l'Anonyme

Picture of Miklós Ligeti's statue of the Hungarian Anonymus by Paul Mannix, taken from Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 2.0). @staff: Pourquoi est-il impossible d'avoir des accents dans mon nom?

[shiroxix]

Doodle of Mycroft I did while Jay read to me.

[suspected-spinozist]

I’m reading some of Petrarch’s letters for a class. Bocaccio is by far his most frequent correspondent, and there’s a bit where Petrarch responds to his accusation that he’d wasted his time in the service of princes instead of devoting it to his work. And Petrarch’s response is really telling - at least about Terra Ignota: 

Here is the truth: I was with the princes in name, but in fact the princes were with me; I never attended their councils, and very seldom their banquets. I would never approve any conditions that would distract me from my freedom and from my studies. Therefore, when everyone sought the palace, I either sought the forest or rested in my room among my books. If I were to say “I did not lose a single day,” I would be lying … there, then, are the seven months I lost at the service of princes; an enormous loss, I do not deny, in so short a life; but would that the loss which the vanity and empty activities of my adolescence caused me were not more enormous!

Ada Palmer is a renaissance specialist; she’s read this. She’s even talked about the Petrarchan scholarly community as a model for the bash’. And having read it myself, I understand the Utopian mindset a lot better. The ability to single-mindedly pursue one’s goals isn’t an imposition but itself a kind of freedom. More importantly, the desire for leisure (that is, unproductive leisure) is a kind of constraint, an imposition on one’s values. Petrarch finds himself surrounded by courtiers pursuing temporal power over immortal knowledge; his only recourse is to isolate himself. I still don’t like it, but i get it. 

There’s also a character who is forced to sacrifice his own productive potential to place himself at the beck and call of princes - I’m talking, of course, about Mycroft Canner. His circumstances have at least as much to do with historical models of patronage at least as much as servitude. There’s an argument to be made that Cato Weeksbooth is in the same position, and of course Joyce Faust’s Utopian hostages. I know this series is supposed to be a riff on the 18th century, but this recurring dynamic feels right out of the 14th. 

[dataandphilosophy]

One of the (many) highlights from Balticon was a one-hour author discussion, where I got Ada on the topic of a project she’s doing with Cory Doctorow, on censorship in the early print era, how it compares to modern censorship, and the bottom-up nature of the Inquisition.

Highlights

The 6th edition of the Encyclopedia was not censored, but the 7th was. However, while Rome was unhappy, France couldn’t have cared less. The format, font, and content remained almost entirely unchanged.

In fact, there was so much apathy towards this ban that copies of the Encyclopedia would be used to smuggle other, more forbidden works. Stick the Encyclopedia on the top, stick your more banned books below, they find what you were trying to hide and don’t look further.

The Inquisition would typically ritually burn a copy of a book that was proscibed. Except the Encyclopedia, where they just burned another book instead and carried off their copy. 

Someone wrote a book critiquing Jesuit education. The local Spanish inquisition was, shall we say, Unhappy, and the local branch burns the copies. Then a second edition comes out. Printed, quietly, by a Jesuit member of the local inquisition who had been among those responsible for burning the first edition.

The inquisition employed scholars to tell them what to censor. These scholars would sometimes send letters to their friends saying “hey, your new book was my assignment for censoring today, I really liked it!”

They would also sometimes do grammatical edits, if they wanted to improve a work. Sort of the inverse of the Soviets, who pretended to do grammatical editing and actually did censorship.

At the end, Ada apologized for having spent no time discussing Terra Ignota. Several of the fans disagreed: the entire discussion was about Terra Ignota.

Someone gave me a pin. Someone carries around an entire bag of Hive pins and hands them out to people who are likely to appreciate them. I love and appreciate this person.

“Mycroft can’t be a Utopian, because Utopians are obligated to take an appropriate amount of rest and Mycroft is incapable of this.”

[tetraspace-west]

love how the humanist hive almost got dissolved because of Eureka Weeksbooth’s problematic tweets

[spaceing-deactivated20190821]

“In darker ages Justice stood alone before courthouses, but in Carlyle’s vision her sister Temperance stands to one side holding back her sword, while from the other side Reason lifts away her blindfold, so Justice can finally see the contents of her scales … Perhaps it was hubris for Carlyle to change Justice’s image image after so many centuries, but such enlightened hubris even gods might forgive.”

— Ada Palmer, The Will To Battle

[tirkdi]

(Image one of forty-eight)

[atheistsensayer]

This is the best Terra Ignota post I have seen.

[atheistsensayer]

Still love this so much

[georgiansuggestion]

preferred pronouns: gentle reader

[infraredarmy]

i saw a capitalized “Me” referring to a human and. i realize it was probably some bdsm shit but now whenever i see that particular bit of bdsm shit i’m incapable of not thinking about jedd mason. thanks ada palmer

[gazyrlezon]

Well, our Άναξ did grow up at Madame’s, so …

[infraredarmy]

one sentence summary of terra ignota: if you outlaw gender, only outlaws will have gender

[infraredarmy]

Ok, this is definitely not what Ada Palmer intended, but: wouldn’t it be funny as hell if Bridger really was made by This Universe’s God, but J.E.D.D. was just a genetically engineered megalomaniac and Bridger’s purpose was to deliver the resurrection potion into the hands of Mycroft, who’d deliver it into the hands of Utopia, but J.E.D.D. thought it was to talk to him?

[timeforsnipersopinion]

My terra ignota oc is that guy who’s been posting “mycroft canner is secretly alive” and “car crashes are cover ups for government assassinations” conspiracies on their vlog that gets like 100 hits a month max and who has the absolute BEST DAY OF THEIR LIFE

[le-comte-deguise]

I wonder if something like that could have an actual political impact, because since suddenly some of that crazy guy's theories were proven true then all the other crazy stuff they're posting might suddenly become immensely popular and influental as well. Think something like QAnon but with some actual evidence that it's all true.

I hope we see something like that in book four.

[utopiaboo]

All Utopian names are beautiful and precious except “Mojave.”

Mojave, California is the worst place on Earth. I think that’s part of what Ada Palmer wanted to evoke with it: spending years living in a sun-scorched desert town full of trash and meth while you’re spending your days and nights turning wrenches on the Great Project is an extremely Utopian #aesthetic but like

Mojave companies ain’t taking anybody to Mars. Virgin Galactic is about to be a suborbital tourism company without the audacity to even have delusions of grandeur, and their (admittedly sweet) spaceplane can’t even hit the von Karman line! Stratolaunch is crossing their fingers that the big bird distracts everyone from noticing that air launch is a terrible idea. Stargazer/Pegasus flies once every few years at most. Masten makes cool Moon landers, but who’s buying Moon landers anymore? RIP XCOR. RIP Rotary.

Shoulda named him “Apollo Rutan” instead (praise be to Rutan). Or “Apollo Gagarin,” which preserves the spectacular double-amphibrach of “Apollo Mojave.”

[utopiaboo]

Thanks for coming to my TED talk; here’s the full list of Utopian names from That One Part of TWTB:

Mordred! Curie! Curiosity! Oz! Poe! Kepler! Milton! Caspian! Quark! Avalon! Watson! Kirk! Adamant! Euclid! Svalinn! Joyeuse! Kili! Pix! Mallory! Fermi! Phoenix! Delany! Olivant! Polo! Clarke! Dragon! Shenzhou! Venture! Franken! Tianlong! Hal! Gulliver! Leto! Freeport! Bochica! Hadaly! Elric! Zamyatin! Quasar! Vimana! Galileo! Talaria! Shadow! Earheart! Pluto! Arcadia! Jules! Vinndálf! Kelvin! Sherwood! Mercury! Helicon! Bard! Zuse! Aegis! Wukong! Cabal! Chaucer! Galaxi! Kusanagi! Leif! Coyote! Bletchley! Ijiraq! Starbuck! Thule! Mina! Hyperiod! Mulan! Atom! Yuri! Pan! Spaceway! Capricorn! Storm! Grimm! Kamalu! Perrin! Condor! Asphodel! Nig! Sirius! Kennedy! Appleseed! Enkidu! Han! Stardust! Abbas! Lyra! Altair! Deimos! Grendel! Char! Langley! Faun! Tesla! Carnwennan! Mab! Ovid! Gandiva! Akatsuki! Argo! Sampo! Turing! Jinn!

[le-comte-deguise]

Why does Carlyle say she only speaks English?

And why does Jehovah believe it? Doylist answer is that Ada Palmer did not want to make it obvious that Carlyle also speaks Spanish until later when Thisbe reveals it when they find her inside Mukta, but is there a Watsonian explanation as well?

I could conceivably imagine Carlyle lying about it, but surely Jehovah would have noticed, and desperate as he is to make himself understood I cannot imagine he would let it slide. Or does Spanish simply not have any words for what he was trying to express?

[bewareofthecar1966]

tricolor sache worn by vidocq while he was chef of the surete

(my gallant friend @tuuilindo went to an exhibition in the parisian police prefecture dedicated to vidocq and l’empereur de paris and took pics for me! yall i’ve only seen this sache in an old b/w photo from the carnavalet museum collection, this truly is christmas)

[prudencepaccard]

!!!!!!

[utopiaboo]

I got that combination sensayer scarf, German nation-strat insignia, and Les Misérables Fan Club sign

[le-comte-deguise]

Him, unless this has changed until the 25th century these are more like Belgian colors, not German ones (black-yellow-red instead of black-red-yellow/"gold"). Definitely agree on the rest though.

[gazyrlezon]

I’m not sure if anyone remembers this (to this day, it’s gotten exactly one note), but a couple months ago I made a post about this amazing project about how censorship has historically worked/still works today. The crowdfunding campaign has since finished, and now here’s the first video!

I know it’s almost two hours long, but I really recommend watching it. There’s also a short ten-minute “best of” compilation, which does get the key points across, but there’s some really good bits missing; Ada Palmer especially is an amazing storyteller (at the very least, listen to the amazing string of stories she fires off at about 1h15 on how to smuggle banned books into France—or how to not get them banned in the first place even if the law says they should be banned—and again at 1h35 about “time-shared torture chambers” and what to do if you’re working for an underfunded Inquisition, or how to determine if the thing you have on your hands should be censored when you’re literally not allowed to read it or else you’ll maybe be damned to hell beyond all hopes of redemption).

If you prefer reading, there’s also a full transcript here. Also, a general advice on lecture recordings: they’re usually safe to watch at 1.25 or even 1.5 times normal speed, particularly if there’s subtitles.

Oh, also, Cory Doctorow talks about the EU’s plans for e-copyright about halfway through and makes some interesting points.

[disexplications]

There was also at one point a brand called Thamanayah that attempted to market kandoras to Western men, without much success that I am aware of, although these undeniably look pretty cool

[utopiaboo]

@cousincarlyle masc cousin wear??

[cousincarlyle]

Perfect!

[sith-shame-shack]

Man, one characterization of Vader that I love but rarely see is: Vader as deeply religious. 

Because from an in-universe perspective, that’s so weird! Vader and the viewer know that the Force is not a matter of faith, and that it does in fact give him powers up to and including the ability to accurately see the future, but the galaxy at large doesn’t know that and his fellow Imperials definitely don’t. I think the point of Motti, besides introducing Vader’s ruthlessness toward even his own faction, is to demonstrate that Force use is not just a known factor of the Star Wars universe. 

In that context, Vader is inexplicable. Not only does he have uncanny and inscrutable powers, like those the murdered Jedi are rumored to have had, but he is the only figure in the Imperial military who seems to talk about his religion. At least among the military leadership, he’s not secretive about it; if he’s got to leave a conversation to hunt down Obi-wan, he’ll just come right out and say that he has supernatural knowledge which he needs to go address now. He wields a banned, antique Jedi weapon. He has several times invoked the Force while speaking to his officers. 

In-universe, the general public doesn’t know why he’s like this! The Empire isn’t a theocracy; besides banning the Jedi religion, Emperor Palpatine doesn’t really seem to make a lot of overtly religious policy choices, and I don’t think the general public knows if he subscribes to any specific faith. Except for people who know what the Sith are, Vader just seems like an extremely devout sole adherent to a religion that is all but dead, its other practitioners hunted for treason. He’s like if the president had a weird murder pet who was a Catholic nun, only Catholicism was banned and all other church officials had been murdered by the government. 

[toolusingmammalgirl]

Isn’t that last bit a perfect description of Dominic Seneschal (in relation to J.E.D.D.)

[canis-domini]

yes it is