Der PigDog's PigBlog

Here is what happens to Odysseus: Right before the Trojan War, O and Penelope have a son, Telemachus. Penelope doesn't want O to go to war, and instead asks him to sail with her into the west. We learn that Zeus's Law is the golden rule, and binds a host's conduct to a guest, and vice versa. The penalty for breaking Zeus's Law is death or exile.  O makes a cunning plan to give the Trojans a gift, you know the one, which will violate Zeus's Law and defeat the Trojans. He tricks Eliot Page, who is on his side, because Eliot "needed to believe it", that the gift really is a gift. Eliot Page dies. Once O is inside the city, he lets Agamemnon and the Greeks into the city, and follows behind Agamemnon. The Greeks massacre the Trojans, including, especially, noncombatants and priests. O realizes he has broken Zeus's Law for everyone forever. He no longer wants to return home. He sees himself as a follower of Agamemnon, which makes him sick, and also as a sui ...

Watched those two movies this week. Never saw any of the Godzilla movies before. Damn this post would be better with pictures but it's low-effort late-night blogging and you get what you pay for. In Shin Godzilla, the monster just walks. People say this a couple times through the movie, and it's a great line, so it's worth repeating. The monster did all that... and it just walks. It doesn't want anything. It isn't angry and it doesn't hate you. It's not trying to hurt you. It just walks. That's a fantastic(al), alien portrayal of a monster. Monster as natural disaster. (Everybody else has already made the comparisons with the tsunami and nuclear incident, which is intentional, but none of the reviews on wikipedia talk about how the monster just walks.) (Ok it smacks people and shoots lasers when somebody is attacking it, but that barely counts.) Still from Shin Godzilla; the monster's first form, adorkable! I love how fishy it looks The monster is to...

The first half anyway. As is usual in these superhero movies, it gets worse the longer you think about it. 3/5. Sorry folks, this review is lower quality than you might be used to getting from this blog, it's been a long day.  The film lacks thematic unity; its first half sets up really interesting, incisive questions, and then the back half ignores them in favor of yet another "destroy a cgi city with little or no actual human cost" drearily familiar from Marvel. (Yeah there's also the invasion sequence in not-Palestine/Ukraine by not-Russia/Israel, but that's very clearly  not  the actual climax of the movie, just a bit of added stakes. Plenty of brown people die in that fight scene, off-screen.) Superman's interview with Lois was the height of the movie. I keep trying to remember the character's name, I know it's not Peter Parker. Clark Kent. Fuck. Great chemistry. Big fan of Rachel Brosnahan going back to House of Cards. This whole line of question...

I say "Part 1" because this movie is the first of a planned trilogy. The movie doesn't announce that anywhere explicitly -- I had to read about it on Wikipedia -- and if you don't know this, you'll be confused and annoyed by its final minutes. I give this movie a strong 3 or weak 4 out of 5. If you like this sort of movie, you'll enjoy this one, and you may enjoy it even if you don't normally like this sort of movie. Thematic summary This guy is desperately trying to find healthy masculinity I don't remember anybody's names, so I'm going to call them the kid, the mom, the dad, the grandad, the alpha, the Swedish soldier, the doctor, and Jimmy. The kid is presented with several conflicting archetypes of masculinity, all of which prove unsatisfactory. He rejects them and leaves society to establish his own values. In more detail: the kid goes on a rite of passage hunting trip with the (his) dad. He thinks he has failed to act properly and feels...

Clickbait opener  The D&D killer has finally dropped: Tunnels & Trolls, by Ken St Andre, with illustrations by Liz Danforth, published 1975. Interior illustration from T&T 5e by Liz Danforth More seriously  I've been playing a lot of Tunnels & Trolls at the Table-Time server lately. It's fantastic. (No, it's not a "D&D killer", there's no such thing, it is not even desirable, just play the games you enjoy. I'm still playing D&D.) I haven't interacted with the T&T community, if there still is one, so I have no way of knowing if what I describe bears any resemblance to T&T as others have played it. Here I will explain the game as it strikes me, and what's so good about it. Player-side fun Tunnels & Trolls is designed for 3 to 5 players, including a GM. I find old-school D&D's insistence on a big play group stifling, not to mention impractical, so this is a nice change. The game is intimate.  Players are ex...

Sometimes it's ok to have a movie with no subtlety whatsoever, especially if the movie blows straight past "blatant" and into "ridiculous". Plus the concept is good (though derivative; I thought about Seconds (1966) and The Picture of Dorian Grey (1890) throughout) and inspired deep emotion in my partner and me. The acting and practical effects are mostly outstanding (with one bad scene by Moore, though I think it's the script's fault more than hers). On the other hand, every single important beat is repeated two or even three times, sometimes literally, and by the end I was waiting for the movie to conclude. The last half hour really dragged. A strong 3/5. Goofy robe, what's up with the dragon? Anyway, how I would rewrite/re-edit the movie. (This is something I think about for most artworks -- what would I do differently, to preserve its core and show it in a clearer light?) Lots of stuff is going to stay the same, and so I won't bother listi...

 I read A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare by Richard Brooks and John Curry. Really enjoyed it, found it enlightening and surprising in many respects. You need to buy it on amazon in paperback or via kindle, which I intensely dislike -- I'd prefer to pirate books, or buy through alternate retailers. Sometimes the book gets lost in the weeds of (I think) irrelevant historical debates, important only to specialists. It also wastes time justifying the relevance of wargaming and reenactment to historical research. Putting those caveats aside, it was a worthwhile read, and I'd recommend it, supplemented by other readings in pre-modern warfare (I've also been reading War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat , the blog ACOUP , and the recommended books list on the Ask Historians reddit . Additional caveat: very little about war makes sense divorced from its historical context. You'll want to bone up on your regular history too!) Anyway, here are some takeaways from the book ...

195 pieces. Took me maybe 15 minutes to build? I haven't played with Legos in 15 years or more. By the end of it, my fingertips were sore, a familiar Lego feeling. I had some compunctions about buying this, because I don't want to support Harry Potter or Joanne in any way. I asked the Lego store people for the biggest spider they had, and this was it. I'm not sold on my decision either way; I knew I would regret it, if I bought it or if I didn't. But this way I also get the fun of the thing. My partner has been in India for the last month, so I plan to surprise her by hiding the spider in a corner. Hopefully she's see it and freak out. On to the set. Lego has become much slicker in the past 15 years. For instance, now they have the pieces divided in separate numbered bags, and they tell you which one to open when. This is a great improvement from an organizational standpoint. In my youth I would just dump all the pieces on the floor and hunt around until I found the...

A new cut of Dracula (1931) by some internet guy from FanEdit.org . The pacing just better in this version; I prefer it to the original. Dracula is a very good movie, and if you haven't seen it, I recommend it! I've also seen Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1958), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Of those, Nosferatu the Vampyre is head and shoulders above the rest, followed by Shadow of the Vampire. Maybe Nosferatu is good if you listen to it with a good score and the right color grading, I don't know. Renfield is on a carriage in the middle of Europe. Everybody around him is a superstitious peasant, and he just wants to get his business done. Renfield and the Romanian innkeeper Look at the differences in their clothes and manner. They're suffering from a little cross-cultural miscommunication. The innkeeper is jovial, laughing and smiling, because he is sure that Renfield is just misunderstanding him -- nobody...

 I don't really read comic books. I read a good chunk of ultimate marvel as a child, and then V for Vendetta and Watchmen in middle school. None of it was super fascinating. The dialogue was stilted. The movies were more exciting. The Question is good.  There's a particular kind of grandstanding you see in superhero comics, and sometimes in action movies, a kind of moral self-indulgence. Usually you see it when the hero says "I DO NOT KILL... EVER!". I think it's a pretty good idea to avoid killing people. But the debate can't be about "can we sometimes kill" versus "can we ever kill", because that's pretty silly: yeah, we can sometimes kill. If you've come this far, if you've killed this many people, it's just not psychologically plausible for you to stop here. And it doesn't give you the moral high ground. I like the movie Road House for an example here. Peak nonsense. Bodhi from Point Break has killed his way through ...