Benjamin T. Milnes,

Obsessed with dying on hills? You’re an orothanatomaniac.

I have noticed in the last two or three years that there are increasingly people who seem desperate to die on whatever (political, social, or moral) hill they see. Whatever issue or cause comes along, they immediately make it their entire personality – everything about them is devoted to it. They will spend hours and hours of their life fighting imagined mortal enemies online over their new cause. And then a few days or weeks later, another issue or cause – or even just vague concept – will come along, and that is now their new personality – the one thing in all of time that they must dedicate their life to.

It’s a phenomenon I see more on the political left than the political right.

I found I needed a word for such people: perhaps orothanatomaniac. Oro- is an English prefix of Greek origin meaning ‘mountain’ or ‘hill’. Orography or orology is the study of mountains and their formation. Orogenesis is the process of mountain formation. An oronym is the name of a mountain.

Thanato- is an English prefix of Greek origin meaning ‘death’. Thanatology is the study of death. And -mania is an English prefix of Greek origin meaning ‘madness’ or ‘obsession’. So orothanatomania is the obsession with dying on hills – in this case metaphorical ones. An orothanatomaniac is someone who exhibits this obsession.

Wicked Part 1 – Astonishingly mediocre – 6/10

You might think it odd that I went to see this movie – given that the Wicked musical is famously more popular with women than is typical for fantasy, and it’s not exactly hard fantasy either. But when it comes to movies, really I’m willing to give anything a shot if it’s sufficiently ambitious and if the basic idea is interesting.

It’s worth stating at the outset that this is a review of the movie as an isolate work. I have not seen the musical it’s based on or read the book that that in turn is based on. I detest changes from source material, and I’m sure if I knew of them and saw them I would mark the movie down for them, but here I am judging it as a movie on its own.

I have heard many great things about the musical over the years (though as I say, I have not seen it). On that basis, I was expecting this movie to be quite good. But then also, the lead-up to the release of this movie has been disastrous. The lead actress criticised a fan for making a version of the movie poster that looked more like the poster for the musical. And then we had the endless series of interviews where the two lead actresses just started crying. It was just pathetic and repulsive. On the basis of all of that, I was expecting this movie to be a complete disaster.

So I was expecting either something brilliant or something disastrous. What I wasn’t expecting was what it ultimately was: astonishingly mediocre.

I’ll start with the stuff that was actually quite good – because quite frankly that stuff is much easier to describe and so easy to get out of the way first. The costume design was excellent – quirky and novel, but just managed to avoid being cliché. The set design was also excellent – exactly what you’d expect but also filled with many new things along the same lines. That train looked amazing. (Although I think it’s more properly referred to just as a locomotive, as it didn’t pull a ‘train’ of carriages behind it.)

The casting was also excellent. Jeff Goldblum was made to play the Wizard of Oz. As he tends to do in every film nowadays he just played himself, but in this case it was absolutely ideal. Michelle Yeoh was brilliant – I’m a huge fan of Michelle Yeoh whatever she’s in. She’s a phenomenal actress – she can take even very boring, cliché lines and make them sound great (which she had to do several times in this film).

Cynthia Erivo was actually very competent. Despite her insufferable personality in real life, she was actually very skilled – never underplaying or overplaying the part (which it would have been easy to do with that part).

The real star of the show, however, was Ariana Grande. Now, I don’t think of Ariana Grande as an actress – I think of her as a singer. I understand that she did actually start out as an actress, but I nevertheless think of her as a singer, and my general assumption is that singers can’t act. (And in fairness to me, that assumption is grounded – a lot of them really can’t act.) But she absolutely stole the show in this film. On a technical level her acting was flawless – every expression was exactly right. She was able to do the Connie D’Amico trope perfectly. And she also had lots of funny moments.

Some might dislike the idea of the second-main character stealing the show, but it’s generally more possible for secondary characters to be able to do this than the primary character, because secondary characters can often have more extreme character traits and be funnier, whereas the main character has to be sufficiently neutral for the audience to be able to project themselves onto them.

Some of the core ideas of the film were very interesting too. (Some, but not all, as I shall get onto.) The basic idea of expanding the world of the Wizard of Oz I really like – I always like that sort of thing. I’m a huge fan of the ‘lost knowledge’ trope (that George R. R. Martin always did really well), and the Grimmerie is part of that. Stories about dictatorships are often fun too.

So there were a number of things to like about this film. In fact, this film was particularly unusual – usually what lets a film down is its peripherals – usually the core story is a good idea, but the film is let down by its casting, its acting, its dialogue, its visual effects, and so on (think about the Last Airbender film – fantastic source material to work from – a great core idea – but let down by all its peripherals – the casting, the acting, the dialogue, and so on). This film was the other way round. All of its peripherals were good – it was let down by its core.

The main story is just, in parts, very stupid. A girl is born with green skin. Her parents – especially her father (although it is implied that he is not actually her father) – despise her for it, even though this is a land where magic is known to exist, even though a demonstration of her raw magical ability occurs moments after birth (if I remember correctly), even though they made an entirely green city – suggesting, as it does, that there may be a connection between greenness and magical ability, and so greenness would be revered, not detested – and even though this is a land filled with people who are already different shades of brown and beige, and even though this is a land filled with talking animals.

When she’s a bit older, some local children mock her for being green, and then when she first goes to the university, the people around her are absolutely mortified at the sight of her (although they get over it extremely quickly – just watch them in the background of the shots). It’s all ‘woe betide me, no-one likes me because I’m green’, but it makes no sense – the world we are looking at is filled with far more odd and unusual things than a person with green skin. It does not make sense for these people to find it as odd as they do.

‘But that’s the whole point! It’s not supposed to be rational! Discrimination isn’t rational!’, I hear an annoying person scream at their computer screen. Yes, discrimination between individuals on the basis of something that has no effect on the situation under consideration is generally irrational – the point is that in order for a difference to seem significant enough for people to hate you for it, it must be quite a lot different to anything else those people have experienced. Being green in a land filled with people who already vastly exceed Hollywood’s diversity quotas, along with talking animals and magic, should not be all that notable. In other words, how do you notice one odd thing in a room filled with odd things? When everything’s odd, nothing is.

It gets even stupider because as the film goes on they morph this idea of ‘discriminating against a person with green skin’ into ‘people with green skin are ugly’. This isn’t the first film to throw out this idea – I can’t remember what the other one was, but I’ve definitely seen it before, and it was stupid there too. It’s just a fundamental misunderstanding of beauty and ugliness. Skin colour doesn’t actually affect beauty at all – and I mean that in the broadest possible sense. Blue skin, magenta skin, orange skin, gold skin, multicoloured skin – literally any colour can look good. What actually matters is bone structure – just the basic shape of your face, the size and position of your eyes, and so on – this is what actually affects beauty. (Skin tone and complexion also affects it, but that’s different from colour – the actual hue makes no difference.) We all know this. Of course we all know this. But here this film is pretending that if someone were green, everyone would think they were ugly. No they wouldn’t.

(As an interesting aside, there are actually real humans with blue skin. Some people take colloidal silver (which is not a good idea), and over time it turns their skin blue – look it up. These people are a curiosity – medical and experiential – but they are not hated.)

Elphaba goes to Shiz University to support her sister as she enrols. While there, however, she accidentally gives a display of her magical power, causing a lot of disruption. On seeing that she has true power, Madame Morrible decides to admit her to the university. Elphaba just accepts this – but this is weird – didn’t she have other plans? Didn’t she have somewhere else to go after this enrolment ceremony? She’s just offered a place on a multi-year residential course and she can start then and there? Doesn’t she have to tell anyone? It’s just weird. I suspect it’s a hang-over from the musical – in a musical it would be fine because musicals always have a degree of unrealness to them, but you can’t get away with that in a film.

The film then progresses into its high school section. This section might as well just be every high school drama ever put to film or television. It’s almost unbearably cliché. The popular girl doesn’t like the girl who’s different. The girl who’s different is nerdy, and she’s ugly because she’s nerdy, and she’s nerdy because she’s ugly – because Hollywood really thinks that nerdiness makes you ugly and vice versa. Eventually the popular girl feels guilty about the way she treats the unpopular girl and decides to treat her better (because god forbid a change of behaviour be based on rationality and not emotion). But of course, now that the popular girl likes the unpopular girl, the unpopular girl cannot be allowed to remain ugly – she must be given a makeover – because you can only truly transcend into the domain of popularity if you completely conform to it and change your appearance. It’s all about appreciating people’s differences – and the way they do that is by completely squashing those differences – you must be like all of the other popular girls. And THEN, on top of that, the makeover consists of taking off the unpopular girl’s glasses and letter her hair down, because in reality this ‘ugly’ girl was played by a very good looking actress and wasn’t ugly at all – glasses and tying your hair up do not, in fact, make you ugly. So the ‘ugly’ girl was not really ugly, she already conformed to the standards of the popular girls, but the need for this conformity had to be emphasised to the audience by having her have a ‘makeover’ anyway.

I mean, it’s just so stupid isn’t it? Almost every idea is undermined by the next idea that’s presented. It’s unbearably cliché – every single part of it was parodied by Family Guy over a decade ago. There’s no meaning to it – it’s just flawed cliché after flawed cliché. I think it would be fine if the film accepted itself for what it is, but it (and its core audience) seem to think that it’s making some deeply profound statement.

We then learn that the animals in this world are discriminated against – and over the course of the film this intensifies. This doesn’t really work because when animals can talk what really sets them apart from humans? In the real world, a goat and a cat seem roughly equally different to a human, because neither can talk, but if they could both talk, surely they’d seem as different to each other as either would to a human, because speech is no longer a defining factor between the three. In other words, how does this category of ‘animal’ exist in this world? It doesn’t matter so much for the kind of easy fantasy of the Wizard of Oz, but since the film makes a big fuss about it it’s worth mentioning.

Jonathan Bailey shows up. Now let’s none of us kid ourselves – we all know why Jonathan Bailey got this part. He got it because he was in Bridgerton. Now, I tried watching Bridgerton. It was shit. Truly and utterly shit. It’s what happens when an American author tries to write about the British aristocracy. Americans do not understand aristocracy or royalty. But it is popular with women who want to fantasise about the Regency Era but who don’t care about facts or historical accuracy. Jonathan Bailey is the object of desire in the show.

And he’s the object of desire in this film too. He’s there because he’s good looking. It’s interesting how a gay actor has been selected as the object of desire for heterosexual women. I could go on a rant about the trend of gay males being treated as pets for women in media (particularly in fiction), but that’s for another post. Bailey’s character is, quite frankly, largely irrelevant in this film. (This is just part one though – perhaps that changes in part two.)

Eventually Elphaba and Glinda go to the Emerald City. I really liked the story of these kind of ancient magical beings who once inhabited the land of Oz and created the Grimmerie. I also really like all of the hints of what it is actually like to live in Oz – which is in far greater turmoil than many would have our main characters believe. All of that was great, but it did really need more worldbuilding.

And then we get a semi-conclusion. I didn’t know before going to see the film that it was only going to be part one, but that’s fine.

All of these story issues really make the film fall flat. Some of them could easily have been resolved – particularly the worldbuilding stuff – that’s easy to fix. But some of them couldn’t have been. The core story between Elphaba and Glinda revolves around the ‘popular girl’ trope, and there’s nothing you can really do with that that doesn’t change the entire story.

On top of that – and most egregiously for a musical – the music was actually pretty shit. There was A LOT of autotune used for some of the singers – I could hear its distinctive tone all the time. But even worse, the music was, quite frankly, forgettable. You can tell how good the music of a film is by how many tunes you could hum when walking out of the cinema. I could only do two: Defying Gravity and Popular – but that’s because I already knew those two beforehand. The rest I can’t remember. Pathetic, for a musical.

And also rather sickening was the dancing. God the dancing was shit throughout. It was that typical ‘Yeaaahhh I’m dancing so hard because I’m so passionate and emotional and kewwwlll!’ style of dance that only Hollywood actors who are desperate for their big break can do. It’s a style of dance that only someone who thought the word ‘rockstar’ was aspirational would come up with. Utterly dreadful.

And you know the film that this one most reminded me of was High School Musical. It’s easy to see why this story is more popular with women: it’s a story about someone being accepted by a social group despite her differences, and winning an attractive male over the (ostensibly) more attractive female.

So overall: not great. Not outright shit either – there were some interesting and fun parts to it – but it was flat, and gave itself much more credit than it deserved.

I probably will watch it again at some point. I put it in the same category as a film like Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – that wasn’t a good film – it had a huge number of core errors – but it had a few interesting ideas – particularly visual ideas – and I like to return to it every now and then.

So it’s a 6/10.

Deadpool 3 – Enjoyable, but flawed – 8/10

I would have liked to have reviewed this earlier, but this movie required a second viewing.

It was difficult to decide what to title this review. This movie is, in some ways, quite complex. It achieves some remarkable things with regards to the context in which it was made, but also has some crucial flaws that I think make it not quite as good as the first two movies in the series.

Where to begin. Well this movie masterfully handles the inclusion of the Deadpool franchise – and the X-Men franchise – into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is an aspect which it could have gotten very, very wrong – and I think with anyone other than Ryan Reynolds writing it, it would have gone very, very wrong.

This movie had many problems it had to solve. First, of course, was that the last time we saw Wolverine was in 2017’s Logan (seven years ago!). The general commentary around that movie was that it was going to be Hugh Jackman’s last performance of the character – I don’t know if that was an idea that came from Hugh Jackman himself, or whether the tone of the movie itself simply suggested it to everyone – but either way, that was the general understanding. And along with that also came the idea that this was the true end for the character. Logan was well and truly dead – his healing factor had finally given out. It was an extraordinary ability but it was not infinite. He was not coming back. (I found it a bit strange that everyone was willing to go along with this idea. It wasn’t as though the X-Men movies had handled timelines and do-overs perfectly up until that point. Timelines had been altered, people had come back, people had made unusual cameos – the studios had always just done whatever they wanted – that’s how it had been for years.)

This was what Deadpool 3 was facing as soon as they decided to include Wolverine. A lesser movie would have just avoided giving any explanation – it would have just included Wolverine and ignored any questions about timelines and settings and canon. This movie tackled it head-on – and that was the right way to do it.

The opening scene handles the questions that we the audience have. Surely Wolverine’s healing factor is infinite? Surely its slow-down was just a result of whatever that evil guy in Logan was doing with the water or something? Surely he’s actually alive? Surely Deadpool’s just got to dig him up?

Well he does, and no, he really is dead. A clever writing move – in writing it’s always extremely risky to bring a character back from the dead, as you undermine the ultimate stakes of any story. And how did Deadpool 3, therefore, get around this? By using the MCU’s new(-ish) multiverse to acquire an alternate Wolverine.

After Deadpool digs up Logan’s adamantium-coated skeleton, some people from the Time Variance Authority show up, and there’s a big fight. The Deadpool movies always start with a fight – which always includes lots of unusual and striking methods of attack, with plenty of gore, highlighted with slow motion.

Now, I was very sceptical when the TVA showed up. I do not think the TVA have been done very well at all. I did not watch the Loki television series. (Have there been two series’ of it so far? I don’t know.) Well – I watched the first episode and a quarter, or something – I can’t quite remember – but it was just dreadful and I couldn’t watch another second. I did not like the TVA in that and I haven’t liked them in anything I’ve seem them in.

I have said it many times before: time travel is difficult to get right as a writer – you have to be very careful about including it in a story. And even harder to get right is any kind of extra-temporal entity. Doctor Who has had problems with this in the past. The TVA seem to exist ‘outside’ of time, but the very fact that they can breathe and walk and talk at all shows that they themselves occupy a space-time. It might be a different space-time to our own, but they clearly occupy one. But then also the fact that they can and do interact with our own space-time shows that they are causally connected to it – they can take part in the events that they are supposedly ‘outside’ of temporal connection with. So to what extent are they really ‘outside’ of it at all. It just becomes meaningless – the TVA isn’t outside of time or outside of our reality at all – they are, unavoidably, inevitably, part of our timeline.

This is the kind of problem you run into when doing any kind of time-travel stuff in stories. Most writers are not mentally equipped to deal with the paradoxes of time travel – and it tends to show VERY quickly. The TVA come across as nothing special. They appear to be able to teleport, but they don’t seem to be able to do anything clever at all time-wise, despite ostensibly having the knowledge, means, and dimensional vantage point to do so.

In order to make something like the TVA work, they cannot merely be ‘quirky’, with some outdated, Arts décoratifs, brown-glass design choices. They must be unknowable. Any beings that are truly beyond time would have such a radically different experience of reality that we would struggle to understand them. Think of how in Interstellar the super-dimensional beings that make the tesseract towards the end never speak or communicate directly. We do not see them; we do not understand them – we only know of their existence through their actions. It doesn’t have to be taken to this extreme every time, but this is how you make something unknowable. They could have done this in the MCU, but they didn’t, and the result is that the TVA is plain and uninteresting. The TVA comes across as less powerful and less mysterious than SHIELD did.

So the moment I saw that the TVA was going to be included in this movie, I was sceptical. But actually, not only did this movie avoid some of the mistakes made with the TVA previously, it managed to repair the concept somewhat. And it did this by not over-using them. A few scenes later we meet Paradox – the movie’s second villain, or deuterantagonist. The fact that Paradox is not following the commands of the broader TVA, and working somewhat independently, allows for an explanation for the TVA’s apparent non-omnipotence. The TVA should be extremely powerful, but Paradox does not have many of the usual options available to him because he is trying not to draw attention to what he’s doing. Deadpool steals a device for travelling around the multiverse, and Paradox tries using a ‘time ripper’, but that’s it really. It sets the movie up for a standard ‘destroying the universe’ storyline with a little bit of multiversial travel to get another Logan. Beyond that the TVA’s just a bunch of kitch workers in a dreary super-dimensional office and their incapable henchmen. We don’t need to indulge the underwhelming ideas of Loki.

This is why I say that this movie achieves some remarkable things with regards to the context in which it is made. With just a few deft keystrokes, this movie has solved the problem of everyone expecting Logan to be truly dead, the problem of how the Deadpool stories can actually be included in the multiverse, and the problem of how to include the TVA (which they have to be to some extent), while also actually improving the TVA over their appearance in Loki. This movie manages to put one thread through several needles on its first try.

I’ve been going through this movie somewhat chronologically because it’s difficult to do anything else. The opening scenes – though clever, and solving many problems – do make one or two mistakes.

Something I found quite confusing on first watch-through, and which I still don’t understand now that I’ve seen it a second time, is how exactly the events of the first two Deadpool movies fit into the timelines and the multiverse. The second scene of the movie is the one between Deadpool and Happy Hogan. It’s a very funny scene – I’ll get to that in a moment – but we are told very explicitly that this is Earth 616 – i.e., ‘the Sacred Timeline’. This is the universe in which all of the events of the MCU before the multiverse split happened – it’s the one we know from the movies. But in the next scene we are told (very explicitly again) that we are looking at Earth 10005, and that it is six years later. So we’re in a different parallel universe, and it is this universe that the TVA pulls Deadpool from (and this universe that the TVA wants to destroy (I think – I’m pretty sure)).

So hang on, which universe did the events of Deadpool 1 & 2 occur in? The scene with Deadpool and Happy Hogan occurs in Earth 616 – does it also occur in Earth 10005? The text says ‘six years later’, implying it did (or that this is a pan-dimensional six years), and they reference it later – it’s given as the reason why Deadpool lost his motivation and split from Vanessa. If it happened in both, why show us it in a different universe? If the events of Deadpool 1 & 2 happened in both universes, then why even suggest that our Deadpool is not from the prime universe?

It’s not clear to me at all. Perhaps there’s an explanation out there on the internet, or perhaps it’s all clear if you watched Loki. I don’t know. This is something that should have been straightforward – either the Deadpool we know is from the prime universe or he isn’t.

This ties into another flaw in this movie – which I actually didn’t realise until after I’d finished watching the movie, even though it is quite obvious from the very first scene. It’s implied (obviously) that the Deadpool of this movie is the same as the Deadpool of movies 1 and 2. This movie also incorporates the events of Logan – Logan happens in the Deadpool universe. In Logan, Logan himself is old, as is Charles Xavier, but in Deadpool 2, when we’re in the X-Men mansion, we momentarily see the young X-Men cast. Charles is bald, so it’s after the events of X-Men: Apocalypse, but this means that between the events of Deadpool 2 and Deadpool 3, some 40+ years must have passed, which would not make sense given that none of Deadpool’s friends have aged.

So although Deadpool 3 managed to include itself into the MCU quite well – solving many problems along the way, it was not perfect. This is, in large part, a result of the mess made by other movies. It was always going to be hard to include the X-Men movies into the MCU, because the X-Men movies have a lot of inconsistencies like this. They simply were not as careful with the young-cast X-Men movies as they were with the MCU pre-Endgame.

Something this movie did incredibly well was weaving together all of the previously non-MCU movies into the MCU by the inclusion of characters from those movies. I mean, this was done really, really well – to the extent that this movie was an homage to 25 years of moviemaking. There are too many to list, but obviously having Chris Evans as the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four movie was a stroke of genius. It was a way to have Captain America in the movie without having Captain America in the movie. It was a brilliant twist when he said ‘Flame On!’. It was a nod through the fourth wall to the curious fact that, while Captain America and Fantastic Four were originally not part of the same cinematic universe, they were part of the same source material universe, and having the same actor in two different parts was ironic. It was also great seeing Chris Evans playing quite a different character from the rather earnest Captain America (which Chris Evans seemed to enjoy).

I was also thrilled to see the return of Azazel – though he wasn’t played by the original actor. I was also thrilled to see the return of Sabretooth and Pyro – both played by the original actors – I love that.

An absolute favourite was the return of Jennifer Garner as Elektra. For that alone I have given this movie an 8/10 instead of 7/10. 2005’s Elektra is an iconic movie for me, and I’m a huge fan of Garner’s version of Elektra – I was beyond thrilled that we got one more performance of the character here. (Personally, I’d quite like to see a whole new Elektra trilogy with Garner.)

Reynolds certainly knows what the fans like and want. It was amazing to see Henry Cavill for a short cameo as an alternate Wolverine. Few studio bosses would have had the awareness to do that. Nicepool was also a fantastic addition – Reynolds has the gift of knowing with extreme precision how a line or expression will come across, and that is why he’s able to create and play a character like Nicepool without it breaking the entire immersion.

Reynolds also knew what the fans wanted in terms of fights. We got two Deadpool vs. Wolverine fights – both of which were very creative – and we got a Deadpool and Wolverine team-up against the gang of different Deadpools (which had a perfect conclusion with no-one dying (except Nicepool) and the gang of Deadpools getting distracted by Peter).

Emma Corrin gave an outstanding performance as Cassandra Nova. That is not an easy character to play. Go too serious and the character becomes incomprehensible. Go not serious enough and the character doesn’t seem threatening. With a character like that, it’s not what powers she has that makes her threatening, nor is it how she uses them – it’s her own reaction to what she does with them that makes her come across as threatening.

The character of Paradox was a bit off. He was a very self-aware villain, somewhat over-the-top, and a bit camp. It made his motivation seem unserious. It was probably not helped by the fact that the protantagonist was introduced quite late in the movie.

I think one of the bigger flaws in this movie was it did not seem to fit with what we’ve seen of Wade and Vanessa in the previous two movies. In the first movie we were shown that Wade and Vanessa are very much made for each other. Vanessa dies near the start of the second movie, and the whole movie is about Wade’s sorrow – and then she comes back at the end. I just don’t believe that, after all of that, they would simply drift apart, as is shown at the start of this movie. Vanessa is almost entirely absent from this movie, which just doesn’t seem to make sense.

Something I also didn’t like in this movie was the ‘grotesque’. I have a very specific idea in my mind of what I think of as ‘grotesque’, and it’s often hard to convey, but I absolutely hate it. I would consider that ugly dog to be grotesque. Of course, the point of the dog was as a joke – that Deadpool would have an obsession with something so ugly. But it was still grotesque. I would also consider that flying skull version of Deadpool to be grotesque. I hated that too. It’s just repulsive – in a way that regular blood and gore isn’t. Were it not for these distorted forms, I might have given this movie a 9/10.

Above all, though, this movie is funny. This is possibly the funniest of the three Deadpool movies – the jokes are just packed in. Particularly funny is that second scene between Deadpool and Happy Hogan – an interview for Deadpool to join the Avengers with Jon Favreau – who plays Hogan – being one of the architects of the MCU. I suspect that scene was conceived of long before the rest of the story.

I think a third Deadpool movie would have been better if the franchise had not been included in the MCU – it could have focused much more on its existing characters like Vanessa, Negasonic, Yukio, Domino, Peter, and Dopinder. However, given that it was to be included, it did VERY well with the situation it had. It managed to neatly connect the X-Men franchise to the MCU, bring in Wolverine with a strong motivation (Wolverine as a character always seems to be best when he is filled with regret), solve some of the problems with the TVA, and be very funny. 8/10.

I’m going back to DVDs

Streaming is just so annoying now.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s I built up a large DVD collection. Well – it seems large to me, but I suppose compared to some collections it’s actually quite moderate. I don’t know the exact number, but I think it’s about 200 DVDs.

I was quite pleased with it, but by the mid 2010s it seemed quite pointless. Lots of what was in my collection was available on Netflix, and anything that wasn’t was likely an old-ish movie – 90s or early 2000s – and not something I was likely to rewatch that often. Also, I was running out of space. I have two shelves for DVDs – both of which have long been full, and I’ve just been stacking up the rest on top. It’s at risk of falling off the wall.

So I stopped adding to it. All was fine for a few years, but I’ve now decided to (mostly) abandon streaming for DVDs once more.

Streaming was fine when it was just Netflix. Now, though, in order to maintain access to the movies and television shows I like to watch, I have to have a subscription to Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video too, as well as buying some movies and shows through YouTube. When BritBox still existed I had to have a subscription to that too, and when Game of Thrones was on and still good I had to pay for NowTV (which was the shittest service I have ever encountered – I wasn’t so much watching a television show as enduring a PowerPoint presentation).

What’s even worse is that half the time I don’t even know where something’s going to be available. (I think most people get around this via their ‘smart TV’ – but I don’t have one – television for me is just something that’s open on a different browser tab.) And things come and go from different platforms. Something that I think is going to be available somewhere often turns out to no longer be.

And the most egregious sin of Netflix: when only the second movie of a trilogy is available. Why would I want to watch only the second movie of a set of three, Netflix? I will watch all three or none at all.

Streaming is now neither cheap nor convenient. (Add to that Hollywood’s burning desire to edit old movies and television shows to delete anything that doesn’t fit their latest extremist ideology and soon I’m paying a lot of money not to watch a heavily-censored movie.) DVDs nowadays seem to be very cheap (if you’re still on the old pre-Blu-ray ones as I am (yes I realise that makes me seem very old)), and they also allow for the wonderful surprise of rediscovering a movie you had otherwise forgotten about.

So I’m swapping back. Time to put up some more shelves.

The Rites of December

At the beginning of every year, I write a big list of the things I want to do that year. I’ve done this for the last few years now, and it’s a great way of keeping those things at the front of your mind throughout the year – I look back at it all the time.

Note that it is not a to-do list. These are not things that I have to do by the end of the year, and they don’t necessarily roll over into the next year if I don’t do them. It is simply a list of things I want to do – an intention list. (It’s a concept I want to explain more in another post or video.)

Inevitably, there are some things on the list each year that I don’t get round to – I’m just focusing on other things, and they get pushed to the back of the queue. What I want to do this year – and in subsequent years – is to make December the month of doing things that I haven’t gotten round to all year. All those things on the list for the year that I haven’t done yet I want to do in December.

Of course, there’s a good chance I won’t be able to do all of them. Some of them are quite big projects – far too much to do in one twelfth of the year – but that’s fine. To complement my New Year’s Day Tradition, and to give the year a sense of completion, for me, December is about finishing things off.

Words of Pain – Words that end with the Greek element ‘-algia’

The word ‘nostalgia’ refers to a sense of longing for a time in the past – perhaps a time in one’s own life or a time long before one’s life.

This word used to have a different meaning: a sense of longing to return home. This makes more sense given its etymology – it’s from Greek nostos, meaning ‘returning home’, and Greek algos, meaning ‘pain’.

The word is part of an entire etymological family of words that end with ‘-algia’. There are actually quite a lot of them. Most of them are nothing as abstract and philosophical as ‘nostalgia’ – most of them just refer, very literally, to pain in a certain part of the body. The table below lists a few (though far from all, as there are A LOT).

Noun	Meaning
myalgia	muscle pain
abdominalgia	abdominal pain (obviously)
brachialgia	arm pain
cephalalgia	head pain – a headache
dentalgia	tooth pain – toothache
glossalgia	tongue pain
ophthalmalgia	eye pain
polyalgia	many pains

There are a few particularly interesting ones. ‘Analgia’ – a state of painlessness. ‘Hypalgia’ – a reduced sensitivity to pain. ‘Hyperalgia’ – an increased sensitivity to pain. ‘Hypnalgia’ – pain during sleep. ‘Pygalgia’ – a pain in the arse.

There is another abstract one – ‘solastalgia’ – referring to a type of homesickness not when one has moved, but when one’s environment has changed. A very useful word.

Words of Healing – Words that end with the Greek element ‘-iatry’

What’s the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist? I remember wondering this years ago, and learning that a psychiatrist is the actual medical practitioner, while a psychologist is an academic who studies the human psyche.

I had this distinction memorised for many years without knowing the etymologies of the words. (Well, without knowing the etymology of ‘psychiatrist’ – ‘psychology’ is a fairly easy etymology to work out.) But recently I wondered where this ‘-iatrist’ ending comes from.

‘Psychiatrist’ is obviously just the agent noun from ‘psychiatry’, which is in turn from Greek psykhe, meaning ‘mind’, and Greek iatreia, meaning ‘healing’. So it’s a perfectly-formed word – no etymological quirks.

There are a few other Modern English words that use this ‘-iatry’ ending – or its derivatives and variants ‘-iatric’ and ‘-iatrist’. I’ve listed some of these in the table below. Curiously, in each case, only one form – the adjective, the noun, or the agent noun – is commonly used in Modern English, with the others not, and sounding a bit out-of-place. I’ve put the common-ish words in bold.

Adjective	Meaning	Noun	Agent Noun
bariatric	‘of or pertaining to obesity’, ‘of or pertaining to the healing of obesity’	bariatry	bariatrist
geriatric	‘of or pertaining to old age’, ‘of or pertaining to the care of the elderly’	geriatry	geriatrist
paediatric	‘of or pertaining to the care of children’	paediatry	paediatrist*
podiatric	‘of or pertaining to the healing of the feet’	podiatry	podiatrist

(*Of course we usually use the word ‘paediatrician’ here, but there’s no reason why it couldn’t be ‘paediatrist’.)

Not a very large selection of words. It’s curious that such a useful word-forming element is not used that much.

As I have done with the other posts in this series, however, we can get creative and imagine some new words that use this ending.

Noun	Meaning	Adjective	Agent Noun
ailuriatry	‘the healing of cats’	ailuriatric	ailuriatrist
cyniatry	‘the healing of dogs’	cyniatric	cyniatrist
chiriatry	‘the healing of the hands’	chiriatric	chiriatrist

And more. Such words could be quite useful in fantasy fiction, where there might be various different kinds of healer.

New Term: Autolobotomite

‘Lobotomite’ is a great word. It refers to someone who is brainless, stupid – as though they have been lobotomised. It’s a great insult that I like to use to refer to Hollywood writers.

We are living through the Great Age of Stupidity, and the demand for insults for stupid people greatly exceeds the supply. Much of the idiocy we see in the world today seems to be self-inflicted – people who have achieved great antisagacity (there’s another new word) by choosing to believe quite obvious nonsense, by refusing debate and discussion, and by rejecting anything that has even the slightest whiff of their enemy’s benodorous scent. There are people who seem to adore their own un-knowledge – and then they also resent anyone who criticises their own adoration of their un-knowledge. Instead of turtles all the way down, it’s just wilful stupidity supported by even more and stronger wilful stupidity.

For these people I can only use the term ‘autolobotomite’ – a person whose intellectual injuries are self-inflicted – a person whose lack of intelligence or knowledge is a result of their own beliefs.

Also, ‘antisagacity’ = ‘the opposite of sagacity’, and ‘benodorous’ = ‘nice-smelling’ – i.e., the opposite of ‘malodorous’.

New Term: Avant-Cliché

I actually came up with this term a few years ago. I thought I might have used it somewhere, but apparently not (unless it was in a video).

This was a term I came up with when reviewing movies and television shows – I think specifically it was when I was reviewing Star Trek Discovery that I thought of it. I remembered it again when watching reviews of Agatha All Along recently. (I haven’t actually watched any of Agatha All Along – the MCU turned to shit a while ago. I just watch the reviews.)

The word cliché refers to an expression that has been used so often – an expression that’s so tired and worn-out – that it has lost all meaning, and often is used only by people who cannot think of anything original or interesting to say.

The term avant-cliché refers to something that, though it has never been done or said before, is immediately a cliché the moment it is used – because it is something so predictably pathetic – such an obvious pattern in an absence of thought or insight – such a blatant appeal to overly-ruminant, self-indulgent, vapid, narcissistic emotion – that even though it is the first time it has been done or said, it feels as though you’ve seen or heard it a thousand times before.

I forget the thing that I originally saw that made me think of the term, but in the clips I’ve seen from Agatha All Along in the reviews, that stupid song they sang made me think of it. As a piece of music, it was so luridly bland – utterly lacking in interesting melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre – that it was as though I’d heard it thousands of times before, even though I’d never heard it before.

Words of Divination – Words that end with the Greek element ‘-mancy’

Continuing my series of posts on words from the same etymological families, in this post we will look at words that end in ‘-mancy’.

‘-mancy’ is a word-forming element of Greek origin that means ‘divination by means of’. For example, ‘cartomancy’ is ‘divination by means of playing-cards’. And ‘tasseomancy’ is ‘divination by means of reading tea leaves’ (which you might remember from Harry Potter).

We also use words ending in ‘-mancy’ to denote kinds of magic. ‘Necromancy’ is often used to mean a type of magic capable of reanimating dead bodies. ‘Pyromancy’ is often used as a general term for ‘fire magic’ – as in Game of Thrones. (Interestingly, it is the Mad King’s fire mages who are called ‘pyromancers’, but Melisandre is far more fitting of the term, since she does actually use fire for divination.)

This family of words is, clearly, of great use to writers of fantasy. And, it turns out, there are a lot more words in this family than one might first expect – most of them aren’t used very often – perhaps an opportunity to bring some back.

Below are words ending in ‘-mancy’ that I’ve been able to find in dictionaries.

Word	Meaning and Etymology	Agent Noun
bibliomancy	divination by means of opening a book at random; from Greek biblion, meaning ‘paper’, ‘scroll’; could perhaps also be used to refer to any magic that uses books	bibliomancer
spodomancy	divination by means of ashes; from Greek spodos, meaning ‘ashes’, ’embers’	spodomancer
sciomancy	divination by communication with shades of the dead; from Greek skia, meaning ‘shade’, ‘shadow’; could perhaps also be used just to mean ‘shadow-magic’	sciomancer
chiromancy	divination by the hand – palm-reading, essentially; from Greek kheir, meaning ‘hand’; could also be used to refer to any kind of magic that uses hand gestures	chiromancer
geomancy	divination by means of signs in the Earth – from Greek ge, meaning ‘Earth’	geomancer
lecanomancy	divination by inspection of water in a basin; ultimately from Greek lekos, meaning ‘plate’, ‘pan’; could also be used to mean divination by inspecting broken plates or pottery	lecanomancer
capnomancy	divination by smoke; from Greek kapnos, meaning ‘smoke’	capnomancer
gyromancy	divination by walking in circles; this is quite a funny one; from Greek gyros, meaning ‘circle’	gyromancer
crystallomancy	divination by means of crystals – looking into a crystal ball; from Greek krystallos, meaning ‘clear ice’; this word could also be used for ‘divination by looking into ice’ or ‘ice magic’	crystallomancer
rhabdomancy	divination by use of a divining rod; from Greek rhabdos, meaning ‘rod’, ‘wand’, ‘staff’; could also just be used to mean ‘wand-magic’ – so possibly quite a useful word; much of the magic in Harry Potter could perhaps be described as rhabdomancy	rhabdomancer
rhapsodomancy	divination by means of verses; from Greek rhapsodos, meaning ‘reciter of epic poems’; could be used to refer to any kind of magic that uses incantations – and so, like rhabdomancy, could refer to a type of magic that appears commonly in fiction; could also be used to refer to a kind of magic that uses songs	rhapsodomancer
cartomancy	divination by means of playing-cards; from Greek khartes, meaning ‘layer of papyrus’; could be used for any kind of magic that involves paper	cartomancer
astromancy	divination by means of the stars and planets – what today is commonly called ‘astrology’	astromancer
oneiromancy	divination through dreams; from Greek oneiros, meaning ‘dream’	oneiromancer
ophiomancy	divination through interpreting the movements of coiling snakes; from Greek ophis, meaning ‘snake’	ophiomancer
anthracomancy	divination by inspection of burning coals; from Greek anthrax, meaning ‘live coal’; potentially a useful word in combination with ‘pyromancy’	anthracomancer
arithmancy	divination by numbers; from Greek arithmos, meaning ‘number’	arithmancer
catoptromancy	divination by means of a mirror; this is quite a good one; from Greek katoptron, meaning ‘mirror’	catoptromancer
psephomancy	divination by means of pebbles; from Greek psephos, meaning ‘pebble’	psephomancer
tephromancy	divination by means of ashes (from a sacrifice); from Greek tephra, meaning ‘ashes’	tephromancer
ornithomancy	divination by means of birds; from Greek ornis, meaning ‘bird’	ornithomancer
pegomancy	divination by fountains; from Greek pege, meaning ‘fountain’, ‘spring’	pegomancer
pyromancy	divination by means of fire; from Greek pyr, meaning ‘fire’; also just a general word for ‘fire magic’	pyromancer
cubomancy	divination by throwing dice; from Greek kybos, meaning ‘die’	cubomancer
ceromancy	divination by inspection of melted wax; from Greek keros, meaning ‘beeswax’	ceromancer
psychomancy	divination by consultation with souls of the deceased; from Greek psykhe, meaning ‘soul’, ‘mind’; could just be used to refer generally to psychic powers	psychomancer
necromancy	divination by communication with the dead; from Greek nekros, meaning ‘dead body’; has the more general meaning of ‘black magic’, and is often used to mean ‘magic involving dead bodies’	necromancer
xylomancy	divination by means of wood; from Greek xylon, meaning ‘wood’, ‘timber’	xylomancer
onomancy	divination from the letters of a name; from Greek onoma, meaning ‘name’	onomancer
phyllomancy	divination by means of leaves; from Greek phullon, meaning ‘leaf’	phyllomancer
hydromancy	divination by the appearance or motion of liquids; from Greek hydor, meaning ‘water’; could just be used as a general term for ‘water-magic’ (such as water-bending in Avatar)	hydromancer
aeromancy	divination by means of air; from Greek aer, meaning ‘air’; could just be used as a general term for ‘air-magic’ (such as air-bending in Avatar)	aeromancer
lithomancy	divination by stones; from Greek lithos, meaning ‘stone’; can be used for ‘stone-magic’	lithomancer
chronomancy	divination to determine the favourable time for an action; from Greek khronos, meaning ‘time’; could just be used for ‘time-magic’	chronomancer

There are a few others that I found, but they were less interesting. As you can see, there’s a lot of them – you could use them in some quite interesting ways in fantasy stories.

The table below gives some words ending in ‘-mancy’ that I’ve made up with my limited knowledge of Classical Greek. (I haven’t checked if anyone else has made these up too – it’s quite possible.)

Word	Meaning and Etymology	Agent Noun
electromancy	divination by means of amber; divination by means of electricity; electricity-magic; from Greek elektron, meaning ‘amber’	electromancer
chromomancy	divination by means of colour; colour-magic; from Greek khroma, meaning ‘colour’	chromomancer
heliomancy	divination by means of the Sun; Sun-magic; from Greek helios, meaning ‘the Sun’	heliomancer
logomancy	word-magic; speech-magic; perhaps a term for any magic that involves incantations; from Greek logos, meaning ‘word’, ‘speech’	logomancer
anthomancy	flower-magic; from Greek anthos, meaning ‘flower’	anthomancer
selenomancy	divination by means of the Moon; from Greek selene, meaning ‘the Moon’	selenomancer

As is usual with these posts, I may add more words over time.