Eruditorum Press

Doxing gods

Elizabeth Sandifer

About Elizabeth Sandifer

http://www.eruditorumpress.com

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

Posts by Elizabeth Sandifer:

Something Rotten at the Sausage Factory: How Wikipedia Embraced Transphobia for Chelsea Manning

42

There is something that you never, ever do to a transgender person: use their birth name. The reason here is simple – to call a transgender person by their birth name is to deny them the basic right to their identity. It is to claim for yourself the right to dictate who they are, over their own express wishes. It is to tell them that their transition is invalid – that they deserve instead to suffer from the genuine and real pain of gender dysphoria, and that this is preferable to ever allowing them to think that they might have the right to define for themselves the basic aspects of who they are. It is hate speech, plain and simple, as straightforwardly as using the worst racial or sexual slur you can think of.

This is not a matter of when hormone therapy has begun or surgery has taken place. Those are just procedures to reduce the material impact of gender dysphoria and make social transition less awkward and, frankly, less dangerous. The point where it becomes hate speech is the instant that a person has told you their preferred name and gender presentation.

On August 22nd, Chelsea Manning issued a public statement confirming the longstanding reports that she was transgender and asking that instead of using the name “Bradley Manning,” as media sources had been doing up to that point, people refer to her by the name of “Chelsea.” Almost immediately after this announcement the Wikipedia page for Manning was changed from being called “Bradley Manning” to “Chelsea Manning.” In the early hours of August 31st, following a week of discussion, the page was moved back.

This is the story of how the fifth largest website in the world came to actively embrace transphobia and hate speech.

Some disclosure. I am not an impartial observer. Nevertheless, this is a factual account based on the public record of Wikipedia talk pages and logs. Still, in the interests of disclosure, I involved myself in this debate in a minor role, advocating for the position you’d expect. This was my first substantial contribution to Wikipedia in several years, but I do have administrator rights on the project dating back to 2004, when I was a highly active editor. I am friendly with several of the persons involved, although have not met any except on the Internet. One person involved, Morwen, was a significant donor to my Kickstarter. I am not writing this piece on behalf of any of them, and in fact more than one person I am friendly with has expressed reservations over the piece, though not about its factual accuracy.

Morwen has a highly visible role in what happened, but not, ultimately, an important one; she was the editor who retitled (or, in Wikipedia parlance, moved) the page following Manning’s announcement on the Today show. To begin, at least, events consisted of jargon-heavy technical decisions based heavily on Wikipedia policy. These events may be somewhat opaque to outsiders, but it is nevertheless worth summarizing the exact events that led to the larger conflict.…

Continue Reading

I Borrowed Them From The Hospital (Smith and Jones)

73

The Doctor learns first-hand what Daft Punk mean by “get
lucky.”

It’s March 31st, 2007. At last, the great leap forward. The Proclaimers with Brian Potter and Andy Pipkin are at number one with “(I’m Gonna Be) 500 Miles,” presumably much to David Tennant’s delight. Avril Lavigne, Gwen Stefani (and Akon), Fray, Sugababes vs Girls Aloud, Take That, and Fergie (with Ludacris) also chart. In news, the iPhone was announced, Jade Goody got embroiled in the racism controversy that was briefly what she was best known for, and actually not much more happened.

On television it’s Smith and Jones. On one level, this is a straightforward bit of television. It has a job to do, and it gets on with it. That job is to properly relaunch Doctor Who without Rose Tyler, and to introduce Martha Jones. This is done in the context of a story that is clever enough to provide some solid images and moments, but nevertheless firmly in the realm of what feels like traditional Doctor Who. (Though it’s worth talking briefly about those solid images and moments – Davies apparently spent a lot of effort on doing the best running through corridors sequence to date, and on portraying proper panic for the first time. I mention this because it’s such an utterly idiosyncratic pair of things to focus on, especially in an episode that already has so much heavy lifting to do, and seems to me to speak volumes about how Davies works as a creative figure.)

At the heart of all of this is the idea of Martha, which is, of course, also at the heart of one of  Doctor Who’s great Problem Seasons. We talked back in The Runaway Bride about how the major split within the Davies era is Rose and Donna. Certainly this appears to be true in terms of the British public, and, for that matter, within the Davies era itself – it’s telling that Martha is the only Davies-era companion to, in The End of Time, get squared away alongside another companion, and that she’s separated from the Big Two at the end. Martha, in most regards, seems the forgotten companion – the one that didn’t quite work. That’s not to say she doesn’t have her fans and admirers, nor that those fans are wrong. But they are swimming against the tide, and the show itself contributes to that tide.

There are many reasons for Martha’s falling short. For one thing, she’s hobbled from her first appearance by virtue of the fact that the show defines her as Not-Rose. There’s not really a way back from this within the confines of what the show can do. Nor, however, was there necessarily a way to avoid it. The importance of Rose Tyler within the show’s cultural mythology is hard to overstate. Her absence was necessarily part of the story, and this was unavoidable. This is not, to be clear, some judgment about Rose as a companion – rather it’s a judgment about the cultural narrative of Doctor Who, which relaunched in 2005 in a high profile version headlined by Billie Piper as the new companion.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (August 31st, 2013)

27

Right. The work update. The Baker book is all drafted, I’ve got the first round of edits back on Wonder Woman, and as predicted, I didn’t quite finish up the Hartnell stuff. (It’ll definitely get finished next revisions week, but I allocated some time to the next Last War in Albion chapter, where I just had a stunning bit of luck involving some bibliographic research lining up Maxwell the Magic Cat strips with Moore’s Swamp Thing run.)

I’m literally writing three things at once right now, counting this post, so am going to commit the most shameless act of blogger laziness ever.
This is Lettie Hempstock, our newly acquired six-month-old cat. Lettie is mostly blind, and has decided that curling up on my desk is a favorite evening passtime. Occasionally she climbs around my head and purrs a lot.
This is Coraline Jones, Lettie’s entirely blind sister. She also likes climbing on my desk, though she is more prone to decide to savagely attack my hands while I’m typing. She is equally prone to crawling around my head and purring.
This is Krypto. It’s a fairly old photo of him, hence the snow, but it is also my favorite photo of him, and unlike the cats I haven’t been obsessively photographing him to show him off on Facebook.  He is largely undisturbed by the recent arrival of two visually-impared lunatics who think his tail is a fun toy.
As the new season of American television gears up, is there anything people are watching or excited about? Besides a new Joss Whedon show, I mean.
…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Invasion of the Bane

, 50

No, no, it’s just that, you know, your profile picture made you
look… and, I mean, this isn’t a criticism, but… less tentacular.

It is still New Year’s Day. Actually, we’ve moved backwards in time a few hours for Invasion of the Bane, the debut of The Sarah Jane Adventures. This is often called the pilot, which, in fact, it wasn’t – a pilot is an episode shot as a demo so that a full series can be considered. The first season of The Sarah Jane Adventures was already commissioned when this got shot, and it was, in reality, a New Year’s special for a series that hadn’t actually aired its first episode yet.

It’s worth rehearsing the development of the show, though it’s well documented enough. The BBC, following the success of Doctor Who, went a bit spin-off mad, commissioning Totally Doctor Who and Torchwood, then moving on to wanting a children’s drama featuring a teenaged Doctor on Gallifrey and, briefly, considering a set of annual specials under the name Rose Tyler: Defender of the Earth. The latter idea was quickly abandoned in the name of peace and sanity, The former, meanwhile, seems to have gotten about as far as Davies and Gardner laughing uproariously and then ordering some people killed.

Once the appropriate heads had been affixed to the appropriate pikes, Davies sent word back to the BBC that while he would not be doing Young Doctor Who, he was eager to do a children’s series focusing on Sarah Jane Smith, who he’d just successfully brought back in School Reunion. Because Davies was at one of those points in one’s career where he was invincible and allowed to do whatever he wanted, his plan to appeal to the youth of Britain with a show about a middle aged woman from 70s television was, in a rare burst of good sense from an entertainment industry that would usually respond to this much like Davies did to Young Doctor Who, enthusiastically approved.

There is an underlying tension here, and it’s one that never quite disappears from The Sarah Jane Adventures. On the one hand, it’s television aimed at people who were not actually alive when Doctor Who was originally on the air. On the other, more than any other show in the Doctor Who family The Sarah Jane Adventures is concerned with the material past of Doctor Who. I don’t just mean this in the sense that it features Sarah Jane, returns of three other 70s characters, and bunches of other moments that are overtly and consciously nostalgic for the past. (Really, it’s a wonder the Silurians and Sontarans didn’t make their returns in The Sarah Jane Adventures)

No, what’s really and oddly nostalgic about The Sarah Jane Adventures is that the show is set up to work like classic series Doctor Who, complete with half-hour episodes and cliffhangers. And even though Invasion of the Bane is an hourlong special, it’s still given the most familiar setup imaginable: exciting new technological object, mysterious goings-on, aliens are behind it and turn out to be evil.…

Continue Reading

Superhuman Effort to Keep Things The Way They Are (The Last War in Albion Part 7: Captain Clyde, Superheroes)

, , 39

This is the second of five installments of Chapter Two of The Last War in Albion. The entirety of chapters one and two are available as an ebook single at Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. Please consider helping support this project by buying a copy. 
PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: In 1979, Grant Morrison began writing and drawing Captain Clyde for The Govan Press, a small local paper of a district in Glasgow. The comic attempted to depict a quasi-realistic local superhero, named after the River Clyde upon which Glasgow sits, who, like Morrison, was just an unemployed Glaswegian trying to get by. Installments of Captain Clyde are extremely difficult to locate, but several strips are publicly available…
“A society where nothing can change because it takes superhuman effort to keep things the way they are.” – Warren Ellis, 1999

Figure 48: The goddess Elen offers Chris Melville superpowers
in an early installment of Captain Clyde (c. 1979)
The first strip appears to be from the earliest days of the strip – a plot that O’Donnell describes summarises as Melville being “offered the powers of Earth and Fire by the earth goddess Elen – If he could defeat her champion, Magna.” This, Morrison explains in response, is because of “an interest in ley lines and earth magic and all that pseudo mystical, hippy shit,” marking the first documented instance of Morrison’s fascination with magic and the occult. Morrison reiterates this in Supergods, using the story of his uncle giving him the Aleister Crowley/Frieda Harris Thoth Tarot for his nineteenth birthday, which got him into magic as a bridge between his discussion of Chris Claremont’s run on the X-Men and his own Captain Clyde work. The anecdote culminates with him performing what he describes as “a traditional ritual” resulting in “a blazing, angelic lion 
Figure 49: Lady Frieda Harris’s design
for The Magus (aka The Magician) in
Crowley’s Thoth Tarot
head… growling out the words “I am neither North nor South.” The second strip at least somewhat continues on that theme, showing Captain Clyde collapsed at the center of a stone circle before being renewed by some mystical power. This strip does not seem to immediately follow from the first, as Melville is identified by the caption box as Captain Clyde, suggesting it is not the origin story. Instead it appears to illustrate a feature of Captain Clyde, who, as Morrison puts it, “periodically has to recharge his powers by drawing earth energy from standing stones and other sacred sites.” The interest in Scotland’s otherness and pagan roots reinforces the initial sense of Captain Clyde as a sort of dissident superhero strip – an attempt to recreate the concept from the outsider perspective of an unemployed Glaswegian. 
The other two strips are consecutive, and feature a battle between Captain Clyde and a villain named Quasar, who is described in Supergods as “a tweed-jacketed headmasterly villain” who turns into a “star-powered monster.” The chronology given in Supergods suggests this too is from the earlier portion of the strip, before its turn towards excess.
…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: End of Days

, 32

Grrr. Argh.

It’s still New Year’s Day, essentially seconds after the close of Captain Jack Harkness, as Torchwood goes out with a two-hour finale event, running End of Days immediately after the preceding episode.

It’s very easy to take shots at End of Days, and some of them are even fair. It attempts to do an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink finale of the sort that Russell T Davies had already made standards elements of Doctor Who, only on a fraction of the budget, and it shows. “Weird things are falling through time all over the world” is a bigger concept than Torchwood can actually pull off, and all we actually get is an ornery Roman and some hazmat suits. It’s tempting to say that this is too big a concept for a one-hour slot, but that’s not really the problem – the problem is that Torchwood doesn’t have anything like the resources to show something this big. It’s trying to conjure a global threat in a show that has the budget, on a really good day, to have three guys in rubber masks lurching through the streets of Cardiff.

On top of that, the pacing wobbles considerably. Much of this is because it wants its third act twist of Abaddon rising up, which would probably have worked better if it had more than three minutes of screen time devoted to it, was remotely set up, and wasn’t a transparent knock-off of The Satan Pit. Instead most of this episode feels overcompressed, making things like the fact that Bilis doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense more obvious than they should be. It turns out that the gambit of “keep the plot moving fast enough that there’s no time to notice the holes” is a more delicate game than it seemed. (My favorite is the fact that they’ve apparently upgraded security to require the butler’s retina print since the last episode.)

And, of course, there’s the character motivation, which requires that Owen’s several-episode idiot plot spontaneously become virulently contagious such that everybody – not just a grief-stricken Gwen, but every single person in Torchwood besides Captain Jack – simultaneously abandoning all semblance of common sense and thinking “if only we were to do the exact same thing that’s already nearly destroyed the world, that would probably fix everything.” This makes the intra-Torchwood conflict scenes something rather short of compelling, and as that’s the central drama of the episode, well, again, there are problems.

All of which said.

Let’s start with Abaddon and his role as a knock-off of the Beast in The Satan Pit. The phrase “knock-off” may undersell this slightly – Abaddon, another name for the devil, is said to be “chained in rock” and “cast out before time,” which isn’t so much copying The Satan Pit as explicitly referencing it. So, OK, apparently Krop Tor was just imprisoning one of several gigantic horned death beasts from before time. But if the episode is going to demand to be read in light of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit then we may as well do so.…

Continue Reading

A Sweater Vest of Reviews

105

Time and the Rani: For all its faults, and there are very many of those, and they are very obvious, already the process of improvement is beginning. Having Kate O’Mara impersonate her is the closest anyone has come to date to getting Mel to work. The direction here really is impressive – leaps and bounds beyond Season 22’s flatness. The writing is shambolic, but we know they’re working on it, and in fleeting spots you can see Cartmel’s influence starting to poke through. It’s abysmal, but it’s also the first step in a real road of improvement. I gave Ultimate Foe a 2/10, so by virtue of the fact that it’s getting better, 3/10

Paradise Towers: It really is quite marvelous, requiring no excuses that we haven’t gotten used to making for other stories. It’s JG Ballard done as children’s panto – something only Doctor Who could ever do. If you don’t want children’s panto JG Ballard then there is something a bit wrong with you. The plot comes a little unglued in the fourth episode, but on the whole this is lovely and funny and human in a way Doctor Who hadn’t been for years at this point. Absolutely marvelous. 8/10

Delta and the Bannermen: Sloppy and undisciplined in places, but with a manic glee and a desire to do new and innovative things that still feels like a drink of cool water after the preceding few years. Right down to the fact that the title is a pun on new wave music, this feels alive and present and like everybody involved is interested in what this specific story has to say instead of in making Doctor Who for Doctor Who’s sake. Yes, it doesn’t quite come together, but it also never leaves you staring at the screen wondering what they were thinking. 7/10

Dragonfire: There’s a school of thought that says the “real” McCoy era starts with Ace, and that thus treats this story as where things start to turn around. Rubbish. There’s no standard by which this isn’t inferior to the two stories that came before it, and the Ace we have here is not the character who shows up to such effect in the next story. What we have here are some good ideas spoiled by poor directorial choices. Where Delta and the Bannermen was an attempt at a serious script elevated by the decision to treat it as a comedy, this is a funny script killed dead by dour excess. Not a disaster by any means, but pedestrian. 5/10

Remembrance of the Daleks: What is there to say? The best Dalek story of the classic series, the best story up to this point in the classic series, a story so radical that it changed how people did Doctor Who forever. Would there have been a new series if the show had been cancelled before this? I’m not sure there would have been… 10/10

The Happiness Patrol: Good lord this is a nice piece of television. Yes, it’s transparently political, but this was late 80s Britain, when the country’s great cultural exports were politically angry music and politically angry comics.…

Continue Reading

Outside the Government: Captain Jack Harkness

, 27

Hello Sailor.

It’s January 1st, 2007. Leona Lewis is at number one with “A Moment Like This,” while Iron Maiden, Take That, Girls Aloud, Gwen Stefani, and Chris Cornell also chart. Since Christmas, Gerald Ford died. The UK paid off its last World War II debts to the United States and Canada, although it still has a few bits from the Napoleonic Wars and a rather large amount from World War I. And, of course, Saddam Hussein was executed. Also, it’s International Heliophysical Year. Aw yeah!

On television we have a triple-header – two episodes of Torchwood and the hour long premiere of The Sarah Jane Adventures all on the same day. Since we’ve been on a Torchwood kick, I’ll sort those two out first, and then we’ll do Sarah Jane on Friday. First, then, is Captain Jack Harkness, notably the only episode of Torchwood to earn a Hugo nomination, although, inevitably, it lost to Blink. This is, in many ways, not surprising. Captain Jack Harkness is an “issues” story that was well-timed. The beginning of 2007 was more or less peak time for a high profile television show to do a gay romance. And Torchwood did it well by not making a big deal of that aspect except inasmuch as Original Jack’s public embrace of Our Jack amounted to a public coming out and acceptance of his sexuality. Even still, there’s no reaction to it except a puzzled “what’s he doing” from one of Original Jack’s men. The episode is in no way about the fact that it’s the “gay men” episode, a quiet confidence that such an episode doesn’t need to be a Very Special Episode that’s about the glories of its own existence.

There is, of course, a reasoned objection to be had here, which is that it is maybe just a little too optimistic to think that 1941 was a time in which a captain in the US Air Force could publicly snog another man and get away with it, even to the extent of flying a fatal mission the next day. But this is an odd sort of objection that requires that we treat Torchwood as the sort of show in which real history is displayed. We’ll discuss this more next week when we get to The Shakespeare Code, but suffice it to say that there is little in Doctor Who that suggests that this sort of romantic view of history would be avoided. It’s obvious wish fulfillment, sure, but it’s not an unreasonable wish, and the little details elsewhere like remembering to depict Tosh’s difficulties as an Asian woman in 1941 give needed reassurance that the production team knows what rules they’re bending.

And without the bending of rules you don’t have an episode like this. Because this isn’t just “Captain Jack falls in love with a man in the past,” but rather “Captain Jack falls in love with his own erased history,” a concept that is, in many ways, actively set up and worked towards over the course of the first season of Torchwood.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (August 24th, 2013)

32

Just finished off the week’s blogging, setting me up for nine straight days of mucking about with books. If all goes well Hartnell v2 will be almost wrapped up at the end of it, barring the essays that are about things coming out in November. Six to write, which is a little ambitious for nine days when doing the reading/listening for them is counted as part of the time, but it’s not impossible.

The next bunch of paragraphs are about Last War in Albion. But for the sizable chunk of readers who are only in it for Doctor Who stuff, there’s a Doctor Who question at the very end of the post you can skip to.

Last War in Albion continues to be very fun. If you haven’t grabbed the ebook of Chapters 1 and 2, please do consider doing so to support the project. I suppose I should talk briefly about some of my plans there. At the moment I’m planning on running it on Thursdays for remainder of TARDIS Eruditorum. After this set of five entries it’ll go to Chapter Three, which is about Alan Moore’s earliest work. After that we finally get to stuff that isn’t spectacularly obscure, at which point hopefully people will read it.

Obviously, as I’ve said, the format of Last War in Albion is a bit challenging. I stand by my reasons for writing it the way I am – I think I absolutely had to get away from the “episode guide” structure of TARDIS Eruditorum, for one thing. For another, Last War in Albion is about the implications of the comics it covers as much as it’s about what’s in them. The notion of the War is a conscious nod to Faction Paradox, and particularly The Book of the War. Part of the point, in other words, is how hard the War is to pin down.

I recognize, of course, that this makes some aspects of it tougher to follow. I’ve tried to smooth that out a bit in Chapter Two – I’m being a bit less ostentatiously aggressive in where I cut the chapters, and, since the idea of serializing the story this way is in part modeled on comics, I’ve nicked the idea of a recap page. The real problem, though, is figuring out how to make money off of it. Because this is a job, and I need to do that.

As I said, the ebook singles are one idea. And they’re an important one – just getting Last War in Albion to provide a steady month-in/month-out income stream would be a big deal. So, again, please think about grabbing them on the basic logic that kicking me $1.50 or so every 10,000 words or so is something that helps keep the project running. So again, please do think about buying it. Here it is on Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords.

But they are just one idea, and this seems like a good idea to at least talk about some of the other things I’d like to do.…

Continue Reading

I Happened To Be Wearing This Old Thing (The Runaway Bride)

60

One wonders why she was fooled. After all, everyone
knows that spiders are from Mars.
It’s Christmas, 2006. So we’ve made it a whole day forward since Combat. There hasn’t really been any news, and the charts remain the same. On television, it’s an actual Doctor Who episode.
A side effect of Torchwood is that it increases the sense of time between the Doomsday and The Runaway Bride when compared to The Parting of the Ways and The Christmas Invasion. Actually, some of that is just the ludicrously compressed cultural timeframe of the first season. The point where bet shops opened odds on what Bad Wolf was overlapped with the release of The Gallifrey Chronicles, and both came long after the announcement of David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor. The Christmas Invasion feels as much like the culmination of Series One as it does the start of Series Two. It’s much harder to say that about The Runaway Bride, in part because it feels like nearly a season’s worth of television has happened since the end of Doomsday. 
In hindsight, of course, this feels like the debut of Donna Noble, companion extraordinaire. As we said last time, this is true in exactly the same way that The Web of Fear introduces the Brigadier, which is to say, not really at all. Catherine Tate isn’t playing a prospective companion here, she’s playing a part that’s written to fit in seamlessly on The Catherine Tate Show, but that happens to not actually be one of her own creations. The point of The Runaway Bride is simply to mash up “a Catherine Tate character” with the Doctor for an hour. Whereas the Donna of Season Four is all about running away from being this character and giving Tate the fully rounded character she should have gotten the first time around.
Put another way, you can see why, when Catherine Tate’s casting in Season Four was announced, the consensus reaction in fandom was that Russell had finally gone completely mad. (Although the fact that we were coming off Last of the Time Lords didn’t help with that.) Because in this story she’s pitched as the annoying comedy sidekick, and is allowed to give voice to everybody in the (sizable) Christmas audience who thinks Doctor Who is complete rubbish. Needless to say, this makes her abrasive to fans even as it causes the episode to work perfectly well for the large casual audience the series acquires for Christmas. (For all I point them out, the problems with Donna in The Runaway Bride are narrow and have to do with the ending not quite coming off – most of the buildup is actually quite lovely. As entertaining screen-filler, the Doctor trapped in a Catherine Tate sketch is lovely. Davies just had no good way to resolve the thing.)
The thing is, there’s no point in the series’ history where the “oh God, do we have to watch Doctor Who” audience would have been culturally more on the run.
…

Continue Reading

«‹ 141 142 143 144 ›»