New Conan animated series

https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/tv-shows/conan-the-barbarian-animated-series-genndy-tartakovsky/

Pretty terrible article and a dubious premise to begin with. Robert E. Howard wasn't a novelist, and he's credited with creating sword & sorcery not sword & sandal, which is a completely different genre. And the idea that Conan "found love" with Bêlit sounds pretty silly and out of character to me. I think a lot of low status men are anxious to "promote" her to his equal for the same reason that they love Jirel of Jorey or other girlboss female characters... even though Howard never wrote her as such. I'm more and more irritated by the trend to try and make strong women characters by low status men who get turned on by them. Why can't women just be feminine? And why can't men just be happy with that? I mean, I realize why; it's because too many creatives are low status, but man is it irritating. Howard may have been low status in his way; he seems to have been obsessed with his mother, and never had too serious a relationship with any woman (although he did, maybe, have a girlfriend for a little while) but at least he understand masculinity and femininity. It must be a generational thing.

Not that Conan hasn't already been pretty poorly treated in anything other than the original stories anyway. Starting with the oft-times questionable "revisions" updates and edits of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, the vast corpus of novels in the 80s, even the movies... even the popular one with Arnold... other than some of the comics over the years, I haven't been very impressed with Conan pastiche. Luckily, I've had the complete collection in three trade paperbacks by Del Rey for many years. In fact, I've got them "out" of their box and readily available. I might even re-read them again soon.

Thursday night gaming

Well, I'm running this substitute Thursday Night one-shot this week. I've decided to adapt 1) the first "scene" of "Burnt Offerings" from the first Paizo adventure path, except converting the "swallowtail festival" to a Christmas festival, and Sandpoint to Snowpoint or something. The goblins will be furry little gremlins or frostlings or something like that. They will be leaving plague around too; so after the frostling attack, I will migrate to an adaption of "Hollow's Last Hope" except the "worg" lair will be Krampus instead, Santa's rival. Some of the players have expressed a keen interest in some Christmas theming. One player wants to adapt a gnome to be one of Santa's elves, and another player wants to use a warlock with cold-themed spells to be Jack Frost. 

I've kinda shrugged and said sure to everything here. This is just a one-shot. I don't care that much. I want it to be fun, in fact, I want it to be fun enough that there's some interest in me possibly running a "real" campaign at some point in the future. But in that case, I will not go with the anything goes stuff. What I can tolerate in a one-shot and what I can run in a campaign are two very different things. For a campaign, I want to set the tone and have limits on stuff in the setting. There are a bunch of really goofy ideas in 5e and even more in 5.5e that I wouldn't want people playing, because they're dumb—or at least, they wouldn't fit the tone of any campaign that I'd be willing to run.

Anyway, this is just a quick short update. I'll probably not post another one until after I run it. Then I'd like to post one more time over the weekend before heading out of town for the holidays, during which I don't intend to post anything at all, because I'll be too busy and don't want to try and post from my phone because that'd be terrible. 

I did, however, finish the actual adventure of "Seven Days to the Grave." I haven't finished the whole book, although I likely will tonight, but I did finish the adventure, which is of course by far the biggest chunk of the book. And I started packing up a few physical books to take with me this weekend when I leave. I'd like to finish the novel I'm reading before I go, though, and take another one instead. 

I also binge-watched Wednesday, which has two seasons as of right now. What a surprise and delight show that ended up being! I didn't really expect to like it, but in fact, I very much did after all. Too bad season two just dropped a few months ago; it'll be at least another year or two before season 3 will be available, I'm sure. I think I needed a break from reading. I don't want to slip back into frittering away all my time on line, but I needed a break after all the crap going on at work, and this ended up working out perfectly.

UPDATE: I got some intel on the characters that I'm expecting. Blegh. But it's just a one-shot. Whatever.

• Holly, the Christmas elf bard (stand-in race: gnome)
• Dragonheart a "mark of warding" dwarf fighter, whatever a mark of warding dwarf is, exactly. (ed. looks like it's an Eberron specific thing, which makes sense. I don't know why someone is using Eberron rules for this, but again, I specifically said I don't care, so I have to not care now.) The name is going to make me think of that cheesy Dennis Quaid movie from the 90s with the dragon who's soundtrack was used for a bazillion trailers in the later 90s and 00s.
• Brock Timbers, a forest gnome ranger.
• Reiner, a goliath wizard who bilked a circus and embezzled their funds when he ran away.
• Saul Adal, a wood elf monk who... actually comes from a Buddhist temple?!
• Frispira, a copper dragonborn druid
• ...and name TBD, a warlock who's built to be an ersatz Jack Frost with a lot of ice and cold powers. Of course, since the game will be set up north... that's not necessarily the most effective. Everything is adapted to the cold. (Update: Name is Pukkasakka, apparently "the Finnish Jack Frost" or something.)

I don't even know who all of these players are. Two are from my regular gaming group, another is someone that I know reasonably well but don't game with, and a fourth is someone that I know a little bit but not well, and I also don't game with. Two of them I've never met, and the last is... I'm not sure who it is, actually. Might be a third guy from my current gaming group that I don't know very well. I think, actually, that it is. But it might be another person that I've met briefly once but don't really know. Or maybe it's someone else entirely. The name "John" is all I've got, and because John is such a common name that I don't know if it's the John that I think it is. If it is, then he's a guy that I currently game with, but he's kind of a cypher, and I don't feel like I know him very well. I'm not even 100% sure that his name is John, lol.

Personally, I think a tongue-in-cheek Santa themed adventure is kind of silly. But like I said, for a one-shot? I'll give anything a try. If I don't like it, well, it's not like I'm coming back to it. If I get talked into running a mini-campaign after this, I've been specifically and discretely told that there's probably two people (and I think I know who they are) that I'd do better not to invite. And I'd also start with nothing beyond the PHB in terms of races or classes. And a few other things here and there, but let's cross that bridge when—or if—I come to it.

The problem, of course, is that I don't really like 5e very much. I greatly dislike the idea (which was also true for 3e and 4e especially) that combat is like a separate tactical boardgame that you have to stop your RPG to play, and I greatly dislike that the implied setting, as delineated by the rules, is about half The Avengers and half The Muppets. What I really want is an immersive singular experience that is like reading a book in a setting that's more like a somewhat more grounded and grittier Lord of the Rings or pulp fantasy story, of course. That doesn't seem like an odd ask. But more and more, D&D specifically has drifted away from it. It never was super good at that, but at least it started out on the same page as that's what it was trying to do, I think. Now, it's just somewhere else altogether.

Wednesday

I'm not much of a binger, but I binged the first season of Wednesday on Netflix the last two evenings. Today and tomorrow I'll no doubt binge season 2. I think I needed the relatively mindless activity of binging TV after all the BS going on at work lately, and Wednesday was (mostly) up my alley. Sure, sure, the first season was made a few years ago now and woke hadn't completely gone out of style, so there's a handful of moments in it that are cringe because they're almost woke... but all in all, this is surprisingly free of too much of that, other than a little gag comparing Enid's discussions with her family about not "wolfing out" as being akin to being gay or something, including with a summer camp for "conversion therapy" for kids who don't completely turn into werewolves yet. If that was really more than a gag, though, they screwed up the punchline by having her fully wolf out in the season finale finally, as a little bit of character arc denouement, and she's happy that she did. But like I said, that wasn't a metaphor, it was just a joke, obviously. Otherwise, it would literally be anti-woke, since being straight and normal (for a werewolf) was the desired state. And Wednesday's quoting once or twice of some feminist claptrap came across as cynical even in her own eyes when she said it. 

There's also an ongoing theme of putting down the Pilgrims as super bigoted or something, but I don't necessarily completely disagree with that, as a descendent of backwoods Dukes of Hazzard-style Southerners. Or at least I identify with the southerners on my dad's side. My mom's side were from the north, but they weren't Pilgrims, just regular guys. But even their identity is more as pioneers and later farmer/cowboys that moved out west much later but still long ago. Echoes of Tim Burton's earlier work on Sleepy Hollow with that particular theme, added to Harry Potter with this show. It works because the plots are sufficiently engaging and the characters and their actors have plenty of charisma and chemistry together. It's not brilliant, but it's pretty entertaining, and vegging out in front of the TV is about all I'm up for. 

I included a screenshot (from Wikipedia) of a children's book of nursery rhymes from the 1880s which is supposedly the source of Wednesday's name. Although apparently, the characters didn't really have names for decades when this was a comic strip in The New Yorker in the 30s, 40s and 50s, and they had to come up with names for the TV show of the 60s. I was born on a Saturday. Just my luck. 

In some potentially possibly interesting family drama, my wife wanted me to watch Stranger Things instead, which she is apparently watching. I don't really love that show, but I was happy to watch it with her. But I have no interest in watching by myself. She also admitted that she had committed to one of my sons that we'd go see the finale in theatres coming up here at Christmas. I told her that I was perfectly fine going to see it in theatres, but there was no way I was going to do the better part of 10 hours of homework to get all caught up so that I could watch it; I'd spend half an hour tops reading summaries on Wikipedia. She really had in her mind this idea that we'd independently watch the show and then see the finale together, and I really had in my mind the idea that once she came back home after Christmas and left the kids on their own again, that we'd watch it together. I simply don't care enough about the show to watch it if I'm not watching it with her. That's the only reason I'd care to watch it, is for it to be something that we did together. Stranger Things was pretty clever in season 1, when it was The X-Files meets HP Lovecraft meets The Goonies. It was fresh, and nobody else was doing anything quite like it, etc. But most of the rest of the show afterwards was absolute garbage; poorly planned, wasting of likeable characters, focus on unlikeable characters (creepy Jonathan and bratty princess Nancy, instead of Steve, etc.) and with incoherent plots. Buzz on the latest season isn't great. They kind of redeemed themselves in the 4th season, except that 11 herself got really bratty and unlikeable and the whole Will gay angle was stupid and irritating beyond belief. I think Netflix, or the show, or someone flinched at the last second on that gay angle too, because it was all transparently built up and then kind of quietly not concluded. I dunno. The show isn't terrible, but definitely not good enough that I had any interest in watching it by myself. If she doesn't want to rewatch it with me when she's home, I probably won't watch it at all. I'm actually a little bit frustrated with how it all went down, because I had my own plan of watching this together. But in the end, I guess I don't care that much. If I never watch season five, I won't care.

UPDATE: Also, just saw this. Guns of Mars. Chuck Dixon is great. I love his Levon Cade novels. I doubt that this is very much like Edgar Rice Burroughs, though. It sounds like a classic western focused on survival and psychological drama of being hunted. ERB never wrote anything like that, and Mars wasn't harsh for its environment, which was generally pretty clement, but for its inhabitants. Which is fine. Dixon is a self-professed huge fan of Westerns, so why not? But it feels much more like the Mars of the 50s, not the Mars of ERB's 1911 story. Which is still pretty cool, but has some different themes and is somewhat different.

In some ways, I actually like those better. Just based on the description, I have to admit it reminded more of an Erik John Stark story than something from ERB's Barsoom, though. Which reminds me; although I only re-read it a year or two ago, I wouldn't mind doing it again, if I can find the box that that book is sitting in. I think I saw it a couple of months ago, so hopefully it won't be too hard to find.

Journalists can't do math

https://thatparkplace.com/amazon-cant-cancel-rings-of-power-without-hefty-financial-kill-fee-to-tolkien-estate/

I really wanted to say women can't do math, but the image and name and biography of the writer says he's a seasoned journalist. But it's ridiculous to suggest, as he does, that Amazon can't cancel without it costing more than it's worth.

According to The Ankler, the first season alone cost north of $465 million, not even counting the $250 million Amazon paid for the global rights to Tolkien’s works or the hundreds of millions spent on marketing. By the time viewers at home were tallying their impressions, Amazon had spent well over three quarters of a billion dollars just to get the show on the air. 

And then this, of course:

The cruel truth is that Amazon may not be able to cancel Rings of Power even if it wants to. The Tolkien estate’s kill fee ensures every unfinished season costs the company another $20 million just to walk away. With season three already in production and five seasons originally committed, the company is boxed in.

So, the first season cost $465 million, but they have no choice but to spend that four more times or it will cost them.... $60 million! Granted, I'm sure that they're spending less on season 2, and can again on seasons 3-5, but there's no way that it's less than $20 million each. So no... it's clearly cheaper for them to just cancel it: pay the "kill fee" and stop hemorrhaging money.

Anyway, the joke I kind of wanted to make, but couldn't. Oh, well.

New X-files

https://www.cbr.com/x-files-creator-looking-forward-reboot/

Coogler has actually done a decent job with breathing new life into the Rocky franchise via the Creed movies, so there's that. Disney/Fox have been teasing how this will be woke, though, and Coogler is so incredibly pro-black (he's also the director of the Black Panther movies in addition to the Creed movies) that it's hard to see how this isn't Moldy and Scolder haranguing the audience in typical woke fashion. I know that the first Black Panther movie was financially very successful, but I haven't heard anyone other than some black young men who really thought it was all that memorable or was a cultural touchstone; rather it was kind of a perfect storm of a specific kind of demand at exactly the right time to peak. Once it was over, the reaction from most that I've seen was—the movie was actually kind of mediocre and forgettable, and the blackness of it was in the long-run a turnoff, because it wasn't really made to be universal, but to be a black story.

The second Black Panther, of course, was much less successful and was received even more poorly. It wasn't exactly a flop, but it was a financial disappointment vs expectations and hopes, I believe, and I also believe that it killed any interest in another iteration of the franchise. It proved that the Black Panther franchise had nowhere to go, in my opinion. 

Anyway, I was a fan of the X-files in the 90s. The last two revival seasons were pretty pointless, and it's also clear that Chris Carter never had a plan to end the show; he thought he'd just keep going with it forever. But when we thought that maybe it would actually end on a reasonable time and in a satisfying manner; up to and maybe a bit beyond the theatrical movie that came after the 5th season or so, the X-files was amazing, innovative, and fascinating. 

It is, however, a great example of a TV show that's a victim of its own success. Because it was so successful, rather than wrap it up, the producers and the network and even the creator got the idea that they could just keep treading water and making money indefinitely. Carter even specifically thought that he had many more seasons left to go, when the series was already getting tired, the main actors were getting done with the series, and he seemed unwilling to understand that the chemistry and relationship between Scully and Moulder were among the couple of keys to the show's success. Not that the new replacement characters were bad, but people just didn't care about them as much and they didn't grab the audience's attention the same was as Duchovny and Anderson did. 

I've seen both Duchovny and Anderson in various interviews and talk shows, etc. Duchovny actually seems like a reasonably sharp guy for an actor, who got more and more involved in the show as not just its star, but someone really invested in it behind the scenes over time. Kind of the like the Alan Wilder of the X-files, if you will, to make a Depeche Mode reference. Anderson, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as too bright, and most of her interview "performances" make her come across as a bubble-headed bimbo. Kind of the opposite of the character that she most famously played, I suppose.

Not that that's super shocking. The myth of the absolute brilliant STEM woman is largely a myth. They do exist here and there, but in such statistically low numbers as to not really be something worth expecting ever. Most of the so-called "STEM" women I've ever met didn't actually do much science or engineering, or whatever, but gravitated to "soft" elements within a science or engineering organization, related to OB or social stuff or whatever. And the more strident a woman is about trumpeting her STEM credentials, the less likely I am to believe that they really mean much. 

Anyway, all this to say that my expectations for a rebooted X-files show by a pro-black icon (albeit one that's had some success in rebooting franchises to be all black but still being pretty good; I really like the first Creed movie, for instance) and handled by Disney are pretty low. I couldn't get behind the attempts to revive the series with the original cast. I also think the climate is different. What people in Hollywood think are conspiracies among the plebs to be made fun of are actually spoiler alerts, while they have their own bizarre conspiracy theories of their own that they believe whole-heartedly. Nobody trusts the government anymore, but for the exact opposite reasons that liberals don't trust the government, and unless they're talking about government conspiracies to displace, jail or persecute normal Americans and Christians, instead of hiding aliens, it's going to feel like a bizarre artifact of the past rather than a timely social show, like the original X-files was.

No more pop culture for me

For many years, I've kept a toe in the water by being subscribed to a number of pop culture commentators on Youtube. Geeks & Gamers, Ryan Kinel, Overlord DVD, Nerdrotic, Critical Drinker, and a few others. For months now, I only kind of skim over what they're posting. I made the hard decision today to let it all go and unsubscribe from all of them. I simply don't care anymore about pop culture. I don't care to see more details of "go woke go broke" and the commentators who have little more to say than that. (And if they're repetitive and offer little, you should see what the comments say.) The reason that I hung on to them for so long was because I still had a complicated break-up going on with pop culture, I think. I'd said before that my relationship to Star Wars, Marvel, Disney and more had all turned to apathy, and while that's largely true, I was still resentful of them for what they'd done, so there was a thin thread of non-apathetic emotional ties to the industry. I still loved some of the older content, and I still held on to some kind of hope that it would be restored. Or maybe I didn't hope that anymore, and I just was angry enough to enjoy watching it burn. 

But as I've had a harder and harder time over the last several months engaging with this type of Youtube content, I've had to accept that I really truly have reached peak apathy. I don't ever care to watch it burn. I'm content knowing that it did, and then not thinking about them anymore.

My connection to Star Wars is maintained because I own all of the older movies that I'd care to watch again, although to be fair, I don't do that nearly as frequently as I used to. It's been years since I watched any of them, especially the prequel trilogy. I never even got around to watching the "new" season of the Clone Wars, and I don't care about anything else happening in Star Wars, with the exception of The Old Republic, which I'm still coming back to from time to time, including (obviously) now.

My relationship with Marvel is a bit different; I spent a few years as a buyer of comic books, but that honestly was in the late 80s. The Chris Claremont and Marc Silvestri X-Men, for instance, and a few other books from that same era (New Mutants, X-Factor, Avengers, Thor and Iron Man. The last three, especially the last two, weren't really super popular at the time, so that was an outlier for me with the market overall.) Previous to that, I'd really liked a lot of superhero cartoons, especially Spider-man and Hulk themed ones, when I was a younger kid. So, I'd always been a Marvel superhero fan (and I watched Batman and Superfriends too, but I was mostly a Marvel guy), but I was a fringe fan, not a hardcore fan who was really into the collecting, or even reading the comics, honestly. I also bought a few trade paperback collections of some more recent stuff, like the Ultimate Spider-man for a while, but I'm still the kind of guy who was never super into it. I enjoyed the brief high profile mainstream popularity of Marvel characters in the movies, and was especially gratified to see Thor and Iron Man come into their own, since I'd liked them way back in the later 80s, but letting go of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is pretty easy, because I only have a somewhat tenuous connection to the older content anyway, really.

For Disney, my relationship is even more complicated. I grew up trusting Disney as a family entertainment company, like everyone of my generation, but I've also been aware of their subversive nature for a long time. But I wasn't ever a huge fan of anything Disney. My wife is a huge fan of Disney, and I let her drag me many times to the parks, to the movies, etc. I think she's disappointed that I've deferred from Disney, but honestly, I wasn't ever that much of a fan anyway; I mostly did it for her.

There's little else going on in Hollywood that I care about. Our pop culture has become completely moribund. And honestly, the corporatization of that is as much a problem there as the wokeness. Pop culture hasn't had a chance in many years. Brian Neimeier, who I don't really read anymore, but who is a good commenter on pop culture stuff, describes how almost all of pop culture went bad in 1997. Long before wokeness was a term (although proto-wokeness was certainly still a thing with many of the same ideals, just not yet metastasized into full on craziness.) It's a good read, and even then it's several years old.  https://brianniemeier.com/2018/01/ground-zero/

I admit that it feels a little strange to be disconnected from almost all pop culture except for old stuff and some occasional indie stuff, but honestly, I already was. I was just holding on to something because of memories of a good time, like an ex girlfriend that you can't quite let go of.

But not long ago, as I mentioned, I watched The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Haviland. My oldest son and his wife watched it with me. That's still a great movie that still entertains, and it's over 80 years old (released 1938.) This weekend we'll be watching Rebecca from 1940 with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine (which was her step-father's last name; she's actually Joan de Haviland and was Olivia's little sister.) Although I suggested it, it's really "presented" by my wife and daughter. On my reading list recently was some equally aged planetary romance from Otis Adelbert Kline, and some cheeky noir/fantasy by Simon R. Green from the very earliest 90s (Hawk & Fisher)

I find that reading old stuff from the age of my teenage years or older is still fun. They were fun in the 80s, and even in the 80s I liked old movies, because my dad played them a lot for us. Errol Flynn swashbucklers like Robin Hood and Captain Blood have always been among my favorite movies. Sometimes things don't get better with age, but sometimes timeless stuff is still timeless, and progress isn't a given. Pop culture hasn't had progress since the 80s-90s. It had a major drop-off following the hippy revolution, climbed back up to another peak in the 80s and maybe early 90s, and then has had a fairly steady degradation and decay since then. Today, pop culture only produces something of value almost on accident, unless it comes out of an indie scene with someone who isn't beholden to corporate interests and still understands what made timeless stuff so timeless to begin with. 

And maybe that's not so bad. After all, until recently, it was normal for people to look at a much broader spread of pop culture. My generation read stuff like David Eddings, Terry Brooks and Weiss & Hickman, of course, but they also routinely read Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard and Michael Moorcock. I hardly knew a D&D fan in the 80s—and we were junior high kids—who hadn't read "the classics" at least as much if not more than the modern authors. Older movies were still broadcast on TV and as VCRs and home media rental became a new business during that decade, older movies were certainly a huge part of it. I used to work in a VHS rental store as a teenager; I remember quite well what rented. Sure, new releases were (of course) the biggest renters, but older stuff had a steady stream of rentals. Later, when stuff became cheaper, archive older movies were popular. Older books were routinely brought back into print, a process that continues through Kindle and vanity/indie presses even today.

It's a brave new world out there, folks. I'm finally addressing that head-on by decoupling myself from my last routine and regular attachment to mainstream pop culture, even if that last regular attachment was just the critics mocking its failure.

Just to add some visual interest to an otherwise banal and boring post, here's a few new screenshots of Luukke in his "Frontier Gambler" mien. The main gist of the outfit is courtesy of Vitnir, who did one very similar in his unique smuggler outfits video series. The head, torso and leggings, as well as the dye module are courtesy of him. I also used his boots and gloves and belt originally, but then decided that I wanted them to be different after all.

Honestly, those matter a lot less than the torso, head and legs, and the dye module, if present. 

Oh, and I always do my own thing with weapons.

And you may notice that there are no shadows. I noticed that the shadows don't line up with the ground very well, and make the floatiness even more obvious sometimes, but even when they don't they cause lag on my rig, which doesn't have a graphics card. I've mentioned before, I had a graphics card, but for some reason it always made the rig crash when my brother was building it, so we decided not to put it in, since the processer was fast enough that I'd be able to play older games just fine without one, mostly. The shadows on this game are one concession to that.

It still lags a bit on really busy environments, like Mek-Sha and Dantooine. Although I remember that people even with super hotrod rigs complained about lag on Dantooine, especially during the pirate event, so I don't think that that's my computer's issue.

I should go check it out, though. The pirate event is ongoing right now, and they did migrate to cloud servers some time ago since I last played.

Blogging in 2024

The last few months have been a disaster in terms of blogging; I haven't been consistent, and my topics are all over the place. This probably inevitable for a variety of reasons; I don't want to be rigorous about blogging; it's meant to be fun and relaxing and I talk about whatever I feel like. I don't blog for an audience, I blog for myself. That said; I've felt pretty disorganized and chaotic.

The biggest part of that is that my life has been disorganized and chaotic the last few months. My youngest son came home from California a few months earlier than we expected him due to some health problems, and my oldest son moved in temporarily with his wife and three small children so he could finish his Masters degree, find a job, and then move back out again eventually. He was burning out trying to work full time to pay the bills and do all of this at the same time, so we were glad to help out. But, of course, it meant that my home life has become very chaotic since late August or early September when all of this started. On top of that, my new (it's not so new now, but still—after more than twenty years in one job, a little over a year in a second one still makes it seem new) job continues to be more stressful and busy than my old one, and bleeds over into my free time somewhat. Even if it didn't, I'm more in the market for "veging" as they say with my free time than doing anything productive. Even if by productive, I merely mean making blog posts.

So let's get a little bit organized for the new year, shall we? 

• I had a decent run the last few months of posts about Heroes of Might and Magic III. I haven't played that already now in more than two months, probably closer to three or four. I don't think it's likely that my picking up of that hobby is going to stick; I'm just over video games of any kind, even older strategy games like this one. I doubt I'll post about it anymore, or do anything with it anymore. I know my oldest son is going to be disappointed, but that's the way it is.
• I haven't really blogged about Star Wars related anything in a long time, and I doubt that I will anymore. Although I do still watch a fair bit of pop culture youtube commentary from guys like Nerdrotic, Ryan Kinnel, Midnight's Edge, etc. the reality is that I've become very disengaged from pop culture otherwise. Sometime last year, and I think it was the Boba Fett show that was the nail in the coffin for me, my attitude towards Star Wars completely changed to one of absolute apathy. I simply don't care about Star Wars anymore. That had been building for a long time, but now the conversion from Star Wars fan to ex-Star Wars fan is complete. I probably won't talk about it anymore. There's juicy commentary to make, about the execrable Obaid-Chinoy, or whatever her name is, being assigned to direct the up-coming Rey movie, but it's just tired commentary at this point. Yes, it will be terrible. Yes it will be woke. Yes it will directly insult the original long-time fans while generating absolutely no new ones. We already know all of this. I simply don't care.
• On a related note, although I never blogged much about it, my attitude towards Marvel has taken a similar trajectory.
• I don't have any concert plans this year, after having had a pretty busy concert schedule last year; we saw Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Air Supply, and a few others that I can't even remember off-hand this last year. This year; probably nothing. Having my sons back home has been a noticeable drain on our budget for both money and time, and my wife's work has largely dried up for reasons that we haven't completely understood yet, so she's making less money than we're used to. Good excuse to tighten the belt. Realistically, we should be doing smarter things with our money than seeing a bunch of concerts anyway. My being laid off in 2022 really borked my retirement plans, and we're not saving more for retirement like we should be. That means that realistically I won't retire anytime too soon, of course, because I won't be able to afford it. If anyone can afford to retire in the future, which may be a debatable thing. I should also get my mortgage paid off, which would free up tons of cash, but will require throwing extra cash at it in the meantime first. This belt-tightening for various reasons means that we'll be doing less frivolous yet fun things to blog about, and even when we are making more again from my wife's babysitting, we should keep the belt tight for other reasons too. We also spent a ton of money just now on my son's wedding and the trip out of state to support it. Much of that cost we threw on a credit card, so we'll be paying it back down over the course of the next several months.
• That's probably more personal information than anyone needed to know, but still; that will be a theme for 2024. Doing less, saving and paying stuff off, rather than running around having lots of fun. We still have some big costs on the (relatively) near term horizon that we know will hit us soon, like one more wedding (not imminent), more grandkids, more kid moves, etc. Not saying that I expect any of these to be imminent or even in 2024, but we have at least two trips that are obligatory in the coming year, so we're doing our best to keep that contained and preparing for the future.
• All that said, I do blog from time to time about music, and no doubt still will.
• One hobby that I haven't done as much with as I'd like in the last couple of years is hiking in the Rocky Mountains, or the Southwestern deserts. I'd love to get back on the bandwagon this year, but I don't know if it'll be really feasible or not. I have done a lot of day hikes here locally with my wife and some of our friends, but hiking in the forested Northern Midwest is not really the same hobby at all, and I certainly don't backpack here. To be honest, I need a new backpack. I bought a bunch of cheap Amazon Basics backpacks a few years ago, and most of the cinch buckles have failed, making them almost unusable. Once I get a new backpack, I'll probably toss them entirely, since they're not really any good to anyone. What a disappointment those ended up being.
• To be fair, hiking and backpacking are not necessarily the same hobby. I might be able to do a bunch of low altitude desert red rock hikes after Easter Weekend. But I might be in too much of a hurry to get back home and work. It's not clear to me yet what I'll be able to pull off there, because that's a terrible time for work to be away, given that we have a April 1st fiscal year. Sigh. What I really want to do is a late July or August hike somewhere in the high elevation Rockies. I've got a lot of ideas in my head about where to go, but I don't yet know which (if any) will be feasible to actually do this year.
• In any case, as details start to flesh out, I'll probably talk more about them on my long-neglected hiking blog anyway.
• I ended up reading 39 books last year. While I didn't talk a lot about my reading, I set a goal more in line with my actual performance for 2024 of 30 books for the year with a 40 book stretch. I read several books at a time, usually if they're in very different formats or very different subjects so I don't get them mixed up. I'm already in the middle of two pdf gamebook, a regular hardcover gamebook, a slim hardcover neo-retro sword & sorcery novel or novella, an old Kindle adventure story, and I've got a regular fiction and non-fiction and religious book all queued up too. To hit my goal, I need to average 3 books a month, or more, but with any luck, I'll actually knock out half a dozen in January. I need to stay focused on that, though. With all of the craziness of the trip, year-end, the wedding, etc. I haven't read much since before Thanksgiving, so I need to buckle down on that.
• I've also pretty much bailed on Hero Forge. I haven't renewed the subscription (unless it auto renews; I should double check that, I guess) and I haven't played around with the app in quite a while.
• And finally, my fantasy gaming and science fiction setting design. The ostensible purpose of this blog, which I talk about increasingly infrequently. Sigh. I do not intend to not talk about this, but I need to come up with some specific plans of what I think I'll talk about relative to these topics, and soon. I have a few ideas:
• I do intend to get my campaign with my daughter and her husband, and my son and his wife going again. We've all been caught up in a lot of the exact same chaos, but the new year looks like it'll settle down into a routine, I hope, so there's hope that this will be easier than it ended up being in November and December.
• I do intend to finish the Races Deep Dive series, specifically by talking about the human ethnicities of Dark Fantasy X, which was my intention last time I actually posted on that. I think I've done all of the non-human races now, but I'll double check.
• I'm not sure if I'm going to do any more Space Opera X (formerly Ad Astra) data sheets or other setting development. Probably not. But, possibly. 

Disney schadenfreude

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/405352.php

In semi-related news: Bob Iger says that Disney might be forced to sell off the ABC television network, the FX and FXX networks, and all "non-linear" networks... and wants someone to come in as a coinvestor to share the losses from the dying ESPN.

Walt Disney Company boss Bob Iger said the company is considering selling its TV assets while seeking a strategic partner for sports cable property ESPN.

Iger told CNBC on Thursday that he has had discussions with potential investors about buying a minority stake in ESPN, though he would not specify.

Iger said he hopes a partner would assist Disney with its sports-related "distribution or content," adding that the company "wants to stay in the sports business."

Iger added that he would be open to selling or spinning off Disney's cable networks, which includes ABC, FX and National Geographic.

Iger, who revealed on Wednesday he will remain CEO of Disney through 2026, told CNBC he did not anticipate the degree to which legacy television networks would be struggling.

Disney's television properties "may not be core" to the company, Iger said.

Note the properties he's considering selling are, mostly, companies that were purchased by Disney before Iger. FX and FXX were acquired by Iger when he bought Fox's entertainment divisions. But neither of those, I think, has ever been sold as standalone units and so do not have any valuations attached to them.

I point this out because [i]f either Valliant Renegade's or WDW_Pro's point (forget which) that Iger does not want to sell off the big properties he bought -- LucasFilm, Marvel, Pixar, and even Fox, as a whole -- because the selling price will be much, much lower than the purchase price. This would expose him as rube who consistently overpaid for other people' successful studios to cover-up Disney's own struggling creative output. And it would also confirm everyone's strong suspicion that all of these properties are worth only 25-50% of what was paid for them, and therefore maybe all of Disney is similarly only worth 25-50% of the current market valuation.

He can't afford to sell anything that people know a recent purchase price for. He can only sell things acquired long ago (ABC) or which have never been sold on their own as standalone units (FX, FXX).

But he will never sell anything that he over-paid for. He cannot afford to let the world know, in stark mathematical terms, just how poorly he's run Disney these past eight years.

By the way, the last weekend's box office had Mission Impossible at number one and Sound of Freedom at number two. Phloebiana Jones fell to fourth. What a disgrace.

The Sound of Freedom has made $85 million in two weeks of release.

Does anything need to be said more than that? He's already exposed, even if he's trying to hide it. Pretty much everybody has questioned his purchases, and has done so from the get-go. If this is a secret, it's a pretty open one. More like "everybody knows it, but nobody wants to be the one to publicly point it out." And by "nobody" I mostly mean establishment entertainment media only. Non-establishment para-media have been saying it for years, as have investment media, particularly with regards to the price paid for LucasFilm.

What is "ambient wokeness"?

I've mentioned a few times with regards to the new D&D movie that it isn't woke, but it does suffer from small levels of "ambient wokeness." My wife in particular doesn't like this term, or my focus on it, but to that I suggest that I'm not focusing on it, but I also think that it is wise to not just sweep this stuff under the rug and notice it. If the goalposts are moved subtly and stealthily, at the end of the day, they are still moved.

So, in spite of the woke comments which angered many would-be fans about the D&D movie (the "white men can't leave fast enough" controversy, and the "emasculated leading men" controversy, I would suggest that the first is not related to the movie, it just was an unfortunate bit of timing. The Hasbro corporation is certainly woke and that was a horribly bigoted woke comment, but it came from someone who is not related to the movie at all. The second one is related to the movie, and people sneered at the directors' commentary that it wasn't woke, but in retrospect... it really wasn't all that woke, but it does represent a kind of ambient wokeness, where women are perfect the way that they are and men constantly need to struggle and learn and grow.

And it wasn't just that Chris Pine's character was kind of ridiculous and incapable of accomplishing much in his own right. (Given that he was a bard, that was probably inevitable anyway). Bradley Cooper's cameo, where they thought it would be funny to have him be a little halfling guy who's totally the woman in all of his relationship, with big, burly women who are the men in the relationship was less overtly woke and more a funny joke, but they didn't make it in an environment where men are expected to be manly and therefore a man in the woman's role is funny. Mr. Mom or Mrs. Doubtfire this is not.

There is one man who isn't ridiculous in the movie, Xenk whats-his-name, the Thayan paladin. Not surprisingly, the actor who plays him is a half-white half-black man who father was English and who's mother was African.

Holga was also race and essentially sex-swapped. Nobody really believes (I hope) that a woman who's less than 5½ feet tall would literally be throwing around much larger men en masse who are wearing heavy armor. We can accept that because it's heroic fantasy and heroic fantasy characters are always larger than life anyway, but it's worth pointing out that until just a couple of decades ago, nobody expected women to act like men. Even characters like Red Sonia weren't so overtly masculine. Although, to Michelle Rodriquez's credit, and contra many other girlboss action stars of recent years, she actually did really spend some time in training, and looked pretty buff.

Even in the movie, though, when they had all the flashbacks of her "ancestors" from just a few decades earlier, every single one of them was a Nordic Viking-looking man, with blond or red hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. But for some reason, she's played by a Hispanic woman?

Elminster was played, in magical illusory form, but still, by a black man. Why was he race swapped? For that matter, why was the cast so diverse to begin with? The "PC group" was a ridiculously ineffective middle-aged white man, two half-black half-white men, only one of whom was presented as all that heroic, a little white woman who was super physical and one of the most powerful characters in the group, and a hispanic woman of... well, I guess Michelle Rodriguez is middle-aged now too. I mean, she's in her mid-40s, fer cryin' out loud. Is there no such thing as "these people live in this area" in the new Forgotten Realms? Is every single locality a cosmopolitan multi-ethnic ambient woke utopia?

Even among the villains; Hugh Grant was the kind of silly con man; the real villain was, of course, a powerful woman (who, it's alluded too briefly, has a powerful man boss, at least.)

These tropes have become so commonplace that they are now what I call "ambient wokeness." People don't really think about them, or think of them as woke, but that is exactly where they had their genesis. The D&D movie avoided any overt wokeness, but future Americans, if Americans survive as a people into the future, will look back at it and chuckle at the ambient little details that are unrealistic because they represent woke thinking, but it is, at least, all background stuff. Not enough—even to me—to crock the movie. I still enjoyed it. Would I have liked it better if Holga was Holgar and a white Viking looking man, and he and Edgin had a Bing Crosby and Bob Hope buddy comedy vibe to them? Yeah, probably. Would I have liked it if Edgin's daughter wasn't a mostly white and obviously not entirely? Yeah, probably. Would I have liked it if gratuitous African elves and halflings didn't show up for some odd reason looking exactly like African humans do, except with ears or small? Yeah, probably. And so on and so forth. But none of those was enough to make the movie unlikeable. Ultimately, Michelle Rodriguez's character worked because in spite of her absurd strength and physicality, she was also a rather ridiculous character, who was kinda dumb, did kinda dumb things, and said kinda dumb things, ultimately making her likeable in the dumb jock kind of way. And although it was weird to see a short Hispanic woman playing a dumb jock, it was still mostly funny. 

Only the little girl druid was kind of unlikeable, because she had that kind of Karen attitude to go along with her oh so perfect abilities. Kind of a shame. Under-utilized and mishandled opportunity there.

Phase 5

So, in spite of my desires, my wife bought Antifa-Man and the Wasp: Commiemania tickets for us to see last night. We don't go very often on opening weekends, even to movies that we want to see, because we don't want to contribute to the all-important opening weekend metric, plus we get half price tickets on Tuesday evening. I would have missed it altogether, but my wife loves seeing movies and is desperate to be in denial of how bad Hollywood in general and Disney in particular are as companies. After we watched it, I allowed her to convince me to binge the Loki show too. Now I'm kind of tired.

In spite of all the hate and anger from the angry anti-Disney pundits, the reality is that neither Loki nor Ant-man were really that bad. In fact, although hardly even close to brilliant, they were relatively fun. Although I did notice the things that the anger-pundits pointed out, they were neither as egregious, or blatant as they claimed, and many of them (like heroic black action women who are as physically capable as any man among the extras and minor characters) we'll just have to deal with until the zeitgeist changes. Scott Lang wasn't made to be an idiot constantly upstaged by all the women around him. His daughter was kinda bratty, but not nearly as terrible a character as I'd been led to believe. She can't carry a movie, like Ant-man kinda can.

Don't get me wrong. In both, there were certainly woke elements. But neither were flat out propaganda films, like we have had in the past from Disney. Nothing was as on the nose as "You've got to do better, Senator" Falcon & the Winter Soldier. Nothing was as subtly insidious as The Batman.

If you don't want to see these movies at all, I hardly blame you. If you want to do like my wife and I did and see the movie while still managing to not really contribute to their "success" because of our timing and discount tickets, on the other hand, I hardly blame you for that either. They really aren't that bad. They're forgettable, mostly. They're not going to be classics. But I don't regret seeing them, and I'm actually a little excited about seeing the next season of Loki, believe it or not. Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd and Tom Hiddleston are sufficiently charismatic and have sufficient charisma to carry the current crop of stuff, and hopefully the next wave. That doesn't mean that anything in the pipeline other than the next season of Loki looks promising. Iron Heart? No way in hell. Anything Wakanda related? Absolutely not. For that matter, within Ant-man itself, anything with Janet, Hank, or Hope or Cassie? I'd rather give all of those characters a pass. Sylvie and Loki and Mobius, on the the other hand—they can actually carry something worth watching with their chemistry and charisma.

Jonathan Majors, or whatever his name is, as Kang? He's been getting a lot of praise from the critics as if he's the next big thing who's already the biggest big thing. I'd never heard of him at all. I have a mixed reaction to his casting and performance. For one thing, I don't think casting Kang as a fairly normal looking black guy with gigantic lips and huge spreading nose was the right look at all for the character. I also don't think that the character he portrayed had any resemblance to Kang as a character as I know him. That said, I've never thought Kang was really all that engaging of a character, and other than his blue face (with narrow lips and nose) with the lines on it, his look was neither memorable nor exciting. He's even more boring than Galactus, who's another character who's actually way cooler in many ways than he looks to be. 

Plus, were they trying to set up a joke where the "Council of Kangs" all gathers together and says "We wuz kangz?"

So, didn't look right, the character was all wrong, but the character wasn't all that exciting to begin with? Majors did, I'll admit, do a good job portraying the character that was written for him. That's certainly true. He wasn't as charismatic on screen as people are making him out to be, because he honestly came across as kind of goofy, though. Especially in the Loki show. His face is nearly as overly dramatically expressive as Jackie Chan's. And honestly, there was a slightly uncomfortable undercurrent every time I saw him of his casting being a result of some ESG wanker saying, "We've gotta cast a black guy here". That said, his performance showed some real talent. Just not sure that this was really the role for him or not.

And... well, multiverse alternate realities, parallel timelines, and time travel in general have never been my favorite plot devices, unless the point is to go see dinosaurs. 

All in all, I'd say that my reaction here has been a variety of "Yeah, OK, I can see what you're going for here, and you're actually trying to be entertaining, and you're trying to tamp down the wokeness to a level that it isn't literally pissing off your audience non-stop... but I suspect the damage has been done already." It's a little too late to suggest that, "OK, OK, we're going to tone down the wokeness (but not eliminate it entirely) and try to be fun again" after you've already gone all in on grooming little kids and telling white people how much they hate them. On top of that, I think that people are just a little over Marvel now. Few of the characters that the audience love (Paul Rudd and Tom Hiddleston's characters being a notable exceptions) are still around, and even when they are, they're saddled with often playing second fiddle to new characters that aren't likeable. The "Ant-man family" could all take a hike except for Ant-man himself, and nobody would miss any of them. The vague references to socialism and antifa from Hank and Cassie were designed to make them unlikeable, and poor Hope just has literally nothing to do, no chance to show any charisma or charm, no chance to even really do anything at all. And Janet comes across as an obnoxious, entitled princess who makes no apologies for 1) sleeping with other men while in the quantum realm, 2) not telling anybody anything about the quantum realm, and 3) generally being high-handed and self-important and insufferable. Sadly, I think the writers think it makes her look like a strong girlboss, an insufferable trope in its own right, but it doesn't; if anything, it highlights her weakness.

2022: Fantasy sux

I have a lot of things I could talk about. The Z-man hit it out of the park with at least two columns since I last posted that I'd love to highlight. I've been busy mostly with my daughter's wedding and then entertaining all of the people (mostly from my wife's side of the family) who hung around after it was over needing to be entertained. Quite honestly, it'll be weeks before we're completely done, and by that I mean, put away everything that we have and figured out where it's going to belong.

And as soon as we're done with that, we have major changes to the house to make. We're actually (sorta) empty nesters now. I still have two sons who have their permanent address here, but they don't actually live here currently, so its just me and the little old lady. What this means is that eventually we're going to do a lot of major things to several of the rooms that we're redoing to better accommodate our expected lifestyle rather than our past lifestyle as parents with kids at home. Two rooms will become guest bedrooms rather than lingering boys' rooms, and one room will become an office/library. The basement will then also need and have the opportunity to be significantly redesigned, or at least have a bunch of crap thrown out of it and moved around, at a bare minimum.

Anyway, I've been busy, and I will continue to be busy, but not too busy going forward. But there are two things that I'd like to do; some 2023 goals (relative to the hobbies that I talk about on this blog, and also elsewhere in my life, but I'll only mention the first here) and a retrospective on fantasy in particular in pop culture in 2022. And because it merits its own post, I'll only do the latter right now, and the former later today or tomorrow.

First, let me quote someone else's blog, briefly. 

I don’t think there has ever been a worse year for the genre of fantasy than the year of our Lord 2022.

There is something almost magical in the way that an entire school of storytelling has been so unrelentingly subjected to incompetence in every way available to it.  How could any studio which theoretically exists to make money, so thoroughly **** up everything they touched?  

At the end of the day, there seem to have been 5 issues:

First, everyone wanted their own Game of Thrones, (it wasn’t just Jeff Bezos). 

Second, none of these producers knew anything about fantasy and they didn’t want to learn.  They just wanted to glom on to something and tell their own version of THE MESSAGE.

Third, neither did the people who ran the studios. They were green-lighting anything that could be accused of being a fantasy franchise with an existing fanbase. And they also wanted to use it to spread THE MESSAGE.

Fourth, Woke.  All of these shows were much more interested in contemporary politics than they were ancient worlds, eerie wonders, and glories beyond imagining.  They cared more about scoring points in Hollywood than they ever could about fantasy. 

Fifth, all of these shows were the result of globalism. Oh, it was Hollywood globalism to be sure, so on top of all of their other failings, they were shallow as a mud puddle.  But it was all globalist fantasy.  It was something too hopelessly bland to be at all interesting.

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”

I don't always love The Critical Drinker, just I like I don't always love any of the other squishy Youtube critics of modern pop culture who are careful to not trip up YouTube's algorithm for demonetization by actually telling the complete truth. Of course, that assumes that they've accepted the complete truth themselves, and as I can personally attest, the red pill journey is, in fact, a journey, and sometimes it's harder to let go of certain pretty little lies that simply aren't true and never were than others. So maybe there's a reason why Geeks & Gamers, The Critical Drinker, HeelsvsBabyFace, Ryan Kinel, the Quartering, Midnight's Edge, Yellowflash, etc. are all exactly on the same side as squishy kind of sorta conservatives who go out of their way to virtue-signal their acceptance of Leftism morality before trying to then complain that Leftists are inconsistent in their own application of it. Well, duh. Yeah.

But in any case, the Critical Drinker's "THE MESSAGE" in a big echoey voice is absolutely something that's useful rhetoric, and its nice to see it replicated here. That said, his second, third and fourth points are really kind of indistinguishable. Yes, THE MESSAGE is the problem, but THE MESSAGE is wokeness. Saying that the writers wanted to spread wokeness, and the studio heads wanted to spread wokeness and then also another helping of wokeness is the problem is redundant. I mean, I get it; he's highlighting different schwerpunkts where valuing wokeness over any other quality failed these shows, but I'd do it a bit differently myself.

First, fantasy is ultimately a hopeful genre. Yes, even the dark fantasy that I have here on this blog and elsewhere is largely based on romanticizing the setting that fantasy takes place in. I would say that fantasy is by and large conservative in many ways, because what it mostly romanticizes is the past, but it also creates romanticized utopias that never existed, and that's where progressives come in. Either way, shows that do not really romanticize their environment to some degree, but rather exist to criticize it, or to create a utopia that normal people see as bizarre and dystopian rather than something to be romanticized, creates a major, off-putting disconnect right off the bat, and this was a major theme of all of the shows that failed this year. And yes, that means the wokeness, the race-swapping, the blatant misandry and anti-white hatred and bigotry, ironically in a genre created by white people to celebrate their own heritage among their own people.

Relative to the first point in the quote above, this means that I don't actually think Game of Thrones is good fantasy, because it is nihilistic and tawdry rather than hopeful or romanticized. But I will give George Rape Rape Martin credit for at least doing something different, which led to his brief moment in the sun, and those who adapted his show also did something which people hadn't seen before, and which they clearly tried to copy with little success. But it was never really a model that was going to last, because it subverts the whole purpose of fantasy to tell nihilistic rape fantasies rather than hopeful, romanticized visions of the past or societies that the author wishes could exist. It's just a critique. Of nothing in particular, mind, just life in general. Personally, I find the Rape Rape Martin and Joe Abercrombie, etc. vision of fantasy very tedious, and I'm surprised that they've had as much legs as they have managed to have. But the end is clearly in sight, I think, for that kind of fantasy. It's not sustainable.

Secondly, it's worth pointing out that biological differences are very real, and treating men and women as if they are interchangeable widgets is off-putting at best, and seriously whack at worst. Of course, the "strong female character" is more than just a woman who acts like a man, or is put in a man's role in the story; it's a spiteful, petty insult to feminism and masculinity both, and deliberately so, by people who hate the very thought of normalcy because it reminds them of how far they deviate from it and how dysfunctional they really are. Pretty much every single one of the failed shows has "strong female characters" who are actually terrible characters; they only exist to constantly heckle, belittle and put down any male characters around them, especially if the male characters are also white and the women are brown. These spiteful "message delivery units" which is probably a better label for them than characters aren't fun for anyone to watch. I can't imagine that even progressive weirdos actually enjoy them, other than a brief endorphin hit of seeing their cult-like beliefs validated in them. 

Thirdly, as an outgrowth of the need of "message delivery units" to constantly harp on their message, the plots are absurd, clumsy, and poorly executed. Nobody's motivation makes any sense, things happen for reasons that are not organic to anything that common sense, action/consequence relationships, or believable human behavior would lead you to expect. This means that the shows all have a strange disjointed feel, and they don't make a lick of sense. People who watch them who aren't engrossed in THE MESSAGE delivery can't figure out why things happen or why characters do any of the things that they do.

It's probably possible (although not desirable) to deliver the message while still writing a competent story (although it will necessarily water-down the ham-handedness of the message delivery, of course), but the writers and producers have all—with the possible exception of Blood of the Dragon (which I have not seen, but that seems to be the review consensus from those who have)—made no attempt to write plots or characters that feel real in any way whatsoever. Stuff just happens because some pre-determined plot outline demands it, but why and how it happens makes no sense to the viewer. Although this was no doubt allowed to happen because of the wokeness of the creators, it isn't directly a product of their wokeness, only indirectly. It's just a product of blatant incompetence and lack of skill on the writers' part.

Fourth, being "updated for modern audiences." This is, of course, very transparent code to let everyone know that the creators don't actually care a lick about the source material that they're adapting, but will fill the show up with woke virtue-signaling in a major, off-putting way. For no reason whatsoever, lesbian couples will show up. Even though the setting looks vaguely European, black and brown people will mysteriously appear at least as often as white people, dressing in a vaguely European style and living a vaguely European life-style, as if any sub-Saharan African were equivalent to a white European, or that if you simply picked up an African and raised him among Europeans he'd act indistinguishably from one. (Not likely.) I know, of course, that fantasy isn't the real world, and when I say European, I don't mean that the lands of Middle-earth or whatever The Witcher or Willow's setting is called is made up of actual Europeans, but fantasy is usually cast as an alternate idealized and romanticized European Medieval setting. I don't know why black, brown, yellow or red people should have any significant place in a white genre based on white heritage. Although few people have tried it, there's no reason why fantasy cast in a fantasy-analog to Africa or Asia or even Latin America couldn't exist. Heck, as long as it wasn't an excuse to bash whiteness, it'd probably be kind of cool and at least new and different, and the few attempts to have done so, such as Rokugan, Kelewan, Imaro, or a few others, have been at least moderately successful. But no; what these shows all do instead is simply insert black, brown and yellow people into a white context and then dare you to point out that it's seriously incongruous and off-putting to see them in that context. It smacks of not only laziness, but also covetousness and pettiness. Again; seriously off-putting, especially to the people who they are casually victimizing by appropriating our heritage.

And that's generically. More specifically, it's off-putting and insulting to fans of the source material being adapted. If Lord of the Rings fans are supposed to like Rings of Power; if Wheel of Time fans or Witcher fans are supposed to like the shows based on those properties, they have to actually resemble the source material. Nobody wants to see the name of a property that they're fans of attached to something that has little rapport with the material its allegedly adapting, because the writers and producers themselves don't actually like the material and really want to do something else.

Of course, I say all of this as if it's endemic to fantasy. The problems with fantasy are concurrent with the problems in pop culture, and among our soi-disant elites altogether. They all either have this woke mind-virus and actually believe these insane things, or at least they pretend to for social reasons, because their jobs, their social status, or something else depends on doing so.

Which is why all of the nebbish, bowtie-wearing conservative pundits attempting to "explain" to the leftists why they're wrong with facts will never amount to anything at all. They're either talking to wild-eyed cultists, or people who's position in society depends on pretending to believe the claims of wild-eyed cultists. Facts aren't going to sway them. In fact, they will see facts that contradict their chosen world-view as threatening. Rather than engaging with and considering those facts, they will attack them as if they are a virus that must be eradicated at all cost, hopefully before they have a chance to spread.

Eh, anyway. That's a little bit beside the point. However, it's curious to see that the oft-repeated aphorism "Go woke go broke" actually has only ever managed to come true in the entertainment industry, which is why it's somewhat fascinating to watch it happen in real-time for Netflix and Disney and others this last year. For one thing, nobody has gone broke yet because the truth is that pleasing investors is more important than pleasing customers, and investors have passively and collectively decided that the ESG score built by Blackrock is an important part of the performance of an investment. So pissing off customers by going woke has not hurt anyone until recently, because it kept investment coming in. Also, for many industries there's no alternative. If you got pissed off when a Wal-Mart executive said that she actively discriminates against white male owned suppliers, what are you going to do? Take your business to Target, who actively threatens the safety of your daughter in the bathroom by encouraging creepy perverts to go in there with her? Take it to Amazon who actively crushes American business by undercutting them with crappy Chinese products? There are no good alternatives, therefore there's no way to effectively vote with your wallet. However, in terms of entertainment, I'm find all kinds of things that I'd rather do than watch crappy movies or streaming shows that feed woke garbage to me. I can watch YouTube stuff instead. I can read an older book. I can watch an older show or movie on blu-ray or DVD. I can play board games with my family. I can take a walk outside. I can go run errands with my wife. 

So, the entertainment industry is the canary in the coal-mine that shows that the anti-American, anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-normalcy cult that has gripped our elites can't last forever. It's finally starting to really, seriously wear its way out. And if history has taught us anything, it's that once the early warning signs of collapse are apparent, the collapse happens much more quickly and suddenly and thoroughly than anyone would have predicted ahead of time. In a way, that's a good thing. While nobody loved living through the collapse of Communism, nobody really loved living under communism either, and the collapse is an inevitable part of moving on to something better.

Jar Jar Abrams or Jew Jew Binks?

Although Jar Jar Abrams seems to be the go-to reference to him among the pseudo-squishy pop culture commentariat on YouTube, e;r has the much more biting Jew Jew Binks nickname for him. In any case, it appears his charmed career may be coming to an end, and he's been thrown under the bus by the Hollywood Reporter. I saw this first on Overlord DVD, who was positively gloating over it, but Clownfish TV has done a report on it as well. Here's the article, for those who missed it a day or two ago:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/demimonde-on-the-bubble-as-warner-bros-discovery-puts-pressure-on-j-j-abrams-1235153965/

Whatever a "Demimonde" is supposed to be. Overlord DVD, who's a pretty good source for this kind of thing—although his histrionic anger comes across as showmanship moreso than genuine, and he has the squishy, obnoxious habit of constantly have to make caveats to establish his bonafides with leftist morality, which he clearly accepts without question—calls Abrams nothing more than a con man or a grifter and compares him to Harry Hill selling defective band instruments. While I appreciate the much older pop culture reference and think its cool that he thought his audience might catch it, I do have to point out that Abrams and his teams of Bad Robot people aren't totally talentless. Alias, when it came out, was a pretty decent show, and I suspect that it still holds up relatively well were you to try and watch it again today. The Kurztman/Orci Hawaii 5-0 reboot was pretty cool too, at least for the first few seasons. While I don't love movies like Cloverfield or Super 8, I don't think they're terrible either.

To be fair, I'm not really much of a TV guy. Keeping up with long-running shows is a lot of effort for not enough payoff for me, although I do admit that that's a personal affectation. And even Abrams' "good" movies just don't really play to my tastes.

It's also true, as Overlord says, that much of the more recent product from Bad Robot has been terrible. They can be directly saddled with having ruined both Star Wars and Star Trek as viable franchises, although I suspect that if they hadn't done so, that someone else would have anyway, because Kathleen Kennedy and her Paramount counterpart are terrible people who would have engaged someone else just as terrible. Matt Reeves, another Bad Robot alum, made The Batman which, while competently and in fact artistically and stylistically extremely well made ultimately didn't attract me, and in fact pissed me off and turned me off of future projects involving DC. Not because the movie was bad, but because it deliberately had a ham-handed subtext of hatred and vitriol towards white men.

The real question to me is; what triggered this perception of weakness at Bad Robot that allowed the SJW piranhas to start a feeding frenzy on them and have them thrown under the bus, as opposed to circling the wagons and attempting to defend them?

UPDATE: As an aside, and speaking of YouTube commentariat, I have never once had any interest in any Minecraft video of any kind whatsoever. Why in the world is Youtube convinced that I must really want to watch some stupid Minecraft "I built XYZ in hardcore mode" video? They just never go away no matter how many times I click "never recommend this channel." The algorithm just can't seem to believe me that I don't want to see anything Minecraft related. Oh, and by the way, just because I've watched Street Fighter or SWTOR videos doesn't mean that I care about Minecraft, or Elden Ring, or any other video game at all whatsoever.

The Spin

The Book of Boba Fett is, sadly, a very stupid show. Boba Fett was one of my favorite characters. When I was about 7-8 years old, and The Empire Strikes Back hadn't even come out yet, you could turn in... what was it, ten proof of purchases, I think? And they'd send you a Boba Fett action figure from Kenner. I had one of those. That Boba Fett action figure was one of the action figures I played with the most. I didn't necessarily imagine that he was Boba Fett, just that he was this super cool supercommando who shot missiles out of his wrist and his backpack, in addition to the gun he carried around. Boba Fett was done wrong by George Lucas himself in Return of the Jedi when he died like a chump for no good reason, but then he was trotted out in the special editions as lame gratuitous fan service. But that could... kinda... be ignored. But this show turning him into a sad, senile, confused, out of shape old man who wants to run a criminal empire by being nice and never making any decisions at all is just pathetic. A real disgrace.

And I actually laughed out loud at a part that wasn't supposed to be funny; The Spin. Here's a clip of it, turned by the genius of the Internet, into a disposable yet hilarious meme.

Book of Boba Fett

I mentioned this earlier, but The Book of Boba Fett hasn't exactly thrilled me too much yet. The plot has been lackluster when it wasn't actively nonsensical, and the character of Boba Fett himself has been completely unrecognizable and leaves much to be desired. Shadows of the Empire writer Steve Perry has even weighed in mocking it on its technical merits (technical writing, that is; nobody is denying that the look of the show leaves anything to be desired) and calling it Blabba Fett.

https://boundingintocomics.com/2022/01/20/shadows-of-the-empire-novelist-steve-perry-eviscerates-the-book-of-boba-fett-the-stupid-is-strong-here/

Episodes 5 and 6 have been better, though. Of course... they've largely been better because Boba Fett barely appeared in either of them. Episode 5 was a lost episode of The Mandalorian, and Episode 6 was a freaking kitchen sink stew of every cameo that they could think of, most of them gratuitous. Even Darth Vader gets name-dropped. Not that it doesn't have some cool moments, but if this is one of the high points for the show, then the show isn't really all that good, is it?

Not sure what is behind the complete mangling of Fett's characterization. The show would have been considerably better were it a different character doing his Man Called Horse routine. The kinder, gentler crime lord stuff doesn't make any sense to me at all. Supporting characters, like that always grim-faced bar owner gal add very little. Fennec Shan gives good advice which Boba Fett always ignores. The mayor's obsequious lackey is at least occasionally entertaining, and is a somewhat believable character, although the acting is a little try-hard for my taste. Literally nobody else matters at all, until we get characters that we already know in the last two episodes. 

I'm OK with the idea of transitioning Boba Fett from a villain to an anti-hero. Still; there's gotta have been a more seamless way to do it then him suddenly becoming a soft-headed retard who bears no resemblance to the character we've already known. And it's fair to say that we don't really know Boba Fett, because he had so little screen time or dialogue in the movies, and anything outside of the movies is suspect. But we knew enough to know that this Boba Fett is an imposter. And not even a very bright one at that.

Filoni's penchant for throwing in characters for nostalgic and gratuitous fan service is briefly exciting, but doesn't say anything good about the show's long term prospects. The fact that Din Djarin, or however he spells his name, is already a more interesting character in Boba Fett's show (as opposed to his own) is not a good sign either. Maybe part of it is the bait and switch, too—the Boba Fett teaser at the end of Mando's season 2 finale suggested a Space Godfather or Space Scarface. What we've got instead doesn't even rise to the level of a forgettable generic Western from the 50s. Again; not that forgettable generic Westerns are necessarily bad, but by definition, they aren't really very good either, or they wouldn't be forgettable and generic. And it's a totally different tone and vibe than what we were teased, which is arguably a much bigger problem than any discussion of their qualities.

Sigh. Star Wars, I'm really trying to make it work here, baby. I'm not giving up on you. I feel like you're giving up on us fans, though. I do admit that this Filoni and Favreau stuff is at least evidence of trying, but I wonder if it really is good enough.

UPDATE: I stayed up too late watching reaction videos to Cad Bane's appearance in the latest episode. While the fangirl squeeing from grown men should be kind of embarrassing, I have to admit that I found it kind of charming to watch after a while. (After all, it's not like I did that.) Anyway, the net effect of this is that I'm more happily inclined towards the latest episode right now after watching how people reacted to it, even though that's probably a sentiment that will wear off over time. There really is at least some element of social priming in terms of entertainment. This is similar to how big blockbuster movies are often more fun to watch with  big crowd on opening night. It was charming to go see the newest Spider-man on opening night and have the crowd of fangirls screaming when Andrew Garfield and Toby MacGuire came on screen.

Of course, the real question is this: these are kind of tricks that play on your emotions for a short-term gain for the show or movie that does them. How exciting will it be to see Andrew Garfield and Toby MacGuire show up when you're watching the newest Spider-man a year or two from now on blu-ray that you bought, or some streaming service, long after the novelty of it has worn off? And what does that mean long term? Will these moments that are exciting now be seen as completely forgettable in the coming months, or will these movies and this episode still be fondly remembered after all?

Book of Boba Fett - brief thoughts (so far)

There's only two episodes. I've seen the first one twice and most of the second one twice. It's not really that great, but it has some potential. In some ways, Boba Fett has become a less compelling character than he was. Plus, he looks kinda old and flabby compared to when he went into the sarlacc. Given that nothing has happened to him that should make him become so, that's unfortunate. I mean, I know why it is; because they wanted to keep using Temuera Morrison who played Jango Fett in Attack of the Clones nearly twenty years ago. He just doesn't look anything like Jeremy Bulloch did in 1983. Even though Bulloch never took off the helmet, he's just obviously a very different man to even a casual viewer. (This was a problem already in the prequels. Not sure why Lucas cast Morrison. He was fine as Jango Fett, and did a good job, but if Boba Fett was supposed to be a genetic clone of him, that never worked, because he never looked anything at all like Boba Fett had in the original trilogy. Yet another bad call by Lucas during the prequels. I know that in the wake of the sequel trilogy, it's somewhat fashionable to now pretend like the prequel movies were good movies with good choices made during their production process, but the reality is that they never really were. They just weren't overt dumpster fires like the sequel trilogy movies have been.)

But honestly, I'm not really digging the very slow burn of current events with the crime lord stuff followed by his "A Man Called Horse" flashback scenes. I'm very tired of "white man must come to respect the primitives who took him captive and abused him" story. It's little more than Stockholm Syndrome writ large. Of course, they deliberately recast Boba Fett from a white man in the 80s to a Polynesian man in the 00s who is now a middle-aged man to boot. But still; the flashback scenes are much less engaging, and yet they seem to take up more than half of the runtime of the episodes so far. I'm sure that they're setting up some kind of "Fett's relationship with the Tuskens will be crucial to his success with the crime lords" type of resolution (I called it here first!) but again; I read A Princess of Mars years ago. It was published before my grandfather was born, and I'm already a middle-aged man about to turn 50 myself. The story isn't exactly a new one anymore.

And I don't really get where Fett is coming from in the non-flashback scenes. He wants to be a kinder, nicer gangster? Yeah, I don't get it. I want to see a combination of space western and space Scarface here, not space West Side Story.

The show has potential. I hope it gets better. Right now, I'm still waiting for it to do something interesting.

Critical Role

For whatever reason, I started watching a bit of Critical Role again. I'm still not very far in, relatively speaking, although by hours in, I've seen more than an entire season of TV show. On episode nine. That's what happens when they tend to average over three hours each, I guess.

I probably said this before, but I'll say it again: they're not playing with the right system for the kind of show that they're trying to make. It really needs to be a system that's a bit more unobtrusive, so that they can just keep the narrative moving without constantly stopping to check rules, check character sheets, discuss how a spell or class ability or feat or whatever works, etc. I've never played 5e. I've never even read 5e. But I can see how it's not really different enough from 3e to make play more smooth. Especially when you have a number of players who aren't really the serious gamer types who really know the rules well and know how to play their characters well. And I don't give them any grief for that; I actually think being actors and actresses makes them better at what they're doing than if they were just gamers. They're much more charismatic to watch—mostly—and they have a better instinctual (as well as trained, I'd wager) feel for what makes for entertaining showmanship to watch. But if they were playing a much more rules-lite, narrative approach to the game, where mechanics were able to sink into the background and combats weren't long, drawn out rules-lookup affairs, it'd be a lot smoother. I can barely imagine what it was like when they were doing it with the Pathfinder system.

And some of the players are better than others at keeping it moving and fast-paced and entertaining. Travis, who plays Grog, is by far the most charismatic person of the bunch (I mean actual Travis, not his character) so on the episodes where he's missing, he's sorely missed. The game isn't nearly as fun nor as funny without him. Laura, his real-life wife, is probably the most charismatic of the girls; her over emotional reactions to everything actually come across (most of the time) as kind of charming and likable. Orion's character, as a kind of almost C-3PO-like, stuffy sorcerer is mostly fun, when he's engaged in the game enough to be acting a bit more than he sometimes does, and I know that he'll eventually part ways with the group as the actor goes on to do other things and can't commit to continuing with the group. Sam's the one who I'm less sure about; sometimes he's kind of funny, sometimes he's too try-hard, and sometimes he comes across as downright creepy or cringey, and I wish that he'd keep his mouth shut. Marisha sometimes comes across as pushy or too try-hard, but it's not likely she'll miss much, since she was the DM's girlfriend (now wife) throughout the show. Part of that may be the character too, but we'll see if I ever make it to season 2. Liam and Taliesin are both quieter; I don't really have a grip on what their characters are actually like. As players, they tend to be the ones who know the rules the best, but play low-key characters who kind of fade into the background a bit, or if they do do stuff, it's kind of metagamey pushing the game forward a bit here and there. Ashley's character is also a bit more on the quiet side, but Ashley herself comes across as quite likable, so there's that.

But they'll all have a chance to grow on me (or not, as the case might happen to be) because there's a lot more to watch. Whether I'll actually watch it all or not, I don't know.

I guess my point is, as a GM, I really appreciate a character like Travis'. From my perspective, he's the ideal roleplayer. He makes the game fun without turning it into an outright farce. He's got a sense for pacing and keeping the game moving, and when the rest of the group gets bogged down in debate or indecision, he's often the natural leader who takes them out of it. Not because of his character, who he plays as a pretty stereotypical dumb jock archetype, but because of the player just being that kind of guy. It's probably no wonder that when they organized into an actual corporation and started doing Critical Role really professionally that they chose him to be the CEO. He's got charismatic, natural leader written all over him, and you can see that just in the way that he plays the game. 

Laura doesn't really do that, but she's so into it all the time that it's hard not to find her enthusiasm for the game as kind of infectious, which makes her a desirable player type to have in one's group if you can have one. Liam and Taliesin are also solid. Honestly, I prefer smaller groups than 7-8 anyway, but you've got to admit that more characters equals more roleplaying opportunities for the kind of group that does them. Not saying that I'd ditch the others, but in an ideal world, I'd get maybe one or two more players, actually, and then divide them into two groups of 4-5. Like a Monday and a Wednesday night group who roleplayed in parallel in the same setting. Chris Perkins did that in the Io'mandra games he ran which he discussed in his DM Experience column when he was writing that, and I admit that I've found the concept intriguing ever since.

I admit, I like the use of that one track by Midnight Syndicate over and over again during combat. It's just unobtrusive enough to not get on your nerves, even with the constant repeats. And it's probably better than what I often do with movie soundtracks, which come in many themes, tones, moods and whatnot, not always what you want when gaming. I've gotten a little bit turned on to the RPG ambient sounds concept, by guys like Michael Ghelfi, but I haven't actually used them in a game. (Yet.)

UPDATE: Some of Keyleth's unlikableness appears to actually be in character, I've now discovered, as some character development has come out. Well... that's good, I suppose. It makes Marisha herself more likeable compared to what I'd previously interpreted. 

My biggest problem with Critical Role is how self-referential it is with regards to D&Disms. Everything is D&D jargon all the time, which is funny because clearly many of the players are new gamers and this is their first campaign. Yet more reason that I suggest an old school, rules-lite, narrative game which allowed for players to just describe natural things to do in naturalistic language rather than always and constantly referring to special abilities on their character sheet by jargon specific labels would have not only made the game itself better for most of the players, but it would have done so for most of the audience as well.

Iger

I've been saying two things for quite some time:

• The people who deign to call themselves our leaders are mediocre at best, and really quite stupid more often than not. Not to mention fragile and brittle in their self-regard, and thoroughly steeped in evil and hatred of normal, white, Christian, males. Or any two or three of those four traits.
• Kathleen Kennedy is a disaster, yes, but she isn't the real problem. Get rid of her, and you still have the entire woke edifice of Disney remaining. It's kind of like being completely ridden with cancer, but thinking that taking a benign skin tag off is going to fix something. And the person most responsible for that is Bob Iger.

Anyway, it's hardly a revolutionary or revelatory declaration to say that getting rid of Bob Iger would be better for Star Wars than getting rid of Kathleen Kennedy. Although few people are able to see past Kathleen Kennedy, I'm not the first or most clever or well-informed to have noted that Disney is just as bad as Lucasfilm, if not worse, so Kathleen Kennedy's replacement is unlikely to be much better than she's been. Of course, the reality is also two-fold: you have to get rid of both of them, and you also have to get rid of the toxins that they have bumped into the corporate structure of Disney and Lucasfilm while you're at it. And that's a bigger picture too; the reality is that almost every corporation is pretty toxic. Disney under Iger is a good candidate for worst and most evil corporation in the world, but Facebook and Google and Twitter give it serious competition.

Anyway, the so-called Dark Herald discusses some of the ramifications of Iger, his unlikely and unwanted rise, and signs of his long-overdue possible ouster.

https://arkhavencomics.com/2021/05/17/is-bob-iger-finally-out/

And randomly; another socio-political thought: If Trump is jailed as part of the ongoing Deep State witch hunt against him, all that the Deep State will have managed to do is to turn him into the white American version of Nelson Mandela.

And even more random; I've misheard the lyrics to Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" for years. If the internet is correct (ha!) then a section of the second verse says "hey, diddle-diddle, with your kitty in the middle." I've always heard that as hey diddy-diddy, put your titty in the middle." Granted, I don't know that either one of those lyrics makes more sense than the other, but it does make more sense that they'd actually play it on the radio if it is kitty instead of titty.