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@zzedar

43 posts

i read the locked tomb books because my mutual kept going on about it but i'm gonna be honest, i feel like i'm taking crazy pills with the way everyone talks about these books like they're not embarassingly bad. have we all just agreed to ignore this or

let me be real with u for a sec: these books have MULTIPLE (!) unhinged murder lesbians in them so as far as i'm concerned they could be actively indecipherable and i would still eat that shit up. it's dire out here if ur a fan of awful women having variously problematic homoerotically charged relationships with each other. i just rly cannot afford to be choosy

having said that: it's fine and understandable if they're not ur thing (especially as things start getting somewhat esoteric from htn onward) and there's certainly things to criticize about them but i personally don't agree that they're "embarrassingly bad" at all. i think gideon the ninth especially is a rly fun, tightly plotted, well executed lil murder mystery and harrow the ninth at the very least succeeds at what it's trying to do even if what it is trying to do isn't gonna work for some people. haven't finished nona yet so i'm reserving judgement on that one.

like, i promise u that ur allowed to dislike these books as much as u want and i give u explicit permission to feel as smug and superior as u like about ur taste in literature, but also... maybe let the dykes have this one just this once

Yes

So here’s the biggest problem I had with that book (I should preface this by saying I only got about halfway through it, so it’s possible that this is an intentional unreliable narrator thing that would become clear if I read the end -- but from the way it’s presented, I don’t think it is):

There’s a serious “take my word for it” approach to characterization. If a character’s supposed to have a certain personality trait, then rather than convey this by having the character actually display that trait, it’s conveyed by having other characters tell us that they have that trait. There’s one in particular that sticks in my mind, where... okay, there’s a common character archetype in fantasy books where you have the arrogant aristocrat who’s confident in their skills because they do well in training or duels but turns out not to be able to hack it in actual combat. And there’s a character in this book (I forget his name) who’s clearly supposed to be that archetype, except... they forgot the part where he actually does anything arrogant! And it isn’t like this is supposed to be a different character, everyone in the story seems to think he’s arrogant, acts towards him like he’s arrogant, but from everything we see he’s perfectly pleasant. And the part about him getting humbled in real battle... we are shown a combat, and at one point the narration says (or Gideon thinks? It’s unclear, and that’s the reason that unreliable narration just might be the explanation) that if Aristocratic Duellist Guy had suffered a similar injury he wouldn’t have been able to take it. And that’s entirely possible! It would not be at all surprising if he reacted that way! But you can’t just assert that -- it’s also possible that he wouldn’t. In general I think “show, don’t tell” gets way overemphasized as writing advice, but there is something to it, from which this book would benefit.

Also I didn’t find the humor funny.

Maybe this will come up later but it would be nice if Babylon 5 would give the audience a better sense of how powerful all these races are relative to each other. Right now it’s kind of like The Force Awakens, hazy worldbuilding to the point that it’s a detriment.

I felt like these were established pretty clearly at least by late in season 1- the Vorlons are obscenely powerful, the Minbari are a distant second but still the most advanced of the younger races by a fair margin (they curbstomped humanity in a 1v1 but humanity wasn’t totally helpless), Centauri and Narn are on the same tier as humanity; compared to each other the Centauri perhaps rule a slightly larger empire with more resources but the Narn are more militaristic and determined to give back as good as they got under Centauri colonization. Most of the other known states are in the League of Non-Aligned Worlds which all together is on the same general tier as a single major power (in ep 9 we see that they have only a single vote on the council compared to 1 vote for each of the major races).

I haven’t watched too many geopolitics space opera but overall there’s more detail than something like Star Trek, where they just have a mix of major empires rivaling the Federation and each other, and planet-of-the-week aliens who never show up again.

I suppose though, thinking of say episode 22 as “very early” does seem kind of unfair to The Force Awakens, when the first season of B5 alone had over 10 times as much runtime.

I think the power ranking’s a bit more complicated than this. In terms of pure physical resources, the Centauri are well ahead of the Narns and humans; it’s their political dysfunction that holds them back. Earthforce considers a hypothetical war against the Centauri to be a hopeless conflict that would be over in a matter of weeks. The Minbari are also a more complicated case than they might first appear; it’s really only their stealth technology that gives them an edge -- Straczynski has said that Earth could have defeated them if not for said stealth tech.

The following contains spoilers:

Note how easily the Centauri were able to take down the Narn -- yes, the Shadows were helping them, but that seems to have been a small-scale thing; what the Shadows mainly did was give the Centauri confidence. The actual amount of military force they added to the Centauri side, at that early stage, was fairly minimal.

eccentric-opinion

[Epistemic status: tentative]

If someone is in a position of weakness, I expect them to welcome peaceful dialogue that gives them the opportunity to improve their lot. If someone who claims to be weak nevertheless prefers hostility (whether literal or metaphorical), they may see themselves as powerful enough to gain from it, so I question whether they’re as weak as they depict themselves. “I’m weak, let’s fight” is a weird thing to say.

I think this is true in a broad sense, but there are a lot of “buts”; it really gets nickel-and-dimed to death on the way to specific situations.

You have to make a distinction between tactical violence and cathartic-but-self-destructive violence, because stuff like running amok is definitely not an expression of power, and I guess there’s also weird stuff like civil disobedience where it’s like, okay I’m going to get my shit wrecked here but it will arouse public sympathy. And of course there are cases where a preemptive strike from a position of weakness is still better than waiting, like if you have a strong belief that you’ll get attacked in a worse position later on.

But okay, those are kind of edge cases. The broader problem you run into is that “position of weakness” is really contextually subtle because it involves a huge number of overlapping and interlocking contexts, and we’re strong in some and weak in others and we may misjudge which of those contexts is more relevant. Like, you can basically always demand that someone leave your house if they don’t normally live there, even if it’s for refusing to endorse an opinion that society hates, but that doesn’t mean that you’re stronger than society in your house. So even when the principle applies it may not extend to a slightly different context.

More generally, this doesn’t work well as a way to tell whether people are actually strong or weak even in a specific context because it’s actually telling you what they think, which has similar failure states to assuming people know what they’re doing if they act confident. This should be obvious insofar as initiating hostilities is not a great predictor of winning. It’s common for rabble-rousers to motivate people in a position of weakness by convincing them that they have some “secret advantage”, like they have a superior national character or God is on their side or whatever, and honestly people readily come up with those beliefs on their own. But that’s just the really egregious cases; more common is simply that the overlapping contexts are so confusing that nobody really knows where the ultimate power rests until it’s been fought out – there was a case here recently where the city flip-flopped several times on a minor construction issue, with media wars and citizen groups and multiple levels of government involved, and I’m still not completely sure it’s settled; I’ve seen that sort of thing go to the courts or the provincial government.

So it’s complicated. But one thing that can be done immediately to improve the model is to think not about hostility but about costs and benefits relative to other options. The world is full of opportunities for dirt cheap hostility, and when you’re mad about something hostility is highly therapeutic while peaceful dialogue is infuriating, and that in itself explains 99% of what happens online. In a broader sense, a lot of the stuff I mentioned above makes more sense when you view it in cost-benefit terms rather than in terms of “hostile or not”.

Like, you can basically always demand that someone leave your house if they don’t normally live there, even if it’s for refusing to endorse an opinion that society hates, but that doesn’t mean that you’re stronger than society in your house.

…it kinda does mean that, actually.

Like, sure, it’s a metaphor and the metaphor has limits. It doesn’t translate to something stupid like “you can take on an arbitrary number of armed federal agents so long as you’re within your home.” But it does mean that, to anyone for whom “your house” represents an important resource, your opinions matter more in some ways than do the contrary opinions of other people, even many other people combined.

This is most obvious when you’re talking about children. A parent with eccentric or widely unendorsed opinions, who is willing to take a hard line on those opinions, can do an awful lot to make his kids suffer if they don’t play along – even if literally everyone else in the world disagrees.

But it’s also important to remember when you’re talking about normal adult social circles. Your little band of five like-minded misfits, despised outcasts though you are, nonetheless probably has all the power in an interaction taking place on your turf. If you want to humiliate someone who’s there alone trying to engage with you, you probably can. If you want to scare someone who’s there alone trying to engage with you, you can probably do that too – maybe in theory he has some kind of recourse, maybe he can call the cops or try to summon up a Twitter mob or whatever, but those are unreliable weapons in all sorts of ways and there’s a reason that people don’t reach for them casually.

There’s always a bigger fish. There is also always a smaller fish. And the relationships are not linear. Context is king.

But that’s a quibble.

The broader point, of course, is: if someone’s logic and rhetoric is dependent on the claim that he is an oppressed underdog who deserves sympathy and support for being so weak, but he’s nonetheless obviously spoiling for a fight, this is in itself good reason to treat his argument with suspicion. Either he’s irrational and running amok, in which case he’s hurting both himself and others and you shouldn’t be contributing – or he’s rational, and deceiving you about his level of weakness in order to accrue allies or status in preparation for a fight that he thinks he can win, in which case you should treat him the way you would treat any other deceptive agent.

I have two problems with this line of reasoning.

First, it may be that the consequences for avoiding a fight are even worse than those for losing one. The classic example here is Switzerland in the Middle Ages: surrounded by stronger countries it always had to be willing to fight in order to not be pushed around. Similarly, a person in a socially inferior position here might have to be willing to pick fights over minor issues in order to avoid setting a precedent of always yielding to the stronger.

Second, this only works if the consequences of losing a fight are very extreme, and seen as that bad for everybody. Like, if you’re going to be killed for defying the reigning order, then sure, that makes sense. But if the only consequence is social opprobrium, then... well, some people don’t care if they’re excluded from polite society, or think that the satisfaction of venting their anger is worth it.

Star Wars tricked a generation of writers into believing it's inherently dramatic for two characters to turn out to be related.

Was that not a thing before Empire Strikes Back? I mean, maybe it wasn’t, it just seems like the sort of thing hack writers would’ve been using since time immemorial.

americanbrightside

Nah, it was a common trope in Roman plays if I remember correctly. Plautus, specifically, wrote a ton of plays that relied on it for drama. And the main characters in his play Menaechmi are siblings separated at birth. The Romans loved that sort of drama, though they kind of relied on it as a way to clean up plot lines. For example, Apollo [coming down from the heavens]: “Oh, you can’t marry him, you’re actually his sister who was kidnapped as a young child, sold into slavery, then freed by another family and raised as their own. Guess we need to call off the wedding and you can marry your true love after all.”

That’s also kind of how Star Wars uses it, no? As a way out of the love triangle?

Pity the poor screenwriter trying to refer to websites without sounding outdated!

Telephones barely changed from 1950 to 2000, but just try watching a movie that mentions MySpace today without snickering.

Telephones changed a lot between 1950 and 2000! Rotary phones were replaced by touch-tone phones, mobile phones became available (including the first BlackBerries), human switchboard operators were replaced by automated systems, and the famous Ma Bell design was wiped out.

There was a time when literally all phones looked exactly the same (at least in the US; I don’t know what phones in the barbarian lands were like). If you’d suggested selling a phone that was a color other than black, people would’ve looked at you like you were crazy. One of the early Dortmunder books has a gag about this, in fact; Kelp suggests a phone that’s a slightly different shape/color, and the narrative treats this as an indication of how weird/flaky he is, in contrast to the more sensible Dortmunder’s request for “a phone that looks like a phone”.

just-shower-thoughts

Han Solo never actually saw Leia while she was in her slave bikini

Yeah he did, when they killed Jabba and escaped together she was in her slave outfit so he would’ve seen her then

He was mostly blind from the carbonite at the time.

where the heck did all the salt come from anyway

why is all this simple stuff so complicated

was the world swimming in chlorine gas and lumps of sodium or what

squareallworthy

Seriously you know your browser has a search bar, right?

yeah that’s where I type tumblr.com

squareallworthy

Sombody start a sideblog called @lookingshitupforargumate please

easily baffled on main

serious answer (according to the extent of my knowledge): it’s the result of skajillions of years of slightly acidic rain that slowly but steadily dissolved all sorts of mineral formations and dumped ‘em into the ocean. As for why it’s more sodium and chlorine than, say, fluorine and lithium, you’d have to ask some kinda star-fusion scientist about that or something

It’s actually a little more complicated than this; the sodium got into the seawater by erosion of rocks, but the chlorine didn’t, at least not in quantity. The source of the chlorine is debated, but the leading contender is gases emitted by volcanoes.

Why are anglophiles weird? You don't consider yourselves lovable?

cause just like weeaboos, the thing they’re into doesn’t exist. if I’m obsessed with something I end up knowing a lot about the thing. Teaboos think the average ‘British’ person* eats afternoon tea every day and gives a shit about the Queen.

I imagine Japanese people might feel similar? Like imagine if you had an admirer who was all ‘OMG I love how short you are! And how you are absolutely all about the values and themes of this sexy comic you put on the internet when you were twelve!’ and actually you’re 6′2″ and think of the comic as an embarrassing remnant of your furry phase. That would be weird, right?

*they usually say ‘British’ even though ‘English’ is more accurate to the thing Anglophiles are into

Edit: which is fair, there’s no reason the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish should be associated with this shit. The Scots and (to a much greater degree) the Irish have their own version of this anyway.

Obs is up to Scottish and Irish ppl what you wanna call them. I can’t think of anything like ‘teaboo’ (credit to anon asker) so I’m thinking ‘McWeeaboo’ and ‘leprechaun-fucker’ respectively.

Yes, that means that wasn’t an Irish bar you went to the other week.

It was a leprechaunfucker bar. Think about your choices.

Also, no, we’re not lovable? The majority of specifically English culture is divided into:

a) things that are straightforwardly kinda fucked-up, e.g.

being the Best at Colonialism

being an Actual Royalist

being so good at cultural hegemony due to aforementioned colonialism that our forms of smug upper-class status signalling are near-universal forms of smug upper-class status signalling (see Fraiser, the global cultural image of Shakespeare, and the general association in US media of ‘British’ with ‘posh and/or intellectual’).

b) things that are, idk, fine I guess, no better than other countries’ stuff but fine if you like that sort of thing, e.g.

jam, Jerusalem and the Great British Bake-Off

objectively not that good food

the Beatles etc

Shakespeare, yeah I said it

Keeping Calm And Carrying On

The Aesthetic of the Royal Family and associated cultural ritual

fucking cricket

football (no even I am not self-depreciating enough as a British person to stoop to calling it ‘soccer’, what do you think I am?)

(Perhaps unfairly) I often find something a bit offputting about someone being super into this stuff, whether they’re English or not. Not being into any of it individually, but being enthusiastically into the whole package, with a kind of ‘because it’s English’ vibe. I think there are two reasons for this:

1. (the one more likely with teeaboos) being enthusiastically and unironically into English Things is in itself unEnglish (subculture-dependent) and thus they come off as cringeily failing at the thing. This is unfair because it really is one of those anti-inductive things like class signalling and thus not their fault, but it is still instinctively offputting to me.

This is also the source of a lot of things that Anglophiles get wrong when they’re tryna ape British people: Displaying a lot of Union Jack stuff - we don’t do that. If I’m in London and I see a bunch of union jack patterns somewhere, I assume it’s something for tourists.

Yeah, p much nobody under fifty knows the words to that shit.

2. negative associations created by odious groups and people such as UKIP/BNP heavily associating themselves with I’m So English branding.

I think there is stuff that is British that is genuinely cool? Like 2 of the world’s 4 oldest Universities and an actual ridiculous ratio of good Universities to population size. Shakespeare is cool so long as you don’t mistake him for High Culture. The ridiculous fossilised rituals and weird shit that comes out of having a form of government/law that has slowly evolved over so many hundreds of years is fascinating. We have a lot of history. I think we’re pretty good at comedy. But that’s never like specifically what Anglophiles are into - they’re into ‘British stuff’ and maybe catch some of it incidentally because of that.

Now let’s all sing the song of my people:

…ner nerr nerr nerrrr, Jerusalem, on England’s something mountains green.

Isaac Asimov once wrote a story in which the hero determined that a man was a Soviet spy because he knew the words to the third verse of The Star-Spangled Banner -- he knew that no actual American citizen ever bothered learning more than the first.

idiopathicsmile

it is pretty hard to find solid statistics on wolf attacks, but as far as i can tell, wolves in north america kill way way way less than one person a year, which means that forces more deadly to us than wolves include: dogs, ice fishing, and getting crushed by a falling flat screen tv.

…further complications to trying to write non-ridiculous angst into a werewolf story

“you don’t understand…i’ve done things under the full moon that i can never take back…one time i ate a squirrel”

“I SNIFFED MY OWN BUTT. THE INDIGNITY HAUNTS ME STILL.”

idiopathicsmile

“i have pooped in the woods and now must go brood about it. don’t try to follow me.

…and seriously, be careful around your flatscreen, it is probably heavier that you think.”

European wolves (before they were hunted into extinction in most areas) attacked humans purposefully a lot; it’s in the historical record.

North American gray wolves have a natural fear of humans and attack people very rarely, really only when threatened or starving.

So like, imagine, like, a divide between people who got infected with Old World and New World lycanthropy. One makes you this dangerous beast that sees humans as a viable food source an another makes you perceive humans as a threat. Imagine people getting it wrong!

Some shady paranormal group capturing a werewolf to use as security but it just runs away when people trespass.

Some hunters go deep into the woods to murder a werewolf clan for their pelts but it turns out they’ve isolated themselves so deeply because they have the European strain and none of the hunters survive.

New werewolves are so confused because the websites give conflicting advice: get yourself to your nearest national park when you’re about to turn and just let yourself run free; if you try to cage yourself the claustrophobia and the smell of people will make you panic and you could really hurt yourself or someone else.

vs

If you’re anywhere near human civilization you must make sure you turn in a closed space that you can’t escape from in wolf form or you’ll definitely kill someone. Just try to take a nap during the full moon, OK.

And they’re like, WHAT DO I DO WHICH ONE DO I HAVE?

idiopathicsmile

updated position: at the end of the day, there are, in fact, a number of possible compelling werewolf problems.

case in point, the global werewolf cultural divide!

idiopathicsmile

on the subject of the global werewolf cultural divide, another update, per wikipedia:

Wolves from different geographic locations may howl in different fashions: the howls of European wolves are much more protracted and melodious than those of North American wolves, whose howls are louder and have a stronger emphasis on the first syllable. The two are however mutually intelligible, as North American wolves have been recorded to respond to European-style howls made by biologists (x)

that’s right guys: wolves have accents

@darkicedragon

THIS IS THE KIND OF CONTENT IM LOOKING FOR

...”syllable?” Wolf howls have syllables?

nobody's a pervert

he did like to beat the old one-eyed giant, as it were.

FUCK I JUST GOT THAT

Augustus Gloop - gluttony

Veruca Salt - greed

Mike Teevee - sloth

Violet Beauregarde - liking gum too much???

… One of the dead husbands in “Cell Block Tango” chewed his gum annoyingly.

I’m not saying anybody should do a filk, but someone should do a filk.

And the converse.

Oompa loompa, doopedee dee,

‘Zekial Young should’ve listened to me

When I found out he had a wife,

Such a shame he ran into my knife

I mean you can’t really look for sane morality in Roald Dahl. If you’ve ever read any of his adult shit…

When I was a kid I saw a theatrical production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which had been described to me as a story of good triumphing over evil; I kept waiting for Wonka to get his comeuppance, because to Child Me, he was the villain who kept bumping off kids.

nuclearspaceheater

If I said, “The ‘The Game’ Theory of Cultural Authenticity”, would you know what I was talking about?

inferentialdistance

Is that, like, if you think about cultural authenticity, you’re inauthentic?

as soon as you start designing a tradition you’re no longer traditional but traditionalist, however your made up bullshit can become a tradition if you just wait a couple of decades.

There was an episode of Kino’s Journey about this. A society is desperate to have traditions to bind them togeteher, so they keep inventing more and more absurd ones but none of them catch on. Kino realizes that this practice of inventing traditions has itself become their tradition, but knows that she can’t tell them this because if she does then it’ll stop having the same import to them and it’ll stop serving this purpose.

poor lass took a lightsaber between the ears

“Turn around, Bright Ears.”

You know what? New rule.

If you force an introvert into a social gathering they don’t feel comfortable with/don’t want to go to you are responsible for their good time.

You have to include them in conversations or go sit with them when they have no one to talk to.

Because if you can’t do that, don’t make them come. Don’t force them in a situation where they feel alone and helpless and leave them floundering.

“But it’s good for them to get out.” You’re not making me adapt. You’re not making me more social. You’re reinforcing every negative opinion I have on these gatherings and giving me the resolve to say ‘Fuck off’ the next time you try this.

I really strongly disagree with this. As an introvert, the last thing I want is for people to try to get me in conversations or sit down next to me when I’m trying to relax. If I’m not participating in the conversation, I want you to respect that and stop trying to force me to do the things you enjoy.

It’s funny how much it’s possible to dissociate fascination with the conversation around a work from enjoyment of the work itself – to have one in pure form without the other. An example of this, with me, is James Bond.

I don’t actually like anything about James Bond. The franchise seems to mostly differ from completely generic action thrillers by starring a character who lacks the nobility, or the salt-of-the-earth gut appeal, of most action heroes – a cold, suave, cruel guy who’d normally be cast as the villain. I don’t watch many action movies to begin with, and this is even worse to me than the baseline.

But reading about the franchise is a wonderful aesthetic experience – it’s like I have a sixth sensory modality devoted to experience stuff like this. The different actors and eras, each having their/its own internal arc and relation to the others, the various takes on the character and their relation to the original novels (a whole other layer) … the amazing titles! It’s the kind of thing I wrote this about. On the rare occasions when I see a Bond movie, I don’t enjoy it much as a movie, and yet I enjoy it as a part of this other thing, this structure, this wonderful web.

Criticizing James Bond for being too much like “generic action thrillers” seems sort of like criticizing The Lord of the Rings for being a generic fantasy saga. A lot of the tropes action movies use were invented by the Bond franchise!

The "Bob from accounting" ad would have been funnier if Bob had won the fight.

As a former professional comedy writer, my expert belief is no, it would not. The “Bob from Accounting” as is my all time favorite Magic TV ad.

In case, you’ve never seen the ad:

Check out this video on YouTube:

https://youtu.be/SgPEhrB7ebc

While it would be unexpected, it would not be as good of an ad. It doesn’t really help your creatures look impressive when they get beaten by some guy.

Yeah, that’s fair.

Realization that took me about 25 years: when Emperor Palpatine tells Luke “Strike me down with all your hatred, and your journey towards the Dark Side will be complete,” he’s not saying something deep about the nature of evil and the ease of turning into the bad guy. He’s just making a last-ditch gambit to not get his ass lightsabered. Luke’s kind of a sucker for falling for it.

Luke’s already decided violence is an acceptable tactic, based on the dozens of nameless troopers and pilots he’s blasted into subatomic particles, so why would the Emperor be any different? Killing the Emperor isn’t going to make Luke a different kind of killer just because he killed someone with a visible face, and it’s certainly not going to make him start blowing up planets or torturing prisoners just for funsies. Luke could have said “Strike you down? Don’t mind if I do,” done just that, and not only would the battle have ended the same way, his dad might have survived.

(And if Vader had survived, repented, and rejoined the Light Side, but retained his influence over the Imperial military, he could have saved everyone a whole lot of grief in the coming years.)

–

The point is, sometimes when your enemies say “You’re playing right into my hands! The harder you oppose me, the more power I get!”, they’re actually just scared and full of bullshit. Never forget to consider that possibility.

Okay, this is a cute metaphor and your general point is quite valid, but in the specific case of the Emperor, you’re canonically wrong. The key phrase here is “with all your hatred.” Killing stormtroopers was different because it wasn’t motivated by hate, but by necessity. The whole schtick of the Sith is that the apprentice will one day kill the master, so that each generation will be stronger than the one before it. Palpatine is absolutely willing to die if that nets the Sith a powerful new apprentice.

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