Entertainment
Raunchy, R-Rated Fantasy Comedy Teams Firefly And Game Of Thrones Cast
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Every now and then, you get a movie description that sounds a bit like the setup to a bad joke. For example, let’s say someone tells you the following: “Jason Stackhouse, Frank Heffley, and Tyrion Lannister must team up with River Tam in order to save a bunch of cosplayers from a sexy lady.” You’re waiting for a punchline, right? There’s no punchline, though, because there’s no joke. There’s just Knights of Badassdom, arguably the weirdest and most underrated character actor collaboration of modern film.
This is a movie whose core cast includes Ryan Kwanten (Jason Stackhouse from True Blood), Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones), and Summer Glau (River Tam from Firefly), making Knights of Badassdom the rare collision of fantasy, sci-fi, and gothic horror. The resulting film is a strange brew that gets a bit better with each sip you take. Where else can you find demons, magic, and cosplay? If you just reflexively answered “in my porn search history,” you’re the perfect audience for this naughty, nerdy film now streaming for free on Tubi!
Roll For Initiative
The premise of Knights of Badassdom is that after an aspiring musician gets dumped by his girlfriend, his friends try to cheer him up by dragging him to a LARPing event. This is meant to be a lighthearted weekend of them dressing like medieval warriors and beating the crap out of other people using foam swords. However, when someone reads the wrong incantation, they accidentally cast a spell that summons a real-life succubus. Unless they can stop her, this deadly demon is going to have her own revenge on the nerds, one bloody kill at a time.
If the plot didn’t give you a clue, Knights of Badassdom is not a film that takes itself very seriously. That’s a good thing. By keeping everything light, director Joe Lynch (who would later direct the pitch-perfect horror movie, Mayhem) invites audiences to bask in the surreal spectacle of live-action role players. Everything is undeniably silly, but the LARPers are so unbearably earnest that it’s impossible not to love their increasingly stupid hijinks. Plus, real talk? If you’ve ever LARPed or simply attended a cosplaying event, every cringe character moment will seem far too familiar. Worry not, though, as Lynch’s movie is (almost) always laughing with you and not at you.
Looking For Group
The strongest aspect of Knights of Badassdom is its cast, which is surprisingly stacked for a low-budget, lo-fi horror flick. Ryan Kwanten is our lead actor, and he’s really just doing a variation on his character from True Blood: all heart and no brains. Fortunately, he has breezy, grinning affability that helps him win you over from his very first appearance. Speaking of not playing against type, Steve Zahn leans fully into the familiar role of air-headed chaos agent. However, Peter Dinklage is the film’s real secret weapon. The most popular Game of Thrones actor in a movie filled with swords and sorcery? Talk about a perfect combination!
Dinklage deserves special praise for fully embracing the zaniness of this wacky plot. From the outside looking in, it seemed like the Game of Thrones actor was really slumming it by being in this film. But instead of phoning in his performance, Dinklage brought the full weight of his considerable charisma to every scene. In the hands of lesser actors, Knights of Badassdom would descend into full farce. Dinklage fully commits to the chaos, though, and that helps lend the silly script the earnestness needed for us to really care about these characters.
Bringing The Summer Heat
With that being said, it’s arguably Summer Glau who really holds this movie together. While initially presented as an archetypal prize (the insanely hot super-dork), her character is refreshingly given plenty of agency and constantly steals scenes even better than Dinklage. Filmed about eight years after she dazzled in Firefly and Serenity, Glau was still fully in her niche as the geek next door to genre fans around the world. She’s so good in every scene, and it’s fair to say she is given more to do (as both actor and character) here than she was ever given in the sci-fi show that made her famous.
Knights of Badassdom is a movie that only does a few things, but it does them very well. For example, the cast is small, but that just gives each of our principal performers that much more time to shine. The movie is more intimate than epic, but that helps it achieve a perfectly cozy vibe (i.e., a movie to watch with buddies and beers). The special effects are modest, but that’s okay. The emphasis on practical effects elevates both the humor and the horror, and when we do get fancy effects, they’re usually worth the wait.
For all of its killer casting and awesome ambition, Knights of Badassdom never really landed on most nerds’ radar. That’s a shame because this outwardly goofy movie is doing something very profound: it’s using the actors and tropes of genre storytelling to deconstruct that genre altogether. In a film whose heroes blend the mundane with the magical, this movie challenges audiences to find the call to adventure lurking within every corner of our shopworn, everyday lives. It’s obviously hard to deconstruct nerd culture without offending your target audience, so Knights of Badassdom was always destined to be a roll of the die. Fortunately, this cult classic landed a critical hit.
Care to roll the dice for your evening entertainment? You could do far worse than Knights of Badassdom, a movie featuring the people you see at nerd conventions doing the same thing you do at nerd conventions: dress like a weirdo and geek out with your fellow freaks. The movie is a celebration of its subject matter, and you will never find a more passionate (like, the sloppiest of sloppy kissing passionate) love letter to the entire genre. It’s streaming for free on Tubi, so you’re just one click away from watching an unforgettable fantasy adventure about bros, brotherhood, and battle.
KNIGHTS OF BADASSDOM SCORE
Or, you know, just one click away from staring at Summer Glau for an hour and a half. Either way, it’s the perfect way to spend your evening!
Entertainment
The best Dyson vacuums actually make vacuuming fun: See my favorites for 2026
Read my full review of the Dyson PencilVac.
The Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones takes the small space vacuum to a whole new level. It’s unbelievably slim and lightweight, and seamlessly scoots into tight crevices near furniture that don’t get dusted often enough. If there are certain spots in your home that you avoid cleaning just because it’s too tight of a squeeze, the PencilVac is about to change your life.
“Fluffy” references the ultra-soft material cushioning the four brush rolls, which provide a gloriously glide on hardwood you don’t want to scratch. The PencilVac’s short battery life and limited suction power wouldn’t be ideal in homes with more than just a few rooms or lots of carpeting.
No stick vacuum takes “stick” as literally as the Dyson PencilVac Fluffycones. It doesn’t have a main body with a battery pack, handle, or dustbin like any other traditional cordless vacuum. It’s just a wand and a funky cleaning head with four microfiber cones as brush rolls — the coolest little vacuum that’s truly grab and go.
The whole vacuum can fit just about anywhere, and tight squeezes are even more accessible with a cleaning head that can spin a full 360 degrees. The agile design led me to so many awkward dusty spots that other cordless vacuums can’t comfortably reach: the small chunks of floor between furniture and the wall, between island and bar stool legs, beside the toilet, or under the low-hanging credenza. The PencilVac had commendable hard floor performance in my apartment, offering near-perfect pickup of daily debris like cat hair and long human hair, kitchen crumbs, multiple types of cat litter, and dust.
Oh yeah, the Fluffycones cleaning head has two dust-detecting lasers. One laser projects out the front to point out the hair and tiny flecks lying ahead, and one laser projects out the back to illuminate anything that you just missed. It’s so satisfying that you’ll accidentally end up cleaning for much longer than you meant to, only to be cut off by the pitiful battery life.
With the precision nozzle wand attached, the PencilVac weighs in at just 2.9 pounds. This uniquely compact design makes cleaning cobwebs out of ceiling corners or dusting baseboards so much less of a pain. The wand’s diameter is just 1.5 inches the entire way down, which made it possible to vacuum behind my dresser without pulling it out a foot from the wall.
Entertainment
RAMageddon is making it harder to find the best Windows laptops. These 10 are actually worth it.
I highly recommend the Acer Swift X 14 for creatives who need a Windows laptop with a discrete GPU for running the most demanding sorts of apps. That includes photo and video editors, graphic designers, and animators.
Most professional creatives need a Windows laptop with a dedicated graphics card to handle their intensive workloads. I like the $2,000 Acer Swift X 14 with a top-end Intel Core Ultra 9 285H CPU and RTX 5070 graphics because it’s super powerful, fairly priced, equipped with a glorious OLED screen, and long-lasting, relatively speaking. You can go with a gaming laptop instead, but most aren’t nearly as compact.
This 14-inch desktop replacement is just as fast as an M5 MacBook Pro when it comes to demanding multi-core scenarios (i.e., most creative tasks). In my testing, its RTX 5070 GPU was more than capable of running graphically taxing games like Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100fps at 1080p resolution without the help of any AI upscaling technology, so it’s very well-suited for the likes of Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. (And other AAA games, obviously.)
For what it’s worth, I also tried a $1,700 Acer Swift X 14 AI with an AMD processor and RTX 5060 graphics, and the Intel/RTX 5070 version performed much better. The AMD/RTX 5060 one had 17 percent worse multi-core performance, so it couldn’t compete with the MacBook Pro, and it could barely run Cyberpunk at its 60fps minimum without upscaling tech. It also had a much worse battery life of about 6.5 hours per charge. My go-to RTX 5070 model lasted just over 10 hours, which is fantastic for a laptop with a dedicated GPU.
Note that the Swift X 14 is not a Copilot+ PC, meaning it doesn’t have a super-powerful NPU for running on-device AI tasks. This isn’t a deal-breaker for creatives, but it is for serious machine learning engineers and software developers.
The Swift X 14 comes with plenty of creator-forward ports (like a microSD card slot) as well as a crisp, vivid 120Hz OLED touchscreen. It’s a real attention-getter on an otherwise plain laptop. You can’t draw on it with the included stylus, but you can do so on its haptic trackpad. It functions kind of like a built-in drawing pad.
Entertainment
I tested the top MacBook alternatives: See which Windows PCs actually beat Apple
The 2026 Dell XPS 14 is a stylish investment for aesthetic-forward power users — I’m thinking content creators who might also be occasional gamers. You’re probably wishing the 14-inch MacBook Pro was even sleeker and a little more portable, and you may be getting impatient waiting for Apple’s touchscreen OLED upgrade. You’re definitely open to carrying around dongles.
I tested two configurations of the handsome XPS 14. The one I recommend as the best MacBook Pro alternative is an upper mid-tier model with an Intel Core Ultra X7 358H processor and a dazzling tandem OLED touchscreen (an optional upgrade). It’s no battery life champ, but it keeps pace with the base Pro in multi-core workloads, and its integrated GPU is excellent for demanding creative software and casual gaming.
The XPS 14 is easily one of the most elegant laptops I’ve ever encountered. Dell trimmed down its all-aluminum design for 2026, making it a touch thinner and nearly half a pound lighter than a 14-inch Pro. It’s available in two MacBook-y finishes: graphite and shimmer (coming later this year). Its lattice keyboard takes some adjusting to if you’re used to regular island-style keyboards, but it translates to a modern, minimalist look. Its seamless glass haptic touchpad looks equally clean. Its speakers are above-average for a Windows laptop — they’re just a little more echoey than a MacBook’s.
The XPS 14’s 2.8K OLED display is a $150 upcharge that I can endorse. It’s not as bright or crisp as a MacBook Pro’s Liquid Retina XDR display, but it’s more vibrant and just as smooth. (The standard IPS version is much duller in comparison.) Keep in mind that OLED won’t be a thing on a Mac until late 2026 at the soonest.
The Core Ultra X7 chip is a close rival of Apple’s M5 chip when you work it hard. It doesn’t feel as snappy in single-core scenarios, but trails the current MacBook Pro by only four percent when used for multi-core tasks. (That’s nothing.) What’s more, the Core Ultra X7’s Intel Arc B390 iGPU is comparable to an entry-level discrete graphics card. It’s perfectly capable of running graphically taxing titles like Cyberpunk 2077 with the help of games’ AI upscaling tech.
The XPS 14’s stamina is lacking compared to the M5 MacBook Pro, though it really depends on what you’re using it for. It held out for 10 hours and 19 minutes in our video rundown test, which is a full workday at least, but not great. (Its Apple counterpart ran for over 21 hours in the same test.) That said, its 120Hz OLED display dips down to just 20Hz when you’re viewing static content, so it should last much longer when it’s not looping a video.
If you want an XPS 14 with MacBook-beating battery life in almost any scenario, look into the $1,999.99 base model with a Core Ultra 5 325 chip. It lasted 22 hours on the dot in our video rundown test, and its refresh rate can drop to a mere 1Hz for static content. Just know that you’ll sacrifice a good chunk of power: It offers 35 percent worse multi-core performance than the Core Ultra X7 version. Speed-wise, it’s most akin to an M2 MacBook Air from 2022. (The cheaper Dell 14S with the Core Ultra 7 355 chip performs slightly better and lasts even longer, FWIW.)
With trade deadline approaching, Hunter Goodman and Rockies take on Royals
Trade talk circling as Tigers open series vs. Athletics
