Midweek Novella Review: Opium Tales: The Staff

I’m continuing to review the novellas adapted from Roman and Anna Riva’s planned animated series, Opium Tales (which doubles as Roman’s Substack moniker and publication). I’ve followed Roman’s work for years, and he has grown an impressive and active presence on Substack. When I found out he and his wife had a series of short novellas in print—and that they are all, save one, under $8—I snapped them up and decided to review them one-by-one.

Last week, I reviewed the second book in the series, A Pirate’s Tale (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link—more of them below—so I receive a portion of any purchase made through that link, at no additional cost to you). As I wrote last week, the novella is “a full-on swashbuckling adventure in the vein of (as the Rivas point out in their introduction) the Pirates of the Caribbean films.”

According to the introduction of each volume, Roman and Anna sought, but failed to procure, funding for an animated series called Opium Tales. They hoped to call it Dark Tales, but the name was taken, so they leaned into the opium habits of early eighteenth-century Romantics and landed on Opium Tales. Since they still had all the rights to their stories, they decided to publish them as a series of novellas.

Here is the series—or, at least the volumes I purchased (the following are Amazon Affiliate links; I receive a portion of any purchase made through these links, at no additional cost to you):

The entire series is (as of the time of writing) $46.94 before tax, so these are easy to scoop up in one fell swoop.

I was unclear which novella came third in the sequence, so I went to the source and asked Roman himself. He told me to read The Staff next. I’ve been on the road a ton lately with some SCISA work and to pick up our new puppy, and was worried I might not have a chance to read The Staff in time of this Wednesday, but Tuesday afternoon presented an opportunity with both dogs napping on the couch—and yours portly cracking open a book starring a clever thief with a heart as golden as the afternoon sunlight streaming into our sunroom.

So far, A Pirate’s Tale remains my favorite, but I’m a sucker for a pirate setting. The Staff is a close second, though, as I’m also a sucker for a skilled rogue who is experienced as a second-story man or cat burglar, the kind of guy who can get into impossible places with seeming ease. The Staff presents us with such a protagonist, the unnamed “thief,” who must retrieve a powerful staff as ransom for his lovely new bride, Katherine.

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Midweek Novella Review: Opium Tales: A Pirate’s Tale

For the next few weeks I’m going to review the novellas adapted from Roman and Anna Riva’s planned animated series, Opium Tales (which doubles as Roman’s Substack moniker and publication). I’ve followed Roman’s work for years, and it’s refreshing to see his active presence on Substack. When I found out he and his wife had a series of short novellas in print—and that they are all, save one, under $8.

Last week, I reviewed the first book in the series, Humpty Dumpty (that’s an Amazon Affiliate link—more of them below—so I receive a portion of any purchase made through that link, at no additional cost to you).

According to the introduction of each volume, Roman and Anna sought, but failed to procure, funding for an animated series called Opium Tales. They hoped to call it Dark Tales, but the name was taken, so they leaned into the opium habits of early eighteenth-century Romantics and landed on Opium Tales. Since they still had all the rights to their stories, they decided to publish them as a series of novellas.

Here is the series—or, at least the volumes I purchased; if I’m missing one, please let me know, Roman (the following are Amazon Affiliate links; I receive a portion of any purchase made through these links, at no additional cost to you):

The entire series is (as of the time of writing) $46.94 before tax, so these are easy to scoop up in one fell swoop.

According to is introduction, A Pirate’s Tale was intended to be the second installment in the animated series. Indeed, there was some debate between it or Humpty Dumpty being the pilot episode, but H. Dumps won out due to name recognition. That move seems wise, as HD strongly establishes the series’ foundation in European folklore and fairy tales, so a classic nursery rhyme turned into a dark tale of corruption and excess was the fitting choice.

That said, A Pirate’s Tale is my favorite between the two. While I loved what HD did with the source material, A Pirate’s Tale is a full-on swashbuckling adventure in the vein of (as the Rivas point out in their introduction) the Pirates of the Caribbean films.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Talk 2: DIY Garage Band Music Ensemble

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.

Yesterday (Friday, 18 September 2026), I attended the SCISA Teachers’ Conference. I presented two sessions, one about creating a “DIY Garage Band Music Ensemble” from scratch, the other about teaching private music lessons to supplement your income.

I always like to have prepared remarks for any public speaking, so I’ve put together the following. The slides for this talk and the one whose text I shared last week are linked above.

For now, here’s “DIY Garage Band Music Ensemble”:

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Midweek Novella Review: Opium Tales: Humpty Dumpty

For the next few weeks I’m going to review the novellas adapted from Roman and Anna Riva’s planned animated series, Opium Tales (which doubles as Roman’s Substack moniker and publication). I’ve followed Roman’s work for years, and it’s refreshing to see his active presence on Substack. When I found out he and his wife had a series of short novellas in print—and that they are all, save one, under $8.

According to the introduction of each volume, Roman and Anna sought, but failed to procure, funding for an animated series called Opium Tales. They hoped to call it Dark Tales, but the name was taken, so they leaned into the opium habits of early eighteenth-century Romantics and landed on Opium Tales. Since they still had all the rights to their stories, they decided to publish them as a series of novellas.

Here is the series—or, at least the volumes I purchased; if I’m missing one, please let me know, Roman (the following are Amazon Affiliate links; I receive a portion of any purchase made through these links, at no additional cost to you):

The entire series is (as of the time of writing) $46.94 before tax, so these are easy to scoop up in one fell swoop.

According to is introduction, Humpty Dumpty was the first installment in the series, and intended to be the pilot episode of the animated series. It is a dark fantasy rendering in the spirit of the Brothers Grimm, in which H. Dumpty is not a clumsy egg, but instead a brutish feudal lord with dark appetites.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026)

While visiting my older brother the other weekend, we drove down to the AMC in Savannah, Georgia to catch Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026). I’m of the mind that if there is a Spider-Man movie, I must see it.

I’m not a huge comic book nerd (although I like them; I just don’t know all the deep lore and storylines and such), and I haven’t devoured hundreds of issues of Spider-Man comics, but I’ve always appreciated the character. Plus, my generation came of age with the Tobey Maguire flicks (directed by none other than Sam Raimi). I’ve heard it said that each generation has their Spider-Man; mine is Maguire (and my Mary Jane is Kirsten Dunst). Also, where else are you going to see Willem DaFoe lose his mind as a super villain (and not as just every other character he plays)?

That said, I love the character and his backstory. Spider-Man is basically a goofy kid with amazing powers who has to grow up fast and learn some hard lessons. He is duty-bound—“with great power comes great responsibility”—to protect those around him, even at great personal cost. Very often, Spider-Man doesn’t get the girl; sometimes, the girl gets killed!

That theme continues with the current iteration of Spider-Man as portrayed by the eternally boyish Tom Holland, albeit with a twist that I think Spider-Man: Brand New Day essentially nullifies.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: SCISA Talk 1: Supplement Your Income with Music Lessons

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.

This Friday, 18 September 2026, I’ll be attending the SCISA Teachers’ Conference. I’ll be presenting two sessions, one about creating a “DIY Garage Band Music Program” from scratch, the other about teaching private music lessons.

I always like to have prepared remarks for any public speaking, so I’ve put together the following. I’m building a Google Slides presentation to go along with the prepared text, but it’s not quite done at the time of writing, so I’ll share that later.

For now, here’s “Supplement Your Income With Music Lessons”:

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

TBT^4: Remarkable Animals

It’s been an animal-centric year for yours portly. Sweet Murphy crossed the rainbow bridge; Nugget is still going strong; and we’re likely adopting a puppy in a few weeks. The koi and other creatures are doing well—I even wrote an entire album about it (still 90% off with promo code koipond)—and our bird feeder continues to attract lots of birds—and lizards. I’ve seen a nasty skink slinking around, too.

That reminds me of this piece I wrote a few years ago, “Lament of the Lizardman“:

But I digress. It seemed apropos to reblog this series of posts about animals in all their glory.

With that, here is 11 September 2025’s “TBT^2: Remarkable Animals“:

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Clancy Mistrial

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After lengthy deliberation on what should have been the most obvious verdict in human history, the jury came back hung in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial. One heroic juror (almost certainly one of the three men on the jury) held out in the face of what must have been overwhelming pressure from his fellow jurors and, it seems, at least half of the country (and, sadly, a massive amount of women).

My younger brother sent me this video:

I agree with the caption: give that man the Nobel Peace Prize!

The only silver lining here is that Lindsay Clancy will still be held at the Tewksbury State Hospital until and/or if a retrial occurs. She won’t be roaming at large, looking for children to lure into her candy cottage in the woods (or whatever modern witches do other than strangling their own children to death). Had that man caved to the pressure, she’d be walking free, probably heading to Lowe’s to buy a cauldron suitable enough for cooking babies.

Of course, this outcome is still a miscarriage of justice, one that suggests the serious need to reconsider our approach to jury selection—and who is even eligible to serve.

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Monday Morning Movie Review: The Odyssey (2026)

Well, long after the brouhaha has passed, I’m finally doing it: writing my review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026). Dr. Wife and I saw it back on Saturday, 25 July 2026, in inglorious 2D (as opposed to glorious 3D or IMAX). Overall, we enjoyed it.

Before diving into the film itself, let me address the meta-narrative/-commentary around the film: the woke casting. Yes, Ellen Page (now going by “Elliott”) appears playing a Greek soldier. If you were going to cast a woman-pretending-she’s-a-man as a male Greek soldier, Ellen Page was about as benign as you could get. The role is a young man who is drafted, essentially, when he’s still a little boy, so he’s kind of gangly and weak, even after ten years at war. Ellen is dispatched in the first few minutes of the film, and only appears again as a shade from the Underworld, her figures so obscured by mud and her voice so obscured by scary audio effects that, at long last, she can actually pass as a man.

It’s the same for the other controversial casting decisions: Lupita Nyong’o as Helen (and Helen’s sister) and Zendaya as Athena. As much as I loved the “Helen of Detroit” memes and thought it was kind of ridiculous to cast the incredibly black (but still beautiful, just not “Helen of Troy” beautiful) Nyong’o as a flaxen-haired Grecian super beauty, she appears only fleetingly in the flick. Zendaya’s casting is, perhaps, the most egregious, primarily because, well, she plays herself the entire time—making one or two facial expressions while wordlessly staring at Odysseus. At least here it makes sense, because (MINOR SPOILER ALERT) she’s basically a representation of his trauma over the atrocities he committed at Troy, so looking like a pouty bullfrog is a bit more excusable.

None of that is to endorse this casting—there were many superior choices to portray “the face that launched a thousand ships”—but to note these roles are fairly minor. Remember, Helen is the catalyst for The Iliad, which details the origins of the Trojan War; The Odyssey focuses on Odysseus’s long voyage home after the war. Matt Damon was convincing as Odysseus, and Anne Hathaway was exquisite as Penelope, Odysseus’s besieged but loyal wife.

One more note on the casting: the one time the diversity casting made me LOL was when the Indian actor portraying Odysseus’s lieutenant exclaimed, proudly, “We are Greeks!” It was so incongruous, it made me laugh. That is, perhaps, a commentary on the pitfalls of “woke” and/or DIE casting: there is a thing that it is to be “Greek”—or “Indian,” or “English,” etc.—and we all know, even if we don’t want to admit it, that a guy from the Indian subcontinent is not Greek (although I’m sure some wags would point to Alexander the Great’s conquests of the far western edges of India, or note the common Indo-European ancestry, etc., but let’s not get carried away with autistry here).

But I digress. What about the actual movie?

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Belated SubscribeStar Saturday: Casey Anthony vs. Lindsay Clancy

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The latest controversy to rock the Internet is a legitimately terrifying one: a mother slew all of her children in what appears to be a premeditated, carefully calculated manner, meticulously planned to concoct an insanity plea; and tens of thousands of women, if not more, are applauding her as some kind of hero for mental health advocacy.

It’s a horrifying example of how evil becomes so mundane, we risk celebrating it as some kind of positive good. It’s also an indication of how easily manipulable women are when a viewpoint—even an objectively evil and lethal one—gains enough consensus to be “popular.” Women are actively identifying with a woman who committed cold-blooded infanticide because “raising kids is hard.”

The bandwagoning of a certain group of women in favor of Lindsay Clancy got me thinking about the Casey Anthony case from over a decade ago. I remember the outcry in response to that case of infanticide was completely different. Most women abhorred Casey Anthony. I still remember when the verdict was announced. I was in the office, one of two men in what was otherwise an overwhelmingly white female office. Every single one of them lost it when Anthony was found “not guilty” of the core charges (but found guilty of some lesser chargers involving misleading the police). “How could she be found ‘not guilty’! She so clearly killed her child!” was the paraphrased howl of outrage.

At the time, I reasoned that women were so fascinated with the Casey Anthony case because it made them feel good about their mothering abilities. The thought process that simmered just below the surface seemed to be, “well, I may have made some mistakes, but I didn’t kill my kid, so I’m a Really Good Mom.” That the jury determined the prosecution could not prove Anthony’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt seemed not to matter at all—these ladies knew Anthony was guilty, evidence be damned. It was one of my first real glimpses into the hive mind of a certain segment of the female population.

Now we find women having a completely opposite reaction to Lindsay Clancy, who has admitted to slaying her children. Whereas the prosecution in the Anthony case relied on all manner of dubious forensic “evidence” to pursue a conviction (which, it seems, is why it ultimately failed), all of the grizzly facts are confirmed in the Clancy case. It’s not a question of whether she did kill her three young children—she did, and she admits it—it’s a question of her sanity at the time.

That’s one key difference between the cases. What intrigues me, though, is that women were so willing to send Anthony to the chair, but are celebrating Clancy. The former might have killed her child, but the State of Florida couldn’t prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, and women were furious. The latter did kill her children, and women are lauding her as a feminist icon. Have things changed so much after a decade-plus of wokery that women love infanticide?

Well, leaving abortion aside—perhaps the most devilish evidence of the self-destructive nature of modern women—I would propose another theory, one I have not seen discussed elsewhere: women hated Anthony because she was poor white trash; they defend Clancy because she’s an upper-middle class white professional. It’s a matter of class identity for them. It felt good for those same upwardly mobile women to dunk on the trailer park girl from Orlando—“she’s not one of us!”

But Clancy is one of them. She represents the apex of the “AWFL,” the Affluence White Female Liberal: a nurse living an affluent lifestyle with extensive medical and psychiatric support, as well as a doctor husband, who still wasn’t content. Indeed, she was so discontent, she murdered her own children—and, somehow, it’s her husband’s fault.

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