Eruditorum Press

We’re not cancelled; these are just our Wilderness Years

Hyrule Haeresis 2

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Video game sequels are a different beast than sequels in other mediums. In video games, a sequel is typically expected to improve upon its predecessor because video games are intensely technical. Since a game is thought of at least partly as a feat of software engineering, sequels are approached as a honing, refining and improvement of the original as much as they are a thematic and aesthetic continuation of them. In other words, we should think of video game sequels as new and improved models as much as the next chapter of a story, if not more so. On the other hand, the nature of a sequel demands in any medium of genre demands narrative escalation.
 
Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is a classic example of this duality. In an attempt to avoid repetition and falling into a rut, Shigeru Miiyamoto set out to create a game that was fundamentally different from Zelda no Densetsu and even brought together an entirely new development team in an attempt to push his designers creatively. From a mechanical standpoint, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link seems to be doing everything in its power to be as different as possible from Zelda no Densetsu: The original game used a top-down perspective akin to traditional RPGS, while this game is primarily a sidescroller, more similar to the Castelvania/Akumajō Dracula series. The game only takes an overhead perspective when traversing the overworld to move from location to location, during which points it more closely resembles the style of the contemporaneous Final Fantasy than it does Zelda no Densetsu.
 
Like many video game sequels of its vintage, including the following year’s Final Fantasy II and US version of Super Mario Bros. 2, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link is indicative of a creative culture defined by a sense of playful experimentation where anything can be anything. That “Zelda 2” is so different from “Zelda 1” is irrelevant, because in 1987 no-one knew what “Zelda” was “supposed” to be. It wouldn’t be until the turn of the console generation where the belief started to ossify that sequels would be technically and mechanically identical to their predecessors, except “better”. And yet the problem remains. A sequel demands narrative escalation.
 
We are told Hyrule is in chaos. Roving bands of monsters wreak havoc across the land. Apparently the defeat of Ganon, central to the plot of the last game and to the Legend of Zelda itself, wasn’t enough to save the world. Lucky for us Link bears a sacred birthmark indicating that he is to inherit the Triforce of Courage, one third of a mystical artefact that united the kingdom of Hyrule under one banner in olden times and a key to a prophecy involving Hyrule’s royal family. After the death of the king, a magician fought with his son the prince and placed a spell on the prince’s sister, Princess Zelda, that cast her into an eternal sleep. With her went the secret to reforging the Triforce, bringing war and strife back to the kingdom.
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Pex Lives XTREME

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Jane’s taking the week off in a push to get Last War in Albion Book One finally out the door, but I realize that I never actually got around to announcing the latest addition to our podcast stable, Pex Lives Xtreme, Kevin’s new sports podcast. Yes, we apparently do sports writing now too. Sports, sex, and Doctor Who. Why do you visit other websites again?

Anyway, the first episode’s here.…

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Cultural Marxism 4: The State of the Art

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“The State of the Art” surrounds Use of Weapons, both diegetically and in publication. Externally, it was first published as a stand-alone novella in 1989, then became the title piece of a short story collection in 1991. Within the narrative, on the other hand, it takes the form of an account composed by Diziet Sma shortly after the events of Use of Weapons (“The State of the Art” is addressed to someone named Petrain, Use of Weapons has Sma tell Skaffen-Amtiskaw [revealed at the end of “The State of the Art” to be the story’s diegetic editor] to “send a stalling letter to that Petrain guy” before leaving to find Zakalwe) that, among other things, relates the circumstances by which she came to leave Contact (the Culture’s diplomatic service) in favor of Special Circumstances (the more interventionist intelligence service within Contact). It demands, in other words, to be read in context with that novel.

This does it no favors. Use of Weapons is, as mentioned, essentially the last Culture novel, at least in terms of what Banks created the Culture to do. “The State of the Art,” on the other hand, is a joke in which Banks goes and does one of the things that people were always going to ask him about until he’d do, namely have the Culture meet Earth. From the start, this was something the novels quietly resisted, with Consider Phlebas going out of its way in its epilogues to specify that it took place in 1331, so as to emphasize the complete irrelevance of humanity, then preoccupied with the Genkō War and Ibn Battuta’s visit to Kilwa, to its events. The Culture is pointedly not humanity’s future – its utopianism is altogether more abstracted than that.

Still, the possibility lingers tantalizingly, and Banks, a sci-fi guy to his core, made the eminently sensible decision to get it over with. And, inevitably, “The State of the Art” runs through all the obligatory jokes, most of them with delicious wit and charm. The best focus on Li, a member of the Contact expedition to Earth (covertly observing it in 1977) who becomes a die-hard Star Trek fan, attempts to persuade the rest of the team to elect him captain of the ship, which culminates in a campaign speech (while holding a real lightsaber) in which he serves the crew various dishes vat-grown from human cells such as Stewed Idi Amin, General Pinochet Chilli Con Carne and Richard Nixon Burgers, then vows that if elected captain he’ll destroy the planet because it is silly and boring. But there are some other good ones, such as the ship trying and failing to request (via postcard) that the BBC World Service play “Space Oddity” and dedicate it to the Arbitrary.  

Other characters, meanwhile, espouse other standard and inevitable positions. One – Dervley Linter – decides he wants to renounce the Culture entirely and live his life as a human, having all of his Culture-specific abilities removed in the process.…

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Embracing Intersubjectivity

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Prologue

A young woman is featured at a freethought conference and speaks on communicating atheism through blogging, then later on sexism within the atheist community. She has her say, makes some points (namely, that just because other female skeptics don’t recognize sexism within the skeptic community in their own lives and work, that said sexism might still exist), and afterwards basically goes on with her life. Later, she spends time at the bar in the hotel chatting and generally having a good time, and when at four in the morning she decides she needs some sleep, she finds herself alone in an elevator with a man who takes the opportunity to ask her to his hotel room for coffee.

(A word to the wise: an offer for coffee at four in the morning is rarely about a desire for caffeine.)

Later, the young woman records a vlog about her experiences at the conference, and as an aside relays this experience, ending with, “Guys, don’t do that.”

Hence Elevatorgate.

This is the story of how I became a feminist.

First, let’s clear the air

“Feminist” is the kind of terms that comes loaded with huge amounts of baggage, and it’s not my place here to define it or to throw up walls about who does or doesn’t get to claim the mantle of the term, or to apply that term to others. Virtually everyone in polite discourse agrees broadly with the idea that “women should be treated equally to men,” or “women should collect equal pay for equal work,” or “women should have strong role models in media,” so hopefully we can address issues slightly more sophisticated than those Gloria Steinem was fighting for in 1972 or so. (Hell, even the complementarians among right-wing American Christian evangelicals would broadly agree with the idea of legal equality between men and women; they’d just cover themselves with the fig leaf of “different roles” based largely on terrible ideas of biological essentialism and determinism.) We can start with the hoary old cliche of “the radical notion that women are people,” and move on from there, can’t we?

Also, I recognize and respect the opinion of those who claim that a man, particularly a white, cisgender, Western-educated man, can by definition not be a feminist, although I disagree. If your politics means that you consider me a feminist ally, rather than a true feminist, I’ll accept that label instead. While this is the space in which I’m telling a story about myself, I fully believe that stories such as mine should be decentered, and offer it here for what I presume to be a largely male, cisgender, white audience.

Second, let’s clarify some terminology.

I’m fully aware that there’s quite a bit of separation among the various subgroups I’ll be discussing here, and that to some degree I’m going to pretend that the atheist, skeptic, freethought, and rationalist movements are one and the same. This is to some degree an artifact of the way the different groups are incredibly porous to one another, and the lines between them are fuzzy at best.…

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Shabcast 23, Part 2 – New Atheism is the Opium of Misogynists, Islamophobes, and Imperialists

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Yes, I use the Oxford comma.  I use it because it is sensible, stylish, and clarifying.

Oh, and this is Part 2 of Shabcast 23, featuring the continuation of my latest chat with Daniel Harper.  I think the title is pretty much self-explanatory. 

That’s my thing now.  Self-explanatory titles.  And Oxford commas.  They’re my thing too now.  And irrelevant commentary on my own style.

Self-explanatory titles, irrelevant commentary on my own style, and Oxford commas.

See, they’re nice aren’t they?  If that comma hadn’t been there, before the ‘and’, it could’ve looked like I was saying I now make irrelevant comments about my own style and about Oxford commas. 

And clearly I would never make irrelevant comments about Oxford commas.

*

By the way, here‘s a link to Rebecca Watson’s video (referred to in the Shabcast), in which she mentions (in passing) that a guy tried to chat her up in a hotel elevator in the wee small hours, and that, guys, it’s probably not a good idea to do that.  That bit starts around 4:30.

Further to the discussions about biological reductionism in the Shabcast, I recommend the works of Steven & Hilary Rose, Richard Lewontin, and Stephen Jay Gould.  Further to the discussion of ‘New Atheism’, I heartily recommend a book called The Threat to Reason by Dan Hind, and (slightly more guardedly) a book by Terry Eagleton called Reason, Faith, and Revolution.

I also recommend (sight unseen but with all confidence) Daniel’s piece touching on these matters, which be along tomorrow here at Eruditorum Press.

 …

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Comics Reviews (August 10th, 2016)

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Avatarex #1

Released last week, but I missed it, so here we are. There’s a fundamental perversity to Grant Morrison’s Graphic India work – a company focused on breaking comics out in India whose marketing talks about how “India is home to some of the most creative talent in the world” and then proceeds to hire people like Stan Lee and Grant Morrison to do their comics. And one gets the distinct sense they’re paying out the nose for it too. Morrison has never seemed particularly connected to Hindu mythology – he did one three-issue Vertigo series that tried to be Kirbyesque Hindu mythology and was deeply forgettable, and he talks about it whenever he’s doing press for Graphic India, but this feels like a phoned in version of stuff Morrison has done before, and miles from any sort of organic attempt at Indian comics. 

Black Panther #5

A stronger-than-usual issue of this, I suspect elevated by the fact that Chris Sprouse is a better artist than Brian Stelfreeze, but also by the fact that Coates keeps a better focus on the story, can be bothered with repeating exposition, and has a clear sense of what this specific issue is doing, as opposed to just focusing on his arc in general. Which means that the bits he’s always done well – the broad thematics and the monologues about kings and power – actually have a solid platform upon which to rest and can shine. Hopefully this book has turned a corner. 

Animosity #1

Another one from last week, grabbed becaue I’ve been meaning to try some of Marguerite Bennett’s indie stuff. Good and unsettling stuff – I really enjoy the wide variety of different perspectives that occur when animals attain sentience, and the core one of “dog loves its human girl” is at once sweet and mildly terrifying in the larger context of an animal world that has (understandably) decided that it’s going to try to kill humanity. This ends up being a “set up the premise” issue rather than a “show what the book will be doing” one, but it’s a damn good hook, and I’ll be following this with interest.

Darth Vader #24

Gillen, having flirted with it before, dives with glee at the third rail of Star Wars and sets about on an issue heavily reconciling the original and prequel trilogies, then offers a mammoth cliffhanger to kick us into the finale (albeit one where it’s hard not to think “oh, Aphra, I see why that looked good on paper, but…”). It’s an issue that it’s just terribly easy to respect the ambition of – more than anything since the “I have a son” scene it offers something that feels substantive and fills a real gap in the story. 

Providence #10

Loads of stuff one could fairly have assumed wouldn’t happen until issue #12 instead explodes in ways that make it hard to imagine what Moore is going to do for two more issues. Personally, I have a hard time not being excited about it being totally unclear what Moore is going to do for two issues. …

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QuakeCon 2016 News Roundup

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QuakeCon is an annual convention held by the Bethesda family of game development studios in Dallas, Texas. Originally created to showcase a massive tournament for the best competitive Quake players, in recent years it’s evolved into a kind of mini-E3 for Bethesda, where they show off new reveals, demos and trailers to closed-door-invite-only audiences in addition to the tournament that’s the centrepiece of the show.
 
I’ve traditionally not covered QuakeCon, and that’s for a variety of reasons. Primarily of course there’s the fact that it is largely invite-only, and there’s obviously a fat chance I’d ever be invited anywhere by game industry professionals. Also, I tend to focus my game journalism energies, such as they are, on the big E3 show in June. But times are changing, and now it seems a lot of companies like having their own events scattered throughout the year catering to their specific fanbases as opposed to putting all of their eggs in the E3 basket. QuakeCon has become that event for Bethesda, and since Bethesda has become one of the only two companies in the video game industry I actually care about anymore, this year I decided to pay closer attention to what was going on in Dallas. Indeed, Bethesda made no attempt to hide QuakeCon’s central focus at their E3 press conference this year, repeatedly saying they’d have considerably more details to share about their reveals at that show.
 
(Incidentally, speaking of that other video game company what I give a damn about, just as I was about to go to press it was reported that Pete Hines told reporters that Bethesda is in touch with Nintendo “all the time”, is “well briefed” on what’s going on with their new console, codenamed NX, and that “our philosophy is that we will put our games out on any format that supports the games as we envisage and make them. If the NX fits that from a technical standpoint, and fits the game that a developer in our stable is making, I don’t see why we would not put it out on NX. But it’s too early to say, ‘we’ll definitely be putting games out or not.’ Like with mobile, we want to have the right fit for the right formats”. So that made me exceedingly happy.)
 
This year’s QuakeCon took place between August 4 and 7, and while there’s no way I was ever flying to Texas, I kept a close eye on my newsfeed and Bethesda’s own blog this past week to keep track of the show’s progress and watching any trailers or other videos released to the public. As is Bethesda’s way, the emphasis was on quality over quantity, making a handful of announcements and showing a smattering of new footage from their current and upcoming games, but spent a lot of time talking about the core design philosophy and ethos that went into them to give us a good idea of a game’s feel and spirit, which I happen to find incredibly commendable.
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The Circle in the Square (Doctor Who)

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(Content note: This post references childhood sexual abuse, the objectifying male gaze, and the repression and processing of traumatic events in general.)

Given that, let’s start with something really abstract.  A symbol, and a pretty basic one as far as symbols go.  A circle, circumscribed by a square.  Simple geometry.  And the Circle in the Square is by no means a hugely important or influential symbol in Western esoterica – it’s minor enough to take some digging to uncover, and what’s uncovered isn’t exactly consistent.  Which, you know, is kind of part and parcel for abstract symbols. 

The first thing that might come to mind is a problem of geometry – “squaring the circle” refers to creating a square of the same area as a given circle, using a finite number of steps with only a compass and a straightedge.  It was eventually mathematically demonstrated to be an impossible problem, which is actually kind of delightful given the subsequent esoteric usages — for if such fusion is technically impossible, its success is necessarily transcendent, pointing to Ascension. Anyways, in basic symbolism, the Circle represents the infinite, the cyclical, the eternal, totality and perfection.  The Square, on the other hand, represents material reality, the four corners of the earth, and subsequent limitation.  As such, the Circle in the Square can represent a “union of opposites,” if you wish, or at the very least the immanence of the divine. 

This basic analysis makes sense of the Masonic use of the symbol – and we should note that the primary symbol of Masonry consists of a square-edge and compass, used for making squares and circles.  Anyways, as W.L. Wilmshurst describes in his 1922 book The Meaning of Masonry, “Deity, symbolized by the all-containing circle, has attained form and manifestation in a ‘square’ or human soul.  It expresses the mystery of the Incarnation, accomplished within the personal soul.”  This, we should note, isn’t just divine immanence (as opposed to a Manichean separation of the earthly and the sacred), but is specifically rooted in the human experience. Wilmshurst goes on to liken the metaphorical squaring of the circle to a kind of “regeneration,” an “ascension into heaven” that accompanies the “necessity of self-dying—not, we repeat, the physical death of the body but a mystical death-in-life of everything except the body” which is fundamental to understanding the esoteric mysteries.

There are also sources like Elliott Wolfson’s Circle in the Square, which delves into the symbolism of the Kabbalah, and specifically into its gender implications.  According to Wolfson, the Circle (with its curviness and suggestion of a hole) actually symbolizes the female, while the Square symbolizes the male, with the placement of one in the other not only suggesting union (alchemical or otherwise) but a particular hierarchical relationship. 

And yet, despite such inconsistencies and problematic implications, there’s nonetheless the same underlying principle at work, namely the integration of what are seemingly, if not opposites, non-overlapping magisteria.  Which is not unlike what Doctor Who does for a living – namely, smashing together disparate genres in new and interesting ways. …

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Shabcast 23, Part 1 – The Ruling Class Thinks Idiocracy and Democracy are Synonyms

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Please find attached the latest Shabcast.  It’s the first part of another long chat between myself and Daniel.  In this episode we talk about the 2006 Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, which is ‘relevant’ nowadays as loads of people have jumped to the wrong conclusions about the Trump phenomenon and clambered aboard the everyone’s-an-idiot-nowadays-except-me bandwagon, using Idiocracy as a cultural touchstone.  (Seriously, google the phrase ‘Trump Idiocracy’ and behold the avalanche of sneering, purblind, elitest drivel.)  Daniel has little time for the film and isn’t shy about saying why.  And nor am I. 

Download or listen here.

The rest of this Shabcast will be available on Thursday, and will feature Daniel and myself moving on to the broader (and connected) subject of the New Atheists, etc.  This little mini-arc of linked posts will then conclude on Friday with Daniel’s new written piece about… well, wait and see.

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Eruditorum Presscast: David J

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I’m not going to get into the habit of using my Monday slot for podcasts, but this one’s a big enough deal that I felt like it justified it. I say down with David J Haskins of Bauhaus and Love and Rockets to, in classic Eruditorum Press fashion, talk about absolutely none of that in favor of talking about his magical practice and work with Alan Moore, including V for Vendetta, “March of the Sinister Ducks,” The Moon and Serpent Grand Egyptian Theatre of Marvels, and The Birth Caul. It’s a fun time. You should listen to it here.…

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