#this is a reminder to all of you to become luddites

[emptyanddark]

In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. “The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,” said one source.

“Nothing happens by accident,” said another source. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.”

According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.

In the majority of cases, the sources added, military activity is not conducted from these targeted homes. “I remember thinking that it was like if [Palestinian militants] would bomb all the private residences of our families when [Israeli soldiers] go back to sleep at home on the weekend,” one source, who was critical of this practice, recalled.

...

The third is “power targets,” which includes high-rises and residential towers in the heart of cities, and public buildings such as universities, banks, and government offices. The idea behind hitting such targets, say three intelligence sources who were involved in planning or conducting strikes on power targets in the past, is that a deliberate attack on Palestinian society will exert “civil pressure” on Hamas.

The final [fourth] category consists of “family homes” or “operatives’ homes.” The stated purpose of these attacks is to destroy private residences in order to assassinate a single resident suspected of being a Hamas or Islamic Jihad operative. However, in the current war, Palestinian testimonies assert that some of the families that were killed did not include any operatives from these organizations.

In the early stages of the current war, the Israeli army appears to have given particular attention to the third and fourth categories of targets. According to statements on Oct. 11 by the IDF Spokesperson, during the first five days of fighting, half of the targets bombed — 1,329 out of a total 2,687 — were deemed power targets.

...

“We are asked to look for high-rise buildings with half a floor that can be attributed to Hamas,” said one source who took part in previous Israeli offensives in Gaza. “Sometimes it is a militant group’s spokesperson’s office, or a point where operatives meet. I understood that the floor is an excuse that allows the army to cause a lot of destruction in Gaza. That is what they told us.

“If they would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it,” the source added.

...

“They will never just hit a high-rise that does not have something we can define as a military target,” said another intelligence source, who carried out previous strikes against power targets. “There will always be a floor in the high-rise [associated with Hamas]. But for the most part, when it comes to power targets, it is clear that the target doesn’t have military value that justifies an attack that would bring down the entire empty building in the middle of a city, with the help of six planes and bombs weighing several tons.”

Indeed, according to sources who were involved in the compiling of power targets in previous wars, although the target file usually contains some kind of alleged association with Hamas or other militant groups, striking the target functions primarily as a “means that allows damage to civil society.” The sources understood, some explicitly and some implicitly, that damage to civilians is the real purpose of these attacks.

[pagingcs]

Lydia wanted me to make sure our little escapade would hit the news, so I sat down and sent out the bots right around eight. They’re set up to go out in waves, small first, then bigger-bigger-smaller, then bigger again, and so on until the first wave completes and the virtual server downcycles. The trick, as it turned out, was to not be too random. Machines have a way of leaving their fingerprints, and my little network relied on me making the final keystroke. Like a pulse, or maybe a friendly ghost, my console started lighting up as the bots started sending back their little reports. As soon as the console was printing faster than I could keep up, I opened the little window that collated results as a trend line, and watched it as you would watch a fish pond, or a rolling spring cloud. It was working.

Three hours later, the bots had done their work, and I closed the window. My feed was full of news about a new and suspicious hacking ring, and the discourse was just what you’d expect. Charlatans first, then luddites, then anti-luddites, then clout-chasers. The specialty outlets would probably run something tomorrow, and with any luck, at least one of the big guys would publish something by the weekend. I added a reminder to do a second push on Friday afternoon, and closed the console.

This little adventure in social engineering was just a warmup, of course. The trick to good marketing is to make your name knowable but not known, not until right when you need it to be. When we finally get the go ahead to pull the real trigger, our little collective will already be under suspicion. Since we were already jangling around in people’s heads, it will be easy to claim the credit.

I can’t tell you the full nature of the job itself, and that’s because I mostly don’t know it. Lydia has some strange idea about distributed hacking, each cell on a virtual connection and never interacting except where necessary. Sure, we all know where we’re going, more or less, but no one’s got a clue as to what car we’re taking, if you catch me.

Of course you don’t catch me. Of course we all looked for each other as soon as we pulled the first job. That was a trick, were you paying attention?

On a separate machine, the whirr and buzz of a cobbled-together intranet kept the burner machine I used at a near constant whine, and an occasional bump as the decrepit internal fan warped under the strain. Already there was come chatter about the public push for name recognition, and I dutifully (and gleefully) presented my role. Several of the members congratulated me on how natural it all looked, and just as many derided me for how generated it felt. That’s life in the underground for you. If someone’s talent isn’t being used for mischief, they’ll use it for wearing down the competition. I was proud of my little botnet, and there was nothing the faceless wonders could say today to dent my pride in a job well done.

I was getting updates from the feeds now, the luddites had taken the bait. I could feel their little paws hammering out their indignation. Every key tap was an indictment of their hypocrisy, of course, but if they could use their own anger to stoke their psyche, I didn’t see why I couldn’t.

You might think I would have a pang of conscience about manipulating people, but I don’t. Any fool that spends that much time on their feeds gets what they pay for, and gets to become what their generous benefactors pay for; a pair of eyeballs, blinking away.

I leave the intranet machine running, and shut down my media ops rig. I get a message from Lydia saying she liked my work, but she’ll need to talk to me first thing tomorrow about the next phase. She phrases it like she wants me to ask more about it, but I don’t take the bait. I’m tonight’s winner, and I plan to celebrate.

The fog is out when I leave the apartment. It’s cool and fresh on my face, and it hides the stink of the streets as well as anything. I walk the four blocks to Dragon 88, the kind of oddball family-run place that serves pretty decent Chinese food and for some reason, steaks. The dining room is small, but clean and spacious enough. The walls are done up in red wallpaper and the chairs are cheap, but sturdy. There’s only one other couple in here, but then again, it’s almost midnight. In the far corner the dining room opens to the kitchen, separated by a chest-height bar covered in bric-a-brac. Jerry Liu, the guy that’s been standing at that counter for as long as I can remember, waves me in. I take a seat at a table close to the window, but not directly in front of it. I don’t bother with the menu.

After a while, Mrs. Liu makes her way out from the back and walks over to the table. She doesn’t like me, but I don’t blame her.

“Usual?” she asks.

“Not tonight,” I say, “Special occasion. Bring me rice, garlic greens, and a filet.”

“Better with broccoli, you want that too?”

“Sure.”

“Ok, a few minutes.”

She walks over to the counter separating the kitchen from the dining room and relays my order in rapid-fire Cantonese. Jerry nods, looks up, and smiles. He says something quickly to his wife and gets back to work.

Mrs Liu makes her way back to the table.

“You want a drink? Wine for the steak?”

“Beer please. Tsingtao if you have it.”

She nods and gives a weak smile, the growing size of my check easing her distaste, and goes back to get the beer.

The front door opens, and a woman walks in.

[readinginthereadyroom]

let’s talk about eddie diaz and technology for a minute. 

we’ve seen him become a bit of a technophobe in s4. paranoid that hildy’s watching and targeted marketing him after they have a call to a smarthome in future tense (911 4x03). 

resulting in eddie forcing christopher and buck to take some time away from screens. unplugging the gaming console and rounding up all the remotes. and them retaliating by pranking him with a new coffee machine. 

and here’s the really interesting thing about that. this character trait is only introduced after eddie meets abby during the train derailment in what’s next? (911 3x18). 

this is important because buck’s relationship with abby in s1 was always done via technology. they first “meet” over a 911 call. abby with a headset at her desk surrounded by screens. she then sees buck on the news and decides to call him. the whole first act of their relationship is over the phone. even their first time together. 

and it’s only when buck becomes a physical mainstay in abby’s life. when he sorta moves in after her mother passes. that she truly balks at their relationship. and puts a literal continent of distance between them. 

because hiding behind technology. using that barrier. has allowed her to keep from truly emotionally investing in their relationship. a metaphorical arms-length.

we even see it in the costume design for abby. she has a work pair of glasses and a life pair of glasses. a brown tortoiseshell pair and a pink crystal pair. and they’re always reflecting blue lights. and not only at work. it’s as if she’s always one step away from a screen. just slightly removed from reality. 

she wears her tortoiseshell frames outside of work once. on the hot air balloon date with buck. which gets interrupted. and is the first real bump in their relationship. 

contrast all of that with eddie. he’s so tactile. a clasp on your shoulder, gestures with his hands, pats on the back, and thumping hugs kinda guy. and with christopher he’s a steadying hand, a spinning hug, an arm to carry, and a kiss to the hair kinda father. 

so he’s immediately a physical presence in buck’s life. I mean he’s introduced practically topless. and their first conversation is in the gym about calendar thirst traps. within weeks their already bumping shoulders when they walk, sitting side-by-side at the dinner table, and leaning into each other against the firetruck.

plus their whole job requires them to be in each’s space. passing tools and medical equiptment. being physically connected by ropes and harness and pulleys and winches. they have each others backs. 

so really it’s no surprise that they end up so entwined outside of work too. and not just buck and eddie. but buck and christopher. besides eddie, only buck ever carries christopher. or gets down on his level to talk or recieve a hug. cradles his head and rubs his thumb against his temple. 

plus christopher is very much his father’s son. he’s equally as tactile. taps buck’s jaw just like he does eddie’s. does his walk-into-your-space-and-lean-against-you-while-using-his-crutches version of a hug. laughs with his whole body. likes to draw and give cards.

and yeah, they spend a lot of time playing video games or watching movies. activities that involve screens. but they do that together. all piled onto the couch. bouncing up and down. high-fiving and dog-piling on each other. it’s the opposite of detached and remote.

they’re constantly in each other’s space and homes. this is eddie’s house. I’m not really a guest. 

and we rarely see them talk on the phone. or text. they prefer to send pictures. and there are plenty of examples of off-screen conversations. usually when the other isn’t physically present. because even when they are apart they are connected. filling up the absences with reminders. 

not to mention when they are forced to be apart. how they both, separately, hit rock bottom during the divorce lawsuit arc. which stemmed from a bodily injury for buck and manifested as cage fighting for eddie. 

how eddie couldn’t initially go to buck when he was pinned under the ladder truck. how buck clawed at the mud when eddie was trapped in the well. how they held each other’s hands for comfort each time. 

and later. how their trauma will be shared during the sniper. how they are shown phyically separated but also connected by eyeline and eddie’s blood spray. eddie’s hand hitch as if he’s trying to reach out to buck. buck being forced to pull eddie’s injured to get him to safety. buck bodily throwing eddie into the firetruck and then cradling his head in lieu of a c collar. 

and it’s why. when abby does show up in buck’s life again. she clutches her phone in her hands. holds it between her and buck while eddie stands by buck’s side. she still needs that remove from buck. a barrier of impersonal technology. 

and why when she meets with buck later. she wears a new set of tortoiseshell frames. presumably her work glasses. because she’s not there to apologize for leaving him behind. for dodging his calls and forcing him to keep track of her travels via instagram. and she knows it. knows she was in the wrong. but not able to own up to it. to be honest with him. so she hides behind the work persona. the detached voice behind the blue screens reflected in the dark glasses.

so really. does it surprise anyone that they make eddie wary of smart technology? turn him into a bit of a 20th century luddite to more fully emphasize the difference in his relationship with buck. as compared to abby’s.

because even without the technology he and buck and chris still have a games night. I think we're gonna be playing it old school for a while. they probably break out the board games and crowd around the coffee table. still up in each other’s spaces. laughing and bouncing in glee.

tactile and affectionate and not a screen in sight. 

[passionate-reply]

Great Albums is back for a third time! This week, we discuss Dazzle Ships, the avant-garde masterpiece that was so infamously weird, it almost “sank” the pop career of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Or did it? As usual, you can find a full transcript of the video under the break, if you’d like to read it instead.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums. Today, I’ll be talking about an album that many would consider OMD’s best, and many would consider the last great album they ever made: 1983’s Dazzle Ships, their fourth studio LP. It has a reputation that precedes it, as a strange, experimental, and avant-garde album. And I can’t argue with that too much, when it has tracks that sound like "ABC Auto-Industry."

The most obvious thing one can say about Dazzle Ships is that it’s dense and rich with samples. You’ll hear found sounds ranging from a “Speak and Spell” toy to a radio broadcast from Czechoslovakia. It’s a magpie’s nest constructed of garbage and baubles, collage-like and conscientiously artificial. And OMD’s Paul Humphreys and Andy McCluskey managed to make it before sampling became easier and hence more widespread later in the 1980s, thanks to advancements in digital technology. In its own day, it was, famously, a huge flop, baffling even the critics, which makes it tempting to argue that the world simply wasn’t ready for it. Popular legend says that Humphreys and McCluskey were essentially forced to make increasingly soft, pop-oriented music for years afterward, usually at the hands of their label’s higher-ups.

Is that story really true? Well, I don’t know, and I’m not sure if anybody really does. But I think it’s important that we entertain some doubt. Regardless of its actual veracity, this legend is offering us a simplistic narrative of art and capital butting heads, and one that we see repeated all too often in music journalism. It’s a story that expects us to believe that experimental music is good by default, and the natural goal of music and all the people who make it--and, conversely, that accessible music is bad, and anyone who writes a song you can dance to is always after profit, never craft.

Ultimately, though, the most important reason why I’m asking you to leave this question at the gate is that it’s simply a less interesting way to think about art. What I think is truly ingenious about OMD is their ability to combine a pop sensibility with that bleeding-edge experimentation, and vice versa. I don’t think of Dazzle Ships as just an inscrutable, esoteric musical ready-made, but rather something capable of animating and enriching a bunch of otherwise mundane sounds. A word I might use for it is "challenging," because it isn't simply off-putting--it has a certain charm that invites you to stick around and work through it, and you don't feel like it's a waste of your time. I think the underlying pop DNA offered by Dazzle Ships is a big part of that.

In “Genetic Engineering,” the samples from that Speak & Spell are contrasted with a more traditional chorus, which rises above the chaos, stirring and anthemic. It’s a song full of friction, not only between these musical ideas, but in ideas about technology and our future. Like many great works of electronic music, especially earlier in its history, Dazzle Ships is deeply concerned with science and technology, and the ways they’ve structured our world. These guys wrote “Enola Gay” a few years earlier, sure, but there’s much more than Luddite, dystopian thinking here! Dazzle Ships walks a tightrope between romantic adoration of the promise of a better tomorrow, and the tempered uncertainty we’re forced to develop, when we witness the devastation our most horrifying inventions have wrought already. Something that helps sell the former is the motif of childhood: in addition to the Speak & Spell, “Genetic Engineering” also features a children’s toy piano, and prominently references “children” in its lyrics. And “Telegraph,” the album’s other single, sees fit to reference “Daddy.”

Touches like these, and the centering of not-so-new technologies like telegraphy and radio, carry us backward in time. Dazzle Ships has a sense of nostalgia for the technological explosion of the Midcentury, when household technologies were improving in ways that saved time and labour, and faith in “better living through science” was high. It’s not a wistful or introspective nostalgia, but rather one that taps into the bustling excitement of living through that era. That retro styling helps us situate ourselves in a childlike mindset: optimistic, but somewhat naive. Children are highly imaginative, and become enthralled with possibility, but don’t always understand every implication their actions have.

But, as I said, “Telegraph” and “Genetic Engineering” were the album’s singles; the typical track on *Dazzle Ships* sounds more like “ABC Auto-Industry.” The track listing is structured such that these more conventional songs are surrounded by briefer, and more abrasive, intrusions. They become signals in the noise, as though we’re listening to them on the radio--or ships, rising above some stormy seas. Several tracks, such as “International,” also feature a more dissonant intro, on top of that, crowding their main melodies inward.

Over the years, many critics have been quick to contrast Dazzle Ships with OMD’s other albums, but I actually think it has a lot in common with their preceding LP, 1981’s Architecture & Morality, and seems to me to flow naturally from the direction the band had already been going in. Architecture & Morality is a lively mix, with moody instrumentals like “Sealand,” guitar-driven numbers like “The New Stone Age,” and catchy, intuitive pop songs like “Souvenir.” Architecture and Morality proved to be their most successful album, when its title track sounds like this. I fail to see how it’s tremendously different than the title track of Dazzle Ships, which leads us on a harrowing sea chase, with radar pings quickly closing in.

That nautical theme is a great segue to discuss the album’s visual motif. Like all of OMD's first five albums, its sleeve was designed by Peter Saville, most famous for his stunning work for New Order. The cover and title were inspired by a painting Saville had seen, Edward Wadsworth’s *Dazzle Ships in Drydock at Liverpool,* which portrays WWI warships painted in striking, zebra-like geometric patterns. These sharply contrasting “razzle dazzle” designs weren’t “camouflage,” but rather served to confuse enemy forces’ attempts to track them, and predict their motions. Dazzle ships were killing machines that fought dirty...and they were also beautiful. It’s a potent, complex symbol, and it’s a natural fit for an album that’s also capricious, perplexing, and captivating in its uniquely modern terror. Saville’s sleeve design features both a die-cut design as well as a gatefold; peeking through the cover’s “portholes” reveals the interior, where we find a map of the world, divided by time zones. It’s yet another reminder of how technology has reshaped the planet, connecting the human race while also creating divisions.

Earlier, I argued that Dazzle Ships isn’t that different from OMD’s preceding LP, and I’d also suggest that their follow-ups to it aren’t all that different, either. It’s easy to see the influence of Dazzle Ships on their most recent work, made after reforming the group in the late 00s, and informed by the critical re-evaluation and cult acclaim of their alleged masterpiece. But even in the 80s, they basically continued the pattern of layering easy to love, “obvious single choice” tracks alongside more experimental, sample-heavy ones. Compare the title track of their sixth LP, 1985's *Crush.*

Even the greatest of pop hitmakers can't maintain a streak in the charts forever--it's not the nature of mainstream pop charts. Not even in the 1980s, when you could get away with quite a lot of electronic weirdness...at least for a while. Looking back and listening to "Maid of Orleans," it's almost hard to believe it was one of OMD's biggest hits. Is it really less weird than something like "Telegraph"? Perhaps they had simply reached the end of their imperial phase...whether they really had that stern talking-to or not.

It's not so much that Dazzle Ships isn't weird, so much as it is foreseeable that a nerdy, left-of-center band like OMD would have come up with it. Dazzle Ships IS excellent--it’s a Great Album! But it's good enough that I think it deserves to be heard and valued on its own terms. The album is too goddamn good--too compelling, too spell-binding--to be reduced to "that one album the plebs were too dumb to really get." I'm not clearing the air because I think this album is overrated, but because I think it deserves better, deeper discourse than it gets. A truly great album is great whether it sells or it doesn't, right? My advice is to never let art intimidate you, no matter how obtuse people say it is. Send your ship on that plunge into the dark waters of the unknown--you might find something beautiful.

That said...my favourite track overall is “Radio Waves,” an irresistibly fun cut that could easily have become a third single. Since “Genetic Engineering” and “Telegraph” live on side one of the record, “Radio Waves” is really the only “reprieve” we get on side two, smack in its middle. It really stands out, in context--almost like the opposite of how a more conventional album might have one out-there track that catches you off guard. Aside from all of that, though, the song also stands perfectly well alone. I have a real soft spot for music about music, how it’s made and transmitted, and “Radio Waves” is simply one hell of a ride.

Thanks for reading!

[ninjamonkeyqueen]

im sitting here crying about new fucking safari phone bullshit because now instead of looking at all of my tabs like a bulletted list, it's this stupid fucking picture grid of hard to discern mini tabs of text and i have to work out on every one what the title is which my brain can barely manage and takes more scrolling and has the effect of WALL OF TEXT which is shitty and i can't fucking change it.

and it just reminds me how apple constantly violates its own hud guidelines and has become more and more inaccessable and i fucking hate it so fucking much.

looking at it makes me actively want to puke. and i can't bitch out loud about it cuz the partner is frankly sick of me complaining about the shittiness of fucking apple and i dont want to annoy them. jfc.

and i remember every time people complain about the changes anything makes, other people treat them like Oh The Stupid Luddites Dont Like Progress rather than that some of the changes are actively shitty, especially for certain groups if people. and sure, sometimes you can just Not Use The Feature but most of the time you have no choice and the feature actively fuks shit up. and it often breaks any modifications, addons, plugins, and/or workarounds people have set up. and usually it is shittier for your privacy. and you can never turn it off or revert. let alone the apps that you loved because they were special and different from all the others in its genre (looking at you, art apps) and then they change it to be like everyone else and killed the only reason you loved it.

so my brain figured crying was an appropriate response. and sure, i am frustrated and unhappy and kinda wanna puke…

but also there is a bit of grief.

i dont hate change. im gen x and this shit used to be awesome and cool and being bleeding edge was my thing. but what was before is not now and i still remember when things were really cool… before facebook and twitter, when we were excited they used the word "google" as a verb on buffy, when sure people had no taste when they customized their myspace BUT THAT WAS THE POINT. when WE made cddb. when WE made mp3.com. when you could legit deride someone for thinking wikipedia was usable as a source. when there was Ceiling Cat (watching you masturbate) and Viking Kittens.

now i have to come to this hellsite for anything not googlezon twittbook

dammit

we are in Candy Fucking Mountain

dammit

[goldinavonlea]

okay other fun things about my theoretical modern Au in no particular order:

Ruby and Gilbert have been neighbours practically since birth. when ruby was five and gil was seven ruby asked gilbert if he’d marry her and he was like ‘ha sure’ because how else do you respond to a five year old except ruby took it absolutely seriously and legit believed they were engaged until she was ten, after six months of being convinced she was a cheater because she thought a boy in the year above had nice hair. after that mess gets sorted they’re really close, Gil does Ruby’s cotton candy highlights for her and leaves notes stuck to his bedroom window in big letters reminding her to water her plants because she keeps letting them die

Diana’s off school sick when Anne starts, so she knows no one there, and she thinks Ruby seems nice (and also pretty and Anne’s bi as hell can you blame her?) so she decides she’s gonna try and befriend Ruby, then sees her and Gil interacting and assumes Gil’s Ruby’s boyfriend. since she has kind of a baby crush on Ruby this immediately sours her somewhat to Gilbert off the bat, and then when he proceeds to behave towards her in a way that she assumes is flirting she’s mad on her own and Ruby’s behalves and whacks him. it takes legit months for anyone to realise anne thinks gilbert and ruby are together and correct her. also, Anne was kind of right gilbert was trying to like Get Her Attention, but also he’s on the aro/ace spectrum and has never had a crush before in his life so like was it even flirting if he had no idea that’s what he was doing?

Gilbert also casually referring to the group made up of Anne, Ruby, Di, Jane, and Josie as the Spice Girls (Ginger, Baby, Posh, Sporty, and Scary respectively)

Ruby is an unexpected tech wizard with an alarming knack for hacking which becomes a problem on the school newspaper because they’ll be trying to find sources or info on something and Ruby’ll just wander off for ten minutes and come back with a stack of printouts she’s very obviously gotten illegally and Anne and Gilbert always end up arguing over whether they should use them or not. At no point does Ruby present any evidence that she a) understands that this is something not everyone is just able to do or b) has a sense that it is in any way wrong

on the topic of technology gilbert is a complete luddite he owns a slidey motorola (though still somehow manages to google on it and does so with a regularity which irritates everyone around him) and like shelves and shelves and boxes and boxes of music on vinyl and tape, the latter of which he plays in his car because he has a car that takes tapes. again, shows no indication of awareness that he is weird in any of this

also he accumulates cats at a frankly comedic pace like every time someone goes to his house he seems to have yet another cat and they are all appallingly fluffy

the discovery at some point of late seventies/early eighties home movies of a party in which John is openly and outlandishly hitting on Marilla and she’s fobbing him off but blatantly enjoying herself and gilbert and anne are both completely horrified

[presidentrhodes]

Spider-Man Far From Home spoilers

I just finished watching it and, honestly, I’d say it was a pretty good way to bid farewell to the first three phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

Spoilers under the cut. This is pretty long and rambly. 

1. Midtown high is supposed to be a school for geniuses but these little shits use comic sans in tribute videos and steal watermarked Getty Images pictures to put in them. I loved it, particularly with the song choice and the fact that Vision’s picture was from the Civil War airport standoff in Leipzig — that means only Peter could’ve provided it and no one bothered to ask how he got it. 

2. Tom Holland really wasn’t kidding when he said the film was a love letter to RDJ/Tony Stark. He was everywhere, his sacrifice was being recognised around the world: they even had a documentary on him, which was available in the in-flight entertainment, plus, there were murals and photographs in Venice and Prague. He was very much present throughout the film. 

3. EDITH. In a nutshell, it’s an augmented reality-enabled AI that controls a tactical and defensive system Tony built to protect Earth in the aftermath of his demise. Think Ultron’s perfect self minus the winning personality — EDITH controls a bunch of massive Stark Industries satellites in orbit that are equipped with thousands of weaponised drones. It can remotely target individual threats and take them out with simple voice commands. It also is able to connect to any network in the vicinity, so, Peter was able to see what his classmates were doing on their devices. 

I’ve already seen so many angry posts comparing EDITH to Project Insight without taking into account a) intent; and b) the reality of the MCU. Tony didn’t build EDITH for the same reason Zola built Project Insight. The former was meant to be a last or first line of defence, controlled by an Avenger Tony personally trusted. The latter was a means to subjugate the world population to Hydra’s will. 

All tech in the MCU is dangerous when it falls into the wrong hands — that’s why they’re called the wrong hands and why Steve once said the safest hands are their own. The supersoldier serum gave us Steve Rogers; it also gave us the Winter Soldiers, a bunch of dangerous, invincible highly-trained assassins. Pym particles gave us Ant-Man and the Wasp as well as time travel; it also gave us Yellowjacket, who immediately wanted to weaponise the tech. The Iron Man suit gave us Iron Man; but also gave us Iron Monger, who wanted to build an army of metal soldiers. Wakanda’s highly-advanced weapon systems were able to withstand a full-scale invasion from the Outriders, but those same weapons almost started a global war in Killmonger’s hands. Project Insight and Ultron showed us the bad side of AI; JARVIS, Vision, FRIDAY, Karen and EDITH, to an extent, showed us the good side of AI.

The point is, technology in the wrong hands will always be a bad thing yet people only seem to gripe about Stark tech while ignoring every other piece of advanced technology we’ve seen weaponized or misused. I wonder why. Since the MCU canonically isn’t made up of one big Luddite colony, there’ll always be new technology being developed and bad guys finding ways to abuse them. 

Just look at the holographic tech Mysterio designed while at Stark Industries. Even before he was fired, his ambitions were grander and afterwards, he weaponized it and willingly sent people to their dooms so that he could play a hero. When 16-year-old Peter Parker, MJ and Ned — literal children — found out the truth and Mysterio risked being exposed as a fraud, he actively tried to kill them. Mysterio beat the shit out of Peter and threw him in front of an incoming high-speed train, so, no, I don’t care if Tony Stark was mean to him by firing him, he was a piece of shit who tried repeatedly to kill a kid. 

Tony, meanwhile, spent $600+ million on the holographic tech to design B.A.R.F — a technology with some really promising applications in the MedTech sector to help people overcome their PTSD and trauma. That’s the fucking difference between a superhero and a supervillain.

Sure, EDITH also has massive privacy concerns. That’s on Tony, but after the Decimation, I think people have bigger problems to worry about than whether Peter Parker is snooping on their text messages. Ultimately, EDITH offers Peter, and whoever else is going to fill up the Avengers roster in the future, a plan B to strike the bad guys from a safe distance. I

4. Tony left Peter in charge of EDITH. Not the Avengers, not SHIELD, and definitely not the US Department of Defense — a fact that actually pissed off Mysterio. Tony left it in Peter’s hands because he knew Spider-Man took the meaning of responsibility far more seriously than he ever did. All those years ago, Peter told him if one could do the things he could, and they didn’t, and then the bad things happened, they happened because of them. And, honestly, if anyone deserves to have control over such a potentially dangerous piece of tech that can help in future battles, then it’s Peter — even more so than Tony. 

5. Again, Peter is 16 in this film and still coping with loss and trauma. He willingly gave controls of EDITH to Quentin because Mysterio had everyone fooled, including Nick Fury/Talos — they’re both highly experienced soldiers. Fooling them wouldn’t have been easy and Mysterio’s plan was extremely well thought-out and perfectly executed. Peter redeem himself in the end and takes back control of EDITH. 

6. Peter and MJ were super adorable. Spider-Man is the only franchise apart from Iron Man, where the secondary lead characters are allowed to grow without it all being about the main hero. MJ is allowed to explore her feelings for Peter and measure them against Brad’s affection. Ned is allowed to also grow in his character and be more than Spider-Man’s best friend/guy in a chair. 

7. Happy and May were also adorable.

8. Happy ruined a perfectly good bed of tulips just to rescue May’s nephew and give him the TLC/pep talk he needed after, again, Beck pushed Peter in front of a high-speed train that would’ve killed an ordinary person. 

9. Peter confusing ACDC with Led Zeppelin is the most Gen Z thing ever. Happy watched Peter design his own suit and it reminded him of the times he spent watching Tony tinker in his lab. You could feel Tony’s absence pretty viscerally in that scene on the jet. 

10. Peter tingle. Lol. 

11. Happy’s words about Tony were beautiful. He said something along the lines of, “Tony was my best friend. He second-guessed everything he did. He was a mess. But the one thing he didn’t second-guess was picking you.” That really furthered the Iron Dad Spider Son narrative.

12. Iron Zombie was the w o r s t thing ever. Again, Beck emotionally manipulated 16-year-old Peter Parker and said if Peter was any good, his mentor would still be alive just as he projected an illusion of a decaying Iron Man corpse attacking him. To give you a sense of how manipulative he really is, he told his guy in the chair that Peter’s blood will be on his hands because he had failed to report a missing drone part that MJ had discovered in Prague. 

13. Peter finally understanding that he doesn’t have to be the next Tony Stark or Iron Man. He just needs to be the next Spider-Man and Peter Parker. 

14. Peter choosing to safeguard EDITH. 

15. J. Jonah Jameson and J.K. Simmons. That is all. He’s the MCU equivalent of Alex Jones and I love him so much. I wonder if this means we’ll see Doctor Strange offer Peter his help to erase everyone’s memories about the reveal of his secret identity. 

16. Every Nick Fury scene automatically becomes 2000x funnier when you realize it’s Talos posing as Fury and 90% of the time, he has no idea what the fuck is going on and he’s just winging it as he goes along. Also, he was furious that he and his wife, as members of a shapeshifting species, were unable to detect Mysterio’s ruse. 

17. Mysterio was a douchebag. Apart from trying to kill actual kids because he feared they might expose him, he did nothing worthy of a hero. He was jealous and angry about Tony, and he wanted to usurp Iron Man without doing any of the hard work. He willingly put people in danger, was prepared to sacrifice people to make his actions seem more realistic and wanted to take credit for saving the day and preventing an Avengers-level catastrophe. I’ve already seen reviewers trying to sympathise with Mysterio, and his persistent attempts to kill a 16-year-old kid because Tony was apparently mean to him. 

18. And, no, Tony did not steal B.A.R.F tech from Mysterio as some review sites are claiming. The narrative is unreliable at best because we hear only Quentin’s point of view — the same Quentin who had been using his holographic tech to deceive people and put them in harm’s way because he wanted to shake the Queen’s hands or some misguided bullshit. He deserved to fired. Plus, he was a Stark Industries employee. Tech companies almost always own the patent to whatever tech you design or invent for them when you’re on their payroll. It’s how corporations work.

19. Tony quoted Henry IV to Fury when he told him to give EDITH to Peter and said Spidey wouldn’t get the reference (Heavy is the head that wears the crown) because it’s not Star Wars. It was a nice, poignant moment — made funnier when you realize that’s Talos in disguise, which means at some point, Fury had to have a conversation with him about Shakespeare and Star Wars. Someone pls write the fic. 

20. The most important thing is that this film actually tried to address the Decimation. Endgame pretended to gloss over it to give Gay Joe Russo his 15 minutes of fame. But this film actually started with May and Peter organizing an event to help the displaced. Pepper sent a huge check and apologized for not being able to make it in person. :( 

20a. I love Jake Gyllenhaal. I had expected Quentin to be a dramatic thot but he really brought a lot of depth to the character. 

Overall, I liked the film a lot more than I had anticipated. Some people are going to scrutinize this film to death to prove Tony was the ultimate MCU villain and, hey, if that’s the hill they choose to die on, I don’t really care. After 11 years and 23 films later, if they still think that Tony was the real villain all along, then nothing we say or Marvel does, will change their mind. 

Personally, I thought this film was a good send off to Tony, now that they’ve firmly established that Peter Parker/Spider-Man is going to be the new face of the MCU and will carry with him the Iron Man legacy. He wasn’t always right and a lot of his choices tended to backfire but, in the end, his motivations were good and he still went out as the man who saved the world. He, unlike Beck, or Vulture before him, never tried to kill a child, not even when he brought him to a parking lot brawl among friends. 

Now, if only Marvel can just leave Tony’s legacy alone and let Peter, and the rest of the MCU, thrive on its own instead of retconning established Iron Man lore to fit new narratives. 

[morning-walk]

I just came in from my morning walk.

My devotions led me to this.

I’m a Luddite at heart.

My heart is monitored by my Apple Watch.

That can be tense.

Or laughable.

I am finding it increasingly necessary to find the humor.

In this rapidly changing, out of control, absurdly incoherent time things can get overwhelming.

In a hurry.

If I let myself go there I find myself despairing.

Because I can’t fix it.

Or control it.

None of it.

What is going to become of my family?

My friends?

My church?

My nation?

So I strap on my faith self and get real.

And laugh at myself for worrying about what I cannot control.

That sort of frees me up to love on my family.

And my friends.

And my church.

And my nation.

And all the nations!

It is a tense thing to play God.

Kind of laughable.

I’m getting a lot of belly laughs these days.

Pretty much every time I look in the mirror.

Or log on to Facebook.

Well what do you know?

My watch just buzzed me.

Time to get moving.

It’s a handy reminder to just keep walking.

As our Friend and I were adjusting the pace we were chatting about giving up control and finding life in the process. He smiled at me the way he does and said...

“Let me suggest Matthew 6:34.”

Your move.

Brother Pat

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

On Sabotage as One of the Fine Arts: a contribution to the topic of the theory of the practice of Sabotage

Chapter 1

Who will revive the violent whirlpools of flame if not us and those that we consider brothers? Come! New friends: this will please you. We will never work, oh tides of flame! This world will explode. It’s the true path. Forward, on the march.

— A. Rimbaud

The spread of sabotage, its increasing practice, on a greater or lesser scale, far and wide against the domination of the market is a given fact. Burning ATM booths, disabling locks at shopping centers, smashing shop windows, setting fire to the offices of temp agencies and employment offices, the sabotage of the infrastructure of capitalism (high-speed railroads, dams, expressways, construction projects) ... are offensive practices against the colonization of our lives by the most advanced form of colonialism — the integrated spectacle.

All this is put into practice by individuals bored with survival as commodities (life reduced to economic imperatives) and disillusioned with false opposition (more false and less oppositional with each day that goes by), parties and unions that want to manage our misery and integrate us into a mode of production that prevents us from any participation in the decisions that relate directly to us and that assist in enslaving us, mutilating every gesture of negation of the existent.

The spectacle writes the scenario and distributes the roles: worker, professor, student, housewife, mother, father, son, daughter, unemployed, police, soldier, artist, humanitarian, intellectual... the majority, individuals who assume different roles in the course of 24 hours, see their existence as still more terrible, assuming this is possible. Everyone with his neurotic-schizoid viewpoint will react to the stimuli launched by power in the way that was already expected.

All social activity is planned in order to reinforce the spectacle, thus slowing down its unstoppable process of decomposition. Though we don’t want to hear the shrieking of militants of whatever organization, clearly we are not against the concept of “organization” as such, but against “organization” conceived as an end in itself , as the crystallization of any ideology, and as a separated organ, representing a class.

We are for the autonomous self-organization of the exploited. History has shown through two clear examples that the traditional form of the party (Russian revolution) and union (Spanish revolution) were nothing more than two attempts to manage capitalism and not to overcome it, and this is something that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody knows. In the seizure of power, it is not destroyed, but exercised: in the first case, the class of bureaucrats replaced the bourgeoisie, and in the other case, the anarcho-syndicalist leaders participated in bourgeois power, calling for the self-management of exploitation and alienation, while the base tried to overcome the relationships of production and social relationships in practice through the direct management of every aspect of their lives and not just work.

To be precise, both forms have the exaltation of work in common (something that they also share with national-socialism and with every political form of capitalism).

Their quantitative vision sought an increase in production, leaving aside the qualitative increase of life. This (practical and theoretical) defeat of the traditional organizations, which claim to represent us, has not been absorbed by the working class (it seems that we only know how to work), and we go along without maintaining any possibility of control over essential aspects of our lives, in a world that is developed, not only without our participation, but against us.

But, comrades, history is not cyclic; it is a cumulative process and already weighs too heavily upon our weary bodies.

Chapter 2

Never did mockers waste more idle breath.

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The contradiction between the possibilities of the means of production (the use of a few of them for the enjoyment of all, since most of them are useless and harmful and would be destroyed) and the relations of production (waged exploitation, commodification, the exclusions of class society) has reached an insurmountable point of rupture. In the spectacle it is easier to falsify the nature of this contradiction than to increase mercantile production with increasing use value. This inertia forces it to display all of its methods for recuperating any real movement of opposition and to turn the spectacular critique of the spectacle to its advantage.

A self-critical hypocrite directed by its own police of decomposed thought (pro-situationists, cadres, non-governmental organizations, recuperators, artists, journalists... the clique of politically correct alternatives).

These toilet brushes of modernity, like good priests, hope that with their patches, the proper development of the system will lead us, hand in hand, into an ideal world planned by their false consciousness and by the putridity of their armoured brains; as if they had ever given us anything. Their social function, which has been denounced for decades already, has been worth more to them than any aggressions, beatings or assassinations, and we are sure that these will not be mere anecdotes. They deceive and manipulate us. We must not allow them ta have a single day more. They are the guardians to the keys of our informal chains. They amuse us with insignificant debates. They impose their opinions on us, avoiding questions so simple that they make them tremble with terror: How best to live? Who and what keeps us from this? Questions that immediately unmask the professionals of the lie. Critical coherence and the critique of incoherence aid this operation.

Chapter 3

Injustice is not anonymous; it has a name and an address.

— Bertold Brecht

Situationist theory, as integral critique of the totality of the conditions of survival and of the mercantile-spectacular capitalism that necessitates them, has been confirmed in events by falsification.

One cannot fight alienation by means of alienated forms. The sabotage of this world starts with the break with the roles the system imposes on us, the sabotage of our death in life and the refusal of the roles that they have allotted and appointed to us. To speak of the Revolution in these times is “to have a corpse in one’s mouth”. We only need to look around ourselves to see a scenario that constantly reminds us of the defeat. Sabotage is thus an action that serves as a propellant against the unreality that oppresses us. A practice that has not gone unnoticed by ideological recuperation, which has transformed it into “terrorism” (the professionalization of sabotage that has done no more than reinforce the system, due to its centralist, hierarchical and militarist character). Today, what is proposed is not the creation of an armed organization of this type, but widespread attack by small affinity groups, uncontrollable by any higher organization, that come together and dissolve like the lunar tides. The tides that are born of the awareness of how bad things are and of the worsening that awaits us due to events.

In the 19th century, such a practice existed that put the incipient capitalism in check. Beyond the Luddite attacks, the “proletarian rounds” rendered their repression and recuperation, in which the embryonic unions would play a role, almost impossible due to their lack of a rigid structure and their maximum flexibility in attacks. A group of people came together, struck and disappeared into the mass, while a new group came together within it. Such widespread sabotage makes it difficult for the enemy to organize repression. Thus it transforms the attack into a universe of pleasure for the enlightened hooligan, the feelings of which are impossible to describe or communicate with the poor and banal language of words.

The game of subversion, the rules of which are written by those that participate in it, becomes an effective weapon against capitalism in all its forms.

There is much more to destroy than to build.

Chapter 4

Our epoch does not need to write poetic slogans, but to realize them.

— Situationist International

It has been demonstrated that small groups that attack do more damage than large organizations that specialize in armed struggle. The Angry Brigade continued its actions when people were arrested and the English state assumed the movement had fallen apart. The Kale Borroka (street struggle) in Euskadi, which Jarrai (the youth organization of the Basque nationalist left, NDR) recently declared uncontrollable is another example. Power has difficulty repressing and eliminating little groups that with complete security do not know each other, and the only thing that unites them is the desire for the destruction of a system that prevents them from living and condemns them to survival and uncertainty. They don’t attempt exhibitionist actions in order to make propaganda as some acronym or mark of origin. In the case of the Asturias, sabotage was a class weapon used innumerable times, particularly in labor conflicts with these enterprises: Duro Felguera, Hunosa, Naval and Ciata...(Asturian businesses and mines where sabotage was determinant in the struggles going on in the 1990’s); every weary person, regardless of her or his ideology, uses it. From the clerk who steals office supplies to the worker who damages the machine to which he is chained, passing through the use of plastic explosives like the licensed professionals of Duro Felguera. Today, the example is the burning of the ETTs (temporary employment agencies). The practice of sabotage remains limited to precise and very localized conflicts, without global perspectives, simply aiming for partial solutions with economic demands that remain within imposed limits where capitalist logic unfolds. The same holds in the case of the ETTs, an attack that goes beyond the temporality of a conflict in one enterprise, but that does not place wage slavery into question. Instead it only questions its most extreme form, not aiming at putting an end to exploitation, but rather to the ETTs. Today the conflict is global and it is not resolved through partial struggles, but through total struggle and through the refusal of this society as a whole. It is necessary to put an end to the reduction of our lives to commodities and to wage labor that wears us out, not just to ETTs. We must put an end to class society and not just fascism. Misdirecting our attention toward partial objectives only benefits the managers of our misery and those who will one day lay claim to its management., and both are among the targets for sabotage.

The widespread practice of sabotage (unhindered autonomy, maximum flexibility, self-organization, minimum risk) among like-minded individuals, opens the possibility for real communication, destroying spectacular communication, smashing the apathy and impotence of the eternal revolutionist monologue. Relationships and the possibility of contact with other people in the refusal of the spectacular role, these are transient situations that in their preparation and development carry in their essence the qualities of the revolutionary situation that will not retreat and that will suppress the conditions of survival. It does not fall into the irremediable alienating hierarchization that every specialized armed group of an authoritarian and militaristic character, to which the masses delegate their participation in the attack, carries within itself

The quantitative growth of this practice does not come to us from the hands of propagandists of the spectacle, but rather by taking a walk through the scenario of capitalism, and finding in this drift the burned ATM, the ETTs with shattered windows, the smiths changing the locks of a supermarket. These visions make our complicit smiles blossom and move us to go out that very night to play with fire with the aim of making the same smiles rise on the faces of unknown accomplices through the fellowship of destruction. The number doesn’t matter, but rather the quality of the acts: sabotage, expropriation, self-reduction... they return part of the life that is denied us back to us, but we want it all.

Comrades, the game is yours and we take courage in its daily practice. Organize it yourselves with your accomplices.

Against the old world in all its expressions, in order to leave pre-history, let’s launch and multiply attacks.

FOR THE ABOLITION OF CLASS SOCIETY AGAINST THE MARKET AND WAGE LABOR FOR ANARCHY STONES AND FIRE

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Enchantress

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

I really feel bad for Enchantress. Like, she has such a cool design, she has such a cool concept, and Suicide Squad just does diddly squat with her. Part of it is obviously the jarring tonal clash of having a bunch of relatively normal criminals going up against a superpowered demon witch for their first mission, part of it is the awful writing for her holding her back, and all of it adds up to a disappointing mess that continued the proud DCEU trend of having dull, unengaging generic doomsday villains (a trend that wouldn’t truly be broken to any great extent until the release of Aquaman).

Actor: Cara Delevingne portrays the wicked witch of the DCEU, but sadly she doesn’t really get to showcase her acting chops here. Enchantress does nothing but writhe around like a Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Man, and June Moone is just a satellite character at best. She doesn’t bring anything to this role, but at the very least I can say the fault here much more squarely lays upon the shoulders of the writers, unlike with Jared Leto where it was clearly his suckiness that was ruining things.

Motivation/Goals: So, Enchantress discovers people don’t worship or even know who she is anymore, and instead worship machines. So, she decides to do the logical thing: build a giant magitek doomsday weapon to wipe out all technology, all while doing weird interpretive dance. Yeah, our villain is a demonic Luddite womanchild who hates that people aren’t paying attention to her and so throws an epic temper tantrum. Wonderful.

Personality: She’s crazy, selfish, and entitled, but really, the most we get from her is very surface-level observations, as she’s not really characterized all that well. There’s not much to even talk about here, becsue even what could normally be gleaned from watching a film like this is contradicted – she treats her brother like an expendable mook for the entire film (which he is, to be fair), but then when he dies she seems actually upset, and actually begs to be killed so she can be with him again. This comes so out of nowhere and flies in the face of how she’s been this whole movie that it feels like a flaccid attempt at pity for her than anything. It doesn’t help that Incubus isn’t exactly much of a character himself.

Final Fate: Flag kills her by crushing her heart, meaning she actually does get to go and be with her brother in the pile of dead, crappy villains.

Final Thoughts & Score: Enchantress just does not work in the confines of this film. Like, at all.

The whole entire concept of the movie is that the Suicide Squad is a black ops group of criminals roped by Amanda Waller to do the dirty work heroes can’t do. None of these criminals are so-called metahumans, save for Diablo. Most everyone here is just a regular person with really good skills in their respective fields, be that assassin (Deadshot), escape artist (Slipknot), boomerang-themed bank robber (Captain Boomerang), or clown (Harley). Now, when you look at this group, do they seem at all like the kind of group who, on their very first mission, one where they do not know each other and frankly can’t stand each other, should be going up against a magical, apocalyptic interdimensional witch demon and her army of zombies? Does that make any sort of sense?

Like I’m all for mashup movies but I really think something like this should have been saved for a sequel, perhaps after building up Enchantress more, giving her more of a character, and have her actively helping the Squad. As it stands, she comes off as a weak, generic, underwritten villain, and it’s a real shame, because her design and concept are top notch (at least until the final confrontation). On paper, she seems a really cool villain, but she’s just not a cool villain the Suicide Squad should be facing, and so she just comes off as an overwhelmingly large threat to a ridiculous degree. This movie is like what you’d get if you asked the Paw Patrol to take down SPECTRE; narratively, it could happen, but should it happen? Would it really be cool and satisfying? It hurts even more because the Joker is, like, right there, and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say I would have loved to see Jared Leto get his face beat in.

As it stands, Enchantress is just an absolute tonal mess who does not fit the movie she’s in at all. She’s a ridculously powerful superhuman physical god in a movie about a bunch of jerks without superpowers being sent on a black ops government mission, and she just doesn’t gel with it at all. Ultimately she gets a 2/10, though I will say this: she doesn’t fill me with revulsion to the same degree Jared Leto’s Joker does, even if she has the same score. At least her design and the idea behind her are cool, and her actress seems like a nice person, which is more than can be said for Leto’s Joker and Leto himself, generally speaking. I really think Enchantress should have been saved for a sequel and been built up more, but I suppose nothing can be done about that now.

I really can’t stress enough though how much I love Enchantress’ design, though. It’s just so cool, and kinda hot in that evil stringy-haired ghost girl kind of way. Though the less said about that weird form she takes at the end, the better…

...Yeah. No. Maybe it doesn’t look so bad in a still screenshot, but in the film it is such awkward and terrible CGI it makes Delevingne look like a living bobblehead amd swan dives right into the uncanny valley. Give me the creepy witch demon, thank you very much.

That actually reminds me, there’s actually another villain related to Enchantress in Suicide Squad, though one who I really don’t think warrants his own review. So for the first time, we’re having a Two-For-One Analysis! This one’s gonna be quick because there’s not much to talk about, but still, get ready for...

Psycho Analysis: Incubus

Enchantress has a brother. I feel the need to say this because you probably forgot this guy even existed, which I think tells you almost all there is you need to know about him. Still, I decided I’m doing this, so I’m at least going to try and be fair here.

Actor: So the only reason I even bring up that he has an actor – Alain Chanoine is his name – is because I thought for the life of me this guy was just a big, ugly CGI creation. I didn’t even remember this guy speaking until I looked it up. That’s how little is brought to the table by his actor, but at the very least I don’t really blame him, because what exactly could he do with a character like this?

Motivation/Goals: He’s basically just assisting his sister. He really doesn’t have much more to him than that, he’s just the muscle.

Personality: So here’s his defining feature: His lack of personality. This guy hardly talks, hardly contributes to the plot, and just exists as an excuse for some fight scenes and to kill El Diablo, who dies heroically sacrificing himself. This guy is just so dull I forgot he was in this movie until I started writing the bit on his sister, and then decided maybe it would be good to just toss him in as a bonus.

Final Fate: El Diablo turns into a giant flaming Aztec skeleton (for… some reason) and fights him off, and then they blow him up with a bomb. Yeah, this ancient demon dies to a bomb, which is especially egregious since he takes worse in earlier scenes. Then again, a pathetic, stupid end to a pathetic, stupid villain is pretty much fitting for this guy.

Final Thoughts & Score: I already think that Enchantress was wasted in Suicide Squad, and if I think that, I feel it doubly for Incubus. This guy barely got to speak or do anything before unceremoniously being killed in an absolutely ridiculous way. Why was he even in the movie? It’s not like he’s a really famous villain to begin with. Why even bother using him if you’re just gonna dump all over him as a character like this? Like yeah, sure, he’s obscure and not a big name, but that’s the point of a movie like this: you should be taking these obscure villains and turning them into something memorable for the audience, so that they become household names. Look at villains like Ego or Thanos or Mysterio; they’re more villains that the comic book savvy would recognize on sight, and not what I would call household names like, say, Green Goblin or Joker or Magneto. But their movies helped elevate them to become truly iconic and well-known and well-regarded among even more casual fans. Here, though? They did the exact opposite somehow. They managed to make an obscure character so forgettable and pointless I forgot he was in the damn movie.

Incubus gets a 1/10, but obviously he’s not worse than Malekith. At the very least Incubus is just a crappy minor antagonist and not the main threat of the movie; his narrative function is basically as an elite mook serving his sister. He sucks, yes, but it’s hard to muster up the sheer revulsion I feel for a travesty like Malekith. There was just a lot less going for this guy in the first place, so when he failed to deliver, I wasn’t really surprised.

[thedeaditeslayer]

Interview: Scott Duvall talks Army of Darkness: Ash the Author.

To celebrate the 15th anniversary of Dynamite Entertainment, you can now purchase a new Humble Bundle that features an exclusive Army of Darkness comic. However you’re going to have to pitch in a minimum of $18 U.S. if you plan on adding it to your collection. You purchase the Humble Bundle here and read an interview with writer Scott Duvall below. 

In an exclusive interview with Villain Media, writer Scott Duvall talks about the sharp laughs and the horror action within The Army of Darkness: Ash The Author (Dynamite Entertainment and Humble Bundle). Make sure to celebrate Dynamite’s 15th anniversary with their huge bundle of comics, including this Humble Bundle one-shot exclusive.

When Ash makes his way to a book signing to promote his new autobiography, a fan shows up with a different book for him to sign…the kind that is constantly out to get Ash and turn him into a deadite! Ash’s plan to promote literacy becomes a life or death romp through (and under) New York you won’t want to miss!

With the Humble Bundle one-shot exclusive available now, Scott Duvall reveals how he moved Ash from the cabin in the woods to the gritty streets of New York, how Ash’s book agent, Kelley, came about, and how social media influenced the story arc. Check out our review of The Army of Darkness: Ash The Author as we head into the writer’s studio to discuss the craft of storytelling.

Villain Media: Tell me how The Army of Darkness: Ash the Author came about?

Scott Duvall: This has actually been in the works for a little bit. Nick Barucci of Dynamite Entertainment has been working with Humble Bundle over the years and bundling great comic book content into each one. But he’s long wanted to create original content for the bundles as an extra incentive for fans to pick up the exclusive story you can’t get anywhere else. That idea has now become a reality and fans can pick up that story as of right now, which I was fortunate enough to be asked to write.

VM: I really liked the concept of a story within a story. You have the main narrative and you also have the autobiography, “I Could Have Been King: Medieval Dead.” What was challenging about having both stories run at the same time?

SD: Because of the nature of this one-and-done story, I didn’t want to get too caught up with the book’s narrative and have that bog down the momentum. I think that could be quite entertaining actually, reading the events of the Army of Darkness movie, as told by Ash through his filter. It wasn’t so much challenging as it was a fun device to play around with and pull some humor out of the idea that Ash wrote an autobiography. Coming up with story titles is not my strong suit — as you can tell from “Ash the Author” — but I felt pretty satisfied with the title of his autobio.

VM: Tell me about Kelley, Ash’s book agent/assistant. She doesn’t believe in the supernatural but she sees Ash as this cash cow.

SD: Fun fact: Kelley is based on a friend of mine, Kelley Allen of Humble Bundle. The project was actually presented to me as writing an Army of Darkness story and dropping Kelley into it for a cameo appearance. But as soon as I realized she was going to be in it, I expanded her role quite a bit and made it more of a co-starring role. I based her personality on Kelley a bit, so having her play off of Ash, and using her literary background to help inform the story, was too fun. I think she doesn’t care if anything Ash wrote about in the book is real or not. Her primary concern is selling Ash’s book, and she’s not going to let some internet troll get in the way.

VM: This is also the first time Ash has to deal with social media and cyber-bullying. Tell me about how you and letterer Taylor Esposito used hashtags and @ as a running joke.  

SD: The idea of Ash having a social media presence seemed like a well of comedy. So seeing Kelley walk this luddite of a man through the process of marketing yourself and your brand to an audience online was a fun opportunity for me to point out some of the ridiculousness that comes with that steep learning curve. And Taylor, who I’ve worked with more than any other letterer, always takes everything I throw at him and makes it better. If I can bring Taylor with me onto any new project, I will! He’s that good!  

VM: I really enjoyed how the story is set in New York, but without the traditional landmarks. Tell me about working on this with artists Edu Menna and Jordan Michael Johnson.

SD: New York was the natural setting, the story being set in the publishing world, but the city is merely a backdrop to where Ash is taking us. He’s such a big presence that the city kind of fades into the background, perhaps more than other stories that take the lead character on location to NYC. There are some really standout panels throughout the story that had the Army of Darkness fan in me bursting with joy. I was lucky to be paired up with artists who clearly have a love for this property, same as I do. Being a one-shot issue, the process went by in a bit of a blur, and I’m excited to share what we created together.

VM: From the yellow taxis to Kelley’s red dress to Ash’s subway fight, tell me how you and colorist Salvatore Ailala brought to life a New York story. It’s not the usual Ash “in the woods” setting.

SD: You’re right, not at all a typical place where we would find Ash, which was part of the challenge for me was dropping him in an unfamiliar setting and seeing where that leads us. Plus, the whole story takes place during the day, so less opportunity for creepy shadows and darkness filling the frames to heighten the horror atmosphere. Salvatore did a great job creating a consistent look throughout, and making Ash look groovy throughout, whether under Edu or Jordan’s line art.

VM: How did The Army of Darkness: Ash the Author change you as a storyteller?

SD: I wouldn’t say it changed me as a storyteller, but it served as a good reminder that all I need as a writer is a couple good prompts to get the creative juices flowing, and then a new story presents itself. While I love telling long, epic stories, it’s also good practice to work on more short-form storytelling where the reader is getting one complete story and you don’t need to worry about manufacturing a cliffhanger ending.

VM: What are you working on now?

SD: I have some projects in the works for 2020 that I’m really looking forward to and am unfortunately sworn to secrecy. But my next published work will actually be a prose story I wrote for Ted Adams’ Diablo House anthology from Clover Press. It’ll be my first published work in prose so I’m excited for that, and it’ll still be dipping my toe into darker material that fans of anthologies such as Creepshow and The Twilight Zone should appreciate. Anyone who knows me or my work knows how much I love time travel stories and so naturally this one also features time travel.

[wumingfoundation]

On #QAnon: The full text of our Buzzfeed Interview

Ryan Broderick of Buzzfeed just published an article on this #QAnon conspiracy bullshit titled It's Looking Extremely Likely That QAnon Is A Leftist Prank On Trump Supporters. The piece features quotes from an interview we gave via email. Here’s the full email exchange.

--

Can you tell me a bit about when and how your book Q was written?

We started writing Q  in the last months of 1995, when we were part of the Luther Blissett Project, a network of  activists, artists and cultural agitators who all shared the name «Luther Blissett». Luther Blissett was and still is a British public figure, a former footballer, a philanthropist. The LBP spread many mythical tales about why we chose to borrow his name, but the truth is that nobody knows.

Initially, Blissett the footballer was bemused, but then he decided to play along with us and even publicly endorsed the project. Last year, during an interview on the Italian TV, he stated that having his name adopted for the LBP was «a honour». The purpose of signing all our statements, political actions and works of art with the same moniker was to build the reputation of one open character, a sort of collective "bandit", like Ned Ludd, or Captain Swing. It was live action role playing. The LBP was huge: hundreds of people in Italy alone, dozens more in other countries. In the UK, one of the theorists and propagandists of the LBP was the novelist Stewart Home.

The LBP lasted from 1994 to 1999. The best English-language account of those five years is in Marco Deseriis' book Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous. One of our main activities consisted of playing extremely elaborate pranks on the mainstream media. Some of them were big stunts which made us quite famous in Italy. The most complex one was played by dozens of people in the backwoods around Viterbo, a town near Rome. It lasted a year, involving Satanism, black masses, Christian anti-satanist vigilantes and so on. It was all made up: there were neither Satanists nor vigilantes, only fake pictures, strategically spread rumours and crazy communiqués, but the local and national media bought everything with no fact-checking at all, politicians jumped on the bandwagon of mass paranoia, we even managed to get footage of a (rather clumsy) satanic ritual broadcast in the national TV news, then we claimed responsibility for the whole thing and produced a huge mass of evidence. The Luther Blissett Project was also responsible for a huge grassroots counter-inquiry on cases of false child abuse allegations. We deconstructed the paedophilia scare that swiped Europe in the second half of the 1990s, and wrote a book about it. A magistrate whom we targeted in the book filed a lawsuit, as a consequence the book was impounded and disappeared from bookshops, but not from the web.

This is the context in which we wrote Q. We finished it in June 1998. It came out in March 1999 and was our final contribution to the LBP.

I've been reading up about it, and it's largely believed that it's underneath the book's narrative it works as handbook for European leftists? Is that a fair assessment? I've read that many believe the book's plot is an allegory for 70s and 80s European activists?

Although it keeps triggering many possible allegorical interpretations, we meant it as a disguised, oblique autobiography of the LBP. We often described it as Blissett's «playbook», an «operations manual» for cultural disruption.

The four authors I'm speaking to now are Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo correct? The four authors of Q?

You are speaking with three of the four authors of Q, and you're speaking with a band of writers called Wu Ming, which means «Anonymous» in Chinese. In December 1999 the Luther Blissett Project committed a symbolic suicide - we called it The Seppuku - and in January 2000 we launched another project, the Wu Ming Foundation, centred around our writing and our blog, Giap. The WMF is now an even bigger network than the LBP was, and includes many collectives, projects and laboratories. Luca aka Wu Ming 3 is not a member of the band anymore, although he still collaborates with us on specific side projects. Each member of the band has a nom de plume composed of the band's name and a numeral, following the alphabetical order of our surnames, thus you're speaking to Roberto Bui aka Wu Ming 1, Giovanni Cattabriga aka Wu Ming 2 and Federico Guglielmi aka Wu Ming 4.

Can you tell me a bit about your background before the Luther Blissett project?

Before the LBP we were part of a national scene that was – and still is – called simply «il movimento», a galaxy of occupied social centres, squats, independent radio stations, small record labels, alternative bookshops, student collectives, radical trade unions, etc. In the Italian radical tradition, at least after the Sixties, there was never any clearcut separation between the counterculture and more political milieux. Most of us came from left-wing family backgrounds, had roots in the working class. Punk rock opened our minds during our teenage years, then in the late 1980s and early 1990s Cyberpunk opened them even more, and inspired new practices.

When did you start noticing similarities between Q and QAnon? I know you've tweeted a bit about this, but I'd love to get as many details as I can. I feel like the details around QAnon are so sketchy that it's important to lock in as much as I can here.

We read a lot about the US alt-right, books such as Elizabeth Sandifer's Neoreaction a Basilisk or Angela Nagle's – flawed but still useful – Kill All Normies, and yet we didn't see the QAnon thing coming. We didn't know it was growing on 4chan and some specific subReddits. About six weeks ago, on June 12th, our old pal Florian Cramer – a fellow veteran of the LBP who now teaches at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam – sent us a short email. Here's the text:

«It seems as if somebody took Luther Blissett's playbook and turned it into an Alt-Right conspiracy lore. Maybe Wu Ming should write a new article: "How Luther Blissett brought down Roseanne Barr"!»,

After those sentences there was a link to a piece by Justin Caffier on Vice. We read it, and briefly commented on Twitter, then in the following weeks more and more people got in touch with us, many of them Europeans living in the US. They all wanted to draw our attention on the QAnon phenomenon. To anyone who had read our novel, the similarities were obvious, to the extent that all these people were puzzled seeing that no US pundit or scholar was citing the book.

Have there been key moments for you that made you feel like QAnon is an homage to Q? What has lined up the best?

Coincidences are hard to ignore: dispatches signed Q allegedly coming from some dark meanders of top state power, exactly like in our book. This Q is frequently described as a Blissett-like collective character, «an entity of about ten people that have high security clearance», and at the same time – like we did for the LBP – weird "origin myths" are put into circulation, like the one about John Kennedy Jr. faking his own death in 1999 – the year Q was first published, by the way! – and becoming Q. QAnon's psy-op reminds very much of our old «playbook», and the metaconspiracy seems to draw from the LBP's set of references, as it involves the Church, satanic rituals, paedophilia...

We can't say for sure that it's an homage, but one thing is almost certain: our book has something to do with it. It may have started as some sort of, er, "fan fiction" inspired by our novel, and then quickly became something else.

There will be a lot of skepticism I think that an American political movement like QAnon could have been influenced by an Italian novel, how do you think it may have happened?

It's an Italian novel in the sense that it was originally written in Italian by Italian authors, but in the past (nearly) 20 years it has become a global novel. It was translated into fifteen languages – including Korean, Japanese, Russian, Turkish – and published in about thirty countries. It was successful all across Europe and in the English speaking world with the exception of the US, where it got bad reviews, sold poorly and circulated almost exclusively in activist circles.

Q was published in Italian a few months before the so-called "Battle of Seattle", and published in several other languages in the 2000-2001 period. It became a sort of night-table book for that generation of activists, the one that would be savagely beaten up by an army of cops during the G8 summit in Genoa, July 2001. In 2008 we wrote a short essay, almost a memoir, on our participation to those struggles and Q's influence in those years, titled Spectres of Müntzer at Sunrise. A copy of Q's Spanish edition even ended up in the hands of subcomandante Marcos. It isn't at all unrealistic to imagine that it may have inspired the people who started QAnon.

Have you seen anything in the QAnon posts that leads you to suspect any activist group in particular is behind it?

No, we haven't.

You think QAnon is a prank? Without some kind of reveal it's obviously hard to see it as that. If you think it was revealed that QAnon was actually some kind of anarchist prank, would it even matter? Would its believers abandon it or would they just see it as a smear campaign?

Let us take for granted, for a while, that QAnon started as a prank in order to trigger right-wing weirdos and have a laugh at them. There's no doubt it has long become something very different. At a certain level it still sounds like a prank, but who's pulling it on whom? Was the QAnon narrative hijacked and reappropriated by right-wing "counter-pranksters"? Counter-pranksters who operated with the usual alt-right "post-ironic" cynicism, and made the narrative more and more absurd in order to astonish media pundits while spreading reactionary content in a captivating way?

Again: are the original pranksters still involved? Is there some detectable conflict of narratives within the QAnon universe? Why are some alt-right types taking the distance from the whole thing and showing contempt for what they describe as «a larp for boomers»?

A larp it is, for sure. To be more precise, it's a fascist Alternate Reality Game. Plausibly the most active players – ie the main influencers – don't believe in all the conspiracies and metaconspiracies, but many people are so gullible that they'll gulp down any piece of crap – or lump of menstrual blood, for that matter. Moreover, there's danger of gun violence related to the larp, the precedent of Pizzagate is eloquent enough. What if QAnon inspires a wave of hate crimes?

Therefore, to us the important question is: triggering nazis like that, what is it good for? That camp is divided between those who would believe anything and those who would be "ironic" on anything and exploit anything in order to advance their reactionary, racist agenda. Can you really troll or ridicule people like those?

It's hard to foresee what would happen if QAnon were exposed as an anarchist/leftist prank on the right. If its perpetrators claimed responsibility for it and showed some evidence (for example, unmistakeable references to our book and the LBP), would the explanation itself become yet another part of the narrative, or would it generate a new narrative encompassing and defusing the previous one? In plain words: which narrative would prevail? «QAnon sucking anything into its vortex» or «Luther Blissett's ultimate prank»?

In any case, we'd never have started anything like that ourselves. Way too dangerous.

[davidsphysicsblog]

Why does it seem that my cellphone is spying on me?

In his seminal book, “The Singularity is Near – When Humans Transcend Biology,” Ray Kurzweil laments the fate of Artificial Intelligence (AI): “An underlying problem with artificial intelligence that I have personally experienced in my forty years of in the area is that as soon as an AI technique works, it is no longer considered AI and is spun off in its own field …” Kurzweil then goes on to give the example of speech recognition – although if you both listen and watch the closed captions to the nightly news, you might wonder how intelligent this recognition is. Still that point has stuck with me since I first read The Singularity is Near, when it first came out in 2005.

Well, friends there is no longer any denying the existence of AI in our lives. We have moved beyond what has been referred to as the “Dark Age of AI.”We’ve got everything from intelligent toaster ovens to self-driving automobiles. Recently, I saw, with a shutter, a news clip about self-driving eighteen wheelers. Yikes, I thought. But then I considered how many people have been wiped out by drowsy truck drivers. Which is better, which is worse?

Now, I am a great proponent of futurism. More importantly, I recognize that there is no denying technology, any more than there is denying climate change. There are good reasons to fear it, especially if your job is in jeopardy. Ultimately all our jobs are in jeopardy. But there is no stopping it. Technology always outruns its own ethical basis.  It has no morality. It just is. And the Luddites, who in the early nineteenth century rose up and destroyed textile machinery because they feared it would take away their means of employment are now reduced merely to a fancy word and a footnote. As I type this AI programs “spellcheck” me and “autocorrect” my grammar. Both of those words exist in the language only because of the AI revolution.  So, they are taking over our language as well.

There is also the nostalgia factor. My IPad and my Kindle do not feel or smell like a book. I so love these tactile and olfactory experiences. But the fact is that my whole library, which is voluminous, could easily fit in digital form on my computer devices, and I read at least three times faster electronically than on paper. Although one might ask, what the rush is? Ultimately, where this nostalgia is concerned we become like Edward Arlington Robinson’s “Minever Cheevy.”

“Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

And he had reasons.

 Miniver loved the days of old

When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;

The vision of a warrior bold

Would set him dancing.

 Miniver sighed for what was not,

And dreamed, and rested from his labors;

He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,

And Priam’s neighbors.

 Miniver mourned the ripe renown

That made so many a name so fragrant;

He mourned Romance, now on the town,

And Art, a vagrant.

 Miniver loved the Medici,

Albeit he had never seen one;

He would have sinned incessantly

Could he have been one.

 Miniver cursed the commonplace

And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;

He missed the mediæval grace

Of iron clothing.

 Miniver scorned the gold he sought,

But sore annoyed was he without it;

Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,

And thought about it.

 Miniver Cheevy, born too late,

Scratched his head and kept on thinking;

Miniver coughed, and called it fate,

And kept on drinking.”

 Isn’t it wonderful how all I needed to do was to type “Minever Cheevy” into my search engine, a form of AI and the whole text, which I first read on paper in high school pops up? This is but the first stage in the development of Kurzweil’s bionic man-machine.

And as I was typing the last, my cellphone dinged with the message from Bloomberg News that:

“Medical apps have made it easier than ever for doctors to treat people without ever seeing them in person.”

Is this getting just a bit spooky?

Which brings me to what I really wanted to discuss. I recently read Michael Chertoff’s “Exploding Data: Reclaiming Our Cyber Security in the Digital Age.” This book describes the megadata on each of us, which seems merely a collection of useless facts. Where we were every minute of the day, what we bought, what we ate, what we spent, and on and on. It is not the individual facts that are significant, but the Gestalt, that ultimately presents the threat, not just to individual privacy an liberty, but to national and world security.

Allow me to quote the ninth amendment to the United States Constitution. Yes, Republican friends there is more than the second amendment, which protects the right of madmen to buy assault rifles. But the little ninth amendment says merely:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

This is your right to privacy, people! The government does not belong in your workplace, in your home, or in your bedroom, for instance. And when we allow ourselves to be monitored 24-7, we give up that right, in part or in total.

And on the security side. Connect your home to the internet with devices such as smart electric meters for instance, where “the bad guys” have implanted administrative codes in the chips they made for us and we bought because they are cheap, and they can shut down our power grids.

In 2004, yes fifteen years ago, the Israeli military assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader and founder of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, by landing a smart missile in the lap of the wheelchair-bound Sheik Yassin. I am not suggesting that you have anything to fear from the fact that your own iPhone is tracking your whereabouts in real-time.

What has freaked me out was an IM session that I was having with a friend on my IPhone to set up a time to meet for coffee. When we had settled as to time and place, I went to add it to my calendar, hit the add button, and there it was Name of Person, Name of place, and time all neatly pre-entered for me. Starting with OS 10.0, we are now up to OS 12.2, the operating system has AI algorithms that search your texts and emails in this way. For convenience, right? I’m sorry it seems not so much as helpful as creepy and an invasion of privacy.

I am reminded of a second poem. This by W. H. Auden and called “To the Unknown Citizen.” Perhaps we might modernize the title to “To the Unknown Citizen and his Megadata.”

(To JS/07 M 378 This Marble Monument Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be

One against whom there was no official complaint,

And all the reports on his conduct agree

That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a

saint,

For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired

He worked in a factory and never got fired,

But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.

Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,

For his Union reports that he paid his dues,

(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)

And our Social Psychology workers found

That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.

Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,

And his Health-card shows he was A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace:  when there was war, he went.

He was married and once in hospital but left it cured.

Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare

He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan

And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,

added five children to the population,

Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his

generation.

And our teachers report that he never interfered with their

education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: e heard.

I feel a need to return photographically to a simpler time, to turn back the clock to the Willoughby of Twilight Zone fame, to a more mechanical time. The time of carburetors, now replaced by AI chips called injection systems.

(c) DE Wolf 2019.

[chiefbuttons]

Happy New Year! Books are the Best!

In 2018 I went to Japan, filled some bookshelves, and read more than the usual amount of literary biographies. In Japan, we navigated the bookstore in which Haruki Murakimi apparently bought his first fountain pen. While there, I bought copies of two of my favourite Japanese books: Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, and Book 1 (of 6) of 1Q84.

Japanese books are very beautiful, and all very uniform. There were hundreds of book protectors on sale in every bookshop and stationery shop (we went to a lot of those – the Iroshizuku ink was soooo cheap!), I had to remind myself that books in the UK don’t fit into them to stop myself from bringing them all home. Now that I have at least one  Banana Yoshimoto book in Japanese, there’s more incentive than ever to try and learn the language. I’ve been thinking a lot this year about how much is lost or gained in translation and what that does to a book depending on the language you read. This Little Art by Kate Briggs is a novel-length essay on exactly this topic, and I read it not long after The Idiot in which the protagonist has a crisis about language and how words can lose their meaning. They fit together very well in my head – both asked and tried to provide answers to questions about translation, like why even do it at all if meaning is going to be lost? Having read Murakami’s most recent book, Killing Commendatore, I’m still not sure if the absence of Jay Rubin as translator is responsible for my disappointment with it, or if it was just a bad book, or if Haruki Murakami has never been that great and it was all Jay Rubin all along.

This Little Art, The Idiot, Shirley and Romantic Outlaws are probably my favourites from this year. Also Daphne du Maurier’s short story The Breakthrough, from Don’t Look Now. Sinister, terrifying, haunting, all words that fall short of describing the atmosphere of that one short story.

I read Shirley after reading Outsiders by Lyndall Gordon. I had tried to read it before and had never been able to get past the first chapter, but something about Outsiders made me want to try again. Reading Outsiders made me realise in a way that I hadn’t before that books written in the last couple of centuries aren’t as far removed from us as I had thought. Previously, when reading books from different time periods, I had become as detached as if I was reading fantasy; I forgot that the stories being told were often very firmly set in social, political and cultural climates that had once existed. It helped me to find ways to empathise with the narrators and the characters, and make them much more human and relatable. While reading Shirley, instead of feeling like the characters and situations were a million miles away, I forced myself to remember that Charlotte Brontë was writing about events that were important to the people in the time she was writing about. Her father witnessed Luddite uprisings. The setting of Shirley with its discussions of workers’ rights and its attacks on mills was as real for Charlotte and her father as Brexit and Trump are for us now.

Turtles All The Way Down – John Green

My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs – Kazuo Ishiguro

Manderley Forever: Daphne du Maurier, A Life – Tatiana de Rosnay

Don’t Look Now & other short stories – Daphne du Maurier

Outsiders: Five Women Writers who Changed the World – Lyndall Gordon

Shirley – Charlotte Brontë

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The first time I tried to read Shirley, I struggled to get past the first three chapters. "This is not as good as Jane Eyre or Villette," I thought. And, of course, I was wrong. How did I come to change my mind and try again? It was because I read Outsiders by Lyndall Gordon. It was sometimes difficult to read; lots of what felt like fact-listing, and the events of the five lives studied are not always in chronological order, which would not be a problem if it was made clearer. This made it difficult to get through but did not affect my ability to be grateful for all the new information and the future reading list (I have a charity shop copy of Middlemarch now sitting on top of a book pile, and am searching for some Olive Schreiner). It also provided me with new reasons to persevere with Shirley. Though the Brontë sister included in this book is Emily, not Charlotte, it is impossible to talk about one without mentioning the other. Especially when Charlotte included a characters based on Emily in a novel: Shirley Keeldar and Caroline Helstone. To read someone's fictionalised perception of her sisters' characters, I thought, would be a very strange experience. And it is, it sometimes feels weirdly voyeuristic. In the future we are all in on the secret. A huge theme throughout Outsiders is the rights of women and how their role has changed over time; Shirley is referred to as an incredibly feminist book. And it is. Jane Eyre has nothing on it. Still feminist, but this is in-your-face "what are we supposed to do all day, cook and sew??" "…yes. I hate womenites." So I decided to read it again but placing it as contemporary, rather than viewing it as a relic of the past which I should accept that I can't always understand or relate to. Putting these new perspectives on it has really helped me to get into the book. This is a huge post. Shirley is great. (Also the first time Shirley was used as a female name!) #bookstagram #Shirley #charlottebrontë #outsiders #lyndallgordon #brontë #nowreading

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Feb 22, 2018 at 1:34pm PST

In Search of Anne Brontë – Nick Holland

Moshi Moshi – Banana Yoshimoto

Asleep – Banana Yoshimoto

Valley of the Dolls – Jacqueline Susan

Eleanor and Park – Rainbow Rowell

Winter – Ali Smith

Banshee, Volumes 2 & 5

My Uncle Oswald – Roald Dahl

Young Hearts Crying – Richard Yates

The White Book – Han Kang

Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë

The Idiot – Elif Batuman

Emily Brontë Reappraised: A View from the 21st Century – Claire O’Callaghan

A Cup Of Sake Beneath The Cherry Trees – Yoshida Kenko

This Little Art – Kate Briggs

The Lonely City – Olivia Laing

The Diary of a Bookseller – Shaun Bythell

Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami

A Cat, A Man and Two Women – Junichiro Tanazaki

N. P. – Banana Yoshimoto

Romantic Outlaws – Charlotte Gordon

The Pilgrims – Mary Shelley

Bartleby The Scrivener – Herman Melville

Behind A Wardrobe In Atlantis – Emma J. Lannie

The Hatred of Poetry – Ben Lerner

Convenience Store Woman – Sayuka Murata

Demian – Herman Hesse

Revolutionary Girl Utena 20th Anniversary companion book

The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories – Edited by Jay Rubin, Introduction by Haruki Murakami

The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night – Jen Campbell

The Tales of Beedle the Bard – J.K. Rowling, Illustrated by Chris Riddell

We went to a talk given by Chris Riddell at Nottingham Trent University. He was answering questions about his work on the newly illustrated Beedle the Bard while drawing for us live. He signed my copy of The Edge Chronicles Maps, and was generally very lovely.

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Tonight we went to see Chris Riddell speaking with Dr Sarah McConnell at Nottingham Trent University. There were live illustrations, and Shauna Shim did dramatic readings from The Tales of Beedle The Bard. I've been reading The Edge Chronicles since I picked up a copy of Beyond The Deepwoods AT THE LIBRARY (libraries, man!), aged 11, and thought it had the best front cover I had ever seen. Now that I'm older, if Chris Riddell has illustrated something I assume it's good and read it. Thank-you @chris_riddell for staying super late after your talk to speak to everyone and sign everything! @ntucreated #nottinghamtrent #illustration #theedgechronicles #beyondthedeepwoods

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Oct 3, 2018 at 2:26pm PDT

Ariel – Sylvia Plath

Charlotte Brontë Revisited: A View from the 21st Century – Sophie Franklin

Killing Commendatore – Haruki Murakami

By The Light of My Father’s Smile – Alice Walker

Agnes Grey – Anne Brontë

Rough Magic – Paul Alexander

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HAPPY FRIDAY GUYS

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Dec 21, 2018 at 1:55pm PST

How To Be Invisible – Kate Bush

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Merry Kate-mas =D

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Dec 25, 2018 at 9:34am PST

Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom – Sylvia Plath

This year I would like to write more about the books I am reading – this blog has been very neglected for the past couple of years! I’ve been occasionally taking part in the Are You Book Enough bookbinding challenge on instagram again. This time last year I was working on the January 2018 theme Darkness. I wrote and illustrated a story called The Black Ribbon. It was inspired by the Tatiana de Rosnay biography of Daphne du Maurier, in which de Rosnay refers to Daphne du Maurier’s depressive episodes as her “black ribbon.” It’s also a tribute to Edward Gorey. I thought his style of illustration would be best suited to the story I was telling, so I had a go at reproducing his style.

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Part 2 of my #AreYouBookEnough January book. Here are all the illustrations and the story I wrote inspired by Edward Gorey, Daphne du Maurier and Tatiana de Rosnay. Please see my previous post for the explanation! #bookart #bookstagram #handmadebooks #illustration #edwardgorey

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Jan 30, 2018 at 1:43pm PST

Another of the books I made this year was a book in a box for the theme Listen. I chose to bind a book of Kate Bush’s Fifty Words For Snow from her song and album of the same name.

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This is my contribution to the August #AreYouBookEnough bookbinding challenge, #listen . I love to listen to music, and Kate Bush is one of my favourites. Why choose Fifty Words For Snow when I could choose any of her songs? Why does it fit the theme best? The song is a list. It's Stephen Fry reciting fifty words for snow – some made up by Kate Bush, some real. She wanted him to be the narrator because people believe the words he says, he is intelligent and speaks with a quiet authority.  Hearing him speak her fictional words for snow makes them sound real. Snow itself deadens sound but has sounds of its own; one of the words is "creaky-creaky." I hope whoever looks at my book can hear the snow behind the words. This is the first time I've made this kind of box, and my measurements are a bit off (the lid is loose!) but overall I'm pleased and know what to do better next time! The paper is very fibrous, I wanted something that looked and felt like snow. Both the front cover of the book and the lid of the box are padded. The ink I used to write the fifty words is a mixture of two different inks – white calligraphy ink and a Grey Plum Kwiz ink. I'm going to have to find a way to photograph it properly because it is almost pearlescent! If you hold the paper a certain way it disappears. Hold it to the light and it looks like it is glowing. I'll try and get some video footage of it. #AreYouBookEnough #bookart #handmade #katebush #fiftywordsforsnow #50wordsforsnow #listen #books #snow #music

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Aug 30, 2018 at 12:36am PDT

I will leave you with a picture of the new bookcase. I hope you have an excellent 2019!

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Got a new phone. The cats ran away so I took a picture of one of the bookcases. It's so shiny

A post shared by Adelle Hay (@chiefbuttons) on Dec 6, 2018 at 1:28pm PST

  Books I read in 2018 Happy New Year! Books are the Best! In 2018 I went to Japan, filled some bookshelves, and read more than the usual amount of literary biographies.

[elenatria]

“By making Johnny Lawrence the inverted underdog, and a surprisingly likeable one, the writers of Cobra Kai have brought the franchise into a post Game of Thrones era. And by making Daniel LaRusso the bigger asshole — a Miyagi wannabe undermined by hypocrisy and self-righteousness — they’ve taken the original hero in an unexpected direction. Part of it is the social class reversal. Daniel grew up dirt poor but has done well for himself as a wealthy car dealer who can treat his family to country club outings. Johnny, for his part, has fallen out with his rich stepfather and lives hand to mouth in the shitty neighborhood of Reseda where Daniel used to live. This reversal alone pays dividends.

But aside from even that, Daniel is astonishingly judgmental. He condescends to Johnny, kicks him when he’s down, tries to ban Cobra Kai from participating in the local tournament, and launches a pathetic crusade to shut down the dojo. He does this by manipulating a business associate into doubling the rent in the strip mall where the new Cobra Kai has just opened, which shafts not only Johnny but all the other mall renters. This is a supremely asshole move, and Daniel’s wife calls him on it. But I was frankly put off by the entire LaRusso clan. Daniel’s wife sounds like she’s always talking down to people, his cousin is a useless twit, and his daughter a priss. The LaRusso home gives off a superficial Miyagi vibe, and at work Daniel has turned some of the best things Mr. Miyagi taught him into cheap gimmicks — karate chops in car commercials, and the bonsai trees he gives away free to car buyers. Daniel does revere his deceased mentor, but has little to show that he actually understands the “balance” that he lectures others (his daughter, Robby) to strive for.

It’s the Cobra Kai losers who sell the series.  Aisha is particularly well scripted, driven to take karate after being cruelly bullied by classmates over her weight. Johnny at first refuses her, on the politically incorrect wisdom that “no girls are allowed at Cobra Kai”, until Aisha proves her potential by slamming his best student on his ass and almost breaking his ribs (mostly on the strength of her fat-ass weight for which she has been relentlessly teased). She soon becomes one of the best Cobra Kai students, and certainly one of the series’ best characters.

Johnny is the true hero of Cobra Kai, in thrall to a harsh version of karate but unwilling to sink to the depths Kreese did. He has a vulnerable side, so he’s not just an asshole. His upbringing was less than kind, and his son Robby wants nothing to do with him. He’s politically incorrect (and, amusingly, a stone-age Luddite who doesn’t know what “a Facebook” is), showing hints of racism, sexism, and homophobia, while proving that in practice he’s really none of these things — as long as his students keep up. (He reminds me of Full Metal Jacket‘s Sergeant Hartmann: “I am hard, you will not like me. But I am fair. There is no racial bigotry here. I do not look down on niggers, kikes, wops, or greasers. Here you are all equally worthless.”) Miguel takes his sensei’s flaws in stride, and Johnny comes to think of him as a son.

When Daniel and Johnny faced off in the ’80s, it was cookie-cutter good vs. evil. With Miguel and Robby in the final round, there’s no such duality this time. Each is an asshole; each is likeable. And I have to give the writers credit for having Miguel take the trophy, which I didn’t expect at all. Surely Daniel’s protege would win, as Daniel always did in the films? But no: Miguel kicks the shit out of him, and in a very Cobra Kai fashion — by taking full advantage of Robby’s shoulder injury, hitting him in his wounds repeatedly with “no mercy”. A sleazy move, and yet somehow Miguel (unlike the ’80s Johnny) doesn’t come across as despicable for it.

The epilogue scores for continuing to portray Daniel in a less than flattering light. As soon as Daniel said “over my dead body”, I saw the Prince of Sanctimony again; and with the foreshadowing of what will surely be a Miyagi dojo in season 2, it’s obvious that Daniel is gearing up with more self-righteous measures against Johnny. And as if Johnny doesn’t have enough to worry about from that corner, the biggest surprise of all comes in the final frame: the return of John Kreese, who has all along been presumed dead. He strolls into Johnny’s dojo, congratulates him on his victory, and tells him they have “much to do” now that Cobra Kai is back. That sounds like a hostile takeover, and Johnny looks appalled; he’s been fighting Kreese’s ghost for years. Trapped between Daniel and the Devil, he has ugly challenges ahead of him, and season 2 has a lot to deliver on.”

If you read the whole thing, I disagree with the article saying that Cobra Kai is just a campy family drama with godawful soundtrack (WHAT???) but I agree that Daniel is portrayed as a self-righteous judgemental condescending hypocrite and that Johnny is politically incorrect  showing hints of racism, sexism, and homophobia, but in reality he’s none of those things.

Of course I’m on Johnny’s side because who doesn’t love a cynical blue-eyed golden-haired underdog with a mouth and an attitude. But I also love how much of a manipulative and sanctimonious asshole Daniel has become, and I’m enjoying every minute of his “villainy” eating pop corn. He’s so enjoyable to watch. I don’t think he’s badly written or badly played at all, and I wouldn’t want him any other way. I wouldn’t want him to be “just nice to Johnny” because where’s the fun in that, and I can’t make myself hate him because he’s just deluded about the true nature of Cobra Kai. Too stubborn to see the truth. And if it wasn’t for this ongoing feud we just wouldn’t have “Cobra Kai”, would we? 

[inventedworld]

THE PROBLEM WITH BIG DATA

To be effective, stories must trade in specificity. Stories need to let us know how things feel, how they taste, what they look like, how they smell. The moments we remember are often the sensual ones. Certainly there are intellectual discoveries that can shock us to new levels of consciousness like Frankenstein's monster being hit by lightning. But most of the stuff that captures our attention and our imaginations resonate when we feel them. As John Keats put it, “…axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses.” It’s arguable that even the brainy thrill that comes from suddenly discovering a profound scientific or mathematical insight is, in itself, made memorable by the quickening of one’s pulse. The insight into a technical truth makes itself real to us by the feel of our beating hearts and quickened breath.

This, however, is an era defined by data. Rather than walk lazily through a riparian meadow, you’re more likely going to just Google some pix. It’s less work, faster, and your fridge is nearby. Click “images”: instant meadow. 

But perhaps you’re feeling expansive. If, perchance, you’re actually standing in the middle of a sun-kissed glade, the long shadow cast by the ubiquitous Cloud likely extends over you anyway. You’ll probably reach for your ever-present battery powered appendage and post a picture to the platform of your choice, chockablock with meta-tags. Suddenly your own day in the meadow becomes yet another database byte in the field of pixelated mountain flowers. You’ve fed the big data maw with one more, and in so doing, you pulled yourself out of the actual experience for a moment and back into the flat glass of your phone. 

Shall I compare these to a summer’s day? Depends on whether there’s good cell signal, apparently.

But who am I kiddin’? This ain’t no polemic! I love my tech as much as you do. It’s true, it’s true: I’m a geek through and through. The issue here is that the lure of big data can impede on experience and sensation. Big data asks us to add, to add, to add. Big data doesn’t ask us to discern. If you’re standing in a meadow, rays of sun illuminating blossoms and birds alike, you might consider fully immersing yourself in that singular moment rather than millions of others like it. This moment is your own. The bottomless well of data asking you to tithe one more digital bit cares not a whit for what you see, what you smell, what you feel when the rising afternoon breeze kisses your skin.

The Luddites effectively proved their own flaws, even as they simultaneously made important philosophical points by rejecting modern solutions to preserve anachronistic jobs.  I understand the power of big data. Some insights are simply invisible without it. Try to describe the apparent chaos of high-velocity atmospheric winds and you’re immediately lost like a stringless kite. See those winds visualized by mathematically precise vector fields, and the breathing Earth suddenly appears. The problem here is not the data itself. The problem is not in deep understanding either, even if that may take some work to achieve. The problem is the growing belief that data itself is the singular highway to deep truth. More data doesn’t make something more meaningful. This is not an either/or proposition. Some data yields its secrets because its deeper meaning only emerges when placed into a gigantic context. Big data can offer insights by showing patterns or trends that require thousands of measurements for them to appear, patterns that would be otherwise invisible in anything smaller than a massive tranche. 

In stories, we don’t necessarily need to hear “more”. We need to hear what matters. There’s always more story that could be told. There’s always more paint that could be applied. There’s always a wider lens or a busier stage or more complex notes that could be played. Artistic quality may be a topic of timeless debate, but one thing is clear. Artistic quality comes by making choices, some invested in limitations as much as from expansive inclusions. Where Neal Stephenson presents hundreds of expository pages to create the space for his stories, he still selects which aspects to include. Nicholson Baker, conversely, tells his stories in miniature, but his precise selections define the cosmos of his creations. 

This is to say, “I’m listening.” 

Tell the story again about how it felt that afternoon when you went skinny dipping in the lake.  

Breathe slowly and whisper about the day the soldiers came dragged your townsfolk away.  

Remind me how you lost all sense of time when the doctor placed your new baby daughter in your hands, sixty second old.

More data doesn’t make these stories better. Big data will not improve a great first date, even if you swiped right one night looking for Mister Right. 

Choices make life real. Data simply describes reality. The problem with big data is that it urges us to believe it’s the best way to arrive at optimized quality, solutions that stand the test of analysis and repeatability. Sure, there’s value in big data. There’s a ton. But some of the best moments in life writ big and small happened without regard to direct measurement, and with life as fleeting and fragile as it is, I would hate to miss the chance to experience any one of them simply because the statistical trend line tell me where things are headed.

@michaelstarobin

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