nesterov81

Latest Posts by nesterov81

Deathloop is a weird one because it takes place in "a possible future" of the Dishonored series. The game is set about 130 years after the first two games on an out-of-the-way island outpost that's been completely cut off from the rest of the world via time nonsense, and while there's enough incidental detail for a Dishonored fan to make the connection, Deathloop itself goes out of its way to avoid namedropping anything from the earlier games.

More games should do the Disco Elysium/Deathloop thing of pretending that they're in our world before gradually revealing that it's a constructed world that has fuck-all to do with our world

There's another Worm connection in No Man's Land with Poison Ivy. As the rest of Batman's rogues' gallery carve up Gotham, she ends staking out a derelict city park and caring for a bunch of kids who were orphaned or otherwise abandoned after the earthquake. Rather than rousting her out, Batman agrees to leave her alone for the time being, provided she uses her powers to generate produce for the rest of the surviving citizens to eat. While Ivy was less than pleased about having to go along with this, she still held up her end of the deal.

In his own discussion of Ivy's history on Twitter, Exalted_Speed has argued that No Man's Land is really where the interpretation of Ivy as an antihero (ahem) took root. The connection with Worm is obvious; however, Taylor's tenure as urban warlord feels like a more refined version of that concept. As noted in the thread, the attempts to turn Poison Ivy into an antihero often stumble on both the sheer amount of carnage she's caused over the years and on with her original characterization of "vicious plant-themed Catwoman" which is still a major element in her modern portrayals. By contrast, it's much easier to offer apologetics of Taylor's conduct on the Boardwalk, since she was explicitly written to fit the role that Pamela Isely was awkwardly retrofitted to play.

Got a Worm meta question for you. I'm starting on the early parts of Taylor's warlord era - I'm about to leap into Arc 13 - and the general concept of a ravaged American city being divided up by various supervillain groups is reminding me a lot of that Batman story arc No Man's Land from the late 1990s. Unfortunately my comics knowledge is rudimentary at best, and I haven't been able to any discussion comparing the two stories, so I was wondering if I could pick your brain on the subject. Was it just convergent evolution, or was Wildbow engaging with the Batman story in some way?

I myself have only read about half of No Man's Land- and several years ago to boot- so I've got limited ability to do a direct compare and contrast. No Man's Land is absolutely the sort of status-quo-shattering, history-book-making upset that, within Marvel and DC, nonetheless always inexplicably heals and loses salience until you can barely tell that it's still in continuity. Worm is heavily informed by Wildbow's irritation with that sort of thing, so I think it's totally reasonable to view the warlord era through the lens of "What if No Mans Land had no editorial escape hatch." Alternatively, I think it kind of makes sense to view it through the lens that it's working backwards from the premise of No Man's Land- In what kind of setting would it be plausible for the Federal Government to write off a sufficiently-damaged American City? In what context would the legal infrastructure have been established for that, in what context would that even fall within the Overton Window? What muddies my opinion on this is that the general concept of a ravaged, atmospherically-apocalyptic American city torn up by superpowered gang warfare is something that's kind of just been in the water in superhero comics since the mid-eighties at least, and it was a relatively common thing to see during the Dark Age- they were choice prey for all those overpouched musclemen with their poorly rendered firearms. I'd be surprised if Wildbow wasn't at least aware of No Man's Land, but it's definitely not the only cape book from the late 90s or early oughts where you could pick up that idea from. Ultimately this leaves me unsure if No Man's Land is the specific referent or if it's just part-and-parcel with trying to do an involved, thoughtful take on what cape comics were like at the time.

I think your best bet might be the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which has mountains of bibliographical entries for obscure and forgotten sff authors. The SF Encyclopedia is another good source, but that's more focused on SF in general rather than solely authors. There's also the SFE's sister work The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; it hasn't been seriously updated since the turn of the millennium, but if you're looking for an old fantasy author, you might get lucky.

the peril of reading old scifi/fantasy is i’m left trying to navigate author websites that were clearly hand coded in html 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since when i just want a nice neat list of all their books that they somehow don’t seem to have 😭

Oh, you just reminded me of my second-favorite Shakespeare adaptation: Rupert Goold's 2010 film adaptation of Macbeth, with Sir Patrick Stewart himself as Macbeth and Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth. It's based on a production Goold put on in 2007 with Stewart, and it sets the play in a nebulously-modern setting with a "subterranean Soviet" aesthetic. It's not quite what anon was looking for, but it's in the ballpark. Oh, and in this adaptation the witches take the guise of WWI-era war nurses.

Having seen the 1995 version of Richard III, I am now convinced that there needs to be an adaptation set in the dying days of tsarist Russia, if only for the red-white symbolism. Just like, the ostentation, the moral ambiguity/amorality of literally everyone involved, the end-of-an-era vibe, except the era definitely needs to end. Also, Elizabeth Woodville in a kokoshnik? Elizabeth Woodville in a kokoshnik.

DUDE YOUR MIND

The question I've been asking is why Sandra Newman decided to go with Julia instead of Winston Smith's ex-wife Katherine. Julia has the much bigger part in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I've come to find Katherine interesting precisely because her presence in the story is so minimal. Winston describes her as a conformist who just recites whatever doggerel the Party puts out, but the stridency of this depiction makes me wonder if Winston himself was engaging in his own little bit of historical revisionism and narrative framing. Additionally, while Katherine and Winston are still technically married, by the beginning of the novel they are for all intents and purposes separated, and IIRC Winston's narration makes it fairly clear she was the one who did the separating. Perhaps there's room there for a story of the contradictions, complexities, and compromises of a true believer.

What do we think of the feminist 1984 retelling? Am I being kneejerk eye-rolling for no reason?

To steal a quote, it’s called “girl power”, not “girl ethics”.

Do you think Col. Cassandra Moore effectively utilized Girl Power when she funneled an extrajudicial paramilitary mailman towards several nominally-hostile-but-perfectly-diplomatically-tractable factions in the Mojave Wasteland

TNG still had a fair number of godlike energy-based or “sufficiently advanced” beings outside of Q. Off the top of my head there’s the extradimensional god of the Edo, Nagilum, Kevin Uxbridge, and “Isabella”. Beyond TNG, I do think you’re right; there really weren’t any in DS9 outside of the Prophets, and VOY and ENT avoided the trope entirely. There are other ways the consolidation of the Trek universe under TNG changed the types of stories that were told. There was a recurring trope in TOS of fellow captains who suffered some sort of horrible tragedy and ended up going off the reservation in some way, and the only time that plot comes up in TNG is with Benjamin Maxwell and the Cardassians. @abigailnussbaum also made the point in her old TNG critique that as the show went on, the planets-of-the-week Picard and co. visited were increasingly worlds that had preexisting relations with the Federation rather than being new discoveries. While this didn’t really change the types of stories that were being told, it had the effect of making TNG more about maintaining the Federation than exploring strange new worlds.

One of Star Trek: The Next Generation's missions was to give coherence to a world originally developed as a frame for the one-off episodes – completely disconnected SF stories using the same stock cast and setting – of the original series.

There's an abortive first season plot about corruption in Starfleet that's dropped once it's established Starfleet isn't interesting enough to bear more weight than as a plot device telling the Enterprise where to go this week.

Something underappreciated as a success though is that the original series had scads of godlike but trickstery or inhuman beings because individual writers (the Trek franchises were famously full of episodes by published SF writers and continued to take freelance episode pitches well after this had been widely abandoned in TV) kept finding the notion of the Enterprise dealing with one a solid premise.

And in TNG we instead get Q, this type condensed into a single recurring character, introduced in the pilot, getting 6 episodes to himself and then blessing the finale, going on to appear in other Trek shows across multiple galactic quadrants (also, basically My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, as the John de Lancie-voiced season 2 big bad Discord)

I’m ashamed to admit that it was only after I finished watching the new Venture Brothers movie that I realized that Distributor Cap was a riff on the ‘66 version of Mr. Sparkplug.

Reading the wikipedia entries for minor Batman villains is like, “Mr. Sparkplug was introduced in 1969. He wore a rectangular costume that resembled a sparkplug, and had power to make electrical outlets stop working. After the Infinite Crisis event, he was reimagined as a serial killer with a fetish for electrostimulation. He had a cameo on Batman the Brave and the Bold where the Joker shoved him into a locker. In the New 52, the Riddler killed him and hung his costume over the mantlepiece as a trophy. He is now on the Suicide Squad.”

What happened? I haven’t been following the show, but I’m vaguely aware they did something with Spock in the latest episode.

Wtf, Strange New Worlds is making me hate Star Trek

Pour one out for all the stories you'll never find again, that you barely remember in totality, but that left an impression on you that you'll never forget.

The short stories from standardized tests that you only had a few minutes to read, but those minutes will last a lifetime.

The books on the library display shelf you used to occupy time until your mom could come pick you up from school.

The graphic novel you picked up when you were first getting into comics and could never find again.

The single lines or themes from stories you otherwise don't remember, save for the one thing that you saw and internalized as a new part of your personality.

Let's pour one out for the books that built us, even if we never could find them again, and couldn't of we wanted to.

Forgive my bluntness, but isn’t the Myers-Briggs system based off of a deeply simplified interpretation of Jungian psychology that mental health professionals (Jungian psychologists or otherwise) consider littler better than a horoscope? Are companies actually using the test as a way to judge candidates? (Mind you, we could probably say the same things about IQ tests.)

Study Myers-Briggs and learn to fake out the test to thinking you’re an “SP” or “SJ”, preferably extroverted type, depending upon the job that’s giving you a personality test. I suspect that lots of non-professional jobs and non-tech jobs are specifically weeding out people who would map to Myers Briggs NT or NF types, and using iNtuitive Thinker traits as a proxy for autism. Make sure you can fake the test out to your cisnormative personality type expected of your gender; that will be T if male and F if female. I highly suspect that iNtuitive (Thinker or Feeler, but especially Thinker in any retail setting) personality traits are being mapped to unemployable neurodivergence by employment related personality tests.

The important thing to remember about the Star Trek universe is that the formula for Coca-Cola was lost during the Eugenics Wars, while PepsiCo was forcibly nationalized in the 2050s by Colonel Green, who dismantled their bottling plants and had much of the workforce executed on the grounds that they produced, quote, “an impure beverage”. (RC Cola still exists in the 24th century, but nobody drinks it.)

The most unrealistic part of Star Trek Deep Space Nine is the idea that root beer is exceedingly popular. Root beer is gross and a hyper-advanced humanity isn't going to embarrass themselves by drinking that in front of the aliens

There was also the Tox Uthat, the MacGuffin from the third-season episode “Captain’s Holiday”, that could perform the same trick. No explanation is ever given as to how the device works, beyond the Treknobabble description of “quantum phase inhibitor”, so beyond “piece of alien technology from three centuries after TNG that works by Trek science rules”, there isn’t much room to speculate as to how it shuts down stellar fusion reactions.

In Star Trek Generations, the bad guys had a substance which could stop the fusion inside a star, making it collapse and produce a solar-system-obliterating shockwave. This is actually somewhat feasible compared to your average Star Trek science: for various reasons I don't think it could actually exist in the way it does in the movie, but you could conceive of a substance that acted as "fusion poison", producing more of itself when it collided with energetic hydrogen but was not itself able to be fused further. Even the bit about the shockwave was really plausible: it's pretty much exactly what happens in an actual core collapse supernova.

The one really unfeasible part was that it couldn't happen instantaneously like it did in the movie. Even in the core of starts, most hydrogen atom collisions don't result in fusion - they can't overcome the Coulomb barrier. If you introduced a self-replicating fusion poison into the core of the Sun, it would grow only very slowly, at least at first. You could imagine a fusion poison produced almost no notable effects for centuries or millennia, then maybe a one-lifetime period of noticeable effects, then the Sun went out and everyone died.

Which I actually think would be a better story. Suppose you knew that there was a fusion poison, but not exactly when the Sun would collapse, since astrophysical time scales are immense and imprecise. It's going to be in the next 10,000 years, but beyond that you're not certain. Would people try to escape the Solar System? What would life be look in an era of certain doom but highly-uncertain timing?

And in another parallel with Disco Elysium, Kathryn Janeway’s psyche is also composed of 24 self-aware archetypes, 18 of which are actively trying to drive her to destruction.

from what i can gather Disco Elysium is about this guy

“Now tell me which is better: three...or four? Three...or four.” “Three...or four.”

Do you see your little red house?

Ha ha ha, this thing. I actually read The Angel of the Revolution about a decade ago when I was in my steampunk phase. What I mostly remember about Angel is its gleeful Russophobia. The Terrorists see the autocracy and cruelty of the Russian Empire as the greatest threat to the free peoples of the world, and when Tsar Alexander III (remember, written in 1893) acquires a fleet of airships in his quest to dominate Europe, he becomes the ultimate enemy the Terrorists have to defeat. There’s a lot in this book that’s objectionable to modern eyes, but the one that sticks with me is a bit near the middle where the Terrorists are flying over St. Petersburg and just decide to blast Kronstadt off the face of the Earth on a whim. My memory is hazy, but I think there’s also an extended sequence in a hidden mountain plateau in Ethiopia where the Terrorists have their main base, and we sort veer into some late 19th century-vintage mysticism. There’s also a sequel, Olga Romanoff from 1894, which can also be read at Project Gutenberg over here. This one picks up in the year 2030, in a world that has been peacefully unified for generations under the patient stewardship of the Terrorists, who now call themselves “Aerians”, and their airships. However, the pax aeronautica is broken by the titular Olga Romanoff, descendant of the defeated Alexander III and a diabolical mesmerist, who aims to avenge Tsarist Russia’s defeat by allying with the forces of Islam and challenging the Aerians for control of the planet. Then in the end the Earth passes through a comet’s tail and everyone is killed by poison gas, but a few Aerians survive in underground shelters to reemerge and repopulate the world. So, yeah. To put it as nicely as possible, The Angel of the Revolution and Olga Romanoff are products of the culture and era that made them, and they do not transcend that culture and era. They’re not the sort of thing you’d read if you don’t have a scholarly interest in that particular form of British sf known as “scientific romances”. Perhaps the most interesting thing about them to a modern reader is that they put some of H.G. Wells’s own stories into context. Wells’s own The War in the Air (1908) in particular feels very much like a response to Griffith’s novels. (And wouldn’t you know it, The War in the Air is also available on Project Gutenberg right here!). While Wells’s novel has its own prejudices and blind spots as well, it undercuts the power fantasy of Griffith’s novels by showing both the horror of saturation bombing along with its inability to be decisive on its own, and the war just drags on until all industrial civilization is destroyed and humanity is driven back to subsistence farming.

I started reading a book called “The Angel of the Revolution” (free on Project Gutenberg), and it is so bad in the most fascinating way

It was written in 1893 by this guy named George Griffith, who was a lot like H. G. Wells, writing near-future science fiction that combined technological speculation, adventure, and a socialist message.  But Griffith is, more, uh … look, just let me summarize.

We’re ten years in the future – it’s 1903.  The central character is a nerdy 26-year-old dreamer who’s devoted his entire life to building a heavier-than-air flying machine.  His prospects are drying up, everyone’s making fun of him, but at last he succeeds in building a little scale-model airship that flies (he’s discovered a chemical reaction allowing for very light fuel).

By chance, he runs into an agent of a massively powerful worldwide conspiracy called “the Terrorists.”  They seem to be left-wing anarchists of some sort, and are said to have been behind the real-life Russian nihilist movement.  But their ideology itself is rarely talked about and only then in platitudes, while on nearly every page there is a loving authorial focus on their methods.

Their main form of activity seems to be arranging the killing of people they don’t like.  They have agents high up in all majors institutions, allowing them to routinely kill public figures and successfully cover up their deaths.  (They love pointing out that these are not “murders” so much as “executions,” because they are bringing bad people to justice.)  They have a centralized power structure organized in circles around a single leader.  Their members obey orders from their superiors without question, up to and including sacrificing their lives.  Snitches and other betrayers are promptly and efficiently killed:

“Every one of the cabs is fitted with a telephonic arrangement communicating with the roof. The driver has only to button the wire of the transmitter up inside his coat so that the transmitter itself lies near to his ear, and he can hear even a whisper inside the cab. […]”

“It’s a splendid system, I should think, for discovering the movements of your enemies,” said Arnold, not without an uncomfortable reflection on the fact that he was himself now completely in the power of this terrible organisation, which had keen eyes and ready hands in every capital of the civilised world. “But how do you guard against treachery? It is well known that all the Governments of Europe are spending money like water to unearth this mystery of the Terror. Surely all your men cannot be incorruptible.”

“Practically they are so. The very mystery which enshrouds all our actions makes them so. We have had a few traitors, of course; but as none of them has ever survived his treachery by twenty-four hours, a bribe has lost its attraction for the rest.”

In fact, they sound exactly like a one world government, and despite being a bunch of anarchists who want all governments to be destroyed, they revel in the control they’ve achieved.  Yet their chosen method of destroying all governments is this targeted murder campaign which is carefully made to look like the work of many diffuse and weak activist groups.  Rather than, you know, saying “hey we actually control you all, the jig’s up now,” or just undermining the works from the inside.

The important Terrorists all seem to be super-rich and lead opulent lifestyles.  Partially this is because they need to pretend to be normal powerful people, and super-rich leaders are used as an explanation for how the Terrorists got so much power, but it’s still treated in the narration as awesome sexy coolness rather than a necessary evil.

Everyone talks in bombastic, Romantic speeches, and the Terrorists – who supposedly hide themselves from the world with unbroken success – are constantly tripping over themselves to reveal their true identities and explain key facets of their grand plans.  This is to a kid they’ve only just met, whom they have no reason to trust, and whom they only care about because he’s built a tiny flying machine that they believe will scale up to military use (because he says so).

There is a lot of talk about “the coming war.”  Everyone has the (correct) sense that the Great Powers are gonna have a big dust-up one of these days.  Since a bloody conflagration is going to happen one way or the other, might as well have it in the Good way, the one that fully destroys “Society,” so it can be followed by, um, something:

After that, if the course to be determined on by the Terrorist Council failed to arrive at the results which it was designed to reach, the armies of Europe would fight their way through the greatest war that the world had ever seen, the Fates would once more decide in favour of the strongest battalions, the fittest would triumph, and a new era of military despotism would begin – perhaps neither much better nor much worse than the one it would succeed.

If, on the other hand, the plans of the Terrorists were successfully worked out to their logical conclusion, it would not be war only, but utter destruction that Society would have to face. And then with dissolution would come anarchy. The thrones of the world would be overthrown, the fabric of Society would be dissolved, commerce would come to an end, the structure that it had taken twenty centuries of the discipline of war and the patient toil of peace to build up, would crumble into ruins in a few short months, and then – well, after that no man could tell what would befall the remains of the human race that had survived the deluge. The means of destruction were at hand, and they would be used without mercy, but for the rest no man could speak.

Our protagonist worries for a sec about brutal extrajudicial murder, but handily remembers that violent people aren’t actually human, so it’s OK to kill them:

Colston spoke in a cold, passionless, merciless tone, just as a lawyer might speak of a criminal condemned to die by the ordinary process of the law, and as Arnold heard him he shuddered. But at the same time the picture in the Council-chamber came up before his mental vision, and he was forced to confess that men who could so far forget their manhood as to lash a helpless woman up to a triangle and flog her till her flesh was cut to ribbons, were no longer men but wild beasts, whose very existence was a crime.

In what I’ve read so far, not much has been said about the leader, except that his name is Natas, which you’ll note is “Satan” backwards.  Internet summaries tell me he has a mysterious power to control people’s minds, as if this all weren’t Code Geass enough already

There’s been more focus on his daughter, Natasha, the titular “Angel of the Revolution,” who is beautiful and enchanting and yeah I’m sure you can fill this part in even if I stop typing

Apparently the rest of the book is about the Terrorists building flying war machines and fighting a big war against everyone, which they eventually win, which somehow means that War Has Ended Forever

This has clarified some things I’ve noticed about earlier generations of geek culture but was never able to articulate. I’m an elder Millennial, so while I ended up coming of age in the more modern online fandoms of the 2000s, I was exposed to just enough of older fandom culture that the whole edifice feels like a lost civilization to me, glimpsed through the stacks of used bookstores, on archived webpages, even in the atmosphere of the only Worldcon I ever attended. What I wonder about, though, is what exactly happened to what you called “bouba” geekdom. Fantasy-oriented, intuitive, pagan (or perhaps Christian with a pagan gloss), the side of fandom you describe as “WASP femininity...by way of Tolkien and Disney”. I can connect the dots and chart out how “kiki” geekdom evolved into a bunch of new forms across the 2000s and 2010s, but it feels like “bouba” geekdom suffered an extinction event during that time and modern corporate pop-feminist fandom moved into its vacant niche. A while back @prokopetz discussed the subgenre of “romantic fantasy” and how it disappeared early in the new millennium, and from his description it sounds like romantic fantasy was a very “bouba” type of literature. Given the timing, I wonder if there’s some sort of connection here.

The two 90s Geek Genders were Pagan Fantasy Medieval and Atheist Techie Futurist

Ok so… hear me out. 

There was this weird thing - I won’t say it’s as clear as outright male vs female as much as kiki vs bouba. Kiki in this scenario is roughly masculinized (sharp edged and all) and bouba is roughly feminized (soft edged) but in practice it just wasn’t as clear as that.

I experienced geek culture as being *very* gendered, and what’s more is that there was a hidden set of class and culture assumptions undergirding which of those two groups you’d end up in. 

Pagan fantasy fan and techie atheist were the two ends of the spectrum in the 90s and it’s weird to realize that a lot of my trying to be pagan when I was in my teens/20s was because of this weird gendered shit and most of it was around this platonic female ideal of female geek. I was trying to perform a higher status female role in my own community; all the popular girls were slender white girls named Willow or Heather or Rowan, who were into musical theater and had long, wavy Disney Princess hair and soft hands with long tapered fingers. (Yes, this archetype is THAT SPECIFIC.)  They needed to communicate in ways that indicated that all of their answers came from pure intuition and dreams, extra points if they perform divination of some kind. They couldn’t ever be definitive or “left brained” in their personalities. It was very WASP Femininity only… geeky flavored. WASP by way of Tolkien and Disney instead of WASP by way of idealized domestic figures.  Most importantly, they were NOT Jewish. They did not have “Jewish hair.” They did not come up in Jewish households where argument is a love language. They were not loud and did not talk with their hands. They had beliefs about religion and mysticism couched hugely in Christian-style faith even if it was cloaked in pagan aesthetics, and this was upheld as an ideal to perform.  (And what’s more is that in “bouba” flavored geek culture, I have actually encountered a lot of casual anti-Semitism, in addition to the aforementioned social pressure to conform to a gentile female ideal. I’ve VERY SELDOM encountered ANYWHERE near the degree of casual anti-Semitism in “kiki” flavored geek culture.)  When I’m in spaces where “bouba” is the female ideal, it often feels like I went from there being one normie cis female ideal I couldn’t perform, to finding the same female ideal upheld in a lot of geek spaces and having it be even *harder* to perform. Which is a big reason why I hung out in corners of geek culture that more often were atheist computer types who liked hard sci fi. (The “kiki” nerds.) 

But another thing is that *class* is why I was never able to find a place in “bouba” geek culture.

“Bouba” geek culture participation - actual subculture membership beyond being a casual - actually requires participation in hobbies and habits that can become as expensive as, say, being into ski trips and vacations, and one’s status in that setting depends upon how much they’re able to buy in. “Bouba” geek culture is HEAVILY gentrified, and always has been.

“Cyberpunk/computer kid/harder sci fi fan” culture wasn’t as hard to access. If anything, being in those spaces *made* me money instead of *costing* me money.

I *wanted* to be part of many “bouba” geeky things but… I *couldn’t.* Even when I started making enough money to do it, suddenly, I just *didn’t have enough time.* You have to have whole weekends to spare. Once I started making the money, I was spending my free time going to tech conferences, trade shows, etc. The resentment just grew and grew.

I feel like some geek spaces have always been heavily gentrified in ways outsiders don’t parse in the way that people just Don’t See Class. It’s for that reason that I actually don’t support that being the dominant face-forward of geek culture the way it has become. 

“We aren’t classist. But you must afford xyz activities and have the free time to do them, to be one of us. Because of your gender.”

It was actually much easier to move in kiki space than bouba space.

My only knowledge of Promising Young Woman comes from Barbara McClay’s review of the movie on her personal Medium, and she makes the point that despite being billed as a throwback to rape-revenge flicks like Ms. 45, it’s far more reminiscent of something like Taxi Driver. There’s all this weird stuff about Cassie’s behavior that suggests that her quest is borne of the same sort of individual psychopathology that animated someone like Travis Bickle, but the movie isn’t willing to dig too deep into her or let her detonate the way Bickle did.

I’m still wrestling with what I think about Promising Young Woman, but it is weird in retrospect that the perpetrators she did the serious psych-outs on were the female bystanders as opposed to the male bar rapists. (This is an argument for more psych-outs, not less, to be clear.)

My guess would be the latter. Speaking as someone who has only seen the Villeneuve film, it feels like his version of the story preserves the basic beats and themes of the original novel, but pares down all the Herbertian weirdness that attracted Jodorowsky and Lynch to a bare vestigial minimum. FAUX EDIT: I just dug up an old article from last year discussing Jodo’s response to the first trailer from last September, and his reaction was about what you’d expect: technically very competent, but aesthetically very safe and predictable, the best you could hope for under the restrictions of industrial-corporate cinema.

I wonder how Jodorowsky feels right now. He said he’d been comforted by the previous Dune movie because if a director he admired as much as David Lynch failed, that meant it was okay that he had failed. Does he feel bad now, or like this version is different enough from his own that it’s not a comparison?

Kuvira thinking about crushing you like a bug

We live in a world where the film adaptation of The Hobbit is nine hours long and the film adaptation of The Dark Tower barely clears ninety minutes. Something has gone terribly wrong.

The X-Files is interesting in this context, since even though Mulder and Scully are our heroes and we love them, they are still FBI agents, actual official representatives of the greater American monoculture who are tasked with going to the backwaters and forgotten places and dealing with the strange and deviant for the good of the whole. To their credit, the people writing The X-Files recognized this, and there’s plenty of episodes where they depict their monsters-of-the-week with some sympathy, or handle Mulder and Scully’s incursions with a note of ambivalence.

Old tv shows where the hero visits the 'town of the week' and identifies then solves a unique problem before moving on are so weird to watch now. "Route 66" to "Touched by an Angel" and etc. Any town in North America that still actually has a unique local culture wouldn't be receptive to an outsider pushing their nose into the local affairs.

Who even still thinks of turning to a pack of kind-hearted outlaws when the bank comes to foreclose on their orphanage?

Tom Holt/K.J. Parker’s fantasy works do include some Byzantine names and allusions, but they tend to be rather mild. I think the Fencer trilogy (Colors in the Steel, Belly of the Bow, The Proof House) probably go the deepest into Byzantine allusions, with the first book being set in a massive Constantinople-like medieval city that is sacked by the end of the book. If you want to go the science-fiction route, Arkady Martine’s Teixcalaan books (currently just A Memory Called Empire and A Desolation Called Peace) rework the Byzantine Empire’s annexation of Armenia in the 11th century into a space opera setting.

Do you know of any (even halfway decent) fantasy set in a Byzantine setting? A Shadow and Bone set in Constantinople for example.

Sailing to Sarantium and its sequel Lord of Emperors, by Guy Gavriel Kay.

I wish all writers who haven’t been able to write in a long time bc of depression a very I love u and I promise u will write again

it’s the 21st day of the 21st year of the 21st century.

you can only reblog this today.

He likes his boxes.

He sat in this container like this for 20 minutes.

ME when I see wasted character arc potential

Isn’t this the final level of Hitman: Codename 47? Is there a mass grave full of dead bald guys in suits in back of this place?

GOOD EVENING

i just found the most fucked up property currently for sale in austria

THIS LOOKS NICE RIGHT JUST A BIG OLD HALL

CUTE RIGHT? NO. FUCK NO

I FEEL SO MUCH DREAD SEEING THIS HALLWAY

YOU WON`T LEAVE THIS ALIVE

IT HAS AN INDUSTRIAL KITCHEN AND BATHROOM IDK FOR WHAT BUT I HATE IT

THIS CUBE IS WHERE YOU GO TO DIE

like this is advertised as just a curious amazing thing with no explaination to what the fuck is going on or what THE ACTUAL FUCK HAPPENED IN THERE

but you can buy it for 99,000€. you might die looking at it but like. you can fucking try to get this

here is a link to the listing i guess. i hate this so much https://www.immowelt.at/expose/2b46g4c

And yes @dumnhpy​, that is indeed Charles Napier, who returned to Trek with the DS9 episode “Little Green Men” as Lt. Gen. Rex Denning.

What a difference twenty six (or negative twenty-two) years makes.

TOS costume design really said “men in thigh highs with tits out”