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santaclausdeadindian · 4 years ago

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Sorry for doing it this way, I think OP deleted their post or blocked me like a mature, balanced person would, so I have to tag you in

@mr-laugh

Oh boy, lot to unpack here.

So you didn’t even know there were that many subgenres of fantasy, one of the most popular classifications of fiction on the planet... And you think you know enough to tell ANYBODY what classic fantasy is?

And where exactly I attempted to do that, huh?

If you don’t even know the most common subgenres of this vast pool of fiction, why are you jumping into this discussion? You just admitted you don’t know anything!

There is no discussion, there is a stupid ass post. Don't flatter yourself, you don't know jack shit.

Me not knowing what exactly are the precize subgenres of a genre of literature, which, btw, are completely arbitrary and for your information, sword&magic is a legitimate category, has absolutely nothing to do with what that post you were so keen on agreeing with above. It was you who said pretty much any classic fantasy is like that: some poorly written, self-indulgent and borderline racist.

Did ya read the link, buddy? Howard talked about knowing what burning black man smelled like. He was quite approving of these things! And the books are pretty racist, it’s not hard to see, unless you ain’t looking.

Yes, I started reading and by the end of the first paragraph I was convinced he was ahorribly racist man. And? Still doesn't change the fact, that for my 12 year old self, there was nothing racist about it. I definetly wasn't looking for it, that much you got right. If I'd read it again, I'm sure I'd catch on to it now, that I know what kind of asshole he was. So the implied racism would be there. You got a point for that.

Rugged individualism? It always amuses me how that argument always pops out of the mouths of guys who are aping what they’ve heard their buddies say. If ten thousand mouths shout “rugged individualism”, how individualistic are they?

Then you should amuse yourself by looking up why this thing crops up as of late. It's coming from certain, supremely racist yet unaware of it publications that claim ridiculous shit like "rugged individualism" is a hallmark of white supremacy, among other, equally laughable things, like punctuality. It's a joke.

Again, I will give Howard to you, if someone that racist writes a black man saving the hero of the story, I bet there was something else still there to make it wrong.

Conan’s not some avatar of rugged individualism.

Uhm, yeah, he pretty much all that.

He’s as unreal and unrealistic as the dragons are,

It's called fantasy for a reason, buddy.

but more dangerous because White Men model their ideas of reality on Big Man Heroes like him;

Glad you are totally not racist, yo!!! It's such a relief that White Men are the only ones with this terrible behavior of looking up to larger than life, mythic superpeople and nobody else. Imagine what it would be like, if we would have some asshole from say, hindu indian literature massacering demons called Rakshassas, by the tens of thousands, or some bullshit japanese warlord would snatch out arrows from the air, or a chienese bodyguard would mow down hundreds of barbaric huns without dropping a sweat, or some middle eastern hero would fight literal gods and their magical beasts in some quest for eternal life.

it's a poison that weakens us, distracting us from actually trying to solve the world’s issues, or banding together to deal with shit.

This is what you just said. It's up to the white man, to get their shit together, be not racist and solve the world's problems, because those poor other people's just can't do it. If we would just not be oh, so racist, then China would surely stop with the genocides they are doing now, or blowing more than half the greenhouse emissions into the athmosphere, the muslims would stop throwing their gays from rooftops or ramming trucks into crowds and would just start treating women as equals, India's massive rape problem would be gone, subsaharan African would be magically bereft of the host of atrocities committed there on a daily, yeah, you sure have that nonracism down, buddy!

A rugged individualist would be smart enough to realize that even the most individualistic person needs others; no man’s an island, and a loner is easier to kill.

Individualism doesn't mean at all what you think it means, it's a cluster of widely differeing philosophies that puts the individual ahead of the group or state, it's ranging from anarchism to liberalism and is also has nothing to do with my point.

Central Europe? What, Germany? Because let me tell you, historically they are SUPER concerned about race!

Germany traditionally considered western european, central europe would be the people stuck between them and the russians, to put it very loosely. We are equally nonplussed by the self-flagellating white guilt complex and the woe me victim complex of the west. We did none of the shit those meanie white people did to the nonwhites and suffered everyting any poc ever did and then some. We don't give a shit about your color, we care about what culture you are from and if you respect our values.

I’m an American from a former Confederate state; trust me, race is everything. It always is.

No it really isn't. How old are you? Asking without condescension, genuinly curious, because if you are in your low twenties at most, it's understandable why you think like this.

See that hike? Do you know what happened at that time that made virtually all american media suddenly go all in with racism?

Occupy Wall Street, that's what. It's a brilliant way to sow victimhood and hate and desperation amongst the people who have one common enemy, the powers that be, the banking sector, the politicians, the megacorporations.

Can't really blame you if you are in your early 20's at most, you grew up with this bullshit hammered into you. If you are older, step out of your echochamber please!

If you actually believe, that mankind doesn't progress naturally towards a more accepting society purely on the merit of there being more good people than bad and sharing a similar living with all the hardships in life, seeing that our prejudices inherited by our parents are baseless, that's how we progress, not virtue signalling courses and regressive policies. I was raised as any other kid, I had a deep resentment towards the neighbouring nations, I said vile, racist shit against people who I actually share a lot of genes with, of which fact I was in deep denial about, and then as I gradually got exposed more and more actual people of these groups, I started to realize I was wrong and everybody should be judged by their individual merits. It works throughout the generations, my grandma was thought songs about Hitler and how all jews are evil in school, she legit thought all black people at least in Africa are cannibals and shit, my mother stillsays shit that would get her cancelled in the USA, and I will probably have a mixed race kid as we stand now.

This whole racism is an eternal problem is laughable and disingenuous and I am actually sorry for you that you feel like that.

Moving on. As for Dany, the “noble white girl sold to scary dark foreign man” is a very popular trope, especially in exploitation films, which Martin draws on much more heavily than most authors do.

No, he fucking doesn't. I already wrote a bunch of examples from the books you seeminly ignore willfully. First of all, she is sold to those olive skinned savages by a white man, who is a terrible, increadibly evil man. He want's to fuck the then 11-12 ish Dany so bad, she picks his slave most resembling her and rapes her repeatedly, "until the madness pass." He also maimes children and traines them as disposable slave spies by the hundreds. There is no boundaries colour here, GRRM prtrays all kinds of people as reprehensible, evil and disgusting. Just like you can find plenty of examples to the opposite.

What is he drawing from your exploitation movies exactly? He writes about the human anture, he writes about the human heart at war with itself, that's his central philosophy of writing.

ASOFAI is basically just a porn movie with complicated feudal politics obscuring it, which is probably why it worked so well as an HBO series (up until the last two seasons or so.)

There is no gratuitous sex scene in the books, the rapes are described as rapes, they are horrible, they are very shortly described and usually just alluded to.

The people commiting them are not put into generous lights and one of the single most harrowing stories hidden behind the grand happenings of the plot is a girl named Jeyne Poole, whose suffering although never shown, is very much pointed out, along with the hypocrisy of the people who only fight to try and save her, because they think her a different person.

Honestly, if you actually read the books and they came of to you as porn, you might want to do some soulsearching.Btw, the HBO series was a terrible adaptation, it immedietly started to go further and further from the books with every passing season and the showmakers made it very clear to everybody, that they didn't understand the very much pacifist and humanist themes of Martin. And neither did you.

We also get no indication Essos will eat it when Winter comes; hell, they seem to not know Winter exists, given the way people act, even though that is also unrealistic and weird. Essos was just super badly designed, and Dany is a terribly boring character.

to be continued

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petescholtes-blog-blog · 5 years ago

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You send me: Why Minneapolis elected Ilhan Omar for this moment

(Mural by Mohammed "Aerosol" Ali in Birmingham, England, July 2019, painted in "solidarity" with her; photographed by the artist for BBC News.)

Why is my freshman congresswoman being "primaried" in the August 11 election, by a political newcomer who raised six times as much money between April and June, including half a million dollars from big donors favoring conservative policies toward Israel?

You probably already answered that question as near to your satisfaction as you can, if you live in the Fifth District of Minnesota and can vote, or mailed your ballot in anticipation of alleged presidentially-induced delays at the post office.

But if the suspicions raised by this race about either leading candidate remain, like piles of un-recycled mailers, I have a theory as to why: A politics based on the presumption of guilt came to town. It lost, or won, but affected us either way. Because suspicion poisons everything. Without the ability to really test the null hypothesis — the default truth that what you see is a coincidence — belief can be a light out of the darkness, a north star into a black hole, or the sparkle in the eye of a face at the bottom of a well.

So let's talk about what we know. As Rachel Cohen reports in Jewish Currents, the contest here for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor nomination for Congress doesn't seem to be about actual policy differences between the candidates regarding Israel or the Palestinians. Omar and her lead challenger, Antone Melton-Meaux, have the same position on the Boycott Divest Sanctions (BDS) movement, for example, which is really more of a BD movement at this point. Both candidates defend the right to boycott, as Omar did last year with a resolution co-sponsored by John Lewis, a right most federal courts have also upheld, overturning recent anti-BDS laws in three states (though not Minnesota, where Omar argued against the law that passed). Both candidates also oppose BDS strategies, reasoning that they're counterproductive to encouraging negotiations toward a two-state solution. To the same end, they join most Americans in opposing Israel's plan to annex much of the West Bank, though Omar would condition aid against it, and Melton-Meaux would not.

Beyond that consensus, Omar has expressed approval of BDS itself, via a single text message from a campaign aid to the website Muslim Girl in 2018, stating that Omar "supports" the "movement." That message, along with her refusal (on expressly articulated principle) to join the House in condemning BDS, gave reporters license to call her and Lewis's resolution "pro-BDS," and Omar the "face of the movement." On the same narrow basis, Melton-Meaux claimed in April that the congresswoman "supports sanctions on Israel."

People are what they do, and I'm not here to attack Melton-Meaux, who seems to have done good things before writing that astoundingly disingenuous op-ed. But his campaign is about Omar, not him, or rather about someone who isn't really Omar at all, which is the problem. Omar never called for sanctions against Israel or any other country. To the contrary, she has consistently and vocally opposed sanctions, sometimes to a political fault: Her "present" vote on the Armenian genocide was a stand against sanctions on Turkey. Her argument in every case is that sanctions harm people, not governments — which appears to be right, to take the example of Iran. Even her bill to sanction Brunei, for stoning people to death for being LGBTQ, targets the travel and assets of officials, not civilians.

Whatever you think of that position, it's integral with Omar's opposition to arbitrary force or punitive retribution of any kind. She's called for an end to the "cycle of violence" everywhere, whether from undeclared war, terrorism, riots, repression, or criminal justice that metes out more harm, as she sees it. Nine months after being smeared as a coddler of terrorists for writing a judge to ask for leniency in the sentencing of a young man who had not yet taken up arms with Isis, Omar did the same for the middle-aged man convicted of threatening her life. In both cases she asked for a "restorative" approach that would help the person repair himself, not just the community.

With similar trueness, after she and Lewis introduced their "right to participate in boycotts" resolution, Omar spoke of "support" only for "efforts to end the [Israeli] occupation and achieve [a] two-state solution," and argued against condemning BDS on the grounds that "if we are going to condemn violent means of resisting the occupation, we cannot also condemn nonviolent means."

A Somali-born refugee and the first Muslim to wear an hijab in Congress, Omar may recognize better than most how essentialist judgments can thwart a person's autonomy. That she became the media "face" of BDS, while her identically-voting white colleagues of Christian or Jewish heritage did not, is one of many such ironies not lost on her, I imagine. But acting as if some double standards are too contemptible to dignify with an answer, or even an acknowledgment, seems to be part of her armor against them.

(Hugging John Lewis in 2018, in an uncredited photograph posted by the congresswoman this year on his 80th birthday.)

Of all the falsehoods sent sailing like stones at Omar, none bothers me more than the idea that the personal attacks against her didn't happen — that a massive, dangerous smear campaign was just "Twitter fights" with the president, or criticism of her "record." The torrent of Omar fictions began in August of 2018, a week after her primary win, and by July 2019 reached a crescendo of six fake stories per month debunked by Snopes. In the first month of her term, she was accused of defending Isis, based on that letter to a judge, a claim pandering to "sharia" conspiracists like her would-be assassin. In February came unfounded and increasingly dishonest charges of antisemitism, based on Omar's seemingly unwitting use of two antisemitic tropes (hypnotism and money), for which she apologized unequivocally, followed by a third one (dual loyalty), for which she did not, by that point apparently not wishing to enable those seizing on her words to keep changing the subject from what she'd been talking about: the Palestinians, and how any discussion of their treatment is policed out of existence. This time, the charges against her pandered to Christian evangelicals, with the apparent hopeful side-goal of alienating some Jewish voters from her or her party's base. But the criticism of her words was roundly picked up by Democrats, whom Omar joined in the House to vote for a resolution condemning antisemitic language. Only Republicans voted against it.

Then came the video in April shared by the president of the United States, a montage of Omar and 9/11 that aimed far beyond the earlier audiences, this time to falsely link the congresswoman with the worst attack on U.S. soil in history. If the videographer thought Democrats wouldn't defend her, they were wrong. But death threats against Omar increased. April also brought a disinformation campaign about Omar and U.S. and Somali casualties in the Battle of Mogadishu, this time aimed at veterans, whose benefits the congresswoman has consistently voted to keep and expand.

In July came the apotheosis: the president's serial fabrications about Omar on camera and at rallies. He riffed on much of the above, but added the lie that she had expressed "love" for al-Qaeda, that she said al-Qaeda made her "proud," an appalling implicit incitement to violence that Republican leaders mostly played along with. It was, I wrote at the time, "the break with reality that a more fundamental break with humanity requires," in a month of detention center atrocity stories in the news, and with growing numbers of young Jewish activists arrested in front of ICE offices across the country chanting "Never again is now," including here. Trumpists were plugging their ears and going "na-na-na-na-na-na-na" to all this. Which was scary, because a reality war could go anywhere — and that's exactly what it did. The president’s tweet of a video with a September 13 timestamp claiming to show Omar celebrating 9/11 was the same basic impulse that would kill 150,000 Americans in a viral pandemic due to denial, inaction, and corruption.

The warning of a year ago also came after the Poway synagogue shooting in April, which brought home, as Omar and Illinois Representative Jan Schakowsky were early to note, how much antisemitism and Islamophobia had merged on the extremist right. Muslims and Jews had already been grappling with their entangled oppressions for years, partnering on issues like gun violence, as a local group of women did here starting in 2016. Particularly in the wake of the El Paso shooting, the ongoing lying about Omar's immigrant community had a uniting effect outside the president's cult.

(Volunteers sweeping and painting names at the George Floyd memorial in Minneapolis, June 12, 2020; photographed by me with the subjects' permission.)

None of those lies will wash here, where the George Floyd street memorial is a garden of flowers and art six miles north from the Bloomington mosque that was bombed three years ago, in the neighboring Congressional Third District. Contrary to Islamophobic fantasy, the Fifth is 63% white, with an active Jewish left and center, of which many are also on record in support of Omar, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Given the math of her 2018 landslide, Omar could have won her seat without a single Somali American vote. Her current campaign's internal polling shows an approval rating of 74%.

To supporters I know across demographic categories, Omar is someone there for everyone — and a threat exactly because she challenges leaders who aren't. Like the largest protest movement in American history, which began in her district on May 25 — she puts the moral dilemma of American exclusion, of all exclusion, at the center of politics. Her "radical love" is the inverse of John Lewis's "good trouble," because left humanists have a parent's love of country, not a child's. They hold the world to something better. A month ago, Omar called on reporters to ask state and U.S. senators who were blocking meaningful police reform these questions: "How come you are not listening to the cries of the mothers and the fathers in our communities? How come you are not listening to the people who are telling you that we don't feel like our lives matter equally in this country?'"

I have never seen a U.S. representative host so many town hall meetings on issues important to her poorest and least powerful constituents — two events per month, from one spring to the next. At one, on Black mental health, I watched an audience member literally seek help for herself and her family from the experts onstage. Observing such events, New Hope city councilman Cedrick Frazier wrote that at every meeting with Omar he saw, she "stayed long after the event ended to talk with and answer questions from the people in attendance."

She has also consistently shown up at important protests, not necessarily to speak, but just to be there, as when she went unrecognized in her mask and headscarf at the first, overwhelmingly nonviolent George Floyd protests. She meets regularly with important local activist groups, like MN350 and MIRAC, whose memberships spiked last summer. That increase, beyond our physical proximity to Floyd's life and death, suggests why the movement and unrest happened here as it did. Fifth District residents who took to the streets in response to his killing — (again) overwhelmingly with nonviolence, often numbering in the tens of thousands, and protesting every weekend day for six weeks after the last fires from three nights of riots were out — built on already record-high levels of left activism and organization before the pandemic: for immigrant rights, the climate, and Black lives. It was protesters — medics but also ordinary participants — who used their bodies to shield and rescue all but two souls in the uprising.

This outcome reflected a culture as well as an infrastructure, and it touches everyone. Omar's teenage daughter, Isra Hirsi, helped lead the U.S. chapter and St. Paul march of the global Youth Climate Strike on September 20 — one of the largest international protests before the Floyd marches. Young MN350 volunteers poured into presidential primary campaigns, especially for Omar's friend Bernie Sanders, whose local appeal to voters was headquartered out of her own campaign office. MIRAC's Mari Mansfield painted the long list of names on the street at the George Floyd memorial on 38th and Chicago, of unarmed people of color killed by police. "It's all civil disobedience now," she said, when I lamented missing a MIRAC training on it before the pandemic. The Black Lives Matter protests in every corner of Minnesota will have similar ripple effects going forward.

Omar herself turned her office into a food distribution center after the unrest, and raised hundred of thousands of dollars for local organizations seeking to transform policing. “I saw Ilhan in the streets nearly every single day," wrote Minneapolis city council vice president Andrea Jenkins. “Unbeknown to most of us at the time, Ilhan’s father was in the hospital with COVID-19.” Nur Omar Mohamed’s death was announced on June 16.

(”Close the camps” protesters blocking traffic outside the ICE office at Fort Snelling on July 30, 2019; Youth climate strikers in St. Paul, September 20, 2019; both photographed by me.)

My point is not that Omar is a leader for this moment, but that this moment already elected her two years ago. The congresswoman speaks to both left and humanist values because both of those things are resurgent in mirror opposition to Trump. Like so many of her constituents, but also American leftists more generally, she draws no distinction between appealing to the best in everyone and defending like a sister those left out of that "everyone." "We need to jettison the zero-sum idea that one person's gain is another's loss," she wrote in the Washington Post earlier last month. "I want your gain to be my gain; your loss to be mine, too."

At her police reform press conference, with the Minnesota Legislature's People of Color and Indigenous Caucus, Omar set off another extremist conservative firestorm when she announced that, "We are not merely fighting to tear down the systems of oppression in the criminal justice system. We are fighting to tear down systems of oppression that exist in housing, in education, in healthcare, in employment, in the air we breathe." But that statement is threatening only if you believe, as some Americans apparently do, that "systems of oppression" benefit you.

In her first 19 months in the 116th U.S. Congress, Omar introduced 39 bills, four of which have passed, all amendments. She also succeeded in getting her MEALS Act — providing kids school lunches regardless of whether schools are open in the pandemic — included as part of the CARES Act. You can read the other 34 bills and judge for yourself if there's a wasted effort among them. (She's made a case for each, which is for you to weigh.) But there's something self-fulfilling about claiming a lawmaker doesn't get anything done when you're blocking or ignoring their legislation. Much as the burden of proof is always on the accuser — because you can't prove a negative — I'll leave it to Omar's opponents to make the argument that any of these laws would be bad for the United States: that, no, we should not eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, keep corporations convicted of fraud out of politics, cancel student debt, award grants to zero-waste projects, stop stigmatizing kids unable to pay for school meals, make school lunches free, cut off military aid to human rights abusers, or join the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Similarly, in a pandemic, I'll let them explain why we should not aid small businesses, cancel rent and mortgages, cancel school lunch debt, or move food stamps fully online.

Omar co-sponsored 601 other pieces of legislation, 72 of which passed the House, nine the Senate, and seven into law by the grace of the president's signature. Those dramatically dwindling numbers suggest a political problem that is not Ilhan Omar. She has addressed that problem, whether you agree or disagree with her, by endorsing progressive candidates nationwide, including here in her own district, where she campaigned for Richfield mayor Maria Regan Gonzalez and Crystal city councilperson Brendan Banks. She's also built her Democratic coalition. After the censure from Democrats and the president's attacks on her last year, she made a public show of unity with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has now endorsed her.

Omar is not the Mother of Dragons some imagine. She's just been through the worst fires of war and politics, and has come out the other side a congresswoman from Minneapolis. Most likely, that's what she'll remain next term.

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thenamelesskitty-blog · 7 years ago

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My Starplace

I have strange dreams. I mean, that’s probably true of most people, considering what our minds try to reconcile for the sake of sanity, but I dream of a strange place. It’s always the same place. It’s become familiar. Now that I consider it, I think the unplanned, undesired move to the UK would have been even harder had I not had I not been able to visit my Starplace at night.

My first memory in that place is of the sky. I don’t know how I came to be there and, with a dreamer’s unaccountable apathy, it didn’t feel like it mattered. Only the stars were important. There were so many! More than I’d seen in any fantastical painting. More than I could imagine. There was no visible sun, but the sky was so bright as to bathe the world in twilight. The Milky Way is too brilliant to examine long.

It was twilight when I first arrived, which wouldn’t change for a great many visits. I remember being shocked, fascinated, and a viscerally unsettled the first time night fell. Night—or something like it—occurs when almost all the stars fade away. In my early days, the phenomenon was strange and terrifying. I knew how the ancients must feel in the face of a solar eclipse. I would learn much later that the master of this place could shift the sky as though conducting the Harmony of the Spheres. Usually, he included all the stars that had ever been and would ever be visible from this point in space, timeless here despite their finite lives.

Other times, the master wished to observe a certain point in astronomical history, or several moments intersecting one another. It was stunning how many stars there weren’t when he did this. So many have died, or will die, our will be born and then die

Despite my unusual comfort with death, the brevity of stars was difficult to reconcile.

It took quite a few visits before I thought to do anything other than sit on my clifftop and watch the sky. It was more like a spire then a cliff, I suppose: most of the great formations in my Starplace are sheer and isolated, like narrower versions of certain Chinese mountains. The place I always appeared was comfortable and sandy. There were no plants, but I far from alone.

I couldn’t possibly fail to notice, when my eyes lowered from the strange heavens to give world-watching a try, that my rocky spire—and all those like it; they stood like fire-stripped trees above the landscape—was inhabited by hundreds of birds. I had yet to see birds rest in the trees far below. They only settled down on stone. (Their feet were shaped differently than those of Earth-birds to accommodate, and, and were very powerful.)

They were mostly similar to earthly species, with some variation. Many had sharp ridges on their legs, wings, or both. Others had thickly armored backs dressed in something akin to scales. Some had prominent teeth in their beaks. Others had only a few strategic flight feathers, relying on tremendous flaps of skin to do the heavy lifting. The creatures ranged from agile raptors to barely-airworthy hulks.

All in all, it felt like a showcase of dinosaurs that didn’t make the cut.

And then, there was Speedy.

He didn’t have that name yet and wouldn’t for awhile, but a certain little owl—some of the birds were similar to earthly species, enough for me to call them by name—seemed particularly curious about me.

I took to killing little lizards for him. He started bringing me flowers. We were friends. I wasn’t under the impression that this was normal, but, again, the complacent acceptance of a dreamer made it innocently wonderful to have a bird-friend. Especially when my friend was the king bird.

The birds on my spire—and around the other I could see, as well as those daring to coast above the treetops far below—fell into two basic categories: they were either highly aggressive hunters, or small and traveling in tight flocks, which utilized aggressive tactics like swarms of bees.

There was a significant amount of predation amongst them. Even the flocks looked to me to be hunting, though I couldn’t pinpoint their quarry. Larger creatures went for mouthfuls of flock birds, or swooped upon unwary raptors. None of them bothered my petite companion.

Despite his size–not much larger than my palm–my horned owl companion never had to watch his back.

He did, anyway…I don’t think anything escaped his notice. But, in all the time I spent with him, not one of the large and vaguely pterodactyl-looking predators tried its luck.

It certainly wasn’t ME staving them off. More than once, I found myself taking cover from a an avian hunter…else vapidly unaware, staring at the sky only to be startled back to unreality by the screeching of a furious Speedy driving off my would-be killer. I still dream of Speedy. He’s my little owl friend, and he acted as my guide and guardian when I finally decided to descend to the alien valley below.

I didn’t begin my descent down the stone spire at Speedy’s behest. I was, as ever, driven by own curiosity. I live for woodlands and forestry and the natural world, and there was some whole new version far below. How could I not explore it? How could I not experience it?

I called it a valley, before. That’s true, but the word conjures up an image that does an utter disservice to the place’s sheer scale. The spires dotting the landscape were petite compared to the sharp peaks forming a steep wall to my arbitrary “west.”

Cliché as the simile may be, the mountains looked like teeth. At least, they would have, had there been any breaks between them. I only ever spotted one pass. (Something in my DNA rebelled, shrieking, at the thought of approaching that shadowed place.) The mountain range curved into the distance until it was swallowed up by distance and haze. On very clear visits and at my starting elevation, I could see the distant silhouettes of the tremendous mountains on either side beginning to curve inward like a bowl.

I always lost sight of them, at a point. The other side was just too far away, and I no visual confirmation that it was as solid a wall as the rest. Understanding this place to be a fully enclosed valley—protected, self-contained, and self supporting: a preserve of sorts—was an insight offered freely to my dreaming mind.

Anyway, there came a point when I wanted to see more. In a way, I needed to. My Starplace had become an unreal part of my reality, and I needed to learn all about it. So, I dangled myself off the edge and then, one careful handhold and foothold at a time, I began to climb.

It was a long way down. 150, 160, 180 meters, maybe? It was a staggering height I would have lacked the muscular endurance to scale in the waking world. There, however, the rules were different.

The wind was variably hot and cold, depending on whether it spun clockwise or otherwise through the valley. The temperature was sometimes intense. Either extreme should have burned me. I found it invigorating. I felt invincible.

Some thirty meters along, I heard myself scream. Something like molten wires drizzled all around my wrist. I almost fell, losing my footing and hanging on by the other hand alone. The burning hand was trapped. After freezing or scalding in so many dreams, and narrowly avoiding the beaks of predators, this first shot of genuine pain hit with a jarring shock.

Can you feel pain, in a dream?

I looked down to the canopy of an alien forest. It was so far away. It looked like a pillow that could catch me. It wouldn’t of course. I could hear my flesh sizzling. I could almost smell it cooking, but something was off. I finally forced violently-wincing eyes from the fall back up. Dozens of long, unbelievably narrow white worms had wrapped around my hand and wrist after pouncing from the stone behind them. And they were still twisting.

Others were crawling up my forearm. Flesh discolored around each strand, radiating a changing spectrum of horrible hues that end in charred green-black.

I jerked against them once more even as my feet scraped and scrambled into new footholds. They were ungodly strong, and the pain was crippling. Some animalistic pain-sound leaked constantly from my throat.

I could picture how this would end. They’d draw me closer, revealing more and more of themselves as they cocooned me in their own burning bodies. I would be dissolved alive. This kind of thing happened to bugs. I didn’t want this end!

I dropped back hard to dangle over a drop a parachute could appreciate, buffeted by the wind and supported only by the acid-spewing ambushers boring through my wrist and burrowing into my skin. It hurt so badly. They burned. Truly, genuinely BURNED. My head swam. I couldn’t imagine why I wasn’t waking up. My free hand asked no such questions. It drew my hunting knife.

It took all of my self-control to grab the ledge spewing weird acidic death-worms. Nonetheless, I did. Something of my upper body needed to be holding on. I wasn’t a good enough rock climber to do otherwise. Not without falling to my death, anyway.

I went to work slashing and cutting. The worms were startlingly tough and sinuous. Their blood was milky white, swelling conservatively out of sliced ends without spurting or drama. Some of them retracted. Some of them held fast. I cut them, too.

I was free, but could see reinforcements slithering through the shadowed crevasse. I took the knife between my teeth and hurriedly resumed my downward climb. The muscles of my forearm bunched and straightened, grinding against the worms under my skin.

Even severed from their core, the burrowers were delving deeper and making their way upward, crawling steadily towards my elbow and interminably closer to my torso. That was concerning, not to mention the feeling of razor wire being dragged the long way through my muscles. I gasped and sputtered, blinking often to keep my eyes clear despite tears, snot, and intermittent cries accompanied my descent.

I couldn’t stop to deal with the thing inside me. The worms had given chase, belching out of their hole in the stone spire and stretching out for half a meter, then a meter, and they kept coming.

For just a moment, I paused, squinting up at them to understand.

The creatures branched off of one another. They moved strangely, pushing against solid surfaces and, in other places, twisted freely with no apparent means of locomotion. I caught my breath when I finally understood.

They weren’t worms. They were ROOTS.

Roots of what?

I have some idea now, but I wasn’t sufficiently interested in learning the answer then.

I climbed faster than ever. A plant wanted to grow through my tissues and eat me, and was already doing a fair job on my arm. I screeched with pain and fear when it approached my delicate elbow, burning ligaments and tendons. That arm started spasming uncontrollably.

That’s when Speedy came to the rescue.

The little owl swooped in, surveyed the situation, and then perched firmly on my besieged arm. His grip was too tight, almost bone-breaking, and his talons drew blood. I didn’t care.

My little friend grabbed at one of the protruding worms—roots—with his beak and began pulling. I yelped or screamed when he began pulling the white thing out by its base. I stopped and clung to the wall, still and trembling. This didn’t allow the network of little white roots to catch me. At about two meters long, they had begun retracting.

The little owl finally dragged one bloodstained root free. I gasped with relief to see he’d retrieved it all the way to the tip, then squeezed my eyes shut when he got to work on the second and third burrowers.

He got them all. About five meters down, I found a ledge big enough to sit on…after carefully scrutinizing every crevasse for danger. I scratched Speedy’s head and preened his feathers like I’d never preened them before. He seemed content at the exchange.

I woke up there, still petting speedy. The next time I fell asleep, I returned to same ledge when I began to dream. That was the first time I’d ever entered my Starplace anywhere but on the sandy top of this spire. (My owl friend, of course, was gone.) It wouldn’t always work that way, I’d learn: returning to wherever I’d left off. It usually did, though. I’ve developed some instinct for which will be the case, but have yet to discern the precise logic.

Anyway, there wasn’t much to do but admire the treetops from my new and closer vantage or resume my downward climb. This time, I did so with greater regard for my surroundings and my knife clenched in my teeth, (which is physically irritating after awhile.)

I passed some hand-sized lumps hanging from the rock face covered in the white roots that had attacked me, wound up as though by a gargantuan spider. They were flock birds, dead and digesting.

Then, one of them twitched a bit before tipping its head gradually aside and finally lying still again. I couldn’t stop staring at it, teeth bare and slack. It was alive. Holy shit, I could literally see roots weaving in and out of its flesh, and it was ALIVE.

One thin white line twisted around the top of its head, branching just above its eye socket. One curled around towards the inside. The other, I could see on the interior of its eye. It didn’t react to me in any way. Its breaths were fast and twitchy.

I took my knife in hand and glanced beneath me, mapping my route. Then, I took a breath, looking back at the tormented bird. One hard stab later, I must have severed half its internal organs…not to mention a whole lot of roots.

More roots came splaying blindly out of the hole from which this plant originated. Smaller streams leaked from nearby crevasses as well. Plants never seem angry, by our standards. This was pretty close, though.

I was already climbing. Fast. Really fast. The knife was clenched between my teeth again, though my lips instantly started to tingle against the bird’s strange-tasting blood. No time for that, now. Hand-over-hand, drop by drop, I fled.

Eventually, the roots reached their maximum length of about two and a half meters, where they splayed in every direction like a huge fan in search of their lost aggressor. I breathed a sigh of relief, kept climbing a bit longer for safety…

And then tore the knife from between my lips, cursing and spitting and trying to wipe them clean. They were burned. They felt BURNED. Gods, I hoped their blood wasn’t poison. That possibility hadn’t even occurred to me.

My lips were the worst, but my tongue and cheeks and the roof of my mouth burned as though I’d eaten something too hot, while my teen had that coarse, high-friction feeling of eating pineapple or a similarly acidic fruit.

So, yeah. Acid. Its blood was obviously acid.

Or basic.

Whatever. The pH wasn’t my friend, let’s leave it at that.

I wiped my knife clean on my jeans—I was a tanner, so let’s face it: acidic bird blood is definitely not the worst thing I’ve wiped on myself—sheathed it, and continued on my way.

All the while, I worked on shifting my mouth around awkwardly in the dry air, generally making an idiot of myself in an effort to produce extra spit to swish around in my mouth. Between that and analyzing each threatening crack I approached, I didn’t notice at first.

I took a step back.

Not down. BACK. Blinking at that strange phenomenon, I turned around slowly, only to find myself peering through the uppermost canopy of an amazing, not-quite-terrestrial, not-quite-alien forest.

Flocks of birds darted through, staging hit-and-run attacks on fruit-bearing trees that tried to grab them back. Vase-like flowers were everywhere—I suspected they functioned like carnivorous pitcher plants, though I wouldn’t’ confirm this until later—some bigger than me.

And then, there were animals. Animals that were something between horses and deer, which had a shearing, claw-like growth on all ankles and restrained, half-circular horns like saw blades. They were herbivores. That meant something different, here.

It was all so…wild. So unadulterated in its aggression, predator and prey and predator rolling through an eternal cycle more viciously pronounced than it was in earth’s more specialized creatures. It was brutal and I didn’t know how to feel.

But my eyes were wide, and I was smiling.

Speedy swooped down, then, to alight on my shoulder. I looked at him, grinning, and then couldn’t keep my eyes from turning back to the most savage forest I could imagine.

��It’s beautiful," I told him.

He cuddled against my neck.

I have lots of little stories from there. Something almost caught me. I almost caught something else. Speedy savef my butt again. The resonant crystals in the half-frozen, half-boiling lake sing notes of passivity or frenzy throughout the valley…

There are stories. But, this is a good introduction. This is the place I go when I dream, pretty often. My Starplace, and my Speedy. I wouldn’t fear it at all if I didn’t sometimes wake up with acid-burns crawling across my skin.

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altermidgard · 8 years ago

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Star Wars Custom Playmat 100+ Characters

Just make it look cool.

Right. Anything specific you wanted?

Not really...Just get as many characters on thee as you can.

Challenge Accepted.

Yes today on the blog, one slightly vague choice of words leads to the most characters ever on one of my mats. Not by a small margin either, especially if you include vehicles (Which I do, objects are objects in programming) I'll be going over the phases of the mats design from concept to colouring telling stories as I go. We've got a lot to get through, so lets jump right in to my latest Star Wars mat.

0 To 30

Thirty is a nice number, I've done mats with around that before, there should be enough space for everyone and more importantly it should be enough slots to cover all the main hero's and villains.

Step 1: Lets make a list.

If your playing along at home it's at this point you realise there might be a few more than thirty people in the Star Wars universe. It's Ok we can deal with this, we just have to organise everyone into some sort of hierarchy, most popular to least well known. OK, wow, yeah still quite a few people in category one.

This is where I was at. Making lists. I've been making mats a while now, you get an instinct for how many and how large the components of the design need to be. Thirty wasn’t an arbitrary number, it's what I considered the upper limit for readable characters to be. In first panel bellow that's how many names I finally settled on. There were many brave souls that fell by the wayside though and to be honest I wasn’t happy about it.

31 To 60

Writing the names on a scrap piece of A4 set the trend for the majority of the sketching phase. Usually I would draw thumbnails, four to eight images on one piece of paper but in this instance I needed to go bigger sooner. The second panel shows the most readable of my early sketches. All the previously names characters are there plus I'm starting to think that if I can get them all in at this size with extra space to spare there might be room to add a few more. Circles for heads is all they get right now but it might work. It just goes to show though. Until you actually start on something properly you cant know how its going to turn out.

The next panel is a more comprehensive redraw, more thought gets given to the layout and how the eye will flow around the image. While the rest of the design process is one of refinement and addition it.s here where the design mostly comes together. That's actuality one of the nice things about doing these blog posts. Looking back and trying to explain your thoughts and processed to others gives you insights on your own work you might never have noticed, I recommend people try it

Next up. Working on a light-box in pen gives me the opportunity to add even more detail. For some people this might not be the case but having that extra contrast and a finer point than most pencils really helps me out. The other nice thing about changing medium is that it alters the art style slightly. I'm making quicker more precise marks and it leads to a more dynamic atmosphere. The real trick will be trying to preserve that feel though the rest of the production

60 To 80

A different style again as I go digital. I'm using the airbrush tool and am less interested in line than I am the shape and weight of each object. It's also an early chance to test where the light should be coming fom. Where I've placed the vanishing point is causing a few hiccups. Triangular spaceships are especially hard to get right and a lot of their final placement has to do with that.

The silly thing is I could add more elements to the design. There's still plenty of room, think of the final total!. But no, at some point you have to take a step back and say 'this is a silly amount of work already and adding to it is going to do more harm to the design than good.

80 To,.. Who the heck knows.

I stopped counting at this point, didn't really want to know. We are almost there though. Most lines are either vertical, horizontal, or pointing at the vanishing point, I've got piles of spirals, and grievous's arms finally look right. Although Obi-Wan needs some work if they are going to duel. There are still questions to answer though. Things like what colour Lightsaber should Starkiller have and why is Luke's head not attached to his body. Enough sketching though, lets get started on the colouring,

Balancing the Force

I say colouring. What I mean is 'lets use a light grey to work out the lighting'. The grey will be easily overwritten so we have a bit of room to experiment and it keep me from doing the outlines first. Another option would be to use yellow, it just comes down to what tone you want your image to take on. There's a lot of ships and metallic in this piece so I went with the grey.

Notice how the left half of the image is always darker? Tha'ts intentional. By loading up on characters there's just going to be more dark there. Why have I done this? Because it offsets the big blob of dark on the right that is the Emperor and Darth. Basically I'm looking to balance the force. Its also why Luke and Leia are in white. That and so they are the main focus of the image I want the ye to start or end thee.

It's a Trap

I don’t want to be using that many colours on this piece. With all the different people and objects here the composition could easily start to break up if everything got its own pallet. This stage then is about making sure that doesn’t happen, all the blues are the same blue, all the browns likewise. I think I even managed to stick with this rule all the way though which is good because it can be so tempting to just think, hmm what if I just add a smidge of this colour here?

I should really have added the ships at this stage though. You can already see how areas of the image I'm less sure about are falling behind the others in terms of how far along they are. (keep an eye on Darth for example)

This is the Droid I was Looking for

I was tempted to stop here.

I don’t normally do pastel shades but this was working, all I had to do was come up with a background and...

… Yeah, no, space is dark, I've designed myself into a comer so we will have to keep going.

If you have been wondering about why characters are where they are, beyond the timeline aspect, there were three other considerations.

1. Are you a bad-guy? If yes your probably a big floaty head the rest of the cast can anchor around.

2. Are you a hero? If yes, you probably have most or all of a body, good job you.

3. Are you someone I like? I'm colouring I don’t know how many people and have free reign, naturally your going to find that my preferences bleed into the design.

Yes that is why chopper is font and center.

Space is Big, Like Really Big.

I found these glitter gel pens. No idea if they would wok on this material but if they did it would make colouring stars way easier. Not particularly economical, I used them up just on the background but the nice thing about them is that the glitter breaks up the colours and gives a sense of depth to areas that would otherwise be large and flat. Time will tell if the stars stay on the mat, But you have to experiment right, how else do you learn new things?

I gave it an extra few layers of sealant just for go measure.

Back on topic. I might have gone a little hard on the quantity of red in Maul's face, it's started to spread. Luckily Thawn has darker hair so it's an easy fix but it's still a reminder not to get carried away.

Mostly Harmless

Hey Darth finally has arms, The pose took some time to get right to be honest. It had to fit the existing upper chest and head and align with the vanishing point since its so close. In the end I fond a one that had the Lightsaber out horizontal and after that it was just a case of getting the other arm right. I went back and forth on the city scene, easing the buildings then adding them back in. something needed to be there to contrast with the stuff in front but I just wasn’t feeling it. turns out they just hadn’t been dark enough and making them practically black with little window lights was the way forward.

Almost everything is in now, but as usual I still have the eyes on most of these people to add. I also need to do something with the Emperor. He's the biggest thing on the mat, he needs a little more respect/detail than I have given him so far.

The Final Frontier.

Add clouds to the planets atmosphere, make the stars and Lightsabers glow in the dark (glow under UV light actually) and just generally go around tiding up. I'm just about done here. OK applying the sealant and taking pictures comes last but close enough.

I guess I should actually count the number of things on the mat then. Just a sec...

110ish! Give or take. That's quite a big number, and not something I think I'm going to be beating anytime soon. Probably...

Next time, lets simplify things a bit huh.

#altermidgard #custom playmat #playmat #star wars

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theadmiringbog · 8 years ago

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Writers and thinkers can be divided into two broad categories:

1. Hedgehogs are type A personalities who believe in Big Ideas—in governing principles about the world that behave as though they were physical laws and undergird virtually every interaction in society. Think Karl Marx and class struggle, or Sigmund Freud and the unconscious. Or Malcolm Gladwell and the “tipping point.”

2. Foxes, on the other hand, are scrappy creatures who believe in a plethora of little ideas and in taking a multitude of approaches toward a problem. They tend to be more tolerant of nuance, uncertainty, complexity, and dissenting opinion. If hedgehogs are hunters, always looking out for the big kill, then foxes are gatherers.

Foxes, Tetlock found, are considerably better at forecasting than hedgehogs.

When we can’t fit a square peg into a round hole, we’ll usually blame the peg—when sometimes it’s the rigidity of our thinking that accounts for our failure to accommodate it.

Beane avoids what he calls “gut-feel” decisions. If he relies too heavily on his first impressions, he’ll let potentially valuable prospects slip through the cracks—and

Good innovators typically think very big and they think very small.

New ideas are sometimes found in the most granular details of a problem where few others bother to look. And they are sometimes found when you are doing your most abstract and philosophical thinking, considering why the world is the way that it is and whether there might be an alternative to the dominant paradigm.

Rarely can they be found in the temperate latitudes between these two spaces, where we spend 99 percent of our lives.

“One comes through Saint Augustine and Calvinism,” he continued, describing people who believed in predestination. Under this philosophy, humans might have the ability to predict the course they would follow. But there was nothing they could do to alter it. Everything was carried out in accordance with God’s plan. “This is against the Jesuits and Thomas Aquinas who said we actually have free will. This question is about whether the world is predictable or unpredictable.”

Chaos theory

You may have heard the expression: the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It comes from the title of a paper delivered in 1972 by MIT’s Edward Lorenz, who began his career as a meteorologist.

Chaos theory applies to systems in which each of two properties hold: The systems are dynamic, meaning that the behavior of the system at one point in time influences its behavior in the future; And they are nonlinear, meaning they abide by exponential rather than additive relationships.

Laplace’s Demon

Laplace in 1814 claimed that given the exact position and speed of all objects in the universe at some time a “demon” would be able to use the laws of physics to predict their positions at an arbitrary time in the future.

The main question that one has to ask him or herself when thinking about Laplace’s Demon is ultimately, what is the threshold for free will?

Bayes’s theorem is concerned with conditional probability. That is, it tells us the probability that a theory or hypothesis is true if some event has happened.

In the beginning of a chess game the center of the board is void, with pawns, rooks, and bishops neatly aligned in the first two rows awaiting instructions from their masters. The possibilities are almost infinite. White can open the game in any of twenty different ways, and black can respond with twenty of its own moves, creating 4,000 possible sequences after the first full turn. After the second full turn, there are 71,852 possibilities; after the third, there are 9,132,484. The number of possibilities in an entire chess game, played to completion, is so large that it is a significant problem even to estimate it, but some mathematicians put the number as high as . These are astronomical numbers: as Diego Rasskin-Gutman has written,

“There are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe.”

The core analytic skill in poker, rather, is what players call “hand reading”: in figuring which cards your opponent might hold, and how they might affect her decisions throughout the rest of the hand.

There is a learning curve that applies to poker and to most other tasks that involve some type of prediction. The key thing about a learning curve is that it really is a curve: the progress we make at performing the task is not linear. Instead, it usually looks something like this—what I call the Pareto Principle of Prediction.

This relationship also holds in many other disciplines in which prediction is vital.

The first 20 percent often begins with having the right data, the right technology, and the right incentives. You need to have some information—more of it rather than less, ideally—and you need to make sure that it is quality-controlled. You need to have some familiarity with the tools of your trade—having top-shelf technology is nice, but it’s more important that you know how to use what you have. You need to care about accuracy—about getting at the objective truth—rather than about making the most pleasing or convenient prediction, or the one that might get you on television.

Then you might progress to a few intermediate steps, developing some rules of thumb (heuristics) that are grounded in experience and common sense and some systematic process to make a forecast rather than doing so on an ad hoc basis.

These things aren’t exactly easy—many people get them wrong. But they aren’t hard either, and by doing them you may be able to make predictions 80 percent as reliable as those of the world’s foremost expert.

In competitive environments, it can require a lot of extra effort to beat the competition. You will find that you soon encounter diminishing returns.

The extra experience that you gain, the further wrinkles that you add to your strategy, and the additional variables that you put into your forecasting model—these will only make a marginal difference.

Meanwhile, the helpful rules of thumb that you developed—now you will need to learn the exceptions to them. However, when a field is highly competitive, it is only through this painstaking effort around the margin that you can make any money. There is a “water level” established by the competition and your profit will be like the tip of an iceberg: a small sliver of competitive advantage floating just above the surface, but concealing a vast bulwark of effort that went in to support it.

It is often possible to make a profit by being pretty good at prediction in fields where the competition succumbs to poor incentives, bad habits, or blind adherence to tradition—or because you have better data or technology than they do. It is much harder to be very good in fields where everyone else is getting the basics right—and you may be fooling yourself if you think you have much of an edge.

In Bayesland, you must make one of these two choices: come to a consensus or bet.

Otherwise, to a Bayesian, you are not really being rational. If after we have our little chat, you still think your forecast is better than mine, you should be happy to bet on it, since you stand to make money. If you don’t, you should have taken my forecast and adopted it as your own.

This book encourages readers to think carefully about the signal and the noise and to seek out forecasts that couch their predictions in percentage or probabilistic terms. They are a more honest representation of the limits of our predictive abilities. When a prediction about a complex phenomenon is expressed with a great deal of confidence, it may be a sign that the forecaster has not thought through the problem carefully, has overfit his statistical model, or is more interested in making a name for himself than in getting at the truth.

Consider the following set of seven statements, which are related to the idea of the efficient-market hypothesis and whether an individual investor can beat the stock market. Each statement is an approximation, but each builds on the last one to become slightly more accurate.

No investor can beat the stock market.

No investor can beat the stock market over the long run.

No investor can beat the stock market over the long run relative to his level of risk.

No investor can beat the stock market over the long run relative to his level of risk and accounting for his transaction costs.

No investor can beat the stock market over the long run relative to his level of risk and accounting for his transaction costs, unless he has inside information.

Few investors beat the stock market over the long run relative to their level of risk and accounting for their transaction costs, unless they have inside information.

It is hard to tell how many investors beat the stock market over the long run, because the data is very noisy, but we know that most cannot relative to their level of risk, since trading produces no net excess return but entails transaction costs, so unless you have inside information, you are probably better off investing in an index fund.

The first approximation—the unqualified statement that no investor can beat the stock market—seems to be extremely powerful. By the time we get to the last one, which is full of expressions of uncertainty, we have nothing that would fit on a bumper sticker. But it is also a more complete description of the objective world.

There is nothing wrong with an approximation here and there. If you encountered a stranger who knew nothing about the stock market, informing him that it is hard to beat, even in the crude terms of the first statement, would be a lot better than nothing.

The problem comes when we mistake the approximation for the reality.

Ideologues like Phil Tetlock’s hedgehogs behave in this way. The simpler statements seem more universal, more in testament to a greater truth or grander theory. Tetlock found, however, that his hedgehogs were very poor at making predictions. They leave out all the messy bits that make life real and predictions more accurate.

We have big brains, but we live in an incomprehensibly large universe. The virtue in thinking probabilistically is that you will force yourself to stop and smell the data—slow down, and consider the imperfections in your thinking. Over time, you should find that this makes your decision making better.

This is perhaps the easiest Bayesian principle to apply: make a lot of forecasts. You may not want to stake your company or your livelihood on them, especially at first. But it’s the only way to get better.

Bayes’s theorem says we should update our forecasts any time we are presented with new information. A less literal version of this idea is simply trial and error.

Companies that really “get” Big Data, like Google, aren’t spending a lot of time in model land. They’re running thousands of experiments every year and testing their ideas on real customers.

#The Signal and the Noise #book review

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