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: Reviews

  • Who’s afraid of long sentences?

    A short story of mine was just rejected by a SF/Fantasy magazine. Along with the usual form rejection I was lucky enough to receive some feedback, and one of their points was that my sentences are too long. Yes, they directly said that! I have always assumed that sentence length was a matter of style.…

  • The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire: The Tedious American-ness of Evil

    I have been reading The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Chris Kempshall, in hopes of learning something new about the sprawling creative failure that is the Star Wars universe. I think it’s going to be a Did Not Finish (DNF) for me, because it’s boring and completely unenlightening, but I thought I…

  • Analyzing the USA’s Masculine Insecurities Through UFC Freedom 250

    Here at the Faustusnotes Academy we’re big fans of the signifiers of elite culture, mixed martial arts (MMA) in particular, which means we have to bring all our analytical tools to work on UFC Freedom 250. That’s right folks, I watched this fascist slop so you don’t have to, and I’m going to give you…

  • Vassily Grossman’s Noisy post-Soviet Interlopers

    I have begun reading Vasily Grossman’s The People Immortal, his story of an encircled Soviet army formation written in the summer of 1942. Although it was his first novel from the war, I have only come to it after reading Stalingrad (originally published as For a Just Cause in 1952) and Life and Fate, which…

  • The Bone Temple: A Clockwork Orange with zombies (without zombies)

    This review is a little overdue because I had a bad sense that this movie was going to be bad, and I wanted to wait till it was on TV and I didn’t have to go through the same horrors and exertions as I went through for the first instalment of this duology. So, I…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Manchukuo 1987: High quality post-colonial SF detective noir

    I recently finished reading Manchukuo 1987, by a person known by the pseudonym Yoshimi Red on Twitter who blogs at lateral thinking. It’s in the Sci-Fi section in Amazon, and presented as an alternative history military sci-fi detective novel by Yoshimi themself, which I think is a good description. I think it’s self-published (sorry Yoshimi…

  • 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…