Eric Rosenfield's Tumblings

Writer and product manager. Home base: ericrosenfield.com

[ericrosenfield]

The soul of video games

In the 90s, Myst and Doom fought a war for the soul of video games. Myst sold more than twice as many units. Within ten years, the entire video game industry had remade itself in the image of Doom.

[sambwmn]

[donnerpartyofone]

ballandcone

Holy fucking shit, this is my dad's painting.

https://ballandcone.tumblr.com/post/183382257946

If you reblogged this meme for any reason, you would probably love my dad's comics on @ballandcone . They are all more or less just like this: beautiful, fun, enticingly disturbing reflections of metaphysical thought.

Part of me feels pissed off that my dad didn't get credit for providing the handmade, original punchline for this 10k+ note post. But then again, when I actually write that sentence, I feel a little ridiculous. Like ok, so I personally think my dad deserves to be mega famous for his fabulous art and hilarious abstract gags. But at the same time, it's not like this meme generated a huge amount of money that my dad is literally missing out on. It's just the internet. And it's not like he "wrote" the meme himself. (Maybe I'll even find out that OP--assuming they made this--knows my dad, or they're one of his students, and it's all cool actually) Also, I think he would find this meme funny and satisfying, it's kind of his style of humor. So I don't really know what to say, it was just startling to see this, and there is always that anxious twinge of wanting small independent artists to get the well-deserved credit that they so rarely do.

Ultimately, I hope that people reblog THIS reblog with my caption so that more folks can find out about my wonderful, talented, deserving father @ballandcone . His comics and paintings are really great, and they might even make you feel a little bit better in these troubled times.

*I never do this, but I'm actually going to directly ask mutuals to reblog this if at all possible, like if they don't have a strict theme blog. It could mean a lot to my dad, and hey, maybe he'll even get to sell some more of his comic books if more people see it. Thanks for reading, and for liking my father's paintings 🖤

[ericrosenfield]

New Episode of Literate Machine!

A Mind Forever Voyaging into Neoliberalism

In 1984, Ronald Reagan won reelection in a landslide and one man responded the only way he knew how: by channeling his horror into a video game. My favorite video game. So let's leap through time as the artificial intelligence Perry Sim and see what A Mind Forever Voyaging tells us about our present moment.

https://literatemachine.com/2020/03/01/a-mind-forever-voyaging-into-neoliberalism-steve-meretzky-and-the-video-game-that-saw-it-all-coming/

A Mind Forever Voyaging into Neoliberalism: Steve Meretzky and the Video Game That Saw It All Coming – Literate Machine

[ericrosenfield]

Built my first mechanical keyboard! This is a Massdrop CTRL Barebones I got relatively cheap off Ebay with Gateron Brown switches and Mac keycaps from MaxKeyboards. Might upgrade the switches and keycaps later, but for now this keyboard is pretty great.

[ericrosenfield]

Omniscient Voice and Middle Grade Fiction

Some openings of Middle Grade novels I like:

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: 

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you'd expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. 

A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginnings

If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle. This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.

Holes:

There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. 

 There once was a very large lake here, the largest lake in Texas. That was over a hundred years ago. Now it is just a dry, flat wasteland. There used to be a town of Green Lake as well. The town shriveled and dried up along with the lake, and the people who lived there.

Mister Monday

They had tried to destroy the Will, but that proved to be beyond their power. So they broke it, in two ways. It was broken physically, torn apart, with the fragments of heavy parchment scattered across both space and time. It was broken in spirit because not one clause of it had been fulfilled.

Howl's Moving Castle

In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloask of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.

It’s common wisdom that the omniscient narrator went out of style with the 19th century, but it seems like (at least in the opening) it’s alive and well in SF Middle Grade fiction.

At least with fantasy it certainly helps emphasize the fairy tale quality of the story, or the epic scope of it.

(And yes, I know that A Series of Unfortunate Events is actually narrated by someone who turns out to be a character in the story. He’s still functionally an omniscient narrator, even if sometimes he claims not to know something.)

[ericrosenfield]

I have committed video - Unboxing the Dark World by Henry Kuttner (and CL Moore)

[ericrosenfield]

A name for something that has not been named

There's this, I guess you could call it a genre or sub-genre (though of what exactly I'm not sure), that I've been trying to classify and name. There's a group of works that would fall into it that, while people might have previously pointed out similarities, I'm not sure anyone has lumped together before.

Attributes of the work include:

Big, larger-than-life characters

A tone that veers wildly between comedic and serious

Recomplicated absurdity and gleeful weirdness

Frequent interrogations and deconstructions of popular culture tropes

A commitment to style and spectacle

Works that fall into this "sub-genre" might include:

Adventure Time

Steven Universe

Umbrella Academy

Scott Pilgrim

Rick and Morty

Cerebus: High Society and Cerebus: Church and State

Doctor Who: Managra

Discworld

John Dies at the End

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

The Venture Bros

Cowboy Bebop

FLCL

And lots of stuff by Grant Morrison, including (but not limited to):

Multiversity

Flex Mentallo

Sea Guy

Annihilator

And probably a whole lot more I haven't thought of or been exposed to. There are also lots of things that are on the edge, like the comic series Bone which doesn't quite dig into absurdity and popular culture quite enough to qualify, but has a similar feeling with the weird cartoon characters and situations thrown into an otherwise "serious" epic fantasy.

Anybody else see the continuity between these works? Anyone else think of a name?

[la-laborista-republiko]

[techno-gal-deactivated20191104]

Please do not pass this by without reading it

[nandalorian]

Louder for the people in the back: No sympathy, no quarter, and no mercy

[theauspolchronicles]

I’m so goddamn mad that oil companies have known climate change is real for decades and did everything to stop people from acting on it. I want to burn their offices down. I want to throw their CEOs into a fucking pit. The world is being destroyed because some filthy rich fucks saw the end coming and figured making money off it was better than saving it. That’s pure evil, plain and simple.

[quasi-normalcy]

Exxon knew about climate change almost 40 years ago and took steps to suppress the evidence

Likewise Shell.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory, this is a documented historical fact, and people’s heads should literally be rolling for it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Here's how the Pentagon swindled Congress with $21 trillion worth of undocumented, untraceable, unaccounted for expenditures

Remember when the Department of Defense’s own internal auditor revealed that the agency had committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in just one year?

Now, an in-depth investigation into the Pentagon’s crooked accounting in The Nation hints at the full extent of the accounting frauds deployed by the agency that already absorbs two-thirds of all of America’s federal tax revenue, and delves into the methods used by the Pentagon’s bagmen to hide their financial sleights of hand.

The Pentagon’s main goal is to ensure that it never has its budget cut, so it is at pains to disguise any funding surpluses it has at the end of the year. The laundering tactics used to accomplish this are shifting money from “one-year funds” into “five-year funds.” The Pentagon’s other tactics are internally described as “plugs” (which “plug a hole” in a budget) and “nippering” (shifting funds from a Congressionally approved purpose into another one, repeatedly, “until the funds become virtually untraceable”).

The total figures are inconceivably large. From 1998 to 2015, the Pentagon made at least $21 trillion worth of unaccountable transactions (some of these were on the positive side of the ledger) – five times the annual US GDP!

(Similar practices take place in other agencies: for example, HUD also made $21 trillion in off-books spending in the same period).

https://boingboing.net/2018/11/29/5x-annual-us-gdp.html

[highfunctioningfool]

[endminx]

[cervinesatyr-deactivated2021083]

I have to reblog this every time because frankly this is absolutely genius prose

[ericrosenfield]

The original Dutch settlers of what’s now New York were employees of a corporation called the Dutch West India Company with the stated mission to acquire beaver pelts from the natives. They proceeded to invent an economy out of the formerly ceremonial wampum beads, monopolize that economy and decimate the livelihoods of the natives who became dependent on that economy, for example causing wars between them over the suddenly scarce resource of beaver pelts. Ultimately, of course, they would displace and massacre the natives. Oh, they also introduced African chattel slavery to North America while they were at it.*

*The first chattel slaves in continental North America were actually in Jamestown, but it was the Dutch who brought them there. (And who first sold African slaves to the English and the French.)

[tillthenexttimedoctor]

“Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

— David Foster Wallace (Michael Schur keeps this quote in his office as inspiration for The Good Place)

[la-laborista-republiko]

[thinkherenow]

fuck this guy

[redroadtoadventure]

These continents were already tamed by the indigenous inhabitants. And had been for tens of thousands of years.

[krungle]

Over 80% of the Native Americans were dead by diseases brought over by Columbus’ crew long before the Pilgrims arrived in North America. The Native Americans suffered an apocalyptic catastrophe that made the European Plague look like a bad cold season. This was not done on purpose but it was inevitable that it would have happened eventually.

So what we had here was a Post-Apocalyptic world being resettled by a technologically more advanced civilization. Anthropologically speaking, there was no other outcome possible but what occurred, not on the grander scale of it, anyway. That a bunch of political and religious refugees turned a culturally devastated land into the greatest bastion for freedom, self-rule, and scientific advancement this planet has ever seen is nothing to be sorry for.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Smallpox blankets

The effort to eradicate bison specifically to starve the Sioux

The trail of tears

Residential schools

Bounties for scalped Native Americans in Pennsylvania

The multiple broken treaties to respect Native Land

Please dont fucking act like Native genocide was some kind of unfortunate accident. It was a series of deliberate, violent acts that took advantage of the aftermath of the plagues Europeans brought with them.

[leosuncancervenus]

“Refugees”

[ophaniell]

i love how white people like to act like they weren’t dying from dysentery and dumb as shit before they met us indigenous peoples. u fuckers couldn’t bathe your ass properly and u want to tell me u helped us “advance technologically?” we already had advanced structures and a method of doing things before u came here and infected us and assimilated our people. kindly shut the fuck up.

[sapphicdogmeat-blog]

My dad was born in 1956 and remembers mysterious boxes showing up on their doorstep with food and blankets/clothes. They once gave the family dog the food and it died.

He also said people would try to hit his brothers and him with a car while they were walking to school.

His dad was allowed to die over appendicitis in a hospital. He suffered for days while the staff did NOTHING.

His uncles disappeared and the police did NOTHING. Their car was later found in a canyon, full of bullet holes. The bullets were military issue.

His eldest brother also died under mysterious circumstances.

My great grandmother, the last of our tribe to be born traditionally, outside, owned 5000 acres in northern California. Active imminent domain left her with 1 ACRE. Which they later took to build a post office.

That same grandma, who I’m named after, was kidnapped as a child and held as a slave in a white mans house. She had a wire put through her ear that tethered her so she could only go from her bedroom to the kitchen. Her dad found her and rescued her, ripping the thing out of her ear. My dad said her earlobe was forever split in two pieces.

In church when I was a kid people alienated my family and my dad got jokey death threats all the time. My mom, who was white, was told she was too good for my dad. I was told I was dark but I would hopefully lighten up if I stayed out of the sun. At school we read a story about a “drunken injun” and I cried in class while my classmates mockingly did a raindance and chanted. My first boyfriend said he wished he wasn’t a white guy because Indians get free college.

This shit was recent and current. Go look up suicide, sexual assault, and drug addiction statistics within Native American communities.

White people came to this country and slaughtered us. Your white ancestors did this. Maybe even your grandparents.

America wasn’t won, it was stolen. Native Americans aren’t better off because we have electricity. I’d rather have my people back.

Fuck Donald Trump. Fuck his voters. And fuck white people who try to downplay what happened here.

[ericrosenfield]

Farscape as the last great space exploration show

There’s a certain model of science fiction TV show that goes back to at least the original Star Trek (1966) and probably earlier to shows like Captain Video, whose main premise is that a crew of space explorers are going around encountering weird stuff in a mostly episodic fashion. (Itself an outgrowth of a model of episodic adventures with a lineage going all the way back to epics of the early modern age like Orlando Furioso, the kind of epics that Don Quixote was a parody of.)

The apotheosis of this kind of show was Star Trek: The Next Generation, but other examples include Space: 1999, the original Battlestar Galactica, etc etc. With the rise of the “Golden Age of Television” and more serialized narratives, this mode of storytelling has fallen away, with even the new Star Trek using longer serialized narratives rather than episodic storytelling, becoming in the process less of a space exploration show and more of a straight military drama.

The last great example of this model of show before the shift was the Sci-Fi channel’s Farscape. It distinguished itself from previous shows in a number of ways, including the extensive puppet work by the Jim Henson Company, the fact that the ship’s crew were escaped prisoners rather than a naval-style crew, and the fact that only one of its main characters is human, but its main innovation to the format is the realization that if a group of people were so regularly exposed to so much weird shit that they’d probably just go insane. Particularly the lone human character, John Crichton, gradually loses his mind as he goes from contemporary Earth into the reaches of space where one after another bizarre happenstance happens to him without rhyme or reason.

[wodneswynn-deactivated-deactiva]

My favorite hobby is describing socialism without using the word “socialism” and watching everyone in the room agree with me.

[wodneswynn-deactivated-deactiva]

Guy at work: *bitches about work*

Me: “Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes. See, the company can only make money off of the work we do, so they’re never gonna pay us what we’re worth; you don’t get paid for eight hours’ work, you get paid for working eight hours. That’s how they make bank. So the relationship between us and management is always gonna be adversarial. Why you think [boss] is such a dickhead? He’s incentivized to be a dickhead.”

Guy: “That….that actually makes a lot of sense.”

Me: *stares into the camera like on The Office while ‘The Internationale’ plays in the background*

[libriomancer]

i don’t understand the difference between getting “paid for eight hours’ work” vs “paid for 8 hours.”

[thatregencygrrrl]

Most companies want you to do 12 hours worth of work in 6 hours of actual time. They want to work you so hard your stress level is through the roof. So then you go to the doctor for various illnesses caused by excessive stress. Then you get to add to that stress by worrying about missing too much time from work to take care of the problems that work created in your body.

[libriomancer]

That makes sense  now, thank you!

[wodneswynn-deactivated-deactiva]

The company makes its profits via the additional value your work adds to their product or service. A sewn shirt is more valuable than three yards of fabric, for instance, and a chair is worth more than a few bits of wood, and so on; but for the commodity to reach that market value so much higher than its components requires labor.

So, your employer is not actually paying you an equivalent value for what your labor generates; that’s where their profit comes from. All they’re paying you for is your labor-power exerted over a certain amount of time per day. With modern industrial practices, your employer easily makes back your daily wage in added value within the first few hours of your working day; the whole rest of that time you spend generating profit.

You don’t get paid for eight hours’ work, you get paid for working eight hours.

[inuicta]

“[…] your employer easily makes back your daily wage in added value within the first few hours of your working day; the whole rest of that time you spend generating profit.“

[lunishel]

“So then you go to the doctor for various illnesses caused by excessive stress. Then you get to add to that stress by worrying about missing too much time from work to take care of the problems that work created in your body.” I have a number of problemsand have been putting them off for a long time. At one point I even put off seeing a doctor about a light hemorrhage that did not seem to be bleeding fast enough to do any major harm so I just put it off until later. Saw the doctor. Was referred to another doctor. Which reminds me, I still need to make that appointment at some point.

[black-geek-supremacy]

^I think about this a lot cuz we had s supervisor at my bullseye store who died in her sleep cuz she was too busy working to see a doctor.

[ericrosenfield]

Philosophical Principles of Writing Fantasy, pt. 1

I don’t like it when fantasy stories have people born with magical powers or the ability to do magical powers. It plays into this idea that people are born with “gifts” which is one of the central myths of our society and is based on sand. There are no gifts, there are only skills, and people who think they’re gifted just learned their skills early enough that they forgot that they learned them.

This isn’t to say I don’t like stories where people are born with magical powers. I like Harry Potter just fine, for example. I just don’t like that aspect of the story, it plays into philosophical underpinnings that are fundamentally flawed.

Of course, in the Fifth Season NK Jemisin uses people born with fantastical powers to spin off wonderful metaphors about the history of race and colonialism, which works great.

But for me this is not what I’m after with my own fantasy, and I don’t write stories where some people are born with magical abilities and some people aren’t.