Eruditorum Press

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Your Favourite Audio

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I’m delighted to share the most exciting news of February. The eagerly awaited return of, and the link to, the new episode of Pex Lives.Kevin and I talk – for free, I’ll remind you, we’re just giving this stuff away – about the Peter Davison serial Kinda. Classic stuff to keep you company as you tidy that filthy hovel you call a home or commute to that job you can tolerate, or during the job itself, or however you listen to podcasts. i don’t know, you can do as you please. But it is lovely to be able to continue to sit down with Kevin and still be chatting nonsense at eachother about our favourite show after all these years. In this episode, Kevin binds me to a promise to write erotic Tegan focused Dr Who fanfiction when I get 50 patreon supporters. So, that’ll be a thing I spend my time doing.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/44-kinda-or-the-not-we-must-know

Lee Russell is one of my best damn friends in the world and our Amicus podcast is excellent. Late last night, while recording an upcoming Wrong With Authority, my tongue slipped and I embarrassingly called him Lee Daniel. I don’t know who Lee Daniel is, but I’m sure he’s nice too. This is me and Lee, one of the most underrated characters out there on the internet, somewhere beyond the grave.

http://pexlives.libsyn.com/city-of-the-dead-18-from-beyond-the-grave

Speaking of WWA – the show about films which purport to be about historical events but which usually prove, on closer inspection, to be a catacomb of pointless lies – we’re starting to pick up a little bit of steam and get them out more quickly. We consider ourselves a supergroup, which means we often find ourselves wearing tights on dark city streets, slick with rain. The latest episode was hosted by me, which means I didn’t have to think very much and let my very clever friends be interesting as I asked probing questions like “What you think of movie? Good movie? Good.” Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York.

http://wrongwithauthority.libsyn.com/wwa-ep7-gangs-of-new-york

I’ll close this out with a plug for a patreon. Not my patreon, no, not the one over here https://www.patreon.com/jimslater  where you can get exclusive content from me for as little as a dollar a month, including very early drafts of the novel I’m writing with Kit Power and audio stuff. No, I’d collapse at such gauchery. I want you all to know that the man Daniel Harper has a Patreon and he is doing invaluable work researching the alt-right. Let me inject a note of seriousness into this post – Daniel is learning more than any of your favs about the fascists and fashish online and it is hardgoing work. Help look after a man who, I believe, will be vindicated in years to come for a far-seeing, far reaching project that will shine real light on where we are, how we got here, and where the racists will take us next.

https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

 

Alright. Thank you very much for your attention. Thanks to Phil for continuing to allow me an amplifier on his site.…

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Shabcast 36 – Jack Gets Shipped With Seven

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Yes, it’s the long-awaited (by a tiny number of people) return of the Shabcast. 

And for my big relaunch I’m joined by a mystery returning guest who has a kickstarter going for a new book about the McCoy-era and Wilderness Years of Doctor Who, complete with some chat about the Virgin New Adventures, the new series, and sundry other inevitable digressions.  Because it’s us. 

Bet you can’t guess who my guest is.

That’s a Kickstarter you should totally contribute to, by the way.  In fact I’d almost say you were morally obliged at this point. Here’s the link.

And here’s the new Shabcast.

And here’s my Patreon.

Happy listening and pledging-of-money-to-Kickstarters-for-new-books-about-the-McCoy-era-and-possibly-also-to-my-Patreon.

(Plus, you can still buy our mystery guest’s last book, to which I made a modest contribution.  It too was made possible because people funded a Kickstarter.)

 

 …

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Thoughts on Dynasty Warriors 9: The Blue Dragon

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In order to understand what Dynasty Warriors is really trying to tell us, let’s first get back to basics. Why is a video game series adapting the history of the Three Kingdoms, and Romance of the Three Kingdoms in particular, called musō (“unrivaled”) in the first place, and why would this be the game to pioneer “1 vs. 1000” combat mechanic it is so (in)famous for?
 
The mascot character for Dynasty Warriors has always been Zhao Yun, and I do not believe this is either accidental or arbitrary. Zhao Yun is known as one of the Five Tiger Generals, who were famed as the most loyal and revered generals of Shu. It is Shu’s emperor, Liu Bei, who is generally considered to be the actual protagonist of Romance of the Three Kingdoms (if you had to pick one) at it’s his exploits and deeds that are depicted in the most positive and sympathetic light. However while Liu Bei is certainly not a supporting character in Dynasty Warriors (especially if you choose to play as him), it’s Zhao Yun who appears on the box art of all the mainline entries and who is oftentimes used as the series’ representative in crossover works and publicity materials. He is also tacitly implied to be the default player character.
 
Zhao Yun’s feats are sometimes seen to have been exaggerated, but again, Romance of the Three Kingdoms *is* historical fiction. We have to think of the book as being kind of like the Robin Hood tales, except very much older. In Romance of the Three Kingdoms and other Chinese folklore, Zhao Yun is depicted as a warrior of unmatched strength, but also boundless humility and loyalty who never boasted of his achievements, did not seek out conflict and refused to draw attention to himself: The epitome of the perfect martial artist who never started a fight, but would always finish one swiftly and decisively if he was threatened or saw someone come to harm.
 
Historically Zhao Yun was known as an uncompromisingly just, loyal and honourable man who was driven by a desire to bring peace to the common people, and the stories emphasize this part of his character to a great extent. Dynasty Warriors shows this as being the ideal he sees in Liu Bei and the reason he is drawn to serve under him. The game even assigns as his signature weapon the Dragon Spear, an unpretentious implement dating back to the Paleolithic era whose beauty is in its elegance and simplicity (indeed, it’s for these very reasons spears have long been favoured by warriors the world over in place of bulkier swords, including by the Vikings, whom pop culture has made almost synonymous with gigantic swords) and also references his auspicious Dragon associations and motifs (his style name even literally means “Little Dragon”). After his death, Wei Yan remembered Zhao Yun as “A gentle, affectionate, wise, miraculous being who called the land to order” and that “With him, neither accidents or disasters could disturb the peaceful balance he created.
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The Proverbs of Hell 37/39: And the Beast from the Sea

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AND THE BEAST FROM THE SEA: The one painting in the series not to have a direct representation or invocation in the series. The tense sexuality that exists between the Dragon and the Sun-Clothed Woman is replaced here by a raw homoeroticism—a theme that is not entirely uncommon in Blake. (c.f. Object 47 of Milton a Poem) The Beast from the Sea appears in Revelation 13, one verse after the Dragon, and is said to be given his power by the Dragon, creating a sense of heritage or supplanting. In Blake, the Beast rises below the Dragon, but has clear dominion over him. Of course, that’s always how supplantation begins. 

ALANA BLOOM: Maybe he’s trying to stop.

JACK CRAWFORD: You think there’s any way to push him to be self-destructive?

ALANA BLOOM: Push him toward suicide?

JACK CRAWFORD: Suicide suits me just fine.

WILL GRAHAM: If he’s really trying to stop, he’s not going to kill himself. How could he be sure his death would affect whatever’s inside him?

Will’s casual apprehension of the absurd logic of Dolarhyde’s difficulties in confronting the beast within is grimly funny. A crucial question, of course, is whether or not it would. Indeed, the metaphysical legitimacy of the Red Dragon is a point of considerable ambiguity here in a way that it simply isn’t in any other adaptation. Ultimately (and in contrast to Hannibal) the show suggests that Dolarhyde is not actually supernatural (the Dragon, notably, does not appear to survive his death), but it’s notable that Hannibal asserts his sanity towards the end of “And the Woman Clothed in Sun.”

HANNIBAL: This new twoness with the Dragon, it’s disorienting for you.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: The Dragon never spoke to me before. It was frightening.

HANNIBAL: What did it say?

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: It called my name. It wants her.

HANNIBAL: If it weren’t for the power of your Becoming, if it weren’t for the Dragon, you could’ve never had her.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: I put my hand on her beating heart. Heard the sound of her living voice. A living woman. How bizarre.

There is a dash of incel to Dolarhyde, although this is firmly segregated from his motivation for murder. Nevertheless, his clear sense of himself as someone it is “bizarre” to imagine touching “a living woman” positions him clearly adjacent to a certain and timely vision of toxic masculinity.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: Will Graham interests me. Odd-looking for an investigator. Not very handsome, but purposeful.

HANNIBAL: He has a family. Save yourself. Kill them all.

It was of course inevitable that Hannibal would do this. It’s a detail from the book, but in terms of this Hannibal it’s also a functionally inevitable consequence of his declaration that Will is family in “And the Woman Clothed With the Sun.” Indeed, there’s a real sense in which the entire Abigail Hobbs plot exists to recast this action, a long and expanding context for this exact moment. Despite that, however, it was moved from being the cliffhanger of “And the Woman Clothed in Sun” to being part of the same episode as the actual attack on Will’s family, a move that downplays the moment’s importance by reducing the amount of time audience affect is expended fretting about Molly from a week to about thirty minutes. …

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The Memes of Production

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Okay, so this popped up on my Twitter feed:

 

Now, it’s tempting, isn’t it?  A really desirable little chunk of cheese, just sitting there, saying “eat me!”, conveniently arranged on a nice wooden platform, framed by a kind of metal wire sculpture of some kind…

I mean, there are so many possible responses.  The person who I saw sharing this on Twitter responded with the admirably direct “because they’re stupid as shit”.  I myself contemplated several possibilities.  There was “So near and yet so far” and “Because they don’t know about Ockham’s Razor”, and a more serious one, which was “Of course they discriminate!  You have to when giving out grades!”  And so on.  It was gonna be great.  I was going to flip the right-wing narrative, revealing them to be – yet again – projecting their own sense of entitlement onto the people they hate.  I was going to point to their own desire for special treatment, their own snowflakehood, their own yearning for victimhood as a great big excuse, their own spoiled sense of grievance, which leads them to assume that they’re right because they feel they must be, and anyone who doesn’t let them win is evil.  Etc, etc, etc.  This is their narrative about liberals and socialists and feminists, and young people generally, and, of course, it is a far better description of themselves than it is of their targets.  And they remain blissfully unaware of how utterly they confuse their own babyish malcontentment with the legitimate complaints of others.  So this was a great opportunity to make this point again on Twitter.

But, yeah, to cut a long story short: it’s fake.  Because of course it is.  As they say: if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. 

The only thing that gave me pause was… well, this is Charlie Kirk, we’re talking about here.  A man so profoundly stupid its a wonder he remembers how to get his trousers on in the morning.  A man so deceiving of both himself and others that it isn’t too implausible to imagine him sticking his own head that far up his own ass and then waddling proudly into the town square and waiting for applause.  If anyone was going to self-own this spectacularly, it’d be… well, it’d be Ian Miles Cheong. Or Paul Joseph Watson. Or quite a few other people.  It’s a fairly long list, actually.  But Charlie Kirk’s definitely on it.  As I said recently, libertarians don’t understand their own dogma – they think the doctrine of ‘self-ownership’ requires them to constantly self-own in public. 

But, as it happens, Charlie Kirk doesn’t seem to have said this.  I searched for the quote and found only the meme.  And the meme is not to be found on Turning Point USA’s website, or in the festering cesspool of bile and bigotry and aggrieved whining and deluded ignorance that is their Facebook page.  And I trawled through a lot of their memes looking for it. …

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New Kickstarter Flash Goal, Podcast Appearance

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So this just got announced. Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovich writing a 7th Doctor comic for Titan. This is, on the face of it, absolutely landmark. Comics were a huge influence on Cartmel, who drew a lot of his style from 2000 AD while freely plundering Alan Moore’s catalog. So having him do one of his periodic returns to the McCoy era in comics is immediately interesting. It’s a shoo-in for the McCoy book. Except I’m really out of stretch goal slots. So instead I’m doing a flash goal. If we can hit $10k by the end of the weekend, I’ll cover this miniseries in the book. Here’s the Kickstarter link. This would be an excellent time either to back it or to link it. We’re at $9192 right now, so $10k by the end of Sunday is ambitious, but it’s doable.

The fact that we’re closing in on $10k also means that the next stretch goal is an interview with Kate Orman. The last two books have both had interviews with prominent creators who are openly fans of the era being covered—Gareth Roberts talked about the Graham Williams years, while Rob Shearman offered a rousing defense of Davison and Colin Baker. And while Orman wrote some of the best 7th Doctor stories, I’m not going to be asking her about those. For one thing, I already did in a podcast a few years back. I’ll probably transcribe those answers for the book too, but this interview will be about the televised episodes and Kate’s own Doctor Who fandom, with an eye towards talking about why the McCoy era was able to spawn the New Adventures.

Finally, I stopped by the Galactic Yo-Yo podcast to promote both the Kickstarter and the Patreon (which reached $350! Still, backing it helps make sure it’ll stay over $350, so it’s still a good idea). I talk a bunch about McCoy, the New Adventures, and scads of wildly off-topic shit because I’m me, and then we settle into me explaining why Kill the Moon is a thing of perfect beauty. That’s available here for your listening pleasure/endurance. 

And Jack and I will be getting in the studio Tuesday for what I assume will be a Shabcast so we can provide one last exciting promotional kick at the end of the campaign. So look for that late next week.

Thanks for all the support.…

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Podcasting Blade Runner & Gangs of New York

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How do you do fellow kids?

This week I have no less than two new podcast episodes for you from Wrong With Authority.

Daniel and I just released a new episode of Consider the Reagan, the thread in which two or more of us watch and comment on a film released during the presidency of Ronald Reagan.  This time it’s Daniel and myself talking about original Blade Runner (1982), followed by some chat about the recent sequel.

Download here.

(By the way, if you’re interested in my thoughts about Blade Runner, watch this space, because at some point I will start properly writing my vast project about the Alien series, and this will involve a fair bit of stuff about Blade Runner, because… well, wait and see.)

And the entire Wrong With Authority gang – James, Kit, Daniel, and myself – also just released a new episode covering Martin Scorsese’s 2002 historical crime epic Gangs of New York, in which Daniel Day Lewis gives one of the most memorable screen performances of the early noughts, and also Leonardo DiCaprio stands in front of the camera and pulls faces.

Download here.

We plan to have more such episodes for you fairly soon. 

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If you like our stuff, you might consider tossing us a dime on Patreon.  There’s no overall WWA Patreon, but we now all have individual accounts, here:

Me – Kit – James – Daniel.

And remember, Eruditorum Press has an overall Patreon.

And Phil’s Kickstarter for the McCoy/Wilderness Years book still needs your help reaching ever more enticing goals.

No pressure.  But if you don’t give at least one of us your money you are a bad person and will almost certainly go to Hell.

 …

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The Proverbs of Hell 36/39: And The Woman Clothed In Sun

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AND THE WOMAN CLOTHED IN SUN: The big one. Hannibal describes its “unique and nightmarish charge of demonic sexuality,” which is fair enough, but seems desperately insufficient. Let’s add, then, a brief discussion of gaze. As John Berger memorably simplifies it, in art the norm is that “men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” Which at least broadly describes this picture, sure, in that we are seeing a woman being looked at. But the woman is obscured in the picture. We watch her being looked at, yes, but we do not really see her ourselves. That picture is The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed With the Sun. Here the object of our gaze is, as they say, dat ass. This isn’t so much a charge of demonic sexuality as a stunningly homoerotic vision of erotic puissance. Dolarhyde, clearly, does not miss the point nearly so much.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: Hello, Dr. Lecter. As an avid fan, I wanted to tell you I’m delighted that you have taken an interest in me. I don’t believe you’d tell them who I am, even if you knew.

HANNIBAL: What particular body you currently occupy is trivia.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: The important thing is what I am Becoming. I know that you alone can understand this.

HANNIBAL: Tell me. What are you becoming?

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: The Great Red Dragon.

Hannibal’s initial response to Dolarhyde is interesting, in that there’s no obvious piece of information on which he should be able to base this leap. And it’s clearly a massive leap—a response that immediately affirms and reinforces Dolarhyde’s trust in him, but that in no way follows from anything in Dolarhyde’s opening line. (In Harris’s original, the line is Dolarhyde’s.) The easiest explanation is that it has been inferred from the crime scenes; that Hannibal can read a theme of transformation into the particular mutilation and mirrors involved. But the underlying reasoning is never explicated. 

The puzzled fascination with which Dolarhyde observes himself talking to Hannibal is an interesting grace note picking up off of his dual nature. The scene has a light tension as to which Dolarhyde is which aspect of him. This is eventually resolved such that the Dolarhyde watching is human, whereas the one talking to Lecter is the Dragon, but the tension is a delicious disorientation.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: I want to be recognized by you.

HANNIBAL: As John the Baptist recognized the one who came after.

FRANCIS DOLARHYDE: I want to sit before you as the Dragon sat before 666 in Revelation. I have things I’d love to show you. Someday, if circumstances permit, I would like to meet you and watch you meld with the strength of the Dragon.

HANNIBAL: See how magnificent you are. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

One reacts, of course, with a certain irritation at the banality of invoking “The Tyger” in the vicinity of Blake. It has nothing to do with the Great Red Dragon paintings, which were painted a decade after Songs of Experience, and feels like going for the most obvious bit of Blake instead of building up anything that actually engages with his work.…

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Thoughts on Dynasty Warriors 9: Flavours of Musō

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Each numbered Dynasty Warriors installment comes in a set of three games. This is also true of Samurai Warriors, and the collaboration games (Gundam Musō, One Piece Pirate Warriors, Hyrule Warriors, etc.) will often have a variation of it. The three versions of Dynasty Warriors are as follows:

The Base Game (e.g. Shin Sangoku Musō 7/Dynasty Warriors 8)

These are the core numbered releases, and the ones that tend to see all the major changes. They will often appear at the start of a new hardware cycle to take advantage of graphical and processing enhancements made since the last main entry, will offer significant gameplay changes (while the base combat of course always remains comparable, things like modes, story progression, RPG elements and other features can and do change quite frequently and dramatically). This is when the vast majority of new characters will be introduced and existing characters will be completely redesigned from the ground up, oftentimes both aesthetically and mechanically. Some characters will lose former signature weapons and gain new ones (or in the case of Dynasty Warriors 9, get shifted into a different weapon class).
 
You might see new areas of China rendered and new parts of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms story included that weren’t before, or parts that were previously skimmed over for time and resource constraints will now be explored in greater detail (this oftentimes goes hand-in-hand with a particular new playable character). These are the games that receive the lion’s share of Koei-Tecmo’s resources and publicity, building lots of pre-release marketing hype. In recent years they also tend to get supported for several months afterward with a barrage of premium downloadable content, including special pre-order exclusive costumes, new weapons, stages, music tracks, and sometimes even new entire characters.

The Expanded Edition (e.g. Shin Sangoku Musō 7: Moushouden/Dynasty Warriors 8: Xtreme Legends)

Starting with Dynasty Warriors 3, each numbered entry has received a secondary release within 12 to 18 months of the game’s original launch, subtitled Moushouden. “Moushouden” means “Mighty Legend”, and gets appropriately localized into English as “Xtreme Legends”, spelled precisely that way. The name is in reference to Lu Bu, known as one of the fiercest, most powerful and most bloodthirsty warlords in Chinese history, and it’s Lu Bu who usually appears on the box art of Moushouden expansions in lieu of series mascot Zhao Yun.
 
Back in the olden days, Moushouden/Xtreme Legends releases were actual expansion packs: Secondary discs you would buy and that would interact with previous save data you had from the current base Dynasty Warriors game. You could also compare them to the myriad of revisions Street Fighter games tend to get over their lifespan as they bring with them gameplay tweaks and balancing, except in this case there’s only one instead of ten gazillion. But Moushouden expansions also bring with them a wealth of new content, often in the form of new game modes and revisions to existing ones.
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Kickstarter Update/Capaldi Entry List

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Since I did my usual “forgetting to queue Proverbs of Hell for a Monday,” I figured I should provide a Kickstarter update instead. At the time of writing, we’re at $8069. We hit the Algebra of Ice stretch goal over the weekend, which means we’re now approaching the $9000 stretch goal of The Unknown, which from Big Finish’s Diaries of River Song series. I haven’t listened to it yet, but it sounds fascinating. The hook is simple: River Song meets the Seventh Doctor. This is self-evidently a good idea. River’s entire M.O. is that she destabilizes the Doctor’s place in the narrative. She can do the things they do, and knows more than them. That’s especially true in stories before A Good Man Goes to War, which obviously this is. The Seventh Doctor, on the other hand, stands out even among the Doctors. He’s manipulative and has foreknowledge of events in ways they don’t. That’s a stereotype of his character in the same way “the loud obnoxious one” is of Six, but it’s also similarly true. So having River meet him is, in its own way, as much of a limit point for her character as meeting the Twelfth Doctor was. It’s a hook that does to River Song what she usually does to Doctor Who. Outside of pornographic fanfiction (where the answer is clearly the Third Doctor) the Seventh Doctor is straight-up the most interesting past Doctor for River to meet save arguably the First? Can Guy Adams rise to the occasion and hit his obviously laid out marks? Can Big Finish avoid screwing up a self-evidently good idea for once? I don’t know. I’m actually kind of nervous to find out because I am so often frustrated by Big Finish and I do so love this idea. 

So if me tackling that sounds interesting and you haven’t backed the Kickstarter yet, now is a great time. If you have backed the Kickstarter and haven’t spread word on social media, now is a great time. If you’ve done all of those things, on the other hand, now could be a great time to do them again. But it could also be a good time for some self-care. Get a drink of water. Have a small and healthy snack. Look at some cute cat videos on YouTube. You’ve earned it.

I also wanted to give an update on the Patreon campaign for the Peter Capaldi era of TARDIS Eruditorum. Right now that’s at $345, a mere $5 away from The Full Eruditorum, complete with Pop Between Realities, You Were Expecting Someone Else, and Outside the Government entries. One way or another that will start on March 19th. But will it start with Deep Breath (currently readable by Kickstarter backers) or Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea (Captain America: Winter Soldier, The Lego Movie, It Follows)? While odds look good for the latter, it’d be good to get well over $350 so that’s nice and secure and we don’t suddenly drop down to going episode-only in the middle of the run.…

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