Blackmoor Vituperative

Here are some animated GIFs I made for Cinema Insomnia.

“The Witcher” on Netflix, episode 3. I’ve stuck with it this long, hoping that it will eventually get going and allow the characters to be interesting once it gets the tedious exposition out of the way. But that hasn’t happened. On top of that, the characters’ conversations in this episode make it apparent that the scenes are jumbled in time.

I know that the jumbled timeline gimmick is in vogue right now, and it might even work, in skilled hands. The first season of “Westworld” made it work, brilliantly. In “The Witcher”, it is just irritating.

They should have left out the “Princess Cally’s Road Trip” subplot. Every single scene tied to that was painfully dull. And the whole “Yennefer Goes To Sorcery School” thing — the whole “Brotherhood Of Sorcery” thing, in fact — is just … yuck.

I wish the show had been about the woman from the first episode, Refiri. She was more interesting than everything else in the first three episodes put together.

As Willie T. Stokes (Billy Bob Thornton) said in “Bad Santa”, “They can’t all be winners, can they.” Time to move on to a different show.

I want to like things. And I don’t think my expectations are unreasonable. But some things just suck.

Conservative Christians believe their rights are in peril partly because that’s what they’re hearing, quite explicitly, from conservative media, religious elites, partisan commentators and some politicians, including the president. The survey evidence suggests another reason, too. Their fear comes from an inverted golden rule: Expect from others what you would do unto them. White evangelical Protestants express low levels of tolerance for atheists, which leads them to expect intolerance from atheists in return. That perception surely bolsters their support for Trump. They believe their freedom depends on keeping Trump and his party in power.

— White evangelicals fear atheists and Democrats would strip away their rights. Why?, By Paul A. Djupe

To summarize, among atheists who said they loathed Christian fundamentalists more than any other religious group, 65% still said they would be perfectly fine with those Christians having the same rights as everyone else. But among white evangelicals who hated atheists the most — even more than “white supremacists” — only 32% would say the same.

This is a core difference between the two groups and it illustrates why the “both sides are the same” argument is ridiculous. We’re not equally dogmatic but on opposite sides of the spectrum. In fact, these results just emphasize a point I’ve made repeatedly on this site: Atheists fight for religious neutrality, while white evangelicals fight for Christian supremacy.

— Study Shows White Evangelicals Want Christian Supremacy, Not “Religious Freedom”, By Hemant Mehta

“You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’ “

— Matthew 15:7-9

Two days until Christmas! Here is a classic Christmas song written (as so many were) by Jewish composers, Joan Javits and Philip Springer: “Santa Baby” (1953). It was written specifically for Eartha Kitt, for whom it was an instant hit. Kitt, at 26, was a star on Broadway and considered (by Springer, at least) the “sexiest woman in the world”.

Even Lovecraftian cultists love Christmas!

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten.

— “The Festival” (Originally published in Weird Tales, January 1925)

On this day in 1997, the world learned about Festivus, the Seinfeld Christmas alternative. Let the airing of grievances begin!

I use a lot of found images in my online RPGs, to help set the scene. Sometimes, the image is almost, but not quite, what I want. Cropping, healing brush, and clone stamp solve most of those problems, but once in a while I find the perfect image… but it needs something more complex to make it what I want.

In this case, I found this illustration of a Pathfinder alchemist goblin, but I wanted the background to be black instead of white. So I looked for a tutorial on changing this in Photoshop, and found this one on StackExchange. The basic technique is to use the original image as its own layer mask. I’ll create a duplicate of the layer, desaturate and invert it, pasting the greyscale result into the original layer’s layer mask.

I start with my flattened image.

I then Desaturate the image.

I then duplicate this layer, Invert it, then select and fill white areas until everything I’d like to be opaque is white, and everything I want fully transparent is black. This was tricky, because I want the smoke translucent, but the goblin itself to be opaque.

Now I press CTRL+A to select the entire image, and CTRL+C to copy the combined greyscale result.

I then selected the layer with my original image, made sure nothing was selected in my image, and selected Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All to create a layer mask on my original layer.

I then ALT+Clicked in the layer mask icon to enter direct edit mode, then pasted the greyscale image I had just copied into there.

I then clicked on my original layer to exit the layer mask direct edit, and tada, I have my semi-transparent goblin.

Now I just add a black background layer, and I am done. It’s not perfect, but it will do for my purposes.

It irks me that people so consistently misunderstand the world “soul“. A whole psuedo-religion has grown up around this misunderstanding.

Finally sat down to watch “Henchman: The Al Leong Story“. I really wanted to pay attention to this, so I didn’t just play it while I work (which is usually what I do). That’s why it has taken me so long to view it.

I really enjoyed this documentary. It gave a good overview of his career, and I learned some things that even I, the founder of (as far as I know) the first and only Al Leong Fan Club, The Golden Horde, did not know.

I wish the background music were not so loud during the interviews, though. More than once, I wanted to shout at the screen, “TURN THE MUSIC DOWN!”

Even so, I suspect that I will watch this DVD again. 🙂

Also, I really should start updating the fan club web site again.

Just finished watching the final episode of “Z Nation” on Netflix (5 seasons total). Considering how many shows I haven’t even bothered to watch the entire first season of (Cloak & Dagger, Evil Sabrina, Star Trek Discovery, Game Of Thrones, etc.), that’s pretty high praise. “Z Nation” combines humour, action, tragedy, gruesome effects, and an appealing cast. It’s a damned good show.

What’s most surprising is that it was made by Asylum. Asylum making a show worth watching is like finding great sushi in a gas station bathroom.