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: Nerd Culture

  • Darth Vader will not Occupy Wall Street

    I found this in the tumblr We are the 53%, your go-to page for people who vote against their own interests. Darth Vader and his stormtroopers are classic examples of people who voted against their own interests. You’re an exemplar for us all, Lord Vader!

  • Continuity in Arthurian History

    I’m fascinated with finding elements of culture that have resisted the force of culture, because I think that many societies retain a socio-cultural core that is resistant to mere events, and drives the society through massive cultural changes with its fundamental structure intact. I have tried applying this idea to east Asian history, and now…

  • Misogyny and Violence in the Chronicles of the Black Company

    In my reading of Glen Cook’s Chronicles of the Black Company I was, of course, confronted with scenes of violence and rapine such as one might expect of a company of mercenaries fighting on the side of an undead evil. However, I was also struck by the difference between the depiction of this aspect of…

  • Harry Potter: A Missed Opportunity for the RPG World?

    I recently watched the last of the Harry Potter movies,which was fun (and had a good dragon!), and thinking about it afterwards was struck by the absence of an RPG for this world. As far as I can tell, there is no official RPG. There are a lot of forum-based RPGs, but no apparent real…

  • Rioters Can’t Wargame

    Britain’s rioters have been returning Games Workshop products, it has emerged.

  • A Game of Thrones and the Misogyny of Imagined Worlds

    I have just finished the immensely enjoyable Game of Thrones TV series, which is a thoroughly excellent and engrossing viewing experience and a fine addition to the genre. I don’t really have any substantive criticisms to level against it, except that it was too short. Oh, and that it was awesomely misogynist, and this misogyny…

  • Retro Hobbies: Subbuteo

    In amongst the horror and carnage and corruption that is modern Western Europe, the Guardian has a quaint report on the table soccer game of Subbuteo, which apparently is still going strong and has its own fanatical retro-games following. The world final concludes tonight in Palermo, Sicily, and the report includes reminiscences on the popularity…

  • Let’s Read Tolkien Together!

    The latest nerdrage over the depiction of Dwarves in The Hobbit has really hit home to me something I often suspected about fanboys but never really paid much attention to: they don’t actually know much at all about the text they love. They’re much more interested in their personal, often (usually?) quite fantastic misinterpretations of…

  • The Eternal Dwarf

    There seems to be a lot of nerdrage going on at the moment about the new Hobbit movie, and the depiction of the Dwarves who form the bulk of the characters. The Dwarves actually seem pretty cool to me (you can see them here) and I particularly like Fili and Kili because they actually represent…

  • The Ongoing Rip-off that is Warhammer 3rd Edition?

    I recently received some new WFRP 3 products (Signs of Faith and the Creature vault), and was led to ponder whether I’m being massively ripped off. The proximate cause of this consideration was not, perhaps, very orthodox: both sourcebooks in the Signs of Faith boxed set contain largely flavour – that is, information on religion…