This whole thing about the She-Hulk scene just makes me sigh. A character can make a pointed argument that makes people pump their fists and go “fuck yeah!”, sure, but that doesn’t make it good writing by default in the context of the scene, selling the characters, or selling the story. If the entirety of She-Hulk was filled with those kind of impersonal messages, you’d have a lot of “take that, sexists!” moments, but there’d be nothing to grab your attention regarding the characters’ own unique experiences.

It would just be an hour-long general PSA that feels a little too on-the-nose and preachy.

Can we conjure a nice fashionable Accessory to wear for the Party?

You focused incredibly hard, and managed to give yourself a nice hat.

Now you look like the life of the party.

KUKULKAN: "Huh? Did I say something weird?" MUSASHI: "Hehe. I don't think so! 'Nice body', absolutely!"

KUKULKAN: "I want first dance!"

Like a rocket taking off, you were suddenly scooped up into the air and spun around, KUKULKAN giggling happily as she pulled you around in the air, caught in a zero-gravity waltz.

Though once you were high enough, her smile faded. She began, rather abruptly, as if this had been something lingering in her mind for a while. Despite you dubious tangibility, you could feel her grip tighten a bit.

KUKULKAN: "Gods are supposed to be cold and discerning, right?"

She asked, suddenly.

"They're supposed to do what needs to be done, no matter what happens or who gets hurt. But now, now I'm starting to have doubts. Gods are supposed to be powerful, and skillful… but all I'm really good at is beating things up, how can I be a wise god like that?"

It seemed like KUKULKAN saw herself as a 'fledging god', compared to others. It was a bit odd, the name 'Kukulkan' was that of an old god from an ancient civilization, and one that became conflated with the idea of wisdom and creation. And yet, when she spoke about herself, it seemed more as if she was simply borrowing the title.

She spun you in the air a bit, before catching you, resuming her statement with a complicated expression.

KUKULKAN: "I meant what I said. I don't feel any love from the Solar Cell itself… but the people who live here, the people who work so hard to live, just like the people of Earth. Despite there being a part of myself deep down telling me to just let Draco wreak havoc, that it would just make it easier… my heart was glad that we helped them. I wonder if it felt good for you too, even if we didn't learn what we needed to?"

Her voice got quieter, turning into a low, uncertain whisper.

KUKULKAN: "My 'Origin'… or my 'heart'… love, or destruction… how do you choose when both seem like the right answer? Which is which, when looking at this place? It's all so... much. And if I can't decide... what right did I have to make you choose...?"

KUKULKAN: "Sorry, Masters. You summoned an unreasonable goddess who hasn't figured out her feelings yet. I thought I was certain, but now I'm not. Maybe I'll be uncertain forever, I don't know… my 'god level' isn't high enough for a task like this."

KUKULKAN: "So, until I can trust my feelings, this 'Kukulkan', this Foreigner, this 'Invader from another world'… is going to put her trust in you, okay? Sorry for unloading like this, I know that this is your celebration-- and you earned it! I… I just had a lot on my mind."

She put you down, a slight feeling of dizziness and vertigo swiftly fading as MUSASHI and CONSTANTINE rejoined you.

CONSTANTINE: "What were you two chatting about up there?" KUKULKAN: "Aha, nothing! I was just being a bit of a motormouth, yes?"

MUSASHI: "From how she was whispering, it seemed like a confession? Come on, spill it!" KUKULKAN: "Well... I guess that isn't totally off the mark. It was a 'confession' of sorts, yes! But I got embarrassed and put them down before they could respond." MUSASHI: "No way, really?!"

CONSTANTINE: "I have to agree. I'd figure a situation like this would be too stuffy for her." MUSASHI: "Maybe she's here on business?"

You could see her blanch a bit, though she waved it off.

MUSASHI: "Not... particularlyyy... but if you need me to, that's fineee..." CONSTANTINE: "Miss Musashi, you seem a bit pale. Do you need me to get you anything?" MUSASHI: "Sheesh, such a gentleman..."

KUKULKAN: "This is a rare chance, isn't it? Go off, have fun! Show off your body! We'll keep ourselves busy!"

I'm drunk, I love Survivor, let me ramble

You know what, all things said, there's a lot of negatives to be said about new era Survivor, but I have to admit, it has (so far) a much better gender ratio on winners. With five seasons, we have three female winners compared to two male winners, which is pretty even. Compare that to before the new era - I remember people complaining about the near unending line of male winners.

I am also incredibly happy with the 5-3-0 ending vote instead of another 7-1-0 vote. I hope I don't get jumped for saying this, but Austin played a genuinely incredible game for about 75% of this season before he decided to fuck up near the end line. Drew's vote for Austin makes 100% sense. I don't understand Kendra or Bruce's vote but whatever, they have that right. I look forward to hearing more. I've heard some possible reasons for why Bruce might have voted for Austin which I hope are not true and thus will reserve judgment until I hear more).

Clearly, Dee made the right choice in sending Jake and Katurah into fire over Austin if it was that close. If Austin had not been as distracted, he might have taken it over her. Which even if some people don't like Austin is an undeniably good thing. One of the reasons Season 42 and Maryanne's victory was so good imo was because Mike genuinely could have beaten her if he had owned his game a little more (albeit this was a Sophie-Coach situation in that Mike was unlikely to ever own up to this though in his defense, I do think between Mike and Coach, I think of the two, Mike had the better chance of doing what he needed to do at the FTC). But Maryanne was awesome and still the best winner of the new Era. (Erika, I love, but the underediting on her makes her hard to place genuinely - I have no idea if Heather would have beaten her, Gabler is...Gabler even if I accept that editing means Cassidy was more abrasive than shown, Yam-Yam was great but would have likely lost to Carson if he had won fire, Dee is also great and would likely still have beaten Katurah but her FTC performance was....okay whereas Maryanne knocked it out of the fucking park).

I also don't hate Drew* and Austin as much as everybody else does. Idk, I think there are people on reality shows who are genuinely misogynist and dick-ish and those who in the moment are kind of annoying or even just a little too successful until a certain point and get conflated with that but in reality are perfectly lovely people. Austin and Drew really, I think, fall into the latter category.

Anyways, our new Era All-Stars should really just be mostly a mix of Survivor 42, Survivor 45, with a sprinkling of Survivor 41, 43, and then put Carson and Carolyn in there.

*That being said, super fucking arrogant of Drew to say he was the smartest person ever to be on the show. I do think without the last 25% of his game if Austin doesn't tell Dee, Austin beats him. But I get the feeling that that arrogant statement isn't the entire scope of him.

toccatainfsharpminor

I mean this post has so many problems which should be apparent from the fact that it's arguing with an imaginary position ("I'm going to assume you're talking about chromosomes..."), makes so many leaps (connection between sexual dimorphism and gender specific traits despite no argument about this, we do not have to make these assumptions). It conflates phenomena in themselves with human observations and representations of those phenomenona in human discourse. 

toccatainfsharpminor

Like, I don't really see what these types of posts accomplish? We can still acknowledge the social construction of gender, we can acknowledge the social construction of biology, and I think it's important to do that actually, but it's quite a stretch to go from "biology is a social construct" to "the thing observed through biology is also a construct", when ecosystem niches and roles exist independently of human observation. 

toccatainfsharpminor

Like, I don't see why we have to agree with this statement in order to also agree with criticisms of socially constructed gender roles, I don't see why acknowledging that biological categories exist means we also have to make any of the connections between gender roles, and as far as I know, that is currently an unpopular opinion in the field itself right now? I was just listening to a talk recently about that very subject. 

So, w/r/t ‘an imaginary position’, the post is several years old & she received the anon in response to a post that she made. At the time terfs had a particular line on the origin of sex & she had reason to believe that they were coming from that. So, regardless of whether that anon held that view, the view that ‘men have xy and women have xx and thats an immutable fact about the world and thats why theres patriarchy & thats why we can only challenge patriarchy by making female-only women’s spaces and anti-sex work laws’ was an argument that needed to be addressed then & it still makes sense to revisit those arguments even if that position is no longer hegemonic.

I generally don’t try to get too into the science side of this stuff because I don’t understand it all that well but I will try to do my best here

In terms of: ‘connection between sexual dimorphism and gender specific traits’ - I believe you’re referring to when she writes: “one type of gametes will appear in the bodies of people whose cells tend to have goop that shows up a certain way on a karyotype, while another type of gametes will appear in the bodies of people whose cells tend to have goop that shows up a different way in a karyotype, with a whole lot of variation and possibilities for things to be disrupted” - she’s not making such a connection here, she is arguing that the connection is indirect or at least plastic. She’s arguing that the fact that it tends to go that way, that karotype & gametes tend to correlate (which is surely true), doesn’t authorize us to make any further assumptions about the relationship between dna, chromosomes, and phenotypes, and what that means for bodies, and how those bodies ought to be organized socially.

Like, I think this is the point she’s making: our sex categories originate prior to the development of rigorous biological science & the categories employed in sex typing and the categories involved in sexuation bulge out of each other on each side. We treat, and want to treat, bodies as though they follow a particular plan (a male body that works like this, a female one that works like this) but our bodies are disobedient. A general tendency (like an isomorphic morphology) exists, for whatever particular reason, but is necessarily incomplete & plastic because (for one) things encode incompletely, they replicate incompletely, they’re exposed to change at several points on several axis. So if you take a position like, ‘these are the most general biological categories that we observe’, you can and ought to do so (eg. human bodies tend to develop one of two gametes, worker ants tend to develop into four size classes, etc.), but you aren’t authorized to say: this makes the woman, this makes the ant... because there are so many deviations within bodies, between bodies, between groups, etc., the general tendency is at all times interrupted & at no time perfectly descriptive. The categories are, basically, a pedagogical short-hand for a generality that does not exist as an empirical fact; in empirical fact there are only radically distinct phenomena which have ontogenetic causes and are part of unfolding processes which at each moment produce difference. We literally cannot describe empirical fact because it is too immense, we arrange it into objects, names, taxa, etc. Put another way: there can never be an empirical definition of ‘the ant’, only this ant, but we could never actually poduce even this definition because it would require listing too many things. (Waismann calls this the ‘open texture’ of empirical statements)

This is just something that I don’t think we can get away from: there is always a gap between noumena and our language; science (in fact perception itself) always involves a moment of hermeneutic interpretation, self-consciously constructing a generality that elides certain differences & stresses some similarities. It’s not that we need to know this in order to overcome patriarchy - we need to know this to understand empirical statements! Really it isn’t necessary for overcoming patriarchy. It could be that humans were designed by some evil god to inflict cruelty on one another and this wouldn’t go as an argument for cruelty. We can say, as the Xenofeminists do, that ‘if nature is unjust, nature must be changed.’ But if this is true, ie., if it is true that the categories we inherit from patriarchy lead us to misunderstand the empirical person, there is surely an argument against patriarchy that can be elaborated from here.

W/r/t the biological niches etc, I feel like we misunderstand it if we take our description of this kind of life as a prescription on this kind of life (& this is morphodyke’s argument; against a prescription on the body from a necessarily incomplete generality - that doing this has drastic consequences is a historical fact, too, w/r/t the butchery inflicted on intersex children). I think ants are a bad example to use because a lot of their society is self-consciously promethean (as I understand it the queen decides which role within the colony each ant will be born into by selectively feeding some more to make them princesses & some less to become workers, etc)

I want to talk about spiders instead because I’ve been reading about them recently. Spiders are almost universally solitary, but there are some social spiders who form colony webs. I’m going to relate a story from my experience, in a way that definitely isn’t scientific, but hopefully you’ll humour me (as they say about ethology and amateurs...) In my home, I once had a fly infestation, and I observed something incredible during this time. One very enterprising, extremely small, solitary spider built a web around the light, which flies tend to butt their heads into over and over again (for whatever reason), & caught a shit-ton of flies like this. Very soon, many other spiders of the same type made their own webs around the light to catch the flies. Their webs were contiguous and there were so many spiders that they ended up spontaneously creating a colony web, which they do not normally do, because the conditions made this possible & in fact quite natural... Eventually, these spiders, all of their own, ended my fly infestaton! (which I’d had for several years up until then and have never had since - it was remarkable). But, the flies ran out, so they were catching few to none, they all turned on one another and ate each other, and whoever was left vacated the web. It is easy to say here that this is because the species are not naturally social. But can’t we see it another way - that if the flies did not run out, if they were somewhere with a limitless superabundance of flies willing to crash headfirst into their lightbulb, they would remain in the colony web without fighting, they would perhaps organize, year after year, colony webs around the light, and subsist in this way? Can’t we conceive of this as the kind of way that a new species of social spider might come into being, as in the Delena cancerides, the only social huntsman spider (which does inhabit a fairly restricted range)?

What I want to say here is: isn’t it possible that the species, fulfilling a particular ecological niche, does so out of its own promethean free will, just as it might abandon it for another niche when the opportunity arises, or might remain there so long as it can do so, and might make this choice individually or as an individual community, not as the species (which is not capable of making a choice)? That is to say, the biological categories of nature are already chosen and performed, not found, not guaranteed by biology itself. It is in just this way that humans developed a gender & age stratified division of labour in the first place, which, as Stiner & Kuhn (no relation) write [in a very nice, nuanced point], “was by no means a necessary outcome of the great diversity of animal and plant communities at low latitudes in Africa or Asia—any more than domestication was an inevitable result of the hunting of wild goats”, but rather that “the evolutionary 'opportunities' for diet-breadth expansion and increased efficiency via cooperation would have recurred most often in the lower latitudes, where biotic diversity generally is greatest.”

I know this doesn’t directly address the point you’re arguing when you say “ants dont even question this stuff”, ie. ants also have a complex biological differentation even if chromosomes don’t reproduce perfectly. But the point I’m making is that this is still a social decision, not a necessary consequence of their biology, & that their biology is capable of fitting into & adapting to different arrangements, either as it is or after physically adapting. If morphodyke’s point is that biological ‘sex’, as we conceive it, is the product of our socially conscious organization of empirical data, this also goes for all species that engage in sexuation, not as a necessary consequence of their biology or subsistance but as one ‘opportunity’ that was taken and has by now, and for now, become general of the species.

Marlene Dietrich/Josef von Sternberg marathon: The Blue Angel, Morocco (1930), Dishonored, and Shanghai Express (1931)

I watched all of these films, the Blue Angel in German (which surprisingly didn’t hurt, though I might have missed some puns), so I could be prepped for the great movie podcast “There’s Sometimes a Buggy” that is covering the collaboration that made Marlene Deitrich as we know her. I don’t have a lot of exposure (more on my movie history later) to the early talkie years so these movies were a bit surprising to me on a lot of fronts, not the least reason for which was that I wasn’t brought up in rape culture, I guess (is this what people mean when they say that? cause, jeesh! every movie, the threat is just there). Funny enough, I felt that The Blue Angel was the only one that was really political to me along axes that felt vital, which is peculiar as the other three were about political conflict of factions/nations and make statements about war, nationalism, and the other, but I guess they don’t seem political in a sense that fits with current discourse. I didn’t see the CPC officer in Shanghai Express as pro communist but as a tentative stab at ambivalent nuance of the other’s perspective, a tipping of the hand that there’s a western-centracism in his absurd rape code (this is a common feature through the films of a “first claim” that a certain type of man has on a woman that has nothing to do with what she wants), and as ultimately an example of the brutality of violent conflict (more pointed because he’s been fleshed out).  But I admit, by the films' equalizing the other side (the Russians, the CPC and even the Tunisian rebels if only by making the French Foreign Legion look so terrible) that is in itself a statement.  Kubrick’s Paths of Glory seems to pick up where this leaves off.

The Blue Angel is the film I have the most to say about, and was the most interesting conceptually, but was hard to sync with for technical reasons (me not speaking German maybe being one of them).  Through the films, we watch Dietrich get better at being a talkie actress and the Blue Angel doesn’t push her that hard, but this may be more a function of the camerawork and editing than anything else.  Jannings somehow works better with her as a leading man than anyone but Dishonored’s McLaglen because he can fill the space created by her silent movie style of encapsulated performative moments then stasis/posing, though the let it breathe editing doesn’t help (I almost think her hand on ribcage pose starts as a need for her to have something to do when reacting that seems like a reaction).  Morocco’s Gary Cooper sometimes seems like he’s in a different space than her and Shanghai’s Brook is super clipped (though she’s better adapted by then).

In Blue Angel, the effort to create composite Mise-en-scène with the ominous foreground frames is terrific (those anchors hanging down! the professor’s approach to the club!) and we have some of that German expressionist inner state stuff going on, especially at the end (the shadow of the chandelier!) but the cameraman doesn’t seem to know where to be and maybe that explains the ostensibly crappy blocking.  The cinematography on the others is much better – the superimposed tracking shots in Morocco are phenomenal – and have just as many knockout myth buildingly shot scenes (too many to mention but her in a tux in Morocco,  the final escape in Dishonored, the prayer in Shanghai Express).  All the movies have enough differences in approach that you could think they were done by a different team (were the external shots in Morocco the ones shot by Peckinpah’s eventual AD, Lucien Ballard?).

There are all sorts of motifs running through the films: clocks (and calendars), racially insensitive dolls, men’s hats on women, skein-like drapes sometimes burned by irons vs drawn opaque shades, a man eavesdropping to get mood altering information from behind a louvered door, clowns/harlequins, throwing stuff that will need to be cleaned up on the floor/wall, makeup application in a number of functions (e.g. highlighting her performative nature, emasculation of men), sitting/sprawling on things as an act of feminine claiming of the space, guttural and animal noises as announcement we’re in a libidinal space positive or negative, the stockings, the kept animals, and all sorts of recurring human archetypes.   But it’s The Blue Angel, with its full bore usage of these things plus more (eggs, nautical detritus, clock figurines, etc, that the subliminal story is the most present (though Dishonored is pretty potent).

The reason why I say Blue Angel is the most socio-political is that as a 2019 person on the internet who sees the culture war, is aware of the history of Weimar imagery as handled post Nazi, and knows what’s coming (spoilers for Hitler), the statement being made looks really complicated with a first pass of: the intelligencia’s embrace of the subaltern as primarily an instrument-possession both losses them cultural power and leaves them outside of the outgroup too, which is how, maybe, regressive populism (the students as rabble) wins. Granted this is an Iser-type hermeneutical hot take and it is complicated by the possibility that Jannings codes as pre-Hitler German populace’s growing conflation of left wing and Jewish as “dark other” (problematic, hard to bring the 1930 and 2019 horizons together on this, mileage may vary, but a case can be made) which would almost make this an anti-radical (on both sides) statement that meshes with the other movies’ anti-violence, anti group/idea allegiance, pro-people take. This is just the "bad decision" version. As for Jannings, the lumpen here is fine with him as long as he performs correctly.  Maybe this is an artifact of Dietrich not being the protagonist by a director who wants her to be.  The thing that really overlays this from a now standpoint, though, is the rhyming with a kind of 4chan framing where he has lost his “rightful” power, is “cucked,” and has an entitled-male rage tm (i.e. this can be read as an anti incel-ideology movie). The other movies don’t have this kind of congruence for the most part.

But the way the symbols work is pretty neat.  His descent from prominent social capital to internationally renowned cock-a-doodle-do jester is marked by the change in the relationship with eggs as sexual enticement vs humiliation (and the humiliation was there from the beginning to be sure).  The clown is there as a warning/future self.  The special clocks that eerily suggests his/society’s demons are coming and no one can stop the forward mechanism of time. The caged bird is as you would expect.  The dolls are a sort of self possession that she does test runs giving away.  There’s too much to talk about.

Morocco has Cooper’s charisma going for it (which works best with Dietrich’s when they cut back and forth), the best non-closeup camerawork (the exteriors are great), large scale staging, and that cool woman in a tux mythmaking performance piece.  It contains Cooper’s great non-verbal performance in the scene where he eventually writes “changed my mind” on the mirror (you can see him decide).   The last scene of her trudging across the desert and throwing away her heals is great, and there is so much motion in the frame so often – the superimposition of movement that turns a dissolve into a long transitional double shot, the scene where she looks for him in the marching parade, etc. The relief map was hinky, though.  

Dishonored was my favorite of the four. I liked all these films but, broken down, it had a couple of “bests” in it, but was #2 for everything else.  It had the best-functioning male lead (the always in a mask non-naturalistic thing was perfect as that how she is and it balanced the space well) and a greater share of my very favorite scenes: the final escape scene, the party, the firing squad, and any any fucking piano playing (the first shot of her playing piano is my favorite shot of all the films).  It’s the second best as a subliminal story (after Blue Angel), was the only one other than Shanghai Express that seemed like it had a screenplay - a story story rather than a loose idea, the idea of certain shots, the actors types, and dialogue. It had the most convincing sweep other than Morocco. The cat was a nice setting free of agency, progressing the doll as totem of self/other possession but with a mind of its own, with the power to ruin everything.  This movie really vibed with me perfectly.  

For Shanghai Express, see above, but I have to say I love the Disney villainess (before there were Disney villainesses) dress.  The multi note secondary characters with actual performances and arcs was unique... the pastor who changes his mind on what is morally good is terrific, as are the exchanges between two fully fleshed out prostitutes and an old prude.  My list is close, but If I had to order it would be Dishonored, Blue Angel, Shanghai, then Morocco, but it’s tough because the great things about each vary so much (I kept dithering on the bottom three more than #1, I considered putting Morocco 2nd).

It’s odd I’ve written this much and I haven’t broached the gender archetype pushing and pulling here, mainly because this seems pretty well mined territory.  I’m under-read on this and feel like my take would be super cold -- cross dressing, Gary Cooper with a flower behind his ear, the unflinching depiction of how tough a time women have it while still depicting a kind of unique female cruelty to men, and the constant sexist statements undermined by the POV and what actually happened.  Hopefully my naive viewpoint, coming at this fresh eyes will be valuable. So, like, are all these movies from this time period about class?  It kind of reminds me of Impro, the Keith Johnstone book, which basically boils all theatrical character interaction to being about status.  

Anyway, I’ve ignored my exegesis of Taylor Swift’s Lover to write this, so I must be back to work.  

When a pundit is too stupid to understand anything about religion and atheism, and exhibits an ignorance so great as to not understand what religion is, ill-defined as may be.  This is the result of supreme idiocy.

...  the argument can be made that an atheist is just as religious as any Christian.

To qualify as a religion there needs to be an outward indication of recognition in the existence of a god or gods.  Atheism is the exact opposite.

Belief, or more appropriately, faith is a big part of defining something as a religion, but on it’s own isn’t religious.  If you tell me you have two children, I will believe you.  I have faith that you’re not lying.  This doesn’t mean you’re suddenly the center of my newly founded religion.  The idea is as ludicrous as the author’s article.

One might counter it takes just as much faith to believe there is no god.  No it doesn’t, it is the lack of belief in a god or gods.  Since it is impossible to prove beyond all doubt there is or is not a god, that doesn’t qualify as faith.  Looking at thousands of failed religions, all of which are not true, I’m sure every christian would agree, means that god, gods, goddesses, spirits, angels, djinn, demons, and every other form of supernatural are mere creations of the mind.  Satan is no more real then Voldemort.  god is no more real than Thor, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, Xenu.  As scientology demonstrates, you can create fake gods and have people believe.  Given enough time and rampant belief in the existence of gods, it could be deemed true, and assholes like Tom Cruise sanctified for being idiotic morons for perpetuating it.  Any reason to believe any other religion is false is applicable to all religions.

Theologian Paul Tillich defined religion as “that which is man’s true concern.”

The true concern is how much it has hindered mankind.  When literally knowledge was destroyed for the sake of god and brought about the Dark Ages, that’s known as a setback.  That’s a real understatement.  Another concern is how much more suffering will be caused in the name of god.  How long will pedophiles be protected by the religious and how much forgiveness will they benefit from to perpetuate more harm?  How much more of nothing will be done to make ourselves feel good?  How long will we denigrate ourselves and give credit to god for our accomplishments?  Why is god more concerned about which team wins and unconcerned about starving children?

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, once said in a German TV interview: “I would say that men, for example, Communists, have a religion when they believe in modern science. They believe absolutely in modern science. And this is absolutely faith, that is, the trust in the certainty of the results of science, is a faith, and is, in a certain sense, something that emanates from people, and is therefore a religion. And I would say no one is without religion, and every person transcends himself, in a way, that is they are dispatched.”

How can such an “influential thinker” be so stupid?  He already grossly misunderstand the nature of belief, science, and appears to be more concerned with conflating science with communism, a political statement rather than in intellectual one.  One has to think this idiot is more concerned with manipulating emotion to generate support than using intellectual arguments to support his false claim.  This is definitely a poor example of his reasoning power.  But, hey, we’re all prone to mistakes.

First mistake, he conflates science with communism.  This is a political agenda.

Second mistake, not understanding what science is the the scientific process.  Not understanding that when something is testable and repeatable, it’s a fairly good reason to trust science, with the caveat that something may come along to prove that we aren’t entirely correct, and that we might have to update what we believe.  Religion however has no update process, no self-correction.  It is absolute.  It uses words like faith and belief and treat them as knowledge.  It acts as though feelings are evidence and no verification is required.  These are definitely separate ways of viewing the world.

Third mistake, not actually understanding what religion is.  While there’s no concise definition, one can surely rely on, “I know it when I see it.”

Forth mistake, not understanding that science rejects supernatural explanations and claims.  If it’s untestable or not falsifiable, it falls outside the realm of science.  Science is about that natural world, not the fictional.

According to the definition of religion, whatever is essential in someone’s life, whatever he desperately believes in and advocates for and clings onto in times of trouble, may be labeled his religion. Whatever your heart confides in is your God.

This actually is not a definition of religion, it’s the author’s idiotic ideology.  People cling to a lot of things, but I’d hardly call someone stress eating performing a religious act.  A sailor clinging to a life raft in the middle of the ocean doesn’t see the raft as god.

According to his [Rudolph Arendt] view, religion may be found in the transcendental realm, in traditional religions with the belief in God and the supernatural, or it may be found in the material or physical, profane world.

Wrong.  “Profane” actually comes from ancient Greece.  When dealing in matters of state, they dealt with the religious things, but the non-religious things were referred to as profane.  Pretty much the way we use the word secular today.

The article pretty much degrades from there defining anything that you like to be your religion.

Materialism is the religion of people who put the acquiring of wealth above all else desirable.

Hedonism clearly may be defined as a religion – the search for bodily pleasure without moral constraints as the goal of life.

Hedonism, of course, means sex.  Notice the bit about no moral constraints.  Sex is evil.  (I’m starting to read Sex & God, so this should be good.)

And of course

Atheism is the all absorbing faith in that there is no God or spiritual beings, none above us to whom he will be held accountable. This forms his passionate ideology, strong conviction and worldview.

Faith that there is no god.  Actually, it’s knowing that people made god up, just as they made up every other god for thousands of years.  That doesn’t take faith, just reason and understanding.  Two skills the article’s author lacks.

Marxism, fascism, socialism and other “-isms” contain strong, religious elements as the ideologies attempt to explain man’s existence with remarkable zeal, focusing on the belief that man – not God – is to be the saviour of the world.

Anything that’s an “-ism” is religious.  The author so waters down the definition of religion as to make the term entirely useless.  Religion as normal people understand it is indeed useless, but in this case the bastardization of language turns the word into nothing.

The author really needs to use a more appropriate word, I can’t think of what it is at the moment.  Because when everything is a religion, then nothing is a religion.

“They Won’t Let You Remember”: Obsession Before Fandom

[This is another round of extremely personal spelunking into my own fannish past that I sometimes do on this and other platforms, including Dreamwidth, which is where I first posted it.  Content warning for digressions into Fannish Discourse, and also brains - mostly mine - conflating fiction and reality in sometimes unhealthy ways.]

Not long ago, my mom asked me on the phone if I was aware that a new Men in Black movie would be out later this year. I told her that I knew, and added, “If I see it with other humans, they might have to hear how the original was one of the root causes of my mind control feelings.” Not the root cause, I should emphasize: those feelings could have come from any number of sources, but that number is probably greater than “one.” We both knew why she had brought up this particular franchise. There is a file cabinet in my childhood bedroom that once contained many, many handwritten stories – some co-written with middle school classmates, though most of them weren’t – that featured the titular secret organization, the protectors of the Earth from the scum of the universe, as the bad guys. I wrote those in order to deal with the sharp turn that my already present Mind Control Feelings took when a silly science fiction comedy featuring giant space bugs encouraged me to root for characters who maintained the status quo by erasing memories from ordinary people – people like me – on a regular basis. Some of you might be asking, “Wait, you knew it was only a movie, right?” And my answer would be, “Yes, but…” Since time and emotional distance have both clarified and obscured my understanding of how I used to think and behave, here is the best (and probably most long-winded) way that I can answer that question for both myself and others: I was an imaginative and overwhelmingly anxious child. On the one hand, my imaginative side desperately wanted magic and aliens and Weird Stuff to be real, which I still don’t think was always a bad thing. On the other hand, during my preteen and teenage years, my anxiety (which wouldn’t be linked to a diagnosis until much later in my life) manifested as “what if?” scenarios that were at least as convincing as reality… even if they were based in speculative fiction. Even if I didn’t believe that they would happen, I spent a lot of time telling myself stories about what might happen if they did, or even just thinking, “What if this is how the world is supposed to work, even if I don’t like it or want it and you can’t make me?” So, although I knew the difference between fiction and reality by the age of twelve, knew that Men in Black was Only A Movie, my “what if?” reflex kicked in hard the more I recognized its world as being much closer enough to my own than my previous, limited encounters with memory erasure in fiction. According to the rules of that world, if the Weird Stuff were real, I wouldn’t even know, and, according to the text, shouldn’t know. “Wasn’t the next line of the theme song ‘They won’t let you remember’?” Older Sister asked, the last time we talked about it. Yes. Yes, it was. The immediacy is right there in the song’s refrain (which, by the way, is still an earworm and a half). At one point, Tommy Lee Jones’ veteran agent character insists that, while Earth is constantly under extraterrestrial threat, humans can only live our lives peacefully if we don’t know about it. (Keeping in mind that humans do a pretty solid job of threatening life on Earth ourselves, I feel like that statement is also linked to questions about the supposedly blissful ignorance of privilege, which go beyond the scope of this post, but are still worth mentioning.) Maybe I reacted so strongly to that bit of dialogue because I believed that it wasn’t true, or because I feared that it was. I’m pretty sure that it was the combination of that scene and its message, with my recurring issues around authority and self-control, and my growing self-awareness about my misbehaving brain, that set my anxious imagination spinning. I would guess that I was wondering something like, “What if the only way that I could have peace of mind was if somebody or something else edited my thoughts and memories without my knowledge or consent?” That idea scared me. It made me angry. And since I was not mature enough to have any filters or sense of other people’s boundaries, I talked – loudly and incoherently – to anybody who would listen, and quite a few people who wouldn’t, about how scared and angry it made me. A lot of the things that I said and did are now difficult for me to understand (one might almost say… alien), and I’m not sure whether they helped with my worries or just made them worse. I do know that this was neither the first nor the last work of fiction about which some of my loved ones told me to shut up because I was too obsessed, resulting in screaming fights, sneering mockery, and tears. I was also old enough, you see, to understand that I wasn’t responding to fiction in the same way that a lot of my peers were, and to, perhaps, start feeling like there was something wrong with me. Not that this was enough to shut me, in fact, up. But I did something else, too: I started to write the stories that I mentioned above. Some of my point-of-view characters were disillusioned agents, others were characters from other media that I enjoyed; the more sources I could pull from, and the more surreal I could make the mix, the happier I was. Still other POV characters were authorial avatars who started out as innocent bystanders and narrowly escaped having their memories wiped. (A few of those self-insert fantasies also involved my earliest fictional crush, who just happened to be an alien from a certain book series that I loved at the time. I quite happily imagined scenarios in which my very knowledge of his true nature was forbidden and yet our love conquered all in the end, but I never put any of those scenarios on paper. I kind of wish I had.) Some of the storylines fizzled out after a few chapters, while others ended with my protagonists riding off into the sunset with their minds, for the time being, safe. I should stress that even my writing wasn't necessarily integrated into my life in a healthy way: I scribbled during my classes (yes, I got caught at least once), I wrote scenarios that crossed the line from nonsensical into offensive (why so many “man in a dress” jokes, younger self? Why even one?), and I buttonholed friends and classmates as audiences and even collaborators despite their probably being much less interested than I was. Even though I was discovering a third option besides “shut up forever” and “shut up never,” it would take several more years, at least two more obsessions, and the discovery of online fandom (I only somewhat knew what “online” was in the late 1990s, and “fandom” was nowhere near my vocabulary) before I sorted out the appropriate time and place for each of those options. But I was on my way there, even if I didn’t know what “there” was. When I questioned and pulled apart an established narrative to turn the heroes into villains and shine a light on viewpoints that I thought the original creators had overlooked, I was writing fanfiction, whether I knew it or not. When I finally did find my way to fandom communities, it was thanks to the Harry Potter books, whose world-building also relies on what TV Tropes calls “The Masquerade.” (If you look up the page for that trope, guess whose quote is right at the top? Yeah.) Which led me to recognize it in certain versions of X-Men, and The Incredibles, and Torchwood and The Vampire Diaries and and and… The more I saw of organized efforts to conceal the existence of Weird Stuff from the Oblivious Masses, the more I understood that the audience was meant to feel like we were in on the secret, but I couldn’t stop sympathizing with the people who weren’t. I still dislike and distrust that trope to this day, even in works that I otherwise enjoy, and storylines involving memory erasure – consensual or not, narratively endorsed or not – still push both good and bad buttons, sometimes both at once. And I believe that my explorations of mind control in fiction, from the beginning until now, have partly been informed by questions like, “What if I couldn’t trust my own mind, and was asked to believe that this was for my own good and/or the good of society?” And, since it bears mentioning: I hope that nobody interprets this recollection as, “A storytelling device warped Nevanna’s understanding of reality, and therefore stories can reprogram people’s behaviors and problematic fiction should be eliminated!” First of all, I object to that kind of black-and-white thinking, as a librarian, a writer, and someone who tries to thoughtfully consume media. Secondly, it’s more accurate that the dysfunction in my own brain once warped my understanding of reality; that even then, I was still responsible for my own actions; and although I have a history of giving fictional constructs an unhealthy amount of power over my own life, I grew out of it. And even though I have mixed feelings about the debate over Problematic Fiction, and I certainly do not condone harassment and shaming – because I’ve been there and done that, on both sides – I try to maintain that it is not my place to stop people from having negative emotions about stories. Even if I don’t agree, even when their objections make me uncomfortable, I can disagree with what they’re saying or doing without invalidating what they might be feeling. And I try to be better at doing so, because I am the last person in the world to deny that stories spark powerful emotions and thoughts, that sometimes they go against the creators’ intentions. Part of becoming a responsible consumer of media and participant in fandom is learning to manage those emotions constructively and make space for other people’s feelings and needs. I used to be angry at my younger self for being unable or unwilling to do that. I’m not anymore. That said, one of the differences between preteen Nevanna and thirty-something Nevanna is that nobody has to hear me talk about mind control unless they want to. (Although I’m happy that a noticeable number of people usually seem to want to.) I never saw the original Men in Black in the movie theater. I think it took me several tries (much to Younger Sister’s frustration) to sit through it on home video, and the ghost of who I was back then, as much as if not more than the actual content, has kept me from revisiting the 1997 movie in the intervening years. If I wanted to watch it again, I think that I would want (and here I'll paraphrase a fantasy series, also about aliens, that more or less avoids the Masquerade altogether) to prepare myself emotionally. I still haven’t watched the sequels or had much interest in doing so, and I never posted any fanfiction set in that universe. It has occurred to me that I might end up writing fic for the 2019 reimagining, if I see it (it wouldn’t be the first time in the recent past that I revisited fictional worlds from my childhood in new and surprising ways). But if I do write anything – and maybe even if I don’t – I will continue to feel pity and compassion and gratitude for the twelve-year-old believer in Weird Stuff who heard, “They won’t let you remember,” and responded, “What if I did anyway?”

Leftism, the DPRK and the Nuclear crisis

I thought id write a thing on this because most of the current far left talking points on this issue are terribly poorly informed. There’s a tendency amongst leftists online, particularly notable on twitter, but also here to conflate two kinds of commentary on contentious geopolitical issues into being one form of sin. Obviously the most current example is regarding the Singapore summit. The way its currently playing out in a lot of cases is basically as follows (I’m being a little snarky here but this is a fairly accurate play by play for a lot of the stupider stuff):

Prominent analyst, journalist, politician or Liberal pundit makes a statement criticizing the deal for a given reason. It might either be ordinary partisanship, or a genuine technical criticism of the content of the circumstances. 

It gets retweeted

People comment on  it in the retweets, claiming that the given person is in favour of  Koreans getting exterminated, because all objections to the circumstances must be borne of a desire for war or something.

The difference between multiple forms of criticism gets totally ignored by the left, we dont learn anything and we continue patting ourselves on the back.

Obviously this is fairly normal for online stuff but even so i think we need to start paying much closer attention to these issues and at the same time, stop being so parochial in our thinking about issues such as these. Therefore I’m minded to make a few points here about why its  short sighted to interpret this via the lens of western domestic political leftist rhetoric, the problem being that there’s severe limitations on that lens. 

Firstly its primarily based on established rhetorical forms that are largely out of date or constrained by a lack of room for outside information. This prevents us from usefully adopting lines of analyses from schools of thought not traditionally connected to existing normal stances within leftism. On the occasions where this does occur, we co-opt it for our own benefit. Essentially, If there’s a form of analysis, or an area of academic or technical expertise where the information and commentary is not directly subordinate to a conservative, US-centric interpretation of anti-imperialism then it tends to get completely discounted. The main example of this type of thing i wish to talk about is an area of interest of mine, namely arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation, as well as the place of nuclear weapons within a fairly basic Marxist influenced viewpoint on nuclear politics. 

Secondly, this stance is limited by the dynamics of online sectarian politics and the desire to produce content. Everyones familiar with this and knows how it works so im not going to bother going into this in any great detail. Essentially its providing a great addition to our respective mutual firing squads.

A third issue is the presumption of knowledge, and of moral or intellectual high ground on a combination of ideological bases. This latter point ties into an ongoing dynamic of orientalist thinking and presumptions that tend to seep into leftist rhetoric on subjects surrounding the Korean Peninsula. This is notable particularly within Marxist-Leninist  self styled “anti-imperialist” discourses, which are the main area of failure on all three of the issues ive listed, though there has been cross-pollination with other leftist sects. This behavior is reliant on making the nuclear crisis All About Us, unconsciously sliding over the human and political realities in order to establish credentials, ignoring regional factors beyond what is read about in a few articles and a surface level adherence to popular conceptions of anti imperialist praxis. Its essentially a highly banal form of watered down orientalism mixed with a vague presumption of superior politics. The reality is that we havent really learned anything from the crisis, because we’ve refused to. Arms Control, Non-proliferation and a lack of far-left institutional knowledge: I’m mainly going to address the first issue, that of a general lack of understanding of evolving dynamics in nuclear proliferation issues and arms control within the far left because its where i have the strongest base of knowledge relating to this matter. Functionally, nearly no-one in the circles of the online left I’m in actually knows how arms control is meant to work either in its form as a policy enacted between countries on a mutual basis, or in its form as a system in the world of geopolitics within which countries formulate policies. Im not trying to grandstand here as this circumstance is totally understandable: its a very niche topic and its not as if I’m particularly special for having made it something I’m interested in, but regardless there is a knowledge gap in leftist discussions on this issue and it seems important to highlight it. If there are any leftist arms control nerds that happen to see this assuming it gets more than a handful of notes by all means let me know. Anyway, I think its wise at this point to make the following statement and to explain it:

In the particular example at hand, namely this weeks Singapore summit and the deal made there, what has just happened is very likely a disaster in the long term, and should be absolutely regarded as such by the left. This is due to a combination of technical and political factors relating to the context and structure of the agreement. I am saying this as a Marxist and as someone in favour of internationalism and popular movements directed towards nuclear disarmament. Leftist institutional knowledge and the general knowledge in the community of how arms control works isn't really that great. During the cold war it was ok, due to the size and importance of the disarmament movement, but in the modern era its essentially non-existent. Anyway, the summit was a disaster for arms control and very few of us seem to get why. This is for a few reasons, but the main one is that it has established a precedent for successful, aggressive  strategies of proliferation under extreme duress. Arms control as a concept has taken a serious beating since 2003 and the Iraq war, with other major points of inflection since. The most significant of these have been the collapse of the JCPOA agreement with Iran  and the various chemical warfare atrocities in the Syrian civil war. The collapse of the Libyan state stands as its own special case as well for its own reasons. In the case of the recent summit the precedent set has been one of the solidification of certain dynamics, of the transition undertaken by nuclear weapons from being articles characterized by their technical use into being primarily characterized by a capacity for abstract political use in a way that had not yet been achieved, and of the deliberate manipulation and degradation of existing institutions in order to facilitate proliferation. I am not merely talking about Nuclear weapons being used for political purposes. I am talking about a very specific type of political use. This dynamic is extremely bad and provides a model for action to accompany the diminishing difficulty in producing nuclear weapons, which will provide a great incentive to states seeking to proliferate nuclear weapons. The only outcome possible here is the furthering of the development of weaponry to be used against populations and in so doing, the armory of empire. This is not a victory for Anti-Imperialism, despite its surface appearance having had great propaganda value.

The deal has essentially entrenched both the (many) negative and the (few) positive aspects of the present crisis, essentially providing cover for the ROK to continue a gradualist approach toward achieving a sustainable end result at the same time as providing a model of success for proliferation as a state policy. In fact i would argue that one of the main contributions that this will all make to geopolitical history will be the establishment, testing, and success of a new model of proliferation, one with profoundly negative though interesting consequences from a leftist perspective. Essentially, by forcing the nuclear issue, by making all of the political capital centered upon repeated escalating crises, comprising a protracted greater crisis, the DPRK strategy meant that all political questions were to be decided according to a single signifier of value: the technical usability and validity of its nuclear weapons, demonstrable to all onlookers from the outside. A value which the DPRK leadership were able to be the controlling agents of, determining its magnitude, qualities and effects. In doing so it has essentially managed to manipulate the existing notions of arms control agreements and non-proliferation principles in order to turn those structures to its advantage: to turn them from being systems which constrained nuclear proliferation, to using them as a basis for updating the nuclear weapon into taking on a modern form of its already infamous role as the ultimate political commodity. It was essentially a strategy of folding up all issues into one and forcing everyone's decisions to rest upon that single focused issue. It is now far easier to proliferate nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles in terms of technical restrictions than it was 30, 40, 50 years ago. The designs are no-longer unknown and the required production technology is no longer as challenging as it once was. Provided with this, directed efforts towards various kinds of proliferation now have new potentials: the end state no longer has to be one option from a three way fork between a failed program, a successful program and being attacked/sanctioned. Obviously nuclear weapons have always been used as chips to bet on and trade between states, but for the most part those items, in the historical contexts of the cold war, the India/Pakistan standoff, and in the cases of Israel, Iran and the DPRK prior to recent developments, were developed for strict military terms, as items of deterrence, as physical items for physical use as instruments of policy in the most literal sense. In other words, they have been pursued by states for their use either as weapons, articles of deterrence or as a combination of being usable weapons and articles of abstract political power realized. This has now changed, likely irreversibly, and the summit has been a notable moment in the change.

The realization of abstract powers, and the risks of a new Nuclear credit:

What the new development has done is to introduce the potential for the transformation from nuclear weapons as weapons into a sort of proto-commodity form, whereby proliferation, as a behavior that states may engage in and as a form of production existing in a political sphere, has been brought to a such point of technical and political development that it may now be used not merely as an action engaged in to achieve a physical end, a productive approach to achieving a state policy, but takes on a new meaning, as a form of bargaining chip in itself. Elements of this have been present with nuclear weapons since the cold war in  relatively isolated minor forms but never reached the stage of proliferating for the sake of trading against that proliferation.

I believe that the summit has laid the groundwork for the establishment of such a dynamic  and I suspect that the fallout from the summit and the ongoing crisis ( which is not at all over) will now exacerbate this tendency in future cases. It is as if they have succeeded in laying the groundwork for making nuclear weapons not merely commodity items between a state and its industrial complex, but have extended their existence as commodities right into the geopolitical sphere. The truly perverse thing about this is that this change has been achieved without the DPRK even having to actually physically trade any of them: it has merely made a vapor-deal based on vague promises to limit the most obvious cases of its potential power.  In this manner another well established dynamic has been reinforced: The confrontational relationship between the instability of deterrence and the long term tendency evolving from it for states to engage in proliferation. The repeated historical cases of the seeming success of deterrence, (a false semblance) have created a climate of encouragement for proliferation: existing nuclear weapons states are encouraged to expand and proliferate new powers to counter their antagonists advances, whilst non-nuclear weapons states begin to seek the weapons to achieve parity on various fronts. Against this backdrop, both the repeated crises in deterrence, the breakdowns of its various forms, political crises between states etc, and the longer periods of time between them, the long moments of false security, serve to enhance the fetishized value of deterrence. The illusory success of deterrent strategies encourage the proliferation dynamic. Deterrence will therefore, if i am correct, become a contributing factor in commodity-led proliferation. But now a new aspect of this dynamic has appeared: the change in nature of arms control into also becoming a contributing feature. Prior to this arms control was a diplomatic, technical activity, with strict technical aims. It may still take on that characteristic but is at severe risk of being held, in measure of value, against the new measuring standard that i fear is being established.  This situation is profoundly negative for leftist political positions: the brief lull in tensions may be whisked away by a new return to sabre rattling at any point if political capital is to be made, ushering in more risks of accident miscalculation or catalytic war and further it is a massive blow to the disarmament movement. It will certainly serve to entrench national military industrial complexes in nuclear states, as well as further contributing to regional problems in areas where proliferating states are players. Holding all this to be down to the blunderings of one leader and the energy of another is a useless way to think about this issue. This is to the detriment of internationalism. 

To the Void with the Void

Few things in Dragon Age lore bother me quite as much as the Void. It appears just about everywhere, in every faith, but what any one teaching says about what it actually IS never seems to be consistent - even in the same set of teachings.

Come with me on this journey, as I go through the Dragon Age Wiki page on the Void and follow every single cite note to the source - and look through those cited sources as well.

It starts with a brief summary, then goes into Chantry beliefs, because of course that comes first. It lists some verses from the chant. 

All that the Maker has wrought is in His hand Beloved and precious to Him. Where the Maker has turned His face away, Is a Void in all things; In the world, in the Fade, In the hearts and minds of men.

Passing out of the world, in that Void shall they wander; O unrepentant, faithless, treacherous, They who are judged and found wanting Shall know forever the loss of the Maker's love. Only Our Lady shall weep for them.

—Canticle of Threnodies, 12:5

So... the void is both a vague emptiness in everything the Maker doesn’t like and the Andrastian version of Hell? Right. How conveniently vague. It never says ‘the Void’ though, just ‘a Void’. 

Next follows some extrapolations. Since I know that fanon and canon tend to intermingle a lot in small, subtle and insidious ways, I shall stick as close to the source material - and only the source material - as the wiki and the rest of my resources will allow for, while mostly ignoring the wiki-specific text. So. Let’s follow the cite notes, in order. 

The first one refers to a conversation with Sebastian in DA II. I don’t have that DLC, because I think that guy is kind of an arse and not worth my money, and after over an hour of searching both the wiki and youtube, I have not found this conversation, so I’m gonna drop that trail for now. 

Second cite note also refers to a Sebastian conversation, but this is one I can actually find. It’s a banter conversation between him and Isabela. 

Isabela: So, I've never understood why the Chantry says if you're good, you'll be taken up to the Maker's side. Sebastian: Those who die with the sins cleansed from their souls will walk beside the Maker in eternity. Isabela: That doesn't sound fun! Isabela: If they really want people to be good, shouldn't they offer an afterlife with... lakes of wine and a dozen naked virgins? Sebastian: Anyone who wants that will be going to the Void. Isabela: Sounds like that's where all the good parties will be.

So, Andrasian hell. K. Still doesn’t tell me anything useful.

Next few cite notes are grouped up. These unfortunately refer to books that I do not have access to at the moment - World of Thedas vol. 1 and the Dragon Age Origins official game guide - so I’ll simply settle for sharing the statement on the wiki.

The sinners are lost, endlessly wandering the Fade or even returning to the "ether" (the primeval matter of the Fade) from which they were made.

So, conflating the Void and the Fade now, are we? The next sentence references the Canticle of Threnodies, saying that it says that the Void is a place within the Fade. Time to check out what’s available of that Canticle myself...

Huh. Oh, that’s a lot. Yet after reading it all, the only mention of the Void I could find is in 12:5 above. “Where the Maker has turned His face away, Is a Void in all things; In the world, in the Fade, In the hearts and minds of men.” I think that can be interpreted in a lot of ways. It doesn’t quite say “The Void is a place in the fade” to me. It just says that there is an emptiness - a Void - in everything that the Maker found fault in. And he certainly found fault in the Fade, according to earlier verses in that very same Canticle. I don’t know, but this instance seems more figurative to me. Maybe I’m wrong. 

Moving on. Up next is another Chantry verse. 

Here lies the abyss, the well of all souls. From these emerald waters doth life begin anew. Come to me, child, and I shall embrace you. In my arms lies Eternity.

—Canticle of Andraste, 14:11

I can’t help but notice how ‘abyss’ isn’t capitalised in this verse. I checked in game - it’s not capitalised there either. 

This verse bothers me. When reading further into the codex entry of “Here Lies the Abyss”, there is some musings by Revered Mother Juliette accompanying the verse. They read as follows:

Chantry sisters have long debated this section of the Chant of Light. It is tempting to assume that the "well of all souls" is a literal well, but such imagery appears nowhere in Andraste's other works. An examination from Threnodies 1:4 yields clues:

From the waters of the Fade you made the world. As the Fade had been fluid, so was the world fixed.

It is possible—even likely—that the "emerald waters" Andraste refers to are the substance of the Fade, which began as an "ocean of dreams" (Threnodies 1:1) and was reduced to a well—bottomless but limited in scope—by the Maker's creation of our world.

Is Andraste urging the listener to come to the Fade? Should we take "From these emerald waters doth life begin anew," as literal evidence of reincarnation—or even of life after death, as the Cult of Spirits suggests—or as a figurative benediction indicating that the Maker is the source of all life, and in finding His embrace for Eternity, we will only be returning our souls from whence they came?

Vague, is it not? Juliette seems as confused as I am. 

Now, I remember when The Descent came out. When seeing The Wellspring at the end of that story, a lot of think-pieces popped up in the Meta community about how it looked an awful lot like what Andraste might have been describing in that Canticle of hers. Note how, in the Wiki page for the above-mentioned codex entry, there is a trivia section with a quoted passage from The Calling? 

"It’s where Andraste goes to speak to the Maker for the first time. It’s where she convinces him to forgive mankind. It was supposed to be this beautiful temple deep under the earth surrounded by emerald waters."

Interesting, no?

If anything, it seems safe to say that The Chant doesn’t seem very interesting in defining just what either the Void or this abyss is in the first place, and anything further simply seem to be interpretations by various Chantry people, which is hardly a reliable source of anything.

Continuing down the Wiki page on the Void, we have the Elven beliefs section. Something something The Forgotten Ones dwell there - the cite note leads us to Codex Entry: Elven God Andruil. Well. Not beliefs of modern elves, then, since this entry is found in the temple of Mythal, but that’s splitting hairs. 

One day Andruil grew tired of hunting mortal men and beasts. She began stalking The Forgotten Ones, wicked things that thrive in the abyss. Yet even a god should not linger there, and each time she entered the Void, Andruil suffered longer and longer periods of madness after returning.

Andruil put on armor made of the Void, and all forgot her true face. She made weapons of darkness, and plague ate her lands. She howled things meant to be forgotten, and the other gods became fearful Andruil would hunt them in turn. So Mythal spread rumors of a monstrous creature and took the form of a great serpent, waiting for Andruil at the base of a mountain.

When Andruil came, Mythal sprang on the hunter. They fought for three day and nights, Andruil slashing deep gouges in the serpent's hide. But Mythal's magic sapped Andruil's strength, and stole her knowledge of how to find the Void. After this, the great hunter could never make her way back to the abyss, and peace returned.

—Translated from ancient elven found in the Arbor Wilds, source unverified

Here is a much more clear distinction of the Void as an actual, tangible thing. Abyss is still not being capitalised, though. Abyss speaks to me of something deep down below. And the ancient Elves were actively encouraged to seek the deepest parts of the Fade, as seen in Codex Entry: Vir Dirthara: The Deepest Fade.

The pages of this book—memory?—are instructions on how to reach the deepest parts of the Fade, realms so far removed they're unmarked by Dreamers:

"Epiphany requires a mind smooth as mirror glass, still as stone. Put aside ten years for practice, and the next hundred for searching. What others have learned will ease your journey. Those who never manifested outside the Fade will find it easier to find its stillest roots, but it is rare the compulsion overtakes our brethren of the air."

Andruil roaming the Void was considered a bad thing by the Elves, yet seeking the deepest parts of the Fade was encouraged. That says to me that they are not the same. That says to me that the Void is not found in the Fade. 

The Andruil codex entry also says that “all forgot her true face” and that because of her actions, “plague ate her lands”. The idea that it was Andruil who caused the Blight has been around for a long time. This codex entry is the source of that theory. So far, I am inclined to agree that it certainly sounds like that may be the case. So. Quite possibly, according to this tale, if this plague is indeed the blight, it can be concluded that the Blight came from the Void.

However, that is a whole lot of conditions. A lot of ‘if’s.

Next up, there’s talk about the legends of Fen’Harel and The Great Betrayal - which we know for certain fact by now is a lot more complicated than the legends make it out to be. However, I don’t remember there being any mention of the Void or an abyss - or even the Forgotten Ones - being mentioned in our conversation with Solas in Trespasser. Sometimes I wonder if the Forgotten Ones are just a trail that Bioware wants to drop, but then I remember that their most explicit appearance in all the games so far is as recently as Jaws of Hakkon. Well. Back on track. 

The cite notes here only lead me to Arlathan: Part two and the Dread Wolf codex entry - both tellings of the Dalish legend, which tells me nothing new. The Forgotten Ones were allegedly trapped in the abyss. Might be good to point out that these legends also appear to imply that the Forgotten Ones came from the abyss, or at least that it was their home. “[...]if only the Forgotten Ones would return to the abyss for a time.“

Hmm. The Void wiki entry next says that The World of Thedas includes accounts of the Evanuris being trapped in the Eternal City. I thought that was just a theory. I really need to get that book. Clear some things up.

On to the next cite note, which leads me to the codex entry Elgar’nan: God of Vengeance. Another Dalish account, but this one brings up something interesting that I’ve not paid attention to before.

The sun, looking down upon the fruitful land, saw the joy that Elgar'nan took in her works and grew jealous. Out of spite, he shone his face full upon all the creatures the earth had created, and burned them all to ashes. The land cracked and split from bitterness and pain, and cried salt tears for the loss of all she had wrought. The pool of tears cried for the land became the ocean, and the cracks in her body the first rivers and streams.

Elgar'nan was furious at what his father had done and vowed vengeance. He lifted himself into the sky and wrestled the sun, determined to defeat him. They fought for an eternity, and eventually the sun grew weak, while Elgar'nan's rage was unabated. Eventually Elgar'nan threw the sun down from the sky and buried him in a deep abyss created by the land's sorrow.

A deep crack in the earth - a crack referrenced to as an abyss no less - created by the Sun’s rage. 

Perhaps, this instead is a reference to the war in which the Evanuris were generals. The war that enabled their ascent to presumed godhood. And this chasm was opened by the battles waged in this war. 

My mind wanders to The Abyssal Reach in the Western Approach. You know the one - the ginormous black chasm? The one that you fall into during Here Lies the Abyss?

The Wiki entry on the Western Approach says that “This area was the site of a major battle during the Second Blight. The darkspawn swarmed out of the great chasm to the south named the Abyssal Rift and corrupted the land beyond recovery.” Note that it doesn’t say is that the chasm was created during the Second Blight. It would appear that it was already there. 

I’m thinking that this chasm is the same as the one referenced in Elgar’nan’s legend. 

Although - nothing about this says that this chasm and the Void is the same thing. But I suspect that they may be connected. 

Continuing down the Void wiki page, all that’s left is the cult of the Empty Ones - who worshiped the blight - as well as a fairly lengthy trivia section. Nothing I find here is new. The Empty ones say the Darkspawn came from the Void and that the Void is a place of nothingness. General mentions of a hungry, yawning void - which doesn’t really say anything because that’s a pretty general turn of phrase. The Staff of the Void’s description talks about a void as an absence of something, which once again sounds more like a turn of phrase than anything substantial.  

There is always the Anvil of the Void - the thing that the Dwarves used to forge Golems. Since it essentially functioned by transferring the soul of a dwarf into that of the Golem, it could imply that the Void is somehow related to souls - or at least Dwarven souls - which would support the verse from the Canticle of Andraste mentioned before. But then, we also know that Elven souls come from the Fade - or at least that is what is implied, considering their close kinship with Spirits before the Veil. 

And there is still the whole thing about where we have absolutely no idea where the Humans even came from in the first place...

So far, I’ve seen a lot of fairly interesting thinking points - but absolutely nothing that would really lead to any real consensus to what the Void even is - IF it even is. I can’t help but feel that despite the frequent use of the terms Void and abyss in both Elven and Chantry lore, none of these references are similar enough - or substantive enough - for me to be able to be able to safely conclude that the Void even is a special place or thing at all. It sounds to me like metaphorical speech far more often than it does anything else. A metaphor for deep underground or something. The Deep Roads. I don’t know. 

But then I remember The Descent again. The Wellspring. The ‘lake’ that seemed almost like a sky. The Dwarf legend of the king who dug so deep down that he and his entire thaig “fell into the sky”. It makes me wonder...

In the end, all I feel I can really conclude for myself is that whatever it is, the Abyss is mostly deep below, and the Fade is mostly up above. I don’t think they are the same. Also that the Blight probably comes from the Void in one way or another. 

But honestly, any more than that, the lore just doesn’t seem to converge into anything substantial anywhere. There is simply far too little to go on to make any solid conclusions, and what little lore there is appear to go into different places more often than not. We can assume, we can theorise, we can extrapolate - but what real lore there actually is tells us surprisingly little.

If anyone has any thoughts about this that are more coherent than mine, I’d love to hear them, because it feels like I’m thinking in circles.

Charlotte Geater, ‘poems for my FBI agent’ (2020)

(Disclosure: I don’t know Charlotte Geater, but as I’ve previously stated I am familiar with Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall from Bad Betty Press — though I don’t particularly know them well).

poems for my fbi agent is a convoluted, multi-faceted investigation into surveillance and our present-day predicament. Who is watching us? Who is watching those who watch us? Every time an advertisement appears boasting a lipstick from a brand we were talking about just yesterday, do we still call this serendipity? Or is it evidence that we’re being observed? And is our relationship with “our agent” a symbiotic one, where we share, even indulge, in each other as voyeurs? Unlike Crispin Best’s Hello, Charlotte Geater’s collection probes more sinister pockets of Internet culture: of spy and spied.  It’s provocative, surreal and deeply disturbing. It’s also encrypted by so many different subtexts and jarring imagery, which makes this a challenging and very personal read, because it entirely depends on you and your experiences. So strap yourselves in.

Whenever I start a new book, I always read the acknowledgements first. I do this because I’m nosy. I like to make sense of the writer, I like to know who they are thanking, where work might have been previously published (particularly if it’s a poetry collection or a photobook). Because beyond the author’s name, the acknowledgements page is the writer’s final note. Afterwards, you’re flung into the book’s meat, and you’re on your own. 

I flicked to the acknowledgements and I had a look at what Charlotte had written. At one point she says: “[I thank] all of my friends, for being supportive when I said, “I’ve started writing some poems inspired by a meme that is already kind of dead.”’ I understood what she was referring to. She’s talking about memes like this: 

It’s interesting to see that we as a generation deal with a lot of our problems in meme-culture (and that is a whole separate conversation from this review). The FBI memes were one such example. They’re designed to nullify and humour our digital anxieties about being spied on. We have developed an acute self-awareness both outside in real time, and on the Internet. We know that we are constantly being watched, whether it’s through cookies or CCTV. Privacy is a luxury. It can be purchased like groceries. We’re not automatically entitled to being left alone. And that brings up questions about authenticity, self-identity, self-integrity. It throws up all kind of worries and fears, as our online presence and real selves chafe against each other. But unlike these memes, poems for my fbi agent doesn’t minimise your worries, it amplifies them. 

I couldn’t always penetrate this collection and hold myself to one specific intepretation; it flummoxed me. I was really confused by the dislocation of imagery, the subtlety of Charlotte’s writing style. It’s exactly how Sam Riviere put it: “a Lynchian rabbit hole”. The series of images, which seemingly bear no relation to each other, is quite jolting. You have to make the connections yourself, you have to look within and draw on your own references to access what certain poems “mean” (I’ll expand on this later). At one point I just sat back in bed and gulped. Because I thought “how the fuck am I going to write a review about poetry I don’t always understand?” And I was panicking because, I thought, “there’s a plethora of ways to understand this work, I don’t have to hold myself to one specific interpretation”, but I was struggling to grasp the imagery and syntax. So I figured talking to my mother about it would be useful because sometimes you need to discuss a book and bounce off one another to engage with it. So really I owe a lot of this review to her and our discussions. 

One of the most disarming things about this collection is its perturbing elusiveness. As my mum said, “I can’t put it into words what she means, but I can feel what she means”. 

A pretty good example of this (and what I mean by jarring imagery) is in ‘my FBI agent is a mathematical problem’:

and not just a philosophical one. if i ask who watches the agent  who watches me, it sounds insincere;  but let’s get down to it in our underwear [...] who does he text when he’s lonely?  who gets to see his underwear, [...]

So far, I’m with Charlotte. I too ask the very same questions. Who is keeping our agent under watch? Y’know, does it become a situation of meta-surveillance where everybody is a threat, even the ones who supposedly work “to prevent threat”, like the agent? Is the agent part of, or rather, included within the same system? Or more worringly, do they sit at the top of the hierarchy, and are therefore untouchable? 

if i type a poem instead of writing it out first it feels closer to god, by which i mean closer to you, watching me and if i am not a problem, are you there? 

The FBI agent and our traditional conceptions of “God” as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, are conflated here. It’s true; the agent has total power and knowledge over everything we do and investigate, even the things we plan to do. The agent can wield time, can document and record. The agent can create business and yet the agent is our business. The agent can defend and attack, break things, read your mind. It’s in the agent’s “god-like” apparition (you can’t put a face to your agent like you can’t with God I guess), and in the agent’s “god-like” power, that we are wholly subservient and are most afeard, because the FBI agent knows all our conversations, thoughts, and internet searches. That access to our personal psychologies makes for an entity like that of God. And it’s all supposedly in the name of our protection, to defend from terrorism or people who might break into houses and axe us out of the blue. The question is: If we’re not posing a threat, or being threatened, where’s the need for the agent? Does the agent evaporate? Do they move only when we move? 

matter changes when it’s hit am i a problem for you yet?  the lake turned to ice improbably fast; and the custard became a rock inside your mouth. 

I mean like, lake? Ice? Custard? This is so random and strange. I sat there scratching my head for ages about this. But I’ve sort of hazarded the best guess I can. And there’s two things. Firstly, this idea about matter changing when it’s hit, liquid states and solid states. So in quantum theory, there is a  suggestion that observation affects reality. So for example, if you wanted to observe electrons and how they move, you have to get them to behave with a proton. And electrons know that they’re being observed when they’re forced to interact with protons, because their wave function changes. It’s horrifically complicated and I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to really unpack it in detail. But basically, what it means is, simply observing something can change the appearance of how it is perceived. It can have an affect on outcomes. And I’m linking a pretty good, simplified article about this here. 

The second interpretation of this really odd image is a little easier to understand, and again relates to this “lake turning to ice impossibly fast-custard to hard rock” metaphor. So ages back, there was this Doctor Who episode (when David Tennant was the Doctor), called ‘Blink’. In that episode, they were these aliens appearing in the form of stone angel statues, called The Weeping Angels. If you get touched by a Weeping Angel, you get zapped back in time and the Angel feeds off all the energy you might have potentially lived in the present-day. They move impossibly fast. Like they can make their way from a garden into the kitchen within a blink. Here’s the snag: they only ever move when they’re not being watched. The minute you look at them, they turn to stone. They can’t even be seen looking at each other, if they are facing one another, they’ll never move again. 

I think about this episode a lot still, and whenever I watch it, it never fails to get my heart racing. But when I read “matter changes when it’s hit”, I was reminded of the clever, foolproof defence mechanism of the Weeping Angels, which renders them the loneliest creatures in the universe. There were parallels between this and the statement implied in the poem. Is it possible then that like the Weeping Angels, the agent’s movements are rendered undetectable when we try to watch them back? When we catch them in the act, say when our phone randomly opens up an app we closed, does the agent freeze? Or is it the reverse? And how lonely that must be. How alone the agent must feel. It was at this point I became more aware of how I was receiving the writing. When I thought about Doctor Who, and made comparisons from the bulk of my own references, I really tapped into the essence of the work, which is written so cleverly. 

Remember how I said earlier that, to understand what Charlotte’s getting at, you have to look within and draw upon your own experiences, in order to access the work? What I meant was, understanding the random collage of images requires understanding your own anxieties, about being watched all the time, reaching into your own pocket of knowledge, and relating all of it back to the work. Like how I drew upon my memory of Doctor Who. And it’s very much like social media, or Wikipedia. You’re constantly having to manage cookies or accept cookies, so you can continue using the programme. Likewise, you’re constantly forced to share more of yourself in order to access a level of understanding in Charlotte’s poetry. So for example, ‘my FBI agent takes me on a date’. This is Page 28. At this point, the gender pronoun of the agent has shifted. The agent is no longer “he”. “He” is now she. 

and decorates her hair with crane flies  prawn cocktail lips / when i said scare me she listened badly  [...]

[...] and I hate anything with a see-through body  plastic wings dancing no,  it’s the legs are wrong in the air like that  it’s the compartments, the exoskeleton  it’s that she doesn’t know how & she pries me open early  & she has teeth that she thinks give more pleasure at the cracking / she says i will like it 

that she has heard fear / makes us braver people in the end & she eats from within

You can feel the discomfort, the repulsion, in this poem so keenly. Sentences like “& she pries me open early // & she has teeth that she thinks give more pleasure // at the cracking / she says i will like it”, it’s so menacing. I could vividly picture the clacking of plastic wings, the sensation of sharp teeth, the cracking. It’s just horrible. And when you try to think about what a “date” is, and what that means when it’s with an FBI agent, you get something really odd, intimated by the gender shift of the agent to being “she”... When I read this transition, I saw it as an indication that ‘I’’s conscience had evolved. At some point, we become so self-aware of everything we say and do online, that we develop the objectivity like that of the agent. If I’m to assume that the ‘I’ is a she here, it’s arguable that and that the ‘I’ and ‘she’ in ‘my FBI agent takes me out on a date’, are the same entity. 

I think this poem implies that as we reveal more of ourselves online, the acuteness of our self-awareness intensifies. We become our own agents, we assimilate the role of our watchers and watch ourselves. We become transparent, as we study our profiles through our own focalisation. This, to my mind and my mother’s mind too, is the “exoskeleton” that Charlotte resents. It’s the imagery of self-consumption, the self-destruction in laying yourself bare to the world, where in turn it’s you that becomes the meal, it’s you who dates yourself, it’s you who tucks into yourself. We become indiscernible from watching and watched, and in these inexactitudes, we end up disorienting ourselves. We have to share so much in order to be able to “progress” or access sites or information we need. It’s parasitic. This is what Charlotte means by “she eats from within”. As though we’re the parasite and the host, we eat of ourselves. 

Other perplexing images: ‘my agent, a rational object / the same size as a mannequin’ (from ‘my FBI agent takes a holiday’) I found this image really wonderful and so apt in defining the agent’s agency... The mannequin is like, your anonymous blank slate. You change its clothes, it remains the same sculpture. It’s something you imprint, and it projects what it wears, how it wears it. The agent being depicted as a mannequin is again, another non-sequitur of a metaphor in this poem, but it makes absolute sense. The agent’s identity is subsumed in the person they surveillance. The agent is in a strange way, our personal twin, which is basically saying, we’re bonded. 

This symbiotic relationship is reflected on deeply throughout the work, oscillating between the way we are watched, how we watch, and how we watch ourselves. Take ‘my fbi agent doesn’t like to read’:

i read a lot of ebooks because i am always thinking  of him                           and his lack of access to an academic library  marxist monetary theory  kate millett’s sexual politics william morris biographies  [...]  i like to read through his eyes 

This is a profound image. As if the agent and the ‘I’ here are sat together. Whatever ‘I’ indulges in for reading pleasure, the agent indulges in also. Ultimately this is not a space that the agent is invading, when we’re aware we’re being observed. Like in those ‘fbi’ memes, we welcome the agent in, to laugh, to trust that everything, as uninnocent as it all is, is still ultimately innocent. No harm, no foul. So with that assurance, we make do with their elusive presence, content to let them read over our shoulders. 

One perplexion I do have about this work, and perhaps it’s an intentional move from Charlotte, is the inconsistency of grammar and capitalisation. Most of the poetry is written lowercase, it reads like the way we text. But every now and then there’s the odd full stop, or comma or semi-colon, that just doesn’t seem to sit right, and I wonder what the motivations are behind introducing punctuation at certain points. It’s something to think about when you’re reading the collection. Similarly with capitalisation, the book cover title is in lowercase “fbi” whereas all the poems are in the uppercase acronym: “FBI”. Funnily enough when you type ‘fbi’ into your phone, it will autocorrect it to uppercase. So that was an interesting distinction I found. Ultimately I don’t think this writing is yearning to read entirely like a text message, it is inviting punctuated sentences, grammar, clever choices in the positioning of semi-colons. But it’s not always clear why they appear within certain poems at particular points, and I question the impulse behind their inclusion. The form too, is fairly consistent, bar ‘my fbi agent talks me through my facebook ad settings’ on page 14, which really experiments with sentence length and the ‘/’:

i say: is this how you see me?  birthday in october / close friends of men with a birthday in 7-30 days / close friends of ex-pats / commuters / gmail users // 

i want to know about data in poetry when it’s bad data & i want to know about how you see me in these systems when they’re bad, i don’t mean morally, i mean shitty, incomplete, i mean you know too much and it’s all worth except. except for the ways in which it works for you. 

I perceived the ‘/’ here as not just a spacer. I think of it as an imitation of a navigation menu, the “clicking and loading” from one page of information to another. The writing itself also stretches right across the page, like it would across a computer screen. The best way to edit your Facebook ad settings is on a computer, not a smartphone device. And similar to Crispin Best, Charlotte’s line breaks often occur less than half way across the page of the book, imitating the dimensions of a phone screen, again. But in this poem, there’s more elongation, there’s more steps. For that reason, it really stands out and it’s also one of the more clogged pieces in terms of its references. The random assemblage of information pertaining to the ‘I’ and their profile, problematises the way information is harvested on social media. It’s loads of ubiquitous, vacuous crap which is all vested in the same person, but ultimately means very little. The only connection in having a birthday in October and being close friends with ex-pats is simply in the ‘I’, here. But there’s about a bajillion other people out there who could have the same thing in common. This poem is a criticism of the conjectures that the agent makes based off watching everything about us. What is the point in having all this crap on me? How boring. How confusing. 

I understand now why I lack conviction in a lot of my own thoughts about this collection, and it’s also why Charlotte Geater is incredibly talented. Everything in our world is open to reasonable doubt, even more so with technology. That same notion is integral to this collection’s thematics—we doubt who we are, we doubt what we do, we doubt what is around us and worst of all, we know that someone is recording those doubts and documenting them as evidence. The fact that Charlotte can recreate our digital anxieties, forcing us to think and overshare with ourselves so we can access an understanding, in the same way that the Internet does, that’s powerful. That is a technique. 

poems for my fbi agent articulates something much greater than ourselves, and yet we have the power to dispel of it whenever we want, collectively as a species or simply as individuals. Otherwise, morbid consequences follow (and are already a reality): ‘your coffin / is there / for the rest of your life’. This absolutism of our persona’s enduring presence that remains long after physical death is the ultimate artifice of reality, and immortality. We’re never truly dead and gone, we’re never really buried, when the evidence we lived is always there. 

It took me time to wrap my head around it, and tbh I don’t think I’ll ever totally wrap my head around everything, but I loved this collection, and I’m interested to see what Charlotte produces next. This is an incredible debut with an amazing press.

If you want to read some of these amazing poems in full, you can view them in some of Charlotte’s previous publications here, here and here. Or you could skip the bullshit and just buy this amazing work at Bad Betty Press, and follow Charlotte on Twitter. 

Speaking of aphobia (again), one of the arguments I saw from that certain someone and his followers was that I am “unhinged” for being able to separate The Discourse and aphobia as a concept.

I want to talk about that mindset--not with him specifically in mind, he and his followers are just a good segway into this discussion, because they demonstrated the mindset I’m going to talk about last night.

I said last night that the problem wasn’t “the discourse,” the problem was the aphobia--and, apparently, they’re one in the same to a lot of people, including the individual I was railing against. Aphobia has become so conflated with the controversy surrounding it that people oftentimes don’t recognize it as a form of bigotry. When they look at it, all they see is tumblr wank.

The tumblr wank isn’t really relevant to the LGBT+ community at large, because the LGBT+ community at large accepts ace and aro folks as parts of itself. The people you see causing problems here on tumblr don’t exist offline in near the numbers their seemingly immense presence on tumblr would suggest. This whole discussion, about whether or not aces belong, isn’t a thing outside of tumblr.

So, in that sense, the discourse doesn’t matter all that much, because it’s just exclusionists trying to exclude and being told, “No, fuck you,” by the greater community.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean aphobia doesn’t exist. Bigotry towards genders and sexualities doesn’t cease to exist when the greater community accepts us. An exclusionist is still a bigot, even if they’re in the minority, even if their opinion isn’t going to change how the greater community feels.

A bigot, is a bigot, is a bigot.

Take cis gay men, for example. They’ve been accepted as LGBT+ pretty much since the beginning. However, I’ve still encountered people saying, without a shred of irony, that we should ban cis gay men from the community, because they are “no longer oppressed.”

Of course, the greater community thinks that’s ridiculous, so it’s never going to happen, it’s just a loud, nonsensical minority spouting rhetoric based largely on anti-male sentiment.

But it’s still homophobia.

No, the dumb things they’re saying aren’t really particularly relevant. They aren’t important, and they won’t shake the foundation of the community. Nothing is going to change by them saying these things. The Discourse, in this instance, is meaningless and moot.

The homophobia, however, is still very real. “Cis gay men shouldn’t be allowed in the LGBT+ community,” is still a homophobic statement, and the sentiment behind it is still homophobic, regardless of whether or not the statement is going to be taken seriously by the greater community.

It’s still homophobic.

Now replace cis gay men with ace/aro people, and homophobia with aphobia, and you’ve got the unfortunate current state of things.

When I say, “It’s not about the discourse, it’s about aphobia,” I mean it. It’s not about tumblr wank. It’s not about saving asexuals, because they don’t need saving, the community already loves and accepts them. It’s not about crusading for their inclusion, they’re already included.

(Though I do spend a lot of time reaffirming this and speaking out against exclusionists, simply because I fucking want to.)

The kerfuffle surrounding ace/aro folks has nothing to do with it.

“Ace people shouldn’t be allowed in the LGBT+ community,” is an aphobic statement--period. Even without the discourse, it’s an aphobic statement. It’s a statement made to exclude and belittle and demean.

It doesn’t matter if the statement is going to change anything.

It’s still aphobic.

The point is, crying, “WHATEVER, IT’S JUST DISCOURSE!” is an obvious attempt at conflating actual bigotry with something largely meaningless on a grander scale. Aphobia isn’t “just discourse.” As a concept, it existed long before the discourse surrounding ace/aro people, and it is a legitimate form of bigotry against a sexual minority.

So when you say, “WHATEVER, IT’S JUST DISCOURSE!” you’re operating under the assumption that aphobia, as a concept, is “just discourse.” It’s not. It exists beyond the discourse. The discourse and aphobia are not inherently linked to one another, inseparable, forever one in the same.

Which is what I’m talking about when I say, “It’s not about the discourse, it’s about aphobia.”

I guess this concept is a little complex, and maybe it’s hard to follow for people who are so stuck in their ways that they feel the two are inseparable, but, honestly, if you’re uneducated on the matter, you probably shouldn’t be speaking so flippantly on it in the first place--especially if you aren’t a member of the community.

There’s no shame in asking folks to educate you. If you want to speak on this issue, but you don’t know how to separate the discourse from aphobia, or what struggles ace/aro people face, just ask someone who does know. Hell, ask me. I’ll talk to you about it, I’ll get a conversation going here on the blog.

I’m here to help people better understand issues like this one, and I sincerely hope people take me and others up on our offers of education.

Bigotry isn’t limited to or by the discourse surrounding it. It has its own life, its own foul breath, and its own evil place in our society.

(Warning: talking about things I have no expertise of, or indeed any kind of comprehensive knowledge)

I’m interested in the way our perceptions of magic differ from actual magic, and in general, how different the pseudo-historical “ISO Standard Fantasy Setting” differs from the thing it supposedly imitates. What it actually imitates is, of course, a certain genre of Romantic literature recycled through D&D (or through Tolkien then D&D again, or Tolkien, his imitators, and D&D), and closely related works. The conventional tropes of modern high fantasy were established in a relatively short period, even compared to hard SF, in the middle of the 20th century. They don't much resemble either their immediate predecessors (Dunsany, for instance) or their supposed source material (actual medieval literature) except in very very superficial ways--knights on horseback, for instance, things called faeries.

Sometimes there's back-contamination, where our erroneous impression of the past as conveyed by pseudo-historical settings in fantasy literature (Medieval Tymes, if you like) color our perception of *actual* historical periods. The video game Crusader Kings 2, for instance, feels much more like an ISO Standard Fantasy Setting that happens to be set in Europe than it does the actual Middle Ages (and this is before they added the admittedly silly Monks and Mystics expansion, which adds a whole new level of tongue-in-cheekness to a game that already played around a lot with its source material). There's very little use of medieval art or architecture in CK2, or even direct imitations of it; even less medieval music. THere's a lot of imitation, though, of what we *think* the middle ages should look like based on fantasy literature and its derivatives--which is why the Elder Scrolls and Song of Ice and Fire mods work so well with the base game's style, since in a way they're truer to the spirit of CK2 than actual history is. Both those works--Martin's especially--are firmly embedded in pseudomedievalism, and built on the ISO Standard Fantasy Setting in different ways.

But let's talk about magic in particular, which is a mainstay of the fantasy genre outside high fantasy, but which I feel, as a reader, tends to be treated in common ways across very diverse works of genre fiction. Here I'll include video games like the Elder Scrolls, traditional games like Dungeons and Dragons, novels of low fantasy (The Dresden Files, Harry Potter) and novels of high (Chronicles of Amber, China Mieville's Bas-Lag books, Discworld, Codex Alera). Every one, I contend, against our intuitions on the subject, while formally fantasy resembles science fiction in its treatment of magic; that is to say, magic is treated as an element of the world, and bears far more relationship to our modern conception of the natural order and of the natural world than any traditional form of magic. Magic is gone; magic has been killed stone dead. With very, very few exceptions, anything we think of as "magic" in film, books, TV, comics, etc., is really a form of not-magic, a kind of exotic naturalism, and at some point between the Renaissance and the industrial revolution, our cultural understanding of the world shifted so much that we (read "the people reading this post, not every human alive") became unable to conceive of magic as it was traditionally understood.

First off: in anthropological and philological terms, magic is a broad and vague label for a huge variety of practices from various cultures in various times and places, founded more or less in common quirks of human psychology, and without a single coherent definition. It's a collection, not a system; "systems" of magic are modern inventions, though there are definitely various kinds of magical traditions from different cultures. If you pick up a book like "The Book of Magic: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment" (Penguin, 2016; ed. and trans. Brian Copenhaver), you can look at a nice cross-section of different references to and discussions of magic from Biblical, Classical, Persian, Medieval, and Renaissance sources. Obviously, there's a lot going on that's different in each text, but a couple common themes emerge, I think.

First of all, you can classify most forms of these "magics" into discrete categories: divination through randomness or omens (entrails, crows, smoke, dreams, the stars); theurgy, or appeals to higher powers like angels (or accusations of appeals to powers like demons), which is big in medieval magic; speaking with the dead or with spirits (e.g., necromancy); and medicine. None of these are distinct, and none of these are distinctly magic, by which I mean many or most of these categories blend into one another and to other activities like cooking, worship, healing, or scholarship, and a strong "natural" versus "supernatural" dichotomy does not seem evident, especially in ancient sources like Plato, Pliny, and the Old Testament.

I think it's important to remember that a systematized explanation for how the world works was lacking for most of human history; you might see salt dissolve in water and precipitate out again, and fire burn things and acid eat them away, but knowing nothing about atoms or chemical reactions or the various electromagnetic and atomic forces which govern most human-level behavior of particles (to say nothing of the gravitational forces which dominate the heavens), it makes perfect sense to speak of the material universe being sustained and governed on an ongoing basis by the direct intervention of God, or spirits, or gods, who act according to consistent principles; in these circumstances, a denial of free will and a statement of absolute Divine control of the physical world isn't just a philosophical position, it's a productive explanation of minute details of life that otherwise lack compelling ones. Even if, as Plato and Pliny, you are more systematic about things and posit that sympathy operates between objects and can produce effects at a distance, much as one musical instrument can be caused to resonate by another, absent understanding of sound (and air molecules) or light or the particles and fields which mediate the electromagnetic or graviational forces, you still need to posit things like daimons and spirits as the actors which actually transmit such connections; and there is inevitably a tendency to personalize such things, even if you're not entirely anthropomorphizing them.

(Likewise, if you notice study of the heavens is capable of predicting things like eclipses and the tides, you may reason that it's capable of predicting other things, like whether you're going to win this war--after all, the moon seems to have an effect on the tides, why shouldn't it have an effect on human beings? Astrology isn't just primitive astronomy; it blends with astronomy in a perfectly seamless fashion.)

*How* magic works is not distinct from *what you do to make it work*. The two are the same; the former does not exist as a separate concept. A spell is performative, not in the sense that it's fake, but in the sense that saying "I take you to be my husband" actually marries you to the person standing next to you if the circumstances are valid.

So substances might have inherent properties; how those properties interact with one another and with the body is going to belong to the same category of knowledge as how the planets affect individual persons or spells affect your neighbor's cow, i.e., the fundamental mechanisms remain mysteries. Thus, medicine blends seamlessly with other kinds of magic, with ritual and with religion. Praying for your son to get better and putting a salve on his forehead aren't entirely distinct actions; thus, medical treatments from the middle ages contain a mix of what seems to us like perfectly sensible actions (mash up this plant and eat it) and insanity that nobody could possibly believe helps (then bury the rest in a cornfield and say verses from the Bible over it). And because other kinds of magic can help or harm, and medicine can help or harm, medicine is prone to being viewed as a kind of malicious magic: it's no coincidence that our word "pharmacy, pharmeceutical" comes from the same Greek word used to translate "witch," as in "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live": pharmakeos, i.e., a poisoner. In fact, all the vocabulary around magic-users is a pile of confusion, a conflation of different kinds of action that don't fit neatly with modern notions of A Wizard. "Witch" is from a word originally meaning "diviner;" in the Middle Ages and early Modern period it seemed to be understood as one who invokes the power of supernatural beings to do evil things--note that the crime of witchcraft was because witches necessarily consorted with the *devil*, not because they used magic per se (presumably, power from God or the angels was OK--and indeed, grimoires like the Lesser Key of Solomon talk about magic from these sources, and emphasize the necessity of moral purity in order to get the spells to work). "Maleficium," in Latin, originally just meant "evildoer," however that evil was done; likewise, mekashefah, the word (originally feminine) which "witch" translates in the above Bible verse. The "witch" of Endor is not at all a crone; she's an apparently respectable woman capable of furnishing Saul and his men with a decent meal, and the term the Bible actually uses is "sho'el 'ov" - i.e., one who knows how to ask ghosts questions.

(With the exception of necromancy, little distinction is in fact made in the Old Testament between kinds of supernatural power; e.g., in Exodus the magic of the Egyptians is depicted as illegitemate, but no less efficacious for that. Magic plainly works, even if it's wrong.)

Charms, spells, and incantations are more often than not about invoking a specific power: gods, in Greek and Roman magic, God and his angels in Christian. (Pliny divides magic into medicine, astrology, and religion; the first two, he says, produce predictions which corroborate divination--as stated above, astrology is not entirely distinct from divination for obvious reasons.) Later, alchemy begins to produce actual theories of matter; but it's still not at all distinct from the kind of magic that involves invoking higher powers.

So what *isn't* magic? That's considerably easier to answer than what is: when you look at the kinds of things that look like magic to us moderns, it becomes easy to recognize the ways in which scientism has so preoccupied our way of viewing the world that it becomes inextricable even from our supposedly "magical" fantasy.

Magic isn't sufficiently advanced technology, for one, or a highly refined and subtle art (Tolkien; he knew this, obviously, and wasn't going for magic-qua-magic). Magic isn't *energy*, or a *force* or a *field*; these things are the language of *science,* of electromagnetics and gravity and atoms (contra Jim Butcher, Terry Pratchett, and every video game ever). It's not local variations in the natural law (as a distinction between natural law, human law, and especially moral law actually *isn't* that clear cut). It's not telekinesis or ESP, however those are caused! Remember, these are pseudo-*science*, they were invented in the scientific era. If you're an ancient using magic to make objects move, you're not "moving it with your mind." You might be invoking spirits to move it for you, but *you* are not doing it with some invisible arm. Magic isn't beams of light or deadly green lasers. It's also not some kind of metaphysical illusion. Sure, magicians have been denounced as tricksters and illusionists all throughout history, but if there's deception in magic, it is good old-fashioned sleight of hand--maybe your court magician replaced his staff with a snake when nobody was looking. It's not a ghost-snake you can put your hand through, though.

A fantasy story using traditional notions of magic would involve attitudes pretty alien and unsatisfying to a lot of modern fantasy readers: a close connection between the physical and moral world, little attention to *how* things worked, and more attention to what you *did* to make things work, nothing like a systematized, sciencified magic, and a blend so close between magic, religion, and nature that they are entirely indistinguishable.

None of this is to say that the traditional F&SF conception of magic is wrong or bad somehow; it fits our modern sensibilities quite nicely and makes for compelling stories. But don't make the mistake of confusing these functionally-distant reinterpretations of history for how people actually used to understand the world.

“Sealioning” is probably one of my least-favorite New Internet Terms, tbh. I guess it was originally meant to meant to indicate the behavior of a person who insists on trying to have debates with disinterested parties and criticizing them for not wanting to engage, which is a thing that people do sometimes and is super rude, but I mostly see it used to mean “this person is asking questions that I think are easy to find the answers to, so clearly they’re only asking for the purpose of wasting my time or pissing me off, and I am therefore justified in harshly criticizing them for either feigning ignorance or being totally apathetic and insensitive.” Which is a horrible position to default to when people ask you obvious questions!

“I’m just venting in private, it wasn’t an invitation to debate”--fine, I understand this, everybody vents at some point and it can be hard to judge how public a particular venue should be considered, especially on social media; we can quibble about whether venting within metaphorical earshot of people who might reasonably be hurt by it is a good idea or not, or whether venting about certain people or groups of people might cause harm even if the subjects never become aware of it, but it's obviously a complicated topic, and it doesn’t mean you should be piled on by people who want to debate when you’re not ready to do so.

“It’s not my job to educate you”--yes, fine, this makes sense if you are not an activist, if you don’t wish to engage in forms of activism that involve spreading information, or even if you’re an educator who isn’t on educating duty at this particular moment. No one is entitled to your time and effort in this specific matter, and you do not bear a responsibility to defend all of your views to all of the people on a consistent basis, even though eventually communication must occur if people are to learn and grow.

“This thing is obvious to me, and has been explained somewhere in the world at least once before, so if you claim it isn’t clear to you or that you want to learn more about why I believe it, you must be baiting me and acting in bad faith, and shall be mocked for doing so”--no, stop, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Consistently reliable research is beyond a lot of people’s abilities, especially if they’ve never been to college or, through no fault of their own, live in an ideological bubble that is isolated from particular truths. It can be really hard to tell the legitimate authorities apart from weirdos with an axe to grind if you have no experience in a field. Even if it’s within their abilities, it may be really time-consuming for them, they may have no idea where to start, they may have a life outside being Right about everything and not know whether the issue is important (”the world’s getting warmer? so what?”), or they may be from a different background that makes your claim look as outlandish as a flat-earth conspiracy theory, something they shouldn’t waste their time on unless someone can give them a reason why they should. And that’s just for things that actually are obvious; topics that are more complex, where both sides make good points, are even harder to get to the bottom of.

It’s not that people never argue in bad faith; that happens all the time.  It’s that accusing people of intentionally trying to piss you off or waste your time, just because they ask questions about things that seem obvious to you, will give you a lot of false positives, will discourage people from asking questions in the future, will turn people away from your position who might otherwise have been persuaded, and is rude as heck. I’ve seen people be accused of “sealioning” for asking one question about the evidence for the gender wage gap, which IMO is not the sort of simple and obvious thing from which you can tell that your conversation partner is necessarily being unreasonable or acting in bad faith.

I don’t think anyone should be required to defend their beliefs on a constant basis. It’s OK to disengage even if your opponent isn’t hostile and does want to learn, and people who don’t respect that are being rude and, in some cases,  harmful. But we all know how easy it is to spread misinformation, so I also think that people shouldn’t be expected to amend their beliefs without getting the chance to dig through and look at all the evidence, and I realize that that can be a time-consuming process. The least we can do is remember not to assume that the apparent desire for more information is evidence of malice.

Also, the lady in the original comic was being kind of rude, and the sea lion was way more calm and polite in the face of her “I just don’t like sea lions” opinion than I would have been in the face of some guy’s “I just don’t like women” opinion. I dunno what the relative systemic power of sea lions is in this ‘verse, but criticizing the sea lion for wanting to start a dialogue with someone who disdains him for something he has no control over seems rather callous, and turning the character into a verb that gets used to mean “this person is being willfully ignorant just to piss me off and then claim they won the argument” strikes me as a slightly worrying failure of cognitive empathy. Yes, he refused to let the matter drop and insisted on following the lady into her house in order to have a debate with her, which is totally inappropriate, but I hardly think his crime was the fact that he dared to ask why someone hated him.

(Yes, I know the author has issued a clarification that sea lions are meant to stand in for people who exhibit the particular behavior of wanting to debate casual statements and refusing to let them lie, not any immutable characteristic of the sea lion, but since “I just don’t like X people” is very often not an innocuous statement, and being a sea lion is immutable in the real world, I don't think the metaphor works very well. It’s not a horrifically insensitive comic, or anything, but it seems like a bad thing to reference when trying to explain why you object to somebody asking questions about your beliefs and worldview. Especially if they’ve only asked a single question and have not done anything analogous to following you into your house.)

If this seems like a petty thing to worry about, I’ll add that I grew up in a church/school environment where questioning Facts like The Earth Is 6000 Years Old or America Is The Greatest Country In All Ways was seen as evidence of either a lack of faith or intentional malice. I’m in a different place now because I had parents who encouraged me to ask whatever questions I wanted, no matter how obvious, tedious, or disturbing, and because I eventually ran into Catholics, and Catholics consistently answered my questions instead of just warning me about hell over and over. They debated, they disagreed, they educated. They discussed things with non-Catholics without acting like they might be infected with something, or like they were afraid that a little investigation might cause their worldview to come crashing down. They sought the truth, and delighted in all those who came to them for help in seeking it.

So yeah, mocking people for not knowing stuff you know is rude, and I think we should try not to be rude. But refusing to tolerate questions and debate in general is dangerous, both to your movement and to the individual people in it. And yeah, as I said, you don’t have a responsibility to debate with people or educate them at any given moment. Maybe not ever, if debating is just not your thing and you think there are better ways for you to use your time. I’m not that good at debate either, honestly! Constructive and honest debate is hard! There’s no shame in saying that you’re not able or willing to answer someone’s questions, unless you have some particular obligation to that person. But mocking, belittling, or punishing people for having questions, for seeking debate, for trying to do the things one does when one wants to understand and lacks the necessary equipment to do so--that is poison to any community, and is most toxic of all to a community that is trying to change the hearts and minds of the people around them.

TLDR: Refusing to respect people’s boundaries and leave them alone when asked is bad. Asking people questions is not in itself bad, even though people don’t generally have an obligation to answer. These behaviors should not be conflated.

We Don’t Need You Back, Kevin Spaceys of the World

Kevin Spacey may be a fine actor, but we don't need his ilk in Hollywood. Rather than accepting admitted abusers back into the limelight, we should strive to find new talent, especially as it concerns women, people of color, and other underrepresented groups. (Photo Credit: Richard Cooper/CC-BY-SA-3.0) In advance of Christmas, Kevin Spacey released a video entitled "Let Me Be Frank" on his YouTube channel. Beyond it being strange enough news that Kevin Spacey has a YouTube channel in the first place, the three-minute clip was deeply weird. In the video, Spacey, speaking in the manner of his persona Frank Underwood from House of Cards, directly addresses the viewer, as he did in character within the context of the show. His remarks are as follows: I know what you want. Oh, sure, they may have tried to separate us, but what he have is too strong, it's too powerful. I mean, after all, we shared everything, you and I. I told you my deepest, darkest secrets. I showed you exactly what people are capable of. I shocked you with my honesty, but mostly I challenged you and made you think. And you trusted me—even though you knew you shouldn't. So we're not done no matter what anyone says. And besides, I know what you want: you want me back. Of course, some believed everything and have just been waiting with bated breath to hear me confess it—they're just dying to have me declare that everything said is true, that I got what I deserved. Wouldn't that be easy—if it was all so simple? Only you and I both know it's never that simple—not in politics and not in life. But you wouldn't believe the worst without evidence, would you? You wouldn't rush to judgment without facts, would you? Did you? No, not you. You're smarter than that. Anyway, all this presumption made for such an unsatisfying ending, and to think it could've been such a memorable send-off. I mean, if you and I have learned nothing else these past years, it's that in life and art, nothing should be off the table. We weren't afraid—not of what we said, not of what we did, and we're still not afraid. Because I can promise you this: if I didn't pay the price for the things we both know I did do, I'm certainly not going to pay the price for the things I didn't do. Oh, of course, they're going to say I'm being disrespectful, not playing by the rules—like I ever played by anyone's rules before. I never did—and you loved it. Anyhow, despite all the poppycock, the animosity, the headlines, the impeachment without a trial, despite everything—despite even my own death—I feel surprisingly good. And my confidence grows each day that, soon enough, you will know the full truth. Oh, wait a minute. Now that I think of it, you never actually saw me die, did you? Conclusions can be so deceiving. Miss me? In his indirectness, his comments are questionable in their true application. Is Spacey talking about another season of House of Cards involving him despite the apparent end of the series without him? Or, more probably, is he speaking through Underwood in a thinly-veiled set of allusions to his accused sexual misconduct, taking a shot at the producers of the show and its perceived dip in quality in its final eight episodes? Whatever Spacey's motivations, the conflation of his character's darkness with his own seeming defense of his real-life behavior is an odd one. It's like Ted Cruz making jokes about himself being the Zodiac Killer as if to make him more likable. Who associates himself with a soulless politician who will stop at nothing in his bid for power so as to make his suspected sexual misconduct and pedophilia more palatable? Who does that? Apparently, Kevin Spacey does, and what's more, he may be partially right about people wanting him back. Back in November, Sophie Gilbert, staff writer at The Atlantic, penned an article about the notion that, for all the attention of #MeToo and Time's Up to holding men in power accountable for their actions, not only has the comeuppance for many offenders been short-lived, but a disparity in on-screen and off-screen representation for women remains. In the case of Kevin Spacey, mentioned specifically in Gilbert's piece, the weight of his legal troubles may be enough to deep-six his career as we have known it. But for others? Charlie Rose? James Franco? Louis C.K.? Matt Lauer? Despite admissions of guilt or multiple accusations of wrongdoing, these men are either working on comebacks or continue to find work. Hell, even Roman Polanski keeps directing films. As for women being creators, directors, and the like as well as garnering screen time, Gilbert notes that these opportunities declined in the year preceding her column's publication, citing statistics from Women and Hollywood, an advocacy group. And this is on top of the belief held by some that, owing to how pervasive sexual harassment and other forms of misconduct are alleged to be in Hollywood (and other industries), if the punishments were truly indicative of the crimes, so to speak, a lot more dudes would be losing their jobs. Gilbert closes her piece on a bit of a sobering note detailing the "paradox" of the #MeToo/Time's Up movements: Since the Weinstein allegations were first published, the entertainment industry has taken measurable steps to help fight instances of abuse, harassment, and predatory behavior. It’s committed time and money to helping women and men who’ve been harassed receive the emotional and legal support they need. A handful of high-level executives accused of harassment and abuse (Amazon Studios’s Roy Price, CBS’s Les Moonves) have been replaced. At the same time, though, studio heads and producers have been relatively quick to welcome back actors, directors, and writers who’ve been accused of harassment and assault, particularly when their status makes them seem irreplaceable. It’s a dual-edged message: Don’t abuse your power, but if you do, you’ll still have a career. Part of the confusion comes down to the fact that these men are seen as invaluable because the stories they tell are still understood to have disproportionate worth. When the slate of new fall TV shows is filled with father-and-son buddy-cop stories and prison-break narratives and not one but two gentle, empathetic examinations of male grief, it’s harder to imagine how women writers and directors might step up to occupy a sudden void. When television and film are fixated on helping audiences find sympathy for troubled, selfish, cruel, brilliant men, it’s easier to believe that the troubled, brilliant men in real life also deserve empathy, forgiveness, and second chances. And so the tangible achievements one year into the #MeToo movement need to be considered hand in hand with the fact that the stories being told haven’t changed much at all, and neither have the people telling them. A true reckoning with structural disparities in the entertainment industry will demand something else as well: acknowledging that women’s voices and women’s stories are not only worth believing, but also worth hearing. At every level. For Gilbert, the slow and incomplete taking to task of men who abuse their fame and power is inextricably linked to societal attitudes that place men, their feelings, and their drive for success above those of women. Moving outside the purview of Hollywood—though, noting his courtroom shenanigans, perhaps with the same performative flair—that Brett Kavanaugh could even be defended as a viable Supreme Court candidate who was being "attacked" as part of a "witch hunt" is beyond absurd. And yet, GOP senators did it with a straight face, eventually casting their votes in favor of his confirmation. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. If this pudding doesn't prove Gilbert's point, I'm not sure what does. Returning to Kevin Spacey's insistence that we're eagerly anticipating his return and my suggestion that he may be, in part, right, it's worth noting that some Internet commentators have expressed dismay that they may not be able to see him act more in the future or have advanced the thought "we haven't heard his side of the story." As Spacey will have his day in court, we undoubtedly will, or at least will have the testimony of his accuser(s) cross-examined. There would seem to be ample time for "his side" to be made public. Theoretically speaking, the truth should set him free. I admittedly think Spacey is a fine actor. His award wins and nominations, as far as I know or am concerned, were well deserved. Owing to his talent, people indeed may want him acting again. But do we need him and his ilk in Hollywood? I submit no. Perhaps I am underestimating the gifts that certain creative minds at the peak of their craft bestow upon their audiences. My supposition, however, is that individuals like Spacey are eminently replaceable. Literally. His scenes in the film All the Money in the World were re-shot with Christopher Plummer in his place, an effort that earned Plummer an Academy Award nomination. If a two-time Academy Award winner like Spacey can be replaced, why not others accused of misconduct? Are we that deficient on acting and other artistic ability? Spacey's attitude and that of critics of the #MeToo movement exist in stark contrast to comments made by actor Idris Elba on the subject. In an interview for an article in the British newspaper The Times, Elba opined that #MeToo is "only difficult if you're a man with something to hide." He received a lot of adulation on social media from prominent women in entertainment. Less so in conservative circles, but as is often heard on The Sopranos, eh, whaddya gonna do? It shouldn't take Shonda Rhimes's enthusiastic agreement, though, to convince us of the veracity of Elba's statement—woman or man, famous or not. Protests of #MeToo and Time's Up as "witch hunts" continue the trend of Donald Trump—who is certainly not above reproach given his remarks about women over the years and multiple alleged instances of sexual misconduct—and others robbing this phrase of its significance. Moreover, that Elba is the conduit for these thoughts conveys the sense that we can yet have performers of a high caliber grace our screens and maintain a clear conscience about whether the rights of women and survivors, in general, can be respected. As for women having more speaking time on screen and having more chances to direct, edit, produce, serve as lead photographer, and write, this also should not be the obstacle it presently is. If Black Panther, a movie with a predominantly black cast and black director, or Crazy Rich Asians, a movie with an all-Asian cast directed by an Asian, can do exceedingly well commercially, why can't we have more creative works in which women play central roles, behind and in front of the lens? Ocean's 8, for example, as derivative as it is, was a box-office success. If the story is a compelling one, the ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation or any similar identifying characteristic of the people involved shouldn't matter. Shouldn't we raise our expectations? Kevin Spacey's "Let Me Be Frank" video has amassed more than 9.5 million views on YouTube since first being uploaded as of this writing. I viewed it only to transcribe what he said. Others, I hope, only watched it because of a similar need to report on its contents or because, like seeing a flaming car wreck on the side of the road, they couldn't help but look away. If they viewed it because they wanted to see more of Spacey and think his talent outweighs his alleged misdeeds, however, I would consider that supremely disappointing. We don't need the Kevin Spaceys of the world back, and we'll be all the better for that realization.   Read the full article

PODCAST BROS. AU

I. Bros being bros and podcasting about nerd shit.

II. The podcast has approximately four listeners, the most dedicated among them being Mike's mom. (Mike has repeatedly told his mother not to listen because it "makes him nervous.") This number fluctuates depending on the time of day, the weather, and the amount of disparaging remarks  Dustin makes about the DC cinematic universe.

III. There is much discussion of comic books, superheroes, table top games, film adaptations, sci-fi and fantasy authors, ethics in journalism, cosplay, the Nintendo switch, what the hell is taking George R. R. Martin so long does he understand his readership will probably be dead before he publishes another book? and other topics salient to college-age nerds under the impression their dedication to their hobbies could someday pay their bills.

IV. Following in the illustrious footsteps of Matt Bessar, they live-stream their Saturday night D&D games. (Dustin: Hey guys, just wanted to give you a quick update. Mike's basement is still disgusting.") The results range from palatable mediocrity to hitherto unseen levels of chaos. The comments page would be a mess...you know, if people left comments.

V. Their first guest is an amazing, unbelievable get. El Ives has written four volumes of the Wizards of Gale series- a staggering, gorgeous epic chronicling the coming of age of a young psychically gifted warrior traversing a galactic wasteland in search of her true purpose-in the last three years. She's gone on national tours, topped sci-fi best-seller lists, and was proposed to roughly thirty-seven times at New York comic-con. Naturally, the dudes freak out, but Mike's is the most memorable melt down. He talks to himself in the mirror in a pre-interview hype session, he drops his note cards, stares for inappropriate lengths of time, and generally makes everyone ridiculously uncomfortable.

VI. After the stress of her tour, the casual atmosphere of the podcast (with the exception of the host who makes tense, terrifying eye contact with her before avoiding her gaze for the rest of the day) is a novelty El is reluctant to relinquish. This explains hanging around Hawkins ("You're welcome to stay at our place." Dustin volunteers before Mike can open his large, endlessly stupid mouth.) despite having deadlines, and interviews and a whole life in Manhattan. They take her to all their lame hang-outs and Mike dies several deaths due to sheer embarrassment (Humiliate Wheeler To Death Tour 2017!)

VII. This is the thing. The thing is this: despite the fact that they've been doing this for like, four months, and no one is even really listening Mike is still absurdly nervous on air? Lucas and Dustin are naturals and Will chimes in when he really wants to make a point (he's often drowned out by the intensity of Dustin\Lucas debates but whenever he manages to incline his chin toward the mic and deliver his statements in the softest, least antagonistic voice ever created, his points are salient and logical and even occasionally border on poignant) but it take s Mike at least fifteen minutes to get comfortable uttering opinions he has no trouble voicing off air. It's disconcerting and weird, and he's envious of the casual way his friends interact on air. They're natural, as if there aren't any disparities between their on air personalities and their real life ones. They're completely comfortable, Mike has to calm down, close his eyes, remember his pre-air inspirational speech, really center himself before he can engage in way that's even close to natural. (Even then, his voice is a touch too high, his sentences come out blunt and semi-intelligible, and his jokes feel more like passive aggressive indictments of other people's moral characters than "ha ha" funnies. These delightful and attractive flaws are only exacerbated by the prolonged presence of one of his literary heroes who, in addition to being funny, clever, sincere, brutally honest, and genuinely down for anything re: appearing on a D&D role-playing channel with four losers, has the audacity to love Ray Bradbury and Farscape as much as he does. It's the fucking rudest.)

VIII. To make matters worse, she loves his friends. Lucas is the most charming mother fucker alive (dude has a certificate!) and Mike hates him for the ease with which he makes El laugh so hard she cries. He then hates himself for hating Lucas, up until the asshole does it again and El looks happier than a ten year old who was just informed she gets to live at Disney Land. Witnessing the vast depths of El's joy is probably the purest experience Mike ever has. Said joy is a product of Lucas recounting any number of stories starring himself as the witty, amazing, bad ass of their high school tenure. So, dilemma. She and Will exchange book recommendations, karaoke Fridays at Lester's is forever altered the moment she and Dustin duet on a gentle, soul-melting rendition of Head Over Heels (they're terrible singers, but the power man, the subtle emotive, power) and Lucas, Lucas is everywhere, buying her drinks, and talking about how there are certain paragraphs in book three he wants to live in, and complimenting her buzz cut, and constantly and at all times making her laugh so long, and hard and with her entire body and it's so fucking unfair Mike can't actually-

IX. In local news, Lucas and Dustin are living in a shoebox across the river from Mike's house. Will is over so often he is repeatedly mistaken for a piece of furniture. He has his own shelf in the fridge (the middle), his own snacks in the cabinet (fig newtons are more than fruit and cake) and coconut shampoo he's neglected to take home and which is become the official property of the estate. Dustin likes to think of his abode as a sovereign nation, wants desperately to draw up a constitution and design a flag. Lucas likes to think of his casa as a Dustin-free zone, and is disappointed upon opening his door and finding reality has very much crushed his hopes and dreams. There is very little sleep, the occupants are lucky to claim several consecutive hours of unconsciousness. Instead, there are twitch marathons, Netflix binges, LOTR re-watches, and intense, lengthy debates over the merits of Zack Snyder being shot into space verses the efficiency of simply setting him ablaze.

X. Will is fond of lying on the couch, or on the window seat or on the floor next to Lucas' mattress and telling him all the ideas that his ridiculous brain ushers forth when he can't sleep. Lucas gently reminds him of the graphic novel he's kind of, sort of, a little bit working on-the thing he starts last year and politely but stubbornly refuses to show him any more pages once Lucas becomes a living, breathing reminder that Will could maybe think about possibly publishing it because It's Good. To be fair, saying the words aloud, letting them take shape in the air is almost like working on it. It's very, very close.

XI. Eventually, Mike realizes that contrary to initial reports, he's actually jealous of two people. Yes Lucas making El laugh is fairly fucking infuriating, but so is the knowledge that Lucas is trying so hard to make someone laugh, and that that someone (for reasons he is painfully, intimately familiar with) is NOT him. Pre-graduation, post-two a.m.  silent, sexuality-specific  realization that takes place in an Arby's parking lot, Mike and Lucas are the most accurate visual representation for best friendship that has ever, or will ever live. Their bond is unshakable, the stuff of Census Bearu legend, the canniest, most argumentative, absurdly affectionate, gleefully contrary pairing so robust and unrelenting it caused even the most patient members of their tight-knit Indiana State study circle to routinely throw up their hands and avert their eyes, yelling, "That's enough! Put it away!" One sunny, late-fall afternoon, they're picking up the thread of an ongoing Alien vs. Aliens debate (Lucas: I'm so glad your mom's not here to listen to her son humiliate himself like this. It would break her heart.") which has ascended to the intensity level that warrants standing very close and screaming as though they are not standing very close, when quite suddenly, they are no longer arguing. The discovery of another item in a long list of things they are hopelessly good at when they combine their talents, takes up the entire afternoon and most of the evening. The surprised, but strong, and ultimately righteous sense of joy\awe is conflated by the subdued, giddy knowledge that what has been in the past for Mike a rare and somewhat lackluster experience, and for Lucas, a little less rare but equally mediocre 'event' currently feels like the wide expanse of potentiality specific to scientific exploration. So there's that.

XII. It doesn't last too long, when he allows himself to think about it Mike abjectly refuses to liken the duration of the event to anything stupid, like a metaphor about supernovas. That would be dumb. And crass. And in poor taste. Plus, he hardly ever thinks about it ever, so there's that. Anyway, Mike dropping out of Indiana state and returning to the cocoon of his mother's basement is a completely unrelated event that never ever needs to be recounted, not even for posterity, except to say that it's unrelated to anything going on in his life at the moment. And it's okay, because he and Lucas are still ridiculously close friends and it's never even awkward except for the few occasions wherein Mike succumbs to jealously, before becoming confused about exactly whom he's jealous off. After he figures it out, he's moody and distant and the podcast gets Weird in only the way Mike can make it. El is confused, 'cause once the dude stops staring and actually says a few words to her, he's kind of cool in this completely doofy way. Lucas eventually plops on the end of Mike's bed, allows Mike to put his dirty, uncivilized sneakers all over his fairly expensive pants and makes a fumbling preamble that might as well be called Intro to Awk Con. It goes okay. Mike's just tired and Lucas co-signs with  a sigh, and a story about his sister, and they talk around it because it's still-they-can't-There's grumbling about the complete absence of something that could even be mistaken for a fan base, and Dustin's rants, and a general consensus on the awesomeness of El and they both feel better after that.

XIII. Lucas might have a supremely underdeveloped thing for Will? It's like, super embryonic, not even worth thinking about much less trying to explain out loud to Will's face while he stands there looking cute and curious and hesitant about the stupid notebook he's been doodling in for like a year, even though what little bits Lucas has seen of the novel that Will's mortified about having written  is so good he'd buy it tomorrow if Will would only deign to finish the damn thing. Yeah. So El hangs around Hawkins, after slaving away in his emotional garden wearing a wide-brim hat and too much sunscreen, Mike manages to grow the courage necessary to ask her to dine at his mom's house (yes, his mom has had El over for dinner roughly a thousand times, and yes her laugsana  with the signature sauce has become one of El's favorite dishes, but owing to the fact that Mike has spent ninety-five percent of those roughly thousands of evenings in his room melting down and wishing he was a person who could handle this shit, they don't actually count.), Will finishes his summer drawing course at the learning annex, because his phone storage is unable to contend with the sheer volume of photos he takes of and with El in the last couple of weeks\months (?) Dustin gets Instagram and instantly gains a thousand followers, and Lucas comes to the conclusion that's actually amazing at this podcast thing? Like honestly, he's very talented. And he's never taken one communication course!

XIV. El heads back to New York, promising to visit when she can. Mike admirably hides his heartbreak, and gallantly takes his frustration out on a pacman machine during their afternoon at the arcade. (Mike Wheeler: Frustrated Bisexual) A couple months later, they all receive signed copies of the next Wizards of Gale book with special messages scribbled on the inside covers. A couple of weeks before that, they post their El interview, and the site it takes Dustin two, painful, sleepless weeks to build experiences a significant amount of traffic for the first time in its uneventful little life. Everyone freaks out and facetimes El who's mid interview on the Teresa Watkins show, and that's how they attain their first television interview. (El: I'm sorry, this is so unprofessional. Do you mind?)

XV. Bros being bros, podcasting about nerd shit. (Dustin: How were you received by the dudebro cheeto dust contingent? I assume they're treating you well? They're super classy individuals.)

XVI. Oh, and Hopper is El's manager\literary agent? Okay? Okay.

Welcome Back

Hello. I had quite the experience last month; three weeks ago, I graduated from university! The final weeks following my graduation day were filled with nothing but relief, anxiety, excitement, and a culmination of uncertainties waiting to be explored. On the day of the ceremony, my friends and family joined me for this important milestone. It was a significant moment for all of us to see me walk up the stage, receive the embroidered casing for my diploma, and get hooded with the final piece to my regalia. First-generation student. First surname of my kind in the family lineage to earn a bachelor’s from a four-year institution. First woman in the family to graduate from university. Woman of color. Magna cum laude graduate. As my friends used to tell my old timid self, “Say it loud and proud.” So yes, this is my greatest achievement thus far. I’ve since then been relaxing while taking time off from job hunting and composing my cover letters. It’s been a restful intermission in my life so far, and I don’t take it for granted.

Initially, I thought I would take this resting period to begin blogging my experiences in college, what I’ve learned thus far since entering young adulthood, what I should or plan to do with my position in larger society, and everything else fueling my existential crisis. I have A LOT to say. My mind is racing with thoughts and I’m excited to break them up and delve into their different dimensions. I, however, recalled a post that one of my beloved internet celebrities posted on his Instagram. He finished writing in his 12th journal. In other words, he finished journaling 12-books worth of his own thoughts that no social media outlet can ever bare witness to. I find that awe-inspiring. When I think about how much people overshare and curate their identity in the cesspool of social media, I become less and less enthuse about others’ integrity. The amount of filters, needless perfection, curation, artificiality, and overexposure we feed into how we want people to perceive us and how we apparently live our day-to-day lives on the media is alarming. Just scratching the surface, it’s an arduous and dishonest interaction we have with ourselves, others, and the rest of the world. Obviously, I don’t want to conflate these people with those who are actually genuine (if being truly genuine is even a thing in the online world) and non-showy on social media.

There is just something about having a sense of liberation and peace of mind that journaling in your own private space provides. I can’t put my finger on it, but how intimate, how raw, how sincere. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t see myself fully quitting blogging. Taking a dual approach, though, I’m considering the possibility of starting up a journal and being fully (but humanly) committed to it. There are just so many things I want to say, and I want to be openly and boldly honest with myself as I go about it. I want to have a physical archive that I can easily access right in the palms of my hands. And perhaps one day, I want to use the journal to express and share my innermost, intimate words with those dearest to me. I don’t have an empty, quality journal at the moment. But I don’t mind starting one of my first entries on here. As long as I know I’m true to myself. So one of the things I’ve learned in this journey we call life is that I am not a one-dimensional, static character following some simple linear path. I am multifaceted. More specifically, it’s surreal to me to learn how many of my hobbies and interests make odd couples or juxtapose each other. And that’s what I love about myself; I love the unusual or atypical combination of hobbies and interests that make me who I am. That’s what makes me multifaceted. So here it is:

I’m Joanne. I am multifaceted. I like doodling, drawing, sketching, and watercolor painting. Watercolor painting is the hardest paint medium I’ve used, but I appreciate the small and certain progress when I see it. l like baking and making sweet treats. I’ve recently made cookies ‘n cream bars and homemade marshmallow matcha cookies. I’m considering dedicating a separate journal to all the cooking and baking recipes I’ve mastered. I like writing poetry. This hobby is new for me and I just finished my first serious poem back in February. I’m obviously not good at it and I sometimes feel discouraged when I jump right into the writing process. About a month or two ago, though, I had the honor of attending a private lunch and poetry reading by an award-winning Southeast Asian-American poet. She was incredibly inspiring, and she definitely boosted my poetry game as a Southeast Asian-American myself. In my future journal, I plan to incorporate my own poems. I like using psychological and sociological concepts to help inform my everyday life, politics, and just larger society. And I just like discussing them in fruitful conversations. Although it’s pretty difficult for me to get a jumpstart in reading a psychological or sociological academic journal, once I get started, I become pretty engrossed in the author’s argument, theories, and findings. I archive some summaries of journals in a separate file folder because I think they’re that valuable and fascinating. I like feminism. I hold strong feminist beliefs but I don’t slap myself with the title. Feminist has become such a buzzword. I think holding that title should only be honored to those who are active in the sociopolitical climate, who speak up against misogyny and patriarchy on a regular basis, and who make strides in restructuring the system that produces and maintains institutional inequality. Calling yourself a feminist because you simply “believe in gender equality” just to then go right on about your merry day? Lazy. I like listening to underground and alternative hip hop. A few of my favorite groups that I’ve been listening to since middle school include Hieroglyphics, A Tribe Called Quest, and Pharcyde. Just a few years back, I read a few books about the origin of hip hop and its prominent role in Black youth’s sociopolitical commentary, political activism, and Afrocentrism. Since then, my appreciation for (non-)mainstream hip hop has grown. But don’t get me wrong; I think mainstream artists like Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole are spitting great, woke material. I also recommend giving T.I.’s “Warzone” song a good listen. Along with hip hop, I like listening to Japanese hip hop instrumental beats. Old favorites include Nujabes, DJ Okawari, and I can’t forget my beloved, TOKiMONSTA, who is Korean American. Low-key artists that I like listening to when I want some simple, feel-good electric beats are COR!S, AZUpubschool, and their musical collaboration, KiWi. I like photography. Although I’m still a novice, I finished a social documentary class project last month on the communal and environmental degradation of my city’s parks. Artist proposal and statement, window matted photographs cut and framed by hand, the whole shebang. Social documentary photography is one of my favorite types of photography; I just really appreciate the impact of different social commentaries. Honorable shoutout to Barbara Kruger for revitalizing the conceptual art scene and calling out capitalism, consumerism, and racial and gender stereotypes in her work. I like anything that is deemed cute. Extra brownie points if it’s also something I can use. I own a cat pencil pouch that I had used during my final year in school, I sleep in a pink blanket that is printed with ponies, and I just have a large Darth Vader Tsum Tsum sitting on my bed. Speaking of Darth, I like Star Wars and any action-packed story with a good plot. As a kid, I actually used to be pretty well-versed about the Marvel and DC world. Boys at school used to test my knowledge and were always surprised at how much I knew. I drastically strayed away from comic book movies and shows over the years, though. I like anime. The anime world has serious problems, though (e.g., pedophilia, hypersexualization of young female characters, etc.), and I fully acknowledge that. Otherwise, I’d like to say I don’t have a preference but I know I gravitate towards shonen and seinen anime. Any show or manga that incorporates some combination of comedy, dark fantasy, science fiction, action, relationships, mystery, and politics makes for a promising watch. Light-hearted, easy-to-watch shows like Shirokuma Cafe are hard to pass up, though.

I have some other hobbies and interests that I could talk about, but I think this thorough and exhausting entry does solid justice. I’m Joanne. I am multifaceted.