#than mormon stories heroes

[nobetafortomorrowedie]

Nothing makes me happier than listening to my family watch mormon podcasts and feel...nothing. It's just a weird fandom to me now, sometimes (sometimes I am lividly angry) but really at its core it is a weird fandom living in their version of a fantasy world based on a fictional book.

[lizardho]

A rant I wrote for my best friend in 2020-ish - now she's my wife and is gonna be like "Why did you post this instead of working on your dissertation?" and the answer is because I'm procrastinating silly stylez

Mormon Missions

The Basis of Mormon Missionary Work

              Mormons, like many evangelical religions, proselyte as a core part of their religious activities. They claim (accurately) that early Christians did the same thing, and that scripture tells followers of Christ to do the same thing. So it’s a pretty big deal to them. When the Mormon church was first founded, missionary work was seen as an excited thing for Mormon men to do. The first prophet, Joseph Smith, would go visit people or invite them to his home, and tell them personally where God wanted them to go preach. They’d take a crate of copies of The Book of Mormon and go to close places (like New York or the American  South), or they’d go to far-away places, like England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Early missionaries were wildly successful, mainly because people the world was in sort of a religious frenzy at the time, and also the internet didn’t exist. They’d convert a few hundred people, tell them to move to Missouri, then continue on their merry way, going for a few years at a time before returning home as heroes. It was sees as a fun, manly way to abandon your family for a few years to go to England and sell books. After a while, though, Joseph Smith started getting too horny. At first, he was content to fuck the babysitter and some single ladies, telling them that God gave them the thumbs up, so it was cool. After a while, he got even hornier, and decided it was about time he fucked some married women. So he’d send the husbands of the hottest MILFs in his congregation to England for a few years, and then marry and fuck their wives while they were gone.

Sometimes, he’d tell them (“Oh, haha, hey, funny story, while you were in England because God told you to go there, your wife tripped and fell on my penis, and God said it was part of his plan, and I was into it, so we just went with it”) and sometimes he DIDN’T tell them. One guy he told got pretty mad about it, and he and his wife packed up and left Missouri, set up shop in a nearby town, and then made a newspaper. They printed the hot headline “Joseph Smith says God wants him to fuck your wives” and Joseph was like “Oh hey, let’s not let people in on that”. A mob of Mormon acolytes, who may or may not have been cucked by Joe the Prophet, also got upsetti spaghetti and burned down the printing press. Joseph then pardoned them, and was backed by the Nauvoo Legion, the 2nd largest military force in the U.S. at the time, and 100% Mormon. This was bad because a) Arson is a felony, commonly referred to as a “dick move”, and b) This violates the bill of rights, which guarantees freedom of the press. So Joseph was arrested. In jail, he was killed by an angry mob, and a new guy took over the Mormon church. His name was Brigham Young, and he was hornier than Joseph, who in turn was hornier than God had ever intended for anyone to be. Brigham took up the proud tradition of ignoring consent and ethical polyamory, and just sending men on far-away missions so he could spread his seed like a shitty incel-gone-rogue Genghis Khan.

After a while, missionary work stopped. Mainly, it stopped because of World War I. Then, the depression his the world like a starvation-inducing meteor, and missionary work slowed down a bit. Fortunately, the great depression ended! Because WWII started and everyone started dying again, so like, it was more of a lateral move. After WWII, though, the U.S. was suddenly a financial superpower with access to more of the world that it had previously had. So they started shipping missionaries off all over. It was still done by “calling”, where local congregation leaders would feel inspired to send people on missions, and then they would do that.

At some point in the 50s, an attempt was made to standardize missionary teachings a little bit, since the church was dealing with issues about people teaching weird stuff, like women having rights (the church still teaches that women shouldn’t work unless single or their husband is struggling to provide, and operates proudly on a “barefoot and pregnant” model of women’s rights that they teach very strongly to everyone from the ages of about 4 until 18), black people not being inferior (this was taught until the 70s), and tithing not being important (the church currently has over $100 billion in stocks and real-estate that we know of, it’s probably more).

So they made a tiny booklet with a basic summary of canon Mormon doctrine. Then, later, in the 70s, there was a HUGE push to get more missionaries. The phrase “every worthy, able-bodied young man should serve a mission” was used, and is still used, to describe who is expected to “serve” a mission. As they started this movement, they also began making rigid lesson plans, called “The Discussions” that missionaries needed to stick to. They were roughly 30 minutes long, relied on rote memorization, and were inflexible. At first, these were a big hit and people had a lot of success, but as education in the world improved, and more people were given access to schooling, technology, and financial stability, suddenly numbers began to plummet. So they changed the game plan: Make the lessons less structured, then blame missionaries personally for failure to convert people. These changes produced a book called “Preach My Gospel”, which was what I used as a missionary. They changed it again recently, but not by much, it’s just more simplistic. Like going from 3.5 to 5e.

- https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/new-era/1981/05/president-kimball-speaks-out-on-being-a-missionary?lang=eng

- https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/missionary-work?lang=eng

My own missionary experience

Basics of Mission Structure

-Mormon congregations are called “Wards”, which get sorted into “Stakes”, which is a group of 5-10 wards.

-A mission is made when there is a certain ratio of stakes-to-non Mormons.

-A mission is split when there are too many Mormons in an area. So like, my dad’s mission has been split 5 or 6 times now into smaller missions because of how rapidly the church grew in those areas.

-Transfers: A transfer cycle is 6 weeks long, and you stay with your assigned companion for at least that whole cycle, sometimes 2-3 cycles.

 One of the things to note (that you may have kinda picked up on already) is that being a missionary is kind of an exalted “rite of passage” thing. They view missionary work as an act of service to the world at large, and thing that missionaries are comparable to like…soldiers or doctors, heroes who are saving people from the forces of evil or spiritual sickness. It’s a weird mindset to be in, and it really gets pushed on you, especially as a missionary. Missionary work is pushed on young men as a spiritual obligation (note: They can’t force you to go, so it’s not like an actual obligation, but it’s definitely perceived as such for a lot of people). So, since I was a young “man” they started pushing it on me at like…12? A little younger? My grandpas both went on missions, so they thought that it would be great if I did too. My dad went on a mission (He went to Argentina’s southern end). It just kinda seemed like the thing everyone did, except I didn’t really want to go. I wanted to get married and have kids, but like…’f’ in the chat, I guess. Uterus machine broke.

I just ignored the general discomfort I felt about missionary work (like the general discomfort I felt about a lot of things tbh), and went to BYU like a good l’il Mormon. I turned down a 10k/year scholarship from ASU to go to BYU, because I am an idiot. At BYU, I made good friends, one of whom was trans!!! But she transferred away after coming out :c  But I had a D&D group!!! But they all left on missions :c  So I decided that if it was between being the only 20 year old on BYU campus who didn’t go on a mission, or going on a mission, I’d go. That was literally my process. Please make fun of dumb boy me, please, he deserves it. Anyways, I put in my papers, the prophets and apostles in Salt Lake sign me up with a big batch of elders going to Mexico City North. Mexico City is HUGE, so it’s broken down into 6 separate missions with 6 separate mission leaders. I was in the northernmost areas of Mexico City, including parts of Hidalgo. Chronologically, my mission went like this:

Months 1-6: Zone – Tultepec  |  Congregation Name – Primavera

-Companions: Elder Luis (my trainer): Chubby, kinda annoying but honestly just a sweetheart who liked to eat.

-Elder Mendez (my follow-up trainer): Chubby, good cook, seems nice at first but a bit unhinged. Threatened to kill me a few times. Kinda moody. Mostly just mean and dumb.

àIn this area, me and Elder Luis baptized: Ricardo Frias, who is no longer a member. Veronica, Alejandra, and Brenda, who are still members. Me and elder Mendez baptized Karen Itzel, who I have not been able to catch up with in years. She’d be about 14 now, tho? She was really little when she joined.

àStories: Nothing weird happened in a paranormal sense, but I did get robbed twice in my first week here, which was fun. There was a place in this area called Infonavit that was like a little neighborhood. There was a gang that controlled the area, but they were nice to missionaries, so we never got held up or bothered by them. Still, I did see 2 men with Uzis once just…walking around. Like. In broad daylight. It was incredible.

Months 6-10.5: Zone – Tula  |  Congregation Name – El Carmen

-Companions: Elder Lopez (my best companion): Short, very dark (from Chiapas, so like…very dark for a Mexican), shredded. The man had a 6 pack. Also, intimidatingly intense. After the first lesson we taught together, we were walking away and he belted out “ELDER HOBBS! I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT!” and I was all intimidated because he sounded like a drill sergeant, and despite being a foot taller and about 60 lbs heavier than him, he scared me. So I was like “What?” and he just goes “THAT WAS SO GOOD. YOU ARE A GIFTED TEACHER. I AM LUCKY TO BE ASSIGNED WITH YOU. WE’RE GONNA DO GOOD THINGS HERE.” And anyway he was the best. He cooked every day, he let me play D&D (by myself, so sad lonely hours, but still, it was stress relief). He worked out in a frenzy, had a miserable homelife, and was really just a very nice and supportive person.

-Elder Amador: Tall, really into soccer (had played semiprofessionally for Cruz Azul, as like a minor league player or something). Funny, aggressively cheerful, kind of a wimp. Farted a LOT for some reason, so we’d always take detours down the “less travelled” roads so he could fart in private. I didn’t mind tho because the area was actually really pretty, and sometimes I could see cows 🥺

- In this area, we didn’t baptize anyone. Which was fine with me.

- Stories: So, this is the area where I learned to make guacamole. We were visiting in on an elderly couple nobody had seen in forever. They lived in the BOONIES, like, it was just NOTHING on all sides, and when they answered the door they invited us in, and made us eggs with hotdogs, and then the best goddamn guacamole I’ve ever had in my life. I ate until I was sick.

-ALSO in the area: A supernatural (ish) story: So, Mormons believe that they have “priesthood power”, which is like divine power from God to effectuate his will on earth. This is stuff like healing the sick (never seems to work), causing miracles, summoning angels, and other bullshit that never actually happens. Sometimes people ask for priesthood blessings, usually if they’re sick or if they’re sad and want to feel better. So a guy in our ward flags us down, says he’s feeling iffy, and asks for a blessing. We had nothing else to do, so…sure! Why not? My companion, Elder Lopez, does it, and immediately after he says “amen” the guy starts puking SUPER hard. He stops, looks at us, and says “I cannot feel the left half of my body” and I was like “Hey elder, this guy is gonna die, let’s go get help” so we went basically next door to the home of the one guy in the area that had a car, told him what was happening, and then headed to the hospital. He stopped breathing twice on the way, and Brother Ricardo (the guy with the car) didn’t know CPR, so instead he just hulk-smashed his chest with arms about as thick as my legs, and that seemed to work. Funny stuff.

Months 10.5-15 – Zone: Nicolas Romero  |  Congregation name: Nicolas Romero

-Companions: Elder Casillas (the funnest companion): Fat. Very fat. Lazy, but we still managed to get more done than with anyone else. He was hilarious, and SUPER smart.

-Elder Montini: Originally form Argentina, immigrated to Mexico as a kid, then lived in Cancún. ¼ Italian, and Argentines are pretty white, so he looked American. He also spoke flawless English, and used this ability to shit talk people without them knowing. Also, VERY fat. Like. IN one day he ripped 3 pairs of pants just by sitting down. Kinda “holier-than-thou” but not too bad usually.

-In this area, we baptized NOBODY. Which was GREAT because this ward was actually the woooooorst. I fucking hated everyone in that Ward. They had about 80 people who attended regularly, but 900 people on record, and all 820 people NOT in attendance could tell you exactly why they left, and it was always because one of the shitty 80 had been excessively rude to them. There were 3 good people in that ward, and they all moved away eventually, so…yikes.

- No weird stories from here, but I did get in big trouble for breaking mission rules to… (checks notes)… provide service to elderly widows, so that was fun.

Months 15-21 Zone: Huehuetoca  |  Congregation name: Xalpa

-Companions: Elder Lucero: Total sweetheart, VERY shy. I cured his shyness by annoying him, since apparently feeling angry made him just rash enough to actually speak, so I just kept him lightly agitated with me for a few weeks until he realized he was good at what he did. He’s probably my favorite companion. We actually got along REALLY well.

-Elder Ramirez: Very nice, VERY fun, has a VERY cute sister. We got along well.

-In this area, the ward was HORRIBLE. Nobody liked each other, and everyone was shitty to us, too. We made our way into the ward’s good graces by getting on the good side of the women’s group, then berating their husbands about how shitty they were. The girls loved it, so we did great here. The ward basically tripled in size, and it wasn’t baptisms, it was just us bringing people back. It was actually really fun at the time. We didn’t baptize anyone, but after I left a Jehovah’s Witness got baptized, so I’m counting that as a HUGE win for us. I can shit talk Mormons all day, but the JWs are somehow worse.

-Weird stories from here: We were teaching an old lady, and she was being annoying and obstinate, arguing with us that her family didn’t need to go to church and that she didn’t want to confuse them. So we decided to leave. Nowadays, I’d have completely agreed with her, but at the time I thought I was a divine messenger sent on behalf of God. So. Anyways, as I went to leave, I felt some thing take control of my legs. Like. They stopped working. Idk how to explain it. The rest of me worked. I just couldn’t move my legs. My companion was already standing, I was trying to stand, and finally I just looked at the lady, opened my mouth to say something, and then kinda just went off, but like…they weren’t really MY words coming out of my mouth? Like, I was barely able to move my mouth fast enough for the words to happen, I wasn’t thinking about what I was saying, but when I finished, she said “Wow, Elder, I’ve never thought about it like that. I will absolutely bring my grandson to church on Sunday.” And my companion was just gawking, so apparently whatever I said was pretty good 🤷 

Months 21-24: Area – Nicolas Romero  |  Congregation name: La Colmena

-Companions: Elder Toledo: Kinda immature and lazy, but nice enough.

-Elder Tec: Kinda geeky and weird, very nice, also very jumpy.

-In this area: The ward was good, the people were nice enough, and there was a cool abandoned ranch house that was used as a dog sanctuary  that I loved. There was El Viejito Emilio that guarded the place, and there was a cute middle-aged couple that ran it, and they liked us, so we’d do “service” for them 1-2x a week, which largely consisted of picking up poop and stuff, and then just petting all the cute dogs for so long. Plus, the ranch house itself was HIGH KEY aesthetic. Like a fallout thing, it had graffiti all over, and cool little nicknacks lying around, and we could use it to hide from the rain, and I loved that little ranch house SO much.

- Weird stories: Another blessing. I was giving a VERY newlywed couple a blessing. The husband said he was possessed, but really he just sleeptalked. Whatever, I can bless that I guess? 🤷 So I put my hands on his head and am really just preparing to make something up, when what actually happens in suddenly I knew these people fucked before they tied the knot. An unwelcome surprise, since they were both deeply weird people and I didn’t want to know about their sex lives. So that just kinda popped out of my mouth, and immediately the guy goes RIGID and falls out of his chair. His wife is panicking, she thinks he died, so I go into emergency mode, we prop up his feet, Elder Tec checks for a pulse, he’s still breathing, all good,�� and then the mission doctor won’t answer he phone. She was bad about that usually, but it was pretty late, so I wasn’t surprised. So instead, I just called home. Like. Dr Dad to the rescue, right? It was late, my parents were VERY confused, and so I described what what happened, and my dad walked me through some stuff and we kinda just decided he was having a full-blown panic attack because I had announced to the room that he and his wife did it before their wedding, which, again, matters very little to me. It didn’t even matter to me at the time, like…people have sex. It’s what they do. But for some reason some part of the universe was like “You get to know this now, bitch” and I was like “ew, OK, thanks for that”. Anyways, we got home super lte because it took us a while to calm him down, and that was the last time I ever had anything weird like that happen to me again.

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T_NYZesRdY (this is from the Book of Mormon musical, and it’s FUCKING hilarious)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KSBEChzpMM (my experience in a nutshell)

[heathersdesk]

Confession Time:

I don't like Come Follow Me and never have. And I haven't been able to articulate why until I tried to buckle down and start with the Book of Mormon this year.

The first paragraph of the first section for 1 Nephi 1-5 ends with this sentence:

"Overall, there is power in this imperfect family’s examples of faith."

I was rocked by that a little bit the first time I read it.

I thought to myself, "Wow. Are we really going to confront the hero worship and unhealthy worldviews our community has internalized about this book because of the way the negative behaviors of the characters are never challenged or confronted for what they are? That many of the details are included because they're cautionary tales about what NOT to do, but you'd never know that based on how the material is presented and talked about by our people at large because the conversation is driven by the needless compulsion to focus on the same tired perspectives of faith promotion that the subjects sometimes don't deserve?"

*reads the section, which is full of the same "I will go and do" about Nephi that they always do, without once confronting the conflicts, doubts, and struggles of anyone but Nephi in any serious way, some of which are exacerbated (if not cause) by Nephi being insufferable and self-righteous to everyone around him*

Nephi is an unreliable narrator, y'all. You're not supposed to believe everything he says, thinks, and does. Especially when he's younger. His view of the people around him and their motivations lack depth because he was totally unconcerned with their feelings and struggles. He was bad at helping and honoring people in their darkest moments, having nothing better to offer them for support than glib and shallow assertions that they would be struggling less if they were more like him. An attitude he learned from his father's blatant and unapologetic favoritism.

Nephi is not an example of what to do when there is conflict in your family. And it takes him until "O wretched man that I am" to realize he's not the most important man in every room. His disrespect for other people in his leadership is the reason they want nothing to do with him, and it takes him a lifetime of chasing people away from God to realize he's not as good of a person as he thinks he is. He has failed people from his need to be seen as being better than he is, better than everyone else is at loving God and knowing what that means. And this becomes a cultural artifact, a baked-in foregone conclusion in the minds of his people that ends up shaping their self-perceptions until it destroys them. His personal failures, viewed for their long-term ramifications and consequences, is part of what this book is supposed to be about.

But sure. Let's do "I will go and do" again, without pondering in any serious way if Nephi's interpretation of his interaction with the Holy Ghost might be lacking in credibility because the alternative is to say something closer to "We really botched this job and killing Laban was not a forgone conclusion or a necessary evil that I can acquit myself of because God said it was okay."

Maybe we don't have to believe that. Maybe we can examine how our culture in the modern church has perpetuated this same logical fallacy with vigilante violence, justified by appeals to this exact story.

Point being, never read the story of Nephi without keeping it firmly fixed in your mind that he's going to regret and repent of most of this later. That cross reference to 2 Nephi 4 is probably the most important thing you can have in your margins every time he says or does something totally uncalled for. 🖖

[baronfulmen]

Absolutely unhinged article from Wired

So there's this well known and very successful fantasy author named Brandon Sanderson. He wrote some of my favorite books. He's known for really good worldbuilding, interesting magic systems, and being extremely prolific. I mean it's nuts, he just cranks out books at an insane rate.

Some idiot from Wired magazine had to write an article about him and it is absolutely bizarre. Sanderson invited this guy into his home and spent what seems to be a lot of time entertaining and chatting with this guy and the whole article is just strange petty complaints and projection and insults and... it's ridiculous.

This is his big complaint - Sanderson just isn't INTERESTING enough to write a good article about! He's lame, and boring, and bad at everything, and his clothes don't fit right, and he puts salt on his ramen, and he talks too much. It's honestly embarrassing to read.

He makes it clear that he was openly rude to Sanderson in the moment, as well:

Hilariously, Sanderson agrees with this and acknowledges that on the sentence level his writing isn't great. This is accurate, honestly. It's better in some books (or parts of books) than others, but his strengths are with the larger story and sometimes his writing is a bit weak (but still very readable, in the way that a lot of YA stuff or beach reads are). Anyway then we move on to insulting his fans.

Okay so his pale, fleshy, nerdy, man-child fans smell bad. Got it.

He paints a picture of a really idyllic life, one of not only success but of good times surrounded by friends and family. It's clear he's bothered by this because he doesn't think Sanderson deserves it due to bad writing and the fact that he's Mormon. The author of this article really really hates that Sanderson is Mormon. (Look, I have no love for the Mormon church but it's still super strange, it's like when you see stuff on a show and are like "oh the author has a fetish" or something. This writer has a hate-boner for Mormons that cannot just be explained by the normal and valid criticisms of the Mormon church, this is something personal and traumatic I think.)

Oh and he tries to convince Sanderson and his family to go to Evermore, which I find hilarious. They tell him it's run down and shitty but he insists and they later go, and yeah it's run down and shitty.

Anyway, as promised he ends up crying because this story isn't interesting enough which is for sure Sanderson's fault and not the fault of the article writer himself being bad at his job. Also because he hates Hugh Jackman.

Oh and then he wants to cry again because they salt their food:

Anyway he pesters Sanderson about being Mormon, focusing on the parallels in the books without for a second thinking about the ways where the comparison breaks down - imagine if, inspired by being raised Christian, I wrote something with a lot of Jesus parallels but also had a scene where the Jesus stand-in killed everyone and the heroes banded together to kill Jesus and take on the mantle of Son of God. But he gets something he can quote out of context to seem somewhat odd or egotistical so I guess he's pleased.

So yeah, the whole thing is just a super bad article that's not worth reading. Sanderson responded, being way nicer than I would have.

If you want to know more, I wouldn't suggest reading the article. I don't think it needs more clicks. There's nothing of real interest I left out, but I know there's a YouTube video about it everyone is suggesting (and which I haven't watched) so if you want to know more I guess I'd say watch that.

[xtruss]

Who Was The Real Calamity Jane? Historians Search For An Answer.

Her exploits became the stuff of legend, glamorizing life in the Old West. But Martha Jane Canary’s real life story bears little resemblance to the fictional heroine.

— By Heather Mundt | March 12, 2024

Calamity Jane — Born Martha Jane Canary — Is a Legend of the American West. But was she a gunslinger? An Army scout? A rider for the Pony Express? After a century of half-truths and fabrications, historians are still struggling to separate fact from fiction in her life story. Photograph By Everett Collection, Bridgeman Images

You would be forgiven in describing Calamity Jane as an iconoclast whose flouting of 19th-century female mores launched her into exceptional fame and fortune in a male-dominated American West.

It’s true the woman behind the fictional heroine—born Martha Jane Canary—was a buckskin-clad, gun-slinging, foulmouthed cowgirl whose affinity for alcohol was legendary, even among men. But that’s where facts diverge significantly from fiction.

Historians have spent decades trying to find her—methodically unraveling a century of mistruths, half-truths, and full-blown fabrication, many of them introduced by Calamity herself. She was also illiterate, leaving no letters or journals for analysis, not even a signature. So who was the real Calamity Jane?

The Creation of a Myth

“People, largely, are still in love with a romantic Old West," says Richard W. Etulain, former director of the Center for the American West at the University of New Mexico who’s written two comprehensive books on Martha Jane Canary.

It's been part of the country’s literary tradition from its inception around the early 19th century, he says. James Fenimore Cooper created the early framework for the Western as a genre in his groundbreaking Leatherstocking Tales, a five-novel frontier series that includes his famous 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans.

These were masculine stories featuring females as love interests, providing a formula for the early paperbacks called dime novels. Emerging around the start of the Civil War, the cheaply printed books sold on newsstands for no more than a dime.

With simple plots placing a hero or heroine in a dilemma, they were the perfect vehicle to spread myths about the real-life personalities of the American West—including Calamity Jane.

A Calamitous Early Life

Born around May 1, 1856, near Princeton, Missouri, Martha Jane Canary was the oldest of three children. Around 1863, the family sold their farm and headed west toward Montana, ostensibly drawn by the booming mining towns.

She told of the five-month overland journey in her autobiography, Life and Adventures of Calamity Jane, a rare kernel of truth in what’s considered an exaggerated work of semifiction.

“I was at all times with the men when there was excitement and adventures to be had,” she said. “By the time we reached Virginia City, I was considered a remarkable good shot and a fearless rider for a girl of my age.”

The Trek Ended in Heartache.

Both of her parents died within four years of the move and, by 1867, her siblings were allegedly sent to live with Mormon families in Utah. Not yet a teenager, Etulain writes in The Life and Legends of Calamity Jane that she was adrift in a pioneer man’s world.

Calamity Jane lived a nomadic life, taking jobs for a few weeks at a time before heading to the next spot whim took her. And that’s where her story begins to blend into myth.

Dime Novel Fame

By the time she’d reached age 20, Martha Canary was already well known in the “rough and ready settlements of the western plains for dressing in men’s clothes, a taste for liquor and wanderlust, and a tendency to shoot off her mouth and her guns,” writes historian Karen R. Jones in The Many Lives of Calamity.

Tthe genesis of her nickname is unclear. What is clear is that she was already known as Calamity Jane in the summer of 1876 when she sauntered down the dusty main street of Deadwood, South Dakota, on horseback in a suit of buckskin alongside Wild Bill Hickok.

Calamity Jane gained fame in the 1870s after arriving on horseback in Deadwood, South Dakota, alongside Wild Bill Hickok. The two were likely mere acquaintances but dime novels and sensational newspaper stories published many a tall tale of their dubious exploits together. Photograph By Everett Collection, Bridgeman Images

She was traveling with the most famous gunman and lawman of the West, Etulain writes, having joined his wagon train of gold seekers as it headed north toward the Black Hills.

“Calamity Jane has arrived!” local newspapers proclaimed. From that moment, her name would be intertwined with Wild Bill’s in Old West lore. The news stories that followed, embellished and sensationalized in the era of yellow journalism, flung her into stratospheric fame.

She would be forevermore the wild woman of the West, often cast in dime novels as the love interest of notorious gunslinger Wild Bill. She was also often linked with another famous Bill—Buffalo Bill Cody, whose prowess in slaughtering buffalo had become dime novel legend. Stories abounded of her performances in his famous stage show, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

In her semifictional 1896 autobiography Life and Adventures of Calamity, Calamity also described herself as a rowdy plainswoman who rode for the Pony Express and served as General Custer’s scout.

For more than a century that followed, the depictions of Calamity Jane in media would make it even more difficult to unravel the truths of her life. In Cecil B. DeMille’s 1936 movie The Plainsman, she was a rip-roaring cowgirl who fought Native Americans alongside Buffalo Bill Cody and Wild Bill. Some 70 years after that she was portrayed as the bawdy friend of Wild Bill and town drunk in HBO’s Western series, Deadwood.

The Real Calamity Jane

Many of the tall tales surrounding Calamity’s life are rooted in fact.

She may have served as an Army scout, her biographers found—just not for General Custer. Calamity did know Wild Bill, but not as his romantic partner. In fact, they would have been little more than acquaintances. (Hickok was assassinated at a poker game shortly after the group’s arrival in Deadwood.)

Calamity Jane was also cast in traveling shows but not Buffalo Bill’s Wild West production, says Jeremy M. Johnston, the Tate endowed chair of Western history at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming, which houses what’s believed is her only remaining buckskin suit.

She was legally married once in 1888 but did shack up with several men whom she called "husband” along the way. She also gave birth twice: first in 1882 to a son, who died shortly after his birth, and in 1887 to daughter, Jessie Elizabeth. (However, whatever happened to her daughter remains debatable.)

Tales recounting Calamity’s nursing skills are also well-documented. “She really took care of anyone who was sick,” Johnson says. “Anyone who needed anything, she would step up and help them through their troubled times.”

Johnston’s own grandmother used to tell the story of Calamity Jane helping their family recover from an illness. To thank her, his great-great grandmother made Calamity a nice shirt. A few days later, however, onlookers found her in the streets intoxicated with the shirt covered in mud.

The Death of Calamity Jane

In fact, alcoholism was constant refrain throughout her life, McLaird writes, perpetuating her lifelong poverty. “Sadly, after romantic adventures are removed, her story is mostly an account of uneventful daily life interrupted by drinking binges,” he writes.

For the last seven-plus years of her life, Etulain writes in Life and Legends, she earned money as a performer and roaming saleswoman, peddling her autobiography and photos.

Calamity Jane poses at the grave of Wild Bill Hickok in Deadwood, South Dakota, in this photograph taken by J.A. Kumpf circa 1903. The famous gunslinger died that year and was buried in the same cemetery. Photograph By Graphicaartis, Bridgeman Images

She died penniless at age 47 on August 1, 1903, likely from effects of alcoholism. She’s buried near Wild Bill in the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood—and the misinformation that pervaded her life has followed in her death, Etulain writes, as even her tombstone displays an incorrect name, birthdate, and age.

But though her real life may have been more tragedy than adventure, Etulain argues that she remains an illuminating example of grit and determination.

“The loss of her parents before her teen years, the lack of education, and the downward push on many frontier women in the late nineteenth century—Calamity rose above these challenges as a young woman of energy, endurance, and fortitude.”

[tigger8900]

World Running Down, by Al Hess

⭐⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

In a post-apocalyptic future, only the fortunate can attain citizenship in Salt Lake City, a privilege that affords them luxuries such as a safe place to stay, plenty to eat, and access to medical care. Valentine, a trans man who scrapes by working salvage jobs, is not one of the fortunate — that is, until a handsome android named Osric arrives bearing a proposal. It's a tempting offer: one last job in exchange for citizenship, with all that entails, including access to hormone treatments. But there's more to the job — not to mention the android — than first meets the eye. With the safety of emerging consciousnesses at stake, can Valentine and Osric make the right choices, even if it means sacrificing everything they desire?

I don't go for main-plot romantic books too often, but I'm glad I made this exception. Both Valentine and Osric were wonderful characters in complicated situations, and I enjoyed watching them fumble around with each other. Yes, this is that kind of book: light on the steam, and heavy on the awkward discovery. And it's well-justified awkwardness, given that one of the heroes is an AI who only recently had to use a physical body. While I'm aware comparisons of transgender people with robots isn't everyone's cup of tea, it's worth noting that the author is himself a trans man, and it's more nuanced than it might sound at first glance. For example, Osric experiences dysphoria from his physical form not being like the distributed consciousness he'd previously inhabited; the fact that his body is artificial/non-human isn't the point of comparison.

One of the things I loved the most about this book was the setting's vibe. It has a wonderful futuristic-yet-retro vibe that reminds me a bit of the Fallout universe(in fact, I wonder if the main character's name isn't a reference to Nick Valentine, from Fallout 4), except throwing back to a time that's a little earlier than the atomic age. I also liked the way the Mormon community the group encounters was used in this story. As someone who has known LGBTQ Mormons, I'm aware the situation isn't quite as black and white as many people might think, and I appreciated this take on what one offshoot community might look like in the future.

As a bonus, Al Hess is a talented artist. In addition to painting the cover of the book, he drew portraits of many of the main and secondary characters. Two — Valentine and Osric — are included at the front of the book, and the rest can be found on his website.

My biggest gripe with the book is that some plot threads seemed to be left dangling. The most egregious was the part about the mutant animals, which got built up and then just dropped. I don't care how sweet it is when our two leads kiss, I wanna know what was up with the mad science! But if you're reading primarily for the romance and characters, you shouldn't have any issues with this, as I feel that half of the plot was wrapped up very nicely. I can't promise you won't yell at the characters and pitch the book across the room, however, but isn't that just a sign of being invested in a good drama?

[gaykarstaagforever]

Someone take this stupid Who Do You Think You Are? show away from me.

The English AND the American version. I don't even know who half these people are and I'm more emotional by the end than they are.

Shout-out to the Steve Buscemi / Jason Sudeikis episodes, where they have to go to the State Archives in my home town of Harrisburg, PA, and the show politely shows the prettiest stock footage of that place that anyone has ever shot. No trash or ruined buildings or anything!

...Also I don't think they actually show the iconic State Archives building in the show, because

Well.

"IT WAS MEANT TO LOOK LIKE A BIG BOOK! IT'S WHIMSICAL!"

It looks like if a Book of Mormon went to Soviet Russia and came back as a Brutalist sociopath that is dedicated to eating joy. We are absolutely full of shit here.

ANYWAY. Judy Dench's dad was a war hero, one of Ian McKellen's grandfathers invented the weekend, and Warwick Davis (is handsome as shit ❤️) found out that one of his grandfathers was a violinist who played in Minstrel shows.

Sharon Osborne's was mostly stories about babies dying. Some of these get real dark.

Marissa Tomei went to Italy to hear about how her great-grandfather (I think) got shot in some Italian macho feud. I wasn't paying that close of attention because I am apparently still 100% straight when that woman is present, oh my god, what the HELL is my body doing over this woman's shoulders?? She is perfect.

Also Warwick Davis should do voice work if he isn't, because I could listen to him read anything for hours. I also didn't know he and his wife lost a baby. Now I'm crying again.

Oddly enough, all I know about my own family only goes back like two generations, and then other random stuff my crazy cousin claims she discovered that I don't believe. My dad's family has supposed been in the US for like 300 years, but every time I hear those stories the details change drastically. The entire show in question (or at least the US version) is an ad for Ancestry.com, so I guess the idea is that I get excited by all of this and look up my own family history.

But based on what I've been told, I'm the result of like 500 years of alcoholic dirt-farmers. And while I'm not ashamed of that, I'm also not paying the Blackstone Group a monthly subscription to prove that.

Plus this show has a big team of researchers and producers doing the leg-work and editing the results to make celebrities' family histories look exciting. That's not the experience that awaits most of us.

Plus if I do it, with a family that has lived in Pennsylvania for a long time, my "journey" will probably end with me having to go down to the State Archives.

And I don't want to be eaten by that spooky concrete book.

(Why do all the pictures look like this?? You're doing this on purpose!)

[thejesusmaninred]

"The Red Proletariat." Mark 15: 21-26.

Jesus is taken back where He began, Golgotha, the place of the skull for His Crucifixion. Jesus is disassembled as the Maha Shabbat "the wipe out" begins. Man cannot be a slave to a fantasy figment, and certainly not to this one called Jesus who is too badly misunderstood. Rectification of this misdunerstanding and right contact with Jesus Christ for the purposes of salvation are the subjects of the closing sections of the Gospel Torah.

At the moment the truth dawns, neither wine "intelligence" nor myrrh, "freedom from oppression" are needed, these are extranneous ceremonial objects anyway, only the written notice, "do not be as the King of the Jews" is needed.

All nonsense and nonesuch about Jesus being in peoples' hearts and loving them unconditionally from afar, permitting extreme license in exchange for a profession of a confession, these must stop. The Jews of ancient Jerusalem suffered a terrible price for standing up for the common man against an impregnable enemy. The Gospel, the story of Jesus Christ belongs to them, it always has. He was, He is their super hero. Without it, we would never have known how Saint Mark started a Jewish revolution leaving its blueprint for future generations should they, like we need it in order to survive.

The Crucifixion of Jesus

21 A certain man from Cyrene, Simon, the father of Alexander and Rufus, was passing by on his way in from the country, and they forced him to carry the cross. 

22 They brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha (which means “the place of the skull”). 23 Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it. 24 And they crucified him. Dividing up his clothes, they cast lots to see what each would get.

25 It was nine in the morning when they crucified him. 26 The written notice of the charge against him read: the king of the jews.

Morning is when the ritual hand washing and prayers take place. The Number is 512, ה‎אב‎‎, haav, "when the father becomes the son."

The death of Jesus on the cross signifies the second time a man is born, after he stops acting like an animal, a lawless brat, and becomes civil, capable of amusing himself in ways that do not have consequences. Communes also need to learn how to do this. Rome was a place where a few enjoyed the dividends of the turmoil they caused among the many. This violates the entirety of the Torah. Rather than let things lay, Roman Jews revolted and to keep their plans sacroscanct they used the name of Jesus, a legend by that time, and off they went.

Rome's response was lethal as we know, and has lasted ever since. This Gospel Torah is the final victory of the Jews over Rome. Their success will benefit all the slaves and vassals of the Roman Catholic Church for all time. I found Karen Pence the notorious Miss Sissy hiding in a Catholic School in Florida along with many Mormon pedophiles. This institution and its framework can no longer be tolerated. Wherever Christianity goes there is oppression and suffering. So as Gandhi said once, "Jesus stays, Christianity has to go."

The indications for this are found in the verse which states Simon the Cyrene carried the cross:

Simon= one who hears

Cyrene= a society without an axis

Alexander=the defense of man

Rufus= a red proletariat

v. 21: He was passing by. The Value in Gematria is 8956, חטהו‎‎, "his sin was his wheat."

Wheat is a symbol of parasatism. Pure wheat is a symbol of manufacturing which by definition is a shared enterprise. The idea of an exclusive God or government that cares for and saves some but not others is blasphemous to Jewish people. The etymology explains:

"In the classics, the noun σιτος (sitos) is a collective word for grain, and the word grain denotes the edible kernels of any cereal. It forms the second element of our English word parasite, which was named after the Greek word for someone who partook in someone else's meal or at someone else's cost. Our noun σιτος (sitos), grain, generally comprises κριθη (krithe), barley, and πυρος (puros), wheat. But unlike us moderns, the ancients did not name plants and animals after some abstract genus, but rather after behaviors and activities associated to them.

The origin of our noun σιτος (sitos) is obscure but it appears to ultimately derive from (or relate to) a Proto-Indo-European root "gweyh-to", meaning to live or be healthy (hence too Slavic words like zivot, life; and note the consonantal overlap with zuto, yellow, and zlato, gold). But it may also relate to the noun we discuss below, namely σινιον (sinion), a sieve (hence too the enigmatic "sift like grain" remark of Luke 22:31), from the verb σινομαι (sinomai), to hurt or harm, perhaps referring to the threshing of grain (hence too, perhaps, the enigmatic "do not hurt the oil and the wine" of Revelation 6:6).

Barley, or κριθη (krithe), appears to have been named too after the process of separating the kernels from the chaff, via the verb κρινω (krino), to separate, and κριτηριον (kriterion), a means to separate. Wheat, or πυρος (puros), appears to have been named after the fire over which it was baked (see πυρ, pur, fire). This indicates that barley was predominantly associated with the primary process of extracting the food from its natural environment, whereas wheat was mostly associated with the secondary process of manufacturing the natural resource into a synthetic product.

The noun πυρος (puros), wheat, does not occur in the New Testament, which many take to indicate that by the first century, our word σιτος (sitos) had become synonymous with πυρος (puros), wheat. But whether this is so or not should not relate to our translation: σιτος (sitos) means grain (which also in English, colloquially, denotes wheat).

Another assumption that's generally made is that wheat was predominantly used for bread and human food, whereas barley was predominantly used for animal fodder. But although barley indeed appears to have been three times as cheap as wheat or grain (Revelation 6:6), it was nevertheless also consumed by humans — the noun κριθινος (krithinos), means barley-bread. Jesus used five of these barley-breads to feed the 5000 (John 6:9-14)."

v. 22-24: They divided up His clothes. Baptism in the Holy Spirit requires the sharing of God's clothes. The Torah discusses clothes quite a lot. The Gospel Torah emphasizes the part where God says Aaron left the temple in his regular clothes. All of us have our own regular clothes we are supposed to wear outside the temple.

The Number is 10837, קחגז‎ ‎‎kahgaz, "the power of the fleece."

This is obviously an importance message to persons of African descent. We know God adores them and sent the Book of Mormon on their behalf. The message of their freedom from slavery and oppression was also ordained long ago.

v. 25-26: It was nine in the morning when they crucified him. 26 The written notice of the charge against him read: the king of the jews.The Number is 7599, זהטט‎‎‎, zahatet, "You fell. This is a mess."

Like you, I think this is a message from the Most High we should not take for granted. The Charge is "this is not the full code of the law. It is not sensible, nor does it convey the power of one person to others. What kind of people are you? It is time to board the ship."

This brings us to the answer of our most important modern question: what to do about Al Aqsa Mosque? Muhammad the Prophet emigrated to Jerusalem in order to broker the peace between the three Muhammadan religions, the site where the battle for religious freedom and personal independence began long before his time. It is of vital importance the site remain in the hands of persons who believe in his vision. Israel must be united and the people living there must not fight. The world must see and learn from their examples.

[talenlee]

May 2024 Wrapup!

Pride month sits on the horizon, full of rainbows and queer media and no doubt, absolutely, just the funnest time. Why would I, of all people, use June as an excuse to write about some absolute bummers or some really funny punchlines? What, me, taking corporate designated Pride month as an opportunity to make fun of things? Naaaah. But May! May happened and it uh kinda was a big deal? For me? Personally?

I feel like I use the icon of a fly for May more than I should but it’s not like it’s a month with powerful symbolism at work for me.

The Game Pile for May included:

Eureka, the Urban Investigative Fantasy Kickstarter

Murdle, the really good website and newspaper-style puzzle game

A video about Beneath a Steel Sky!

A print and play for my own game Lysen Co!

The Hugo’s House of Horrors series

I was approached about promoting Eureka, by the makers, and it was a good experience. Specifically, they sent me the thing, I showed them my notes, told them the kind of thing I would only tell them (like formatting stuff), and then … that was it. They trusted me to say what I wanted to say about the game, they shared it with their own opinions on what I had to say, and they checked if I was okay afterwards. It was really positive.

It was also one of the first times I’ve been told someone checked out, and played, and enjoyed the game based on the video I made about it. Beneath a Steel Sky got one more player this month thanks to me, which was also really cool.

I then went and released a print-and-play demo of my own game! I haven’t got my own printer’s proof copy of the game, but it’s out there and I don’t know if it’s been downloaded or not. I wanted to share it with the Print-n-Play subreddit for playtesting, and I’ve been too shy to.

Then finally, the Hero’s games is a thing I’ve kind of wanted to do for ages because there’s no way to explain the nonsense of the Whodunnit puzzle without just showing you gameplay footage of it, showing you the puzzle ‘being solved.’ It’s an area where video is genuinely the best way to do what I did. I don’t get to feel like I do that often!

Story Pile, we talked about:

Ronin, a movie about the fantasy of good spies

Endo and Kobayashi Live! The Latest On Tsundere Villainess Liesolotte, one of the worst anime of its type for just being completely lacking in anything good or remarkable about it,

A winter anime wrapup with Fox!

Pluto! A really good anime I liked a lot!

What else went up, oh, my two parter on drugs in Cobrin’Seil (part 1, part 2). An article explaining the Mormon Shelf and how it’s a useful term for use. I wrote about World building and number systems because hey you probably don’t know it but your number system is social! While we’re talking about social systems, I talked about privilege and how to contemplate it as a person who benefits from it that isn’t just like, you drip with it, and about the way that people can try and make other people make their arguments for them and also also I wrote about how we exist in a situation where ‘the right thing’ that ‘should’ work won’t.

Also? I had my 20th wedding anniversary a few hours ago. Weird day to write about!

I made this shirt design a while back, referencing a podcast I like and an activity I support (the cool and rad buying of machetes and bolt cutters which are probably useful tools for breaking locks on things like billionaires’ mansions). I still like it, you can check it out on black shirts and white shirts.

Alright, month of May, the diary, the over of it all, what about what happened in May. What happened in May? Hmm. Well, there was a birthday celebration for me, which meant I got given some homemade chilli. I got some lovely sambal, made some great curries with it. The semester wended to a close (like, tomorrow is the last day I’m going to class and that’s going to be just to play and prototype and help students out).

Comic-gong happened! Local convention! I got to see some of my former students who were really excited and we got to chat about stuff they hadn’t seen for a while. I got stickers that I then put in my bullet journal how cool is that. Hey why don’t – why do I call it that? LIke it’s my diary. I use the bullet journal method but it’s a diary, you know, I might as well put a unicorn on the cover.

Is my mind wandering inappropriately? Weird I wonder why.

I had to watch Ready Player One this month? It’s a movie I have a lot of animus towards but it’s certainly great at its task in the context, which is it’s a really well made conversation piece about what people mean and express and interpret about the things in the work they’re looking at. Even if I don’t like a thing I can still meaningfully engage with it and I love that, and I love what it gets students talking about.

Oh oh oh, we had the Suletta/Miorine vs Destiel tumblr vote this month! That was fun! I liked partaking in that and watching people get really mad about their favourite thing not being other people’s favourite things!

Basically, I had a pretty cool May. And a lot of people I know and love had awful months. Like breathtakingly bad months. Things that are hard to recover from, things that are hard to structure your life around, things that just fucking suck. It makes it hard to really think about the fact I had this month, where I got this work done and I did okay and I got to do something cool with my wife who I love.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[steveyoungjokes]

Discworld Pushed Me Left

by Steven Young

Thanks to the marvelous editor, Lyta Gold.

[Originally published in Current Affairs, (before the purge)]

It took Hannah Arendt two books and 800 or so pages to describe the origins of totalitarianism and the banality of evil. Terry Pratchett did it in 326 words when describing the workplace culture of the religious torture chambers in his book Small Gods. Karl Marx spent many chapters in Capital describing how the rich fleece the poor; Pratchett boiled much of that down into the 169-word “‘Boots’ Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness” in Men At Arms. By using humor to poke fun at the world that he created, Terry Pratchett made many progressive and leftist ideas accessible, explainable, and shareable. And his Discworld series helped move my political outlook leftward in a way that not many other things could.

I grew up conservative in the way that many middle-class suburban religious white kids are conservative. (“We’re fine, right? Everyone else must be fine, then. If not, it’s their fault.”) My father was a career Army officer and my mother had been in the Army during Vietnam. As adults, they both joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). That’s why I served a mission for two years in Brazil (for my Church), and why I joined the Marine Corps, serving my country (I thought, lol) for 12 years. You would think that being a religious colonizer, and a veteran in the “War on Terror” would have cemented my conservativeness, but the most important thing I inherited from my parents is silliness. I am a very silly person, and am more strongly influenced by funny things (comedy, light-hearted fiction) than serious things (pundits, war). Conservative comedy, I realized as I matured, wasn’t particularly funny or clever, since it consisted mostly of racism and bullying. In watching, listening to, and reading comedians who critiqued society and its institutions, rather than just mocking people, I began to see the weak points in my inherited conservative views. Then I found the Discworld, and was changed forever.

Terry Pratchett’s 41-novel Discworld series describes a place of barbarian heroes and hapless academics, brave witches and cowardly Wizards, silly kings and evil fairy godmothers. There are magical flying dragons, and domesticated swamp dragons with a propensity for inadvertent self-immolation. You’ll also find plenty of politics, as well as war, inventions, grifting, intrigue, love, danger, and DEATH. (On the Disc, Death is no mere abstraction, but an anthropomorphic personification with a voice like “the lid of a sarcophagus slamming,” who is really quite likeable.) Perhaps more than anything else, the Discworld has humor. Every page is full of puns and other wordplay, clever rejoinders, and silly situations. Pratchett’s stories are often laugh-out-loud funny and at the same time incredibly insightful, often by using a silly situation to show the inherent silliness of many things in our world. 

In his book The Truth, about the invention of the newspaper, Pratchett writes that “People like to be told what they already know… They get uncomfortable when you tell them new things… They like to know that, say, a dog will bite a man. That is what dogs do. They don’t want to know that a man bites a dog, because the world is not supposed to happen like that. In short, what people think they want is news, but what they really crave is olds.” Pratchett often gets the reader to think about “the news” by referencing “the olds,” re-telling classic stories from a different perspective to challenge their established values. For example, in Witches Abroad (Discworld #12, Witches #3), the young witch Magrat Garlick is given a magic wand, and told that she is to act as fairy godmother for a young woman named Emberella, an obvious play on Cinderella (both in name and, as we find out, in the story). After many adventures on the way to find Emberella, Magrat discovers that there is another fairy godmother who is “helping” Emberella by trying to force her into marrying a handsome “Prince” (who had until very recently been a frog, and still thinks he is one). The book hinges on Magrat and her fellow witches competing with this other fairy godmother by trying to help Emberella figure out if marrying the handsome prince is what she really wants. The entire story, in fact, is premised on what happens when powerful people (in this case, powerful magic users) try to impose their idealistic stories onto the lives of others.

Pratchett’s 41 novels are dense with literary references, and are hilariously critical of just about anything one could be critical of. I do not have enough space to give the incredibly broad scope of the characters and places of the Discworld the discussion they deserve, so I will focus for now on the biggest city on the Disc: Ankh-Morpork. That’s right, “Ankh-Morpork! Pearl of cities! This is not a completely accurate description, of course—it was not round and shiny—but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.” Ankh-Morpork can be likened to immediately-pre-industrialization New York City and London, and many of the problems in the stories arise from the growing industrialization of the Discworld—such as urban blight, policing, corruption, organized crime, innovation, monopolies, and lack of funding for public services. 

The government of Ankh-Morpork can be described as libertarian, more or less. The city of millions is ruled over by the Patrician, whose role is, as he understands it, to ensure that everything works. “Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote,” Pratchett writes in Mort. “The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote.” The Patrician, Havelock Vetinari, doesn’t rule Ankh-Morpork with an iron fist: he just lets everyone go about their business, and then rigidly holds them accountable. That said, his real power comes from his ability to influence people by sheer foresight and incredibly detailed planning. In fact it was Vetinari himself who instituted a new type of “justice” system. He legalized the Guild of Thieves: 

“Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, it at least should be organized crime...[I]n exchange for the winding down of the Watch, the [Thieves Guild] agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead… and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.”

I can imagine certain libertarians trying to explain how paying a predetermined amount to the Thieves Guild in exchange for a receipt and future protection is different from paying taxes, but you and I both recognize that that argument would be nonsense. By taking the concept of “organized crime” literally, Pratchett exposes the baselessness of the libertarian idea that freedom can be found through just legalizing everything and resolving all conflicts through contracts. Arrangements like these don’t make people any safer, and no matter what, they still result in powerful entities charging citizens money for protection. 

The societies in Discworld are pre-industrial, as I said, with some later going through industrialization, and for that reason there is little governmental regulation of housing, industry, commerce, and the environment. The water in Ankh-Morpork is described as having a “thick texture,” “too stiff to drink, too runny to plough” and smelling like “several armies had used it first as a urinal and then as a sepulcher.” Any urban planner will tell you that environmental degradation, among other things, leads to urban blight: Ankh-Morpork is squalid and dangerous. As Pratchett writes in Pyramids, there “was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place. A direct hit by a meteorite would count as gentrification.” For all the danger and organized crime, “murder was in fact a fairly uncommon event in Ankh-Morpork, but there were a lot of suicides. Walking in the night-time alleyways of The Shades was suicide. Asking for a short in a dwarf bar was suicide. Saying 'Got rocks in your head?' to a troll was suicide. You could commit suicide very easily, if you weren't careful.” There’s a sly joke in here about crime statistics, and how technical terminology can be used and misused to tell a certain story. Relatedly, the Assassins Guild in Ankh-Morpork doesn’t commit “murder”; instead they merely “inhume” their victims, but they keep detailed records of their work and come down very hard on unlicensed inhumations. The state of policing in the United States is so horrible that perhaps, if we had a strong Assassins Guild, it would be an improvement; sure, murder would be officially legal, but in the guild system it’s costly to hire an assassin and costly to be an unlicensed assassin, whereas in the United States the police often do the assassinating themselves. At least in Ankh-Morpork the Assassins Guild school provides one of the best and well-rounded educations on the Disc, with scholarships for need-based students. This is partly out of noblesse oblige, but mostly because the experienced assassins know how important it is to keep an eye on youngsters with an aptitude for the profession. (Yes, to some degree this sounds like the current school bully-to-cop pipeline, but at least Pratchett’s assassins are held accountable.)

Criminals in Ankh-Morpork are often just referred to as ‘entrepreneurs,’ and at the start of the Discworld series, the city doesn’t have much in the way of a law enforcement system. Due to Vetinari’s re-organization of the Guilds into self-enforcing crime causing and prevention, an official law enforcement body was seen as superfluous. For that reason, early in the Discworld series the Night Watch has only three very ineffective police officers. To leftists like me this may sound great, but  as discussed above, Ankh-Morpork’s methods of criminal self-enforcement coupled with unregulated markets makes for a pretty terrible place to live.  The three officers of the Night Watch—Captain Sam Vimes, Sergeant Fred Colon, and Corporal Nobby Nobbs—have three different takes on policing (all of which might be called a sort of “anti-policing.”) In Making Money, Pratchett writes that “Colon and Nobby had lived a long time in a dangerous occupation and they knew how not to be dead. To wit, by arriving when the bad guys had got away.” Sergeant Colon was the type of policeman who would say that “trying to keep down crime in Ankh-Morpork was like trying to keep down salt in the sea…” and would avoid having to interact with criminals by proactively guarding very notable city locations because “[o]ne day someone was bound to try to steal the Brass Bridge, and then they’d find Sergeant Colon right there waiting for them. In the meantime, it offered a quiet place out of the wind where he could have a relaxing smoke and probably not see anything that would upset him.” Corporal Nobbs, however, is the kind of person who joins armies to loot corpses. He’s often the main suspect in any unlicensed minor theft around town, stemming from his preferred method of police work (testing doorknobs to see if houses are locked, and going into the unlocked homes to make sure no thieves are there.) Slightly less risk-averse than Sergeant Colon, Corporal Nobbs would never fight fair:

“Corporal Nobbs,” [Vimes] rasped, “why are you kicking people when they’re down?”

“Safest way, sir,” said Nobby.

When we meet Captain Vimes in Guards! Guards! (Discworld #8, City Watch #1), he’s a somewhat functional alcoholic who stumbles through the city avoiding crime as much as possible, and trying to keep Colon and Nobbs from getting into dangerous situations. Over the course of his arc, we learn that Vimes is driven to drink because of past trauma, plus the ongoing and somewhat banal trauma caused by the internal tension that he experiences as an ersatz peace officer who is constantly confronted with the fact that he is mostly powerless to protect those who need protecting and that most of the harm caused to the city and its inhabitants is technically “legal.” In short, to the extent that Vimes can be considered a “good cop,” it’s because he comes to the realization that the status quo of organized and legalized criminal syndicates fueled by unregulated libertarian capitalism doesn’t help people, and he pushes back somewhat significantly against that status quo. 

That being said, in later books the Night Watch is expanded (as one of the more prominent efforts in Ankh-Morpork to officially reflect the diverse social makeup of the city). It becomes the City Watch, and Vimes is promoted, becoming a part of the aristocracy. This is all a bit neat—it just so happens that Ankh-Morpork’s libertarian problems can be solved by more policing, and Vimes is rewarded for his efforts. However, despite Vimes’ increased station, and the increased power of the City Watch he commands, he remains mostly grounded and functions as a traitor to his new class. This is likely because of the lessons he learned during his years of living on the lower rungs of society, probably the most famous of which is:

Captain Samuel Vimes’ “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

Though there are flaws to Vimes’ theory (mostly because there are many additional reasons why the rich are so much richer than the poor), his theory is very understandable, and can lead readers to ask deeper economic questions about labor, value, and planned obsolescence. It doesn’t seem like many leftist academics have incorporated Vimes’ Boots theory into their writings, but the internet is full of people who read the Boots theory and immediately find that it describes their lived experience. As many of us have seen, the internecine online leftist debate over “reading theory” vs. “not being a fucking nerd” often does not lead to much progress when it comes to spreading awareness of left ideas. It is my opinion that a very readable, understandable, and funny version of “theory,” like the one Pratchett wrote, allows for more people to understand—or become interested in or familiar with—leftist theories than would otherwise be the case. I know that during my post-Marine Corps life, Pratchett’s humor was integral for my discovery of progressive ideals.

There are subtler left touches in Pratchett’s work as well: while many stories do focus on high-level political actors or those on the front lines of conflict, his writing also considers the lives of ordinary working people. The personification of Death, rarely dealing with kings and potentates, spends time working as a farm hand, interacting with children (who, like magic users, can see him because they “can see what’s really there”), playing rock and roll, and trying to discover the meaning of life… and death. The witches, as powerful magic users, do interact with various political leaders, but it’s very clear that they gain their power and experience from helping farmers and shepherds deal with the everyday, practical issues that are part of life in a pre-industrial society. Another subseries focuses on the senior faculty of Unseen University—a bunch of old wizards with tenure—but every story illustrates the blinkered stupidity of these senior faculty members, and how useless they are without the help of their support staff. 

Though Pratchett often writes stories about the inherent goodness of most people, he is also interested in the ways in which anybody can become a collaborator with evil. Perhaps the best example of this comes in Small Gods, in which the country of Omnia launches a “Quisition” [inquisition] complete with torture pits. The cellar of the Quisition is not, at first glance, a wildly evil workplace: “There were no jolly little signs saying: You Don’t Have To Be Pitilessly Sadistic To Work Here But It Helps!!!” But take a look at their coffee breaks: “The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives.” This is such a small, perfect image of evil: the inquisitors heating their coffee and their torture tools on the same hearth. Pratchett further describes their environment:

“...there were the postcards on the wall. It was traditional that, when an inquisitor went on holiday, he'd send back a crudely coloured woodcut of the local view with some suitably jolly and risque message on the back. And there was the pinned-up tearful letter from Inquisitor First Class Ishmale "Pop" Quoom, thanking all the lads for collecting no fewer than seventy-eight obols for his retirement present and the lovely bunch of flowers for Mrs. Quoom, indicating that he'd always remember his days in No. 3 pit, and was looking forward to coming in and helping out any time they were short-handed.”

Pratchett could, of course, be describing any office break room. The casual and friendly quality stands in horrid contrast to the actual work of the inquisitors. On this point, Pratchett is unsparing:  “...there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.”

Reading this, as a former soldier in the U.S.’s imperial military, and as a member of a generally conservative religion with a strict hierarchy, this passage (and Small Gods in total) helped me recognize the part I had played in evil. I am still a member of my church, but do my best to push back against the banal and even friendly aspects that push people to accept evil results without question. Recently, I led the teenage boys in our local congregation in reading Small Gods together, with profound results: these fellows understood the underlying themes perfectly. It was very heartening to witness young people realize how humor can be a part of discussing serious topics, and how easily one can be co-opted to do harm by a seemingly inevitable and even friendly-seeming organization. It should be noted, that this experience did not (from what I could tell) cause these young men to question their faith, or to immediately start sinning (hormones will likely do most of that work), but it allowed them the space to question the parts of our organized religion that merit questioning. 

*

Teasing out all the thematic complexity of Pratchett would take an entire magazine by itself, but it’s worth looking at his approach to gender. There’s Monstrous Regiment, in which (spoiler) nearly every seemingly-male soldier in the army turns out to be a woman in disguise, and a very competent woman at that. (Incidentally, Pratchett does a surprisingly good job of describing the nitty-gritty specifics faced by a frontline soldier that are otherwise almost never mentioned in literature.) Other novels revolve around the experiences of Tiffany Aching, a young witch who must navigate adolescence, gender roles, feminism, rural life, and incursions by very nasty creatures; and she does it all while subverting traditional fantasy stories’ treatment of women and sexuality. 

Tiffany’s stories—and that of the other witches— are presented in sharp contrast to those of the wizards. These tenured academics live in a gender-segregated university that admits only men (with one eventual exception); they are celibate, and show no interest in the women who clean up after them. For example, in Unseen Academicals, the Archchancellor Ridcully realizes he “had never thought of the maids in the singular. They were all…servants. He was polite to them, and smiled when appropriate. He assumed they sometimes did other things than fetch and carry, and sometimes went off to get married and sometimes just...went off. Up until now though, he’d never really thought that they might think, let alone what they thought about.” Women’s labor may go unseen in the Unseen University, but the narrative ensures that you see it. Additionally, the absurdity of the university and the relative impotence of the wizards’ magic is constantly contrasted against the witch-style of magic that is largely about creating life and being useful. For example, while the witch Nanny Ogg is the matriarch of a large family, has had a host of husbands (which is not seen as particularly scandalous), loves singing dirty songs, and has published an adult-themed cookbook, the wizards of Unseen University have to keep the magical tome Ge Fordge’s Compenydym of Sex Majick “in a vat of ice in a room all by itself and there’s a strict rule that it can only be read by wizards who are over eighty and, if possible, dead.” There are multiple interactions between the wizards with their supposedly-high minded form of academic magic and the witches with their supposedly-homespun form of rural magic, which end up as pointed critiques both of gender and the hierarchical forms of educational systems. In most of the Discworld books, both wizards and witches believe that magic should be gendered; in Equal Rites (Discworld #3, Witches #1), the wizard Treatle states that “Witchcraft is Nature’s way of allowing women access to the magical fluxes, but you must remember that it is not high magic...High magic requires clarity of thought, you see, and women’s talents do not lie in that direction.” At the same time, Granny Weatherwax agrees, saying “if women were meant to be wizards, they’d be able to grow long white beards...wizardry is not the way to use magic, do you hear, it’s nothing but lights and fire and meddling with power.” 

That said, the witches do a much better job of questioning the existing hierarchy and challenging their social status than the wizards. In A Hat Full of Sky (Discworld #32, Tiffany Aching #2), Pratchett describes the nature of the witches’ non-hierarchy (while also illustrating the power of a determined individual) when he writes that “witches are equal. [They] don’t have things like head witches. That’s quite against the spirit of witchcraft...Besides, Mistress Weatherwax would never allow that sort of thing.” Though Granny Weatherwax is likely powerful enough to run roughshod over the Disc, she seems to be of the same mind as Tiffany Aching’s grandmother, who said “Them as can do has to do for them as can’t. And someone has to speak up for them as has no voices,” a rather different ethic than that exhibited by the wizards, who gain rank by killing older wizards. In “‘Change the Story, Change the World’: Gendered Magic and Educational Ideology in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld” L. Kaitlin Williams points out that “the witches’ subversive educational ideology not only undermines the wizard’ repressive educational ideology, but also...takes on a threateningly rebellious quality capable of toppling the hegemonic and hierarchical structures of Discworld.”

This is well-illustrated in The Wee Free Men (Discworld #30, Tiffany Aching #1), where Tiffany Aching seeks out more formal witch training and is told to “go to a high place near here, climb to the top, open your eyes...and then open your eyes again,” the lesson being that witches learn from experiencing the world as it really is, rather than taking tests and attending lectures. This self-education, based in lived experience and self-knowledge, helps her defeat her enemy, the more logic and reason-based Queen of Fairyland who tries to tempt and trick her with realistic dreams. Tiffany’s less-than-formal education also makes her a natural ally of the mysterious and magical Nac Mac Feegle “pictsies” with their anti-authoritarian rallying cry (in a Scottish-ish accent) of “Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae Master! We willna be fooled again!” 

But the most subversive part of Discworld—or possibly the least, depending on your perspective—may be the Industrial Revolution Series, featuring the novels Moving Pictures, The Truth, Monstrous Regiment, Going Postal, Making Money, and Raising Steam, which cover issues such as the free press, minority rights, support groups, industrialization, mechanization, government services, trains, recycling, and telecommunication. Three of the books center around Moist von Lipwig, a former conman who changes his stars (somewhat reluctantly) and helps found or resurrect some of Ankh-Morpork’s public institutions. In Going Postal, Lipwig is tasked with saving the city post office when Reacher Gilt (a brutal steampunk pirate who clearly inspired Jeffrey Bezos) tries to drive it into ruins (via murder and monopoly) in order to force everyone to use his new visual telegraph system. Moist manages to save the post office while working through civil rights issues and confronting the complexities of incorporating new technology and automation into a changing world. He also gives us a glimpse as to why he’s an ideal person to usher in a new style of banking when he stops to think about the concept of money: 

“Money is not even a thing, it is not even a process. It is a kind of a shared dream. We dream that a small disc of common metal is worth the price of a substantial meal. Once you wake up from that dream, you can swim in a sea of money.”

If this sounds a bit like the principles underlying Modern Monetary Theory, you’ll love the sequel Making Money, in which Moist is tasked with saving the city bank. Specifically, he is tasked with taking the bank over from the people who had previously been running it, and who, among other class warfare tactics, wouldn’t let poor people bank because they felt that “a brigand for a father was something to keep quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of.” In addition, they had come to understand that “the best way to make money out of poor people is by keeping them poor.” Moist saves the bank, and likely the city, when he comes to two important realizations. First, that many people of Ankh-Morpork do not trust the banks (likely because of the dismissive attitude bankers held [hold?] toward the poor), but they do believe in the overall progress of their city. Second, he notices that many people of Ankh-Morpork have begun using postage stamps (which Moist invented in Going Postal) as currency. Combining these two insights, he realizes that the city’s money does not need to be backed by gold, and begins making new money that is backed by the city itself (and further determined by the value of the bodies of the city’s inactive golem slaves/workers, which is just a whole other mess). If this doesn’t sound like an especially profound reform, you would be right. Ankh-Morpork remains a city with terrible living conditions, terrible water, and extreme inequality. Making Money is the only Discworld book with an economist in it, and it has predictable results. 

The neoliberal blindness at the end of Making Money is not the only flaw in Pratchett’s Discworld. Despite its breadth of subjects, it is very much a product of a Briton (Pratchett’s full name is actually Sir Terence David John Pratchett OBE), a fact which is reflected in the way that he writes about Fourecks, the Discworld stand-in for Australia, not being a finished continent. Pratchett often uses physical caricature to make great plays on words, and for the most part he makes jokes about everyone, but sometimes it can dip into the realm of body-shaming; for example, there’s quite a lot in Making Money about the villainess being fat and ugly.  Sometimes, Pratchett’s love stories can be a bit rote, as if it is the woman’s duty to let the man woo her, and although many of Pratchett’s women characters are quite empowered, this can sometimes take a form similar to the CIA’s new ad promoting case officers who refuse to “internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can, or should, be” while shaking hands with Gina Haspel. And because Pratchett’s books are humorous, they are sometimes seen as low brow or “light reading” that justifies “robbing readers of the true delights of ambitious fiction.” That may be true, but it should be noted that light or humorous reading can often be used to tell stories that don’t otherwise get told. That said, the effectiveness of Pratchett’s prose may be limited by the fact that oftentimes the people least likely to want to read a silly story are the people who most likely need to experience something from a different perspective.

Reading Pratchett is a delight, and not just because he uses minute details of the lived experiences of working people and incredible humor to turn accepted stories on their heads. Fun is important for its own sake. I’ve read most of the Discworld books several times and am constantly astounded that nearly every single page has jokes and puns on it. You’ll laugh, but you may also shed tears of melancholic camaraderie, as I did when reading Night Watch which features much of Vimes’ heartbreaking backstory. But don’t take my word for it; as Terry Pratchett’s Moist von Lipwig would say “I wouldn’t trust me if I was you. But I would if I was me.” 

[bookish-bi-mormon]

top 5 genres of mormon fiction you wish existed, go

Ooooooo this is a good question

1. Top has got to be Mormon Urban Fantasy/Paranormal. I want dealing with evil spirits and angels from a mormon perspective (rather than a catholic one). I want vampires who are susceptible to consecrated oil. I want teams of people who practice folk magic and use seer stones and divining rods as they fight the forces of evil

2. Queer Mormon re-told classics. This is one I'm planning on making myself. Jane Austen and other classic novels retold with modern queer mormons at the center.

3. Mormon Superheroes. Not necessarily heroes who's powers come from Mormon stuff, but just like Ms. Marvel where the character gets superpowers and also has a religious family and religious traditions and inspiration and questions and stuff.

4. Mormon sit-com. Just a silly comedy about a Mormon family that pokes fun at the culture while still allowing moments of sacredness. Something with the vibes of One Day at A Time.

5. Really anything that just has a casual Mormon character in it. I want to be allowed to be side characters in sci-fi, drama, crime shows, portal fantasy, etc. And have our religion be important to the character but not a plot point in the story and definitely not the butt of a joke.

[nerdygaymormon]

Alma 3:6-9

I've heard this verse used as proof that mormonism is racist. Do you have an argument against it?

These verses in the Book of Mormon say people were cursed by God with a dark skin for being wicked. For most of its history, members of the LDS Church understood this passage as God cursed these people & their descendants with darker skin.

In 2020, Church spokeswoman Irene Caso said of the mark of dark skin, "The nature and appearance of this mark are not fully understood. … Later, as both the Nephites and Lamanites each went through periods of wickedness and righteousness, the mark became irrelevant as an indicator of the Lamanites’ standing before God.”

The 2020 Come, Follow Me study guide was updated to say “the curse of the Lamanites [one of the groups] was that they were ‘cut off from [the Lord’s] presence … because of their iniquity.’ … When Lamanites later embraced the gospel of Jesus Christ, ‘the curse of God did no more follow them.’”

In Sunday School classes, I've heard it taught that this group of Lamanites met and joined with other inhabitants who occupied the land. These inhabitants had darker-colored skin. By intermarrying, their offspring naturally had more melanin as a result of genetics, not a curse. Other times I've heard it said that this is symbolic, light=goodness and dark=wickedness. Their skin didn't actually change color but their countenance darkened.

I think it's terrible it was ever taught that darker skin is a curse from God. I think it's problematic this language still exists in the book and wish it would be changed.

The title page of the Book of Mormon says “And now, if there are faults they are the mistakes of men; wherefore, condemn not the things of God…” It's an interesting way to introduce the book. If it's determined there are errors, can they be corrected?

Unfortunately, this view that dark skin means cursed fit with the narrative common in America at that time, that Africans were cursed with black skin because they're descendants from the Biblical figure Cain, and they were also cursed to be servants as descendants of the Biblical character Ham. This is clearly a case of twisting the Bible to justify their racism and the enslaving of Africans.

By the end of the Book of Mormon, the labels Nephite & Lamanite lose their association with color of skin as the two groups have intermixed. Instead, it's behavior which determines who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

In addition to what it teaches about faith in Christ, the overarching lesson of the Book of Mormon is that wealth inequality & pride are the real dangers that doom civilizations and those who resort to violence and fail to care for the needy will dwindle in unbelief. The book ends by showing us the Nephites dwindling to nothing.

Cal Burke, a friend of mine, summarizes the Book of Mormon as "a story about a large group of violently racist misogynists who thought they were better than everyone else, & wound up getting annihilated *explicitly because* they would not stop being violently racist misogynists. That's it, that's the plot."

The Doctrine & Covenants confirms that the Nephites are not the heroes but rather are a cautionary tale. D&C 38:39 contains this warning to the church: "beware of pride, lest ye become as the Nephites of old." This warning to the early Latter-day Saints meant if they didn't change they would face complete destruction

Even if we go with the earlier interpretation that the Nephites saw the Lamanites having darker skin as a curse from God and that having lighter skin is superior and shows the Nephites are better, we are warned to not be like the Nephites.

In December 2021, the General Handbook of the church was updated to say church members “strive to be persons of goodwill toward all, rejecting prejudice of any kind. This includes prejudice based on race, ethnicity, nationality, tribe, gender, age, disability, socioeconomic status, religious belief or nonbelief, and sexual orientation.”

Unfortunately, the church has a history of being prejudiced. It is trying to do better. I appreciate the steps it has taken and look forward to more steps to remove prejudice from the church.

[7-wonders]

Unexpected Guests (Adrian Chase)

Summary: Adrian tries to keep his work life separate from his personal life. Until one day when his work life literally shows up at his front door.

Word Count: 2.1k

Author's Note: I thought about what it would be like to meet the 11th Street Kids unexpectedly, and this is what happened.

Also! If you want to be on an Adrian taglist just let me know!

Adrian’s not the best at remembering things. In fact, he’s so bad at it that it was one of the first traits of his that you learned about when you got involved with him (right after his dry humor and his inability to read a room). The longer you’ve been dating Adrian, the more you’ve gotten accustomed to leaving him brightly-colored sticky notes as helpful reminders: “Don’t forget you picked up a shift at Fennel Fields tomorrow!”; “Pick up popcorn for movie night”; “The Sebring is going to explode soon, PLEASE get your oil changed today”.

Although Adrian has never asked you to remind him of what he’s forgetting, nor does he expect it of you, he very much appreciates it. The one part of his life that he tries to keep you away from though, is anything involving Vigilante. Not only is his line of work dangerous, with all sorts of guns and knives and other weapons that could very easily fatally wound someone inexperienced, but he’s also made a number of enemies as Vigilante. If these enemies caught wind of his personal life, or saw you interacting with Vigilante, they wouldn’t hesitate to use you against him. Adrian’s not someone that’s scared of a lot of things, but you being in harm’s way is the one thing that scares him the most in the world.

You, for one, completely understand this. It does suck when he can’t contact you for days at a time, or when he starts to tell you a story about the people he spends so much time with before remembering there’s sensitive information and having to awkwardly change the subject. It’s frustrating, but also kind of sweet, because he cares so much about you that he would shield you from such a huge part of his life just to protect you. Such is life when you’re dating someone who masquerades as an anti-hero.

Said anti-hero did not make it back from his anti-hero business until early this morning. You had tried your best not to wait up for him, knowing that he feels bad whenever he comes home at an ungodly hour and finds you awake, but it’s impossible to do that when you know that he could potentially be hurt or captured or any number of terrible things. After he finally did make it back and you had patched him up (again, he feels bad when you do, but you’re not about to watch when he bandages himself), you both fell into bed with the intention of not getting out of bed until mid-afternoon at the earliest.

Of course, that becomes pretty difficult when there’s a knock at the door. You’re the first to wake up, being a lighter sleeper than Adrian. It takes you a moment to register why you’ve woken up, and then you’re wondering why somebody’s knocking on your (Adrian’s, but same thing) door on a Sunday. It’s probably just some Mormons asking if you have a minute to talk about their lord and savior. You don’t make any move to get up, hoping that they’ll get the hint and leave so that you can go back to sleep.

They don’t get the hint. In fact, the knocking seems to increase in intensity, and you groan. This is a problem for the man sleeping next to you.

“Mmm, Adrian.” You refuse to open your eyes, choosing instead to blindly feel around until you find the wall of muscle that is Adrian’s chest and begin to shake him. “Door.”

Adrian always wakes up like he’s coming back from the dead, and today’s no different. When he does finally rouse, he sucks in a deep, loud breath and shoots straight up. “What?”

“Someone’s at the door, babe,” you mumble, already starting to drift off despite the noise. “Go get it.”

He falls back onto the mattress, tugging the blankets up over his head. “No way. You’re the one who heard it first, so you can deal with it.”

“It’s your apartment.”

“You practically live here.” Shit, he’s not wrong. You both basically live at each other’s places, which can get kind of confusing when you’re trying to find something at Adrian’s and remember it’s at yours, or vice versa. You guys really should just pull the trigger and officially move in together.

“What if it’s one of your many enemies and you’re sending me to face them alone?”

He groans, and you know you’ve got him. “Fine.” Adrian nearly throws himself out of bed to head to the front door, and you smirk before snuggling back into the pillows again.

You’re expecting his trip to the door to be quick. He’ll tell the Girl Scouts or whoever that nobody’s interested in buying what they’re selling, close the door on them, and then land on you when he jumps back into bed as revenge. So when at least five minutes passes and he’s still gone, you get suspicious. Is there actually an enemy of his at the door? You haven’t heard fighting or gunshots, but you can definitely hear murmuring if you focus hard enough. Maybe not an enemy, per se, but definitely somebody who Adrian finds important enough to have a conversation with in his home. It must be serious, considering Adrian is not the type of person to just invite random people inside.

It’s impossible to just sit in bed and wait for him to get back, so you finally decide to crawl out of bed and investigate. You’re thankful that you don’t have to search for any clothes to put on, both of you having been too tired to do any sort of fooling around last night when Adrian finally came home. You creep slowly down the hallway, listening for any sort of threats or heated voices that mean that you should stay hidden. Instead, when you hear laughing and joking around, you peek around the corner in curiosity.

There’s a group of people in the living room, but Adrian seems to be extremely at-ease with them. Odd, considering it took him a couple of months to even be mildly comfortable with being himself around you. There’s two women and two men, and three of them are unfamiliar to you. The other one, the man, is one that you recognize from the many pictures that Adrian has on his phone. But what’s Christopher Smith doing in your boyfriend’s home on a Sunday?

“Adrian?” you call, making the group look over at you. You’re really not expecting the looks of shock that all four of them have when they notice you, and you freeze. Why are they looking at you like that? “Is everything okay?”

Adrian grins and nods. “Yeah! These are my–”

“Dude,” a bearded man interrupts, “you’re just gonna tell your one night stand all of your secrets?”

One night stand? Who does this guy think he is? You plaster a smile on your face, determined to make him feel bad for this assumption (please, as if you would ever be a one night stand), and introduce yourself. “I’m Y/n. Adrian’s girlfriend.”

It’s interesting how the four people that have invaded your apartment seem to work simultaneously, almost like they share one brain cell. They all fall silent, their eyes jumping back and forth between you and Adrian before finally, the blonde woman is the first to remember that she’s in front of others.

“Oh my god, what?” she says.

Chris laughs loudly and claps Adrian’s shoulder. You wince, knowing that he landed wrong on that shoulder last week and it’s still a little tender. “No way!” Chris exclaims. “We thought she was fake!”

Adrian laughs awkwardly, but you just stare incredulously. “Who are you guys?”

“Oh yeah! These are my team members from Task Force X.” Adrian points at each team member and gives you their name. “This is Harcourt, Economos, Adebayo, and Chris! Everybody, this is my girlfriend, Y/n.”

“Hi,” you mutter, slightly lifting your hand up to wave at them. They greet you back, all of you still sizing each other up. You’re so confused at everything that’s happening, especially because you’re still waking up. You tug the hem of your (Adrian's) sleep shirt down, feeling self-conscious in just that and a pair of shorts.

“Ha, so you’re probably wondering why Smith said what he said,” the woman Adrian identified as Adebayo says. You nod. “Well, that is because, uh…we thought you were fake.”

“Why would you think that?”

“C’mon,” Chris interjects, “have you seen the guy?”

“Yeah, have you?” You wave your hand in Adrian’s general direction. Why wouldn’t you date him? Adrian’s funny, sweet, protective…and incredibly hot. That’s definitely a plus.

“What these dumbasses mean to say is that Adrian talks about you all the time, but he refuses to show us a picture. That’s why we got the impression that you weren’t real,” Economos explains.

“He likes to keep work and personal life separate.”

“I like to keep my work and personal life separate!” You and Adrian both look at each other and smile at how you both said that at the same time.

“I can assure you I’m very much real and very much in love with my boyfriend. Adrian Chase,” you tack on, though you probably didn’t need to do that. “Um, not that I’m not happy to meet you guys, but since it’s ten thirty on a Sunday morning and I’m in my pajamas, I’m gonna ask the inevitable: why are you here?”

“Funny story!” Adrian chimes in. “Remember how you’re always getting on me because I’m not good at remembering things and I never write stuff down so that I can remember those things?” You nod. “Well, I forgot that we had a mission debrief this morning after last night. And my phone is dead, so nobody was able to reach me.”

“Oh! Suddenly, this all makes a lot more sense.”

“We’re really sorry to have barged in like this,” Harcourt apologizes.

“No, there’s no worries. I totally get it. Thank you for being so concerned about Adrian, I really appreciate it.” You look at Adrian, with his tousled hair and wearing an old Star Wars shirt. He was alone for so long before you came along and he finally had someone to care about him. You’re glad that there’s others who can be there for him as well. “If you need to take Adrian, feel free.”

“They gave me a rundown of the debrief before you came out here,” Adrian says.

“We’ll go ahead and leave you to your Sunday,” Adebayo awkwardly bounces on her feet, doing a little shimmy in the direction of the door. You already like her.

You let Adrian handle the goodbyes and getting his guests out the door, choosing to stand back and watch. When everybody’s finally gone and the door is locked behind them, you yawn and rub your eyes. Nobody should have to interact with people so soon after waking up. Adrian looks at you, grinning like he’s in pain, which typically means he knows he did something wrong.

“So, I should probably apologize,” Adrian says.

“For forgetting you had a meeting or making me talk to strangers?”

“Both?”

You smile, shuffling towards him and letting him wrap his arms around you. “You don’t have to apologize. It happens. Besides, I’m glad I got to finally meet your ‘coworkers’.”

“Yeah?”

You nod. “Not glad that they thought I was fake though. As if you’re not a catch.”

Adrian blushes. He’s still not quite used to praise and compliments and someone genuinely loving him, which is why you love doing it so much.

“Now I can make sure that you don’t forget your superhero stuff either,” you point out.

“You’re the best.”

“Am I?” He nods. “You can show me that by carrying me back to bed.”

You’ll take any chance you can get to be in Adrian’s strong, muscular arms. After you had gotten over the initial doubts of if your super-ripped boyfriend could hold you (he can), it became something you very much enjoy. From the giggles that are escaping from Adrian as he lifts you up so that you’re clinging to his back, you can tell he enjoys it just as much. You’ll help him remember anything he needs if it means you get this kind of payment from him.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Booklist on "Red Team Blues"

I've published more than 20 books, and I still get nervous in the few months leading up to a new book's release. It's one thing for my agent, my editor and my wife to like one of my novels - but what about the rest of the world? Will the book soar, or bomb? I've had books do both, and the latter is No Fun. Scarifying, even.

My next novel is Red Team Blues, which Tor Books and Head of Zeus will publish on April 25. It is a significant departure for me in many ways: it's a heist novel about cryptocurrency, grifters and crime bosses, the first book in a trilogy that runs in reverse chronological order (!):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

The hero of RTB is Marty Hench, a forensic accountant and digital pioneer. Marty got his start when he discovered spreadsheets as an MIT undergrad. He got so deep into the world of Visicalc and Lotus 1-2-3 that he dropped out of university, moved to Silicon Valley, and pitted his ability to find money with spreadsheets against people who use spreadsheets to hide money.

RTB opens with Marty on the verge of retirement, when he is roped in for one last job - a favor to a friend who has built a new cryptocurrency that is in danger of imploding thanks to some stolen keys. If Marty can recover the keys, his customary 25% commission will come out to more than a quarter of a billion dollars. How could he say no?

I wrote this book in a white-hot fury of the sort that I underwent in 2006, when I wrote Little Brother in eight weeks flat. Red Team Blues took six weeks. It's good. I sent it to my Patrick Nielsen Hayden, my editor. The next day, I got this email:

That.

Was.

A! Fucking! Ride! Whoa!

That night, I rolled over in bed to find my wife wide awake at 2AM, staring at her phone. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Finishing your book," she said. "I had to find out how it ended."

I loved writing this book, and after I finished it, I found that Marty Hench was still living in my mind. How could I keep writing about him, though? Red Team Blues is his final adventure. Then, one day, it hit me: now that I knew how Marty's career ended, I could write about how it started.

I could write prequels - as many as I chose - retelling the storied career of Martin Hench, the scambusting forensic accountant of Silicon Valley. I pitched my editor on two prequels - one a midcareer adventure, the other his origin story - and my editor bought 'em. For the first time in decades, in dozens of books, I'm writing a trilogy.

It's nearly done. I finished the second book, "The Bezzle" - about private prisons and financial corruption - late last year. I'm 80%+ through the final one, "Picks and Shovels," AKA Marty's origin story, a caper involving an early eighties PC-selling pyramid scheme run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi, who run their affinity scam through a company called "Three Wise Men Computers."

But for all that I love these books, love writing these books, I am still nervous. Butterflies-in-stomach. I got some reassurance in December, when the New Yorker's Chris Byrd said some extraordinarily kind things about RTB when he profiled me:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/cory-doctorow-wants-you-to-know-what-computers-can-and-cant-do

Despite that, though, I continued to have vicious pangs of self-doubt, imposter syndrome, superstitious dread, haunting memories of the mentors and writers I admired as a young man whose careers were snatched away by changing industry trends, market shifts, or just a bad beat. I love this book. Would other people? I'm not a crime writer. Ugh.

Then, this week, my publicist Laura Etzkorn at Tor sent me the first trade review for RTB, Booklist's starred notice, by David Pitt:

Well, talk about timely. In the wake of the late-2022 collapse of cryptocurrency comes this novel about a forensic accountant who’s hired to work a case involving electronic theft of cryptocurrency. The guy’s name is Martin Hench; he’s in his late sixties, with decades of experience, and he thinks he’s seen it all. Until now. Doctorow, author of such novels as The Rapture of the Nerds (2012) Homeland (2013), and Pirate Cinema (2012), is a leading force in cyberpunk fiction, and here he mixes cyberpunk with traditional private eye motifs (if Martin Hench feels a bit like Philip Marlowe or even Jim Rockford, that’s probably not a coincidence).

Doctorow's novels are always feasts for the imagination and the intellect, and this one is no exception: it’s jam-packed with cutting-edge ideas about cybersecurity and crypto, and its near-future world is lovingly detailed and completely believable. Another winner from an sf wizard who has always proved himself adept at blending genres for both adults and teens.

To quote a certain editor of my acquaintance:

That.

Was.

A! Fucking! Ride!

Whoa!

Maybe this writing thing is gonna work out after all.

ETA: Well, this is pretty great. Shortly after I hit publish on this, Library Journal published its review of Red Team Blues, by Andrea Dyba:

Cyber detective, forensic accountant—whatever his title, 67-year-old Marty Hench is one of those rare people who tries to prevent financial crimes. He’s spent his whole career as a member of the Red Team, as an attacker, one who always has the advantage. Now ready for retirement, he’s living it up in California and trying to decide what he wants to do when he grows up when he’s hired by an old friend. Danny Lazer, the founder of the new crypto titan Trustlesscoin, needs Marty to recover stolen cryptographic keys and prevent the type of financial crisis that people lose their lives over. Marty delves into the shady underside of the private equity world, where he’s caught between warring international crime syndicates. The sincere and intelligent writing has a noir feel to it, enhanced by Marty’s dry humor. There’s a sense of satisfaction as this unassuming retired man dishes out comeuppance.

VERDICT  This absorbing and ruthless cyberpunk thriller from Doctorow (Attack Surface) tackles modern concerns involving cryptocurrency, security, and the daunting omnipotence of technology. Great for fans of Charles Stross.              

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/red-team-blues-1794647

[Image ID: Will Stahle's cover for the Tor Books edition of 'Red Team Blues.']

[bookofmormonmemes]

in lamoni’s kingdom we don’t say “i love him” we say “to me he doth not stink” and i think that’s beautiful

[sea-owl]

You rang for a Percy Jackson Bridgerton AU? Long ago, it was said that the Godess of love showed favor on the the Bridgerton family and gave them her blessing. Meanwhile, Violets side was blessed by Hera for being so faithful and nurturing. Now you get to the modern Bridgertons. None of them have been lucky with love. The story really starts after Colin and Eloise find out Penelope is Whistledown and are not happy about it. Poor Penelope can’t exactly tell them she saw horrible futures for them and this was the only way to avoid it. It’s not like she could tell Colin that Marina got knocked up with a demigods child or that Theo was really a monster out to steal Eloise’s soul! Anyways they are ranting to their siblings about this all while walking out of a restaurant when a monster attacks them out of nowhere. Luckily Kate and Sophie arrived in time to save their hides (after getting a frantic call from Penelope). Realizing they have no idea what is going on, the bring them to camp half blood where the Bridgertons luck is about to change.

Cue Michael flirting with Francesca, Benedict trying to find Sophie who keeps alluding him somehow, Anthony being annoyed and turned on by the snarky woman who saved him, and Colin and Eloise now freaking out that Penelope has seen them die or have something bad happen to them. Multiple times. It’s not fun for her. That and Colin is not happy that apparently Penelope frequently gets sent on dangerous quests with the Aphrodite guy flirting with his sister and the brother of the man who knocked up Marina.

Ya'll trying to force me to figure out Gareth and Lucy's godly parents aren't you? Please don't leave me in the dark ya'll, someone please give suggestions.

Okay so since I refuse to do a full on crossover fic, cause I don't got the brain power, ya'll are going to get the vaguest details from Percy Jackson, like world building only stuff.

Some maybe helpful backstory because I don't know how to fit it in. Lady Danbury's family are blessed by Hecate and they are tasked with the protection and training of the demigods. The camp is technically on her land that's been in her family for generations.

So let's set this world up:

Heroes, monsters, and gods. It's the thing of myths and legends but there was no other way to describe that thing that attacked them.

Agatha Dambury ("That's Lady Danbury Bridgertons!") and the woman next to her, who insisted they call her Auntie H, led the eight siblings around the well honestly it looked like a summer camp.

"So why were we attacked by those. . . monsters?" Anthony asked. He could tell his siblings were itching to ask the same thing.

Auntie H gave them a sympathetic smile. "Children of Echidna to be more precise."

Eloise scoffed. "I see you read Lady Whistledown."

Lady Danbury laughed. "The children here would be fools not to. It takes a lot of effort to exposing the disguises monster's and spies' use. While you mortals think it nothing more than a gossip blog it has saved many demigods lives."

"Sirens, Mormones, Chimeras, the names of the Roman and Greek demigods who would rather start a war than live peacefully with their family," Auntie H started listing off. "They all have been listed for the safety of others. So many demigods and legacy children have been saved since we found a way for demigods to use technology, the Lady Whistledown blog included."

"You Bridgertons are a blessed family, quite literally. You all have been born with the blessings of my sister and my niece. Sadly with those blessings it has given you all a certain smell that attracts monsters."

Daphne wrinkled her nose. "A smell?"

"Normally it's only a smell attached to those brats. But with those blessings you all smell like them now."

Ever impatient Eloise lets out a huff. "Whose them and what is this place?"

"This is Camp Half-Blood, well the European camp at least. Our main camp is in the United States since that is where Olympus is located now too, but my family does tend to take trips around the world which more often than not leads to children."

"You keep saying demigods," Colin said. "Do you mean like actual demigods, half mortal and half god? Like Hercules, Achillies, Perseus, and Helen?"

"I see you know our history." Auntie H nodded. "And yes. Camp Half-Blood is where we train the children to survive monsters, creating a safe haven for them."

"So what happens to us? We are not demigods, but you say we smell like them. Should we be worried about them attacking again?" Anthony asked.

"That's what the children are discussing in their meeting right now," Lady Danbury said. "While it won't be all of them the councilors who can come on such short notice have been deciding what we do with you. This is their home after all."

That's when Lady Danbury and Auntie H led them into a room. It was a regular looking meering room. A round table sat in the middle with 11 chairs occupied. Some the Bridgertons recognized, others they didn't. At the urging of Auntie H the Bridgertons took seats.

Lady Danbury tapped her cane to the floor. "Alright, introduce yourselves to the overly blessed Bridgertons."

The first to stand up was someone Anthony recognized. "Simon Bassett, son of Zeus."

The next to stand was a girl with olive brown skin and dark auburn hair. "Ofelia Lopez, daughter of Poseidon."

Next was a bubbly girl with longest hair out of the whole group. "Astrid Grimsson, daughter of Hades."

The next guy awkwardly rubbed the back of his neck. "Phillip Crane, son of Demeter."

His friend next to him held no such awkwardness as he bodly stood up and winked at Francesca. "Michael Stirling, son of Aphrodite."

An Indian girl stood up, rolling her eyes at Michael. The Bridgertons reconized her as one of the people who saved them. "Kate Sharma, daughter of Athena."

The next one to stand could only be described as big. "Thomas O'Neill, son of Hephaestus."

The girl after only raised her cup. "Marie Beaufoy, daughter of Ares."

The next one to stand kept her gaze directed at the wall, eyes glazed over. "Penelope Featherington, daughter of Apollo."

The blonde girl stood after, giving Penelope a shoulder squeeze. She was the other one who saved them during the attack. "Sophie Beckett, daughter of Hermes."

The last one with dyed purple hair stood. "Logan Smith, son of Dionysus."

"So have you all come to a verdict?" Auntie H asked.

Simon stood back up. "We have. After learning the Bridgertons have the smell of low-level demigods and having Penelope seeing no future where it turns out in their favor should we turn them away we agreed that the Bridgertons should stay here to at very least learn how to defend themselves."

Lady Danbury banged her cane against the floor again. "Then it's settled. Meeting adjourned."

The demigods got up and gave a word or nod to the Bridgertons as they walked out. Sophie and Phillip helped Penelope onto Michael's back, her eyes still glazed over. The two to stay seated was Simon and Kate.

"I'm going to help the boys get Penelope to her cabin and talk to them about setting up some archery training sessions," Sophie said before running after the other three.

"Is Pen okay?" Colin asked.

"She's just tired," Simon answered. "Penelope's father is the god of prophecy which led her to being born with the power to see the future. We had her over do it today and her gift can wear her out if she searches too many futures at once." Simon snickered at the thought of something. "By the way she does plan to yell at all of you first chance she gets."

"But onto your training," Kate interupted.

Simon plaryfully rolled his eyes.

"We'll start with sword training tomorrow and then work our way around other weapons. Once we find what you all are good at then we'll push forward." Kate stood up. "Prepare yourselves. Just because you're all mortal doesn't mean we'll go easy on you."

"Well isn't she fun," Anthony snarked.

"More fun than our roman family members," Simon joked.