Man, what is it about sixth episodes. I mean, at least this one’s mediocre cliffhanger isn’t a rape scene, so it’s an improvement over last season. But after two very strong episodes, this is an unfocused, transitional mess. About the best you can say for it is that it makes sense to schedule the burn-off episode for Memorial Day weekend, when nobody will actually be watching, but one doubts they were planning the episode with that sort of precision, so we probably have to call that a lucky coincidence.

Still, this is basically designed boring. It’s not that an episode that drops Tyrion and Jon can’t work, although this is actually the first-ever episode to feature neither of them. But dropping both of them while spending a lot of time in Horn Hill and reintroducing Walder Frey is almost as perverse as “The Red Woman.” So there’s only so much that one can complain about it. It doesn’t make for a great episode, but it makes for a good one. The individual parts are generally well done. The biggest moment is return of Benjen, which is only slightly more surprising than the return of Jon, but it’s still a big moment, and it’s nice to have a version of the story where Benjen is Coldhands. Joseph Mawle conveys a sense of sorrow at his existence that’s really compelling, and it helps make Bran feel like he’s in a relatively interesting place, which isn’t something you can say about him historically, so that’s good.

But it’s generally the not-big moments where it shines. The Horn Hill sequences are lovely – beautifully shot, and alternates charmingly between deft comedic beats and genuine drama. Sam is clearly the least important plot this season, and the amount of the time that’s spent on him is part of what makes this a fairly sleepy episode, but it’s one of those bits that makes you glad Game of Thrones has the narrative space it has. It would be a far weaker show without bits like the cutely melodramatic scene where Sam leaves and comes back, or the quiet thrill of him nicking a blade he’ll probably get to kill another White Walker with.

Similarly, while Arya’s makes a big transition this week, finally pointing herself back towards Westeros, her actual big moment this week is just the reclamation of Needle – a symbolic gesture as opposed to one that actually has immediate consequences. She’s still got a big “kill the Waif” setpiece to do before she can actually start moving back towards the rest of the plot. Still, her scenes this week are all marvelous, from her inappropriate affect at the theater to her slipping into character as Mercy and strange moment of empathy for Cersei, to, of course, the Needle scene. (And a scene with Maisie Williams, Faye Marsay, and Richard E. Grant is an entertaining motley of Moffat guest-actors as well.)

It’s the episode’s two nominally big moments that fall flat – the confrontation in King’s Landing and the final scene.…

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Well, we hit $12k, so I suppose it’s time to post the beginning of the short story that I’ll be adding to the book as the final component if we hit $14,000. All of this was written basically before Neoreaction a Basilisk even started, while I was on a Providence-inspired Lovecraft kick and fooling around with my own spin on “modern day Lovecraft.” I got through, basically, the first section (like “Call of Cthulhu,” there’s a distinctly episodic structure to the plot as I envision it) before getting distracted by accidentally writing a book. But that ended up giving me the ideas I needed to finish it, and the modified idea for the story seems like it’ll fit well into the book, not unlike how “The Immortality of Leelah” fit into Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons. So, all disclaimers, this is first draft prose, and I’m still not a comfortable fiction writer at all. But if you like it, there’s four days to get the Kickstarter up to $14,000. (And at $13,000, don’t forget, I’ll be doing a magical ritual to neuter the alt-right.)

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This site represents my most up to date account of what I have taken to calling the Vala Phenomenon. I have tried to be skeptical and impartial in this matter, not that this will matter to my inevitable critics, but I should stress: I wish I did not know the things I know. I do not sleep anymore. I fear sleep like I fear death. I am not writing this because I think the world should know. I am writing it because I have to. Because I want there to be something left of me. Because the glow of my laptop helps keep me awake.

It started when David killed himself. It wasn’t a surprise to anybody; he’d be the first to tell you he’d always been fucked up. He’d set up a deathswitch, though, which made some projects he’d been working on public and notified some trusted friends, or at least whoever had come to mind when he set it up. We hadn’t had a proper conversation in something like three years when he died, but apparently whenever he set it up, that included me.

Most of it was encryption stuff, which isn’t really a community I follow anymore (yes, I’m that Sarah Harper), but I followed the discussions as people tried to figure out what these projects were and if there was anything worth tinkering with, the communal act of doing so seeming like a good way to mourn what was, for all of us, an old and wondrously idiosyncratic friend.

Anyway, as a side project from some steganography algorithm he’d developed, he’d made a set of photo filters that produced some very startling visual effects, and I found myself fascinated by them. The whole group did, really, at least for a day or two. But after the initial flurry of emails as people put various photos (including many of David) through the filter a sense of unease set in.…

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Very short today, mostly because getting this up is the last thing I have to do before bed and I’m tired. Though I suspect I’ll be back later today with a proper excerpt of the short story that will be the $14,000 stretch goal for Neoreaction a Basilisk, as the Kickstarter’s at $11,750 or so, which means we’ll probably make $12k today. Here’s your convenient link for that.

On the subject of that book, Kit Power did a review of it for Ginger Nuts of Horror, and James Wylder did an interview with me for his site. Both are fun if you’ve got a few minutes.

Finally, 101 Claras to See, a fan anthology on Clara Oswald co-edited by Caitlin Smith, is in its last weekend of availabilty for a hard copy, and also has an electronic edition for sale. I’ve got a piece in it that I’m not going to be reprinting elsewhere, and it’s also got contributions from both Jane and Jill. That’s available here.

And that’ll pretty much do us for this morning. Really hoping to be back this afternoon with a chunk of short story and some vague teasing about magical rituals to neuter the alt-right.

 …

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To round out the series of podcasts promoting Neoreaction a Basilisk (alltogether now, currently available on Kickstarter) I am thrilled to finally have Alex Reed on the Eruditorum Presscast. Alex, of course, is the primary architect of Seeming, and so in one sense has been on every Eruditorum Presscast, since our theme music is of course “Worldburners Unite,” previously described as “a protest song as imagined by Thomas Ligotti. That’s available here for your listening pleasure.

We remain on that exciting/stressful bubble where we could well make the last stretch goal if the weekend goes well, but it’s in no way certain. So I figured I’d talk a bit about the most expensive edition (well, aside from the original plates, which have been snapped up), the Sigil Edition. I’ve not actually mocked one of these up yet (I’m not acquiring the printer I’ll need until after the move), but I’ve got the next best thing as an image here, namely a photo of the audio edition of Unearthing, which came with a transcript of the piece printed in the same style I’ll be using. I’d completely forgotten this was a thing when I came up with the Sigil Edition months ago, and didn’t remember until I was watching the film version of Unearthing and its existence came flooding back. Which was funny. 

The reason this seemed like a fun way to do the high-end edition of the book was that it seemed like it encapsulated the sort of “dispatches from a madman” vibe that the Conspiracy Zine edition had, only moreso. (That’s much of why Moore/Jenkins did it, I think – the same sort of “weird transmission from the outside” vibe that nearly led them to release the film version exclusively on VHS, and that’s implied by the very silly “private and confidential” tag on the envelope.) But it needed something a little bit extra to make it special, and so I merged it with another idea that had been kicking around, namely distributing a bunch of sigils to various people and letting them decide if they wanted to launch them.

Right now I’ve got eleven of them to make, and a nice text document where I’m jotting down possible purposes for the sigils. (The only one I know for sure, as I’ve said before, is “destroy capitalism.”) I’ll draw the sigil on the back of the first page (so it’ll be at the top of the stack when it’s all folded) along with a signature, and then package the whole thing in an envelope to keep it safe, with a print-off of the cover on the outside of the envelope. 

I really like this idea – a distributed magical ritual, the goals of the book encapsulated in a small and finite set of copies, sent out into the world and put in the readers’ hands so they can decide what to do with it. Which is, of course, how books always work.

Anyway, if that’s a thing you want to be a part of, they and all other Kickstarter editions remain for sale through Tuesday.…

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Promoting a Kickstarter is far from an exact science, but this seemed to work well for the Lizard People essay, so here goes for TERFs. As before, if all of this sounds interesting and you want it to happen, the trick is to back Neoreaction a Basilisk on Kickstarter. I suspect that if we can make $12k and the TERFs essay by the end of the weekend, the end-of-campaign momentum over the last two days will take us over the $14k line.

Anyway, TERFs, or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Basically, a set of feminists for whom a major (or at times the major) component of their feminism is the belief that trans women are not real women and ought be excluded from female spaces. More virulent strains consider the entire notion of being trans an excuse for men to invade women’s spaces and treats all trans women as rapists. They are, as you can imagine, absolutely fucking terrible. And they’re terrible in ways that aren’t dissimilar to how various bits of the alt-right are terrible. (In fact, one of the notable things about them is their willingness to work with right-wing groups on things like bathroom bills.) So they seemed an interesting counterpoint to put in the book.

Anyway, thinking about it further, one obvious angle to take is the larger theoretical question of the Sister Souljah moment – the question of why it seems important to take a shot at your own side. And this gets into larger questions of the leftist circular firing squad that feel meaty and worth exploring. Why do we do this? Should we stop? The answer to that last question “not entirely,” of course, and that in turn circles to the question “OK, so why are TERFs on the wrong side of that line, and what does that tell us about the line?”

But there are also a lot of questions about paranoia and conspiracy theories that feed in with the rest of the book. One of the central metaphors will, as I’ve said, be Janice Raymond’s book The Transsexual Empire, which has always stood out to me as an utterly bonkers metaphor, ascribing the staggering amount of power implied by “empire” to one of the most brutally downtrodden populations imaginable. And in a manner consistent with the sort of barmy thought of, say, the Austrian School or David Icke, this sort of frenzied tautology that erases all other concerns no matter how reasonable. 

I’m also interested in what TERFs reveal about the history of feminism and social justice – the extent to which it’s a phenomenon of the second wave (which I deal with a bit in A Golden Thread, actually), and reveals the way in which leftist “progress” actually works in a way that’s rather more intelligent than Moldbug’s dumb-ass “Cthulhu always swims left” nonsense. This’ll also involve looking at the hijacking of Stonewall and the way in which a sequential narrative whereby gay rights preceded trans rights was constructed in the first place, and end up looking at the way in which a largely silenced trans history existed and has finally started to reassert itself, including how the fight for survival against TERFs prefigured the wider civil rights fight. …

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DC Universe Rebirth #1

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DC Universe Rebirth #1 Review That Isn’t Just a Poop Emoji

This seems almost entirely unnecessary, but of course, that’s still more necessary than this. I’d say “never mind the appallingly stupid incorporation of Watchmen,” but of course, I really can’t do that. Suffice it to say that Johns demonstrates absolutely zero understanding of Watchmen or of Doctor Manhattan, that the characters teased elsewhere to be Watchmen-related look like utterly stupid and banal twists, and that this entire farrago appears motivated out of nothing so much as sheer and utter contempt for the best writer DC has ever or will ever have. On top of that, the issue is a confused muddle of plot teases, most of them fairly incoherent to me as someone who’s dropped most of his DC books over the course of the New 52 experiment that this book not only brings an end to but attempts to loudly reject. I don’t know these people. Two-panel cameos don’t make me care. Johns can stamp his feet all he wants about legacy, but the only legacy this confirms is DC’s long history of screwing over its actual creators and its long-term health in favor of making a quick buck now. Really, 💩  summed it up nicely.

Batgirl #52

It’s probably not possible for me to actually like a DC book this week, and there’s more here than I’m inclined to give it credit for, but it’s still a weak and unsatisfying finish to the Fletcher-Stewart-Tarr era, two issues after the real finish, and without much more to say than “well wasn’t this lovely.” I still love this cast and style. I hope the next Batgirl run is fun like this was. I might even buy an issue of it. 

Cry Havoc #5

Still seems like it could be a great book, but I’m going to have to revisit it after the first arc at this point. Still, it’s doing better than a lot of comics in that sort of position do, in that I more or less understand what’s going on at this point. It’s just that I’ve next to no idea how the pieces quite fit together, and I’m sure there’s a bevy of implications I’ve completely missed. So yes – looking forward to rereading this, but may well switch to trades soon. 

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #8

I am thankfully capable of enjoying Marvel this week through the clever trick of not buying Captain America. (Which one assumes is rather more of a feint/trick than Rebirth anyway.) The dating montage in this is all that the bottom-page captions promised. Past that, a typically entertaining and clever issue of one of Marvel’s most entertaining and clever books. With lots of other good jokes about dating. 

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #7

Yet another super-fun issue of the sort of Marvel book I’m actually enjoying these days. The decision to hold off on revealing Lunella’s Inhuman powers is good, Captain Kree is an endearing twerp of a villain, the art is pretty, and there is regularly a dinosaur.…

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Eruditorum Press is thoroughly ecstatic to announce that we have been joined by Josh Marsfelder, who will be publishing the continuing adventures of his blog Vaka Rangi with us every Wednesday morning, starting in about sixty seconds. Vaka Rangi, his sprawling personal memoir and critical history of the Star Trek franchise. So far he’s made it through the whole of the Original Series and The Next Generation, as well as the first season of Deep Space Nine, along with the entirety of the anime Dirty Pair, because Vaka Rangi is that sort of blog, which is to say an awesome one, and all of that is available in our archives for your reading pleasure, so basically I hope you didn’t have any other work to do this week. 

The obvious point of comparison for Vaka Rangi, and I’m sure Josh won’t mind my pointing it out, is TARDIS Eruditorum, and certainly anyone familiar with my Doctor Who work will find many similarities in Josh’s approach. But where TARDIS Eruditorum‘s default position was that Doctor Who was basically a good thing, Josh’s relationship with Star Trek much more wonderfully fraught, full of frustrated utopias and half-memories of a show that was never quite the one that was on television. It is, for my money, some of the smartest critical writing on television out there right now, puncturing many of the myths surrounding Star Trek and exploring what it could and should have been.

We are absolutely thrilled to have him here, and look forward to bringing you the latter portions of his epic journey to the stars. And stay tuned, because we’ve got another fantastic announcement to roll out in the next couple of weeks. Until then, ladies and gentlemen, Vaka Rangi.…

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