#though also is heavily implied to *also* be a history nerd

[aroaceleovaldez]

Jason, Reyna, and Nico have one billion in-jokes about Mediterranean history between the bronze age to the renaissance that they find absolutely hilarious and no one else understands in the slightest. i know this in my heart to be true.

[daradiostarz]

Okay Hiii me back!! Time to talk about Book Enzo (Honestly the best iteration of Enzo) and an insight on him because I feel people look at book Enzo so one noted and it's very frustrating to watch so okay.

Context: The Book was where Nicky's friends were mostly introduced (This was during a time when SN wasn't considered part of the lore so no Finch, no Ivan and no Delroy and Leader, Brave and Detective were separate cause like Maritza and Enzo were hinted to be dark skinned mexicans) Enzo in the books was also very different in the two books.

Yes he IS a nerd he HAS nerd qualities but he was also had a very sharp tongue and will opp out of a conversation when Aaron is brought in as a topic. And book 2 is where Enzo stole alot of the show cause of his arc and turnaround and also his argument with Nick in chapter 7 and the iconic:

"Have fun alone." While Jackson 5 is blasting in the bg

He also did something somewhat of a prick move which was: ditching Nick & Maritza to instead hang with kids whom he had zero platonic compatibility with and allowing them to walk all over him (Like them giving him an embarrassing nickname) and though in the end of the book he does have a turn around and make up with Nick. Alot of people by that time see Enzo as a prick/mean girl/idk whatever u wanna call him. Ik 14 year old me did at the time till I reread it and started to be charmed and eventually now I usually tend to defend some of his actions of book 1-2 (3 I'll tab in a bit l8r)

Okay, let's start w the easy one which is Enzo telling Nick off in chapter 7 about staying away from Maritza & Trinny: In book 1 Enzo told Nick "Oh btw your neighbor cornered my sister and told her about her dead friend flying" and to which Nick then met up with Maritza irl by book 2 and the two shared a bond over them losing a close friend while amidst Nick falling out w Enzo. So let's go back to that first sentence in blue: imagine a friend of yours is friends with someone who the adult figure in their life said something pretty horrifying to a family member, to which you tell them about it & instead of that friend backing off that friend with the scummy adult figure they instead put your family member risking their life for investigating on that scummy adult figure behind your back cause they thought you simply just want to hide behind your tail and not confront the situation, and mind you. You and the friend are both 12.

Now let me say this: Yes it was somewhat scummy for Enzo to try and avoid it at all costs especially when Maritza was hurt he did not take into consideration her feelings BUT the situation could've been bad had Maritza been closed off to the topic about her two dear friends & being thrust into foregoing to investigate a man who said creepy shit to you by someone you kinda met through your brother. Yeah, Enzo HAD a reason for what he said about Nick staying away from Trinity and Maritza two people who he not only cares about but HAS HISTORY. I love Nick but it is stupidly dangerous how he set up 2 other kids to investigate with him and doesn't think of how DANGEROUS that is especially since in the books it is HEAVILY IMPLIED THEODORE ABUSES AARON.

This isn't a case of unreliable narration or the author forgot to add it in it's a case where the POV doesn't understand why the character feels like that way, it's Nick POV at the end of the day he doesn't have all the answers but it's hinted.

They're meant to be a parallel to their own fathers' how-to approach to an article on Theodore except switched on its heads. So yeah how do you expect a bunch of 12-year-olds to react to someone being kidnapped?

Aaron & Enzo: Okay in general this is something I always kept in mind about the books especially cause this was intended by the author:

Enzo and (the rest of the kids too not just him.) Are meant to be flawed so it's not a surprise personally he doesn't want to be affiliated with something as macabre as Lucy's death or the Petersons anymore and is again trying to cope (He's 12 his mind is at the end of the day still developing) but it just doesn't work. My only complaint was I wished we could've seen a scene where Enzo realizes Ruben and Seth didn't care for him. But with what we have I much rather have it be implied through Enzo not making it to the basketball team and finally Enzo and Nick making up and going to Miguel for help. Nick & Enzo CARE about the people they love they unfortunately butt heads over how to approach it with Enzo wanting Nick to do nothing while Nick wants Enzo to do something. They don't HATE each other I do not understand where that is coming from especially cause Nick was so quick to forgive Enzo even wanting to hug him like... They care for each other, they just clashed about how to approach a very heavy situation that will likely get police involved.

And as for Enzo falling out with Aaron, obviously, it's the Maritza situation I want to irritate though that yes Aaron isn't at fault Enzo probably with the influence of Miguel shaped his mindset that Aaron and Mya are people he should stay away from in order not to be sucked in by Theodore's toxicity (Cause that book they were all 10 and had brains that soak up like a sponge)

Okay time to talk generally about book 3: It's a very weak book that forces the characters to be written out of a plot for the final scene which was planned out. And though yes Enzo abandoned Nick (with like also Trinity and Maritza)

Oh right I totally forgot HNVR exist despite how book 3 seems to have written them not wanting to do with anything w Nick! let's all actively pretend book 3 never existed:

Okay, I'll try my only defense for him in book 3 is: Everyone was written stupidly for a forced conflict but I think cause as a reader I was desensitized to Enzo being mean it doesn't come off as left field for me as Trinity and Maritza also he was the last one to opp which again says alot. Also HNVR says otherwise let's pretend they realize how stupid they were and then wanted to apologize only for Nick to be missing let's say that (or pretend book 3 never exist)

So yes this is my gushing about the book Enzo and why I believe he's the most well-written character in the books and what I think alot of people tend to miss out... I wish Enzo was more studied on like this on the same levels as Ted tbh lol

I love these four... I will talk about these four... Please let me talk about their book versions of them so bad you have no idea how much I will go the 7 seas to defend them like a soccer mom.

[simp-city-sirens]

BatFam Reading Habits Headcanons

*I’ve been getting back into reading lately and it got me thinking about the bat families reading habits or tastes. These are just my headcanons - feel free to disagree or add on your own thoughts - I’d love to hear ‘em!*

Jason Todd reads the classics but not in a snobby way. I mean, we already know he reads Austen. He’s also into classic poetry in addition to the novels and he’s secretly really into annotating and analyzing such. On the flip side he is also a massive nerd who loves to read comics and manga as well (he’s more into shojou than shonen but he won’t tell anyone that)

Bruce Wayne on the other hand is into classics but in a decidedly much more snobby way (if it’s not a classic is it even worth his time). He has definitely read books such as Frankenstein, Crime and Punishment, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and The Divine Comedy. He’s into anything with really nihilistic tones and he almost certainly is one of those dads that reads history and political books. 

Dick Grayson reads whatever’s popular at the moment. He wants to stay current and it’s very “so this is what the kids are into these days?” energy. If the book is blowing up on tiktok you can be sure Dicky boy has or is reading it. He’s also a comics nerd and get’s into heated debates with Jason over them.

Barbara Gordon is a nonfiction girly for sure. As far as fiction goes, though, she’s giving me high-fantasy vibes. Don’t know why - but I’m convinced. She’s also definitely into true crime thriller’s, growing up as the police commissioner’s daughter and all and then later joining the bats and their detective vigilantism. It just came naturally.

Stephanie Brown is in it for the spice. She reads smutty books and nothing will convince me otherwise. Trashy romance is her thing - she’s in it for the drama - the twists - the turns. She definitely rants to the other bats about the books she’s reading a la “and then you wON’T BELIEVE what this bitch does next!!! She-”

Damian Wayne is into sci-fi and fantasy. He just is. After Jason has him read Austen, though, I think that he secretly really really enjoys romance novels way more than he thought. He would sooner die than admit this - but he definitely has a secret guilty pleasure stack of romance novels hidden away where no one can find them (spoiler alert: someone found them. Which bat family member was it though?)

Tim Drake is someone I struggled with a bit but I think he reads mostly true crime thrillers, though he gets bored with them easily as the plot twists are just SO predictable. If the book can blindsight him in a good way with it’s plot, though? That’s a winner. A truly god-tier book. Also manga. Definitely manga. Tim Drake is a fucking weeb.

Kate Kane gives off horror vibes. She definitely reads horror. She also is down to read anything sapphic. Is it outside her preferred genre but it’s sapphic? Give it to her. She is very critical - with good reasons - of the representation in said books, though, and she only keeps books of the highest gay quality.

Duke Thomas is one of the ones I struggled with the most (along with Cassandra) but I think that I’ve landed on the idea of him reading sci-fi. I couldn’t tell you why - but it feels right. He is also a MASSIVE nerd on the same scale as Jason and Tim who definitely reads comics and manga. He flips between being into the really mainstream popular shonen manga and really obscure shit no one (but Tim) has heard of.

Cassandra Cain I definitely struggled with the most out of anybody so feel free to jump in and add your headcanons. I feel like she would mostly read contemporary literature with very well written characters and social relationships and dynamics??? Why??? I’m not sure. I also like the idea that she likes to explore more of her culture - which correct me if I’m wrong but we don’t have any concrete canon information on but it’s heavily implied she’s Chinese - through reading Chinese literature.

[bellatrixobsessed1]

Icy Is The Avatar Of High School; The Essay

I would like to begin this essay with a song. While reading this essay keep in mind that Icy has the exact same energy as this song which (imo) embodies prep & jock with a touch of nerd. No goth tho, press f in the chat.

Wow I put way too much into this. I hope y’all love it.

Okay so lets get into this! We will begin with the obvious one, goth:

*Gestures to all of the snow*

Edit: that was supposed to say show but snow works too.

Next we will talk about Jock.

So think of your typical jock. A stereotypical jock has a few qualities; reckless bravery and determination, large ego, usually at least kind of an asshole, doesn’t know when to quit, craves them gainz, and makes impulse decisions. 

Icy is definitely a very brazen person. It takes balls (and a large ego) to get banned from your campus and then very boldly strut back onto said campus in the middle of dinner while the whole school is assembled. She looked at Lord Darkar, shadow phoenix of the underworld and was straight up like, “yeah, whatever dude.”  Dude is such a jock word. 

So onto determination! Okay look, we have like 7 whole seasons of her trying to take over the world. She was arrested, what? 5 times? She literally doesn’t know when to stop. Give up??? Who’s that??? 

I feel like the large ego thing also speaks for itself she is constantly talking about how she deserves to be Darkar & Valtor’s main witch. She is well aware that her plans are usually fantastic. She just exudes an I’m better than you energy. It’s in her posture, her gestures, her tone of voice. Icy is absolutely certain that she is the shit and in the 4kids version one of her demands to the professors was to stand before the student body and say, “Icy rules, Icy’s the greatest.” *Spoiler alert* she is. I promise that she is not holding me hostage. 

Which brings me to the next point, getting dem gainz! Your average jock is at the gym, drinking protine shakes, and building muscle! While Icy is not in a gym trying to get 6 pack abs, she 100% chases them magical gainz! The dragon fire is just a really hot protine shake.  

In the 4kids version, upon overrunning Cloud Tower, she addressed the student body by welcoming them to her pep assembly. Ya know who else likes pep assemblies? Football jocks. 

Also that whole scene in episode nine (Spelled) where she rallies up the witches and they all chase Musa. That’s like the goth equivalent of getting the entire football team to chase after the nerd (or a member of the rivaling team).

And let’s not forget the ‘nerd run’ from season two where she rode this dinosaur thing and chased Timmy, the stereotypical nerd type. (It’s funny because she doesn’t know that she’s a nerd too). 

Okay so now that we dug deep into jock, it is time to discuss Prep!

I tend to use prep & always wears pink, blonde, mean girl interchangeably. But wiki says; Characteristics of preps in the past include a particular subcultural speech, vocabulary, dress, mannerisms and etiquette, reflective of an upper-class upbringing. Both definitions hold up in my book. 

So we’ll start with wiki’s. Icy (depending on whether or not we’re going with the season 8 retcon) is from an upper-class upbringing. Tbh she’s like Stella but a witch.  Icy is Stella’s goth phase and that’s why Stella fears Icy because she knows that that’s what she could be. I feel like Icy also has the most preppy dress style of her sisters.  Also pretty sure preps are known for being over-achieving perfectionists. Icy was actually pretty good with her academics. 

As for the Regina Gorge type prep; Icy is totally your classic mean girl bully, but make it witchy. I really think that this speaks for itself. It sings for itself too in 4kids OST. One of the lyrics in the Mean Girls song is that they will steal your boyfriend and trash your makeup. If that doesn’t scream prep, Idk what does. 

She reads them magazines. I don’t remember which one but I do remember her mentioning that there was a question posed in said magazine about ‘what would you do if you took over the world’ and apparently she wrote, ‘you’ll find out soon enough, loser’ and sent it in. 

Loser, pixies, nerds, dweebs. Icy has a whole list of mean and petty insults to put in her burn book. Like bye girl. 

Literally all of the Miss Magix contest. That is peak mean girl shit. The Trix literally went to a beauty pageant for the sole sake of making everyone look stupid and to trash on everyone’s fashion and makeup. On top of all of that she did that just because Lucy agreed to do their homework for ???? amount of time. Let’s be real, it was a life sentence.  

Now, the moment you’ve been waiting for! Nerd!

Literally every time she calls anyone a nerd or a loser I wheeze because, girl, check yourself! Prior to getting kicked out (for being a dumb jock), it is heavily implied that Icy, Darcy, and Stormy were at the top of their classes. Like these three were Griffin’s best students. And I am inclined to believe that Icy was thee top student. This woman was an overachiever whether she wants to admit it or not. 

Icy is the plan person. She’s the one who keeps the Trix on task. Though Darcy exudes ‘group mom’ energy, Icy is usually the one to snap at them to stay focused. She’s the organized one  and the one who seems to do most of the scheming. That takes some deep thinking and brain power. She knows how to summon monitors, banish trolls into oblivion, astral project into virtual reality using voodoo dolls, summon nightmare monsters, and summon an army of rot. Like how does she know all of this?  Studying. I almost said that I have no proof except in the Winx comics (this one) she is seen venturing to the library to research dark magic and spells. 90% she has done some extensive research and reading into all of these things because I highly doubt that Cloud Tower teaches things like summoning the army of decay. That was all down time research because this nerd enjoys learning about dark magic. Ya know who else enjoys reading and learning? Nerds. I know, I’m a nerd who loves reading and learning. Just because she likes learning about ~cool~ thinks like dark armies, doesn’t mean it’s not a nerdy quest to know everything about the subject she knows. 

Speaking of which (lol get it, witch), Icy also knows about history. She was the one who told Bloom all about what happened to Sparks and all about the coven. Why? Because that knowledge is floating around in her brain and she chose to retain it. I have a feeling her knowledge of history goes beyond the coven and Sparks too because she also knew that the Ring Of Solaria had fragments of the dragon fire.  She knows too much about this shit. 

I think that her nerdiest moment though, had to be when she solved that riddle at Red Fountain to get the codex. Like you have to have brain power to solve a riddle with the added pressure of being surrounded by your foes on enemy territory. In general her nerdiness just bled through in that season because she was snatching those codexes left and right. 

Also lets get into the fact that she (especially in the comics) has a tendency to humiliate herself, whoops. She managed to get her own (and Darcy & Stormy’s) memories erased, she got them trapped in an avalanche (and then dated a fellow nerd for two seconds and pretended like she didn’t hate it), and she is constantly pulling ‘we’ll be back’ speeches every time she gets defeated. Like seriously this is the evil equivalent of ‘lol I meant to do that’ or ‘haha, that didn’t happen, you didn’t see anything.’ And then she will make her next attempt as if she had never gotten defeated at all. Because losing is for losers and Icy ‘totally isn’t’ a loser. 

And honestly what’s more nerdy then prattling off your entire evil plan? Like this is her trying to flex her intelligence. 

Let’s not forget how she had her nerdy fangirl moment. She simped for Darko for like two or three whole comics. Like full on simping over here. If she could have bought a T-shirt with Darko’s face on it, she would have. Bonus, he was her childhood crush.

And finally, I am also very  inclined to believe that Icy is the fake it until you make is sort. With her it’s all about presentation. The only thing that saves her from being an obvious nerd is confidence. I touched on this with the whole ‘you didn’t see anything’ bit. But legit, pretty much everything she does would be kinda nerdy if she didn’t make it look good. 

Please feel free to add if you think that you have more examples of Icy being a nerd. 

[searchingforthestage]

So I watched all of Hollywood (2020)

I really liked it! I’ve been in a vintage hollywood mood for a while now so it came out at exactly the right time for me, and even though I’m usually a nerd about historical accuracy it didn’t bother me this time because everything that the show did historically wrong felt like they were changed on purpose. It’s like an alternate history show - all the progressive elements in it that would not fly at all in the time period are supposed to be very noticable, and it feels very refreshing while being entertaining (while it also does feel like a rewrite of the parts of hollywood that it might be irresonsible to change right now, but that’s a debate).

It hasn’t yet been approved for a second season but if it does, I hope it picks up on what was hinted at in the finale (no spoilers). Some people are saying that it could be treated as an athology show and I wouldn’t be satisfied since it heavily implied what storyline they would go with in the finale. 

[krixwell-liveblogs]

Worm asks

Have you tried to give D&D alignments to The Travelers yet, and if not how would you classify them?

Hmm.

Trickster: True neutral

Sundancer: Neutral good

Ballistic: Chaotic neutral

Genesis: ???

Noelle: Lawful? good

Oliver: Chaotic nerd

Gurer’f abguvat vaqvfchgnoyl njshy tbvat guebhtu, ohg V’q qrsvavgryl yvxr gb frr yrff uvagvat znxr vg guebhtu gur fperravat gb Xevk

Sharks: Fher guvat. V’ir orra ehaavat bss gur vqrn gung vs vg’f va gur sbezng bs na ubarfg dhrfgvba, va beqre gb nibvq nabgure Fpragyrff Zna vapvqrag, ohg V pna svarghar vg vs crbcyr jnag?

As usual, translate here.

While you’re checking out all the Simurgh fanart, you should listen to this theme someone made for her: (google Simurgh Husr, first result. Hopefully sharks can just replace this with the actual link) Same person who made that Leviathan theme linked way back.

https://soundcloud.com/user-371879520/simurgh

This was really nice. I like how it does sound like a good melody while at the same time exhibiting some of the pattern-defying nature of the tune. 🙂

I think you miiiight have jumped to conclusions from an ask that simply asked you if you could list the Traveler’s cape and civilian names. Miiight have. Also, I’m pretty sure most of them where refered to by their civilian names in previous arcs.

It’s certainly possible.

It’s not so much that I jumped to the conclusion as that the ask opened my eyes to the possibility of it, which I hadn’t considered before. From there, I had to reevaluate things and consider how things would change if it turned out I had gotten the two mixed up. Ultimately I think I’d prefer for Cody to be Ballistic, but I’m still not sure either way (even with this ask heavily implying it’s Luke).

As for names, most of their names did show up (all the more reason for an ask about matching names to capes being kind of odd if it wasn’t trying to set me thinking of something), but I can’t recall Ballistic’s being one of them. But you know how my memory can be.

That smurf song you posted definitely says “dab dab dab” several times, despite the video being uploaded to YouTube in 2009, and the song supposedly being from 1978. So that’s suspicious as hell.

I… think that has to be the bits where it actually says “tramp, tramp, tramp på en smurf” (“stomp, stomp, stomp on a smurf”).

Either way, now we’re all forced to consider the concept of the Smurfs dabbing, so thanks for that. 😛

“Dragonberry” was Scarfgirl’s old character on City of Heroes, a MMORPG with a superhero theme that no longer exists. I know you’re not reading the chapter comments, but if you ever go back to read the early ones, you’ll see that quite a lot of the early readers were City of Heroes players who had an interest in superhero fiction. That’s why Scarfgirl’s art is signed “Dragonberry”, because it’s how people knew her back then.

Ah, interesting. Fun to hear a little about the fandom’s early history. 🙂

I’ve had many names, myself. Once upon a time I used to make a different name, if not more, for just about every site I was on. One of the names that stuck with me the most was Elementarion, which I used in the game Godville and a few other places (not every Elementarion that comes up on Google now is me, though), because I found long-time friends while using that name.

Though for some reason I wonder why 😛, nobody seemed to want to type it out every time they wanted to mention me. I’ve been called almost every short form of Elementarion there is. El was the most common (made watching Stranger Things kinda odd the first time around, even though I’d long abandoned the name), but I’ve been called Ele, Elem, Eleme, Elemen, Element…

A couple other highlights I remember were Hiatus (in a browser game I don’t remember the name of), OldHeavens (NewGrounds) and Barbute (ArmorGames).

It wasn’t until I came up with Krix Jace, later Krixwell Jace, that I started stabilizing my name.

1. Do you think people ever submit misleading questions just to fuck with you?

Some, probably. And that might be a good thing — if there are some asks that deliberately imply things that are wrong, it makes it harder to trust accidental implications of things that are right.

2. Have you ever noticed that Danny and Eidolon have never been in a scene together?

Hmmmmmm 🤔

Still no Travelers interlude… do you still think you’ll get one, or has this dashed your hopes?

Ahaha

Yeah, no, I’m counting this as everything I asked for and more. 😛

Sharks:

http://www.nospoiler.com/y/WenCYI_Bn7I

Sent in by “ewerwqer”. “Simurgh Scream” by person257 Don’t… Open it with headphones on. Trust me. Don’t.

I’m scared.

*disconnects his headphones*

…not as bad as the description sounded, but yeah, probably a good idea to not use headphones. It’s a well put-together bit of mind noise, nice work. 🙂

Worm fanart

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

By Winkle92

Oooh, there are more of these? Awesome! They’re all going in my backgrounds folder.

I love how Behemoth just kinda peeks around the corner of the image border. It’s okay, don’t be shy!

(Also I just discovered I can do slideshows. Neat.)

K6BD ask

My favorite part is the Master of Aesthetic saying “she is an idiot, and a loathsome schemer!” and YISUN is all “YEP, YOU GOT THAT ONE RIGHT 😀 😀 :D”. With Aesma standing right there.

YISUN is the type of person who has “precious trash babies” in every fandom they’re in. 😛

I feel like you all need to know, even if you don’t care about MLP:FiM, that the final episode of the show proved us all wrong.

The show’s resident Skitter is not Queen Chrysalis, the villainous, scheming ruler of a hive full of insect ponies.

Nor is it Twilight Sparkle, the mainest character and socially awkward brainiac who leads a team of five other main characters and always does her research if she can.

No, because of this one episode, it becomes clear:

It’s Rarity.

…

Okay, that’s just a joke, Twilight is still the best fit among the Mane Six, but Rarity using spiders for her fashion did immediately make me think of Taylor.

Twilight – Taylor

Applejack – Brian

Rainbow Dash – Rachel

Rarity – Lisa

Fluttershy – Alec??

Pinkie Pie – Aisha??

(Spike – Shatterbird??????)

K6BD patron comments

1. “What happened to Hansa” is addressed in the Prim story so that’s still out there if you want to know.

Ahh. That would explain why it was left unexplained in Aesma, aside from acting as a noodle incident if you haven’t read Prim.

2. As you observed, the word “demon�� has appeared very rarely in the comic, outside of epic title drops & an instance where drunk Allison used it in place of “devil”. It’s used in some of the bonus texts but without a clear definition. Can you speculate further on what it might mean?

The priests seem to call Aesma a demon in the sense of a being of evil, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a definition that’s relevant to the comic’s title (and what appears to be Allison’s “name” in some sense, though the Demiurges do seem to have misinterpreted other parts of the prophecy and Zoss didn’t unambiguously use it as a name). It may be more about inner demons, Allison killing her fears, doubts and insecurities as she grows into the role of a king/queen of the cosmos. Six billion might be hyperbole, in that case, but still.

Alternatively, the prophecy and name might actually refer to Zaid, who could easily end up being the final villain of this thing even if he’s not actually Zoss’ intended successor. In that case, “six billion demons” might refer to humans, if Zaid gets really nasty with his own species. We know very little about Zaid’s base personality beyond “kinda sleazy boyfriend”, so a lot of developments are plausible on that front.

Though there are other parts of the prophecy, as well as illustrations, that do fairly clearly indicate Kill Six Billion Demons is Allison and will be flanked by White Chain and Ciocie, so it referring to Zaid is unlikely.

3. I think the author once said that there are still Aesma-worshippers active in Throne. What do you think they’re like and what would she think of them?

(Somehow the flesh sellars come to mind.)

Well, clearly they’d be Slytherins, if they understand her teachings. Aesma might treat them as ants, if she were still around, but bask in their adoration.

4. Kalpa — a Hindu / Buddhist concept meaning a really fucking long time. Besides in the story you just read, the term has also appeared in the comic at least once so far.

Good to know. I think I kind of just assumed it was Throne’s equivalent of a year, however long it might be.

5. Panopticon — a prison design envisioned by philospopher Jeremy Bentham, allowing all prisoners to be observed from a central point.

Makes sense. When I read it in Aesma’s story, the word’s construction was clear enough that I figured out what it was immediately, before I finished reading the sentence. It very clearly means a place from which to see everything.

6. Root — penis.

Yeah, I figured that one out. 😛

7. To offset the unfortunate scarcity of Cio in your life lately, here’s some of the old concept art:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

(The quantity of arms was somewhat uncertain.)

Oooh.

Her arms and legs look so spidery here. I suppose that might be why she was introduced with the Coat of Arms.

Can Skitter control her?

8. Not related to K6BD but Abaddon has also been working on a tabletop mecha RPG and here’s the very nice cover art:

Ooh, you’re right, this looks very nice. It kind of gives me a K6BD x Steven Universe x Star Wars vibe. And a little bit of RWBY with that one guy that reminds me of Tyrian. I can definitely see the resemblance between this an K6BD in terms of character design style, despite the genre shift.

I particularly like the blonde in the lower left.

In the interest of transparency, I should also mention that the patron has said he probably won’t sponsor full liveblogs of any of the other bonus texts, but has sent me a few recommendations and links to some of the ones I’ve passed (besides Prim). I might read some of those on my own time, though, especially the second Aesma story. If I do, I will of course let you know and discuss any particularly notable observations.

Between: PB7

[vaguely-concerned]

Overwatch cookbook lore thoughts

b/c I’m not proud, I’ll be excited beyond reason for any scraps of lore and these are actually really fun

- let me open by saying that “A longtime resident of the Southwest, where cultures collide and outlaw justice prevails, Jesse McCree built his own personal brand of right and wrong. Also born out of a complex history, these cookies have a decidedly old-world flavour with a twist” are the greatest lines ever conceived in the English language, and I am tempted to put my pen down for good in the face of it. Nothing I write will ever be as good. ‘also born out of a complex history, these cookies’ what more could I even add

on a further personal note: I can’t fucking believe I actually hit on the emotional implications of the cookies thing like two years ago! between that and the was-temporarily-a-farmboy vindication I can keep warm on cold nights for approximately fifty years, thank you, my AU is at least canon adjacent in ways I didn’t expect lol

also the idea of him starting the day by downing a drink that handily combines alcohol and caffeine makes me feel honor bound to reiterate that young jesse living off of coffee, alcohol, cigarettes and adrenaline must have been a wild-eyed, wildfire clever, awesome-in-the-original-sense sight to behold. I am laughing and crying simultaneously, which is the mood he habitually inspires in me god bless him  

- for some actual new info and not just my rambling internal monologue: Torbjörn’s wife Ingrid is a genius chemical engineer! One gets the feeling the Lindholm household is very warm and loving but exhausting to anyone without the genes for constant curious tinkering and experimentation

- There are very clear, very intentional mentions of both Vincent and Emily, which has me so sad all over again that this development team is housed in a company that actively sides with tyranny and human rights abuses (as opposed to the more tacit complicity of the rest of the industry, which remains shitty but at least most of them don’t cheerfully double down on it in public. ah ain’t capitalism grand fuck blizzard as a company, sympathy to the good people working for blizzard it must be a uncomfortable place to be) 

- winston dipping bananas in peanut butter pudding to get them down fhdskjafhsakf now I don’t know how aging actually works for borderline-my-god-what-has-your-science-wrought biological experiment gorillas, but he! is! such! a! teenage! boy!!!!! the sweetest hairiest teenage boy! give him his family back! dr. winston sr used to make them cookies ;o;

- Reinhardt remains indecently wonderful and delightful. ‘Beneath Reinhardt’s armor is a jovial man with an insatiable zest for life’. poetry. 

- ‘Though she had little time to cook, Ana could put together a comforting lentil soup even on nights when Fareeha insisted she needed nothing. A mother always knows best’ 😭😭😭😭 I am practically allergic to mother figures but you know what for all her faults ana amari is the actual best and I love her so much, they somehow managed to convey through fareeha’s recipes how much she misses her mom,  h e l p  

- D.Va’s entries are just. harrowing. I like that they don’t look away from the horrible inhuman weight on her shoulders every hour of every day even in this lighthearted cooking book, that was real nice of them 

- jack morrison is an absolute sweetie pie and it hurts me. seems like he’s one of the few heroes who actually does some cooking, along with reyes! also that little tidbit about him and ana eating breakfast together back in the day (and him absolutely doing the cooking in that duo)... BrOTP 4ever, between that and the mention of reyes, amari & morrison eating churros together after missions I am emotionally compromised

- I’ve seen Genji’s before actually but for some comments: a) the fact that across the lore one of his most consistent Things is that on some level he just... really wants his big brother back? even after everything?? is an eternally bleeding wound in my heart that never heals, b) the shimadas had a dedicated family chef! and it sounds like they had a slightly closer relationship with the boys than what’s implied to be the case in the ogundimu family, for example, and c) genji is one of the characters who’s mentioned the most in other characters’ recipes, predictably! I like that he learned to like the healthy muesli... eventually lol (also I feel like the canon has vacillated on whether he actually eats and drinks stuff still, but all this seems very settled that he does and has the whole way, even under Mercy’s care)

- can u believe... that hanzo’s idea of a simpler, happier time involves him overachieving enough to let him have a few minutes to himself and a meal alone. how does he do that. how does he break my heart at every turn. why is ‘diligently completing the tasks his father had set out before him’ so crushingly achingly sad. he just wants to eat nice simple foods in peace everyone leave him alone I will fight talon I will fight the shimada clan pls just let something nice happen to him Y______________Y

- GLØGG GLØGG GLØGG GLØGG! secondhand scandinavian joy (the book neglects to mention that it’s a drink heavily associated with christmas/at the very least wintertime, it would feel super weird to drink it during the summer lol) also ‘saft’ seems to be called ‘squash’ in a lot of places in English, I had never thought to translate it before it’s just such an iconic childhood staple lol 

- I love that sombra’s show how much of a fucking nerd she actually is. being an elite amoral-ish hacker is 2% cool parkour and glowing implants and 98% sitting in the dark in front of a screen with snack food for days at a time 

- I don’t like Ashe very much, but BOB making comfort food for her unasked and her parents having ruined most desserts for her through emotional neglect and general shittiness are both undeniably heartbreaking

- *mercy, dead eyed, pouring brandy into her chamomile tea* self medicating (I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS IS ACTUALLY CANON IT IS SO FUNNY)

- Roadhog conscientiously writing down Junkrat’s -- let’s generously call them ‘recipes’ -- just in case he’ll want them later is the most weirdly heartwarming thing I have ever heard 

- “They’re a great dessert to share anywhere, including at clandestine meetings for plotting the next world crisis” allow me to just... savour this mental image of talon members eating sweets under doomfist’s watchful eye for a bit (also... beneath the tough man act he is  s u c h  a rich fuckboy. he prefers gin because he thinks it’s more sophisticated oh my GOD)

[myfriendpokey]

Morality Play

What does it mean to have a videogame tell you you're a good person? It doesn't know me, can't see me. I don't know if you can be *immoral* in a single player game outside of some very inventive custom controls. Why should I care what a game says? Any inner moral life that a videogame or a painting might possess would be more alien to me than that of a bug or a starfish. Of course videogames and paintings are made by humans, and shaped by the moral opinion of humans.. but we might make a distinction between what the human says and the object says, we might still feel the latter is more important, somehow. 

The moral authority of an artwork or object comes from the fact that it's not quite human, that it comes to us from outside humanity to an extent, is distinguished from the unreliable back and forth of human consciousness in motion. But this distance is exactly why you might expect those moral verdicts to be unintelligible to us, or at the very best, to be untrustworthy, an imitation. So what's the appeal – that of having a human voice which speaks with the gravitas of an immortal object? The pleasant conceit that the general shape of our minds is universal, like all those Star Trek aliens that are just regular guys with slightly weirder ears or foreheads? The void speaks, and turns out to sound like a computer engineer.

But maybe not necessarily, maybe in fact it's sometimes not universal authority and moral support that we seek from the object: maybe a certain jankiness of verdict around the way these things communicate in human terms is itself part of the appeal. I think of paper fortune tellers, magic eight-balls, "love tester" machines that return a romantic prognosis based on palm temperature. The entrancing bathos of the chance-driven or mechanistic judgement that still speaks with a human voice: I’m sorry, I cannot answer right now. Please shake me, so I may try again. How different is that to the widely beloved and magnificently broken romance system in Dragon's Dogma, where, spoilers: your "soulmate" is not a matter of direct moral choice, but of variables being tracked over the course of the game including who you talked to and what sidequests you completed - which means it could arbitrarily turn out to be the weapons merchant, or a grandpa npc you found a potion for. Which is goofy, but only in a slightly more blatant way than "accidentally unlocking the romantic option in a dialogue tree from just clicking around" or "having your morality score drop 5 points because you pressed the wrong button and accidentally hurled a rock at someone's head while trying to equip shoes". 

I think something I appreciate about videogames is the kind of insectlike moral life that they tend to portray, the sense of value systems which are in some way recognisable but which have mutated in conversion to something alien and horrifying. Lara Croft shooting a wild eagle is unfortunate, Lara Croft shooting a thousand wild eagles is bizarre – but really those thousand eagles are just the one eagle, the one self-contained pulp encounter fantasy, which has been extended, extrapolated, systemised as result of being placed in this machine. The latter may be more egregious but it’s still composed of repeated incidents of the original encounter - and part of the strangeness in these games is just the uncomprehending machine effort to systemise the half-formed gunk substance of our terrible fantasy lives, which only bear a vague and halfhearted relation to any notion of ethics in any case.. We can contemplate with envy and excitement the possibilities of running more realistic, recognisable emotional and moral situations through the meatgrinderof the format in this way. How about a solemn middlebrow videogame about divorcing 50 different wives, each one larger and more powerful than the last (excluding sprite recolours)? 

All this is not to say that the casual political and moral stupidity already in videogames should simply be excused or exist outside of critique. But in addition to the body of discourse  around "moral commodities" - commodities invested with moral  or political meaning independent of any brutal labour practices they might entail or monopolistic accumulation of private  wealth they might support – I think it's also worth considering the purpose of the "moral object" itself. The alienation intrinsic to the object form can be a way to think, and also a way to avoid thinking. To project moral beliefs away from the specific context of a creaturely human existence can be a way of expanding that existence, but also of denying it. The paltriness of the human can itself be problematic next to the splendour of the object, and the reflected moral superiority of those with the means of producing such objects.

*****

There's a famous line in the Spiderman comics that with great power comes great responsibility. But it's also kind of a weird line because, while obviously applicable to Spiderman, the person it's actually delivered to is Peter Parker - who is, for all his uncle knows, still a physically awkward and friendless nerd with no immediately visible "great power" to speak of. He does like nuclear physics, though - maybe the advice was intended as a friendly intervention to keep him from turning into the next Edward Teller? Or possibly it's just a kind of unconscious, pulp-writer-trance-appropriation of the muscular liberal rhetoric of the then-current Kennedy administration. Or maybe, and stretching a bit, it's a line that relates more to the conditions of pulp culture manufacturing itself, to the awareness that the stuff you make will be printed thousands of times and sold to kids around the country, poured raw into the national subconsicous. With great sales figures comes great responsiblity.

I mention it because I think it connects to an issue with the kind of cultural criticism that emerged, like it or not, from the specific context of an age of mass media. With great power comes great responsibility - but conversely, to execute your great responsibility you also need great power. And what are you meant to do if you don't have it? Does no power mean having no responsibility? It's possible, but i feel like most people would be dubious about this as a moral lesson - and the inescapability of heavily-financed blockbusters in the culture means that an assumption of already "having great power" sometimes becomes a critical starting point. If you don't have power you should get it, so that you can then have great responsibility and contribute to the discourse. The effect can sometimes be like climbing a mountain of corpses to get a better platform for your speech about world peace.

A good essay on jrpgsaredead.fyi points out the way that certain industry conversations on "accessibility" revolve specifically around access to whatever mainstream AAA action games are currently dominating the news cycle. And the related effect where both problems and proposed solutions are particular to these games, the audience they have, and the resources they can bring bear: More consultants! More characters! More romance options! Better character creators! If you're speaking to an (essentially captive, given the marketing monies involved) audience of five million people you'd better be sure your ideas are, at least, not actively harmful, and in fact should ideally be improving - - fine. How about an audience of 50 people? Or an audience of 0? Does that mean this work is less moral than what speaks to a larger crowd - in effect, that it's worse? And what about the relationship to audience that this kind of teaching implies? i can think of several occasions where people from different subcultures or minority groups were reprimanded because something in their own experience might read differently, or problematically, when presented to a presumably white/cis/affluent etc audience - which is of course the audience that matters, because what's the value of presenting work from an alternative perspective to an audience already familiar with that perspective, to whom it has no automatic moral significance (might, in fact, merely be 'aesthetic')? Compare the complexity of a specific local audience which can think for itself to the easy win of the alternative:  a phantasm audience of moral blanks to whom rote lessons in hypothetical empathy can be tastefully and profitably imparted over and over, forever.

****

If the ethical act is that which we'd be willing to posit as universal law, perhaps we could say: the ethical artwork is that which we'd be willing to mass produce. Small or hobbyist developers are encouraged to work from the perspective of a mass-productive capacity they do not in fact possess; their successes and inevitable failures are hoovered up alike by the industry proper for later deployment in the form of cute dating sim or inspirational narrative with similar but sanitized tone or aesthetic. In essence a kind of moral QA testing, with all the job security and recompense that this implies. 

The hobbyist is, by definition, not universal: they are enclosed within the local and the material. What time do you get off work? What materials do you have to hand? Are those materials always legal? The entire western RPG Maker community exists as result of widespread bootlegging; the entirety of videogame history and preservation essentially depends on stolen copies; we find out about it through ROMs, videos and screenshots which mostly depend for their continued existence on copyright holders either not finding out or choosing not to pursue these debateable violations.  It's a complicated discussion whether this stuff can be justified on a general, universal level - but also I'm not sure we can do without it. When Fortnite uses dances from TV and music videos of living memory they're considered to be in the public domain; but Fortnite itself is not in the public domain, even though it's so inescapable that even I have a pretty good idea of what it looks and plays like despite having made a pretty determined effort to not find out anything about it. It's "public culture" in that sense, and it includes public culture within it, but both game and imagery are privately owned and aggressively policed (suing teenage hackers, etc). What does it mean for art to emerge from an ever more privatized sense of public life?

In 2007 the RPG Maker game Super Columbine Massacre RPG was added to, then removed from, the Slamdance festival following complaints; it was a minor cause celebre at the time following concerns about censorship and the lack of protections for expression in the videogame format specifically following the Jack Thompson media crusade in the United States. In 2019 the same festival retrospectively changed their reasoning: now the game had no longer been removed on the basis of questionable taste, but on the basis of questionable compliance with copyright law, since it included music from the likes of Smashing Pumpkins without paying for licensing fees (and also because the author generally "hadn’t created several of its elements" - asset flips!!!). There's some humour in the fact that a benign-sounding concern with "artist's rights" could just be swapped in as a more respectable-sounding surrogate for general prudery with exactly the same result. But also, in this instance, what does it mean about the game? As facile as SCMR is, the bootleg use of graphics and music was its most interesting element: the game was a bricolage of American pop culture at a specific point in time, as were the killers, as are we. The nearness and recognisability of that culture, the sense of not being able to get enough distance from it to properly fictionalise or think about what happened, is what stands out. An "ethical" version of the same game which used original music - Nirvanalikes, some tastefully copyright-adjacent Marilyn Manson clones - would not just be diminished, it would be actively insulting in the false distance it implied.

I don't mean this at all as a request for more edgelord-ism. But it's worth remembering that videogames themselves are not ethical; are, in fact, colonized materials assembled with exploitative labour and dumped aimlessly into public life by electronics corporations looking to make a buck. The bizarre and haphazard ways this long dump of poor decisions has manifested, warped, been adjusted into culture is part of what's worth attending to about the format – I think it's worth looking closer into all these pools of murkiness, before ethical  landlords can come drape a tarp over them as part of the process of divvying up the property.

(image credits: youkai douchuuki, quiz nanairo dreams, trauma center: under the knife, espial)

[bywandandsword]

Yeah, so anyway fuck that one English professor who taught the class on the Hobbit and the Silm a few semesters ago. What a dick

This guy was clearly the type who’s fandom community experience was very insular and who still labored under the belief that ‘nerd stuff’ is for dudes and always has been. Like, that was a conversation we had. This is a man teaching a class of nearly twenty, all but two of which were afab, had the gall to say to me that he didn’t know why women were suddenly into it, implying heavily that it was because the actors who played the characters were hot. Like, really? Naw man, people who ain’t dudes have been in nerdy shit since the fucking beginning, it just hasn’t really been socially acceptable until recently, and I told him as much. Unfortunately, I didn’t know quite as much about afab nerd history as I do know, but I used Mary Shelly, goth mom extraordinaire of both the scifi and horror genre as an example. He was still skeptical.

Also, there was this one time he had us read some obscure part of the library that is Tolkien’s work and when he asked a question about the reading and no one could immediately give him an answer, he went off, actually yelling, telling us not to waste his time, then left. Even though like, we’d all done the readings, we just didn’t have encyclopedic knowledge of it yet. 

And! If your interpretation/analysis of the text was different from his, you were wrong. I once argued that the Battle of the Five Armies was a clusterfuck (cause it was) and that Thrandy marching on Erebor’s gate with an army was unnecessarily aggressive (cause it was) and that the dwarves in the Company and the Iron Hills were justified in raising a defensive army (cause they were). And this fucker right here accused me of “making a case for the dwarves” because I think Richard Armitage is hot and I liked the movies (BotFA hadn’t come out yet). Like, how fucking insulting. Armitage’s beardy goodness aside, I am perfectly capable of analyzing a text separate from any subsequent renderings of said text. 

And did we do any even remotely interesting analysis? Nope! We didn’t talk about, like themes of war in Tolkien’s books and how that was influenced by his time as a soldier and his witnessing industrialization. We didn’t discuss the antisemetic tropes Tolkien used in the Hobbit and how his depictions of dwarves changed in later works when he became aware he’s done a shitty thing. Or like, anything relating to Tolkien’s treatment of women, how he either excludes them or puts them on pedestals. Or depictions of Tolkien’s work excluding actors of color except as villains. We didn’t talk at all about how his religion impacted his writing, or his love for history and language being the reason he wrote to begin with. Maybe compare some old Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Brythonic tales to Tolkien’s? But no, were were given lectures about how “there are no hot dwarves” and how the animated Hobbit’s Smaug that was voiced by Richard Boone was clearly superior to the one in the movies. 

He’s lucky I’m not taking this class now, now that I have a better understanding of all this, the vocabulary to articulate why he was acting like a douche canoe, and now that my deference towards professors has cooled considerably. I’d be calling him out every freaking class more than I did. I’m still salty cause he took a class that could have been one of the coolest I ever took as an undergrad and made it a less than mediocre experience, to reflect his own self

[tyrantisterror]

Thoughts on Song For Spider-Man

Remember that Song of Spider-Man book I bought a while back?  The tell-all book by the co-writer of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark?  The one that I hoped would be what I’ve wanted since news of that play’s disastrous production started - i.e. an in depth explanation and analysis of the production, detailing every creative decision and disastrous misstep?

Well, it’s not quite that, unfortunately.  It’s more of a new piece of the Turn Off the Dark puzzle, rather than completed puzzle that I’ve been looking for.  The world has yet to produce the exhaustive documentary on that musical that I crave.  But as puzzle pieces go, it is a fairly large and enlightening one, albeit one that’s also deeply biased.  It’s the story of a disaster from the perspective of one of the key players in that disaster, and, as you’d expect, is full of “this wasn’t my fault!” explanations and pleas of ignorance.  I don’t know how much you can trust the narrative, even though (and honestly, because) it’s an enthralling and emotionally gripping read.

The biggest disappointment about the book for me is that it doesn’t go very deep into the creative journey of the musical, which is the aspect I’m most interested in.  Instead it focuses more on the managerial aspects of it, which is admittedly where the drama is.  There’s money woes, conflicts of personality, miscommunication, backstabbing, and negligence that leads to a lot of good people getting hurt - the juicy gossipy shit that drew most people in.  As trainwrecks go it’s pretty compelling stuff, and the author uses the benefit of hindsight to foreshadow eventual dooms well in advance.

It’s a fun read and sheds some light on how that infamously troubled production became “a machine that teaches humility,” but it’s not the whole story, and as such my lust for the ultimate Turn off the Dark autopsy remains unsated.

Some scattered notes:

Julie Taymor was really only in this to tell the story of Arachne, and in fact was only sold on the idea when one of the producers showed her a page of a Spider-Man comic that mentioned the myth.  The Arachne character and plotline was what ultimately got Julie fired, because not only did it shift focus from Spider-Man to an obscure Greek mythological character, but it also was built upon the musical’s worst songs AND required the most complicated set piece that no one could figure out how to accomplish, and yet Julie refused to let it go.

Incidentally, I’m nerdy enough to recognize from the brief description given in this book which Spider-Man comic the Arachne reference came from.  It was Ultimate Spider-Man #1, and is made by Norman Osborn, who in the context of that comic is presented as a pretentious ass who uses bullshit philosophy to cover up his delusions of grandeur.  There’s a bit of irony here is what I’m saying.

Another “oh god I AM a nerd” moment the book made me have: the writer claims that Green Goblin has used his goblin glider since his first appearance, but, um, ACTUALLY Green Goblin used a flying broomstick in his first few outings, and didn’t get the goblin glider until later.  I remember this fact because it was in the Complete Guide to Spider-Man book I got when I was thirteen, and because the picture of the Green Goblin riding a mechanical jet-powered broomstick was delightfully stupid.

The above two facts are why I desperately want to know more about the creative process of this play - on the one hand, it has some obscure elements of the Spider-Man comics in it, like Swarm, the nazi-made-out-of-bees supervillain.  On the other, it fucks up key aspects of the story, like having Uncle Ben get killed in a car crash that has nothing to do with Peter Parker whatsoever.

One of the things I gleaned was that most of the people involved - Julie Taymor, Bono, and the Edge specifically - seemed far more familiar withe the Sam Raimi movies than the comics, and also seemed more interested in their vague notion of what a superhero means rather than any actual pre-existing superhero story.  There’s an air of condescension towards the source material, but I’m not sure how much of that is my own biased assumptions at work, the author’s definite bias, or an actually true analysis of the creative team.  Again, I want a deeper look at what they were thinking!

One part of the creative process that was explained in an illuminating way regarded the music.  Apparently, part of Bono’s process in songwriting involves him writing lyrics in “Bonoglese,” where the lyrics are just random words and Seussian things that sound vaguely like words but are actually nonsense, all mixed together in a way that does make a coherent thought at all.  This explains why the lyrics in Turn Off the Dark’s songs are either instantly forgettable (and by that I mean you forget what the words were literally one second after they are sung) or, when memorable, are just... really bad, forced attempts at rhymes.

At one point Julie, Bono, the Edge, and the other writer agreed that they weren’t trying to make a musical so much as a “rock and roll circus experience,” which, y’know, is accurate.

The guy they got to replace Julie as director was actually FROM a circus.  That’s not a joke, he literally directed a bunch of different circus shows, including ones with live animals and shit.  So in some way an aspect of the original artistic vision remained.

As much as I love to make fun of this horrible show, reading the book did inspire some compassion in me.  These people were all passionately dedicated to a very grand artistic vision, and they accomplished a lot of stuff that has never been tried in theater before.  While a lot of horrible failures occurred, the amount of stuff they got right is still pretty notable, and a part of me wished they could find a way to make it work.

I felt especially bad when the book gets to the initial fan-reaction early in the musical’s production process, where I realized that the fan’s initial criticisms of the musical’s concepts did look kind of shallow and petty.  I felt like a bit of a jerk for a moment.

Then another part of me remembered that the one song Julie Taymor refused to cut, comparing the demand for its excision to having a mastectomy, was the song where Arachne tells her minions to go buy her hundreds of shoes so she can seduce Peter Parker, because lol women love shoe shopping and if they had eight legs they’d love it even more AMIRITE?  So, y’know, guilt rescinded, we were right to be skeptical.

That said, I am legitimately pissed that the producers adamantly refused to tape a single recording of the first version of Turn Off the Dark, aka Spider-Man 1.0, aka Julie Taymor’s (approximate) vision.  Julie herself begged them to do so before and after she was fired and they didn’t listen and that sucks.  I mean, it sounds like a trainwreck of a show, but it’s a trainwreck that’s BROADWAY HISTORY.  It should be preserved!  It belongs in a museum!

The tell-all book draws an obvious parallel between the relationship of Arachne (the brilliant and misunderstood but also megalomaniacal and controlling artist) and Spider-Man (the geeky young man who suddenly has great power and responsibility thrust onto him by the aforementioned older female artist, who he also has the hots for) and the relationship of Julie Taymor and himself.  It’s pretty clever but also, like, a huge dick move since it implies Julie Taymor is a tragic villain that the author was forced to destroy just like Spider-Man is forced to destroy Arachne.  Good writing, sure, but fucked up man.

“Spider-Man was not a musical, but rather a machine built to teach humility.”  A fuckin’ excellent description, even if the account of that machine’s creation is pretty heavily biased.

[leogichidaa]

I had this Idea about a muggleborn who didn't want to stay in the wizarding society and then I had this idea of a crossover with Star Trek, soon after Hogwart she went to Starfleet Academy and became an Ensign on a ship. But Then I wanted to throw Regulus Black, so I decided to change HP timeline and to throw them in Star Trek. It's the same story with Voldemort but in Star Trek timeline. Regulus survive and somehow has to go with the muggleborn on the ship. How will he react to Aliens?

Oo, interesting. I don't actually know anything about Star Trek, other than what I see on my dash here and there. I've been told several times that I'd enjoy it, and I'm sure I would, but I just never got around to watching it. So I'm going to have to answer this ask in very general terms, as I have no substantial knowledge of the Star Trek universe.

How would Regulus react to aliens? I think it's safe to assume he would treat them the way he treats anyone who isn't a pureblood magical human: like they're beneath him. Like house elves, goblins, etc., aliens are humanoid but not human, and for someone like Regulus that translates very naturally to subhuman. But while the house elves and goblins have been beaten into submission by wizardkind on Earth, aliens have no such history and thus, I think, Regulus would find them more actively threatening. I think he'd be suspicious and scared of them.

What's also interesting to me with putting fantasy characters into a sci-fi story is: how does Regulus react to the science and technology of muggles and aliens when he has no baseline of scientific knowledge? I imagine the kinds of tech described in Star Trek (and really, just the basic tech of the modern world) would seem like magic to someone from a society that has largely been out of touch with the muggle world since the middle ages. It would blow Regulus' mind the things that non-magical beings are capable of. Which, of course, would only compound his fear.

Aside from all the bigotry, though, I think he'd be a huge nerd about it. It's pretty heavily implied in the books that wizards haven't been to space. I think he'd be fascinated by space exploration.

[samalusia]

So you want to be a conlanger?

A new way to learn a language: create one!

You’d be forgiven for reacting with confusion and bemusement upon reading the title of this post. To clear things up, a conlanger is somebody who builds a language from scratch (a constructed language, or conlang) for the purposes of use in a work of fiction. Arguably the most famous conlanger in history is J. R. R. Tolkien, who was singlehandedly responsible for the creation of all the languages we see (or rather hear) in his famous Legendarium. His works include the Elven languages such as Sindarin, Quenya, and Noldorin, as well as the menacing Black Speech of Mordor. Of course, Tolkien’s name can be attributed to numerous more conlangs, but detailing them all here would be too mountainous a task. I’ll revisit them another day.

The reach of conlangs in the modern world is vast and often flies under many peoples’ radars. World famous films and TV shows often prominently feature conlangs, such as Parceltongue in Harry Potter, Klingon in Star Trek, or Dothraki and the Valyrian languages in Game of Thrones. All of these conlangs have a common trait in respect to their genesis – all of them were created and nuanced by linguists. Tolkien himself, before working on his Legendarium, was a Philologist (a branch of linguistics concerning written texts and etymologies). As a linguist myself, perhaps I am rather biased in the ways I appreciate these conlangs and their creators; nevertheless, the sheer task undertaken in creating them cannot be understated. Producing a conlang has been an integral part in a worldbuilding project I have been working on for some months. It has undoubtedly taken up the bulk of the time spent on the project and is certainly far from finished. Regularly frequenting online conlanging communities provided me with a wealth of inspiration and taught me something valuable: there are plenty of aspiring conlangers out there, most of whom are extremely talented and are capable of creating languages that could stand toe-to-toe with the aforementioned established giants, and some which, well…won’t. The discrepancy between those that captivate the imagination and those that do not can be summarised in one word: realism. It’s forgivable to think that in order to create a language that’s believably fictitious (and in some cases, inherently alien), it has to differ as much as possible from any natural language on Earth. This train of thought often leads to conlangers designing their lexical inventory (the words of the language) to include long and incredibly unpronounceable words that essentially seem like their cat has just walked over their keyboard. In my experiences, the opposite tends to be the case. The linguistic brilliance of Dothraki, High Valyrian, Quenya, etc., stems from the fact that they simply sound real. This is because they were all heavily based on, and influenced by, real world languages, and abide by the same linguistic rules that natural languages are bound to.

So, with this information, potential conlangers are faced with a dilemma: how do you make a language sound ‘real’, but also different enough that it passes as a true fictional language? Unfortunately, there’s no clear way to tackle this. However, from my personal conlanging experiences, the best solution is to find a relatively obscure real language (which won’t be a hard task – there are over 6,500 spoken languages in the world), familiarise yourself with the linguistic properties of that language, e.g. its phonological system and rules, its syntactic structures, etc., and stay close to this source language when developing the conlang. Some people might be put off by needing to have such a focus on stereotypically ‘boring’ elements such as grammar, but there is definitely more to it than that. Some of the most fun I’ve had so far with my conlang has been developing and evolving its phonology (the system of sounds that make up the words of the language). In this arena, your creativity is absolute, and with so many possible phonemic combinations, you can produce something beautiful time and time again.

I’ll talk more about my conlang in an upcoming post – but be warned, it’s still very much a WIP. One thing to remember, though, is to embrace inconsistencies in language. No single language on Earth (that I’m aware of at least) has grammatical or structural rules that have no exceptions to them. English is particularly famous for its inconsistencies (anybody want to say “i before e”??), and traits such as this are inherent and important for making a language sound properly real. It adds an extra dimension to it that implies a history of linguistic change. For linguist nerds such as myself, it makes me think in detail about that history: what culture or country invaded which in order to instigate linguistic change or assimilation that’s ultimately led to these weird structural systems? What social or technological development drove the change? The potential answers to these are vast, but the important point here is that nearly every component to a conlang is admissible, no matter how strange it becomes, so long as the feel of the language is properly embraced.

[threadsketchier]

sorry, but i don't really stay up to date with media or anything. I'm a star wars fan and i'm pretty excited for the new movie! in that meme you reblogged with the same reaction for fans/non-fans... i don't quite get it. Did the company do something bad? do other people just think it's not gonna be good? sorry for all the questions but i just wanted to stay informed xoxo

It’s a reference to the fact that a significant number of fans are dreading TLJ based upon their disappointment in the wake of TFA - and honestly, it’s not just limited to the major, outstanding offense of the OT characters’ arcs and achievements being backpedaled and undone.  There have been other strange and upsetting things concerning Disney’s marketing and stewardship of the franchise, rumored plot choices, etc. that have marginalized characters like Finn and Rose in favor of Emo Band-Aid, or excluded Lando despite the longest running film time in the saga’s history and a plot that could have easily accommodated him, etc. etc.

I’m no cranky old gatekeeper looking to ruin everyone else’s genuine good time, and many of my dash peeps have explained this in much better fashion; I also prefer not to air my personal opinions too often to minimize Drama™ but given that we’re literally on the threshold of the film’s release, I’m a human being with feelings and I’m going to voice some of them if I feel like it.

I sincerely started out enjoying TFA and I do love the new characters.  Just given where the new trilogy has gone, though, I would have preferred a different storyline or total separation between the old and new gang.  As my fellow dash peeps have said countless times, there was absolutely no necessity - other than to follow today’s current depressing “everything must be awful to be interesting” trend - to craft a tale completely obliterating the happy ending of the original trilogy and the sensible character arcs of Han, Leia, and Luke:

Han Solo: selfish nerd with a deeply buried heart of gold who’d obviously seen and been through a lot of shit who needed the right people and encouragement to listen to his conscience again and stop being afraid to commit himself to both a good cause and a wider set of friends.  Goes from “Better her than me!” to “[The temperature’s dropping too rapidly.] Yeah, and my friend’s out in it - I’ll see you in hell!” to “I’m sorry” to “When he comes back, I won’t get in the way.”  His arc is about finding companionship, belonging, and emotional openness.  He’s found a home and a family with these beautiful ragtag misfits.

Leia Organa: a fervently duty-bound young woman forged by trauma and pressed upon by staggering responsibilities into an icy diamond; she is hard and unyielding and unstoppable, and very emotionally repressed.  She has lost so much and can’t afford to lose more.  Yet a fluffy farmboy and a scruffy nerf herder worm their way into her heart.  Goes from “We have no time for our sorrows,” and “[Well, Your Highness, I guess this is it.] That’s right.” to “I love you” to “…Hold me.”  Her arc is also about emotional openness and embracing the hope and then reality that she can find love and gain a new family in spite of the destruction of her homeworld and the seemingly impossible war she helped lead.

Luke Skywalker: idealistic (yet pragmatic, in some ways) softboy who infectiously inspires everybody he comes in contact with to find the good within themselves, and has both a normal, down-to-earth bedrock upbringing and the strong personal moral compass to keep doing what he feels is right.  Goes from “I guess I’m going nowhere” to “Take care of yourself, Han; I guess that’s what you’re best at” to “[I feel like I can take on the whole Empire myself!] I know what you mean.” to “I’m looking for a great warrior” to “You want the impossible” to “They’re my friends, I’ve gotta help them” to “You’ll find I’m full of surprises” to “Ben…why didn’t you tell me” to “I warn you not to underestimate my powers” to “I can’t kill my own father” to “I’ve accepted that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father…Come with me” to “Soon I’ll be dead, and you with me” to “I feel the good in you, the conflict” to “NEVER!!!” to “You’ve failed, Your Highness - I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”  He needed his dreams shattered to get a proper grasp on how to prevail in his circumstances - and the important part here is that he was already shattered in this trilogy, and put himself back together - but despite this, he kept on believing.  He chose to see the humanity in his father and defy the Emperor, the ultimate representation of the Dark Side, by a moral rather than physical victory.  He transcended the intentions of his teachers and became a Jedi in the truest sense by disputing his mentors and refusing to relinquish his devotion to his friends and an undeserving father.  Although he lost said father, he had the satisfaction of saving and freeing his soul and finding reconciliation with him, along with gaining a twin sister and a whole lot of new friends in comparison to his former, lonelier moisture farming life, and was equipped to carry on the knowledge of the Jedi with his own experiences to renew their doctrines.

In the new trilogy:

Han is implied to be a restless ne’er-do-well who could never escape the impulse to take off and not be around for his family, rather than being grateful and satisfied to finally have a stable life and a loving wife and friends who deeply cared for him.  He’s also painted as much more of an outright idiot and useless as a smuggler rather than a clever guy who just often finds himself in shitty situations

Leia is not allowed to hold on to anything in her life.  She must not only bear witness to even more planets being ruthlessly and callously destroyed, her own child grows up to commit patricide and it’s heavily implied that his genocidal tantrums are her and Han’s fault for being neglectful parents, as though being a woman with a demanding career automatically makes it impossible for her to raise a child properly, and never mind the fact that less-than-perfect-parenting from two people who still clearly loved their son is the flimsiest excuse for anyone to commit any level of murder

Luke is also not allowed to pass on his knowledge and bear any fruit for his hard-won labors.  His efforts to restore the Jedi go up in a flaming ruin, pointlessly bringing about a second shattering into his life for the express purpose of turning him into a grieving and bitter shadow of his former hopeful self who now abandons his found family rather than cleaving to them for support and encouragement as he always did before

The new films transform the OT into an ultimately hollow story in where there is no happy ending and nothing is learned and taken to heart.  The characters are doomed to suffer forever and not grow logically from their experiences.  This happens while we’re meant to get accustomed to the new team and watch them struggle to clean up the mess that apparently the older characters couldn’t fix after all.  It fosters a sense of nihilism - no one will ever get it right, and each new generation will just keep wading through another war and another war while making the same mistakes their elders did.

It sounds a liiiiiiiiiitle too much like reality for a story that’s supposed to be a space fairy tale.  If I want to be depressed, I’ll read the news.  If I want to be happy, I’ll go watch a star war.  Except oops, now I really can’t.

I’m well aware that plenty of folks don’t see it this way at all, and yes, duh, my response is biased.  Like I said, if you love the new movies, more power to you; it’s still a (mostly) free world.  But you asked, so I answered.

[vintagegeekculture]

Dead Fandoms, Part 3

Read Part One of Dead Fandoms here. 

Read Part Two of Dead Fandoms here. 

Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.

Mists of Avalon

Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out. 

Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it. Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.

Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr is at it again.”

Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.” It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women, who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and Morrigan.

This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.

Robotech

I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away. Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older, teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different world.

Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans: there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz. 

However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60 episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.” The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes, and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.

The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.

Legion of Super-Heroes

Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as “Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.” 

I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera for nerds. The book is about attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay. The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time, where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.

Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for weird sex...and not much else.”

LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny. This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiest fandom of all time.  You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.  

For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.  

Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller, but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in comics history.

If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.

It helped that the boundary between fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were running the asylum.

Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board...but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling rewards a long term reader.

This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This is amazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It’s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie. 

Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men. Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan” comic.

The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties, but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.

Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and minutiae (and to jack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea. You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property, the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over and over and over until there was nothing at all left.

E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels

The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of. 

I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this. Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the 30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from different alien species, and space marines in power armor.

My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:

The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer, Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.

Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way, he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor, Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like planet of selfish cowards.

The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned into a vacuum tube.

It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance. While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series never recovered from the spirit of that decade.

Prisoner of Zenda

Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller.

The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.

Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.” 

One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.

A. Merritt

Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s? 

If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong - it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.

Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that...” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality. 

That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?

[tripstations]

Japan: the Ultimate Travel Guide

So you’re going to Japan. Cool… take us with you?

At STA Travel, our motto is ‘we know because we go’. Or in my case, we lived there. I’m Jo, and I lived in Japan for just over one year working as an English teacher in a small, mountaintop middle school in Hyogo prefecture. My students and fellow teachers not only taught me how to survive, but also where the best little-known adventure spots were hidden. Now it’s my pleasure to pass on the wisdom so you can be the savviest gaikokujin (foreigner) walking out of the airport.

Besides unwaveringly excellent food, epic history, and colourful traditions, the whole country is practically one giant UNESCO World Heritage Site. As much as we’d love to show you the ropes ourselves, this ultimate travel guide will probably say it better than we can—it’s hard to talk while shovelling tempura into our faces.

  Japan’s highlights

We’d usually give you five here, but we’ve split it out into 25. That’s five for each of the five major tourist spots you can’t miss.

  Tokyo top 5

From forest-enclosed shrines to blaring neon streets, Tokyo has everything. EVERYTHING. Like…

Akihabara – If you’re a total otaku (nerd), the Akihabara district is the biggest anime hub in the world and sells every piece of merch you can dream of. Prepare to be converted into a full-on foodie as restaurants and cafes are elaborately themed into whatever you can, or can’t, imagine. The Mori Art Gallery – Still not funky enough? The Mori Art Gallery has enormous, interactive exhibits and, with a ticket, you get to squeak into one of the city’s best viewpoints and score a selfie with the top of Tokyo tower. Harajuku – The epicentre of teen culture, Takeshita street is an explosion of colourful wigs, J-pop merch and syrupy crepes. Walk 15 minutes into the woods across the street and find the Meiji Jingu Shrine. If the Harajuku Girl look isn’t quite you, go shopping on nearby Cat Street for sleek, luxury brands and killer vintage finds. Shibuya – After joining thousands in crossing the world’s most famous (and busiest) intersection, watch the chaos from above in the Starbucks above Tsutaya or head to one of the thousands of nearby bars or izakayas (snack bars) for a night out. If you love dogs, don’t forget pass the Hachiko Memorial Statue and give that pupper a good pat. Ueno Park – As a traveler, the museums in Ueno Park have the finest artifacts and art works to aid in your understanding of the history of Japan. If you’re more into the pop culture side of things, this landmark is heavily featured in books and movies as a place where love and heartbreak happens. Come spring, the rows of cherry blossom trees are good for the ‘gram.

Also don’t miss: Senso-ji temple, wandering down the endless yokochos (narrow alleys) around the city and Tsukiji Fish Market, for all the noms.

  Mount Fuji top 5

Don your goggles and facemask, and venture up Japan’s iconic summit… or just chill at the bottom of it, gazing in awe.

Climbing up – It’s best to kick off your pilgrimage in the early afternoon, bundle up in a hut overnight, and see why Japan is called The Land of the Rising Sun the next morning. Sure, Fuji sounds daunting, but getting up is the easy part—getting down after your adventure and an intoxicating sunrise is where the challenge lies. Lake Kawaguchi – If the two-day journey doesn’t quite peak your interest, view it from one of five lakes surrounding the mountain. Lake Kawaguchi is the most accessible and popular, flaunting onsens, hotels, and the temple-framed views of Fuji pictured above. Lake Motosuko – If you have an appetite for something a little more remote though, Lake Motosuko’s vistas are clear of buildings save a couple of stand-up paddle board rental shops and campsites. Assuming you’re driving from east to west, the drive past the four other lakes is an additional treat as well, and a strong contender for our favourite of the five lakes. Water sports and rollercoasters – If you like queuing up for ages to see great heights, hop on to one of the rollercoasters at Fuji-Q. This popular theme park is home to the Takabisha, which has the steepest drop in the world at 121°. It’s just like climbing Fuji again, but much, much faster on the trip down. Exploring caves – If rock compositions excite you like this geography nerd, you’re in for an education about volcanic magma, limestone caves, and how three of the Fuji five lakes are actually connected by underwater tunnels. Give Bat Cave, Ice Caves and Wind Cave a go.

  Kyoto top 5

Nearly every Instagram you’ve seen of Japan was probably taken here. Does bamboo forests and rows of bright orange torii gates ring a bell?

Gion – Consider Kyoto the cultural capital, sprawling with kimono-clad visitors scuttling past in the historic alleys of Gion. Your only indication that you weren’t transported to the Edo period will be the dozens of other camera-wielding travelers, all hoping for a glimpse of a  real-life geisha. Fushimi Inari Shrine – You can pose with your back to the camera as you walk through the hundreds of torii gates near the bottom of the mountain, but a complete pilgrimage means slowly winding all the way up the mountain to the final shrine and a wide vista over the whole city. You can even see Osaka from up there on a clear day. Arashiyama – This corner of Kyoto is home to the famous bamboo grove, a monkey park, and pretty incredible gardens. The best teahouses are found at the temples here, though be sure to ask for a chair if sitting on your knees is a challenge. Golden Temple – There are literally hundreds upon hundreds of temples. If you stop to visit every single one you pass, you seriously won’t get very far! Even if it means tying horse blinders to your face, you need to make it to Kinkaku-ji, aka the Golden Temple, at the northern end of Kyoto. It’s the birthplace of so much art and cultural history, and it sparkles brilliantly in the sun. Ryoan-ji’s rock garden – The Ryoan-ji temple neighbours the Golden Temple, but is much more niche. The dry landscape garden here is thought to been built in the late 15th century and no one knows its original creator. Fifteen rocks sit in a position that makes it impossible to view them all from any perspective. Contemplate the implied existential meaning of your existence as you sit quietly on the viewing platform.

  Osaka top 5

There’s no better medicine for getting a little templed out in Kyoto than diving head-first into the neon sprawl of Osaka.

America Mura – This village is a divine mix of chic and bizarre. A rooftop Statue of Liberty will watch over you as you wander from sleek cocktail bars to funky restaurants. The most wholesome delight is hearing people sing their hearts out to karaoke at 7am as you walk back to your hotel after a long night out. Dotonburi – Speaking of a night out, one is incomplete without posing with the Glico man in Dōtonburi—just don’t get too excited and fall into the river. Feel free to pose with the massive dragon, crab, and fish robots that sit above shop doors. To burn off some extra energy, check out Round1/Spocha in the Namba area. This 24-hour sports centre has hundreds of arcade and sports games including a mechanical bull, a roller rink, and those inflatable bubble things you can play human football in. Spa World – Foreigners who live Japan share whispers among themselves of this fantasy waterpark for adults. It’s a hotel with its most attractive features being multiple onsens, waterslides, stone spa and restaurants. You don’t have to stay overnight to bask in Spa World’s relaxing waters. Did we mention it’s open 24-hours? Baseball Game – Here, the locals are known for being a bit more boisterous than their Tokyo counterparts. The best way to witness this is at a Hanshin Tigers baseball game. The team is doing better these days, but there was once believed to be a curse on the team due to a lost statue of the KFC mascot, Colonel Sanders, that was throw into a river. It’s pretty hilarious and you won’t regret looking it up. Stay in a Love Hotel — Japanese people usually live with their family until marriage. So love hotels make big business on couples who are still in the dating stage of things. Even though they charge by the hour, they are still often cheaper than an ordinary hotel. They’re SUPER clean, give you free condoms, have karaoke and video games, and are a general great place to catch an afternoon nap when it’s a long walk back to your hostel.

  Hiroshima

This is a place of peace and mournful tranquility. It’s well worth paying your respects and educating yourself about Japan’s devastating war history.

Peace Memorial Park – This curved monument is engraved with all the names of the known victims of the 1945 atomic bomb. Burning in the pond is the Flame of Peace, which will only be extinguished once all of the nuclear weapons on earth have been destroyed. Atomic Bomb Dome – This building used to be the Industrial Promotion Hall until the bomb exploded directly above it. It was one of very few buildings left standing in the epicentre, and serves as a reminder of the damage that was caused. Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum – Learn about Hiroshima’s ongoing legacy for peace in this expansive museum. Inside features items found in the aftermath of the bomb, first-person accounts shown on video and a range of photographs. It’s upsetting, but an absolute must-see in Hiroshima. All sites are translated into English and other languages for maximum accessibility. Shukkei-en – This garden was created in 1620, and the buildings were largely destroyed when the bomb fell. However, many trees survived and bloomed the next season. The rest of the garden has long since been restored and is calming to stroll through. Orizuru Tower – This is boasted as the best viewpoint in Hiroshima. It oversees the Peace Memorial Park, the Atomic Bomb Dome as well as the rest of the city and the mountains beyond. It’s a great place to take a break and contemplate everything you’ve learned about Hiroshima.

  Getting around Japan

The JR pass is perhaps the second most important thing you’ll want to bring when going to Japan (your passport obviously being the first). There are some exceptions when it comes to unlimited rail travel, but unless you’re headed to very niche areas of Japan, you should be able to get to every adventure on your list. You can choose to live life on the tracks with one-, two-, or three-week pass options at prices that would drive locals to jealousy:

7 days — ¥29,110/ £212 14 days — ¥46,390/ £338 21 days — ¥59,350/ £433

Fikri Rasyid, Unsplash

You’ll need to buy your pass online BEFORE arriving in Japan. When you purchase your pass online, you may to arrange your exchange order to be delivered to either your home or your hotel in Japan. An exchange order is not your JR pass though! You must then go to any JR Exchange Office in Japan with your exchange order to finally possess your coveted pass.

Guard you JR pass with your life — it’s irreplaceable, so you’re out of luck if you lose it. To arrange your actual train journeys, visit the JR offices at each major station as you go along your trip. You should generally be fine to simply show up to the station on the day you want to travel, but you should probably book at least a few days ahead if you’re traveling during hanami (cherry blossom season) or Golden Week. Seriously, Japanese people book their travel about six months in advance for these times.

An IC card (also known as the Suica card inside Tokyo) is going to be your best friend when gallivanting within the cities. You simply tap on and off the metro and busses like you would an Oyster card. Each region has its own adorable IC card name and mascot. Can you catch them all?

Move over CityMapper, and hello HyperDia. This goddess of an app comes in English and has the latest train times, prices, connections, and platform numbers of each journey. You’ll never be late or get lost if you pledge your undying love for HyperDia. Seriously though, Google Maps is drunk in Japan. Don’t trust it.

  Accommodation in Japan and how to book

Hotels and hostels can be perused and booked online as you would in any other country – start searching now. Whether you’re up for flopping on a futon or crave the comforts of home with a western-style bed, you’ll find a huge variety of rooms that will match your style and budget. Such as…

Capsule hotels – These efficient little pods are made for you to rock up and flop inside, and are a classic ‘Japan’ experience for a lot of travelers. Often the most budget friendly, they offer shared showering facilities and individual phone chargers, radios and mini TVs in each capsule. Every place you’ll stay is almost guaranteed to be extremely clean, even if it’s not rated 10/10.

Ryokan are traditional Japanese inns that are usually run by families. Lounge in a yukata robe and, soak each evening in a traditional onsen (hot tub), and be sure to opt for a traditional evening meal or breakfast cooked by the ryokan’s chef. After your knees are sore from kneeling on the tatami floor, slip under the warm sheets of a futon. These indie spots used to be tricky to find if you didn’t speak Japanese, but fear not! We’ve got you covered with our booking page right here.

Love hotels, most commonly found in the Roppongi and Shinjuku areas of Tokyo, are… well, exactly what they say on the tin, so you might want to approach with care. Japanese couples can pay by the hour to use their facilities, making for their seedy reputation. But if you do your research, you can find thoroughly clean and amazing-value rooms, filled with everything from revolving beds, to karaoke machines and futuristic-themed hot tubs. F-U-N.

We hate to break it to you, but Airbnb is unfortunately not your friend in Japan. Due to new regulations being enforced in the last few years, the number of Airbnbs listings have dramatically dropped. Some can still be booked, but your host will likely give you instructions to not tell their neighbours you are guests from the site. It’s okay though—our lips are sealed.

  How much should I budget?

Depending on how much yen you have in your coin purse, your typical night in Japan will probably look like one of these.

On the cheap: Start the night by bagging a selection of ready-to-eat yakitori, croquettes, or sushi from a convenience store such as Lawson, FamilyMart or 7-Eleven (¥600/$5.50). While at said store, stock up on the miracle elixir known as Strong Zero (¥160/$1.25!) — careful though… don’t take that 9% alcohol lightly. Finish up the evening in a hostel (¥3,000/$26) that looks just like a European hostel, only it’s ridiculously tidy.

Like a local: Pop into the local izakaya (a Japanese pub) and order a pint of Asahi beer (¥300/$2.50) and munch on an insane variety of vegetables and fried meats also known as kushi katsu. (¥1,500/ £11). You can opt for an ordinary hotel, (¥5,000/$46) or you can discover first-hand that love hotels are surprisingly cheaper and much more entertaining (¥3,500/$30).

Luxury: Indulge on the finer things in life and incite wild envy in your Instagram followers. Take more time photographing your multi-course artisanal dinner than actually eating it (¥4,000/$37), and ask the server what sake pairs best (¥900/$8). Prance off to your ryokan to retire, and make sure you pick one with an onsen (¥8,000/$75).

  Top 10 Japanese phrases you need to learn

Do you speak English?: Eigo ga wakarimasu ka?

Sorry, I don’t understand: Gomenasai! Wakarimasen.

Good morning — Good day: Ohayo Gozaimasu — Konnichi wa.

Excuse me/Sorry: Sumimasen.

Where is the washroom?: Toire wa doko desu ka?

I would like that one please: Kore wa kudasai. (Be sure to point to something when you say this!)

Is this/are you okay?: Daijoubu desu ka?

It’s okay (useful when declining things/No thank you): Daijoubu desu.

Is there a bin I can use?: Gomi ga arimasu ka?

Thank you!: Arigato gozaimasu.

  Food

You’ll never have a bad meal in Japan. People here never half-ass anything, and it shows in their painstakingly perfected food creations.

In big cities, you’ll be able to find an array of international cuisine that has affectionately been transformed with a Japanese twist (for example, pizza with corn as a topping). Western-style vegetarian and vegan eateries can also be found if you know where to go. Outside of big cities, you’ll find six Japanese staples reign supreme: Sushi, Japanese Italian, Japanese curry, okonomiyaki, yakitori (grilled chicken), and ramen.

Be sure to also check out a convenience store and suss out the seasonal flavours of KitKats and other sweets. While your friends and fam are pretty much expecting you to bring them back a handful of matcha-flavoured Kit Kats, also try out the crème brulee, chocobanana, blueberry cheese cake and… baked potato(??!) flavoured ones.

  Can you taste Tokyo in your mouth yet?! Check out our Japan destination hub, where you can find flights and heaps of adventure tours.

The post Japan: the Ultimate Travel Guide appeared first on Tripstations.

from Tripstations https://ift.tt/2FUVHlo via IFTTT

[theinvinciblenoob]

They all started with the best of intentions. Formation 8 talked about bringing “smart enterprise” to the corporate world. Social Capital talked about how to “fix capitalism,” and Binary Capital wanted to “affect global behaviour change.” Rothenberg Ventures set out to “work on the biggest problems that change the world.”

Young founding partners debuting change-the-world funds were irresistible for chroniclers of the venture world, who too often had been forced to chat to balding and aging managing directors while hitting the links at resplendent country clubs. Everything was going to change in the venture world, and here was a new guard of progressive-thinking talent that would transform Silicon Valley forever.

Then it all came crashing down.

Social Capital fired nearly its entire remaining staff last week after seeing a mass staff exodus over the past few months. Formation 8 suffered deep acrimony between its founding partners, and its successive funds continue to deal with new challenges, such as a new, unreported lawsuit in California. Binary faced the Caldbeck sexual harassment situation, while Rothenberg imploded with allegations of financial fraud and mismanagement.

Some of the tales are sordid, while others are clearly the result of inexperience and hubris. But together, they weave a narrative for us that shouldn’t surprise anyone: giving hundreds of millions of dollars to neophytes wasn’t perhaps the best plan to build long-lasting funds.

The lessons though are myriad and broad. For founders, receiving investments from same-age peers may have made board meetings more relaxing, but at the cost of experience and oversight. Journalists who sat by while VCs built founding fables about themselves should have done more to pierce these reality distortion fields.

But perhaps most of all, the lessons need to be learned by limited partners. As LPs continue to lower their guard and drop due diligence in the race to get into the next hot fund, perhaps the combination of these stories can serve as a warning against rushing to write a check and being thoughtful about who to partner with in business.

The Valley finds its glamour

Sand Hill Road was the epicenter of venture capital. Its monopoly is increasingly being lost to downtown Palo Alto and SF. (Photo by Steven Damron used under Creative Commons).

It’s almost impossible to imagine today, but venture and the broader startup ecosystem used to be decidedly uncool. In the early 2000s, before the rise of blogs like TechCrunch and the breathless coverage of thousands of tech startups, Silicon Valley startups worked in the relative obscurity of the South Bay — the actual Silicon Valley of lore. A boring suburban hell of sorts, startups attracted the misfits and the communalists, and most definitely the engineers who saw in the internet the future of human society.

Things changed as the global financial crisis struck in 2008. The startup world began to migrate north, to San Francisco. Technology went from a backwater industry to the forefront of global power and commerce. Once the bastion of nerds, the MBAs and other pretty people started pouring in, ready to seek out fortune — the tech that might drive it be damned.

Perhaps most importantly, glamor hit the tech world hard. Conferences like Disrupt and AllThingsD propelled formerly unknown entrepreneurs to the heights of fame. Exec comms became de rigueur for founders, and venture firms equipped themselves with some of the best communications talent they could find.

Yet, while the entrepreneurs were increasingly speaking about “saving the world,” the venture firms were not. Stodgy, venerable, and just plain old (and white and male), the stalwarts of Sand Hill Road (the epitome of a suburban hell street complete with a full-service gas station) struggled to adapt their boring Excel number crunching thinking to this new world.

Their firms – and LPs – noticed, and responded by trying to hire a new crop of partners, operators with the cachet to win over founders and snare the next great deal. Operators had very different mentalities from traditional venture folks, but that was okay in the competition for the next hot startup.

But as any Silicon Valley enthusiast knows, the path to disruption doesn’t lie through evolving incumbents. Instead, it’s about founding startups, or in this case, new venture firms with fresh perspectives that connect with founders looking for a friend on their board rather than competent but mature directors who were older than their grandparents.

The best-laid plans of mice and VCs…

Joe Lonsdale of 8VC. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

And so we get Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, who left and eventually started Formation 8 at age 30 with Brian Koo age 33, scion of the Koo family of South Korea which owns the LG conglomerate, along with long-time VC investor Jim Kim. They raise $448 million for their first fund in 2013, the largest debut in the history of venture. Lonsdale described the firm’s investing style simply: “First and foremost, we invest in driven entrepreneurs who we believe will change the world.”

We get Jonathan Teo aged 34 and Justin Caldbeck aged 37 (and the oldest of the pack!), two young but reasonably experienced venture capitalists peeling off of their venerable funds (General Catalyst for Teo and Lightspeed and Bain for Caldbeck) to start Binary Capital, which began with a debut fund of $125 million in 2014 and raised another $175 million just two years later. Teo, speaking to a Singaporean magazine, explained that “We are at the centre of the tech ecosystem, and consumer technology is the highest leverage a company has to affect global behaviour change.”

(That same article noted in its intro that “It is not every day that someone buys a Boeing 747 as a gift. But that was exactly what Jonathan Teo did last year, when he gathered a group of Silicon Valley tech titans to purchase a used plane and donated it to Burning Man, an annual experimental art festival held in Black Rock Desert, Nevada.” Burning Man may well be one of the most inter-connected events for all of these folks).

Justin Caldbeck, formerly of Binary Capital. Michael Short/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Chamath Palihapitiya, who spent four years at Facebook early in that company’s history and eventually headed growth, would start Social+Capital Partnership in 2011 and synced up with experienced hands Ted Maidenberg and Mamoon Hamid. Palihapitiya, aged 34 and self-described “Merchant of Progress,” said that he wanted to “fix capitalism.” In an interview with Fast Company’s Ainsley Harris, he said, “But you can fix capitalism. And the reason you can fix capitalism: It is inherently numerical, and as a result, it is inherently objective. It can be done objectively.”

Rothenberg may not have raised the same kind of moolah, debuting with a $5 million seed fund in 2013, but Rothenberg spread his wings far and wide in San Francisco, opening up his apartment and co-working facilities to create a community of entrepreneurs. He loved the press and media attention and outlandish behavior, eventually hosting a now infamous field day at the SF Giants baseball park in SoMa. As he explained during an interview at Stanford, “…we can build and create awesome experiences, people care about that and then we can actually work on the biggest problems that change the world and that’s awesome…”

These four firms flouted venture conventions, and sought out the path-breaking investments that would drive returns. Formation 8 struck a bit of gold with its exit of Oculus to Facebook and RelateIQ to SalesForce. The rebranded Social Capital bought into high-flying startup Slack, and also led the series A into Intercom. Binary invested in young consumer startups like Bellhops and Shoptiques and Havenly according to Pitchbook. Rothenberg invested heavily in VR and also in popular companies like Boosted, Apartment List, and Chubbies, albeit with mostly tiny checks.

These firms were designed to cultivate the next-generation of founders, and on that front, they succeeded. If only that was the sole benchmark for success.

… often go awry

Chamath Palihapitiya of Social Capital. (Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with the line that “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The same is true of venture firms. Portfolio returns can easily make everyone happy, but when firms blow up, they all blow up in their own, idiosyncratic ways.

Formation 8 was the first of the set to disintegrate. Part of the equation was accusations and a lawsuit against Joe Lonsdale around a sexual assault – allegations that were in the end dismissed. But the challenges internally at the firm far pre-dated those challenges. As William Alden at Buzzfeed chronicled at extreme length, Lonsdale and Brian Koo were at loggerheads over investment strategy, and even the geography of where the Formation 8 offices should be located in the Bay Area. Plus, they had a fight over a Korean restaurant Koo tried to open in Palo Alto. There were also the lurid details of the Hyperloop One imbroglio, where Lonsdale was a board member.

The two ended up separating, with Lonsdale creating 8VC and debuting with a $425 million fund and Koo starting Formation Group with a $357 million fund.

Yet, the troubles continue. A lawsuit – so far unreported – was filed in the United States District Court for Northern California this past June, alleging that Koo and Formation Group and its affiliates committed “fraud, breach of contract, breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing…“ by failing to pay a partner named Martin Robinson and a principal named Selvam Moorthy. That litigation remains on-going according to district court records, where the parties are due to discuss a motion to move the matter to arbitration.

Lonsdale, for his part, has certainly shied away from the media, and has been in a rebuilding phase, eventually nailing a second fund for 8VC of $640 million earlier this year.

Partner fallout is one version of an unhappy venture firm, but Binary Capital disintegrated due to alleged sexual harassment by Justin Caldbeck from multiple women in Silicon Valley. He would eventually come to be the Silicon Valley poster boy for the MeToo movement, and was sued by a former employee of Binary. The firm’s assets were sold to LHV earlier this year, and it is now essentially a non-entity.

Rothenberg Ventures team

Meanwhile, Rothenberg has been facing tougher challenges. He faced a litany of investigations over his fiduciary responsibilities to his fund, eventually being charged by the SEC last month for fraud. That criminal trial is on-going.

And then we get to Social Capital, whose troubles appear to be more managerial. Palihapitiya’s two early partners, Maidenberg and Hamid, both decamped to other firms. There has now been a complete exodus of partners and staff at the firm, with even more layoffs taking place just in the last few days. The fund is no longer raising outside capital.

Outside of Palihapitiya, the math on who is left remains decidedly unclear. The Information quotes Palihapitiya as saying that “I would rather spend time with the people that are 100% aligned with what I want to do and the person that’s most aligned with what I want to do is me.”

That shouldn’t be a problem when there is no one else in the room.

Lessons for founders, VCs, and LPs

RubberBall Productions via Getty Images

Silicon Valley loves a great story. We love the entrepreneurs who fight like hell to build their companies, who beat the odds against incumbents and competitors. We love the drama of business, of Uber against Lyft and Airbnb against city governments. We want the underdogs to win.

At some point though, we need to evaluate our own narrative fetishes. We need to see through the loud pronouncements, the ambitious quotes, the glossy marketing. Especially in venture capital, where excuses for poor performance are a common trade, we need to resurrect the age-old skill of simply looking at the numbers and evaluating quality. As my VC mentors over the years have consistently said: VC is not an investment business, it is a returns business.

We also need to reevaluate our patience. Startups take twelve years or more to build and exit, but VC firms have a much longer cycle. They are meant to last, because they owe broad obligations to so many other firms through the board seats they hold.

Partner turnover is up at many firms, despite the damage that does to startup governance. Even worse is when a firm disintegrates entirely. We should celebrate the slow and steady on the finance side, and leave the quick growth to the startups.

In a region that reveres the young, we also need to remember that many jobs are ultimately dependent on experience, and venture capital is certainly one of them. VC is its own trade, with learnings and techniques that build up over a lifetime of investing. That doesn’t mean that young people have nothing to offer – far from it. But it does mean that our indexing should not just assume that a 30-something automatically has the capacity to manage a complex front and back office team and invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a few short months.

LPs face the greatest challenges in this area. They are the guardians of their funds, since after all, it’s their money that will be lost. But the timing to get into a hot investor’s hand can be extraordinarily limited, and even asking a question or two could lead them to be cut out of a fund’s subscriptions. LPs need to band together and refuse to concede to these demands. Due diligence doesn’t have to be exhaustive on a debut fund, but it should also not be de minimis. Some coordination here is just absolutely needed to ensure a basic level of integrity.

It’s said that new VCs need to down an F-16 in order to learn the trade. Together, Formation 8 raised $1.39 billion, Social Capital $1.3 billion, Binary $300 million, and Rothenberg $70 million, according to Pitchbook.

That’s a $3 billion education for these partners, and for all of us.

via TechCrunch