The Tower, at its most optimistic (which is not very) offers the destruction of illusions. I don’t know about you, but I feel like burning some shit down.

First, then: nobody is to blame for Trump’s election save for the people who voted for him. A failed resistance is not at fault for the actions it tried to prevent. Everyone in the circular firing squad is in the end wrong. The awful truth is that there is nothing you could have done to stop him. Let’s start, then, by jettisoning the illusion that said otherwise. The arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice. The moral universe has no arc. The moral universe does not even exist. History is a butcher without face or agency – a thing that simply happens to people. There is no individual level response to it. Your relationship to history is not one of subject to narrative, but of meat to predator.

Accordingly, there is no refuge to be found in any of the liberal platitudes offered as possible modes of resistance. There is no benefit to be found in giving him an open mind. There is no point in appealing to the checks and balances of the very system that has just given him material power. There is no value in hoping that history is going to suddenly develop a benevolent streak. “What do we do for the next four years?” is as stupid a question as “What do we do about Syria?” was. We don’t do anything. We cannot stop history. It is going to proceed with a grim inevitability, as deterministic and implacable as planetary motion.

The flip side of that is that history has no moral legitimacy beyond the mere fact of its existence. The material fact that when Donald Trump orders a drone strike there will be a drone strike is not “right” or “just.” It’s just true, in the same way that a bullet is true. There is no moral dimension to mere existence. That is not to embrace the idiot fantasy of “#notmypresident” or anything. Of course he’s the President. But this is only true as a material fact, and only material concerns follow from it.

Put another way, being President has not made Trump any more morally justifiable. Nor has it made him any more competent. Even for a right-wing authoritarian he’s a fucking moron driven by easily manipulable pathologies. The material consequences of this are by and large easy to figure out, at least in the broad strokes. Spoiler: it goes badly, and not just for his targets. Deaths in the millions are the best case scenario. The worst is billions. You can’t change that either.

But that does not mean that there is no resistance to be had. It’s merely to understand that resistance starts as an individual program. The fact that there is no intrinsic morality to Trump’s material power does not mean that we cannot ascribe morality. Indeed, allow me to do so with utter bluntness: Trump is fucking evil.…

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No comics reviews this week. I just can’t. We’ll see about next week when we get there, but I was thinking of winding down the feature anyway, so peg your expectations accordingly. Instead, here’s this week’s Super Nintendo Project.

The future arrived in late September 1996, untethered to any major gift-giving occasion. My assumption in hindsight is that my mother, giddily triumphant after scoring one on the sly and apparently correct logic that Toy Works was still a place that would get a shipment but was not a place where they’d sell out in thirty seconds, couldn’t resist giving it to me immediately. It seems as though I must have known the Nintendo 64 was coming, just because it’s hard to imagine myself as a person who didn’t know things like that a new Nintendo console was coming out, but I honestly can’t even remember a trace of anticipation for the future. Perhaps that’s just where I was in late 1996. Certainly it was something of a low point for me, as adolescent depression’s teeth sunk in deepest and my academic performance began to degrade in the face of a simple and blunt inability to drag myself through page after page of rote busywork.

So it’s perhaps not a surprise that I was at the time unimpressed by the future. But oh boy was I. I beat Super Mario 64, but my desire to go back and collect further stars was essentially nonexistent. My objections were numerous and diffuse. I saw the “hunt for six stars in a level” schtick as little more than flagrant cover for the fact that there weren’t actually very many levels in the game, found the camera thoroughly unsatisfying, and hated holding the weird M-shaped controller by the middle and right prongs.

Most, though not all of this, was unfair, at least as a judgment of the future, in that it amounted to peculiarities of the early-version tech involved in Super Mario 64. Yes, the multiple stars per level were a workaround to deal with the fact that the cartridge could only hold so many of of the big 3D levels, but with subsequent games in the 3D star-hunt format this restriction loosened, and levels started getting the number of stars they could interestingly fit instead of six come hell or high water. The camera, likewise, gradually improved its basic AI, and the eventual switch away from the four-button C-Pad of the Nintendo 64 towards cameras controlled by a second analog stick took away most of the annoyance involved in Super Mario 64. Likewise the controller design, rooted in an understandable but still fundamentally erroneous guess that the D-Pad would remain the primary control mechanism for most games, was subsequently ditched, with future controllers, whether Nintendo’s or not, positioning the analog stick in more ergonomically pleasant locations.

(A side note on the multiple stars per level. On the one hand Super Mario 64 is focused on the search for a singular and defining object – a golden star around which entire worlds are organized.…

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Judging the first part of a two-parter is always a pain in the neck. (Remember when I thought Under the Lake had promise?) And there are other factors complicating this, like the nagging worry that Class isn’t ever going to transcend the fact that you can snarkily describe it as “The Sarah Jane Adventures with fucking.” Certainly we’re in familiar territory here, both in general and for Class, which is to say that we’re running through a fairly standard set of genre paces with a couple of unique spins. In this case, the basic mode is the mid-season finale, with the most obvious model being the “Surprise/Innocence” two-parter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Class is at least consistently good at throwing itself into whatever it’s doing with zeal, and so four episodes in its reliance on old standards has consistently been outshone by the flare with which they’re being done. All the same, my fondest and most adamant hope for the second part of this, or at least for something in the back half of the season, is that we get an episode that’s actually doing something new instead of adding a bit of spice to a cliche.

All of which said, once again the cliche is very tasty. Ness continues to be very good at striking a balance between the show’s instincts towards taking place in a TV school and its instincts towards emotional realism. The scene among Ram, April, and her mother is probably the highlight in this regard, with Ram being perfectly pitched both as a genuinely decent guy (“I didn’t want her to think bad of you.”) and as a mildly rebellious “bad” kid (“I had some condoms.”) It’s a smart balance, and more to the point one that’s ultimately derived from Doctor Who’s own longstanding balance of melodrama and actual drama. (And, of course, from Buffy.) And there are other bits of genuine intelligence around this. The “April feeds back into Corakinus” beat is entirely expected. Corakinus asking to cuddle after sex, on the other hand, is absolutely inspired. (Less successful – Tanya’s “I think they had sex” seeming to exist entirely to set up the moronic “Ram and the Shadow Kin?” joke.)

This last parenthetical also brings us to the things the episode is doing that at least offer real potential for going in a boldly original direction. The most interesting thing the show has going for it remains the Charlie/Ms. Quill relationship, which is clearly being pushed gradually to the forefront. It’s frustrating that this is often some of the clumsiest writing, with Tanya and Matteusz getting to flail uselessly against Charlie’s conviction of his moral rectitude, both on the slavery issue and on the owning weapons of mass destruction issue. This sets up the odd phenomenon of a plot that’s simultaneously the show’s best hope of turning in something that really makes you sit up and take notice and that’s flopping around on the table unsatisfyingly.

In a similar and more successful vein is the new head teacher, Dorothea, who tragically isn’t played by Sophie Aldred or Jackie Lane, but who is otherwise charming.…

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Sorry about missing Thursday, but here it is (better late than never).

This time, I’m joined by Kit Power to chat about two Stephen King novels, The Dead Zone and The Running Man, and their respective film adaptations. 

Kit and I think these stories have some application to issues of the day.  See what you think.…

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Bitch Planet #9

Righteous and angry the way you want tis book to be, but… who’s Eleanor Doane again? I mean, the issue tells me somewhat, but clearly she’s a big part of the book’s underlying mythology, and, well, that’s always rough when a book’s as sporadic as this. This would work if it were coming out on an actual release schedule, but the “an issue every once in a while” is just killing it, and I’m increasingly contemplating switching to trade for it. 

Animosity #3

The meta-arc of this one is feeling cloudy – there’s a big jump between the second issue and the third, enough of one that I went back to the second to refresh my memory, which was a mistake because I’d forgotten just how clumsy the end of that issue was, making the jump even more jarring. But on a single-issue level this is golden – an unsettling and provocative look at animal-human relationships that’s an absolute joy to read. I suspect its problems quite fitting together will eventually overwhelm it, but for now this is a highlight. 

The Wicked + The Divine #23

An ambitious high-concept issue in which Gillen proceeds to get a bunch of real journalists to roleplay interviews with his characters and then write up those interviews as though they were real articles. There’s literal authorial self-insertion. Add to that some gorgeously lush portraits by Kevin Wada and you’ve got something that’s obviously a lot of fun, and that manages to seed hints for where the next arc of WicDiv is going as well. Shit like this is why this is one of the best books on the stands. …

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Hi all,

So, it’s been a while since I’ve put something up on Eruditorum Press.  My bad.  Got caught up in work-related travel, and then there was the return of the intestinal bug, and, well… I apologize, because I’ve been sitting on this awesome Giant Woman podcast for two weeks now, where Shana and I talk more about Steven Universe.

Steven Universe! 

In this installment of Giant Woman we cover Bubble Buddies and Serious Steven the 7th and 8th episodes of Season One.  And as both of these episodes are quite good, so too is the conversation around them, although to be fair I blew it in my analysis of the Beatles’ song “Strawberry Fields Forever” as an influence on Serious Steven, as I completely neglected to mention that the song is a fusion of two different takes.  Seriously, where was my brain at?

As always, you can get your Giant Woman fix at the Oi! Spaceman library of podcasts right here.…

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Something of a holding pattern episode, executing a bog standard premise whose primary virtue is clearly that it’s cheap and depends primarily on interior shots in which two people talk or street scenes in which static monster tendrils are strung about. This is, of course, not something to complain about – “the cheap one” is a thing Doctor Who has always had to grapple with. Sure, it ends up being the downside to the decision to drop the first two episodes together, in that you don’t really want your cheap holding pattern episode to come on your second week, but that’s a pretty minor complaint. And on the bright side, Class is intelligent enough to burn off “people are mysteriously visited in the night by their dead relatives” as the cheap midseason episode, which is more than can be said for Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or, the most obvious comparison, Torchwood.

On top of that, “Nightvisiting” has what can increasingly just be described as Class’s usual instinct to avoid genre defaults in favor of more interesting routes. For one thing, at no point are any of the main characters particularly tempted by the Lankin, so that at no point does the drama hinge on the fact that the audience knows genre tropes and the characters don’t. Particularly satisfying, after two episodes focusing pretty hard on his trauma, is Ram’s reaction to Rachel showing up at his window, which is basically to go “nope” and run like hell. But Tanya’s consistent and intelligent interrogation of the situation and eventual self-rescue is good stuff as well.

There are certainly some ways in which the script is sloppy. The idea that Tanya’s family constitutes the biggest reserve of grief in London on the two year anniversary of Tanya’s father’s death is… sloppy, though wisely buried in the denouement when things are happening quickly enough that you don’t notice. On the other hand, the sequestering of Charlie and Matteusz in the bedroom, lampshaded explicitly by Ms. Quill when they finally make it down to involve themselves in the plot, is hard to treat as anything other than a particularly clumsy bit of storytelling that serves to keep Matteusz at an odd remove from the main characters, dropping out of the story for an episode and then popping up having been thrown out of his house, as opposed to us getting to see him get thrown out. It’s odd, because there’s no obvious reason for him not to be given roughly the same weight that Tanya, Ram, April, and Charlie get, and yet he very clearly isn’t. It’s also a bit puzzling to do this as your third episode, such that your ghosts are all characters we’ve never seen before, which ends up being somewhat underwhelming. Tanya’s father is at least well-set up by the previous episode and the intro montage, but Mrs. Quill’s sister is an utterly damp squib.

But for everything that’s clumsy there are bits that are deft and intelligent.…

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