Oh, You Just Reminded Me Of My Second-favorite Shakespeare Adaptation: Rupert Goold's 2010 Film Adaptation

Surprisingly often, to be honest.

You ever just... yell about #star trek the next generation??

To steal a quote, it’s called “girl power”, not “girl ethics”.

Do you think Col. Cassandra Moore effectively utilized Girl Power when she funneled an extrajudicial paramilitary mailman towards several nominally-hostile-but-perfectly-diplomatically-tractable factions in the Mojave Wasteland

As a fan of alternate histories of various stripes, there’s nothing more disappointing that a story that imagines a world where history went differently, but almost everything is still exactly the same. The whole point of the concept is to have fun extrapolating the changes. On the subject of Beatles-themed alternate histories, Ian R. Macleod, one of my favorite sf/f authors working today, wrote a novella back in 1992 called “Snodgrass” which imagined Lennon leaving the Beatles in 1962 over a fight with a studio executive, only to spend the rest of his life being haunted by the road he never took. It was eventually adapted as a short drama a few years back with Ian Hart as a bitter Lennon in his fifties.

Can a Beatles Fan Believe in ‘Yesterday’?

Our resident hardcore Beatleologist on why this fantasy about a Fab Four-less world should have fixed its holes

… there’s no attempt to have fun with the Twilight Zone possibilities. There’s no humor about the “butterfly effect” in erasing the Beatles from the world they changed. It’s a parallel universe where Coldplay and Neutral Milk Hotel exist without the Fabs, and where all the men have longish haircuts that would have been unthinkable before the mop tops came along. As British critic Dorian Lynskey noted, “‘A world without the Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse,’ says one character, in a film where a world without the Beatles is almost exactly the same.”

Yeah… I was about to make the argument that you can’t make a movie where everyone save one schlub “forgets”: the Beatles without re-imagining a musical climate in which the Beatles, arguably the biggest pop band of all time, nor their inevitable influence, never existed, but apparently this is too pedantic for Hollywood. 

I thought my parent’s cat Archie was really serious about his breadmaking, but this is a whole other level. (His brother Claude, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to knead that much.) Also, Bodhi is getting so big!!! <3

I remember back in the day when this blanket used to be mine…

I wonder where this one came from. I want to say from the Allied front in Murmansk/Arkhangelsk, but given logistics I imagine it was probably shipped in through the Black Sea to aid Denikin’s armies and got captured and shipped to Moscow later. Reminds me of a story I read in a book on the RCW where the Whites in the south lost something like 3 tanks because they weren’t secured properly at the docks and just slid into the sea.

Captured British tank Mk IV, in the service of the red Army, during the parade on red square.1920.

ME when I see wasted character arc potential

Incredible, but true: @coppermarigolds deserves to have a good day today.

In Nagle’s defense, Kill All Normies was going to the publishers just as Milo’s star was starting to fall. Personally, I found that Nagle’s discussion of combined with the events surrounding his fall from grace suggested to me that he was ultimately an unknowing “useful idiot” for two parties at once. More traditional conservatives (or at least the more utilitarian ones focused on campaign strategy) saw him as a way to drum up support from a younger, traditionally anti-conservative cohort and get them to vote Republican. Meanwhile, people with genuine racist, white supremacist, or hard-right views wanted to use him both to drum up support from a new younger demographic and to use him as a Trojan horse to inject “alt-right” arguments into the political mainstream. After the election and he had served his purpose, neither of these groups had any more use or fondness for him, so away he went. (I may be speaking beyond the evidence, but I feel like part of the mainstream conservative turn against Milo was due to the fact that, for all their many sins, conservatives actually didn’t want to let potential neo-Nazis into the Republican Party.) As for your main point, I sometimes feel that modern American leftism has a problem with knowing how to criticize but not knowing how to rule. Even in places where leftists are in positions of authority, there is still a tendency to see themselves as rebels pushing against a white patriarchal conservative Other, even when the Other in question is far smaller and less influential than they are. It leads to situations where people are fighting battles that have already been fought and won, or in attacking people rather than trying to persuade or cajole them. (These are very fragmentary thoughts that I haven’t put much concerted effort into articulating, so take everything in this last paragraph with a grain of salt.)

Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention of differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, it’s ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about its appeal. It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan, “It is forbidden to forbid” than it does anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right. – Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies

Thought it was a good idea to revisit this book. Even though it’s only a couple years old, some of it – the idea of Milo sustaining any sort of status or influence – seems quaint now, but this is what is most disorienting for older leftists. If the right is the underground, the cultural renegades, then we are its moral police, and we don’t do moral policing well. We lose too much by tightening the reigns and saying, “no, you can’t say this… you can’t THINK this.” I lived through the 90s version of political correctness (watch the movie PCU – I swear it’s documentary), and it was customary for even those on the far left to mock it. The left being any kind of moral majority is laughable. 

Most of what you've written jibes with my experience with B:I. All the Bioshock games had convoluted development histories, but B:I feels like there was never a clear idea as to what the game should ultimately be. (As an example, all those Vox weapons you find late in the game are the only surviving trace of a multiplayer mode the game was supposed to have.) Apparently it got so bad that after four and a half years in development, the publisher had to send in a producer to hammer the game into a playable form in six months to meet the final ship date. As for BaS...I only played the first one, and it felt weird, like a jerry-rigged version of B1′s combat manhandled into B:I’s mechanics, with a heavy emphasis on survival and stealth. As for plot, it does retcon a fair amount of detail from B1 while trying to pretend B2 never happened, and none of the changes are really for the better. I never played BaS2, which was even heavier on stealth, but what I’ve heard makes it sound like a scorched-earth epilogue to Infinite (and a fix-it fic for Daisy Fitzroy that just makes things worse).

Well, I just finished Bioshock Infinite. Some probably not very well-formed thoughts, plenty of spoilers, and a question for those who’ve played it, under the cut…

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Daily Kuvira #205

When there’s nothin’ else to do in prison. You might as well try some meditating.

She’s probably meditating along with one of the greats.