I do enjoy listening to classical music, and I do enjoy watching attractive women perform in a way that makes it easy to imagine sexual access to them, and I’m actually a little surprised how poorly those tastes went together.
That Neil Patrick Harris coming out as a gay Broadway-lover would help his career reinvention as an onscreen avatar of hyper-heteromasculinity is kind of weird, but then “taking artifice to 11” has a long tradition at the intersection of gay and performance arts
That George Takei debuting an offscreen personality as “gay memejoker” would help land him a bunch of Serious Patrician roles is even more weird, but I guess the guy knew how to read the zeitgeist
That Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen would use their existing recognition in Serious Patrician roles to launch an offscreen brand as a mixed-sexuality pair of South Beach queens is just… well, helllllo, postmodernity
Things I did not expect before I came to the PNW - a lot of people from Spokane identify as more Canadian than American
Most and least remembered US states
atrubetskoy:
This map shows which states are the hardest and easiest to remember, according to Sporcle, as of 14 April 2014.
Table here.
Qin Shi Huang was obsessed with immortality and his death may have been hastened by the concoctions his alchemists made him that had lots of mercury in them (in fact a lot of Chinese emperors got offed this way) and you know sometimes i think the taoists knew exactly what they were doing when they wrote that a concoction of arsenic, mercury, and gold would make the drinker immortal
It’s Easter, let’s talk Scientology.
So, one thing you should first understand is that historically, Southern California is the second-richest wellspring of new religious enthusiasm in America, after the “Burned-Over District” of Western New York. Other prominent religious movements to come out of LA include Pentecostalism and the Foursquare Church, and there’s a ton less famous.
If you loosen up your definition of religion, throw out the requirement of a cosmological mythology (and Scientology’s cosmological mythology was kind of an afterthought), and accept things that present as philosophies or best practices for life, you can add in stuff like Objectivism.
The second thing it’s worth understanding is that when it started out Scientology was more of a theory and praxis of mind than a religion. The… okay, wait, that’s maybe the third thing.
The second thing it’s worth understanding is that the founder of Scientology, pulp author L. Ron Hubbard, was part of the Los Angeles literary scene. Yes, LA had a literary scene, and yes, it was pulp authors and screenwriters, because obviously. This being before the internet, they had salons and cocktail parties, ideas passed around and people trying to top each other. Raymond Chandler used to be part of this scene.
Yes, this is kind of ridiculous, yes, now is your time to bring out the (accurate) line about how no one reads in LA (though they do have a very good book fair). But those hack writers managed to create Scientology and Objectivism and and a bunch of good movies, which is at least on a level with the rival and ~better accredited~ New York novelists and critics of the time who gave us neoconservatism (by way of Trotskyism + Zionism + resentment of uppity Negroes), a bunch of boring books about academic politics and adultery, and a bunch of little magazines with an increasingly tedious Holocaust obsession. Meanwhile you, reader, have given us jack shit so show some respect.
Anyway, back in the ‘50s some of the bigger hobbyhorses on this scene were Freudian psychology and Huxleyite psychedelic mysticism. The ‘50s LA intelligentsia was basically the first place LSD came into regular use, which actually explains a *lot* of things.
(Ayn Rand, who had been a screenwriter, was more oriented towards the more practical drug vogue of the time, amphetamines, which accounts both for her disinterest in mystical nature-of-reality-and-consciousness stuff and for the thousand-page books with hundred-page speeches about how everyone else in the world should just shut the fuck up and defer completely to your obvious innate superiority.)
Okay so that brings us to the third thing it’s worth understanding, that when it started out it was more a theory and praxis of mind than a religion. That it was conceived towards the same end as Freudian analysis - a method to enable people to overcome internal limitations and achieve full potential - but in opposition to its premises and methods. The funny thing is that if Hubbard thought “I’ve got a better way of doing psychology”, most modern psychologists would agree with him. You hear stories about Scientology practices that involve a mentor identifying trauma in their mentee and directing them “Focus on a thing. Touch a thing. Repeat. For hours.” as a way to overcome it?
Haha what bunk right? Except that’s basically cognitive behavioral therapy, which since then has almost completely eclipsed analysis as the standard practice of mainstream psychology, because it has a track record of producing results. It works by basically exploiting bugs in human mental processing
(Actually maybe I shouldn’t wander too far into the programming metaphor, under the frame of cybernetics that was actually an active and competing (Northern) Californian theory/praxis of mind - Lily’s “human biocomputer” model, Leary’s 8-circuit model. Basically, later on Silicon Valley techies also decided to drop acid and investigate the nature of human consciousness, with programming rather than psychiatry as their lexifier. A lot of stuff that today seems aligned with “hard science” materialist atheism - stuff like artificial intelligence, SETI, transhumanism - used to be linked with this ‘70s technomysticism, with the ’80s-‘90s Mondo 2000/WIRED/Web 1.0 cyberpunk technoshamanism as the intermediate link.)
And the “thetan” thing, well, I’ll get into mentioning the mythology, but the concept - that “you” are not actually an integrated whole, the coherency of your sense of self is actually a narrative wrapper around a set of scattered drives and aversions that are only in coincidental proximity if not active tension - well, in addition to bearing some similarities to the Freudian id/ego/superego model, I mean, if you’ve never done psychedelic drugs, well. I’ve tripped out for maybe 50 hours in my life, spent maybe 10 minutes dealing with visual hallucinations, and the rest of it was just grappling with this realization and trying to figure out what to do with it.
Deconstruction and continental literary postmodernism also incorporates a lot of psychedelic insight. It’s very true what they say, that most avant-garde stuff from the ‘60s and ‘70s makes a lot more sense if you’ve ever used psychedelics, and that gets treated as a knock on said avant-garde stuff when it’s really a strong argument for the psychedelic experience.
This - psychology as the core of Scientology - is why the biggest bete noire of Scientologists is psychiatry, because Freudian analysis having fallen, it’s mental pharmacology, not, say, Christianity, that’s their real major rival.
Okay that’s a treatment of Scientology as an ideology. As an institution - well, people say it’s a cult and obviously they’re right. “Cult” is the infant stage of religion, a bunch of people gathering around and giving control of their lives over to a charismatic figure with radical new teachings. The Twelve Apostles were a cult. As Hubbard’s following grew, I mean, he liked it. Who wouldn’t. And as it grew past Dunbar’s number he realized he had to create some sort of structure, and so he kind of slapped one together ad-hoc. Dude was in fact a science fiction author and the whole worldbuilding aspect of “what are some plausible alternate social structures humans could arrange themselves in” was something he’d spent time thinking about, and reading other people’s ideas, but in a pinch he drew heavily on the one top-down functional hierarchy he’d had extensive personal experience with - the U.S. Navy. Which is why the ecclesiarchy is called “Sea Org” and wears uniforms rather than robes.
And then, as it goes with cults, the founder dies and maybe a charismatic successor can step in, and that chain can go for a while if the successors are competent enough, but if the cult survives it eventually switches its power source from personal charisma for institutional charisma and settles as a stable(ish) church. From what I hear, people are realizing the current head figure Miscavige is kind of an incompetent jackass and trying to figure out how to edge him out or route around him or practice Scientology outside of the structures he dominates, so I’d say we’re in that process now.
Now finally the mythology - Xenu and the volcano and all that - is dumb. I’m not going to pretend it’s not dumb. It’s batshit stupid. It was kind of an afterthought - like I said, Scientology is first of all a theory and practice of mind, and the cosmology is exactly what it looks like - a halfassed effort by a SF hack made to make the whole thing more closely fit the expectation of what a religion looks like, mostly so it could claim the tax exemption and general shielding from government oversight traditionally granted to American religions. And it worked well enough I guess, backed up with an admirable dedication to lawfare on behalf of the Scientologists that basically made it not worth the effort for the government to deny them.
(The legal system likes to put on airs of majesty and absolutism and meaning, but anyone who’s been in contact with it long enough realizes its just an organization of finite resources and internal politics same as anything else, and like feudal succession crises you need a plausible enough claim to legitimate a campaign, but past that success really comes down to how much resources each side is willing to spend.)
Scientologists as individuals - not lying they can be a little weird, though I think a lot of that is that converts to any religion are a little off-puttingly intense, and as a young religion that puts a lot of energy into recruitment (also like the law, evangelism likes to pretend that it’s a matter of having a more correct understanding but in practice mostly comes down to how much time and money and effort you’re willing to put into it), they’ve got a pretty high share of first-generation converts in their ranks. In LA I knew a few Scientologists who were born into the church, and they were actually some of the chillest bros I’ve ever met.
Wait, Death Proof was totally Tarantino proving he could merge the ‘70s genres of rape-revenge and car chase movies, wasn’t it?
So I suppose in some history of our era, it will be written - correctly - that we were the generation that first convinced itself that Batman was important.
I myself think that Batman is the flip side of Santa Claus, who - as I’ve said - in turn is the modern vision of the Christian God.
The lineage follows that in the age of desert nomadism, God was a force that created water and food in the desert and rearranged inconvenient geography - mountains, seas; that in the age of early settlement and tribal war he demanded ethnic solidarity, granting in return victory in war; that in the era where settled tribes were subsumed into Mediterranean empire, he was a fisherman/shepherd who unified mankind and ended war; that in the era of courtly feudalism he was at the head of heirarchies of angels, saints rewarded with face time to press their clients’ claims; and so obviously in the age of bourgeois democracy he’s an industrialist who rewards socially approved behavior with consumer goods and punishes its opposite with violence.
Went to Vancouver for the first time. This about sums it up.
I myself think that Batman is the flip side of Santa Claus, who - as I’ve said - in turn is the modern vision of the Christian God.
The lineage follows that in the age of desert nomadism, God was a force that created water and food in the desert and rearranged inconvenient geography - mountains, seas; that in the age of early settlement and tribal war he demanded ethnic solidarity, granting in return victory in war; that in the era where settled tribes were subsumed into Mediterranean empire, he was a fisherman/shepherd who unified mankind and ended war; that in the era of courtly feudalism he was at the head of heirarchies of angels, saints rewarded with face time to press their clients’ claims; and so obviously in the age of bourgeois democracy he’s an industrialist who rewards socially approved behavior with consumer goods and punishes its opposite with violence.
“Santa Claus is a god. He’s no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn’t ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially-garbed priests in all the department stores. And don’t gods reflect their creators’ society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption?”
—From “Nackles”, by Donald Westlake
The city of San Antonio could rule the post-collapse world (or at least Texas) if it isn’t nuked because we have 4 military bases and a huge reservoir of water but the city council keeps letting these fucking real estate developers to build gated communities were everybody has green lawns like we haven’t been in a drought for years
I went to San Antonio once because every few years me and my parents fly out from different coasts to go on a vacation together and my dad literally only knows how to book vacations to golf destinations, previous vacations included “the boring island of the Bahamas” and “the boring island of Hawaii”
Riverwalk was okay, the Alamo was ironically not very memorable
we were at some fancy hotel complex out maybe near Six Flags? there were villas with golf carts, me and my mom both got massages that were the best we’ve ever had in our whole lives, I was literally stumbling around unable to do basic arithmetic for the rest of the day
I was sitting in one of the outdoor hot tub grottos, that was marked as being for adults, I thought “huh, this is Air Force country, isn’t it. that means this hot tub has definitely been used for swingers’ retreats, hasn’t it?”
we went to a barbeque place someone had recommended and it was pretty good, but it was at an intersection with signs at each fork pointing towards different bases and a honky-tonk across the street, and clearly made its name on feeding a lot of drunk young enlistees quickly
So in response to some of my recent posts, people have pointed me towards two really good stories that I want to share onwards.
First, in response to my musing on Santa Claus/Batman as the modern good/bad dual gods, pureamericanism pointed me to Nackles: A Christmas Story, which is a 1964 piece specifically about Santa Claus and a dark counterpart as modern gods, it’s always a mixed bag of glee and frustration to see someone’s already taken up your brilliant idea years before you were born.
Second, in response to my Scientology backgrounder, bloodandhedonism pointed me to The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga, an alternate history tale of Ayn Rand being inspired by L. Ron Hubbard to found a country in the Congo as Belgian rule collapses. If you don’t know much about Rand or the decolonization of Africa don’t worry, it’s written well enough that you’ll pick up most of what you need, and it was written piece by piece on a message board with inline commentary from the author and readers that’ll fill in the rest, in a manner that reminds me of the old Shadowrun sourcebooks.
Man, the Shadowrun sourcebooks were absolutely great. The system itself was kind of a mess - they used tons of D6s for everything, on I think the business principle that before the rise of gaming-specific stores in the ‘90s obscure dice would be hard for entry-level players to find but books could be gotten from bookstores and D6s from board games or anywhere. This made rolling anything a mess, and also contributed to a system where there was very little range separating a miss and a catastrophic hit. Also between decking, vehicle rigging, and astral plane stuff you too often got into a situation in which only one character could meaningfully participate.
But the sourcebooks! They were written as BBS posts interspersed with comments from a recurring gang of regulars, and the worldbuilding was great. Some of the best books didn’t even add any game mechanics but just explored the dynamics of the world - Corporate Shadowfiles was an incredibly readable introduction to corporate finance, and Dunkelzahn’s Will, which was, well, a will and testament that was basically a long list of adventure hooks, rivals it as my favorite RPG book ever.
I love stuff like that. I think the L5R RPG - also a great world, and with a better system, open-ended D10, skill/attribute::roll/keep, though I don’t know if they ever got dueling to work in a way that made sense - did some good stuff like that too. The Merchant’s Guide to Rokugan, which turned out to be an unnanounced book about the conspiratorial Kolat, for one, though that was in the period after the Clan War when the worldbuilding was sort of stumbling around in the dark tripping over its own feet for a few years.
vehicular “plunge” stories as minor asides is a long-running journalistic in-joke.
cinnamyn tile
feel it on ur toes
teak teak bench
feel it on ur crutch
this is the path to eternity
this is the path to eternity
this is the path to eternity
this is the path to eternity
So as far as -punks go we’ve got steam, (mana,) diesel, atom, cyber, what’s the version riffing off of today?
I nominate “dronepunk”.
