There were many things wrong with the awful slog that was the first Rings of Power episode. The pacing sucks. So very very much. The dialogue is just flat out bad, with almost all of it being cringe at best. I was bored. Flat out bored.

These people don’t understand Tolkien at all. No, not even a little. This has as much to do with Tolkien as Satanism has to do with Christianity.

Confused? Thinking that hyperbole?

Here’s three very curious facts The Rings of Power left out:

1. THEY DON’T EVEN MENTION THE VALAR. Who are they, you ask? They’re the major gods of Middle Earth. They’re literally what Valinor, the land of the Far West, is named for! The elves lived with them, in eternal blessedness. 

Until Morgoth, one of the most powerful of the Valar, was able to destroy the light of the trees.

Yes Tolkien fans I oversimplified a bit. Shut up. At  least I mentioned them!!! The Valar invited the elves to live with them.

2. THE NOLDOR AREN’T THE GOOD GUYS. Who are the Noldor? The elves who swore revenge upon Morgoth and left the light of Valinor. The Valar point blank told them not to go. Morgoth was entirely out of their league. The Noldor didn’t listen… and then committed genocide to get to Middle Earth. 

Yup.

The Kinslaying.

The Noldor slew an entire civilization of sea faring elves to get their ships. Now, some of them (Galadriel among them) went acrost the ice way up north. But they didn’t reject their brethren who did the killing.

And then they got their asses kicked.

For thousands of years.

Eventually the Valar stepped in and sunk half of Middle Earth in a war one could rightfully call apocalyptic. The Noldor were totally useless, by and large, just like the Valar predicted.

3. THE NOLDOR CANNOT GO BACK TO VALINOR. Nope. Flat out. When they left Valinor the Noldor were forever banned from the continent, and all attempts to get back put you on a magical island, asleep, until the end of the world. Sleepy time night night!

Removing these three things completely changes the point of Tolkien’s stories. “We resisted” is the dumbest thing they could have said. Fighting Morgoth was not like fighting Sauron at all. The Noldor were not going out for justice, but for revenge. They did heinous things and destroyed much as a consequence.

Oh, and like I said it’s a banal piece of shit. Totally boring, and with fanfic levels of writing.

Dear Incompetent Dumbass: Companies Have to Make Money!

 

This is a rant. If you cannot take rough and uncouth ways of handling a subject and you’re otherwise easily offended please: get the fuck off my blog. I don’t make a dime off of it. I don’t need you crying about hurt feelings. If somehow someone misses this memo… well… who’s that on?

Oh right. YOU.

The Verge are shills and we all knew it, but holy hell, I didn’t realize the Marxism had hurt their brainpans that much.

Yes, read the article. It’s stupid, but read it.

For those who care, Marxism is defined by me as the latest iteration of the weaponization of the masses by one group of elites against another. It doesn’t have to be fully conscious. Marxism is the last stage of  classical liberalism: having realized that the masses cannot make decisions that are in their own best interests, the elites try to put said masses in their back pocket and come to a new society, a utopia!

It always ends in squalor and death, both spiritual and physical.

Yes, always.

No, progressives,  your fantasies of representation and a fully tolerant society will never work. Ever. You wanna know why? Because you can’t stop the majority of people from wanting a common religion that isn’t class envy, the opposite sex, babies, good and evil, and a family unit free of political interference. The vast majority of people have these drives and simply cannot have it programmed out of them. Propaganda’s power is in making the masses feel that everyone else has stopped feeling these drives but them. You can trick them but you can’t change them. Screaming “YOU’RE A HATEFUL BIGOT IF YOU DON’T WANT STORIES ABOUT WHAT I AM TOLD BY PARTIES I SHOULDN’T TRUST MY SHOELACES WITH ARE MINORITIES” will not work long-term: those primal drives mentioned above are too strong. They’re not socially programmed. They’re not constructs. They will always win, opinion be damned.

Here’s a truth I bled for, and you can take it to the bank: life and what you think of it are not the same thing. And life, at its base, is about living long enough to fuck someone, make babies, keep them from dying, and then dying after helping make sure the next generation’s good to go. Oh, and others will suffer (sometimes meaninglessly) so you can do it. Sorry, folks, that’s the average life. Pretending that ain’t so is stupid.

Y’know what our current society has decided you need to do the above? Money! And by money I mean made up numbers we throw around in a fake world. Everyone agrees it’s real. God, it’s so stupid. But there you have it.

Now, without this made up stuff you can’t fuck, raise children, or do anything else.

That’s a fact for most of us.

And your thoughts on that process are quite irrelevant. So are mine.

So if you’re going to entertain others to make your money? You better hit the common denominators. Otherwise you lose money. And then you lose your business. And then you don’t eat.

To pretend Warner Bros. wasn’t losing money is a special level of stupid, not to mention the constant bleeding of CW. So when Zaslav took over he did something that ten years ago was considered smart, and it still is. He asked “Who’s actually paying for our stuff and what are they mostly watching?” Surprise! He went along with the major demographics, cause the primal purpose of a business is to make money, because killing each other for food turns out to be a really bad idea and money ain’t great but it’s better than that.

It’s really as simple as that. Sorry, there’s no Marxist bastardization of myth going on here. It’s Zaslav’s job to make money for the company, and he’s going after the lowest common denominator. That’s smart. He should do that. 

Those who think I’m just a shill, like The Verge, have clearly never read this blog. 

And that’s entirely your problem.

Pattern Pattern Apocalypse: A Rant

 

This, this scene right here, should have gotten a loud cheer from the "conservative Christian" crowd, particularly the Catholic and Orthodox crowds. The above scene is a masterful climax to an epic space fantasy, where the value of the nature of life itself is affirmed. If you believe in the communion of saints this scene should have reduced you to fucking tears. Rey, an obvious reference to light, takes on a damningly obvious image of the soul as conceived by apostolic Christians. The soul, which is usually depicted as female, channels the light and goodness of the nature she shares with the world and with God, using this light to defeat evil, with a cross. Two seconds of ascetical reading should have made this image obvious. This image would not work with a man claiming to be all the Jedi. Because the human soul is female, not male; the soul, working properly, receives its light and life from God, and its this reception, in and of itself, that is salvific to itself and to others nearby. If there is one image in modern cinema that is Christian it is this one. This is Analogical Reading 101, it is blindingly basic.

Should I be shocked that the Right missed it???

No, I should not. 

But I am.

Because somehow, someway, using classical Christian imagery in an inventive way counts as SJW NONSENSE. Blind idiots!

The thing that really confuses me about conservative reads on the sequel trilogy is that, in theory, they have preserved the truths and tools from the past that would make this whole Skywalker Saga not just a simple tale, but a profoundly beautiful and hopeful one. Dead or alive, we all matter, one way or another. 

And honestly, if it wasn't for the absolute destruction of an actual spiritual sense in our culture, I think more people could see it. As Spengler puts it, we are in the Civilization phase of our society; we are all, by default, atheists at this point. Atheists do not see with the soul, they see with the mind. Which means that, if you're going to not be an atheist, you have to learn to turn your nous, the perceiving instrument of the soul, back on. The nous sees in repetitions, patterns, and sudden apocalypses that re-contextualize what came before, changing it irrevocably.

Oh, if you don't know, apocalypse originally referred to the moment in a Jewish wedding where the woman takes off her veil for her husband for the first time. The word essentially means "a sudden revelation that was only barely hinted at".

The nous (what us Americans call The Third Eye) sees life in terms of patterns and apocalypses.

So does the Skywalker Saga.

DEATH OF THE MENTOR

Pattern

Pattern 

Apocalypse

FACING THE FAILED FATHER FIGURE

Pattern

Pattern

Apocalypse

FACING THE DEATH OF A LOVED ONE

Pattern

Pattern

Apocalypse

Look folks, this is tiresome to me. I don’t enjoy being angry. I don’t find rage entertaining and try to avoid it as often as possible. I’ve avoided writing about Star Wars because I have gotten so annoyed with the popular reception of the sequels that I just don’t want to be bothered. I'm two decades ahead and I know it. And that annoys me. Knowing that in two decades people will have figured that the entirety of the Skywalker Saga is awesome does not make me feel superior, but lonely and inhumanely peeved. I can't just go with the flow, I have to put up with two decades of whining.

Yes, whining.

Yes, you're all acting like children.

Now, the thing is that you could tell me I'm supposed to act with patience about this situation. After all, children need that quite a bit, don't they? If I think you're acting like a child I should calmly and sweetly explain, over and over again, what it is you're missing and then let you put the rest of the puzzle pieces together. After all, that's what adults do, right? They help children grow up.

Whoever says that has clearly never had children. Children are narcissists on a good day and assholes on anything less, and it's frequently less. Yes, patience and niceness can help.... but usually I find you have to hold up the standard of behavior that you expect, let the kid know what it is, and then become as granite in the face of the oncoming storm.

So here's the deal, you supposed guardians of a culture that's been dead for at least a decade now:

The storytelling methods of The Skywalker Saga are the patterns of Western Civilization. Yes that includes the sequels. I get that the corporate buyout of Disney is the deathknell. Yup. I hear you. But the thing they completed? They actually did their job. And you know how I know that? Because I sat down and watched the hell out of all nine movies and think every last thing you'd want a Westerner to relearn to see is not just in these movies but it's the only spot where it's being done currently. This is your shot! You got nothing else! And irony of ironies, a corporation gave it to you!

So you can either sit down and look at the object objectively, without your bullshit lenses, or you can just whine. 

Like a child.

Oh, and progressives, don't think you're off the hook. I don't take your positions seriously enough to comment on them.

So take that as you like.

Harry Dresden: Stormfront

 Mild Spoilers Incoming!

I have been begged, commanded, threatened, etc. to read the Dresden files for the better part of ten years. 

"You sound like this guy!"

Ug, no thanks. I have to put up with myself as it is, why would I want to consume more grade-A shlock? Just because the very few folks who read this blog like it doesn't mean I don't question my own judgment for writing it and y'all's for reading it!

"I love the characters and I think you would too!"

Go away I'm busy. With... stuff.

"This is hilarious!"

... so what? I go straight for dark midnight and you want to pull me in on the promise of a good laugh?

Explanation is not defense.

Well, finally Morgan did exactly what you do when I put up that much resistance: she just bought the book and dropped it into my lap, telling me to shut the fuck up and read. I'm not sure why I don't take offense to such a direct action, but I don't.

I mean, you told me to shut the fuck up and read, Morgan, so who am I to say no?

Okay, yes I sound like this guy. Over the last ten years my roaring self-hatred has gone from apocalyptic level storms to a merely horrific hurricane, so I can think that maybe it's good to have a shadow of a compliment thrown my way? PROGRESS IS PROGRESS.

And yes, he's funny. Probably in a very similar (and tragic) way that folks think I'm funny.

The author can plot like nothing else. Jeez.

Alright, so one of the things that someone brought up was the.... constant fixation on sex that Dresden has. Now, granted, when that complaint was logged with me I rolled my eyes. I read and enjoy Wolfe, sweet summer child, the stuff in here is child's play. Absolute. Child's. Play. In comparison to Wolfe's treatment on sex and women in general. Bob bothers me, sure, but Dresden himself?  He screams trauma. Now, whether or not fiction could use more stories than recovering from trauma? That I don't know, but the simple fact of the matter is that most females reading this post were at least sexually harassed, if not assaulted, and male sexual harassment/assault is not usually reported, not directly.

We got semi(??) accurate numbers on one sex. We know we don't have accurate numbers on the other.

If you want good fiction you need honesty. Sorry, folks, it's the only way to really do it. You need craft too, but without that honesty something just isn't good. So if you have a whole bunch of folks writing about horny men who need women to keep them stable does that scream as a cliché, or that a lot of men in our first-world countries are in deep deep trouble and the few who care to talk about it choose fiction to do so? That the world most men are in is so against them that the only way they can grieve is by writing books about grieving, which then get construed as cliché?

Two young fish were swimming around. They bumped into an older fish who told them the water particularly fine that day. A few minutes later the younger fished turned to each other and asked: "What the hell is water?"

I'm going somewhere with this, folks hang in there.

See, the thing that fascinated me about Dresden the character in this book was his stubborn insistence on doing the best that he could with what he had, despite having clear preferences for the easier thing. It's a constant theme in this book: Dresden clearly wants to take the low route, but his memories of his mother, along with his father's strength, prevent him. Prevent. There isn't much of a choice throughout the book. Dresden just sorta gripes about how it would be so much freaking easier to just take the low road, and is bitter about how the one time he did take the high road all he's gotten for it is crap.

Bob aside, the through-line for Dresden is clear. He wants to objectify those around him and can't seem to bring himself to do it.  His descriptions of people are clearly those of someone who wants to reduce the world to flesh and concrete. And the few times he talks of his family it's quite clear why he's hesitating.

And then he comes to the house. Victor's house. Now, one of the things that folks do not seem to get is that lust is a cover-up for heartbreak. It is not a proclivity so much as A solution to the problem of a broken heart. Y'know what another one is?

Rage.

Folks will generally oscillate between these two, if they're in this particular framework. Notice I said oscillate, not one or the other. They're two poles of the same choice.

You picks your drugs and makes your choices, childrens!

Harry is constantly, constantly, constantly picking lust over rage. It's not a great choice, but he's picking what he thinks of as the lesser of two evils and all that. But there, at that house? Lust has been set as such a revolting choice that all Harry has left is his rage.

What follows is a beautiful moment of Mercy.  Harry gets a moment where, because he hadn't burned his previous bridges with his parents, his relationship with their memory saves his grumpy ass. 

It's awesome.

Victor Sell, on the other hand? He has not. He's destroyed his family, raped his wife over and over, and decided that power is the only thing that matters. You've spent the entire book in Harry's head as he has to grapple with this question... and it's not even a fight with Victor. Victor doesn't show up till the end because he made his choice a long time ago. And so he's literally consumed by symbols of rage. I mean, you can't get more elemental and primal than the images that Butcher picks here. It's amazing.

So yeah, I found this useful and fun. I'm on board!

HAPPY?????

The Iliad

 

This is one of the oldest books in the Western Canon. Most of us think we know it: Helen of Greece ran off with Paris of Troy, a war runs for ten years, and eventually the Trojan Horse happens and Troy falls in a rage of fire, pillage, and rape. All of this was because Paris had made the mistake of slighting Hera and Athena, who wanted their revenge against Paris. And apparently nobody thought to ask "Why the hell are we doing this?" Heck, for a lot of people it's a bit of chronological snobbery. "Look at those stupid ancients! Fighting a ten year war over a woman who clearly didn't want to stay with her husband!"

That. Is. Not. The Iliad. At all. 

The Iliad is not the ten year war. It is toward the end of the war. The humans are tired. They want to go home. A lot of people have died. And folks are just wanting it to be over. But the gods are not through. Hera and Athena are bound and determined to destroy Troy, to wreck that whole city to get back at Paris. The gods keep pushing and prodding the humans into greater and greater acts of violence.

And before you start scoffing at the stupid humans reacting to virtual gods.... go check Twitter. I mean, throw up in your mouth if you must, but go check Twitter. And then ask yourself how on earth some of those ragefests could possibly go on as they have?

"But Nathan," you may say. "That's humanity at its worst." And you're right, but that's not what Homer is showing. Homer shows something much worse. These heroes are doing what they're doing because they're at their best. Their virtues of loyalty, pride in country, courage in the face of  danger, are just as prone to being manipulated as their vices. And in so doing Homer makes a more chilling point: our virtues are actually easier to manipulate, because they are stronger. If someone can short-circuit your brain your virtues can keep you going on for a much longer time than your vices.

But even the idea that the gods' influence is inherently evil is... complicated. Because the ultimate "win" of the narrative, Achilles weeping with Priam, only comes about because Zeus tells Achilles to do so. Many of the moments of actual heroism and goodness that occur in The Iliad are because the gods intervened. So the whole "the gods are bad" is.... reductive. The gods are the gods. Whether you think they exist or not the group-think that they are shown to be doing in The Iliad is very real, and Homer's insight into how far and how long  it can be leveraged is nothing short of chilling.

The number one thing I did not expect is just the sheer anguish in The Iliad. People are killed brutally, explicitly, intimately, and cruelly. The pearl-clutching and "only focus on nice things" part of my brain (gotten from people who claim to want to preserver Western Civilization) spent over five hundred pages dying in the face of Homer's brutal onslaught. And Homer enjoys writing these deaths down, do not doubt it; there's a detail to the killings that speaks of obsession, of being unable to get it out of your head, and whether one likes to admit it or not that level of obsession is frequently pleasant.

But then Homer did something I didn't anticipate. He doesn't just kill people brutally; Homer give s a lot of them stories. And not just "Captain of the Guard" sorta stuff, but goes into sometimes long detail about where this particular corpse comes from. And how their family will miss them. And how nobody on the field of battle gives one solitary crap, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and now their tongue is on the other side of their head... along with all their brains. Most of The Iliad is about the ruination of family after family after family as fathers, sons, and husbands are brutally killed and looted. It actually gets numbing, how much death there is. 

And Homer doesn't skimp on the living, either. These are not simple characters, by any stretch. Even douche nozzles like Agamemnon have more than a few moments of sheer badassery and humanity.  I mean, you know someone has sympathy when they can find a good moment for Menelaus! The folks that are generally better human beings (like Odysseus) have more than a few moments of weakness, and everyone comes out... with a lot more nuance than I expected. This is easily one of the deepest and nuanced takes on characters I've ever read, especially considering just how large the core cast is, nevermind all the other stories Homer recounts!

That surprise is chronological snobbery on my part, by the way. I'll admit it, freely! It's so hard to look at the past with any amount of objectivity and appreciation in any day and age, but I can't help but feel the poison of our modern age in a particular way. Our demand for squeaky clean, moral characters, who gets over themselves and becomes more, all on their own, is not only not Western, but it's completely unChristian; all fall short of the glory of God. All. All. ALL. The ancients knew it. They embraced it.

Why don't we to this extent? Cause I guarantee you we don't. It's been mostly lost to us. George R.R. Martin plays at this level of sympathy, but even he comes up short. He's a lot closer to our canon than most people would like to imagine.

So why do conservatives try to sanitize our own heritage? Why do conservatives shy away from what made us great and insist on squeaky clean narratives where everything works out?? 

And call it conservatism? 

What, exactly, are conservatives trying to conserve?

And why do leftists not seem to understand they can't run away from it? No matter how hard they try?

The Force Awakens is Not A New Hope

So I've begun ranting and raving on my Facebook.May God have mercy on us all!

I Hate Everyone and Everything

So I was planning on just making a few addenda for my Star Wars Epic Review. Star Wars is a very, deeply, personal thing to me as it exists, Rise of Skywalker included. So it gets hard to watch as people just utterly... wreck the point. Rather than approaching it from the Campbellian framework that it exists in they prefer to see it as they would rather prefer to.

To be blunt, I find that silly. And immature. If you approach life on your terms you will never be happy, so I'm not sure why Star Wars is an exception to one of the hard and fast rules of living.

So, the thing is that, with the advent of the digital release of The Rise of Skywalker, I had the opportunity to just tack on my observations of The Rise of Skywalker, as if it was an appendix to The Last Jedi. And, given that The Last Jedi is one of my favorite movies, ever, it would be very easy to do that. But that wouldn't be approaching the series on its own terms, now would it?

So, I will start over, ALL over, from The Phantom Menace and up.

I do not relish putting my thoughts out there and seeing it have no impact on the Star Wars community, or few other people.

But my brain won't shut up.

And so therefore whoever wants to read this is going to have to put up with my temper tantrum of 25+ posts.

Risk Legacy: A Review

Let's get a few things out of the way, before I start roasting this game. Cause yes, I am about to hit it where it lives, as hard as I can.

I did enjoy myself.

I AM A TERRIBLE RISK PLAYER. NORMAL RISK AND I DO NOT GET ALONG.

This was my first Legacy game, ever. So I've no idea what this experience will do to my understanding of future Legacy games. I may look back on this more kindly in the future. We'll see.

It's important to know these things, because I am about to drop about a ton of bricks on this game. Yeah, I get the novelty of "adding things to the board" started here and we're all still living in the environment that the designer built (hopefully that ends with Oath) , but Risk Legacy is not a good narrative game.

 "Ok, wise-ass", someone who likes this game will say, "Define narrative!"

OK, sure.

A narrative is a sequence of events that each end with the statement "But" and/or "Therefore". Patrick Wilhem's amazing video boils it down and he's a quality dude to begin with, so if you wanna watch that and then get back to this rant/review I'd be more than happy to recommend it.

Yes, right now if you wish.

Back?

Cool.

So, by way of example, we'll take the Spider-Man origin story: Peter Parker is a cruelly abused nerd BUT he gets spider-powers THEREFORE he uses them for his own personal gain BUT his uncle is killed THEREFORE he chases down the sonabitch BUT discovers it's a dude he'd let get away with a crime THEREFORE Peter Parker realizes that he can never look away, never again THEREFORE Peter resolves to put himself in situations where he can't look away. That origin story is so good, on a structural level, that Spider-Man remains Marvel's best character, hands down.

Of course I'm objective about that. DUH.

The really heartbreaking part about Risk Legacy is that it actually manages to nail a narrative at the beginning. Stickers are flying, card bits are going into the trash, and there's so many But and Therefore statements happening because of the Legacy elements. Cities! Ooh! I can begin to muck with those! Wait, Ammo Shortage makes it harder to defend? CRAP! What now? What some think of as an addiction to just opening boxes is, I think, a reaction to powerful statements that fundamentally change everyone's relationship to the board state.

And for the first... ten or so sessions?

Maybe eleven?   

I was totally there, is the point.

So was my group. We would walk away from each game going "I have no freaking idea how we're going to deal with this now". We had been thrown back into the unknown, with a system that we had enough of an idea about to manipulate, but with elements that we could have some illusion of control over. And we would just blow up our group chat, every week, trying to figure out what we were going to do next.

Now, to be fair, a lot of real-world things happened in these last few sessions. But that's just not true anymore. The Legacy statements had mostly dried up, and I was left with a very, very unfortunate truth: Risk is still a bad game, nostalgia be damned. The same problems that I've always had with the game, namely how it seems to defy any and all attempts at actual strategy beyond slowly turtling along and for God's sake grab Australia had not vanished, but instead had become magnified. Risk's mechanics do not, natively, provide for But and Therefore statements, not in a way that respects player agency. The mechanics of battling would work out just fine if that was just one part of a holistic picture, where the wild and random nature of the dice fit into a larger mechanical picture. The Legacy mechanics provide for a fun and engaging distraction from Risk's battle mechanics, but there is nothing in the game that further engages with the wild nature of Risk's battling mechanics. Nothing. These additional mechanics are never developed further.

No, the stupid Event deck does not count. That thing was made for everyone's pain. Even when I benefited from it I found it dumb.

I can totally see enjoying this game for eight to ten sessions. There's a lot that gets unlocked, which keeps changing the board and the pace of the game, deepening it out and allowing you to take slightly different tacks. But the lack of depth on the Legacy mechanics, as well as the slowing of the drip of gaining new stuff, makes the end-game a ridiculous slog. If you don't mind Risk to begin with I can't recommend the game highly enough, because this game just takes that engine and tacks a few things on. But for folks like myself, who routinely considers burning his own dice?

Play eight to ten sessions and get out. You may not even last that long.