Tag: analysis

Myersvision: The Last of Us (TV Series)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Dear old Audre Myers e-mailed Ponty and me a couple of Sundays ago recommending the HBO Max series The Last of Us, based (albeit, I suspect, somewhat loosely) on the video game of the same name.  I’ve never played either of the two TLoU games, but I am quite familiar with the controversy surrounding the sequel, which went fully woke.  It is a classic scenario:  a hugely successful cultural phenomenon gets hijacked—willingly or otherwise—by the Cultural Marxists and becomes a pitiful version of its former self.  The Cult Marxists hope to trade on the popularity of the intellectual property or franchise by shoehorning their bizarre beliefs into it, thereby reaching a massive audience before everyone sours on it.

It’s a fundamentally vampiric, parasitic relationship:  the healthy host rapidly loses whatever cultural cache it enjoyed, becoming an insufferable, withered husk of its former self.

I was not surprised in the slightest that Ponty reacted so negatively to Audre’s request that one of us review the show.  As an avid gamer who (it seems) enjoyed The Last of Us video game and despised its woke sequel, I knew the suggestion would touch a nerve.  Poor Audre had no idea; I hope Ponty wasn’t too hard on her!

So, I proposed that Audre write a review.  I’ll check out the show when I’m able, but she is the queen of television reviews around here.

With that, here is Audre Myers’s review of the television series The Last of Us:

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TBT^256: End the Income Tax

The Portly Politico5 Comments

It’s that time of year again, when yours portly yells impotently at the clouds and demands the end of the income tax.  Unlike prior years, yours portly actually got his taxes done relatively early (if you count early March as “relatively early”), and while I owed both Uncle Sam and the Great State of South Carolina a pound of flesh, I ended up getting away with only paying $54 total—woooooot!

Still, the annual ritual of telling the federal government how many miles I drove to music lessons and what I paid for WordPress is an odious and obnoxious reminder that the federal government dominates our lives and our personal information.  I recognize that taxes are a necessary evil, but let’s focus on the “evil” part of that equation.

I don’t know what the solution is, and I think the Republican Party has spent far too much time quibbling over the placement of commas in the tax code instead of fighting the necessary cultural battles in our nation, but tax reform should be a no-brainer.  Here’s the Portly Proposal:

  • Tax all income at 10%
  • Don’t tax interest earnings in savings accounts

That’s it!  Easy.  Cheap.  Everyone pays the same percentage.  Maybe—maybe!—have a carveout for people who earn, say, less than $20,000 a year—they pay, say, 5%, or even just 1%.  If people want to withhold from their paycheck, fine.  But there are no surprises—if you earn $2000 in March, you withhold $200.  At filing time, all that would be done is confirming you’ve paid your amount; if you overpaid on that first $20,000, then you’d get a refund.

Even that is more involved than I’d like, but it gives a bit of relief to the working poor.  Otherwise, no deductions, no carveouts, nothing.  There’s still an incentive to save, since no one pays for interest earned on savings accounts.

Yeah, yeah—you want to write off your $300,000 mortgage.  No.  Sorry—let’s not incentivize people to borrow huge amounts of money so they can save forty bucks on their taxes.

With that, here is 13 April 2023’s “TBT^16: End the Income Tax“:

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Southern Comfort (1981)

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Shudder serves up some strange dishes sometimes, including a good bit of non-horror fare.  For a service that is ostensibly dedicated to horror, it’s always interesting when something outside of that genre pops up.

Of course, “horror” is a pretty broad category, and there is horror in many situations.  Perhaps that is the rationale for the inclusion of Southern Comfort (1981) to its slate of films.

Southern Comfort follows the foibles of a Louisiana National Guard unit on a weekend bivouac into the swamps of Cajun country.  After a truly stupid act, the weekend warriors find themselves embroiled in a guerrilla war with murderous Cajuns.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The King in Yellow Review

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

The artwork for today’s post is the cover of the instrumental piece “Yellow Knight,” from my upcoming release Four Mages.  The album releases on 2 May 2024, and a YouTube video for “Yellow Knight” (linked above) will go live on 14 May 2024.

Recently I purchased a copy of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a classic work of “weird fiction” that would inspire writers like H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for sometime, especially with the idea of a malevolent play that is so terrible and beautiful, it drives anyone who reads it mad.  That play, of course, is the titular The King in Yellow, the text of which—beyond a couple of snippets—is never quoted in the book.

The book is a collection of ten stories, the first four of which share the thread of the infamous play.  The rest of the book consists of stories that take place mostly in Paris, specifically the Latin Quarter, and revolves around the lives of young American art students in the City of Light.  Indeed, Chambers published In the Quarter, a collection of stories about the Bohemian lives of the Latin Quarter’s residents, a year prior to the publication of The King in Yellow.

The four proper TKiY stories are quite good, and succeed as horror stories that unsettle, more than they scare.  The hidden gems of this collection, however, are the Latin Quarter stories, which depict a freewheeling, fun-loving period in French history before the unhappy days of the First World War ruined France and the West forever.

I reviewed one of those stories, “The Street of the First Shell,” earlier this week.  Today, I’d like to examine the entire book, which really is two shorter books in one.  There are the stories clearly connected to the “Yellow King” mythos.  The rest are all stories that take place in the Latin Quarter.  Unlike “The Street of the First Shell,” however, most of the rest are comedic romances, though some are a bit heavier than others.

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Spring Break Short Story Recommendation 2024: “The Street of the First Shell”

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Recently I purchased a copy of Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow, a classic work of “weird fiction” that would inspire writers like H.P. Lovecraft.  It’s a book I’ve wanted to read for sometime, especially with the idea of a malevolent play that is so terrible and beautiful, it drives anyone who reads it mad.  That play, of course, is the titular The King in Yellow, the text of which—beyond a couple of snippets—is never quoted in the book.

The book is a collection of ten stories, the first four of which share the thread of the infamous play.  The rest of the book consists of stories that take place mostly in Paris, specifically the Latin Quarter, and revolves around the lives of young American art students in the City of Light.  Indeed, Chambers published In the Quarter, a collection of stories about the Bohemian lives of the Latin Quarter’s residents, a year prior to the publication of The King in Yellow.

The four proper TKiY stories are quite good, and succeed as horror stories that unsettle, more than they scare.  The hidden gems of this collection, however, are the Latin Quarter stories, which depict a freewheeling, fun-loving period in French history before the unhappy days of the First World War ruined France and the West forever.

Of those stories, my favorite is “The Street of the First Shell,” which takes place during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71.  It is a thrilling depiction of the privation and struggle of that conflict, and of the doomed Parisian defense against the Prussian siege.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Disco Elysium

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

I recently picked up the “final cut” of Disco Elysium during the Steam Spring Sale at the amazing price of $9.99 (it usually MRSPs for $39.99).  It’s a game I’d heard about since its release in 2019, but always with an air of mystery around it.  It’s a roleplaying game, yes, but totally different from the typical fantasy-inspired roleplaying worlds of, say, The Elder Scrolls series or even the sci-fi roleplaying of Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield (Ponty’s promised a review of CP2077, and I am quite excited to read it).

There have been non-fantasy roleplaying games before, to be sure, and even those that take place in the modern-ish world.  Disco Elysium, however, is unlike any other game I’ve ever played, roleplaying or otherwise, and after just a few hours of gameplay—and having not even solved the first case yet!—I love it.

It also turns out the game can be had on consoles—and much more affordably than the default Steam price.  Amazon has it on the Nintendo Switch ($25), the Playstation 4 (marked down $16.90 at the time of writing), and the XBox One ($24).  If I’d known it was on the Switch I likely would have got for that console (and may still do so), but I think the game is meant to be played on the PC.  That said, I can tell it’s quite console-friendly based on the controls.

What sets Disco Elysium apart from other games, I think, is that most of the game is dialogue—with your own mind.  And not just one, unified mind, but your character’s entire nervous system.  It is probably the closest simulation I’ve ever experienced to what goes on in my mind, although I’m not a drug-addled 70s-style super cop down on his luck.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: A Bucket of Blood (1959)

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Thanks to Joe Bob Briggs and The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, I’ve finally experienced some film inspirado.  To celebrate seventy—yes, seventy (70)—years of filmmaking, Joe Bob and Darcy the Mail Girl hosted a special live edition of the show to honor Roger Corman.

For the uninitiated, Roger Corman is the king of the B movies.  He’s made anywhere from 500-700 films; one source of the disputed figure is that Corman himself doesn’t know how many films he’s made!  Casual fans most likely know Corman from 1960’s The Little Shop of Horrors, which was filmed on the same sets as this week’s film, A Bucket of Blood (1959).  Tonally and narratively, the two films are very similar (as a fun aside, The Little Shop of Horrors was the first flick I watched on Shudder).

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Sartorial Decline

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

People are not dressing well anymore.

I’ll include myself in that assessment.  When I first started teaching, I wore a coat and tie every day, although I’d shed the coat pretty quickly.  On Fridays, when teachers were allowed to wear jeans, I’d make myself wear a tie if I wore jeans, as a compromise (that also used to be my stage look—jeans, sports coat, tie).

Since The Age of The Virus, everything has loosened up.  I happily wear polo shirts—tucked in!—to work most everyday, aside from the six weeks of frosty winter we sometimes get in South Carolina.  Fiddling around in an un-air-conditioned football pressbox in August is far more pleasant when I’m not wearing a long-sleeve button-up with a goofy tie.

Indeed, teachers can now wear jeans, so long as they are of a darker hue, any day of the week.  My female colleagues avail themselves of this privilege fairly shamelessly.  As I descend elegantly into middle age, I’ve adopted the uniform of my people:  five-pocket workman’s slacks with a tucked-in polo or short-sleeve button-up shirt.

What has stirred my sartorial ire is not form-fitting jeans or polo shirts, but the prevalence of pajamas—yes, outright pajamas—among the general population.

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