Author: David V Stewart

Dune 2 Sucks

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If there is a poster child for the Hollywood beast and its relationship to the audience, it is Dune 2. It’s a movie that hoodwinked (seemingly) everyone besides myself, a downgrade from the average part 1 in every respect, and a movie that, like so many other sequels, is a kind of hate letter to the source and to its fans, and yet the audience excuses its failings (of the story variety) because it has a few pretty sets and some good (monochrome) VFX.  Make no mistake, there are great things about Dune Part 2, just like with the first…

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What is Fantasy?

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Before I begin, there is one thing I like about fantasy readers as opposed to science fiction readers: they aren’t rigid, even when they attach parts of their self-identity to liking the genre. That’s important, because when trying to define “fantasy,” there is a tension between what constitutes a literary genre as a marketing paradigm (basically, what the readers expect when picking up a book labeled “fantasy”) and what, in a technical sense, makes a fantasy book. “Fantasy” means simply imagination, as the word is used in music composition. So the simple and robust definition of fantasy is an imaginative…

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Localization and (Bad) Writing – Unicorn Overlord

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The venerable and beloved Vanillaware just released a brand-new fantasy tactics RPG in their characteristic painted anime aesthetic and it has what is possibly the best name in the history of anything, ever: UNICORN OVERLORD. The gameplay and art are top-notch and perhaps the best the company has ever produced. But I haven’t bought the game. The reason: the translation. Or rather, “localization,” but that word is not robust enough to describe what John Riesenbach and his company 8-4 has done to what should have been the biggest breakout of the TRPG genre. What they actually did is replace the…

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Take a Shad in the Indie Fiction Well

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This is not the kind of article I like to write, since I prefer not to attack anyone directly, but in this case, what I want to discuss is bound up in the example of a specific person and a specific product. I would not call the person in question evil, and in fact I like things about him and other content he has done. Recently Planefag did a very thorough blow-by-blow review of Shad Brooks (a.k.a. Shadiversity, a youtuber most known for talking about medieval things). Here’s the whole thing, but I’ll be focusing on a few points that…

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Super Propaganda

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I watched (most) of the Superbowl last night. Before you accuse me of being a hypocrite for doing so after saying I’m not interested in watching millionaires who hate me give each other brain damage, know that this was part of a block party put on by my neighbors and I think it is important to have connections with the people who physically surround you. Since most of my neighbors are Gen X and older, they still view the Superbowl as an important cultural event and, even in 2024 with its fractured microcultures, it still is. It’s not just the…

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Art is Communication

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I talked about this a bit in my video “Humanizing the Digital” as well as “Writers who hate writing,” but I thought I would also write it down here, since different types of media create different effects and have different emphases. AI (popular shorthand for large language model) is a disruptive technology. My focus is on art since I am an artist, but it potentially affects other professions, from marketing to engineering. These arguments only apply to the arts directly, and I will leave other thoughts for the experts in their respective fields. Let me start with the main argument…

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Retro Review: Sixteen Stone

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Going back and looking at Antichrist Superstar almost 30 years later was a valuable, if a bit exhausting, experience. I thought it might be fun to take another 30-year trip back, this time to a hit album coming in the wake of Nirvana, and one of the few albums my wife and I both owned as young teenagers. Bush is a band you might remember from the 90s. If it isn’t, their debut album from 1994, Sixteen Stone, might be worth a turn. Billed as a grunge band, Bush was (and is, they are back in business) a fairly straight-forward…

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The Problem with Audiobooks

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Best-selling science fiction author Brian Niemeier recently weighed in on the titan of the fantasy industry, Brandon Sanderson, keeping his crowd-funded books away from Audible. You should read Brian’s article on the matter and note what Sanderson talks about. As an independent author of more modest means, I’ll weigh in on a few things regarding Audible and audiobooks in general. People frequently ask me about audiobook versions of my books. I have a few out (Garamesh, Keys to Prolific Creativity, Eyes in the Walls, Voices of the Void, and technically Afterglow), but they represent only a small fraction of my…

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Antichrist Superstar – Retro Review

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Marilyn Manson’s biggest crime was being boring, at least musically, and nothing encapsulates the emptiness of the band and the eponymous figure’s music better than 1996’s “controversial” second album (on the appropriate Nothing Records label owned by recording giant Interscope) Antichrist Superstar. Amid the self-perpetuating legendarium that is 1990s music media’s promotion of Manson the actual content of the music is often forgotten. I revisited this album recently with fresh ears, having not heard anything other than the occasional radio play of “The Beautiful People” since the 1990s and I must say my initial reaction to it from way back when…

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Working sucks I guess

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Check this out: I expect most people to react to a video like this with derision, but not me – I think it says a lot about expectations, efficiency, and more than anything, sex. I can hear the boomers seething now that a young person would dare complain about all of their waking hours spent away from the places and things they would prefer. I can even hear younger generations echoing them, because the first response to a complaint is to make a comparison – to think how much better that person has it than you, and you never complained.…

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