For those who didn’t follow it - East of West is about an apocalypse. The four horsemen rode out a while back, and they were doing their thing - the US balkanized and split. There was a treaty that split the Country leaving us with The Union, The Confederacy, The Republic of Texas, The Kingdom of New Orleans, The…

OK, but that “at best” is pretty awesome.  Yes, Jordan Peele is the more successful of the two, but Keegan Michael Key is, by basically any measure, very successful.   It’s hard to imagine Desus and Mero would see that as a cautionary tale.  

A couple of thoughts:

I remember it being terrible and poorly received (perfect other than that though!). It must be Revisionist History Week.

I loved Speed Racer but I think I’m the only one and it’s definitely far from perfect. It is amazing to watch on an IMAX screen though, that’s a great experience. 

Wait. No, no, no. You must not have seen it. The author eventually got around to declaring it all “fine.”

Too much “tough love” from Vin?

Do you read Jason Pargin’s Substack articles? He just published one that kind of hit on this exact point. White, Christian Conservatives are always portrayed in media as low-class losers or crazy zealots. He used to be an editor for Cracked, so his articles are always funny, but he makes some really good points about…

Eh, no, I don’t agree. Even the so-called “liberal” New York Times and Washington Post regularly run op-eds from “regular working class conservatives” or whatever. There’s a whole genre of reporting from the “heartland” that is invariably what some old boomer in rural America thinks about x or y. There was a Times…

Hank Hill, and even he had some doubts about his party affiliation, as should everyone.

Nah. That’s not it. Social conversation has ALWAYS been toxic, particularly around conservatism. That’s been true going back to the 1980's at least, and I’m sure likely before then. Including them in media won’t change a thing. They were like that when they were the dominate voice in media and they’re still like that.

I hear you, but I disagree. Modern Conservatism has become a parody of a political party, and its followers’ sole purpose seems to just be trolling people online and getting mad about headlines. I mean, look who they nominate for political office. It’s hard to portray modern Conservatism in any way that doesn’t come…

When was the last time you saw a white conservative character in real life that wasn’t a world-class jackass?

The decline and fall of NASCAR has nothing to do with “wokeness” or inclusion or anything like that. It has to do with races that are too long, too contrived, and have too much down time.

While absolutely true, the joke, “If I wanted a list of new science-fiction and fantasy to suggest to people, which books from the 60s and 70s would you recommend?” lands for a reason.  A lot of SFF readers DO still live in 2005, or much earlier.

To be fair we are seeing some more pop up boutique publishers with very specific remits picking up and making a real go at their niches, headstamp publishing for example which is driven largely by a single youtube creators fans.

I almost exclusively read SF and it seems to me that much more than half of what I read that has been written in the last few years has been written by people who are not cis-het, white, males. I realize this is a very small sample size of everything that is published, but the “traditional” model of the SF author…

I like Scalzi’s take:

I agree, and think this has been the case for a while now- the author came off like a recently graduated liberal arts student (of which, I was once one).

If Hardy doesn’t apologize to Twitter - the only one who really matters here - that’s just horrifying.