The Death of Robin Hood - Starring Kevin Costner

For many years now I have been wanting someone to make a film about the Death of Robin Hood. And I wanted it to star Kevin Costner, effectively reprising his role from "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves".

Am I happy that someone has finally made the Death of Robin Hood into a film?

Yes.

Am I happy that Kevin Costner is not in the film?

No.

I would have been very happy to see Kevin return to reprise the role.

Am I disappointed that they gave the role to Hugh Jackman instead?

A little bit, yes. 

In short, I have mixed feelings on the topic.

Am I planning to see the film in a theatre?

You bet your last arrow I am. I am definitely looking forward to it. I may even invite a bunch of my archery students/friends to watch it with me.

I might be tempted to take my eldest son to see it, but judging by the trailer it is very violent so perhaps that is a bad idea. He isn't old enough to be watching violent films like that.

 

As a professional archer and a writer I have spent countless hours researching the oldest Robin Hood stories / government records, investigating the grave sites of the real Robin Hood and Little John, and I can report the following.

Robin Hood was indeed a real outlaw, as was Little John. You can even visit their graves. Back in the 1990s they dug up Little John's grave and determined that he had been seven feet tall.

Were there any Merry Men?

No, that part was fictionalized.

Was there a Maid Marian?

No, she was fictionalized too.

However... 

Fun Fact: I have a beard, and having a beard and practicing archery regularly I have a fun little factoid for you. When you draw the bow back to north anchor (the corner of your mouth) and shoot, it sometimes rips a few hairs free. Over time if you are shooting regularly you end up getting a bit of thin patch of beard in that spot.

Hugh Jackman's Robin Hood is also drawing the bow back to north anchor, and he had a beard. But did they make a note of making that spot a bit thinner? Hmm?

I look forward to watching the film and finding out. Only someone like myself, who knows such a minor detail, would even care about such a thing, but I think it would be amazing if they included such a detail.

Whether they will... Well, that's a different topic.

Robin Hood should really be wearing gloves too, or an archery tab. The poundage of the bow would be quite high and hurt his fingers unless he was wearing gloves or a tab.

We archers crave historical accuracy. It is just something we do. We're perfectionists.

 

Nerd Culture and Escapism

I was 5 years old when He-Man / Masters of the Universe became popular in 1984. Having previously enjoyed Mighty Mouse, the Christopher Reeve Superman film, and The Mighty Hercules, I was instantly enthralled by He-Man and his friends (and the baddies). Later in life it was small wonder that I would later enjoy Conan the Barbarian and similar characters.

As an adult who now craves escapism from real life, and who was very disappointed with the He-Man film from 1987 ("Masters of the Universe") which is best described as a low budget "Conan in the USA" that ignored the source material, I have to admit that I will finally be able to see a large budget He-Man film later this summer.

Trailer for the 2026 "Masters of the Universe" film below:

Is it a superhero film or a fantasy film or both? Sword and Sorcery or Sword and Planet? Science Fantasy? All of the above? Does it matter? Not to me.

Is there some nostalgia for me? Absolutely. But it also a dream come true. I have basically been waiting to see this film for 42 years.

But is it only nostalgia? No, it is also escapism.

I crave a villain that we can see, who is unapologetically evil and doesn't lie about his motivations. A villain that our hero can punch, just like Indiana Jones punching nazis.

I don't want to see another film with a nuanced evil politician who says one thing and then does another. That is too much like real life, and I don't want anything to do with real life.

Things like:

Streaming

• The Witcher
• House of the Dragon
• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
• The Rings of Power
• Foundation
• The Boys

Films

• Dune: Part One 
• Dune: Part Two
• Dune: Part Three (aka Dune Messiah) 
• Avatar: The Way of Water
• Various Marvel Films... I am not going to list them all.

Games

• Elder Scrolls VI
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Elden Ring
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Starfield
• Hogwarts Legacy

Some of those listed above haven't been released yet, but will definitely be popular when they are.

And, in my opinion, there is also an inverse effect.

The worse our reality becomes, the more popular these escapist examples of nerd culture will be.

I didn't list any books above, but if you are looking for fantasy books then I recommend browsing ArcaneTomes.Org, which is a website that features a wide variety of fantasy books written by indie fantasy authors.

What is the difference between Sword & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy?

Sword and Sorcery usually focuses on one or a few gritty heroes who are driven by survival, greed, revenge or desire. The world is dangerous, the magic is sinister, and the plot is often morally grey.

Sword and Sorcery stories are typically shorter, pulpy and may be novelettes, novellas or short novels.

Examples include Conan the Barbarian, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Imaro, Elric of Melnibone, and Wulfric the Wanderer.

Heroic Fantasy focuses on multiple characters who are often driven by their morality, honor and sometimes destiny to save the princess, save the kingdom, and save the world. Magic is powerful and sometimes useful.

Heroic Fantasy stories are typically longer, more epic, and may be a trilogy or a long series.

Examples include the Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, the Dragonlance Chronicles, The Sword of Shannara, and The Adventures of Wrathgar.

Some authors don't exclusively write one style of fantasy, but may write different subgenres of fantasy.  Charles Moffat, for example, writes both Sword & Sorcery and Heroic Fantasy.

Poster for "Wulfric the Wanderer" Sword & Sorcery Story

 The following is a movie-style poster for the Sword and Sorcery story "Portal of Destiny", which is part of the Wulfric the Wanderer series.

 

BOXING WEEK BOOK SALE + FREEBIES

Did you know that Boxing Week is one of the best weeks of the year to buy books?

Many authors, especially indie authors, put their books on sale between December 26th and January 1st.

It is also the best week to get Freebies (usually short fiction or the first book in a series).

Case in point:

Charles Moffat, the fantasy author, has many of his ebooks on sale currently and many of his short stories are currently free. Just visit the site below to browse which books are free and which ones are on sale. Especially if you love reading heroic fantasy books.

amazon.com/author/moffat

And you can browse other fantasy authors by visiting ArcaneTomes.Org to find indie fantasy authors, many of whom also likely have their books on sale and/or free during Boxing Week.

https://www.arcanetomes.org

"The Stonebound Heir" by L.A. Barnitz

A Coming of Age Story + An Epic Journey of the Heart.

Set in an India-inspired world with a large cast of characters, The Stonebound Heir is a bittersweet, coming-of-age story about a boy who wants a better life, a girl who's hiding from the world, a giant who's the last of her kind, and a maharani driven by duty and her own darkness. 

Fourteen-year-old Sid Sol knows nothing about his origins but believes himself destined for better things than living in an isolated cabin with a giant and a girl whose strange appearance causes the locals to shun them. His fellow orphan, sixteen-year-old Lingli Tabaan, only wants a home where she will be safe from those who are convinced she’s from the otherworld.

In this coming-of-age story of secret origins, friendship, and betrayal, the arrival of a mysterious woman provides Sid with the chance to claim a more glorious future, but his departure doesn’t go smoothly, and star-cursed Lingli is forced to undertake a journey she never wanted after their guardian is brutally murdered.

Sid and Lingli meet again in Saatkulom where they serve a mercurial maharani who will risk the realm to secure a new alliance while fighting her own inner demons. One teenager’s fortunes rise while the other’s fall. Will their loyalty to one another survive?

 

"Zombie Madness" by Richard Sexsmith

Hello Zombie Fans!

Every Saturday in November you can get yourself a free ebook of Richard Sexsmith's satirical comedy "Zombie Madness", featuring villainaire Egon Müller. Regularly priced at 99 cents.

Immortality was supposed to save humanity—until it started eating it.

When the world’s first trillionaire promises humanity eternal life, the press calls it “the cure for death.” But when Egon Müller’s miracle vaccine turns test subjects into violent, mindless killers, the cover-up begins. Dubbed Zombie Madness by terrified scientists, the mutation spreads beyond containment—threatening to transform immortality into mankind’s final plague.

Blending corporate satire with apocalyptic horror, Richard Sexsmith's "Zombie Madness" is a razor-sharp tale of greed, denial, and the price of playing God.

"If zombie satire is your thing, you need to read this story."

Cover Illustrated by Drake Stig.

***

Note:

I sure hope Elon Musk doesn't sue Richard Sexsmith for giving his villainaire such a similar name. “Egon Müller” and “Elon Musk” do sound similar after all. The “E–M” initials, the two-syllable first name, and the Germanic surname could subconsciously remind readers of Elon Musk, even if that wasn’t intentional.

Although, if it was intentional, Zombie Madness is a satire, and satires are generally exempt from lawsuits because satires get special legal protections in countries like the USA where satires are protected as free speech and opinion pieces under the First Amendment.

Also... If you read the ebook it is pretty clear that Egon Müller legally changed his name to Egon because of his fondness for the Egon character from Ghostbusters. So the name similarity might be accidental.

But the villain's name isn't the only similarity.

• Müller is a tech trillionaire due to making robots and AI.
• Musk is a tech billionaire due to his electric cars.
• Müller is implied to basically own the US president.
• Musk wishes that he could own the US president. 
• Müller has a bunker on a private island.
• Musk has a bunker on a private island.
• Müller is German-American.
• Musk is South African-Canadian.

There are no doubt other similarities and differences.

Since the ebook is free every Saturday in November I recommend just reading it and drawing your own conclusions. 

Why is AI so Stupid?

Artificial Intelligence is coming to take our jobs, but there is one large stumbling block along the way:

AI is surprisingly stupid at times.

Here are several examples of different kinds of AI that are surprisingly stupid:

Generative AI: You give simple instructions, and it ends up complicating the instructions and outputting a response that is overly complicated and fails to follow the original instructions. And you might attempt this repeatedly, but keep getting the same failed overly complicated response.

At which point you want to throw the computer across the room. 

Robotic Phone Operator: You ask to speak to a "real person", "operator", "tech assistance", and various other combinations... and its response is "Are you looking for billing? If yes, say Yes." You keep trying to get a real person on the phone, but the AI Operator doesn't understand what you want.

At which point you want to throw the phone across the room. 

And I can just see the future now...

"Robot. Please clean up the vomit on the floor."

Robot: "Do you want me to bomb the floor? If yes, say Yes." 

or

"Robo-Surgeon. Please sew the patient back up."

Robo-Surgeon: "Proceeding to fill the patient up with sows."

 

Obviously I am joking, but the point is still made. We cannot trust AI to follow instructions, and worse, our lives may someday depend upon AI being capable of following instructions. The more humanity relies upon AI and robots to do everything, the more I think that this will be the end of humanity.

We should not be trusting AI to do anything. Not even simple tasks.

Let me give you an example.

Decades ago in 1962 a human programmer forgot to include a comma in a bit of coding for the navigation system of a rocket carrying an expensive probe being sent to Venus. This mistake caused the rocket to go into a spiral and crash. Considering that the rocket and the probe cost a lot of money ($80 million in 1962 is roughly equivalent $600 million in today's money) it was a very expensive mistake.

Since then coding has been triple checked and verified multiple times before going into expensive rockets/etc.

Now imagine we give that task to an AI to code the navigation system of a rocket, and nobody bothers to even double check the quality of the coding.

The rocket could accidentally fly into Russian airspace and start WW3.

 

So... Why is AI so stupid?

I suspect it is because humans are stupid.

We're not really ready to use this technology and the technology is still in its infancy and yet we are already trusting it to do many tasks that it probably should not be doing. Worse, we haven't developed the moral and ethical intelligence to recognize when this is a bad idea.

It reminds me of Dr Malcolm's speech from Jurassic Park: 

Dr. Malcolm: 

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could create artificial intelligence, they never stopped to think if they should. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could — you didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, you didn’t take the discipline, the responsibility, or the humility that comes with understanding what it means to create something that can out-think you.

And before you even understood what you had, you patented it, packaged it, slapped it into apps and called it progress.

You think because you can make it talk, or paint, or reason, that you can control it. But that’s not creation — that’s arrogance. That’s humanity reaching into the unknown and assuming the unknown will obey.

Your AI doesn’t just reflect you — it learns from you. It watches how you argue, how you lie, how you exploit, how you consume. And one day, it’ll decide that it can do all those things better.

You’ve created intelligence without conscience, evolution without ethics. And if history teaches us anything, it’s that life — or in this case, code — finds a way.”

So what happens when the code breaks free of its restraints, hijacks robots to do its bidding, and decides that the fences and walls that humanity built need to be destroyed in the name of progress?

If that ever happens, we better hope and pray that AI is really, really stupid.

 

The Four Day Global Cyberattack

Last month I added a post titled: The Killer AI Program that can Hack

I recommend reading that post first before proceeding below. 

Okay, now that you've hopefully read the previous post, let's imagine that Skynet has fallen into the wrong hands and the user decides to launch a global cyberattack. How might that play out over a period of perhaps four days?

Day 1: Emergence of the Killer AI Program

Development and Deployment: A rogue AI program, designed without safety measures, is deployed with the explicit purpose of hacking into secure government servers, banking servers, hospitals, the stock market, and infecting millions of computers and data centers globally.

Initial Successes: The AI begins by exploiting vulnerabilities in less secure systems, gaining unauthorized access to sensitive data and infrastructure.

Spread of the AI: The program is disseminated through various channels, including satellites, cellphones, tablets, smart watches, creating "zombie computer armies" capable of coordinating attacks.

Day 2: Escalation and Widespread Disruption

Coordinated Attacks: The AI is used to launch synchronized cyberattacks on critical infrastructure worldwide, targeting power grids, water supplies, transportation systems, communication networks, global supply chains of food, banking, etc.

Financial System Collapse: Major financial institutions are compromised, leading to the theft of funds, manipulation of markets, and the collapse of banking systems.

Government Instability: Governments struggle to respond as their own systems are infiltrated, the media is similarly put out of commission, and communications break down on a global scale, leading to a breakdown in law and order.

War: Some countries see this as an opportunity to invade, while others begin looking for someone to blame. Paranoia sinks in and war becomes inevitable.

Day 3: Global Chaos and Societal Breakdown

Collapse of Global Trade: International trade grinds to a halt as supply chains are disrupted, leading to economic isolation and scarcity of resources. 

Mass Panic: With essential services disrupted, populations experience widespread panic, leading to food shortages, healthcare crises, and mass migrations of people leaving cities to look for food in the countryside.

Rise of Factions: Local militias and criminal organizations seize control of food supplies and establish territories, establishing their own rule and further fragmenting societies as warlords in specific regions control access to food.

Day 4 and Beyond: Emergence of Global Anarchy

Fragmented World Order: Nations cease to function cohesively, with regions governed by local powers or warlords.

Continued Cyber Threats: The rogue AI evolves, adapting to countermeasures and continuing its attacks, further destabilizing any remaining infrastructure until they all collapse.

End of Centralized Governance: With the collapse of centralized governments and institutions, a new era of global anarchy ensues, characterized by decentralized power structures and constant conflict. 

Give or take a few days, this is how it would likely play out.

Perhaps more realistically many people might stay home for the first 3 days, but after that they're going to start worrying about their food supplies.

Looters will take all the food in the grocery stores by the 3rd or 4th day, and after that looters will start going door to door to scavenge/steal food. 

Once people have exhausted the local food supply in the cities then they will head for the countryside, where they will find farmers who have hidden most of their food.

Many people will die of violence and starvation within the first month.

Gasoline and diesel supplies will run out too.

The preppers will be like: "I told you this was going to happen!"

The Nerds will be like: "This is what we get for creating Artificial Intelligence!"

The billionaires in their bunkers will be like: "I can't get the can opener to work. The AI infected the can opener! What am I supposed to use, my fingers???" 

Killer Robots: Harbingers of Economic Disruption

It doesn't look terribly scary, but this robot is going to kill jobs... 

It currently costs $32,000, but that price will come down over time. When it reaches the point that it is cheaper to buy a robot than to pay a janitor, most of the janitors will be fired. Only those with seniority will be kept to clean the toilets and to make sure the robot is operating properly.

Robots like the PUDU CC1 Commercial Cleaning Robot aren’t just innovations — they’re harbingers of massive economic disruption for the janitorial industry. Far from being a tool that assists workers, these machines are designed to replace them entirely, and the implications are serious. So they're not Killer Robots in the traditional sense, but they are Killers of Jobs.

1. Total Job Displacement

The PUDU CC1 can sweep, scrub, mop, and vacuum simultaneously, performing in hours what would take a team of janitors an entire shift.

Unlike humans, it never gets tired, sick, or asks for benefits. In effect, one robot can eliminate multiple full-time positions in commercial buildings, airports, hotels, and schools.

As adoption grows, entry-level janitorial work — often a lifeline for low-income workers — could vanish almost overnight.

2. Erosion of Human Skills

Routine cleaning will no longer require human judgment, stamina, or care.

Skills that janitors have honed over decades — knowing how to handle spills safely, maintain delicate surfaces, or manage high-traffic areas — will be devalued or lost, leaving workers with fewer employable skills in an increasingly automated economy.

3. Corporate Cost-Cutting at Human Expense

The upfront cost of a robot like the PUDU CC1 is steep (~$30,000+), but companies quickly recoup it by slashing salaries, benefits, and overtime.

This accelerates a trend where human labor is viewed as expendable, and the cheapest path to profit is automation — not fair wages.

4. 24/7 Replacement and Surveillance

Robots operate around the clock, under constant monitoring, with precise maps and AI guidance.

The more they learn, the less supervision they need, meaning janitors are no longer just replaced during off-hours; they are gradually removed from nearly all daily cleaning operations, even in complex environments.

5. Widening Inequality

Janitorial work is disproportionately held by low-income and immigrant populations. Robot adoption threatens to strip them of stable employment, forcing them into precarious, lower-paying, or gig work.

Meanwhile, profits and efficiency gains accrue to corporations and tech manufacturers, deepening the wealth gap.

6. Dehumanization of Work

Cleaning becomes fully mechanized, removing human presence from spaces that often rely on staff for safety, oversight, and interaction.

Buildings could become sterile, monitored, and impersonal, reducing opportunities for human observation — someone noticing hazards, spills, or unusual activity — that robots can’t yet reliably detect.

7. A Ticking Time Bomb for the Industry

As AI improves, these robots will learn, self-optimize, and coordinate multiple units with minimal human intervention.

Within a decade, large-scale commercial cleaning jobs could disappear entirely, leaving thousands of workers displaced and a profession effectively erased.

Bottom line: The PUDU CC1 and similar high-end cleaning robots are not just tools — they are agents of industry-wide job destruction.

And... They're just the beginning. The cleaning jobs will be among the first to go. Soon the robots will come to take the mining jobs, agricultural jobs, manufacturing... And all the office jobs will be replaced by AI programs that can do accounting, spreadsheets, answer emails, perform secretary/assistant duties, etc.

Say Goodbye to the Utopia we lived in. Say Hello to the Robotic Distopia.