MTG: First Draft of my Biollante EDH deck

A global pandemic is an excellent time to waste money, time and energy on expensive social hobbies. Magic has been something of a mythological game for me for almost a decade now. Never quite having the money or social group to get into it, but thoroughly enjoying the game nonetheless. Back seat watching middle class liberals who were all pretty much awful people made up a good portion of my teenage years. As an adult, I am more disillusioned than ever with Wizards of the Coast and the history and narrative of Magic as a franchise.

However, the good game is still good.

EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander) or Commander, is a way of playing Magic that is an absolute hot mess. You can use cards from the entirety of Magic’s history. It has a minimal and soft ban-list. And utilizes 99 card singleton decks – to maximize variance – with 1 card Commanders who you can cast at more or less any point, with which you normally build a strategy around.

The reason EDH works, is that it is normally played with at least four other players, and that people usually are not playing it just To Win. It’s fundamentally a non-competitive format where you try and play at around the same ‘power-level’ as your friends and have a chill time with.

What follows is my (almost) finished first draft of my Nethroi, Apex of Death deck. Or, alternatively, my Biollante deck, since we live in a world where Magic now has collaborations with Godzilla or The Walking Dead. This probably is absolute gibberish if you do not know much Magic, and if you do know much it may still be gibberish.

You Probably Just Hate Women

You probably just hate women and, in this case, have given up being subtle about your homophobia.

If you are one of those unfortunate people who have been following me on twitter and seen my endless venting about it lately, you will have seen that BL discourse is never ending. Since we are at the start of a new season of anime, where a show of this kind in any other genre would be considered prestige anime, and that the Anime Nazi Network that none of you are to mention this post to have, as always, stuck their foot in their mouth due to their awful editorial systems, lets try to make something of this.

The following post is a somewhat dry refutal of one of the more common arguments against the BL genre. It is a refutal that ultimately should apply to 99% of all common arguments against BL as a genre, as these arguments all tend to be the same argument dressed up in slightly different ways.

Land of the Lustrous is something special

Land of the Lustrous‘s first episode is incredible.

Anime is good right now. There’s countless shows, both airing and in my backlog, that I’m enjoying or hope to enjoy. Really, I have too much on my plate. Yet. With such harsh competition Land of the Lustrous still stands out.

My Confusion over Dies irae ~Amantes amentes~

Reading Dies irae has been quite the odd experience for me. Not because it does anything particularly groundbreaking and unique with the visual novel medium. Though there are some odd decisions about how it’s structured and how you buy it. But rather because it is a VN that despite having spent 70 hours with, I am still very mixed up over. I feel I would be doing it, and myself, a disservice by calling it a bad VN. Yet so much of my experience of Dies irae has been frustrating, annoying, or disgusting.

It is a story in which one of the most despicable men in modern history is depicted as a cursed ubermensch. Someone who’s evil captivates, destroys and devours everything. Though only due to him being forsaken by a twisted cynical ____. He is an absolute evil, intentionally so. But that evil is also separated from his historical counterpart, whilst being drenched in his mythology; there is no mention of his non-small role in The Holocaust which is something you would expect from a character based on Heydrich.

This is but one example of how Dies irae makes it difficult for me to talk about it in positive terms. I wouldn’t say Dies irae is Nazi apologia for instance, or at least it doesn’t intend to be such. But the very nature of Dies irae‘s fetishization and indulgences with Nazi mythos leaves a bad taste in my mouth. For all of Dies irae’s charm and thrill it is almost always includes at least one line, or theme, that cements my Dies irae experience as being mixed.

On Netflix’ Death Note Adaptation

When I first heard that Netflix was actually making that American Death Note movie that we’d had rumours about for almost a decade I didn’t think much of it. I assumed that we were getting just another shitty cash-grab movie, another Dragonball Evolution or Ghost in the Shell. Something that’d butcher the original works and ultimately not stand on its own feet either. Too tied down to source material to do its own thing, and too American to get what the source was doing. Hell, I doubt I truly get what Death Note was in Japan. I doubt I ever can.

At any rate, very little could have prepared me for what Netflix’s Death Note really tried to be.

(The following contains spoilers for Death Note, Death Note and Death Note)

 

 

Why using an interview with Totalbiscuit is a terrible idea when addressing harassment in Gaming Cultures UPDATE 17/08

Love him or loathe him it’s undeniable that John Bain, much better-known as TotalBiscuit, is a highly-influential video game personality with a huge and passionate fanbase. – The opening line to a Kotaku UK article that went online today

John Bain is a Youtuber, podcaster, and ‘Man With A Large Audience Within ‘The Gaming Community”. He’s been actively contributing to various gaming communities since 2005, meaning a good third of his life has revolved around games media, content creation (An umbrella term that basically means “makes stuff” often used to separate contemporary medias from traditional ones) and, most relevant to this piece, building and sustaining an audience/community. He currently has about three quarters of a million followers on Twitter and over two million subscribers on Youtube if you care for such metrics.

He’s also an absolute prick.

Referential Humour and Prisma Illya

I have been toying with the idea of writing a post about Fate for a while now. I’ve been playing the mobage. I watched Unlimited Bladeworks the other month, and before that rewatched Fate/Zero. All three of these works, despite building on each other, are drastically different. They have drastically different goals, and drastically different philosophies towards achieving their goals. However, whilst there is a multitude of ways I could tackle Fate – from it’s portrayal of the sufferings brought about by the restricted world views of Men in Zero, to the promises that Unlimited Bladeworks makes and then fails to keep – lets instead talk about, what I can only imagine to be, the worst Fate series available on Crunchyroll. Fate/Kaleid liner Prisma Illya.

Philosophy of Film – Nonexplicit Moral Messages

Today (The 13th of July 2017) I graduated from the University of York with a 2:1 Bachelors degree in Philosophy. In celebration of that I have decided, since Twitter seemed receptive of it, to upload one of the essays I handed in during my time there. What follows is a 4000ish word essay that contrasts the ways Jud Süß (Some pretty vile Nazi propaganda commissioned by Goebbels during the peak of the Nazi film industry) and Fail Safe (A Very Concerned thriller made in Cold War Era US) indulge in certain kinds of rhetoric. Interesting! I hope. At any rate I wouldn’t recommend using this academically, though the sources may be of some interest to you, and I do not mind adding an addendum if I, in my BA philosophy ways have missed something of importance. I have loved my degree, but I don’t necessarily expect it to have not overlooked any potential crap when it comes to weighty subjects like Nazis. Fuck Nazis. Enjoy. 

PS: Sorry the formatting is iffy. Juggling from openoffice to WordPress is a pain =S

How ‘A Silent Voice’ succeeds at a difficult topic

I recently handed in the last essays of my University career. A momentous occasion, slightly undercut by the fact that the day I was finishing them I spent my entire morning watching, for the third time, A Silent Voice.

I have previously jotted down a few words about my relationship with that franchise, so I shall not reiterate it here. However, it isn’t just the formative role the manga played for me that makes the movie maybe my favourite of all time. The staff behind A Silent Voice have managed to make a complex and sensitive film, that can even tackle such dangerous themes like suicide well.

(Spoilers for the movie as well as discussion about suicide and it’s place in the movie follows. Please take care. Suicide hotlines worldwide are available here, as well as at the end of the essay.)

My Relationship with Mawaru Penguindrum

My first introduction to Kunihiko Ikuhara was through Revolutionary Girl Utena. It made me re-evaluate how I approached and felt about fiction. I still think well of shows like Waiting in the Summer and The World God Only Knows, but Utena is just on a whole other level. It was only natural that I would look into watching Mawaru Penguindrum shortly after I first experienced Utena. My friend Ally had been liveblogging it on Tumblr, and it appeared to be exactly the kind of follow-up show I wanted.

This isn’t really a blog post about Penguindrum. So if you were after an indepth look at any of the themes, episodes, or specific motifs of it you’ll have to look elsewhere. Instead here this will be self-reflection of my experience with and around Penguindrum. So if you’re after something not massively self indulgent I might upload an editted version of my Philosophy of Film formative if I hear back from my lecturer and it isn’t The Worst.