The god of Black-and-White fallacies

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Thor Ragnarok poses a great example for the black-and-white fallacy. You might wonder what I'm talking about. What do logical fallacies and the construction of arguments have to do with that fun romp of a movie? Don't worry, I'll explain. 

Why Kylo Ren is the best Star Wars villain of all time

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I'm going to take the fully objective and uncontroversial stance here. I think Kylo Ren is the best villain of any Star Wars movie. You can't really argue with that, so I will kindly take you through this process so you can arrive at the same conclusion. A service of your Boiled Leather Audio Popculture.

Before we arrive at this conclusion, let us take a look at the contenders. 

My own experiences at gardening

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George R. R. Martin is famous for coining the terms "gardener" and "architect" to designate different approaches to storytelling (and also in some corners for the obscure fantasy saga "A Song of Ice and Fire"). I think these terms are just brillant, and rightfully reserve Martin the place in the pantheon of literature analysists that he has.

Game of Thrones Season 8 trailer analysis

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!  

 

The first trailer for Game of Thrones Season 8 dropped! It's THE FINAL SEASON (all in caps). So, naturally, it wants to be examined. Given the time-sensititive nature of this release, I'll do it today instead of in a week, so the next installment of these mini-essays (and, for only 1$ more, the audio version!) will come end of the month, before you're confused about the release schedule.

With that out of the way, into medias res! 

Movie reviews lightning round

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I used the winter vacations for follow up on a few movies I hadn't seen yet that I had on my to-do list for quite a while. So, here is my list with short reviews in a lightning round! Maybe you'll find inspiration as well. 

Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse review

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So, I went to the movies with my son and a friend of his (both six years old) and watched the new Spiderman movie. You know, the animated one. It got raving reviews, so I wanted to know whether it really is any good. And to take the major thing out of the way directly: oh boy yes, it's good. Like, really good. 

Blue curtains

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!

 

There is a common joke about literature teachers going like this.

Author writes: "The curtains were blue."

Lit teacher says: "This reflects on the generally depressed state of the protagonist."

Author meant: "The curtains were blue."

Ha ha ha. Drum rolls. 

Is it in the text?

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I remain consistently amazed by people who read "A Song of Ice and Fire" and clearly misunderstand the text. How can you, for example, read the saga and come away with the idea that Tywin is a role-model in how to govern or rule a family? The proofs for the opposite conclusion are right there in the text, and I could quote you a host of scenes in which is made entirely clear, from Tywin's stinking corpse to hill clans dying for "The Ned's" daughter. But PoorQuentyn is doing such a consistently good job with this that I'll let him earn the laurels for it. 

Why biopics suck even on the moon

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On the site "Birth Movies Death", there's an interesting review about the bioic "First Man", which covers Neill Armstrong's landing on the moon:

The other side of northern badassery

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There's a thought that come to me randomly thinking about the part of "A Dance with Dragons" in which the greybeards of several northern houses join up mainly (though not exclusively) with Stannis. In the text, we get the explanation that, with winter looming, they go on what essentially is a suicide mission to relieve their communities of useless mouths. Instead of doing it as literal suicide, as seems common in the North (disguised as "going hunting"), they use their death wish to "taste Bolton blood on my lips" (there's an image for you). 

The intricacies of expanded universes

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look! 

I thought about expanded universes a bit staring at a T-Shirt of my son's, featuring a tryptychon of a stormtrooper, Captain Phasma, Finn and Kylo Ren. Captain Phasma, I came to realize, is a bit of an oddity in the new canon. So, let's wind back a bit to 2015, where the only thing in existence was "The Force Awakens", just before additional material was released.

If you don't communicate your rules

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I like playing the X-COM games. In case you never heard of them, you're tasked with defeating an alien invasion that threatens the whole world, which has taken the sensible step of pooling all its resources into an organization that has around three squads of very good soldiers and can respond to exactly one crisis at a time because they have only one transport. When the aliens become stronger, your funds are cut. Exactly what you'd need to do in case of an invasion. It reminds one of the premise of Pacific Rim. 

 

Anyway, the games are round-based tactical strategy, which means you order around your squad on a tactical map where each soldier has certain actions he can perform and try to outsmart the aliens. Between missions, you research new tech and perform other more strategic tasks. It's good fun if you like that sort of thing. 

 

If you REALLY like that sort of thing, you install the "Long War" mod. It's a giant fan-made modification that blows up the length of your average campaign from the reasonable twenty-ish hours of the basegame to something around 80-120 hours. It also offers a wealth of new options in upgrades, skill trees, strategic choices, etc. And it's fiendishly difficult to boot. 

 

Now, you might say: "Stefan, don't be such a coward! Difficult games have their challenges, and I'm glad that there are games like this!" And sure, I can see that argument. But the Long War mod does have three problems that for me destroy what in theory I could really like. 

 

You will inevitably fail. This is ok, again, it's upposed to be difficult. The problem is that your failing happens around ten to thirty hours before you notice it. That means you can be forty hours into the game and only then realize that you fucked up thirty hours ago. 

 

The second problem ist that your failing comes in the form of a vicious cycle. One mistake, or simple bad luck, can start such a cycle that will lead you into an ever devolving drain of further failure with practically no chance to escape. That's bad. The same happens for the base game as well, but because that game doesn't suffer from problem number three, you usually notice your failing earlier and don't lose too much time. 

 

So, problem number three is the one I can't excuse. The other two you can file under "high difficulty", and if you like that, fine. The third, though, I don't accept. It's not communicating your rules clearly. 

 

The Long War mod does something quite a lot of more complex video games do (Paradox Interactive is another perpetrator here): it gives you a ton of interlocking systems that work quietely in the background that you can influence indirectly and which are HUGELY important. But the game doesn't explain to you how they work or how you can influence them OR THAT THEY'RE EVEN THERE. 

 

And that's not difficulty, that's just bad programming. You can essentially only play the Long War mod (or one of those Paradox monsters) when you open the fan-made Wiki in another window and permanently cross-reference it. Because it's not like that stuff would work randomly in the background, work as essentially a Fate putting down her weight on the scales of destiny. That's Darkest Dungeon, and you can do that, and it makes a game difficult, and that's ok. 

 

Long War and other games guilty of this sin simply outsource writing a good manual or tutorial to the community. And that's really, really not ok. 

 

And then, because these people hate you, there will be semi-regular updates that change whole features and variables, so you'd need to constantly start the learning process anew.

I'd really like to like Long War and other games like this. In theory, they're totally my thing. But Problem Number Three breaks them for me. Sorry.

How to detect Wonder Woman's villain in his first scene

 

This post comes out of a new series of writing I do on ASOIAF meta and other topics of popular culture over at the Patreon of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour. If you like to read stuff like this, chime in just 1$ and you get access to everything I write. If you throw in 2$, you even get access to mini-podcasts I'm doing with Sean T. Collins answering questions by listeners of the podcast. Give the Patreon a look!

 

I'm discussing the identity of the villain of Wonder Woman, so spoilers.

 

Back when I was was watching Wonder Woman with my wife for the first time and Sir Patrick came on screen for the first time, I said aloud "He's the bad guy." My wife, who had watched the movie in cinema, was incredulous. "How do you know?" Today, I want to share the magical powers of ruining a movie with you. 

Tomb Raider - Movie Review

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Tomb Raider recently came out on Blue Ray, and I watched it with my wife. I thought I'd share my two cents with you. Short version: Watchable. Long version: There are some really interesting conclusions to draw from this in two regards. One is basics of screenwriting and the second is the ever-present problem of adapting a video game to film. I guess this is the best video game adaption movie so far, but that's not been a high bar to clear yet. 

The height of Assassin's Creed

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I played all Assassin's Creed games up to "Black Flag". What I've read from the reviews so far, I didn't miss all that much from the games that came after. I don't want to talk about gameplay here (very repetitive and simple), but the story. The height of the series, in my book, were the ones with Ezio Morricone (Assassin's Creed 2, Brotherhood and Revelations), and especially the last of those, Revelations. 

The "problem" with the Golden Age of Television

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Time and place in ASOIAF

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George R. R. Martin is a prolific and excellent writer. One of the biggest problems he has to wrestle with are the constraints of time and place. He famously labored for years over the "Meereenese Knot", the question which character would arrive in Meereen at which point on time, the conclusion of which determined the whole solution to "A Dance with Dragons". Given that that solution took the last third of the novel, that is quite a tall order. 

Life is not a song

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„Life is not a song, sweetling. Some day you may learn that, to your sorrow.” – Peter Baelish

Littlefinger is right, of course. Life is definitely not a song. However, that statement comes in the Song of Ice and Fire, which makes this into an almost philosophical riddle. Life is not a song, but if you are a character in one and know that, can you use it to your advantage? Fourth-Wall breaking has a long tradition in literature, and Martin is no stranger to the concept. So, if life is a song after all – or, to quote Shakespeare, the world a stage and we all players – then who exactly is cognizant of this fact? 

The posthumous gendering of Frozen

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I don't know if this is a "Germany only" phenomenon, but I highly doubt it: in the last months, a ton of branded stuff of all stripes - shower gels, chocolate bars, caps, bed sheets, EVERYTHING - has hit all the stores. It always comes in two varieties: Star Wars for boys, Frozen for girls. So you get a black shower gel bottle with Yoda on it, and a pink one with Elza. You get the same damn toothpaste with Anna and with Kylo Ren. And so on and so forth. This isn't restricted to the usual merchandise shops, which is the weird thing about it, it's just about EVERYWHERE, and it's clearly gender-marketed. 

The problem with biopics

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I recently watched "Darkest Hour", the biopic about Winston Churchill in May 1940. I'm usually not a fan of biopics, which are oscar-bait at best and boring distortions at worst. "Darkest Hour" begins really strong, but it falters in the last third, falling victim to the problems it shares with many other biopics.