three masks

[materialist-scumbag]

materialist-scumbag

THE WHOLE OZ MACHINE — every adaptation is downstream of a shoe

The silver shoes are silver in the book. Dorothy kills the Witch of the East by dropping a house on her, inherits the shoes off the dead woman's feet, and they turn out to be the thing that could've sent her home the entire time — Glinda tells her this at the very end, after the whole quest, which is the actual joke of the 1900 book and the part everyone forgets because the shoes aren't silver anymore. They're ruby. They're ruby because in 1938 a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer screenwriter named Noel Langley looked at the property and realized silver shoes photograph as nothing — gray on gray — and the entire reason to make this picture was that MGM had bet the most money it had ever bet on a single film on three-strip Technicolor, and you do not spend that to put gray footwear in the center of the frame. So the shoes became ruby. A solved color problem. And then MGM owned the ruby slipper as an object that does not appear in the source text, which means the single most recognizable prop in American cinema is the one element of the Oz mythos that was never public domain, and that fact is going to organize the next ninety years.

Start at the beginning, because the beginning is already a rights problem.

Baum and his illustrator W.W. Denslow co-held the copyright on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz — jointly, fifty-fifty, which is itself a tell about how the book got made. The color plates were the expensive part. George M. Hill, the publisher, didn't want to eat the cost of color reproduction and only agreed to publish at all once the manager of the Chicago Grand Opera House committed to staging a musical version as a publicity vehicle. So the book is greenlit on the strength of a stage adaptation that doesn't exist yet, to sell a print run nobody's sure of, with the author and the artist splitting the rights because the artist's contribution is half of why the thing costs what it costs. The 1902 stage musical opens, runs 293 nights on Broadway, tours until 1911, and reworks the book into a "musical extravaganza" for adults, with topical gags about Rockefeller supplying the oil for the Tin Woodman. The adaptation is already drifting from the text in 1902. The text is barely two years old.

Baum dies in 1919. The copyright keeps running, because copyright then is a 28-year term renewable once, and the book published in 1900 is good through — do the arithmetic the way the studios did — 1956.

Hold that year.

Now MGM. By 1938 Disney has had Snow White and every studio wants a fairy-tale feature, and Louis B. Mayer's people go to acquire Wizard and find the rights have already moved — Samuel Goldwyn had them, then they land at MGM — and the picture gets made for $2,777,000, which is 65% over the original budget and the most expensive thing the studio has ever produced. Four directors cycle through it. The Emerald City you remember Dorothy first seeing is a crayon drawing with pinholes punched in the towers and lights flickering behind it. And on first release the film loses money. It earns $3,017,000 against that budget, which sounds like a profit until you add prints and advertising, and then it's a loss of $1,145,000. The Wizard of Oz, the 1939 one, the one that is now shorthand for "beloved American film," did not turn a profit on its initial run and did not turn one on the 1949 re-release closing the gap either — it limps to black years late.

What makes it permanent is television. CBS pays MGM $225,000 a broadcast and airs it November 3, 1956, and it becomes an annual ritual, the thing a whole pre-VCR generation sees once a year on a fixed date, and that ritual is what installs the movie, rather than the book, as the canonical Oz. The ruby slippers, the specific shade of green, Margaret Hamilton's skin, the framing device where the Kansas farmhands turn up as the Scarecrow and the Lion and the Tin Man (also not in the book) — this is the version that hardens into the culture, and it becomes that in 1956.

1956 is the year the book enters the public domain.

So the timing runs exactly backwards from how you'd assume. The text goes free at the precise moment the copyrighted film adaptation becomes the dominant cultural object. Anyone can now print Baum — and they do, editions proliferate the moment the term lapses — but nobody can touch the slippers, the green, the specific faces, because those are MGM's, invented for the film, never in the text that just went free. The public domain opens on the museum and keeps the gift shop locked.

Watch what that does to everyone downstream.

Walt Disney wanted Oz back in the Snow White era, got told MGM had the first book, and did the obvious flanking move: he bought the rights to the OTHER Oz books. There are fourteen Baum wrote and dozens more after — Reilly & Lee kept publishing official sequels by other "Royal Historians of Oz" for decades, the so-called Famous Forty. Disney bought eleven of them in 1954 for a Disneyland TV thing called The Rainbow Road to Oz that never got made, and then sat on those rights for thirty years. The rights are an asset depreciating toward a cliff: the books' copyrights are themselves going to start expiring, at which point Disney's exclusive option becomes worthless because the material is free to all.

Which is the actual reason Return to Oz exists. 1985. Walter Murch — the sound and picture editor off Apocalypse Now and the Godfather films, who had never directed — pitches Disney an Oz movie, not knowing Disney already holds the book rights, and Disney greenlights largely because the option is about to lapse and it's now or never. Murch draws from the second and third books, Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, makes something strange and frightening — Dorothy committed to a sanitarium for electroshock, a princess with a cabinet of interchangeable heads — and it costs $28 million and grosses eleven and dies. But here is the structural part. Disney needed no permission from MGM for any of it, because by 1985 the books were public domain and the sequel books were Disney's own — except the ruby slippers. Murch wanted the slippers in. The books say silver. So Disney, making a film MGM had zero involvement in, off material MGM never owned, had to write MGM a large check for the one object that was invented to solve a 1938 Technicolor problem. The shoe is still charging rent half a century later.

And then 1995, and the move that eats everything.

Gregory Maguire writes Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, a revisionist novel that takes Baum's public-domain world — free to use, no permission needed, that's the whole point of 1956 — and reads it from the villain's side. Within a week of publication Maguire's getting film offers. The rights get optioned by Demi Moore's production company with Universal attached, and Universal spends about three years and a lot of money developing a screenplay that goes nowhere. The thing is conceived, from day one, as a movie. The book is film bait.

The musical is an accident wedged into the corpse of the dead film deal. Stephen Schwartz reads the novel on vacation, wants it as a stage show, and discovers Maguire has already handed the film rights to Universal — so Schwartz has to make what he literally called an "impassioned plea" to the Universal producer, Marc Platt, to carve out a stage license from underneath the development deal that's already failed to produce a film. The 2003 Broadway musical — the cultural juggernaut, the show that ran twenty years and grossed past a billion — exists as a derivative sublicense Schwartz had to beg loose from a movie that didn't get made. The stage version is the side door.

And then the side door becomes the front door. The musical is so enormous for so long that Universal — which had the film rights the entire time, sitting right there, the original 1990s option that the stage show was carved out of — finally makes the movie it always wanted. Announced 2012. Stalled, delayed, COVID, a director swap from Stephen Daldry to Jon M. Chu. And then, because the show is too long and too beloved to cut, they split it: Wicked in 2024, Wicked: For Good in 2025, the two acts of the stage musical as two films, combined production cost around $300 million, combined marketing around $250 million. The first one grosses about $759 million and becomes the highest-grossing film adaptation of a Broadway show ever made; the second does another half-billion-plus.

So trace the actual chain of title on a billion-dollar film franchise. It's an adaptation (Chu's films) of an adaptation (the 2003 musical) of an adaptation (Maguire's 1995 novel) of a book that went public domain in 1956 — and the only reason there's a stage musical in that chain at all is that the novel's film rights were locked up first and the show had to be pried out as a sublicense. The movie everyone thinks of as "the Wicked movie" is the original plan. The musical that made the movie possible was the detour. Universal spent twenty-five years not making the film it owned, and the thing it did instead got so big it forced the film.

And running underneath all of it, the slippers. Wicked is set in Baum's free-to-use Oz, but the second film has to stage Dorothy's arrival, the bucket, the melting, the journey home — the plot of the 1939 movie that the whole musical is structured around as its negative space — and the visual grammar everyone's measuring it against, including the shoes, is MGM's, now Warner Bros.', invented to photograph in three-strip Technicolor. The most expensive Oz production in history is built in the gap between a book anyone can use and a film nobody can.

The book has been free for seventy years. You still can't have the shoes. Same as it ever was.

[materialist-scumbag]

French flag turns 232; red still on it (June 2026)

Like, the thing everybody "knows" about the tricolore (liberty, equality, fraternity, one color each, the Revolution distilled into fabric) is a story invented after the fact to explain an accident of municipal livery, and the actual answer to "why is there red on the French flag" starts about four hundred years before the Revolution, with the city of Paris having a corporate identity the way a guild has a corporate identity.

Red and blue were the colors of Paris. Specifically of the Parisian merchant oligarchy, the prévôt des marchands and the échevins, the water-merchants' guild that ran the city the way the Hanseatic patriciates ran their cities, because Paris was a river port before it was anything else and the men who controlled the Seine traffic controlled the town. Étienne Marcel, the cloth merchant who led the Parisian uprising of 1358, put his partisans in red-and-blue hoods. (Marcel, by the way, got his skull caved in at a city gate by his own side, which is the kind of thing that keeps happening to Parisian municipal revolutionaries, file that away.) The colors stuck as civic heraldry the way these things stick, on the barges, on the militia, on the livery of the Hôtel de Ville, for the next four centuries, completely inert, meaning nothing except "property of the city of Paris."

White, meanwhile, was the Bourbon color, the royal color, the color of the king's own cockade and the navy's ensign. So you've got two color systems sitting next to each other in 1789: the city's red-and-blue and the king's white, and neither one means anything ideological yet. They're ownership marks. Brands, basically, in the cattle sense.

Then July 1789. The Bastille comes down, the Paris militia, about to become the National Guard, needs a cockade, and the militia is a municipal institution, so it takes the municipal colors. Red and blue. And here's the part the schoolbook version garbles: Lafayette (or Bailly, the accounts fight about credit the way accounts always fight about credit) inserts the royal white between the red and the blue, which the schoolbook misreads as revolutionary synthesis and which works on the ground as a coalition signal. The white in the middle says: the city has captured the king, or the king has blessed the city, depending on which paper you read, the monarchy held inside the grip of the Paris commune. Louis XVI wears the thing at the Hôtel de Ville on July 17 and the crowd reads it correctly: the brand of Paris stamped on the body of the king.

So red is on the French flag because the water-merchants of a medieval river port used it on their barge pennants. That's the answer. Everything else is decoration applied later. But the decoration is where it gets good, because red was about to have an extremely weird eighteen months.

Because here's the thing. At the exact moment red enters the national cockade as one-third of revolutionary respectability, it has a second job, and the second job is the opposite of the first. Under the Ancien Régime and then formally under the loi martiale of October 1789, a plain red flag was the signal of martial law. You flew the red flag from the Hôtel de Ville and it meant: crowds must disperse, after this point the troops may fire. Red was the color of state violence against the Parisian crowd. The riot-suppression flag. Everyone in the city knew this the way you know what a siren means.

July 17, 1791. Champ de Mars. A crowd gathers to sign a republican petition after the king's flight to Varennes; Bailly, same Bailly, has the red flag run up; Lafayette, same Lafayette, brings the National Guard; the Guard fires into the crowd; somewhere between a dozen and fifty dead, nobody counted the poor carefully in 1791 or since. And in the weeks after, the radical clubs perform one of the great semiotic heists in political history: they take the red flag, the government's own kill-authorization signal, still wet, so to speak, and adopt it as theirs. The Cordeliers carry red flags reading "martial law of the sovereign people against the rebellion of the executive power." You shot us under this flag; fine, the flag is ours now, and it authorizes our violence against you. The red flag of socialism, the one that ends up over the Winter Palace and on about forty national flags and every union hall on earth, is the French crowd-control flag worn inside out. (Temporal rhyme, with its break: the parallel everyone reaches for is early Christians adopting the cross, the execution device as the brand, but the cross took three centuries to flip and the red flag took about six weeks, because print existed and Rome's communications ran at the speed of a donkey. The mechanism is the same; the clock speed is the dye works.)

And the dye works are the literal other half of why red could even be a mass political color in 1789, because somebody has to actually produce red cloth at scale, and the somebody is the madder industry. Garance (Rubia tinctorum, a scraggly root crop) was what dyed European red that wasn't cochineal (cochineal being a Spanish-monopoly insect scraped off Mexican cactus at colonial gunpoint, too expensive for mass anything). France spent the eighteenth century in a state-directed industrial-espionage campaign to crack "Turkey red," the colorfast madder process the Ottomans had and Europe didn't: Greek and Armenian dyers imported to Rouen and Darnétal on royal subsidy, the trade secrets pried loose workshop by workshop. By the Revolution, the Vaucluse and Alsace are carpeted in madder, and red cloth is something a municipal militia can actually afford to wear. The cockade is downstream of the root.

And then the loop closes in the dumbest possible way. In 1829 the July-Monarchy-to-be puts the army in garance-red trousers, explicitly, partly, as agricultural protectionism for the madder growers of the Vaucluse, who by mid-century are supplying a guaranteed state market. The deputy who championed it represented Avignon. The red on the soldier is a farm subsidy. Then in 1868-69 Graebe and Liebermann synthesize alizarin from coal tar, BASF and Perkin race to the patent office (they file one day apart, look it up, it's delicious), and within fifteen years German synthetic alizarin has annihilated the French madder belt; the Vaucluse rips out the root and plants table grapes. So by 1900 the French army's red trousers, originally a subsidy to French farmers, are dyed with German chemicals, money flowing to the cartel of the country they're the uniform for fighting. And when reformers try to kill the pantalon rouge before 1914 (there were trials, gray-green and "reseda" prototypes, the works) the objection that wins is Étienne the former war minister's "le pantalon rouge, c'est la France!" Red has fully eaten its own history: a barge pennant, then a riot signal, then a stolen riot signal, then a farm program, and now it's "France" itself, an essence, the one thing that can't be touched, and it walks into the machine guns at Charleroi in August 1914 visible at two kilometers. They got the bleu horizon uniforms out by 1915, after the madder of it all had been paid for in the usual currency. The color outlived every single material reason it was there, which is the normal life cycle of a symbol; the machinery dies and the paint job becomes sacred. Same as it ever was.

The water at the edge of this is shallow for a long time. You walk in past your knees, past your waist, the tricolore somewhere behind you on its pole, and when the surface closes over your head you find you are not sinking, you are emerging, the sand above you and the sky below, and you have been walking out of the water all along, into a country where everything red is a consequence.

I should tell you what is on the other side of the water. On the other side of the water there is a column of men in red trousers walking into the twentieth century, and they do not stop walking, because the column is very long; it begins at a barge on the Seine in the fourteenth century and it has not ended yet. I have tried to count them. You cannot count them. The medieval Church had a procedure for this, the Bollandists, who spent four hundred years cataloguing every saint, real and invented, arranging the martyrs by feast day like a filing system for blood, and even they never attempted a hagiography of the color red, because red is the one martyr that never dies; it just changes uniform.

Consider what was begotten. The red flag goes up over the Hôtel de Ville in 1791 to authorize a massacre, and within weeks the massacred have it, and in 1832 it's on the barricades Hugo will launder into a musical your aunt has seen four times, and in February 1848 a crowd brings it to the new provisional government and demands it replace the tricolore entirely, and Lamartine, a poet, an actual poet, this is the last moment in European history when a lyric poet stands between a mob and a flag and wins, talks them out of it on the steps, the red flag has only ever gone around the Champ de Mars dragged through the people's blood, he says, while the tricolore has gone around the world. He was lying, in the way poets lie, which is by being accurate. The crowd kept the tricolore. The red went underground, where colors go to become serious. It came up again in 1871 over the Commune, and the men of Versailles shot perhaps twenty thousand people in a week partly to put it back down, and Marx wrote his pamphlet, and a Russian who read the pamphlet put the red over one-sixth of the Earth's land surface, and for seventy years two-fifths of the human species woke up under a color that exists in their sky because the water-merchants of medieval Paris needed to mark their barges. There is a midrash (I am not going to tell you which tractate, partly because you wouldn't check and partly because I may be inventing it) in which the Holy One, blessed be He, shows Adam every generation of his descendants in a single bolt of dyed cloth, and Adam asks why the cloth is red, and receives no answer, and this is considered a complete teaching.

And the trousers. I keep returning to the trousers. Everything modernity believes about itself, that it is rational, that it audits its inheritances, that it would never die for a paint job, was tested at one specific price point in August 1914, when France sent its young men into German machine-gun arcs wearing trousers the color of an agricultural subsidy for an industry that had been dead for forty years, dyed with chemicals purchased from the enemy, defended in the Chamber of Deputies with the argument that the trousers were France. Twenty-seven thousand French soldiers died on the single day of August 22nd. The trousers were visible at two thousand meters. A color that began as a logo had become a soul, and souls, unlike logos, are things men are required to die inside of. (The British had figured this out in time, which is the most British thing imaginable: the empire of shopkeepers did the cost-benefit analysis on glory and went khaki, the color of dust, the color of nothing, and lived.) Afterward the red moved indoors, as survivors do. It became the red of the poppy, which is to say it became memory, which is what a color does when it can no longer be worn: it stops being on the body and starts being about the body.

And then the strangest issue of the whole bloodline, the runt that inherited the estate: somewhere in the last twenty years the red flag stopped flying over anything and started flying over people. He doesn't ask questions on the first date: red flag. She's still friends with her ex, he says "females," his favorite book is by a man you've decided things about: red flag, red flag, red flag. Understand what this idiom actually is. It is the loi martiale of 1789, miniaturized and privatized, the red flag was always the signal that the authorities had assessed the crowd and pre-authorized fire, and that is exactly what it still means, except the Hôtel de Ville is now a group chat and the National Guard is you. The whole apparatus survives intact: the assessment, the warning, the license to treat a person as a hazard rather than a person, the relief of never having to do the slow work of finding out. A civilization that no longer believes in armies or revolutions or God has kept, of the entire vocabulary of red, precisely one term, and it is the one for deciding in advance who may be fired upon. We tell ourselves this is wisdom. It is triage, which is what wisdom becomes when there are eight billion people and you are tired. (I am not against it. I have run up the red flag over men at dinner parties for less than a wrong opinion about Kafka; I am running it up over an entire culture right now, in this paragraph, and you are nodding along, which means you have run it up over the people who wouldn't.) The crowd on the Champ de Mars at least got to see the flag before the shooting started.

But the man at the bottom of the water, and you are at the bottom of the water now, or the top, the directions stopped cooperating when you went under, will tell you the part the historians leave out, which is that none of this was ever about red at all. Red was simply first. It is the first color the human eye resolves after black and white; every language on Earth that has three color words has red as the third; the oldest deliberate pigment we have found is ochre rubbed into a shell in Blombos Cave a hundred thousand years before anyone needed a flag, and ochre is red because blood is red, and blood is red because of one iron atom sitting in a porphyrin ring like a king in a hedge maze, and the iron is there because a star died. That is the full supply chain. The water-merchants, the cockade, the massacre on the Champ de Mars, the Commune, the trousers, the poppy: all of it downstream of stellar nucleosynthesis, a subsidy program older than the Sun. The flag did not choose red. The flag was chosen, the way a riverbed is chosen by water.

When you come up out of the water, and you do come up, walking the wrong way, which is the right way now, the flag is still there on its pole, and the red third of it is moving in the wind, and if you stand close enough you can hear it. It does not sound like history. It sounds like cloth.

[deadgenerations]

literally everyone on earth believes in social policing. we are social animals. everyone believes that there are valid reasons to socially exclude people from certain social spaces. Its just completely embarrassing to call that sort of thing "cop thinking" or pretend you don't believe in it. you do! you just quibble about where the lines are and how to decide who needs to be on the outs. so let's be honest about the fact that that is what we are arguing over - not whether or not people should be socially excluded, but who, for what, and how!

[bambamramfan]

"literately everyone on earth believes in distributing medicine for the benefit of the social whole. everyone believes there are valid reasons someone might not get medicine, like preventing antibiotic resistance. Its just completely embarrassing to call that sort of thing "cop thinking" when the Committee bans someone from receiving medical treatment, or to pretend you don't believe in it. you do! you just quibble about who gets it and who needs to be on the outs. so let's be honest about the fact that that is what we are arguing over - not whether or not people should be be denied medicine, but who, for what, and how!"

So no, there are matters of proportion here and you are trying to elide them by only talking in verbal absolutes. There is a big difference between "everyone finds this person unable to communicate with anyone present, or people have been repeatedly phystically attacked by them" versus "my subgroup of the community said the new rule is that no one who agrees with Bad Political Opinions is allowed around. so please kick out (person who was around well before out) or you're just hypocritically denying that social police exist.

No, you're being a cop, and even if you're right you don't get to run from being a cop. If you are ever demanding someone else DO SOMETHING to punish another person, you are a cop.

you say "quibble" i say shunning is morally cruel, tomato tomahto.

Now, to have a wider vision here, there are DIFFERENT social groups which have DIFFERENT RULES.

This is my favorite article on the internet, and you should read it.

Norms of Membership for Voluntary Groups

Epistemic Status: Idea Generation One feature of the internet that we haven’t fully adapted to yet is that it’s trivial to create voluntary

For this discussion, let's look particularly at these two:

Civic/Public Norms

Roughly everybody is welcome to join, and free to do as they like in the space, so long as they obey a fairly minimalist set of ground rules & behavioral expectations that apply to everyone.

We expect it to be easy for most people to follow the ground rules; you have to be deviant (really unusually antisocial) to do something egregious enough to get you kicked out or penalized.

If you dislike someone’s behavior but it isn’t against the ground rules, you can grumble a bit about it, but you’re expected to tolerate it. You’ll have to admit things like “well, he has a right to do that.”

Penalties are expected to be predictable, enforced the same way towards all people, and “impartial” (not based on personal relationships). If penalties are enforced unfairly, you’re not expected to tolerate it — you can question why you’re being penalized, and kick up a public stink, and it’s even praiseworthy to do so.

Examples: “rule of law”, public parks and libraries, stores and coffeeshops open to the public, town hall meetings

Guest Norms

The host can invite, or not invite, anyone she chooses, based on her preference.  She doesn’t have to justify her preferences to anyone.  Nobody is entitled to an invitation, and it’s very rude to complain about not being invited.

Guests can also choose to attend or not attend, based on their preferences, and they don’t have to justify their preferences to anyone either; it’s rude to complain or ask for justification when someone declines an invitation.

Personal relationships and subjective feelings, in particular, are totally legitimate reasons to include or exclude someone.

The atmosphere within the group is expected to be pleasant for everyone.  If you don’t want to be asked to leave, you shouldn’t do things that will predictably bother people.

Hosts are expected to be kind and generous to guests; guests are expected to be kind and generous to the host and each other; the host is responsible for enforcing boundaries.

Criticizing other people at the gathering itself is taboo. You’re expected to do your critical/judgmental pruning outside the gathering, by deciding whom you will invite or whether you’ll attend.

We don’t expect that everyone will be invited to be a guest at every gathering, or that everyone will attend everything they’re invited to. It can be prestigious to be invited to some gatherings, and embarrassing to be asked to leave or passed over when you expected an invitation, but it’s normal to just not be invited to some things.

Examples: private parties, invitation-only events, consent ethics for sex

-----

What we can see is fairly clearly going on in the OP quote, and that type of 2010's cultural discourse writ large, is an effort to blur the boundaries between "civic norms" and "guest norms." Our society welcomes EVERYONE (civic), but if you make certain people feel uncomfortable in an unwritten way, we won't hesitate to kick you out (guest.)

[deadgenerations]

political violence is another example of shit people pretend they believe is completely unacceptable. this one is especially embarrassing when like, Joe American says it. sir you are from political violence nation, so either you both believe that your country shouldn't exist and that slavery shouldn't have ended, or you don't believe political violence is never justified.

[isaacsapphire]

I think people don’t tend to see a civil war that occurred on a governmental level rather than a “people killing their neighbors” level as political violence.

The Revolutionary War… look, the Founding Fathers put a lot of effort into framing their rebellion as a legitimate act by other established states, and the violence of the Revolutionary War was mostly carried out on the level of armies clashing. Again, on a state level rather than too much people being violent to their neighbors. Like, the American side for a fair amount of the conflict was an army and local militias; organized and government authorized and funded groups of trained and armed men. (Granted that is partly because the British didn’t want to start shit with urban mobs and so deescalated in urban areas in the leadup to the conflict.)

When people speak of “political violence” rather than “rebellion” I think they generally mean interpersonal violence carried out in a fairly disorganized way by independent actors rather than organized agents of the state.

[bambamramfan]

I actually agree with your general point, but I cannot resist quoting KM here: https://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/162844832678/you-want-to-protect-free-speech-and-privacy/amp

kontextmaschine

During the American Revolution, printer James Rivington’s Gazette was something of a proto-NY Times: Manhattan-based, but with a broad circulation and the most international coverage in the colonies. It was also the biggest newspaper not to tilt to the rebels, first offering a platform to all factions and then increasingly Loyalist.

This was not universally well-received. Isaac Sears, the privateer-trader who organized the merchants of New York into the Sons of Liberty, pushing back against British regulation which cut into their profits and backed by the threat of mob violence, described Rivington thus:

He would appear as a leading man amongst us, without perceiving that he is enlisted under a party as a tool of the lowest order; a political cracker, sent abroad to alarm and terrify, sure to do mischief to the cause he means to support, and generally finishing his career in an explosion that often bespatters his friends.

I have known a Statute of Lunacy taken out, upon a degree of conduct less exceptionable than this I have described: If the relations of our politician, should find his estate wasted by means of his patriotism, and they choose to improve upon this hint, I assure them, it is heartily at their service.

They did not. (A “Statute of Lunacy” was the period version of involuntary psychiatric commitment)

The Sons of Liberty arranged a series of hanging-in-effigies of Rivington, complete with a poem by revolutionary poet Philip Freneau framed as a satisfying confession before the gallows, and he was arrested by the New York Provincial Congress.

This not availing, an angry mob besieged Rivington and his family, driving them to the safety of a British warship, sacked his office and press, and seized his lead type to be melted down and cast into bullets.

They then faced and wheeled to the left, and marched out of town to the tune of Yankee Doodle. A vast concourse of people assembled at the Coffee House, on their leaving the ground, and gave them three very hearty cheers.

[captainjonnitkessler]

I really can't get behind the sudden anti-data center push because every single thing people claim about data centers - they pollute the earth! They use too much energy! They cause warming! The communities don't want them there! They're bulldozing our beautiful natural spaces for them! They're only a way for rich tech bros to line their pockets at our expense! - are all identical things I've heard from people protesting solar fields, to the point where people online cheer and celebrate when they hear news of people being injured at the solar field I work at.

My faith in the average American to seek out and accurately interpret the cost-benefit analyses of any major development instead of just hopping on whatever hatred bandwagon is popular at the time is less than zero. The insane misinformation I've seen about solar fields and data centers alike - just absolutely, blatantly untrue claims that are ridiculous on the face - is wild. I don't trust any of you all to know what the fuck you're talking about tbh

[bambamramfan]

sympathy for your epistemological condition (and of course, for your poor coworker.) I get where you are coming from as a matter of attitude.

but rather than swing from the anti-AI left to "I can't trust the anties, so whatever they say is wrong" I encourage you to find out the facts for yourself.

I generated a very long, researched post here https://everythinganaiknows.blogspot.com/2026/03/pellegrin-foiskola-ai-is-using-lot-of.html, and I wrote a quippier one here https://bambamramfan.tumblr.com/post/819455501814431744/someone-asked-why-in-the-early-days-of-my-ai.

In short, current data centers being built pay below-rates for electricity and water due to *complicated-but-politics* and as they crank up, they are rapidly increasing the price of those necessities for the people who live there. (think the california water crisis, but without the almonds.)

So no they aren't going to ruin the global environment, but they are genuinely making people worse off who live around them -- and for not a whole lot of benefit?

Like ban 4k streaming, ban crypto, and ban further AI research beyond Mythos-level, and I don't think we lose much but data center demand almost disappears.

[materialist-scumbag]

Goodnight Moon

Jon and Mac consider: the plight of the picture book author, wildlife trafficking, tangenting, disappearing socks, death, life, and mush

materialist-scumbag

Okay so the Klassen/Barnett Goodnight Moon piece is making the rounds, and it's a lovely piece of close looking, the tangenting and the vocative comma and the trap door of "goodnight nobody," all of it correct. But there's a moment in the framing where Barnett does the thing that picture-book people always do, which is reach for the warm explanation when the cold one is sitting right there. He asks why sales exploded in the seventies and answers: the kids who heard it in 1947 grew up and bought it for their own kids, and those kids grew up and bought it for theirs, the great sentimental relay race of American childhood. Nobody knows exactly, he says, but I have a theory.

The timing actually checks out, which is the trap. A kid read Goodnight Moon at two or three in 1947 is born around 1944, becomes a parent around 1970, and there's your seventies spike, right on schedule. It's worse than that for the theory: the relay race runs on time and still can't be the engine. The reason is supply.

Because how many kids actually heard Goodnight Moon in 1947? Six thousand copies sold that first year, and then sales fell, and by 1953 the book was moving fifteen hundred copies a year and the publisher was eyeing the cull list. That's the whole circulating population during the years the supposed rediscoverers were children: a few thousand copies a year, in a country, blacklisted by the dominant buyer. The cohort that could grow up and nostalgically seek out the book they remembered is, by the book's own sales figures, tiny. You cannot have a mass rediscovery of a book that was nearly out of print while the rediscoverers were being born. The echo is real, it just can't carry forty-eight million units, because the thing it's echoing barely existed yet.

So once you go looking at who was buying children's books in this country and through what channel, it stops being a mystery about the staying power of great art and becomes a fairly boring story about distribution.

The fact Barnett actually mentions and then walks past: the New York Public Library did not own a copy of Goodnight Moon until 1972. Twenty-five years. He treats it as a sad footnote, a posthumous snub. It's the thing that set the sales.

Okay so, what a library was, commercially, in 1947. It was the buyer. Not a buyer, THE buyer. Before the postwar paperback build-out and the mall bookstore, the trade in children's hardcovers ran through institutional purchasers, and institutional purchasers ran through a very small number of tastemaking librarians, and the most powerful single node in that entire network was the children's department of the New York Public Library, which for decades had been built and run and personally embodied by a woman named Anne Carroll Moore.

Moore is a genuinely large figure and the easy version of her is wrong. She invented, more or less, the idea that children should be allowed into libraries at all (they were frequently barred until fourteen), that they should be allowed to check books out, that there should be a person whose whole job was the children's room. She chaired the thing at the American Library Association that became the body that hands out the Caldecott and the Newbery. When she gave lectures to New York publishers in 1918 telling them to make books that entertained children instead of browbeating them, the publishers reorganized around her.

So when I say she was the buyer I'm undercounting. She was the buyer, the critic, the credentialing body, and the taste itself, all in one retired-but-not-really-retired woman who kept running the department meetings after her own successor took the title.

And she thought Goodnight Moon was garbage. "An unbearably sentimental piece of work," per the internal review. She came out of the fairy-and-fancy tradition, Beatrix Potter, the velveteen-rabbit vision of childhood-as-enchantment, and Brown came out of Bank Street and the Here-and-Now school, the clanging-garbage-truck, name-the-real-objects-in-the-real-room program, and Moore experienced the second as an attack on the first, which it sort of was. So she didn't stock it. And because she didn't stock it, the libraries that took their cues from NYPL didn't stock it, and because they didn't stock it, the dominant purchasing channel for the dominant format simply closed to the book.

Watch what that does to the numbers. Six thousand copies the first year, 1947. By 1953 it's down to fifteen hundred a year and the publisher is thinking about killing it. This is a book that would go on to sell, conservatively, forty-eight million copies, and in year six it is on the cull list because one woman in one building decided it was tacky.

And the close-reading crowd would love this if they followed it one step further: the squeamishness Moore represented had already gotten INTO the book before publication, surgically. Goodnight Moon's editor at Harper was Ursula Nordstrom, who had personally watched Moore try to strangle Stuart Little two years earlier, and who knew exactly what the librarians flinched at. So Nordstrom went through Hurd's art pre-emptively defusing it.

The cow jumping over the moon was drawn, originally, with an udder, the way a cow has an udder, and Nordstrom had Hurd reduce it to what Brown's biographer called an anatomical blur, because a cow's underside was the kind of bodily fact that made the Important Ladies wince. There was a mouse in an early study sitting right on the bunny's bed, and Nordstrom had it moved off, because a mouse on the bed read as vermin, as dirt, as the wrong kind of real.

The book you're close-reading for its uncanny dream logic was also, at the level of the marks on the page, edited by anticipated librarian disapproval. The udder is censored. What Klassen clocks as Hurd "messing with us" is partly Hurd being managed around a buyer who wasn't going to buy it anyway.

It didn't work, obviously. Defanging the udder didn't move Moore an inch; she killed it anyway. Brown didn't live to see any of the sequel. She died in 1952, age forty-two, in a hospital in France, recovering from surgery for an ovarian cyst, and she kicked her leg up cancan-style to show a nurse how well she felt and dislodged a clot that went to her brain and killed her more or less on the spot.

So the author is dead, the book is on the cull list, the most important buyer in the country has blacklisted it, and it is 1953. By the warm theory this is the trough before the great generational tide. By the cold theory the book is just dead, and would have stayed dead, except that the channel it died in stopped being the only channel.

And what happened between 1953 and 1972 has nothing to do with anybody's tender memories. The retail book trade got built. Walden, B. Dalton, the mall chains, paperback racks in places that weren't libraries, and the whole locus of who-buys-children's-books slid off the institutional purchaser and onto the parent. The library stopped being the gatekeeper because it stopped being the store.

And once a parent standing in a Waldenbooks is the buyer, Anne Carroll Moore's opinion is worth exactly nothing, because the parent has never heard of Anne Carroll Moore. The parent has a screaming toddler and a book that is engineered, at the level of its susurrating sounds and its dimming light, to put a toddler to sleep, and the parent buys it again, and tells the other parent at the thing, and the recommendation network that sells the book is no longer the library-school sorority, it's word of mouth at the level of the exhausted.

The boom is the demand side of this, and the mechanism is more boring than the memory version. The boom babies were BORN, in enormous numbers, to parents who had to put them to sleep, at exactly the moment the retail channel matured enough to sell those parents a sleep aid without a librarian's permission. The cohort that drives the numbers is on the supply side of the next twenty years, not the readership of the first five. It's the tens of millions of new babies needing to be put down at night, and the new stores selling their parents the thing that does it. The book sells because the babies exist and the stores exist and the gate is gone. By 1970 it's moving almost twenty thousand a year. By 1990 it's past four million lifetime. By 2000 it's doing eight hundred thousand a year all by itself.

So then 1972, the NYPL finally buys a copy. And everybody tells this as the redemption beat, the library coming to its senses, Margaret Wise Brown winning at last. But look at the order of operations. The book was already selling. The book had already routed around them.

Moore had died in 1961, the demographic and retail wave was already cresting, and the library acquiring the book in 1972 is not the cause of anything. It's a lagging indicator. It's the institution that lost control of the market finally noticing the market had moved without it and quietly restocking the shelf to match what everyone already owned. The gatekeeper opening the gate after the wall's been knocked down.

There's a coda that makes the whole materialist point almost too on the nose, which is the board book. The single best-selling format of Goodnight Moon today, three-quarters of the eight-hundred-thousand-a-year, is the board book, the indestructible chewable cardboard slab handed to a one-year-old. The board book has no author photo, runs almost no text-as-text, and exists because the object's job is to survive being gummed and thrown.

The thing that made Goodnight Moon immortal in the end was, on top of the poetry that Barnett correctly identifies and the modernists would've recognized, a manufacturing format that let you sell the same hundred and thirty words to a customer who would physically destroy the previous copy. Brown's estate, incidentally, sees the royalties on all of it and she sees none of it, because she's been dead since Eisenhower, and the royalties went to the young son of a neighbor, who later claimed Brown was secretly his mother, and who blew the Goodnight Moon money on drugs and, by some accounts, crime. The most soothing book in America funded a minor true-crime footnote. Fine.

So that's (a). The seventies aren't a mystery and they aren't a tribute. They're the lag between a book getting blacklisted by the institutional buyer and the institutional buyer ceasing to matter, with the boom generation as the demand and the mall as the new gate. The art is real. The art was always real. The art sat on a cull list for six years because the art's quality and the art's sales ran through completely different machinery, and only one of those machineries had Anne Carroll Moore standing in it.

Now (b), the stuff with material fodder that a close-reading piece leaves on the table, because Klassen and Barnett are looking at the page and the page isn't where some of the best material is.

The color-and-black-and-white alternation. They flag it, correctly, as a rhythm device, and then both note in passing that it "might have to do with midcentury printing techniques." It's not a might. The full-color spreads and the cheaper one-color vignettes are an economic structure showing through as an aesthetic one. Color printing in 1947 children's publishing was a per-signature cost decision, you got a budgeted number of full-color plates and you spent them, and the standard move was to alternate color spreads with cheaper monochrome ones to hit a price point. What Hurd did, and this is the actual artistry, is take a cost constraint, the thing forced on him by the plate budget, and convert it into the book's pulse, the wide color room versus the close grey object. The thing that reads as a deliberate dreamlike oscillation between the room and its remembered pieces is, underneath, the printer's invoice. Constraint became signature. That's a more interesting story than "the colors are unsettling, absinthe-y," and it's invisible if you only look at the page and never at the press.

The palette itself, the orange-and-green that everyone finds slightly nauseating and that Barnett calls a used-car-salesman's-tie. There's a material reason a 1947 book looks like that and it's the inks and the registration tolerances of the period, the limited cheap-and-stable pigment set you'd use for a mass children's title, and the way those greens and oranges sit is partly a fingerprint of what was affordable and lightfast in the plant. We read it as a bold modern color choice. Some of it is a bold modern color choice and some of it is what the four-color process of the era could cheaply and consistently hold. The "off" feeling is partly aesthetic intent and partly the technical envelope of mid-century mass color, and you can't fully separate them, which is the point.

The cigarette. This one's perfect and they don't touch it. For at least twenty years the back of the book carried a photo of Clement Hurd holding a cigarette, because in the mid-century a man on a dust jacket holding a cigarette was simply what a photographed adult man looked like. In 2005 HarperCollins digitally erased the cigarette out of his hand, leaving him waving at nothing, fingers extended around an absence, because the cultural meaning of a cigarette had inverted from sophistication to a harmful-message-to-very-young-children.

His son, also a children's illustrator, said the doctored photo looked absurd, his father waving at empty air, and was right. They printed seventy thousand copies of the man waving at nothing rather than just find a different photo of him not smoking. The book didn't change a word. The world's relationship to a cigarette changed, and the object got quietly retouched to keep pace, which is a cleaner little fable about how the past gets continuously edited to remain sellable than anything in the text proper.

The pseudonyms, which sound like whimsy and are actually labor economics. Brown wrote something like a hundred children's books in fourteen years, fifteen in addition to Goodnight Moon in a single 1946-to-1948 stretch, and she published under a stack of pen names, Golden MacDonald, Timothy Hay, Juniper Sage. The romantic read is the playful protean artist. The material read is that she was running an industrial output rate across multiple publishers who didn't want the same name on too many of their lists in the same season, and the pen names are a volume-management device, the literary equivalent of a studio releasing films under different labels so as not to flood its own brand. She wasn't being whimsical. She was being prolific in a market that penalized visible prolificacy, and the names are how you hide the assembly line.

And the deepest one, which the piece gestures at and then sentimentalizes: the whole Here-and-Now program that produced Goodnight Moon, the name-the-real-objects-in-the-real-room method, was itself a material artifact of a specific institution at a specific moment. Bank Street wasn't a vibe. It was Lucy Sprague Mitchell's experimental lab school, funded and staffed to do something new, which was treat childhood development as an empirical research subject, psychologists and pediatricians actually observing what small children responded to and building books backward from the data. Goodnight Moon is basically the productized output of an R&D shop. The rhythmic naming, the repetition, the sounds chosen because Brown's speech-development research said those were the sounds that caught a young child's attention first, this is a designed object that came out of a lab, and the reason it works on your kid with that slightly creepy reliability is that it was reverse-engineered from kids. Barnett knows this, he says it, and then he files it under "she was a genius poet," which she also was. But the genius poet was working inside a research institution that existed because somebody decided childhood was a thing you could study and design for, and Goodnight Moon is what the study shipped. The Fairy Tale Wars that Moore was fighting weren't about taste. They were about whether children's books would be made by enchantment or by empiricism, by a librarian's sensibility or by a lab's findings, and the empiricists won so completely that we now find it hard to even see Goodnight Moon as the product of a method, because the method became the water.

Moore lost because she was defending a craft against an industry, and the industry had a research arm and a retail channel and forty-eight million units in it, and she had a sensibility and a shelf she controlled until she didn't. The udder's still blurred, though. Whatever else changed, nobody ever un-blurred the udder.

[materialist-scumbag]

So Pete Davidson split from Elsie Hewitt and the response is the usual thing where everyone marvels at the dating history (Kate Beckinsale, Kim Kardashian, Ariana Grande, Margaret Qualley, Phoebe Dynevor, Emily Ratajkowski, Kaia Gerber, Chase Sui Wonders, the list keeps going) and tries to formulate a theory about WHY, the dick joke, the BDE thing that Ariana invented as a marketing exercise that became a folk concept, the eyes, the height, the vulnerability, the alleged emotional availability, and they're all kind of beside the point, and the underlying mechanism nobody talks about is that Pete Davidson is a Saturday Night Live cast member.

Like that's the whole thing.

I mean there's more on top of it, the dating Kim Kardashian was the moment it transcended into something else, became its own meme, the trajectory got self-sustaining, but the launching pad, the thing that put Pete Davidson into the room with Kate Beckinsale in the first place, was that he was on SNL, and to understand why being on SNL is THE specific machine for this you have to think about what SNL actually is as an institution, which is something nobody outside New York really gets because the show itself is mostly bad and the cultural relevance has been declining for like thirty years and so people assume the institutional power has declined proportionally, and the institutional power has held up regardless.

SNL is the central social node of the New York entertainment-adjacent universe, has been since approximately 1975, with some peaks and valleys but never not, and the way this works is that the cast and writers and the broader extended SNL cinematic universe (the Lorne Michaels production company orbit, the alumni who still come back, the comedians who host, the musical guests who get pulled into the after-party circuit, the actors doing promo who end up at the Monday read-through and then somehow at dinner) constitute the only entertainment-industry social scene that's NOT in Los Angeles, and because it's not in LA it's the only one where models live (because models live in New York, the modeling industry is fundamentally a New York industry even though LA has fashion now, the actual top of the modeling food chain is still New York and Paris with LA as a distant third), and so the SNL after-party at like Zero Bond or wherever is the only place in America where TV comedians and supermodels are in the same room on a regular weekly basis at 2am with cocaine.

This is the mechanism. It's an actual room.

And the thing about that room is that it has the specific topology of being high-status (because SNL is high-status, models like high-status, and crucially SNL is high-status in a way that's adjacent to but distinct from finance and acting and fashion, which means it imports cultural cachet from a different vector than the men models normally encounter), low-stakes (because comedians are not threatening in the way that Hollywood actors or financiers are, the power dynamic is different, the relationship can end without lawyers), and high-frequency (every week, same place, same scene, same rotation of the same three hundred people).

The pre-Davidson template here is Lorne Michaels himself, who has been running this exact social machine since the seventies and whose own dating history (he was married to Susan Forristal who was a model, the whole seventies-eighties Studio 54 SNL crossover where Belushi and Aykroyd and Chase were running around with whoever), Lorne built this specific scene because he understood, correctly, that the comedy show needed a social ecosystem around it to attract the talent, and the social ecosystem he built was specifically calibrated to be the place where models came on Saturday night because Lorne Michaels is a guy who likes models and built the institution accordingly.

The other template is John Mulaney, whose post-Anna Marie Tendler life is the same scene but at a different temperature, Mulaney is the SNL writer model, Davidson is the SNL cast member model, and Mulaney's transition from "wife who was an artist" to "Olivia Munn" is the same fundamental institutional arbitrage Davidson has been running, just compressed into one move instead of being his entire public identity.

So the better question, beyond "why does Pete Davidson get models," is "what would happen if Pete Davidson were a stand-up in Chicago," and the answer is he would date a graphic designer, because the whole BDE-eyes-vulnerability-height theory is post-hoc rationalization of the fact that he's standing in a particular room every Saturday at 2am.

Now there's a secondary question which is why HIM specifically out of the cast, like why isn't it Mikey Day, why wasn't it Kyle Mooney, why wasn't it Beck Bennett, all of whom were in the same room, and I think there's something to the affect, the willingness to be photographed, the absence of LA-comedian self-protective irony about being seen with someone famous, plus the specific Staten Island thing where Davidson reads as authentically working-class to women who grew up around money in a way that comedians from comedy-club backgrounds don't, plus the dead firefighter dad which is a fact about his life that does real emotional work in initial conversations whether he wants it to or not, and all of that is variation layered on top of the underlying condition.

The underlying condition is the room.

And the room has been there since 1975, and it's been producing this exact kind of pairing for fifty years, and the only thing that's different about Davidson is that he's the first cast member to do it during the Instagram era so we can all watch it happen, which has the effect of making it look like a Pete Davidson phenomenon while functioning as a Lorne Michaels phenomenon that Pete Davidson happens to be the current expression of.

The next one will be somebody else. The room doesn't go anywhere. Probably already happening, some current cast member you couldn't name leaving Zero Bond at 4am with somebody whose face you'd recognize from a campaign, and in three years there'll be another think-piece industry trying to figure out what's special about him, and the answer will be the same answer, which is that he was standing in the only room in America where this particular transaction clears.

Davidson got the meme version of it because he was the first one to do it loudly. The quiet version has been running uninterrupted for half a century. Belushi was fucking models. Chase was fucking models. Sandler was around models even if he ended up marrying a normal person. Farley would've been fucking models if he'd lived long enough to figure out the room properly. Fallon married a producer he met through the SNL ecosystem. Meyers married a lawyer but the SNL alumni network is how that introduction happened too. The room produces couples. That's what it's for. Lorne built it that way on purpose.

The dick joke is funny and the actual explanation runs through real estate and scheduling, that there's a building on 49th Street (well, 30 Rock, half a block off it) where models and comedians are guaranteed to be in the same place on Saturday nights, has been for fifty years, will be for fifty more, and Pete Davidson happened to walk in.

[bambamramfan]

[materialist-scumbag]

materialist-scumbag

Žižek's "Liberal Fascisms" trilogy wraps in 2026, and he's doing the Barbican in May, tickets through How To Academy's box office

So the thing that's actually funny about the Royal Institution booking him for May 7th, a four-way God debate with William Lane Craig, Rowan Williams, and Sabine Hossenfelder over whether we need God to explain the world, is the venue. The Royal Institution is an 1799 lecture-theatre, purpose-built to put science in front of a paying subscription audience as spectacle. Faraday did the Christmas Lectures there. It's a stage.

And what Žižek has actually been for about thirty-five years is a man who performs theory as spectacle for paying audiences. The God question is the set dressing. The venue is the tell.

Okay, let me back up, because the conventional wisdom on Žižek is that he's a brilliant-or-fraudulent (pick your team) Continental philosopher with a coke-spoon nose-tic and too many books, and both teams are arguing about the wrong object. The interesting thing is the machine that turns a Ljubljana Lacanian into a globally distributed intellectual commodity, whatever you think of the Hegel, and that machine is specific, and it has dates.

Start in Ljubljana, because you have to.

Žižek's a 1949 baby, grows up in Tito's Yugoslavia, and that's the part nobody foregrounds: Yugoslav self-managing socialism was the one Communist country that let Western film and theory in. He's watching Hitchcock and reading Lacan as a teenager because the border was porous in a way the Soviet bloc's wasn't. People file that under biography color. It's the whole intellectual formation: a guy trained on Western pop culture and French psychoanalysis inside a socialist state, which is exactly the hybrid he'd later sell to the West as exotic.

And then the institution. In the late '70s there's a circle of Slovene Lacanians, Žižek and Mladen Dolar and the sociologist Rastko Močnik, that becomes the Ljubljana school, working through the journal Problemi (running since 1962) and eventually the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis. Alenka Zupančič joins later and rounds out the famous troika. This is a real school doing something unusual: reading Lacan through Hegel and German Idealism, hard, as philosophy rather than as clinical practice.

The point being that "Žižek" the brand is downstream of a collective project that existed before the brand and still exists. Most of the people consuming the brand have never heard of Problemi. The dry cleaner gets famous; the laundry stays anonymous.

He gets the PhD at Ljubljana in 1981 on German Idealism. Then, and this is the move, he goes to Paris, 1981 to '85, to study under Jacques-Alain Miller.

You have to understand who Miller is to see why this matters. Miller married Lacan's daughter and became the legal executor and editor of the seminars; he controls the transcripts, decides what gets published and how, runs the whole institutional apparatus of Lacanianism. So in Paris Žižek is apprenticing to the man who owns Lacan, the one who controls access to the principal. Every Lacanian after Lacan is in some sense leveraged against Miller's editorial position, the counterparty the whole French-theory book is exposed to. Žižek gets a second doctorate out of it in '85, a Lacanian reading of Hegel.

Then the late '80s, and here's where the Western team's mythology gets the story exactly backwards. Žižek comes home and writes columns for Mladina, the alternative youth weekly, which is anti-regime, running pieces against the militarization of Yugoslav society. In 1988 he resigns from the Slovene Communist Party with a bunch of other intellectuals. In 1990 he runs for the four-member collective Slovenian presidency as a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party, the liberal party, and narrowly loses.

Look at the contradiction for a second. The man marketed for thirty years to Anglophone audiences as the dangerous Marxist, the guy who'll tell you Stalin had a point, was in actual political fact a liberal-democratic anti-Communist dissident candidate in the only election he ever stood in. Both halves are documented fact, and the contradiction itself is the product. The provocations are calibrated for an audience that was never in the room in Ljubljana in 1990.

1989: The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first English book, comes out from Verso. And the publisher is the whole story. Verso is the book imprint of New Left Review, founded 1970 as New Left Books, with Tariq Ali and Perry Anderson on the board, the house organ of Anglophone Marxist theory. So Žižek's path into the English-speaking world runs through Verso, the single most prestigious distribution channel the Western academic left has, with a preface by Ernesto Laclau, himself a Verso figure, rather than through a university press or a trade house.

The seed capital was an existing institutional left that needed fresh continental product and got handed a Slovene who could do Hegel and talk about Hitchcock in the same paragraph.

That's the seed everything compounds on. From the early '90s he's a visiting professor everywhere, and the books start coming, and they do not stop. Looking Awry in '91, Enjoy Your Symptom in '92, Tarrying with the Negative in '93, and so on, and so on, until the count gets hard to establish; the bibliographies list north of 200 items if you include the edited volumes and the translations and the introductions to other people's books. Forty-some monographs at minimum. He wrote intros to Slovene editions of Chesterton and Le Carré. In 2007 he edited selected Robespierre, selected Mao, and selected Trotsky for Verso, the "Revolutions" series, where Žižek's name on the cover sells you the dead revolutionary inside.

And once you notice the edited-volumes-and-introductions habit you see the whole operation. "Žižek" became a valorization mechanism, a name you bolt onto other material (a film, a dead Jacobin, a concept, the news) to revalorize it as Theory. The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, where he narrates Hitchcock and Lynch from sets recreating the films, is the purest version: Žižek as the value-add welded onto someone else's images.

2005, Astra Taylor makes the documentary Žižek!, exclamation point and all, and the copy that sticks to him in this period is "the Elvis of cultural theory," "the most dangerous philosopher in the West." That's rock-tour language, and the people writing it know exactly what they're doing, because by 2005 the product had stopped being the argument and become the performance of the argument: the sweating, the lisp, the digressions about toilets and Coke ads, the sense that you're watching a mind overheat in real time. The arena act. When the LSE reviews the new trilogy and reaches for fireworks-in-daylight imagery, that's the tell. People reach for that vocabulary when they're describing a show.

Which gets us to now, and the recurrence.

The 2024–2026 trilogy is Bloomsbury: Against Progress, Zero Point, and the forthcoming Liberal Fascisms. The titles do exactly what the titles always did, take the thing the audience believes is good (progress) and deadpan that it isn't, the same provocative-minimization that ran the engine back when he titled a book In Defense of Lost Causes.

There's a Substack now, "Žižek Goads and Prods," which opens by complaining about puritanical editors cutting his dirty jokes. Meaning the man whose whole apparatus was built on prestige publishing houses has, like every other content producer in 2026, disintermediated down to the newsletter. There's a ten-week EGS seminar on Zoom, $575, taught on the Žižek-as-singularity premise. And there's the live circuit: Barbican in May, the Royal Institution God-debate, How To Academy moving the tickets.

So here's what the whole sequence adds up to, visible now in a way it wasn't at any single step. The Anglophone left spent thirty-five years consuming a Slovene liberal-democrat's Lacanian Hegelianism as if it were the cutting edge of Marxist thought, when what it actually bought, structurally, was a distribution deal. Verso needed continental product. The documentary economy needed a character. The lecture circuit needed an act. A brilliant man from a real but invisible Ljubljana school was the asset that satisfied all three at once.

The Hegel is real, and so is the school. The commodity built on top of them is a separate object, and it's the one with the May tour dates.

None of which is a complaint. Nobody's lying. He's been on the record as a liberal candidate, the Slovene school publishes under its own names, the books say what they say. And here's where I'll cop to the limit of my own read: I've been telling this as distribution capturing a man, the channel making the brand. It's possible I've got the arrow backwards and he engineered the whole thing on purpose, picked Verso, courted the documentary, built the act, and the wide-eyed Ljubljana Hegelian is itself the performance. That would be a better story than mine, honestly, and I'd have no way to tell the two apart from out here in the cheap seats, $575 for the Zoom, watching the man sweat through a bit about toilets. Either way the tickets are moving.

The thing he's actually contributed that I don't think will be undone — once you set aside the books, the celebrity, the YouTube clips, the Peterson debate (which was bad, both of them were bad, Peterson bad in his way and Žižek bad in his, which is, he was tired and he didn't bother because Peterson is beneath him and that came across as not bothering rather than not needing to bother) — the thing he actually contributed is a way of reading ideology that takes seriously that ideology operates as the structure of consciousness rather than as false consciousness, that you can know perfectly well that the commodity form is a fetish and still treat it as one because the treating-as-one is built into the social practice and not into your beliefs about the social practice. This is in Marx, it's in Sloterdijk, it's in Lacan, but Žižek synthesized it into a form that you could USE — you could pick up his ideology critique and apply it to a movie, a political speech, a piece of architecture, a joke — and the application would yield something. That's why people who are not his fans keep using his moves.

He's 75 now and the late stuff is, frankly, not great — the Ukraine writing has been bad, the COVID books were filler, the Peterson debate was the moment where you could see that the engine was sputtering — but the engine was a real engine and it ran for a long time and it was doing something nobody else was doing, which was, taking continental philosophy seriously as a tool for reading the present moment without retreating into either jargon or pop simplification, and the failure cases of that project function less as arguments against the project and more as arguments about how hard the project was, and how few people are even attempting it now, and how the space he occupied — the public intellectual who's actually a philosopher, not a journalist with a Wikipedia article on Foucault — has basically collapsed back into journalism since he aged out of it, which is its own historical phenomenon, and which I'd argue is downstream of the same forces that produced him, which is to say, the post-89 opening where suddenly the West needed people who could explain why the Eastern bloc had failed without admitting that the West also had problems, and Žižek was uniquely positioned because he came from inside the failure and could narrate it in a tone that flattered nobody.

Anyway he'll outlive us all out of pure spite and write thirty more books and half of them will be the same book and the other half will contain, buried somewhere around page 140, a single passage that makes you sit up and reread it three times.

[arcticdementor]

"I recently drove several thousand miles through small town heritage America during my PCS. Mostly in the South. Hopping from home to home of the families of my friends I made in the military while on the East Coast. VFW posts prominently doted many small towns. Banners of their fallen in the streets, town halls, courthouses, small stores. I remember the media mocking the Russians for doing the same.  They take pride in their patriotism and they made sure to point that out to me as I talked with them. They welcomed me, an outsider, into their homes and places of worship. These people are not bitter, nor angry at the state of affairs. They largely seem, not ignorant, but sort of in a strange trance that they are still living in a long past republic that still loves them. They are, in Yarvin’s term, the very definition of Hobbits. Good, moral Christians, who are being abused and don’t realize it. It is horrifying and depressing. The big blue cities don’t honor their fallen, their VFW Posts hidden away, their veterans keeping to themselves as private individuals, and often I see foreign flags more than my flag. The heritage American is by far not the “deplorables” they are portrayed as. Their sacrifices derided and insulted. It burns in a way I can’t really describe well. I don’t really have a grand point with this post other than vent. I’m powerless regardless of what little authority has been delegated to me. It seems like all I can do is stand my post like that one Roman soldier at Pompeii waiting for terrible things to consume all that matters."

—Pax Imperialis

[bambamramfan]

"You know what people say about you where I’m from?" "Let me guess, bad things." "No. Worse. We say nice things. “We took them literally, when we should have taken them seriously.”"

-----------------------

I wasn't going to say anything, until I saw the tag "blue america hates red america."

So this quote is being passed through three factions of culture war, and each adds to its interpretation.

It's describing a small town ethic that isn't out to get anyone, just wants to be respected and not bothered.

It's being written up by a cosmopolitan right wing ideologue who emphasizes the elements of resentiment, while thinking that makes it better.

It's being shared uncritically by roughly center-left aligned (socially at least) people who want to use this to criticize how the left is treating #1.

All the while, its most concrete depiction of that """hate""" that the left has shown is a word quoted from *ten years ago* from a party's presidential nominee, that was quickly condemned from everyone right and left.

When was the last time the right's actual President said something that cruel about American citizens who disagree with him? Tuesday. (It *is* Tuesday. Yeah, I know.)

Which is the part that infuriates all the progressives, that they are held to a standard of "if one of us says one bad thing you will resent it for a decade" vs "Trump told veterans to go die in a ditch, that rascal." But that's such old hat no one even bothers to complain anymore.

But it's not 1 saying this, it's 2, a tiny unrepresentative slice demographically, LARPing about the Roman Empire (yeah I said empire not republic.) Who sees a bucolic idyll and can only think "they hate you! get mad at all the hate they have for you! (why aren't you more mad yet.)" And 3 who spreads it, presumably about a desire for the left to stop fucking up (I feel you man) but is so out of date they need to rely on plot points from three presidential administrations ago.

If you read Tolkien, the point is to be Hobbits, not to patronizingly try to protect them while never being of them.

[maidthings]

elf liberalism probably goes insane

[maidthings]

"elf liberalism is basically the same as gnome fascism" - phrase that has been echoing in my head for the past 30 minutes

[autisticexpression2]

What the fuck does this mean?

[maidthings]

its not my job to educate you

[materialist-scumbag]

materialist-scumbag

The first edition of The Hobbit, 1937, calls the high elves Gnomes. On the page. Elrond is descended from them, the swords from the troll-hoard were forged by them, and the word Tolkien uses for the most exalted, most learned, most tragic people in his entire invented cosmology is the word you now associate with a ceramic man holding a fishing rod next to a birdbath.

He kept using it. Gnomes survives in the Lord of the Rings drafts as late as 1944, deep into the writing of the Frodo-and-Faramir material, and only dies in the late 1940s when he's drafting the appendices and concedes the word is too misleading.

So when the phrase "elf liberalism is basically the same as gnome fascism" started circulating on tumblr in the summer of 2024 (tumblr user maidthings, quoting a phrase already rattling around their head, in a thread that also produced "elf liberalism probably goes insane," which is the better line), everyone treated it as a joke about vibes. Elves are wine-mom NPR listeners, gnomes are little angry men, ha. And it works as that. But the reason it works is that for about thirty years in the most influential fantasy corpus ever written, the elf and the gnome were the same guy, and the thing that split them apart was a manufacturing sector in Thuringia.

Tolkien wanted "gnome" for philological reasons. Greek gnōmē, thought, intelligence; the Noldor are "those who know," the craftsman-scholar elves, the ones who invent writing and gems and most of the plot. A gnome, to a man trained on Greek, is a knower.

The problem is that the word had a prior owner. Paracelsus, the Swiss alchemist, coined or at least popularized gnomus in the sixteenth century for his earth elementals, little people who move through soil the way we move through air. That's the folkloric gnome: subterranean, small, attached to the ground itself.

And then the ground-spirit got a supply chain.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the ceramics towns of Thuringia, Gräfenroda above all, started turning Paracelsus's earth elemental into terracotta. Philipp Griebel is the name that survives, August Heissner the other one; bearded little miners with picks and lanterns and wheelbarrows, fired and painted and sold by the gross. This is the same German toy-and-ornament belt that gave the world the mass-produced Christmas ornament, and the gnome was a product line. Folklore in, SKUs out.

In 1847 Sir Charles Isham, tenth baronet, comes home to Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire with twenty-one of them for his rockery. Isham was a spiritualist who believed the figures had a real connection to earth spirits, which makes him roughly the last man in history to take garden gnomes at theological face value. He also, and the photographs from 1897 confirm this, posed three of them holding a placard, on strike, demanding better pay and conditions. A Victorian baronet built a miniature labor action out of German ceramics in his rock garden.

His daughters hated them. After he died in 1903 they went after the collection, air rifles, the works. One gnome survived by falling into a crevice in the rockery, was found decades later, got named Lampy, and now sits behind glass at Lamport Hall insured for a million pounds.

Hold Lampy in mind. He's the whole arc in one object: working-class iconography, purchased by an aristocrat, exterminated by the next generation of aristocrats, then re-valorized as heritage once it was safely rare.

Because what happened to the gnome between Isham and Tolkien is a price collapse. Mass production made gnomes cheap, and the British suburban expansion of the 1930s gave millions of working-class and lower-middle-class households their first gardens, and the cheap ornament went into the new small garden the way the flying ducks went onto the wall. The gnome became the marker of the wrong kind of garden. The Royal Horticultural Society kept gnomes off the Chelsea Flower Show for about a century, with the explicit logic that they were tacky, and didn't relent until 2013, as a one-off for the show's centenary. The ban was a class boundary maintained with a list of prohibited ornaments, and the gnome was the named offender.

That's what poisoned the word for Tolkien. By the 1940s "gnome" no longer suggested knowledge to anyone; it suggested the pebble-dashed semi with the concrete fisherman. The Noldor couldn't afford the association. So the knowers got folded fully into "elves," a word that had spent the same century moving in the opposite direction, up through Victorian fairy painting and Edwardian children's books into Oxford philology, and the gnome was left holding the wheelbarrow.

One word goes up, one word goes down, and the sorting mechanism is retail price point.

And once you see the split as a class split, the post-Tolkien product lines all make sense, because every fantasy property since has had to decide what a gnome is FOR, given that "small earth-person" was already taken by dwarves, and they all converge on the same answer: the gnome is a technician. D&D makes him a playable race in 1978 and can't find him a personality beyond illusionist and tinkerer. Dragonlance, 1984, gives Krynn its tinker gnomes, an entire race that is one joke about engineering committees. Warhammer had gnomes early and simply deleted them. And World of Warcraft, 2004, ships the purest version: the gnomes are refugees. Their city, Gnomeregan, was irradiated in a botched defense of their own homeland, and the survivors live in a corner of the dwarves' capital, a displaced population of engineers with no territory, valued for their skills, owning nothing.

The elf in the same period keeps his real estate. Rivendell, Lothlórien, the eternal forest kingdoms; nobody can enter without permission, dwarves get blindfolded at the border, and there is no visible economy in any of them, no farms, no trade you can point to, just the kind of effortless abundance that in any actual society means the money was made somewhere else, earlier, by someone whose name is on the gate. Galadriel calls her whole project "the long defeat." Tolkien himself, in the long letter to Milton Waldman laying out the legendarium, says the elves' sin is that they became embalmers, that they wanted to stop change itself, to keep Middle-earth as a private preserve of unfading beauty. And when the preservation finally fails, they liquidate and sail west, to a jurisdiction where their assets are protected forever.

A deathless person is a perpetual trust. Immortality in these settings does the narrative work that inherited capital does in ours: it means time is always on your side, compounding is always working for you, and you can afford a politics of patience, procedure, and tasteful regret. Elf liberalism is the liberalism of the secured. Tolerant in the abstract, cosmopolitan in self-image, and absolutely gated in practice. The blindfold at the border of Lothlórien is the most honest institution in Middle-earth.

The gnome's position is the opposite balance sheet. Skill but no land. A workshop but no rents. Everything he has, he has to keep making, and one bad decade, one irradiated city, one shift in what the big people will pay for, wipes him out. Historians of actual fascism have spent a century on exactly this class: the artisans, shopkeepers, and smallholders, the Mittelstand, proprietors small enough to be terrified, big enough to have something to lose, and convinced that organized labor below them and finance above them are jointly arranging their extinction. That's the gnome's structural position in every setting that bothers to give him one. The meme's instinct that his politics curdle nationalist (the soil connection, the racial gift for craft, the ancient claim on the underground) is just reading the class position correctly.

Here is where the joke stops being a joke. Gräfenroda, the town that manufactured the garden gnome, is in Thuringia. Thuringia is where the AfD, under its most openly extreme state leader, won a German state election in September 2024, the first far-right plurality in a state parliament since the war. The gnome's actual hometown, the small-workshop ceramics belt that lost its markets twice, once to the war and once to reunification, voted the way the meme says gnomes vote. I am not claiming the lawn ornaments did it. I am noting that the meme reverse-engineered, from fantasy-race vibes, the political sociology of the exact region that produced the fantasy race's commercial form, which suggests the vibes were carrying real information the whole time.

And the equivalence, the "basically the same" part, holds up better than the joke needs it to. Both peoples are ancient, declining, demographically doomed, and organized entirely around what they hold: the elf around land and time, the gnome around tools and skill. Both run a politics of loss management. The difference is whether the portfolio is currently safe. Elf liberalism is what gnome fascism looks like when the assets are still appreciating; the other line in the thread had it right, elf liberalism probably goes insane, because the moment the long defeat stops being long, the moment somebody actually moves on the forest, the tolerance was always a luxury good and luxury goods get cut first. Tolkien wrote that part too. The Noldor, back when they were still called Gnomes, responded to their first real dispossession with an oath of unlimited vengeance, three kinslayings, and a multi-generational war of revanche over inherited property. The most liberal-coded race in fantasy has, as its founding political document, a blood feud over stolen jewels.

Anyway. Lampy is still at Lamport Hall, behind his glass, a mass-produced Thuringian worker figurine that survived an aristocratic extermination campaign by hiding in the rocks, and is now itself landed heritage with an insurance valuation and a gift shop. And somewhere in the 1897 photographs his three colleagues are still on strike, placard up, waiting on the baronet for better pay and conditions.

#elf liberalism #gnome fascism #tolkien #garden gnomes #the noldor were gnomes this is real #class composition of fantasy races #thuringia #same as it ever was

[bambamramfan]

Left vs Right

Start with the thing everyone gets wrong, which is that they think left and right are positions on a number line. You hear it in the languag

You hear it in the language. “Far left,” “centre-right,” “moving towards the middle,” as though there were a single road running east to west and every political creature on it could be located by a single coordinate, and the only question worth asking about anyone is how far along they’ve travelled. This is the dumbest map ever drawn and we keep using it because it lets a newspaper sort six hundred million people into a bar chart.

[bambamramfan]

How Poly are you?

I am not saving any results, so reply or put yours in reblog tags.

[materialist-scumbag]

materialist-scumbag

HOUSE (HAUSU, 1977) is back at the IFC Center in New York this spring, running in their Late Night Favorites series — which is the same room where Janus first put the remastered print up for American audiences in January 2010

So the cat in this movie is named Blanche, and Blanche is a matte painting for about half her screen time, and when you kill her the portrait of her sprays enough blood to flood an entire upstairs room, and a girl named Melody gets her fingers bitten off by a piano that then eats the rest of her. Everybody who writes about Hausu starts here, with the inventory of insane images — the flying severed head that bites a butt, the futons, the disembodied legs that flying-kick a painting to death — because the images are genuinely like nothing else, and because starting there lets you skip the boring part, which is the only part I care about, which is: why did the biggest film studio in Japan pay to make this.

Because that's the actual weird fact. Not the piano. The piano is downstream. The weird fact is that Toho — the Godzilla studio, the Kurosawa studio, a company that is literally a component of the Nikkei 225 today — green-lit a script that every director on its own staff refused to touch because they thought it would end their careers, then sat on it for two years, then handed it to a guy who had never made a feature and wasn't even an employee. That doesn't happen at a healthy studio. Healthy studios have a development process specifically so that this never happens. So something had to be broken for House to exist, and the thing that was broken is the entire Japanese studio system, and it broke on a schedule you can date.

Okay so. The Japanese film industry in the 1970s is in what one historian flatly calls a virtual collapse. In 1975, for the first time, domestic films drop below 50% of the box office in their own country. The thing eating them is television, same as everywhere, but the Japanese majors respond to it in a specific structural way that matters enormously for our piano movie.

Here's the move. There's no Paramount Decree in Japan — no antitrust ruling forcing the studios to divest their theaters, the way it gutted the American majors in 1948. So Toho does the opposite of what Hollywood was forced to do. In 1971 it spins its actual film production off into a subsidiary and keeps the theaters, the real estate, the exhibition business. The studio stops being a place that makes movies and becomes a landlord that occasionally finances content to fill rooms it owns. By 1972 the trade press is already describing Toho and Shochiku as companies expanding by gradually shrinking the production arm and making the money on exhibition and theaters and other business. The lots empty out. Crews get "farmed" over into television work, conventions, expos — anything that isn't the expensive, money-losing act of producing a comprehensible feature film.

And I mean that last phrase literally. Obayashi's own account of how he finally got the job is that his producer told him Toho was tired of losing money on films people could understand, and figured they'd give the incomprehensible one a shot. Read that as a balance-sheet statement, because that's what it is. The legible product was a money-loser. So the studio took a flier on illegibility as a hedge, not as an artistic bet. The thing nobody could explain was, on net, no worse a gamble than the things they could.

Now. Where does Obayashi come from, this guy who isn't on staff. He comes from commercials. This is the part that explains the texture of the entire movie and almost nobody foregrounds it, because "TV-commercial director" sounds like a knock and it's the opposite of a knock — it's the whole engine. Through the 1960s and into the '70s, the place in Japanese visual culture with actual money to burn on optical tricks, on chroma key, on matte work and animation composited onto live action, was not the dying film studios. It was the advertising industry. Commercials were where the special-effects R&D budget lived, because a thirty-second spot for Calpis or whatever amortizes a gimmick across a national audience in a way a feature can't. Obayashi spent that decade making CMs, building exactly the bag of optical-printer tricks that he then dumps, undiluted, into House — he says outright he wanted the effects to look fake, like a child made them, and he could make them look any way he wanted because he'd been doing this commercially for years. The seven girls? Cast largely out of models he'd used in his commercials. The aunt is played by a woman he'd shot in Calpis ads. The composer scored CMs with him. House is a commercials unit that briefly got loaned a Toho soundstage and a horror premise, with a commercials guy directing.

And it was pre-sold like a commercial campaign, too, which is the detail that should really make you sit up. The soundtrack album by Godiego — the rock band, the Monkey Magic guys — was written and released before the movie was even shot. There was a House manga, a House novelization, a House radio drama, and it was the success of the radio drama that finally got Toho to officially commit to production. Sit with the sequence: the ancillary merchandise generated the demand that justified making the thing the merchandise was ancillary to. The film is the loss-leader the franchise was built to subsidize, except the franchise existed first. That's a media-rights structure the rest of the world spends the next forty years catching up to — ahead of 1977 and ahead of 2010 both — and Toho fell into it sideways because the production economics were so wrecked that the only way to de-risk a movie was to sell everything around it first.

So that's how the thing gets made. A landlord-studio with empty stages, a hole in the schedule where comprehensible profitable cinema used to be, an effects industry that had migrated into advertising, a director who is really an ad-man, and a financing logic that treats the actual film as the least important object in a bundle of products. Run all that through one Toho soundstage for two months with no storyboard and you get a haunted house that eats schoolgirls.

The film comes out July 30, 1977, double-billed with a romance picture nobody remembers, gets panned by the Japanese critics who bothered, and is a hit — specifically with the young audience, the exact demographic the industry was convinced it had permanently lost to TV and Hollywood. Jasper Sharp's line is that House recaptured a youth audience believed lost. Which, sure, but notice what recaptured it. What recaptured it was a blast of the visual grammar those kids were already swimming in from television and advertising, ported onto the big screen at a scale advertising couldn't afford. The studio system got beaten by TV-and-commercial aesthetics and then briefly saved, in this one case, by hiring the TV-and-commercial aesthetic and pointing it at a movie screen. The disease and the cure are the same organism.

And then the film just sits there for thirty years. This is the second material fact people skip past. House spends those thirty years as a regional Japanese hit that essentially never gets a proper American release, no home video in the States, for three decades. It exists in the way a lot of things from a collapsing industry exist — as an asset on a shelf, technically owned, commercially inert, waiting for someone to figure out it's worth something.

That someone is Janus Films, and the mechanism is worth naming because it's the same kind of machine as the rest of the story, just thirty years later. Janus and its prestige arm, the Criterion Collection, build a sub-label called Eclipse — explicitly conceived as the bin for cult and minor titles that don't merit the full white-glove Criterion treatment. Eclipse is a way to monetize the back catalog cheaply: no commentary tracks, no restoration budget, just get the rights and get it out. House is slated for that bargain shelf. And then Janus starts getting requests for theatrical screenings — there's demand for the thing on a big screen — so they run a remastered print on a small theatrical tour, two sold-out shows at the New York Asian Film Festival in 2009, and then in January 2010 a wider rollout that begins at the IFC Center in New York. Then the Criterion disc in October 2010. The cult forms on the other side of all this, not before it. The "cult classic" is the dividend; the distribution play is the principal that got put up to earn it.

Which is the loop closing, and it closes in the same building. The IFC Center is where House's American afterlife was capitalized in 2010, and the IFC Center is where it's running again this spring as a late-night favorite. A movie that exists because a landlord-studio needed cheap content to fill rooms it owned is now, sixteen years into its second American life, content that a New York arthouse runs at midnight to fill a room it owns. The economic function is the same as it always was: programming to put bodies in seats. The only thing that changed is that the bodies now think they're at a cult event rather than at the bottom half of a 1977 double bill with a forgotten romance.

I don't want to oversell the rhyme, because the rhyme breaks in the obvious place — Obayashi was making something he believed in, out of grief, even; he was from Hiroshima, lost his childhood friends to the bomb, and the whole engine of the plot is a woman who waited for a fiancé who never came back from the war and curdled into something that devours the unmarried girls the bombings spared. That's real, and it's the part the merchandise structure can't account for and didn't need to. The financing logic explains why a movie this strange could get funded. It doesn't explain why this particular strangeness, and the grief is the answer to the second question, not the first.

But the funding logic is the one I keep coming back to, because the legend is always "a studio inexplicably let a madman make his vision," and there's nothing inexplicable about it. The studio was broke, the production economics were upside down, the talent and the techniques had already decamped to advertising, and selling the soundtrack first was just prudent. Every weird thing about how House got made is what prudence looks like inside a collapsing system — the empty stages, the ad-man director, the soundtrack out before the cameras rolled, the radio drama greenlighting the movie, the cult that arrives thirty years late to a midnight room, all of it the most cautious available move at each step, and the cumulative result of all that caution being a piano that eats a girl named Melody.

[bambamramfan]

Supergirl bombed this weekend, $38 million which is less then Morbius, but that's never a sign of the quality. Opening weekend is a mix of marketing spend and uninformed buzz (such as who loved the previous movie.) So what that tells me is Paramount didn't spend much, and buzz for superhero movies is lower than it was. NEXT week we will see how audiences reacted to it, but it could be the most tasteful dive into our own souls, and we wouldn't know it yet.

[bambamramfan]

Lessons from Quizzes

I made two web quizzes this weekend, one of which has been taken by the entire internet now, and one just a few people tested. I found a few commonalities.

I had no idea how deep into the weeds it was going to get trying to balance all the results, so that every result gets some love. Here is a paragraph of text Claude was regularly giving me as we tried new attempts:

Centroidal Voronoi / Lloyd (capacity-constrained CVT). Provably gives round, equal, central-generator convex cells — generator = centroid by construction. But the generators migrate to density centers, so archetype names unglue from their concept coordinates. This is the k-means re-tile the project already tried and rejected (15/41 recovery). Round cells, scrambled labels. Drop equal-mass (plain Mahalanobis Voronoi). Rounder, but corners get ~nobody and the center jams — exactly the reachability problem equal-mass was added to solve.

The second thing I learned is more important.

Users don't want what the designer thinks they want (at least when the designer is me.)

I thought the purpose of a quiz is to give the most accurate result for the respondent.

But what users want is *questions* that feel about them. They want answers that are, in addition to being funny and demonstrating a concept, *about them.* Some users will get quite distressed that none of the questions *speak to them*, and then the fact that the final result got them dead on is just an afterthought.

Relatedly, people will think the quiz is missing a question, like about the environment, when it's just that if you are worried about environmental impact, I found your result already.

Or they may feel a "question entirely about X" is only for people who care about X, when instead the whole point of the question may to be "find out the level of the user's interest in X, which may be zero and that is important data."

Some users assume that each of the answers represents a type of person, and by giving that answer you are saying you are that type of person, and you're more likely to get categorized that way, which made them afraid of agreeing to answers that "aren't them."

So to be clear, that is not the case. Every question/answer gives you points in various columns, and then at the end the columns are all added up, and that determines what archetype they get.

The question is, having learned all this, what do I do.

[bambamramfan]

folks see this is what i mean

[bambamramfan]

Lessons from Quizzes

I made two web quizzes this weekend, one of which has been taken by the entire internet now, and one just a few people tested. I found a few commonalities.

I had no idea how deep into the weeds it was going to get trying to balance all the results, so that every result gets some love. Here is a paragraph of text Claude was regularly giving me as we tried new attempts:

Centroidal Voronoi / Lloyd (capacity-constrained CVT). Provably gives round, equal, central-generator convex cells — generator = centroid by construction. But the generators migrate to density centers, so archetype names unglue from their concept coordinates. This is the k-means re-tile the project already tried and rejected (15/41 recovery). Round cells, scrambled labels. Drop equal-mass (plain Mahalanobis Voronoi). Rounder, but corners get ~nobody and the center jams — exactly the reachability problem equal-mass was added to solve.

The second thing I learned is more important.

Users don't want what the designer thinks they want (at least when the designer is me.)

I thought the purpose of a quiz is to give the most accurate result for the respondent.

But what users want is *questions* that feel about them. They want answers that are, in addition to being funny and demonstrating a concept, *about them.* Some users will get quite distressed that none of the questions *speak to them*, and then the fact that the final result got them dead on is just an afterthought.

Relatedly, people will think the quiz is missing a question, like about the environment, when it's just that if you are worried about environmental impact, I found your result already.

Or they may feel a "question entirely about X" is only for people who care about X, when instead the whole point of the question may to be "find out the level of the user's interest in X, which may be zero and that is important data."

Some users assume that each of the answers represents a type of person, and by giving that answer you are saying you are that type of person, and you're more likely to get categorized that way, which made them afraid of agreeing to answers that "aren't them."

So to be clear, that is not the case. Every question/answer gives you points in various columns, and then at the end the columns are all added up, and that determines what archetype they get.

The question is, having learned all this, what do I do.