Before I post the art, let's ramble just a bit. First, some political/social news. People are making a big deal about a couple of Supreme Court decisions that came down yesterday. I think the Z-man has the best take on them:
[T]his case is a good reminder that words on paper will never constrain a ruling class. The letter of the law means nothing to people who have no respect for the spirit of the law. Right now, our ruling class has no respect for the rules that are supposed to govern Western societies. No amount of ink spilling will cause them to change their minds about it.
Another thing worth mentioning that I did not cover in the show is the implied cowardice in these cases. When the Left had the whip hand on the court, they rammed through as much as they could as fast as they could. When the Right has control of the courts it is nothing but baby steps and concessions to the Left. This recent case was a chance to roll back a lot of horrible ideas, but they cucked.
This removes the last argument for voting Republican. We know that when they have control of Congress they will fink on their voters. When they have control of the White House, they will appoint people like John Roberts to the bench. Even with a stacked court the people who vote Republican cannot expect to get anything for their support, so what is the point of voting for a Republican?
Vox Day had a briefer take on it as well. Again; I'm quoting them rather than putting it into my own words, because why not? I agree with both takes and did already before I read them. Even though they appear on the surface to disagree, I don't think that they really do, and both can be equally true.
Conservatives will celebrate this as a great legal victory, and perhaps it is. But the reality is that the damage has already been done, as university educations and the lifelong debt they entail are best avoided by everyone of any color.
However, if the ruling can be successfully applied to an employment context, that could be significant indeed.
Totally switching gears; my reading. I've read 22 books so far this year. My minimum goal was 12 books, which was kind of weak. I had a "real" goal of 20, which I've now passed, and a stretch goal of 30. I had a "crazy stretch" of 40, but at the rate I'm going, that might actually be possible.
I'm reading more than one book at a time. I tend to read, depending on my mood, 1) a physical book (I'm halfway through my new copy of The Two Towers right now, 2) a Kindle ebook (usually on my Kindle app on my phone, so I can read it wherever I am without having my Kindle device). I just finished Keith Baker's Son of Khyber, the second of the Thorn of Breland Eberron trilogy. 3) a gamebook of some kind. I picked up Drow of the Underdark, which I hadn't read since I first bought it back in the late 3e period, and 4) a pdf gamebook. In this case, I'm actually reading two; Death on the Reik right now, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay "director's cut" book by Cubicle 7. I'm also reading The Age of Worms. This one slipped in because I was going back and forth between physical copies of the Dungeon Magazine issues which I had physical copies of (about half of the run on this Adventure Path) and pdfs of the magazine.
So, I'm 75% done with the Age of Worms, at which point I'll pick up Savage Tide. I'm going to read all of the Adventure Paths, until I run out of ones that I have. This will probably take me several years, because I do it slowly, and there were a lot that came out from Paizo for Pathfinder (and Starfinder.) If I finish Savage Tide this year, I'll be happy with my progress there. I'd also really like to finish all of the Enemy Within plus companions this year, but I suspect that I may not.
And finally, I need to pick up a new ebook since I just finished one late last night. I don't know what I'm going to pick up there yet. It might be a non-fantasy book. I'm considering Levon's Trade by Chuck Dixon, which is a kind of Jack Reacher or Mack Bolan-like vigilante fiction thriller.
Final rambly thought; my wife liked The Flash and in what was perhaps a lapse of judgement, I allowed her to talk me into going back with her to see it after she watched it first without me. I didn't really like it. It wasn't actually terrible, but it was forgettable and kind of insulting. Michael Keaton was certainly the best part of the movie. What did I not like? Ezra Miller. Even assuming that you can divorce his performance from his real life persona (which I cannot completely do), he's just an irritating, obnoxious character. Barry Allen—and keep in mind that I was always more of a Marvel guy than a DC guy, but I've seen a bit here and there of DC as it was when it was good decades ago—is a tall, lean blond guy from a fictional Midwestern city (first vaguely in Ohio, later Missouri) who's a forensic scientist, often a bit of an alpha jokester, and is, in the words of Batman, "[T]he kind of man I wouldn've hoped to become if my parents hadn't been murdered." Like all superheroes of the Golden and Silver Ages, he has an iconic love interest, Iris West, a cute little redhead. Flash isn't awkward and stupid around her, they're already a serious item, if not actually engaged, and they do end up getting married in the comics canon.
Barry Allen in the movies is a super beta Jewish kid afflicted with logorrhea and terminal awkwardness, who's mother, we now find, is Hispanic and who's father is the guy from Office Space. Apparently, the movie division didn't "get the memo" because this character is not only unlikeable, but he's unrecognizable. There is an Iris West, a chubby Halfrican who also bears no resemblance whatsoever to Iris West, but is it least friendly and a bit more likeable than the other Halfrican who played her in the CW soap opera Flash show.
The plot isn't really very bright. A lot of folks have talked about the multiverse angle being overdone by now, but the reality is that the multiverse as a deus ex machina device feels very lazy, and isn't used cleverly. If it were, I don't think that there'd be a problem with it.
As many have said, the CGI is really had. It almost looks as bad as the cow in Twister from... what, 1996 or so? When did that movie come out? The attempts at a lighthearted Marvel vibe boil down to Barry doing or saying something stupid, and we're supposed to think that it's funny.
Anyway, it's not a terrible movie, but it isn't a good one either, and as an adaptation of the Flash character, it's particularly egregious, as DEI casting decisions and super beta writers who can't imagine what a normal person acts like completely ruin its ability to emulate anything recognizable. But, as an alternate version of a speedster character who also happens to have an old Batman (Michael Keaton in Dark Knight Returns; how awesome would that be?) and a Hispanic dykish Supergirl, it's still only... OK.
There are a lot of rationales being tossed around by entertainment self-proclaimed pundits for its failure. I think all of them have some merit. I have no doubt that Ezra Miller's own behavior is a factor. As is general superhero fatigue. As is James Gunn's rebooting of the DC franchise and getting rid of Henry Cavill only to cast a discount Henry Cavill who literally looks almost just like him except a bit younger. I think by far the biggest factor is just that the Flash character as he's been written and portrayed thus far just isn't a very likeable character, and nobody really wanted to see a movie that not only focused almost solely on him, but literally had two of him on screen for most of the movie.
About superhero fatigue, I think it's a mistake to call superhero fatigue a problem that audiences have. In reality, it's a problem creators have. When they get to the point that the creators are fatigued with a genre, and just churn them out formulaicly without any love for a paycheck, or try to subvert them or do something different with them because they fundamentally don't really want to make a superhero movie, that's when you've got superhero fatigue. The same thing happened with the Western in the late 60s and early 70s. I don't think the audience tired of them. The studios and creatives tired of them, and stopped making them in such a way that audiences would like them. And then, of course, audiences were blamed for moving on and abandoning the genre rather than the creatives, who were by that time making anti-Westerns that turned the tropes of the Western completely on its head, but wore the superficial trappings like a skinsuit. The same thing has happened to superhero movies. Sure, audiences don't like what's being made. But that's because the creatives have turned the superhero movie upside down and are wearing its superficial trappings like a skinsuit. Audiences aren't that stupid. They know when a superhero movie isn't really a superhero movie anymore.
Anyway, enough of all that. Here's the art attack.
Some Wayne Reynolds. The last one is Eberron, but the first two are 4e pieces. I haven't seen nearly as much of his work as I used to. I think either his star is fading and he's not being picked up as the iconic face of the brand art, like he used to be for Wizards, Paizo and Green Ronin (among others) or he's just moved on to doing different stuff.
A couple of AI generated girls; Snow White and the Tomb Raider, respectively. Given that both are about to get live action remakes, or so we hear, that I won't want to see (the first starring a race-swapped Hispanic Snow White and the latter starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who may actually be more unlikeable than Brie Larsen even—and certainly less attractive) I thought these images of what they should look like will stand as a testimony against whatever we actually get.
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