I would love to see Mao rip Reagan’s spine from his body like a Mortal Kombat character.

If you mean the edge, that’s just a decorative cut. Called a deckle edge, meant to mimic the way expensive books were made in the 19th century. Personally, I think they do look nice but are more trouble than they’re worth, especially if you spend a lot of time flipping back and forth in a text, like referencing notes or appendices or what have you.

One of my more curmudgeonly traits is I hate “who would win in a fight” discussions about fictional people. So I like fantasy books and I’ve found if you spend pretty much any time in any fantasy-devoted subreddit or forum people will eventually ask the who would win question. And it makes sense, since the plots of so many traditional heroic fantasy books are ultimately about fighting some bad buy. But I still hate the discussion because it really just comes down to who the author wants to win, what point the author is trying to make.

These aren’t real people engaged in real combat (and even that is a fraught discussion). Like, if you want to argue about who would win, Muhammad Ali or Jean II Le Maingre, that’s a discussion that can be had. They were both real people, real fighters, and in a hypothetical match between them there is no author to intervene. I still think that’s a borderline pointless discussion because there’s so much that goes into it, but there is at least something to talk about.

But “who would win in a fight? Melkor, he who is Master of the Fates of Arda, King of the World, and God of Darkness or Petunia Dursley from Harry Potter?” Pointless question. It could go either way, depending on the author. George RR Martin, of Game of Thrones fame, wrote this whole blog post fanfiction where his character Jaime Lannister, who is a normal man with a sword, defeats Rand al’Thor, a magical demigod from Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.

Also, I’m willing to bet most Fantasy authors don’t have any martial arts or combat training at all, let alone knowledge of actual pre-modern fighting techniques. If Drizzt Do’Urden and Geralt of Rivia fought each other they’d just pirouette like ballerinas and flourish their blades at each other until eventually some contrived plot event caused them to separate at a draw.

Look folks, I’m just going to say it. I hate the word sorcerer. It’s a word that demands to have a double letter somewhere in it but it doesn’t. And its last vowel should be an o not an e. Sorcerror. Sorrceror. Sorcorror.

But no, it’s sorcerer. How disappointing.

Girl dinner, boy crisis.

Is that anything?

The front fell off.

The DaVinci code

The movie they made out of that with Tom Hanks and its sequel Angels & Demons (haven’t seen the third movie) have long been guilty pleasures of mine. Ian McKellen doing a heel turn, being a criminal mastermind while deluding himself about being a grail knight and rambling about Jesus’ secret bloodline (even if he happened to be right about all that), what’s not to love? Plus I do like Tom Hanks. And then in the second one, they make you think Stellan Skarsgard is a bad guy by having him be a grumpy dick but it turns out he’s the only true man in the Vatican and good-boy Ewan McGregor turns out to be a power-hungry mastermind and even though its the most predictable shit ever put on screen I’m going :soypoint-1: :soypoint-2:

All this to say, I’ve never been able to read the novels. I tried, and I’m not even a prose first kind of reader- I read all sorts of books with shitty prose and don’t care -but I find Dan Brown to be such a terrible writer on the sentence level that I just cannot force myself to read more than a few dozen pages of one of his books. Only other author I’ve encountered like that is Robert Ludlum. Ironically, I do like the first Bourne movie quite a bit.

In the new canon Mon Mothma’s defining act as the first chancellor of the New Republic is to disarm the Galactic Military in the face of an obviously bellicose imperial remnant (who totally promises they aren’t interested in reconquering the galaxy), and then she promptly retires. This leads to individual systems militarizing themselves and then pledging support to the First Order, who easily destroy the New Republic at the first opportunity.

It almost seems like political satire, but no, it is just a hasty post hoc rationalization for returning to the A New Hope status quo.

Von Rosen became brother-in-law to Hermann Göring

propertarian communalist

Isn’t that just a fancy term for anarcho-capitalism? Holy shit, imagine being an ancap. The most incoherent ideology possible. “Let’s get rid of the State but keep Capitalism, I’m sure megacorps won’t own everything and rule over us all like slavers.” What dummies.