Wow, What A Month!

Holy shiitake mushrooms, Batman! This has been one interesting month, hasn’t it? First, Pokémon Legends: Arceus came out. Then my (nearly fifteen-year-old) hard-drive needed to be replaced, forcing more delays on my writing.

What else? What other world-shaking event could possibly have happened this month?

Oh yeah. Vladimir “I’m too crazy for Russia, crazy for Russia” Putin decided to invade freaking Ukraine! And botch it.

People much more informed than me have been discussing this on Twitter and elsewhere, but I’ll sum up the general consensus here:

Putin dun goofed. The Ukrainians have shown far stiffer resistance than expected, the Russian army has shown itself to be thoroughly incompetent, both NATO and the EU are reinvigorated… the list goes on. Select Russian banks have been kicked out of SWIFT, the international banking communications system. China is playing it cool.

The final analysis is that a lot of Russians, Ukrainians and others are going to die for… nothing. This is a pointless, stupid war. Putin will gain nothing from this, though it may sow the seeds for his eventual downfall.

What a waste of human life.

Regular posting will be back next month, I promise. See you next week!


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Fandom Funnies: Avatar (James Cameron) Isn’t Dances With Wolves In Space, It’s Actually A Terrible Dune Adaptation!

Hello my fellow random response generators! It is I, Josh Stoodley, with more silly thoughts on the silliest occupation in the universe: fandoms!

So, this thought came to me when I was watching Dune (2021). Now, I have a confession to make: I do not like Dune. I don’t. It’s creepy and weird, with all of the nonsense of pre-Star Wars science fiction. About the only good thing I can say about it is that while it is incredibly racist towards Middle Eastern and North African peoples, it is in a positive way instead of the overwhelmingly negative one we see today.

Anyway, while I watched the movie, amused by the cyclical nature of art (Dune the novel inspired Star Wars which inspired Dune the movie…), I realized Avatar (2009) is just a bad Dune ripoff!

Let’s count the ways, shall we?

  1. There is a distant planet with some mineral needed to keep humanity functioning
  2. It takes place in humanity’s future (pet peeve of mine, by the way)
  3. A young and dumb man is sent to the planet to get more of the mineral (Paul, at least, is marginally smarter than Jake)
  4. Young and Dumb is betrayed!
  5. Young and Dumb falls in with local tribe, meets Girl
  6. Young and Dumb bangs Girl
  7. Young and Dumb becomes leader of local tribe and leads them on a grand, pointless, bloody crusade

Granted, these kinds of stories are old. John Carter of Mars is a good example (the movie adaptation is good by the way), but it just tickled my funny bone about how shamelessly Cameron ripped off Herbert.

Next week, a post on the philosophies behind The Standard Tech Case Files, Brockhold and Legends of Infernia!


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