You know, I think a lot of modern internet culture war shit goes back to the ‘60s-‘70s (counter)cultural refoundation that both sides claim lineage from. ‘cause there’s a sense it was sold as something for everyone - women, racial, and gender/sexual minorities would get their civil rights and inclusionary movements recognized, in return straight white guys got the consensus that Cool People agree: sexualization is Correct, being offended is Incorrect. And there’s a growing sense (from all sides) that the terms have not been upheld.
Sad Puppies and the Hugos. Because that’s what we’re talking about now, apparently.
Both sides claim to be the true heirs of SFF. The antis sniff that it’s obviously them because the genre has always been committed to a progressive vision, especially starting with the ‘60s-'70s and the New Wave.
And that’s not wrong, but there’s a lot of stuff under that aegis. You have Left Hand of Darkness, with LeGuin all “gender fluidity would be great; we could experience our true selves independent of mutilatory social structures, and it would give rise to meaningful new cultural practices oriented around the beauty of self-discovery and self-crafting”.
And then there’s Varley’s Eight Worlds, which is like “Just imagine, if perfect sex changes were consumer services like haircuts, you could experience banging-hot hetero sex from both sides!”
Or Marion Zimmer Bradley all “adding strong female characters to fantasy allows us to escape tedious military epics towards an exploration of the importance of emotional labor, correctly identifying life-creation, not -destruction as the fundamental force of history”.
And meanwhile, “Red Sonja, DAAAAMN. She could force herself on you, how hot is that?”
(Joss Whedon postures like he’s from the Bradley tradition, but he’s toooootaly from the Red Sonja tradition.)
And then you have stuff like Stranger in a Strange Land, which is about interspecies tolerance, peace, love, and understanding, as enabled by author-insert dirty old man Jubal, attended poolside by his harem of buxom secretaries, including the one trained to totally suppress her personality so to better serve.
Like I said, something for everyone.
(Modern equivalent being Kim Stanley Robinson, recurring theme being “If scientists ran the world, there would be peaceful, multicultural, inclusionary socialism. And also collective nude bathing, where young female students seduce their mentors.”)
And you know, I’m still waiting on the WisCon panel on “Recovering the Promise of Teenage Groupies”.
Honestly I’m not much in the fandom these days but I do get Gardner Dozois’ “World’s Best” anthology every year, and I have noticed an increase in stories where nothing happens, but at least it’s brown and queer folks it’s not happening to.
One story a bit back that stuck with me, the message seemed to be “working in a Foxconn plant would suck”, which okay but I couldn’t even tell what was SF about it. Another that started promising - in an Islamic country (bcuz good point, the future won’t just come for white Anglophones), polygamy and semi-arranged marriage coexist with social media (ditto), and men hire Cyranos to polish their appeal, under the pressure that not every man can win even one wife. That’s a solid premise! But once this is established, the protagonist just throws up his hands and experiences a wave of relief as he realizes he could just be gay instead.
And it’s like… wut.jpg
In a proper world an editor would’ve returned that with a note saying “great story, can’t wait to see it when it’s done”. But that’s exactly the issue, isn’t it, that box-ticking and message Correctness are being accepted in lieu of quality.
Actually, you know what that really reminds me of? Christian rock.
Cats and humans have gotten along for millennia, spaying and neutering them only started to become common in the first world in the 1970s. (Which means when Bob Barker started ending Price is Right episodes by imploring people to spay and neuter their pets, it was still novel.)
Part of it’s back when the world was a lot more agricultural, cats tended to be considered more “allied local wildlife” than family members - you’d never even think of neutering the squirrels in your trees, would you? And farmers are not squeamish about killing animals for practical reasons.
Killing surplus kittens was considered a matter of proper, pro-social animal husbandry and “tied-off sack in a pond” was a well-recognized trope for this.
Raised nominally Catholic so I got the Princess Bride version of the Bible - an elder figure reading us the Good Parts Version.
Did actually read it myself once before, in like 3rd grade, book by book to earn Pizza Hut Personal Pan Pizzas. Gave up somewhere before the New Testament.
So rereading it’s been a blast, really. It’s better and weirder than I remember and I’m picking up on all sorts of stuff.
Like the creation of Eve and the temptation reads as a mythologizing not of gender but of language and metacognizance - man’s said to name the animals in Gen 2:20 but doesn’t clearly speak until 2:23 now that he has someone to talk to (and be heard by).
And then Genesis 3, that the snake’s temptation is the first actual conversation in the bible, speech up to now being proclamative - the forbidden fruit is eaten because people can talk.
And the first-order reading is “language introduces corruption and deceit”, but more interesting is language introduces the self. It’s because of language that they recognize their nudity - which is to say, they’re able to model how they’re seen by others. And the episode dramatizes how language, and thus persuasion, require the cultivation of a sense of self with enough “mass” to resist argumentation - this whole conflict coming from the way man and woman had simply done the will of whoever spoke to them last.
The snake totally isn’t the rebel Lucifer or the adversary Satan, he seems more like an abortive trickster figure. He’s useful to add a third party to the temptation (language also means your kin are vectors for invasive memes), and also my headcanon is he’s the same figure who tempts Jesus during his 40 days in the desert, and possibly the reason for the 40 years in the desert when he steps in after God exhausted himself with the plagues and Red Sea and stuff.
Genesis 3:22-24, woah I missed this. God’s like “now man’s aware like us(!), nothing stopping him from eating the immortality fruit, better gate it with a boss fight”. How has that plot thread not paid off somewhere? You’ve got grail romances and the fountain of youth and the philosopher’s stone, how have I not read an immortality quest that uses the hook in the opening of our culture’s foundational text?
Is Genesis 4:1 implying that Cain’s conception was an act of God (but in 4:2 Abel’s just happens)? That’s one of those Old Testament precedents I don’t remember hearing.
Genesis 6 is ridiculous. After a page of begats it’s all “And there were all these hot chicks, and these superhumans, and the superhumans banged the hot chicks, and their kids were all badass warrior heroes”, and then God’s like “UGH, this is too grimdark, I regret making it.”
THE FLOOD WAS GOD REBOOTING HIS EMBARRASSING T&A HACK & SLASH WEBCOMIC TO MAKE A SRS BZNS FANTASY EPIC
You’d think the whole “create women” thing backfired on God, but by Noah’s ark when he goes for a do-over he doubles down on the sexual complimentary thing, sons and wives and even the animals paired.
But that’s God for you, eventually he comes around. That’s what I’m picking up, his character doesn’t really read as an essence of perfection or really as a tyrant - he’s distant, a little pompous, a little out of touch but ultimately seems to want good things and eventually comes around in the end.
And my mind’s like “you mean, like some sort of… patriarch?”
And I’m like “yes, exactly like an… oh. Huh.”
Saying “the Bible is a love letter to patriarchy” sounds so banal but it really is, it really really is. The Old Testament is in a lot of ways a narrative about the triumphs and frustrations of a first-time father, one of those photomosaics composed of lots of little explorations of fathers and fatherhood.
I’m looking forward to reading the Book of Job imagining Calvin’s Dad as God.
America has already birthed its signature religion in Mormonism, the LDS Movement coming out of our most intense cultural moment, the Second Great Awakening Burnt-Over District
In response we chased them across the continent and raised mobs against them and lynched their founder-prophet and the government of Missouri declared an honest-to-god extermination campaign against them and they fled to the barren desert and we still sent armies against them in what was a comically transparent update of the Christian and specifically Protestant and specifically Protestant dissenter persecution narratives that American culture was founded on
And by the Constantinian timeline we still have a century-plus left until the country converts en masse as a palingenetic gambit
Golden age Americana gets like one notch trashier when you realize the omnipresent Coca-Cola was an energy drink and Hershey’s milk chocolate was an energy bar
advertising is fascinating and I hate it in that shitty “corporate drones turning us into zombies” way, which sounds like something right out of fight club and so I hate myself for hating it for that childish and condescending reason but holy shit let’s talk about advertising
the thing is though that it doesn’t turn us into zombies, advertising works by emotionally arousing us and making us feel. it’s actually the opposite of being turned into zombies and if we ever feel that way it’s because the hyperstimulation of advertising has made real life seem hollow and empty and false, and also exhausted us and made relating to how we spontaneously react to real emotive stimulus seem strange and wrong
So here’s a site for you: the Closing Logos Wiki, a collection of production company logos from the end of shows. (This month is 2-D and 3-D Logos Month). Pretty comprehensive, still pretty compulsive in a kind of pre-2007 internet way.
Mostly seems to be the work of one guy. Fair enough, you read around, you read the descriptions of enough, and you notice each one has a “Scare Factor”, which - it’s not really clear what it’s for. Sometimes he seems to be using this for an esthetic critique - he’s not very fond of black/neon color combinations, which makes him not very fond of the late ‘80s-early ‘90s graphics. But sometimes he’s being strangely earnest about it, that the logo is scary or “terrifying”. And then you read enough of these entries, each with their own “Scare Factor” section, and you realize there’s not actually a line there, for him.
And you realize that not only is this site the product of a guy who felt compelled to compile every production company logo he could find, but one of the things he made a point of addressing for every single one is “whether this production company logo could possibly scare you”. And the answer is sometimes yes! (Another thing he addressed are “what are three or four nicknames I could coin for this logo?”)
Check out all the “Scare Factor: High” reviews. Check out the MGM one especially, where a lot of them are fine but one is terrifying because it involves a particularly scary lion, and also banner.
And now look at this “rules’ page. I mean as petty as any forum mod, though the enthusiasm for putting “BANNED” in red caps is something, but also of interest is the only rule with a listed exception:
17.) To the Writers and Up: Do not add personal comments to the articles. That includes personal scare factors, your own side notes, making the articles your own forum and telling people not to upload images or videos on the articles (that even includes locking pages where no one can edit or put up images or videos). The pages here are for logo descriptions, pictures and videos ONLY. If you want to share personal opinions, go to the Favorite Logos and Dreaded and Hated Logos pages, or use the discussion feature. If you disregard this rule, you will receive a warning. If you do it again, you will get another warning and a demotion, and if it continues, you will be BANNED!
17b.) If you must make a thread about a logo that scares you, do it on the page the logo is described on, and nowhere else. Any thread running afoul of this is at risk of deletion.
Twice today tried to google something I’d googled before and couldn’t find it
First, this classic comic on 90s net furry culture which in row 3 column 2 invokes the old concept of “furry gay” (as distinct from gender dysphoria, r1c2)
The 90s had a richer concept of pansexuality as, ah, undiscrimination
ANYWAY, the second was that Richard Seymour attempt to schism the SWP with Laurie Penny (and China Mieville, thus their faction were the “Sino-Seymourists”)
Listening again to Taylor Swift’s Red, picked up something I hadn’t - “memorize” used in two different songs
In Stay Stay Stay,
you took the time to memorize me
my fears my hopes and dreams
I just like hanging out with you
all the time
and then in Red,
memorizing him was as easy as knowing all the words to your old favorite song
and I thought on it and realize this downright sapiosexual knowledge-as-intimacy theme is pretty important in Tayswift, it’s the load-bearing element of YBWM
I’m the one who makes you laugh
when you know you’re ‘bout to cry
I know your favorite songs
and you tell me bout your dreams
think I know where you belong
think I know it’s with me
can’t you see I’m the one who understands you
been here all along so why can’t you see
you belong with me
it’s even important in negative (which is how interrogators tease personality from pretense) in Red,
forgetting him was like trying to know someone you never met
thinking about that, and also remembering when her transparent brand strategy was accessibility and fans chosen to meet her would gush about her casually referencing something they mentioned on their tumblr long ago, and it’s like
AWW, she really IS just like us, in that her real output is multilayered invocations of accreted culture but she charms incidental humans by studying up on whatever incidental shit they happen to be and mirroring it back at them
I just want to know you better
know you better
know you better now
I just want to know you
know you
know you
why do you always make her sound like a bundle of chitinous plates and spines tightly wrapped in human skin
because her superpower is making you think she’s you
“Don’t be an asshole” seems like a reasonable strategy for reducing assholism in the world, but when you realize “asshole” just means “someone imposing themselves on the world more firmly than me” you realize it has the effect of making everyone into assholes.
Let that be my epitaph: I imposed myself on the world!
But not as firmly as the world imposed itself on me :|
3dspacejesus asked: Are there any Amhist topics you've been meaning to write effortposts on, which just haven't come together for some reason or another?
I’ve mentioned I’ve wanted to write about historical travel/communication routes:
Roads - the organic growth of local roads, the tendency to form road districts, corvee labor as a support mechanism, the iffy history of medium-distance private roads (profitable mostly in support of land development w/ poor long-term income streams); above all the historical novelty of roads as city-to-city transit modes, previously a thing of railroads or
Coastal and Inland Shipping - historically the fastest, most efficient method of transit; the significance of the Appalachians and the East Coast’s lack of lengthy rivers; the way command of New Orleans (and thus the Mississippi system) and the St. Lawrence (and thus the Great Lakes) played into trade empire strategies and how that interacted with US settler colonialism (, how this experience played into the Chinese Exclusion Act as a defense of the American Pacific presence focused on the trade city of San Francisco); the way Philadelphia came to early prominence due to the Delaware Water Gap offering a rare route to the interior and how New York stole her thunder with the Erie Canal offering an alternate route to the Great Lakes, with a potential portage to the Mississippi system at a site we now call “Chicago”
The Post Office - overlapping a lot with the above two on modalities; how post-carrying contracts promoted, structured, and regulated American shipping and railroads before the dawn of the modern regulatory state; how the era where the federal government was “just the Army & Post Office” actually meant a lot of recognizably contemporary programs got shoehorned in (compare the Army Corps of Engineers, Lewis & Clark Expedition, various imperial overseas administrations). The Post Office as a domestic spy and countersubversive agency - against abolitionists, Confederates, anarchists, antinatalist feminist race-suiciders. The Post Office as the major source of federal patronage, and the reason the same parties operate at federal and local levels where issues and pressures are otherwise perpendicular
Jury nullification as discussed on the Internet: Keeping some who wasn’t hurting anyone from going to jail for violating some bullshit law
Jury nullification IRL: Keeping someone who was violent against someone subverting the social order out of jail
Absolutely correct. For an example, check out this series on “The Unwritten Law” - the turn-of-the-century practice of acquitting (as “temporary insanity”) men who had determinedly stalked and killed the rakes who had sex with their women.
Two interesting points here: one, that this “Law” metastasized to the point of undermining ALL murder laws, as defendants would offer this difficult-to-disprove backstory.
Two, that the government (under threat of losing the ability to credibly punish killings) responded not with crackdowns but by accommodating the desire to punish adulterers - criminal laws against adultery were passed or rediscovered, likewise “heartbalm” civil actions - “criminal conversation” and “alienation of affection”.
Defendants could even claim a formalized, if limited equivalent to “temporary insanity” defenses - a man who caught his wife in the actual act of sex with another, “in flagrante delicto” was entitled to kill either or both of them, and men who knew or suspected adultery would arrange such “surprise” discoveries for the purpose of claiming a righteous kill.
That’s not the only place in American history to show that pattern - citizens use lethal violence as means of social control, government responds by cracking down not on them but their targets in hopes of rewinning assent to a government monopoly on violence by proving itself willing to use it as they would prefer. Many southern states tightened “Jim Crow” racial codes between the World Wars as part of an attempt to stop lynchings, many victims of which were in jail awaiting trial when they were seized by mobs unwilling to trust the courts with their punishment.
And labor leftists bitch that American strike action is too constrained under the Taft-Hartley Act, but that governments that stand for the suppression of mob violence, extortion, and trespassing would at all allow a mob to forcefully lay sieges on private property with the intent of extracting concessions from its owner – let alone defend them and enforce the resultant contracts – is nonobvious. What it is is the same thing - over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries the people had made clear there would be labor militancy, and the government shrugged and decided it preferred it to be backed by the threat of violence by existing government institutions, rather than open violence by private actors who might eventually seek to supplant those institutions.
it is possible that I’m an asshole, but it is 2 0 1 7 and we’re still doing books where the main conflict is “mages/wizards/magic users are banned by an Oppressive Catholic Church analogue” and i am tired of it
A) That’s Dragon Age’s schtick at this point, y’all should stop copying them.
B) this is making me want to do a ‘evil mages vs. Christian martyrs’ thing just out of spite.
[Catholic dives into conversation like a wounded osprey]
A thing that I found even more irritating was Dishonored’s “There are horrible evil human-sacrificing magic users and an Oppressive Catholic Church Analogue that doesn’t even, like, pray, or believe in God, or do anything other than oppress the evil human-sacrificing magic users with excessive violence and everything is horrible and there is no hope”.
Missing link is JRPGs and the fact that Prussia/Germany used to be to Japan what America became
(“Sempai, help me understand the world! Also, I might seize your Pacific island holdings.”)
So the whole one-city kingdom/Chancellor edging in/Emperor taking over/corrupt demonic Church thing
GERMAN (PROT) AS HELL
You’re not gonna have a franchise where the good guys are an institutional church, because duh, institutions are the way you portray villains.
But the good guys as underground spirituality who obey a higher moral power vs powerful warlords who use the religion as just a tool to increase their own supernatural power, with no care for the spiritual mandates of that power?
It’s kind of interesting to think up examples where institutions are the heroes. So far I can come up with:
the odd Catholic (or Catholic-friendly) story (e.g. Father Brown, Pillars of the Earth)
police procedurals
spy stories (particularly where the villains are terrorists)
Got any more?
I feel like the standard western violent melodrama (westerns, cop stories, superheroes obviously) formula is of the protagonist breaking out of institutional constraints to shore up the status quo - methodological radicalism + substantive conservatism
(crude formulation: anything with a male protagonist that isn’t the proverbial horny english professor is narratologically fascist)
Isn’t the horny professor breaking out the institutional constraints
of monogamy and employment to shore up the status quo of
heterosexual patriarchy?
