I’d never actually visited J.K. Rowling’s twitter page and so I was surprised to see that her entire page there is just transphobia. I thought there’d be a bunch of other stuff with transphobia sprinkled in between. But she’s posting like somebody with nothing else going on.

I heard somewhere that, supposedly, George Lucas is using his billions to make and screen films just for him and his buddies. Don’t know if that’s actually true, but that is how a person should use such an immense fortune (well, that and also funding public works, like building and staffing libraries and schools, and then using those schools to disseminate revolutionary thought). I can’t imagine how miserable Joanne must be, as a person, to post like that.

Why the children seem to be demonstrating against the mass murder of innocent civilians. Could I be so out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong. :Principal-Skinner:

Stephen King has just started spinning rapidly and even he doesn’t know why.

So for years I thought I just didn’t like anime as a form. All my friends watch anime. But I tried some of the more popular ones and didn’t like any of them. I tried Death Note, and Monster, and Dragon Ball Z. On Brandon Sanderson’s recommendation I tried Maria the Virgin Witch. I tried Attack on Titan. I watched some episodes of a random slice of life anime I’ve never been able to remember the name of. None of them were doing it for me.

Then I found the original GiTS movie. Then Standalone Complex, and the concluding SAC movie. I absolutely loved those. So I googled it to see where I could find more anime like these, and the result I found basically said “the feeble western mind only likes serial cop shows, so we made one and they flocked to it. But it wasn’t super popular in Japan so we’re not bothering to make more like it.” I might have that wrong, but the gist of it was there wasn’t anything else out there like SAC.

In the years since of course Netflix has begun releasing their own anime. Though I don’t know if it’s right to call them anime, really. I guess the look and the animation styles take a lot of cues from anime but as I understand it all those shows are written and created in the West, then they get Korean animation studios to actually make the shows. If that counts as anime then isn’t The Simpsons also anime? But you know, Castlevania, DOTA: Dragon’s Blood, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Blue-Eye Samurai.

All good shows, or at least I think so, but all written by Westerners aimed at Westerners. So even though I like those anime, or maybe anime-adjacent Western animation depending on how you look at it, I still feel like I don’t really like anime. Before those shows started being made the only anime I’d found that I’d liked was GiTS and the original Full-Metal Alchemist. Kinda interested in trying out older stuff like Bubblegum Crisis or Legend of the Galactic Heroes. And on paper I should like Berserk, though I haven’t tried it yet. Been meaning to read the manga and haven’t gotten around to it yet.

But I have been watching Delicious in Dungeon and really liking it.

I’m so torn on my excitement for Kingdom Come II. I’m just so ambivalent about the first game. On the one hand, for me and the things I value in a game, the first KCD is one of the best games I’ve ever played. I really think it’s fantastic. It’s like a better version of Oblivion. On the other hand, it’s a frat bro power fantasy glorifying brutal violence made by an outright racist studio. Or at least the lead writer made some posts on Twitter, years ago now, which in my memory were explicitly racist, misogynistic, and pro-gamergate.

It wouldn’t even be that hard to fix the main issues I have with the game. Feature more women with agency, some of whom find success within their ascribed gender roles and some who buck those roles. To its credit the game does a bit of the former, but not enough, and I’m not sure it’s balanced out by all the lascivious prostitutes and the three women who throw themselves at the main character for no reason. Next, the game takes place near Prague, a major city in medieval Europe. You could have all sorts of people traveling through who are something other than Bohemians. Jews, Arabs, Berbers, Ethiopians (this actually would be pretty unlikely, I think, but perhaps not impossible. An Ethiopian Pilgrim meets a Bohemian Pilgrim in the Holy Land and for some reason accompanies them back to Prague, something like that), Moors*, Mongols, assorted people from the Caucasus region, etc. It’d be so easy to take some stance other than the frankly insane “only white people ever set foot in these lands for all history.” And then the last real issue is how Henry is the son of a middle class tradesman, then is elevated to knighthood and riches among the gentry. The story does sort of justify this, and it isn’t impossible anyway given the time period, but still I’d rather the story featured a character already trained to fight, a professional soldier or something, and there should be more explicit commentary on the class system.

Of course since there seems to be a racist/misogynist attitude at Warhorse Studios they can’t do these things, or if they were to do them they’d likely be cynical about it.

*Is Moor explicitly a racist term? I always have assumed it meant the people resulting from the centuries of mixture between Arabs, Berbers, Iberians, and Visigoths in Al-Andalus, but now I’m not so sure.

Saw Alex Garland’s Civil War. Thought the complaints might be overblown. I was wrong. There were a few suspenseful scenes I liked, some moments where it reminded me of the film How I Live Now which I enjoyed. But from commentary I’ve seen from Garland himself, he wanted to pretend this was an indictment of both sides of the political aisle in America. But it wasn’t. When we finally get a look at the military that is fighting the illegal President, we see a multicultural infantry. And whenever we see people aligned with the President, who is obviously Donald Trump, we see Boogaloo Boys in Hawaiian shirts and other assorted white supremacists. This wasn’t a centrist “I hate the democrat far-left and the republican far-right” movie. This was a movie about liberal multiculturalists fighting against an explicitly white supremacist faction emboldened by Trump taking a third term and disbanding the FBI.

Which, it’s probably for the best that they kept it vague and didn’t worldbuild much, because what little we do get is so stupid. There’s a brief mention of “Maoist Portland.” There was something called the “Antifa Massacre.” I doubt there are enough Maoists in this country to fill up a convention center, let alone take over a major metro area. As mentioned above, there’s a scene where guys wearing Hawaiian shirts packing carbines fight an unidentified enemy, presumably the previously mentioned liberals. It doesn’t seem like Garland, when deciding to write this film, sat down and really studied post-WWII conflicts to really determine what war in ~2020s America would look like. I don’t really see the lessons learned from, like, Mosul, Ukraine, and Gaza reflected here. Instead seems like a guy who spends way too much time in Twitter and has a terminal case of Trump-brain made a movie about Jan 6th.

Also, as ever I do not believe there can be a civil war in 2020s America, or at least not one like in Civil War, where the liberal white moderate and the conservative white moderate fight each to the death over Donald Trump or race war or whatever. They’re both entirely too comfortable to fight a war, and have no real incentive to do so. The liberal white moderate is not so committed to pluralism that they’d actually sacrifice anything for it, let alone their lives or comfort. And I doubt most of the chuds would really be willing to sacrifice anything to bring about their visions of a white ethnostate. If there was a clear economic motive I could buy it, like the actual American civil war.

I used to find the dead internet theory pretty uncompelling. What does it matter if most Youtube comments are bots, who reads those anyway? But I didn’t really think that tech moguls would empower the bots to actively destroy actual useful parts of the internet.