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Yeah, the background stuff was fun but the actual 'wow' was a lot more in the beautifully hand-painted stuff. And that's definitely not something you can imitate without a lot of lessons/practice

Very relatedly I've seen quite a few articles talking about an amphib assault on Kharg which seem to skate over that those amphibs would have a very exciting journey of hundreds of miles within missile range of the Iranian coast. Fantastic way to check how many missiles the Iranians have left...

Could you avoid that by pitching it as a kind of superhero road trip movie? Aragorn as basically a LotR Captain America - extra good fighting skills, but his real superpowers are charisma, leadership and moral authority. The other problem is more the arc though? You'd end in the middle...

'Delights in causing hideous random pain to strangers' is a fairly odd sub-species of sanity anyway

The whole discussion is so weird. . Firstly given what the guy did and the reasons given for that he's clearly barely sane, as a layman would understand it anyway. And the idea that anyone would delight in a transfer to a place full of violently, criminally insane people seems bizarre too.

There's several bits of writing painting them as demonic spirits of utter evil and nothing to tbe contrary, so that seems as clear as things get.

'Dreadful among these spirits were the Valaraukar, the scourges of fire that in Middle-earth were called the Balrogs, demons of terror.' That's not supposed to be a complex entity like Sauron

*Very* fallen. 'in Utumno he gathered his demons about him, those spirits who first adhered to him in the days of his splendour, and became most like him in his corruption: their hearts were of fire, but they were cloaked in darkness, and terror went before them; they had whips of flame. '

Exactly. I was onboard with the idea of complex orcs - LotR suggests they have very messy lives and social organisation, especially when Sauron is not at max strength, but 'complex Balrog' is on the edge of just misunderstanding the metaphysics of Tolkien's universe.

I'd say that it's a feudal problem that's recently come back. In medieval times if you captured the enemy king (as e.g. the English to the French once and to the Scots a couple of times) on the one hand negotiations with him go pretty easily, on the other his authority back home is in the toilet

Surprised you can get online logistics warehouses to burn that hard. Wonder if they've found a new trick for it?

The funny thing is that there was an unspoken rule that you don't blow up the other guy's politicians so you have someone left to talk to. And it is completely incontrovertible who decided to throw that rule on the trashheap of history, back in February

Looking at the bandwidths the polling actually says there are three parties who could get quite a lot of seats, and a bunch of smaller ones who could get the rest. It's completely uncertain what's going to happen

Say what you like about the orange scumbag but he gets people, especially business people, to press the 'hope' button over the 'experience' button every time

This takes me back to the only piece of child-rearing advice I ever share, after about 40 child-years of child-rearing - everything's a phase. Enjoy it!

The mixture of parkour, being able to roll down stairs and generally looking great doing those things screams 'stunt actor' doesn't it?

'No progress' still equals holding more than enough formerly Tory seats to deny the Tories a majority

Perhaps this is one reason why many Tories seem tolerant of Badenoch's occasional total weirdness...helps the appearance of this being the 'New Tories'?

Even if they don't, I think the real gaping hole in the strategy is that even at 12% the LDs likely hold on to most of that Orange Wall and a Tory majority is not realistically possible without it. (a real tragedy for the Tories that 'Orange Wall' hasn't taken off. as term, it helps them ignore it)