Leo Tolstoy - Based (sometimes)

While trying to verify if a quote I saw actually did come from Leo Tolstoy, I found the following quotes, which includes the one I was looking up, which I think are quite profound. 

I also found a bunch of garbage, but that's OK. That doesn't mitigate the wisdom in these quotes.

"Everything thinks of changing the world, but nobody thinks of changing himself." (the fatal flaw of leftists and Yankee totalitarians since at least the time of the English Civil War.

"It's amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." (for you binary thinkers out there, that doesn't mean that beauty is evil or that ugliness is goodness, though.)

"History would be a wonderful thing if it were only true." (fake news was just the beginning. Wait'l you get a load of fake history and fake science.)

"It is no sin to look at a nice girl." (I just threw that one in for fun. He really did say that, though.)

Movies

Because I was traveling last Friday, and because my wife loves movies and had the day off, she spent the entire day at the theatre watching movies that mostly I wasn't interested in. See, actually I love movies too, but I've become very jaded and cynical about most movies made in the Woke Era, and I've actively been turned off from seeing franchises like Star Wars or Marvel anymore. So, she gambled that I wouldn't want to see any of the movies that she had slated, except maybe the last one, which I actually had time to finish driving, get home, and go meet her at the theatre to see with her. Her itinerary, annotated by me.

Elvis. I'd actually heard relatively good things about this movie, and wouldn't have minded seeing it. She thought it was pretty mediocre and won't want a repeat viewing, however. Granted, she doesn't really like any kind of musical all that much on principle with the exception of animated Disney movies. And even those have mostly disappointed her in the last several years, although she's loath to admit it. It's possible that I'd appreciate this movie more than she did. Possibly. But maybe not. My excitement was more along the lines that I'd heard good enough things about it that maybe it was a movie I could see with her and not hate myself for watching. If she doesn't even want to see it with me, then there's not much point in me watching it just for me.

Thor: Love and Thunder. She didn't like this. I didn't expect to like anything at all about it either. For all of the reasons that nobody else is liking it; it tries too hard to be funny all of the time without actually being so, Thor himself is a big, dumb character who goes through the exact same story arc over and over again movie after movie, and nobody else is likeable either. And the plot is stupid beyond all reason.

I don't think she even caught the post-credits scene where Jewish Hercules is introduced. Ironically, he's supposed to be the likeable dumb jock of the Marvel Universe (who is now inexplicable gay in the comics... but who reads those anyway?) Thor has been unexpectedly saddled with Herc's personality in the movies, but Herc will probably not suffer indignation after indignation like Thor has had to; i.e., he'll get the more classic Thor personality. After all, Thor is white and Herc is Jewish and was raised in a strip club, so he's clearly morally superior. Nevermind that the actual ancient Greeks weren't nearly as Levantine genetically as the current ones are, and Homer constantly describes blond and red haired Greek heroes. Meanwhile, Jewish Herc didn't even have to bulk up to take the part. He looks like a piker compared to Chris Hemsworth. Sigh.

Where the Crawdads Sing. While I appreciate the correct usage of the word crawdad, I expect is was deliberate to evoke a bumpkin Southerner outlook by the smug author. That said, my wife said that this was a more interesting than expected murder mystery. Where I expected a chick-flick, that's not what she described, or what a viewing of the trailer suggests either. Maybe it's a murder chick-flick like Fried Green Tomatoes? I dunno. I might actually sit down and watch this with her at some point later.

Minions: The Rise of Gru. We were both pleasantly surprised when we went to see Bad Guys (I mean, I'm 50 and she's 49, and our youngest kid is 18.) It was actually quite charming and well done. We're not too proud to watch a movie made for kids if its charming. We'd always enjoyed the Despicable Me series so far well enough, but she said this one doesn't really live up to the legacy; it's pretty mediocre.

The Gray Man. This is the one that I saw with her. It'll be available for Netflix streaming in a couple of days, so when my 20-year old son is back in town briefly between college semesters, I'm going to sit down with him and watch it. It's a Russo Brothers production, and my son does follow Hollywood specific people and the Russo Brothers are on his very narrow watch-list. I think he'll enjoy it. Ryan Gosling plays the titular Gray Man, a super-spy of sorts who ends up on the wrong side of a corrupt CIA director. Chris Evans plays himself, just as he did in Knives Out, except this time more violent. Ana de Armas is completely unconvincing as an American agent with a super-strong Cuban accent; although I will say that the action scenes, while over-the-top, didn't make me roll my eyes at her stronk wamman approach; I was able to suspend my disbelief as well watching her beat people up as I was watching Gosling to the same. I actually quite liked this movie, and recommend it, in spite of my flippant comments here. 

My favorite moments, and minor spoiler alerts for the rest of this paragraph here, were watching Chris Evans get his fingers blown off with a flare gun fired by a 13-year old girl, watching Chris Evans get his head smashed into a giant flower pot, watching Chris Evans getting choked out, watching Chris Evans get shot and watching Chris Evans' dead body floating in a fountain.

While there's still obviously lots of garbage in the pipeline coming from Hollywood, because the lead-time for a movie is many years, I think the tide has turned on Wokeness in movies. There has developed a wide-spread acceptance of the idea that woke movies are big flops now, and everytime one does, normal people everywhere point at it and laugh (Lightyear) while notably non-woke movies like the Top Gun sequel are making super-huge bank, even without catering to the Chinese market. It'll take some time for the ship to turn, but I think in general, the "powers that be" have started spinning the wheel at least in an attempt to start the process.

Or maybe that's just wishful thinking. Hollywood is, after all, merely a mouthpiece for the greater Cloud People cult of hating the Dirt People and wanting to see them suffer in any way possible.

UPDATE: As an aside on the Love and Thunder debacle, which is about pagan gods getting their comeuppance in a not very transparent swipe at religion overall, I tend to like the Survive the Jive channel on YouTube, but he hasn't done much lately, and he seems to be talking more and more about paganism rather than history and prehistory. He posted a conference speech he gave, which I watched a few minutes of, and it was curious to see him specifically thank Ing and Woden, his two patron gods, for making it all happen. The modern neo-pagan movement is, to me, somewhat bizarre. I get it and yet don't at the same time. I understand people; especially frustrated, increasingly disenfranchised and dispossessed white men, wanting to get in touch with their ancestors and their beliefs, but the idea that we can create a meaningful pagan belief system out of what little we know about what the pagan Anglo-Saxons (or even the pagan Vikings) actually believed is ludicrous. It'd be like trying to recreate Christianity with a few dozen scattered pages from the Bible. It's hard for me to believe that modern neo-pagans like Rowsell from Survive the Jive honestly believe in the existence of the same pagan gods that their pagan Anglo-Saxon ancestors supposedly prayed to, and if they do, then they certainly know very little about what those ancestors thought or believed about them, or how they related to their lives. Neo-paganism is a somewhat desperate and pathetic attempt, well-meaning in some ways though it may be, to connect with our ancestors in a society that constantly attempts to villainize our ancestors. It's little more than ancestor worship by proxy; repeating rituals and phrases and boutique beliefs without any understanding of whatever context our ancestors may have attached to them (to the extent that we have anything to repeat, and aren't just making stuff up anyway.) Embracing a pagan identity today seems more about making a political and social statement that you reject modernity and it's sterile hatred of anything white than it does about having a real spiritual belief system such as what one expects from a normal religion.

It's kind of the opposite situation of the other pagan movement of the last few decades, the Wiccan and Wiccan-like movement. Those pagans were merely very low-status weirdos looking to create a community where they could be as weird as they wanted to be and still find acceptance, of sorts, in a group of like-minded people. They basically rejected normal, healthy, functional society because they wanted to continue being weird, unhealthy and dysfunctional. The neo-pagans who are into Viking paganism or whatever, on the other hand, aren't necessarily high status, but they're more normal people who are rejecting the weird, unhealthy and dysfunctional modern society, which has changed a lot since the 80s or 90s, but they're throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm kind of sympathetic to them, but at the same time, I don't think creating a religious identity from scratch and a few references from Beowulf and stuff appropriated from Saxo Grammaticus or Snorri Sturluson is really the answer.

I'm back

My vacation was really three trips in one: first, a trip to the farthest west point that I went to visit my son and his family for my grand-daughter's first birthday. Secondly, my wife and I took our daughter in law and our grandkids to a family reunion at Bear Lake, a famous vacation spot that neither of us had ever been to before. We did a lot of things in and around Bear Lake, like a visit to Bloomington Lake, for example. Then, my wife took the kids back and flew home for work, while I stayed out west for a backpacking trip in the Bighorn Mountains. Everyone seems to have gotten sick at Bear Lake, and I didn't realize it because I was out of touch, but I've been feeling kind of beat-up myself. I attributed it to the hiking and being out of shape, which are both things that are real, but I had strange tiredness, stiffness, soreness and achiness that didn't seem to be related to that, and which lingered several days after I stopped hiking. I suspect that I got just a touch of whatever everyone else was getting too, but the only symptoms I really had were the random achiness and tiredness. Don't know what people had. Flu, I guess. Some people tested positive for COVID, but some negative. Whatever. Covid is a coronavirus, and coronaviruses have been a leading cause of the flu for decades. There's really no difference between Covid and the flu. It's just a strain of the flu.

Had an interesting discussion during the second part of that trip. I made a kind of off-the-cuff comment that I doubt I'll ever vote again, since my vote was countermanded specifically in my county, although this happened in many counties in the 2020 Presidential election, by hoards of fraudulent votes. I thought this was pretty self-evident, given that the evidence for electoral fraud is overwhelming, and loads of people have actually been arrested for involvement in several counties, in Georgia, Texas, Nevada and elsewhere. Turns out it is not so self-evident if, of course, you refuse to be aware of the evidence. My sister-in-law, in fact, said that there was no proof. When I asked her if she wanted me to send her the proof for her to look at (I'd start with 2000 Mules and then you could spend hundreds of man-hours reviewing the stuff at this bibliography) she said no, she didn't want to see it. At that point, I realized that there wasn't much point in talking to her. She is uninformed of the evidence, and actively refused to even look at it when offered. If you're that obtuse, then frankly, you shouldn't be having opinions about political/social/cultural issues. They think that I'm extreme. Which isn't an argument about my position at all, its an attempt to shame me into having a more "socially acceptable" opinion by giving my opinion and out-grouped label. But they're actually also wrong; it's the mainstream opinion. And even that's likely understated. Rasmussen is better at most at eliminating sampling bias, so they don't oversample Democrats and then make conclusions based on that, but that's only one of three sampling bias problems that tend to understate conservative opinions. One other is something similar to the Bradley Effect, while another is the fact that conservatives are more likely to distrust that the data that they give to the survey will be treated with integrity, so they either refuse to answer surveys or don't answer them honestly. 52% is a very conservative (no pun intended) lower limit, and the real number is certainly higher, but how much higher is impossible to ascertain. My own handwavy attempt to guesstimate it, which would be closer to 60%. And if the media weren't non-stop lying about it, it would be at least 70%.

But I shouldn't be surprised. While they're not exactly SJWs, there are, as Aristotle said over 2,300 years ago, some people who are only convinced of anything by emotional manipulation and are unable to receive instruction from facts and logic. I also made an off-hand reference in another conversation about the problems with the education industry in America, and this same sister-in-law attempted to shut me down by pointing out that she works at a school. And that her oldest son and probable future daughter-in-law will do so as well. So? What does that have to do with anything? My wife used to too, until she quit because the environment was so toxic, and she found a better way to spend her time. Her husband, who thinks I'm an extremist because I like to make decisions based on confirmable data, said at one point that he doesn't know if anything at all in the Old Testament actually happened. That's an extreme interpretation of the "as far as it is translated correctly" clause. Projection, through and through.

But I don't intend to let this blog turn into a socio-political blog. I'm looking for more topics to explore. I've actually gotten interested again in D&D and FRPGs, especially after reading the last 65% or so of The Night of Long Shadows, which is probably the best Eberron novel I've read so far, and really good relative to any game fiction I've read for any game or setting. But much of that may be either on my Youtube channel or my Dark Fantasy X blog, where I've (in theory) migrated my RPG discussions.

I'm actually thinking of going through some of those "thirty day" exercises for worldbuilding that I've seen. Yeah, yeah... most people who did them did them when they were current a year and a half ago. But I do stuff that seems interesting to me when I encounter it, even if it's old news. But I'll probably do that as a YouTube series.