We Have Met The Enemy And They Are Us @clawsofpropinquity - Tumblr Blog

That last post actually triggered a related thought for me - what is the linguistic evolution that got us from Derrida's conception of literary deconstruction to the "TVTropes" modern version of deconstruction? I am pretty sure that is where the term came from; but while their meanings have enough connection for that evolution to be logical, they are still very different; that was a big leap.

I don't think it was TVTropes to be clear, it predates it I am quite sure. I wager this happened through the "academia media theory" channel, where a bunch of previously-internal-jargon got out into the mainstream via writers via more bespoke media establishments, and then ofc the internet and nascent blogosphere picked them up and ran with them. Same channel as the normalization of social justice concepts, really.

TvTropes probably codified it though, since it was previously much more loose in its meaning. "Making explicit commentary on specific genre conventions" is a definition TVTropes was born to run with. And the internet (and nerd media more generally) was also creating works of art that were much more explicit in how they were "playing with genre".

But I am not that sure about any of this - would be interesting to find writing from the 90's and see how they used the term...

kbnet

Usenet is a lazy easy way to tell if it at least goes back before the 90s. Let's see what rec.arts.anime has to say.

Of course it's you, Carl Horn. This is the only post in the newsgroup my search returned, and notably, Carl Horn fits the bill for an erudite geek versed in western comics. Let's check up on rec.arts.comics.

Well that's a bit more. No idea if rec.arts.comics was even the most active capeshit newsgroup, but for our purposes it doesn't matter. It seems they use it the same way TVtropes uses it. Is Alan Moore to blame? I dunno, there aren't many interviews with him archived on the internet before around 2000.

centrally-unplanned

Yeah this is both exactly the kind of primary source you want to look at, but also in a way too close to the whole affair! Of course people were using it in the Usenet Anime Forums in the 90's!! They are exactly the "academic adjacent" people who would be all-in on this kind of terminology. I am curious about how much currency it had in wider circles at this point, or how it "got here" to begin with.

Not saying it isn't valuable in any way, to be clear - and in the end my default hypothesis is "the term was known but niche, only used by indie artists & academics, and it was the internet that blew it up". Posts like these are exactly that pathway, as these would be the people running anime forums and subreddits in future years. Here you can tell it is being used very directly - an explicit, mocking parody of a work. That definition is gonna stretch over time.

Also incredible that it is Carl Horn >.< As insufferable as he is great, I have blogged before about how is editorial commentary is the best part of the Evangelion manga's official translation. Never change my friend.

clawsofpropinquity

Might be worth seperating out two things here: Geoff Klock style division of genre works into classical/revisionist/reconstructionist, and the use of "deconstructionist" as a synonym for revisionist. The ship sailed on the second of those before the internet: people were talking about "deconstructionist westerns" in the 80s. Possibly Alan Moore just meant to say that Watchmen was a bit like McCabe & Mrs Miller.

femmenietzsche

Sci fi stories that feature psychic powers are generally on the cringe/silly spectrum, but some psychic powers are more plausible than others. Like, telepathy... some version of it is not strictly incompatible with the laws of physics, it's just a huge reach and it's not like people would ever just evolve into being telepaths. Telekinesis couldn't happen unless the world became suffused with like nanomachines that respond to thought, which admittedly would be a good premise - the internet of things taken to the infinitesimal limit. There is no astral plane to project to unless you're just plugging into a fancier internet, which who cares.

raginrayguns

there's a weird thing going on though where they want it to be incompatible with the laws of physics, or... at least, to violate some sense of what is physical

this goes at least as far back as Olaf Stapledon, who distinguished between a telepathy-like function that was just radio waves and real telepathy, which is more like an ansible, and don't even worry about relativity because telepathy also works with the past and future

actually speaking of ansibles there's also bugger telepathy from Ender's Game, also violates relativity and becomes the basis of the ansible tech

and then in like actual quantum woo, with "remote viewing"... it's hard to say whether they wanted it to violate the laws of physics because at first they thought faster-than-light communication was physically possible with quantum entanglement. There was this weird overlap of parapsychology and physics, that built on interest in two then-new ideas, virtual particles and quantum entanglement, and they proceeded from there pretty quickly to the idea that perception involves quantum entanglement with distant objects by way of virtual photons from vacuum fluctuations. As no-go theorems accumulated, the more sophisticated side of this did reject quantum mechanics in favor of modifications that would allow communication through entanglement (I haven't followed their math, but it sounds like a similar idea as Weinberg has pursued; he says that if you add any non-linearity to Schrodinger's equation you get instantaneous signals), but of course most people never followed it in that much detail anyway. But the '70s "remote viewing" woo and the idea of signaling through quantum entanglement were inseparable, and they thought of it as physical though it really isn't. Then this trickles down into science fiction; A. A. Attanasio comes to mind.

So there was, early and late, this idea that telepathy should violate, if not the laws of physics, at least standard ideas about causality.

Of course I'm skipping over a lot. Asimov just went with it being electromagnetic radiation.

clawsofpropinquity

I think it makes sense if you think of Golden Age space opera as a sort of "what if we took these daft ideas seriously" response to pulp scifi, similar to the deconstructionist wave of superhero comics. Like the og scifi hacks called their evil magicians psions and psychics for the same reason they gave their heroes beam swords and space armour, because if you didn't change the nouns the story may as well be set on earth. And then later writers take those tropes and work out explanations and consequences for them; so you can travel faster than light using wormholes but that means it's possible to violate causality; or psychic powers are real but they violate the laws of physics. Interestingly I don't think Asimov bit either of those.

eightyonekilograms

A while ago, someone on here (don't remember who) made the point that stories about covert agencies handling supernatural or alien stuff (e.g. SCP, Men in Black, the TVA from the MCU, etc.), if they're nominally set in the present day, almost all use the same basic aesthetic template: that of peak American state capacity right after WWII, before the long period of steady decline.

And I'm suddenly wondering, is this typical for the twilight days of the empire? Obviously plenty of people throughout history reminisced about their past golden ages and great kings, but did this ever extend specifically to fantasizing about their past bureaucracies?

Maybe people in China did this when they were in one of the low points of their epicycles. I would love to read examples.

clawsofpropinquity

Aren't all those agencies total chumps though? Between Legion, Doom Patrol, Loki, Control and Umbrella Academy I feel like the main association the mid-century g-man aesthetic should convey is "out of their depth and destined to be taken down by an unstable ex-employee". The TVA in particular are much more retro and much less competent than the MCU's other bureaucracies, which are more at risk of being subverted than overpowered.

tsarina-anadyomene

the problem with genre fiction people is that they have no sense of tackiness. or maybe it's that they have a really good sense of tackiness but something in their brain is misfiring to say that they're aiming at goodness when they aim at tackiness.

clawsofpropinquity

SFF, Horror = openly love bad taste, distrust anything afraid to be tacky

Crime/mystery = convinced they have great taste, only the bad authors are tacky

Romance = missing this part of their brain

max1461

Looking at real GDP per capita data and it just doesn't make any sense to me? What is the rhyme or reason? Why does the UK have 60% higher real GDP per capita than Japan or South Korea? Why does Taiwan have higher real GDP per capita than any of them, on par with the US? Why does Russia have higher real GDP per capita than China? Why is Ireland so high? I have been to a number of these countries and I don't notice anything that would suggest to me living standards vary by +-2x, and if you'd asked me to rank them by my intuitive perception of how wealthy they are I would not have ranked them like this.

I guess that's my confusion. What observable aspects of life do these real GDP per capita data correspond to?

poipoipoi-2016

So Ireland is weird because every American tech company sends all their profits through there. Consumption measures show a significant drop back down to normal measures.

This is honestly generally a case with financial hubs. They are rich. But not that rich.

In a more generic sense, you're looking for:

Houses

Cars to get you places because houses are big and non-dense

Hilarious inequality

Assorted financial trickery between corporates and actual consumer consumption. Asia does particularly "well"/terrible on this. But so does Germany. Ye gods Germany.

At this point America is becoming visibly richer than Europe and neither Asia nor Europe outside of really China have seen growth in 20 years.

clawsofpropinquity

Ireland vs the UK is also a great example of the big problem with conflating wealth and GDP which is that one is a stock and one is a flow.

Ireland is I think even once you account for the tax evasion a slightly higher income country than the UK and if you just look at like, phones and cars and holidays it does feel that way. But wealth-wise that's swamped by the gulf in historical income, the sheer amount of stuff that Britain was able to build up while Ireland was impoverished, not just the fancy buildings but all the infrastructure, the railway lines and sewers and roads that are perhaps older and more run-down than what you see in Ireland but also more extensive. Which makes a difference to how people live, particularly in rural areas.

friendshapedhole

So what’s the deal with lab-grown diamonds? Did they successfully disrupt the market and make fat diamond engagement rings cost $20? I haven’t seen an ad for jewelry in years so I have no idea what they cost.

Did they discover a way to prove which diamonds are naturally occurring and which are lab grown?

clawsofpropinquity

I think the main impact has been on other stones, since white mined diamonds are still more-or-less competitive with lab-grown but fancy diamonds are not, undercutting their cachet. Seen a few sapphire engagement rings in recent years and I think that was a harder sell when you had the ruinously expensive spectre of blue diamond hanging over them. But now a diamond being blue just means it's synthetic, so sapphire looks like a sophisticated option.

transgenderer

some fields have a large psuedofield, some dont

examples of robust pseudofields: pseudophysics, pseudohistory, pseudolinguistics, pseudomedicine,

examples of fields without robust pseudofields: math, philosophy (you can dabble in pseudo, but once you start building elaborate theories youre probably just doing the real thing), psychology, economics, political science, sociology (fully intermixed with mainstream), engineering (exists, but either your contraption works or it doesnt), chemistry, geography (unless you count flat earthers i guess)

transgenderer

@raginrayguns said:

PSEUDOECOLOGY hmm if you count stuff as NOT having a pseudofield if it's mixed enough with the mainstream then idk how to classify ecology. It's hard to call the boundary between like "mathematical modeling of population counts from national parks" and like nature spirituality (what is an "ecosystem" for example?)

@charadriusnivosus said:

leery about polisci being declared as lacking pseuds but kind of curious as to your thought process

i think to have a meaningful "pseudofield" there needs to be a sharp boundary between "approved practitioners" and "outsider cranks" and neither of those fields have that! ecology and poli sci both have real results but they shade smoothly into utter nonsense, there's no hard social wall between them. so no real pseudofield

@dreg-heap said:

Pseudopaleontology could be your classic christian science museum or the mud fossil guy

@ishparpuaqib said:

pseudoarchaeology! one of the most expansive pseudofields by far

i guess i was lumping both of these in under pseudohistory but they function differently, so yeah these are definitely two of the largest pseudofields

i think climate science is an interesting example cuz theres a huge body of false science but i dont think it's built around forming alternative cohesive paradigms, its mostly "surface level"

elancholia

Psychology is unpopular around here, but some is definitely more pseudo than the rest. MBTI, neurolinguistic programming, the enneagram, and so on.

transgenderer

sure sure sure, theres lots of real psychology! but there's no BOUNDARY, that's the important part. theres total nonsense ecology, there's total nonsense polisci. but there's no sharp red line, with a bunch of guys patting each other on the back on one side, and the disavowed on the other. theres just a slow slide down into pseudoscience, uncomfortably sideeying the guy a little farther down the slope. while in history or physics or archeology theyre pretty strict about this, there's definitely an "in" and an "out"

clawsofpropinquity

Economics definitely has a strong boundary. If it's not got clearly definied pseudofields it's for the opposite reason to the other fields, the boundary is too sharp and so cuts off bits of Marxian/Austrian/Sraffian/etc theory that at least some mainstream economists dont dismiss entirely.

But all the crankery is done by self-identified dissenters, it's not disguised as normal economics the way MBTI is disguised as real psychology.

transgenderer

I think considering of marxian/straussian/Austrian economics as doing "pseudo economics" is ksilly. Like. These people have professorships! In the field! Economics is just a field that hasn't formed a consensus the way many other fields have. You need a consensus before you can have pseudo science, it's the same reason there wasn't "pseudo physics" in the 1500s, there wasn't a community with an in and an out

clawsofpropinquity

Yeah of course heterodox economists aren't all pseudoeconomists, the borders of mainstream economics are drawn more tightly than that. But all the cranks are heterodox, there's nothing like MBTI that appears mainstream but is looked down on by insiders. Orthodox economics isn't one school among many, it's the mainstream the heterodox are outside of.

Like a high school that based all it's economics lessons around praxeology or the LTV would be extremely questionable. Not intelligent design bad but more like that than, idk, the english department all being hardcore intentionalists, or the physics teachers all hating the Copenhagen interpretation.

transgenderer

some fields have a large psuedofield, some dont

examples of robust pseudofields: pseudophysics, pseudohistory, pseudolinguistics, pseudomedicine,

examples of fields without robust pseudofields: math, philosophy (you can dabble in pseudo, but once you start building elaborate theories youre probably just doing the real thing), psychology, economics, political science, sociology (fully intermixed with mainstream), engineering (exists, but either your contraption works or it doesnt), chemistry, geography (unless you count flat earthers i guess)

transgenderer

@raginrayguns said:

PSEUDOECOLOGY hmm if you count stuff as NOT having a pseudofield if it's mixed enough with the mainstream then idk how to classify ecology. It's hard to call the boundary between like "mathematical modeling of population counts from national parks" and like nature spirituality (what is an "ecosystem" for example?)

@charadriusnivosus said:

leery about polisci being declared as lacking pseuds but kind of curious as to your thought process

i think to have a meaningful "pseudofield" there needs to be a sharp boundary between "approved practitioners" and "outsider cranks" and neither of those fields have that! ecology and poli sci both have real results but they shade smoothly into utter nonsense, there's no hard social wall between them. so no real pseudofield

@dreg-heap said:

Pseudopaleontology could be your classic christian science museum or the mud fossil guy

@ishparpuaqib said:

pseudoarchaeology! one of the most expansive pseudofields by far

i guess i was lumping both of these in under pseudohistory but they function differently, so yeah these are definitely two of the largest pseudofields

i think climate science is an interesting example cuz theres a huge body of false science but i dont think it's built around forming alternative cohesive paradigms, its mostly "surface level"

elancholia

Psychology is unpopular around here, but some is definitely more pseudo than the rest. MBTI, neurolinguistic programming, the enneagram, and so on.

transgenderer

sure sure sure, theres lots of real psychology! but there's no BOUNDARY, that's the important part. theres total nonsense ecology, there's total nonsense polisci. but there's no sharp red line, with a bunch of guys patting each other on the back on one side, and the disavowed on the other. theres just a slow slide down into pseudoscience, uncomfortably sideeying the guy a little farther down the slope. while in history or physics or archeology theyre pretty strict about this, there's definitely an "in" and an "out"

clawsofpropinquity

Economics definitely has a strong boundary. If it's not got clearly definied pseudofields it's for the opposite reason to the other fields, the boundary is too sharp and so cuts off bits of Marxian/Austrian/Sraffian/etc theory that at least some mainstream economists dont dismiss entirely.

But all the crankery is done by self-identified dissenters, it's not disguised as normal economics the way MBTI is disguised as real psychology.

transgenderer

i dont think psychiatrists are evil, as people (perhaps more formally: "virtue ethically"). i think in their interpersonal lives theyre probably an average amount of good, and i think theyre generally sincerely trying to help their patients. and it turns out, if you give one average person a huge amount of legally-enforced power over another person, they will use said power to cause that person massive harm. cf parenting, of course. i think this is the fundamental argument towards "freedom" in the usual "freedom to" sense, and why im pretty intensely anti-paternalist. people are bad to people they have control over.

the-reconciliation-of-all-things

erred again tgendie... people who seek out careers that give them immense power over others are infact generally not good people

transgenderer

i sincerely dont think most psychiatrists even think about their capacity to incarcerate people at will before entering the field. like some weirdos maybe. but i think most of them are people who were going through medical school for the usual greed+vague-altruism reasons, and eventually needed to pick a specialty, and for whatever reason psychiatry stuck out as the most desirable option (maybe theyre interested in psychology, or dont like doing stuff with their hands, or are a "people person" or whatever). like, prison guards, cops, sure, theyre genuinely choosing a role where this sort of power is a central part of its external conception. but psychs i think mostly stumbled into it. its like nurses

clawsofpropinquity

Surely the shrink is the only person working in a prison who might have actually wanted the job growing up? Stereotypically the guards would all prefer to be cops or soldiers. Granted, also evil motive jobs although I don't think the bloodless "power over others" you see in some medics is all that common. Much more "I love crimes and fighting but also having a pension". Of course all of these are more than anything family connection jobs, so maybe the psychology goes the other way.

dmonet-macitan

learned how to use blenders film making tools

isanrichar

Mad Max: Fury Road concept art by Brendan McCarthy

transgenderer

the anglophone scholarship on akhenaten has this really irritating tendency to depict monotheism as like, an "intellectual advance" akhenaten made. instead of like. a value-neutral shift. i need to be reading japanese scholarship on akhenaten. or indian, altho they have a monotheizing streak, esp in the upper echelons of society

phaeton-flier

...[indians] have a monotheizing streak, esp in the upper echelons of society

Hmm, do you know how far back that goes? Like I assume there was always some minor viewpoint on it going back, but how widespread was this before colonization?

transgenderer

ok im basically just regurgitating doniger's on hinduism here but, while indian monotheism is much older than colonization, "hinduism is a monotheist faith" was like. a type of guy in colonial india. cuz yknow. the british were really terrible about it. i mean like, it was pretty widespread before colonization, theres a bunch of it in the upanishads, arggggguably all of shaivism and vaishnavism take this form. but i think the idea that hinduism is "genuinely monotheist" doesnt predate colonialism, like the other gods are the same as the one god but only in the sense that every thing is existence is the same as the one god (or yknow. emanates from. whatever). so like. there are definitely still other gods in the usual literal sense. you have more than one kind of statue

and then with colonialism you get this type of guy whose a brahmin that wants to be respected by the british but keep his faith. so he's like "guys its *literally* monotheist. were monotheists. were in the club"

clawsofpropinquity

Do find it a little funny that, at least as Doniger tells it, this only really started to happen under the British. So they accepted that Muslim rulers would look down on them as polytheists, but the trinity-worshipping idolators doing it is a bridge too far. Like, if you guys are in the club then so are we.

shieldfoss

perhaps wizard robes are a requirement for higher level spell casting? or there is some positive reason for wizards to wear robes that helps with magic rather than a penalty

BrazenAutomaton suggested something similar and I replied that, though there's room for a bonus here, there is not enough room to grant a bonus that makes up for not getting +10 AC from plate armor.

And yet, now that suntzuanime has reminded me that you can make heavy armor out of non-metal material (I am literally putting linothorax in the game! How did I forget?) I may have to adjust something because "bonus for (incompatible with armor)" is starting to look more feasible than "penalty for armor."

samueldays

I am once again suggesting the Jack Vance model of magic (not D&D Vancian) where "casting fireball", strictly speaking, means asking a Fire Goblin to please cast fireball on your enemies.

Fire Goblins have strong opinions on heavy armor and will not perform the fireball-casting services for people wearing that.

Basically just move your aesthetic constraints in-universe. ;-)

clawsofpropinquity

This works well with the detail mentioned in the other post, that anyone in the setting can cast magic via elaborate ritual and spellcasters just have access to the express lane. Evidently this still requires dressing up in the appropriate courtly robes and silly hat. Also explains why elves are permitted to wear swords while invoking their supernal cousins, while upstart humans are limited to courtly substitutes like wands

kierongillen

I recently finished reading Rue Britannia, and despite really enjoying it I felt I could get more out of it with more knowledge of the music you built it around. What would you say was the essential listening for it?

Elastica and Pulp are the only bands we recommend without reservation from Britpop, and with Elastica we have to do a Stalinist revision of history that made them only release one album.

The core albums to get are the three period albums by the three biggest bands. You’ll get a lot from them, especially if you listen to them in order. I stress, not all of them are good throughout (or good at all) but that’s the story we’re telling.

BLUR: MODERN LIFE IS RUBBISH/PARK LIFE/THE GREAT ESCAPEPULP: HIS’N”HERS/DIFFERENT CLASS/THIS IS HARDCOREOASIS: DEFINITELY MAYBE/WHAT’S THE STORY MORNING GLORY/BE HERE NOW.

You probably need BLUR’s Eponymous one they released after THE GREAT ESCAPE as well.

I’d probably get Elastica’s Elastica before going into most of them.

Otherwise, going through the notes in the back and listening to anything that sounds interesting would be the next step.

Obviously, Kenickie.

tomewing-blog

“Image Comics found itself at the centre of a scandal last night after one of its top writers took to social media asking his young audience to listen to ‘Be Here Now’ by Oasis.

Horrified parents BOMBARDED the publisher with demands for an explanation after finding their children had knowingly accessed the Manchester band’s 70-minute third LP. But DEFIANT Image writer and goth Kieron Gillen was unrepentant, saying fans needed to know the full truth about Britpop in order to understand his work. “That’s the story we’re telling,” SNEERED Gillen, 38 as he repeated his twisted commands, issued on social media site Tumblr.

Parents like Michael Enswear of Camden disagreed. “There’s never a justification for playing Be Here Now,” he said angrily, “It’s sick. This Gillen has gone too far - he should stick to his World War II atrocities and pagan death goddesses and not meddle in topics like the overdubs on “D’You Know What I Mean”. He says he issued warnings but as far as I’m concerned they weren’t nearly clear enough.”

The sentiment was backed up by Susan Leeper of Also Camden. “I’m no prude,” she told our reporter, “But it’s a parents right to choose when their children learn about difficult material. We would have been happy to sit down when our little girl reached 21 and have a discussion about why a loving God allowed an extra reprise of “All Around The World” to be recorded. Now that chance is gone. Forever.”“

kierongillen

Any research into a war which dodges the war-crimes is not research worth doing.

femmenietzsche

I obviously haven't seen anywhere near all the good sci fi movies ever made, but I have seen most of the expensive ones at this point

argumate

so fuckin' depressing

centrally-unplanned

Need to make a film called "City of Darkness" where I build a "practical effects" billion dollar cyberpunk 1:1 ratio cityscape for filming, and then I just sell the set after as affordable housing; that is what our most expensive movies should be doing.

clawsofpropinquity

This Kind Of Smart, Walkable, Mixed-use Urbanism Is Illegal To Build In Most German Cities

malibuklaus

clawsofpropinquity

“Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich. [...] "But we have also," continued the management consultant, "run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying on ship's peanut." [...] "So in order to obviate this problem," he continued, "and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and...er, burn down all the forests. I think you'll all agree that's a sensible move under the circumstances.”

pinktreasure123

Hanfu and Motorcycle

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