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

  • Why I Can’t Enjoy American Football

    It’s that time of the year again, and the newspapers are full of reports about the Superbowl. Vox has been flooded with articles about why we hate the Patriots or why players keep getting bigger, and everyone is expected to have an opinion on this sport. Apparently this year’s effort was extra boring, and the…

  • Netflix’s Fyre Documentary: Not Quite Penetrating the Hype Around Fyre

    The new documentary Fyre, available on Netflix, describes the events surrounding the collapse of the infamous Fyre festival in 2017. The collapse of this festival gained worldwide notoriety because the festival was billed as a super luxury elite event full of models and influencers and famous people, which only the very rich could afford, but…

  • Operation Red Sea: Madcap Chinese Nationalist Slaughter Chaos

    I have just completed a three day trip to Chengdu, China, where I was visiting an NGO that provides HIV testing and counselling to men who have sex with men. There’s not much to report about the trip itself – the NGO is doing well and we came up with some interesting research opportunities, and…

  • The Latest Sokal Hoax

    And let me tell you something Before you go taking a walk in my world, …you better take a look at the real world Cause this ain’t no Mr. Rogers Neighborhood Can you say “feel like shit?” Yea maybe sometimes I do feel like shit I ain’t happy about it, but I’d rather feel like…

  • Avengers Infinity War: Bullying, Railroading Rubbish

    Avengers: Infinity War is essentially a terrible movie. It’s about an hour too long, it has too many characters and too many plot threads running at once, and most of the characters are either not introduced or barely introduced, get very little dialogue and don’t get any development. If you haven’t watched a long train…

  • The Old Gods and the New

    Recently after a week in London for work I took a trip back to the area of Britain where I grew up, in particular Wiltshire, where I spent a couple of years of my childhood. I think I lived there for about four years from the age of about 6 to about 11 (the details…

  • But unlike black women, centaurs do not exist: Revisiting the Tuvel Transracialism Controversy After a Year

    The New York Times reports on a sexual harassment scandal at New York University, with a bizarre twist: a lesbian feminist philosopher, Avitall Ronell, has been found guilty of sexual and physical harassment of a gay postgraduate student. As is typical of these cases, the graduate student waited until he got his PhD and a…

  • 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…

  • Three Documentaries About America’s Cultural Decline

    Recently I had the opportunity to watch three movies in quick succession: Solo, Death Wish and Pacific Rim: Uprising. Solo was kind of fun but overall these three movies were pretty ordinary, and none of them is really worth its own separate review. I thought I’d put reviews of all three in one post, as…

  • Wolf Warrior 2: You Will Never Cheer the Chinese People’s Liberation Army as Much as This

    Wolf Warrior 2 is an entertaining Chinese action movie set in Africa. It is the story of Leng Feng, a former special forces soldier in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army who lost his job after killing a corrupt gangster in China (in front of about 10,000 cops, natch), and ends up working in Africa, possibly…