Compromise and Conceit
Infernal adventuring…
recent posts
- Did Stalin’s Purge of the Generals Really Hinder the Soviet War Effort?
- Vassily Grossman’s Noisy post-Soviet Interlopers
- Putting the Third Wave of anti-Trans Panic in its Historical Perspective
- The Bone Temple: A Clockwork Orange with zombies (without zombies)
- Shadows of the Firstcome: Unwelcome visitors
about
Category: Reviews
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I never thought that I would find myself In bed amongst the stones The columns are all men Begging to crush me No shapes sail on the dark deep lakes And no flags wave me home In the caves All cats are gray In the caves The textures coat my skin In the death cell…
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The death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of death’s kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way. On the 23rd January Ursula le Guin died at the age of 88, leaving behind a legacy…
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The internet is all abuzz at the moment with the proud news that a men’s rights activist (MRA) has produced a woman-free version of Star Wars’ The Last Jedi, based on a low-fi cam recording from a cinema somewhere in Asia. The stated reason is to (amongst other things) cut out all the scenes which…
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There’s a moment in Netflix’s The Mist that I think summarizes the rot at the core of modern American TV and cinema. The main characters are Eve and Kevin Copeland, a preposterously young couple with a teenage child, who seem like a nice enough couple though they are struggling with the conflict between Eve and…
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Two days ago I wrote a scathing review of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and since then I have been digging around for others’ views on the matter. The Guardian has an article giving some fans’ reviews, and the below the line comments are suitably critical of this awful movie. Meanwhile Vox has a pathetic,…
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Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens with Po Dameron pushing a ridiculous and unbelievable plan that gets a lot of people killed, and ends with him walking away a hero. He should have been killed in the middle of this movie as a consquence of a whole chain of reckless and stupid decisions but somehow…
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I am up to session 6 of a short campaign using Mutant:Year Zero, a post-apocalyptic RPG from the Free League, a Swedish mob whose games I had never heard of before I stumbled on Mutant. This game is apparently 30 years old – I’m playing the 30 year anniversary edition – and I guess it…
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Imagine if you will an anime set in the immediate aftermath of World War 2 about a man called Mr. Stonewell, a former soldier from Unit 731 who has returned to Japan and is having difficulty fitting in. He bears a terrible secret about the involvement of senior military figures in the murder of many…
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Dunkirk is not a war movie. It’s a movie about staying alive in the places between the world, a kinder of Stranger Things set in the strange space between France and England. This is why there are a million reviews comparing it to Brexit (or saying it has nothing to do with Brexit). Of course…
Compromise and Conceit 