Author/ editor/ game designer/ indie publisher/ music lover/ hypercreative malcontent/ ecstatic pedant of loving fury. (he/him/they/them)
5,494 followers 6,916 following 6,190 posts
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Slash salaries, lay off hundreds of thousands of workers, cut all social safety nets, allow medical insurance companies to charge whatever they want and limit coverage as much as desired, remove all public-health research, ban all gun laws, and then wonder why folks don't wanna have kids.
Yep. He has openly admitted to everything he has done before he did it. One of many reasons for us to abandon mainstream American "news" is their abject refusal to hammer that point home, in service to their corporate owners.
She had her chance. SEVERAL chances. Instead, she was "concerned."
Thanks! Enjoy yours, too.
Because his Reichstag fire attempts haven't sparked, and the American people haven't given his Gestapo excuses to fire into crowds and slaughter opposition, so now he needs a war in order to assume full power, cancel elections, declare martial law, and distract us further from the Epstein files.
Because his Reichstag fire attempts haven't sparked, and the American people haven't given his Gestapo excuses to fire into crowds and slaughter opposition, so now he needs a war in order to assume full power, cancel elections, declare martial law, and distract us further from the Epstein files.
Cool. Sorry. That's why I asked. Nazis co-opted the "OK" sign as a white-power flex, and certain leftists accuse anyone who questions them in any way of being a Nazi/MAGAt/whatever. Thank you for clarifying, and I apologize for presuming. www.adl.org/resources/ha...
Are you calling me a white supremacist? Because it's not that I agree with these fuckers - I'm just answering your question: Section 2: The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy... and of the Militia of the several States constitution.congress.gov/constitution...
If Biden had "disappeared" amidst a cloud of suspicious physical ailments, every media venue in the country would be howling.
Also apparently not afraid of shooting his own nuts off. Of course, he'd first have to find them...
Also apparently not afraid of shooting his own nuts off.
"'State's rights' applies to only one thing, motherfuckers. And that's your right to oppress people you don't like. Unless, of course, those folks are God-fearin' Evangelical het white Christians. Limiting them in any way is tyranny."
If I didn't know the answer, I'd wonder how the hell working-class Americans ever believed this lifelong enemy of workers everywhere was somehow "the champion of the American working man." The answer, of course, is "racism and misogyny." And also, "TV."
If I didn't know the answer, I'd wonder how the hell working-class Americans ever believed this lifelong enemy of workers was somehow their champion. The answer, of course, is "racism and misogyny." And also, "TV."
Article 2 declares the president to be the ultimate authority over state militias.
Because he wants an excuse to lock down "blue" cities and declare himself emperor for whatever life he has left.
Every single US city needs to do this, and enforce it.
As a metaphor, this is about as accurate as it gets. 😂🤣😂🤣😂🤣👇
The good doctor has quite a few of those lightbulb/smack moments on his blog. I highly recommend it even though... hell, often BECAUSE... many folks might find his observations uncomfortable. medium.com/@drleocroft/... medium.com/@drleocroft/... medium.com/@drleocroft/...
My friend, thank you for writing these rhetorical hammer-blows of yours, and thanks also for name-checking me in this one.
Imagine being those cops and thinking you're anything other than a walking bag of shit.
Perched here waiting for the inevitable "Bhut Teh Nazis Wur So-shul-ists Too" comments to arrive...
Too many Americans think they're goddamned action heroes.
@drleocroft.bsky.social drops uncomfortable truths about the entitled behavior that gutted Clinton's presidential run and still kneecaps a significant proportion of white American "progressives" today: "Unchecked whiteness doesn’t just trip you. It drags you down..." medium.com/@drleocroft/...
Yeah, I love him. Kind of a cross between a young Henry Rollins and a wood chipper.
("Man, I said "like" a lot in the comment above. That's what happens when you post shit at 6:30 am.)
#31 These prompts provides me with daily reflections into my creative process and the progress of the creations themselves. Thanks! You can find the first chapter of The Forever Bridge for sale on my Patreon: www.patreon.com/posts/foreve... #booksky #FantasyIndiesAugust #writesky #amwriting #WIP
You can tell, often easily, the difference between satire by people who know and love or at least understand the material they're satirizing (like, say, GalaxyQuest) and satire by people who don't understand or respect it (the [Whatever] Movie franchise).
So, yeah - you understood what we meant. Thank you for that. 💜
*laughs* Oh, the right-wing WoD "fans" REALLY do not like it when we're like, "Did you even fucking READ the stuff we wrote?" They're like, "The SJWs ruined our World of Darkness." Motherfuckers, we were ALWAYS "SJWs." Anyone who thinks differently wasn't paying attention.
Thanks! It's dismaying to realize how much like a satirical game from the 1990s our real world has become. I mean, we always knew we were addressing IRL issues in our creations; the extent to which those issues have manifested since then... sucks. satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/t...
#30 Snippets from The Forever Bridge (left) and Not the Final Girl (right). Enjoy! #booksky #FantasyIndiesAugust #writesky #amwriting #WIP
Yep. I don't know if you've seen my blog, but I've written a few essays about that subject over there. satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2017/01/24/t... satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/t... satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2023/03/19/b...
I really appreciate the insightful threads you've been posting about it. We wanted Mage to be a game that inspires folks to think and then act in the real world away from the table afterwards. You are. Thank you!
Hola! Thanks for enjoying our work. 💜
The opening chapter of The Book of the Fallen features a Nephandus describing just how horrifying "good guy" mages are when you look at them from the perspective of someone who isn't one of them; the next chapter details how Nephandi corrupt other mages by encouraging their worst tendencies.
Yep. The M20 sourcebook How Do You DO That? has a sizable sidebar about how influence spells override consent and can, depending on how they're used, become rape. "But isn't that better than killing them?" Well...
Thank you. And yep - as I note in Mage 20's introduction, even the best of mages are monsters.
Apparently, she recorded the entire main vocal track in one take. www.musicradar.com/artists/she-...
Bluebeard's Bride, by Whitney Beltrán, Marissa Kelly, and Sarah Richardson The 1st editions of Wraith: The Oblivion and Vampire: The Dark Ages, by Jennifer Hartshorn/@editorjen.bsky.social Afterlife, by Elizabeth Chaipraditkul, Danielle Lauzon, and Steffie de Vaan/@steffiedevaan.bsky.social
Imagine the pathetic level of hatred and cowardice in the heart of someone who would work this hard and spend this much money to be this petty and spiteful this publicly.
"...all the damn vampires!"
It would also clear things up in the pantry. I usually buy rice in 25-pound bags (which cost just five or six bucks more than 10-pound bags for the same brand), trying up room on the pantry floor with a snap-closed bin that could be used to hold something else.
Oh, neat! I recall seeing Gamera vs. Barugon on public access in 1977, though I recall very little about it, as that was almost 50 years ago.
Thank you! I'll need to check that one out. Sounds cool!
(In my S&S tale "The Forever Bridge," the narrator admits occasionally that she's embellishing events. At one point, she even stops, breaks character, and is like, "I'm sorry, but here I have to be honest about what really happened," implying that much of the tale's veracity is up for grabs.)
Gods, yes. Besides, a more accurate way of explaining it would be, "The bard wrote it down wrong." If I recall correctly, they even DID use that explanation a few times in the show... a show framed as Gabrielle's portrayal of events long after they happened, anyway.
It's also a bleak, slow, grimy and grim-spirited exploration of a man who receives magnificent gifts and yet fucks up almost everything he touches because he's a pretty, vain, selfish coward. That's all absolutely intentional, and it's artistically valid, but kind of a slog to watch.
As for The Green Knight, it's a mixed bag. GREAT atmosphere, a deep sense of magic and mystery, a gritty aesthetic more common to European and Japanese fantasy than to American or Chinese fantasy media, strong performances, and an uncommon understanding of mysticism and avant garde art.
That remark reminds me of people who think "magic" means, "just makes stuff up - you can do anything." So much terrible F/SF/H media gets created by people who neither respect nor understand what those genres mean, how they work, why they appeal to people, or what their fans get out of them.
And having a "fictional" setting means you have to take it MORE seriously, not LESS. Not to mention that part where a significant part of your audience - like its creator - knows that "imaginary" setting backwards and forwards, with very strong feelings about how it's supposed to be presented.
Thank you. Honestly, given my feelings about Tasha's writing "skills" I'm not sure she has anything to say that I'd want to hear. Seeing someone do so many basic things so badly, so often, while getting paid so much to do them, feels like a slap in the face to me.
(Do not EVEN get me started about her decision to turn Abigaile Ortiz into a petty raging Bridezilla. That choice was completely wrong for the character and added a weird strain of misogyny into a Tomb Raider series written - like the survivor trilogy games - by a writer who's a woman herself.)
Her depiction of PTSD boils down to "and now Lara's a total bitch to her friends." Even the PTSD element was off because Lara sorts out a lot of her shit over the course of Shadow of the Tomb Raider; coming to terms with the Croft family legacy and trauma of the first TR game is LITERALLY THE PLOT.
This doesn't surprise me. I felt annoyed by her Lara Croft animated series, too. She writes infodump dialog that's so on-the-nose it gives you a sinus infection, and didn't understand Lara at all. The show takes place after the survivor trilogy while missing all the character growth between games.
TS&TS feels grim, weighty, gritty and sweaty, yet paradoxically seems more epic and sinister than the brightly lit Conan and Red Sonja films. The director and production crew had to get creative, and they did. I just rewatched the film last week, and it still stands up. The sword's the worst part.
...the low budget forced the team to get creative. Tight shots, lots of smoke, dim lighting with clashing colors, and a cast taking the assignment seriously despite a production budget closer to a local Renaissance festival than to a movie. Richard Moll is especially good, but nobody phones it in.
Exactly. A few weeks ago, I'd cited The Sword & the Sorcerer as my favorite S&S film because aside from the stupid three-bladed shooting-sword thing, the filmmakers just GET the genre better than any other creative team I've seen tackle it. It FEELS like sword & sorcery, in part because...
Also, MAJOR writing fuckup: Sonja doesn't kill any of the big bads. While I liked the film's subversion of the hoary "final battle" trope, Red Sonja's story team went to the opposite extreme, robbing her of agency by leaving her victory in other characters' hands.
Yeah, that woo-woo nature goddess annoyed me. Nature is implacable. Again, Fargeat understands that. Miazaki got it too, in Princess Mononoke, and Boorman in Excalibur. Did you see The Green Knight? That film's atmosphere is what a great S&S film needs. youtu.be/sS6ksY8xWCY?...
Because Nazi.
>Anisia tells Draygan she stabbed Sonja through the heart Both Andi and were like, "THAT'S NOT HER HEART!" Arg. And the dialog in general was abhorrent. Writing 101 stuff. I feel professionally insulted to see people get paid that well to write that badly.
Fargeat gives zero fucks what anyone else thinks she should or should not do, and the wild success of The Substance buys her the ability to not. She's become one of my all-time favorite filmmakers because she combines stylish beauty with dark humor, emotional authenticity and audacious grotesquerie.
Exactly. That's the sort of sword & Sorcery movie Coralie Fargeat would make. Which I would love to see. And we probably won't. Dammit.
Yep. I noted that too, and felt annoyed about that. Andi can attest that I cursed the screenwriter through the whole damn film.
Momoa isn't a great ACTOR, but he made a great CONAN. And he was really into it, so he modeled his portrayal on a combination of Howard's stories, Frazetta's paintings, and the Marvel comics. Which is pretty much petty much perfect. And the filmmakers blew it. I'm still mad at them for that.
I got a laugh out of it. I'm still waiting for someone to make a Conan film that's actually GOOD, and remain irrationally angry that the makers of the 2011 version threw away a chance to have a far better actor (one who LOVES Conan and gave a book-accurate portrayal) take up that mantle from Arnie.
She's not really enslaved in the film. Taken into captivity to become a gladiator, but that's it, and she's an adult an already a badass by then.
Sheehan is quite good. Like Lutz, he pulled a vivid performance out of a terrible script. Villains are usually the weak links in this sort of film (Robert Moll in The Sword and the Sorcerer being probably the biggest exception), and that's not the case in Red Sonja.
True. It IS a good film. Just a very bleak one.
Like I noted elsewhere, I would LOVE to see Lutz reunited with her Revenge partner Coralie Fargeat for Red Sonja's (apparently never gonna happen now, dammit) sequel. Fargeat would drench the film in so much stylish sex and gore that hardened GOT fans would be like "WTF did I just watch?
In a way, it's not cheesy ENOUGH. Like I noted earlier, there are three scenes I suspect they made more gruesome so as to get an R rating; the rest of it, though, is about on the level of an average Xena episode. Not even on the level of The Witcher or Game of Thrones.
Yep. I really wanted to shake both the director and the screenwriter for taking so many good-to-great ingredients and making such weak soup with them. It's worth seeing for a few bucks, mostly for Lutz, good production design, and a cast that puts effort into making the movie better than it is.
...lacked the cathartic ass-kicking that comes with a defiant antihero wrecking the fuck out of antagonistic forces even if that antihero (as with Elric and [-SPOILER-] Mistborn) dies at the end. Poor Tzod and her companions are just doomed ragdolls, and that took much of the fun out of it for me.
Thank you! Saw it, liked it but didn't love it, largely because Tzod is a victim of circumstances who becomes the pawn of forces beyond her control. (Red Sonja has a similar problem but she's far more proactive than Tzod.) The Spine of Night got the tone right (to a dour, gruesome degree), but...
One of the most frustrating things in the movie is that the antagonists are more "tragic antiheroes who fell victim to their obsessions" than "sadistic born-evil nya-ha-haas." It's a good idea, and the actors bring that quality to their portrayals... and then bad direction and awful dialog kill it.
Sorta. The villain is a magi-tech guy who uses steampunkish gadgets to tear down the natural world. Kind of a cross between Lady Eboshi, Saruman, Lex Luthor and Elon Musk. I think that was a strong creative choice and it's among the film's better elements.
Sword & sorcery is innately chthonic ("relating to the underworld, death, and fertility"). It's wet dream nightmare fuel. It's not SUPPOSED to be "realistic." Horror, sex, violence, mystery, death, liminal spaces, ancient secrets - it's dark, damp, and thoroughly disreputable. Goth in a loincloth.
Red Sonja's worth seeing for its best qualities, while bearing in mind that it is neither a good film nor an endearingly bad one like Beastmaster, The Sword and the Sorcerer, or the Schwarzenegger Conan films (which, I'm sorry, but they're fucking terrible movies redeemed by sheer elan).
A vital aspect of "new edge" sword & sorcery (for which Xena may be the progenitor and guiding influence) involves retaining that erotic quality while removing much of the colonial, racist and misogynist aspect of the genre's origins. Helping libidinous fantasy appeal across ethnic and gender lines.
Exactly. As with guns, knives and injuries, armor in action media is set dressing that does whatever the plot requires it to do. And complaining about sexualization in sword & sorcery misses the point. The entire genre, regardless of gender, is one big kink fest. It's erotic by nature.
About Red Sonja, Revenge, or The Substance?
Although it's not stated explicitly, Revenge visually implies that Jen dies and is resurrected by the spirit of the earth, as an instrument of both her own revenge and the wrath of the Mother upon the man who betray and violate both the woman and the land. The Red Sonja sequence echoes that scene.
...a genderqueer manifestation of Mitra rather than the usual masculine "Hyborian Jesus" portrayal favored in most other Conan media. Intentionally or otherwise, the movie echoed a subtext in Lutz's breakout film, Revenge. (Trailer and film serious CW territory.) youtu.be/LppUjf1PmLs?...
One of the film's many welcome changes to Red Sonja "canon" (changes which, I think, began in the comics with @gailsimone.bsky.social's work) involved going from "SA survivor blessed by Mitra" to "genocide survivor blessed by the Earth Mother." Even in the 1970s, though, the comics favored...
I always loved Xena. Fuck Hercules, especially now that Sorbo is a grotesque MAGAt hack.
nathanieljohnstone.bandcamp.com/track/snuggl...
Lutz definitely doesn't need to worry about looking weak. A big reason I knew she'd ace this role is because she can absolutely sell the idea that this lean pretty woman can fucking kill the shit out of you.
Unfortunately, the bits can't save the whole. Though it's hardly a howling fiasco like Fire & Ice or Sorcereress (or, for that matter, the Red Sonja from the 1980s), Matilda Lutz deserves a better vehicle than this. Maybe she can convince Coralie Fargeat to shoot the sequel. That would RULE.
...showed how a fast, skilled knife fighter could disable armored opponents by going for the joints, hamstringing opponents, and stabbing their faces and throats once they're on the ground - a welcome break from the usual "stab and slash through plate armor" trope that unfortunately returns later.
Definitely some good bits. The forest battle and the arena sequence show what the rest of the movie could have been. There's a clever nod to Lutz's role in Revenge, echoes of Princess Mononoke, and I rather liked the magi-tech vs nature-warrior theme. One especially good fight scene...
It lands slightly better in the movie. But yeah - either respect the genre or go batshit over the top. I just rewatched the first Deathstalker and The Sword & the Sorcerer, and despite all their flaws they go all-in balls-out and thus suit their genre better than either Red Sonja or any Conan film.
If and when someone finally manages to treat sword & sorcery material with Game of Thrones gravitas and LOTR energy, we may finally get a film worthy of that genre's legacy. Not for lack of trying, this one ain't it. Lutz is good, though. And so are much of the supporting cast. So close, yet...
Dammit. Dear Blue Sky: We can haz edit function plz?
While I didn't find Red Sonja as infuriating as the 2011 Conan (which squandered a beautifully feral performance from Jason Momoa, and a near-perfect opening sequence, by turning into a bad riff on The Mummy), it's disappointing to see yet another eager cast failed badly by the production team.
0 followers, 1 following. Go 'way, troll.
I rather liked the idea of a magi-tech Elon Musk-type antagonist as opposed to the usual big brute or Evil High Priest. Robert Sheegun made a game try at bringing spark and dimension to that role. Draygun is a cool counter to the usual cliches; again, though, the script and direction failed him.
