#longing for fictionland

[deuterosapiens]

So I started reading Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club on something of a whim. Yes it was a book before a movie. Yes, I stopped Under the Whispering Door to read it (which I will pick back up now that Fight Club is over; it will not languish on the shelf of unfinished books like so, so many other things).

Like many a person, I've seen the film a fair number of times. It's one of those highly quotable films that makes up about thirteen percent of all film references that aren't Mean Girls (quick aside: how well do these two films specifically compare? There's probably some interesting parallels for another time, though that's not important). Unlike many a person, my first experience with Chuck Palahniuk's writing was the short-story "Guts," which is fairly unpleasant for the squeamish, rather than this. It felt like the logical place to start with his novelist work. I've got Choke ordered as a potential follow-up (Sam Rockwell makes all movies better).

All the discourse and discussion of what it's really about has all been had and I'm afraid I can't really add anything interesting to the discussion. Is it social satire? Is it a critique of toxic masculinity, anarchy, the destruction of the hetero-male image? What's it stand for, what's it believe in? What ideas does it promote?

The reading I found the most interesting here, which is the one I found the most relatable or relevant to me, given my own personal drama, however, was that it's a perfectly good critique of toxic escapism. I'm fairly certainly this was not exactly what Palahniuk had in mind when it was written.

Consider this: a person becomes bored with their life and runs off with a fantastic stranger to a new world. No one on earth would bat an eye to that description applying to basically every piece of escapist fiction ever written. And yet, if you boil it down to the essential elements, removing the fat, this is an adequate description of the events of Fight Club's first act.

The fantasy becomes worse and it takes a destructive toll. What was initially a medicine has become an addiction, and, like all addictions, eventually the fantasy isn't enough. Fight club is no longer enough and so Tyler kickstarts Project Mayhem. I consider this an important point as the novel makes it extraordinarily clear that Tyler Durden isn't starting Project Mayhem for social reform, but because his friend, the unnamed Narrator (I think the sequel calls him Sebastian, but I obviously haven't read Fight Club 2 yet; yes there's a sequel; it's a graphic novel as opposed to the original which is a novel that's quite graphic, but not a graphic novel; where was I again?), is no longer having his escapist needs met through the fights.

Project Mayhem grows out of control and the Narrator realizes, too late, none of this is okay. It's then that he realizes the tomato in the mirror, that Tyler is a dissociative self created to cope with just being actually bored as hell of living. Okay, technically he created Tyler because he was interested in Marla Singer (sort of, the part of him that was interested in her became Tyler, it's a bit murky, the details, but that's not strictly important).

So, in-universe, everything that happens is the literal exact result of an actual fantasy going too far.

What I find best about this reading though is how it plays with the ending. A brief note: the film ending, with the explosions set to the Pixies' "Where is my Mind?," doesn't happen; instead the explosives fail, and the Narrator is left recovering in a hospital after having shot his face-out (where Project Mayhem members await eagerly his recovery and the recovery of the Tyler Durden persona).

You have someone who has ran away to some other world as a means of escaping their own problems, who learns that this fantasy is causing them more harm than good, who then takes action to recover themselves and return to the real world. Still, there will always be that possible thread, the lingering will, desire, to leave reality behind again and succumb to the fantasy.

I think a lot of us, who used books or games or movies or what have you to ignore our day-to-day routine problems, can relate to that. To finally wanting to confront the problem you've avoided head-on, and feeling that tug, a little pull in your mind, something drawing you back to the distraction. The easy-way, always available if you want it.

Perhaps I did have something to say about Fight Club the novel after all. I know I broke the rules (the first rule of fight club: you do not talk about fight club; the second rule of fight club: you do not talk about fight club), but perhaps that's the point. The delusion by itself is no fun; madness spread to others (folie à deux) is a riot.

Perhaps that's why we need a Marla, a tether to ground us (even if painfully), when the fantasy can no longer be differentiated from reality.

[shokuto]

Hear me out. We need to make Mary Jane insecure again so she can cope with it by being sinking into the role of MJ

[keikakudori]

tfw you love your muse so much you're sitting and reading on the absolutely horrific effects of solitary confinement and what it does to prisoners in order to properly convey just what it is doing to your muse who is in solitary confinement as well as sensory deprivation hell.

let me just say that i view solitary confinement as absolutely cruel and unusual punishment and torture in real life. it is horrific. it is horrible. and it can absolutely harm people physically. i am endlessly amazed at how aizen is still properly coherent in the blood war. i know that it is fictionland and realism doesn't fucking apply to superhuman characters and ghosts and what are best summed up as magical powers and everything, but guess what.

aizen is my character and i make the rules here and i can tell you that Muken is genuinely absolutely wrecking him. two years is horrible. i can't imagine what he's like in the jaws of hell arc.

i do know that in my verse where aizen has had to serve his full sentence of 20,000 years that he is absolutely catatonic once he's removed from Muken and winds up spending about twenty years showing no reactions whatsoever to being free. he has to literally be bathed and fed because he shows no awareness of the world. he's retreated inwards so deeply that it takes up to half a century for him to start showing anything approximating life and reactions again. he doesn't even come in out of the rain or the snow if weather changes happen. for a very long time, all he does is sit and stare into space, unblinking and not seeing anyone or anything. he doesn't talk. he doesn't react to people talking to him. it takes a long time for him to come back to that.

so honestly i'm just thinking about what Muken is doing to him because i have to steep realism into things here and there and realism, in this case, is studying how solitary confinement just fucks with the brain; it actually literally physically changes as a result of prolonged solitary confinement. that isn't something made up; the physical structures of the brain can literally change because there is damage done to the hippocampus. and it's got long-lasting effects on real-life prisoners who have suffered in solitary confinement.

so basically aizen's time in Muken has impacted him DEEPLY in any thread i write where he's spent time in there. and my defense is that kubo made this canon. he did this. he showed me these changes in aizen so of course i'm taking it all and running with it. aizen's time in Muken was not a walk in the fucking park. it's impacted him, possibly permanently in the short-term and will leave him irrevocably altered if he stays in there an extended period of time after the Blood War. like -- he's been changed by it. literally altered. it's cruel and it's awful and in some ways i find it disproportionate punishment as well.

but on the other hand, they can't do worse to him than he's already doing to himself.

[shinelikethunder]

"#'what circumstances exactly' you ask? congrats! now you're asking the right questions#feel free to join the rest of us in arguing endlessly over the answers at essay length because this shit's complicated" i'd love your thoughts!

(re: the tags on this post about suspension of moral disbelief)

I mean, there are plenty of finer details lurking in that “exactly” that I won’t even pretend to have well-formed answers for. But applying the concept of ‘suspension of disbelief’ to morality is just... a thing people do with stories. All the time! The decision to play along with it can be well-judged or ill-judged, just like most other human exchanges of ideas, and the demands a story makes of its audience can be beneficial or pernicious or just plain expedient. All you really need for it to be in play is:

some kind of moral skepticism to suspend (re: consequences, risk, what really matters here, the innate horrificness of a transgression, whatever)

some sufficient incentive to suspend it (catharsis, Feeeeels, wish fulfilment, digging into the appeal of something that’d be a terrible idea IRL, neat thought experiments, compelling trainwrecks, having more important things to Story about...)

some level of confidence that this is a temporary setting-aside of scruples for the duration of your stay in Fictionland, not actual persuasion about something you’ll potentially take with you into real life that demands fuller scrutiny

And there’s no one uncomplicated answer on that for any story. Different people are gonna have different reactions to the same work, on all three points. There are fandoms I just never got into, because the main characters didn’t grab me enough for there to be any incentive to play along with whatever their Standards-Warping Special Snowflake Bullshit was. There are others where I ate that shit up but grumped about it the whole time, because the writing seemed to be huffing its own paint fumes re: narratively vs actually justified. And others where it wasn’t bullshit or grump-worthy at all, because the story knew damn well when it was offering to take you for a ride and when it was in dead earnest and when it was having too much fun to know for sure. (And the last point, about RL persuasion, has a whole stable of sub-essays about intent, responsibility, actual effectiveness at persuading, risk of actually picking up unexamined bullshit vs. sheer annoyance at being sold a load of crap you have no interest in buying... it’s all complicated!)

The “moral suspension of disbelief” mechanism itself, though? It’s a routine part of telling and being told stories. It’s in play every time you don’t give a shit about the widows and orphans and rich inner lives of the redshirts getting killed off. Every time you take satisfaction in watching an obnoxious character meet an outlandishly awful fate they would never have deserved in real life. Every time you root for a protagonist pulling a long-shot heroic stunt that would recklessly endanger everyone around them if the laws of narrative probability weren’t so thoroughly in their favor.

I’m going to haul out Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie I love dearly, for examples of both a success and a failure at getting me, personally, to suspend judgement. On pretty much the same highly-morally-charged question of fact--the efficacy of torture, and how it’s portrayed in fiction. The success: I really don’t give a fuck that the movie trotted out a bunch of hoary old chestnuts about torture, brainwashing, and miraculously competent mindfucked double agents to get from Point A to all the tasty layers of identity porn we’re really here for. It’s convenient handwavium presented as Literal Comic Book Science. The traditional fearmongering about inhuman foreign enemies and their magical exotic mind-control techniques is a vaguely-gestured-at red herring; the onscreen horror is homegrown and ugly. The tropes themselves are a crock of shit, and the later movies completely dropped the ball on questions of responsibility and rehabilitation, but zero claims or assumptions about reality are being put forth here, except that The Really Bad Shit Is Coming From Inside The House.

The same can’t be said for Steve, Sam, and Natasha getting from Point A to Point "Obligatory exposition the movie could just as easily have delivered any other way” by... uh... staging a mock execution on a Hydra mole? And doing it as a quick, dirty, totally effective, totally-justified-by-the-Proverbial-Ticking-Clock, nasty-but-efficient way to get 100% accurate information out of someone who has zero incentive to cooperate. All of which is taken so thoroughly for granted that the whole scene, particularly the idea that Steve might consider it unconscionable, is played as a joke. That’s fucking rancid. Doubly rancid for this movie (whose politics are otherwise “what if the real fascism was the national-security state we built along the way”) to be blithely regurgitating the exact same War on Terror propaganda talking points that are still used to "justify” actual, real-life, really fucking recent US war crimes. Triply rancid to have the character who is literally called Captain America, who is supposed to be the country’s idealized conscience in the face of whatever its most topical ongoing failings happen to be, ringleading that shit. Listen, I love this movie, but that scene is straight-up morally indefensible. It skates by on good comic timing juuust long enough for the next big plot point to click into place and divert your attention before you can think too hard about it. But think about it for five seconds and it’s vile.

There was also a weird trend in some of the first waves of fanfiction after CA:TWS came out, which I suspect was the result of a mismatch in moral-disbelief-suspension between that movie and Person of Interest. Overall the tonal, thematic, and subject-matter overlap between the two canons is downright uncanny, but it’s not 100%, and one of the little differences is that the crew of maladjusted weirdoes on Person of Interest are big on “covert surveillance of your friends & loved ones as Actually A Gesture Of Affection.” A number of popular authors who’d written in both fandoms ported that over to CA:TWS fic as an endearing quirk to spice up the character dynamics, and let me tell you, it hit real differently in that universe.

[floralseokjin]

ahhhh decalcomania gave me mixed feelings. the part where the reader asked jungkook to tell her everything about the cheating felt like she was forcing him agst his will. and maybe i'm just seeing it as black and white but she literally threw him out; they broke up. so he wasn't cheating. it felt like jungkook was the victim in this relationship and they don't have equal grounds since he cheated. and her crying was so abusive behavior-ish bc it felt like she's guilt tripping him unconsciously D:

Reply under cut! 

I’m going to have to majorly disagree with you there anon, sorry :/ There’s nothing abusive about oc’s behaviour whatsoever.

1. Yes, there are technicalities when it comes to whether or not Jungkook cheated or not, that much is true. After all oc did break up with him before he had sex with someone else, however, it was a mere few hours after, not days or weeks. This is still a betrayal and imo still cheating. In Jungkook’s mind it is also cheating. Also the breakup was done in the heat of the moment. After years of being together it just seems like a major dick move if Jungkook rocked up and was like “well you broke up with me four hours previous, it wasn’t cheating.” Nothing would ever excuse his actions from that night, and he knows that too.

2. Her crying was absolutely NOT abusive behaviour. She was upset, her whole world had just come crashing down around her, the man she loved had betrayed her. She was not faking her tears to emotionally manipulate him like it seems you are suggesting. She was heartbroken for a reason and allowed to show it. Plus, how could she guilt trip him unconsciously? He should already feel guilty! He cheated! 

3. I think it’s the least Jungkook could do to tell her all the details of that night if that’s what she wanted to hear. He was not being forced to do anything. If he found it difficult to tell her that’s because of his own shame, and rightfully so. He should feel shame and does.

4. She is definitely the victim. I’m not saying she was perfect in the relationship, because of course she wasn’t, but Jungkook was the one who cheated. He wasn’t a victim because they argued and she chucked him out. He isn’t a victim now after he cheated and she took him back. They’re just in a very unfortunate, unhealthy situation now because they cannot let one another go. In truth, they should’ve broken up long before that night, and that was kind of the whole point of the story. 

I know my writing is here to be perceived any which way you guys want but in certain instances I can’t just agree to disagree with stuff like this. Again, I am in no way saying the oc in my fic was perfect but she wasn’t an emotional abuser. I did not write her that way and even that phrase makes me feel a little gross. There was nothing abusive about anything in that fic. And I’m not even saying that Jungkook was a bad guy in it. He wasn’t. He’s just someone who made a mistake, but following that mistake he needs to learn and grow.

I’m sorry but I can’t really understand your mentality. I want to think it’s because the fic is in Jungkook’s pov, that and you already feel biased towards him because he’s a real life person that you follow and like, not a made up character like the oc. That is why it’s important to separate fiction from reality. This Jungkook is made up, it may as well not even be him. In fictionland he can mess up and have flaws. You don’t have to jump hoops to excuse his behaviour in this fic which it seems like you were doing here. 

[orriculum]

hello! can you help me please? what do you think are the things to research when writing a fiction (novel) about witches?

i guess it depends on how much you want it to reflect real-life crafts v doing whatever floats ur boat

honestly for fiction, you can make the magic have a system, you can make it demand equal sacrifice, make it all powerful or you can give it limitations, you can reflect on how people react to it, what is sacred and profane, etc etc. tbh a bit of research into cultural anthropology is very eye-opening into seeing the similarities of what various cultures consider magic

BUT. but but but. regardless of how it works in fictionland there, references you use to irl’s various practices do not exist in a political vacuum, and that’s very important to take into consideration. put research into what you should not say.

be mindful to avoid tropes about “black magic”, the connotations that follow that, be aware not use hoodoo or voodoo as ~spooky~ or evil, that has a long history of racist tropes.  

lots of magic-having fiction likes to make romani people into caricatures, and throws around the g-slur. also racist, i’d avoid doing that

do not use any rituals/spells whatever from closed cultures! you might do a little research and think how cleansing rituals seem like a cool thing to add, but if you call it smudging and have characters wave around sage the way irl cultural-appropriators do, that’s a problem. that’s a long standing issue in the witchcraft community, as are a lot of these points. 

those are just a few examples. the main line is be mindful of existing peoples/cultures/religions, and that there are right and wrong ways to draw influence from and represent them. 

good luck with your writing!

[isfjmel-phleg]

I need to figure out how these stories end. In their continuity, Delclis turns 28 today (September 26), and goodness only knows what he’s out there in fictionland doing.

An ideal birthday for him would involve a long nature walk with his dog in the morning, circling back to the palace gardens by noon to check on whatever experiment he’s performing, and an evening in his library with the latest botanical journals, possibly without having spoken to a single person all day.

Unfortunately, becoming King means your birthday becomes a national holiday and everyone wants to make a tremendous fuss and parade you around.

But how about going back to a moment before all that, when Delclis’s stepfather was king, and Delclis’s biggest concerns were his education and avoiding people?

Correspondence

It was a May morning. The birds were vocalizing with varying degrees of length and complexity, the sun was enabling photosynthesis, the entire plant kingdom was rife with microscopic secrets, and Delclis sat indoors, reminding himself that he couldn’t put off a reply any longer.

Slowly blowing out his breath, he dipped his pen in the inkwell and wrote, “Dear Azella.”

Exhausted by this exertion, he laid down his pen and racked his brain for what to say next. He had not seen Azella since childhood—but had he met her every day of his life, he still wouldn’t have known how to talk to her. She sent him a lengthy letter every month about her doings, none of which had yet registered sense with him.

Oh, right. This time she had asked a question he had an answer for. He could do that.

“Yes,” he wrote, “I am going to Hollingham in the autumn. I will say hello to your brothers if I see them”—Delclis was relying on his terrible memory for faces to get him out of that one—“and I will let you know if we do anything interesting. But I do not think I will, unless you find physics and mathematics fascinating. I am going to be on the Science side. Do they have a Science side at your school too?”

There. A personal question. That ought to mollify her. Perhaps he wasn’t such a poor correspondent after all.

How this exchange with his father’s sister’s granddaughter had been foisted upon him he still wasn’t sure. Her family had visited several years ago, and Azella, who was his age, had insisted on playing with his dog and, when possible, him. She had talked him into sitting with her under the long table in the grand dining room, pretending they were in a submarine. She had just read a book called A Tour of the Undersea World by a Faymondian called J. M. Jouverre, and her imagination was full of ships and exploration and aquatic monsters.

What a lot of nonsense it had been. Delclis idly sketched a border of squids in the margins and gave them scientifically inaccurate beady black eyes. She would probably think they were funny. She would.

“I want to get into the Sixth Form as early as possible,” he wrote. “Perhaps in a year or two. Then I can go on to Claverworth University, which has always been my intention.”

Ever since Mr. Davell, his tutor, had told him, years ago, about a town of spires and arches and gargoyles, where gown-clad scholars trod the cobbles en route to libraries and laboratories where everything you might want to know was shut away from a prying world, where everyone chattered over dinner about theories and philosophy instead of the weather and everyone’s health, where if you opened enough doors and passed through enough gates you could emerge in acres of gardens and parks where you’d never know there was a bustling town on the other side of those portals—ever since then, Delclis had decided that that was where he belonged.

He kept asking his stepfather to let him go, just for a visit, but the last time he had asked, Talfrin had laughed and said that a boy his age ought to be more keen on sneaking off to Sortey for the races—which he would gladly send Delclis to if asked. So Delclis stopped asking.

He frowned at the paper and scanned the contents of his desk for inspiration. The gloriously crossbred orchid lifted its face to him expectantly. Girls liked flowers, didn’t they? But discussing this latest experiment would bore Azella, as it did everyone else. He probably wrote too much about that sort of thing anyway. He could seldom think of anything else to say, and surely it was mere politeness that kept her replying and claiming interest.

 So he settled on, “Are your brothers going to Claverworth? Have you thought about going too? I think they have a college or two for ladies. Do you think your people would let you?”

Since they wouldn’t be at the same college, he wouldn’t have to bother about social encounters. Although they might run into each other in the library. She’d probably want to jaw about another Jouverre novel again, but he would have to take that risk. If he must be subjected to conversation, that topic wasn’t intolerable.

He added a big whale, wearing an incorrect top hat, to the bottom of the page. 

A knock on the door mercifully interrupted this torture, and he was delivered a tray bearing a telegram from the Palace.

Rolling his eyes as he opened it—for surely his mother was imploring him to be careful looking after his brother on the train to Loriston next week—he read:

CONGRATULATE ME DELCLIS STOP HAVE LANDED YOU PLACE CRAMMING WITH ARCHBISHOP MOSSING STOP TOOK MONTHS PERSUASION YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN ME BUT OLD BOY FINALLY CAVED STOP BRUSH UP ON LATIN MY BOY BECAUSE IN DECADE CALLING YOU RIGHT REVEREND IF POSSIBLE WITH STRAIGHT FACE STOP BLOODY BRILLIANT FEAT STOP YOUR MOTHER SAYS I MEAN VERY STOP I DO NOT STOP —TALFRIN R

Delclis crumpled the paper into a compact ball. He did not fling it into the fire. But he tossed it on his desk with more vehemence than strictly necessary.

Talfrin had often talked about sending his stepson to the Archbishop, but Delclis had hoped this was idle speculation and tradition would win out. After all, Talfrin was himself an Old Marbertian.

Delclis resumed his letter. “I expect Hollingham would be an excellent place to go before reading for the church. Was that what your brother Deniol wants to read or was it Chemistry? He doesn’t have to study with anyone instead before going up, does he?”

Even if Delclis had to spend a few years on the college’s Classical side, he could still manage to move on to reading Botany at Claverworth when Talfrin wasn’t looking. It might require extra work, but he could keep up. So why wasn’t he going to Hollingham?

Of course he could tolerate spending the next few years reading Divinity with a man who owed his seat to the King. Of course they’d be debating nearly constantly, if the Archbishop’s views were anything like Talfrin’s—and they had to be—but if that was what he must endure to achieve paradise, so be it. Even if it made no sense.

Another knock. Another telegram. This one read:

WHEN SAID BRUSH UP ON LATIN BELIEVE ME BOY I WAS NOT PULLING LEG STOP ARCHBISHOP RECOMMENDS UNIVERSITY NOYOSE STOP UNEXPECTED ADVENTURE FOR YOU STOP —TALFRIN R

This one Delclis tore to shreds. And pieced back together to read again for confirmation. The King couldn’t have meant it. Sending his stepson to an Otionovian university, when Corege and Otionovia had not progressed beyond suspicious avoidance of each other after the war, had no foreseeable practical outcome. It wouldn’t reduce costs. It wouldn’t teach him anything necessary that Claverworth couldn’t. And if reading with the Archbishop would be one long theological debate, then three years in Otionovia…

He swept the scraps aside and tried to resume the task at hand. But his letter within moments had passed into obsoletion. He would have to start over again. 

At least he wouldn’t have to dodge overly friendly cousins at Noyose. In fact, he wouldn’t know anyone at all, because hardly any Coregeans studied there. He would be nobody, just as he was at Endean—would that really be so bad? To study where no one knew who—or what—his father had been? At Hollingham and Claverworth they would be all too conscious…

Delclis stabbed his pen back into the inkwell.

“If you really want to go up to Claverworth,” he wrote, “I think you should do it. We might even start the same year. Look me up if you do. And tell your brothers I will see them in the autumn. It has been a while, and I will be glad for some familiar faces at Hollingham. Sincerely yours, Your cousin, Delclis.”

He finished with a swordfish with an actual sword for a nose, folded the letter, and sealed it. Then he began another one.

“Dear Mother, I have just received some correspondence about which you might wish to know...” 

[cromulentbookreview]

What We Do in the New Orleans Shadows

♪ Long before the Superdome / Where the saints of football play / Lived a city that the damned call home / Hear their hellish roundelay / New Orleans! Home of pirates, drunks and whores / New Orleans! Tacky, overpriced souvenir stores / / If you want to go to hell, you should take a trip / To the Sodom and Gomorrah on the Mississip / New Orleans / Stinking, rotten, vomiting vile... New Orleans! / Putrid, brackish, maggoty, foul / New Orleans! ♪ 

And by that, I mean: The Beautiful by Renée Ahdieh!

My sincerest apologies to the city of New Orleans, which I hear is quite lovely. I’d like to go there someday, but only when I can be assured that I, as a female, am considered a human being with rights in the State of Louisiana. Anyway, whenever I think of New Orleans, all I can hear in my head is the song from A Streetcar Named Marge. And then I think about beignets. Mmm. And how I never learned French, instead I spent all my time learning German, which is useless, unless you’re hoping to eavesdrop on German tourists (a note to German tourists: Rede keinen Scheiß, es gibt Amerikaner die dich verstehen können. Ihr kränkte uns...)

Anyway, on to The Beautiful. 

New Orleans! 1872! The crinoline is out and bustles are in! Corsets continue to be the worst! The Gilded Age is just getting started (even though the book won’t be published for another year) and Belle Époque is big in France! Imperialism is everything! Ulysses S. Grant is drinking whiskey under his desk! Meanwhile,  seventeen-year-old Celine Rousseau has fled her life as a dressmaker at one of the finest ateliers in Paris to join a convent in New Orleans. As you do when shit happens. Luckily, Celine made a friend on the boat ride over - Pippa, another girl fleeing shitty circumstances in favor of life in a convent. Once in New Orleans, both girls are enchanted by the city, and I absolutely have to hand it to Renée Ahdieh for knowing how to capture a setting. The way she describes it, you can practically smell the city of New Orleans. Especially the food. Dear God, the food. Mmm. 

I missed ALA Annual last year when it was held in New Orleans (and by “missed” I mean “couldn’t afford to go”) and just reading this book made me kick myself for not going. 

Back to Celine, though. The whole point of going to live at the Ursuline Convent of New Orleans is for her to lay low and find herself a good husband so she can escape the aforementioned shit that went down in Paris. Pippa has the same goal, though she is way more focused on the “finding a good husband” thing than Celine is. One day, while selling bric-a-brac to raise money for the convent, a strange woman named Odette compliments Celine on her sewing skills. Once she learns that Celine is a dressmaker, Odette immediately commissions Celine to make her a dress for a masquerade ball. Because, of course, it’s Mardi Gras. In fictionland, it’s never not Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

Anyway, Odette is high up in some shady New Orleanian society called La Cour des Lions which seems to be full of hyper-beautiful people with all sorts of special skills. La Cour des Lions is led by the mysterious and largely absent Comte de Saint Germain, and is rumored to be embedded pretty deep in local politics and business. While on her way to fit Odette for her dress, Celine, accompanied by Pippa, encounters the comte’s nephew and heir, the absolutely gorgeous Sebastian St. Germain, as he mercilessly beats an unarmed man in an alleyway for reasons that are never made clear. (Seriously, we never do find out for sure why he was beating up some dude in an alley, at least, not in the ARC text). 

Also, I like to imagine that Bastian looks like Taika Waititi.

Also I’d like to imagine he has Taika Waititi’s accent. 

When Celine encounters Bastian again at Odette’s club, they quickly go from being complete strangers to head over heels in love. Because teenagers. But that’s all interrupted when Pippa stumbles upon the body of a girl drained of all her blood. Suddenly the police are involved, led by rival love interest, Michael Grimaldi, who happens to be a former childhood friend of Bastien, and thus, the future love triangle is established.

Also, if you haven’t already guessed by now (I mean, the presence of the Comte de St Germain is a pretty big hint) La Cour des Lions are vampires. Because somehow, even though New Orleans averages a total of 216 sunny days per year, vampires live there.

Maybe Laszlo is onto something, there.

Still, vampires live there, sticking to the indoors and shadows (or managing to daywalk like Colin Robinson or something. Not sure as the book does specify that sunlight does kill these vampires...).  La Cour des Lions are in a centuries long feud with something called the Brotherhood, who are....I’ll let you guess.

Did you guess?

Oh, come on.

You know. 

I’ll give you a hint.

Yes, because warewolves and vampires go together like...warewolves and vampires, honestly why not.

So we’ve got all this going down with Celine smack dab in the middle. Now there’s a serial killer on the loose and they seem to be fascinated with Celine in particular...

So! The Beautiful. It’s a return to the YA vampire genre, so...yay? I dunno, vampires just aren’t my thing. Twilight was huge when I was in high school and college and I tried reading it, but...euch. No. Honestly, outside of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the O.G. Dracula, and What We Do in the Shadows, vampire stories just don’t do anything for me. I never bought into the idea of exchanging a mortal life with sunshine and never committing murder for one in which you can never go out during the day and have to murder people for food. Plus, immortality sounds like it really sucks. Who wants to outlive their whole family? Their friends? Literally everybody you’ve ever known? Immortality means having to watch all of your pets die, over and over again, forever. Yeah, no thanks. Not to mention the fact that, after a few decades without aging, people will start to notice. “Hey, it’s been thirty years, why do you still look like you’re 18 do you have a disease or something?” 

Yeah, I’d rather have my limited time and then be reincarnated. I like that idea way better than being ageless and alive forever and ever. Didn’t any of you read Tuck Everlasting? Winnie made the right choice, you guys.

So while the setting and the writing for The Beautiful are fantastic, as soon as the story brought vampires in, my brain just switched into “eeeehhh” mode. I also have a hard time with romances where the two love interests go from “hey person I just met” to “I love you and will die for you” very quickly. Again, not really my thing. Most of the problems I had with this book just stemmed from my own biases. YA Vampire romances just aren’t my thing. What We Do in the Shadows (movie and TV series!) is more my thing. 

HOWEVER.

Just because something is not my thing, doesn’t mean it’s not your thing. If YA paranormal romances featuring vampires and warewolves running around late 19th century New Orleans sounds like your jam, then in all likelihood, you will really love The Beautiful and I recommend you go and get it when it comes out. Remember: I’m just an idiot with a tumblr account, just because I’m meh on a certain book doesn’t mean it won’t be your new favorite thing ever. I’ll admit, if Renée Ahdieh wrote a New Orleans travel guide, I’d read it in a heartbeat because holy shit she knows how to transport you to a time and place. 

Have at it, YA Paranormal Vampire Romance fans. I’ll be over here, watching What We do in the Shadows. 

RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone fond of YA Paranormal Vampire Romances (see above), fans of historical fiction, anyone looking for something cool set in New Orleans

NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Anybody not fond of YA Paranormal Vampire Romances.

RELEASE DATE: October 8, 2019

RATING: 3/5

VAMPIRE RATING:

[pudgy-puk]

so um. random question, but do you have a hot take on what is even up at the garlean leadership considering the 4. 0 stinger and that the 4. 2 trailer has asahi trying to offer an alliance with the empire? if you don't mind sharing, that is?

i DO have a hot take! i don’t feel i can go into as much detail as i’d like because my Hot Take re: the emperors of garlemald relies on other things i had been meaning to make a post about but haven’t yet because i am the world’s greatest procrastinator. but anyhow, the short version is: shit’s fucked. not irrecoverably so, and frankly not as much as eorzeans would LIKE, but shit is fucked.

now part of my belief re: this is that if there’s one thing i know, it’s that dynastic empires are REALLY FUCKING HARD. i have frankly lost count of the number of times i’ve read the “highly capable and effective man builds/conquers/acquires a huge swathe of territory, rules over and administers it well, dies, leaves it to his useless children/grandchildren, said useless offspring cock it all up, possibly losing most of the territory in the process, and inside of 30ish years after the original founder died, his descendants are being exiled or jailed or killed while another ambitious, capable person takes over” story. honestly it’s the most common way this shit goes. now, it’s certainly not the ONLY way this shit goes--sometimes this or variations thereof work--but it sometimes makes it hard for me to make the analytical leap over from realworld to fictionland, where those thousand-year empires on which the sun never sets are the rule, not the exception. 

now, that being said, solus was the founder of his dynasty and the architect of garlemald as an empire, not just a regional power--and after he died, there was an (offscreen, but) apparently very vicious succession war, which the ultimate victor, solus’s grandson varis, won via killing most of his family. and now varis is embattled, with two large occupied territories (ala mhigo, doma) lost and more vassalage-esque relationships (e.g. red kojin, hingashi) broken or weakened, the biggest obstacle to the empire (eorzean city-states) are stronger than they’ve ever been, esp with the addition of ishgard*, he’s discovered that a region/people he had dismissed as beneath his attention does actually pose a threat (the xaela of the steppe)**, AND he’s minus one crown prince (zenos)*** to boot. this is a bad situation. but it is not unsalvageable for him.

(* i honestly think ishgard entering the field of conflict is something garlemald absolutely wanted to avoid. the ishgardian state was intensely militaristic, had a large army, was regularly improving their martial capacity, and was accustomed to fending off threats airborne and armored on the land and all capable of shooting fire and lighting. as long as they were tied up with dravania, with fighting the broods of midgardsormr’s brood, that was GOOD for garlemald. and now that the war is not only over but they’re agreeing to ally with the other city-states and also pals with hraesvelgr’s brood--hraesvelgr being the child of midgardsormr--as far as garlemald is concerned, that should be considered a worst-case scenario).

(** i never had the occasion to talk about this on the blog, but i am very pleased that stormblood seemed to validate the answer i considered most likely to the question circulating among me and friends/acquaintances after the xaela were revealed in the leadup to HW: the question being “if they’re all from the steppe in othard, which is all up in garlean shit, then... why isn’t there any mention of the empire fucking with them in their lore bits?” and my considered guess being “because the empire’s probable reaction to fifty-plus weirdo tribes constantly warring with each other over a grassland is likely along the lines of ‘these stupid, base savages are uncivilizable, and their territory is a scanty grassland only useful for feeding their nags. punish their incursions and lightly reward their favors, otherwise they don’t deserve our attention’.”)

(*** i’d just like to uh. to observe the fact that a violent monster like zenos was never removed via institutional means from the line of succession does not exactly fill me with confidence regarding the power, wisdom, and discernment of the governing laws and institutions of the administration of garlemald. not at all).

now, the reasons why this is not unsalvageable for varis! first off, while losing a prince is still generally Bad, tbh there’s a good chance that this means the remaining princes are The Sane One(s) and thus zenos’s death is a net positive in terms of preserving the dynasty. second, while i did list off a lot of bad things that happened for garlemald, there were good things too, particularly concerning R&D and tech advancement. thirdly, garlemald has put down rebellions and insurrections before, and winning back lost territory, re-intimidating marginal powers, and weakening their enemies is still perfectly doable, which is what i think the “we want to negotiate an alliance!” bit is about, especially using eikons/primals as the wedge.

i am absolutely certain that this is not an honest effort by the emperor to learn to live with the people of eorzea and doma. this is an attempt to get some time and space to rebuild, recuperate, and re-evaluate the strategies. eikons/primals are the wedge, because this is the one issue where there is overlap between the goals of the protagonists (primals hanging out in our mortal plane of existence is Very Bad for said plane of existence) and the goals of the empire (godless subjugation of the globe to technocratic order and perfection). if the tip of the wedge can find a good landing spot, it can be used to divide the diverse peoples of the far east and gyr abania alike: a reasonable concern regarding sri lakshmi can be turned into suspicion and resentment of ananta in general, despite all the help the vira gave to the resistance, and a perfectly rational fear of susano can be used to manipulate opinion against the kojin in general, even though they were instrumental to the salvation of doma. indeed, as i understand it this was part of garlean campaigning against eorzea in 1.0, fomenting suspicion of people like the amaljaa that then turned into strife. so i see the “negotiating an alliance” as “buying time to regroup by getting our enemies to be quiet for a while, and if we’re lucky divide and destabilize them.” 

remember: as i hinted at in the bit on ishgard, in the situation i’m describing varis’s win condition is not limited, in the short term, to “total and utter subjugation and turning enemies to his unwavering allies.” he just needs their passivity. to use the steppe xaela as an example: varis doesn’t need to conquer the whole steppe and break the spirit of every tribe there, nor does he need to turn magnai and sadu and cirina and all the rest into his fearless soldiers. all he needs to do to win in the short term is to prevent them from honoring their pledge to hien for long enough for the empire to deal with hien. and there are many ways he could accomplish that. the emperor of garlemald cannot stand against the world united against him. if he’s smart, he won’t try to. instead, he’ll try to stop the union, via prevention or breaking it up as it forms. and the attempt at offering alliance suggests that he may, in fact, be smart.

but, of course, if he’s too transparent about his attempts to divide and conquer when he’s currently dealing with opponents who--absolutely crucially--have first-hand experience in how rebellions fail as well as how they succeed. he’s making plans, but against veteran opponents who know what they’re doing. 

and that, roughly speaking, is why i think “shit is fucked” re: garlean leadership. the position is bad, but can be recovered from, but also they’re starting to run low on things that can be sacrificed or losses endured in the process of recovery.

i said this was going to be short, and i lied

[shirlleycoyle]

Experts Want to Give Control of America’s Nuclear Missiles to AI

When it comes to nuclear weapons and the Cold War, everything old is new again. Old treaties against the creation of long range nuclear weapons are dead and Russia is working on new nukes it promises can strike the United States in record time. Two experts have an idea how to counter the new Russian threat—turn over control of America’s nuclear weapons to artificial intelligence. It’s a terrible idea.

In an article for the military blog War on the Rocks, nuclear policy wonks turned college professors Adam Lowther and Curtis McGiffin, proposed making it easier for the President to launch nukes and advocating for an American, artificially intelligent “Dead Hand.” “Dead Hand” is a Russian fail-deadly (like a fail-safe, but everyone dies), first deployed during the Cold War that ensures Russia’s nukes fly if the country is attacked, even if no one exists to launch them Nuclear deterrence hinges on the theory that no country is willing to launch a nuke because it knows that rival countries will retaliate in kind. That’s the idea behind Mutual Assured Destruction.

“Some ideas cross into bad science fictionland”

Lowther and McGiffin suggest that, thanks to Russia’s new nuclear weapons, the credible fear that America could retaliate with a nuclear strike is disappearing. The solution is to give control of nuclear weapons to AI. “Time compression has placed America’s senior leadership in a situation where the existing [command and control] system may not act rapidly enough,” they wrote. “Thus, it may be necessary to develop a system based on artificial intelligence, with predetermined response decisions, that detects, decides, and directs strategic forces with such speed that the attack-time compression challenge does not place the United States in an impossible position.”

A 2018 report from the RAND Corporation suggested that AI might, in fact, make the world less safe from nuclear war. The report asked several experts to weigh in on how AI might change nuclear deterrence and the results were inconclusive. Some of RAND’s experts believed AI would make the world safer, and others believed it would radically destabilize the current balance of nuclear power. “AI needs only to be perceived as highly effective to be destabilizing—for example, in the tracking and targeting of adversary launchers. Threatened with potential loss of its second-strike capability, an adversary would be pressured into a preemptive first strike or into expanding its arsenal, both undesirable outcomes,” the report said.

The War on the Rocks blog has spread widely among people nuclear weapons experts, some of whom think it’s a dangerous idea. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists covered the idea late last week.

“Its, uh, quite the article,” Peter W. Singer, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, said of the War on the Rocks blog in an email. Singer admitted Lowther and McGiffin proposed some good ideas, such as increasing investment in reconnaissance. “Then some ideas cross into bad science fictionland.”

Singer says the use of artificial intelligence in America’s nuclear command and control systems set off alarm bells, but it wasn’t the worst thing the pair suggested. “For me the stand out was proposing a change in ‘first-strike policy that allowed the president to launch a nuclear attack based on strategic warning,’” Singer said. “We have a President who just anger-tweeted Grace from Will & Grace and pondered nuking hurricanes and you’re proposing that we should LOWER the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons? Read the room.”

The post-Cold War detente and slow draw down of the world’s nuclear arsenal is over. Russia is working on new nuclear weapons it claims will give it an edge in a nuclear war. But none of those weapons have been deployed.

The history of nuclear weapons is a history of paranoia, accidents, and human intervention preventing a global disaster. Before the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, the United States kept a fleet of nuclear bombers flying in the skies across the world 24 hours a day. The strategy resulted in several crashes and lost nuclear bombs, including the contamination of Greenland in 1968.

In Britain, which has nuclear weapon-equipped submarines, Submarine captains rely on a letter of last resort to instruct them in the event of a nuclear war that destroys London. Every new Prime Minister must personally write a letter instructing the captain of how to proceed should the United Kingdom be destroyed by nuclear fire and the submarine left at sea. Every PM has to decide—if I’m dead, should the nukes fly or not?

Artificial intelligence won’t solve these problems, and it might make them worse. In 1983, Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov prevented a nuclear war. He was monitoring the USSR’s radar and noted saw what appeared to be American missiles headed for his country. Instead of readying the USSR for war, he waited, assuming it to be a technical glitch. He was right, and he prevented a disaster.

There’s no way to know what happens if we cede control of these systems to an artificial intelligence, but we do know the likelihood of a person like Petrov stepping in to stop the madness plummets.

Experts Want to Give Control of America’s Nuclear Missiles to AI syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[deuterosapiens]

You know that point where you become so obsessed with a piece of media where you spend more time researching it, delving into its history, its lore, its intricacies, that you never end up actually finishing it?