Reginald Pole was the last Archbishop of Canterbury

Posted on May 9, 2026 by JC

I have discussed Christianity on this blog numerous times over the years; especially as I began writing on it regularly around the time of my conversion and before I was received into the Catholic Church in 2017. This naturally meant it was on my mind and I often wanted to write about it and share what I was reading and learning. I even have an entire unpublished story of my conversion that I may still make public one day; when I feel it is ready. This may never be. 

In these posts, I know I’ve mentioned at least once that I was brought up in the Anglican Church of Australia which is part of the Church of England. Until, the 1970s, this was the largest Christian Church in Australia but it has dropped off significantly in observance To say “significantly” is classic British understatement and “disastrously” is perhaps more apt. This was also around the time churches within the “Anglican Communion” began “ordaining” women beginning in the United States Episcopal Church. This began in Australia shortly after my birth though I didn’t really know of it until I was older. Christianity as a whole, has seen steady decline in Western nations but due to mass immigration, the Catholic numbers have been more steady in Australia.

The reason why I’ve used the “scare quotes” above is deliberate. The Anglican Church is at best, separated from the Catholic Church and should not be regarded as a legitimate church by Catholics. This is even more so now that it claims more acres than it does adherents and has continued to depart from even the most basic tenets of Christianity. More importantly, women can not be ordained to the priesthood and so can not be bishops or even deacons. This is an ontological impossibility and not up for debate or serious discussion. This has special relevance now because since earlier this year, there has been a woman who dresses up as a bishop and claims to be the Archbishop of Canterbury. More scandalously, the public head of the Catholic Church has written an official message to her on the Vatican website and even received her in Rome.

As someone who left Anglican Church for the Catholic over this and a number of other issues, I have a pretty strong opinion on this.

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John Scalzi’s Cat Book

Posted on April 29, 2026 by JC

Starter Villain by John Scalzi, Tor Books, September 19th, 2023

It may be hard to believe but the United States came really close to legalising rape in late 2012. You might scoff but this was all but a certainty according to many reputable pundits and major news sources; especially on the Internet. If the Republican candidate Mitt Romney had won, binders full of women would have been raped and the men who did the raping wouldn’t have faced any consequences at all! This was of particular interest to John Scalzi who made a timely post on his blog thanking conservative politicians for their work making it easier to rape as well as declaring his intention to vote Republican. He also claimed this was satire but it doesn’t read like that. Whatever the truth, Barack Obama won a second term and no more women were raped in the United States until after inauguration of Donald Trump in January, 2017. We will thankfully never know just how many would have been raped had Mitt Romney been elected.

John Scalzi isn’t just a rape apologist someone that is really good at getting into the mind of a rapist for the purposes of satire. He is also an author and not just any author but a Hugo Award winning and New York Times bestselling author. That I have not read any of his books until recently is a personal scandal of mine that I’m glad I’ve finally addressed by reading one of his most recent novels.

My review follows below.

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A Review of Sid Meier’s Memoir!

Posted on April 19, 2026 by JC

Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games by Sid Meier, W. W. Norton & Company, October 12th, 2020

Around the time I picked up John Romero’s autobiography, I noticed Sid Meier’s also listed in the recommended section on Amazon. I didn’t pick it up initially because unlike with Romero and id Software, I had little experience with Sid Meier’s games though I certainly knew his name. I had played the 2004 remake of his Pirates! game and (I think), a little bit of Civilization III. Outside of these two games, I don’t think I’d played anything else he had designed and even the former, I did not play to completion until a few years ago. Still, he is undoubtedly one of the great designers in computer games and I eventually did pick this up about a year ago and finished reading it just the other day.

As I’ve reviewed quite a number of books based on gaming history, this was certainly worth adding to the growing list. 

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How Inspired?

Posted on April 8, 2026 by JC

Though I have previously revealed a distaste for most Boomer era music, I do like some Beatles songs and one of my favourites is ‘Let It Be’ which was written by Paul McCartney. This is the official story of course and there is certainly a question of how organic the Beatles were. I haven’t looked into any of this enough to offer an opinion though I suspect there is truth to it. I mention this only because, McCartney’s authorship is assumed for what follows, regardless of the truth. 

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Joining Team Tux

Posted on March 31, 2026 by JC

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I would be changing over to Linux on my main rig soon and I have now done that. This post was written on my main rig which is now running Bazzite. Before doing this, I had installed Linux Mint on my work computer and my previous desktop (which amazingly still works). I wanted to force myself to get used to the change before fully committing and this did help the adjustment. As bad has Windows has progressively gotten, it still has familiarity on its side and I briefly entertained the idea of running a stripped down version of Windows 11 to keep myself in my computing comfort zone.

I’m glad I didn’t chicken out though and after trying Linux Mint, Bazzite and even Zorin, I am quite happy I forced myself to make the change.

This post will just cover some general experiences and observations. Continue reading →

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A Gamma Best Rendered Cold

Posted on March 22, 2026 by JC

Over the last six months or so, I have read through four books by English author Joe Abercrombie. This began with his First Law Trilogy, which includes his debut novel, The Blade Itself. Following the success of this trilogy, he wrote three standalone novels including Best Served Cold which I have just completed. While it can definitely be read on its own, it is set in the same fantasy world after events of the trilogy and a number of characters appear or are mentioned. I have one more that has been lent to me called The Heroes which is the second of these standalone novels but I have set that one aside for now.

In general, there is a lot to enjoy in these novels though they aren’t my cup of tea. Similar to all too many modern novels, there are no real heroes and virtually every character is shown to be flawed in some significant way. The cripple Sand dan Glokta is probably the most prominent and likeable in the trilogy, though he is a torturer employed by the state who extracts confessions whether or not they are true. His humanity cracks through to his equally crippled conscience at a few significant points in the narrative; usually where a woman is involved. Jezal dan Luthar, a vain nobleman and Logen Ninefingers, a violent and ruthless northern warrior are the two other main characters and they too, have their moments.

Similarly to A Song of Ice and Fire and The Witcher novels, the flawed characters, corruption, violence and fornication are supposed to make the books more grounded and realistic. Yet outside of fiction, there really are moral and even heroic people who live good lives. None are perfect but there are many examples in history and today of people who lived largely virtuous lives; whether of noble or more humble origins. There are also plenty of people who get married and have children instead of fornicating, as well as people who are honest and don’t lie, cheat or steal in any egregious way. These people are real and I can point to plenty of examples in my own life as well as historically. This moral nihilism is the overarching theme to these novels and makes for a disappointing end to the original trilogy though one that is thematically consistent.

Another small criticism I have (which is less true of the later novels), is with a couple of bad writing habits Abercrombie has. Male characters (especially Jezal), say “Err” a lot and particularly in answer to females in conversation when even someone as awkward as myself would have had a ready answer. There are also a lot of irritating twin sentences that read something like, “A dog. A big dog.” From time to time this can be effective but more creative use of adjectives would have made the prose flow better. This is a minor criticism though as he writes well enough and much better than the majority of his contemporaries in the fantasy genre.

The subject of this post is not his books on the whole though but a notable character in Best Served Cold that fits in well with my growing series on ‘Gamma Fiction’. Continue reading →

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The Dubious Logic of Black Female Resentment

Posted on March 14, 2026 by JC

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male Power by Ijeoma Oluo, Basic Books, December 1st, 2020

For some reason, I don’t remember how I found out about this book but when I heard about it, I immediately checked if the library had it and they did. They had eight copies but as I write, I am the only one with a copy on loan. I began and quickly finished it a few weeks ago, thinking it would give me a good chuckle. From time to time it did, but I was mostly baffled when not bored at the contents.

With a title like this, some might claim I’m just going for the low-hanging fruit of left-wing discourse and not seriously engaging with issues like racism and sexism. Yet this has been praised and endorsed by all the right sort of people including two writers in The New York Times and one bestselling author, the Washington Post, TIME Magazine, some professor from UCLA and some others I assume are political activists. On the back cover it is described as “deeply researched and revelatory” among other exaggerated praise. So this being the case, I am going to assume that the contents meet these high standards.

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The People Love a Winner

Posted on March 8, 2026 by JC

This is what a winner looks like.

In April last year I covered the outcome of a lawsuit brought by Billy Mitchell against Karl Jobst and followed up with a review of the documentary King of Kong that significantly raised his public profile. There hasn’t really been any news to cover since then but there was one more angle I wanted to look at with this whole affair before (hopefully), moving on forever.

That angle is the significant change in perception Mitchell has had since his big court win over Jobst and why this happened.

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Remakes and Remasters: The Case of Final Fantasy VII

Posted on February 28, 2026 by JC

I’ve shared some observations about video game remakes and remasters including in my post on the games I played in 2023, but I’ve never had a post dedicated to the subject. Something I think still needs to be frequently clarified is the difference between a remake and a remaster which can be blurry at times. The latter should be the same game only modified to play on modern systems. Textures and the user interface can be upscaled or redrawn and there can be other quality of life improvements, but it should be the same game. These releases are usually welcome as there are quite a few great games that can not be easily obtained or played at all anymore on modern hardware. It helps also that re-releases are much cheaper than making entirely new games so many publishers are opting to re-release older games. Sometimes these are excellent and sometimes they aren’t but on the whole, it is a good thing to make classic titles more widely available.

Remakes on the other hand are a bit more controversial. After all, if a game really is great, does it need a remake? I would say that the remake of Resident Evil 4 was not necessary as the first one still looks and plays great from my perspective. But then, I have to remember that I played it when it was new and know the game really well. Newer players used to constant tutorials and yellow paint spread everywhere to guide progression, might find the original harder to appreciate today. I recall back as early as 2009 there being complaints about not being able to move and shoot in Resident Evil 5 which mostly adopted the same control scheme. And just a year after Resident Evil 4, Gears of War gave players much better third-person mechanics with an intuitive over-the-shoulder combat and cover system that became widely copied. Resident Evil games even incorporated some of these mechanics in subsequent titles as the series became more action orientated. So games can age quickly and it is true in some sense that “you had to be there” for many popular titles and this even applies to me with many old PlayStation titles including the original Resident Evil games.

One title that has seen calls for a remake since one was announced and then aborted in the early 2000s was 1997’s Final Fantasy VII for the original PlayStation. The 2020 remake is the main subject of this post.

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Send a Maniac to Catch One

Posted on February 15, 2026 by JC

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone spent the better part of the 1980s in friendly competition with multiple now iconic action films released during this decade. Schwarzenegger started with Conan the Barbarian and had continued success as the titular antagonist in The Terminator then Predator and Commando among a number of others. At the same time, Stallone continued his Rocky series into the 80s which also embraced the decade’s muscular machismo as did the Rambo films after First Blood in 1982. They continued to dominate the genre into the 1990s but it was also around this time that they took on more comedic and sometimes a more “family friendly” turn. Although still containing plenty of graphic violence, even Terminator 2: Judgement Day was unsubtly marketed towards pre-teen boys with ten-year old John Connor and his own personal killer robot. I know this is true because I loved Terminator 2 when I was around the same age and my mother (very reluctantly), allowed me to watch it with my brothers. If my personal anecdote doesn’t convince you, the toys and video games produced at the time of the film’s release should. 

Some more examples of the family-friendly (but not really), films are Kindergarten Cop and Sylvester Stallone’s bizarre but somehow still  forgettable Stop or My Mom Will Shoot. Both actors continued doing action films but many of these had a more light-hearted tone. For Schwarzenegger, there was the poorly received but still entertaining The Last Action Hero and Stallone had the more memorable Demolition Man; the latter which is the subject of this post. 

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