Eruditorum Press

The Coalition of Chaos

“The Final Voyage”: Journey’s End, The Maquis, Preemptive Strike

, , , 7

It’s over. This is the moment Star Trek: The Next Generation officially ends. And it ends in the most ignominious manner imaginable: Assassinated on stage in front of its audience to make room for its presumptive younger sibling and overeager heir apparent.

No, not Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I’ve always maintained Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are effectively the same show (or should be read that way), the only difference being what part of the universe the camera lens shines on at any given moment. And never has this basic, yet frequently overlooked, truism been more clear than now, because when Star Trek: The Next Generation goes down, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine goes down with it. Where one leads, the other will follow, bound inexorably together by the ties of fate and kinship. And while yes, something *called* Star Trek: Deep Space Nine continues for another five years after this moment, it’s fundamentally a very, very different creature from what we’ve been watching since January of 1993. The shared universe that we’ve been witnessing unfold has suddenly and violently been torpedoed by friendly fire, and it’s only a matter of time now. There’s plenty of brilliant material left to cover that this world has opened up for us to be sure, but as far as the studio higher-ups are concerned, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine can’t get their asses out the door fast enough. 
 
Star Trek Voyager has arrived, and Star Trek Voyager is all that matters anymore.

Plans for a frankly nonsensical fifth Star Trek series were in the works as early as 1993, which I honestly find kind of scary to think about. No sooner did Star Trek: Deep Space Nine debut and make a case for being the future of the franchise than Paramount executives were busy drafting up its replacement. *Technically*, of course, Star Trek Voyager was intended to replace Star Trek: The Next Generation, but this only begs the question: Why go to all the trouble to draft up a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the first place, a show that has from the outset been so self-consciously walking a tightrope between complimenting its older sister and defining itself in opposition to it, if the studio was always just going to go ahead and do “more of the same, but cheaper” anyway? After all, the mantle was supposed to be Deep Space Nine‘s to inherit eventually…Or so we were told.

I won’t talk about the premier of Star Trek Voyager here because it’s still a year away and the series doesn’t even technically exist yet in a material form, but you better believe it does in every other form. But for the purposes of this essay, I’ll have those of you know who weren’t there that this was an event. It was a massive entertainment media blitz the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, and all throughout 1994 nobody would shut the fuck up about it.…

Continue Reading

The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate Preview

21

The full version of this essay is now available here.

Thrilled to announce that the Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter hit goal twelve hours in, which means we’re on to stretch goals, the first of which is a long essay to be titled “The Blind All-Seeing Eye of Gamergate,” about the tortured and short-circuiting logic of everybody’s least favorite hate group. I wrote up the first 1500 words of both it and the next stretch goal essay as demos to make sure they worked as concepts, so here’s a preview of it. It even turns out to be timely. (I wrote it weeks ago.)

Anyway, thanks to everybody who’s backed the Kickstarter, and if this looks interesting to you, we’re only about $1500 away from my having to finish it.

—

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.

Day tears into the game at length –  a critical savaging. “It’s even less fun than it sounds”; “I have never played a less entertaining computer game”;  “soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date.” 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.…

Continue Reading

Neoreaction a Basilisk: Kickstarter Launch

4

So, the Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk is up. That’s the link right there. In case you’ve missed the hype machine for it over the past few weeks, it’s a book why far-right politics are stupid and also about the end of the world. The official description’s on the Kickstarter page over here. We’ve posted two excerpts on the site so far (Excerpt One – Excerpt Two) and there’s more coming over the next few weeks, along with some fantastic podcasts about the book. This post, on the other hand, serves as a bit of backstage commentary on it all for the Eruditorum Press regulars.

First, a simple pragmatism. My wife and I are moving next month. We’re excited for this, and it’s almost certain to have good effects on my work, but it’s expensive as moves are. So that’s part of why I’m Kickstarting this book, and doing it now. That said, I hope the ideas appeal. Certainly I found them interesting, hence, you know, accidentally writing it.

This gets to the other big reason why I decided Kickstarter was the way to go with this one. One of the problems with accidentally writing a book is that certain important planning steps involving figuring out how you’re going to describe and market a book get skipped. Typically these steps exist to kill off or heavily modify ideas that, while potentially interesting, are potentially undisciplined and difficult to explain to somebody else. This, of course, is also one of the major advantages to accidentally writing a book, but it doesn’t do wonders for the conventional marketing campaign.

It also makes it suitable for having a bit of fun with. As purchasers of Recursive Occlusion will be aware, despite (or perhaps because of) being a digital-centric author, I love the book as an object. It’s part of why I love Blake so much. So with a kind of eccentric and inadvertent book, it seemed like a good time to do something I’ve kind of always wanted to do, which is a book that serves as an homage to the pre-ebook, pre-POD self-publishing tradition of zines and half-baked conspiracy theories. (I’ve literally been considering something like this since the Deadly Assassin post in Eruditorum.) You can see a preview of the visual style I’m going for here.

This also nicely solves one of the harder things about Kickstarters, which is the lengthy period between taking everyone’s money and knowing how much giving everyone their stuff is going to cost. Especially important when you’re using one to fund a short-term expense like a move. With a manuscript in hand and an intended format that’s a bit odd, I could do a Kickstarter where all the rewards would ship more or less upon completion, making all the idiosyncratic editions Kickstarter-exclusive. Which they are – I’m never going to sell any of them again.

To balance that, if the Kickstarter funds I’ll be doing a permanent edition with, assuming we hit any stretch goals, some extra essays on topics like Gamergate, Donald Trump, and Austrian School economics (the last of these would be co-written with Jack).…

Continue Reading

Vox Day Put A Child Pornographer On The Hugo Ballot

75

For obvious reasons, I will not be providing links here, however I am happy to provide them privately to anyone with a legitimate interest in the information, including law enforcement.

It was brought to my attention today that “kukuruyo,” one of the artists that Vox Day put on the Rabid Puppies slate in Best Fan Artist and that made it onto the Hugo Ballot recently posted to his blog a commissioned drawing of comic book character Ms. Marvel in which her genitalia is clearly visible and provocatively displayed. Ms. Marvel – whose comic won last year’s Hugo for Best Graphic Story – is a sixteen-year-old girl in the comics. Under US law, this would seem to legally be child pornography. 

Although the drawing post-dates Day’s placement of the artist on his slate, the hypocrisy of Vox Day endorsing the work of a child pornographer is particularly glaring given that he continues to throw childish insults like this around:

and has been vocal in accusing sci-fi fandom of harboring pedophiles, including slating two works with arguments to this effect in Best Related Work.…

Continue Reading

Saturday Waffling (April 30th, 2016)

9

Two announcements. First, 101 Claras to See, a fan anthology co-edited by occasional Eruditorum Press contributor Caitlin Smith and featuring contributions from both Jane and me, is available for preorder. This is the only chance you’ll have to buy that, so you probably should do so.

Second, the Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk will begin tomorrow. There’ll be a big kickoff announcement here, so keep your eyes peeled. 

For now, here’s a preview of the first three pages of the standard print edition, which I’m calling the Conspiracy Zine Edition for reasons that will be obvious. There will be some other fun editions, but you can find out about those tomorrow.

Two more pages below the cut. …

Continue Reading

His Name Burning, His Voice Below Things. All Suffering Nourishes That Presence (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Thirty-Three: Tyger)

18

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Blake’s artistic career was a continual and unceasing war against the very notion of certainty and fixity, as represented in the figure of Urizen.

But there is a more foundational aspect of Blake’s unfixed style – one upon which these textual incommensurabilities build. Blake’s illuminated works exist in individually printed and hand-colored copies, no two of which are identical. In the case of The Book of Urizen, for instance, eight copies are known to exist, six of which are widely available. And the differences among these copies are significant; as mentioned, the fourth plate (from which the “solid without fluctuation” line originates) only exists in three of the copies. No two copies place the full-plate illustrations in the same order or locations throughout the text. Plates 8 and 10 each contain the beginning of a section labeled Chapter IV, each of which begins with a stanza numbered 1; on top of that, the order of the two plates is reversed in several copies. Several illustrations change dramatically across copies as well; Plate 6 depicts three figures hung upside-down, bound in serpents, and cast into fire, save for in Copy D, where there is but a single figure. Plate 16, meanwhile, depicts Los in two of the three copies in which it is included, while in a third the figure is given a white beard indicating that it is Urizen. And these are just the variations with the biggest interpretive implications: every page of every copy has its own idiosyncratic decisions of coloring. Nor is this phenomenon unique to The Book of Urizen. Even Blake’s most iconic and nominally fixed poem, “The Tyger,” exists in nearly thirty separate copies, printed and colored over the course of more than thirty years, with major differences across the coloring.

Figure 962: One of the few versions of “The Tyger” in which the beast actually seems to burn bright in a forest of the night. (By William Blake, from Songs of Innocence and Experience Copy T, written 1794, printed 1818)

“The Tyger” is a fitting thing to look at here, not least because it shares some of the particular horror of The Book of Urizen with its deadly terrors, dread grasp, and, perhaps most obviously, its fearful symmetry, a phrase that seems tailor made for the geometric precision of Urizen. But more than that, “The Tyger” illustrates another means by which Blake destabilizes his texts, namely the gap that opens up between image and text. For all the anthology-friendly bombast of the poem, after all, it is impossible to escape the fact that in the overwhelming majority of the copies, the image is not that of a monstrously incandescent Tyger, but of an ordinary, at times even downright goofy looking tiger. This is not universally true – in particular, Copies T and F adopt a strikingly dark color palate, such that the flashes of yellow and orange really do seem to burn brightly out of some limitlessly dark woods.…

Continue Reading

“To the Future”: Firstborn

, 1

I didn’t want to use this picture. Thought it was too obvious. But there are very few high quality images from this part of the series.

A brief rant: Why isn’t this episode called “Bloodlines” and the next one called “Firstborn”? “Bloodlines” to me connotes family ties, lineages and heritage, which is precisely what this story is about. Next week’s episode is a drama about firstborn sons, or perceived firstborn sons, with DaiMon Bok coming back (oh yeah Spoiler Alert DaiMon Bok comes back. Remember him? That makes two of us) to try and exact revenge on Captain Picard yet again because he’s still tortured by the death of his son. I legit thought this episode was called “Bloodlines” and got incredibly confused when I was trying to figure out which episode I was writing about.

Anyway, the should-have-been-called-“Bloodlines” isn’t about any of that, although it does feature a firstborn son. Namely Worf’s, that is, Alexander. A personal highlight of the TNN years for me, it’s the best Alexander story in the entire series, which will assuredly make things interesting for any prospective viewers who (for some reason) listen to my recommendations as I would advise skipping every story in which he plays a major role except this one (and I suppose “A Fistful of Datas” too). It’s also the best thing Star Trek: The Next Generation has done with the Klingons since the first season. I hate to keep bringing up “Heart of Glory” as I seem to be doing that a lot lately, but that really is the best, and pretty much only, story you can do with the Klingons as originally conceived for this series (there is one more story that can be done with the Klingons without throwing out absolutely everything about them, and it’s a damn good one at that, but we have to wait nine years to actually see it get made).

Because the whole point of “Firstborn” (I am never going to get used to saying that) is to problematize the concept of honour and the way of the warrior in Klingon society. It doesn’t quite go far enough with this on a macroscopic level-You could, for example, imagine a story where the ramifications of Alexander’s choice are explored on larger scale political and social level (again, nine years), but that’s OK because this isn’t that kind of story. It’s a very personal story about a father and son and the social expectations that are placed on them, and it handles this outstandingly. Ever since “The Emissary”, Worf has tended to get pigeonholed as a born-again zealot for conservative Klingon values and cultural norms which, like all conservative values and cultural norms, are ludicrously ahistorical and inauthentic. I still think it was wrong to take Worf in that direction and it irreparably damaged him as a character, but that aside if there was one story where it was absolutely imperative that he not be written this way it was this one, and miraculously he’s not.…

Continue Reading

Shabcast 19, Part 1

3

With Shabcast 18 vanished into the ether, this week we move straight on to Shabcast 19.  My now-frequent-interlocutor Daniel Harper of Oi! Spaceman stepped into the fray and helped me bring something in. 

We had a looooooooong chat about all kinds of shit, including (but not limited to) Prince, Chyna, sex and gender (of course), Marxism, neoliberalism, intersectionality, voting,Trump, lesser-evilism, Bush, the invasion of Iraq, strikes, the romance of revolution, TV you’re scared to go back to, and the exciting future of Dan’s own project – he and Shana are branching out to talk about other shows, such as Red Dwarf and Firefly.

The conversation was so long that I had to split it into two parts.  (It ends on a cliffhanger.)  Part Two next week.  There is, perhaps, some hubris involved in chatting for three hours+, recording it all, and then releasing it for strangers to listen to, and being so enamoured of almost everything you said that you basically refuse to edit… but hey, if I let things like that bother me I wouldn’t be here.  And that’d be a shame, because I think we all agree that the internet can’t afford to lose even one opinionated white man.

Download and/or listen here, my pretty ones.…

Continue Reading

Comics Reviews (April 27th, 2016)

2

From worst to blah blah blah blah

Saga #36

An arc ends. It’s reasonably good. The next issue of this will be after I’ve moved and switched to digital instead of supporting the comic shop where I’ve been buying comics since third grade. I can’t imagine I won’t be trade-waiting this at that point.

Sex Criminals #15

There’s a moment, most of the way into this basically good issue, where a bunch of characters meet, many for the first time. Most of these characters were introduced months and years ago, this not always being the speediest of books. And Fraction and Zdarsky drop to four panels of all text, white on black, beginning “imagine now a scene where everyone is introduced to everyone else and their roles within both our story and the lives of the characters are hastily, dutifully, yet exhaustingly rendered.” Before, of course, skipping that scene to get on with the plot. And that moment, right there, where Matt Fraction basically told me to go fuck myself if I didn’t remember all of the characters and relationships of his sporadically published sex book, is where I dropped this book out of sheer fury. This book needs to stop disappearing up its own ass and actually tell a fucking story in a coherent manner again.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #6

The first arc ends with some good emotional beats nicked from the other iterations of Marvel’s “new teenage sueprhero book” style in recent memory. As usual, they work well filtered through Reeder and Montclare’s exuberant madness, and the cliffhanger into arc two is wonderful and sad and touching, and sets up loads of interesting stuff. Still, I can’t help but feel like six issues was a bit long for this arc, and I need something more than “yep, quite well done” to jolt my excitement about it.

Batgirl #51

An answer to how we’re winding down the Fletcher-Stewart-Tarr era, namely with a two-parter by Fletcher with a bevy of artists (Eleonora Carlini, Minkyu Jung, and Roger Robinson – they’re quite good). I’m relatively excited about post-Rebirth Batgirl – it’s one of two titles I’m likely to buy – but man, the setup here where the book is basically a team book among a bunch of second and third-tier minority Bat characters that occasionally crosses into things like Gotham Academy is tough to say goodbye to. I know the “weird like Batgirl” DC You lauinch was a flop, but this really is the most functional and long-term stable a DC book has felt since… what, Infinite Crisis-era? Ouch.

Silk #7 and Spider-Woman #6

Missed Silk last week, so ended up with these two parts of Spider-Women together. This is really good stuff – a vintage Marvel crossover that moves forward every issue, has actual character beats, and feels coherent from issue to issue while still showcasing its individual characters. These were my first two issues of their respective series, and while I can’t see myself picking up Silk (who, as a protagonist, is a little too on the nose – a created-in-a-vat heroine finding her place in a Marvel Universe that will no doubt fridge her within the decade), Spider-Woman‘s genuinely compelling and funny. …

Continue Reading

“The Murderer”: Blood Oath

, 2

So this episode. This one has been a long time coming, certainly for me. Here’s an episode I’ve always heard so much about: A good, nay great Jadzia Dax episode penned by Peter Allan Fields, possibly the most consistently excellent writer in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s stable. It’s a story I never experienced at the time, as I didn’t have the magazine issue where this one was written up and I didn’t, to my knowledge, see it on television before the DVD sets came out. Furthermore, this is supposed to be a kickass action story set against the backdrop of a glorious Klingon romp. If this isn’t Dax’s best story, its the one where she finally comes into her own as a character.

At least, that’s what everyone tells me. And you can, I’m sure, see where this is headed.

The first thing that strikes me about “Blood Oath” is how much it actually feels like a Ronald D. Moore story. It isn’t, obviously, nor could he have had any input on it considering he’s not on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But it had absolutely all of his signature beat points: Pompous, grandiose musings on death, honour and glory. Angsty, moody, broody male antiheroes who don’t get along with anybody because “no-one understands” them (at least Fields has the decency to play them as slightly comic characters, whereas Moore tends to play these types of characters alarmingly straight). A ham-handed approach to feminism that is basically saying a “strong woman” is someone who can reject femininity to prove to us she’s capable of filling the same masculine/patriarchal archetypal roles. Here it even manifests in a rather cringe-worthy game of “I can do anything the boys can do!” that lasts about two-thirds of the episode. It’s a picture-perfect example of the liberal assumption that increased opportunity to climb the pre-existing social ladder of the heierarchical status quo is tantamount to liberation, where real liberation would entail the dismantling of said ladder and probably the torching of the entire building and surrounding areas. And of course, it’s a great big Klingon love-letter epic that puts the entire rest of the show on hold so it can fawn over a bunch of trivia questions for forty minutes.

To be fair, this isn’t on Fields. Kor, Kang and Koloth were not in his original pitch, which was basically a “Let’s Do” of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. The Klingons were apparently added at the behest of Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who is, of course, a massive Original Series fan. Fields compensates for this by writing them based not so much on their portrayals in “Errand of Mercy”, “The Trouble with Tribbles” and “Day of the Dove”, but on characters from John Sturges’ remake of Seven Samurai called The Magnificent Seven, as well as Falstaff from Henry IV, Part II. But even so, Holy Prophets is this bad: The fanwank, while not quite as overwhelmingly wanky and referential as this sort of thing tends to get, is still the number one biggest problem with “Blood Oath” and sinks the whole production for me before even the shaky grasp on feminism can.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 118 119 120 121 ›»