Erudite Waffles (3/25/23)

What I’m Up To

Well, mostly I’m trying to finish off the Eruditorum post on Resolution, so I want to get through this as fast as possible. A lot of my last week was eaten up by some exciting work for hire news that I can’t share yet. Spent a bunch of last week in Brooklyn working on a piece that I successfully sold, and then spent the early part of this week working on a pitch for another one that I hope to hear back on soon. So balancing that with Patreon work is currently… exciting, and I’m going to make this super brief and get back to it.

Still, we’re back Monday with the first of six parts of Last War in Albion v3 Chapter 9: Brought to Light. We’ll be talking about war comics, Harvey Pekar, the CIA, and Bill Sienkiewicz.

Halo 3: Head Like a Hole

As a single, a bit “this book taught me more about penguins than I care to know,” not only incorporating all the needless “Down In It” remixes off Halo 1 but offering five separate and once again mostly interchangeable remixes of the song, made all the worse by the fact that the Opal mix, which is actually interesting, isn’t on the most readily available version. All of which said, the Empathetic mix of “Terrible Lie” on this disc can get it. And I feel like you have to acknowledge the fact that “Head Like a Hole” itself is an absolute classic banger that literally never gets old. Put it this way: unlike Halo 1, this is actually offering quantity as an alternative to quality. 3/9 Inches

Tumblr Ask Theater of the Mind

As always, my ask box is open to anonymous asks if you’d like to lob a question my way.

Since the original run of Eruditorum ended, are there Who episodes that you didn’t love at the time but have since grown on you to become favorites?

Favorites? Not a ton, but I’ve largely grown bored of Tomb of the Cybermen is overrated discourse and come to find it a modest classic. Day of the Daleks I’m probably fonder than I used to be of.

Inverse question: What Dr Who episodes have you found yourself souring on since writing Tardis Eruditorum?

I really struggle to get excited about Genesis of the Daleks anymore. Not sure The Mutants will ever be as good as it was on the precise amount of cannabis I was experiencing right then. And man, Name of the Doctor was rough on the last rewatch.

Which other of the Wh- words would have made a more or as interesting show as Doctor Who?

Whalebone

What episodes of Flux would have been in Dalek Eruditorum?

Probably would have done it as a whole.

Is there a method to the madness with the ordering of the Sandman essays? Or rather, does the ordering make sense if you’ve read Sandman and know the content of the issues, or is it some private system you’re keeping secret?

They correspond to the content of the issues in much the same way that individual passages of v2 corresponded to scenes in Watchmen, which is to say in a way that makes sense to me and that I don’t especially care whether does to anyone else while also broadly assuming it’ll make sense to some people at least some to most of the time.

Have you and Jack talked about doing more of those Seventh Doctor commentaries you did?

Not in a while, though I’m always easy to persuade if Jack has the time.

What are some of the ways Jack has influenced your thinking and writing, beyond just the topic of Doctor Who?

Gosh, I mean, how do you meaningfully talk about the way in which you’ve been influenced by someone who’s been a friend for a decade? Like, it’s probably safe to say Neoreaction a Basilisk wouldn’t have happened without Jack, even if I can’t actually point to any direct causality there. I read China Miéville due to Jack, which had a ton of knock-on influences.

Oh, here, I’ll go with a funny one: Jack caused me to think carefully enough about Marxism that I became an anarchist.

Are there genres that Doctor Who has never done before and that you like to see it try ?

To quickly invent a critical distinction, though there are televised Doctor Who stories that are cyberpunk, it has never done cyberpunk.

Could you explain your distinction between stories “being” cyberpunk vs “doing” cyberpunk ?

I guess.

The Long Game is cyberpunk in the sense that its themes are decidedly cyberpunk-adjacent. It’s got enough cyberpunk tropes that you could pretty easily and with a straight face make the argument that it’s cyberpunk and no one would be able to call you an idiot for it.

But like, it’s not cyberpunk the way Transit was cyberpunk, i.e. in the sense where you could tell 100% that it was written by someone who went “I’m gonna do a cyberpunk story.”

Any thoughts on the writing of Timothy Morton and/or the concept of Hyperobjects?

The concept seems to address a problem I don’t especially relate to; thinking on the sort of scale involved in conceptualizing global warming comes pretty naturally to me. The scale I find vertiginous is roughly community. The idea that there are fifty thousand individual lives within a handful of miles of me, all of them with fully realized sets of qualia and loves and anxieties? That absolutely blows my mind. The fact that the fragile ecosystem that keeps them alive is collapsing under them and they very well might not be here in three generations? Eminently graspable.

What’s your favourite Iain Sinclair book?

Player of Games.

The Part Where She Leaves You With a Song

Cause i just got it on vinyl.