I see my friends getting all excited for the new season of Game of Thrones. It almost makes me wish for HBO. But as I’ve said before, I’ve read the books, and as I’ve said before, Martin has drawn heavily on the actual history of 15th-century England in creating his saga. Sure, most people with… Read More Game of Roses, or How George R.R. Martin Gave New Names to Historical Persons
I finally got the last two issues of Three today, and I am absorbing the boulder-to-the-face that is their finale. At the fifth issue, finality. That’s several pleasant layers of verisimilitude mixed with economy of storytelling. I’m saving it for next month’s post. Besides, I thought I might chime in on something that DC’s been doing that’s… Read More March Comic Book Post: Please Don’t Humanize the Comedian
I’ve really blogged enough about this show, but as long as it keeps sending me hits, I’ll continue registering my notice of comic FAIL. Blackmailer’s Don’t Shoot finally threw in the towel this season. It’s a world of smug 20 and 30-somethings whose self-regard vastly outweighs their accomplishments. Watch it to see what a glimpse… Read More How I Met Your Mother: a Consideration of Character Decline
The Hollywood Reporter offers the usual dead-horse cruelty: As a television event, this year’s Oscars was more like an endurance test — turgid, badly directed, poorly produced and featuring an endless string of tired or wince-inducing moments from host Ellen DeGeneres. To which one can only add, well, isn’t that what it always is? A… Read More The Oscars Were Boring, Just Like Every Other Year….
Lung disease, poor fellow. “I quit smoking 30 yrs ago. Not soon enough. I have COPD. Grandpa says, quit now!! LLAP,” the living legend tweeted, adding his signature abbreviation for the half-Vulcan’s “live long and prosper” motto. Now, COPD is bad, but it’s not lung cancer. My grandfather’s had emphysema, a form of COPD, for years. He’s… Read More Leonard Nimoy is Sick. Prepare for Nerd Agony.
It doesn’t take much to interpret Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s untimely death of what’s looking increasingly like a heroin overdose as an unconscious leap into the void. When I first read the accounts, I was struck by two facts: Hoffman had been clean, or so he said, for 23 years before last year. The brand of… Read More Why Celebrities Kill Themselves
This was supposed to be January’s Post, but I didn’t get around to it. There will be a February post as well…sometime in April, the way things are going. I’ve been meaning to address this scene, from Issue #2 of The Star Wars, but I was waiting for it to get addressed. I’m waiting for Annikin… Read More January Comic Book Post: The 70’s Punching You Right in the Face
Strategy Games For Change | Bit Creature. There is no better way to understand an historical period than by putting yourself in the center of it. The best way to understand the Middle Ages is therefore to play Crusader Kings II. And that’s what I’m going to tell my wife the next time it keeps… Read More Crusader Kings II Gets the Middle Ages
Matt Yglesias asks an interesting question: “If Elves, Hobbits, and Men can interbreed in Middle-Earth, aren’t they the same species?” I’m not sure if the ability to breed entirely defines a species (as Yglesias mentions, we interbred with Neanderthals, and I still think they’re classified separately, though some say otherwise), but I’d call it a… Read More On the Question of Human-Hobbit Interbreeding
I was done with you, you old dead grump. Yes, I liked the Hitchhiker series in my early adolescence. Early adolescence is the right time for silly stories finding the funny side of planetary extinction and philosophical fail. A send-up of the whole sci-fi genre was long overdue, and Douglass supplied them in witty style. The… Read More Geek Heresy Episode 2: Damn You, Douglas Adams.
Content Blues 