RANKED: History's Greatest Heroes!!! OF ALL TIEM!!!

Theme: Deeds of Glory - Saxon

I know real life can be depressing: your job sucks, you can't get a date, and they keep trying to reboot the DC Comics movie #universe. But life has always sucked, and there have still been heroes who have risen from the crowd of NPCs to give Satan a swirly in based defiance of despair. These are history's greatest whitepills: indelible proof that, while good is always on the backfoot, it has triumphed over evil in the past, and will again before the end.

Pope Leo the Great

Uhhh based?

5th Century Pope Leo I became the only memorable Pope by telling Attila the Hun to fuck off to his face, which the steppe warlord actually did. You might think Leo had reason to feel safe as his esteemed office conferred diplomatic immunity, but you'd be characteristically wrong because the average lifespan of premodern Popes was about 15 seconds, everyone murdered them left and right for any reason or no reason at all, and Attila was such a beast that his name is still synonymous with rampant slaughter to this day, despite the fact that you have no idea who the Huns were, or what else was going on in the 5th Century, or where the little man in the canoe is hiding. The equivalent today would be if the current Pope Leo barged into Blumpf's bedroom, kicked Netanyahu fatally in the cloaca, forced a complete and unconditional IDF surrender, and let's say Ian Miles Cheong died too, somehow.

Gabriele Tadino

Seasoned military engineer Tadino da Martinengo defied his Venetian masters and ditched his governership of the isle of Candia to join the Knights Hospitaller on Rhodes in their defence of the island against the vast forces of Suleiman the Lawgiver. Using a percussive device fitted with bells to alert him to tremors caused by Ottoman mining operations, Tadino was able to sabotage many of their efforts with his own brilliant countermining operation, like if you played Worms Armageddon with the drill- and blowtorch-heavy weapons set, but instead of a fat manchild you were the biggest Chad of renaissance Italy.

Chadino reps his Hospitaller drip (1538, colourised).

When a Turkish mining effort did succeed, its impact was still largely mitigated by Tadino's venting system, which allowed the walls of the Knights' fortress to release much of the shock of the explosion and remain standing with the based impudence of an internet anon who still says gay and retarded. Tadino even lost an eye to enemy arquebus fire and simply replied with the full lyrics of "So What" by the Anti Nowhere League, because his whole life long he never even learned how to give a fuck. A siege that should have been a cakewalk for the Ottomans ended with them beaten down to letting the whole Order leave with all their stuff, whereupon they simply set up their entire operation again on Malta, which held against Suleiman's increasingly buttmad efforts well into the sultan's overly beturbaned seventies.

John Rabe

Sometimes piano teacher physiognomy belies a heart of gold and steel.

German businessman John Rabe took it upon himself to establish the Nanking Safe Zone in the midst of the Sino-Japanese war's most notorious episode, for which he has been credited with saving over 200,000 people, just because it was the right thing to do. Rabe was a humble Christian man who enjoyed gardening and classical music, and received nothing but trouble for his efforts: after w*rld w*r 2 ended, he lived in obscurity and often relied upon donations from grateful Chinese. The allies also made him undergo Denatzification brainwashing because, of course, he was a card-carrying NSDAP member, and an immeasurably better man than you or anyone you know will ever be, because, of course, your entire Manichaean Marvel movie worldview is complete bullshit.

Leonhard Seppala & Friends

If straight men ran fashion, scarfs made from live sled dogs would be mandatory winter apparel.

In 1925 there was an epidemic of diphtheria in Nome, and only 20 men could get the serum necessary to counteract it there on time. 20 men and 150 dogs, that is to say, since this implausibly cinematic race against time was achieved via sled dog relay. Most famous among the Chads who pulled this off was Leonhard Seppala, a Norwegian Kven famed for his expertise in sled racing. Per Mushing.com, to "save valuable time Leonhard risked the 20 mile sea ice crossing between Cap Denbigh and Point Dexter in a blinding blizzard". The same article cites temperatures as low as -64° for other participants, to say nothing of sleds flipped over by high winds and dogs suffering from "frozen groin". I think I had that once around the time they fired me from the morgue.

Francisco Franco

ywn rock drip this hard. You've been MOGGED, son.

I'm going to take the TWISTED and DEMENTED position that the people in the Spanish civil war who raped nuns, crucified priests and buried people alive were the bad guys. Historians can debate ad nauseum on whether the election that would have delivered Spain into the dominion of these drooling psychopaths was rigged in the conventional sense, but the leftists' habit of dragging conservative members of the Spanish parliament out into the street and murdering them also counts as de facto election rigging, because (stay with me here) you can't actually vote to elect someone once they've been murdered by a communist. Generalissimo Franco was the only rightist to win anything in the 20th Century and, wildly not coincidentally, Spain was the only European country to be better off after WW2 than before it, perhaps because he had the good sense not to participate in it. Few men are objectively chosen by God to save their people from the most rancid and cartoonish evil imaginable, but our Frank was.

Timur

"Wait, surely not?" you say, in a posh Bri'ish accent, monocle falling from your face in surprise.

Pictured: you.

Sure, the warlord best known for building pyramids out of his enemies'/victims'/anyone's decapitated heads might seem an odd fit for inclusion in a heroes' list, but, as J.R.R.R.R.R.R.R. Tolkien once said, sometimes evil can do good that it does not intend. Around the turn of the 15th Century, Sultan Bayezid I laid siege to the crumbling defences of Constantinople. Bayezid was a repulsive, brutal tyrant and colossal pedophile, so about average for an Ottoman ruler, but he was winning hands-down, until he made the historic error of taxing one of Timur's vassals. Timur was probably the only more powerful ruler in the world at the time and one of history's most brilliant generals, and had a much bigger army, so this was about as wise as Bayezid's habit of sending him insulting letters had been. Timur crushed Bayezid's army and captured him, saving Christendom for another decade, much to his own annoyance upon later reflection, which just makes it funnier.

Some accounts say Bayezid was treated well, but this is somewhat unconvincing because he died less than a year into his captivity. More persuasive and hilarious accounts suggest Timur literally kept him in a cage and cucked him to death by fucking his way through Bayezid's entire harem in front of him until Bayezid got an aneurysm and croaked, whereupon he went straight to hell where the same thing has been happening to him on endless repeat to this very day.

Taylor Root

Random hiker Root was fortunate enough to catch on his GoPro camera his timely rescue of a lady hanging off a cliff, being held only by her daughter, who had one arm. While this sounds like the most made-up shit since Jussie Smollett's 3am MAGA Country ordeal, the footage proves it, unless enough people in the comments post "FAKE AND GAY"*. Root's story prompts us to adopt the Rodin's Thinker pose and contemplate the large degree to which heroism is just being in the right place at the right time. After all, wouldn't you feel kind of awkward if you just kept walking despite the amputee's increasingly desperate pleas for help? I mean I wouldn't, but I'm Pat Bastard. NONETHELESS, Root did the right thing, unless the lady he saved was secretly a big murderer or some shit, which is what I would assume, but I'm Pat Bastard.

Vlad III

The hero we need.

My regulars will know that on this δ╝◙♀ we stan a spooky king, but did you know the historical Dracula was taken as a boy to serve the arch-nonce Mehmet II in his janissary corps, while his brother Radu became the loathsome sultan's personal rape-slave? Frankly, this origin story would have more than justified young Vlad becoming the comic book villain as which he's been immortalised, but instead he returned to the throne of Wallachia with only the most practical, Machiavellian, yet righteous plans in mind to cast off the Ottoman yoke, running an underdog campaign so effective that he could only be undone by the incessant treachery of his fat pig boyars and Matthias Corvinus.

But Vlad's domestic policies were as autismally righteous as his warfare: it is said that his impalement of criminal scumbags was so effective that he could leave a golden cup at a well and no one would dare take it. Another time, a merchant petitioned him to recover goods stolen from him. Vlad tracked down the thieves, mounted them on stakes, then had the merchant count out all the coin he had returned to him. Vlad had slipped an extra coin into the hoard to test the man, who luckily or wisely passed by reporting the extra coin as handed to him in error, at which point Vlad commended him and told him that he would have shared the fate of the initial thieves had he omitted to report the discrepancy. He then spent the rest of his evening drawing Sonic and playing with his train set. Based and wholesome!

Roman von Ungern-Sternberg

It is a little known fact Charles Manson ripped off his stare from my boi right here. 

History has known two great Mongolboos: myself and the good Baron von Ungern-Sternberg. In the 1910s, a lot of people listened to a 5'6" manlet named Lenin who looked like Satan and promised utopia could be achieved by murdering the Tsar and his family and anyone who supported them, springing all the rapists and murderers from prisons and arming them, and then starving to death. Anyone who could read knew this had already been tried in something called the French Revolution, but, fortunately for Satan, noone bothered to read actual history back then either, so the Red faction won, mostly by using terror tactics like picking 100 randos from a village and hanging them to scare the rest into submission, boiling people's hands and peeling the skin off and nailing it to the wall, and having rats eat their way through people's stomachs. Today, very sophisticated people will tell you that these guys were just idealists whose ideas need a little more fine-tuning.

It might well be imagined that anyone who survived this apocalyptic horror would have given in to despair and so ended, but, after much guerrilla-style service doing Jesse James tier train raids, the good Baron found a whole new lease of life fighting the Chinese in Mongolia, where he restored the Bogd Khan and was praised by the local people as a reincarnation of Chinggis Khan himself, from whom he had always very dubiously claimed descent by way of Temujin's grandson, Batu Khan. His supporters eventually got tired of his madladdery and abandoned him to be picked up by Reds, who executed him, but Outer Mongolia remains an independent nation to this day. Like Vlad, horror stories of the Baron's antics told by his seething h8rs proliferate unto the present, but we will always love him for the inspiration he provides: if at first you don't succeed, you can just go to Mongolia and become Khan.

Alfonso VIII of Castile

The face of one who's seen some shit.

The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 is perhaps the most celebrated and pivotal in the long saga of the Reconquista, marking the beginning of an ignominious end for the Almohad invaders. For the king of Castile, it also marked the most glorious redemption arc in all of history. This is on account of Alfonso VIII having fucked up catastrophically and suffered a crushing defeat at Alarcos in 1195. Whereas the Almohad force was formidable, it's Alfonso's rash tactics that tend to carry the blame for the disaster. This is important because human error is inevitable in all walks of life, including where the stakes are highest, and the true test of a man is whether he folds into it's-so-overism or picks himself up off the ground and skullfucks evil with a thousandfold replenished zeal. The Reconquista would take some 280 more years to complete, but the king's redemptive victory was a tipping point from which the occupation forces would never recover. Even with a coalition of the Spanish kingdoms at his back, Alfonso doubted to the last that he could win, but he did what he had to anyway. No matter how badly you've fucked up, walk it off, because the best is yet to come.

*If 10% of the comments on any video read thus, it's legally classified as fake and gay per statute 5318008 of the Bastard Code.

Greatest Vidya of All Time of the Week: Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy!

Theme: Warp Speed Now - Attack

Back when I had time for vidya, it was 2003. Fortunately, that was the year vidya and St*r W*rs peaked with greatest vidya of all time, Star Wars Star Trek Jedi Knight Jedi Academy.

POV: you're arriving at the only table that will let you sit with them, and you're me.

Academy was the third in a series of games featuring Kyle Katarn (?) in the timeline where the heroes of George Lucas's Flash Gordon pastiche actually won instead of the Empire coming back thirty years later with a different name because Jar Jar Abrams' imagination is limited only by the extent of his brilliance, but somehow that's enough. I never read any of the Star Wars Extended Uuuuuuuniverse comics or books because I'd rather eat nails, nor did I play games the first nor second, so IDK who Kyle Katarn is, but by part 3 he's become mentor to your very own custom character. I played as Joseph Merrick in a spooky Bane mask:

He's literally me.

This game gave you the option to pick different powers to develop, but there was no contest: by far the best power was the force choke. If you maxed this out, it let you fling your hapless enemies fifty feet up in the air with a flick of your mouse hand, whence they'd fall to their deaths, screaming piteously. Choking low level goons also made them drop their weapons, which you could then hoover up, rendering them defenceless. Then you could herd them around and bounce on their heads. After beating the game once, I then went back to low-level-goon levels and replayed them this way, making sure not to kill anyone I didn't have to. Then I'd herd them around like the world's most autistic sheepdog. The game never prompted you to do this; I just did it because I'm a retard and I found it funny.

Me phoning this ḃḹȱǥ post the fuck in.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Foxy Shazam!

Theme: Everything Louder Than Everything Else - Meat Loaf

Pre-hash-tag-me-too album art be liek

Cultural appropriation is a good way to make interesting and engaging art, nowhere moreso than in the field of music: blacks culturally appropriated instruments like the guitar, piano, trumpet, saxophone and double bass from whites and used them to make blues, jazz and rock & roll. Whites then reappropriated and improved rock by stripping out the roll, refining it into more potent forms like heavy metal, punk and shoegaze. Mongolians then appropriated metal and combined it with their own traditional instruments and throat singing, and so on.

In a similar way, Foxy Shazam elevated soul music by combining it with emo, which sounds like putting sardines in your ice cream but it actually worked, but not content to mog blacks at their own game, flamboyant frontman Eric Nally also mogged gays by imbuing the resultant concoction with Queen-tier histrionic camp. Lead single "Wannabe Angel" drops the most incongruously unintentionally Gigachad-meme lyric I can recall: "and all you hipsters say I'm gay/Well I'm not gay at all". In fact, Nally even culturally appropriated Freddy Mercury's moustache, to add insult to AIDS. I MEAN-

Don't get me wrong, this band is not based even slightly: one track from their first album, Introducing..., literally features the lyric "I wanna be black", placing them in the same boat as poor Eminem, who found to his embarrassment that he kept outcompeting the black rappers whose shtick he had stolen (yeah, I'm sure there were plenty who were better than him, but not that made it into heavy MTV rotation). Self-h8ing lib entertainers endowed with straight white excellence not quite sure whether they're allowed to cut loose with their egos might not be a common dilemma, but it's given good schadenfreude both times. But if blacks and gays want izzat satisfaction, they can GIT GUD. Whitebois don't crie because Mongols currently rule metaldom; they earned it, and it's up to us to take back the crown anytime we feel like ditching the fedoracore and getting back to trad/true/NWOBHM basics.

So celebrate, don't seethe, as Nally sings "Connect" over a beatboxed backing track and blows away Queen anthems with the likes of "Unstoppable". Their next album reined in the excess and was rubbish, and they never made the big time. I have no idea what became of them since then, and less doubt that they bent the knee to some variety of panopticon-mandated poz in the dreary decades that have followed, but for a shining moment they schooled all their betters on the commie social totem pole, and that, beside the madcap choons themselves, will always make me smile.

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: We're Outta Here!

Theme: R.A.M.O.N.E.S - Ramones ft. Lemmy (the narrator from Tromeo & Juliet)

Actual punks pass righteous judgement on the posersphere.

The first Ramones album I ever heard was the live album of their final show. When I went back and heard their OG studio recordings, they seemed way too slow. This is because the Ramones kept playing faster as they went along, with the result that by the end they less resembled that orangutan trying to hammer nails in that one video you've all seen and more resembled Travis the chimp on the fateful day of his gamer uprising.

This is because Johnny, the reactionary chud who invented the punk guitar style*, also forced the band to wear their signature uniform leather jackets and bent his efforts toward endlessly refining and perfecting the sound now most ripped off in all pop music history. I know it's fashionable to pretend prog was actually gr8 and punk ruined everything, but you're wrong on that, and the posers who immediately co-opted punk are right: two-minute songs that sound like Dennis Hopper wilding on that log with a chainsaw are the Platonic form of rock, and everything good about prog found its correct expression in the metal of Crimson Glory, Queensrÿche and Megadeth.

But as much as the sound saved rock from disappearing up its ass completely, it would never have transcended gimmickry without the songwriting, which is funnier than any imitator to this day. The greatest lyric ever written isn't "Scaramouche, can you do the fandango" (???) or "I'll see you on the dark side of the moon"; it's "now I guess I'll have to tell 'em/that I got no cerebellum" from DDT abuse cautionary tale "Teenage Lobotomy". A thousand monkeys on typewriters would replicate the works of Shakeƒpeare twenty times before they'd write something that good. Likewise, "Cretin Hop" consigns your attempts and mine at political incorrectness to the tryhard penalty box of shame. But it's not just the household-name hits that are on parade here: hardcore dabble "Wart Hog" makes the cut along with "The Crusher" from Dee Dee's epochally bizarre rap album. The most inexplicable choice is to end the set (and their career as a band) with a cover of "Any Way You Want It", but it wouldn't be the Ramones if they didn't throw a questionable curveball at the moment least expected.

It is a testament to their singularity that the most ripped-off band in history's like will somehow simultaneously never be beheld again on Earth. Everyone gets one time-machine gig to attend, and this one would be mine, after I was done giving thalidomide to famous boxers' mothers and planting a rotary telephone in Ötzi the ice man's cave.

*We will entertain no hipster ackshyouwallys of any kind.

Helga: Last of the Amazons? - 1. Titanoboa!

Theme: Für Immer - Warlock

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Broken Arrow!

Theme: Quote Unquote - Mr Bungle

SPOILEUSE!!!

The great where-do-you-want-to-eat-tonight standoff continues.

The greatest and best of the 90s' Big Orange Fireball Explosion movies, Broken Arrow is chiefly notable for its use of doing it right - a long-forgotten cinématic technique where the list of boxes you tick looks like this:

Fun, likable, resourceful hero: ✅

Fun, hammy, but credibly menacing villain: ✅

Likable feminine heroine: ✅

Creative action sequences: ✅

Twists and turns in the action to keep it fresh: ✅

Cool scenery porn: ✅

A bit of humour: ✅

≥4 helicopters blowed up: ✅

John Woo is perhaps second only to James Bond in his inexplicable antipathy toward helicopters.

The plot concerns an average day in the life of John Travolta (The Punisher), whose scheme to hijack a pair of nukes for ransom and/or shits and giggles hits a snag only when his copilot and bro Christian Slater catches wind and tries to stop him, enlisting the aid of adorable park ranger Terry (Samantha Mathis) as he goes, for this kinögraph is set in Utah's Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, because it looks cool.

In the good old days you just had to stand around with your thumb up your ass waiting for kino clouds to form.

When a movie does everything right, it often leaves little to talk about. The most nonsensical component is the contrived ticking clocks that result no less than twice when one of the nukes is armed. Naturally, these give our heroes just enough time to escape and/or disarm them. While the first time can be overlooked because Travolta needs to get away as well, the second time he's planning to die in the blast, so why set it to five minutes instead of five seconds? Fortunately, "to be moar entertaining" is a perfectly good explanation for this character in-story, because his main motivation seems to be to set himself a challenge and have fun.

This is in fact also my motivation.

It's kind of endearing the way Travolta sort of mentors Slater through the runtime, even though they're enemies for most of it. It's like their broship doesn't have to end just because one of them turns out to be a psycho. You get the impression Slater would have visited Travolta in the can had he been taken alive. Every man should have a bro as tight. Also, the movie has a guy get kicked off a railway bridge, which is worth a star in itself.

I hope he's alright.

A Bastardly Guide to How to Draw Good!

Theme: Art Decade - David Bowie

As the debut of Thinking Barbarian followup series Last of the Amazons draws nigh, I figured I might share my TOP TIPS for How to Draw Good when, like your humble blogìste, you don't actually have any talent, but still want to draw cool things like mastodon riders fighting Aztec cavemen, Voodoo bike gangs with tommy guns chasing our heroes through neon-lit streets, and goth girls fighting Baywatch babes in gladiatorial combat, because you're an arrested 12-y/o.

1. Get Some Perspective!

You're supposed to do this every time you draw a simple building.

Perspective is HARD and BORING. Swerve it by setting most of your action in forests and caves, so you can draw irregular shapes instead of buildings. Drawing trees and shit is EASY, but is also BORING, so you can cheat by using photographs for your backgrounds. This leads us nicely to...

2. My Sketchy Background!

If your background is too detailed, noone knows where the fuck to look! Blurring your backgrounds helps direct the reader's eye toward the main event occurring in the foreground, which is where you put your characters.

Then again, like me, you might prefer to use distraction to conceal your comical ineptitude at anatomy.

3. Go Figure!

Most of what you will draw will be the human figure. Like perspective, anatomy is HARD, but unlike perspective, it's also NOT BORING, so I suggest you study anatomy. One way to do this is by dissecting cadavers; these can be found at your local morgue or cemetery. Should this prove too difficult, copy your poses from better artists, which should at least get you in the ballpark, and when hall monitors CATCH you in the ACT, don a beret and call it an "homage". On the other hand:

4. Colour Me Shocked!

Learning basic colour theory takes five seconds: red goes with green, blue goes with orange, purple goes with yellow (but this last one is used pretty seldom). This is because these are opposites on the colour wheel.

In "The Fell Civil War" I had the red and green wizards fight each other and the orange and blue ones fight each other for this very reason. IDK who invented the colour wheel OK but it just works, just trust me on this.

ALSO: don't give one character too much colours; give them two main ones and a third one that's more of a highlight on details of their costume such as belts and straps. Let me expostulate...

5. My Dark Designs!

Besides incorporating colour theory, another rule of thumb I learned for character designs is that you take some visual motif and repeat it in a bunch of places on the character. One character can have two or three of these motifs but they have to be spaced out somewhat intelligently.

Helga has a black widow hourglass motif on her lips and kneepads, sometimes over her eyes, and a square "face" motif on her shoulderpad and shield. She also has the same type of feathers on her shoulderpad and trident. This simple approach creates unity and balance in the character design. Later I switched that random semicircle on her belt for another square face, which works better.

Now you've mastered character design, make like an embalmer and start...

6. Managing de composition!

Advanced composition is HARD, but simple composition that works is as EASY as the rule of thirds and shapes. Place a strong line on each third. You can just do this with the vertical or horizontal thirds or you can do it with both. Having characters with spears, or interiors with pillars, gives you easy things to use for these strong lines. The rule of thirds is such an easy hack for composition that it should be BANNED in competitive drawfaggotry, but is INVALUABLE for bastards like you and me!

Yeah, I eyeballed all my thirds, but it's an art, not a science. The thirds police aren't going to come knocking at your door.

Shapes are another good simple way to do composition good: arrange the components of your mise-en-scène into a triangle, a square or a circle. When you GIT GUD at art, you can combine several shapes more smartly, or so I am told.

Circle.

Square.

Triangle AND circle. Illuminati confirmed!!!

7. Most importantly, have fun!

Because one day you'll die and be forgotten.

8. Outsource to AI!

If you get stuck, remember that learning to draw is a complete waste of time and I only do it because it brings me joy, and if you just want to skip straight to the end point, you can just ask one of many AI programmes to create your picture for you. The Art Community might throw a bitchfit, but who cares what insane people think? For myself, I'm content to draw the old-fashioned way, but more out of quaint Amishness than any pretense toward punkish Luddism. If you want to cheat on your homework by having the smart kid do it for you, knock yourself out. For my full thoughts on the implications of AI technology for mankind, see: it's way too early to tell.

Now you know everything I do and more! Tune in next week for IDK, you decide.