Elizabeth Sandifer

Well, the Kickstarter hit $4000 overnight, which means we’re on our way to our second stretch goal, “Theses on Trump,” projected to be another lengthy essay. This was an odd topic for me – present-day electoral politics aren’t my normal beat, and it’s not like there’s a shortage of Trump thinkpieces in the world. But I think I managed to find an angle on the topic that would work with my psychochronographic approach. Here’s the first 1500 words. The plan from here is to get weirder and weirder, of course.

Schedule for the next couple days is Super Nintendo Project Tuesday morning, a Neoreaction a Basilisk excerpt Tuesday afternoon, and a podcast with David Gerard, who got Neoreaction a Basilisk serialized to him as I was writing it, on Wednesday morning. Then normal schedule for the rest of the week.

For now, “Theses on Trump,” or at least the first 1500 words of it. If you enjoy and want to read more, I’m sure you can surmise how to make that happen.

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0.

Let us accept that categorization is pointless, and that any attempt at it will eventually collapse under the basic fact that he is contradictory and in his own way even contains multitudes like some Deleuzian/Guattarian Rhizome. He is what he is, in his own way as deific as that makes him sound. He does not have immediate political analogues in 1930s Germany or 40s BCE Rome any more than he does in 1650s Britain or 2013 Australia. Similarities abound, but every case is unique. It is not even useful to call him liberal or conservative. He is right-wing, I suppose, but only insofar as he is adamantly not a leftist. On the whole, however, he is simply not particularly ideological. He is an aesthetic wedded to a perversion. In the end, most people are, and virtually all politicians. Still, one has to start somewhere.

1.

It is not quite possible for anyone who did not grow up in the greater New York area to understand him. It is not that rich idiots in the general case are unique to the Atlantic northeast; the British class system is founded on such people, after all. Rather it is the particular subspecies of rich idiot that he occupies; one that is, so far as I can tell, unique to the white-assimilated second and third generation immigrant populations of New York. Post-Gatsby empire-builders, inevitably rooted in the idiosyncratic infrastructure concerns of the northeast. Insistent, often not without reason, that an ethos of grit and ambition has driven their success, but where that success is always expanding the family business, not starting it. And there’s always a family business. Their chief talent is braggadocio. Their favorite movie is The Godfather, but they don’t have the patience for Part II.

It would be cruel to recount immediate analogues from my own tri-state area childhood, but they abound. Instead I’ll pick another vivid memory of the region; the day after the Sandy Hook shooting, in a local breakfast-and-lunch diner called King’s that people actually from Newtown still call Leo’s.…

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At the moment we are $368 away from funding “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate” over at the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter. So The Super Nintendo Project will either post Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning, depending on when that happens and I have to get the “Theses on Trump” preview up. Personally, I’d prefer Tuesday morning, so please consider backing.  

In many regards the episode everyone expected to watch last week, which I suppose means we should start with the end, in which Jon Snow is resurrected more or less exactly how everyone expected, right down to it being the cliffhanger. It is in some ways puzzling why this couldn’t happen last week, not least because the mechanics of Jon’s death back in “Mother’s Mercy” required that there still be Wildlings at the Wall (as there are in the book), so the inevitable collapse of Thorne’s regime in the face of the reality that they can’t hold Castle Black against a bunch of pissed off Wildlings could easily have happened last episode. Which in turn probably could have made the resurrection work in one. Should they have?

There are clear advantages to not having done so, most obviously that the incredible Davos/Melisandre scene really benefits from the end of “The Red Woman.” (Carice van Houten in particular is amazing here.) But even with that, it remains tough not to be at least somewhat frustrated by the underwhelming start to proceedings. But that declaration, in many ways, requires looking at only one plot. The amount that would have had to happen at Castle Black to make it fit in the first episode would have been an awkwardly-sized – only the Sansa/Brienne scene really would have had a chance of standing up to it in scale. Here, however, it finds an episode that can actually support it, and the result is consistently satisfying.

Perhaps the biggest thing in helping balance this episode out is the return of two long-absent sets of characters. Neither are historically plots it’s easy to get excited about, and the Iron Islands are in some ways difficult to straightforwardly get invested in by dint of things hinging on a mysterious new character who’s not even named. But even if it’s not entirely clear how events in Pyke are going to suddenly stop being excruciatingly dull (especially given how awful the book material is for this plot), Balon’s death at least constitutes a major shift in the status quo that could in theory be interesting, and makes returning to the Iron Islands feel like a significant decision. Likewise even though little of import comes of Bran’s journey into the past, the basic fact that the show now has an easy means to go look at the past is interesting, not least because that sure looks like the Tower of Joy in next week’s trailer.

Also substantial is the death of Roose Bolton. There are some distinct problems with this scene – the timing of the Maester’s entrance is painfully contrived, and the sequence of Ramsay killing Walda and her son is a tedious bit of Ramsay being Ramsay, and one that’s tough to be invested in given that all the significant fireworks have already gone off in that plot.…

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The full version of this essay is now available here.

Thrilled to announce that the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter hit goal twelve hours in, which means we’re on to stretch goals, the first of which is a long essay to be titled “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” about the tortured and short-circuiting logic of everybody’s least favorite hate group. I wrote up the first 1500 words of both it and the next stretch goal essay as demos to make sure they worked as concepts, so here’s a preview of it. It even turns out to be timely. (I wrote it weeks ago.)

Anyway, thanks to everybody who’s backed the Kickstarter, and if this looks interesting to you, we’re only about $1500 away from my having to finish it.

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One measures a circle starting anywhere, so let’s pick up where we left off. Vox Day, who got in on the ground floor, back when it was still called the Quinnspiracy, begins his description like this, in the first of two chapter fives:

“In 2012, a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings decided to play at being a ‘game designer’. She plugged forty thousand words into the Twine engine, a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programing to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977, combined it with a ten-second piano loop, and called it a game.”

It is ironic that the book should be called SJWs Always Lie, because he lies right there. He lies when he uses the same disaffected tone of factual declaration for “a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programming to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977” and “a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings,” as though these are both straightforward truths in the same way. He lies when he shifts the definition of game throughout; one moment she is a faux “game designer,” the next the not-games she not-designs are defined straightforwardly in terms of an iconic piece of gaming history.

Day tears into the game at length –  a critical savaging. “It’s even less fun than it sounds”; “I have never played a less entertaining computer game”;  “soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date.” He brings a gun to a knife-fight, eviscerating the game with a level of contempt that raises the question of why he even gives a shit about it if it’s so self-evidently unworthy of attention. Of particular note; his citation of its 1.8 score on Metacritic, based on 308 ratings.

Eventually he reaches his point, saying that the game was a complete irrelevancy until “August 2014, when an upset young man who had finally broken it off with his cheating girlfriend created a WordPress blog called The Zoe Post that documented, in excruciating detail, his experience of having loved and lost.” Apparently the designer of this game cheated on a guy with some people who wrote for some websites that had mentioned the game in articles at some point.…

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So, the Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk is up. That’s the link right there. In case you’ve missed the hype machine for it over the past few weeks, it’s a book why far-right politics are stupid and also about the end of the world. The official description’s on the Kickstarter page over here. We’ve posted two excerpts on the site so far (Excerpt One – Excerpt Two) and there’s more coming over the next few weeks, along with some fantastic podcasts about the book. This post, on the other hand, serves as a bit of backstage commentary on it all for the Eruditorum Press regulars.

First, a simple pragmatism. My wife and I are moving next month. We’re excited for this, and it’s almost certain to have good effects on my work, but it’s expensive as moves are. So that’s part of why I’m Kickstarting this book, and doing it now. That said, I hope the ideas appeal. Certainly I found them interesting, hence, you know, accidentally writing it.

This gets to the other big reason why I decided Kickstarter was the way to go with this one. One of the problems with accidentally writing a book is that certain important planning steps involving figuring out how you’re going to describe and market a book get skipped. Typically these steps exist to kill off or heavily modify ideas that, while potentially interesting, are potentially undisciplined and difficult to explain to somebody else. This, of course, is also one of the major advantages to accidentally writing a book, but it doesn’t do wonders for the conventional marketing campaign.

It also makes it suitable for having a bit of fun with. As purchasers of Recursive Occlusion will be aware, despite (or perhaps because of) being a digital-centric author, I love the book as an object. It’s part of why I love Blake so much. So with a kind of eccentric and inadvertent book, it seemed like a good time to do something I’ve kind of always wanted to do, which is a book that serves as an homage to the pre-ebook, pre-POD self-publishing tradition of zines and half-baked conspiracy theories. (I’ve literally been considering something like this since the Deadly Assassin post in Eruditorum.) You can see a preview of the visual style I’m going for here.

This also nicely solves one of the harder things about Kickstarters, which is the lengthy period between taking everyone’s money and knowing how much giving everyone their stuff is going to cost. Especially important when you’re using one to fund a short-term expense like a move. With a manuscript in hand and an intended format that’s a bit odd, I could do a Kickstarter where all the rewards would ship more or less upon completion, making all the idiosyncratic editions Kickstarter-exclusive. Which they are – I’m never going to sell any of them again.

To balance that, if the Kickstarter funds I’ll be doing a permanent edition with, assuming we hit any stretch goals, some extra essays on topics like Gamergate, Donald Trump, and Austrian School economics (the last of these would be co-written with Jack).…

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For obvious reasons, I will not be providing links here, however I am happy to provide them privately to anyone with a legitimate interest in the information, including law enforcement.

It was brought to my attention today that “kukuruyo,” one of the artists that Vox Day put on the Rabid Puppies slate in Best Fan Artist and that made it onto the Hugo Ballot recently posted to his blog a commissioned drawing of comic book character Ms. Marvel in which her genitalia is clearly visible and provocatively displayed. Ms. Marvel – whose comic won last year’s Hugo for Best Graphic Story – is a sixteen-year-old girl in the comics. Under US law, this would seem to legally be child pornography. 

Although the drawing post-dates Day’s placement of the artist on his slate, the hypocrisy of Vox Day endorsing the work of a child pornographer is particularly glaring given that he continues to throw childish insults like this around:

#SJW logic: Pedophil Sandifer complains that #RabidPuppies are “bullying fucks” while declaring that they are outnumbered “3,800 to 200”.

— Supreme Dark Lord (@voxday) April 30, 2016

and has been vocal in accusing sci-fi fandom of harboring pedophiles, including slating two works with arguments to this effect in Best Related Work.…

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Two announcements. First, 101 Claras to See, a fan anthology co-edited by occasional Eruditorum Press contributor Caitlin Smith and featuring contributions from both Jane and me, is available for preorder. This is the only chance you’ll have to buy that, so you probably should do so.

Second, the Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk will begin tomorrow. There’ll be a big kickoff announcement here, so keep your eyes peeled. 

For now, here’s a preview of the first three pages of the standard print edition, which I’m calling the Conspiracy Zine Edition for reasons that will be obvious. There will be some other fun editions, but you can find out about those tomorrow.

Two more pages below the cut. …

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From worst to blah blah blah blah

Saga #36

An arc ends. It’s reasonably good. The next issue of this will be after I’ve moved and switched to digital instead of supporting the comic shop where I’ve been buying comics since third grade. I can’t imagine I won’t be trade-waiting this at that point.

Sex Criminals #15

There’s a moment, most of the way into this basically good issue, where a bunch of characters meet, many for the first time. Most of these characters were introduced months and years ago, this not always being the speediest of books. And Fraction and Zdarsky drop to four panels of all text, white on black, beginning “imagine now a scene where everyone is introduced to everyone else and their roles within both our story and the lives of the characters are hastily, dutifully, yet exhaustingly rendered.” Before, of course, skipping that scene to get on with the plot. And that moment, right there, where Matt Fraction basically told me to go fuck myself if I didn’t remember all of the characters and relationships of his sporadically published sex book, is where I dropped this book out of sheer fury. This book needs to stop disappearing up its own ass and actually tell a fucking story in a coherent manner again.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #6

The first arc ends with some good emotional beats nicked from the other iterations of Marvel’s “new teenage sueprhero book” style in recent memory. As usual, they work well filtered through Reeder and Montclare’s exuberant madness, and the cliffhanger into arc two is wonderful and sad and touching, and sets up loads of interesting stuff. Still, I can’t help but feel like six issues was a bit long for this arc, and I need something more than “yep, quite well done” to jolt my excitement about it.

Batgirl #51

An answer to how we’re winding down the Fletcher-Stewart-Tarr era, namely with a two-parter by Fletcher with a bevy of artists (Eleonora Carlini, Minkyu Jung, and Roger Robinson – they’re quite good). I’m relatively excited about post-Rebirth Batgirl – it’s one of two titles I’m likely to buy – but man, the setup here where the book is basically a team book among a bunch of second and third-tier minority Bat characters that occasionally crosses into things like Gotham Academy is tough to say goodbye to. I know the “weird like Batgirl” DC You lauinch was a flop, but this really is the most functional and long-term stable a DC book has felt since… what, Infinite Crisis-era? Ouch.

Silk #7 and Spider-Woman #6

Missed Silk last week, so ended up with these two parts of Spider-Women together. This is really good stuff – a vintage Marvel crossover that moves forward every issue, has actual character beats, and feels coherent from issue to issue while still showcasing its individual characters. These were my first two issues of their respective series, and while I can’t see myself picking up Silk (who, as a protagonist, is a little too on the nose – a created-in-a-vat heroine finding her place in a Marvel Universe that will no doubt fridge her within the decade), Spider-Woman‘s genuinely compelling and funny. …

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It’s funny how a year of steeling yourself for something doesn’t actually mask the taste of bile rising in your throat when it happens. It’s hardly a surprise that the Rabid Puppies got sixty-two works on the ballot beating their haul of fifty-eight last year. Until E Pluribus Hugo passes, the voting system is flawed in a way that made stopping the Puppies at this stage impossible. This ballot has been predictable since last year. Still, it’s sickening. Short Story, Novelette, Related Work, Graphic Story, Professional Artist, and Fanzine are all full-Puppy categories at present. All categories save for Best Editor Short Form and Best Novel are majority-Puppy. Most of what I have to say I said last year. You can buy the book if you want. But here’s some scattered and off-the-cuff thoughts on this year’s dogfucking.

First, as predicted, the Sad Puppies were a non-entity. That’s a little tough to judge given their new “we’re just a recommendation list” sheen of pointlessness, but it’s notable that the most conspicuous omission from their list, The Fifth Season, got a nomination in best Novel, and that in Fan Artist, a category where they had four picks, three of which were not on the Rabid Puppies slate, none of theirs made it on. Indeed, at a glance I can’t find anything that’s on their list, wasn’t an obvious contender anyway, and made it. These were Vox Day’s Hugos, plain and simple.

Second, let’s not have any silliness about pretending that what was picked reflects any agenda other than Vox Day’s spite. He’s been unambiguous that his sole goal this year is to disrupt the Hugos, not even making an effort to pretend that he was picking works on merit or because there’s actually some body of quality sci-fi he thinks is being overlooked by the awards. His only goal was to ruin things. The nominees exist only for that purpose. They are political, yes. Avowedly so. But their politics does not have even the barest shred of a constructive project. This is fascism shorn of everything but violent brutality – political in the sense of an angry mob kicking a prone body.

And so once again, the course is clear: we must resist. With every tool we have, we must resist. The highest priority, of course, is passing E Pluribus Hugo, the repaired nomination system that will serve to prevent this from happening again. Also important is No Awarding. 

But, of course, that’s more complicated this year than last because of Vox’s tactic of poison pill nominees (which I also called last year, because for a supposedly brilliant tactician Vox sure is predictable). Some of these will hopefully correct themselves – both Stephen King and Neil Gaiman are occupying slots in all-Puppy categories and have the power to withdraw to make room for people that were kept off the ballot by Vox Day. I have a tough time coming up with any justification for such decorated writers not to do so.

Other categories are trickier.…

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The Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk will begin next week. For now, here’s another excerpt, this time after a section looking at the notion of “the red pill,” a concept Mencius Moldbug introduced to the alt-right, and claims that his blog offers readers.

No, what’s really striking is Moldbug’s repeated insistence on the “agony of ingestion.” While a fair description of his writing style, it’s rather hard to see what he actually intends it to refer to in terms of neoreaction. And this is clearly a definitional thing about the red pill. It doesn’t just offer the truth; it offers the searing and traumatic truth. That’s the entire point of Joe Pantoliano’s character in The Matrix, who, having taken the red pill, has decided that the Matrix was his preferred drug after all, a position that is not so much refuted as set aside when its sole proponent is impaled. And Moldbug is visibly desperate to believe he’s got it, despite the almost painful lack of agony.

But look, Moldbug isn’t insincere. If he says the red pill is agonizing to swallow, we can safely assume that he, at least, thinks there’s agony. So the question becomes: what, precisely, does Moldbug find agonizing in his own thought? This is closely related to the question of what his monstrous offspring looks like. What’s the moment in his reasoning that he doesn’t want to be there? He says that it’s Part 9a of the Gentle Introduction which begins, after several parts not mentioning anything like the red pill at all, “Today you begin your irreversible descent into black, unthinkable madness.” Oh boy! But let’s continue with our “Moldbug is sincere” principle and assume that, after his eight part buildup, he really is delivering what he imagines to be the goods. Certainly Part 9a marks a turning point, as he explains it, between the first eight parts that explain “what history really is, and what it really has to teach us,” and the finale that offers a program of action.

So what is the program of action? It’s not, to be clear, putting Steve Jobs in charge; that’s Moldbug’s wish, but he isn’t actually proposing it as a plan of action. Actually, Moldbug is being refreshingly realistic here, trying to come up with a program that can be enacted on an individual level. As he conceptualizes it, the idea is to be “political engineers” designing a backup system that will kick in when American democracy inevitably goes south. And the first step of this backup system is, as he puts it, becoming worthy, by which he means the embrace of a doctrine he calls passivism. He describes it thusly: “The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power. We note instantly that any form of resistance to sovereignty, so long as it succeeds, is a share in power itself. Thus, absolute renunciation of power over USG implies absolute submission to the Structure.”

And suddenly the abyss gazes also. Moldbug has stared into the truth of history, seen that it is a massive pack of lies designed purely to justify the corrupt status quo, and the only thing he can think to do about it is to submit entirely to the status quo.…

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