Eruditorum Press

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“To the Future”: Firstborn

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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.…

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Shabcast 19, Part 1

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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.…

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Comics Reviews (April 27th, 2016)

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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. …

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“The Murderer”: Blood Oath

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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.…

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2016 Hugo Nominations Reaction

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It’s funny how a year of steeling yourself for something doesn’t actually mask the taste of bile rising in your throat when it happens. It’s hardly a surprise that the Rabid Puppies got sixty-two works on the ballot beating their haul of fifty-eight last year. Until E Pluribus Hugo passes, the voting system is flawed in a way that made stopping the Puppies at this stage impossible. This ballot has been predictable since last year. Still, it’s sickening. Short Story, Novelette, Related Work, Graphic Story, Professional Artist, and Fanzine are all full-Puppy categories at present. All categories save for Best Editor Short Form and Best Novel are majority-Puppy. Most of what I have to say I said last year. You can buy the book if you want. But here’s some scattered and off-the-cuff thoughts on this year’s dogfucking.

First, as predicted, the Sad Puppies were a non-entity. That’s a little tough to judge given their new “we’re just a recommendation list” sheen of pointlessness, but it’s notable that the most conspicuous omission from their list, The Fifth Season, got a nomination in best Novel, and that in Fan Artist, a category where they had four picks, three of which were not on the Rabid Puppies slate, none of theirs made it on. Indeed, at a glance I can’t find anything that’s on their list, wasn’t an obvious contender anyway, and made it. These were Vox Day’s Hugos, plain and simple.

Second, let’s not have any silliness about pretending that what was picked reflects any agenda other than Vox Day’s spite. He’s been unambiguous that his sole goal this year is to disrupt the Hugos, not even making an effort to pretend that he was picking works on merit or because there’s actually some body of quality sci-fi he thinks is being overlooked by the awards. His only goal was to ruin things. The nominees exist only for that purpose. They are political, yes. Avowedly so. But their politics does not have even the barest shred of a constructive project. This is fascism shorn of everything but violent brutality – political in the sense of an angry mob kicking a prone body.

And so once again, the course is clear: we must resist. With every tool we have, we must resist. The highest priority, of course, is passing E Pluribus Hugo, the repaired nomination system that will serve to prevent this from happening again. Also important is No Awarding. 

But, of course, that’s more complicated this year than last because of Vox’s tactic of poison pill nominees (which I also called last year, because for a supposedly brilliant tactician Vox sure is predictable). Some of these will hopefully correct themselves – both Stephen King and Neil Gaiman are occupying slots in all-Puppy categories and have the power to withdraw to make room for people that were kept off the ballot by Vox Day. I have a tough time coming up with any justification for such decorated writers not to do so.

Other categories are trickier.…

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Neoreaction a Basilisk: Excerpt Two

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The Kickstarter for Neoreaction a Basilisk will begin next week. For now, here’s another excerpt, this time after a section looking at the notion of “the red pill,” a concept Mencius Moldbug introduced to the alt-right, and claims that his blog offers readers.

No, what’s really striking is Moldbug’s repeated insistence on the “agony of ingestion.” While a fair description of his writing style, it’s rather hard to see what he actually intends it to refer to in terms of neoreaction. And this is clearly a definitional thing about the red pill. It doesn’t just offer the truth; it offers the searing and traumatic truth. That’s the entire point of Joe Pantoliano’s character in The Matrix, who, having taken the red pill, has decided that the Matrix was his preferred drug after all, a position that is not so much refuted as set aside when its sole proponent is impaled. And Moldbug is visibly desperate to believe he’s got it, despite the almost painful lack of agony.

But look, Moldbug isn’t insincere. If he says the red pill is agonizing to swallow, we can safely assume that he, at least, thinks there’s agony. So the question becomes: what, precisely, does Moldbug find agonizing in his own thought? This is closely related to the question of what his monstrous offspring looks like. What’s the moment in his reasoning that he doesn’t want to be there? He says that it’s Part 9a of the Gentle Introduction which begins, after several parts not mentioning anything like the red pill at all, “Today you begin your irreversible descent into black, unthinkable madness.” Oh boy! But let’s continue with our “Moldbug is sincere” principle and assume that, after his eight part buildup, he really is delivering what he imagines to be the goods. Certainly Part 9a marks a turning point, as he explains it, between the first eight parts that explain “what history really is, and what it really has to teach us,” and the finale that offers a program of action.

So what is the program of action? It’s not, to be clear, putting Steve Jobs in charge; that’s Moldbug’s wish, but he isn’t actually proposing it as a plan of action. Actually, Moldbug is being refreshingly realistic here, trying to come up with a program that can be enacted on an individual level. As he conceptualizes it, the idea is to be “political engineers” designing a backup system that will kick in when American democracy inevitably goes south. And the first step of this backup system is, as he puts it, becoming worthy, by which he means the embrace of a doctrine he calls passivism. He describes it thusly: “The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power. We note instantly that any form of resistance to sovereignty, so long as it succeeds, is a share in power itself. Thus, absolute renunciation of power over USG implies absolute submission to the Structure.”

And suddenly the abyss gazes also. Moldbug has stared into the truth of history, seen that it is a massive pack of lies designed purely to justify the corrupt status quo, and the only thing he can think to do about it is to submit entirely to the status quo.…

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The Evil in All the Wood (X-Kaliber 2097)

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This wasn’t on the original list of games to be covered. Consider its inclusion something of a magickal mistake, honored as hidden intention. I cast my initial circle carelessly, and, through an accident of timing, ensconced a particular monster within the territory covered. This, then, is the consequence.

Like any story, it could begin anywhere. Let’s pick 1980, when a Chicago record shop called Wax Trax, owned by Jim Nash and Dannie Flesher, began releasing records itself, including both local acts like Ministry and European acts like Front 242. The resulting WaxTrax! label became one of those glorious scenester success stories, at the forefront of the American industrial music scene despite being a literal backroom operation with spectacularly lax bookkeeping.

WaxTrax! represented a key part of a slow and arcing transition for the industrial subgenre, which began in the late 1970s as an aggressively experimental anti-genre pioneered by UK acts like Throbbing Gristle, whose legendary founder Genesis P-Orridge coined the actual term. As with any such venture it gradually cleaned up its act (literally – Throbbing Gristle performances were famously the sorts of things that required phrases like “licked their own vomit off the stage” to describe) and became a quasi-mainstream style that visibly influenced actually popular bands like Depeche Mode.

In the US this culminated late in the decade when Cleveland-based musician Trent Reznor assembled a set of demos during spare time working as a technician/janitor at Bart Koster’s Right Track Studios. Reznor managed to spark a bidding war for the album, and through WaxTrax! was one of the labels to make him an offer, he ended up going with TVT, an oddball label that got its start releasing compilations of television theme songs, but that also handled things like the American distribution of Discordian legends the KLF, a band that famously literally had a million quid to burn, mostly on the basis that TVT was willing to pay for him to work with top tier industrial producers.

 The resulting album was Nine Inch Nails’s 1989 debut Pretty Hate Machine, and its fusion of the increasingly danceable industrial sound with more pop-friendly song structures and a brutally confessional lyrical style made Nine Inch Nails the premiere band for alienated American white boys of the 90s. Their second full-length album, The Downward Spiral, was released just a few weeks after X-Kaliber 2097, and featured the mega-hit “Closer,” whose leeringly stomping chorus of “I wanna fuck you like an animal” was the perfect way to offend millions of suburban American parents who had finally gotten over Mortal Kombat. This album, however, was released by Interscope, who had acquired Reznor from TVT in 1992 following his acrimonious falling out with boss Steve Gottileb.

Nine Inch Nails’s assault on the mainstream charts made industrial bands the hot new thing for major labels to acquire. The resulting feeding frenzy hit WaxTrax! hard. The label’s DIY ethos meant that it was being run largely on handshake deals that were spectacularly vulnerable to disruption, and the label quickly found itself under water.…

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The Red Woman

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State of Play

(They’re genuinely helpful in quantifying what the episode did.)

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of Meereen: Tyrion Lannister

Lions of King’s Landing: Jaime Lannister, Cersei Lannister

The Dragon, Daenerys Targaryen

Ships of the Wall: Davos Seaworth

Burning Hearts of the Wall: Melisandre

Roses of King’s Landing: Margaery Tyrell

Snakes of Dorne: Elyria Sand

Direwolves of Winterfell: Sansa Stark

Direwolves of Braavos: Arya Stark

Spiders of Meereen: Varys

Kraken of Winterfell: Theon Greyjoy

Shields of Winterfell: Brienne of Tarth

Stars of King’s Landing: The High Sparrow

The Sword, Daario Naharis

Flayed Men of Winterfell: Roose Bolton, Ramsey Bolton

With the Bear, Iain Glenn

The episode is in nine parts. The first runs eight minutes and is set at the Wall. The opening shot is of the Wall at sunrise, as the camera pans down into Castle Black.

The second runs ten minutes and is set in Winterfell. The first section is three minutes long The transition is by image, from Jon Snow’s dead body to Miranda’s. The second section is seven minutes long. The transition is by dialogue, from Ramsey and Roose talking about Sansa to Sansa.

The third part runs six minutes  and is set in King’s Landing. The first section is four minutes long. The transition is by hard cut, from Brienne’s anguished face to the sails of Jaime’s ship. The second section is two minutes long. The transition is by hard cut, from Jaime holding Cersei to Septa Unella’s book.

The fourth part runs two minutes and is set in Dorne. The transition is by hard cut, from Margaery in her cell to a garden in Sunspear.

The fifth runs one minute and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by family, from Doran to Trystane Martell.

The sixth runs four minutes and is set in Meereen. The transition is by hard cut, from Trystane’s corpse to an establishing shot of the city.

The seventh runs nine minutes and is set in the Dothraki Sea. The first section is three minutes long. The transition is by faction, from Varys and Tyrion to Jorah and Daaario. The second section is six minutes long. The transition is by dialogue, from Jorah and Daario concluding that the Dothraki have captured Daenerys to Daenerys among the Dothraki.

The eighth runs two minutes and is set in Braavos. The transition is by hard cut, from Daenerys to a street in Braavos.

The ninth runs five minutes and is set at the Wall. The transition is by family, from Arya Stark to Jon Snow. The final image is of Melisandre going to bed.

Review

For what is surely the most highly anticipated episode of Game of Thrones ever – the first 100% off-book episode (well, 90% – Arya’s still in A Dance With Dragons) – this is a shockingly thin and uninspiring thing. Given that… I’d say there’s a fine line between a languid start and just trolling the audience, but it’s not that fine a line, and the title is on the wrong side of it.…

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“IF WE FIGHT LIKE ANIMALS, WE DIE LIKE ANIMALS!”: Genesis

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Well, it could be worse. A lot worse.

I’ve been looking forward to revisiting “Genesis” since I first started this project. Of all the episodes of Star Trek I remember, this is the one that has the absolute widest gulf between popular opinion and my own recollections. Fan consensus on this story is that it’s about as bad as it can possibly get-The only episode that seems to regularly beat it out for the title of Worst Star Trek: The Next Generation Episode Ever Made is, deservedly, “Code of Honor”. It’s at least regarded as one of the nadirs of the series, and of the franchise as a whole. But I remember being utterly mesmerized by this one back in the day-It’s another story whose imagery has haunted me ever since, and I remember immediately taking to it for its grotesque surrealism and dark, foreboding atmosphere. Prior to this rewatch I’d actually only ever seen this episode once, way back when it aired in 1994: I’d always avoided watching it again because I wanted to save it for a time when I could give it a fair and sober evaluation, and also because I probably always knew it was never going to be as good as I remembered it as being.

And it’s not. “Genesis” is no masterpiece of popist abstraction in the same way even “Eye of the Beholder”, “Phantasms” and “Dark Page” are. But it is significantly better than people give it credit for being…Or at least there are parts of it that are definitely deserving of praise and attention that people tend to ignore and disregard while in a rush to mock its sillier aspects. You could call it a Curate’s Egg (“parts of this disaster are excellent!”) if you were so inclined, but I think even that’s being a bit unfair. I found “Genesis” to be an entirely enjoyable and watchable (well, mostly), albeit goofy, outing with some really outstanding cinematographic touches worth taking some time to look at.

So let’s get the big thing out of the way right off the bat. The plot device makes absolutely no damn sense. But let’s be careful here: This isn’t to say the plot makes no sense. Actually, it makes perfect sense, it just doesn’t make sense in a way Star Trek fans like. What doesn’t make sense is the technobabble stuff, all that business about introns and junk DNA and synthetic T-cell viruses. The script’s conception of evolution is notoriously scientifically wonky, and there’s absolutely no getting around that. But it’s actually not as terrible on this front as you might expect: It’s actually very careful to avoid falling into the trap of presenting biological evolution as teleological-I don’t think the phrases “lower life form” or “higher life form” appear anywhere in the script, and the central artistic license hinges on the fact that all life shares common ancestors somewhere up the tree, which isn’t actually inaccurate, it’s just vague.…

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Saturday Waffling (April 23rd, 2016)

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First of all, we hit the Game of Thrones reviews threshold on Patreon, so I’ll be back tomorrow night for “The Red Woman.” 

I also just cut a podcast with David Gerard, who probably very few of you have any idea who is, but has been an online friend for literally over a decade, starting in the Wikipedia trenches and evolving to… the Tumblr trenches. He ended up being the beta tester for Neoreaction a Basilisk by dint of being mad enough to volunteer, and kept me confident that this fifty-thousand word piece of madness was actually working despite all common sense that this was a very bad way to write a book. Anyway, that’ll be out in a few weeks, along with some other people who’ve gotten preview copies of it.

Also finally wrapped the backmatter of the “Fearful Symmetry” chapter, and am about to make a tilt at not having to take a break before “The Abyss Gazes Also.” Which brings me to my question, which is really just “so who’s being obsessive enough to track my structural gimmicks there?” To be clear, literally no problem at all if you aren’t; if the chapter doesn’t work for non-obsessive readers the chapter fails. I, who complain regularly when I can’t follow monthly superhero comics, have no right to whine if I can’t make a Watchmen pastiche work. But those posts get low comments, which is totally understandable – they don’t lend themselves to comments. So I don’t really have a sense of how that aspect of it is landing at all. Or any questions people want to throw out about that project.

Actually, since the Neoreaction a Basilisk excerpts aren’t necessarily comment friendly either, I should explicitly solicit Eruditorum Press reader questions on that book as well. 

Obvious answers to questions on both topics, then. 

1. Last War in Albion Volume 1 will be out in late summer.

2. The Neoreaction a Basilisk Kickstarter will start in May.

3. I don’t know for sure whether the specific work you’re wondering about will be covered in Last War in Albion, as I’m only just starting to have my first serious “actually write things down” thoughts about the structure of Book Three in the last few weeks, but broadly speaking it’s probably got a pretty good chance of at least coming up.

4. Monday’s Super Nintendo Project post is a hoot.

That last one’s not really an answer to a question. It’s just true. …

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