Eruditorum Press

Siding with bugs is praxis

Attack of the Fifty Foot Podcast

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Okay, the podcast isn’t literally fifty feet.  Because we don’t use spools of magnetic tape for recording anymore.  We use computers.  And so trying to measure a podcast as such would be ludicrous.

What’s not ludicrous is the podcast itself, Giant Woman, the second in what’s shaping up to be an ongoing series with Shana and Jane talking about Steven Universe.  You can get the podcast here.

By the way, we are planning to go to Virgina Beach next year (yes, I really like to plan things out in advance) for the Beach City Con, a Steven Universe convention in Beach City.  The kickstarter for it is already funded, but of course the more that’s pledge the more awesome the con will be!  Check it out here.

Finally, for those listening to the podcast, I forgot to mention that the theme song itself indicates that a “spiritual” approach wouldn’t be inappropriate for intepreting the show.  After all, “That’s why the people of this world… believe in…”

…believe in giant women!  Because giant women are awesome.  Literally!

#BelieveInSteven…

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Alt (Chrono Trigger)

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It’s not about changing history; not really. One does change history, yes, but that is not the point, at least in the conventional sense. Normally we change history to alter present circumstances, after all. Here, however, we change history to alter the future, with the present remaining not fixed, but largely conceptualized as a somewhat indifferent midpoint between the two poles – strangely unimportant to the actual story being told.

On the other hand, the apocalypse is set in 1999, which is to say that it was our own impending eschaton – the end of the world we were thoroughly fixated upon by 1995. We’re less than a year out from Doctor Who’s ridiculously and pointlessly millennial American reboot. Bowie was about to launch on tour with Nine Inch Nails to promote Outside, the start (and sole piece) of his millennium-ending superproject. It’s the year that Seven hits, more murderous paranoia piling up in the cultural gutters. The greatest magician of the age is finishing up his diagnosis of the previous century’s grisly denouement, turning his attention to the task of birthing the new aeon. I go to CTY for the first time, the beginning of a genuine realization that yes, I had a tribe, it was just geographically mis-distributed. AOL was in its boom years. It was, in other words, strange fucking days.

The game’s present, meanwhile, is 1000 AD, squarely in the middle ages, which are portrayed as a standard JRPG technological medieval aesthetic – the sort of thing where there are stoves and refrigerators but no cars or airplanes, and the government consists of a hereditary monarchy whose castle is surrounded by a forest full of monsters. There’s both a tomboy princess (water-affiliated and your first healer) and a steampunk inventor (also female, satisfyingly, as is the later prehistoric barbarian). Making up the past is 600 AD, i.e. also the middle ages, portrayed as such in a more traditional European fantasy milieu (by the time the Byronic Magus with purple flowing hair shows up in that timeline the game’s doing enough genre fusion that it doesn’t jar), which is a terribly cute conceit. Rounding out the timestream are a 2300 AD “domes in a radioactive wasteland” dystopia, a 65,000,000 BC “dinosaurs and early humans” set piece, and a late addition of a 12,000 BC timeline that’s basically Atlantis with the serial number filed off. (Which, notably, means Chrono Trigger is a retelling of The Time Monster made by actual Buddhists.)

The relationship between this and our world is strange. It’s modeled on ours without having any particular connection to or relationship with it. It does not seek to reflect any particular concerns with our world. There’s a vaguely ecological bent to Lavos and the destruction of the world, but it’s vague to the point of being essentially contentless. Past that, this isn’t a game that’s about anything as such.

This is mirrored, in a key sense, in its production. It’s silly to try to identify where the notion of the AAA game began – the term arose in the late 90s, yes, but the idea of the tentpole game that’s designed with the clear intention of it being a hit has been around for ages.…

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Regarding J.K. Rowling’s Recent Ridiculous Comments on Twitter…

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… it’s old news.  I don’t condone any abuse she recieved, but (and this isn’t one of those ‘buts’ that really means ‘ignore what I just said’) her stated views are terrible… and, despite the apparent surprise of some, predictably terrible.

Rowling wrote a book about how dangerous it is for softy governments to ignore terrorism – in 2003!

Rowling put the following into her books:

  • Gold-obsessed Goblin bankers with big noses and a nigh-communistic inability to comprehend or respect ‘human’ notions of private property.
  • A race of willing slaves with brown skin, huge rolling eyes and ‘pickaninny’ speech patterns.
  • Giants who are born savage and thick, and who live in ‘primitive’ tribes.

In her Potter books, there’s only one political extreme and it contains both the Right and the Left, both representing an evil and illegitimate challenge to the mainstream and the established, which is legitimate whatever it does and however unaccountably it works.  So of course she thinks the ‘far Right’ and ‘far Left’ are essentially the same.  She’s already told us this.  As the above adumbrations illustrate, she’s horribly insulated from the implications of her own privileged position.  It shows in her politics (which allows her to insult the memories of millions of left-wingers who died fighting fascism) and her politics shows in her writing.

As I wrote somewhere else:

“Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise represents – like so many villains – the distant and distorted echo of the snarl of radical anger.  He is himself thoroughly unsympathetic, as Koba comes to be when he starts murdering other apes.  However, even thoroughly unsympathetic villains like Voldemort (who, as the snobbish fuhrer of the magic-Nazis, is not someone I’d vote for) tend to represent the – to use a hackneyed phrase – ‘return of the repressed’. And repression is political.  That which is oppressed is also repressed in mainstream discourse.  Voldemort can ascend because he takes advantage of faultlines in Wizarding society that reveal deep, structural injustice and hypocrisy, ie the ethnic cleansing of the giants, the economic ghettoisation of the Goblins, the resolutely undemocratic and unaccountable nature of Wizarding government, the enslavement of the Elves, etc.  Now, J.K. Rowling never really addresses these problems.  She occasionally has goodie characters display a bad conscience about them (ie Hermione’s patronising SPEW campaign and Dumbledore’s occasional remarks to Harry about how badly Wizards have treated other races) but the addressing or remedying of these injustices is NEVER made crucial as a precondition of saving the Wizarding World. The Wizards never really have to face the consequences of these injustices, or change them.  Harry & Co fight to reinstate the status quo that includes all these structural injustices.  The happy ending involves no emancipation of the Elves, no change in Wizarding attitudes to giants (indeed, Rowling makes it clear that the Wizards are essentially right about the respectively servile and primitive nature of these races!)  The happy ending involves no real tackling of the deep strain of racial prejudice about bloodlines.…

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Shabcast 24, Part 2 of the JFK / Nixon Conversation

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And here it is at last, Part 2 of Shabcast 24. 

Rejoin the conversation between myself, Daniel, James, and Kit.  We talk more about Oliver Stone’s grandly bad, silly, outrageous, audacious, irresponsible, febrile, fascinating epics of 90s political cinema, JFK and Nixon. 

(Part One here.)

This episode concentrates more on JFK (man, myth and movie), and moves to a wonderful final act in which the awesomely well-informed Daniel, under Kit’s adroit questioning, dismantles some of the more pivotal parts of Stone’s conspiracyballs.  (And it is balls, by the way, just in case any of you were in any doubt.  I speak as a one-time believer, as does Daniel.)

*

Here are some links for you:

Generously, Oliver Stone and the Mail Online (brothers under the skin) have been helping to promote this episode of the Shabcast, with a new ‘news’ story – here. 

Here are the two parts – Part One and Part Two – of an excellent TV documentary about Nixon, which picks at the scab and uncovers some of the pus Stone doesn’t let you see, including the factual conspiracy on the part of Nixon and his people to commit treason and sabotage LBJ’s 1968 Paris peace talks.  This article from a couple of years ago is a good way into the subject.

While I’m referring you to YouTube, here‘s a good documentary about the Kennedy assassination – a rarity on YouTube (I refer to quality rather than subject matter).

Here‘s John McAdams’ site about the Kennedy assassination.  McAdams may be, as Daniel says, a Right-wing nutjob, but his site seems to be generally considered a good portal for real info about the assassination, and is a good place to go to quickly get myths and factoids busted. 

The audio at the start of the episode is of my own mixing, but the audio at the end is mostly taken from a couple of John Pilger documentaries, Vietnam – The Last Battle and Year Zero – The Silent Death of Cambodia.  Lots of Pilger’s documentaries are on YouTube and they’re mostly essential, scorching, and revelatory (though Pilger and I have our differences).

Sadly the Errol Morris documentaries about Lee Atwater and Robert Macnamara that Daniel mentions are not on YouTube, but they can be found online if you look in the right places.  Not that I’d ever encourage anyone to do anything illegal.  I’m not a crook.

If you want to know about some real, actual, historical ‘conspiracies’ (carried out or just planned) by powerful people (which have the benefit of having actually happened) check out these links:

Suez – Iran-Contra – Northwoods – Operation Mongoose – The Gulf of Tonkin Incident (which, with intense irony, Stone refers to in JFK without mentioning even that there is a controversy about what really happened) – COINTELPRO – Pinochet’s coup – the coup in Guatemala – and I could go on. 

As you will see from the above examples – which are, if not undisputed, at least part of the historical record to the point that they’re on Wikipedia – is that real conspiracies of the powerful are mostly conducted within what the conspirators broadly consider normal business, even if they feel the need to be clandestine about it. …

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Comics Reviews (August 31st, 2016)

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In a smidge of a hurry today, so I haven’t had time to look at what’s out next week yet.

Ms. Marvel #10

The bits that work are typically brilliant – the “nine years earlier” intro in particular is charming. But Wilson can tend towards a somewhat subtlety-free didacticism on its own, which works fine when she’s picking interesting topics like gentrification, but is a rough mix with the already crass didacticism of Civil War II. Add in yet another “Captain Marvel shows up to be blatantly and transparently wrong” scene and a desperately unsubtle bit with Becky and you get an issue that’s just not very good. Also, opening with four pages of Adrian Alphona art serves to make the rest look lackluster, which is terribly unfair to the quite talented Takeshi Miyazawa, whose only flaw is to not be flattered by the comparison. 

Avatarex #2

One strongly suspects Grant Morrison is writing the scripts for these in an afternoon and then collecting the paycheck. I’m sure it’s a very nice paycheck, and I don’t begrudge him this one bit, but it’s still Grant Morrison at his most “here are the standard issue Grant Morrison tropes put in an equally standard issue order.” If it were the mid-90s this would be refreshing. Instead it’s just got some pretty art in places.

Spider-Man #7

A solid issue. The Bombshell conversation in the middle is grotesquely contrived in that way that talking about the plot of Civil War II almost has to be, but the narrow focus on Miles and Miles trying to figure out what being a hero means to him along with the basic satisfaction of the Jessica Jones plot keeps this one in the “Bendis showing why he’s actually good” category instead of the “for fuck’s sake Bendis I know they say style is the stuff you keep doing wrong, but could you have a little less of it” category. 

Lazarus #24

An above-average issue that maintains a simmering tension throughout. There’s a lot to wonder what’s going to happen about, which is always a good place for a book like this to be. There’s still an entire plotline I couldn’t tell you what the hell was going on in, which is a frustration (the recap page for this book never comes close to doing enough). But it’s good, compelling sci-fi espionage, which is what i look for out of this book, and the “Forever finally learns the truth but from Johanna of all people” twist is a smart one.

4 Kids Walk Into a Bank #1-2

Couple weeks old, but came recommended. If Stranger Things were a heist film, basically. There’s a sort of willful sloppiness in places, which is kind of a thing with Black Mask, I find, but the entire premise of “four kids get themselves involved in a bank robbery” is sufficiently ludicrous that the moments of “what are you actually trying to do here” seem more like charming embellishments than carelessness. I’m not as in love with it as some are – I think there’s a real failure to develop a lot of the main cast adequately – but it’s smart and funny and trying interesting things, and I’m probably in for the back three issues of it to see if it pays off cleverly. …

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Myraid Universes: Divided Light Part 3: Bodies of Evidence

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As with all issues of this kind, we begin with a couple of pages of recap from Captain Picard. The Enterprise then sends down three teams to assist the three gestalts in retrieving the missing bodies as per Deanna Troi’s request, each containing a doctor and an engineer (needed to disable the shield generators surrounding the holy sites). While on the ship, Captain Picard asks Reg Barclay to try and track down the base where the crewmembers were captured initially, just in case Deanna’s plan runs into trouble.

Each team has to navigate some kind of harsh environment to reach the holy sites in question. Needless to say, they all make it and everyone gets their body back in one piece. The first team, led by Deanna (in Alexander’s body) also includes Commander Riker and Robin Lefler. As they hop across a series of ice floes in an arctic environment, Will regales his team with tales of an old friend who fell through the ice and couldn’t look at ice cream sundaes for months right before Deanna promptly does that. She’s fine (as is Alexander) though, and no sooner do they fish her out then they come across what they were looking for. Deanna comments on a very literal out-of-body experience.

Doctor Selar’s team (comprised of her, Alyssa Ogawa and Jenna D’Sora), has to navigate through a desert in the middle of a howling sandstorm. Thankfully Selar has figured out how to use Geordi’s VISOR and can lead everyone through the sand no problem, except for Alyssa who stupidly wanders off and gets lost. Thanks to the VISOR though, it’s no time at all before she’s found again. And just as before, the team finds the missing person, the engineer disables shit (while Jenna stands guard) and they beam out. And finally, Ro Laren leads Lwaxana Troi and Doctor Crusher through a dense thicket of tropical jungle. The three most kickass ladies in the crew use their phasers as machetes and fry their way through the undergrowth to reach the temple where Worf is being held (to which Laren kicks the door in to get inside, because you’d better fucking believe she does). On each team, someone comments on how strange it is that none of these places seem to be guarded.

On the Enterprise, Captain Picard is about to contact the Sakerionites to let them know the missing crewmembers have been retrieved safely and to take them up on their offer to put everyone’s consciousnesses back where they belong. But before he does, Reg comes in and tells him he might not want to do that until he hears what he discovered. What follows is one of the worst dumps of exposition in the history of mankind: For the duration of an entire two-page spread, a bunch of Sakerion randos explain in extremely loud and exacting detail about how it was in fact they who orchestrated the whole body-swapping fiasco and framed the Ergeans in order to sabotage their application for Federation membership and cover up the fact the Sakerionites have been exploiting Ergeus’ natural resources and have been effectively using its inhabitants as slave labourers.…

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like this (poem)

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times like this
hotel alone
panic attack
soon to be crone
new rhythm, new daring
time to make another
can’t find the word, something like life

should be happy
all put away
food in the fridge
dogs are at bay
but this, this, other thing lurking
a freshly calved iceberg about to
can’t find the word, might be like sluice

just keep running?
find it so hard to
can’t find the word, like being together
left behind
this is my way
follow your bliss, follow my this
always calls out
just turn away
keeps me at bay

stumbling slow like
running through sand
the palm of that hand
too late to go back
no, must find a sanctum
desktop, café, cave, bedroom
holds treasure so dear
like a word
just beyond this grasp

steal it
catch the wind
sail away to my garden
feed, water, dress it so fine
in plain sight
inch word
this

introduce to new friends
in hope of communion
vain hope

for i have no roots …

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I Think It Would Be a Good Idea (Civilization)

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In case you missed it, “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” a longform piece on topics closely related to The Super Nintendo Project, went up on Saturday.

At last, the false dichotomy between playing video games and saving western civilization stands revealed. But when we choose to do both at the same time, what exactly is the civilization that we are saving, and how might that shape our understanding of certain larger conceptual wars?

In bluntly materialist terms, which are after all the best way to approach civilization, it is another instance of a PC game getting a fundamentally middling SNES port, in the same vein as Populous and SimCity. There are no doubt those for whom this is “their” Civilization – the version of a monumental piece of video game history. This is the game that inspired Iain Banks to the phrase “outside context problem,” for fuck’s sake. Or, at least, it’s the crummy console version of the predecessor to that game. Certainly that’s where my history here intersects – somewhere past 1996 with a lot of Civ2, in a phase of video gaming otherwise defined by Diablo and Quake. High school, notably, where the Super Nintendo was late elementary school/early middle school.

The games are largely similar – Civilization II refines the original, as opposed to reworking it from the ground up. It’s more balanced and more elegant. This is doubly so when compared to the SNES port – the gap from this to 1996 is in many regards far more shocking than the gap from Donkey Kong Country 2 to Super Mario 64. But the basic thrill of the mechanism and its dizzying central metaphor persists. I compared it to Populous and SimCity earlier, and it really does manage to be a fusion of the two, combining the granular deep systems of SimCity with the cosmological scale of Populous to great effect. You may have had godlike powers in SimCity, but the scale of it was always small – one’s cities fundamentally never felt vast. Civilization feels vast easily, especially in the early stages of the game, which is as it should be. The effect of your initial tiny and contextless patch of land on which you build your capital slowly opening outwards until you encounter the Other, then borders, and finally a coherent world is genuinely effective, making the scope of what you can do feel real and substantive.

But we must be careful here. This sense of progressively illuminating an exterior world is certainly the form of western civilization as depicted here, but it is not the content. We’ve identified the story Civilization likes to tell, but not how it tells it. The answer to that question is inherited from the Avalon Hill board game Civilization is unofficially based upon: a tech tree. This is perhaps Civilization’s most significant not-quite innovation – a sublimely smooth implementation of an interlocking ladder of game upgrades that also serves to create a technologically deterministic narrative of human history from road-building to space colonies.…

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The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate

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An excerpt from my book Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right

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. (And he gets it wrong for good measure; Zork was a parser game, not a hypertext.)

Day tears into the game at length –  a critical savaging. “It’s even less fun than it sounds”; “soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date”; “I have never played a less entertaining computer game.” 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. From this he casually spins out a conspiracy theory; “Given the very poor quality of Depression Quest, it seemed readily apparent to casual observers that the unusual amount of media attention garnered by the game must have been the result of the developer’s liberal distribution of her sexual favors.”

At this point, three pages into the chapter, entitled “Counterattack,” Vox Day makes a stunning reversal, admitting that “this does not appear to have exactly been the case.” And no wonder.…

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Consider the Ray Gun: Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land

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Because apparently it’s podcast week here at Eruditorum Press, and creating new podcast threads is more fun for me than watching Firefly again, today I’m going to introduce yet another new podcast as part of the Oi! Spaceman family. This one is called Consider the Ray Gun, and it’s ostensibly going to be about reading old science fiction books, but since it’s an Eruditorum Press thing it’ll likely go wildly off topic in an episode or two. 

For the inaugural episode, I’m joined by Pex Lives’ own James Murphy to chat about Stranger in a Strange Land, a book that I grew up with and meant a lot to my teenage years, but which James had never encountered. We chat about the counterculture, period sexism and racism, Hugh Hefner wannabees, Heinlein’s political evolution, and whether American science fiction authors live more colorful lives than British fantasy authors. Among many other topics. It’s a fun listen, I think, although of course I’m biased. …

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