SPOILERS—both Black Widow and Iron Man are killed for real, and the Hulk is seriously injured, maybe permanently (?)  Captain America phases out by using the time travel mechanism to go back home to his own time and have the life that he didn't get to because of being frozen in the ice.  This nicely deals with the fact that both Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. have now made all of the Marvel movies on their contract and don't want to renew; so their characters are nicely handled, written out in a way that isn't cheap, and which works very well.

OK, OK, so now, what are people on the Right saying about this movie, and how valid are their criticisms?  And since the Right is right, what does that mean for the franchise in the future?  That, I think, is a more interesting discussion than whether or not the movie is "good"—it is, but you can hear that from hundreds of other voices.  Here, there are a few points to be made:

First, there are two moments of over-the-top, in-your-face virtue-signaling wokeness, but they are so forced, obvious, and mercifully short that they are almost more comical than irritating.  (Almost).  When one of the Russo brothers (the directors) makes a cameo during an AA-like therapy session, and is talking about going on a gay date and how sad it is because everyone's sad because so many people are gone, it's a little absurd, and when every single woman character makes a ridiculous pose, claiming that they'll protect Spider-man (or whomever it was at that point) during the final battle, it was comically unserious.  They also keep throwing Wakanda around as if it's the most interesting and realistic and desirable society on earth instead of a bizarre fantasy based around both an idea and a character who simply aren't very interesting.  But luckily, these strange woke-signals aren't sufficient to ruin the movie, although a much better cut would get rid of them altogether.  My assessment?  Minor irritant and something to keep your eye on for the rot that will probably destroy the franchise in the near future, but someone, whether it was the Russos or Feige or someone else, had sufficient discipline to keep the SJWs from ruining this movie, at least.

Second, Captain Marvel.  It certainly looked like Captain Marvel was all set to swoop in and deus ex machina this movie, ruining it at the literal goal-line, but luckily, her presence is incredibly muted.  Some idiot feminist SJWs are running around complaining that she only got fifteen minutes of screen time compared to hours for Iron Man and Thor and Ant-Man and Captain America.  Not only is that stupid, it's surprisingly, understated.  I doubt she even got that much screen time.  Which is good, because she is, amazingly, even more unlikable in this movie than she is in her own movie.  She's like some kind of cancer, destroying everything that she touches.  The Russos—or someone, at least—saw this, in spite of the propaganda that everyone loves Captain Marvel and her movie was a big success, and wisely kept her on the bench as much as possible, and made her role in the resolution of the plot that had literally been building for decades, nonexistent.  As it should have been.

Third, the idea I've seen floated around a lot this last few days or so is that the message of the movie is something to the effect of, "OK, white males, if you accept your role as subservient until you die out and are replaced, we'll let you go out with some dignity at least."  This is primarily based on a few things: Captain America choosing Sam Wilson (Falcon) as his successor, when he comes back at the end is a very old man, while Bucky looks on and the audience wonders why he wasn't picked instead, and Thor acknowledging that the Halfrican "Asgardian" Valkyrie has been the de facto ruler of the small community of refugee Asgardians anyway, and he abdicates in favor of her.  And finally, the assumption that Captain Marvel herself would take on a much bigger role as the chief amongst the Avengers, as well as the focus on Wakandans as the stand-ins for people of Earth instead of Americans, which would have been normal for a movie made in America by Americans for Americans as recently as even a few years or so ago.  But this is both true and untrue at the same time.  Let me break this down just a bit more.

• Yes, Marvel is banking big-time on the supposed popularity of Black Panther and Wakanda, I think, because the first Black Panther movie was a big financial success.  I think this is foolish.  The success of the Black Panther was due to a perfect storm of minority identity politics and virtue-signaling, married to a movie that was better than average.  But I think future installments will stall out; you can't get people to virtue signal how wonderful Africans are forever, and as a big block, Black people in America are notoriously difficult to pin down and get to focus for long on a political or social agenda more complicated that, "I hate white people and want their money and women."  Meanwhile, few of the characters in this sub-franchise are really very interesting; the best thing Black Panther as a character did was in his debut movie, Civil War, where his revenge fantasy vibe, and then willingness to let it go, was probably the most interesting thing that could or will ever happen to him.  My assessment: this can survive as a much reduced "rump state" of the Marvel franchise, probably regardless of what they do, but if they resist the temptation to go too woke and drive away everyone in their audience who isn't a shrieking weirdo or a black person, it can still be reasonably successful.  It will never again achieve the heights of the first movie, though.
• Captain Marvel as the entitled, bratty, narcissistic girl Superman of the MCU is a non-starter.  Sure, sure, the official narrative is that her movie was a big success and made tons of money.  We all know the score, though.  If Disney can't improve the character and rein in Larson's bigoted, hateful comments in public, Captain Marvel as an important character will be infamous as a failure to launch.  The interesting thing is the gossip flying around the internet about her supposed inability to even manage to get along with the rest of the cast, with Don Cheadle, Jeremy Renner, Elizabeth Olson and Chris Hemsworth all having moments publicly where very awkward body language and dialogue in interviews seems to make this obvious, in spite of the professional denials.
• Thor abdicating is actually one of the few good things that we can see in the future for the franchise.  It means that Halfrican Valkyrie will be relegated to cameos, most likely (if even that), while Thor himself is now free to go adventuring with the Guardians of the Galaxy, which should make for a reasonable bright spot in the forecast for future Marvel films.  That, and maybe Spider-man.  The latter is saddled with a relatively bad cast of unlikely supporting characters, but Tom Holland as Spider-man himself is great.  Actually, if they can get rid of Zendaya as a younger, browner version of Brie Larson as his completely unconvincing "love interest" Spider-man could have a bright future.  But I doubt that they will.  They're committed to the woke message of having someone like Zendaya there, so the fact that she's a completely unlikable character played by a completely unlikable actress and that there's no chemistry there at all is unlikely to end up mattering, or even penetrate the minds of the movie-makers that it's a possible issue in the first place.
• Captain America getting old and abdicating his role to, as my son called him flippantly, Blacktain America is not going to be a good move for the franchise either, but it makes some sense in movie, at least.  What few have pointed is that after sampling Diversitopia for a few years, Captain America would much rather just go back and live the life that he had before in a non-diverse America where he could be surrounded by his own people living their own culture more or less unmolested by others (more or less, anyway.)  That's obviously not a message that the movie is trying to convey, but it's there nonetheless. Sam as new Captain America is also a non-starter.  He's just not really very interesting, and his only defining character trait is his loyalty to Steve Rogers personally.  I can't imagine that he can possibly make for an interesting choice in any way whatsoever, or that in attempting to make him interesting and develop him as a character that they could possibly find any direction to go that isn't steeped in wokeness.

Another odd fact is that this movie so nicely wraps up everything that there really isn't any longer any compelling reason to see another Marvel movie, necessarily, and I strongly suspect that a lot of audiences will take it at that and not worry about seeing any more, or at least not religiously expecting to see them all.  There are no credits teasers, there's nothing in the works, and the major plotline is all resolved.  They need to start from scratch, and it's unclear what they could possibly do that would be as well-received.  I suspect most people will see the coda, Spider-man: Homecoming, which is actually a Phase 3 movie, even though it's after the finale of Phase 3.  It will play the role of a kind of encore, I suppose.  What does Phase 4 look like, and how likely is any of it to rise to the heights that Phase 1-3 Marvel did?  Let's have a look at what we know:

• Guardians of the Galaxy 3, now with Thor on the ship too.  Guardians 2 was a step down, in most respects, from the first one, but it was still entertaining.  More curious was the firing of James Gunn, Guardians creator, because he's a pedophile (or at least obsessed with it in a creepy way), which was, of course, "not in line with our corporate values" as said by Disney.  However, he was of course subsequently rehired quietly, and has an executive producer credit in Endgame too.  (I guess pedophilia is a Disney corporate value after all.  Although publicly admitting it isn't a Disney corporate value.)  That said, as much of a disgrace and terrible person as Gunn seems to be, it's hard to deny that his vision for the Guardians movies and space-Marvel overall hasn't been pretty entertaining.  This is the one sub-franchise about which I am actually still kind of excited to see where they go.  Speaking of which, rumors are thick that the arrival of Nova will be a major plot point in the next movie, while teaser scenes in the trailers have hinted at Adam Warlock and the old Guardians team, headed up by Sylvester Stalone having roles in the future too.  There's actually quite a bit of interesting stuff in space-Marvel, and now that Disney have gobbled up Fox and own the rights to the X-men related stuff (like the Shi'arr) they could potentially keep a subset of Marvel as a space opera franchise going for a long time.  Honestly, I think that's by far the brightest future for the franchise.
• Kevin Feige confirmed "off hand" that a Dr. Strange 2 is in the works, but I'm not quite sure that Strange has risen to the level where he can be anything more interesting than the straight man off which Tony Stark played his jokes.
• Black Panther 2 has been confirmed, but I've already given my analysis of what kind of legs I believe that franchise to have.
• A Black Widow solo is confirmed, presumably a prequel.  Could be fun, but where does it go, and how does it tie into the rest of the broader franchise?
• Shang-Chi is supposedly confirmed, although I can't imagine that anyone at all cares.
• An Eternals movie is in the works, supposedly, although again, I have no idea where they go or what they could do with this.  Then again, Thanos was an Eternal (assuming that that's carried forward into the MCU) and even though the Eternals haven't necessarily been super popular, they have been super important as background characters, supporting characters and occasionally villains, and as Guardians of the Galaxy (and for that matter, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man themselves) show, the MCU can take a low popularity comic book and turn it into a highly successful movie, if they do it right.
• Although nothing has been announced, Disney's acquisition of Fox allows for the full, final integration of the mutant and Fantastic Four stuff into the MCU, which of course, opens up lots of possibilities that no doubt they've already given loads of thought to.  Although with the exception of about half of the X-men movies, I'd suggest that the bankability of those properties is a long way from a confirmed thing.

As Disney+ gets ready to go and Disney takes on Netflix head-on, they're trying to put their best foot forward and develop content for that too tied to the MCU, including:

• A Loki show
• A Hawkeye show (with an apprentice or squire or whatever you want to call her, in training)
• WandaVision, with Scarlet Witch and the Vision (how does Vision come back, anyway? He didn't in Endgame.)
• A Falcon and Winter Soldier show.  Maybe that's the way to actually develop Falcon in a venue where he could possibly have some success.

Of course, some of this assumes Disney actually knows how to create good content, and given the fiascos with LucasFilm in recent years, some recent scares with the MCU, and the generally dismal performance of MCU-tied TV shows in general, that may well be giving them too much credit.

Overall, it's fair to say that I'm fairly bearish on the prospects of the MCU.  I think it peaked this last weekend, and that it's decline and shrinkage will be both marked and rapid, as will be its turn towards radical anti-white, anti-male wokeness.  Which, of course, will only hasten it's decline even more.

Friday Art Attack

Another Friday!  Another week without much in the way of posting, and what there is is significantly weighted towards Indo-European stuff (and... I've got another one for later today in the works.  Oh, well.)  I am however, not entirely RPG-less; I'm actually reading Paizo's Distant Realms books as we speak, which spells out a number of extraplanar cities.  The first ones aren't particularly fascinating, but I'm hoping that some of the locations and characters are worth reading about.  Also; I haven't seen Endgame yet, and I won't tonight either, but my son will, and the whole famn damily has tickets for tomorrow afternoon.  Rumors—relatively respectable ones that I trust—are that the movie is really quite good, but that the "set up" if you want to call it that for the next phase is pretty dismal, and it looks quite a bit like the message of the next phase will be something along the lines of "white people, if you submit and admit the ascendancy of the brown coalition, we'll allow you to die out with some dignity as we replace you in your own homelands and your own cultural institutions."  Maybe it shouldn't be very surprising that a corporation as fundamentally and thoroughly evil as Disney is gradually ruining Marvel the same way that they rapidly ruined Star Wars, but rather it's surprising that they didn't do it faster and sooner.  Anyhoo, by the time I have anything to say about it based on actual personal experience when I blog again after the weekend, it'll be old news.  But I'll almost certainly do it anyway.  I mean, heck—I've long been reviewing D&D books that had been out for years back when book reviews were a more regular part of my post rotation (and if I do them now, it's after two additional editions have come out—not that I'm likely to anymore.)

Anyway, later today, like I said, I'll post a discussion on "the origin of whiteness"—as a phenotype, specifically.  And early on Monday I'll talk about Endgame.  That'll keep me occupied most likely, but if something else comes up that I want to post about, maybe I will.  With that; on to the Friday Art!  UPDATE:  Eh, no I probably won't do that post.  Too complicated.  I've got literally dozens of haplogroup distribution maps, and I have to make sense of all of them before I can start to draw correlations because the phenotypes associated with "whiteness" and the genetic clusters.

Graz'zt, in his 5e form.  Graz'zt is a unique D&D character, of course, but he's also not.  As the embodiment of the Black Man of the Woods (mentioned by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter), the Black Man of the Crossroads from hoodoo lore, and even Nyarlathotep from Yog-Sothothery.  He's a fairly typical representation of the Devil, honestly.

A combination of eastern Iroquois and Algonquin savages with some romanticized notions of early Europe give us this barbarian.

This was the cover to a rather mediocre Eberron novel, if I remember correctly (actually, that's probably not really fair.  I'm pretty sure it was among the best in that series.)

Another great Wayne Reynolds "Indiana Jones in D&D" style painting.  I think this was a Dragon or Dungeon Magazine cover, but I could be misremembering that.)

I'm not quite sure what's going on in this picture.  It might actually be the D&D version of Koschei (although they transliterate that much more difficult in D&D for reasons that I can't quite fathom, with all kinds of gratuitous yet unpronounceable consonants clustered together.)

Sigh.  The future we didn't get, sadly.

A Viking (with an ornamental boar on his helmet no less!, no doubt based on the historical Anglo-Saxon Benty Grange helmet, or various other Celtic helmets that had similar crests) fighting some kind of forest monster.  In Dark•Heritage, that would almost certainly be a thurse.

I'm not quite sure when undead and pirates become so closely affiliated, but they are, and it works remarkably well.  Even Disney couldn't completely screw that up when they gave us undead and pirates.

Some James Ryman art from an old Dungeon Magazine.  If I recall correctly, that monster is a barghest.

Cosplaying a Bronze Age Mycenean warrior.

Dis, from the book I mentioned above that I'm reading.

If you've ever been to an "art" museum, unless it's an old school European one, it probably doesn't show you real art like this, but instead something idiotic like Andy Warhol.

Warfare in the Bronze Age must have been a pretty grim business.

Environmentalism by PA and Heartiste

I don't often do this, but this is one topic that intersects between many of my interests, and to which I've given a fair bit of thought.  The original post is here:

Environmentalism is complicated. As left wing vanguard politics, it’s the devil wearing a human skinsuit. But in listening to our healthy European voice deep inside, we recoil at the destruction of forests. The European soul loves the forest. Poor is the White man who knows not the joy of time alone deep among trees, the moss, the lawless cries of birds. The European subraces have their own customs with regards to the forest. Teutons, Celts, Slavs… we northeastern Slavs (I’m not that familiar our Balkan brothers, whose spiritual landscape is rocks and mountains, unlike our vast snowy plains) we forage for mushrooms. Every child is an expert on the prize-find vs something that can kill you. 

Special People are desert people, khazar nomads. They hate the forest. They love money and especially monetizing (liquidating) the forests, parceling them off, clear cutting the wood, selling and settling them with alien biped economic units that they bring in to keep the economic churn at high percolation until it all withers like a dead branch and then they move on. The land developer is a particularly loathsome insect. Even if he’s of our ancestry, his soul is twisted in the image of the Special.
[...]
Regarding PA’s comment, I think we all have our personal mystic connections to particular environments — natural and cultural — which reverberate in our souls and likely derive from ancestral memories encoded in our DNA. 

The Special loves the dry, hot, cacophonous market bazaar. 

The NW European loves the forests and verdant meadows. 

The Med Euro loves the rocky shorelines and rolling hills of the interior. 

Highlanders are at home in mountainous terrain. 

We can break down these preferences even further, along ethnic lines. 

This is why, I believe, in a future disaggregated America, the ethnics and races will organically find their way to the regional State which suits their environment template for contented living. I wonder most about White Southerners, if they stay where they are or migrate to a climate and ecology more in tune with their ancestral heritage.

I think it's more complicated than that.  I don't have to look back to my ancestors in the Chalcolithic to see what kind of environment best suits me by genetics.  To me it's very clear; culturally, I'm most at home in the American south—especially Texas, with its hybrid Western/Southern nature.  Environmentally, I prefer the American west; the American savanas, the Rocky mountains and their aspen and pine forests, the red semi-desert cliffs, etc.  I don't need to go back to the Hadrian's Wall territory to feel at home.  America is my home.  It's the nation best suited to me.  My ancestors were brought here by the Lord himself, I strongly believe, and they built this nation for their posterity in what to them was nothing less than a Promised Land, set aside specifically for them.  In any case, the American South is the ancestral heritage of the American southerner.  They've been there for centuries now, and they belong to the land as much as the land belongs to them.

I'm not really too interested in delving too deeply into my spiritual connection to the land of America (lest the swine find my pearls, so to speak), but it is deep.   (A small flavor of what I mean can be seen here.)

On environmentalism, yes it’s a shame that it’s been co-opted by lunatic leftoids when the natural home of nature preservers is on the right (and never more so than today, as leftoidism becomes increasingly the ideological accoutrement of deracinated and denatured urban rat racers). “Climate change” is the way in which the modren shitlib White, who has lost his connection to nature, accesses a path to an ancient racial longing that embarrasses him when spoken of or thought about in reflective moments. 

In the end, the environments beloved by Whites will be ruined by open borders, so all this climate change sanctimony will come to naught. The result of virtue signaling is always a boosted signal at the expense of the virtue.

Conservationism and responsible stewardship of our homeland is the natural position of the Right, actually—not the feckless libertarianism of throwing it all away and privatizing it.  Environmentalism, on the other hand, is nothing more than a mystery cult of virtue-signaling and flagellation.  The more you listen to the prophets of the Green Cult the more obvious it becomes that they are absolutely ridiculous and insane and far removed from any kind of objective reality.

Bing Translate kinda sucks

I've been listening to a lot of tracks lately credited to Daniel Doering (and his nom de plume Danny V.)  He was a talented musician from, presumably, the formerly German section of Poland, who died tragically in a car crash last year.  I knew this already, but as I was listening to more of his tracks, I wanted to get more detail on what happened.  I found a news story on a Czech news site, and I got what I wanted.  Unfortunately, the translation isn't very good.  It says that Doering loved humor.  I hope he'd appreciate this, morbid though it may be.

The tragic death of the musician Daniela (d. 25): The passion for cars became fatal to him. He died in a car accident

He was young, talented, and was expecting a career as a successful musician. Polish hardtrance DJ and producer Daniel Doering (d. 25) also known as Danny V. Had a whole life ahead of him. When he became famous in the world, it ended a tragically ugly car accident on the German highway.

He loved humor, music and cars. Death finally caught him at the wheel of his Fiat Ducato near the German city of Ahrensburg on the A1 motorway towards Hamburg. According to the server planeta-transportu.pl Daniel in the section where the repair work took place, lost control of the car, got skid and subsequently ended in hours.

Then he thrust himself into the trolley with a gravel, a passer-moving minibus, and finally into the barriers. Fire Brigade teams with 30 fireers, rescuers in two ambularies and a medical helicopter were immediately on the spot. Daniel ended up in the wreckage. It was clear to the firefighers that it was a race against time, so they tried to get it as fast as possible with the hydraulic scissors.

Daniel died at the site of the Wreckins

Unfortunately, a young musician, too severely injured, sucked on the spot. The drivers (67) of the minibus nothing happened. "You were a nice fellow and a serious talented producer. I'll never forget you, my friend,"WROTE DJ Shock: Force on Facebook. "Rest in peace, Danny v. Your legacy will live for a long time," joined DJ Hardeval.

Daniel loved driving in the car. On your social network profile, it has a large number of photos from your car. It was also a big joke who liked to make monkeys and told jokes. His sense of humor is also evidenced by the name of his track Polnische Wurst Ist Fantastisch (Polish sausage is fantastic).

Unfortunately, no more music will ever fold this young talent.

What is Hardtrance?

Melodic trance is one of the softest electronic genres his harder an offshoot is usually characterized by more dense beats or bassy, often at a faster rate and sometimes even more harsh vocals. This subgenre originated at the beginning of 90. In Western Europe. His most famous representatives include Scot Project, Kai Tracid, and Derb.

Perseus and Andromeda

Reposting a portion of an older post, specifically the parts that talk about the two Clash of the Titans movies...

As an aside, I watched the 1981 Clash of the Titans last night while holed up in the house due to lots of falling snow, inability of our infrastructure to clear the roads well, and stuff getting canceled across the board that I would otherwise have been out doing.  It's not a great movie, but I've kind of got a soft spot for those old cheesy sword & sandal movies, especially with the stop-motion mythological monsters.  I imagine most D&D players kind of do.  Now, I might watch the 2010 remake here soon, but even if I don't, I think I can remember well enough why that failed compared to the 1981 version, and much of it comes down to [the following]:

• In the 2010 version, Perseus is kind of whiny and reluctant.  I hate the trope of the reluctant hero.  Men that women love and other men aspire to be are movers and shakers.  Leading men who are passive, or even worse, surly and whiny, just are incredibly unlikable.  The Perseus of the earlier version, on the other hand, is happy to go find his destiny; he's even impetuous about it, which gives him a kind of youthful charm.
• In the 2010 version, Andromeda isn't even the love interest.  Oh, she's pretty enough, but she's cold, distant, and there's nothing feminine or charming about her at all.  (For that matter, the same is mostly true of the actual love interest, some new character played by Gemma Aterton.  She's credited as Io, but has absolutely no connection to the mythological Io, so I don't know why.)  Judi Bowker's Andromeda, on the other hand, is everything a young princess should be; full of youthful, virginal sweetness, compassion, femininity, and very, very beautiful.  When she runs off on her horse in front of the guys, it's not because "I'm a manly pseudo-woman in the feminist vein, here me roar!" it's because she's young, impetuous, in love, and it makes her even more cute and more feminine rather than less so.  It's not unlike the famous line from A Princess of Mars; "Fly Sola, Dejah Thoris stays to die with the man she loves."  The men react to it fondly.  But they protect them, even from themselves, and when Andromeda wakes up to find that everyone except old Burgess Meredith has already left and there's nothing for her to do except go back home, it's sad, but not as sad, reckless or foolish as taking the girl you love into harm's way.  These two are where I say that the feminist imperative fights against biology; the story that the feminist imperative would have us tell simply isn't a story that most people are going to react to very well, because it makes men into low-T losers, and it makes women into pseudo-men. Both are off-putting and unlikable at best, and seriously wretched at worst. And then to make it worse, these pseudo-men played by women actresses have plot immunity to even minor setbacks, because the shrieking harpies who write this stuff can't bear to see them suffer even that.  So the stories not only feature unbelievable and unlikable characters, but they also feature unlikable, boring plots with no real tension or suspense.
• Poor Sam Worthington is probably a decent guy, but I've never yet seen him in a movie where he had any charisma or chemistry with the other actors.  Harry Hamlin, on the other hand, isn't a particularly talented actor, but even so, he had a kind of dumb jock charm, and it was credible that Perseus and Andromeda were victims of young love.
• On the other hand, the 2010 version had much better special effects, and usually better action sequences (although I actually think the Medusa scene works better as a tense horror scene than as an action scene, so 1981's version actually wins there.  By a little bit.)

Y-DNA haplogroup

I don't know my Y-DNA haplogroup.  I could take the 23andme test, or one of several others that gives me genomic information, but in reality, my ancestry isn't very mysterious to me, and I don't want to spend the bucks to do a test only to be told what I already know, plus something that's kind of esoteric, but which I'm curious about, like my haplogroup assignment.

That said, I can limit my likely haplogroups down to half a dozen closely related variants easily enough.  My ancestry is mostly English and some Scottish.  I also have some Portuguese ancestry through my paternal grandmother's side of the family, but because it's my paternal grandmother, it wouldn't have given me either a Y-DNA or an mtDNA haplogroup.  For that, I need look only to my British ancestry.  The possibilities are, therefore:

• R1a-L664, which is a Northwestern European haplogroup associated with the arrival of the Corded Ware horizon to the shores of Northern Europe.  It is (relatively speaking) slightly common today in areas in which the Corded Ware or its derivatives (such as Dutch Bell Beaker) settled, including Western Germany, the Low Countries and the British Isles.  In general, R1a is much more associated with Eastern Europe than Western Europe, but it still is present from this ancient invasion.
• R1a-Z284 is a specifically Scandinavian subclade.  Its epicenter is in central Norway, but it also appears in places where the Vikings settled, including England and Scotland.  Also, my Y-DNA heritage can be traced, of course, through the male line, and my male line does back to the Norman invasion of England in 1066 before we lose track of it somewhere in Normandy.  The Normans were, of course, also Vikings who had settled in France and taken local Frankish wives.  Although at a total genome level, I don't associate much with the Vikings but rather with the Anglo-Saxons and the Scottish, at the Y-DNA level, there's a very good chance that I have a Viking/Norman haplogroup.  That said, the R1a haplogroups are themselves relatively rare in England and by extension in areas settled by the former English, like America (and Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.)  They make up a significant plurality, but R1b is much more common.
• R1b-L21 is the so-called "Celtic" subclade.  It actually dates to before the formation of the Celts, and can be found in the Bronze Age Unetice culture, which is considered by most to have been at a level where Celtic, Italic and Germanic had yet to completely split from each other (Celtic and Italic more in the southern and Central Europe, Germanic after moving north, hybridizing with the remnant Corded Ware population to form the Nordic Bronze Age, which eventually became Germanic.)  While I no doubt have many ancestors who've had this genetic clade, it's probably unlikely that I do myself.  It's not out of the question, but unlikely, based on what I know of my paternal line, which is how Y-DNA is passed on.  By the same token, it's possible although even more unlikely that I have the related R1b-S28 subclade.  This appears in small numbers in the British Isles, but it mostly associated with the traditional Gallic expansion of the Celts and is most common in Alpine Northern Italy, Switzerland, a corner of southern Germany, and the French Riviera coastline, while the L21 clade is most common western Ireland, Scotland, some of Wales and Cornwall and Brittany, although in much smaller percentages throughout the British Isles.
• R1b-S21 is the Y-DNA haplogroup that I consider most likely by a significant margin.  It's a marker associated with the Germanic language group overall, and is quite common in areas with heavy Germanic settlement, including (naturally) the Nordic Bronze Age territory.  It is a derivative clade from the Unetice group that helped create the Germanic languages in the first place, it was brought by the Franks to the Low Countries and much of northern France (including, especially Normandy), the Anglo-Saxons made it incredibly common in England, and it's also incredibly common in much of Germany, Austria and Scandinavia.  In fact, I have multiple avenues by which this clade could have come with my ancestors to England and from there to America. 
• I didn't think it likely, at first, that I'd have an I1-DF29+ or I1a under the older classification scheme, clade, but given that my Y-DNA is specifically Norman (most likely) then the odds actually rise compared to, say, an Anglo-Saxon or Lowland Scottish dude.  The I1 haplogroup is the only haplogroup in this assemblage that isn't specifically associated with the arrival of warlike Indo-European males through the Corded Ware or Yamnaya horizons or their later derivatives, but is rather a native hunter-gatherer clade that was common in prehistoric cultures like TRB, Ertebølle, and Globular Amphora.  The peopling of Europe in prehistory is interesting.  A big wave of Neolithic farmers invaded Europe from the south (during the Neolithic Age, obviously) and replaced much of the hunter-gatherer genetics that previously had been there, which is why southern, Mediterranean Europe still looks phenotypically very different from Northern Europe even today.  As the latitude increased however, this replacement waned.  The farther north you go, the greater the preponderance of hunter-gatherer DNA remained.  And cultures like TRB and Globular Amphora may well have been invasive to their historical range from the west and north, even.  When the Indo-Europeans came, they largely replaced much of the Y-DNA haplogroups associated with the farmers, although the mtDNA haplogroups continued.  (In other words, they were much more successful than the farmers with the ladies, and they passed down their genes while the farmer men didn't, being forced to see their women fall into the arms of the invaders.  This may have been a very violent affair associated with the killing of the men and the Sabine women-like rape and capture of the local girls, or it may have been relatively peaceful where the newcomers were simply more economically successful which in turn led to being more procreatively successful.  Most likely elements of both persisted depending on the time and place.)  But again, in the northern areas, this didn't happen nearly as much, and the equally war-like GAC descended more from the Western and Scandinavian hunter-gatherers held their own with the incoming post-Yamnaya folks and merged with them in many areas to contribute a significant number of male lineages to the Corded Ware and subsequent populations of the area.  I1 is especially common still in Scandinavia, but all of northern Europe still has traces of it.  Most of the Germanic territory it's much more than a trace, making up a significant plurality of the population.  This has led to the hypothesis, first proposed on linguistic grounds but now strengthened by genetic ones, that the Germanic languages in particular formed as a three-way hybrid; first, the first wave of Indo-Europeanization (mostly R1a Corded Ware, possibly speaking a satem language distantly related to what later emerged as Balto-Slavic) hybridized with a local hunter-gather and mixed farming population of equally war-like people like GAC, which were once believed to have been "Indo-Europeanized" according to the original version of Gimbutas' kurgan hypothesis.  Genetic research has largely removed that interpretation from play, but clearly the GAC was a militarized and warlike culture, which may account for its durability in the face of Indo-European invasion, and the subsequent persistence of Y-DNA lines that are associated with it in the subsequent post-I-E cultures.  Later, a second wave of R1b Indo-Europeans from the Unetice horizon spread over the same area bringing with them an Indo-European centum language.  Anyway, the point of all of this is that I1 is actually quite possible, especially given its relatively high occurrence in Scandinavian ancestries, like that of the Normans.

Anyway, in conclusion, R1b-S21 is by far the most likely Y-DNA haplogroup to which I belong, but I1 and R1a-Z284 are also possibilities.  All of the other ones I highlighted are very remote possibilities, and I'd be very surprised to have them pop up.

Contatto

I've been too busy to even really think about what to blog about.  The challenges of rotating to a new position at work and having just gotten back into the office after a week of Spring Break, I guess.  I hope to see things slow down shortly and I'll get my eye on something different to think about and blog again, but for right now, between work and personal commitments, I'm coming up a little dry.  HOWEVER, here's a small sampling of what I've been listening to while working.  Luca Antolini is the primary artist here, regardless of what the credits say, and "Contatto" is the name of the song.  It comes in, I believe, three versions (at least those were the only ones I could find.)

Friday Art Attack

While I'm among those who isn't a huge fan of "anime-style" art in fantasy, this picture of Iggwilv and Graz'zt isn't bad.  Plus, I tried to be a completist when it came to Graz'zt art, given that I based the look of my kemling race pretty heavily on them.

Then again, what is Graz'zt but Nightcrawler of the X-men combined with Darth Maul, at least visually?

I've also long been a fan of the "savage races" of fantasy, and given that hobgoblins in particular were supposed to be lawful, I never understood why they weren't supposed to have had militarily successful, yet presumably tyrannical, highly developed and civilized empires.  So, I tend to grab a lot of savage humanoid art, especially when they're more (rather than less) anthropomorphized.

This guy, on the other hand, is a much less anthropomorphized version of a savage humanoid, with a much higher emphasis on the savage.

This orc is also highly non-anthropomorphized, with an almost gorilla-like face.  Yet somehow, the orc serving lass just looks like a green-skinned anime girl.

An interesting and savage take on the ghoul.  I had thought maybe I'd used this in the past, but it's not in my used folder, so I guess not...

Same thing with this one, although maybe I've used other art of this same less iconic Iconic character by Paizo.  The Red Raven, the swashbuckling Zorro-like figure of their ersatz French Revolution country, Galt, is an interesting character, in spite of the cliche.

Dark Ages Greeks fighting against Phoenician or other Levantine people.  Curiously, PCAs of sampled cemeteries from Mycenean Age Greeks are not notably different from those of samples from pre-Greek Minoan Aegean, so the Greeks themselves came in originally relatively small numbers, spread their language and culture via elite dominance, and superimposed themselves on a fundamentally alien population.  This is not what happened in some other areas; in Iberia, for example, when the Bell Beakers arrived (roughly similar in time to the "Coming of the Greeks" they replaced almost 100% the male Y-DNA lineages already there (although they then seemed to have taken local girls to wife, based on the genetics of subsequent generations.)  In Great Britain, they replaced 90% of the entire genetic package, so they didn't even take local girls; they seem to have brought their own and just replaced the people entirely.

Even in India there was substantial genetic admixture, but Anatolia and the Aegean seem to have suffered relatively little of it with the coming of the Indo-Europeans.  I wonder, though, if we could sample the Greek aristocracy from early after the arrival, if we'd have a much more northern/eastern European phenotype.  I strongly suspect that we would.  Literature from the period seems to suggest as much very strongly as well.  I also wonder if some of the iconic city-states like Sparta may well have had an Indo-European rather than local Mediterranean phenotype until fairly well into history.

This orc shaman isn't very anthropomorphic at all either, and clearly is meant to look like an ape.

This champion, on the other hand, looks like a green-painted human barbarian with slightly pointy ears.

Undead and snakes with an Egyptian flavor.  Always a good combination. Just ask Indiana Jones!

Another Wayne Reynolds undead sorcerer of some kind or other.

And another Mycenean Age Greek warrior, here showing a significantly Yamnaya-like phenotype.  As an aside, I'm still quite skeptical of the notion that the Yamnaya were significantly darker than the Corded Ware, given that the Corded Ware were over 75% Yamnaya by PCA.  Plus, if they picked up all of that blond hair and blue eyes from native Scandinavian and Eastern Hunter Gatherers that made up the remaining 25% or so of their genome, yet the blond hair and blue eyes phenotypes tend to be recessive, how did that even happen?  Rapid mutation after the Yamnaya became Corded Ware over the course of just a few generations?  I doubt it.  The Yamnaya were probably considerably fairer than they are often given credit for, and if we think that they weren't because of a few samples that showed darker hair and eyes and even skin, to a great degree, then we probably have a sampling bias of some sort, plus a lack of sufficient samples to give us the full picture of the population anyway.  Don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to revert back to some "pure-blooded Nordic" phenotype for the Yamnaya or anything like that, but I am suggesting that they brought with them markers that led to significantly fairer skin, hair and eyes everywhere they went, except possibly the general region of Fennoscandia and Baltic and North Sea coasts where the locals already had similar physical features.  Much is made of the fact that the Baltic is the highest incidence of blue eyes and blond hair today, rather than the Ukrainian and southern Russian steppes, but that region has been washed over—historically even—with wave after wave of Eastern invaders: Huns, Avars, many groups of Turks and Mongols, etc.  It's not difficult to explain small changes in phenotype without having to invoke a statistically unlikely explanation of dark Yamnaya people having almost entirely fairer descendants.

The Lord of Blades from Eberron 4e's cover, by Wayne Reynolds.  And some kind of Giger-esque alien/construct wolf/dog or whatever.  I'm not sure what those are (steel panthers, maybe?)

A cool demon image.

Aryan (Andronovo) invaders on the northern portions of what is now India/Pakistan or the Iranian region from the Middle/Late Bronze Age.  If you think those Andronovo guys look an awful lot like early Celtic chariot warriors, except in the desert, and with Nazi iconography, well, yes... They do.  There are historical reasons for that, actually.

Hiking near Grand Junction

I'm back.  I doubt anyone will want to watch all of this, but here's my trip reports.  I don't know why my second and third videos are low res.  I did them with a different app, but the file size is quite a bit larger than the first movie, so if anything, they should be higher resolution.  (Nevermind.  Got that fixed.)  Anyway, since nobody's going to watch these all the way through anyway, it's probably a moot point...

The REAL Captain Marvel

Although few remember this today unless they're really into Golden Age comic book nerd-dom, but Captain Marvel was actually created by Fawcett Comics (which has been closed for decades) and was the most popular superhero comic throughout the 40s... and is the character that we now mostly know as Shazam.  Shazam itself was an acronym that described his powers:

The wisdom of Solomon
The strength of Hercules
The stamina of Atlas
The power of Zeus
The invulnerability of Achilles
The speed of Mercury

Which gives him most of the abilities that Superman later picked up, back in an era when, if you recall, Superman was "faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound." (Although Captain Marvel originally couldn't fly either, he picked up that ability fairly quickly.)  Fawcett eventually succumbed to dirty politics and lawfare when DC sued them for copying Superman (probably they are scenes a faire, but the court battle is notable as one of the longest court battles in comic book history.)  Somehow while all of that was happening, Marvel trademarked the name, although they applied it to a totally different character (of course).  DC later ended up with ownership of the Fawcett characters, they couldn't even use his name, so they went back to the acronym of the wizard who granted him his powers and used that as an alternative name.

This Captain Marvel is notable for, among other things, outselling Superman, but also being the first superhero adapted to the screen, in the Republic Serial during the 40s named after him.  Thus, it's quite interesting that the movie Shazam! comes so closely on the heels of Captain Marvel, when he's really the character who by rights should have that name, not Carol Danvers.  How do the two movies compare?

First off, let me just point something out.  Zachary Levi—despite his stage name, which drops his real last name of Pugh—and despite his general appearance, is the descendant European not Jewish ancestry, and his last name is Welsh.  You probably remember him from Chuck and as the voice of Flynn Rider in Tangled, and if you haven't seen him recently, you probably thought of him as a kind of lanky nerdy looking dude.  He's not.  He put a ton of work into looking the part of Captain Marvel, and he's freakin' enormous.  Brie Larceny, on the other hand, is such an entitled little whiny princess that she just showed up, can't look the part, and had to get a butt double hired (squats are a girls' best friend.)

That vibe really describes the differences in the job that everyone involved with each movie did.  The produces, actors and writers of Shazam! worked to entertain you.  They worked hard and did a good job.  The producers, actors (with some exceptions, notably Jude Law, Ben Mendelson and Samuel Jackson) and especially writers of Captain Marvel just showed up all entitled and expected you to be entertained just because.  Billy Batson/Captain Marvel was a character who showed more depth in a single scene with his real mother than Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel was able to pull together during the entire two and a half or so hour runtime of her movie.  She was flat (and not just physically in the backside), uninteresting and unlikeable.  Billy Batson, played by a teenaged boy and Zachary Levi when in superpowered mode, was charming, funny, relatable and very fun.

Sigh.  Marvel continues to slide while DC is finally getting its act together with several good movies now in recent years; this one, Aquaman and Wonder Woman.  Mostly because they're actually trying to be good movies that entertain the audience and make them glad they came, whereas Marvel is not only coasting, but also starting to get into the kind of preachiness that is death to entertainment.

Now, don't get me wrong, Captain Marvel isn't totally unredeemable, even though the main character, the plot, and the actress herself were.  The space opera stuff, when it did that, was pretty cool.  Jude Law and Ben Mendelsson in particular, turned in great performances that I quite enjoyed.  But I absolutely will not buy this movie, or watch it again under, I can't imagine, any circumstances at all.  Shazam! on the other hand, I really liked a lot.  I'll probably buy it on blu-ray, and I'll certainly go out of my way to watch it again.

The worst thing about the Captain Marvel debacle is that it suggests the possibility that Marvel is going to majorly drop the ball with Endgame...