The Little Platoon

YouTuber @ The Little Platoon/LostChord | Video game writer | Business Enquiries to [email protected]

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

The Mandalorian & the Death of Star Wars will premiere today from (probably) 7:30pm UK / 2:30pm Disney LucasFilm's Eastern Time. Link below.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

I like how Sauron's dominion encompasses precisely one named city, and then a couple of procedurally generated villages because the world of Rings of Power is so fucking empty.

Rhun is described as a powerful kingdom to the East. We spent a horrifically long time there in Season 2. It is a desert populated by a dozen harfoots, 5 lepers, Tom Bombadil for some reason, and a wizard.

[The Rings of Power @TheRingsofPower]

Tomorrow, the war for Middle-earth begins again. Here’s where the map stands as you prepare for Season 3.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

Episode 1: Harcourt gets railed by John Stewart while James Gunn watches from his corner.

Episode 2: Harcourt gets railed by Ultraman while James Gunn watches from his corner.

Episode 3: Harcourt gets railed by Gorilla Grodd while James Gunn watches from his corner.

Episode 4: Harcourt gets railed by G'Nort while James Gunn watches from his corner.

Episode 5: Flashback. In 1995, Harcourt's mother gets railed by Ambush Bug while a young James Gunn watches from his corner.

Episode 6: The show is nearly cancelled because the entire HBO executive team threatens to kill themselves if they have to do any more. They signed up for Game of Thrones, not this.

Episode 7: Harcourt gets railed by the entire HBO executive team while James Gunn watches from his corner.

Episode 8: Harcourt is revealed to have been a shape-shifting James Gunn all along, and he is now pregnant.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

And after he painstakingly worked out which bits of his own movie were canon on a podcast with his wife and a large gimp. It's so cruel.

I was really looking forward to HBO's "Dots" — a show about how Polka-Dot Man's mother surgically branded him with all the colours the evil demon race of White People have oppressed across the centuries.

It would have been the most important piece of TV since Lanterns, which is doubtless why the Christian Nationalist Trump Fanatic Nazi regime at Skydance has cancelled it.

At least Hawkgirl killed Benjamin Netanyahu in Superman. They will never take that from us.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

James Gunn's DCU plans will be mostly dismantled, excluding what has already been filmed.

(Source: @PuckNews)

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

@Kingubitto As far as I know it IS still going to be a thing. It's basically done. It releases after Man of Tomorrow next year.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

I'm picturing James Gunn accidentally setting himself on fire like Denethor and leaping from the top of the Daily Planet office on the set of The People Vs Gorilla Grodd.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

James Gunn and Peter Safran will no longer run DC Studios.

Jeremy Latcham, who previously served as a producer at Marvel Studios, is taking over DC.

(Source: https://t.co/hpjOIGUTvx)

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

Like 95% of people, places and things in this awful movie, Zendaya is playing a symbol of the Vietnam veteran's war guilt.

She is nominally Athena, but because Nolan is extremely boring and modern, she cannot actually be a goddess. Gods and goddesses do not exist, though the Cyclops son of Poseidon does.

(Nolan, being a Peak Director, says: "yeah, that's kind of a contradiction" — then does nothing whatsoever to solve it.)

So the "character" of Athena takes on the visage of a murdered temple girl, and she haunts Odysseus as a trauma vision that scowls at him.

This is because creating the Trojan Horse and ending a 10-year siege, in relatively bloodless fashion next to the alternative, destroyed the entire bronze age, which the Greeks at the time did not believe they were in, and Odysseus blames himself for it.

This despite the fact the only thing he really does wrong is build the horse too close to the sea, getting a bunch of his men drowned in the tide — though in his defense he could not have predicted it, because the Mediterranean is famously known as "the tideless sea".

But as Nolan says: we must apologise for greatness, otherwise the audience won't relate to it. Retard.png

So he abandons his useless son and his kingdom to a thousand years of darkness, so he can go off with Anne Hathaway like it's the end of The Dark Knight Rises, and get "Athena" to stop scowling at him.

Because Nolan is a hack and The Odyssey is Boomerslop.

[Daemon @emeyorX]

can someone explain who zendaya is actually playing? is it athena or the ghost of a girl who died in the trojan war?

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

The simple way around this, by the way, is to put a wide variety of classic boys' and classic girls' literature on the syllabus, one-for-one, and let the student choose. Co-education might be irreversible but there's no reason we cannot limit the damage.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

I read a lot as a boy, and fancy I still read quite a bit today.

The first book I remember obsessing over in lower school was about dinosaurs. I read it several times a week.

I progressed to Narnia, Harry Potter, Treasure Island, Artemis Fowl, War of the Worlds, His Dark Materials, Sherlock Holmes, Day of the Triffids, a bunch of Arthur C Clarke, The Hitch Hiker's Guide, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and so on.

None of this was on the reading list, which at high school seemed to consist, in the main, of lesbian poets— taught by a woman who was much better at being a lesbian than she was at being a poet.

My lower and middle schools also decided - I do not know if they still do this - to make it competitive. Students were assigned a "reading age," and naturally, being a boy, I wanted to trounce the opposition.

Jayne Eyre is indeed a masterpiece. Absolutely nothing could have convinced me, then, to give a shit. Nor, frankly, could it now.

Boys and girls are different. If you want boys to read, don't give them Jayne Eyre, or any of the interminably solipsistic, introspective guff that makes girls think they're interesting.

Boys need fantasy, science fiction, the external over the internal world — and, yes, a bit of "self-actualisation with a weapon".

This is better and healthier than self-actualisation at the end of a werewolf's dick, which seems to make up the bulk of women's publishing today.

Failing this, boys will continue to find their thrills in videogames, which have not yet been entirely ruined by women.

[Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield]

What I will say about this is, I am sure it seemed very witty and charming in whatever its original context, but putting it in the newspaper was probably a mistake

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

Leaving aside that the concept of ethnicity is pointless if you can just vote yourself into it, I don't know why you'd bother.

I always identify as a disabled, pansexual African trans woman whenever I'm asked. That's where the real money is.

[Josh Babarinde OBE MP @JoshBabarinde]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 Do you have to be White to be English?

I say no.

My St. George’s Bill that I’m putting forward in Parliament on Tuesday will settle this question, once and for all.

Let’s let non-White people identify as ethnically English in the census.

Let’s have this debate out in the Commons.

You in, @SuellaBraverman?

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

I know the midterms look bad for Republicans but at least Malfoid is winning the culture war.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

@damespjuffy Thom Yorke is slightly insane, so he combined memories of a car crash when he was 17 with excerpts from William Blake and Tibetan Buddhism in a collage inspired by REM. It probably shouldn't work, but it does.

[MauLer @MauLer93]

Just 24 hours remain to grab the EFAP Christmas Plushies set before they are gone forever!

If you would like some cuddly Christmas cheer in the form of frame pausing plushies, then check 'em out now!

Link here - https://t.co/5WR6HHsoSs

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

If you want my chestnuts roasting on your open fire, there are only TWO days left to purchase the EFAP Winter Plushie collection from Makeship!

Santa's Little Platoon: https://t.co/Gpo22Y2wEw

Fringy the Reindeer: https://t.co/HE8gmTwGoB

The Abominable Longman: https://t.co/VcW7SmTr87

[The Critical Drinker @TheCriticalDri2]

Join us for Open Bar Episode 204 this evening. https://t.co/QDtymMGj7f

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

Rings of Power really looked at those UK energy prices and said fuck it, we don't need lighting.

[Fellowship of Fans 💍 @FellowshipFans]

"Is that why you dance alone?"
"I wasn't dancing, I was sparring"

NEW clip of Galadriel & Celeborn in #TheRingsofPower Season 3 on @FallonTonight ⚔️✨️

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

If the women of Gondor had the vote, Sauron wouldn't have needed to fight.

[Nerdist @nerdist]

Embark on a week-long celebration of The Rings of Power Season 3. Every day, we’ll share an exclusive piece from our set visit. First up, a deep dive into the “forging” of Dark Lord Sauron. #TheRingsOfPower https://t.co/lC6k7As8wg

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

Twitter's auto-translate feature is wonderful.

Thanks to that, and the existence of VPNs in the Workers' Paradise, I have discovered that the political and historical views of the average Chinese Communist are indistinguishable from your average humanities student in the West.

Actual carbon-copy rhetoric. All the same talking points. The same fantasy world. Entirely the same style.

"Mao was terrible and debased the proud history of his country."

"Oh yeah? What about [insert microwaved Leninist Alt History agitslop]".

They're just as proud of their ability to copy-paste generic scripts. Their interchangeability does not occur to them, much less bother them. They conform to the Party Line like it's their religion — which, in a very real sense, it is.

They even argue with Grok the same way when it gives them the "wrong" facts.

The similarity is unnerving, but I'm sure there are no implications there whatsoever.

(Deng was a much better and more interesting leader than Mao, even admitting that little accident in Tiananmen. China has a long and fascinating history. But you cannot convince Communists to prize competence, pick worthy heroes, or value true history. Theirs is, at its root, monkey psychology, not a coherent ideology — which is why it takes the same base form across countries, cultures, and eras.)

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

Many Western nations managed to "uplift farmers and the working class" without killing upwards of 30 million of them.

We did this, generally, without empowering student mobs to trash all the history we now claim we're proud of, and without massacring the wealthy and the educated on the altar of cultural revolution.

One of the many ironies of the modern Chinese nationalist is that, were it not for generals countermanding the Red Guard, the evidence they claim for their greatness would have been totally destroyed by Mao's own faction.

We have no equivalent of Mao's campaign against the Four Olds, having largely gotten over iconoclastic religious hysteria in medieval times.

We never went around killing sparrows to avert famine (which caused a surge in locusts that made famine worse) — of all our many retarded leaders, none have been so retarded as that.

Our war heroes did not hide in mountains waiting for the Kuomintang to do all their fighting for them, only to emerge and claim credit after the fact. The Communists are not war heroes. They drove the war heroes out of the country they fought to save.

We have managed to make modern nations of citizens, not subjects; and our technological prowess today is the product of invention, not theft.

We have empowered our ethnic and religious minorities, almost to a fault, while the Chinese government locks them up in camps that we consider horrors.

As is usually the case, Communist doctrines of "colonialism" and "imperialism" - the latter a Leninist propaganda trick designed to save Marxism from all its failed predictions - are spread today to spare Communism the shame of its own deeds.

And we are able (and even encouraged) to criticise our most important leaders and heroes, while the Communist Party apparatchik must debase his own intellect before he is allowed to speak.

China does have a rich and wonderful history. Mao created none of it, and destroyed much of it. The fat ass of his legacy squats on what remains.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

Many Western nations managed to "uplift farmers and the working class" without killing upwards of 30 million of them.

We did this, generally, without empowering student mobs to trash all the history we now claim we're proud of, and without massacring the wealthy and the educated on the altar of cultural revolution.

One of the many ironies of the modern Chinese nationalist is that, were it not for generals countermanding the Red Guard, the evidence they claim for their greatness would have been totally destroyed by Mao's own faction.

We have no equivalent of Mao's campaign against the Four Olds, having largely gotten over iconoclastic religious hysteria in medieval times.

We never went around killing sparrows to avert famine (which caused a surge in locusts that made famine worse) — of all our many retarded leaders, none have been so retarded as that.

Our war heroes did not hide in mountains waiting for the Kuomintang to do all their fighting for them, only to emerge and claim credit after the fact. The Communists are not war heroes. They drove the war heroes out of the country they fought to save.

We have managed to make modern nations of citizens, not subjects; and our technological prowess today is the product of invention, not theft.

We have empowered our ethnic and religious minorities, almost to a fault, while the Chinese government locks them up in camps that we consider horrors.

As is usually the case, Communist doctrines of "colonialism" and "imperialism" - the latter a Leninist propaganda trick designed to save Marxism from all its failed predictions - are spread today to spare Communism the shame of its own deeds.

And we are able (and even encouraged) to criticise our most important leaders and heroes, while the Communist Party apparatchik must debase his own intellect before he is allowed to speak.

China does have a rich and wonderful history. Mao created none of it, and destroyed much of it. The fat ass of his legacy squats on what remains.

[Li Jingjing 李菁菁 @Jingjing_Li]

To us Chinese, Mao Zedong is our hero.

Mao uplifted farmers and the working class in China, united the Chinese people, led us to defeat foreign invaders, and founded an independent country so we could all live with dignity.

Mao supported the heroic struggle of the African people against imperialism and colonialism.

He was one of the greatest leaders in world history, and one of the most demonized by the West.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

@braden582260828 Which rules out any explanation besides that you have neither logic nor taste. Good day.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

If you have to apologise for calling Chairman Mao a dictator then you might as well give up speech entirely.

It's like apologising for saying the sky is blue, the world is round, the French are revolting.

[The Little Platoon @PlatoonPod]

@braden582260828 I got it from spending a lot of time in France, a lot of time in Italy, and no time in America.