Unqualified Offerings

Radley Balko has a poll on “the best Liberty-themed movie.” A perfectly nice movie, Serenity, is unjustly beating out Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece so far. He would get points just for the bit where the government boasts of its fiscal responsibility in charging execution victims for the bullet, but what makes the movie brilliant is the [...]

So say the Economist and Larison. I actually make us as 32, using an unweighted sum of the Freedom House table in question. That’s close, though.
Sorry about the not blogging. I was
* performing Saturday night, like I said I would; if any of you came, you did not introduce yourselves afterward. Consider your guilt assumed [...]

Couple of recent Batman critiques that mix the commonplace with the misconceived. Allen Varney’s article isn’t all wrong, and in fact the more I pick at it the less I find that’s irrefutably silly. Except for . . .

This genius psychologist and criminologist, who has repeatedly out-thought every other superhero in the DC Universe, still [...]

Hugo Chavez talks a big game, but persists in half measures. The promising headline, Venezuela launches Zeppelin to tackle rampant crime!, turns out to be about mere surveillance craft. As someone on the Fate RPG mailing list wrote,
Now they need to arm them, hang biplanes from them or pack them full of monkeys. [...]

Glenn Haumann has a short essay on Comixmix considering Marvel’s recent “Civil War” crossover series in light of my old “Gaudy Night” essay. Let me say briefly that “Civil War” is the kind of “literature of ethics” that should work when done well. (If you’re a non-comics reader who wants to follow along, here’s the [...]

Hm. This episode . . . a Hero dies!
Which we knew from the previews. And sure enough, that’s Peter Petrelli playing Rocky Balboa’s son in the new movie they keep showing commercials for.
Plot talk would be spoilery, and G-Farb is probably planning to watch the show in 2009 or something, so I don’t want to [...]

Bookmarking the rules for A Tale Unwinding here lets me close another browser tab!
UPDATE: Sad. Link is dead now. It looked so healthy even yesterday.

I have a tediously long playtest review of The Princes’ Kingdom, a roleplaying game for adults to play with kids, on RPG.Net. This seems like an appropriate place for a public thanks to Bruce Baugh for generously looking the thing over before publication. I’d never written a game review before and Bruce helped my confidence.

Phasing: underpriced in almost every superhero game.
Q: Shouldn’t the precog have a painting of the hot chick showing up at his door?
I missed last week’s episode, even the Friday night scifi channel repeat.

Tried an episode of Heroes tonight. It’s up my alley after all. Now, I’ve never been wild about Jeph Loeb’s comics writing. The script here is serviceable, though it’s redolent of Rising Stars and probably some stuff I can’t even remember right now.
But that cast. They’re awful! The two Japanese guys are engaging, but that’s [...]