Eruditorum Press

We don’t need AI to hallucinate.

A Touch of Grey Around the Tentacles (Empress of Mars)

39

With Alpha Centauri only appearing on a screen, the “looking like a giant penis” needs of this episode had to be filled elsewhere.

It’s June 10th, 2017. Despacito? Despacito. Ariana Grande makes it up to number two, while Niall Horan, French Montana, and Ed Sheeran also chart, with the latter having his last week in the top ten following the great Sheeraning. In news, Montenegro joins NATO, a Saudi Arabian-led blockade of Qatar begins, and James Comey testifies before the Senate Intelligence Committee. But the big news is the general election, which ends with a hung parliament after unexpectedly large gains for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, resulting in Theresa May forming a confidence and supply agreement with the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party that gives her an incredibly narrow majority that would require near unanimous support from within her own party for any major legislation such as, say, a Brexit agreement. 

Speaking of Brexit, on television we have Empress of Mars. This is a story that, by all rights, should be easy to dislike. It’s Gatiss doing pure and unadulterated fanwank, without any of the wider concerns that allowed things like The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End or Hell Bent to justify their excesses. Its very existence is not a sign of a healthy program. On a very basic level, functional TV programs do not resolve storylines in ways that depend on the audience recognizing the forty-three year old supporting character who’s making a cameo for the final scenes to make any sense. This absolutely and unequivocally should be a hot, steaming mess. So why is it so utterly delightful?

Part of it is that Empress of Mars provides the natural culmination for the project we’ve been identifying as “late Gatiss.” Much of Gatiss’s late style has emerged from what seems like a greater sense of comfort with his own approach. His early work often seemed to struggle at fitting what he does to the strictures of the modern series, particularly the themes and approaches established by Russell T Davies, which are ultimately where The Idiot’s Lantern, Victory of the Daleks, and Night Terrors all trip up. But starting with his Series Seven contributions, Gatiss seems to have resolved to stop trying to tailor what he does to larger expectations of what modern Doctor Who is like and to instead just write Gatiss episodes. The results have been consistently charming and, with Robot of Sherwood and Sleep No More, have done non-trivial amounts to expand the concept of what a Gatiss episode can be. But with Empress of Mars, this hard-earned “let Gatiss be Gatiss” ethos is taken to its endpoint and we finally get to appreciate how good an idea it was in the first place.

It’s notable that Gatiss required some work to get to that point with the episode. His first instinct, correctly squashed, was to try to pen a sequel to Sleep No More given that story’s ambiguity-laden resolution. It is unsurprising that this did not quite work, as the downer ending was central to that story and revisiting it could only diminish the idea.…

Continue Reading

Magician

, , 2

Magician

A good landmark of an artist’s prestige is when they start doing music for films. A new star will show up on the scene and filmmakers will take advantage of their star power to grab a young, hip audience for their movies. There was a period a few years ago where young bands like Florence + the Machine and Paramore gained traction by recording songs for the Twilight Saga. Of course the inverse is also true, as long-established stars are also likely to help a film earn more press. The UK’s bestselling single of 1979, Art Garfunkel’s “Bright Eyes,” is inextricable from its haunting appearance in Watership Down. Just as a song can mark a film, a film can mark a song.

Of course, this is in no way an assurance of a song or movie’s quality. A song and a movie can both be deservedly forgotten. Such is the case with “Magician,” which, while a footnote in Kate Bush’s wider career, still marks the beginning of a trend for her.

“The Magician,” or “Magician” as it’s usually called, was written by lyricist Paul Webster and composer Maurice Jarre for the virtually unseen film The Magician of Lublin. An adaptation of Nobel-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish novel of the same name, it was such a critical and commercial bomb that it’s nearly impossible to see now unless you find either the world’s best torrent site or fork over $226 USD for the VHS. Its near-unseeability causes the near-unlistenability of Bush’s song for it, as “Magician” has never been commercially released either. “Magician” exists as a low-quality audio clip from the movie, with static and diegetic noises all over it (someone says “cow” or a similar-sounding word at one point). It’s easier to hear than, say, the Phoenix demos, as it’s a professional recording rather than a home demo, but it’s possibly even more obscure than them.

If we’re being honest, the lack of HQ ways to listen to “Magician” is no great loss. This isn’t a lost gem, just a mediocre film track that happens to set a precedent for Bush. Webster and Jarre give Bush a slog of a track to sing through, a bogstandard piece of carnival music set in a minor key like a particularly manic depressive Dresden Dolls song, with lyrics strung together by tedious aphorisms and hackneyed couplets. How did someone read Webster’s lyrics and decide that “When you reach for a star/only angels are there/and it’s not very far/just to step on a stair” wasn’t a laughable opening? The rest of the song is a series of banal vignettes about whimsical creatures and individuals having downbeat times in “the circus of life,” where “life is bitter and gay.” It’s hard to imagine any vocalist making this work, and Bush doesn’t do much to elevate it, opting for a Shirley Bassey impression that she only utilizes in her worst work. The whole thing sounds like a parody of itself, and what’s more, it’s a boring one.…

Continue Reading

You Must Not Allow Yourself to be Trapped Into Looking at It (The Lie of the Land)

88

This is not actually a screenshot of the episode, but a candid photograph of Peter Capaldi shortly after recieving the script.

It’s June 3rd, 2017. “Despacito” isn’t going anywhere, but Captain Ska and Jonas Blue are newly in the top ten, while Ed Sheeran, DJ Khaled, and Clean Bandit continue their runs. In news, the US government announces its intention to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and Arsenal eats Chelsea to win the FA Cup. While on the day this episode airs, Reality Winner is arrested for leaking information about Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election to journalists, and a few hours after it airs, a terrorist attack on London Bridge kills eight people.

On television, meanwhile, we have The Lie of the Land. This is a story that fits smoothly into an important tradition of Doctor Who stories, along with things like The Celestial Toymaker, The Dominators, The Monster of Peladon, Warriors of the Deep, Planet of the Dead, or Nightmare in Silver. Which is to say, fundamentally lazy fuckups at the tail end of otherwise good eras. There are a number of ways to get to this sort of story—Nightmare in Silver, in particular, is bad in ways that are difficult to relate to any generally applicable principle beyond, perhaps, the all too often realized “Cybermen don’t work as a sole villain.” But all of them are united by a sense of creative exhaustion—a feeling that the people in charge are just too tired to put in the effort they might ordinarily to make a bad script into a vaguely acceptable one.

It is interesting, then, how often what goes wrong for these stories includes the political. The Celestial Toymaker, The Dominators, and The Monster of Peladon are to be sure bad for a lot of reasons, but their politics are both undeniably among them and are all weirdly egregious in their awfulness. The other three are less ostentatiously bad in their politics, although Warriors of the Deep certainly has its problems, and I could just have easily decided Journey to the Center of the TARDIS, with its deeply questionable decision to make its team of bumbling thieves all black, was the Matt Smith example of this particular phenomenon. But The Lie of the Land is a despondent return to the early days of Doctor Who, in which the show does not just throw out any poory thought out piece of tedious garbage but a offers a politically noxious poorly thought out piece of tedious garbage. 

The production timeline makes it clear that Whithouse was writing this in response to the rising threat of fascism that Trump represented, doubly so given that it had the Doctor namecheck fascism in his otherwise largely incoherent monologue pretending he really had sided with the monks. But, to make an obvious point, there’s nothing especially fascist about the monks. They’re not a populist and far-right authoritarian program. The mass movement that is in point of fact a central aspect of fascism is utterly absent.…

Continue Reading

Wow

, , 0

Wow (album version)
Video 1 (Keith Macmillan)
Video 2 (The Whole Story)
San Remo
ABBA
French TV
Tour of Life

It begins with the sound of an orchestra warming up, strings humming in anticipation of an incoming trobairitz. Then, a four-note synth loop, which is played for nearly the entire first minute of the song, when it gives way to the song’s rhythm section. Twenty-nine seconds in, the wail of a processed guitar ushers in the vocal of Kate Bush, who delivers the opening line. “We’re all alone on the stage tonight,” she sings with equal trepidation and excitement. “We’ve been told we’re not afraid of you.” With that, the audience is hoisted onto the stage, and “Wow” commences.

The similarities between “Wow” and “Wuthering Heights” are largely structural. Both songs have arpeggiated hooks (“Wow” opens with the notes of a C major chord), followed by tense, melodically wrought verses, before breaking into the song’s triumphant chorus. “Wow” is shorter, its album version capping off at four minutes, compared to the four-and-a-half minutes of “Wuthering Heights,” with its intro which is built into the verse, keeping the song moving after its chorus. The chorus and verse of “Wow” are repeated twice each, with the intro and outro essentially built into the verses, letting the song flow smoothly while also breaking it into distinguishable segments.

This clarity is something some other songs on Lionheart lack, like “In the Warm Room” and “Fullhouse” (and if you recall, I quite liked “Fullhouse”). Bush wasn’t given adequate time to flesh her compositions out, and as a result Lionheart is a victim of second album syndrome. Just as, say, Give Em Enough Rope or Every Open Eye needed more oxygen and room to push themselves and make their songs come along, Lionheart needed more time than it had to bring its songs to life. There’s brilliance and innovation in it, and some of Bush’s finest songs, but too often there’s mere hints of what these songs could be (if Bush was going to give the Director’s Cut treatment to any of her albums, it should have been Lionheart).

As the one single from Lionheart to reach the top 20, peaking at #14, (“Hammer Horror” just barely made it into the top 40), “Wow” was a not-insignificant success for Bush. It’s tempting to ask why. “Hammer Horror” has all the theatricality of “Wuthering Heights,” if not more. Why didn’t it speed to the top of the charts like “Wuthering” and “The Man with the Child in His Eyes?” Maybe “Hammer Horror” was just too odd for the charts, with its sprawling shape and gothic paranoia. More crucially, it’s not tender, and if the charts are anything to go by, listeners like Bush when she’s tender. The three highest-charting singles of the first three years of Bush’s career, “Wuthering,” “Child,” and “Babooshka,” all lean into the mystery, sweetness, and tragedy of domestic life. “Wow,” meanwhile, isn’t domestic at all, taking place entirely on the stage.…

Continue Reading

I Point and Laugh at Archeologists (The Pyramid at the End of the World)

23

More likely than not, aliens invented airplanes.

It’s May 27th, 2017. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber remain at number one with “Despacito,” while Liam Payne, Charlie Puth, Harry Styles, and DJ Khaled also chart. Narrowly missing the top ten is Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time,” which re-enters the charts more than two years after its last appearance. This provides us a grim transition to the news, where a terrorist attack at the Manchester Arena kills twenty-two people during one of her concerts. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey stage their final circus show, while on the day of this story six out of seven leaders at the G7 summit reaffirm their commitment to the Paris climate accord. No points for guessing who the odd man out is.

Meanwhile, on television, we have The Pyramid at the End of the World. The Pyramid at the End of the Worldmay or may not have the messiest gestation of any Moffat era story. Certainly it has the messiest one to play out in public. Announcement of Harness’s involvement was left extremely late, and when it came he was laden with the season’s only cowriting credit. The story of this finally emerged in Doctor Who Magazinein Ben Cook’s preview of the episode, in which Moffat made an unprecedented public apology to Harness for how the story was handled. Describing his drafts as dazzling, Moffat notes that he “was imposing too many things on Peter—put this in, put that in,” and explains that the final draft of The Pyramid at the End of the Worldcame due at the same time that Moffat’s mother fell ill, and that Moffat, lacking the time to work closely with Harness to polish the script, literally wrote the final draft by his mother’s deathbed. As he puts it, “I don’t feel great about that—Peter deserved better from me, frankly.” Clearly this is an immensely sad story, and a reaction along the lines of blame or second-guessing the decisions that got made is beyond unhelpful. Nevertheless, the archeology project of excavating the stories that The Pyramid at the End of the Worldcould have become is interesting and fruitful in its own right. And since I happen to have all of the draft scripts handy…

The Pyramid at the End of the Worldbegan life as a script entitled We Dare Not Go a-Hunting, was submitted on April 28, 2016 (Drake was at number one with “One Dance”). This was to be the first part of a two-parter, the second half of which would be called For Fear of Little Men. Harness never wrote a full draft of part two—there’s about twelve pages of loose scenes (compared to 49 pages of the fully drafted We Dare Not Go a-Hunting). Behind the scenes, what went wrong here was simple: Harness had a vacation scheduled that conflicted with the required production schedule, and so his contribution was pared down to a single episode, with Toby Whithouse assigned to write the concluding half of the story. …

Continue Reading

Dust Then Becomes Solid Entity (Extremis)

47

Don’t worry, Doctor, I’m sure the Chibnall era will be fine

It’s May 20th, 2017. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber remain at number one with “Despacito.” J Hus, Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, Clean Bandit, and French Montana also chart, the latter presumably introducing enough consumer confusion to explain Miley Cyrus being stuck at #11. In news, Chelsea Manning is released from prison. It emerges just how bad Trump’s firing of James Comey was, resulting in the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the election. Trump makes his first foreign visit as President, to Saudi Arabia, leading to that low key amazing supervillain photo of Trump, the king of Saudi Arabia, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi all touching that glowing white globe.

On television, meanwhile, Extremis. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the monks arc as a whole; there’s time enough to talk about what could have been, what was, and how that happened. Contrary to the greatest moment of Jack’s podcasting career, Extremis is too interesting for that. That said, the monk arc hangs over it in that there is no way to talk about Extremis without talking about failure. In many regards, Moffat set this story up for failure from the moment of its promotion, describing it as a weird experimental piece in the vein of Listen and Heaven Sent, which is to say holding it up to a standard that one doesn’t need the rest of the fingers on your hand to count off the other stories to meet. Extremis is done no favors by being the successor story to these when it is, in reality, a slightly hasty hodgepodge that’s trying to do the Missy reveal and set up the monks arc without necessarily having a clear idea why these two things to together.

The result is decidedly one of Moffat’s failures. But while that list contains cringeworthy banalities like The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, it also contains things like The Beast Below that, while they might not quite come together as episodes of television, are still fascinating and basically delightful. Extremis falls into the later camp: an episode that does not belong anywhere near anyone’s lists of Moffat’s greatest triumphs, but that is nevertheless profoundly satisfying to delve into.

The thing that makes Extremis fascinating and compelling is that for all its hot mess tendencies, it’s one of those Doctor Who stories that are remarkably plugged into the zeitgeist. Simulationism is the sort of fun science idea you write about in 2017 the same way you did black holes in 1973. Add reincarnation on computers, escaping AIs, and ideas that drive you mad and you have one of the most shockingly on the nose Doctor Who episodes ever, at least from the perspective of the bitch who wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk.

To some extent, despite literally writing the book on it, I’m in no position to explain why these ideas go together.…

Continue Reading

Coffee Homeground

, 1

Coffee Homeground
Tour of Life

“Coffee Homeground” comes at the tail end of Lionheart, when the album’s slower and quieter tracks have all trailed off. As the album’s penultimate track, it provides Lionheart with a relatively bombastic and staunchly theatrical climax. For all that Lionheart explores stagefright and theatrics in depth, it’s a much quieter album than that description might suggest. There are few especially up-tempo songs on it, and Bush’s piano guides her backing musicians through her songs. “Coffee Homeground” almost sounds out of place on the same album which has “Oh England My Lionheart” and “In the Warm Room,” with Bush’s camp attempt at a German accent and Kurt Weillian orchestral scoring. It’s by the grace of Lionheart’s strong thread of camp that “Coffee Homeground” is allowed to work, exploding into full blown theatrics at the end of an album which previously treated them as something more to be discussed than outright embraced.

As we’ve discussed at length in this blog, Kate Bush is a consistent purveyor of camp. Her mime training, her focus on character in her songwriting, and a constant awareness of form are camp attributes of her songs thus far. When we get to the Tour of Life, we’ll see just how far she takes that. Bush’s camp instincts to come a head in “Coffee Homeground,” is one of her most unreservedly theatrical songs. It’s hard to overstate just how theatrical this song is. Bush as a singer is always expressionist; in “Homeground” she takes this camp tendency to its logical conclusion by doing a funny accent. Her play at a German accent is willfully funny, one of the silliest things on Lionheart. Bush was often mocked for her gurning and high-pitched vocals (by such comedians as Faith Brown and Pamela Stephenson), and “Homeground” suggests she’s in on the joke to some extent, or least just as capable of having fun with it. On the track she engages in Sprechgesang, a kind of singing in which a singer rapidly moves back and forth between speaking and singing. This a natural move for Bush, who’s done this sort of thing before — moving back and forth between speech and song is a stylistic norm for her. But it’s worth investigating just what brings her to it this time around.

Bush’s use of Sprechgesang, her mimed German accent, and an unusually playful orchestra make up a hat tip to the early 20th century German theater team of playwright Bertolt Brecht, composer Kurt Weill, and singer Lotte Lenya. This collective is one of the most influential in 20th century theater, and we could get a whole book out of talking about any one of them. Let’s start with Brecht, as his writing is useful for discussing Bush’s storytelling in “Homecoming.” Brecht’s great contribution to dramatic theory is “Epic Theater,” which, like glam rock, revels in its status as artifice and production. Jack has written about Epic Theater as applied to Doctor Who before, so for a more thorough take on the subject you should read his post.…

Continue Reading

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 19 – Jared Taylor and American Renaissance

, , 5

Again, pardon my forgetfulness.

In this episode, Daniel tells me about the so-called ‘godfather of the alt-right’ and Richard Spencer’s claimed “mentor”, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, one of the most important and idiosyncratic influences on today’s resurgent US white supremacism.

Warnings apply.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG on iTunes

*

Show Notes

Episode 18 additions:

Popular Front: “The American Militia Movement”
 
“Standoff: Between Two Shotguns” by Ruth Graham at Slate
 
Knowledge Fight Podcast

Jared Taylor and American Renaissance:

Jared Taylor SPLC

Sam Dickson at Atlanta Antifascists

“The Racists on Ridgeland Way: Ground Zero for Alt-Right Organizing in Atlanta

Sam Francis at the SPLC

“While always a staunch conservative, Francis’s views radicalized over time. He began describing himself as a “paleoconservative” focused heavily on racial issues and ended up writing for racist publications like the Council of Conservative Citizens’ (CCC) newsletter, Citizens Informer. (The CCC, which had from the late 1980s until the late 1990s dozens of state legislators and other politicians in its ranks, is a white supremacist group that focuses on issues like support for the Confederate battle flag and opposition to non-white immigration, school busing and affirmative action. The group was built using the mailing lists of the White Citizens Councils, organizations formed to fight school desegregation in the South.)

Francis’ definitive break with more mainstream conservatism came with his 1995 firing from The Washington Times. The newspaper acted after conservative author Dinesh D’Souza quoted a Francis speech to a 1994 conference put on by the white supremacist and race science journal, American Renaissance. D’Souza wrote that Francis’ comments embodied the “new spirit of white bigotry.” “

Sam Francis at Amren 1994

American Renaissance SPLC

American Renaissance on Youtube

American Renaissance website

American Renaissance podcast

“A schism over anti-Semitism threatens a key ‘white nationalist’ group. The outcome could be critical to the radical right.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2006/schism-over-anti-semitism-divides-key-white-nationalist-group-american-renaissance

“HERNDON, Va. — For a gathering of people devoted to denouncing the inferiority of blacks and sounding the alarm about civilization-threatening Muslims, the biannual conferences thrown by the New Century Foundation, publisher of the racist newsletter American Renaissance, are decidedly genteel affairs. Men dress in suits and ties, women in formal business attire, and there are no uniformed skinheads or Klansmen to be seen. Large plasma television screens, Starbucks coffee spreads and fancy linens adorn the hotel meeting hall. Epithets have no place here.

Or at least they didn’t. At the latest edition of the conferences that began in 1994, held this February at the Hyatt Dulles hotel, a nasty spat broke out that upset the gathering’s decorum — and may even shape the future of the radical right.

It began when David Duke, the former Klan leader and author of Jewish Supremacism, strode to a microphone after French author Guillaume Faye wrapped up a talk vilifying Muslims entitled “The Threat to the West.” Duke thanked Faye for remarks that “touched my genes.” But then he went one further.

“There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit,” Duke said, according to an undisputed account in The Forward newspaper.…

Continue Reading

This Isn’t a Cause; You’re Not an Activist (Oxygen)

22

I heard they had a space program; when they sing you can’t hear there’s no air

It’s May 13th, 2017. Luis Fonsi is at number one with the Despacito remix. DJ Khaled, Ed Sheeran, French Montana, and Shawn Mendes also chart. In news, the WannaCry ransomware attack goes off, affecting hundreds of thousands of computers in a hundred and fifty countries, with major effects on the NHS. And Donald Trump fires FBI director James Comey on the pretext of an objection to his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, but in reality, as Trump admits the next day in a meeting with Russian officials in which he also shares classified intelligence obtained from Israel, in an attempt to derail investigations into his campaign’s involvement in Russian attempts to influence his election.

On television, meanwhile, Oxygen. It is traditional, especially towards the end of an era, for me to take a good story that I enjoy and write an entry that is generally quite down on it. Even when writing the review of Oxygen, it was obvious that this would be the Capaldi story I did it to. The point of that exercise, after all, is not to indulge in the spurious pleasure of complaining or of contrarianism. Rather, it’s something baked into this project’s approach to Doctor Who, which holds that the show has a mandate to change and do better that applies equally to good eras and bad. If I don’t show the inadequacies of its triumphs, I’m not doing my job. And Oxygen was perfect for this: the most overtly anti-capitalist story in Doctor Who, written by one of the great writers of the era. I could either worship at its feet or be unsatisfied. The latter is more interesting by far.

What surprised me when actually rewatching it, then, was how much the episode made my job easy by failing to quite engage me in the first place. Upon initial airing, this was a huge sigh of relief after a desperately uneven first third to the season. Revisited two years later, its grim and gunly traditionalism stands out as an aggressive conservatism. It gets away with this for the simple reason that Jamie Mathieson is very good, and is capable of pulling off the minimum requirement of such an aggressively traditionalist-pandering story, which is to actually do everything basically perfectly. But the fact that only a writer like Mathieson would make this exercise worthwhile is not the same as the exercise actually being a good idea. More than anything else this season and possibly anything else in the Moffat era, this is a cynical box-checking exercise informed by GallifreyBase notions of what fans want. This is rearguard action, designed to placate a particular sort of hater. 

It is in light of this that we need to look at this story’s politics. The first thing to note is that the aesthetic conservatism helps the story get away with the anticapitalism. To make a very obvious point, Series 11 not only has nothing that’s even close to this story’s level of overt leftism, it contains Kerblam!…

Continue Reading

Pass by Catastrophe

4

No Dreams of Orgonon post this week. I’ve been preoccupied with finals and a move. Here’s a short story I wrote for a class and revised for Eruditorum Press. 

Iran annexes Ukraine | Entire US Cabinet Found Dead of Lead Poisoning | Immanuel Kant Cloned | Rabbit Kills 70

Wednesday, 6th of May, 20 _ _

The Pedagogic Courier

PASS BY CATASTROPHE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE METZGER UNIVERSITY NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE
Reni Abbasi

As Metzger University resumes operation in the aftermath of its nuclear explosion, the university’s administration is working hard to earn back its students’ trust. The families of the deceased have been offered compensation fees of $20,000 per casualty, plus a partial tuition refund for both deceased and living students. Metzger has asserted student loans are not forgiven under any circumstances). All students have received automatic 4.0 GPAs, and adjunct professors have received a 6% raise in their salary. The university has embroiled itself in a bout of some controversy over the 56% salary increase its administration has given itself. “With an unprecedented catastrophe like this, we felt Metzger University owed its students some financial support,” says University President Charles McDonnell. “And with their recent efforts to boost student morale, the board figured they owed themselves a reward.”

The catastrophe occurred at 2 PM PDT on the 17th of November, when Metzger University sent its student body emergency text messages, alerting them that the college had triggered a nuclear bomb and all faculty, staff, and students would have to be 50 miles off campus by 2:10. Over 15,000 students, academics, and manual workers scrambled to leave the building, causing many to be injured and some to be fatally trampled. Evacuation was further slowed by fifty philosophy majors who beat each other to death in an eschatology debate. In the parking lot students leaped into the windows of moving shuttles, often breaking ribs in the process. One mass of people managed to tip over a shuttle in motion and forced it into the side of another shuttle, as attested to by the university director’s personal security camera. At 2:09, a blinding flash and a mushroom from hell obliterated the landscape, instantly claiming thousands of lives (exact numbers have fluctuated, as estimates vary from 30,000 to 170,000). Buildings were decimated and forests burned for days. The governor called a state of emergency, martial law, and bypassed constitutional law to declare himself dictator of Transylvania. Shortly afterwards, security footage obtained by the New York Times showed the governor screaming at an aide about goblins under his desk. Institutionalization is being considered for the governor by his family.

As entire counties burned, governments, universities, and news channels debated the details of the nuclear explosion. A federal investigation was launched into the cause of the detonation, but it seems to have been inconspicuously concluded. In a rare public appearance, Harold Camping visited the destroyed Metzger campus. He has since been quarantined with radiation sickness despite his insistence that he has been cured.

Getting witness accounts from corpses is difficult, so pinning down a cause for the event has proved difficult.…

Continue Reading

«‹ 51 52 53 54 ›»