I can’t believe that Matthew Stover’s novelization of Revenge of the Sith didn’t make the list. What the fuck?

Just saw The Devil Wears Prada 2 and I didn’t expect so much of the movie to be about McKinsey trying to destroy cultural institutions in the name of Capital.

To be reductive, the conflict of the movie is ultimately between two sects of the ruling class: greedy, self-aggrandizing billionaires who care for nothing other than the increase of their own personal wealth and suave sophisticates who want to benevolently use their wealth to be caretakers of culture.

Ultimately quite distasteful, but a fun enough film.

I discovered today that John Tester, who was a US Senator for Montana for 18 years until he was unseated by Tim Sheehy (the man who broke the arm of that (former?) marine that was protesting Israel and the Iran War), hosts a political podcast along with a journalist. Out of sheer boredom I decided to listen to the most recent episode, which came out Thursday, and features an interview with US Senator Adam Schiff, who you might remember led the first impeachment trial against Trump when he was still in the House back in 2020.

I was surprised how enraging it was to listen to. In the first portion of the show, before the interview, Tester is going back and forth with his cohost discussing the Iran War, mostly, and laughing at the antic of Pete Hegseth. The only thing I remember strongly is that there was one point where Tester was laying out the many wasteful follies of Donald Trump and he felt the need to stop and genuflect and say that “the President does some stuff right.” Why bother, in this political landscape, to make a meaningless gesture at bipartisanship? My only conclusion is that Tester genuinely believes that Trump has done some good things as President.

Then Schiff came on and the episode became more enraging. They discussed at length how they believed their Republican colleagues aren’t evil in their hearts, they are just scared for their jobs and prepared to vote however Trump wants them to. Immediately after that they discussed how, back in June of '25, Senator Padilla tried to get in Kristi Noem’s face when she was holding a press conference and got forcibly hauled off by security, and Tester asked Schiff if the republicans were privately aghast by that and Schiff had to somewhat impotently say that he couldn’t think of any Republicans who approached Padilla privately. And they both talked a lot about how much they wished fucking John McCain were still around to ream Trump a new one.

Embarrassing, cowardly drivel. Impotent criticisms of Trump. At one point they subtly implied it’s the voters fault for voting for bad people and not good people.

Also, I kinda forgot that as mainstream Democrats they were going to be opposed to Trump’s particular conducting of the War in Iran while also broadly agreeing that the Iranian government is bad and needs to go and offering no critique of Israel. I’ve gotten so used to my little media bubble that I forgot about the callous disregard most Americans have for the lives and suffering of the people in nations that are deemed enemies of the US. Test and co. weren’t particularly bloodthirsty about it but there was also no sorrow or regret or righteous anger for the indignity forced upon a whole people.

Vijay Prashad refutes claim that an article he published was AI generated

David Brophy, a historian of Modern China at the University of Sydney and a Harvard alum, who appears to be a pusher of the Uygher genocide narrative and a Xinjiang separatist, has taken to Elon Musk’s X(formerly Twitter) to accuse Vijay Prashad of using AI to write a review that has been published in the Monthly Review.

https://xcancel.com/Dave_Brophy/status/2042077191132082358

Brophy doesn’t seem especially trustworthy, having an obvious bias and I’m sure an axe to grind with Prashad given their differences in political opinion. But I haven’t looked into it myself, nor have I read the review, or the work being reviewed, or any of Brophy’s work (which at a glance does not look worth reading).

decided to start up my old Bannerlord save. I got to a point where I was a powerful vassal in the Southern Empire, but I wasn’t so powerful that I could seriously entertain winning an independence war. I had control of one city and two castles captured from the Western Empire, and they were positioned such that anytime a war kicked off with them my holdings were surrounded by enemies.

Then the Southern Empire went and got all bellicose against the Kurzgesagt right up until the Empress was humiliated in battle. She’s captured, her army destroyed, at the time I was in Battania trying to level up smithing. The Western Empire, Northern Empire, and Aseri declare war on the Southern Empire. Kurzgesagt take Onira, the personal city of the Empress (Bannerlord doesn’t exactly have capital cities, if you’ve never played it). The Northern Empire takes the city that was held by the second strongest clan in the Southern Empire.

I try to form an army of my own and set out to take a city near my own from the Western Empire. Unfortunately I only form a 600 strong army and was narrowly defeated by defenders who came to lift the siege. Might’ve even eked out a win if my character hadn’t been wounded, though I’ll admit I’ve never had a strong grasp of M&B battlefield tactics. Lost a very strong personal army (or I felt it was strong, anyway, like I said I don’t really get the tactics), which at the time was 180 strong, about half veteran cavalry and the other half divided between veteran archers and footsoldiers.

The Empress manages to make peace with all the realms against her.

Suddenly here I am, reforming my army from the ground up, when the Northern Empire, Kurzgesagt, and Aseri declare war. I stop and take a look at the internal factions of the Southern Empire. I am only Clan Level 4, and before the disastrous wars I was like the fourth most powerful clan in the Empire. Now I’m number one. No individual clan leader can control more troops than me. With the Southern Empire facing war on multiple fronts I feel like there’s no reason not to declare independence. But I don’t know. I’ve never actually done the Dragon Banner thing, maybe I should just ignore it all and forge on with that.

The last two used bookstores I was in didn’t have a copy of Moby-Dick so I decided to buy one off Amazon. And I got lazy. I knew I wanted hardcover, so I filtered my search results to show only hardcovers and bought the cheapest one from a big publisher (because I didn’t want to accidentally buy a cheaply produced print-on-demand book). I went with Macmillan, it was only $11.50. Didn’t even glance at the item details or description.

The book arrived today and when I opened the package I was shocked and dismayed to discover that, as is plainly stated in the first line of the product description on Amazon, I had purchased a pocket-sized hardcover edition of Moby-Dick. It’s smaller than a mass market paperback. It’s nearly 800 pages long. The print is minuscule. I can read it, but I don’t know. I mean, being honest there’s a chance I’ll never read it anyway, but I wish I would’ve just paid $20 for the Penguin edition.

So I was just doing what I usually do of an evening, wasting the precious minutes of the only life I’ll ever have by doomscrolling twitter. And I came across a short series of right-wing tweets discussing, basically, misogyny in Islamic religious practices. The last of these tweets said something like “An American Professor visiting UCL for a debate refused to participate because women were made to sit at the back.”

And I thought, well, despite the tenor of these particular tweets, it’s probably good on that professor for refusing to speak there.

So I googled and I quickly learned that the professor was one Lawrence Krauss, that this happened in 2013, and that the debate in question was titled “Islam or Atheism: Which Makes More Sense.” Now I didn’t immediately remember who Krauss was but I knew I recognized the name for some reason, and I thought to myself, now, what sort of man would take part in a debate with that kind of obnoxious framing?

So I went to Wikipedia and I remembered where I knew the name Lawrence Krauss from: he was one of the authors included in the book The War On Science, which I know of because the skullboi Youtuber Shaun discussed both the book and Krauss himself at length in this video. He’s been accused of sexual misconduct, he was friends with Epstein and tried to introduce the man to Joe Rogan, and obviously he’s a crusader against cancel culture.

I guess what I’m saying is you do not gotta hand it to them.

So funny to me that the director and writer Alex Garland, the creative genius behind such films as the terminally Trump- and Twitter-brained Civil War(2024) and the Iraq War apologia Warfare(2025) which I only know from that maudlin clip where the American weeps to himself after killing three generations of one family, collaborated with the director and writer and commercial hack Danny Boyle, creator of such visionary works as 2019’s Yesterday and 2015’s Aaron-Sorkin-written Steve Jobs, on their quarter-century old zombie film franchise to create the most touching and thoughtful film I watched last year (28 Years Later). And I saw some pretty good stuff.

Also, I don’t know if this is a one-season show or if it’s getting more seasons or what but I think the show should end with a shot of Earth from space and an alien space ship flies up, and written on the side of the ship is “pest control” and then there’s, like, Klingon being spoken and they say “lol, the stupid apes infected themselves with the psychic godhead” and they release a chemical antidote into the atmosphere destroying it.

Decided to binge watch Pluribus over the holiday. Currently on episode 6. It’s a fine show, but it seems fairly uninterested in exploring the portentous philosophical questions it raises. Also, for a show that has so far mostly been a character study of Carol, the main character seems a little lacking in psychological depth. The sci-fi elements start to feel less like intriguing questions to explore and more like a threadbare sweater pulled over a wireframe mannequin to try and poorly disguise the fact that it isn’t a flesh-and-blood person.

Assuming things continue on this track I expect I will come away feeling that this was a fine show, perhaps better suited to have been condensed as a film, ultimately lacking real heft. Fun enough, but too insubstantial to really think about much.

Lol, Larian releasing a cool teaser for their new Divinity game and then wounding their reputation by immediately saying they use AI is very funny. You hate to see it.

The last bootleg feed I knew of for Trueanon (jumble.top I believe) seems to be down. A sad day when I can’t get podcast slop for free but there’s no world in which I am paying $5 a month for Trueanon, a podcast. Easy come easy go.