Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Art

  • Stranger Things season 5: About Vecna’s vision for Will

    This post contains a huge spoiler for season 5 of Stranger Things, so here is a picture of an actual real life Demogorgon to fill up the screen, for those of you who haven’t seen this season yet. So, it turns out (as I guessed in the middle of Season 4) that Will Byers is…

  • Stranger Things season 5: Why is everyone so angry at each other?

    I was hoping season 5 of Stranger Things would be a tour de force, a final reckoning with Vecna in which the kids from the previous seasons defeat him, learn the truth about his origins and persistence, and ideally destroy the military organizations that gave birth to him. These guys have been fighting this pernicious…

  • War of the Worlds 2025 and the Co-option of Black Cultural Resistance

    This week I watched the new War of The Worlds so you don’t have to. The sacrifices I make for my reader(s)! I watched it because a) I was interested in whether it actually deserved the 0% rating it has received on Rotten Tomatoes and b) I am interested in all the variants of this…

  • Reflections on the collapse of cultural output in western youth

    When I lived in Sydney my kickboxing teacher was Mick Spinx, a master of Karate, Jin Wu Koon Kung Fu and kickboxing. Mick worked as a builders labourer, and spent the 1980s fighting in no-rules martial arts contests around Asia, before he retired, set up a part-time gym and established a builder’s business. He eventually…

  • The Sad Decline of the American Action Movie

      I have spent the last 4 weeks on a series of fairly demanding business trips to two continents, and since I am bound by the tyranny of miles to a single airline I have been forced to watch movies on only one channel during the flights. This has been really challenging because aside from…

  • John Wick is a Fey Champion

    There’s something otherworldly about the John Wick movies. Primarily a series of set pieces, with the story loosely connecting the parts together, they feel more like fairy tales than standard action stories, and that’s because they are: John Wick is a fey champion, and the world he moves in is not the human world, but…

  • Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth, a Fascinating Review of Tolkien’s Life and Work

    Last week I visited the Boolean Library in Oxford to see the Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth exhibition. This exhibition combines work from Tolkien’s estate, material from various museums, and published material to produce a detailed description of his life and the process of producing his seminal work, The Lord of the Rings. It includes…

  • Hollywood is Not Your Liberal Friend

    There’s a moment in Netflix’s The Mist that I think summarizes the rot at the core of modern American TV and cinema. The main characters are Eve and Kevin Copeland, a preposterously young couple with a teenage child, who seem like a nice enough couple though they are struggling with the conflict between Eve and…

  • How Wrong Were the Movie Critics: An Analysis of Rotten Tomatoes Data

    Two days ago I wrote a scathing review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and since then I have been digging around for others’ views on the matter. The Guardian has an article giving some fans’ reviews, and the below the line comments are suitably critical of this awful movie. Meanwhile Vox has a pathetic,…

  • Mucha’s Slav Epic: An Incredible Experience in Transformative Art

    Last week in Tokyo was Golden Week, the long week of public holidays that people traditionally use to travel. I stayed in Tokyo and chose to use one of the days to visit what I thought of as “the Mucha exhibition” at the National Art Center, Tokyo. This exhibition was timed to coincide with the…