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: Movies

  • 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…

  • Watching the Diplomat: All Media is Fascist Now

    Out of a lack of good sense I started watching the new Netflix show The Diplomat, which is basically about a woman called Katherine Wylder who gets appointed US ambassador to London just as an enormous shitshow of international relations swamps the post. She gets entangled in this quite complex international conspiracy while trying to…

  • 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…

  • 28 Years Later: A bad zombie movie that doesn’t know what it’s doing

    Update [2025/12/28] I have written a short, freely-available novella exploring the world of 28 Years Later, building on my criticisms and observations from this review. If you appreciate my perspective on the movie, consider visiting Royal Road to read the story, and my other work there. I took time out of my busy weekend bludging…

  • The Substance: Misogynist Trash, Badly Done

    The other day I aimlessly chose a movie to watch at the local cinema, and settled on The Substance, which I somehow mistakenly thought was a psychological thriller with a fantastic or horror element. I don’t know where I got that idea from, but the poster certainly did not give away that it is a…

  • Post-poverty SF: Some Reflections on the Vast Inequality in the Star Wars Universe

    I have been playing Star Wars recently with my regular group, first using the Genesys rules and (since yesterday) using a port of the Coriolis rules, because we’re all sick of Genesys. The Star Wars universe is fun and, like D&D or Lord of the Rings, has that particular positive quality that you can settle…

  • Why Is Durin a Man?

    There has been a lot of racist backlash against the decision to cast some non-white characters in the new Lord of the Rings tv series. Tolkien fanboys and fascists (a not very distorted circle on a Venn diagram, it would appear) are very angry that a few new characters – some Harfoots, Durin’s wife, a…

  • Everything Everywhere All at Once is Trash pro-Family Propaganda

    Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAO) is a weird “absurdist” science-fiction in which a multiverse-hopping Michelle Yeoh attempts to deal with her family issues while saving the universe from destruction. It was released in 2022, gained plaudits at some random US film festival, and has been making a killing in its public release. It has…

  • Initial Reactions to the Rings of Power

    Having spent a lot of time writing about Tolkien and racism on here, and having watched fanboys consistently misread Tolkien’s novels in various ways to justify their racist and anti-semitic imagery, I was looking forward to the inevitable backlash at the new Amazon Prime show, the Rings of Power. Being a big Tolkien fan, I…

  • Understanding Trump’s Popularity Through the Lens of Tiger King

    I have just had a knee reconstruction and have spent the last 6 days wallowing in self-pity in a hospital bed in Tokyo, completing the last (I hope) uglinesses of three months of body horror (report to come). With little else to do I have resorted to Netflix, and of course I have watched Tiger…