Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
recent posts
- House Rules for Warhammer 4e: Reforming Combat
- The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire: The Tedious American-ness of Evil
- Analyzing the USA’s Masculine Insecurities Through UFC Freedom 250
- Is it Time for NASA to Retire Private Spaceflight Projects?
- Did Stalin’s Purge of the Generals Really Hinder the Soviet War Effort?
about
Category: Reviews
-
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…
-
Update [2023/12/6]: This is number 2 in a series of posts, and the original post in this series is getting a lot of attention, so I thought I’d link the entire series of posts together for those reading, so that they can follow the entire journey down memory lane. Here are the other posts: A…
-
While digging around in Amazon recently I stumbled on a cute 1-5 person card-based role-playing game called “Novice Novice Table Talk Role-playing game [steampunk]”, pictured here. In Japanese it is shortened to “Nobi Nobi TRPG”. The game is a simple and relaxed system in which every player (including the GM) picks a PC, and every…
-
Update[2023/12/6]: This post is getting a bit of attention, but it’s actually only the first of a series of posts exploring this topic. Here is the full list, which I will update as I write them, so that those interested in this journey down memory lane can follow me all the way to its grim…
-
I found Jock Serong’s novel Preservation through the pages of the sadly defunct magazine Great Ocean Quarterly, of which he is the editor. Great Ocean Quarterly is an Australian magazine about the sea that was published between 2013 and 2015, covering miscellanea about life around and in the sea, art and culture connected to the…
-
I have just finished reading The Buried: An Archaeology of the Egyptian Revolution, by Peter Hessler. I found this book because I stumbled on some tweets of his that suggested he actually had a nuanced view of China, which is highly unusual for a western journalist. He is a journalist working at the New Yorker,…
-
I just finished reading A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, an entertaining story about the collapse of a small American town by a local journalist, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling. It was a fun and engrossing tale with a lot of good points which I really enjoyed reading, but ultimately it failed to live up to its promise,…
-
America is currently Having a Moment, and various historical works have been identified as having predicted or foretold her Current Predicament, including Sinclair Lewis in his 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. Since I am interested in tracing the cultural and historical origins of the Present Unpleasantness – and since I have already made the…
-
I was very excited to discover Max Brooks, author of World War Z, has a new book out, Devolution: A Firsthand Account of The Rainier Sasquatch Massacre, and bought it as soon as it was released. It turns out to be excellent airplane reading (I went to Okinawa for a few days’ relaxation) and not…
-
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…
Compromise and Conceit 