Dunce Macabre

"He walked aft, whistling Danse Macabre, off key again, and began to fiddle with his space suit."

Robert A. Heinlein - Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

 

 

My recent mention of 2005's Corpse Bride reminded me the central musical number, Remains of the Day, featured not just skeleton versions of Bo(ne)jangles and Ray Charles, but title-dropped a book from 1989 and acknowledged its debt to a quite famous Disney cartoon from 1929, The Skeleton Dance. While dancing cartoon skeletons were new at that time because animation was new, musical morbidity had run in parallel via pieces like Camille Saint-Saëns' 1875 Danse Macabre, which I assume Heinlein's all-American boy next door was whistling while fighting space-Nazis on the moon just after WWII. Some of these dates are from my own youth or childhood, others from my grandparents' or from their grandparents in turn. The theme persists, art continues. But of corse that dude Cammie did not invent rib-cage xylophones either, but was inspired by the centuries-long tradition of the death dance throughout Europe, and look what I ran across at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples:

The ancient Romans didn't just coin the phrase "memento mori" but handed it out as party favors. With legs retracted, that jolly fellow's about the size of your pinkie. Bronze was probably more common and commonly articulated... so they could bonejangle it up with state-of-the-art special effects on dia de los muertos. And hey, we could keep chasing this theme both sideways and back if you like, through all of human history, a psychological artifact of our intellect's limitation within mortal bodies, of generational cycles, decay and impermanence.

 

It does help knowing which cycles, which artifacts you're actually observing, and how far they stretch. If you told me Remains of the Day's a song about two love triangles, black musicians and the jazz age, you'd be less than half right. There are older and more pervasive influences at work.

 

On a completely unrelated topic, it's well established that many signs of physical attractiveness are actually stand-ins for a mate's viability. Clear skin or fresh breath for instance pretty obviously indicate your intended's resistance to disease, and such environmental threats are always changing. As Richard Dawkins summarized in The Blind Watchmaker:

"If females really could successfully choose males with the best genes, their very success would reduce the range of choice available in the future: eventually, if there were only good genes around, there would be no point in choosing. Parasites remove this theoretical objection. The reason is that, according to Hamilton, parasites and hosts are running a never-ceasing cyclical arms race against one another. This in turn means that the 'best' genes in any one generation of birds are not the same as the best genes in future generations. What it takes to beat the current generation of parasites is no good against the next generation of evolving parasites. [...] The only general criteria that successive generations of females can use are the indicators that any vet might use -- bright eyes, glossy plumage, and so on."

 

Such divination also implies the criteria themselves are mutable, can be faked or cheated and can outweigh the animal's actual fitness due to the importance placed on them by instinct, valid or not. My old point that intra-tribal status symbolism can be considered such a runaway adaptation for humans would get me laughed out of any biology department (for one, it's entirely too wide a category) but I maintain there's something to it. Sapience threw a kink into selection. As females grew able to actively interpret new stimuli as markers of status and males able to establish new means of competition, that cyclical arms race melded into fad worship, with every new fashion or badge of moral superiority a new peacock tail in its own right. And women's own pecking order proceeded, to a lesser extent, in parallel but with the same caveat: status trumps the means by which it's acquired. Corsets, bustles, crinolines, men in pantyhose, war-steeds or sports cars, piety or patriotism, all that matters is that if you have one, you're better than those without.

 

That trend, that theme, that unending parade of self-important, self-righteous glory hogs, divas, powermongers, fops, pulpit-pounders, attention whores, etc. etc. etc., has shaped and colored the entirety of human history, globally. In fact, you can make this prediction for the future with unerring accuracy: that no matter how destitute or aristocratically bloated a human society, no matter how backward or advanced technologically, every new generation's primitive instincts will lead it to jump on new fads where available and inflate them as holier-than-thou badges of superiority.

 

Now, remember, the adaptation can easily outstrip its original, practical meaning so long as it's reinforced via status.

 

So take a phenomenon like the rise in LGBTQOMGWTFBBQ "minorities" (along with pervasive media pandering) during the 2010s, especially as the most glaring example, transsexualism. You might see two obvious explanations:

 

1) This was always the real proportion, even though it has never shown up anywhere in human history to such proportions (even the ancient Greeks in all their gaiety still mostly fantasized about knights charging to the rescue of fair damsels) and was just being repressed until now. This is not entirely without merit, especially in a chronically and comically sexually repressed society like Puritan America. But it's not exactly supported by historical and social context.

 

2) You made it a fad, made it a badge of social superiority, and youth jumped at the chance to join the ranks of the new nobility, of those who cannot be criticized, must only be portrayed as unimpeachably angelic and favored in all social interactions by mass consensus. And for fad worship, for narcissism and self-promotion, we have endless examples, globally and multimillennially! It's a thread and trend far more reliable than the danse macabre.

 

Chopping your tits or balls off is certainly counterproductive from a sexual fitness angle, but for a species whose status obsession trumps all else it still feeds into the race for legitimacy driven by an instinct far older than any culture war. If the gender Lysenkoism of the 2010s were valid, if explanation 1) more reliable, then when the restrictions on gender identity were supposedly lifted*, you should have seen a tidal wave of long-suffering gender-counterfeiting old or middle-aged individuals coming out of various closets. Instead it's been attention-seeking adolescents overwhelmingly driving the shift.

 

So what do you think will happen once fascism becomes the new genderqueer? The danse macabre has an endpoint.

 

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* They were in fact enforced to fit a new postmodernist cultural grand narrative.

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alternate title: Dead White Shemales

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edit: The cult of Cybele in ancient Rome, whose followers would occasionally castrate themselves in offering to the goddess, is strongly reminiscent of the past decades' glorification of transsexualism in the wake of feminism's takeover of pop culture.

I'm more of a Goya-supra-Giacometti

"A man does not insist on physical beauty in a woman who builds up his morale. After a while he realizes that she is beautiful - he just hadn't noticed it at first."

-from The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

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"Say goodbye to the one who's subordinate to the weak
Say goodbye to your fear and you finally will be free"

Aesthetic Perfection - A Quiet Anthem

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Let's see, how does that old joke go?

A guy begs one of his friends for help:

"Man, my wife's always complaining I'm not romantic enough, I don't compliment her enough."

"Hey, don't worry, just tell her she's got the face of a Botticelli and the body of a Degas."

Excited, the first man runs home and blurts out:

"Honey, you've got the body of a Botticelli and the face of a Degas!"

 

DuckDuckGo associates that phrase with the movie The Pick-Up Artist from the '80s, but I have no idea if it originated with or predated. What's great about it as a joke is that it can be written both ways. Botticelli's that "birth of Venus" guy but being active half a century before Michelangelo and Titian and their ilk, mostly stuck to strict churchy themes and while his human faces can look angelically serene, his human proportions/poses are a bit unnatural and relatively tame. Also, back then voluptuous chicks usually ranked sexier. Degas painted lithe, pretty young ballerinas but being an impressionist didn't quite detail their faces. So body B and face D could mean a curvaceous broad with the angelic, innocent face of a young girl... or it could mean an awkward body with a big gut and a smeared face. Body D and face B could mean a slim youthful figure and composed, seductive womanly beauty... or it could mean fat face on a little girl's body.

 

But it doesn't matter, does it? The real joke is that the guy's wife's gonna put him in the dog-house for getting it wrong (laugh, damn you) whichever way he says it. That's the punchline we're all waiting for; cackle and point your finger at that other man, always that other man, to prove your own devotion, your own willingness to chase the goal-posts she keeps moving on you. How many such jokes do we produce, non-stop, about men failing to flatter women to women's tastes? Fire up any sitcom, any romcom, any stand-up routine, any impulse magazine on the checkout rack. More importantly, reverse the polarity: how many jokes do we circulate about women being put in the dog-house for failing to flatter a man? What's that? Sorry, I don't speak cricket. What could she in turn possibly say to insult him into making her sleep on the couch, as if he had the power in the first place? What insult will he not swallow? Insulting his mother, to double down on the self-righteous juxtaposition? A man is only permitted to tell a woman "hop off your broom for a second" in defense of another woman.

 

If every book and movie contained nothing but jokes about hindus desperately trying to flatter christians and failing because hindus are such idiots, would that indicate hindus are more respected than christians?

If everything mocked "darkies" struggling to flatter their way into the hearts of whites and failing because blacks are such idiots, would that indicate blacks have greater status in our society and control over its culture?

How many centuries of such evident one-sided servility and mockery and maligned self-abnegation would it take to suggest to you the balance of power lies very much in the opposite direction?

Lemony Picketing Comatose Jeannies

"You've traveled farther than you've ever before
You can't leave by the way you came in"

 

Mary Crowell - City of Doors

 

 

I been schemin' to be callin' on Warframe this month, since it's putting out. a new minor game mode offering a new intro to game mechanics for new players, doubling as a tour de force for what always set this fundamentally mindless arcade-style loot grind about magic space ninjas apart from its Diablo-esque competitors, FPS-style or not: the art design. Not just "graphics" as in polygon count, but convoluted, rococo, shamelessly flashy art major masturbation. But damnit, though occasionally goofy, they usually make it work. With The Duviri Paradox, they've gone full Dali-tard into outright surrealism... and damnit, they still made it work!

 

Come on, even I'm not jaded enough to deny this looks gorgeous. Nonsensically gorgeous.

It's a faceless VTOL interdimensional bronze-plated rhinoceroboskelepegasus with an ankylosaur tail.

Uh... huuuh...

OK, screw it, sure, whyever the hell not?

Check the swaddled statue. See what I mean about not just graphics?

The hover-sculpture is very, very mobile

Looks like someone read the same edition of The Martian Chronicles* as I did growing up.

 

However, the logical cost of handing control over to people with paint on their brains is... logic. Not that the kid-friendly Warframe was ever much on coherent plots (relying entirely on "a space wizard did it" for its phlebotina and motivations) but this latest oneiric fantasy really piles on the kamehameha moments where the hero overcomes superior foes BY.SHEER.FORCE.OF.WILLLLL!!! and couches it all in a mindscape where emotions are reality yadda-yadda navel-gazing journey to the center of the mindless bloviating.

Which reminds me: enough with the damn genie plots. You know the ones I mean: hero seeks wish-granting macguffin or lands in a dimension where thought becomes reality, discovers the pitfalls of absolute power and the whole thing inevitably factors down to a bimillennially-outdated morality play on hubris and purity of heart. Sure, it's one of the great classic yarn hooks, but much like the schizophrenic "villain was myself all along" twist or superhero pugilism, over the past couple of decades various media have simply driven the precept so far into the ground it would take a tectonic event to dredge up its appeal again. Genie plots were clever enough when Stanislaw Lem and Philip K. Dick were doing them back in 1970, and retained a kick up to the turn of the millennium Serial Experiments Lain / Planescape: Torment era. Now the returns have long since diminished to nothing. Give it a rest. That routine's naught but a symptom of postmodernist rot, the tedious, infantile self-gratification of two generations raised to believe they can remake reality just by screaming at it.

The same goes for the "emotions as real force" angle. Reality does not care one singular quark how you feel. No amount of self-esteem or prayer will ever turn a lump of copper, sand and petroleum into a cellphone. Everything we've gained, everything we can do as modern apes, we owe to the application of cold-blooded reason to twist the unbreakable mechanics of objective reality into a medium conducive to intellect, which is personal existence itself. Emotion is an evolutionary holdover and its management imperative to our development, but its glorification holds such mass appeal precisely because the masses are incapable of developing. Stop feeding the anti-intellectual jihad.

 

It's not like you can't find worthy counterpoints even among children's literature:

"in their hearts they knew that the troubling world lay just outside"

I'd never heard of A Series of Unfortunate Events before the movie came out, so can't speak for the books. I did have a chance to re-watch it recently (love the atmosphere) and was struck by its lamentably unique attitude among modern media toward thought. Where the villain of most stories is a mad scientist, here he's a social manipulator and deceiver by trade. Emotional appeals are used to subvert otherwise competent adults to their doom. Reason and the application of natural laws yield life and freedom.

Yet was this an emotionless movie? Hell no. You'd need gumboots to wade through the schmaltz in some scenes. But it contextualizes the management of one's internal state as tool for interacting with the physical world, NOT as replacement for it. Avoiding self-deception is paramount. Solutions are to be found in reality, not wishful thinking. Learn as much as you can, be aware of your environment, be skeptical, make connections. Don't make believe, believe what is made clear.

 

Millions of children loved such stories without being traumatized by them. Why is that so hard for the rest of you?

 

 

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* Leafing through his image galleries now, I realize Michael Whelan was responsible for quite a few of my youth's most memorable images. Damn man, good work.

Mediation

"The best lack all conviction while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity"

Yeats - The Second Coming

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"Coming to this cinema soon!

The tender, compassionate story of one man's love for another man in drag. Thrill to the excitement of a night emission over Germany, when the pilot, Jennifer, has to choose between his secret love for Louis, the hot-bloodedly bisexual navigator, and Andy, the rear gunner, who, though quite assertive with girls, tends to take the submissive role in his relationships with men, and sensational Mexican starlet Rosetta Nixon plays the head of bomber command, whose passion for seabirds ends in tragedy! With Ginger as the half-man, half-woman parrot whose unnatural instincts brought forbidden love to the aviary, and Roger as Pip, the half-parrot, half-man, half-woman, three-quarter badger, ex-bigamist negro preacher for whom banjo playing was very difficult, and he never mastered it though he took several courses and went to banjo college... uhhh... and everything...

Don't miss it! Coming to your cinema soon!"

Monty Python's Flying Circus - The Light Entertainment War (S4E3, 1974)

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I resent the Pythons pre-empting my criticism of identity politics content generation with that hilarious movie trailer spoof, and for doing so more sweepingly and at once more thoroughly by mixing in overdone settings. That entire Light Entertainment War episode is more or less a drawn-out sigh of frustration at the endless tirade of war dramas churned out in the decades after WW2, most of which had nothing to say but all of which held themselves above criticism by the inviolable tragedy of national pride. The movie trailer segment in particular rings painfully true against contemporary media and their desperation to rehash every single idiotic cliche with special interest demographic twists, narrowing down to ever more obscure niches.

 

Reminds me of trying to sit through a bad movie called Summerland, which starts as a tale of wartime hardship during the Battle of Britain as a boy is sent to the country to live with a cantankerous female writer. Comedy... or something, should ensue, but we soon scrap the odd couple setup to segue awkwardly into a tedious lesbian romance having nothing to do with the intro besides one monstrously overblown contrivance. Seriously, they have to actively remind you there's a war on, or what year they're living in. One gets the distinct impression that Summerland's writer(s?) could find nothing either irksome or piquant in the 1940s besides closeted carpet-munching. Which likely stems from lack of research, as neither dialogue nor comportment support a period piece* and everyone's only mode of communication seems limited to copping attitude like sassy brit-com bit players. Why even bother? If you wanted to make yet another movie pitting glorified lesbians against the injustice of whatever, you could simply have made that movie, without resorting to a time period you can't accurately portray, or the informed existence of a war, or a child as prop, or confused gratuitous mysticism, or a man conveniently dying to clear the way for morally superior girl-girl love.

 

The story seems contrived backwards from homosexuality being SRS BSNS to the need for a dramatic backdrop and what the hell, WW2's only been milked for cheap drama for seventy years and counting, what's a few more? Blame it on inertia, I guess. Entertainment industries long ago grew so accustomed to copying and repackaging as to standardize even the packages. "Set piece" was not a slur to start, but earned its status as such, and it's hardly just special interest summer filler cinema getting bogged down in conventionality.

 

If you play any so-called "MOBAs" (LoL, DotA2, etc.) more properly remembered as Aeon of Strife games after their Starcraft beginnings, you might wonder why your inventory has six slots, exactly six slots, no more, no less. Six shall be the number thou shalt count and the number of the counting shall be six. Seven shall thou not count, neither count thou five, excepting that thou then proceed to six. Eight is right out. If you expect some convoluted justification based on class balance, match pacing or numerological progression, prepare to be disappointed: DotA, the one they all copy, was a custom map for Warcraft 3, not a single-character RPG but RTS with simplified skills/inventory for its hero units. In other words the 6slots were not a design choice but an incidental, arbitrary external restriction, slavishly copied by imitators for twenty years now like Corinthian columns on Howard Roark's house, for absolutely no reason besides looking more like a custom map for a game with early-2000s limitations. The same was true of the map size or shape (diagonal to fill more space, with lanes angled to fit Warcraft 3's square maps) or the 5-player teams (limited by War3's 12-player match maximum = 5+1 AI per team) though at least there five players coincide with a good multiplayer class mix.

Hardly an isolated example. If you step into The Lord of the Rings Online you might wonder at Bree's max-level NPC town guards, since monsters usually leash away from town's edge so there's nothing for them to actually fight. Well, World of Warcraft had town guards at launch partly to provide safety on PvP servers, and LotRO as WoW-clone with zero open-world PvP mindlessly copied over the superfluous guards into original launch content.

 

Don't get me started on random genres forcing you into platform jumping quests just because nothing says "video game" like Donkey Kong.

Don't even try to sell me on the artistic merits of pixelation. Pointillism's merit as clever novelty waned with the rest of the belle epoque.

On a completely unrelated topic, I don't like opera, or musical theater in general. Not to say opera doesn't occasionally offer some bangin' howl-alongs, but the few times I was dragged along or tried sitting through an entire performance I quickly grew aware of the genre's massive amounts of filler. Yes, yes, I can appreciate lavish mood/scene-setting, but generally speaking, I shouldn't have time to read the whole libretto while the plucky squire's still recitatatin' 'bout the sandwich he had for lunch. The covers are too far apart, to borrow Bierce's witticism. But the filler was originally part of the selling point, wasn't it? An evening at the theater is just that, isn't it? An evening, a social event, with the theater as pretext. When it took strapping on a corset, quadruple-tiered flowery hat and three layers of petticoats, plus a creaky carriage ride across town behind a horse's hind-hole to reach your entertainment, the least they could do was provide an entire evening's worth, complete with intermissions to intermingle. Also, singing troupes in full costume with orchestral accompaniment were the height of technological and choreographic achievement for about three centuries, the most impressive spectacle you might witness. Nowadays? Not so much. Pretty sure Industrial Light and Magic can out-glitz a dozen prancing ponces in puffy pantaloons. The strictures of form imposed by 18th-century avant-garde stagecraft no longer serve their function.

But if opera might be dead for most relevant cultural purposes, the simple observation that ILM was founded to illustrate a *space* opera speaks emphatically of its lasting influence, and the same is true of other dead forms whose functions outlived them. Romanticized drama persists.

 

Are silent films dead? Move your lips to say yes. Still, entertainment industries learned well the power of silent scenes. Peaceful vistas bloom onscreen a few seconds before the music score winds up, lovers wake alongside each other in wordless reverie, and rare is the thriller which doesn't include some nerve-jangling aural crater as the plucky squire hides... from... the... vill- BOOM, HEADSHOT! Talkies did not abolish silence, merely counterbalanced it.

 

Are radio dramas dead? Tell it to Morgan Freeman, The Narrator. Is letter writing dead? Then what the hell am I doing right now? Can you make a war movie? Sure, if the war's actually relevant. Are fairy tales dead? Not if superheroes have anything to say about it. Is ballet dead? Yes. Yes, that one is dead.**

 

A medium is not a goal. It's a means, a vehicle to be used to whatever extent it carries meaning. And that word, medium, reminded me to dig up my copy of Nicomachean Ethics:

"decision is either understanding combined with desire or desire combined with thought; and this is the sort of principle that a human being is."

Sapience is decision, the ego between id and superego. You are the process of processing. Somewhere between memories and impulses, between desire and thoughts, between desired effect and learned technique, there should be a choice, a chooser, a creator whose decisions shape those simpler elements into something worth creating.

That endangered species, the creators, have dwindled with every decade. All we have are industry standards cut and pasted, "babble babble, bitch bitch, rebel rebel, party party" as another brilliant philosopher once put it. Mercenary pandering renders bad art grotesque by its subhumanity, the degenerate, inbred, troglodytic effluent of caged animalism. The new media of the electronic age helped... for a bit... but as they outgrow their Betty Boop stage, they too have been choked with standardization and mass appeal, all features trimmed away which do not maximize short-term profit. Even the supposed alternatives do little but fetishize meaningless, outdated forms without function.

 

And the final nail in our cultural downfall is that the only members of our society now permitted to be heard are the ones saying nothing the loudest, the ones peddling moralistic prurience, desire without either thought or decision.

Activists.

 

 

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* Compare character word choice, tone and mannerisms to The Dig, set almost exactly in the same time, place and social stratum, and representing it far more believably. By the way, The Dig also managed to make a point of sexual repression. Just a marginally more dignified one.

** Nope, wait, never mind, we do have strippers.

Burgher Quest

or: "Turn, Hellhound, Turn!"

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"Dein hässlicher Bruder, ein Schlag ins Gesicht"

Eisbrecher - Verrückt

 

"So how much easier would life be if nineteen million motherfuckers grew to be just like me?"

Eminem - Who Knew

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Anybody remember Galaxy Quest? Not whatever sequel or spin-off or remake Hollywood's bragging about making now, for fear of originality. I mean the original parody of Star Trek and by extension SciFi fandom from 1999, which turned out to be both funny and an unexpectedly engaging little SF adventure flick and contributed in no small amount to the public's increased acceptance of SF/Fantasy entertainment over the following years.

 

Long story short, actors from a defunct Trek-ish TV series get shanghaied by space aliens to Last Starfighter to death some green lizard space general. They learn to grow into their heroic roles, save the day, and one guy fucks a tentacle monster. As basic plots go, you've heard better. Execution was key. Among Galaxy Quest's virtues, it didn't skimp on the special effects just because it was a comedy. Glossy visuals prevented the audience from disengaging from the heroes' perils, hitting that dramedy balance point upon which our expectations can never quite settle into complacency. I've recently found myself thinking how much the film relied on the uncanny valley effect. Tim Allen for instance would normally make a terrible SciFi protagonist... until you realize he's actually playing William Shatner, now pretty universally recognized as a terrible SciFi protagonist. He's not supposed to be a good fit. But, more importantly of course, the Thermians in their ill-fitting human suits, while heavily feminized/neotenized to secure the audience's unthinking sympathy, also maintained enough rigidity in their movements and their taut, awkward facial expressions to remain offputting at the best of times.

It reminds me of a creative work far less appreciated by the modern public at large, Rodin's Burghers of Calais, who are not feminized or grinning babyishly at the audience. They're a bunch of unsympathetic, sour-faced curmudgeons dragging their feet and avoiding eye contact. It takes a bit of viewing to notice the almost imperceptible caricature traces in their features, most obvious in their slightly oversized, bony hands, but also, once you know what to look for, in their emaciated, siege-starved sunken eyes and senescence-enlarged ears and noses. If Rodin wanted to show human bravery with human features, he wound up more human than human.

If you've been paying attention to my bloggerin' here you probably guessed I'd somehow bring this around to video games at some point. Good for you, have a cookie, shut up and listen: the burghers are a team. A team, you got that? The town had wanted a single heroic figure symbolizing glorious martyrdom, a fairytale Prince Charming for viewers to look up to and pretend to identify with. Rodin gave them personal suffering and resolve marching alongside themselves. That should be the sentiment evoked whenever you queue up for a team game, not the false expectation of playing the hero but amor fati, that bitter plodding slide into the inimical fray, that embrance of a death worth dying, that "far, far better thing I do" raging into "cursed be he that first cries 'hold, enough!'"

This is far from the first time I've brought this up. I'll gladly support anyone in refusing the idea of innate debt or duty in real life. You owe the apes around you nothing simply for being born, or being born the wrong sex or race. But if you willingly and through no necessity join a group activity, like a game, you implicitly devote yourself to the group, and any behavior to the contrary should be immediately and mercilessly punished and exterminated. You exist to suffer and die taking as many enemies down with you as possible; that is your only worth and your only purpose, end of story. While parasitic vermin playing team games only to pad their own personal scores, using their teammates as props, plagued online games (as they do every human endeavor) from the beginning, the past decades' cultural devolution hitting rock bottom in snowflake narcissism has by now ensured such behavior drowns out any better alternatives. Every online game seems to consist predominantly of dickless little bitches running away from fights, taking the easiest way out, and bitching at their betters for not running away faster, condemning any 'tryhards' struggling toward the objective. Whether it's teleporting around the map looking for effortless captures, or spamming surrender votes as soon as it doesn't look like they'll get a free win, or letting your team fight 4v5 while you hit defenseless inanimate objects, or yet another life gain proc card deck, the idea that only the easiest option is worth taking mirrors only too well our real world popular politics, the spineless little twerps rallying behind the most widely accepted pablum they can trumpet like 'slavery is bad' or 'babies are cute' in abject terror of being forced to argue an unpopular point.

Say what you will about the youth of the nineties, but at least we remembered how to hate ourselves - not just our race, sex or sexuality, but our own personal failings.

Given that your role in a game can be more viscerally your own and that ideas are easier to workshop and play out in a virtual space maybe you should be trying a little harder to teach the up and coming generation to grow a fucking spine via online games. And sure, I'd try to make them tie nooses around their necks and accept their fates with grim determination. You are a shitstain on your team's asshole and your only worth lies in dying in its service. Any little retard who panics and runs instead of helping allies? Knock his teeth out and throw him off a bridge. The penalty for desertion is execution. No matter how much your score is suffering, keep trudging to the gallows like those burghers. I'd probably fail, but that's how I'd do it. Go for the throat. But maybe lycanthropy ain't for everyone.

So, okay, fine, you want a cheerier option? Self-sacrifice still hinges on seeing oneself as not entirely human, not heroic, not the nec plus ultra of the team's aspirations, not a woman or a child whose well-being comes first. We still desperately need some dwarven steadfastness. At least remember those plucky, sappy, dopey, lovable Thermians from Galaxy Quest, supporting cast in their own story, inhumanly awkward and imperfect, hopelessly out of their depth in an open conflict and seeking heroes... but also willing to stand by those heroes to the bitter end. If nobody can drum up a proper berserker rage anymore, at least make the new slogan of team activities that slightly off-kilter cry of:

Nnnevergiveup! NevER, surrENder!

Golden Oldies

I can't believe it took me four years to find out about people reconstituting fossilized squid ink. I gotta say, though: if you're gonna do it, do it right. Write Hammurabi's code in fossil squid ink using an Archaeopterix quill on mammoth vellum.
Your eraser? A trilobite.

Leftover Sycophantry

Damnit, I wanted to talk about computer games today but that bastard over at Leftover Soup did something again. He has a very bad habit of doing something. I've bit my tongue time and again (or would that be my fingers; though that would turn confusing as I actually have a nervous habit of biting my fingers) to prevent myself from writing tedious, lengthy blog posts on trains of thought his comic or comments appended to said comic have sparked.

The freedom created by webcomics' original lack of financial pay-off yielded a heavy dose of social commentary, with many authors slapping their disjointed thoughts online to vent as they could not in real life about anything and everything. Patreon brings death to that freedom, but that's a big-ass can of gut-instinct-worms I really shouldn't allow to parasite this reaction post. In any case, Leftover Soup follows that proud dying tradition, hitting everything from race to gender to religion to the military to... ida know, hell, there was even an incontinent three-legged sheepdog involved at some point.

This week's flavor's police brutality and the bureaucratic brutality of the police/legal system as a whole, a topic on which I mostly agree with the author. I say "mostly" because I don't think he's nearly forceful enough in his views on the matter. Yes, he is absolutely right in pointing out to those who criticize his criticism that he's already included a sympathetic cop character in the comic in the form of Cheryl - a bit too sympathetic as far as I'm concerned. I disagree with him a helluva lot more when it comes to religion or gender relations, but you know what? That's fine. He gets to be wrong, as a basic right of sentient individuals. I'm not indulging in "everyone has their opinion" or some other anti-critical, anti-intellectual bullshit postmodernist self-serving rhetorical means of placating, subverting and silencing those around oneself. Tailsteak is just wrong sometimes. Dead wrong.

I still read his comic and comments. He is right more often than wrong and damn clever at being both, which is what art is supposed to be: expression. Pretty sure I even tossed him a few bucks some time ago and will likely do so again once he finishes it. What I don't do is write letters to the editor attempting to censor this or that view expressed in that one particular work of fiction, demanding that he voice my opinion through his work.*

To the point: in the comment to today's comic, as in a few past instances, he takes a conciliatory, almost apologetic tone in response to what I'm guessing is some vociferous pressure from his readers to lay off this or that social group, ideology, ice cream flavor or hair style. This is a problem. It's not enough that he gave them Cheryl, not enough that even without Cheryl they might like 80-90% of the comic; they demand supplication. What's worse, he doesn't seem to have completely internalized the realization that this will not be enough either, that no amount of kowtowing and self-flagellation for one's thought processes can ever compare with the communal public's utter lack of thought processes. You will never be "me" enough for my tastes, Tailsteak. You will never provide bland enough reinforcement to compete with a facebook friend list. While you still have three or more working brain cells you will never provide a loud enough echo chamber to compete with the social media circle-jerks your readers likely use as their frame of reference for discussion.

Focus groups are the death of creativity and objectivity both. That oversocialized tug of war of compromise toward the lowest common denominator yielded "news" stories about kittens up trees long before teh internets went pop and in the era of one-click social sanction recalcitrance has become a necessity. You'd think webcartoonists of all people would readily think back to a recent example of an individual mind collapsing under social pressure. Its name is Tatsuya Ishida.

Creators, if your audience's comments start coloring your work, sequential or otherwise, as you're working it, it's time to stop reading them. Your mind is not a damn democracy. Yeah, maybe years later you'll look back and think "I was a bit too hard on the pigs" but at least it'll have been your own past error, your own personal growth and not the mutant, half-formed brainchild of getting completely mindfucked by the zeitgeist. Fuck tha thought po-leece.

Damn, this ran long, and I've been trying to ramble less too. That bastard needs to stop doing somethings.

_____________________________________________________________________
* I did this one time only, and if I ever meet Christopher Baldwin I'll have to apologize for that e-mail he never even read thirteen years ago.

In His Tomb

Listen,

I know nothing about Francis of Assisi. Well, I know he was pro-poverty... or something to that effect. Oh, and was he the nutjob who jumped into a briar patch because he felt horny? Maybe it was chastity or maybe Br'er Rabbit's just that hot. Hey, what monks and folk heroes do behind closed bushes is their own business...
What else? Oh yeah, stigmata. That's about it.

I don't know much about Saint Francis but I like him. Not only did he totally nail the whole "lunatic ascetic" monkish media figure (the guy preached to birds) but, supernatural gibberish aside, his image, his persona seems to evoke so closely the archetypal self-destructively dedicated social reformer that it provides century after century of inspiration. It's not just that Umberto Eco made the heroes of The Name of the Rose Franciscans, or that Zarathustra and Siddhartha drum more than a few of Francis' footsteps across continents, but his largely imagined, stern, somewhat pained patrician visage which has fueled some of the best paintings in history.

My favorite would have to be Zurbaran's macabre, wall-sized effigy, which I was honored to have looming over me during a museum visit a few years ago, or maybe Bellini's slightly more upbeat imagining, though any number of random images now conveniently google-able may serve. Don't really need to know much about Francis to be impressed with the impact his persona has had on artistic depictions of intrapersonal workings. Whether true to the original nutjob stigmatist or not, we could use more figures like him in movies, games, what-have-you. More patron saints of somber kindness and peaceful midnight vigils, more serene, animal-loving, plain-clad, honestly deluded do-gooders.

No, this individualized moratorium on my hatred of fundie brainwashing has nothing to do with that story about Francis taming a wolf. I only now found out about it. It's a coincidence - a hilarious coincidence; the sort which, were I sheepishly inclined, I would take as celestial signo to convert and do some vincesing in the name of Saint Frankie.

The Sound of Money

"God-Money's not looking for the cure
God-Money's not concerned about the sick among the pure
God-Money let's go dancing on the backs of the bruised
God-Money's not one to choose"

NIN - Head Like a Hole


Buy!
I'd like to take this chance to recommend one of the few things to wring belly-laughs out of sour-tempered big bad lupine me over the years, the far-east re-imagining of a beloved "classic" known as The Backstroke of the West.
Now with 300% more Presbyterian elephants per galaxy far away. I bring this up specifically because I fired up Prime World a couple days ago to find Nival attempting to out-Engrish Chinese amateur translators:

Buy! Buy the arised awaken! It is a big.
Ah, traduttore, traditore.
Buy!
!

Well, yes, it is in fact a big. Fuck the Middle-East and drowning polar bears. Babelfished translations aside, this weekend there's no other news to talk about except the awaken of The Force, by which I mean
Buy!
by which I mean Disney's mind control apparatus. If we're to believe Wikipedia, over half of the most expensive movie in history's budget went into marketing. Two hundred and twenty-three million dollars our of four hundred and twenty-three. That's a quarter billion dollars spent on nothing.

I don't say that lightly.
Buy!
First it might serve, as a thought-exercise, to translate that amount into something relatable like several thousand houses but I'll leave it up to my readers' imaginations to figure out what they could do with a quarter billion dollies. We cannot properly treat this as a comparison with other products, because it was not spent on producing anything.

Interlude: Nasreddin Hodja and the sound of money.

Once upon a time, Nasrudin came upon a hard-working wood-cutter going about his labors while another man lounged nearby clapping and yelling praise and encouragements. Confused, he asked the meaning of such a sight. The idle man said he's entitled to a third of the worker's income for providing support. The worker bitterly denied this, but Nostradin nevertheless demanded his coin-purse because it's only fair to provide an appropriate reimbursement for such a service. Taking out a metal dish, the Hogia loudly dropped a few coins onto it then handed all the money back to the wood-cutter saying "the sound of money is the proper payment for the sound of work."

In another version, Nasr ud-Din Ependi is himself lounging around the outside of an inn, delighting in the aromas of dinner wafting from the kitchen. The owner steps out and angrily demands payment. Payment for what? Why, consuming the scent of food, of course. Nastratin dutifully takes out his coin purse, holds it by the inn-keeper's ear and shakes it, saying "the sound of money is the proper payment for the smell of food."

Anyway, what I was
Buy!
...
Ahem, what I was getting at was that Disney sank a quarter billion dollars (that we know of) into market manipulation for a single movie. This is money which adds nothing to the quality of the product. It can't render the explosions explodier or the hams hammier, the Yoda-ling more cryptic or the force any more forceful. Marketing doesn't cut wood. What burning the equivalent GDP of Micronesia can do is starve out the competition, make you
Buy!
the latest Star War instead of many other perhaps more deserving space-age reincarnations of the swashbuckling mystical hero routine. You don't know what you don't know, and the obscenity of the sums involved in keeping it that way grows every day.

Economists faithful to the fundamentalist dogma of the invisible hand (flipping the public the all-too-visible finger) routinely slam any mention of socialism by citing the legendary inefficiency of old Eastern Bloc Communist economies. The free market, you see, is supposed to be efficient. Of course everybody who's anybody does their darndest to un-free the market as soon as they get the capital to do so, which is where the monstrous inefficiency of capitalism comes in. Over half of Disney's investment in The Force has gone not into out-competing other movies as per the naive interpretation of competition by offering a product for the public's evaluation and comparison with competitors, but in limiting the public's knowledge of available choices. They do this because of course they expect a huge
Buy!
return on same investment, to the tune of half a billion dollars just in the first weekend, and ever more ridiculous sums over the weeks and months to come. How many different movies could have been funded with a quarter billion dollars? How many Primers in a Force? How many Primers in a Force's Twitter budget alone?

Of course in another week Americans will remember there's a still bigger circus in town and everyone will go back to watching Donald Trump calling Mexicans rapists and Ben Carson's homoerotic Jesus fanfic and Sanders' goofy hair and hopeless appeals to reason and Hillary Clinton cackling maniacally and telling Obama to clear out his office and don't let the door hit your scrawny black ass on your way out. Wanna talk marketing? Estimates for this two-year campaign now seem to be exceeding ten billion dollars. The Clinton dynasty's brand name alone comes with a two or two-and-a-half billion dollar price tag attached.

Buy!

Buy what? Stock markets and mass-media have reversed Nasreddin's lesson. This is capitalist "efficiency" throwing greater effort into telling the public which food smells better than into actually cooking or eating anything, and it's all paid out of that wood-cutter's money because the Koch brothers sure as hell aren't manning the spigots on an oil rig themselves. Ten or twenty billion or however many Primers' worth of your money spent to decide which dog eats which, spent to tell you which product is superior instead of allowing you to decide for yourself. Two billion dollars' worth of Walker and Clinton's plastic smiles tacked onto every billboard and every TV channel and every online video ad day-in and day-out for the next year, all because the fatcats are expecting a HUGE return on their investment. Sounds like money to me.

The leas-
Buy!
Sorry, the least she
Buy!
I said the least she could do-
Buy!
The least she could do is wave a lightsaber around.

Buy!
Buy!
Buy!
Oh, will you shut the fuck up already?

"Bow down before the one you serve
You're going to get what you deserve"

LotRO's Cowbells Are the Stuff of Worlds

If you've wandered around Lord of the Rings Online through the Shire and in many of the northern lands of men at night you may stop at some point in confusion and question why the soft, measured, faeric night-time music track has begun to give way to a particular noise, to an equally soft, repetitive, multiple clinking and clanging. You likely will not recognize it. Very few of LotRO's customers, online gamers, will have led the double life necessary to become acquainted with the sound of cowbells.

Even fewer will have encountered cowbells in the setting LotRO's attempting to bring to life with such a reference. You see, old European peasant villages don't feed their animals at home and it's inefficient for each family to send someone out with three or four livestock of varying sizes and appetites. Cows, sheep and goats are often brought out at dawn and handed over to herders who take them up out of the tired dusty village street to rich, grassy hillside pastures for the day. At dusk, they descend once more and must be reclaimed by each household. Even left alone the animals will amble toward their barn more or less haphazardly, by virtue of habit. Just to make sure though, it's often the village children, little ten-year-old scamps who can barely reach a cow's neck, who are sent out by their busy parents to gently lead the beasts back home.

"Til the cows come home" does not signify only an unbearably long time, the end of time as it were in the eternal workday of village life. It's also the Friday to the week's worth of daily backbreaking physical labor of peasant life, when the heat and the dust and mud and toil and danger of maiming by farm implements finally relent in favor of gathering around the homestead for a family meal. It's one of the few moments when an exhausted peasant can wipe the sweat out of his miserable sunburned face to see a peaceful future stretching out before him in the figures of growing children leading fattened, healthy animals back home.

That sound of cowbells among the hills of the Shire conveys more peace and hope and context for your adventures than a dozen overblown varieties of cheaply re-skinned giant spiders. These sorts of artistic details like the gossips in Dragon Age or an NPC humming to herself in Morrowind are vital to such escapist fantasies. They create the world itself in which various "kill ten rats" nonsense can play out. They make us swallow the indignities and incompetence of various gameplay mechanics and they are too often ignored. LotRO's later content was churned out more and more without a thought to background or atmosphere or context. Games can be an artistic medium but the difference between good and bad content is as great as between a stick figure and The Old Guitarist.

Immersion matters. A joke here, a sound there, a pretty house or a scrap of flavor text appended to everything the player touches, it all adds up to a new reality. The best games, the ones we remember, invest in detail and become worlds. For all of LotRO's disgusting slot-machine idiocy, teleporting back to the few well-designed spots in the game world for a view or a sound that truly captures Middle-earth has kept me coming back to this piece of trash for year after year. That cowbell track is a greater selling point than any of the worthless "kill ten rats" quest packs I've actually paid them for.

Idiocracy

"There's no stoppin' the cretins from hoppin'
You gotta keep it beatin' for all the hoppin' cretins"

The Ramones - Cretin Hop


You can sometimes catch Idiocracy on cable, which is good because you sure as hell couldn't catch it in theaters or even on video a decade ago when it came out. For references on how the Fox corporation tried to bury the movie, consult your local Internet. My purposes are served well enough by simply admitting that calling Idiocracy "controversial" would understate matters, dealing as it does with modern society's great taboo: intellect.

During my life I have listened to several psychology / neurology professors and lecturers state quite blankly the reality that some individuals are simply better able to reason than others and that statistical analysis of varying complexity supports the case that intelligence is strongly heritable. Yet such statements are always given as polite asides in closed classrooms. Outside the doors of scientific reality we condemn each other to an anti-intellectual dreamscape of socially convenient platitudes. Whatever your qualities and achievements in real life, you're forced to attribute everything to determination, hard work, teamwork, divine inspiration... anything, anything at all so long as you never claim the taboo virtue of intellect for yourself. You can tout your social superiority through every facet of conspicuous consumption, but never dare claim that you, the individual, the mind inside the body occupying that social rank, are superior in and of yourself. We're all equal. Pass me the keys to my new Dildozer.

Not that you can fix such skewed perceptions with one comedy, no matter how threatening it may have seemed to corporate overlords, and the writer/director knew better than to try. In fairness, Idiocracy is neither a grimly-detailed treatise on dysgenics nor a paean to eugenics, but dark comedy lending its deadly serious subject matter the farcical sugar-coating it needs to go down easy. Judge seems to have had little intention of soapboxing for ninety minutes straight and for the most part adopts dysgenic prognostication for the jester's "he's saying what we're all thinking" angle. Somewhat to the detriment of its coherence, the movie's heavy-handed first half peters out somewhat in favor of strung-out slapstick and it overplays the "rehabilitation" scene as a climactic special-effects payoff.

It's thankfully salvaged by a concisely narrated epilogue but one can't escape the realization that as with many of the best Science Fiction stories, Idiocracy can be distilled to one or two monologues encapsulating its progressive ideology. The introduction concerning the two case studies and the second narrated introduction to the world of the future could be watched quite easily as disparate shorts. The rest, the myriad forms stupidity takes in the contemporary "developed" world, from Ow My Balls to the House o' Representin', well, that's just added catharsis for those of us who were sold on the flick's premise already. Delicious, delicious catharsis.

You know, maybe that's what made this thing so threatening. The public is impervious to reasoned argument, as the upper classes know all too well. Shameless, uncompromising satire presenting a progressive point as a fait accompli, now that has some potential in the political arena. In the famous words of Boss Tweed "My constituents don't know how to read, but they can't help seeing them damned pictures!" Mike Judge provided pictures: lurid, sickening, vibrant, laugh-the-pain-away imagery of humanity's suicidal refusal to adopt quality control measures. It's no more a recipe for salvation than Joe Average's failure to save the world of the future but where reasoned discourse comes up against the public's ignorance, shortsightedness and outright stupidity, Idiocracy does get the ball rolling, and that's pretty good for an average satirist.

The River, the Bough

"Lay me down
Let the only sound
Be the overflow
Pockets full of stones"
Florence and the Machine - What the Water Gave Me

When it comes to harnessing the elemental forces for dramatic effect, pop-culture proves itself hopelessly one-dimensional. Fire is power. Water is surrender. Forests are dark. Without getting into the larger issue of underused natural iconography for now, I'd like to ramble on the subject of water. Water has started to bore me. I want some trees.

"All this time the river flowed
Endlessly like a silent tear"
Sting - All This Time

Maybe I'm hearing too much of this because I've listened to too many Sting songs. Sting's an Englishman, in or out of New York, and Britannia rules the... do they even have forests anymore atop the sparkling cliffs of Albion? In any case, desert roses aside, Sting sees shadows in rain and sails to his islands of souls.

"If a prayer today is spoken please offer it for me
When the bridge to Heaven is broken and you're lost on the wild, wild sea"
The Wild Wild Sea

And hell, it's not just the Brits. I suppose it's no accident that last song reminds one of notable suicide-king Aegeus. European civilization was long dominated by the water at the middle of the earth, and that ever-present, untamed wasteland dominated the thoughts of the rich aristocrats and merchants whose denial of funding choked artistic expression. Such imagery has been carried from empire to empire into public consciousness. If you've listened to at least a few songs about suicide, you may have noticed that oceans, seas, rivers and any puddle deep enough to inhale tend to make frequent appearances.

"And I descend from grace
In arms of undertow
I will take my place
In the great below"
Nine Inch Nails - The Great Below

Or perhaps you're a fan of Poe? He may have mentioned the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir, but still all the night-tide he lay down by a tomb by the sounding sea. One of Poe's fanboys, Lovecraft, has done a great deal to maintain our fear of the clammy, unknowable deeps, but though the tides are occasionally portrayed as a menace, water in general remains the ultimate oubliette.

Take The Cat Lady, for instance. Much of its effect, as with many roleplaying / adventure games, depends on helping the player identify with the playable character. Thus, much of The Cat Lady hinged on the interlude provided by chapter three, the snippet of Susan's lonely existence, a nearly inevitable descent toward a nervous breakdown. Her attempts to trudge through the minute, neverending chores and indignities of mundane life are bracketed by quotes from a poem about suicide by drowning.
Which is kind of odd, since water plays little or no part in the rest of the game. Not that the notion of a sack of drowning kittens is lost on me and it's a beautiful scene in a great piece of interactive fiction, but I can't help thinking a poem about suffocating clouds or premature burial might've served the same purpose better, in context. Maybe something about maggots gnawing at roots.



See, I'm not a scion of an ocean-spanning major empire but happen to be descended of hill-folk and to me, forests hold at the very least equal symbolism to running water. Someone to whom I gave a few of my attempted short stories for evaluation noted that a couple of them ran along the same theme: suicide by plant. In fact, much of European folklore was imagined by dirt-farming peasants who would never see the great salt waste. To many of our ancestors, woods held the secrets of magic and dread, doom and escape, inhuman life both bountiful and fearsome. The stories collected by the Brothers Grimm grew out of the outskirts of the Black Forest, as did the Celtic faeries out of the equally defunct foliage of Caledonia. Baba Yaga in her endless incarnations lurked just beyond any East-European forest's edge and even the seafaring ancient Greek mythical bestiary included both Naiads and Dryads. Aegeus could have his pick, really.

Maybe the issue is one of accessibility. Poe, bless his psychotic heart, really did acknowledge the charm, grandeur and melancholy of plants - and those are the stories no-one bothers to read. Everyone can envision death by suffocation and the sinking feeling of depression translates quite easily to slipping beneath the waves. Forests are too diverse, wear too many faces for their symbolism to be worked into most narratives. Even sticking to flowers alone, can anyone remember the interpretations of pansies, rue, myrtles and roses? How about parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme? I wrote a page-long piece of flash fiction on the assumption that readers would know oleander leaves are poisonous. That's the sort of thing which just doesn't get you staged as a musical.

However, some of the best authors manage it. Princess Mononoke mixes water, a forest glade and vulnerable flesh into a single memorable icon of nature. Tolkien, reviving European folklore amidst the giddy technocratic progress of the interbellum, painted nature's uprising not only in the rise of the Bruinen against corruption but the march of the Ents. Poe's Morella borrows nature as symbol of inhuman, saprophagous renewal. Occasionally, you'll get a song in which water is used to paint more than wistful melancholy.

"It's you that moves me, hydroelectric"
MDFMK

Yet it's difficult to portray such melding of symbolism concisely, whether depressive or uplifting, rooted or flowing, past or future. How about all of it in a single image? Back when DeviantArt used to be worth browsing, before it became utterly choked by highschoolers drawing My Little Pony fanart, it was actively populated by some truly gifted artists. Arcipello's Forget Me Not manages more in a single frame than most artists can do with ninety minutes.

I am not seeking a complete shift but a growth and interconnection of subjects which are too often treated as facile set pieces. If you're tempted to write of the fanged wood, turn it into the assault of the tide against a rocky shore. If you seek surrender beneath the waves, find it in deciduous rot instead. Watch a high-altitude forest after a rainfall. That should be our inspiration. Water flows to plants which exude water and every wer-wolfe needs a water-hole. Blood flows and ice can cut. Forget-me-nots grow in muddy riverbanks, nurtured by the rich decay of corpses upstream.

TED vs. Kickstarter

I've been watching/listening to some TED Talks lately (word of advice - don't, they're habit-forming) and in the process engaging in wanton speculation and criticism as is my wont.
First off, Jane Goodall has gotten scary in her old age. I don't mean my kind of scary, angry nerd when-will-he-snap insane asylum scary, but the other kind. The softspoken social prime-mover sort. Listening to her dismissing complaints about her speech running overtime with "Are you going to come and drag me off?" you have to realize this is the sort of persona which can power social movements, and there are precious few of those among scientists. Granny Goodall can shame you into recycling where even if I had any credentials, the likes of me couldn't badger you into it.
Second, if you're relatively young, male and especially a gamer, Philip Zimbardo is kicking your pasty, antisocial ass. Implicitly, metaphorically, but you're gonna feel it nonetheless. And if you don't think a guy whose landmark experiment adorns every Psych100 textbook across the U.S. has enough pull within the unofficial trade-guild of headshrinkers to influence how society sees you, you really have spent too much time in Neverland. I won't say "let's try to prove him wrong" but rather let's prove him right and prove that we're in the right. In the mass-media culture we could all use a good dose of antisocial egomania.

I won't go into any others. Love or hate TED, the content provided is endlessly fascinating. However, I am constantly reminded of one of the first posts I made when I started this sad little joke of a blog. Where's the decentralization?
As delighted as I am by the varied material provided, lurking in my semiconscious assessment of the website, the tone of the presentations, the suppliant fundraising slant on every issue discussed, is the realization that in order to speak at TED you must very likely be or make yourself a corporate whore. When every talk is followed by an ad from GE, IBM, various car companies or Goldman-Fuckin'-Sachs, the social damage of promoting the most destructive agents of modern society arguably outweighs the positive effects of popularizing scientific breakthroughs or artistic achievements. Is anyone seeing the irony of having talks on global-warming endorsed by peddlers of gas-guzzling SUVs? The implication that human advancement cannot exist without the stranglehold such thoughtless, fungal, megalomaniacal, expansionist giants place on human advancement is viciously, deviously counterproductive. There can be no true progress until we are no longer slaves to the stock market, until we can advance scientifically and artistically without feeding the lion's share of our due benefits to the animalistically, instinctively competitive powermongers at the top of these pyramid schemes which block all social progress.
As much as TED is lauded as a positive movement, taking what used to be a multibillionnaire exclusive and opening it somewhat to the public, the program's roots still taint it. It is a game by the rich for the rich. Don't kid yourself. You're not co-opting them, they're co-opting you.

And then there's Kickstarter. At first glance, Kickstarter is an economic dead-end. The rich have no interest in it. It is by definition a for-product enterprise, and powermongers are by definition for-profit. So while in the short term Kickstarter results in many creative, ambitious projects coming to light which would otherwise never exist and creates a highly progressive climate of product-oriented design, it would arguably peter out in the long term. Redistributing, shuffling the funds of the few middle-class progressives among each other does not in itself fight corporate power. However, while funding an artistic project through direct contribution does not directly grow the economic share of the middle-class, it does keep more of that investment from being funneled up to the ultra-wealthy to be used counter-productively for say, face-saving, misleading, crowd-controlling advertisements on the TED website.
Let's remember that the rich produce nothing in themselves. Power is parasitic. Everything they have they acquire by raping and pillaging, by stealing it from true producers. You don't have to fight them actively if you can just keep yourself from feeding those parasites. They can be starved out.
Combined with promoting a product-oriented instead of profit-oriented mindset, this lateral redistribution has tremendous potential. Economists, social scientists, prove me wrong.

I for one am looking forward to the day when I find a large, crowd-funded, user-friendly service I can use instead of Google to post my rants.* I am always painfully aware of the irony of my dependence on this site. The other corporate dependencies of the Internet are bad enough.

*And no, I'm not going to deal with 4chan.

Grisaille, ailes grises and gray trees

Grayscale is often used to support a bleak atmosphere in virtually any visual medium. I am therefore, going out on a limb when i propose a couple of examples in modern media which seem to have been more specifically influenced by the grisaille painting style. Still, artists are, after all, drawing on a much wider knowledge of artistic examples. To them, style seems to be not so much a nebulous collection of ideas as it appears to me as a mere viewer but a series of influences, some stronger than others. It doesn't seem so farfetched that the following anime and game would have been created with a strong awareness of the possibility of adapting a painting style to modern media.

First up: Haibane Renmei (linked to the Anime News Network page and not the official site because i don't want to pretend i speak Japanese). I have to wonder if the use of the french subtitle 'une fille qui a des ailes grises' is not only an internal reference but also a little joke by Yoshitoshi ABe which would confirm my theory. Certainly the palette used through most of the series and the original comic is not strictly greyscale, but the lack of sharp contrasts, the feel that the story is only a gradation on a continuum of events in the mysterious, isolated little town, the subtlety and gradual transitions, the doggedly sedate pacing of the whole thing all seem too coincidental.

The second example is Diablo, a game dating from the times of yore when Blizzard Entertainment, despite dumbing down gameplay, had not completely abandoned the idea of quality. Here it really is the palette itself that makes me think one of the visual artists was reliving his art-school days. Granted, the limited technology of the time made complexity all but impossible, but most games, including Blizzard's own Warcraft series, took the opposite route, banking on humorously cartoonish, garishly colorful graphics. Diablo not only used bleak monochromes as backgrounds, but also a technologically unnecessary stillness, a lifeless, dusty, stifling atmosphere. Other 'goth' games of around the same time like Planescape:Torment with its bleak, despairing mausoleum, trash warrens and the like, still used moving backgrounds or critters scurrying about to create atmosphere.

Well, there you have it. Mock me for a tin-hat conspiracy theorist if you will, but i'll stick by my crazy notions until the artists themselves show up to tell me they weren't trying to adapt Bosch for the computer age.

Give it to me straight, doc

I give you four television characters: House, Hawkeye, Becker and Cox.


Broadcast television is intended to be universal. It is the definition of lowest-common-denominator entertainment. It is inoffensive, bland, and frequently actively works to reinforce social norms rather than challenge them. Yet here we have characters, three out of the four being main characters, whose main schtick is pointing out the stupidity of social norms. They're the only characters around who attack the irrationality of inter-human relations, of religion, the pretense of family values, sports, machismo, sexual relationship power games, the armed forces and every other display of primitive simian idiocy that are otherwise lauded in all corners of human society.

So why, even as a fictional character, does an angry nerd need an M.D. after his name in order to be allowed to tell the truth?


"And this guy knew that he wasn't accepted by the staff, didn't even try, didn't dress well, he didn't pretend to be one of them. The people around that place, they didn't think that he had anything they wanted, except when they needed him. Because he was right; which meant that nothing else mattered, they had to listen to him."
(From that episode of 'House, M.D.' where House recounts why he became a doctor.)

There is a mystique about medicine to the common mind, an aura of divinity. Doctors are automatically seen in a positive light, are automatically viewed as pillars of society. The main difference is that unlike other pillars of society, they are visited by commoners in order to acquire truth or facts. You go to a doctor for answers, not platitudes. Priests, teachers, cops, politicians and every other kind of charlatan in a position of power is expected to lie, cheat, beat a confession out of you or at least serve up nothing but platitudes. When you go to a doctor, you need the truth.

Ironically, this is anything but a representation of reality. Philosophers, scientists, thinkers of any type are readily available in the real world, but they are viewed as nerds, external to the human condition, dangerous megalomaniacs of alien motivation and thought which the kin recognition instinct of every ape on the planet labels as targets for ostracism. Only doctors are allowed the luxury of displaying intelligence.

Most M.D.s are idiots. Hardworking idiots, but idiots. They go into medicine because they want to be viewed as pillars of the community and paid as such. Four out of five doctors recommend doping you up, overcharging you and sending you out the door. They are technicians, working off whatever script the pharmaceutical companies feed them. Finding a doctor who is intelligent and interested enough to actually keep advancing the science of medicine, to keep looking for questions and answers like the four examples above do is about as likely as spontaneous cancer remission. You might as well just pray for it.
As far as challenging social norms, well, hah! The mercenary nature of their motivation precludes it. They're in it for the social standing. They're not going to challenge the values that set them above others.

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17th of March, the year of Jeebus 2014
The search for nerdy life continues. Add Doc Martin to the list.

Art and economics

One justification trotted out whenever any group wants to crack down on online distribution is 'piracy' or copyright infringement in general. Just some random thoughts on this.

You shouldn't need need to go through publishers to repay an artist for his work. Anyone can set up a paypal link these days, webcartoonists having discovered this a long time ago. Donate to the creator of a work directly based on the value you find in the work, not to the parasites taking the lion's share of 'published' works and deciding for you, before giving you access to the work, what it's worth to you.

The creator should always be given credit in name, but profit should be decided by the worth others find in the work. That this will result in the lowest-common-denominator overshadowing quality is inevitable, but this is still better than the current system, where existing capital(ists) can set prices and use advertising in order to reinforce the trend towards the lowest-common-denominator.

Paper is outdated. I like books. I don't like having to read in a chair. I will have to adapt to using my cheap knock-off of an i-pad instead, so i can still read in bed without justifying the insane waste of printing, transporting, protecting and stocking dead trees. I like books. My whole family does. We were raised around them. My grandfather, mother, uncle and myself spent most of our lives in rooms walled with book-cases. We like the smell of ink. We finger the pages of a book as if every legend, every play, every fairytale, every romance and war story were our own personal bible. We are attuned to the smell of moldy paper. We learn from five years of age the proper way to handle books so as not to ruin them, to preserve book jackets and never crease the pages. We enter libraries as if we're coming home. It is painful to me to abandon the comfort of this childhood nostalgia, but it has to go. We can do better now. The initial material investment for the creation of an i-pad pales in comparison to the cost of a thousand, ten thousand volumes of books. It is a part of my childhood, my identity, but books (or at least their widespread commercial use) and newspapers have to go the way of goose-quills, vellum and scribes.

This also reshapes the lifestyle of most artists. In the past, the creation of art was limited by distribution. Much of the cost of a novel or a CD was taken up by the creation not of the art itself, the expression, the image, sound or words, but of the medium, the physical mode of delivery. These days, a computer, the same machine which can bring us our news, allow us to communicate and work from home is also one of the best repositories of works of art. What's the material cost of e-mailing a picture? Five joules? One millionth of the cost of your computer's wear and tear? One quadrilionth of the wear and tear on the network you're using?

I'm not even sure if copyright was ever a valid concept. It is now becoming an outdated one. If you like something i've written, feel free to reproduce it. Say it was first said by Werwolfe, and plaster it on every web page until i'm more quoted than Nietzsche and Jesus combined. Then pay me whatever you think my contribution to the development of your ego, your mind, your self, is worth, whether it's five cents or a limousine.