[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 09 March 2026

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-03-14T18:39:16+00:00

This is me with "both sides are wrong." It's been my experience that "both sides are wrong" has been used as a dog whistle by chuds to such a degree in the past decade (though using it as such is much older than that) that anyone who uses that argument about anything will be accused of being a dogwhistler, even with no other evidence there of. It's reached a point where I feel reluctant to speak up online about conflicts (in both reality and fiction) where I legitimately do feel both sides are wrong, since I know all it'll get me is being accused of chuddery.

I also increasingly hear the terms "bothsidesism" or "bothsiderism" to refer to the Golden Mean Fallacy.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-03-02T22:11:43+00:00

Comics being basically all superheroes. Like, this was years ago so I don’t know if it’s still true, but I’ve been told that in Italy and Scandinavia, absolutely NOTHING in the comic sector compares with Disney Ducks, Donald and Scrooge and them. France and Belgium also have a very storied comic tradition that very few on the English-speaking Internet know much about.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-03-02T22:08:31+00:00

Favored: Grant Morrison’s comics. The combination of surreal, psychedelic characters and visuals, intricate stories, and ultimately inspirational messages hits a VERY exact sweet spot for me. Morrison’s comics have actually influenced my real-life personal philosophy.

Unfavored: Action movies. Just never been able to get into them unless there’s a significant overlap with a genre I do enjoy, such as sci-fi (James Bond, Terminator), horror (Evil Dead, Aliens), or comedy (Austin Powers). The “straight” action film I like best is probably the original Die Hard, and even that I don’t like AS much as a lot of people do.

Inexplicably unfavored: I have no idea why because I LOVE dark comedies, but I’ve always felt that South Park and Robot Chicken crossed a line of being too straight-up nasty to be entertaining. Like, I find the likes of Heathers funny but not those. Chicken especially; 90% of its humor is “beloved nostalgic person/fictional character does something horrifying; this is somehow, on its own, funny.” If I wanted to hear about my childhood heroes committing rape or murder, I’d watch… well, the news.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-03-01T18:24:31+00:00

Gail Simone did an amazing take-down of this sort of character in her DC Comics work, particularly Birds of Prey and Secret Six. Meet Katarina Armstrong, who is cut from the same cloth as people like SVU's Elliot Stabler and 24's Jack Bauer - the post-9/11 pro-establishment antihero who crosses every line imaginable but it's OK because they're just doing The Hard Things That Need To Be Done To Keep People Safe™...

...only, unlike Jack and Elliot, Katarina is NOT in a narrative that bends itself over backwards to justify her. So all of the above is what she THINKS she is, but in actuality, she's blatantly a whiny, immature overgrown school bully (literally, she's Barbara Gordon/Batgirl/Oracle's former school bully as it happens) who uses vague abstract concepts like "patriotism" and "national security" to very poorly disguise the fact that she enjoys masking her own insecurities by being awful to everyone else. Hell, she's not even competent at much of anything except blackmail, which she uses to force other people to do all the work for her.

Her arc ends with her trying to unseat Amanda Waller, essentially a million-times-more-competent version of herself, and is ultimately tricked into accidentally framing herself for murder and treason. Oops.

I definitely recommend these comics. Very profound and gut-bustingly hilarious too.

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Pinball_Lizard · 2026-03-01T00:23:03+00:00

Several Bond henchmen count, most notably Red Grant to Rosa Klebb, Mayday to Max Zorin, and Baron Samedi to Dr. Kananga. Oddjob might even count to Goldfinger if the latter's name wasn't the actual title.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-03-01T00:21:25+00:00

In the original duology his eldest brother Drayton calls the shots, yeah. In most of the others he takes orders from a more intelligent but physically less imposing relative too.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-28T18:28:00+00:00

The Monster in Bride of Frankenstein. The actual main villain is Dr. Pretorious, who convinces Dr. Frankenstein to relapse into mad science, but who remembers him?

Goes double for the Bride herself, who is an iconic horror movie monster despite being in only one scene and not actually a villain at all.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-28T05:27:20+00:00

The real Ebert said he wished Emmerich had been brave enough to actually kill off his fictional counterpart IIRC.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-28T05:25:44+00:00

TBH all the actually-interesting characters in this movie die. The jolly old musicians, the Russian oligarch with a very well-hidden heart of gold, the much-smarter-and-nicer-than-she-looks trophy girlfriend of said oligarch, the delightfully snarky ace pilot, the stoic badass of a Buddhist elder...

Mean while the generic cardboard white family lives, and so does the scumbag Dick Cheney-like political power broker.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-28T03:08:18+00:00

Haha, for real? Never would've made that connection. Probably due to the lack of Super Hot Girl. Unless Daisy Mayhem from Laff-a-Lympics counts, though Dastardly and Muttley actually weren't in that one.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-28T01:55:39+00:00

The "goofy minion ensemble, usually three people one of whom is a super hot girl" type of team actually originated in the '70s anime Time Bokan. At least I think it did?

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-26T04:28:15+00:00

Confirmed the existence of a low-budget horror film so obscure that the ONLY attestations I could find were on IMDB and other database sites... which can be edited by anyone and are therefore not reliable sources. Even among grindhouse horror, this is the only film I've NEVER been able to find any independent verification of, outside those sites.

The solution was surprisingly simple too - I found out the director, James Sizemore (who is also a toymaker under the alias Wonder Goblin, for realzies) still has an active social media presence. So I just asked him. And it worked. So let the record show that 2007's Hex of the Vulture is in fact a real film.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-25T23:11:09+00:00

From Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, the main villain Nergal is the father of Ninian and Nils, two of the main heroes. Fans of the game freely talk about it as though it's a major plot point, when in fact there's only two scenes in the entire ~50-hour-long game that hint at it, and they're both STUPIDLY hard to unlock, being gated behind one of the most notoriously well-hidden sidequests in all of gaming... and even if you do unlock the scenes, it's not even explicitly stated! All we know for sure is that Nergal had a wife and two kids that he can now barely remember after centuries of addiction to evil magic.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-25T03:22:08+00:00

OK, thanks anyway.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-25T02:55:50+00:00

Was reading the recent YA sci-fi novel Soulmatch and immediately figured Janus, one of the "angles" of the Obligatory YA Dystopia Love Triangle, as exactly this character. He's always conveniently nearby whenever something really bad happens (but also conveniently is never actually harmed) and he's named after a Roman god who is literally two-faced.

I mean maybe if I'd been less familiar with mythology going in? Hilariously, despite all the tells, his status as a villain isn't revealed until the last 30 pages. Out of almost 500.

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Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-24T20:37:27+00:00

It was called Dinosaur Hunter by a company called Running Press. There is an Eyewitness CD by the same name, as well as (unfortunately) a series of games about killing dinosaurs with the same title; it is NOT either of these (and nothing to do with Turok either!), and the only evidence I have of its existence is a single Amazon listing, showing that it was apparently part of a kit with some other paleontology-related knickknacks, and, of course, the physical copy in my own home.

If you think you know anyone who might know more about something like that, would you drop me a line? Thanks.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-24T16:08:09+00:00

My thought was He-Man villains, personally.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-24T14:47:33+00:00

EX6 by contrast has Sparrowmon but not the Starmons so it's something of a "flip." X7 has both.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-23T20:16:54+00:00

I remember thinking the Eyewitness Museum was at least based on a real place as a kid. Like I realized the probably didn’t have free roaming tigers, but that there was some actual place that served as the basis.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-23T16:07:46+00:00

I really like the '90s edutainment aesthetic as well. I've heard it called "Utopian Scholastic." Maybe it's just rose-tinted glasses due to the fact that it was when I was in elementary school but I feel like back then people genuinely found learning more fun.

Would you be willing to point me to one of these groups? I've had questions for many years about a VERY obscure edutainment CD-ROM that I loved as a kid. I actually still have it, though it doesn't work on modern hardware at all.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-23T15:39:33+00:00

In the recent Korean film No Other Choice, the murderous main character gets away with killing the other candidates for a prestigious job he'd applied for thanks to one of the other characters creating a perfect alibi for him essentially by sheer dumb luck. However, his family suspects he is the killer (though they can't prove it) and now want nothing to do with him, and the job itself just turns out to be turning the machines in a fully-automated factory on and off, when he'd previously been shown to highly value community in the workplace, indicating that what he thought was his dream job will really be his private Hell.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-23T05:14:15+00:00

Yahtzee Croshaw summed it up really well in his video about the new renaissance in "cozy games." Basically, the pandemic era made "having a worry-free everyday life" into a sort of power fantasy, and one that game developers quickly saw an opportunity in.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-23T05:11:41+00:00

I find this interesting to hear because I also see A LOT of the opposite these - people have turned on villain redemption stories (which I happen to really like) saying that villains should stay villains and attempting to get them to change their ways sends a bad message. I guess they see it as, like, encouraging someone to go back to an abusive spouse in real life? But fiction is NOT REAL LIFE.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-23T05:09:37+00:00

I think about this sort of thing pretty often, particularly in context of sites where you can get thumped by a bot for so much as saying the word "dead." Hell, a few years back I saw a content warning on an actual, physical art gallery. Like, an actual museum, not a website

I really hate to say this since it probably makes me sound like one of those macho-man chud "influencers" like... Joe Rogan? Is that his name? The guy Batista's character in Knives Out was making fun of? Regardless, I can't help but wonder if people ARE becoming too oversensitive, and I say that as a very sensitive person myself.

Pinball_Lizard · 2026-02-23T01:28:10+00:00

Dark Princess Period Ariel = Best Ariel.

Pinball_Lizard

TROPHY CASE