A few updates

Three updates on unrelated subjects. I've made a goal to read books again, since I feel like I had spent a lot of my time frittering away free time online. I did pretty good in January, but February was slower due to real world concerns turning my free time into "constrained 'free' time" where I had committed much of it to other things, not to mention stress due to work, and having picked up a book that although I've read before a long time ago, I found less compelling than I'd hoped, so I slowed way down. I did, however, just recently finish Thomas M. Reid's The Temple of Elemental Evil novel, which I found as a mobi somewhere years ago and just got around to reading just now. It's not very cheap on the used market, and it's been out of print for a long time, but I don't recommend going to the trouble, frankly. It was kind of interesting in the sense that it played out just like a D&D adventure, but that made it play our relatively poorly as a novel, and the attempts to create charismatic characters out of the D&D characters was pretty flat except maybe in one or two of them at best. That makes my sixth book so far this year, and if I keep up that rate; three a month, that will get me to 36 books this year. My low bar goal was 12, so I'm halfway there, but my real goal was 20 and my stretch was 30. I did have hopes to surpass even that, though. Four of the six are not novels, though—they're game books. And the two novels are both D&D tie-in fiction. I'm ready to break out into better material.

So I need to power through my new copy of Ivanhoe, which is a great book, but isn't written to be a gripping page-turner, I have to admit, and pick something else off my Kindle to read in tandem. And I need to get back into my read-through of Age of Worms, which has also stalled after reading the third adventure. After I finish reading my new copy of Ivanhoe, which is admittedly a pretty cool copy, then I'll watch my new copy on blu-ray of the Robert Taylor and Elizabeth Taylor version of the movie too. It's a bit less faithful to the book in some ways, but not to its detriment; it actually improves the pacing, if nothing else. Plus, young Elizabeth Taylor from the early 50s; I mean, you just can't go wrong. Wowza. I'm not sure what I'll read next in the Kindle and physical space, but I'm going to make sure that both of what's on deck has nothing to do with gaming. 

I've also made most of the updates I talked about in my past post to the Dark Fantasy X document. I'm going to let it "rest" for a day or two, before doing a final review and making sure that nothing was missed that needs to be edited out (I actually found that I'd left hit points instead of health in a number of places when I went back to reverse that change. I might review it, let it sit again for a couple of days, and then review it again. I always find another couple of errors when I do that that I'd missed in my first pass.) I'm also still a bit unsure about a few of the changes I made to the classes, specifically the Expert class, where I made some updates, but I'm not 100% sold on them being the best deal I could have thought of. More time to let it marinate and then hopefully I'll either feel better about the changes, or think of some slight tweaks that improve it even more. The image above is an alternate cover image I whipped up in Midjourney for the game, and I thought I'd add it just to make the post feel less like a big ole wall of text.

Thirdly, the internet is abuzz with news of Ant-man 3 and its performance. By the internet, I mean the youtube pop culture criticism channels which kind of bag on wokeness as a marketing ploy, while they read articles that anyone else could find, and annotate them with a lot of smarmy "I told you so, go woke go broke, etc." guys, like Geeks & Gamers, Ryan Kinnel, Nerdrotic, Overlord DVD, HeelsvsBabyFace, Yellowflash2, Critical Drinker, and even more liberal folks like Clownfish TV, and more. While I tend to agree with a lot of what these guys say, and much of what they say is just regurgitated journalism from someone else anyway, I find their schticks kind of annoying after a while. Even if they're right, do we need to constantly beat the drum on that? I'm pretty much ready to just not think anymore about Star Wars, Marvel, Disney, or Netflix, etc. The point and yell routine of the pessimists just brings more attention to these products. While I don't agree that all press is good press, or at least bad press usually isn't good enough press, I think at this point, I'm more than willing to just let this stuff go and not keep complaining about it. It's already been happening nonstop for years. There's nothing new to say that hasn't been said over and over again already. Plus, making sure that you release new videos three or four times a day, when all you're doing is stretching a story that I could find myself in the trades, or on Breitbart, or Bounding Into Comics, or somewhere, is kind of a waste of my time. If I really want that news, it'd be faster to just go read it myself. I do still watch at least some of their videos, especially analysis of box office and sales and ratings, because that's where I think it's the most interesting, and that's where the Ant-man story has something interesting to say.

Like I said in my own off-hand review, the movie isn't really that bad (some of the YouTube rage heads will tell you it's terrible. It's not. It's just mediocre, forgettable, formulaic, and rather poorly structured.) But regardless of the movie's quality or lack thereof, it's clear that it's not performing financially as well as Marvel must have hoped. The trade media is sometimes trying to spin the sales, but when you compare them to other movies, even other Ant-man movies, its performance isn't good. Given that this was supposed to be the grand launch of Phase V, that must be a bit worrying to Disney and Marvel. Sure, the thumbs on the Youtube videos are all "PANIC" and "DISASTER" and worried face Paul Rudd, Kevin Feige or Bob Iger with photoshopped tears running down their cheeks. It may not be that dramatic, because the copium amongst wokesters who are deeply embedded in their cult is pretty hard. But I'm sure that failing to hit financial targets or expectations for this movie can't be good. 

On top of that, it keeps piling on. The new Patel Pan and Blackerbell with the Lost They/Them girl/boys, and the Little Black Mermaid are not endearing Disney as a corporation to audiences, even mainstream "normies", and I'm sure that this avalanche of wokeness is paying negative dividends on the Ant-man box office as well. People are sick and tired of hearing how much Disney hates them and wants to see them replaced with resentful, covetous, entitled brown people in their own white homeland of America. Ironically, black retellings of white stories aren't necessarily bad. I still remember The Wiz, the blacksploitation musical retelling of The Wizard of Oz on Broadway and later the cult classic movie. But The Wiz wasn't dishonest about what it was. It was, "hey, what if we made a soul-remake of The Wizard of Oz?", not "Hey, what if we overtly discriminate against white people in our casting as a passive agressive insult to white people everywhere and pretend that that's normal and that white people are racist if they don't like it?"

As the recession deepens, we'll see how well the entertainment industry is able to weather their decision to spit on the largest segment of their target audience. We'll also see how well the Great Replacement will continue as the economy sours, since everyone honest knows that the overwhelmingly most common reason these Third Worlders are in America (and Europe) in the first place is because they've been told that they're just giving away free money to brown people if they show up in white countries. Both of these trends are unsustainable, but exactly how and when they will break, and what the final result will be when the shaking stops is harder to predict.