Is the unmasking of certain ideologies (which many people do not even clearly acknowledge) an indication of the weakening of bourgeois consciousness? In any case, the fact that the higher strata have fallen silent contributes to the radicalization of the younger generation. You can't live on bread alone, particularly when you don't even have any. Even right-wing radicals have partially freed themselves from a bourgeois mindset which they feel does not serve them well. But theirs is an emancipation in the name of irrational powers that are capable of reaching a compromise with the bourgeois powers at any time. The larger masses of the middle class and the intellectuals do not, however, participate in this mythical rebellion, which rightly strikes them as a regression. Rather than allowing themselves to be forced by the spiritual void (which reigns in the upper regions) to break out of the corral of bourgeois consciousness, they instead use all available means to try to preserve this consciousness. They do this less out of real faith than out of fear—a fear of being drowned by the proletariat, of becoming spiritually degraded and losing contact with authentic aspects of culture and education. But where does one find reinforcements for the threatened superstructure? The latter now lacks various material props, and the newly emerged strata that consider themselves part of the bourgeoisie are not its obvious supporters. They do not have any idea where they belong, and are merely defending privileges and perhaps traditions. The important question then is: How are they fortifying their position? Since under the present conditions they cannot simply adopt the inventory of bourgeois consciousness as such, they have to resort to all kinds of alternatives in order to make it seem as if they still wield their former spiritual/intellectual power.

Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays

Hey, sorry if this is a weird question but. I was wondering if you knew of any blogs specifically for responding to/arguing against leftist antisemitism? I want to be a good ally to Jewish people, but also I Am Not Immune To Propaganda and sometimes I just don't quite notice the implications, you know?

There's been a few posts going around recently, where there's screenshots with the water filter, and someone responding to them like "yeah this is actually pretty fucked up for x and y reasons". Those have been really helpful because, while some of them are much more obviously antisemitic, some of them I'm not sure I would've noticed, and now I'm a bit better educated. That's the kind of thing I'm looking for.

Again, sorry if this is a weird question, and I hope you have a good day!

none that i'd recommend tbh? i feel like laser focusing on something can get to the point of seeing it everywhere, and there's also a risk of becoming reactionary abt it if that makes sense. the blogs i do rec are mainly other jews' blogs, especially the ones you've prob seen me rb from.

my main rec for recognizing leftist antisemitism is familiarizing yourself with antisemitic tropes. some of the most common ones you'll see:

Blood libel: Originated in medieval Christian Europe, spread throughout Afroeurasia and persists today. The accusation that Jews kidnap gentile (Orig. Christian) children to do nefarious things (Orig. and still relatively commonly "blood rituals" or "taking their blood to use in making Matzah") with. You'll see this often alongside "Jews rule the world" antisemitism.

Jews rule the world/Zionist-occupied government/Evil Cabals: What it says on the tin. If you see some shit about how "Oh isn't it SUSPICIOUS how many billionaires/millionaires/rich people are Jewish?" or "The ZIONIST-CONTROLLED MEDIA is suppressing this!", that's a variant on this canard.

Khazar theory: Antisemitic pseudoscientific theory that Ashkenazi Jews aren't ackshually descended from the Judeans who were forcibly exiled from our homeland, but instead descended from Turkic Khazars who converted to Judaism. Easily disproven by actual genetic studies that show that uh yeah all ethnically Jewish folks, Ashkies included, are descended from common ancestors that originated in the Levant. Also Yiddish is derived from, y'know, not Turkic languages. There are definitely Khazar Jews, but they make up a small number of an already small population. Variants you'll probably see of this are basically anything saying that Ashkies are somehow less Jewish than other Jews, that we're all White People (Jewish connection to Whiteness is Complicated) who have no connection to the Levant, How Could Ashkenazim Be From There When Some Of Them Are BLONDE?, etc. Shit like that.

stalin shit: a lot of modern leftist antisemitism has its roots in soviet antisemitism, which used "zionist" as another word for "jew" in order to pretend to not be antisemitic. people still do that today. if you see a post where "zionist" can be replaced with "jew" and it reads word-for-word like a classic antisemitic trope, well, you know. don't trust anyone who stans stalin (or modern russia to be honest. tankies (derogatory)).

this is non-exhaustive ofc. here are also blogs i recommend blocking asap (with / in their names to inhibit name-searching); they're all in the same far-left antisemitic atrocity apologist circle (i.e. assad stans, putin stans, holodomor deniers, uyghur oppression deniers, CCP stans, houthi stans, etc):

her/ita/gep/osts (north korea stan, which is fucking insane. beloved tumblr funnyman who implicitly blames jews for the actions of the israeli govt in multiple gross posts and has targeted multiple jewish bloggers, prompting mass harassment)

ko/ms/om/ol/ka (nasty character all around. claimed she was banned for being pro-palestine, it's actually prob because she's been reported before for being a fucking racist antisemitic freak lmao)

tx/tt/le/ta/le (ew)

bre/nda/nic/us (happily antisemitic. homophobic too, as a treat i guess)

blo/g/lik/ea/ne/gyp/tian (egyptian nationalist. don't ask her what happened to cairo's jews. makes nasty posts that outright state that jews should feel guilty for current events ON JEWISH HOLIDAYS.)

whe/nma/gic/fil/led/the/air (infamously antisemitic. block.)

a-si/ent-/ecli/pse ("Happy Holocaust Memorial Day")

ara/bia/n-k/nig/ht (extremely and openly antisemitic kid. just, like, don't engage)

nat/ive/ne/ws (tweet screenshots aren't news. loooooves spreading disinfo and misinfo)

ap/as-/95 (part of the tankie committee)

les/bia/nch/emi/cal/pla/nt (i think she's a jew but she's, like, the tankie tumblr pet jew istg. she's also an asshole. girl they will gladly turn you over once you outlive your usefulness 😬)

other advice: anyone who claims to be "anti-zionist NOT antisemitic" who only ever fixates on jews and jewish orgs instead of the christian zionists who vastly outnumber the entire jewish population is lying, they're antisemitic (whether they realize it or not). houthi stans generally are stupid jew-haters who would rather support the ethnic cleansing, racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and chattel slavery party than possibly say that Someone Who Rejects The Enemy(tm) is, yknow, not morally pure. people who are abnormal about ashkenazim are generally abnormal about non-ashkies, too, but in a different and still nasty way. if someone claims that "everything was fine before the Zionists(tm) attacked", they are wrong. do some research on the history of jewish life in the region and it's very clearly wrong. if someone says that they're tired of jews and jewish feelings and jewish safety being a focus, they probably don't feel particularly kind things about us in general. fact-check claims. screenshots aren't news. people who are okay with widespread civilian death/suffering in one direction probably only desire vengeance more than anything else, which does nothing for anyone and is a net loss. anyone baying for blood is suspect, anyone without a concrete solution/plan beyond "burn it down" is not going to do much constructive work in terms of delivering justice.

There are other things happening with this landlord is a piece of s*** and hasn't done anything to fix the apartment at all that our son's in and he's complained a lot I don't know what his problem is but we are on top of it and he's sitting there meowing and saying stuff it doesn't intend on fixing department of store that stinks and we are going to go after him for it I am so sick of that guy a bunch of a****** freeloaders who think you can get stuff for nothing and it didn't work and you're still doing it you're just like this John rima Lord guy and for Christ's sake he didn't get anything all he did was start a war with Tommy f and it was very much needed I know he's going to pay them for it and it's a slime ball and I guess slime balls these days are heroes it's kind of funny because he's taking the hit for people who would have ratted or tried to stop him. And Stan too was found riding on Stalin and you guys don't have support from anyone and they are going after you it's just not noticing it and it is a huge group messing you up and they saw you move him out of the house into Castle and that's who did it Miss You morons and you didn't get what you wanted and you still didn't and you suck at it and that's right Stan is working with the marlock. And the Sun is going to get us some funding back from you Stan and we know how it's not real complicated. It's convicted of murder goes away and you're on trial next for homicide Mike too and Mack ben Arnold and others have evidence and proof. And of homicides against theirs and they're planning to bring you to trial and you're saying no and they are and Ken is not going to trial no he is looked at as trying to defend himself what she was some members of the other forces were attacking cuz they thought it was him doing it because Stan was disguised as Ken and he still seen doing it and they're after him and the guy is getting taken apart. Today he's going to lose probably half again if it's fleet and big stuff and it is who the rebels are fighting as well cuz he's starting to try and take their stuff what they have left of empire stuff it's not that much like 20 million chips and there's some big stuff it's like 15% of all the big stuff and that's what he's after and the pseudo empire is going to use it.

It's quite a bit more going on but we're going to publish those guys have been a pain in the ass for a long time

Thor Freya

Olympus

Zues Hera

Anonymous asked: I enjoyed reading your posts about Napoleon’s death and it’s quite timely given its the 200th anniversary of his death this year in May. I was wondering, because you know a lot about military history (your served right? That’s cool to fly combat helicopters) and you live in France but aren’t French, what your take was on Napoleon and how do the French view him? Do they hail him as a hero or do they like others see him like a Hitler or a Stalin? Do you see him as a hero or a villain of history?

5 May 1821 was a memorable date because Napoleon, one of the most iconic figures in world history, died while in bitter exile on a remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Napoleon Bonaparte, as you know rose from obscure soldier to a kind of new Caesar, and yet he remains a uniquely controversial figure to this day especially in France. You raise interesting questions about Napoleon and his legacy. If I may reframe your questions in another way. Should we think of him as a flawed but essentially heroic visionary who changed Europe for the better? Or was he simply a military dictator, whose cult of personality and lust for power set a template for the likes of Hitler? 

However one chooses to answer this question can we just - to get this out of the way - simply and definitively say that Napoleon was not Hitler. Not even close. No offence intended to you but this is just dumb ahistorical thinking and it’s a lazy lie. This comparison was made by some in the horrid aftermath of the Second World War but only held little currency for only a short time thereafter. Obviously that view didn’t exist before Hitler in the 19th Century and these days I don’t know any serious historian who takes that comparison seriously.

I confess I don’t have a definitive answer if he was a hero or a villain one way or the other because Napoleon has really left a very complicated legacy. It really depends on where you’re coming from.

As a staunch Brit I do take pride in Britain’s victorious war against Napoleonic France - and in a good natured way rubbing it in the noses of French friends at every opportunity I get because it’s in our cultural DNA and it’s bloody good fun (why else would we make Waterloo train station the London terminus of the Eurostar international rail service from its opening in 1994? Or why hang a huge gilded portrait of the Duke of Wellington as the first thing that greets any visitor to the residence of the British ambassador at the British Embassy?). On a personal level I take special pride in knowing my family ancestors did their bit on the battlefield to fight against Napoleon during those tumultuous times. However, as an ex-combat veteran who studied Napoleonic warfare with fan girl enthusiasm, I have huge respect for Napoleon as a brilliant military commander. And to makes things more weird, as a Francophile resident of who loves living and working in France (and my partner is French) I have a grudging but growing regard for Napoleon’s political and cultural legacy, especially when I consider the current dross of political mediocrity on both the political left and the right. So for me it’s a complicated issue how I feel about Napoleon, the man, the soldier, and the political leader.

If it’s not so straightforward for me to answer the for/against Napoleon question then it It’s especially true for the French, who even after 200 years, still have fiercely divided opinions about Napoleon and his legacy - but intriguingly, not always in clear cut ways.

I only have to think about my French neighbours in my apartment building to see how divisive Napoleon the man and his legacy is. Over the past year or so of the Covid lockdown we’ve all gotten to know each other better and we help each other. Over the Covid year we’ve gathered in the inner courtyard for a buffet and just lifted each other spirits up.

One of my neighbours, a crusty old ex-general in the army who has an enviable collection of military history books that I steal, liberate, borrow, often discuss military figures in history like Napoleon over our regular games of chess and a glass of wine. He is from very old aristocracy of the ancien regime and whose family suffered at the hands of ‘madame guillotine’ during the French Revolution. They lost everything. He has mixed emotions about Napoleon himself as an old fashioned monarchist. As a military man he naturally admires the man and the military genius but he despises the secularisation that the French Revolution ushered in as well as the rise of the haute bourgeois as middle managers and bureaucrats by the displacement of the aristocracy.

Another retired widowed neighbour I am close to, and with whom I cook with often and discuss art, is an active arts patron and ex-art gallery owner from a very wealthy family that came from the new Napoleonic aristocracy - ie the aristocracy of the Napoleonic era that Napoleon put in place - but she is dismissive of such titles and baubles. She’s a staunch Republican but is happy to concede she is grateful for Napoleon in bringing order out of chaos. She recognises her own ambivalence when she says she dislikes him for reintroducing slavery in the French colonies but also praises him for firmly supporting Paris’s famed Comédie-Française of which she was a past patron.

Another French neighbour, a senior civil servant in the Elysée, is quite dismissive of Napoleon as a war monger but is grudgingly grateful for civil institutions and schools that Napoleon established and which remain in place today.

My other neighbours - whether they be French families or foreign expats like myself - have similarly divisive and complicated attitudes towards Napoleon.

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle, who led France from exile during the German occupation in World War II and served as a postwar president.

The split in French opinion is closely mirrored in political circles. The divide is generally down political party lines. On the left, there's the 'black legend' of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the 'golden legend' of a strong leader who created durable institutions.

Jacques-Olivier Boudon, a history professor at Paris-Sorbonne University and president of the Napoléon Institute, once explained at a talk I attended that French public opinion has always remained deeply divided over Napoleon, with, on the one hand, those who admire the great man, the conqueror, the military leader and, on the other, those who see him as a bloodthirsty tyrant, the gravedigger of the revolution. Politicians in France, Boudon observed, rarely refer to Napoleon for fear of being accused of authoritarian temptations, or not being good Republicans.

On the left-wing of French politics, former prime minister Lionel Jospin penned a controversial best selling book entitled “the Napoleonic Evil” in which he accused the emperor of “perverting the ideas of the Revolution” and imposing “a form of extreme domination”, “despotism” and “a police state” on the French people. He wrote Napoleon was "an obvious failure" - bad for France and the rest of Europe. When he was booted out into final exile, France was isolated, beaten, occupied, dominated, hated and smaller than before. What's more, Napoleon smothered the forces of emancipation awakened by the French and American revolutions and enabled the survival and restoration of monarchies. Some of the legacies with which Napoleon is credited, including the Civil Code, the comprehensive legal system replacing a hodgepodge of feudal laws, were proposed during the revolution, Jospin argued, though he acknowledges that Napoleon actually delivered them, but up to a point, "He guaranteed some principles of the revolution and, at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it," For instance, Napoleon reintroduced slavery in French colonies, revived a system that allowed the rich to dodge conscription in the military and did nothing to advance gender equality.

At the other end of the spectrum have been former right-wing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, an aristocrat who was once fancied as a future President, a passionate collector of Napoleonic memorabilia, and author of several works on the subject. As a Napoleonic enthusiast he tells a different story. Napoleon was a saviour of France. If there had been no Napoleon, the Republic would not have survived. Advocates like de Villepin point to Napoleon’s undoubted achievements: the Civil Code, the Council of State, the Bank of France, the National Audit office, a centralised and coherent administrative system, lycées, universities, centres of advanced learning known as école normale, chambers of commerce, the metric system, and an honours system based on merit (which France has to this day). He restored the Catholic faith as the state faith but allowed for the freedom of religion for other faiths including Protestantism and Judaism. These were ambitions unachieved during the chaos of the revolution. As it is, these Napoleonic institutions continue to function and underpin French society. Indeed, many were copied in countries conquered by Napoleon, such as Italy, Germany and Poland, and laid the foundations for the modern state.

Back in 2014, French politicians and institutions in particular were nervous in marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's exile. My neighbours and other French friends remember that the commemorations centred around the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the traditional home of the kings of France and was the scene where Napoleon said farewell to the Old Guard in the "White Horse Courtyard" (la cour du Cheval Blanc) at the Palace of Fontainebleau. (The courtyard has since been renamed the "Courtyard of Goodbyes".) By all accounts the occasion was very moving. The 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau stripped Napoleon of his powers (but not his title as Emperor of the French) and sent him into exile on Elba. The cost of the Fontainebleau "farewell" and scores of related events over those three weekends was shouldered not by the central government in Paris but by the local château, a historic monument and UNESCO World Heritage site, and the town of Fontainebleau.

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, over a decade ago, the president and prime minister - at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin - boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon's greatest military victory. Both men were known admirers of Napoleon and yet political calculation and optics (as media spin doctors say) stopped them from fully honouring Napoleon’s crowning military glory.

Optics is everything. The division of opinion in France is perhaps best reflected in the fact that, in a city not shy of naming squares and streets after historical figures, there is not a single “Boulevard Napoleon” or “Place Napoleon” in Paris. On the streets of Paris, there are just two statues of Napoleon. One stands beneath the clock tower at Les Invalides (a military hospital), the other atop a column in the Place Vendôme. Napoleon's red marble tomb, in a crypt under the Invalides dome, is magnificent, perhaps because his remains were interred there during France's Second Empire, when his nephew, Napoleon III, was on the throne.

There are no squares, nor places, nor boulevards named for Napoleon but as far as I know there is one narrow street, the rue Bonaparte, running from the Luxembourg Gardens to the River Seine in the old Latin Quarter. And, that, too, is thanks to Napoleon III. For many, and I include myself, it’s a poor return by the city to the man who commissioned some of its most famous monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe and the Pont des Arts over the River Seine.

It's almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story.

How Napoleon fits into that national story is something historians, French and non-French, have been grappling with ever since Napoleon died. The plain fact is Napoleon divides historians, what precisely he represents is deeply ambiguous and his political character is the subject of heated controversy. It’s hard for historians to sift through archival documents to make informed judgements and still struggle to separate the man from the myth.

One proof of this myth is in his immortality. After Hitler’s death, there was mostly an embarrassed silence; after Stalin’s, little but denunciation. But when Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821, much of Europe and the Americas could not help thinking of itself as a post-Napoleonic generation. His presence haunts the pages of Stendhal and Alfred de Vigny. In a striking and prescient phrase, Chateaubriand prophesied the “despotism of his memory”, a despotism of the fantastical that in many ways made Romanticism possible and that continues to this day.

The raw material for the future Napoleon myth was provided by one of his St Helena confidants, the Comte de las Cases, whose account of conversations with the great man came out shortly after his death and ran in repeated editions throughout the century. De las Cases somehow metamorphosed the erstwhile dictator into a herald of liberty, the emperor into a slayer of dynasties rather than the founder of his own. To the “great man” school of history Napoleon was grist to their mill, and his meteoric rise redefined the meaning of heroism in the modern world.

The Marxists, for all their dislike of great men, grappled endlessly with the meaning of the 18th Brumaire; indeed one of France’s most eminent Marxist historians, George Lefebvre, wrote what arguably remains the finest of all biographies of him.

It was on this already vast Napoleon literature, a rich terrain for the scholar of ideas, that the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl was lecturing in 1940 when he was arrested and sent to Buchenwald. There he composed what became one of the classics of historiography, a seminal book entitled Napoleon: For and Against, which charted how generations of intellectuals had happily served up one Napoleon after another. Like those poor souls who crowded the lunatic asylums of mid-19th century France convinced that they were Napoleon, generations of historians and novelists simply could not get him out of their head.

The debate runs on today no less intensely than in the past. Post-Second World War Marxists would argue that he was not, in fact, revolutionary at all. Eric Hobsbawm, a notable British Marxist historian, argued that ‘Most-perhaps all- of his ideas were anticipated by the Revolution’ and that Napoleon’s sole legacy was to twist the ideals of the French Revolution, and make them ‘more conservative, hierarchical and authoritarian’.

This contrasts deeply with the view William Doyle holds of Napoleon. Doyle described Bonaparte as ‘the Revolution incarnate’ and saw Bonaparte’s humbling of Europe’s other powers, the ‘Ancien Regimes’, as a necessary precondition for the birth of the modern world. Whatever one thinks of Napoleon’s character, his sharp intellect is difficult to deny. Even Paul Schroeder, one of Napoleon’s most scathing critics, who condemned his conduct of foreign policy as a ‘criminal enterprise’ never denied Napoleon’s intellect. Schroder concluded that Bonaparte ‘had an extraordinary capacity for planning, decision making, memory, work, mastery of detail and leadership’.  The question of whether Napoleon used his genius for the betterment or the detriment of the world, is the heart of the debate which surrounds him.

France's foremost Napoleonic scholar, Jean Tulard, put forward the thesis that Bonaparte was the architect of modern France. "And I would say also pâtissier [a cake and pastry maker] because of the administrative millefeuille that we inherited." Oddly enough, in North America the multilayered mille-feuille cake is called ‘a napoleon.’ Tulard’s works are essential reading of how French historians have come to tackle the question of Napoleon’s legacy. He takes the view that if Napoleon had not crushed a Royalist rebellion and seized power in 1799, the French monarchy and feudalism would have returned, Tulard has written. "Like Cincinnatus in ancient Rome, Napoleon wanted a dictatorship of public salvation. He gets all the power, and, when the project is finished, he returns to his plough." In the event, the old order was never restored in France. When Louis XVIII became emperor in 1814, he served as a constitutional monarch.

In England, until recently the views on Napoleon have traditionally less charitable and more cynical. Professor Christopher Clark, the notable Cambridge University European historian, has written. "Napoleon was not a French patriot - he was first a Corsican and later an imperial figure, a journey in which he bypassed any deep affiliation with the French nation," Clark believed Napoleon’s relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent.

Did he stabilise the revolutionary state or shut it down mercilessly? Clark believes Napoleon seems to have done both. Napoleon rejected democracy, he suffocated the representative dimension of politics, and he created a culture of courtly display. A month before crowning himself emperor, Napoleon sought approval for establishing an empire from the French in a plebiscite; 3,572,329 voted in favour, 2,567 against. If that landslide resembles an election in North Korea, well, this was no secret ballot. Each ‘yes’ or ‘no’ was recorded, along with the name and address of the voter. Evidently, an overwhelming majority knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

His extravagant coronation in Notre Dame in December 1804 cost 8.5 million francs (€6.5 million or $8.5 million in today's money). He made his brothers, sisters and stepchildren kings, queens, princes and princesses and created a Napoleonic aristocracy numbering 3,500. By any measure, it was a bizarre progression for someone often described as ‘a child of the Revolution.’ By crowning himself emperor, the genuine European kings who surrounded him were not convinced. Always a warrior first, he tried to represent himself as a Caesar, and he wears a Roman toga on the bas-reliefs in his tomb. His coronation crown, a laurel wreath made of gold, sent the same message. His icon, the eagle, was also borrowed from Rome. But Caesar's legitimacy depended on military victories. Ultimately, Napoleon suffered too many defeats.

These days Napoleon the man and his times remain very much in fashion and we are living through something of a new golden age of Napoleonic literature. Those historians who over the past decade or so have had fun denouncing him as the first totalitarian dictator seem to have it all wrong: no angel, to be sure, he ended up doing far more at far less cost than any modern despot. In his widely praised 2014 biography, Napoleon the Great, Andrew Roberts writes: “The ideas that underpin our modern world - meritocracy, equality before the law, property rights, religious toleration, modern secular education, sound finances, and so on - were championed, consolidated, codified and geographically extended by Napoleon. To them he added a rational and efficient local administration, an end to rural banditry, the encouragement of science and the arts, the abolition of feudalism and the greatest codification of laws since the fall of the Roman empire.”

Roberts partly bases his historical judgement on newly released historical documents about Napoleon that were only available in the past decade and has proved to be a boon for all Napoleonic scholars. Newly released 33,000 letters Napoleon wrote that still survive are now used extensively to illustrate the astonishing capacity that Napoleon had for compartmentalising his mind - he laid down the rules for a girls’ boarding school on the eve of the battle of Borodino, for example, and the regulations for Paris’s Comédie-Française while camped in the Kremlin. They also show Napoleon’s extraordinary capacity for micromanaging his empire: he would write to the prefect of Genoa telling him not to allow his mistress into his box at the theatre, and to a corporal of the 13th Line regiment warning him not to drink so much.

For me to have my own perspective on Napoleon is tough. The problem is that nothing with Napoleon is simple, and almost every aspect of his personality is a maddening paradox. He was a military genius who led disastrous campaigns. He was a liberal progressive who reinstated slavery in the French colonies. And take the French Revolution, which came just before Napoleon’s rise to power, his relationship with the French Revolution is deeply ambivalent. Did he stabilise it or shut it down? I agree with those British and French historians who now believe Napoleon seems to have done both.

On the one hand, Napoleon did bring order to a nation that had been drenched in blood in the years after the Revolution. The French people had endured the crackdown known as the 'Reign of Terror', which saw so many marched to the guillotine, as well as political instability, corruption, riots and general violence. Napoleon’s iron will managed to calm the chaos. But he also rubbished some of the core principles of the Revolution. A nation which had boldly brought down the monarchy had to watch as Napoleon crowned himself Emperor, with more power and pageantry than Louis XVI ever had. He also installed his relatives as royals across Europe, creating a new aristocracy. In the words of French politician and author Lionel Jospin, 'He guaranteed some principles of the Revolution and at the same time, changed its course, finished it and betrayed it.'

He also had a feared henchman in the form of Joseph Fouché, who ran a secret police network which instilled dread in the population. Napoleon’s spies were everywhere, stifling political opposition. Dozens of newspapers were suppressed or shut down. Books had to be submitted for approval to the Commission of Revision, which sounds like something straight out of George Orwell. Some would argue Hitler and Stalin followed this playbook perfectly. But here come the contradictions. Napoleon also championed education for all, founding a network of schools. He championed the rights of the Jews. In the territories conquered by Napoleon, laws which kept Jews cooped up in ghettos were abolished. 'I will never accept any proposals that will obligate the Jewish people to leave France,' he once said, 'because to me the Jews are the same as any other citizen in our country.'

He also, crucially, developed the Napoleonic Code, a set of laws which replaced the messy, outdated feudal laws that had been used before. The Napoleonic Code clearly laid out civil laws and due processes, establishing a society based on merit and hard work, rather than privilege. It was rolled out far beyond France, and indisputably helped to modernise Europe. While it certainly had its flaws – women were ignored by its reforms, and were essentially regarded as the property of men – the Napoleonic Code is often brandished as the key evidence for Napoleon’s progressive credentials. In the words of historian Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon the Great, 'the ideas that underpin our modern world… were championed by Napoleon'.

What about Napoleon’s battlefield exploits? If anything earns comparisons with Hitler, it’s Bonaparte’s apparent appetite for conquest. His forces tore down republics across Europe, and plundered works of art, much like the Nazis would later do. A rampant imperialist, Napoleon gleefully grabbed some of the greatest masterpieces of the Renaissance, and allegedly boasted, 'the whole of Rome is in Paris.'

Napoleon has long enjoyed a stellar reputation as a field commander – his capacities as a military strategist, his ability to read a battle, the painstaking detail with which he made sure that he cold muster a larger force than his adversary or took maximum advantage of the lie of the land – these are stuff of the military legend that has built up around him. It is not without its critics, of course, especially among those who have worked intensively on the later imperial campaigns, in the Peninsula, in Russia, or in the final days of the Empire at Waterloo.

Doubts about his judgment, and allegations of rashness, have been raised in the context of some of his victories, too, most notably, perhaps, at Marengo. But overall his reputation remains largely intact, and his military campaigns have been taught in the curricula of military academies from Saint-Cyr to Sandhurst, alongside such great tacticians as Alexander the Great and Hannibal.

Historians may query his own immodest opinion that his presence on the battlefield was worth an extra forty thousand men to his cause, but it is clear that when he was not present (as he was not for most of the campaign in Spain) the French were wont to struggle. Napoleon understood the value of speed and surprise, but also of structures and loyalties. He reformed the army by introducing the corps system, and he understood military aspirations, rewarding his men with medals and honours; all of which helped ensure that he commanded exceptional levels of personal loyalty from his troops.

Yet, I do find it hard to side with the more staunch defenders of Napoleon who say his reputation as a war monger is to some extent due to British propaganda at the time. They will point out that the Napoleonic Wars, far from being Napoleon’s fault, were just a continuation of previous conflicts that arose thanks to the French Revolution. Napoleon, according to this analysis, inherited a messy situation, and his only real crime was to be very good at defeating enemies on the battlefield. I think that is really pushing things too far. I mean deciding to invade Spain and then Russia were his decisions to invade and conquer.

He was, by any measure, a genius of war. Even his nemesis the Duke of Wellington, when asked who the greatest general of his time was, replied: 'In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.'

I will qualify all this and agree that Napoleon’s Russian campaign has been rightly held up as a fatal folly which killed so many of his men, but this blunder – epic as it was – should not be compared to Hitler’s wars of evil aggression. Most historians will agree that comparing the two men is horribly flattering to Hitler - a man fuelled by visceral, genocidal hate - and demeaning to Napoleon, who was a product of Enlightenment thinking and left a legacy that in many ways improved Europe.

Napoleon was, of course, no libertarian, and no pluralist. He would tolerate no opposition to his rule, and though it was politicians and civilians who imposed his reforms, the army was never far behind. But comparisons with twentieth-century dictators are well wide of the mark. While he insisted on obedience from those he administered, his ideology was based not on division or hatred, but on administrative efficiency and submission to the law. And the state he believed in remained stubbornly secular.

In Catholic southern Europe, of course, that was not an approach with which it was easy to acquiesce; and disorder, insurgency and partisan attacks can all be counted among the results. But these were principles on which the Emperor would not and could not give ground. If he had beliefs they were not religious or spiritual beliefs, but the secular creed of a man who never forgot that he owed both his military career and his meteoric political rise to the French Revolution, and who never quite abandoned, amidst the monarchical symbolism and the court pomp of the Empire, the republican dreams of his youth. When he claimed, somewhat ambiguously, after the coup of 18 Brumaire that `the Revolution was over’, he almost certainly meant that the principles of 1789 had at last been consummated, and that the continuous cycle of violence of the 1790s could therefore come to an end.

When the Empire was declared in 1804, the wording, again, might seem curious, the French being informed that the `Republic would henceforth be ruled by an Emperor’. Napoleon might be a dictator, but a part at least of him remained a son of the Enlightenment.

The arguments over Napoleon’s status will continue - and that in itself is a testament to the power of one of the most complex figures ever to straddle the world’s stage.

Will the fascination with Napoleon continue for another 200 years?

In France, at least, enthusiasm looks set to diminish. Napoleon and his exploits are scarcely mentioned in French schools anymore. Stéphane Guégan, curator of the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, which, among other First Empire artworks, houses a plaster model of Napoleon dressed as a Roman emperor astride a horse, has described France's fascination with him as ‘a national illness.’ He believes that the people who met him were fascinated by his charm. And today, even the most hostile to Napoleon also face this charm. So there is a difficulty to apprehend the duality of this character. As he wrote, “He was born from the revolution, he extended and finished it, and after 1804 he turns into a despot, a dictator.”

In France, Guégan aptly observes, there is a kind of nostalgia, not for dictatorship but for strong leaders. "Our age is suffering a lack of imagination and political utopia,"

Here I think Guégan is onto something. Napoleon’s stock has always risen or fallen according to the vicissitudes of world events and fortunes of France itself.

In the past, history was the study of great men and women. Today the focus of teaching is on trends, issues and movements. France in 1800 is no longer about Louis XVI and Napoleon Bonaparte. It's about the industrial revolution. Man does not make history. History makes men. Or does it? The study of history makes a mug out of those with such simple ideological driven conceits.

For two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain as he has swung like a pendulum according to the gravitational pull of historical events and forces.

The question I keep asking of myself and also to French friends with whom I discuss such things is what kind of Napoleon does our generation need?

Thanks for your question.

If you still fancy a drabble prompt, I've always seen Canada and England having a very warm and comfortable relationship- if it interests you, maybe a prompt could be one going to the other for advice about something?

It does indeed interest me, thank you for the prompt! I've had a bunch of Mattie-Arthur scenarios swimming around in my mind for a long time, so I'm glad to have a chance to put one of them down on paper. As always, this was supposed to be a "drabble" but magically lengthened itself the more I thought about it -- I don't think drabbles are supposed to have historical notes.

"Come in."

Matthew shifted his pile of papers to his other arm and pushed through the door of Arthur's office. Inside, the fading afternoon light illuminated the rich mahogony floor and danced on the spines of the hundreds of books that lined each wall. Remembering the excitement he felt when he was first allowed to peruse these shelves, Matthew couldn't help but smile softly to himself.

Arthur himself sat at his desk, one ankle propped up on his knee as he stared idly out the window. Matthew could just barely see a white trim of bandages that peeked out from underneath his collar. That dimmed his smile. It had been more than two years now since the war had ended in Europe, but Arthur still looked as gaunt as he did during the days when engines still roared over London and — though Matthew had not thought it possible — even more exhausted. The worn smile Arthur offered him said as much, and Matthew pushed away a twinge of guilt.

Arthur jerked his chin at the seat in front of his desk and Matthew sat, stacking his documents in a neat pile in front of him. Instead of immediately going through them, however, he gazed worriedly at his old guardian.

"How are you feeling?"

Arthur sighed and shifted in his seat, dropping his leg and turning to face Matthew. He stared at the ancient, ink-stained wood of his desk for a while, and Matthew could almost see the warring emotions on Arthur's face as his desire to be honest fought with his lingering instinct to conceal and protect Matthew from the worries that plagued him. But because they were past such pretenses, he finally murmured, "Tired."

Matthew hummed sympathetically in response. There wasn't much he could do or say to change that, and he expected the reports he brought would only exhaust Arthur further. So he merely asked, "Are you remembering to apply the salve twice a day?"

Matthew flushed a little when Arthur rolled his eyes at him good-naturedly, realizing he was fussing like Arthur was his child, instead of the other way around. Thankfully, Arthur spared him further embarrasment by only answering a tad dryly that yes, he was actually capable of following simple instructions. Matthew mumbled out a reply before deciding that he might as well get on with what he was actually here for, knowing Arthur had never been one for small talk. Clearing his throat, he slid the top half of his stack of papers across the desk.

"They sent you a copy of Lord Mountbatten's plan, I think with annotations, though I haven't gone through the whole thing. And this part is the proposal for the national flag. Also," he pulled a cream letter from the pile and passed that over as well, "India asked that you be there personally, in August," he finished.

Arthur hummed and rifled through the papers. Matthew couldn't quite read his expression. After a few moments, he stacked them again and placed them to the side, with the letter on top. "Thanks. I'll go through them later."

Matthew nodded. "And here I just summarized the letters and stuff from the others. I've left them back in the box, in case you wanted to read them yourself. There's not too much going on really. That you don't already know."

"Yes. Thank you. This is a great help, Matthew, truly."

"You're welcome," Matthew murmured, and watched Arthur scan the notes before setting them aside as well. His eyes traced the shadows underneath the other nation's eyes, before dropping back down to the cotton bandages around his neck. He wondered if Arthur was sleeping at all.

"Is there anything else I can do? I'm heading back to Ottawa next week, but if you need me to take over some stuff for a bit, I can stay longer —"

"No, no, it's fine," Arthur cut him off. "Like I said, I'm just a little tired, that's all. But all this," he waved a hand at the documents , "isn't anything new."

Matthew frowned. "Isn't it?"

"Hmm?"

"I mean, I know the paperwork isn't new, but, these," he drew a breath, "reforms, and the war, of course. That's — I mean. No one's, you know, had to deal with that, before."

Arthur frowned, and traced a finger along the edge of his desk, before sighing, "No, I guess not." He turned again to look out the window behind him. After several long moments, he said, quietly, "But it's not entirely unexpected, either. I just—" The corner of his lips jerked down, and for a moment it seemed as if he was almost in pain. He drew in a breath, and said, "It's just. Difficult. That's all. To—but." He stopped again, grimaced, as if at his own ineloquence. Finally, he said, slowly, as carefully as if he was embroidering the words onto the air between them, "The world is changing. Let us not stand in the way, lest they make us out to be fools."

Watching him struggle, Matthew found himself at a loss as well. Never had he imagined that Arthur — sharp-tongued, quick-witted Arthur, who could neither be bullied nor silenced, who could quote from more books than Matthew had ever read — would be scrambling for words. But then, as he watched Arthur's shoulders curve in towards himself like Matthew had seen a thousand times before in another stubborn, sandy-haired nation who also seemed to have endless words but never quite the right ones, he knew what he needed to do.

Smiling again, Matthew stood, drawing on Arthur's arm so he would turn to face him and said, "I think you need a hug."

Unnecessarily Long Notes are Unnecessarily Long

I didn't state the specific setting of this scene, but the timing of the historical events mentioned means it has to have been sometime between June and August of 1947. Despite the fact that Mattie says "not much is going on", my lord, a lot was going on in 1947; hence why Artie is doing his best impression of the walking dead. Besides the Indian and Pakistan independence movement, officially achieved in August 1947 which is alluded to (Mountbatten, or 3 June Plan, was the precursor to the Indian Independence Act of 1947), Europe was also going through complete social upheaval. To mention just a couple highlights: Germany was in such ruin it was said to have returned to the Roman ages, Britain was rationing harder than ever despite the war having ended, and of course Mr. Truman and Mr. Stalin were gearing up for the Great Showdown. A quote I like which captures the feeling of the time is from H.G. Wells: "[where] other civilizations rolled and crumbled down, the European civilization was, as it were, blown up." [quoted by Tony Judt, Postwar]. Also directly concerning Arthur was the issue of Palestine, which as we all know was and is contentious, to say the very least.

Arthur's attitude to decolonisation is...complicated. Clearly I went with a softer view here, but certainly not all (or even many) British held the view in 1947 that the Empire should be decolonized at all. Hence Arthur during this time was probably a raging hypocrite and, if he wasn't already, at least 50% psychologically unstable. However, I allowed Arthur a little dignity here, in part because he's 2000 years old and as such should have a tiny more perspective than us humans, and also because the weakness of the Empire was much more evident to those in government and the army. Even if it wasn't popular opinion yet, anyone with half a braincell could see that every day Britian didn't decolonize was costing them more than they could afford. Additionally, Britain did decolonise much, much faster than all the other powers and in a relatively peaceful and orderly manner, though what ensued in the countries they left behind was neither. I should also add that Matthew is not the most objective of narrators either -- Canada, despite being a former colony, was still strongly Anglophilic, especially right after WWII. Still, I hope ya'll won't begrudge Arthur a hug.

I hate to say it but realistically voldemort nor bella or any of their party would support the trans community. What theyre just going to be horrible evil villains but be cool with that? Not likely.

[[OOC: You know, I’m not sure about that. Yeah, I can say well, of course! He’s a villain and therefore evil and bigoted and I admit I artificially make this blog a LGBTQA+ inclusive space. But. 

We know in the wizarding world, the canon is intended to be so that magical society has grown past many of the standard prejudices against race and gender that muggles still get hung up on. Who is to say that this also applies for the LGBTQA+ community? I believe this is up to the fans, at this point. 

And ok, let’s say the wizard world still has these issues, or at least pureblood society does. Who is to say Voldemort would even give a rats ass about things like gender and sexuality? Voldemort sees people as tools, ranks and favors them on what they can do for him. It doesn’t matter if your favorite spatula is pink or blue - as long as it flips your pancakes. 

And also: just because someone is a villain doesn’t mean you can assume all of their morals, values, and beliefs. People are complicated. Hitler was evil incarnate, and yet he was a vegetarian and animal lover. Ted Bundy worked at a suicide hotline - and was good at helping people in crisis. Stalin was a poet. And that’s unsettling, right? I mean, all of those people killed so many others in cold blood. But to be human means you are layered, complicated, unsettling, complex. It’s why when someone reveals an abuser, a common reaction is “But they’re such a good person!” 

I believe if done correctly, Voldemort can be an ally, or at least unbothered by marginalized groups such as the LGBTQA+ community, and still be evil. The best villains are the ones with bits of humanity poking through. They’re scarier. You know them in real life. 

And one last thing: Fandom is a place where you can rework a world to whatever the hell you want it to be. And sometimes what the people want is a bloodthirsty wizard-racist who would officiate a same-sex wedding.]]

Kicking around the idea that Sullivan tried to go back to his family after his Embrace and wound up violating the Masquerade.

When Sullivan's twins were six months old, his wife disappeared, and Sullivan ended up a single parent. His in-laws really stepped up to support him. They'd been iffy about their daughter getting together with another apparent woman, even more uncomfortable when the "woman" in question turned out to be trans... but when Sullivan's transition progressed enough it just clicked in their head that queer and trans people were just normal fucking people. They ended up being their biggest sources of support when Sullivan detransitioned enough to have the twins. Sullivan was glad to have had them, but was so relieved to get back on his medication and was like "I am NEVER doing that again."

So when his wife disappeared when the babies were six months old he was pretty close with his in-laws and they really supported him through it. Helped him raise the babies.

Then Millicent happened.

The twins were two years old.

Sullivan was in shock for nights. out of all my OCs, he was stuck in denial and dissociation for the longest. He'd gone from a normal fucking life to suddenly turning into a goddamn vampire, and one who'd been given a new name at that. He barely said a word to Millicent the first few nights except to bleat that he needed to get home to his daughters, and otherwise followed her around like a lost sheep. It didn't really sink in each time Millicent told him that there was no going back.

He thought that he was stuck in a dream.

But eventually it sank in that he wasn't waking up. And since it was important in this dream to get back to his children - well, he'd go back to his children.

So he did.

He turned up in the middle of the night after being missing for almost a week, barely coherent. He stared into space a lot and was incredibly confused. he didn't even know how to say what the hell had happened. At first his in-laws thought he'd had some kind of psychotic break, but he kept muttering something about a woman hitting him over the head with a shovel and dragging him all over the city. They still didn't know WTF was going on, but they figured he'd had some kind of assault - that he'd been targeted because he was trans and sustained a brain injury. They promised to take him to the doctor in the morning, since he refused to go to the ER just then and whatever happened had happened long enough ago that waiting til morning probably wouldn't do any damage.

Next morning he locked himself in one of the bathrooms and refused to come out, saying that the sun hurt his eyes. They tried to talk him into coming out but he wouldn't.

They managed to get him to come out that night and took him to the ER. The staff tried to do brain scans but he fried every machine that tried. Finally the staff gave up and just examined his scalp - no sign of trauma, no old bruises, no fractures. Since he wasn't a threat to anyone they wouldn't section him, so they wrote him a referral to a psychiatrist and let him go before sunrise.

His in-laws were... pretty freaking worried. Sullivan had never shown any signs of psychosis or mental illness up to that point. Now he was incredibly protective and doting on his children - more than usual - and kept making them promise not to let any old ladies near the twins, all in between moments of apparent delirium and fear.

Meanwhile Millicent figured out pretty quickly where he'd gone and was like "ah, fuck". She didn't even have his name, let alone his legal one - she'd been the one to name him Sullivan Blackmoore. But she had contacts, so she started looking for missing person reports that had recently been resolved. After a few false starts, she finally got a hit and was able to get a hold of his address.

By that point, local hunters had figured out that there was a Lasombra nearby - Sullivan's weird disappearance and reappearance had triggered a check, and him frying electronics and refusing to go out during the day, and not eating, confirmed it. They decided to go for him during the night because of the mortals he was living with - sneak in, stake him, drag him out and destroy him elsewhere. Much harder to do in daylight when there's civilians around. Problem was he'd be awake, but as a newborn fledgling he shouldn't be too much difficulty to take out.

Millicent showed up to the house the same night the hunters did. Almost the same time, even.

And she hesitated. He was just a shovelhead, why go to the trouble of putting her own neck at risk for him? He'd survived his initiation - if he was truly strong, if he was worthy of survival, he'd survive this too.

besides, there were hunters here.

it was a problem that was about to take care of itself.

She didn't think this through.

Because there was a reason Sullivan survived his first night when his brothers and sisters didn't - he knew how to fight. He knew how to scrap, and he knew self defence.

Oh, and did I mention his children were in the house? He went all papa wolf on those hunters. there were complete strangers, violent strangers, and as soon as they realised there were children in the house they moved to protect them - which sent Sullivan right over the edge. he stopped pulling his punches once he realised that they were going for the children.

So he frenzied. killed the hunters. didn't come out of it until his poor in-laws were like WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED

The bit Millicent did not foresee? Yeah, cops got called. And Millicent was like oh crap, well, this is going to be one hell of a mess now that more humans are getting involved. uuugghhh I suppose I'd better step in before the cops get here.

anyway her turning up in the bloodspattered lounge room almost made Sullivan frenzy again until Millicent told one of the in-laws to go to the children. Sullivan was standing over a few corpses. there's blood everywhere. he's covered in it. the in-laws are white. completely white.

she asked Sullivan how much he told them. Sullivan told her the truth - that he'd gotten hurt, that she'd done it, and he couldn't stand daylight now. that he thought he'd had some kind of head injury after she hit him with the shovel. made him hallucinate weird shit. made him think he was a fucking vampire.

and this was when his reality was finally beginning to sink in. and he was like... I thought I'd wake up by now. but I haven't woken up. what am I? why aren't I a person any more? what am I? what's happening to me?

and Millicent - totally expecting that she's going to have to commit a complete massacre here and put down her childe - just tells him, you know you can't stay here.

and Sullivan tells her, I just... I just want the babies to be okay. they've already lost their mother. I can't leave them. I can't.

Millicent just. looks at him.

she doesn't have to say anything and they both know it. they both know what'll happen if he refuses to leave the children.

Sullivan says, promise you won't let any harm come to the children? please?

and Millicent is beginning with think that maybe they can come out of this without any (more) bloodshed. she's not looking forward to putting Sullivan down - he might be newborn but he'd make her work for it. she's still got her shovel at the ready though. still waiting to have to put him down - and the witnesses. but she promises him no harm will come to the children. they're too young to remember this, anyway. she can't make any promises about the in-laws though - the Camarilla have contacts in the cops too, they'll investigate this. they'll notice the dead hunters. they'll trace it here easily.

and Sullivan just says. okay. then turns and just casually Dominates the remaining in-law, like he'd seen Millicent do. Makes him forget, tells him to tell his MIL that... that Sullivan got scared and ran. To forget that Millicent was here. that Sullivan was mentally ill, went apeshit on the intruders and ran in a delirium.

the FIL goes into the baby's room. Sullivan's newborn, that complicated Dominate won't work completely at his level of inexperience.

but Millicent supposes it's enough until the Camarilla step in.

Millicent's like... well... no point putting down a childe that's strong enough to survive hunters and smart enough to do basic damage control and learn from your mistakes. she's not Stalin, she's not going to purge a childe who learns from his mistakes. may as well keep you on if you're convinced you'll behave, but if this happens again I'll let the Camarilla take care of you this time.

Sullivan doesn't say anything.

Millicent says, we'd better go before they and the cops get here.

so they go.

And this time, Sullivan doesn't go back.

Psycho Analysis: Skull Face

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

The Metal Gear franchise is well known for its complex, deep philosophies, and the antagonist of Metal Gear Solid V is absolutely no exception to this. Skull Face, while definitely on the more shallow end of the villain pool in terms of the series, is still one of the most intriguing and even pivotal villains the series introduces. Why is that?

In short, he is responsible for much of the bleakness that plagues Solid Snake’s adventures. But you’re not here for the short version, you’re here for the long one. So how exactly does the mysterious Skull Face fit into the incredibly dense and convoluted mythology of Kojima’s masterpiece of a franchise?

Motivation/Goals: Skull Face has a pretty surface-level motivation at first glance: he wants revenge against both Zero and Big Boss, as Skull Face previously worked for the covert project XOF created by Zero that cleaned up messes left behind by Big Boss during Virtuous Mission and Operation Snake Eater, XOF being the shadow of the FOX program, so to speak. After FOX disbanded in the 70s, XOF became the strike force for Zero’s Cipher. Of course, during all this time, Skull Face became resentful of both Zero and Big Boss alike, weary of being left in the shadows cleaning up the messes of men who would gain more honor than he did. This is the guy who assassinated Stalin in the Metal Gear universe, so it is understandable he’d be a bit miffed.

Of course, as any Metal Gear villain is wont to do, he takes his anger too far, and decides to play Cipher and MSF against each other, and sets into motion the events of The Phantom Pain by kidnapping, torturing, and possibly even raping Paz before having those bombs implanted in her as well as kidnapping and torturing Chico (and perhaps even forcing him to rape Paz). He then destroys Mother Base, which leads into Big Boss going into a coma when his helicopter explodes due to Paz’s bomb.

His ultimate goal from all of this chaos is this: he’ll create nukes only he can stop from detonating and distribute them around the world along with the Metal Gears needed to fire them, upsetting the global power balance in the process while also keeping Skull Face in control. Then, he would unleash the English parasite that kills its host whenever they speak English; when the world is liberated from English, the new world language will be one of nukes and Metal Gears, and the world will be at peace through mass nuclear deterrence, a sentiment similar to that of Hot Coldman of Peace Walker. And if that doesn’t work? Just kill everyone. The plan is ludicrously complicated and seems like it could easily be thrown out of wack by even the slightest of variables, which makes Skull Face a perfect Metal Gear villain.

Really though, everything boils down to his desire for revenge against the sleights he feels Zero and Big Boss dealt against him, be they real or imagined, which fits very nicely into the game’s deconstruction of the idea of vengeance and how ultimately seeking revenge can utterly consume a person and cause far more harm than good. This makes Skull Face thematically gel with the story while also being someone to root against and to, in the end, help Kaz and Venom realize how utterly futile their thirst for vengeance against Skull Face was and how destroying him does not bring back the years of suffering they suffered or all that they lost.

There’s also an element of the fear of being forgotten to his motivations, erased from history by his enemies in an attempt to eradicate any and all legacy he may have; however, in this regard he is far more successful than in his main evil plain, as he managed to pass on his vengeful, nihilistic philosophies to his enemies. Even though his body is burnt away due to housing parasites and even though the Patriots eradicate his existence, and even though the true Big Boss never acknowledged Skull Face or his existence, Venom, Psycho Mantis, Skull Face, Diamond Dogs, and even Cipher are forever warped by his philosophies and in part plays in to how Outer Heaven was created. Even worse, he actually does get his revenge on Zero, causing him to fall into the state he is seen in right before his death at the end of Guns of the Patriots. As special tapes show, Zero truly was remorseful for how things between he and Big Boss had turned out and truly wanted to communicate and reconcile… but because of Skull Face’s desire for revenge, he ended up preventing such a reunion from ever occurring.

“Poor communication kills” is another strong theme in the game, and Skull Face weaponizes such a thing, inadvertently ensuring all the tragedies that would follow in the Metal Gear timeline, all because of his thirst for revenge against two men who never intentionally wished to screw him over… perhaps if he had communicated, things would have turned out a bit better for all parties. Instead, he turned one man into an immobile, barely functioning shell and warped another into someone just like him: a monster who lives only to lash out in anger and vengeance at those he has perceived as wronging him. Even though Skull Face died, he still ultimately was victorious in the sense that Big Boss and Zero were both twisted and destroyed by his actions.

Performance: James Horan does a wonderful job voicing Skull Face, making him sinister, creepy, and hammy whenever the scene calls for it. In fact, his scenery chewing skills are nearly unmatched; Skull Face goes whole hog when it comes to hamminess. He’s certainly not Armstrong levels, but Horan knows what kind of series he’s in and is definitely having a lot of fun.

Final Fate: When Mantis hijacks Sahelanthropus, Skull Face ends up caught in the crossfire and crushed, so Kaz and Venom come up and blast his limbs off as payback for the limbs they lost. But then they realize that killing him is a pointless, hollow victory that won’t bring back their dead comrades or give back all they took from him, so they toss him his gun as he begs them to kill him and tell him to do it himself as they walk away. A powerful moment in the series…

...That Huey immediately ruins by going over, killing him, and then shouting “REVENGE!” in the stupidest manner possible, despite the fact that any grivance Huey could possibly have against Skull Face is petty at best. For such an important villain in the grand scheme of the franchise, he deserved better than being shot by Huey of all people.

Best Scene: It’s pretty hard to pick, as almost any of his disturbing tapes from Ground Zeroes could qualify due to their fantastic voice acting and horrifying content that cements Skull Face as one of the franchise’s most twisted villains. But if we’re talking in-game onscreen appearances, the scene in “Hellbound” where Sahelanthropus is revealed in all its terrifying glory while he poses and gestures in its hand, hamming it up for Huey and Snake, is just a truly golden moment.

Best Quote: “Who is doing this? Such a lust for revenge… WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!??!!?”

Final Thoughts & Score: Skull Face is a really cool villain, even with that dopey face mask. It may be because he continues the proud tradition of ridiculous, over-the-top bad guys that the series is known for, but gives one suited to the Big Boss era of the franchise; Volgin and Hot Coldman are not nearly as hammy or enjoyable as Skull Face is. And much like any great Metal Gear villain, Skull Face has some awkward moments, such as that uncomfortably long car ride and the fact he’s wearing a mask that makes him look like an edgy reimagining of the Hamburglar, but frankly these things just endear him more to me. The whole fun of Metal Gear is that these games have so many poetic, beautiful, poignant, and philosophical scenes juxtaposed against over-the-top absurdity and ridiculous levels of narm; Skull Face fits right in.

Truly this man earns his 9/10. Ultimately I keep him from the perfect score due to being killed by Huey, which is insanely embarrassing for any villain, as well as the fact that he’s a little underutilized and never really beaten in a meaningful way because, again, Huey is incapable of not ruining something. But none of that changes how thematically strong the guy is. He’s a lot of fun, and while it’s a shame he’s killed only about halfway through the game, the shadow he and his actions cast on not only the entire game but the franchise as a whole more than make up for his shortcomings.

"because a lot of folks on this site for example are buying into conservative mindsets even as they battle conservatives" Can you elaborate on this a bit more? It is interesting.

Ok so you know how in the build up to the American Civil War a lot of white Northerners were fiercely opposed to slavery but were still extremely racist in terms of their world view, they basically were right for the wrong reasons.  A lot of leftists here seem to doing the same thing, they oppose conservatism but don’t actually doubt many of the core principles of conservatism.  This is especially obvious when looking at tactics or methods 

1) Accepting Right wing Framing of Issues.  @randomshoes actually made this observation to me, but I’m going to steal it for this post here

Basically when the Right frames an issue, its often this massively simplistic binary narrative like “Capitalism good, Communism bad” or “The West is totally a real thing and it is good and anything on western is bad” or “Christianity=good, nonchristain=bad”  And so many leftists, rather than challenging the binary just accept it but invert it.  So I see people being like “Lets downplay the crimes of Joseph Stalin” rather than “actually making it capitalism vs. communism is a massively simplistic way of viewing extremely complicated political movements that emerged over centuries”.  Or people going on to these extremely nasty anti Christian movements rather than just accepting 

The most extreme version of this is that I sometimes see leftists support literal conservatives because they happen to be opposed to Westernization, like I see leftists justifying ISIS or even Japanese Ultra Nationalist.  

2) The desire for everything bad to be traced back to a single unified source.  If you ever have the misfortune to watch Right wing News like I do, their world view is one where everything they don’t like from socialism to Islamic fundamentalism to Crime to Hollywood to racial minorities  are all one mass that they just call “enemies” ussually led by George Soros or some other antisemitic stereotype.  Because a core part of rightist thought process is an embrace of intellectual simplicity and rejection of complexity.  They like nice simple narratives with clear bad guys and good guys and where they don’t have to imagine things in a more nuanced or complicated manner.   

So it is super infuriating when the left buys into it

Both me and @randomshoes have met leftist who honest to god believe that there is some council of rich white men who are sitting around table being like “ok so the 15th meeting of the Oppressors meeting has met, what are some new ways we can make the world shittier for black people?”  There is no secret cabal of oppressors out there, there are systems, that is why its called “systemic oppression”.  There are people who want to spread or take advantage of that oppression (see entries, Koch Brothers, Donald Trump, the Entire Republican Party) but the systems go beyond just the right.  For that matter, they go beyond capitalism itself in many ways. 

To use one concrete example, so many people at my college were 100% convinced that capitalism invented patriarchy and racism which like....no, capitalism doesn’t exist until the 17th century (ish) while racism goes back to like...all of recorded history.  Even if we specifically mean “racism based on skin color” well that was invented by the Spanish in their conquest of the Americas and Spain was very much not a capitalist power.  Meanwhile patriarchy like...have you studied the ancient greeks.

I could go on through literally dozens of examples of this, but the left can be just as guilty as “all of my problems can be traced to one issue” as the right, though unlike the right at least the left has real actual problems.  

3) Utter lack of Nuance.  Again if you spend time on right wing media, you notice that they tend towards dramatic demononization vs. idealizing of public figures.  Anybody in their circle is good, and those that aren’t are pure evil.    because again....complex thinking is literally antithetical to right wing thinking.  It would be really really nice if the left could avoid this...but nope.  

This can be the sort of Moral Cholesterol thing that I’ve talked about before (and thank you @archpaladin for coining that term), where people are like “oh i morally agree with this movie therefore it is good” or the inverse which is just the most simplistic way you can possibly view art.  Or it can be how certain elements of the left views historical figures.  

You see this the most with equivocation, I have met leftists being like “oh the US interment camps are equatable to the Rape of Nanking” which like...no....one is bad one is far far worse.  

I could write a whole series of post on this one its 

4) Embrace of Conspiracy Theories, Pseudo History, Pseudo Science etc

The Right thrives on conspiracy theories, because again...facts don’t care about feelings but I get really testy when I see the left embracing these tactics as well. Again, the right is worse at this, I’m not equivocating, but lets remember Anti Vaxxers were a left wing bullshit theory. Actually the entire “new Age” movement is rife with grifters, conspiracy theorists, and associated bullshit.  

I mean on tumblr you will see posts talking about how China really discovered American (nope), how Beethoven was African (nope), how a Jewish lobby controls Washington (ugg) or 

I mean just a few days ago, a classmate of mine was claiming that Christianity invented patriarchy and mentioned the example of “like with overthrowing cleopatra” which like....nooo on every possible level

This goes from annoying to outright sinister when you take into account that some leftists are willing to serve as apologists for certain horrific regimes, like I keep finding Mao apologists on this site.  

5) Mob tactics.  Again, the Right is so much worse about this since they deliberately artificially create mobs for the purpose of mass harassment (cough Gamergate cough) but the left is pretty guilty of this as well, I refer to you that entire contra points fiasco as one example.  

6) Not Checking Sources.  I swear to god, if I could get everybody on tumblr to change just one thing about their behavior it would be

.....to get ride of the nazis...

but somewhere on the list would be this public service announcement 

IF YOU SEE SOMETHING CLAIMED ON TUMBLR.....DOUBLE CHECK IT FIRST

the amount of times i see people just spreading utter bullshit that was just posted on this site which a basic google search could stop is just...ugg

7) Nostalgic.  I see a lot of leftists engaging in primordial ism, romanticism and “appeals to nature fallacies.  Again you will find a lot of leftists indulging in “oh things were better before modernity” nonsense

8) Fetishistic of violence, especially revolutionary violence, ignoring the consequences that tend to emerge from that.  Still better than the right obviously

9) Finally dehumanization.  This one i’m a bit understanding of, after all the Alt Right are basically evil, and the Republican are a death c ult at this point, but even so quite a few elements of the left are just a bit too gleeful.  And the thing about that militant mindset is that while it might be directed against bad people at first, it quickly can get corrupted.

Take RadFems for example, a group who I’ve always thought were a great example of anti intellectualism, militancy and violence from the start, with their almost Manichean attitude towards men.  The thing is that this approach didn’t really hurt any men ,not really but it was this “with us or against us attitude” that lead many of them to go on to become TERFS.  

This “the enemy must be destroyed” attitude is like a poison which sort of consumed yourself in it, and leads to hurting those who can’t fight back.  

In Short, the left frustrates me when it behaves like the right, who are utterly awful at their core. 

A Response to Postmodernism: Asymptotes

(Inspired most recently by this random ask about metanarratives, but for people just stumbling on the topic check out this SSC post “Postmodernism for Rationalists”. And when discussing pomo, I am always reminded of this tweet by St_Rev: Postmodernism is like nuclear fission; true but too dangerous for humans to be trusted with.) Let’s back up a bit. Lacan broke down mental experience into three parts: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic. I’m going to accept this, but a) ignore the Imaginary, and b) append Social to Symbolic because they are the same. Which is to say: Our experience of the world consists of the Real and the Social/Symbolic. What does that mean? The Real is well, actual reality that exists independent of human understanding. It’s the stuff that’s still there if you close your eyes. It’s the fact that there isn’t enough food no matter what the Emperor says, or that we will all one day die, or the cruelty of cancer, or the unimaginable gulf between the stars. It is the reality that victory goes to the side with more guns not the nobler cause, or that some people won’t get along no matter how much you love them both and try to negotiate peace. The Real is usually far too complicated and chaotic and unbounded for us to comprehend. Like in the question of “when were the Dark Ages” in the linked SSC post, the Real is all the individual lives and experiences of people over that time period. It’s too big to even put into words, but it’s still undeniably there. Any attempt to just ignore the Real is called repression, and the Real will eventually rise from that and disrupt your plans. The Symbolic is our attempt to make any sense of the above. It is how we split infinitely varied things into simple categories and binaries, like the insistence that everyone is male or female (or good vs bad.) It is the map instead of the territory, and *every single word* we use is just a Symbolic interpretation of far too messy Real. (Like this post recently asking just what is a boss anyway? Or the well written post “The Categories Were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories”) Whenever we try to say something about every type of apple, or define what “life” is, or come up with an ideology that pits an obvious group of good guys and bad guys, or just try to predict the results of a scientific experiment with a probability curve, we are still thinking using the Symbolic. This is not a huge sin. After all, we can not actually think about the ineffable Real, let alone communicate about it. If we want to make any progress at all, either in reasoning about the world or working with others, we *have* to use the Symbolic. It’s like physicists using models assuming spherical cows - it gets you somewhere, eventually, at least. (Certainly a tribe using imperfect Symbolic thinking would outcompete and defeat a bunch of brainiacs just meditating on the Real. Existence without using the Symbolic is just not sustainable.) I even upgrade the term to Social/Symbolic since all of our social existence depends on how we use the Symbolic to express concepts to others. That’s well, what language is. And once you have a Symbolic term, and you share it with another via mouth-sounds or ink-scratches, then it takes on an independent Symbolic existence that can be read and interpreted by people who are neither you nor your intended target. Then these symbols really do have an external existence, spreading throughout the population, with no direction by a conscious mind. Words and concepts are like a virus living in the social body this way. The narrative or metanarrative, is a Social/Symbolic entity this way - fairly detached from the Real that gave it meaning, and evolving based on what is most efficient for the social rules it inhabits. Two brief examples: - Science. Science is obviously a quest for the Real, and that is admirable. And yet even when trying hardest to do this, we create standards of objectivity and merit that reflect Social/Symbolic understanding. We talk of p-values and grant writing and peer review and hundreds of ways this search for the most raw truth is filtered through simplistic understanding, and incentive schemes that have long since become normal status-seeking rat races. - Capitalism. Markets are a method of social relation of course. And yet the values and prices of things fluctuate in response to the necessities of the Real. If food becomes scarce, or a movie is truly terrible, or a new writer is brilliant beyond precedence, no matter how unexpected these things are to the powers that be, they can earn money and renowned in a market, proving some glimmer of the Real in doing so. Now the price of something is not an untainted mark of its true value, but it is at least related to it somehow. Anyway, the tumblr version of Postmodernism (which is to say, that version that is most politically useful to the class of people who have currently discovered this concept - laypeople arguing about politics on social media) could be reduced to this: 1. In no cases do we ever know the Real, without relying on narratives found in the Social/Symbolic. (We can’t know when the Dark Ages began or ended.) 2. So choose which narratives you want to pursue based on Social/Symbolic reasons. (Do you want to align yourself with the narrative of the Dark Ages spread by the Catholic Church? By labor historians? Etc.) The problem with these is that they are true, but also noxious, as they would always mean dropping the evidence of our own eyes for the narrative of the class we are trying to support. And people who do this too much are very evidently stupid (in action, not in essence.) We see the results of this in Holocaust deniers and Stalin apologists and 9-11 truthers. The issue is that they are forgetting that the symmetric case is true: the complete Real may be inaccessible *but so is the complete Social/Symbolic*. While amateur pomo knows you can never completely reach the Real, it forgets you can never *escape* it either. In actuality, total Social/Symbolic is an eternal fantasy. It is referenced in FALC or the singularity, where you are immune from any needs and can spend all your time engaging with only concepts, or only the social sphere you have chosen, free of all messy entanglements. It is a powerful dream (or nightmare), with a lot to say for it, but it’s as impossible as knowing the mind of God. There will always be some element of the Real under the fantasy, repressed and pushing back in the ways we least expect or want. Everything we know is between two asymptotes - which can approach the Real, but never reach it, and we can approach the pure Social/Symbolic but never realize it. So an attempt to choose your narrative *solely* on Social/Symbolic grounds (like which side you want to support) will find itself constantly interrupted by rude counter-evidence. It might be the people voting against you, or your story not selling, or just an anxious feeling in the pit of his stomach. It’s really impossible to predict how the Real will erupt, but it always will. You have to accept you are just stuck as a mutt in the muddled middle, never have authentic Real knowledge or pure Social/Symbolic simplicity, but a mix of both at all times.

My 2018 in Pop Culture

Same plan here as usual. This is what meant most to me last year in pop culture.

Top Forty Things From 2018

40. King Kong on Broadway I wrote about this as an adaptation of the Kong story over at SportsAlcohol.com, but here I'll just say that while I was really disappointed with this as a musical, the execution of Kong himself on stage was breathtakingly rad.

39. Rhyming "is nae" with "Disney" in Anna and the Apocalypse In theory, I don't have much of an appetite left for a zombie comedy, having been well and truly sated by Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, and the wave of imitators that followed them. I felt like I'd seen all of the moves that are possible with that particular genre mash-up, and then I read about a Scottish zombie comedy that ALSO threw in the musical and the Christmas movie. So it was almost with a sense of grudging obligation that I accepted the inevitability that I'd see Anna and the Apocalypse. It won me over. It's got a winning cast, catchy songs, and a surprisingly effective melancholy tone. But I have to admit, the moment that really won me over was a moment in the song "Hollywood Ending" where "is nae" ("is not" in a Scottish accent) is rhymed with "Disney."

38. The Conners/The Roseanne Revival This was a real roller coaster in 2018. I was excited and apprehensive about the revival, and only slightly relieved when it began and was mostly pretty good. Still, there was an uneasiness with the way that the Roseanne character had been conceived for the revival and that basically exploded thanks to the behaviour of the real Roseanne. Still, overall I've enjoyed the revival and The Conners, and while I'm sad about what happened to TV Roseanne and real Roseanne(for different reasons)

37. "The Queen" episode of Castle Rock I liked the show pretty well overall, but oh man did this episode stand out. For most of the run, I'd just thought it was a cute bit of casting to have Sissy Spacek playing what seemed like a strangely minor role. Then this episode happened. It's a real acting showcase for Spacek and it satisfies with suspense and emotion in equal measure.

36. Kurt Russell performing "Santa Claus is Back in Town" in The Christmas Chronicles I'm a sucker for a Christmas movie, and this one is agreeable enough. There is some attempt at telling an emotional story that might hit you if you're in the right mood, and there is pleasant hint of Gremlins in the movie's portrayal of Santa's elves, but mostly it is a pretty satisfying expansion of the thought, "what if Kurt Russell was Santa Claus?" Russell is a hoot in the role, and the movie hits a peak when his Santa ends up in jail and breaks out into a jailhouse rendition of "Santa Claus is Back in Town." Downloaded and added to my Christmas playlist.

35. Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert This new wave of live musicals on TV hasn't always resulted in a great show (I honestly have forgotten a lot of the Peter Pan and Rocky Horror broadcasts), but sometimes they end up with some really cool television. Grease Live still reigns as the champion of these things, but this production of Jesus Christ Superstar was exciting and energetic and featured some neat ideas in its staging. It's shows like this that keep me hoping they'll continue to try these live musical shows.

34. The Death of Stalin Wrote about this for SportsAlcohol.com.

33. Isle of Dogs The visceral aesthetic pleasure of this film might outweigh the delicate emotional effect all of Anderson's films tend to achieve, but even if the complicated story and worldbuilding in the film kept it from succeeding for me fully on a first viewing, it did get me to want to watch it again (and again).

32. Keira Knightley in The Nutcracker and the Four Realms The movie as a whole is a good enough time in the way that all of these lavishly produced live-action Disney fantasy movies tend to be. But Keira Knightley, as the Sugarplum Fairy, single-handedly drags this movie up a notch with her fantastically daffy performance. To explain all the ways that her performance delights would be to spoil what happens in the movie, but I'll just say that she finds a few different registers to play in the film and she is amazing in each one. Think of this snub when you watch the Academy Awards.

31. The Favourite A three-hander where each leg of the triangle is different and spectacular. Turns out that acidic dialogue works just as well in the Yorgos Lanthimos world as alien affectedness, and the cast he's got for this one hurl barbs with aplomb.

30. Ash vs. Evil Dead Series Finale The third season of this show lost a bit of a step for me, not quite balancing the goofs and the horror quite as deftly as the show had done at its best. But it really brought it back around for the last couple of episodes. The finale in particular had some surprisingly big action and an ending that felt perfectly Evil Dead. If that's the last we see of Ash, it feels right.

29. DuckTales The first season wrapped up with some good adventure and some ambitious emotional storytelling. And the second season has seemed, if anything, even more confident so far (including an excellent Christmas episode).

28. Eighth Grade What a lovely, humane, gem of a movie.

27. The Old Man and the Gun I was head-over-heels in love with this one like halfway through the opening scene. If it had ended after that scene, I might have been satisfied, but the rest of the movie was truly wonderful too.

26. A Series of Unfortunate Events Season Two There's no twist for book readers as great as what they did with the Parent characters in the first season, but this second season of the show continued to be really great.

25. Rusty Lake: Paradise & Rusty Lake: Paradox This year I played all of the Rusty Lake/Cube Escape games, and it's probably a good thing that it takes a while between game releases or I might just burrow into these Twin Peaks inspired puzzles and not come out.

24. The last 20 minutes of Halloween I pretty well loved the entirety of this 40-years-later sequel, but the last twenty minutes or so were just next-level great. Basically, once everybody gets to Laurie's compound, this film was as scary as I wanted and as fist-pumpingly thrilling as I didn't know I could have expected.

23. Lost in Space Season One Might have loved this if it was just the one thing after another space survival show, but when you layer on an intriguing mystery and then add on Parker Posey's slitherly Dr. Smith? Yep, loved it.

22. The Haunting of Hill House Mike Flanagan has been doing cool horror work on smaller movies for a few years now, and I'm glad he seems to have found a patron in Netflix. The broader canvas of Haunting of Hill House allows him to do pretty much everything he's so good at, and even allows for some new tricks (like that "one long shot" episode, or the creepy background ghosts that go uncommented on in the story).

21. Creed II Creed was so great, and the notion of Stallone returning to the Ivan Drago well so worrisome, that I was a little apprehensive that this one would disappoint me. What a great surprise, then, that this was basically a best-case scenario for how this could have worked out. Even the Drago stuff is pretty compelling! I'd love to see more with Adonis and Bianca sometime, and I certainly still love Rocky himself, but for this round of playing with fire, I am satisfied.

20. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters & Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle The first two (out of three) animated Godzilla films hit Netflix last year and they were much more curious and idiosyncratic than I expected when they were first announced. Slowly paced, with an intentional disregard for the expectations of kaiju fans, they take a brilliant concept and proceed to use it to explore the perils of various belief systems. Each of these ends on a cliffhanger, so the success of the whole thing might depend a bit on how Godzilla: Planet Eater wraps things up, but for now it's a fascinating experiment.

19. The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs I can't say I sat around missing the horror host thing (I also love and regularly watch the family-friendly Svengoolie), but I was still surprised by how enjoyable and how nostalgic I found the experience of sitting back down with Joe Bob to watch a trashy horror movie. I didn't watch this as a marathon, but it did make for a bunch of swell weekends catching up with some movies I'd never seen and a charming film buff I hadn't seen in a while.

18. Bad Times at the El Royale Everything about this, from the cast to the aesthetic to the story, was just right up my alley. There was a moment late in the film where Maggie and I turned to each other, our jaws literally dropped, and we burst into nervous laughter.

17. BlacKkKlansman Wrote this one up over at SportsAlcohol.com.

16. Three Identical Strangers This documentary knocked me out. It's an amazing story with a bunch of incredible twists and turns and fascinating characters. It also poses some really intriguing questions and left me with a lot to think about. Don't read anything about it, just see it!

15. Disenchantment As a big fan of The Simpsons and i (and knowing the similar arcs they followed pretty well), I was pretty excited for a new Matt Groening animated show, and the first season of Disenchantment might have surpassed my expectations. It's funny, visually appealing, and takes some effective swings at the kind of emotional storytelling that it took the earlier series a couple of seasons to really nail. The finale sent me scrambling to the internet to see if it had been picked up for more episodes.

14. Nancy by Olivia Jaimes As a regular and avid comic strip reader, I propose that I was more blown away than most of the internet by the new Nancy. I regularly checked in on the soggy Gilchrist version of the strip, so imagine my surprise and delight at the change! It is neat to see a newspaper strip make any kind of impact in the culture again. Plus the strip is really fun!

13. Star Wars Star Wars: Rebels came to a close with a run of really exciting episodes and a really excellent finale. The comics continued to be really good. And Solo: A Star Wars Story showed up with smaller, not so fate-of-the-galaxy stakes and still just nailed the iconic characters it was digging into in exactly the ways it needed to. In a year where Star Wars fandom was showing itself to be home to a lot of the same toxicity as other fandoms, Star Wars itself kept up its end with lots of fun stuff.

12. The Last Best Story I thought I had a good idea what to expect from a high school newspaper riff on His Girl Friday, and this book certainly (thoroughly, delightfully) satisfies that. But I wasn't exactly prepared for the emotional depth and lovely observational detail in Maggie's book (I mean, I probably should have been, but it still sneaked up on me). I finished and just wanted to read it again.

11. "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" episode of The X-Files This second (and seemingly final) revival season of The X-Files boasted a more confident ratio of hits to misses than the previous one (even the nutso mythology episodes showed a stronger grasp of how the show works and what it means in the current moment) but the highlight, again, was a virtuosic episode written and directed by Darin Morgan. It was brilliantly funny, very X-Filesy, and sneakily provided a hilarious alternate series finale for fans in the event that Chris Carter would botch the actual one a few episodes later (luckily, he did as well as I might have hoped, really).

10. Arrested Development - Season 5, Part 1 I disagreed with most of the complaints people lobbied against the fourth season of Arrested Development, but I do think the batch of fifth season episodes released last year did fall prey to some of the shapeless storytelling and clunky greenscreen they were accused of before (I thought the fourth season did wonders with having the characters separated, while they flailed to meaningfully integrate Lindsay in the fifth season). And because episodes weren't as clearly defined in their storytelling, it left some of the character stories feeling both too dragged out and thinly developed (thinking here of Gob's struggle with his sexuality and Tobias's relationship with Murphybrown) by the time the half-season ended on a slight cliffhanger without really building significant momentum. But for all that, I love these characters so much and the show particularly really does right by the way that Michael and George Michael try to navigate their relationship with each other after the events of the fourth season.

9. Mary Poppins Returns This movie had impossible shoes to fill, and you can tell that everybody involved took that seriously. I saw this one twice. The first time, I really enjoyed it. The second time, it made me cry.

8. Marvel Cinematic Universe Black Panther was so fantastic, Avengers: Infinity War felt like a really special theater experience, and Ant-Man and the Wasp was a delightful trifle with an amazing, playful gut-punch of a stinger. Really, I had a great time will all three movies they put out this year and I loved the ride they took us on all the way through to the final text card in the Ant-Man credits.

7. Surprise, it's The Cloverfield Paradox! Sure, this is easily the least of the Cloverfield movies so far (it's still a fun haunted-house-on-a-space-station movie with an overqualified cast), but I don't imagine there'll be a more fun way to see one of these. I was already feeling that familiar Cloverfield excitement as the online marketing game started spooling up, but I pretty much leapt off the couch when Katie and I saw the Super Bowl ad that announced it would be dropping soon on Netflix, and freaked out even further when I looked on Netflix and saw the tag that it would debut after the game ended! We stayed up and watched it that night, and I went to sleep in the glow of a new Cloverfield. Gonna be hard to top that for excitement next time, but I'm looking forward to seeing them try.

6. Support the Girls Basically a "day in the life" movie about a manager of a Hooters-style sports bar, this movie (starring a perfect Regina Hall) is warm and human and reassuring because of the way it eschews the normal reassurances of this kind of thing and just plays it real. It's a beautiful movie.

5. GLOW I loved the first season of GLOW, and I think this second season is even better. It digs a little deeper into the supporting cast, doubles down on its resonance with things happening in the culture right now, includes that delightful episode within an episode, and ends on a perfect and delicate emotional note.

4. American Vandal Here's one of those shows with a perfect first season taking a shot at a follow-up, and they nailed it. Whatever trades are made in taking on a case with less personal involvement for our investigator leads are made up by the incisive observational writing (and hilarious bathroom jokes), this time throwing race and class into the mix. I'm sorry we won't get to see them take on another case and format, but these first two seasons are perfect.

3. Ready Player One I am in the tank for pretty much any Spielberg movie (I've loved the dramas he's done in the last few years) and here he's made a movie with cameos from King Kong and Mechagodzilla. I enjoyed the book this was based on, but I loved the movie even more. The visuals and action (and that amazing Shining sequence) are terrific, but the way that they restructured the game tasks build to make a moving argument for the ways even popular art are used for communication and connection, and Mark Rylance's portrayal of the Wonka-esque Halliday makes it all land.

2. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs I wrote about this one over at SportsAlcohol.com. I loved it.

1. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts One & Two To be quite honest, this would be hard to beat in any event since I got engaged to be married between Part One and Part Two. Luckily, the show was a really special event even beyond that personal association. A surprisingly moving epilogue to the Harry Potter stories (and more satisfying in performance where the performances of the actors makes up for some of the ways the supporting characters seemed more thinly conceived in the script than they did in the books), it was also a dazzling theatrical experience. The variety of tricks employed to bring the wizard world to the stage meant that just as you figured out how they pulled off one big effect you were met with three other nifty flourishes. I dig Rowling's continued noodling around in her wizard world through things like this play and the Fantastic Beasts films (I enjoyed Crimes of Grindelwald) as a way to tell new stories and explore nerdy minutia without undoing the lovely bow of that original series of books. (Side note: Because my pleasure reading time has been so heavily curtailed as I get through this first school year, I'm only about a third in on Lethal White. Really digging it, but don't feel like I can include it on this list properly.)

Top Twenty Things I'm Excited About in 2019

Godzilla: King of the Monsters Never would I have believed that we'd be getting a big-budget American Godzilla film that would prominently feature Mothra, Rodan, and King Ghidorah as the third film in a shared Godzilla/Kong movie universe. Now it is happening, and everything they've released to do with the film (trailers, posters, etc) have looked incredible. Gonna be hard to top this one for excitement this year.

Marvel Cinematic Universe Captain Marvel looks like a lot of fun, I'm sure Spider-Man: Far From Home will be great, and I'm pretty interested in whatever Marvel Studios ends up doing for the Disney+ streaming service, but the main event this year is obviously Avengers: Endgame. Whatever form this big finale for the first decade of MCU stories takes, I cannot wait to see it.

Star Wars As with Marvel, there's plenty to look forward to this year, with The Mandalorian presumably accompanying the debut of Disney+ along with the revival of The Clone Wars, but the biggest deal will of course be Episode IX, the grand finale of the main Star Wars saga and the story of the Skywalkers.

Arrested Development The original run of the series was nearly flawless. The fourth season is, in some ways, even more ambitious and special. And even though the first half of this fifth season was, to my eyes, guilty of some of the baggy, formless storytelling that season four had been accused of (and splitting the season like this meant that the first half felt weirdly unsatisfying), it still had a ton of joke that I really loved and developed the relationship between Michael and his son in a way that I did find satisfying after the fourth season cliffhanger. Excited for more of the show and crossing my fingers that it nails the landing.

Stranger Things III This one drops on my birthday! Setting the story in summer sounds fun to me, and I'm pretty excited to see these characters again after a year off.

The Twilight Zone The original series is a deep foundation of my pop culture world and I even found things to like about the UPN revival in the early 00s, so I'm predisposed to be interested in this. But giving it to Jordan Peele (also so psyched for Us) seems like a masterstroke and the trailer they just released is so perfect (both for the obvious love it displays for the original and the new energy it promises) that it's driven me to distraction. Cannot wait for this.

The Addams Family I was obsessed with The Addams Family back when the two Barry Sonnenfeld films came out in the 90s. I loved the 60s sitcom, the movies, and the animated series (and more recently was bitterly disappointed by the Broadway musical). But most of all I adored the Charles Addams cartoons. This latest animated film has been kicking around in some form of development for a while now (there was a time when it was reported that they were trying to get Tim Burton to give it the stop-motion treatment) and I'm a little apprehensive that it ended up with Illumination Studios. Still, a new animated Addams Family film is a must see.

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance This sounds pretty special, and in any case it is exciting to get an ambitious new puppet project from the Henson Company delivered right to my Netflix queue this year.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood & The Irishman A new Tarantino film would be on this list no matter what, so those photos they released a while back were most exciting to just get a look at what he's going for aesthetically. And of course I'm intrigued and excited to hear that Netflix is throwing money at Scorsese to make a crime film starting De Niro, Pacino, Keitel, and Joe Pesci.

The French Dispatch Not sure if this one will actually hit this year or end up seeking out some awards-friendly release next year, but it's a Wes Anderson film about journalism with a predictably great cast. Exciting whenever it comes out.

Knives Out Rian Johnson writing and directing another mystery film with this cast? Let's do this now.

Little Women Lady Bird was sooo good that I'd be pretty into whatever movie Greta Gerwig made next, so the incredible cast she's assembled for this follow up is just icing.

The Righteous Gemstones When Jody Hill and Danny McBride make another HBO show, I'm going to watch it. Make it about a family of televangelists and make John Goodman the patriarch, and I can't wait to watch it.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters Volume 2 The first volume was a surprise highlight of 2017 and it was a bummer to see this follow up slide further and further back on release calendars. Hoping it finally arrives this year, but the original was so wonderful that I'm ready to wait as long as it takes.

Missing Link There are other animated movies I'll be really excited for by the time they come out this year (Toy Story 4 and Frozen 2 will surely be huge events) but I'm probably most excited that Laika is back with a new feature.

Star Trek It looks like, as an attempt to get people like me to actually keep up their CBS All Access subscription outside of the two months they're offering new episodes of Star Trek Discovery (and I am pretty psyched for this second season!) they are planning on keeping us in new Star Trek as often as possible. An animated Trek comedy! A new series about Picard! More of those very cool Short Treks! I'm pretty into seeing what they have in store this year.

Looney Tunes Cartoons After years and years of grousing about Warner Bros' treatment of the Looney Tunes characters (even when they have something that kinda works, like Wabbit or New Looney Tunes, it has felt like they're on the C-list; and no, Space Jam 2 does not make me feel better), I'm intrigued by this series and am anxious to see some footage to see what they're cooking up.

Penny Dreadful: City of Angels I loved the original series, I'm a sucker for stories set in America in the 30s, and  I like the cast they're lining up, so I'm definitely into this.

Amazing Stories I don't even know if or when I'll get to see this (we already have so many streaming services and if I'm adding another one this year, it'll be Disney+), but I love the idea of a new Amazing Stories and if Spielberg directs an episode or two it'll make this a must watch somehow.

Opinion on Vasily Stalin and also! Do you know much more about how Yakov treated Svetlana and how Vasily treated her?

Oh, man, anon, I’ve been thinking about this ask all day nowand marshalling my thoughts. I actually have a lot of really intense feelingsabout Vasili, and they’re all kind of tangled up together in a conflictingmess. I have a huge amount of sympathy for Vasili as a child, and quite a bitfor him in certain aspects of his adult life as well, but ultimately I alsohave huge issues with who he grew up to be and the choices he made with hislife.

This got EXTREMELY long so the rest is under the cut. CW discussion of abuse, suicide, and alcoholism

I’ll start with Vasili as a child, and what I do find verysympathetic and compelling about him. First of all, I think there’s substantialevidence that Vasili had ADHD—he was extremely hyperactive as a child, whichwas remarked on by various observers and apparently a matter of some concern tohis mother, who was concerned about his development. He also really struggledacademically, from the time he started school, having trouble focusing, completinghomework, and procrastinating on assignments. He consistently got failing tomediocre grades, and eventually transferred from a high school for children ofthe party elite that had a more typical curriculum to military school, and thento air force training when WWII broke out. I don’t think he ever technicallycompleted high school. Kids with ADHD or other learning issues still struggletoday, obviously (I should know, I was one of them, which also makes meidentify a little bit with Vasili’s experiences), but for someone like Vasiliwho was born in the 1920s, there was very little support or even knowledgeavailable.

I think this situation really ties into the other two thingsthat made Vasili’s childhood really difficult and traumatic—his mother’s lossand his father’s abuse of him—because it did affect his relationship with hisparents quite a bit.

Stalin clearly viewed Vasili as a disappointment—he oftencalled him lazy or stupid, both to his face and when complaining about him toothers, including to his teachers. (In a couple very sad instances, he reactedto teachers praising something Vasili had done or expressing concern about himbeing bullied by dismissing their view of Vasili and just putting him downagain). He was also physically violent with his son, including breaking hisnose when he was about fourteen. He also often unfavorably compared Vasili tohis younger sister, who was much more academically gifted and “better behaved”.He was very physically affectionate and cuddly with Svetlana when she waslittle, but almost never with Vasili, who was desperate for his father’sattention and approval and probably deeply hurt by this.

Vasili, on the other hand, seems to have been very close tohis mother. Nadya voiced some concerns to her friends about his academic strugglesand hyperactivity, but she was also very supportive and seems to have tried towork with him on his level rather than view him as deliberately misbehaving oruseless as his father did. She also framed it more as trying to make sure hewas able to succeed and be happy rather than viewing him as shameful ordefective. Nadya was also very affectionate with and protective of her son,often as a response to the way her husband treated him. She seems to haveviewed Vasili as being vulnerable and in need of special attention. I think herdeath was even harder and more traumatic for Vasili than it was for Svetlana,which is saying something. Because Svetlana was still very little, she stillneeded a lot of care on a day-to-day level, so her nanny was there to be asource of comfort and emotional support for her after the loss of her mother,and this continued throughout her childhood. Vasili, who at age eleven didn’tneed as much childcare, was still very vulnerable, but he didn’t have a supportsystem to the extent his sister did. In the first couple years after Nadya’sdeath, he went from a sweet, rambunctious little boy to an awkward, ganglyteenager who had panic attacks, frequently talked about suicide, and starteddrinking heavily at thirteen. A couple of Stalin’s bodyguards were concernedabout him, but it was more emotionally distant—they tried to distract him orwatch him to make sure he didn’t hurt himself, but he certainly wasn’t gettingcuddles or a chance to talk about his emotions. I think after Nadya died Vasilipretty much lost his only consistent source of nurturing, and the only persontreating him as a lovable little child—which at eleven he still very much was.After that, he was expected to start “acting like a man”, and he did clearly tryto emulate the behavior of the adult men in his life, and was very concernedabout their approval. This had disastrous consequences for both him and thepeople around him, because he was exposed to and adopted a lot of reallyharmful behaviors.

So, this leads me to mydiscussion of Vasili as an adult, who was frankly kind of a huge asshole. Thefirst and foremost thing, which I do think is absolutely inexcusable, is thathe was physically violent with several of the women he was in relationshipswith. I don’t think this is entirely surprising, given the environment he grewup in and the messages he was getting from his father about what adult menbehave like with women/people who are weaker than them—but that doesn’t makethat any better. And these are also choices that he made, because Yakov wasnever like that with women, and he was not doomed to be like that. He was also,according to his sister, prone to misogynistic comments in general, as well asanti-Semitism. Also he embezzled money from the Soviet Air Force and wasgenerally kind of an entitled brat who pulled rank and threatened to rat peopleout to his father—which I don’t think is quite as repugnant as the domesticabuse and bigotry but isn’t exactly appealing. Basically, I think the onlything he had going for him was that he was Stalin’s son, even if Stalin didn’tlike him much, and he was willing to take that for all it was worth in order tosucceed in the Stalinist system, even though his life was pretty much constantlyon the verge of falling apart because of his drinking and reckless behavior.And then his father died and it DID fall apart, because the new governmentdropped him like a hot potato and then his health completely shattered and inthe last couple years of his life he had multiple chronic health conditionsrelated to alcoholism and then finally died of liver cirrhosis at the age offorty.

So yeah, I have extremely complicated feelings about Vasili.I do sympathize a lot with his struggles—not just what he went through as achild, which is very sad in of itself, but also he was clearly really sufferingas an adult as a result of that. But I also really despise a lot of what he didand who he was as an adult. Ultimately, I think I feel anger towards him, and quitea bit of disappointment, I’d say? But ultimately primarily sadness. Especiallybecause I have so much respect and love for his mother, and SHE had so muchlove for him, and I think she would have been very, very unhappy to see whatbecame of her sweet little boy—both in terms of what he did to other people andwhat he did to himself.

I’ve exhausted myself and am now in my feelings so you all will get the second half of this post (about Svetlana and her brothers) later.

Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/andrea-riseborough-talks-hollywood-sexism-mother-sucker-four-films-sundance/

Andrea Riseborough talks Hollywood sexism, Mother Sucker and four films at Sundance

Andrea Riseborough is having quite the banner year at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival as she is featured in four films including the U.S. Dramatic Competition films Nancy and Burden, the Midnight selection Mandy (in which she acts alongside Nicolas Cage), and the Spotlight film The Death of Stalin. From one film to the next she not only plays a completely different character, she’s thoroughly unrecognizable, transforming herself physically and vocally, whether it’s as a raven-haired eccentric in Nancy or as a country girl with a deep southern drawl in Burden. But the moment that Riseborough wanted to discuss in this interview wasn’t hers, but the collective one pushing for change in the film industry. More women have felt empowered to speak out about sexism, harassment, and abuse in Hollywood and independent film, and in this conversation and others throughout this week and in the months prior, Riseborough has added her own impassioned voice to the call. As she discusses below, she’s also working to change things systemically, having formed a production company called Mother Sucker that is run entirely by women. After several years of development, the company’s first completed project is Nancy, on which it served as co-producer. When an actor turns up at the Festival with multiple films, the inevitable question is how you managed to work this much over the course of the past year. The reality of production is more complicated though, in that you might have completed a few of these films at an earlier time, and of course, some films take longer than others to make. But still, four films at Sundance demonstrates an actor working hard and in demand, so clearly you’re doing something right. The pay disparity has been bad for the last couple of years. It’s actually gotten worse than it had been in the past. I found myself really just needing to accept more work in order to keep up as a woman. Generally the projects I really care about, the ones that push the needle, the ones that have diversity and eventually one day affect some sort of social change, are not ones that pay a great deal. You have a choice of doing one really terrible movie a year—which I’m just not interested because I end up wanting to kill myself—or, as a woman, you can do five projects to make up the same sort of pay. I would’ve liked to have not worked as much. But that’s the reality. That’s the honest truth. I did do them all back to back, and in one of the films I was paid 1/24th of what my male co-star was paid. Did you know the extent of that disparity at the time? Yes, I did. I knew that. And I went into it with my eyes open because I believed in the director, in his unique perspective and voice. That he’s not a run of the mill, mainstream director. As women, we make our money from being involved in more male-driven projects that make the money. We have to balance between doing some of that, where hopefully you don’t feel too compromised because it’s normally a male-heavy situation on set, and putting money back into films like Nancy with my company, which is an all-female film company. You’re referring to Mother Sucker, right? Yes. And then you take a hit financially, of course. Not many people want to invest in diversity. Though I do feel like that has changed in the last few months, which is a wonderful, wonderful feeling. And I feel now like I can actually step into a room and say, “I would like equal pay with my male co-star.” Not that they’ll give it to me. But I feel like I could say it and the option wouldn’t be off the table. Which is what used to happen in the past. If you asked for more money, they would just offer it to somebody else. Because they could. The long-term message being that you’re disposable. And that’s the opposite of what we’re all striving to come to believe in life, isn’t it? And that’s coming from a deeply fortunate position—I cannot even imagine what an actor of color goes through. When and why did you start Mother Sucker? In 2012, and the original concept was: What would it be like to see a film that was, from beginning to end, a female construction? Beyond that, I wondered what it would be like to live in a world where town planning had been done by women, rather than men. Where we didn’t live in concrete boxes, separate from one another, but in communal spaces where we all breast fed each other’s children. I’d really like to walk through a world of female constructs because the patriarchy has been in place for so long. I had been going through a very difficult moment with a film that I was on. I was originally the protagonist, and then I was bumped down to a secondary role in order for the male to be the protagonist. I tried to get out of it but couldn’t. So I just started writing ferociously—I’ve always written. A couple of projects came about, and we developed a few things, then I met Christina Choe and we started the Nancy journey. I quickly realized that was going to be the first film Mother Sucker was going to be part of co-producing. Because Christina’s voice is so strong. She truly is the definition of an auteur. What did you learn from the making of a film co-produced by an all-female company? We wrap early on set. Meaning you’re actually able to have a life during the shooting of the film? No, let’s not be crazy. Just very efficient. The experiment concept has not yet been fully had, because Nancy was made with several other companies, and mine is the only one that is all female. But for another film coming up I would really like to try it, to see how the energy shifts on screen when everyone around it is a woman. I mean, it might be a shitshow, who knows? But I think it’s a very interesting social experiment. I’ve spent so many days being the one woman surrounded by lots of men—and a makeup artist. Sometimes it’s very hard to do my work. Sometimes I have felt unsafe on set. People say weird things to you. You feel very outnumbered. You come onto the set and you feel virtually invisible. It’s hard to command focus on a set. I don’t mean the way a director [commands focus], I just mean to be very silent and do what you need to do. Imagine giving birth. Imagine being raped. To have that silence where it’s not just joke time for everyone else. It’s very difficult with a woman. We often do most of the emoting. We often need to get in that headspace, and it’s just tough. I just imagine getting in that headspace and being surrounded by a bunch of women. Why not just see [what happens]? We almost did it on Nancy, which was really wonderful. Let’s talk about your performance in Nancy. I would imagine it’s a tougher role because she’s somebody who makes it hard for the audience to read—she’s a bit of a fabricator and lives in her own head a lot of the time. As the performer, you have a much better sense of who Nancy is, but you also can’t always reveal that. From the beginning of Nancy, it was always very clear to me. She was an entire human being, which I really appreciated. Flawed, confused, disenfranchised, isolated. Desperately wanting to connect. Feeling isolated and disconnected from the rest of the human race, which we all feel with the advent of social media. That feeling of wanting to connect and not knowing how to do it is very timely. Christina and I used to joke that if Nancy had been brought up on the Upper East Side of New York to very liberal parents, perhaps she might have been one of the great writers of our time. But what actually happened was that she was smart enough and unusual enough that she ended up being the madwoman in her hometown. I mean, what would’ve happened to us if we hadn’t have gotten out of where we were from? We probably would have ended up as the mad people, too. You could see how, with a different writer and different performer, that role could be played as a madwoman. But you definitely pull back from that. Well, she’s just a woman. All of us, in some respect, felt that. It’s so real and accurate to portray a woman as flawed. We have a film culture in which men are portrayed as flawed consistently. And a history of portraying women born to a few narrow things, and generally not all of the things together. They rarely make up a whole person. We can all identify with Nancy. We can all laugh at the manipulations that we’ve all been part of to some extent in our lives. Whether it’s for survival, or for gain. That unhealthy behavior is very familiar to me. And then, when she reaches out to Leo and Alan, the moment is too much. She doesn’t quite know where to put it. There’s a feeling of deep discomfort as a response to being loved. I think that is something we can all identify with. That’s very human. When it’s just too much. We crave it. We pull for it. And once we get it we don’t know what to do with it. I’d like to also talk about Burden, another of your films in the Festival, with both of these appearing in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. Judy is technically a supporting character, to Garrett Hedlund’s character of Michael Burden. Yet Judy does carry a huge moral weight in the narrative but is integral to his transformation and redemption. I think of the reverend as the hero. I would like to have seen [the story] from that perspective. But yes, Judy was the catalyst for most of the change, and she suffered for a lot of the actions that Mike took. I wanted to show how much of a part she actually played, which wasn’t quite reflected in our story. The facts about what actually happened are very interesting if you look into it. Did you meet the real Judy? Oh yes. Many times. Was that helpful? I would imagine sometimes it can be intimidating or derailing. It’s tricky when you meet the real people and you get the real facts. It’s always difficult to set those aside. It was very helpful to see that Judy was the person whose heart was open to change. She was the person who stayed changed, and didn’t go back after all of this. The reverend runs up to her and yells “Super Judy” when he sees her in the supermarket. She grew up in an environment where most of the people she knew joined the Klan at 16, yet she still felt innately like it was wrong. And the way that society still is wrong. In a different time, years down the line, will a black writer have the resources to tell the story from the reverend’s perspective? I hope so. I’m kind of sick of seeing it from the same perspective all the time. I really like seeing things from a different perspective. I’m a white woman. I’ve spent so much time in my body. I’ve known enough of that. I go to the cinema, and I want to see other people. I want to see other walks of life. Different perspectives. As an actor, you’re a great ambassador for the power of story to take us out of ourselves. Part of why you do what you do is following an impulse to inhabit other experiences. And that’s also partly why we’re drawn to the cinema. Why we’re drawn to stories, no matter who we are or where we are coming from. I don’t think anyone wants to hear their own story told over and over again. I think you’re absolutely right, and I think that’s the beautiful thing about humans. We’re really hungry to understand each other. Part of the gossip and the voyeurism comes from wanting to learn more about each other, to know more about what’s going on with other people behind closed doors. This a great time because now I think studios are so focused on the way they are set up, and on the white patriarchy specifically, they are really having to be held accountable now. Whether they are interested or not, whether they are morally invested or not. We just need to make sure that the door doesn’t close. It’s open and we cannot allow it to close. That’s why I think putting women in power and into creative positions is really important, because we can’t let the change be superficial, we can’t let it all be about show and checking a box. I can honestly already tell you though that this year, going into 2018, I know that I can say I want equal pay with my male co-star who has a smaller part than I do. They may not listen, but that I can bring that up and the job won’t necessarily go away. That’s huge. It’s so huge! I feel a bit like I won the fucking lottery. It’s so weird. I have a meeting this afternoon and I’m going to bring that very thing up with my agent. She’s a wonderful agent at CAA and been in a powerful position for a long time. And we’re going to bring that up today and it feels like Christmas. It’s very empowering and hopeful. And I don’t see that as irrelevant to the art itself. As someone invested in the life and evolution of the form, I can’t help but think that if we stop thinking about actors and performers as replaceable, as types and commodities, then the casting and the performances will get better, more diverse, and truer to our experiences. I can’t help but think that. Absolutely. The more diverse voices we get, the more perspectives that stories are told from. The story is often a similar story. We can tell Star Wars from a different character’s perspective, you can tell it from the eyes of the Wookies. There is a way for every perspective to be valid. We can tell a story that we’re all familiar with, but from the perspective of somebody else, somebody’s whose shoes we may not have walked in.

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

Command : Modern Operations – Birth of a Scenario Part 1

CMO offers a host of new and exciting features that I’ve been eager to tear into. Except life had other plans and I’ve had to sit on the sidelines since launch. Now though I’m getting back into it and am going to walk through a scenario I’ve had in mind for awhile. The Soviet invasion of Sweden.

I know, stop the music, the Soviet Invasion of Sweden? Yup!

Sweden was neutral in the Cold War. A big empty spot on the map between Norway and the Soviet Union. Sweden managed a pseudo neutrality in WW2 but provided Germany with a good deal of iron ore. So what would they do, what could they do, in a Cold War gone Hot?

Luckily a good poster elaborated.

The strategic reality of Sweden in the Cold War revolves around The Great Naval Invasion. The Warsaw Pact was expected to only care about Sweden as a minor speed bump on the way to their strategic objectives – the Sound and the Norwegian North Sea harbors. Possibly they could be interested in Gotland (which was fundamentally indefensible, but the attempt had to be made) and in a decapitation strike on Stockholm as well, but that was pretty much it. Reaching the Norwegian coast was a matter of crossing many hundred kilometers of frozen taiga and sub-arctic mountains with incredibly poor infrastructure, and that war was expected to become the Winter War 2.0. The Sound and the decapitation strike though were a different matter. To accomplish either objective, a naval invasion was needed.

When people look at Cold War Sweden they kind of assume that NATO support must’ve been expected, because of course the idea of Sweden winning a war against the Soviet Union is absurd. However, Swedish operational planning did not actually expect or plan for any military NATO help. The NATO cooperation was on a subtler level and more political than anything else. If you’re thinking that, well, in that case the Swedish operational planning was pretty much a very complicated way to say dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and delaying the inevitable for as long as possible, then, well, you’d be wrong. The Swedish plan was to win the war, to win it alone, to win it quickly and decisively. Not winning in the sense of dictating terms from the ruins of Moskva, but winning in the sense of eliminating the military threat to Sweden for the immediate future. The planners saw one way to do that and then they bet on that horse with almost everything they had.

The way you win a land war in Asia is by not fighting it. Everyone knows this. Sweden attempting to delay the Soviet Union would be idiotic. There is nothing good that could ever come from that. Instead, the Swedish military focused with laser-like intensity on the Great Naval Invasion. It was the Soviet Achilles heel, the only point at which there was a fighting chance, the one moment where the war could be won. Push the landing force back into the sea, destroy the specialized landing craft (a scarce strategic resource for the Soviets) and there you go – you can sit back and stare at the Russians over the Baltic Sea in relative safety. If they establish a beachhead and start shipping in Guards tank armies, might as well throw in the towel immediately, because there is no winning that game.

This is what the S-tank was built for and why half of all the tanks in the country were stationed so stupidly close to the Iron Curtain (seriously, you could reach their tank garages with rocket artillery from across the Sound). East Germany and Poland were too close, the sea too narrow and the travel time too short for the navy and the air force (the Swedish air force was and to some extent still is specialized on anti-ship strikes) to take much of a bite out of the landing craft, so the army had to shoulder more of the burden. The plan in the 60’s and 70’s was to take every tank and APC that could be scrounged up and start rolling towards the sea as fast as the tracks would carry them. As soon as the brigades were concentrated and rolling on the open roads, they were expected to take horrifying losses from air strikes, but that was part of the calculation. Go for the beachhead, establish close contact as soon as possible to make it unpalatable for the enemy to use tactical nukes (since they’d be hitting their own guys too), and either you reach the sea or you run out of tanks. That’s it, that’s the plan, the one chance to win the war. If it doesn’t work, then the infantry brigades get to fill the entire southern half of the country with mines and it’s time for the delaying tactics while waiting for an unlikely bailout from NATO, but that doesn’t involve much tanking.

TheFluff

This stuck with me for a long time. Could Sweden have defeated the Soviets? They could swing through Finland and come from the north but it’s a loooong way with mediocre infrastructure.

But why would they risk an angry porcupine of S-Tanks? Soviet doctrine intended to capture from Shetlands north to Iceland and use it to harass incoming units from the US such as REFORGER showed. Without locking down Norway the US now had an unsinkable aircraft carrier that could hit at the North Flank of the Soviet advance.

There is actually Soviet planning along these lines but it is from the 1950’s-1960’s. Stalin really didn’t care if his forces got nuked, things changed post Kruschev. As I don’t want scenario bloat, I’m going to just focus on Sweden.

Originally I wanted to focus on 1970 but I miss out on an iconic Swedish aircraft.

The Viggen.

On top of that I ran into an oddity of the CMO databases that proved frustrating. In a nutshell there is two databases. One for the Cold War, another for everything post Cold War. CMO uses database ID’s (DBID) to define if something is a pier or a missile battery.

Using the Import/Export Units function I can easily draw in a huge variety of Swedish installations. One problem though, they are all tied in to the DB3000 (Modern Database). So if I try to use the Cold War DB the DBID’s don’t match up.

I tried to get fancy and write a Python script to convert the installation files to a version with the proper DB3000 ID’s. It became an exercise in coding that I didn’t feel like getting into. (Note, let me know if you’re into Python…)

On the up side I just bumped it to 1990 and can easily use the DB3000 without any issues and still get a very wide variety of Cold War aircraft. Plus we get the Viggen at the peak.

We’re lucky as Sweden has a really great selection of installations available. Now this is just facilities, but it’s a great start.

With a couple of clicks I can load in all of the Swedish Air Wing bases. Note that I had to de-select some doubles and select the earlier option.

There! But we’ve got no planes. Or radar. Or surface units or…

Now things get a bit more interesting as I’ll have to research what was available and place it in likely positions. I’m using a Google Sheet to build my research. For starters I’m working off of a Rand research paper from 2005 that describes the state of the Swedish Air Force in 1990 very well.

Rand – https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2007/R4007.pdf

This gives us a great start, and for the moment all I’m focusing on is building the force allocation. I may use some lua scripting to populate the air bases as the generic unit names that CMO creates are US centric. I’ll probably use a Swedish Name Generator to give the scenario some flair.

I’m testing out Github for some version control. It’s not really designed for something like this as I can’t see my changes in the actual code (which is OK) so I just have to comment my versions accordingly. Hopefully this will help once the scenario gets larger. It really works well on code…

I’m working on storing all of my lua externally so as to make it easier for future reference. As you can see on the above generic lua script all of my changes are tracked.

Once I’ve got some bones on the scenario we’ll take another look.

The post Command : Modern Operations – Birth of a Scenario Part 1 appeared first on The Strategy Gamer.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/command-modern-operations-birth-of-a-scenario-part-1/

Lean and Honey: Gucci Mane & Rupi Kaur as Contemporaries

A recent profile of Rupi Kaur on The Cut, as picked up and redoubled by Deadspin, puts forth an unsettling topography which anyone engaging Kaur’s work must currently navigate: defending even the principle of “net art” is implied to be a support of Kaur’s work itself, a precarity that requires a great deal of exegesis, given the sources from which it hails and the means by which it creates a space for itself. In attempting to discuss this, one is effectively given over to a certain series of holdings about the affectations Kaur plays with, as well as the origins and judgments one makes upon those, their worth, and a complicated assemblage that goes far beyond her. And analyzing this discussion without a sort of act of fictionalization, a means of understanding a profile of Kaur as fictional, her poetry as poetic fiction, the means by which even recollection is an act of fiction-writing leads eventually to invoking an artist whose work stretches across an incredible breadth: Gucci Mane.  

The same day that Žižek released the promising Lenin 2017, a work reminiscent of a much younger Žižek in its forward, open, irreverently Hegelian engagement with the legacy of Stalinism, Gucci Mane’s autobiography was released. The cover is a tasteful, subdued matte gold, with a shot of Gucci’s right hand wearing a large, diamond-covered watch. The back is a full-size portrait of Gucci, a thoughtful smile and a large ring on his finger serving to frame the famous Ice Cream Cone tattoo that is the subject of one of the later anecdotes in the book. Gucci Mane’s strength does not lie with prose, and at some points coauthor Neil Martinez-Belkin appears to have a heavier hand than one may like. But with Gucci Mane, there is no questioning authenticity. Perhaps one can question authorship, but to do such is to undermine the textual structure in a manner that does not disturb it due to tensions within itself, but rather through a process of imposition, a creation-of-truth that does not understand the vitality of fiction to Gucci's work, to the work of numerous others in similar structure, to effectively create a structural limitation that is levied largely through half-truth, to a truth that denies it fictional quality even through an act of fiction-writing, a fictive act.

Martinez-Belkin’s differentiation from Gucci is apparent largely in the way that one finds a process of drawing oneself into the book, such that it eventually smooths into Gucci’s comfortable storytelling style. The experience Martinez-Belkin has writing for XXL certainly influenced the style of the book, which often has magazine-esque asides to quote Gucci’s lyrics, reviews of his work, or news articles about him. While the lengthiness of these excerpts can be a bit jarring, one would be hard-pressed to trim many of them, given the way that they capture something about Gucci’s rapping that is incredibly difficult to put into text – the way in which his voice captures a unique depth, his southern affectations and the warm, even overwhelming qualities of his voice foundational to his rapping style. When he talks about some of his most famous songs, “Lemonade” being perhaps the most anticipated, the way that it is surrounded by incredibly evocative, personal storytelling conveys the life of Gucci Mane in a way that glamorizes not to support or to lure, but to create a proper space in which Gucci’s life may be viewed. The scale at which these songs are made, the way that Gucci was first coming up rapping as he was still serving dope, the way that stays in jail punctuate his life from the beginning of the book, how he talks about getting clean not as a way of demeaning those who do use, but coming to terms with how his own PTSD (as he himself names it) and the lifestyle he was afforded alongside of it lead to a lot of lean, a lot of ecstasy, bars, weed, the works: his guidance involves quite a bit of reveling in just how good the times were, but ultimately come to his current station in life being one from which he can actually meaningfully make music he wants to make, create more than just music for himself, but take part in an entire movement of sound that he has been locked up or leaning for much of. Understanding the book as a sort of fictionalized text, one that is not Gucci Mane’s own journal but rather a recollection that has been restructured such that it can take on the narrative structure of a book, a translation from Gucci as an engaging and genuine person who has made some of the most compelling rap music of the 21st Century to Gucci Mane, New York Times bestselling author, is understanding what the structural impetus behind fiction serves to do. For Martinez-Belkin, the task is to present the machine of structuring the text as a book in order to create a measure between the fiction of Gucci’s music and the fiction of the text itself. Meanwhile, the opposite is on display in a book such as Go Ask Alice, a lurid and largely discredited tale of a girl caught in the world of drugs, a hopelessly dated artifact of young adult literature from the earliest days of the genre, one that is still taught not as a metafictional work, as a sort of articulation of a fictional idea through the affectation of the diary as a fictional construct, but as if it were a primary source. The rather suspicious origins of the book, its connections to anti-drug advocacy and the incidental homophobia or the fascination with the main character’s suffering that characterizes its structure lead one to believe that there is far more interest in the book as a machine for affecting an affirmation of certain already-maintained opinions through coopting counterculture aesthetics rather than as part of a process of development. Development, the means through which fiction becomes literature, bestsellers become classics, the process through which the “literary” is marked can be clearly seen in both Kaur’s work and the response to it. Originally posting her poetry on tumblr, then instagram, the article dismisses her short-form poetry as unimportant or unserious specifically because of its juxtaposition with the structure of instagram, rather than acknowledging it as an attempt to explore literature and writing through a certain means of engagement, the use of the format as a means of rabattement upon the poetry at hand. When words are precious few, being evocative, duplicitous, and most of all relatable certainly gains attention. Milk and Honey was a self-released book that became a runaway bestseller. When discussing its ubiquity, the way in which it was divided into certain easily digestible thematic components and written in a fashion that engaged with the reader in a pop subjectivity, an intentionally cultivated aesthetic which aims toward a lack of pretension as beginning a process of inviting the reader into active identification and subjectification, leads to a process of identifying that gives Kaur a great deal of her audience.

And indeed, the earlier-mentioned piece in The Cut, which follows Kaur from NYU to Union Square by way of The Strand, evokes purposeful moments that seem unfair to Kaur in isolation, even if their assemblage implies a certain sort of fair assessment of individual aspects of Kaur’s work. When she discusses the design of a collection of Kafka’s works, Kafka is mentioned before the designer she is actually admiring, in order to create the imagery of her judging a book by its cover, rather than discussing the evocative potential of book design. Indeed, while the Light Novel as a literary form is a particular roughly named subgenre in Japanese literature, the power of a cover to shape the work is hard to underestimate given the means by which the Monotagari series was relatively sparsely illustrated but an enormously popular series even before its anime adaptation. While many anime are adaptations of manga series, that LNs provide their fair share of anime fodder is in fact perhaps an invitation to judge a book by its cover. The cuter the girl, the more likely she will make the leap from page to screen, from television to movie, from Blu-Ray to figurine. Monogatari itself is a highly metafictional work if read as an indictment of the structures of fanservice that it features, but even more jarring if read as a failed attempt to justify those structures through a sort of pretentious process of grasping at straws until a halfway-readable novel comes away. The avant-garde structure of Kaur’s poetry are not terribly avant-garde when analyzed in a literary context, but perhaps that is just the problem: analyzing them as such.     

Addressing Kaur’s larger efforts to work as an artist, one eventually comes to her relatively sophomoric sophomore effort, The Sun And All Her Flowers. In discussing it we are faced with a sort of challenging exercise: we do not wish to collapse the potential of the text that she lays out, rather affirming it to say more meaningfully that her work does not do it particularly well. There is not a failure in walking the already-laid path, there are instances where her work holds poignancy. For artists that have gained enormous popular consciousness, such as Justin Beiber, there is often a sort of critical backlash to be expected. But the turn by which that backlash becomes a renewed acceptance, the way in which it is then realized for that which it may be: a gem of pop production, a feat of exposing the weaknesses in a very strong voice as part of creating tension within a song, the same sort of draw that brings pop aficionados to be more devoted to production teams than pop stars in particular, is all part of the realization of a given sort of art as not merely accessible in a literal sense, but as part of an inspirational process, a process whereby flows of generative energy are encouraged and stoked. Kaur’s poetry has often been parodied, and it lies within a newfound tradition that largely exists in bookstore displays and the precious meta-schooling that takes place between Junior Year in high school and Sophomore Year in college. Kaur’s poetry can, in isolation, serve very well to evoke the clumsiness that characterizes the process of recollecting or living such times. But when collected into a book, it does not stand up very well. The matte black cover, the coy typefaces, the neither-here-nor-there sketches found in Milk and Honey were inviting, interesting, very nice in the hands. Opening it and finding a poem that immediately brought forth certain memories was rather easy. But it was also rather easy to pick up The Sun And All Her Flowers and open it to an almost artlessly drab poem about sexual arousal, one far too proud of its own cleverness. It is best noted as a book of Instagram Poetry, of twitter literature, a book not merely meant to be read but as part of creating a certain image in reference to Kaur’s, and while Kaur's poetry can be quite evocative, it does not stand as a book, and neither does it particularly need to. Whether it stands as more is a question that largely relies upon looking at her work in assemblage, as a milieu, rather than a mere text or even collection of texts. Challenging texts like Han Kang's Human Acts are pivotal, are contemporary in addition to postmodern, present us with interesting questions on the structure of authorhood and are moreover still nestled nicely between popular literature and literary fiction. I think Human Acts is an incredibly important book that explores the body, the way in which the body acts, the means by which the body may be constructed, collapsed, maimed, traumatized in a way that Kaur is unlikely to, but this is because Human Acts is an incredibly timely and moreover simply incredible work that will hold certain characteristics of itself as time goes on. With The Sun And All Her Flowers debuting to an unseasonably warm fall perfect for instagram, it is sure to sell and moreover sell very well. Whether or not it will stand up as a book of poetry is uncertain, and while it remains to be seen whether Kaur can retain her caché when working primarily in the metatextual topography of the internet, without the luxury of near-anonymity or pseudonymous duplicity afforded to artists such as Daniel Lopatin or James Ferraro, writing poetry that echoes the forms of Barbara Kruger or Jenny Holzer without nearly as much pathos, one eventually does reach a questioning of what exactly Kaur’s poetry is meant to do. With mildly feminist aesthetics frequently evoked, sometimes to greater effect than others, one questions if her treatment of the body is all that interesting, all that revolutionary. Similarly, while her discussions of immigrant experience are occasionally well-put, they often require a certain structural presence from the diasporic form, are written not with the mindfulness of a certain gaze nor of an ostentatious deference from it, but instead a clear glance out of the side of the eye to make sure the gaze is present, and then a performance within it. Kaur is certainly less guilty of this than the article’s presentation of her as the daughter of Indian immigrants who worked blue-collar Canadian jobs and implored her to pursue a science degree, a sort of classic story of defiant daughter that inevitably runs into orientalist ideological structures when repeated even if that story merely happens to be true. Much like the stories Gucci Mane tells, there is not a larger violent structure that can be fully affirmed by its violent rearticulation of a fictional preface to the anecdotal, a fictional continuity that only can be named when it is first allowed to settle upon the text in an act of overcoding. The same is true for the totalizing means by which Kaur’s work about the body becomes reterritorialized by a largely heterosexual feminist ideology of the gendered body and how that implies certain necessities from both the reader and Kaur herself. Critiquing the presence of these fictions in Kaur’s work is worthwhile, but only insofar as their origin is also recognized explicitly, as just that, the origin at-hand.

To understand Gucci Mane simply by reading his autobiography is to largely miss what makes it so wonderful, in that it creates a metatextual assemblage between both highs and lows of his career, between straight edges and doubled cups, the path from “Lemonade” to "Plain Jane” through Gucci’s career rearticulated within the book, a music of near complete silence. To understand the book without the music is to effectively imagine a Gucci Mane that does not exist but moreover fundamentally cannot exist, cannot even be imagined. One can imagine Kaur without her instagram, without her aesthetics, and the result is unsurprisingly flat, but doing so robs her of what she has been doing so phenomenally. The accessibility with which she creates is itself in some way inspiring, even if negatively. Many critiques of her are misguided, but many others acknowledge a fundamental level on which her work can be regarded and then go on to assess it as such and still find it wanting. To limit her work to simply poetry, to attempt to make her suitably literary when she has never particularly aimed at such is an unfair attempt to redefine art in a fashion which fetishizes the book, the gallery, the shelf, the coffee table. To deny Kaur as anything other than a writer is to effectively cut oneself off from meaningfully critiquing the artifice of capitalist producing-production which has seen her work spread so far, that has seen it disseminated along certain lines of affinity that develop it far past itself, out of context, out of joint with its own message.

25 of the best spirits ads in the world

Without ads how would we know which celebrities enjoy the same biscuits as us, or which shampoo will make our hair the shiniest?  Ads are everywhere today.  We’ve out together a collection of some of the ads that we think are the best spirit ads in recent decades.  Which ones do you think work best?

  Smirnoff Loch Ness

Smirnoff isn’t even Scottish, but they still managed to fit Nessie into their advertising.  This ad makes Smirmoff out to be something different and to be the drink that offers adventure to those who enjoy it.  This is abi more tongue in cheek than the usual ads we would see these days, but I think that makes us more appreciative of it. And lets be honest if we were offered the chance ot go water skiing with the Loch ness Monster, who would say no?!

    Bergedorfor

Ok so this isn’t a spirit but it was too good not to include!  It takes so many typical ideas and subverts them, all while creating the notion that this beer should be nurtured and considered on a higher pedestal than most.  The images get slightly creepy if you look at them for too long, but I think it all adds to the effect really.

Absolut 

There were a lot of Absolut ads to choose from, but this one is particular is perfect.  It conflates Absolut with the greatest of the great and gives it a foothold in history.  This ad is also adapt at making us associate Absolut with any one of these films, which is great for them, since these are pretty commonly talked about.  The abstract form of the bottle captured by the stack reels is also a nice graphic without being to obvious.

  Gringos Tequila 

The message here is that Gringos Tequila is authentically Mexican.  They are really able to capture this and give the product a lot of character, which can be hard to do in a print ad.  The whole look of these ads is great with just enough minor details to keep the audience engaged.  And it’s always nice to see a brand celebrate their heritage in such an inventive way.

  Cactus Jacks 

This ad is in a similar vein to the Gringos Tequila one and gathers a lot of imagery from Mexican culture to create a character for the product.  The graphics here are especially good and I love the illustration.  What they do better than the Gringos ad is giving the audience something to explore.  While Gringos gave us enough to look at and take in, this goes further by swamping you with information and allowing you to fully explore it for yourself.

Pampero

This is an ad that takes some time to think about.  The message is that Pampero is a perfect blend of good and evil, and we as the audience have to translate that into the image.  I like it because it looks good and it gives us something to focus on that isn’t the liquid inside the bottle, but rather the idea of what else is inside the bottle.

Four Roses 

Four Roses create a wonderful image for themselves ehre and give their product a story.  This at once takes you straight back to frontier times and gives you the impression that Four Roses was there at that time too.  It also gives the drink a macho image that will definitely resonate with anyone who loves a good John Wayne movie!

    Alibi Bourbon

This ad is hilarious and just generally great at capturing the rough, tough, Devil-may-care attitude of Alibi Bourbon.  It is also a distinctly American image, placing Alibi firmly in its Kentucky roots.  Like many of the ads included here, Alibi have created a character that they want to people to associate their product with.  Tis reaches a lot of different audiences, from those looking for a fun brand, to others who may relate more with the character that Alibi may have thought  possible.

Waterloo Gin 

Again we have an American brand that is using patriotism and Americans’ own love of their country to market to them.  the rugged old flag indicates the age and therefore quality of the Gin, a drink that is often associated with Britain.  It also gives them a place to call home and shows a deep pride for that place, making any association with Britain that Gin may have immediately disappear.

Hennessey 

Like a lot of big brands Hennessey have gained a glowing celebrity endorsement here.  Martin Scorsese, although he may not be instantly recognisable, is definitely a name that we all know and appreciate.  He comes with a ready made reputation and audience trust, so Hennessey gains all of the when they are seen to be associated with him.

Effen Vodka

Effen is definitely marketing themselves as a premium brand for younger audiences in this ad.  The black and white filter with the ultra modern bottle design gives them an edge over older competitors.  The focus on design and designers specifically is evident and gives the audience the idea that this is a brand that cares about more than taking money out of your wallet and actually wants to help the little guy on the street rather than the fat cats.

Amundsen

It can be quite controversial to use murderous dictators in ads, just ask Nandos and Robert Mugabe, but Amundsen attach humour to what they are doing.  This ad works because it is not denying the horror of Stalin, but rather is saying that their method of distilling their vodka six times, can transform anything into something far more pure and clean.

Monopolowa

I think what I love about this ad is the hilarious irony.  The most humble champion is obviously the brand with the medal around their neck and the awards lined up at the bottom right?  Well for Monopolowa it is, and they are.  I think this ad is the epitome of a humble brag and we only have to wonder whether it was intentional or not.

Alita

This ad has a lot to take in and I love that it builds up layers the more you look at it.  The audience are given a hint at a story and allowed to fill in the blanks themselves, something that works to build up a character for the product as well.  The story hinted at is quite unusual as well, with a shark jaw and frying pan involved, so that helps to make for something memorable as well.

Hendricks 

I love Hendricks whole look.  They capture a lot about the history of Gin while at the same time creating a whole new world with a modern twist to it.  This ad is along the lines of their usual aesthetic and is always giving the audience something to look at.  Everything works here and there is a definite theme to the ad, which helps to tie the whole brand together.

The Singleton

The worldwide taste test referred to in the tagline is perfectly captured in this ad.  At first glance it seems a little strange but once you get to the tagline all becomes clear.  I like this ad for its humour and the way it carries it out.  The graphics look great and the message is clear.

Martel 

A lot of spirits try to communicate their age and expertise but Martel seem to do it flawlessly here.  We immediately conflate the past with the present and see how everything has remained the same, even Martel.  There is almost no need for a tagline to tell us what they are saying, since the image is so good at relaying it.

  Binboa

We get a greta idea of what Binboa are trying to say about themselves in this ad, even if it is a little strange at first.  They give us a bogus statistic that we can all still relate to and that endears them to us.  They pull apart the old societal norms of making bad jokes and allow us to final laugh at them and see how absurd they are.

DYC 

These das are great.  They take well-known pop cultural icons and transform them into the complete opposite.  Within this they use them to sell their own message, one that becomes instantly funny at the simple twisting of images that we’ve all seen before.  This makes them seem just as iconic as the images they are changing.

Martini 

This ad is for their aperitif expression and this ad sums it up quick and easy.  It literally makes beef “easy”.  There really isn’t anymore to say except it must be very hard to make a cow look “easy” but I think Martini have given it a far shot.  The only thing that perplexes me a bit is that she’s pink, but maybe that’s a reference to her being “rare”?  you’llhav to figure it out for yourselves folks!

Lambs 

I love this ad.  It is funny and plays up the brand name perfectly.  It also makes everyone who’s ever felt like the black sheep of the family feel a little bit more accepted.

Martini 

More from martini, only this one is a little bit more sophisticated than sexy beef.  They really do make an art out of the serve and it almost appears like a deconstructed cocktail.  It is simple and eye catching, with lots of different elements for the audience to look at.  It is also a nice source of inspiration should anyone be feeling particularly creative!

Stolichnaya Vodka 

What could be better than playing with politics to promote vodka?  The graphics of course recall the age-old communist propaganda that so many of us know and recognise.  It uses this to create the idea of Russia in the mind of the audience and then plays on that by offering itself up to the UK but at the same time mocking their ability to catch Russians.

Mathusalem

Mathusalem paint themselves very much as the hero in this image, against the communist dictator Castro.  This is a brilliant way to use their history to their advantage and to create an interest around their origins.  They ad copy is also well thought out and very witty, which helps to complete this as a light hearted and humourous take on what was probably a lot more complicated past.

Absolut 

What better way to end than with a healthy dose of Absolut?  This is just one of their wide range of “In an Absolut world” ads and it perfectly sums up the idea behind them all.  In an Absolut world, things are pretty much like they would be in a perfect world, because of course Absolut is perfection.  The ads work well with the ad copy and don’t take away from the brand, despite not really being associated with drinking.

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