Killing people is, rarely, justified, but I think it should be viewed as this grimly necessary thing, this dark part of existence that it had to be done at all. If you're jerking off about how cool you were for killing Bad Guys you've lost the moral plot
Unfortunately the grim necessary dark part of existence is just part of the coolness at this point.
The very fact that it's so grim and dark only makes people swoon that much harder at the cops, soldiers, and spies who do it, because they're willing to take on that burden so the rest of society can live carefree and innocent and fat and lazy. And reinforces the idea that because they're dealing with something so ugly, they're fundamentally different from the rest of society and therefore we can't judge anything they do.
That's the subtext behind most of the people who repeat that "people sleep peaceably in their bed at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." They totally embrace the "grim dark necessity" point of view, they've just incorporated it into their worship of the cool people killing bad guys.
Genuinely not sure how to explain things to people without it just becoming part of the mythos.
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I think that Elon Musk is an object lesson in moral philosophy.
Like, he's the epitome of self-interest; the closest thing real life can produce to a Randian hero. And by any reasonable standard, he's won at life! He's the richest man ever to live, and he's getting richer; he controls the channels of information and communication; the government of what remains the world's only superpower waits on his command. If capitalism had a victory condition, he would surely have achieved it. And yet...
He's empty. He's an absolute sucking void of neediness. His own children hate his guts. He pays professional gamers to run up impossibly high scores in every game under the sun because the pale glow of being praised by epic bacon chuds online is the closest thing that he can feel to love.
Like. I can't tell you what a soul is, but I think you neglect it at your peril.
#He has such a vile anti-personality that even CONVICTED PEDOPHILES thought him insufferable
He has such a vile anti-personality that his own children would rather forego half a trillion dollars in inheritance than maintain a relationship with him.
I never really thought about it until this tweet but I think Oates clocked him completely. He spends all day on Twitter posting and NEVER talks about anything he enjoys. He has an enormous family and infinite money and yet he seems entirely joyless.
I've reposted this before, but one sentence jumped out at me this time:
If capitalism had a victory condition, he would surely have achieved it.
Isn't it kind of the point of capitalism (at least as practiced today especially in the United States) that there is no victory condition? No matter how rich you are, you're always supposed to make more. As someone once said, the capitalist mindset is the mindset of the cancer cell.
Which of course leads us right back to the point about being an absolute black hole.
every so often i remember how awesome the modern interconnected multicultural world is. i grew up getting to hear fairy tales from all over the world. africa, asia, europe, america. everywhere in between. i can have bagels for breakfast, curry for lunch, and ramen for dinner without even leaving the city limits. music and art and philosophy and technology that originated thousands of miles and years apart from eachother have come together and interwoven into something greater than the sum of its parts. its hard not fall into despair when thinking about the horrors but god. god the wonders.
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Okay, let's put the formal stuff aside for a second and talk about Olrik's actual financial situation.
The nature of his work and his personal spending habits mean he's never going to be a stable millionaire. His net worth constantly ping-pongs between upper-middle-class and straight-up wealthy.
1. Income side: Olrik's money comes from one-off commissions, smuggling kickbacks, and the occasional treasure-hunting gig. The first two are high-risk, irregular paychecks. The last one is kind of a steady trickle, but even that comes with risks—go ask Cheik Razek about why the Horus Chamber collapsed.
Mission failures, confiscated cargo, or even prison time can wipe out a huge chunk of his earnings too.
2. Asset structure: To dodge wanted lists, Olrik isn't parking large sums in public bank accounts. Either he's got accounts scattered across the globe, or most of his wealth sits in illiquid physical assets—art, antiques, bespoke suits, that kind of thing—which he'd have to launder later to actually turn into spending cash.
3. Spending side: Whenever he strikes it rich, he can't keep his hands off his wallet. Bespoke suits, safe houses, informant fees, intel purchases. Remember that time he fished two sacks of gold and jewelry out of Cornwall? Blew through most of it. That tells you everything about his live-for-the-moment mentality.
Also, the Arkaim sanatorium was a one-off base—probably used for less than six months. So it's temporary, a safe house that was always going to be abandoned eventually.
Here's the guess: he's not gonna blow the bulk of his income on decking out some temporary hole in the wall. He can do the math. At the very least, he's not footing the entire bill himself for filling that office with original artworks and high-end replicas.
And since most of those pieces are clearly Soviet Expressionist in style, we can assume they were sourced locally and shipped out to the middle of the Ural Mountains.
Now, let's talk about that Tatra 603 of his. The GRU supplies high-end official vehicles to senior agents and officers—the Tatra 603 is one of those models. So that car is almost certainly not his personal property. Maintenance, gas, repairs—all on the state's tab. That's one of the system perks he gets to enjoy for free.
So the truth is screaming at us: Olrik skimmed a fair chunk of GRU funding to buy local artworks for his office.
Here's how it probably went down: the abandoned sanatorium in the Urals needed to be converted into a temporary command post, lab, and asylum. In his budget requisitions, Olrik would've padded expenses under Kranz's section—line items like "ward renovation, equipment maintenance, facility upgrades."
And about that equipment maintenance—only Kranz and his tiny team actually know how to maintain and service that weird machinery. Outside auditors and military inspectors? They'd have no clue what they're looking at. All they'd see are paper receipts. They don't have the technical know-how to trek out to the middle of nowhere and verify how much maintenance "actually" costs or how many parts were replaced.
Those machines rarely break down anyway, since the team's competent. So major repair expenses were few and far between.
So Olrik could avoid one huge suspicious reimbursement and instead break it into dozens of small, piecemeal entries. Over a three-month cycle, he'd stack them up little by little. Each individual line item looked perfectly reasonable—no red flags for the auditors. Until the total quietly crept up to the equivalent of a hundred thousand euros in today's money—enough to buy a whole stack of experimental abstract art.
Part of that cash went straight into his pocket. Another part covered transport costs to get the goods to the sanatorium. And only a tiny sliver actually went to Kranz as a bonus.
That said, not all of it was public money. Some pieces were probably bought with his own funds—the ones that genuinely hit his aesthetic sweet spot. For those, he'd dig into his personal savings. State money bought the decent local décor; the sculptures, bronzes, vases that actually caught his eye,those came out of his own commission.
Man saved himself a pretty penny, honestly.
But he wouldn't push it further. He didn't want to risk getting turned in—even if his operations were totally independent and geographically isolated.
🤣Gotta hand it to him, though.Man's got some boundaries.
Kranz had no complaints. Olrik kept him very comfortable. All the paperwork, budget applications, military coordination, personnel scheduling—Olrik handled every bit of it. Kranz just had to focus on his experiments, completely insulated from admin, accounting, and military red tape. So Kranz never saw the sleight of hand behind the ledgers. All he saw was Olrik: the guy commanding armed troops, handling guns, running operations, his head full of practical tactics and conspiracy.
And that gave Kranz a gloriously warped perception:
Olrik was a halfway competent but simple-minded brute—good for fighting, good for providing space and manpower, and that's it.
It never crossed his mind that this "brute" was quietly skimming project funds under the "equipment maintenance" line to decorate his own office.
You can find supporting evidence in other storylines too.
E.g. Voronov Plot. Olrik was undercover as "Colonel Ilkor," embedded in the Soviet high command with Voronov as his cover.
Two hard constraints there:
1. He didn't have enough authority to freely misuse state funds.
2. He had way less freedom than in the Urals. Too many people had dirt on him, and his identity was fake—exposure was a constant threat. If his accounts or lifestyle showed even a hint of irregularity, the KGB would've been on him in a heartbeat, and colleagues could've ratted him out.
So his office was deliberately Soviet-spartan—barely a trace of personal taste. He used whatever the state gave him and didn't dare touch a single state kopek for personal art or decorative luxury. His appearance matched the system perfectly, leaving zero ammunition for anyone to call him out on "corruption" or "decadence."
Also in SOS Meteores. He worked for the Soviets too,and had similar setup and partners as the 8hab operation.
This time his partner was Miloch—same breed as Kranz: all-in on research, clueless about admin and accounting, and absolutely unwilling to touch paperwork.
And Miloch's huge equipment? You could bill maintenance costs sky-high and no one would question it. If that General came around to supervise, maybe Olrik would tone it down a bit.
Probably around this time he started getting his hands dirty, because he'd already decked out his own apartment with Japanese screens, porcelain, scroll paintings—that sort of thing.
Ugh. He's impossible, honestly.
"Isn't it totally normal for him to do stuff like this?"
"Yeah, it is. But I just wanted to write it anyway."
Before he was Public Enemy Number One / International Man of Mystery, Olrik was one of the most powerful men in the world. He was a close adviser, secret police chief, and sometime military commander for Emperor Basam Damdu. He was basically his regime's version of Himmler or Beria (if Himmler or Beria had briefly held the entire world in their grasp).
There's no way he doesn't have an absolute mountain of treasure left over from that time period. With the GRU, he's a consultant, so he has to embezzle funds. With the 13th Bureau, he was the boss, so he doesn't even have to do that: the sky's the limit. Think of all the rich parts of the world he's had the opportunity to loot. Think of all the political prisoners he's been able to strip of their assets. Think of all the people who've had to pay bribes to him to be able to keep operating.
Some of that probably went up in smoke with the nuking of Lhasa, but not all of it. Even after the conquest of the entire planet, he still had that moment when he reached out to Mortimer and suggested working together to free the world. This is a guy who hedges his bets. For the reason it's also unlikely that his wealth was tied up in regime-specific assets that would've lost their value at the end of the war (i.e. Confederate dollars).
So... Even with his appreciation for the finer things in life and his impulse control problems, he very likely has a big pile of gold somewhere (or more likely a lot of small heaps spread around) that would take a lot of work to deplete.
In fact, it's hard to imagine his later life working out without that big pile of gold. His postwar adventures are one long series of defeats, and even if you assume that he has his successes on the side that aren't in the comics, he's got to be drawing the funds from somewhere to bounce back from all those events - if only to find room and board and whatever medical attention he might need.
(It's also hard to imagine his life working out without that background. Again, he fails a lot. The prestige he gets from "I was Emperor Basam Damdu's favorite henchman" is probably why he keeps getting hired by so many people, who remember that role and overlook his less impressive career afterwards).
In short, I think his net worth does ping pong a lot, but there's a very very big safety cushion underneath it all, even if his personal spending habits mean it isn't what it used to be.
The main character of the last TV show I watched won't even investigate my death for another three decades, and I haven't finished the season yet so I can't even be sure that he'll solve the case at all. So, you know, could be better.
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Very fascinating type of person i have seen at least twice on tumblr is someone who wants to travel back in time and kill Jesus to stop Christianity in its tracks and therefore prevent the colonization of the Americas, Atlantic slave trade, etc. Like. I don’t think killing him is gonna stop Christianity. In fact, it famously did not.
Well, not with that attitude! The problem is that the other time travellers all had weaksauce assassination plans like "make his mother give birth in a stable with no assistance" or "get Herod to kill all the local kids". Pfft. I've done it right: I got the Romans to crucify the fucker. The most painful death known to man, and the most shameful; even the Romans reserved it for slaves and rebels. Let's see his reputation recover from that one!
As a Terminator fan, I'm a bit surprised that no one's suggested going back one generation further in time to kill Mary before he has a chance to be born.
Never read her as a kid, but I liked the Song of the Lioness story arc very much when I grew up. This is my reminder to myself to read more in that universe.
The thing about really long series is that they start to develop their own tropes. And if they go on long enough, they get the opportunity to subvert their own tropes.
There's a sort of running gag with the Star Trek engineers. Something will need to get done, the captain asks how long it will take, and the engineer gives an estimate. The captain will then say they need it done twice as fast, or more. They then usually pull it off somehow. This is the done thing. TVtropes calls it "Scotty Time", after the engineer from the first series.
We get this same interaction over and over across multiple series, from multiple different pairs of captains and engineers. By the later seasons of Next Generation they're already riffing on it. One scene establishes that the initial estimate is usually actually already longer than they'll actually need, because captains love to pressure their crews and the engineers know this, so getting it done in less time than initially proposed makes them look good. This ritual has by this point been established as Starfleet standard, seen in the original series, Next Generation, and prominently in Deep Space Nine.
So then we get to Star Trek Voyager, and we have our captain Janeway and our chief engineer B'elanna Torres, and we know how this is gonna go. In a season one episode, sure enough, Janeway asks that whatever needs to be done gets done in half the estimated time, and... Torres stops her. No, she says, it takes as long as it takes, it can't be done faster. And her face is dead serious. Janeway is momentarily surprised but doesn't protest. And it's some great characterization for both of them. It establishes Torres as an honest and hard working officer, a straight shooter who doesn't take shortcuts. She'll look her commanding officer in the face and just say the truth. And it establishes Janeway as someone experienced but not incapable of adapting to her crew. She knows how this interaction is supposed to work, but takes Torres at her word, and doesn't repeat this trope for the rest of the series. I like it a lot. Idk end of post
This is interesting when you remember that B'elanna Torres is Maquis, not Starfleet. You'd expect the ragtag bunch of insurgents to be the ones cutting corners and the Starfleet ones to be sticklers for precision, but it's the opposite.
Starfleet flies around in ships of the line built by professionals and presumably overengineered and quality controlled and generally, well, reliable. Which gives their engineers a little bit of fudge space.
The Maquis fly around in rickety second and thirdhand ships with no reliable repair yards or sources of spare parts - less Enterprise and more Serenity. That makes them far more unforgiving of their owners, and means their engineers can't afford any mistakes at all. And that translates to B'elanna telling it exactly like it is.
The cosmology of this place is weird. Miguel and Tulio are clearly not gods, but it's equally clear that the gods do in fact exist, right? Tzekel-Kan's magic doesn't come from nowhere, all the carvings are clearly prophetic, and events line up just a little too conveniently for Miguel and Tulio to be mistaken for gods.
Conclusion: the entire adventure was, in fact, orchestrated by the gods, presumably because they wanted something to come along and break Tzekel-Kan's hold on El Dorado. Making Tzekel-Kan the Dreamworks version of an Indiana Jones villain, someone who worships powers he doesn't really understand.
I've seen this before, but I'd somehow never noticed the moment where they save the armadillo from the big snake, thus setting up all the times in the rest of the movie that the armadillo saves the day. (I get distracted during song bits).
That also kind of works along with the "a higher power is at work here" theory. If the armadillo is actually some supernatural being in disguise, then their saving him is the equivalent of every story you've read where a weary traveler or a beggar or an old lady begs for some help as a test of character and rewards or punishes you accordingly. The armadillo-creature could have just put itself in their path and decided they were all right.
According to TV Tropes, the original opening was going to have Chel being offered up as a human sacrifice by Tzekel-Kan. (Because she stole from the temple, or did she steal from the temple on her way out?) And barely escaped, with guards in hot pursuit. Explains what she was doing when Miguel and Tulio met her.
Also according to TV Tropes, this started out as a remake of The Man Who Would Be King. I can see it, but I'd love to see the process by which somebody looked at that film and decided "you know, this could be an animated movie for kids!"
I knew fandom commonly interpreted Miguel and Tulio as a gay couple. I didn't know, until some googling, that in the first script they apparently were a gay couple. Hells yeah.
Chief Tannabok might be my favorite portrayal of a fat person in... definitely in all of animation. He's really, really fat. And yet he has no trouble climbing the staircase to the top of the temple (which leaves the trim and fit main characters gasping for air), and when holding back the pillars, turns out to be easily the strongest guy in the city. And his weight isn't a symbol of his decadence and excess and oppression of the masses as it so often is in fiction (think Baron Harkonnen or Jabba the Hutt).
And of course there's Chel who's easily the smartest person in the story, an active participant as much as the two leads, who's dressed and acts as provocatively as a kid's animated movie will allow and isn't punished for it by the story.
I want to say this movie was ahead of its time, but I genuinely don't know if it's that or if it's just that the pop cultural landscape at the turn of the millennium was just healthier. It's not the only animated movie from this time that feels "ahead of its time" - The Hunchback of Notre Dame had Esmeralda who in many ways feels like the Disney precursor to Chel, and Lilo and Stitch had a sisterly relationship that rivals (if not exceeds) the one in Frozen.
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I'm kind of dumbfounded that no one (to my knowledge) has written some quality fiction or fantasy about the Byzantine/Ottoman wars. It is literally a war between steampunk flamethrowers and steampunk cannons.
Well, it’s actually been 30 years now, but here’s a spew I did 5 years ago on the bird app to commemorate my 25 years as a TV writer.
I’ve edited it a bit for clarity. Hopefully some of you will find it useful.
1. In TV writing (and writing in general) there is only one unbreakable rule: Thou shalt not be boring.
2. Write characters people want to hang out with for an hour or so once a week for years to come. Even if they’re bad people, make them interesting, engaging bad people.
3. If your lead is a bad person, make them funny and/or sexy. Direct most of their bad behavior toward other bad people or themselves. Make them well motivated. Maintain rooting interest.
4. What makes a character special should be intertwined with what makes them struggle. Perfect people are boring.
5. Characters should complement/conflict with each other. No two characters should serve the same purpose/have the same backstory/have the same voice.
6. Cast the best actor, adjust the character to suit.
7. Give your leads the best lines/moments. No one is tuning in to watch the funny guest star. Like Garry Marshall said back on HAPPY DAYS, “I’m paying Henry Winkler $25,000 an episode. Give the Fonz the jokes.”
8. Your characters, good & bad, should reflect the reality of our wonderful, diverse world. White male shouldn’t be the default.
9. Avoid stereotypes. Stereotypes are boring.
10. If all your POV characters know some secret, the audience should know it too.
11. If your show hinges on a big mystery, know more or less what the truth is from the beginning. You can change it later if you need to, but write to a specific.
12. If your story doesn’t test your characters mentally, physically, psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually, you don’t have a story.
13. You can start by figuring out the Beginning, the Middle, or the End, but you don’t have an episode until you have all three.
14. Big suspenseful act outs (the last moments before the commercials) aren’t just a gimmick. They’re a good way to structure an hour of entertainment to make sure the audience is invested and your pacing is solid.
15. Every scene should be a consequence of the previous scene or a refutation of it.
16. A scene also needs a Beginning, Middle, and End. The end should propel the characters and/or audience into the next scene.
17. Every scene is a negotiation/confrontation between two or more characters who want different things or have different ideas on how to solve the same problem.
18. A good action scene is still a character scene. With punching. (This applies to sex scenes too, but you know, with sex.)
19. A crap page is better than a blank one.
20. It’s easier to cut than to add.
21. Good things rarely happen in the Writers Room after dinner. Go home, get some rest, write pages at home if you have to, start fresh in the morning. Writers who have a life outside the writing room are better writers. Beware the showrunner who doesn’t want to go home to their family. That said…
22. Script by day one of Pre-Production. No matter what.
23. You’re a writer first. Almost nothing happening on set or in post is more important than the writing. Delegate when possible.
24. Make an extra effort to surround yourself with writers who are different from you (background, race, gender, orientation, etc). Listen to their perspectives, especially on experiences alien to you.
25. And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make. In TV writing and life in general.
2. Write characters people want to hang out with for an hour or so once a week for years to come. Even if they’re bad people, make them interesting, engaging bad people.
This. Rediscovering it yet again watching Resident Alien: the best shows aren’t the ones with incredible plots, it’s the ones with characters that I love hanging out with. (The switch from the classic TV model hasn’t been great for that).
8. Your characters, good & bad, should reflect the reality of our wonderful, diverse world. White male shouldn’t be the default.
What was nice about DS9 was also keeping in mind the corollaries of that for your fictional world. If your universe is crammed with different life-forms, human beings shouldn’t be the default.
11. If your show hinges on a big mystery, know more or less what the truth is from the beginning. You can change it later if you need to, but write to a specific.
It’s shocking how many writers don’t understand this. Even the ones that haven’t made a career out of going against it. (Looking at you, J. J. Abrams).
Interesting bad people was a strong feature of DS9! Gul Dukat, Kai Winn, Enabran Tain, Garak at least some of the time, even the Jem'Hadar with their abject devotion to the Founders and total lack of any warrior ethos.
