#actually it’s that we’ve written about south for way longer than north and so tracking down all that and sorting through what should be

[leonardalphachurch]

i REALLY want to actually organize my tagging system one day so i can more easily find stuff but for now i’ve just tagged all of my north posts bc they weren’t too hard to track all of them down and also… im really proud of our north writing lol

[sharkselfies]

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast Transcript - Episode 1

Since some folks requested it on Twitter, I’ve started transcribing The Minds Behind The Terror podcast episodes! Below the cut you’ll find episode 1, where showrunners Dave Kajganich and Soo Hugh talk to Dan Simmons, the author of the novel The Terror, about episodes 1-3 of the show. They discuss Simmons’s initial inspiration for writing the book, the decisions they made to adapt it into a television series, and the depictions of some of the characters such as the Tuunbaq, Hickey, and “Lady Silence.”

The Minds Behind The Terror Podcast - Episode 1 

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

Dave Kajganich: Hello! Welcome to Minds Behind The Terror podcast. I’m Dave Kajganich, I am a creator and one of the showrunners of the AMC show The Terror, and I’m here in the studio with executive producer and co-showrunner Soo Hugh.

Soo Hugh: Hello!

DK: And we welcome today the author of the sublime novel The Terror, on which our show is based, author Dan Simmons, calling in from Colorado. Welcome, Dan! Hi! 

Dan Simmons: Hi Dave, thank you. 

DK: So let’s start with the very beginning. This was a mystery from actual naval history that you decided to transform into a novel that was crossed with Gothic horror. Can you tell us a little bit about where you got the idea from this, how you went about preparing to write it, anything that can give us insight into how you blended all of these remarkable genres into this incredible book.

DS: I’ve known since I was a kid that I wanted to tell a story about either the North or South Pole. And the reason is in 1957, 58, when I was very young, actually I was just a fetus, they had the international geophysical year, and that really caught my imagination. Now the international geophysical year saw cooperation between American and Soviet scientists, it was the height of the Cold War, that’s the first time they submit(?) a permanent base at the South Pole, and I fell in love with Arctic stories. I had one book left on a book contract with a publisher I really liked, and we hadn’t decided what that book was, and I wanted to write a scary story about the Arctic, in this case the Northern Arctic, and that happened because I was doing a lot of research on Antarctica and just couldn’t figure out what the macabre, Gothic, scary part would be. I wanted to put it in, but I didn’t think they’d go for, you know, an eight foot tall vampire penguin. 

[laughter]

DK: You might be surprised! 

DS: There was a footnote on a book I was reading about the Franklin Expedition, which I had never heard of, and I decided that’s what I was gonna write about, and it had a tremendous amount of the unknown that I could fill in, that’s what novelists love. And so I told my editors excitedly that this was what I was gonna do, I would call it The Terror after the HMS Terror that went with the Erebus, got stuck in the ice, all the crew disappeared in history… And they said no. 

[laughter]

DS: ...it was the first time the publishers did that. I said, “Why not? I think it’s gonna be a pretty good novel.” And they said, “Look, nobody’s interested in a bunch of people that’ve been dead for 150 years.” 

SH: That sounds like some of our meetings.

[laughter]

DS: So I did what maybe you do, in such a meeting, I just thanked them, and I liked them all, and I had a good dinner(?) and I said goodbye, and bought back my last book on the contract and went out and wrote it on spec. 

SH: Well why don’t we take a step back, Dave, and why don’t you tell us about how you found Dan’s book and that experience?

DK: Sure! Dan, you might remember some of these steps from your side of it, which is that originally this was auctioned by Universal as a feature, and I sort of tried to get the rights and was a bit too late, and tracked them down to the producers at Universal who were running the project and got myself hired as the screenwriter for a feature adaptation. By the time I was ready to start actually committing an outline to the paper, Universal had let the rights go because there was a competing project. It was interesting to sort of rack up reasons why people wanted to make it but didn’t feel that they could pull the trigger, and we were so grateful when AMC finally called us back and said, “Look, we’ve figured out a model where we can do this as a limited series,” it really felt like ten episodes was a great length for this, because we could blend genres in a way that, you know, we could unpack sort of slowly, more slowly than a lot of shows would’ve done, and drive the plot as much as we could, like the novel, with character choices and decisions as opposed to just horror kind of entering the frame and taking over for one set piece after another. So it was a long journey, getting this to AMC, but at the end of the day I think we found the right home for it.

DS: I can no longer imagine a two hour version, feature film version of this story, and I can’t imagine a second season of this story, I think it was just right.

SH: It does feel like we did a ten hour cinematic novel. 

[audio from the show]

Crozier: Only four of us at this table are Arctic veterans. There’ll be no melodramas here--just live men, or dead men. 

SH: Dan, Dave and I talk about how addictive the research gets for this when you start going down the rabbit hole, how did you approach the research?

DS: I think most novelists run into that, but since I write a lot of quasi-historical novels, at least set in history, I get totally addicted to going down the rabbit hole. Readers say, “Well, Simmons’ book is too long, and the descriptions of things are too exhausting,” but I watch your characters go on deck and there are all the things and views and everything that I tried so hard to describe and then people tell me, y’know, “talky, verbose,” and in print I have to do it that way, but you just pan the camera a little bit. 

DK: You have words, we have images! For every thousand of yours, we get one!

DS: Yeah.

SH: But I remember this passage in your book where it talks about all the different ices, and you vest it with so much psychological import. We talk about that passage a lot in the writers room, it was one of our highlights, of this is how you do great descriptive writing.

DK: And you made so many parallels between things like the environments of the ships and characters, you built a kind of code book for the show without realizing you were doing it, which is making visual metaphors out of a lot of these things that would normally just be exposition or historical detail.

SH: Well especially between Crozier and the ship, I mean when you hear about Crozier’s relationship with Terror, and you have so many amazing passages about, you know, the groan of the ship and how it, y’know, and you cut to a scene with Crozier and how you feel that the bones of Crozier is embedded in the ship, and we really took a lot from that. 

DS: Well I noticed that on one of the episodes where Lord Franklin [sic] is trying to get back in touch with Crozier, you know, trying to be friends with him again, I think it’s a brilliant episode you guys wrote.

[show audio]

Franklin: You’ve succeeded in avoiding Erebus most of the winter.

Crozier: I’m a captain. I’m--I’m peevish off my own ship. I leave it and I hear disaster knocking at its door, before I’m ten steps away.

DS: And that was beautifully written, that. You got so much of Crozier right there.

DK: It was a pleasure to write these characters on the backs of your writing of these characters, because you really--I mean, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do, as you know, from having written, you know, a whole long string of historical books, is to make these people’s psychologies feel as modern as they must have felt in their day, while still being able to articulate some of the blind spots of being from the eras they were from. 

I’m curious from sort of a history nerd point of view, if people watch the series and like the series, and read the book and like the book, and want to know more about this expedition, what’s the first book about the Franklin Expedition you would point people to? What was most helpful or most interesting in your research? 

DS: I apologize, I can’t think of the name of it, but it’s a collection of stories about both the South and North Pole, and so it’s a short section on the Franklin Expedition, but it didn’t make mistakes, and most of the other books that I read, uh, keyed, and videos for that matter, like PBS did a story about the Franklin Expedition, but they keyed off a 1987 attempt by several doctors to figure out what happened to the crew, and they exhumed three crewmen’s bodies from the first island where they stayed the first winter, and those crewmen had only been on the ship a couple of months, but they decided because of a high lead content that the lead had poisoned them and then made them stupid, and made them paranoid and everything, but they didn’t compare that test of lead with any background people in London at the time, and later they did, so I didn’t believe the lead thing.

DK: Well that’s the fascinating thing about a mystery with this many parts and pieces, kind of in flux, is, you know, you can create all kinds of competing narratives about it, and what’s fascinating about writing a fictional version is you can’t have that kind of ambiguity, you have to make a decision. I think people will enjoy very much ways that the show and the book have a similar point of view, and also ways that they diverge in their points of view, because there are so many ways to tell this story--

SH: Well you know how much we invest responsibility in the audience as well, right?

DK: Sure.

SH: In terms of your book and our show as well, we’re not against interpretation, that there’s a responsibility on the audience’s part to put together--we’re not gonna hand feed them. There’ll be some people who put more of an onus on Franklin, and others who would say, “You know, if I was in that position, I probably would’ve made the same decision,” “Oh no, this definitely killed the men,” “No, this killed them!” and that dialogue is exciting, you know, when you read fans talk about your show and your books and really smart, insightful ways. 

[show audio]

Franklin: Would it help if I said that I made a mistake? 

Crozier: You misunderstand me, Sir John, I--I only meant to describe why I brood, not that I judge.

DS: I don’t worry about who or what my reading audience is. People ask me about that and I don’t imagine a certain reader. But I’ve always tried to write for somebody who’s more intelligent than I am. My perfect reader would be just smart as hell, speak eight languages, you know, have fantastic world experiences, and I want to write something that will please that person, and I think your show does the same thing.

DK: Well we were--that was our motto! We wanted to be sort of the dumbest members of our collaboration and there’s a sort of horrifying moment when you realize that’s come true. 

[laughter]

[show background music]

DK: Tell us a little bit about why you made the decisions to tell the story in the order you told it, and whether you sort of felt like there was anything from the way you had told it that we were--or a missed opportunity. We’d love to know sort of what your experience of that was. 

DS: I don’t think there were any missed opportunities in terms of not adapting my way of telling it, and I can’t remember all the reasons for why I broke it down that way, some of them were just very localized to, you know, when I was writing that particular bit. But I do know that it gains a lot by being told chronologically the way you’re doing it, so for me that seems now the logical way to tell it again.

DK: Have you ever read the novel in chronological order? When we hired writers for the writers room, we gave them a list of what the chapters were like in chronological order, and I think we asked half the room to read it in your order and half the room to read it in chronological order so we could have a discussion, a meaningful discussion about whether there were things about telling it without being in chronological order that we wanted to embrace or not. It was a fantastic experience and I wonder if you’ve ever read your chapters in chronological order? ‘Cause it’s also a fantastic book!

[laughter]

DS: I haven’t read it that way, they were that way in my mind before I started getting fancy and breaking them up and moving them around in time and space, but I would love to have seen that experiment.

DK: The reason we can get away with it in the show is because there is a loved book out there that people trust, and you know, it is a classic in this genre, so I mean this is a perfect example of, you know, the amount of gratitude we owe the book, because we got away with a lot of things that maybe we wouldn’t have been able to get away with because you came before us. 

SH: And speaking of those rabid fans, Dan, it’s been really interesting reading audience reactions to the show from people who’ve loved the books and who just naturally will compare the two, and we’ve been heartened by just how supportive our fans have become--are of the show. There is this controversy, some people like our choice to give Lady Silence a voice and some people feel it was sacrilege to your book, where do you fall on that? DS: At first I was surprised. In fact when you were hunting for an actress for Lady Silence and I read about that, it said somebody who’s fluent in this Inuit language and this Inuit language, and I said, “What the hell?”

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut to her dying father] 

DS: Having seen her with the tongue and heard her, and knowing the different reason they call her Lady Silence, it all works for me and I was also surprised when Captain Crozier could speak fairly fluent, you know, dialect, ‘cause I had him just not understanding a thing.

[show audio]

[Crozier speaking Inuktitut to Silna in the same scene as above]

DS: I love it when readers get rabid about not changing something from a book, and I have to talk to them sometimes, not ‘cause I have a lot of things adapted, this is the first one, but I love movies. They say “Aren’t you worried it will hurt your book?” and first I explain Richard Comden(?)’s idea that you can’t hurt a book anyway, except by not reading it, I mean the books are fine, no matter how bad some adaptation becomes. Books abide, and so I wasn’t concerned. With the changes that I see, I get sorta tickled, whereas some readers get upset, and they just have that set. So I think that the vast majority of viewers haven’t--well, I know the vast majority haven’t read the book, haven’t heard of the book, probably, they’re gonna keep watching because of the depth of the characters, and that’s based on the first two episodes, and I agree with them completely.

[show audio]

[Silna speaking Inuktitut]

Crozier: She said that if we don’t leave now, we’re going to “huk-kah-hoi.”

Blanky: Disappear. 

SH: We get asked a lot of questions about the supernatural element of the show and the way a monster does or does not figure in the narrative, and seeing our episodes, did it feel surprising or did it feel faithful to the way you imagined it as well to your book? 

DS: It was surprising to me at how well it was done, because it’s hard, I know, to show restraint in a series like this, and certainly in a movie, but it’s hard to show restraint at showing and explaining the monster. 

[show audio]

[ominous music, Tuunbaq roaring, men screaming]

DS: The way you did it in the first few episodes to me were just lovely, just, you know, a hint of a glance at something and then you see the results of this creature, so that’s what I tried to do in the novel, one of the reasons I moved around through space and time, part of what I wanted to do was not cheapen the story and not cheapen the reality of these poor men dying by just throwing in a monster, and so I tried to do it in a way that would not disrespect the true tale, and I believe you’re doing it the same way I tried. 

DK: The way you incorporated the supernatural into the book, I mean, I was a fan of it when I first read it. It was jaw dropping the way that it fits so well on a level of plot, on a level of character, and on a level of theme. So when we got the green light to adapt it I was so confident that we were going to be able to do something with it that would be able to be nuanced because the bones of it are so organically terrific.

SH: It helped us know what we didn’t want to do. That formed so much of our conversation, of “this is what we do not want, this is what we do not want,” and slowly you whittled down to getting down to the essence of what this thing had to be.

[show audio]

[Tuunbaq growling]

DK: Another character from the book that really stands out for fans that they are wondering what in the world we’re doing with is Manson. [laughter] And I was curious what you made of the fact that he is pretty invisible in the first three episodes of the show, and that some of his plot beats have been given to a character called Gibson, who I don’t remember is--I don’t think he’s featured very much in the novel. And I wondered if that caught you off guard or if you sort of intuitively had a sense of what we were doing in making that change? 

DS: Any discussion of Manson to me leads to Hickey converting him to his future, his tribe, the tribe he wants to have, group of worshippers, that I think Hickey wants to have, but he does it by sex below decks. Hickey’s not gay at all, he’s a manipulator, to me, and he was manipulating Manson who was big and dumb, in my book, he’s manipulating him by this sexual encounter. But I was curious whether you were worried about showing that?

DK: Well, we weren’t worried about showing characters having same-sex affairs or relationships. We wanted to make room in Hickey’s character for actual affection, or if not affection then companionship, or some kind of connection.

[show audio]

Hickey: Lieutenant Irving! I was hoping we’d meet. 

Crewman: Mind the grease there, sir. 

Hickey: I wanted to... thank you… for your help. For your discretion, I mean. 

Irving: Call it anything but help, Mr. Hickey. Please. I exercised clemency for a man abused by a devious seducer.

DK: We wanted to make sure that Hickey had access to command in some way that a steward, an officer’s steward, would be able to provide him, that an able seaman wouldn’t be able to provide him, and that was really valuable to us in terms of charting out all of these character stories, was how does he know what he knows about how command is dissatisfied or where the fractures are if he can’t see them from where he’s sleeps in his cot in the forecastle. 

SH: I mean we know that there were relations between the same sex on ships, it just was part of this world. Not to belie that there was serious consequences for it, but you know, we have 129 characters, and we wanted them to feel fully fledged and rich, and, you know, passions do naturally develop and have no characters engaged in sexual relations would have felt just as odd and perhaps even more controversial, and when Irving discovers Gibson and Hickey, his shock is from such a subjective point of view of his moral center. It’s not the camera’s perspective, right? Our camera’s very neutral in that scene. It’s Irving, that character at that point in the show, that is infusing a sense of horror, that’s his horror moment.

DS: I’d like to add that it’s not the gay connection that would cause criticism, but I was flayed alive because the most openly quote “gay” unquote character, that is, Hickey, you know, maybe hunting for affection but definitely hunting for power, he’s the only one they said in reviews, and he’s a killer and a bad person, so I’m homophobic, but I was flayed alive for that. The word homophobic appeared in about 80 reviews. Nobody mentioned the purser, who uh--

DK: Right, Bridgens and Peglar.

DS: Yeah. I thought he was a fascinating character. I loved getting glimpses of him in the series because he’s super smart, he’s super wise, he’s probably wiser than any of the commanders, ahd he’s obviously in love with--who is it that he’s in love with in the show?

DK: Peglar. 

DS: Yes, that makes sense. And, uh, so Peglar says, you know, “Is this another Herodotus?” and, “No, I’m giving you Swift now,” he’s educating the man he cares for. 

[show audio]

Hickey: I understand you cleared up our “association” for Lieutenant Irving? Gibson: You spoke to him.

Hickey: Mhm.

Gibson: Directly?

(beat)

Christ, Cornelius, I’d reassured him.

Hickey: Cornelius Hickey is a “devious seducer.” That was your--that was your reassurance? You’ve got some face, you know that? 

DK: We wouldn’t have dramatized Hickey’s story if we weren’t also going to pull in Peglar and Bridgens’ story, because we knew that people, you know, are predisposed to sort of make that kind of quick assumption, and we just wanted to make sure that the show didn’t have that blind spot and reflected the book, which also doesn’t have that blind spot. 

SH: We had those same questions with Lady Silence, and I’m sure you did as well. When we meet her, she’s a frightened young woman who’s about to lose her father, and that’s a universal character moment that anyone can relate to, and the otherness is sort of--is secondary, but then once--in the end scene of 1.02, when she’s sitting there grieving her father and then you have that language barrier with everyone else, we worked with Nive on this because we wanted to make sure the language itself was as accurate as possible, so when you say disappear making sure that the disappear in our language means the same thing as disappear in her language. I think whenever you have characters that feel othered in most media and you’re bringing them into your show, Dave and I also just wanted to make sure we weren’t swaying on the pendulum on the other side and being almost too careful about touching them, and with Nive I think when you have an actor of that talent, she was strong, she was representing a voice that she felt very confident in, and that was very reassuring for us.

DS: And it works well, and when her father’s dying, she throws herself on his chest and says “I’m not ready, it’s too soon, I’m not ready,” and I love that in the show because if she’s gonna become a Shaman he’s dying you know it’s not reached that point of education yet where she feels secure and later on you know beyond what we’re discussing today she becomes to me in the show I see her as more and more majestic.

SH: I do love the word majestic ‘cause I think it describes pretty much all of our characters. I agree, I do think there is something very sublime about who they have become at the end because when you go through that much trials and tribulations, it’s this beautiful human spirit to endure. 

DS: I think that’s one of the central themes of the story that you’ve brought out so clearly. In most post-apocalypse, you know, terrible situation movies and shows, everybody turns nasty as hell, they start shooting each other, it’s just like WWIII when they should be helping each other survive, and I found even though there was controversy, even though there was opposition in this story, people opposing against each other, still that they rose to the occasion. And that is so rare I think in much media these days or even books where the characters are themselves and they do the best they can, and when things get bad they rise to the occasion.

DK: The first conversation you and I had about the book, you know, I was basically pitching you sort of what I thought thematically the book was about, and I talked a lot about, that in a disaster like this, a kind of moral emergency, that we would get a chance to unpack what is sort of best and worst in these characters’ souls.

DS: I confuse readers often when I was on book tour for this book, and it was a long time ago, I’ve written a few million words since then, but I confused people by saying that if you want a theme for the survival story of The Terror, it’s love. It’s love between the men. And just unstinting love. And this came out in a piece of dialogue, in the first two episodes.

[audio from the show]

Franklin: I’ll not have you speak of him uncharitably, James. He is my second. If something were to happen to me, you would be his second. You should cherish that man. 

Fitzjames: Sometimes I think you love your men more than even God loves them, Sir John. 

Franklin: For all your sakes, let’s hope you’re wrong. 

DS: That to me was right the theme I was working with, and with Crozier who shows it a different way, with Fitzjames who’s struggling to show leadership, and between the men despite their hierarchy and the British hierarchy, the rank and lieutenants and so forth, eventually they come down to loving the men they try to save. And I found that lovely. 

[The Terror opening theme music plays]

DK: Thank you so much for listening to The Minds Behind The Terror, join us in our next edition when we talk about episodes 4-6 with the additional guest Adam Nagaitis phoning in from London. We will see you soon!

[preview snippet from the next episode plays]

DS: I’ll confess something else to Adam, the first time I watched it, I thought your character was a good guy because he jumped down in that grave to put the lid back on.

[laughter]

[appalledbc]

“Our House is on Fire,” and Carbon Taxes Are Not Enough to Save Us

In 2008, British Columbia implemented North America's first broad-based carbon tax. Between 2007 and 2016, provincial real GDP grew by 19%, while net emissions were reduced by 3.7%. Although GDP growth over nine years is impressive, the meagre 3.7% reduction in emissions over such an extensive period is, to say the least, dismal. Add another year, the results look even worse: in 2007, BC emitted 64.76 tons of Greenhouse Gas emissions; in 2017, 64.46 tons - a  mere .30 ton drop in emissions or 0.46%, less than one-half a percent, over ten years. And these recent figures do not take into account all the carbon emitting forest fires in BC over these years - a situation, one could easily surmise, that would add significantly to the total amount of emissions recorded over this ten year period.

Nonetheless BC’s initiative continues to be frequently looked to as a model strategy for carbon emissions reduction. But, in our current context of a climate emergency, it is not really, I would argue, an effective enough method for reducing emissions as aggressively as we must in order to have a truly habitable world.  It is instead a good example of market based economics that has been successfully sold politically, especially by neoliberal economists, and that is why it continues to be pushed in at least 50 jurisdictions around the globe as a relatively comfortable method for dealing with emissions by those in particular who have a stake in the business-as-usual game that serves their economic interests.

It is this sort of strategy, that is, putting a price on carbon, that our current federal government has adopted as its main strategy in its Greenhouse Gas Pollution Act of 2018 and, with variations, some of the major federal parties advocate - specifically a fee-rebate structure - but it, like the BC initiative, is also woefully ineffective. We don’t have a recent report, but as of 2017 emissions in Canada (716 million tons of carbon dioxide) have been reduced by a mere 2% since 2005 levels, we are 79 mega-tonnes short of the Paris Agreement targets, and emissions in 2018 have risen 7% since 1997, the year we signed the Kyoto Agreement. It’s doubtful they dropped significantly in 2019.

The fee/tax is supposed to provide an incentive to change one’s carbon behaviour. What works against such an incentive, however, is a politically motivated tax credit payable to just about everyone to use as they wish - except the big industrial polluters who have a different market based scheme based on industry sector thresholds that is also inadequate. Such compensation, in effect, undermines any real incentive to change one’s carbon behaviour. Unless one is a committed environmentalist, why should one change one's carbon behaviour when there’s little or no pain? And in what way are such fees an incentive, say, to drive less when one has no other choice but to do so, as many do, for example, in rural Canada, where there is no public transportation to speak of, or to opt for a green vehicle or home energy source when one cannot afford the capital outlay even with government subsidies, now only available from the federal government in Ontario? Not to mention  that, despite the tax credit, any fee or tax on fossil fuels disproportionately wounds those with lower incomes who cannot afford to absorb increases even with a dividend.

Even if the fee were higher, as some have suggested it should be for the process to work effectively, is anyone who isn't in the 10% going to stop driving a fossil fuel car? Is any medium size business suddenly going to switch its energy sources and green its infrastructure without significant subsidization? We're all deeply locked into fossil fuel capital investments and inscribed in the global infrastructure of fossil fuels - our houses, our cars, our businesses - and because we've naturalized that situation so deeply, we won't abandon them completely until we absolutely have to do so in order to survive. 

That day may be coming: a report synthesizing all the recent research by the Science Advisory Group of the UN Climate Action Summit to coincide with the UN Summit on climate change reveals that 2014-2019 is on track to be the hottest six year period on record and that emissions reductions should really be three times what the Paris Accord recommends. Issued just two days later, the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report co-written by 100 scientists synthesizing 700 recent scientific studies indicating that conditions are even worse than they anticipated in their 2018 report underscores once again the monumental crisis we're facing without aggressive action.

Yet carbon tax strategies remain attractive to governments and political parties, and it would seem many climate conscious environmental organizations also think they are a good strategy. Why? Because they are more politically palatable and would seem to balance some effort against climate change with a business-as-usual economy.  But it is, alas, no longer business-as-usual:  there are no jobs on an uninhabitable planet.

There is of course considerable resistance, propagandistic and otherwise, from the vested interests of fossil fuel production corporations, their financial backers, and their friends in media and government to any efforts to wean us off fossil fuels and to shift us exclusively towards sustainable green energy sources. Ask yourself who benefits from political inertia? Who benefits from climate inaction? We have a considerable number of those especially in the Western world who indulge in classic whataboutism too: what about China? What about the recalcitrance of Brazil, Turkey, and Russia? What about all the developing countries still burning coal? 

And there is also what has now become a desperate resistance from climate change deniers who, when they behave with a degree of civility on social media and elsewhere, masquerade as philosophical skeptics with a veneer of reason and dance around the massive amount of globally coordinated scientific evidence on the existential reality of global warming and climate change. (Check out the hashtag #climatebrawl.) Their goal is essentially to keep the issue in doubt and a contested state. Recent cooperative research from the University of Montreal and the University of California at Santa Barbara, however, reveals that the majority of people in every single federal riding in Canada with the exception of three accept the fact of climate change and suggest that some sort of action should be taken. Indeed, with the exception of the three all say their province has experienced climate change.

No wonder they say that. The planet’s average surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth highest since 1880, when record keeping began. Nine of the ten warmest years in recorded history have occurred since 2005 - soon to be ten of the eleven warmest. This past June, the month ER visits in Ontario uncharacteristically but perhaps not coincidentally spiked, was the hottest June ever recorded, while July was the hottest month in human history, the four-hundred and fifteenth straight month of temperatures higher than the twentieth-century average. We also learned recently that September 2019 was the hottest September in recorded history. But, worse news of all, we have increased C02 emissions globally by 20% since 2015, in  mere 3 and 3/4 years. 20%!!

The simple fact is that Canada is the ninth biggest emitter in the world, that Canada has the highest per capita carbon footprint of any country in the G20 (16 tonnes), that we are the tenth biggest emitter in the world if emissions are counted from 1900, that Canada’s North is warming at three times the global average, and that Canada in general is warming at twice the global rate, among the major effects the devastation in the North about which we learned this spring and summer - melting ice and refreezing ice slabs, eroding permafrost, raging fires, warming oceans - and several sustained dome-like heat waves in the South. 

And the effects of carbon emissions will be with us forever: the temperature we experience at the Earth’s surface will not decrease if/when we actually manage to stop carbon emissions. It will remain at whatever level it is at the precise moment when we fully stop emissions. That's why net zero* strategies are ineffective: they still allow for the continuous production of CO2 emissions, and seldom do the offsets actually balance that output. Recent research on the significant carbon debt incurred between old forests and new forests of four decades to 100 years are a good example of that failure. In other words, biomass/biofuels (whose carbon debts are misleadingly not budgeted accurately in national carbon ledgers) as well as reforestation are not quite the salvation we might think they are as raging forest fires spewing carbon around the world continue.**

Our carbon dioxide*** emissions are 415 parts per million and accelerating. We burn two-thirds more fossil fuels today than in 1990, and one-half of all fossil fuels burned in human history have been burned since 1990. Another way of saying that: emissions have gone up by 46% in the last 300 years, half that amount in the last 30 years! They will be with us for thousands of years. In other words, the longer we wait to get the process of aggressive decarbonization going, the hotter it will be and the more the economic fallout even if we finally do manage to stop emissions completely.

Much, much more than a carbon tax is required. We'll find out soon enough that only binding government legislated regulations with legal consequences will actually work to reduce emissions and mitigate their effects with the dramatic intensity we need. We will learn that we need to shift the focus to the larger perspective of systemic change - no easy task given that the entire global economy is driven by fossil fuels. Carbon taxes can play a supporting role,**** to be sure, but the sooner all our political parties stop flirting with a price on carbon and market based solutions in general as their main climate change policies, the sooner we can get on with the job that needs to be done right now.

That job is five-fold: 1)  Recognize fully at every level of government the scale of the challenge and that we all have a moral responsibility to work against the undeniable harm being inflicted on our world. Global warming even now affects every single aspect of our lives. Its effects are economic, social, and psychological; and it is already emerging as the number one health issue in the world as conditions worsen. 2) Reduce carbon emissions radically now through legally binding regulations. 3) Aggressively mitigate through whatever methods available the effects of carbon emissions already present in the atmosphere. 4) As politically difficult as this might be, shut down through legislation the production of any and all fossil fuel infrastructure (no more pipelines no more new extraction, no more subsidies). And 5) develop adaptation and survival strategies in all our communities big and small. Why this last? Because we long ago reached the point of no return and  there is no going back.

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*Net zero emissions or emissions neutrality means that the amount of emissions generated is no more than the amount taken out, a theoretical complete offset. But the new emissions generated in this process nevertheless remain in the atmosphere, thus extending the presence of those emissions in the atmosphere for decades to come. This is an inadequate form of mitigation in my judgment simply because we’re still burning fossil fuels and emitting carbon. What we need to get to is a state of carbon emissions negativity whereby our carbon footprint is less than neutral by reabsorbing the carbon emissions already in the atmosphere. That job is undermined with net zero strategies. As long as we continue to burn fossil fuels at our current rate, that will not happen and matters will only get worse.

**See Eddy Isaccs in his recent report from The School of Public Policy (https://tinyurl.com/y3vdfc5m): “This is because of the time lag between the instantaneous CO2 release from combustion of wood and the decades of regrowth required“ - 44 to 100 years.

***Why Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a Problem

Two conditions are always in play with respect to Earth’s atmosphere: the amount of sunlight (solar radiation) that reaches the Earth’s surface through the electromagnetic spectrum and the amount of greenhouse gasses in the air.

Greenhouse gas levels control the amount of heat (infrared radiation) absorbed into the atmosphere as it radiates up from the Earth.

Nitrogen and oxygen make up 99% of the atmosphere, but they really don’t have an effect on the Earth’s temperature because they do not absorb heat (infrared radiation).  Carbon dioxide does indeed absorb heat, a process that prevents CO2 escaping from the atmosphere into space. Thus the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the hotter the Earth’s surface temperature.  Fossil fuel emissions are the biggest source of C02 emissions, and C02 can last in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

****I agree with Eddy Isaccs in his recent report from The School of Public Policy (https://tinyurl.com/y3vdfc5m) that revenue from pricing carbon emissions should focus not on recycling that income for whatever reason, political or otherwise, but on investments in solar and wind infrastructure that can actually contribute directly to the reduction or mitigation of emissions.

[lostandfoundmagazine]

DEADLETTER talk ‘Fit For Work’

South London band DEADLETTER are vetrans of the scene, playing regularly at local venues such as The Windmill before the pandemic threw live music into a world of uncertainty. We caught up with lead singer Zac from the band to see how they’ve been coping with the latest restrictions, as well as talk about releasing new music under the new name.

How did you arrive at the name DEADLETTER?

We decided a while ago that a name change was due. We regard DEADLETTER as a whole new entity, not associated with our previous incarnation. Of course, there’s no need to erase history, but we weren’t happy with what we had to show with the previous name, and because of a year’s worth of dissatisfaction in tracks we’d recorded, and producers we’d worked with who maybe hadn’t quite clicked with our “sound”, it ended up seeming a good idea to release a fresh single to the world as a phoenix from the ashes rather than tailing on from an EP which, on the whole, no longer represented us as a band. The name change was an incredibly stressful process - inevitably so when there are 5 other people to please with each pitch. However, one night in a pub in Brixton, DEADLETTER was spoken, written down on a napkin alongside 4 or 5 other names, to which we then spoke about each one, crossing them off until DEADLETTER remained. 

With the name change and new music you’re bringing out, did you view this as an opportunity to start fresh?

 As previously mentioned, I think it was time for a new start. Not only musically but, I suppose, stylistically. We’d gone for a fairly DIY approach both in sound and visuals back with Mice, which is fun up to a point, however, there’s only so long that you can make stencils in your living room before feeling the urge to “clean up” if you like. You look around you, and yes, it’s wonderful to think that the members of the band are the ones behind the “style” but I think a fresh set of eyes and ears is what’s really needed to create an atmosphere that works like clockwork and has just enough elementally to be eclectically appealing. I think we’ve also learnt how to play our instruments (at least everyone else has, I prefer to just hold a microphone these days- much better after a show too- I’m on my second post-performance-pint whilst the others are still arguing about 9 volt adapters). All in all, it was seen as an opportunity to sort of say, fuck you, we’re going to sound like a well-produced band whilst still playing our raunchy mix up of Post-Punk and garage tunes, and it’s going to work.

Do you guys hang out together outside of the band?

Myself and Alfie (Drums) were born and brought up (for a few years) within a 20-minute walk of one another. The same goes for myself and George (Bass) who both attended (two different) schools together until the age of 16. It started out just George and I going busking on weekends, with the addition of Alfie, and was decided fairly early on that due to the lack of musical potential where we came from (small towns in the North of England), that perhaps moving to London together one day would be an attainable and wholesome venture. I’m not sure about the latter, but we made it happen (the struggle was definitely the word of the day for our first few months together). Of course upon moving here an expansion of sound was decided on, and we now regularly wake up to one (or both) of the guitarists lounging about our abode. Since COVID-19, we’re all in different places, but no doubt will all convene as one again when London starts to open up musically.

Can you tell us a story about ‘Good Old Days’? What does it mean to you?

‘Good Old Days’ was and is my way of expressing regards for an issue that I felt shouldn’t be explored in too explicit a manner - so as to maintain an air of both dignity and sensitivity in an implicit way. The song’s title is a phrase taken directly from one of the many perpetrators of reminiscing about the history of the USA for the most shamefully deplorable reasons. I find it disgraceful that you have these people in positions of power, trying to leverage the historical hatred and discrimination against minorities for personal/political gain (and that isn’t to say it isn’t the same here in our own country). Prejudice in any way is and always will be something I, and, I can easily speak on behalf of the others for this, completely despise. I think if progress is desirable and worth striving for, then prejudice is synonymous with regression.

Are there any bands you’ve been obsessed with over the last few weeks? 

I know that Alfie’s been getting stuck right into those new Massive Attack singles that they’ve released on Youtube. Alfred’s always been an avid Massive Attack head- maybe that even rings through in his drumming at times- hard to say without an outsider’s perspective. The others are funny because one day they’ll be indulging in Don Juan’s reckless daughter, and the next I’ll have George sending me some South London drill, absolutely enamoured with it. I suppose I’m similar in the sense of diversity, but my phases tend to be a little more pigeonholed. If I’m listening to Dylan, it’ll be Dylan, The Band, Neil Young, Townes Van Zandt, likewise if I’m listening to The Fall, it’ll be The Fall, The Bad Seeds, Young Marble Ginats. Ebbs and flows, but in a more coordinated way. We’ve also unanimously shared our love for Fixer-Upper, the new single from fellow Northerners Yard Act, and look forward to seeing what else they’ve got up their sleeve for the coming months.

How would your most recent single ‘Fit For Work’?

‘Fit For Work’ in itself, is far more than a statement about the DWP. I gathered all these ideas of writing this long, drawn-out tune about the brutality of British society and government, and realised that perhaps it was a case of “the less words, the better”. It’s supposed to put all these outrageous ideas on the table, but is unfortunately also heavily rooted in reality. Imagine something as absurd as seeing someone in a wheelchair and saying “well at least you have strong arms”. Now imagine a member of our beloved ruling class doing the same… What comes across as extreme and overemphasised actually doesn’t rub off all that far from the truth, and that’s the whole idea encapsulated within the song.

When did you record the track? Was it difficult to work on music collaboratively given the current climate?

 When lockdown hit we all sort of headed our separate ways- got out of London as quickly as possible before it was off the table as an option (we all just made it pre the 23rd March Lockdown announcement. It was definitely 23rd March by the way- before any of those cretins start trying to claim otherwise. Obviously, we had this single ‘Good Old Days’ ready to go, but upon its release quite quickly realised that if we didn’t come up with some sort of plan of action, it may be months and months before being able to share anything else with the world. Luckily, we were able to use the same producer, Rhys Downing, again, and were able to get to London and get the track done just as Lockdown had started to ease.

[ciathyzareposts]

Missed Classic: Spellbreaker – Avalanche!

Written by Joe Pranevich

Wow! It’s been a while. How have you been? Family good? Any of you have children who grew up, went to college, started a family, and then had children of their own still waiting for a Spellbreaker update? I am sorry about that, but life has been a bit extra challenging these last few weeks and writing needed to take a back seat. The other issue is that this game isn’t really “singing” to me. It’s good and all, but I’m not really getting drawn to the story or the puzzles in the usual way for Infocom. I’ll discuss that more in a bit and in upcoming posts, but the end result is that not having enough time, plus having to force myself to play and write when I did have the time, made for a longer than usual time between posts. I’ll try to do better with the remainder of the series now that real life has settled a bit. I apologize for my tardiness.

Where we left off last time, I had just survived (somehow) an attack where all of the elders of all of the magical guilds in the world were all turned into frogs. Why was I not affected? That remains a core mystery. I chased after the assailant, but he teleported away in a cloud of orange smoke, leaving me only with a white cube left in the middle of the street and a new spell in my spellbook. When I cast that new spell on the cube, I was transported away into a dark room. That’s all we’ve done so far, so let’s see what happens next!

It’s dark, but there don’t appear to be any grues…

Whenever I am, it is dark. I cast the “frotz” spell on the bread from the buffet and use it as a light source. Not everyone has the style to make a flashlight made of bread work, but I think I can just about manage it. It’s a baguette of power! Once I can see, I find that I am in a room of “Packed Earth” with exits in four directions and a hole down. My first thought is that I am far underground someplace, back in the Great Underground Empire, but not all is as it seems. The passage north seems to be blocked by a magical force, while the other exists behave more like teleporters than exits in a cave. Every time we leave, the cube reappears in our hands and we are somewhere different:

East leads to a “Hall of Stone” with passages to the north and south. North of there is a snake eating its own head blocking the way. An ouroboros! South is an underground ruin and a swiftly moving channel of water. I also find a magic zipper.

South leads to a cave with a sneezing ogre. He won’t let me by to explore deeper. Heading east from there leads to…

West leads to the middle of a cliff face with a short path above and a longer one down, taking me back to the ogre’s cave. The cliff has a scroll (“throck”: make plants grow) on the side and a curtain of precariously perched rocks above. At the top of the mountain is a hut that I can see but not reach. Any exploration at the top triggers an avalanche that will kill me if I don’t get out of the way. 

As I explore, I save/restore to return to “Packed Earth” but I probably need not have bothered. The “blorple” spell seems to be able to work any number of times and I can return. While at first I suspect that maybe time travel is involved and the regions reset when you leave them, that doesn’t appear to be the case because taking the scroll or the zipper means that we have those objects until fetch-quest-do-us-part. During my explorations, I managed to get myself buried in the rockslide once and die. That takes me to a new room called the “Boneyard” where a mysterious voice offers to give me one more chance. I restore again anyway, just in case there is a walking dead situation, but knowing there is a place we go if we kill ourselves is both comforting and probably used to solve some puzzle later. (The inspiration for Kings Quest VI? Or do I just have Sierra on the brain.)

  An illustration of an ogre from “Legends of Zork” (2009)

One mildly confusing aspect of the “blorple” teleportation is that two of the exits are so close to each other, literally two screens apart. Does that mean I’ll find a path to the Hall of Stone later as well? Is that entrance what the ogre is guarding? Turning my attention to that ogre, I find that he doesn’t bother you very quickly. If you invade his space, you have plenty of time to explore before he kills you. That leads me to triggering an avalanche and hiding out in his cave until it passes, but that doesn’t win me anything and all the rocks are back in position when I return. It must be a magical mountain.

Speaking of magic, I turn my attention back to the zipper that I picked up in the underground ruins. When I open it, it behaves almost exactly like a bag of holding. I reach in and feel around; in two attempts I am able to grab ahold of a hidden scroll: “girgol”, to stop time. It’s too long to put into my spellbook so I’ll have to consider it a one-and-done solution to a puzzle rather than a spell to add to my repertoire. Hiding in the zipper– which surprisingly doesn’t kill me– doesn’t seem to win me that much other than a hidden “room”. I try climbing in to survive the avalanche and that doesn’t help at all. I die.

“And I am a snake head eating the head on the opposite side…”

I “blorple” my way back to the cliff face and try to stop time there, but it doesn’t work the way I want. Instead of the rocks forming a natural staircase up the mountain or being climbable before you trigger the avalanche, all I end up with is a near-vertical curtain of rocks and no climbing equipment. Using the stop-time spell on the ogre helps a bit, but doesn’t really solve the puzzle. With it, I can get past and see that the passage he is blocking just leads to his bedroom, containing a gold box and a dusty scroll. Unfortunately, the stop-time spell is really strong and I can’t interact with anything because only I can move, nothing else. When time resumes, I am killed immediately. I think for a while that the trick is to hide so that the ogre doesn’t see you, but with time stopped I can’t really do much to accomplish that and I eventually give up. I even try going into the zipper, but that only buys me a bit of time since I die as soon as I come out. There’s a way to get that box opened, but this isn’t it.

At this point, I am stuck.

I try casting “yomin” everywhere to do a mind probe. That gives me a few clues such as the snake being imprisoned due to its pride and the ogre having hayfever. The “throck” spell to grow plants could be useful in his case, but I don’t find any plants to try my theory out on.

I experiment further with the zipper. I can climb in it! I can even shut it while I’m in, but it doesn’t help in ways that I expect. I cannot hide inside to avoid the rockslide, for example, and while it does fool the ogre for a bit, he still kills me as soon as I come out.

Is this the Ur Example of the roc’s nest puzzle in adventure games?

The next break comes back in the Packed Earth room: I can go down the hole after all. Although I have to force the issue, the game lets me climb down the hole if I am insistent. Moments later, I am high above the Earth, falling into a mountainous and forested region below. Maybe if I squint, I might be able to see a cave with a sneezing ogre in it. Fortunately, I neither splat into the ground, nor get turned into a bowl of petunias as I am picked up by a roc flying nearby. The giant bird takes off towards the Flathead mountains to the west. Have we seen those in any of the other Zork games? It is so difficult to keep track. I get a few turns to consider my situation while the roc is carrying me, but nothing I do seems very helpful. Eventually, it– or rather she— deposits me in her nest.

Now, where have we seen this scene before? We had a roc’s nest scene in Kings Quest V, as well as a parody of that one in Space Quest IV. I feel like it’s been in other games as well. Is this the first example? Regardless, the roc ignores me once I am in her nest– I suspect that she’s waiting for her chick to hatch so I can be their first meal. The nest contains some flotsam and jetsam, stuff that the mother bird picked up, including both another one of the white cubes and a flimsy scroll. The scroll turns out to be the “caskly” spell which makes something perfect, although some quick attempts don’t seem to suggest that I can use it on anything here. Unfortunately, the white cube is under the egg and the mama bird doesn’t let me anywhere near it. Attempting to help mother nature take her course with the “rezrov” (open) spell doesn’t do the trick either. Eventually, I “blorple” my way back to safety. I quickly check and verify that I can drop down the hole and end up picked up by the roc again, so I know I can get back if I need to. At least I got a scroll out of the deal!

I’d totally try “caskly” on this guy. It would have saved like 30 episodes.

Still stuck, I “caskly” everything in the game to see if the perfect version is what I need. Unfortunately, nothing seems to do the trick. There is a different response when I use it in the ruins, but still no dice. Maybe we’ll try that again later.

Once again, I am stuck. I even nearly end my first post with a “Request for Assistance” which would be embarrassing considering how long I made everyone wait for it. But the trick was that I was mis-timing the avalanche. If you stop time at the right moment, you can climb up the boulders to the path above. At the very top is the hut, as well as a gold coin that I happily pocket. It’s 500 zorkmids! I would be more excited about that if the game had an actual economy. Heading east, I enter the hermit’s cottage where I discover a featureless white cube in the wall. There are three of them! To try to get a hint, I use “yomin” on the hermit to discover that his brains have been a bit addled through years of being alone. He thinks I am going to rob him, which might be true considering that I’d really like to get my hands on that cube. I ask him about the cube and he tells me that it appeared in a cloud of orange smoke some time ago. That sounds like our assailant, but if he dropped off the cube ages ago then he’s either time traveling or was planning whatever he is up to well in advance. He also tells me that he has struggled to build the hut for years and that white cube was just what he needed to finish. The solution seems obvious: I use “caskly” on the hut and it is rearranged and rebuilt perfectly. The cube, no longer necessary to hold up the walls, is on the floor where I can take it.

Now that I have snatched my first “new” cube, I blorple it and find myself in a “Soft” room with exits to the east and south. This seems like a good stopping point for now, although I do not know how many cubes I will come across. rive,

Just like this, but a bit more of a climb.

My remaining mysteries:

How do I get past the ogre to get the scroll and gold box?

How do I get past the snake?

What is up with the water channel in the ruins? 

How do I get into the final “blocked” direction in the Packed Earth room?

As far as the core mystery of the game is concerned, the trail seems to have gone cold. The attacker that I had been chasing at the beginning of the section is now long gone, with no clues as to who he is or where he escaped to. I now know that there are several white cubes, but what connection they have to each other or the assailant is unknown. I hope that the game picks up this thread because what started as an exciting chase quickly became a slow progression through some timing and teleportation puzzles. Of course, being a Zork game, I have to theorize that there are time-travel shenanigans and I might find out that I’m actually the attacker. That would either be a nice callback to the coal mine puzzle from Zork III, or a ripoff, depending on your point of view. I will have many more thoughts on how Zork III successfully closed out the original series and whether Spellbreaker is a worthy successor in a few weeks. See you soon!

Time played: 3 hr 20 min Total time: 3 hr 50 min

Inventory: 2x white cubes, gold coin, zipper, rye bread, smoked fish, magic burin, knife, spell book Spell Book Contains: caskly, throck, blorpie, yomin, rezrov, frotz, gnusto, malyon, jindak, lesoch

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/missed-classic-spellbreaker-avalanche/