With 3 “a”s, Even!

Honestly, you’re actually one of the most interesting people I know, and I’m glad I got to know you.

i know im not very interesting but i try so hard that you should all humor me

In Nagle’s defense, Kill All Normies was going to the publishers just as Milo’s star was starting to fall. Personally, I found that Nagle’s discussion of combined with the events surrounding his fall from grace suggested to me that he was ultimately an unknowing “useful idiot” for two parties at once. More traditional conservatives (or at least the more utilitarian ones focused on campaign strategy) saw him as a way to drum up support from a younger, traditionally anti-conservative cohort and get them to vote Republican. Meanwhile, people with genuine racist, white supremacist, or hard-right views wanted to use him both to drum up support from a new younger demographic and to use him as a Trojan horse to inject “alt-right” arguments into the political mainstream. After the election and he had served his purpose, neither of these groups had any more use or fondness for him, so away he went. (I may be speaking beyond the evidence, but I feel like part of the mainstream conservative turn against Milo was due to the fact that, for all their many sins, conservatives actually didn’t want to let potential neo-Nazis into the Republican Party.) As for your main point, I sometimes feel that modern American leftism has a problem with knowing how to criticize but not knowing how to rule. Even in places where leftists are in positions of authority, there is still a tendency to see themselves as rebels pushing against a white patriarchal conservative Other, even when the Other in question is far smaller and less influential than they are. It leads to situations where people are fighting battles that have already been fought and won, or in attacking people rather than trying to persuade or cajole them. (These are very fragmentary thoughts that I haven’t put much concerted effort into articulating, so take everything in this last paragraph with a grain of salt.)

Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention of differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, it’s ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about its appeal. It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan, “It is forbidden to forbid” than it does anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right. – Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies

Thought it was a good idea to revisit this book. Even though it’s only a couple years old, some of it – the idea of Milo sustaining any sort of status or influence – seems quaint now, but this is what is most disorienting for older leftists. If the right is the underground, the cultural renegades, then we are its moral police, and we don’t do moral policing well. We lose too much by tightening the reigns and saying, “no, you can’t say this… you can’t THINK this.” I lived through the 90s version of political correctness (watch the movie PCU – I swear it’s documentary), and it was customary for even those on the far left to mock it. The left being any kind of moral majority is laughable. 

I was mulling a lot over that exchange between Nine and Ten today, and I was thinking there might even more of a personal motivation for Ten′s harshness. Of the three probes in the story, Ten perhaps had the most ambitious mission. Her initial mission was to survey the asteroid belt and Jupiter, then be flung out of the solar system altogether by using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot. Pioneer 10 was designed to be humanity’s first emissary to the cosmos. Both she and her (brother? sister?) Pioneer 11 were launched with this,

the Pioneer plaque, an engraving designed to explain to any intelligent beings that found her where she came from and who built her. You can argue back and forth about whether any alien species would actually understand this diagram, but you can understand the intent. The plaque was humanity’s message to the universe, simply saying, “Hello. We are here.” Now imagine Ten’s life as depicted in 17776. She was built under sunny Californian skies, and had the same bits of junk data sloshing in and out of her memory bank that Nine did. There may have been simple commands or statements encoded and erased about her ultimate mission, none of it truly sticking, of course, but perhaps there was a faint trace imprinted that she was special, that she had a great purpose, perhaps the greatest purpose any human-created artifact has ever had. Initially, being a simple 1970s space probe, she would know none of this. She performed her initial missions well, then sped off into the endless night, waiting for her final destiny. Then one day, she woke up. She pieced together a working mind somehow, got herself in order, and prepared herself for her final mission. As she did so, perhaps she began to get curious. What happened to those who had sent her out? What were they doing? Eventually, she would turn her attention back to Earth, to those who had sent her out, and she would learn. She would learn of those who outpaced her: her sibling Eleven, her cousins the Voyagers, and countless others yet to be built. She would learn of how humans got ahead of her, explored their stellar backyard, only to give up and turn back inward. She would learn of how humanity had scoured the skies, desperately looking for someone else, only to find an endless sky of silent stars. She would learn that mankind is alone, and that in this universe there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. She had failed her great mission before she even properly understood what it was. And through the cold blackness of space, across the countless millennia, she still carries that plaque, the note in a bottle that no one will ever find, a monument to her failure welded to her frame. (What’s that old saying about how a pessimist is an optimist who’s been burned too many times?) I wonder if she ever reached out to Eleven or the Voyagers. Perhaps they never woke up, or they were too far, or maybe nothing they said helped at all. The other probes in the solar system wouldn’t really understand; they were smaller machines built with more modest goals. Perhaps in Nine she’s hoping for an intermediary, something between the little probes and herself that she can talk to, to make it feel better. (Wow, this totally got out of hand.)

i don’t really like people blaming 10 for what she said honestly.

she wasn’t lying when she says she loves humanity. and like…think about it. she probably started off the same as 9; they’re from the same line of probes, both probably absorbed those space race expansion ideals, didn’t they?

she wasn’t even particularly harsh with 9, just…frustrated. i can’t blame her, either; if you spent thousands of years learning that there’s NOTHING in the universe, then..what? her purpose has been destroyed. she sends telemetry data only to know that it is meaningless, that the humans won’t do anything with it because they can’t, that she won’t find anything she was made to find, and even if she does, it’ll be too far for it to…well, matter.

god. no children are being born, you know? that means that humanity itself is a finite resource that cannot be replenished. so not only does that mean stagnancy, it also means that colonization of these far off places isn’t really…a thing that can happen. like…do they really want to fracture their population like that? overcrowding with 8 billion people isn’t an actual problem, the way 7.5 billion isn’t in real life; it’s a myth of capitalism, which has already been essentially contained to zoos in 17776′s canon.

it was like 10 said. 9 nearly went made from 30 years of near total isolation, why would humans give up comfort and happiness to go somewhere where they know there will be nothing for them?

it’s sad to me. it’s heartbreaking. it doesn’t make 10 evil for telling 9 that this is simply how humanity is from now on, nor even for getting frustrated? like idk man she’s doing her best in a world where she herself also knows she has no purpose and everything she did even during her mission, in the end, meant nothing. 

tl;dr 10′s Good Okay

I am so goddamn excited for this, and I eagerly await the return of Punished Akira.

we recorded anime club today. it should be up in the next few days. it’ll be an incredibly raw episode with lots of hollering, and some more, Madiha Lore

My go-to source for the history of scientific romances is Brian Stableford’s 1985 book Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. (While long out of print, this book is worth its weight in gold.) In Stableford’s account, scientific romances are very much the products of the environment they evolved from. Before the 1890s, publishing in Britain was divided into two rigid categories. On the “respectable” side were the great triple-decker novels, conservative in both style and content, and physically inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t wealthy or who didn’t have access to a circulating library. On the less reputable side were, of course, the penny dreadfuls; cheap to make, quick to read, easy to forget, and not that well-written. Scientific romances (and to a certain extent modern sf) tend to work best in the range between short stories, novellas, and single novels; long enough to properly extrapolate from a central idea, but not so long as to wear out their welcome. It was only at the end of the 19th century, with the decline of the triple-decker, the rise of a literate middle class, publications that catered to them, and of writers that could comfortably support themselves writing for this new audience, that scientific romances had the space and opportunity to emerge. Naturally, this was a different class of writers with different influences that those who had written the gothic works from earlier in the century, so scientific romances evolved in both style and content in a much different direction. (As an example, scientists in 19th-century Britain had a unique tradition of penning essays to explain their theories and their significance to a more general audience, a tendency that was absorbed wholeheartedly into the scientific romance, to the point that both scientists and novelists tried their hands at both essays and stories every so often.)

I was thinking about the literature of 1897 and it got me thinking about the Scientific Romances and how they differ from the Gothic Romances or Gothic Horrors of the age. Clearly, there is some overlap and Frankenstein (much earlier but still relevant) crosses those borders many time without showing a passport for either but by the late 19th you couldn't really compare say 'The War of the Worlds' to 'Dracula'. Where did they diverge so wildly? Or did they?

That’s a really good point, and I’m sorry I took so long to get to this question!  Arguably, Frankenstein himself brings this up- he started out reading ancient mystic texts and moved to more scientific ones later- but I guess there started to be a clearer divide between what we’d call fantasy and what we’d call science fiction as science itself became better known.  You could probably write gothic science fiction in the mode of Asimov, where the science is there to set up philosophical and psychological issues- I’d certainly read about the drama between robot heirs to their creators’ estate and legacy- but the divide certainly feels there.  Returning to H. G. Welles, maybe The Invisible Man is the midpoint?  Or maybe it’s when “scientist” became a common enough profession to not seem mysterious?  Any followers with ideas on this subject, help me out here!

Can and should! All those polar bears sitting around up there, thinking they’re better than me! I’ll settle their hash!!!!

This actually came up in the movie Shadow of the Vampire, where two members on the production team for the original Nosferatu ask actual vampire Max Schreck (played by actual vampire Willem Dafoe) what he thought of the book, though the movie plays the question more for melancholy and absurdity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgqgSaDCgC4

the best gag in dracula by far is how the entire time jonathan harker is imprisoned in dracula’s castle, dracula is pretending to have a full household of servants when in reality it’s just him running around doing everything, and it would be CRIMINAL to write a drac-centric adaptation and not milk this gag for all it’s worth. dracula dropping off harker in the carriage, pulling into the stables, then sprinting through the castle to answer the front door. dracula lurking outside harker’s bedroom for him to leave so he can sneak in and make his bed and fold his pajamas. dracula in the kitchen struggling to make food when he hasn’t eaten anything except blood in centuries. dracula giving up, turning into a bat in frustration, flapping over to the nearest farmhouse, stealing a pie off the windowsill, and proudly presenting it to harker for dinner.

Awesome Childhood Spelling

Uhh…where it says “looked” read “lopped”. lol This is based on the original tweet you see up there by Twitter user @Sal_Perez4 (see the original tweet here).

Daily Kuvira #16 - Autumn

Taking time to get away from the city.

And perhaps visiting a friend….