Is the bare minimum enough?

Posted on March 20, 2022 by JC

I have mentioned the Mike Judge film Office Space once before here when reviewing his film Idiocracy and I shall have to do a deeper dive into the film at some stage. Perhaps after the next time I watch it. For this post, I’m taking a memorable scene to work into a religious angle. The scene involving an employee requirement to wear bits of “flair” in a restaurant is posted below for context.

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The Importance of the Scouring

Posted on March 13, 2022 by JC

Homeward Bound by Alan Lee

I have recently re-read the The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time in a decade — this time to my son who had really enjoyed The Hobbit. When getting to the end I was reminded of a brief post Vox Day wrote about The Scouring of the Shire, which is the final major event of the novel. When I first read it many years ago, I found it a surprising turn of events but I didn’t give it much thought beyond that. In re-reading there is certainly foreshadowing with Sam’s vision in the Mirror of Galadriel and in smaller ways such as with Merry and Pippin’s happy discovery of halfling pipe-weed in the ruins of Isengard.

Vox says it is “a minor flaw, but it is a flaw nevertheless”, and suggests this is an early example of message fiction through Tolkien’s famously luddite-lite views on the modern world. Having had this in mind on re-reading, I disagree and consider it an important and logical end to the events though I do allow that one could argue the time-frame in which Saruman could have accomplished all this was perhaps implausibly brief.

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Microsoft has bought husks

Posted on February 27, 2022 by JC

Last month Microsoft announced it had purchased Activision Blizzard, one of the largest publishers in in the video game industry. This came after a number of high-profile purchases over the last few years including Bethesda in 2020 and a number of smaller development studios. I didn’t initially comment on this as it was worth waiting and getting a few details first. And one of the advantages of having few readers is there is little pressure to respond to the news cycle. 

Microsoft has been involved in video games for a long time with DOS and then Windows becoming dominant in the personal computer market — the latter still being the main focus for PC gaming. They moved into the console market just over twenty years ago and the financial investment they put in immediately put them right in the competition though the original Xbox sold relatively poorly compared to Sony’s PlayStation 2; their main competitor. 

They became far more successful with the Xbox 360 which was released in 2005 and remained on the market until the Xbox One was released eight years later. The Xbox One had a terrible start but did become successful though selling roughly half as well as the PlayStation 4. They are now on their fourth home console with the Xbox Series X (also continuing their confusing choice of names). It is too early to predict where this next generation will go — especially with the continued shortages of available units but the Xbox brand will at the very least, retain a significant place. 

I haven’t mentioned Nintendo which has been there the whole time though not considered a direct competitor. The Nintendo Switch is still by far the most dominant home console though whether this continues is hard to say as Nintendo has seen more than a few rises and falls in close to forty years of involvement in the home console market. 

One more aspect before getting to the main purpose of this post, is to point out that both Microsoft and Sony have noticeably began bringing their brands to the PC market. The Xbox brand is integrated into Windows 10 and most of the games and services are available on PC as well as console. Sony is slowly doing the same with many major games coming to PC though the console releases remain the priority. These moves suggest the brands may move truly beyond the consoles themselves and become services available on a variety of different devices in the long-term. 

For now, Microsoft’s moves to acquire so many studios suggests it is trying to address a major weakness of the brand and that is the lack of exclusive titles available to the system.  

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The Gamma According to Trollope

Posted on February 22, 2022 by JC

Having just finished reading The Warden and Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope, I wanted to write something about them as I loved them and Trollope is now on my ever growing list of authors I regret not reading earlier. I had a number of ideas for topics to such as to what extent the events of this novel (unintentionally) support priestly celibacy or a general commentary on moral crusaders and their crusades chiefly drawing from The Warden. Instead, I found myself coming back to a topic I’ve written about before and that is Vox Day’s Socio-Sexual Hierarchy (SSH).

This comes forth particularly in the character of Mr. Obadiah Slope, the main antagonist of Barchester Towers. I will quote extensively from Trollope as he writes better than I could ever hope to and add commentary and give context where necessary.

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A Review of The Hobbit Film Trilogy

Posted on February 12, 2022 by JC

I shared the excitement of many when it was announced that Peter Jackson would be returning to direct a film adaptation of The Hobbit. This excitement was somewhat muted learning it would be split into two films and was further subdued when it later became three. The Hobbit was a shorter work than any one of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings and the writing was also far less dense. That this could be stretched into three films even including further elements found in Tolkien’s canon, was hard to believe. When the first part, An Unexpected Journey was released in the cinema, I went to see it and came away underwhelmed. It covered only a tiny portion of the book and many scenes were overly long or surprisingly underdone. My opinion at the time was that it was being artificially dragged out and I didn’t bother to see the next two in the cinema or home media until this year — almost a decade later.

I had tried to re-watch the first and then watch the sequels a number of times but never got far. I couldn’t even bring myself to watch a fan edit that brought the three films together into one as it should always have been. What brought me to finally sit down and watch them through? An amusing Twitter account. What else would?

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The Historical Fiction of Robert E. Howard

Posted on January 25, 2022 by JC

This is a continuation of my journey through the works of Robert E. Howard. A journey that began with an interest in reading the stories of Conan the Cimmerian and led me to his other great tales. I have written previously about Conan, Solomon Kane and most recently about Kull of Atlantis in the middle of last year. Now having recently finished Sword Woman and Other Historical Adventures which is from the same outstanding Del Rey published series in which I read Kull and Solomon Kane, I have more to write. I’ve also began slowly going through the Conan stories again and plan to write more at length in the future as despite my increasing knowledge of Howard’s excellent oeuvre,  Conan remains by far, my favourite character.

I did not like the cover but the illustrations within are much better.

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A Review of Modern Japanese Short Stories

Posted on January 12, 2022 by JC


Modern Japanese Short Stories edited by Ivan Morris, Tuttle Publishing,
August 1st, 2019 (first published in 1962)

Modern Japanese Short Stories is a collection by twenty five Japanese authors with stories published from early to middle of the twentieth century. It was originally published in 1962 and the edition I have was published in 2019. The first thing to observe is that these aren’t modern in the literal sense but represent the Japanese modern literary movement in its various forms. If you are familiar with literary jargon, we are (last I checked), in the post-modern or maybe even post-post-modern period now. Although there may be some little read academic publication that claims otherwise. I don’t know and I frankly have little patience with modern (in the literal sense), literary criticism or at least what I’ve read of it.

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Believing in Science

Posted on January 7, 2022 by JC

The rhetorical phrase, “I believe in science” or “I trust the science” and other variations has been with us for a while but has become especially common of late for reasons that aren’t hard to guess, and which I have dwelt on before. In the same post I wrote about the way much of the population has been easily manipulated into believing they’re intelligent or virtuous merely for adopting the promoted position on any given issue — including science. I can’t quite go back to the beginning of all this but it was common earlier in the century with the “new” atheists regarding evolution where anyone who departed from the science was considered… unevolved at best. One didn’t need to know the first thing about evolution or biology in general to join in the mockery of people who questioned it.

Now this rhetoric has shifted to the realm of medical science and most notably in defense of multinational pharmaceutical companies with extremely lucrative government contracts around the world; as well as legal immunity from prosecution for any adverse affects from the therapeutics they’re administering. I don’t believe anyone questions the factual accuracy of the last (perhaps overlong) sentence though the people who place their faith in science wouldn’t phrase it quite as I have. Nonetheless, the legal immunity alone should send any morally sane person’s eyebrows upwards at the very least. Indeed, not long ago the same sort of people now treating vaccines as a religious sacrament were very critical of the same companies and their often shady practices.

The purpose of this post isn’t really to dwell on this so much as the very concept of “believing in science.”

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The Games of 2021

Posted on December 31, 2021 by JC

This is a continuation of what I did last year, where I offer a brief review of the new games I played this year. For many reasons, the last two years have seemed to blur together and the quality of new games released has contributed to that in a small way. I did end up playing a few more games from last year including Ghost of Tsushima which was exactly what I assumed it would be — yet another open-world game only distinguishable by its setting.

One observation I will make about the new games I played this year is that we have now reached a point where publishers have all but normalised releasing games first and finishing them later. The idea of “games as a service” has been around for a while but it is really getting into a swing now. The real warning signs are that Nintendo — a company with a reputation for quality, is now doing it with major releases now too. We’ll start with these.

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The True Lies of True Lies

Posted on December 24, 2021 by JC

I would usually make more effort in thinking of a title but there really isn’t a better way to discuss a film that reveals itself so openly. True Lies was released in 1994 which was seven years before the events of September 11th, 2001 when Islamic terrorism became the previous “new normal”. This film (and there were plenty of others) did much to pre-program the US population for what was to come. It is fair to note that this sort of terrorism was already happening in parts of the Middle East with hijackings and other acts pf violence but it hadn’t yet come directly to the United States as it would in the coming years.

Directed by James Cameron which I believe was his last film before Titanic gave his ego a very underserved boost. I will say as an aside here that I quickly went from liking to disliking Cameron’s films from Titanic onwards and it caused me to re-think what he had been doing in his films going back to The Terminator. To be clear, True Lies is a well-made and entertaining film in most respects. It is a blend of drama/action/comedy and appealed to a wide audience on release. What I want to look at here is not the quality of the film but the window it gives us into the US government and the nature of the world.

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