I think Daenerys is the most appropriate analogue for Hillary. No, hear me out. Both, in their adventures in a strange land full of poorly characterized brown people, used airborn personifications of death in a 'civilizing' mission that was catastrophically misguided at best and maliciously imperialistic at worst.…

Qbert isn't by any means a beloved character of mine either, but the depths of sickening horror that begin to grow around the propositions the movie makes give me shivers. I write and read weird horror fiction for fun. I'll eat up Ligotti and the darker stuff of Vandermeer's, but not this. There is something unholy…

No. I refuse. I accept that critic circles can be insular and snobbish, but if that means Pixels is good then the whole statement is wrong. That film broke me. Qbert gets fucked. Qbert gets fucked.

Hey man, with Tudor history it's like sports teams. It's Cromwell or More and More is probably one of the most reprehensible people that the historically literate public seems to like.

God damnit I chose this name because I liked Wolf Hall and it's constantly bringing me in to roleplaying as sexy sexy Mark Rylance.

I can't wait until the men's rights crowd gets here and fills the comments with shit and puke.

PhD here standing for preening, hateful douchebag.

He's placed in a situation where he has to shove an entire loaf of bread up his ass. He can roll, squash, or moisten it if he likes but it has to all go in.

I haven't seen the episode but the whole "gang rape threat" deal smacks of the awful evil-rapist-brown-people panics that shitheads create around black people in the USA and Muslims in Europe. Man, I used to kid myself that all the racist stuff started around season three but honestly it's been here since the show's…

*casts magic missile* ah shit

Because fuck illiterate and dyslexic people, right? Fuck the people who can't afford the book or have the leisure time to devote to it. Fuck the people who don't have enough investment in the story to make that purchase or slog through 800 pages.

This is semantics.

I think there's also great value in writing dramatic history with some healthy invention, as long as it's not too misleading. For example, the speech Tacitus' wrote for Calgacus before the battle of Mons Graupius is one of the most beautiful things I've read from an otherwise crotchety old puritan idiot. I will fist…

I don't really care, actually! Public literacy in the minutiae of historical events does NOT contribute to the health of the discipline. Interest does. Adaptations and drama will foster interest always, no matter what they get wrong. You know what kills historical interest fast? A complete lack of resonance. You know…

You could make a very strong argument that the historical content of Herodotus and lots of Thucydides' "records" of events are just dramatisations of what actually happened. See: dialogues that those parties could in no way be privy to.

Yeah maybe. We don't really have the same breathlessly enthusiastic narrative about our history for it to resonate in the same way, but I think we could get it.

If you want to make the argument that cultural adaptations destroy the historical discipline, you'd have to roll that criticism back to Shakespeare and probably further. I mean I think we can still have nuanced historical discussions about Julius Caesar despite him being the subject of a highly fictionalised drama.

As a Brit who maybe knew about two founding fathers and one American revolutionary event, it'll go fine.

Have you considered that people can enjoy more than one thing? Or maybe enjoy another thing because they enjoyed something related to it? Dude I like history too, but every single adaptation of anything that is in any way successful severely reduces or distorts what it's trying to adapt.

Tovarishes, these are extremely poor puns. Any self-respecting comrade would understand that LeoNERDo is the best pun to make in this situation, da?