Cup of Libertea

I'm just saying, I think you all underrated Alex Garland's Civil War in any number of ways.

if voting didn't matter they wouldn't be working so hard to stop you

I feel like all the Bioware retrospectives have not yet dwelt enough on what an absolute watershed Femshep was in terms of female playable protagonists

Mass Effect 2 (2010): The Normandy crew, art by Benjamin Huen

We could have had the WORLDDDDDDD

My heart can't take it 💔

This is one of the most holy sh*t stories I’ve ever read in my life. www.vanityfair.com/story/jared-...

The more I think about this the funnier it gets. Modern Africa don't even need to *fight* Europe. Who controls Suez and the Cape? Where is Europe going to get enough rubber, oil, etc? Euro Reich panicking about manufacturing collapse as Africa keeps building and selling them cars and white goods.

*whispers, fingers crossed* Indomaidan Indomaidan Indomaidan

If Julie K Brown is looking into this, then it's worth considering to what extent there may be patterns around all these deaths.

While we're at it, go full Cold War on global fascism. Make it the top strategic focus for national security.

for a minute @hurricanexyz.bsky.social has been saying that Legend of the Galactic Heroes is his favorite piece of political theory and now that I am 15 hours into the series I get it. i’m totally Yang Wen-li-pilled.

My Steam most played ranking! 1. Civ 6 2. Total Warhammer 3 3. Stellaris 4. Civ 5 5. Baldur's Gate 3 6. Civ 7 7. Total War 3 Kingdoms 8. Total Warhammer 2 9. Crusader Kings 3 10. Mass Effect 2 If i combine the Warhammer entries, they still don't dethrone Civ 6, but my fav Suzerain comes in at 10.

Scott Bessent:

Watts did such a great job with Skeleton Crew (it's their best show after Andor), so he's an excellent and experienced choice. If they manage to get this movie off the ground I'll be very excited! Also, given this is not official yet, take THR's "skywalker saga" framing with a big grain of salt.

"An army of orcs and goblins that has gathered a Waaagh may be too numerous to defeat directly. Spend 3 points on Lightning Strike and you may attack the orc army while denying their Waaagh reinforcements from arriving to battle." - Sun Tzu

“the warrior ethos glamorizes the prowess of the individual warrior in a way that starkly contradicts the professional, ethical, and organizational nature of military service and modern warfare.” @briankerg.bsky.social

the rebooted trilogy, beginning with Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is terrific. i think "Dawn" and "War" are two of the best science fiction films of this century so far. the most recent, "Kingdom," is also pretty good. bsky.app/profile/alex...

i did it, i finally wrote about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (and the Statue of Liberty, and Planet of the Apes, and Iris Murdoch)

There's multiple overlapping communities in my WIP with conflicting values and agendas - all of them dangerous. A central tension in the story is the protag trying to stay true to her humanity (while having to hide it) when the communities around her want to dehumanize, exploit or destroy.

missing a few, but otherwise... solid!

Were the Agents trying to pull off Memento here by leaving messages to themselves?

Plenty of people quite rightfully reminiscing on Tim Curry's myriad starring roles, but I'll always be particularly fond of his voice acting for Arl Howe in Dragon Age: Origins. A sneering, contemptuous antagonist that you just love to hate, Curry gave him pure venom.

The latest White Dwarf I picked up has been showing off the Cities of Sigmar and their new cogfort models and now I have a new fav AoS faction. Look at this beauty!

Watching the CENTCOM Commander write WSJ Op Eds about how amazing the war is going and how the morale has never been higher as we drag on into the 6th month of the 3-day special military operation to denuclearize Iran

Been seeing some Nolan tier lists going around, so thought I would do my personal ranking: S Tier: The Prestige, The Oddysey, Oppenheimer A+ Tier: Interstellar, Inception, The Dark Knight, Tenet A Tier: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight Rises, Dunkirk, Memento, Insomnia

I thought the Netflix Persuasion movie was a charming adaptation and I've enjoyed it every time I've watched it, which is multiple times now.

"We lived in a world of pride merch and girl power, diversity, blind to its beauty, until we broke it."

I'm a parent who actually quite enjoys paw patrol as a kid's show, but it's also a lot of fun to imagine "the dark side" of Adventure Bay if you think about it like a near-future where genetically engineered talking forever-puppies manage municipal emergencies. Is Ryder (no parents) also engineered?

Double Agent must save her Sorceress sister from Steampunk Megacorp.

Broke: Nolan’s Odyssey dishonors Homer by having black people. Woke: Nolan’s Odyssey dishonors Homer by Americanizing the values of the ancient Mediterranean Bespoke: Nolan’s Odyssey honors Homer by acting as a Trojan Horse for a message audiences would otherwise be unreceptive to.

Having finally seen the movie and read this piece, I can now say that they’re both good, but damn, she misses the point big time here. The entire structure of the movie, the entire Athena thing and the way the movie presents it & then only spells it out at the end IS what it has to say

🤯: “[Nolan’s Sinon] feels like a direct parallel to the way the powers of the western world have been using trans kids for decades now. They, too, have been drawn into a conflict outside of their control.“ Holy shit Chris Nolan is so based

This piece on Nolan's The Oddysey and the role of Sinon is fantastic, give it a read!

if I ever taught film criticism lesson one would be “you being smarter than the movie is not interesting to anyone”

turns out, appointing a non-credible idiot crony to the most important central banking job in the world was a bad idea

Doesn't line up with the 100 years, but with all 4 grandparents for a certain period the answer is simply "survive the Japanese occupation of Malaya and Singapore".

Honestly, a real problem with a lot of 'collapse' revisionism for both LBAC and the later Roman Empire. You get a lot of fancy academic rhetorical footwork and sure, there are things of value in the periods that followed, but, like, aggregate population declines are generally not fun.

This is a 1938-level story from Nazi Germany

My full ODYSSEY movie review is up! "Zeus's law at the beginning presupposes that the gods are the only strangers who deserve to be treated like people. But by the end, when we realise whose face Athena actually wears, the theme twists." letterboxd.com/suzannahgawk...

I wrote a thing! My take on Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey is up at @foreignpolicy.com foreignpolicy.com/2026/07/23/o...

Goddess Athena! Absolutely incredible! Memory, totems, homecomings, the consequences of brilliant ideas and toll of lost connections. Nolan’s entire filmography exists within this gift of a film. An ancient text imagined with contemporary anti-war, anti-isolationist relevance.

Been through a handful of Army Leader Professional Development trainings which could have been titled "why we shouldn't invade Iran" which largely consisted of someone slapping this map on a PowerPoint slide and pointing out that Iran has three times the land and twice the population of Iraq.

Ngl “the USG commits a new spectacular class of war crimes the same weekend everyone is talking about the classical myth movie with a major ‘committing war crimes will destroy your entire society and ruin the lives of everyone you care about’ theme” feels like pretty heavy handed symbolism