Random catch-up musings (featuring Wrestlemania and Takeover spoilers)

Okay, its been a while so what we got?

Well, Wrestlemania happened and so did Takeover: New Orleans. One of these shows was better than the other. I was very down on Wrestlemania this year. The disappointment started early with Asuka losing her match and her undefeated streak. I genuinely thought they were going to have her win and do the Brock Lesnar thing and hold the title Wrestlemania to Wrestlemania and have her drop it to... oh, probably Bailey.

Instead they had Asuka lose to Charlotte and (to quote a favourite sentiment of Jim Cornette) I don't see where the money is in this? They have spent so much time investing Asuka's undefeated streak with the proper weight and mystique, they allowed it to run so long it long ago beat Bill Goldberg's all time record.

And then she loses on her first big-time match on main roster.

Where's the money? Where's the money in breaking her record for Charlotte who is already over, already respected and a multiple time title holder? It doesn't make sense to me.

And the hits kept on coming. Brock Lesnar's interminable part-time Universal Championship run lumbers on for reasons we discovered the next evening when Lashley made his triumphant return to Raw. I can only hope the rumours are wrong and Lesnar is going to drop at the Greatest Royal Rumble instead of making us wait for SummerSlam. Nakamura/Styles was somehow a lot less interesting than the famous match they had at Wrestle Kingdom a couple years back just before they jumped ship to WWE. I really thought that was going to be an all-time classic.

And I just cannot get over the whole bizarre scenario of hiring the most famous female combat athlete in the world and having her debut in a match against a semi-trained 41 year old mother of two featuring two semi-retired old men. Really, Triple H and Angle should have been their own nostalgia match and at least let Rousey's first match be all-women.

To be honest, the highlights of the night for me were Xavier Woods playing the Dragonzord theme and the Bludgeon Brothers winning the tag belts less because I love the Bludgeon Brothers (though I do) but because it finally ends the wretched and over-extended Usos/New Day feud.

Takeover, meanwhile, could not have been better. Worth the money I didn't pay for it (we use my housemate's Network account) for Gargano vs. Ciampa which ran just over half an hour and was amazingly intense. The Six-Man Ladder Match for the North American Championship was amazing and I swear I have never expected be so hyped for the introduction of a mid-card title.

*****

On a happier note: Paige is the new General Manager of Smackdown Live! A female authority figure for Steph to bump up against. I know they want Rousey to be the female Stone Cold but I really think someone in a management position needs to exist who can stand up to her.

I also really hope this isn't just a stunt appointment for market Paige's biopic. I mean, obviously they're going to use it like that but I hope it outlasts the movie's release.

*****

DC finally made announcements about the post-Metal Justice League comics beyond the No Justice stuff they already announced. There's a new Justice League Dark with Wonder Woman and Zatanna which is interesting but the real news for me is Justice League Odyssey which not only has Cyborg leading a team featuring Jessica Cruz and Starfire but its going to be drawn by Stjepan Sejic, the amazing artist of Sunstone and a recent really good run on Aquaman.

*****

Roseanne came back and every time they interview John Goodman he looks like one of those hostages assuring their family they're fine and being fed and everyone is bein provided proper medical assistance. I grew up with that show and didn't know any of the stuff about Roseanne herself going a bit made and tyrannical towards the end of the original and now she's a bloody Pizzagate truther!

Oh, well, not like I'm starved for television I want to watch and keep not finding time for between the Arrowverse shows, the Marvel-Netflix stuff, Voltron: Legendary Defender, and that Lost In Space reboot.

*****

So, the solo Flash movie that became a Flashpoint movie is now a solo Flash movie again because DC figured if they were going to make another shit movie they might as well make the version of it that doesn't basically require expensive guest stars.

*****

I have developed a visceral hatred of Sam Ovens, a man who hawks business webinars in YouTube ads. Somehow I manage to get one of his ads on every video I watch and I watch a lot of stuff on YouTube. My only respite from his voice is the strange banjo accompanied adverts for toilet nowl nightlights.

*****

Marvel's upcoming Death of the Inhumans event is coming in July. I don't care. I genuinely do not give a shit. I have tried to care about the Inhumans since Inhumans vs. X-Men. I read Royals, which was okay, and Black Bolt, which was great but as a larger concept I can't say they grab me at all. “The X-Men but even more uncomfortably eugenic” isn't that good a pitch and I can't say I'm surprised we've reached this point.

However...

If this latest bullshit event has any negative consequences for Kamala Khan words will be had.

*****

Donald Trump has decided to pick a fight with the US Post Office because he doesn't understand that Amazon's free delivery isn't free to Amazon. He genuinely seems to believe that Amazon just declares they aren't paying postage and gets away with it. Don't get me wrong, Amazon is pretty evil and I don't doubt this is something they'd try if they thought they had he chance but the simple reality that should be apparent to anyone with a functional reasoning brain (or a White House full of functional reasoning brains they can consult at any hour of the day or night) that Amazon pays the postage fees out of their profit on the sale.

And that's the only Donald Trump news I want to do in this one because its Trump and there's a scandal a day with that guy.

Hopefully he'll be impeached or do something to terminally disappoint his personality cult of heavily armed, emotionally unstable racial supremacists some of whom, I'm told, are very fine people.

She's, like, a strong and stable genius

No matter how engaged you are with politics there's always something that'll blindside you, especially in a governmental system as old as ours.

You see, the way popular culture has always portrayed cabinet reshuffles is as basically the most dictatorial thing a prime minister can do. You watch the likes of Yes, Minister or The Thick of It and whenever the mere possibility of a reshuffle comes up everyone's scrabbling for favour, seeking out the slightest rumour of who's going up or down or not moving at all.

At no point has anyone told me a minister can just refuse to be moved and yet a good portion of the government reacted to Theresa May's (the prime minister, not the pornstar) decision with a resolute “Nope. I'm happy here, I live here now.”

So, yeah, that's the strong and stable leadership this country is counting on to get us a good deal on Brexit: a prime minister who can't even tell her ministers what job they're meant to be doing.

At this point a vote of no confidence would be a mercy to the woman. 

The First Order: the power of the pathetic

Is it okay to do spoiler posts for The Last Jedi yet? There's stuff I want to discuss and first and foremost is the clarification we get on what the First Order actually is so BEWARE, SPOILERS BELOW!

One job I felt The Last Jedi did very well was clarify what the First Order is. It helps that most of the rise of Trump and the fallout of Brexit happened inbetween production of Episodes VII and VIII because the exact dynamics of this sort of fascist nostalgia movement are better know to us now. I'm not completely throwing Abrams under the bus here but I feel we have a much better handle on where these characters are coming from now the banal mechanics of this sort of thing are better known.

It all starts with that first scene of Hux (a character best described by a tweet I saw calling him “the personification of British foreign policy circa 1950”) breathlessly informing a subordinate that his orders come directly from Supreme Leader Snoke. You can just feel the daddy issues pouring off him as he says it.

Then there's Kylo Ren going full-on Reddit MRA incel negging pick up artist on Rey with his “You mean nothing to anyone except for me” routine which is a textbook emotional manipulation device.

Meanwhile there's Snoke himself sitting on his throne in his Hugh Hefner dressing gown going so far as to describe how he's manipulating Hux right to Ren's face to make Ren feel special and valued even though its also pretty much how he's manipulating Ren.

There are those who feel that reducing the main antagonists to an old man blatantly and shallowly manipulating two needy manbabies into repeated acts of pointless aggression devalues them somewhat.

Have these people met the modern far right? Because that's a pretty accurate portrayal of what they are nowadays. The last US election presented a New York real estate billionaire as the anti-establishment candidate who would make it socially acceptable for white people to say “Merry Christmas” again and build a wall to keep those Mexicans out of all those border states who ever so slightly economically rely on immigrant labour. My own country regularly mistakes the likes of Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Nigel “I love foreign tax havens but not foreign people” Farage for salt of the earth sorts who understand the struggle of the working man because they said something mildly amusing on Have I Got News For You or drank out of a pint glass for a photo op.

So, yeah, portraying the foot soldiers of the right wing as easily led useful idiots bowing to any authority that flatters their personality defects strikes me as pretty bloody fitting right now.

And that's really effective. It can't be denied that Hux, Ren and the First Order in general are a threat. They kill a lot of people over the course of the two movies. They hunt the Resistance to the point of extinction (there may be more space puffins on the Falcon than dissidents) They have access to huge numbers of weapons and, let's face it, pathetic young white men with access to huge numbers of weapons are something that especially US audiences have reasons to have anxieties about.

So, yeah, I liked all of that. Nice to see someone portraying the fact that these people are completely pathetic and yet a genuine threat to life and limb. I feel that sometimes the awful harm these people are capable of causing is diminished by how bloody stupid they are and perhaps that mixed message has helped them achieve as much power as they have. 

Blue passports? Its a Brexit Miracle!

This is truly pathetic. One last bloody stupid thing before I take a break for Christmas.

The government has announced that following Brexit the UK will return to issuing blue passports. “Iconic” blue passports according to some news stories.

Pathetic.

It has been almost nine months since Theresa May (the Prime Minister not the pornstar) invoked Article 50 and began the process of leaving the European Union. Nine months in which the UK government fought a pointless general election that lost them their majority and the rest of the time have just postured and sabotaged their own chances in negotiations. Our country's negotiating position was called “nostalgic and unrealistic” by EU officials for the simple reason that it is nostalgic and unrealistic.

Blue passports are, of course, not something we need to negotiate with the EU on. All of that is still up in the air aside from the EU's demand that we pay them £50 billion in as a divorce settlement. Blue passports are a British government decision which is good because its not like we've actually managed to make any headway in actually negotiating with the EU on anything.

At least this is something, though, right? At least the government is thinking about what life in the UK will be like after Brexit, yes?

So, blue passports.

Not the status of the Irish land border; not European doctors and nurses; not how to keep our agricultural sector afloat without EU subsidy... blue bloody passports.

Iconic blue passports.

This, truly, is the sovereignty that Brexiteers voted for: the inalienable right to carry your passport in a little blue folder instead of a little red folder because how dare those European cuck snowflakes demand that we sacrifice our sacred, God ordained blue plastic documentation coverings.

Pathetic. 

A vision of the future

The year is 2021. The witch hunts are over and Hollywood is a post-apocalyptic wasteland populated solely by feminist biker gangs, Keanu Reeves and Terry Crews. Gal Gadot rules with an iron fist and Woody Allen's crow-ravaged corpse hangs above the highway leading into town, a stark warning to all interlopers.

Bernie Sanders, two years dead, still has his supporters who contend he was robbed of the last Democratic nomination and they have pie charts to prove he can still win big in 2024. Trump was impeached years ago but still lives in the White House basement behind a barricade of his own faeces with his “cabinet”: a collection of dismembered shop window dummies.

Surprisingly, the Republicans narrowly won the last election but it doesn't matter because Chelsea Clinton, so enraged at constantly being accused of interfering in politics, simply conquered the United States in a brutal military coup. Jeff Sessions and Richard Spencer accompany her to all public engagements naked and on all fours at the end of a leash, long resigned to their fate. Richard smiles when she tugs the leash hard, its very unnerving.

Meanwhile, closer to home in the UK, an unfortunate contract oversight for an edition of Celebrity Job Swap has left Theresa May working as the country's least popular camgirl (she has made 38p so far and that's being contested through PayPal) whilst pornstar and erstwhile star of the music video for The Prodigy's “Smack My Bitch Up” Teresa May remains as Prime Minister. The pragmatism of a former sex worker did, in fact, do wonders for Brexit negotiations and the public on both ends of the political spectrum pretend not to notice the very obvious changes in the national leader. On the parliamentary end the only operational difference is the Chief Whip now has one.

The French have banned all abbreviations in the wake of the “ya'll'd've” controversy. 

A sidestep into royal commentary

Look, usually I don't care about this stuff. I mean, I've nothing against the royals as people though I do think they should be able to afford their own bloody weddings (seriously, tens of millions in taxpayer money is not something we need to waste right now) and I know this could come across as mean...

… but...

… I kind of want the alt-right to get confused about this engagement and condemn the future princess' ethnicity as forced diversity that doesn't serve the plot.

You might think this an unrealistic expectation but The Spectator is honest to goodness saying she's “unsuitable” to marry a royal because she's divorced. Yes, in our exciting Space Year 2017 a supposedly serious news source is invoking the spirit of Wallis fuckin' Simpson because they can't bring themselves to just be honestly racist.

Wallis. Fucking. Simpson. 

Pity the political historians of the future

I mean, for serious, the present day is bizarre if you stop and think about it from the perspective of what, if we survive the Orange Supremacist's attempts to dick wave at “ Crazy Rocket Man”, will have to be included in future political science textbooks:

“Okay, so there was a huge fascist revival that first came to public prominence as a harassment campaign against one female game developer.”

“The fascist revival adopted a cartoon frog as their new mascot and god. When a fascist was explaining this on television they got punched in the face and it became a meme. It also became a sort of competitive sport at his future speaking engagements.”

“The fascists founded a fictional nation, made a flag for it and named it after their frog god.”

“Okay, so internet memes and their political significance...”

“Here is a photo of the future 45^th President of the United States failing to sell a Stone Cold Stunner at Wrestlemania 23. Here is another photo of his appearance in Home Alone 2.”

“A massive vote winner was the promise to save an obsolete fuel industry whose entire US infrastructure employed fewer people than the Arby's restaurant chain.” (Totally true fact, I swear)

“Another vote winner was a promise to build a wall across the entire US/Mexico border. There follows fifty-sxeven pages of detailed costings and basic geography that prove how impossible that would be.”

“In Great Britain, the generation who spent twenty years telling their children not to believe anything they read on Wikipedia collectively decided 'but if its on the side of a bus, it must be true'.”

“After claiming their opposition was soft on terrorism, the Conservative Party lost their majority in an election they had no reason to call and ended up entering a coalition with the political offshoot of a terrorist organisation.”

“The Kremlin used social media to try and stop British pensioners from getting their flu jabs.”

“There was an annual controversy amongst conservatives about Starbucks holiday themed cups that got so entrenched that in 2017, in sheer desperation, they decided that a pair of simplified cartoons hands drawn on the cup were both so slim they must represent a clear advocacy for lesbianism.”

“In a separate incident, US conservatives ritually destroyed their coffeemakers in support of Sean Hannity.”

“The coffeemaker incident was tangentially related to an Alabama election where 'Republican pedophile or Democrat not a pedophile' was a genuinely hard decision for thousands of people.”

“The president supported the pedophile, by the way.”

“There was a transphobic conspiracy theory concerning the chemical composition of soy milk.” 

Christmas Warfare

(Content warning: Trump, also Alex Jones' face).

"Mine now. China!"

It really is the most tiresome of all conservative talking points this idea that there's a war on the idea of Christmas. Donald Jodocus Trump, the Woody Allen of US presidents, recently used it as a talking point in a speech to the Pseudo-Christian Hypocrisy Values Group (or some such bunch of cretins, anyway) to huge applause because these people are so desperate to feel oppressed its pathetic.

Of course, Trump had to go as far as possible in making his goat-bothering audience feel as masochistically oppressed as possible by claiming you never heard anyone say Christmas anymore. Bearing in mind this is the same man who recently claimed he invented the word “fake” we should be grateful he didn't claim that Christmas was itself a Trump-branded event.

There is no war on Christmas.

Every Western government maintains Christmas as a bank holiday (or whatever the local equivalent is); every corporation that sells product to the public spends millions upon millions on Christmas branding to the point that a particular Coca-Cola advert is literally considered an absolutely mandatory component of the season; every broadcaster has dozens of special projects made for broadcast over Christmas; an entire Hollywood genre exists to make movies about Christmas.

No other holiday gets that. Easter comes close which is, again, a Christian festival.

But these people are so desperate to feel oppressed that they'll take whatever they can get. They see people who are actually marginalised getting attention and concessions and actual legal rights and they feel left out because they have the collective emotional maturity of a five year old noticing their baby sibling (gender neutral phrasing there, suck it, social conservatives!) is getting more attention than they are.

So they latch on to the fact that the Starbucks coffee cups have “Happy Holidays” written on them instead of “Merry Christmas” (yes, this is an actual thing these people lost their shit over last year, I am not even slightly joking) because this is such a blow against the fact that the whole of Western society rearranges itself to accommodate this one religious observance. In their minds the mere acknowledgement that other winter festivals exist (and they exist in almost every culture) and that people might celebrate them is an act of terrible censorship and probably also somehow tied in with issues of ethics in games journalism.

Its fetishistic, this desire they have to be downtrodden, it really is. I remember the good old days when socially conservative pseudo-Christians just stuck to being self-loathing closeted homosexuals. Bonus points if they were also a televangelist!

"Lister... DO. YOU. HAVE. A CAT!?"

Also, is it just me or is Alex Jones (who claimed recently he lost custody of his son but we all know that was just a child actor hired to garner public sympathy. I know, I was shocked when I found out too) starting to look like Captain Hollister from Red Dwarf?

Not relevant but I was on a roll. 

For serious, Marvel...

I don't usually believe in karma but Marvel's NYCC this year is starting to make me wonder. Now, I'm writing this Saturday evening so if I don't mention something obvious here like a Marvel panel causing the venue to spontaneously burn to the ground that's why.

The news started off bad when I read that another of those retailer meet-ups (like the one where a Marvel executive dropped the line about nostalgia selling better than diversity) seemingly devolved into a near-lynching because some old white comicshop owners were angry about (what else...) diversity. That was bad. I thought that was as bad as a major industry/fan expo could possibly go.

And then it got worse.

They announced that they were publishing an all-ages Avengers comic in association with defense contractor and gun manufacturer Northrop Grumman. You read that sentence exactly right, a comic pitched to children sponsored by and advertising a government defense contractor. Apparently this was meant to interest children in STEM careers but, well, you can imagine that the thing people concentrated on was “children's comic sponsored by and advertising an arms dealer a week after a gun massacre”.

How did that get past anyone in management? How was it that in a company owned by one of the most obsessively PR-oriented entertainment corporations in existence a partnership like this was floated for more than a second?

I cannot imagine a single PR professional in this world looking at this idea and not raising concerns.

At this point the only logical conclusion is that the publishing wing of Marvel Entertainment is literally trying to commit suicide. No professional organisation could want this much bad publicity. It has actually reached the point where I was actually surprised when they canned the project given how bloodyminded they've been about sticking to bad decisions the past year or so.

An arms dealer, guys, seriously?

That's the literal baddie in Iron Man 1. 

The elevated estrogen levels of Star Trek: Discovery

An unnatural number of women types, yesterday.

You ever enter a conversation and you get to a stage where you're desperately praying “don't disappoint me, don't disappoint me, don't disappoint me”? Well, I keep having that when Star Trek: Discovery comes up. I swear, 90% of the conversations I have about this show with any guy ends up with “Aren't there are a lot of women in it, though?”

No. No no no no no.

There's five. There's Michael Burnham herself, Captain Phillipa Georgiou, Commander Landry, Cadet Tilly and the ginger flight controller whose name escapes me at the moment. So far only four out of this list have appeared in a single episode together. That's not a lot. Four women in any given episode (so far, in the UK we have episodes one to three). That's not actually a lot, especially considering one of them has so few lines I can't remember her name.

I'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's Men-At-Arms where one of the central jokes is that the Watch is being required to recruit “minorities” and they recruit a troll, a dwarf and a werewolf except no one says that Angua is a werewolf until she finally transforms so for more than hundred pages you think the minorities are a troll, a dwarf and a woman and laugh at these male characters who are so uncomfortable about (you think) having a woman in their space.

And then you get to a point in real life where people continuously act like having four women sharing screentime in a given episode of Star Trek is somehow an unnaturally inflated figure.

Spot on, Sir Terry, spot on. 

Again (Vegas)

Pulse was 16 months ago and it was the worst mass shooting ever, worse than Port Arthur (the Australian mass shooting that led to their current gun control laws). Now this Vegas shooting has been even worse. Last I read 58 people were dead and close to 500 wounded. The guy rented a hotel room, had a stock of ten military grade assault rifles and just opened fire from the window.

He had ten military grade assault weapons. Ten.

Nothing will change because of this. I don't know who originally said it but its been said that Sandy Hook ended the US gun debate. Once it turned out that the Second Amendment could survive the deaths of tiny children in one of the richest states in the union it was over.

Obviously, I'm biased here. I'm English, we had one school shooting massacre and the government was forced by public pressure to pass new gun control laws that greatly restricted (not banned, it must be pointed out) private gun ownership in this country. That one was enough for us.

It wasn't enough for the US government. Nothing ever will be. 

Bill Clinton's Sean Spicer impression...

To be frank, its a bit situational and I don't know how well it'll play in a club environment because, let's face it, those props are not portable.

Sorry, Mister President, but it needs workshoping. 

Trump: a case of too many perfect metaphors

He stared directly at the eclipse as his staff yelled at him not to. That should be enough, that should be more than enough to be getting on with, that's the perfect metaphor.

But this is Trump we're talking about so, of course, this came after the revelation that he'd managed to bankrupt the Secret Service with his golf trips. Yes, he actually managed to exceed the annual budget of his own bodyguards including overtime through charging them obscene rent in Trump Tower, charging them to rent golf carts at Mar-A-Lago (a bill one source placed at around sixty thousand dollars) and just generally being a massive prick who feels an egotistical need to hold campaign rallies three and a half years before the next general election and having a golfing trip every weekend.

Just when you thought nothing could top “he bankrupted a casino once” he goes and bankrupts the arm of the military specifically and solely charged with defending his life.

Don't get me wrong, I am all in favour of Donald Trump having as little protection as possible, I have a vested interest in the survival of the human race, but that is an achievement. At this rate it might even go down in history as the only achievement of his administration.

We can only hope...

Olbermann vs. Farage. FIGHT!

Things have been hectic this week and I haven't had a chance to read anything from this week's pull beyond Gotham City Garage so no reviews today (maybe tomorrow) but it is SummerSlam weekend so let's talk about a fight I've been wanting to see for months and it seems like we're going to get it:

Yes, Keith Olbermann called out Nigel Farage on Twitter. I am, as I have alluded to before, low key in love with Keith Olbermann, an unashamed liberal more than willing to scream at the world until it bloody listens. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, was perhaps most accurately described by Youtube video game commentator Jim Sterling as “the human equivalent of that feeling you get when you remember you swallow spider sin your sleep”. He is a racist conman who helped lead this country off a cliff and the government is still trying to decide whether they want to land on their head and die instantly or on their legs and hope to be as lightly crippled as possible.

I want Olbermann to destroy him. I don't care that its mean, I want to hear the rant. 

I am so tired of pissbaby men right now

I say this as someone who is only 50/50 on the idea of the new Doctor Who. Not Jodie Whittaker, to be clear, I still haven't seen her in anything. My ambivalence is purely down to being rather so-so on Chibnall's Doctor Who work to date.

Its not because I believe “no one wants a TARDIS full of bras”. Yes, that is an actual thing an actual person put in a comment on one of the announcement news stories.

And its not like this is some sort of isolated case, either. There was that whole bollocks with guys going mad over the Alamo Drafthouse cinemas in the US doing ladies' only viewings of Wonder Woman. There was even one guy who went out of his way to acquire a ticket to one of those women only viewings.

Why? I mean, what is the damn point? What this guy did was go out of his way to buy a ticket just so he could sit in a dark room watching a movie whilst surrounded by women who didn't want him there just to prove that he could. I mean, I'm just guessing here but I imagine the only novel experience for him in this scenario is the darkened room and the movie.

I am so fucking tired of this. I am so fucking tired of the loud idiots whose masculinity can be threatened by Ghostbusters of all damn things getting an average remake starring female comedians. I am tired of this being what men are in the public consciousness: fragile babies incapable of empathising with any character who is not like them.

I just don't get it. I mean, there but for the grace of God go I, I know that. I was raised mostly by women. My father had to travel for work a lot because he was an engineer in a recession started by the government-sponsored destruction of primary industry in this country so, for the most part, I was raised by my mother and two grandmothers. A lot of my friends growing up were girls and for most of my professional life the majority of my co-workers have been women.

So I just don't get this idea that I, as a man, cannot invest in female characters. The Doctor is a woman now, the Ghostbusters are women now, the lead Jedi character in Star Wars is a woman. Okay. I'm aware that there are people who think it odd that I don't feel threatened by this and that is pathetic.

It is pathetic that anyone could have their fragile damn masculinity threatened by a series moving from a male to a female protagonist. It is pathetically sad that this can turn someone off from the series, that all other content of the series is less important than the gender of the main character. It is pathetic that the existence of a remake can so threaten someone's enjoyment of the original that they will go out of their way to protest its existence. It is pathetic that there are people so invested in the critical reception of DC movies that they couldn't stand the idea that Patty Jenkins might get more praise than Zack Snyder and went through mental gymnastics to try and prove tat Snyder was the one “really “ responsible for Wonder Woman's success.

It is pathetic that this the mainstream understanding of my gender. It is pathetic that this is how we're seen and that even women who know me, who know my past and my politics will assume I'm one of these pathetic pissbabies just because I also happen to be a man.

And I am so tired of being lumped in with these losers. 

Do Theresa May's talents know no beginning?

Theresa May (the prime minister, not the pornstar) has so far succeeded calling an early election that cost her party their majority, announced a coalition before it was properly negotiated and is even now announcing cabinet appointments ecen though you usually save a few to bribe your coalition partner with.

Her chosen coalition partner is the DUP: a far right Irish Unionist (that means pro-UK) party founded by former terrorists that is the most anti-choice party in government, rabidly anti-LGBTQ and climate change deniers. Sinn Fein has already started grumbling about this coalition, which is exactly the sort of tension you want to encourage in Northern Ireland. I mean, what children these days really need is the character building experience of bomb drills at school like what I had.

Elsewhere in the Conservative Party, press interviews are being given in which the sharpening of knives can clearly be heard. Not that anyone can blame them. There didn't have to be an election for another three years and any other leader who losyt the majority would have resigned out of sheer bloody pragmatic shame to spend more time with their index linked pension.

When this all started there were two theories. There was the generally accepted idea that the Conservatives wanted a more solid mandate for Brexit and to not have to fight an election after the Article 50 deadline just in case (you know, on the off-chance) Brexit completely fucked the economy. Then there was my theory where they were so completely unable to control the Brexit negotiations that they just wanted to throw the election and make it someone else's problem.

During the campaign, as May did seemingly everything she could to alienate her core voters (like the Dementia Tax), it started to make an awful lot of sense.

Now, she's holding on to power when any other politician would resign and willingly getting in to bed with the DUP who, even by Conservative standards, are utterly mad.

I guess what I'm saying here is: Has anyone seen The Producers? 

Theresa May gets hung

As I write this we have a hung parliament, which for those in countries who don't do it this way is an election that does not return a majority. There are five seats yet to declare but the Conservatives have 314 seats so they can't themselves get a clear win. They could, if literally two seats are declared for them, form a coalition with the DUP, though that has a bunch of issues all its own because the DUP might have an actual spine unlike the Liberal Democrats.

There are not, mathematically, enough seats in the hand of progressive parties to form a Labour-led coalition, which is a shame.

Still, the Tories have suffered from their arrogance and if Theresa May (the Prime Minister, not the pornstar, and I hope this is the last time I have to write that clarification) doesn't resign over this I confidently predict a vote of no confidence in her future.

I am willing to take that as a win. May campaigned hard on her Brexit strategy which, for those unaware, has been purely to stamp her foot and impotently threaten the EU because she has no idea how to negotiate.

So, as much as I would have preferred a Labour government we do at least have a stronger opposition, a right that has been given a kicking and we will likely be rid of May. Its not perfect and the left needs to build on this and build on this until the next election happens but it is something.

Over in the US, James Comey has given his first round of testimony.

In France, fascism and xenophobia lost big.

The Resistance has finally begun. 

Donald Trump is a fucking idiot

Donald Trump and Theresa May (the Prime Minister, not the pornstar) at NATO,
behold the dignity of The Donald!

It was bad enough when his administration decided that, yes, they would give all the classified intelligence we'd handed over on the Manchester bomber to the press thus compromising the active investigation and jeopardising all future intelligence co-operation between the UK and US because, frankly, you're meant to be able to trust your allies.

I never expected to empathise with Benjamin Netanyahu but here we bloody are.

Then there was the speech. A normal person, or at least a normal politician, would just lead the moment of silence and launch into the platitudes. To the credit of Trump's handlers, he started well. I wasn't even that shocked when he decided that calling ISIS “losers” was suitable to the dignity of the moment.

No, what had my blood boiling was when Trump finally proved, once and for all, that no tragedy is so great or so distant that it can't be all about him. From the loser comment he segued into a rambling monologue about some of his favourite subjects: how NATO owed him money; unsubtle digs about how his Muslim immigration ban was a good idea and similar measures would have prevented the bombing (the bomber was born and raised in Manchester, so no); and reminiscing about how amazing his speech in Saudi Arabia was.

All this quite aside from trying to rip Emmanuel Macron's arm off when it looked like the French President was trying to avoid a handshake and literally grabbing another NATO leader to shove the man aside because The Donald has to be at the front of the shot, damn it!

He is a child. He is a stupid child who can't even conjure up the simple human decency to lead a moment of silence without finding a way to make it all about him.

Worthless orange shitgibbon. 

Again (Manchester)

I have nothing profound to add. Innocent people are dead. People rallied round as they always do, offering help and support. Blood was donated in vast amounts. Manchester taxi drivers, many of them Muslim lest we get, working for free to reunite families. Hotels and Sikh temples opened their doors to give people shelter and a solid address for their relatives to collect them from.

The usual monsters crawled out of the woodwork to claim responsibility and the other monsters who exist only to feed them have already started showing that they're more than willing to prove the terrorists right. Katie Hopkins, who for American readers is basically Tomi Lahren with less innate class, has already taken to Twitter to declare that what we need in this country is “a final solution” because invoking religiously motivated genocide is fun, kids! I mean, let's forget that if this was ISIS (who are, of course, an utterly unimpeachable source that we have every reason to take at their word) there's an obvious reason they picked Manchester. That city is one of the most multicultural cities in the country, the target was a concert mainly attended by women and young girls. I wonder why ISIS would want to disrupt that?

By this evening I confidently expect the government will have decided to bomb a country the perpetrators of this atrocity will later turn out never to have set foot in, the press will have forgotten the many inconveniently brown people who acted with compassion and charity during this horrific business and the terrorists will have won,again. More fear, more anxiety, more white politicians telling us to fear the unlike right before a general election, the self-serving bastards. More public support for bombing Middle Eastern countries further and further back into the stone age.

Exactly what they want.

Again. 

Is Power Rangers the new Catwoman?

The Power Rangers movie failed in China, which these days pretty much means it failed full stop. Now, I haven't seen the thing and I'm not likely to until it comes out on DVD, a few months have passed and its on the reduced racks but critical consensus seems to be that I was right and there wasn't much market for a gritty, dark reboot of a brightly coloured nostalgia property from my generation's childhood.

Which is, in a very specific way, a shame because I don't want what happened with Catwoman to happen here.

You see, back when this whole superhero movie boom was just getting started in 2004 there was a Catwoman movie. It wasn't a very good movie quite besides the fact the lead character was basically in no way Selina Kyle. She had feline super powers, for one thing, and for another DC managed to get over their need to put Batman in everything at the worst possible moment. There was also, not long after, an Elektra movie spun off from the not great but not awful Daredevil film. They both bombed, financially and critically, because they were, you guessed, it not good movies. They had pretty poor scripts, minimal budgets and not much pre-existing audience interested in a) a movie about a Batman love interest/villain without Batman in it, or b) a movie about the girlfriend of a superhero people only knew from a pretty average movie two years before. That all seems a pretty logical chain of events, right?

Yeah, so naturally, the Hollywood bean counters decided the problem was that No One Watches Action Movies Starring Women.

And here's the thing: compared to the Avengers there's a lot more diversity going on with the Power Rangers and I mean a lot more. These Power Rangers start out with three actors of colour whilst the Avengers opened with six white actors and only added two black characters at the end of their second movie. Add to that the fact that one of those Rangers of colour is gay and another is not only on the autistic spectrum but uses the phrase “on the spectrum” which is pretty much unheard of in this genre.

Look, a few weeks back an idiot working for Marvel Comics blamed poor comic sales on the fact that “diversity doesn't sell” and I want my Kamala Khan movie, damn it!

Saban is the cheapest entertainment company on Earth. This entire franchise only came about because Saban saw a way to make a superhero TV show without spending money on effects: buy the superhero footage from Japan and add in American actors for all the civilian bits. By all accounts this movie followed the pattern of chronic cheapness with the team only getting their costumes and Zords pretty late in the day to save on CG.

So, should we expect the bean counters to decide the problem here is making people wait for the action? Or making the movie grimdark when there's no ready audience demanding that take on the property? Or just that word of mouth travels faster now and bad movies get found out quicker?

Experience tells me no. Experience tells me that entrenched Hollywood wisdom will find correlation where none exists and declare that “This is why we like having white leads! Put too many ethnic minorities in a thing and people won't watch it!” just as before they said “This is why we don't make the woman the lead! No one wants to watch that!”.

So depressingly familiar...