Liveblogging Conan the Barbarian

The full movie of Conan the Barbarian is available on YouTube (link above), so I watched it and posted my reactions and thoughts in real time. This is easily the dumbest idea I've ever had for a post on this site, so of course I had to do it. There is no earthly reason for you to read this and watch along, but ... sorry, can't think of anything. 

Ready? Then let's begin:

0:26 First thing on the screen is Nietzsche: "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." This movie is already metal as fuck. 

1:03 An 8/10 opening credits. Only Arnie and JEJ get billing.
Voice over! Ugh. 

2:00 Forging a sword. Now we're LITERALLY being metal.

4:25 Conan's dad gives him THE talk. You know the one. About Crom and the gods, against a majestic bluescreen. But wait! Is his dad Kris Kristofferson?
No. No he isn't.

OH NO THE VILLAGE IS BEING ATTACKED BY GWAR. 

7:20 Dude has a horned helmet. Extra metal points right there. For badass barbarians, the Cimmerians sure went down like little bitches. Big hammer dude is awesome though. 
10:29 Led by Evil General Lemmy. 
11:32 That hair, James Earl. It's magnificent.  

14:30 Narrator: 'Why did they do it? Eh. Who the fuck knows.' Thanks Narrator. Very helpful insight.

15:21 We have this task requiring extreme physical strength. What type of slaves shall we get? Hmm. I know! Little kids! Nothing stronger than preschoolers. 
16:31 Especially if the preschooler is Arnie.
Is the thing he's pushing supposed to be a grindstone for flour, or have they just got kids pushing it for giggles? If it's a mill, why the heck is it in the middle of nowhere?

18:25 OK, now Arnie's a gladiator and his first opponent is ... Lord Humongous! Biggest crossover in cinematic history.

20:32 Leveling up his loot, Skyrim style. He's up to 'Steel' now. 

21:24 Mr. Miyagi from the Karate Kid makes a cameo. BIGGEST CROSSOVER IN CINEMATIC HISTORY. Wax on, wax off you idiot. (Slaps Arnie)
22:20 First boobies. Not very sexy ones, but boobies nonetheless. The 80s were a magical time.

24:01 The greatest monologue ever uttered in cinematic history. Ever.

34:41 So he screws the witch, she turns into medusa, so he kicks her into the fire and she becomes a cheap special effect. 
But hey, I'm not here to kink shame.
Whatever turns you into a flaming ball of light, baby.

35:27 Fun fact: Subotai was the name of Genghis Khan's best general. Dude seems pretty Hispanic for a Mongol, though.

37:08 We're now watching Lord of the Rings. Look at all this scenery we're jogging through!

39:44 Red light district. There's a llama. Why? No wait. I don't want to know. 
46:05 Arnie getting 'Nam flashbacks. Very PTSD. 

52:45 The other girl he screwed turned into a firework. This one just turned into a hungover drunk. Must have done it wrong, Arnie. 
It's King Max von Bit Part in Force Awakens.

I SALUTE YOU!

1:04:45 What is it with Arnie and raging Asian stereotypes? Here's another.
1:05:43 Arnie infiltrates the hippies by carrying a bouquet. 
1:08:10 And promptly murders a gay man. Subtle this movie is not.

Let's crucify this dude but not actually stick around long enough to see if he's dead because we're Bond villains, apparently. 

1:27:49 Getting ready for the KISS concert. 
So, is Conan technically a zombie now?

1:30:52 Thulsa Doom has the best orgies. I hope they brought enough mysterious green goop for everybody.

IT'S PEOPLE. The mysterious green goop is people. 
Everyone: Pretends to be shocked.

Sorry lady, you're name wasn't on the movie poster. No resurrection for you.


1:46:25 Okay, but this is basically the plot of Home Alone with sharp edges.
1:48:05 They've been preparing for like, a week. Has Max's daughter been chained to a rock the whole time? That's going to stink, man. 

1:54:06 Saved by Disco Valkyrie!

Some guy assassinates the leader of your murderous cult: 'Huh. Welp, guess we'll all go home now.' 
... and done.

Great 80s cheesefest/10. 
They should do one more Arnie Conan movie, but like Johnny Cash 'Hurt' Conan, looking back on his life, all the cult leaders he never found time to kill. I would cry.

Thin Air

Title: Thin Air
Author: Richard K. Morgan
Publisher: Del Rey

This is kind of Morgan returning to his roots, as Thin Air is more like Altered Carbon than anything he's published in the intervening years. 

There's a cynical, hard-bitten, quasi-military protagonist who now works independently, dragged into a missing person investigation that turns out to be part of a bigger conspiracy ... which is pretty close to the setup of Altered Carbon. The action takes place on a barely- slash badly-terraformed Mars rather than Earth and the gee-whiz technology is cybernetic implants rather than digitally backed-up consciousness, but the tone, setting and story beats are all pretty familiar.

I suspect whether you like this or not will depend on how you felt about Altered Carbon, and whether you wanted more of the same. Personally, I enjoyed the overall style and tone, but the hero is a little too super-powered for my taste, and like a lot of whodunits a lot rides on suspects or baddies revealing their entire plans in lengthy monologues in unlikely situations, and plus I think the conspiracy is a little too convoluted for its own good.

Maybe the biggest change, other than the surface details of the setting, is there's a kind of acceptance in the writing that wasn't there 16 years ago--the world is shit, but it's the world we gotta live in, so we might as well make the best of it. Despite the noir style there is an almost, if not quite hopeful, then almost zen feel to the ending.

So, if you liked A.C. this will definitely scratch almost exactly the same itch. If not, probably not your thing.

Winter Holiday Reading List!

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle: A classic far beyond any words of mine to either help or harm. Got a Vonnegut collection from my brother for Xmas, so working my way through that.

David Drake, Hammer's Slammers Vol. 1: Interesting to see it obviously gestated in the same juices as BattleTech, with its intergalactic mercenaries and monocultural colony worlds lifted straight from 20th century stereotypes. 

Started off promising with some good rip-snorting scifi action (reminded me more of Renegade Legion than BT, but anyway), but I find the constant slaughter of civilians faintly nauseating (let's massacre these surrendering guerillas, let's drop a nuke on this village, let's not bother distinguishing between combatants and non-) so I've given up halfway through.

Joe Abercrombie, Heroes: Set over the course of a sort of medieval Gettysburg, a three-day battle between the barbarian Northerners and the civilized Union. Anachronisms abound, including late medieval armies organized into divisions and regiments, but a lot of the hack and slash is entertaining. 

Started reading Abercrombie years ago, when I quite enjoyed his destruction of fantasy genre conventions (the kindly wizard is a manipulative schemer, the dashing hero is brain-dead, the torturer is the nicest character, the mute gets the best jokes, etc. etc.) but over the years his grimdark anti-trope style has itself become a trope, so I found a lot of this predictable: the worst people will come out on top, the nicest people in the latrine, and so on. 

Still, Abercrombie's a vivid and entertaining writer, so it's a fun read.

Martha Wells, All Systems Red: Novella about a self-aware security cyborg tasked with defending a survey team when everything starts to go wrong. Won both the Nebula and Hugo awards for best novella, and though I'm still only halfway through, I haven't been too impressed. Too much seems to ride on the cyborg's indestructible nature and ability to hack any system, while the baddies are boilerplate corporate bad-guys we've been seeing in scifi since, like, Alien.

Digital Lascaux

One day you’re going to write the best thing you’ve ever written, and you won’t even know it until maybe years later. You’ll just go on, blissfully producing a steady stream of increasingly mediocre drivel. 

And what’s worse, no one will read it, this masterpiece of yours, and it will disappear forever into some dusty hard drive in some server farm cavern. Never to be seen again, unless data archeologists stumble across it in a thousand years, like some digital Lascaux. 

Van Gogh died a pauper, and you are no van Gogh.

No Word for Yes

The Tatemae were a quiet, peace-loving race, descended from avian omnivore stock, migrating along the Perseus arm in flocks of swept-wing spacecraft. 

They were involved in more and bloodier wars than any other race in the galaxy.

The trouble was this: The race had no word for “Yes,” and thus by extension, no way to give an unambiguous “No.” Regardless of their individual feelings, culture custom and language forced any individual Tatemae to hem and haw and reply to any request with “Well, it might be difficult…” 

Did they come in peace? Well, they might, they might not. Too early to tell.

Would they be willing to exchange technologies? Ah, now, that was a good question.

Could they change their migration route? Hm. Might be tricky.

How about a peace agreement between their race and ours? Perhaps. Hard to say. 

Would they withdraw before we open fire? They’d give it some thought.

And cue another bloodbath.

Animate Entropy

As quantum scientists know, the world is shaped by observation and belief, and so it will end when enough of us want it to. We’ve approached that point asymptotically, a steady erosion of our will to live through famine, war, pestilence, and even just the common, petty, daily drudgery of not being dead.

That loss has weakened the foundations of the world, and allowed the demons in.

A demon is just animate entropy, with no more malice than an acid or alkaline, only driven by the need to liberate all the stuff that makes you you from its molecular bonds and the tyranny of being you.

This is why demons are banished by belief. Only the certainty that life in all its imperfections is still worth living will ensure that there will be any life left in the universe.

Klondike Again

The wagon master eased his horse to a halt at the crest, and turned to the train behind him. 

After centuries the Klondike River was once again a destination, though its visitors were running from something, not to. It was hot even in winter, and gritty asphalt got into everything, including the food. 

“Welcome,” he called to the refugees. “Welcome to the promised land. Welcome to the last indrawn breath before the mortal exhalation of a dying world. Welcome to the penultimate paragraph in Earth’s final chapter. 

“Enjoy the scenery, dinner is at seven. Hope you like grubs and algae, cos that’s what you’re getting.”

One

There is only one soul, and it lives the life of every person, one at a time, forgetting itself at the end of each, so to return and do it all over again, only through different eyes. You will be the richest of us, and the poorest, you will be the happiest and the saddest, you will love yourself, torture and kill yourself, but never ever remember.

Transjovian Airsphere

Welcome to the Transjovian Airsphere, your soap bubble among the stars, your exotic exile, your home away from home, friends, family, pets, the whole shebang really. 

Head forward please while we insert the subdermal MTE chip. 

We’re five billion clicks from Earth so there’s not a lot to see or do, but not to worry, the chip gives you immediate retinal access to centuries of shows and movies. 

There we are.

Here’s your Motivator. Yes, it looks like a knife. The Airsphere orbits slowly but the walls are too thin to keep you in, so you’ve got to keep in constant motion or you float off into nothingness. Just give yourself a jab from time to time, stop yourself from getting too comfortable.

Right? All set then. Away you go.

The Point of It

The Grave Digger dug by the moon’s bony light, and the Bounty Hunter kept watch from his shadowy seat atop the next grave stone, thumbs hooked around his six-shooter belt. 

The Grave Digger’s spade bit deeper and deeper into the endless black earth, and the Bounty Hunter’s fingers drummed a brittle and skeletal tune on his thighs. 

“Just a little bit more,” said the Digger, leaning against the handle of his shovel and wiping cold sweat from his brow. 

“Ain’ goin’ nowhere,” the Hunter replied with the ghost of a shrug.

“No,” the Digger squinted at the Hunter. “I reckon you ain’t.”

The graveyard was silent but for the bell toll of the metal spade on unforgiving earth.

“Such a waste, dyin’ so young,” the Digger muttered. “Makes you wonder, what’s the point?”

“Too late to worry about that now. Either there’s no point, or the whole thing is the point. The length of the livin’ don’ enner into it.” 

When he was done, the Digger threw aside the shovel, and hauled himself out, back out of the hungering hole, dusted the dirt from his palms and took off his hat. Held it nervously in both hands. “Anything to say before we do the necessaries?”

“Naw, no sense in gettin’ all loquacious now. Best say what you need to say when you’re still among the quick. Why waste words on the dead?”

The Digger shrugged. “Like what you said: Either words are their own point, or there ain’t none.”

The Hunter chuckled, and took off his own hat. Giving the Digger a good view of the shot that had killed the Hunter, a neat, round and brown hole just above the right eye. “Maybe put that on my tombstone,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “My thanks.”

“Safe travels,” said the Digger as they shook, and then watched as the Hunter lay down in the hole he’d prepared for him. Sighing, the Digger began to fill it again.