Camestros Felapton

2022 Hugo Award Finalist

Month: Jan 2021

  • Gamestop etc and the Alt-Right

    The term “Alt-Right” has gone out of fashion largely because there is increasingly little differentiation between the US right in general and the section that promotes extreme & far-fetched ideas via internet communities and social media. I still find it a handy term though, partly because for everybody else when we think of “conservative” we […]

  • WandaVision: Episode 4 – We Interrupt This Program (spoilers)

    Disney+ shows off it’s new sci-fi superhero show guest starring continuity and lots of familiar faces…It’s not an episode that can be discussed without substantial spoilers, so be warned!

  • I watched Star Trek – Lower Decks

    At the risk of becoming some kind of Star Trek completist, I watched the animated series Star Trek – Lower Decks which recently made its way onto Amazon Prime in locations beyond the USA. Initially confined to CBS All Access, the show wasn’t available for some time internationally (unlike Discovery or Picard which could be […]

  • Review: The Left-handed Booksellers of London by Garth Nix

    Garth Nix has a neat way of creating fantasy stories that have a reassuring familiarity that nonetheless introduce novel or unusual aspects. With The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, plunges us into a slightly-alternative-universe version of 1980s London where the policing of the borders between the mundane and the mythic lies in the various hands of […]

  • Australia’s Honours System Remains Very Broken

    Another year and January 26 ticks over again. Australia’s very flawed national holiday continues to be a source of division and disunity. Among the manifold aspects of this is the announcement of various honours. Last year, the secretive process led to the far-right ‘men’s rights activist’ Bettina Arndt being honoured. The previous year in the […]

  • Susan’s Salon: 2021 January 24/25

    Susan’s Salon: 2021 January 24/25

    Please use the comment section to just chat about whatever you want. Susan’s Salon is posted early Monday (Sydney time which is still Sunday in most countries) . It’s fine to be sad, worried, very worried, angry or maybe even happy (or all of those things at once). Please feel free to post what you […]

  • Lawfare…with a whimper

    I had missed this among the various histrionics among the right post Biden’s inauguration. The legal dispute between Owen ‘Flat Earth’ Benjamin and Patreon appears to be over. Patreon asked for the case they had lodged to be dismissed. Court documents for case CGC20584586 PATREON, INC. VS. PAUL MICHAEL AYURE ET AL show that the […]

  • Review: WandaVision Episode 3 – Now in Color!

    Philip K Dick has an unenviable position: his stories have been frequently adapted and yet the films that capture his distinctive mix of average Joe’s caught up in worlds which are lies, are films (e.g. Terry Gilliam’s Brasil) that aren’t adaptations of his work. Dick’s Ubik (1969) literally features an average Joe albeit one who […]

  • Correia Flees Facebook

    As part of the post-Trump trauma, noted Sad Puppy and bestselling Baen author Larry Correia is semi-leaving Facebook after years of time-outs and post deletions. “I’m done helping those parasites. Facebook is trash. We all know it. We’ve all seen it. We’re just there because of inertia. Over the last decade, working with some stupendous […]

  • Review: Lupin (Netflix)

    The obvious comparisons made about Netflix’s French language hit is with Sherlock: a modern day re-imagining of a turn-of-the-century character. The first episode suggests a slickness of form suggestive of Sherlock but Lupin as a show is less impressed with its own cleverness and more interested in the central character. The bold choice is that […]