#writing manifesto: all characters are idiots in their own way

[inaconstantstateofchange]

astarion/durge/halsin & hanwenzhou: a manifesto

For @sugarbabywenkexing and @realitycheckbounced, because you asked, and I am more than happy to deliver.

Starting notes: I do not at all like reducing characters to simple archetypes/tropes, so trust that the complexities of the characters and their interactions are implicitly maintained, and this is of course not anything like a 1:1 connection (how could it possibly be), just core themes that stood out to me from both relationship dynamics.

Also, the Durge connection is going to be affected by how you personally conceptualize/play Durge, but I am writing this with a Neutral Resist!Durge in mind, so that's what we're going with for the sake of this meta.

Spoilers for both canons, but especially the Dark Urge backstory.

Durge & Zhou Zishu

[Using my own Durge, Kelis, for the image - incredible art by @somespareserotonin-please]

A cult leader of a murderous organization, with an ocean's worth of blood and evil on their hands, who has broken away from that past but doesn't expect or even pursue anything like forgiveness or true redemption.

These characters are so unique to me because they hold regret for their actions, but not in the traditional "past evil seeks redemption" way that is familiar. They're so much more complex in their motivations, desires, and conceptions of the world than that.

Astarion & Wen Kexing

Steeped in blood and spending the majority of their lives being taught that power is all that matters, and those who have power will only ever use it against those who do not. The only way to get out from under the heel of those above you is to overthrow them, take their position, become worse than they could ever be.

When free from the oppressive darkness they were "raised" in, even for a brief period, they grasp onto it with a bloodthirsty glee.

Halsin & Han Ying

Loyalty and devotion are the very core of these characters, deep-rooted. They feel the weight of responsibility upon their shoulders and they wear it like a mantle. When they make a promise, especially to one they are devoted to, they will see it through, no matter how long it takes, or how much it requires of them.

Relationship Dynamics

Astarion and Durge are to each other, in so many ways, what Zhou Zishu and Wen Kexing are in another universe. They find each other at a time when their fates are at a point of divergence, and they find a kindred spirit - a kindred monster - within each other. They make each other better, but they do not make each other morally good.

Durge and Halsin have the capacity for a very similar relationship dynamic to Zhou Zishu and Han Ying. In an ideal situation, Durge is the one who makes it possible for Halsin to make good on his century-old vow to see the Shadow Curse broken. He showcases a great deal of respect for Durge as a leader, and a significant amount of loyalty and adoration for them as well.

Finally, Halsin and Astarion have the potential for a relationship with similarly disparate and flexible conceptions as Wen Kexing and Han Ying. They can be equal partners in truth, bonded first over their shared devotion to Durge, if provided enough time and narrative support to build such a relationship. They can be comrades with a bond of devotion only, not engaged romantically with one another but appreciating the other for their importance to Durge. They can be neutral parties, without true care for one another, but still cordial for the sake of their shared love. These are just three examples of a truly infinite number of variations.

Thank you for coming to my TedxTalk. All six of these idiots are so absurdly important to me. I'd love to hear any thoughts you may have!

[onelungmcclung]

im sorry if you've answered this before im relatively new to the ship hehe but-- how'd mcclung fall for toye? was it in bastogne? before bastogne? in holland? in aldbourne? after the war? what were the circumstances? when did he realize it? and after he'd overcome that high of finding out he's in love, how did he deal with the aftermath once it started to settle in? hehe, i hope this week isnt as rough on you as you're anticipating. sending you much love and strength and calm vibes.

💜💜💜 

ok, firstly, I have not been asked this before; secondly, even if I had no earthly power would stop me from answering it again; and thirdly, obviously no pressure but pls consider coming off anon and being my tumblr friend  

probably everyone is new to this ship lmao

so, I started writing a (probably long) mctoye fic starting in fort bragg or aldbourne and continuing to postwar (enablers always welcome). but for the purposes of this ask, I’m mostly going off character insights revealed to me developed over the course of writing the ask him to dance universe. 

(counterpart to this ask: toye noticing/falling for mcclung)

essentially: mcclung is/would be kind of theoretically ok with the idea of falling for a guy, if it had occurred to him he might fall for anyone right now, but falling for anyone is — for the time being — a concept he has strategically compartmentalised out of his entire thought process. (please clap.)

maybe he’s relatively ok with the possibility falling for a guy because he did not really grow up with white conservatism the way most of the easy co guys did; he’s always been aware of it, and his worldview is not informed by it in the same way. his family is arrow lakes/settler and he has friends & acquaintances among the other confederated tribes. and though he doesn’t take a strong interest in domestic/international politics, he has a more critical attitude towards the us govt and its laws (he’s still quietly angry about the grand coulee dam, constructed during his childhood). he’s never really considered that he might be into men; he likes women and he’s always assumed, without thinking much about it, that he’ll get married at some point; but he’s not particularly homophobic, outwardly or inwardly.

he’s not thinking much about these things when the war comes. he gets drafted into the army, thinks “not with these fucking clowns” and besides the airborne pay is better, and volunteers as a paratrooper. he joins up with easy after he’s completed his jump training.

he is excellent at training, naturally; he’s spent days at a time alone, fishing and hunting, since he was a child. he’s an exceptional sniper and scout. he’s confident in his own abilities. some of the toccoa guys initially assume he won’t be as skilled as them because he didn’t have their training, but in fact he has a headstart on most of them; and he knows it. (if he knew it any better it would probably come off as arrogance, but he’s just very clear on what he’s good at. and if he wasn’t beforehand, the airborne has proved it, to him & everyone else.)

he recognises, of course, that toye is an excellent soldier too (not as good a shot as himself or shifty, but overall one of the best paratroopers in the company), and they’re in the same platoon, so that helps. he never really gets afraid, not while training and not in combat; he just keeps his focus and gets on with it. for the most part, he doesn’t form close friendships until they get into combat.

he has some instinct towards helping and protecting others, but once they’re in a combat zone he realises that’s going to hurt him a lot. while they’re training, he helps some of the guys make their shots by shooting the targets for them; but after they jump into normandy, he avoids befriending the replacements because so many of them are killed early on. it’s — a little — easier that way.

he and toye don’t become close friends before bastogne, but they get familiar with each other’s combat style, and they’re comfortable working together. they trust each other; they’re both good soldiers, and toye is a good nco.

and then of course in bastogne they share a foxhole, and that is (I think for all the other characters as well) an incredibly vital, pivotal relationship. he and toye rely on each other entirely; without that, they’d probably die. they learn each other backwards; there’s no possibility of pretence. he knows what toye’s flaws are (stubbornness, prickliness, a reluctance to accept help), but there’s a lot more about him that mcclung likes, trusts and admires (not that he’d say so), and he knows those things are genuine.

he does his level best to stop toye from developing trench foot when he loses his boots. sure, he pretty much calls toye an idiot for getting into this situation and for refusing to tell the medics, but he does everything he can think of. it hasn’t occurred to him that he cares deeply about toye; it just seems inevitable.

(and he tells smokey to let the medics know. he doesn’t tell toye he’s told smokey, because it’s funnier this way. like everyone else, he’s starved for entertainment.)

but toye gets hit, and they’ve spent months beside each other — sleeping in shifts, keeping each other safe, trying to keep each other warm, kvetching, arguing with each other; he’s put up with toye’s singing and toye’s put up with mcclung talking to himself. a synchronicity and interdependence has developed between them, throughout the war but particularly in bastogne, to the point where it’s almost telepathic. he doesn’t consider what a powerful kind of intimacy this is, both physical and psychological, until it’s gone.

toye gets hit, and mcclung loses him. toye gets hit, and mcclung is blindsided by the enormity of it. you can’t take anyone’s survival for granted, he’s always tried to be careful of that, but losing toye is like losing part of himself.

he’s pretty determinedly unsentimental about everything: he’s not going to fall in love with anyone while he’s fighting a war, and he’s not going to dwell on situations beyond his control, and he’s not going to let himself be distracted by worrying about someone who isn’t here anymore. or at least that’s the attitude he’s internalised, and he takes it so much for granted that he never even considers that he could have fallen for anyone: right here, right now.

but he can’t forget anything that’s happened, even if he’d like to, and there’s no other friendship that can quite replace what had developed between toye and himself. bastogne was when things were at their worst, and toye is the one with whom he survived the worst. without toye, he feels an inescapable sense of wrongness, unevenness.

he’s half aware that he misses joe. he tries not to acknowledge that to himself, because that would mean acknowledging that he may not have any chance to see joe again, that one or both of them may not survive. that’s a line of thought he keeps away from altogether; it’s there, but he won’t look at it.

he knows it’s not his fault toye was injured. sometimes it has nothing to do with being a good soldier; sometimes it’s just luck and timing; he’s nearly been hit himself. he knows that, but deep down inside he wonders if he could have saved joe, by making sure he was in their foxhole before the shelling started. he heard toye and second-guessed himself. he stayed where he was. he thinks he probably did the sensible thing. he still feels guilty about it.

(sidenote: the glaring exception to his “don’t befriend the replacements” rule ends up being babe. after toye, guarnere & compton are taken off the line, he and babe start sharing a foxhole. possibly he could have found someone else, but his protective instinct resurfaces and maybe it helps to take his mind off missing toye. it’s a friendship that comes out of grief and loss.)

he gets through foy, and haguenau, and he focuses on the situation at hand and he doesn’t think about toye.

when they reach austria, mcclung is ordered to hunt animals to feed landsberg’s prisoners, and so he sets up camp alone in the woods. it’s beautiful; it’s peaceful; it’s the first time he’s been truly alone in two years. it’s the first time his mind is able to relax, and the memories come back — prewar life, everything he’s been through since, bastogne, toye — and the thoughts of the future, what he might do after the war.

he’d like to see toye again.

he still hasn’t thought that maybe he has feelings for joe.

and then the war ends, and he has the freedom to decide what to do next. he returns to england, and then ships back to the us. the memory/loss of toye is still a weight on him, and so he tracks toye down and goes to see him. that’s the obvious, logical course of action.

it’s also making him much more nervous than it has any right to.

(for the past year and a half, he’s been compartmentalising very hard because he intuitively understood that as the best way to survive the war. he learnt it early on, and it’s hard to let go of it. he’s convinced he’s handling everything great, very matter of fact and pragmatic, getting the job done, no emotional baggage here, etc etc. this is... not 100% true, but a coping mechanism is a coping mechanism is a coping mechanism. he is doing pretty well; nobody thinks he’s not; so obviously that counts as a roaring success.

but once the war is over, the psychological walls he’s maintained throughout combat — between survival and emotion — begin gradually to disintegrate. he has to let himself become whole again, learn to navigate who he is now, accept that the war has scarred him. he still feels himself to be one of the lucky ones. some of the things he’s been avoiding hit harder than others, and he can’t control that anymore.

insofar as he’s aware of these developments, he considers it extremely unfair.)

but, ensuing stupid panic or no ensuing stupid panic, he commits to meeting up with toye. he figures they’ll catch up, maybe keep in contact, that now he’ll be able to stop wondering how toye’s doing, stop this strange off-balance feeling he’s had since toye got hit.

seeing toye again is actually a lot more than he’d ever anticipated, and he’s forced to acknowledge that maybe there’s more going on here than he’d figured.

he realises he’s attracted to this guy, and he doesn’t know when that started: probably in bastogne, but maybe earlier. it feels new but not new; if he hadn’t pointedly avoided thinking about joe after foy, maybe he’d have figured it out sooner. if they’d made it through the war together, maybe something would have happened between them in europe, but they lost each other too soon for him to know. he’s a little discomfited by these feelings suddenly creeping up on him, but he’s trying hard not to let any of it show: not the attraction, not the unease.

he reasons that his feelings are only a problem if toye doesn’t share them. he thinks he could deal with that, but he is afraid they may not have a friendship anymore, that it was left behind in wartime.

he tells himself he’s not afraid of rejection. but he is. he doesn’t like feeling vulnerable, and suddenly he is.

when he thinks there’s a chance the attraction is mutual, he takes it. it works out for him. they stay together. he accepts that he’s falling in love and he lets it happen.

he falls in love with joe’s courage and honesty and selflessness, and he finds it incredibly hard to actually say that. (this is someone who considers “hanging out with you voluntarily” to be a love language.) he’s moved just by the fact joe wants to be with him, that he’s able to acknowledge that attraction and act on it despite his provincial catholic upbringing lol. he knows that joe’s recovery has been difficult, and he sees how joe is dealing with it, and, like in bastogne, he tries to support him as quietly and simply as possible.

he finds it hard to tell joe he loves him, but he pays attention to what joe does and says, and does whatever he can to make his life better. he never thinks joe needs him there, and he wouldn’t want it that way. he helps joe to adapt their old calisthenics training; they take roadtrips together. they’re still deeply protective of each other, and they still express it via touch, practical acts, and snark. they don’t struggle with physical affection as much as either of them might have worried; they’re a little hesitant at first, but it falls into place.

they’re fumbling their way a little, but they respect each other completely and unconditionally, and they’re kind and careful, and their relationship gets stronger as it goes on. 

and they dance together.

[poxar]

Just read some manifesto about how to write Latino characters.

The idiot kept talking about how they don’t speak Spanish (often) so because of that Latinos must also not speak Spanish that often…

The leap of logic and self-indulgence. Like admit it bro you just don’t speak Spanish lmao 😂. That’s perfectly fine. Not every Latino has to be Hispanic as in Spanish speaking some of us speak French or Chinese or Arabic or Portuguese but are still Latino it’s okay.

But living within a Hispanic community means that people within that community only speak Spanish or speak it idk 85% of the time?

It’s how immigration works. Go to any Korea town, Chinatown, Russian town, the people in those ethnic groups tend to speak in their native tongues and have businesses that cater to their people within their respective communities in their languages. It’s not even that hard to find in the real world.

Also code switching is a thing all immigrants do. African Americans do it when they slip into AAVE. Immigrants do it when they slip into their native tongues and they still switch into other versions when they speak with their relatives vs other members of their communities. Like the way I speak to my brothers and sisters for example is not the same way I would address my elders or church members or something like that just like co-workers. We have a lot of things in common. And I think that’s wonderful tbh 🥰

Like the case for most immigrant kids is like they go to school and try their best to assimilate because that’s what their parents tell them to do and fuck were bullied OD so society tells us to assimilate or perish tbh. So we do we just abandon our culture when we leave the house. But the minute we enter the house we switch back to the old ways and we HAVE TO speak in our native languages because that’s what our parents/grandparents speak in and understand. That’s literally it. You just learned immigration assimilation and integration 101 congrats 🍾🎉🎊.

OP didn’t even mention immigration at all… but somehow their Latinx???? 😭like okay imma have to take your card away sis. I’m not saying everyone is fresh off the boat like my green card ass having parents. I know some people who aren’t… and honestly fuck them they straight up turn into Republicans which is like the most fucked up shit. Not saying all but I don’t like it! The assimilation and integration went too fucking hard.

It’s crazy to me how some people who really live in a god damn bubble are given a fucking platform to be talking about shit they’re clearly not even apart of. I saw the post and I’m not linking to it because honestly it doesn’t need anymore notes. It has like 10k from both white and black people who don’t know wtf they’re talking about. It’s annoying as fuck. -_-

Like for the love of god, just ask a fucking Hispanic person what it was like to live. Like if you want to create an authentic story or character. Just ask someone from the community and ask them about their life. People love sharing stories, and now you have something that connects you to someone and to a whole community.

Instead of reading bullet points from some antisocial loser who probably doesn’t even leave their fucking room and their social interactions with other people within their community stops at the drive-thru window at their local Wendy’s. I can smell their dumbass little privilege.

Being the daughter of immigrants and being from the Bronx and also living in NYC forces me to be diverse. I can’t be ignorant about socializing unless I want to be a complete jackass. Like for real. If you’re closed off and xenophobic in New York it’s by choice… it’s definitely a reality for some people but not for me and I’m glad and blessed for that. 😩

And tbh OPs takes were too generalized and basic. Every Hispanic/latino whatever you wanna call us idc at this point is attached to our specific culture.

This mf didn’t seem to have one ☝️ it was just…

We don’t all speak Spanish and we don’t all eat tacos and burritos…. And I’m like…… okay first of all burritos are Tex-mex like technically they’re AMERICAN you ask any Mexican that and that’s what they will tell you. It’s not a Mexican dish but something created here like pizza or whatever.

Tejanos and Mexicans who lived in Texas and Arizona and what not, before the whiteys came and just manifest destinied that shit, (chicanos) had their own way of cooking that has changed over the years due to war, colonialism, and just good ol’ evolution. A lot of people forget that Mexico owned that area and people been living there and had been for generations. There’s a lot of history that’s been kind of stomped out, appropriated, and then white washed and then abandoned. It’s not really given the respect it truly deserves and it’s sad. I’m sorry guys that I don’t have any sources on this matter but I do know of a lovely book.

La Frontera/Borderlands: The New Mestiza

I think it’s a fantastic read and a great way to dust off your Spanish speaking skills and learn what being American means to some people. Chicanos are what I’m referring to when I’m talking about the Mexicans who were annexed after the Alamo and the Spanish war America had with Mexico. It’s not a perfect term tbh but it’s the best I can do lol.

God I’m so fucking hungry

I SMELL A RAT 🐀

Lmao 😂

It’s pathetic lmao. I hate you and you’re dumb lol. Not you reading this, the person who made that awful post about how to write a Latino that just boiled down to just slap a Latino title and don’t bother making them Hispanic (which means Spanish speaking) because why would that add anything to their culture or sense of identity lmao 🤣 musty ass bitch.

I’m not even Mexican bro and I felt the need the need to step in because you’re not just going to disrespect my friends like that.

I get mad because I had a lot of friends who were illegal, who were scared of being deported, of fucking graduating high school or even applying for college and outing their family.

Like these are real fucking people. They pay taxes, they laugh and create and dance and live along side us. I wish them health, wealth and safety tbh because a lot of people don’t. And it’s so heartbreaking to me because they’re culture is so gorgeous and worth paying attention to. It is literally right there. They have the connections to their ancestors. Like cmon now, everyone is always looking for something new. 😞

Oh and here’s a cooking channel! Fuck it why not!

Aquí estas doñita Ángela con sus dos hijas Brenda y Mary. Buen Provecho!

This lady OD cute and she make good ass food 🥰 she’s Mexican Mexican though not Chicano

[zeffiroh]

Wikipedia just turned 20!!!

[ID: Origami W,  a gift for wikipedia END ID]

[ID: Origami models of arabic numerals two and zero, symbolizing wiki’s 20th birthday END ID]

send thanks and love to wikipedians.>>>

have a looksie at the birthday celebrations(twas on 15th), and confetti are still around.>>>

[ID: gif of puzzle globe(wiki logo) bursting, metaphorically the burst of knowledge and joy wiki gives, a gif from the creative commons bday stash of wikipedia END ID]

“Wikipedia started as an ambitious idea

…to create a free encyclopedia, written by volunteers, for everyone in the world. It seemed impossible.

Over 20 years, Wikipedia has become the largest collection of open knowledge in history. How did it happen? People, like you.

Made and sustained by humans.

Meet the movement.”

[ID: Graph,WIkipedia: citability vs helpfulness of articles on academic timescale .helpfulness increases from elementary academia to graduate academia as wikipedia articles are stuffed with knowledge from archives and enthusiasts, but elitist academic institutions have created a situation wherein the citability of these articles drops down from elementary levels to graduate studies.  END ID]

graph is taken from this aptly named article, “time to stop wikipedia shaming”

It is as if the main theme of wikipedia “ is edited by everyone” is taken as a flaw. the fascist and elitist gate-keeping control is not more evident anywhere but when wikipedia is shamed. Articles are locked, users banned and multiple people editing it makes it much more reliable than papers and books written by bigoted academics and reviewed by bribed editors (case in point- Sigmund Froyd’s theory of female sexuality, cough cough)

It is “the best thing ever,” because “anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject—so you know you are getting the best possible information.” - Michael Scott - The Office

This dialogue was used to identify Michael as an idiot, but it has the opposite effect, as this is truly the most beautiful missions of all time.

The thing about wikipedia is it is a macrogasmic entity of knowledge. Edits materialize at a rate of 1.8 per second. But perhaps more remarkable than Wikipedia's success is how little its reputation has changed. It was criticized as it rose, and it still is a matter of superiority complex in academic gate-keepers to state that Wikipedia is a blog and encyclopedias are more trustworthy etc etc, that wikipedia is not a source, and similar shaming tactics, when actually wikipedia is, in fact a tertiary SOURCE and, a more frequently updated encyclopedia.

Wiki is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10 most used sites , and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising(it could, but it doesn't, just to make it a comfortable and easily comprehensable resource), intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling, and still broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike the other top social platforms , it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?

Wikipedia is not perfect. The problems that it does have—and there are plenty of them—are discussed in great detail on Wikipedia itself, often in dedicated forums for self-critique with titles like “Why Wikipedia is not so great.” One contributor observes that “many of the articles are of poor quality.” Another worries that “consensus on Wikipedia may be a problematic form of knowledge production.” A third notes that “someone can just come and edit this very page and put in ‘pens are for cats only.’” Like the rest of the tech world, the site suffers from a gender imbalance; by recent estimates, 90 percent of its volunteer editors are men. Women and nonbinary contributors report frequent harassment from their fellow Wikipedians—trolling, doxing, hacking, death threats. The site's parent organization has repeatedly owned up to the situation and taken halting steps to redress it; several years ago, it allocated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a “community health initiative.” But in a way, the means to fix Wikipedia's shortcomings, in terms of both culture and coverage, are already in place: Witness the rise of feminist edit-athons.

The site's innovations have always been cultural as well as computational. It was created using existing technology. This remains the single most underestimated and misunderstood aspect of the project: its emotional architecture. Wikipedia is built on the personal interests and idiosyncrasies of its contributors; in fact, without getting gooey, you could even say it is built on LOVE. Editors' passions can drive the site deep into inconsequential territory—exhaustive detailing of dozens of different kinds of embroidery software, lists dedicated to bespectacled baseball players, a brief but moving biographical sketch of Khanzir, the only pig in Afghanistan. No knowledge is truly useless, but at its best, Wikipedia weds this ranging interest to the kind of pertinence where Larry David's “Pretty, pretty good!” is given as an example of rhetorical epizeuxis. It is one of the reminders, that the internet is a wonderful space.

In 2000, around a year before Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger cofounded Wikipedia, the pair started a site called Nupedia, planning to source articles from noted scholars and put them through seven rounds of editorial oversight. But the site never got off the ground; after a year, there were fewer than two dozen entries. (Wales, who wrote one of them himself, told The New Yorker “it felt like homework.”) When Sanger got wind of a collaborative software tool called a wiki—from the Hawaiian wikiwiki, or “quickly”—he and Wales decided to set one up as a means of generating raw material for Nupedia. They assumed nothing good would come of it, but within a year Wikipedia had 20,000 articles. By the time Nupedia's servers went down a year later, the original site had become a husk, and the seed it carried had grown beyond any expectation.

Many similar sites have languished. They came up against a simple and apparently insoluble problem, the same one that Nupedia encountered and Wikipedia surmounted: Most "experts" do not want to contribute to a free online encyclopedia.

This barrier to entry exists even in places where there are many "experts" and large volumes of material to draw from. Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance, is the subject of tens of thousands of books. There are probably more dedicated historians of the Corsican general than of almost any other historical figure, but so far these scholars, even the retired or especially enthusiastic ones, have been disinclined to share their bounty. Citizendium's entry on Napoleon, around 5,000 words long and unedited for the past six years, is missing events as major as the decisive Battle of Borodino, which claimed 70,000 casualties, and the succession of Napoleon II. By contrast, Wikipedia's article on Napoleon sits at around 18,000 words long and runs to more than 350 sources.

The Wikipedia replacement products revealed another problem with the top-down model: With so few contributors, coverage was spotty and gaps were hard to fill. Scholarpedia's entry on neuroscience makes no mention of serotonin or the frontal lobes. At Citizendium, Sanger refused to recognize women's studies as a top-level category, describing the discipline as too “politically correct.” (Today, he says “it wasn't about women's studies in particular” but about “too much overlap with existing groups.”) A wiki with a more horizontal hierarchy, on the other hand, can self-correct. No matter how politically touchy or intellectually abstruse the topic, the crowd develops consensus. On the English-language Wikipedia, particularly controversial entries, like those on George W. Bush or Jesus Christ, have edit counts in the thousands.

Wikipedia, in other words, isn't raised up wholesale, like a barn; it's assembled grain by grain, like a termite mound. The smallness of the grains, and of the workers carrying them, makes the project's scale seem impossible. But it is exactly this incrementalism that puts immensity within reach.

The stars of Wikipedia are not giants in their fields but so-called WikiGnomes—editors who sweep up typos, arrange articles in neatly categorized piles, and scrub away vandalism. This work is often thankless, but it does not seem to be joyless. It is a common starting point for Wikipedians, and many are content to stay there. According to a 2016 paper in the journal Management Science, the median edit length on Wikipedia is just 37 characters, an effort that might take a few seconds.

From there, though, many volunteers are drawn deeper into the site's culture. They discuss their edits on Talk pages; they display their interests and abilities on User pages; some vie to reach the top of the edit-count leaderboard. An elect few become administrators; while around a quarter of a million people edit Wikipedia daily, only around 1,100 accounts have admin privileges. The site is deep and complex enough—by one count, its policy directives and suggestions run to more than 150,000 words—that its most committed adherents must become almost like lawyers, appealing to precedent and arguing their case. As with the law, there are different schools of interpretation; the two largest of these are deletionists and inclusionists. Deletionists favor quality over quantity, and notability over utility. Inclusionists are the opposite.

Most dedicated editors, whether deletionist or inclusionist, are that category of person who sits somewhere between expert and amateur: the enthusiast. Think of a railfan or a trainspotter. (Wikipedians disagree on which is the better term.) Their knowledge of trains is quite different from an engineer's or a railway historian's; you can't major in trainspotting or become credentialed as a railfan. But these people are a legitimate kind of expert nonetheless. Previously, their folk knowledge was reposited in online forums, radio shows, and specialist magazines. Wikipedia harnessed it for the first time. The entry on the famous locomotive the Flying Scotsman is 4,000 words long and includes eye-wateringly detailed information on its renumbering, series of owners, smoke deflectors, and restoration, from contributors who seem to have the most intimate, hard-won knowledge of the train's working. (“It was deemed that the A4 boiler had deteriorated into a worse state than the spare due to the higher operating pressures the locomotive had experienced following the up-rating of the locomotive to 250 psi.”)

Pedantry this powerful is itself a kind of engine, and it is fueled by an enthusiasm that verges on love. Many early critiques of computer-assisted reference works feared a vital human quality would be stripped out in favor of bland fact-speak. That 1974 article in The Atlantic presaged this concern well: “Accuracy, of course, can better be won by a committee armed with computers than by a single intelligence. But while accuracy binds the trust between reader and contributor, eccentricity and elegance and surprise are the singular qualities that make learning an inviting transaction. And they are not qualities we associate with committees.” Yet Wikipedia has eccentricity, elegance, and surprise in abundance, especially in those moments when enthusiasm becomes excess and detail is rendered so finely (and pointlessly) that it becomes beautiful.

In the article on the sexual revolution, there was a line, since deleted, that read, “For those who were not there to experience it, it may be difficult to imagine how risk-free sex was during the 1960s and 1970s.” This anonymous autobiography in miniature is an intriguing piece of editorializing, but it's also a little legacy of the sexual revolution all by itself, a rueful reflection on a moment of freedom that didn't last. (The editor who added “Citation needed” is part of that story as well.) In the article on the anticommunist intellectual Frank Knopfelmacher, we learn that “his protracted, usually freewheeling, invariably slanderous late-night telephone monologues (visited alike upon associates and, more often, antagonists) retained a mythic status for decades among Australian intellectuals.” The Hong Kong novelist Lillian Lee, we are told, seeks “freedom and happiness, not fame.”

Pedants have a reputation for humorlessness, but for Wikipedians a sense of humor is at the core of the good-faith collaboration that defines the project. There is probably no need for an exhaustive history of a giant straw goat erected in a Swedish town each Christmas, but the article on the Gävle Goat chronicles its annual fate fastidiously. It is prone to vandalism by fire, and the article centers around an exacting timeline that lists the date of destruction, the method of destruction, and the new security measures put in place every year since 1966. (In 2005, it was “burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man, by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat.”)

Why do Wikipedians perform these millions of hours of labor, some expended on a giant straw goat, without pay? Because they don't experience them as labor. “It's a misconception people work for free,” Wales told the site Hacker Noon in 2018. “They have fun for free.” A 2011 survey of more than 5,000 Wikipedia contributors listed “It's fun” as one of the primary reasons they edited the site.

This is why the meta side of Wikipedia—the Talk pages, the essay commentaries, the policies—is suffused with nerdy jokes. We're so used to equating seriousness with importance that this jars at first: It's hard to square the encapsulation of all human knowledge with a policy called “Don't be a dick” (since revised to “Don't be a jerk”). But expressing the directive that way carries a purpose. It's the same purpose that drives Wikipedians to collect and celebrate the site's “Lamest edit wars,” which include long-running skirmishes on Freddie Mercury's ancestry, the provenance of Caesar salad, the proper pronunciation of J. K. Rowling's surname (“Perhaps it rhymes with ‘Trolling’?”), the wording of certain captions (“Is the cat depicted really smiling?”), and the threshold of notoriety required to appear on a list of fictional badgers.

Few architects of a world encyclopedia would think to include a forum for jokes, and in the unlikely event that they did, no one could anticipate that it would be important. But on Wikipedia the jokes are very important. They defuse tensions. They foster joyful cooperation. They encourage humility. They promote further reading and further editing. They also represent a surprise return to the earliest days of Enlightenment reference works. Samuel Johnson's dictionary, compiled in 1755, gives one definition of “dull” as “not exhilarating; not delightful: as, to make dictionaries is dull work.” Perhaps the most important encyclopedia of the late modern period, the Encyclopédie, is barbed with satirical and anticlerical quips: The entry on “Cannibals” cross-references with “Communion.”

Wikipedia ought to serve as a model for many forms of social endeavor online, but its lessons do not translate readily into the commercial sphere. It is a noncommercial enterprise, with no investors or shareholders to appease, no financial imperative to grow or die, and no standing to maintain in the arms race to amass data and attain AI supremacy at all costs. At Jimmy Wales' wedding, one of the maids of honor toasted him as the sole internet mogul who wasn't a billionaire. And that's what's awesome about it. It realizes that in as a society, we don't have to work to sustain ourselves, that's something we built the society for, we work to collect what we like, and that's our earning from the labour. Wikipedians work for curiosity and satisfaction and collect knowledge and joy.

The site has helped its fellow tech behemoths, though, especially with the march of AI. Wikipedia's liberal content licenses and vast information hoard have allowed developers to train neural networks much more quickly, cheaply, and widely than proprietary data sets ever could have. When you ask Apple's Siri or Amazon's Alexa a question, Wikipedia helps provide the answer. When you Google a famous person or place, Wikipedia often informs the “knowledge panel” that appears alongside your search results.

These tools were made possible by a project called Wikidata, the next ambitious step toward realizing the age-old dream of creating a “World Brain.” It began with a Croatian computer scientist and Wikipedia editor named Denny Vrandečić. He was enthralled with the online encyclopedia's content but felt frustrated that users could not ask it questions that required drawing on knowledge from multiple entries across the site. Vrandečić wanted Wikipedia to be able to answer a query like “What are the 20 largest cities in the world that have a female mayor? The knowledge is obviously in Wikipedia, but it's hidden. To get it out would be huge work.” .

Drawing on an idea from the early internet called “the semantic web,” Vrandečić set out to structure and enrich Wikipedia's data set so that it could, in effect, begin to synthesize its own knowledge. If there were some way to tag women and mayors and cities by population size, then a correctly coded query could return the 20 largest cities with a female mayor automatically. Vrandečić had edited Wikipedia in Croatian, English, and German, so he recognized the limitations of using plain English semantic tagging. Instead, he chose numerical codes. Any reference to the book Treasure Island might be tagged with the code Q185118, for example, or the color brown with Q47071.

Vrandečić assumed this coding and tagging would have to be carried out by bots. But of the 80 million items that have been added to Wikidata so far, around half have been entered by human volunteers, a level of crowdsourcing that has surprised even Wikidata's creators. Editing Wikidata and editing Wikipedia, it turns out, are different enough that they don't cannibalize the same contributors. Wikipedia attracts people interested in writing prose, and Wikidata compels dot-connectors, puzzle-solvers, and completionists. (Its product manager, Lydia Pintscher, still comes home from a movie and manually copies the cast list from IMDb into Wikidata with the appropriate tags.) ANd wikipedia is amazing because it isn't bothered by the possoibility that AI does sort of take over, or that there is canabalistic editing, its an evolving landscape, with its freedom to exist.

As platforms like Google and Alexa work to provide instant answers to random questions, Wikidata will be one of the key architectures that link the world's information together. The system still results in errors sometimes—that's why Siri briefly thought Bulgaria's national anthem was “Despacito”—but its prospective scale is already more ambitious than Wikipedia's. There are subprojects aiming to itemize every sitting politician on earth, every painting in every public collection worldwide, and every gene in the human genome into searchable, adaptable, and machine-readable form.

The jokes will still be there. Consider Wikidata's numerical tag for the author Douglas Adams, Q42. In Adams' book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a group of hyperintelligent beings build a vast, powerful computer called Deep Thought, which they ask for the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” What comes out is the number 42. That wink of self-awareness—at the folly and joy of building something as preposterous and powerful as a world brain— is why, with Wikipedia, you know you are getting the best possible information.

[lesbianaglaya]

Please elaborate on that The Idiot essay

Okay anon, ask and ye shall receive. Here is my manifesto on why I love The Idiot (1868-1869). Homoeroticism and me crying over Bakhtin under the cut.

Okay from here on out let me just warn you that there will be discussion of epilepsy, sexual abuse, violence against women, murder, and suicide. I never claimed it wasn’t a messed up story.

Let me start off by saying, this is not a good novel. It was written as a desperate cash grab by Dostoevsky after he and his wife Anna had had to move to Switzerland for financial reasons (they were rather continually in debt due to Dostoevsky’s gambling problem. In fact, they’d met when Fyodor hired Anna as a stenographer to help him write down The Gambler, the completion of which he’d bet all his rights to his published works on).  The four separate parts are only loosely linked by narrative threads, things don’t follow the course you would expect from a work of literature, and the protagonist of the novel’s literal schtick is that he was supposed to be “a perfectly beautiful man”. Which, yeah, great in theory but in reality people don’t want perfect protagonists. The morals of the novel tend towards Dostoevsky’s own often troubling views of religion and morality, and it is a distinctly 19th century work.

And yet, it’s still one of my favourite things I’ve ever read. Not only are there some truly insane homoerotic moments in here, but there are some brilliant moments of play with narrative voice, society novel-esque shenanigans, questions about the nature of goodness and what that really means, and, of course, one really hot moment where a woman slaps a guy who’s being a dick in the face with a riding crop.

The loose plot of the novel is that Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, the eponymous idiot (and a holy fool, or as Dostoevsky once described him, “Prince Christ”), is returning to Russia from a period of many years in Switzerland being treated for epilepsy. On the train into Petersburg he meets Rogozhin, a young man who has just inherited an enormous fortune after the death of his father. They begin talking, and Rogozhin confides in Myshkin about his love for (read: obsession with) a girl known as Nastasya Filipovna. (This seems weird doesn’t it? Just confessing your major life problems to this weird guy sitting next to you on the train? Yea that’s just what people do around Myshkin). Upon arriving in Petersburg, Myshkin goes to meet with his distant relations, the Epanchins, to get to know them and form a family connection. The rest of the novel is these characters cycling through various love (?) plots, more random inheritances, people dying of consumption, going to stay in the country for a while Just Because, and other stereotypical 19th century novel things.

What makes it unique is that each character is their own person with their own thoughts, experiences and world views and the novel is these views interacting and clashing, or as Bakhtin puts it “a plurality of consciousness, with equal rights and each with its own world”. The characters are not there to help prove any thesis or idea; instead the thesis of the novel is how these characters differing views interact with each other. Myshkin is the lens of this, making it a picture of how each different character (or world view) reacts to his inherent goodness.

Of course, that’s all very... meta. Fun to discuss, but it doesn’t necessarily make the book fun to read. That’s where Nastasya Filipovna comes in.

Nastasya Filipovna, the girl that Rogoshin is “in love with” is a young woman who was born to nobility but orphaned and then sexually abused and turned into a concubine by her guardian Totsky. At the beginning of the novel she has escaped the control of Totsky and is in the incredibly tenuous situation of being provided an income from him for not completely destroying his reputation. A marriage has been arranged by Totsky (so that he won't have to worry about her any more) between her and this one asshole Ganya, but she has not agreed to it yet and has said she will announce her decision at her name day party.

At said name day party is where things get Crazy. She goes ham, mocking Ganya (who she knows hates her) for selling himself for the money promised in marrying her, verbally torturing Totsky, and generally saying fuck you to everyone while also tossing in a good amount of self hatred. Myshkin (whom she invited after meeting him once earlier that day for like five seconds seriously just role with it) declares quite earnestly that he thinks she is a good person and if she likes he’ll marry her amd also that he just inherited a fuck ton of money. Nastya is taken aback, and agrees to marry Myshkin. Then Rogozhin shows up (drunk, with the lads) and we find out Nastya has been planning all this. She tells Myshkin that she can’t actually marry him because he’s too innocent and she believes herself to be awful, and then asks Rogozhin for the money he promised her. Rogozhin hands over 100,000 rubles and Nastasya proceeds to toss them in the fire, tell Ganya that they’re his if he’ll reach in to get them out, and then leaves her own party with Rogozhin!!! I said this novel was batshit!!!!

Nastya through out the novel continues to be The Best Character, writing homoerotic letters to Aglaya Epanchina, who I FIRMLY choose to see as a lesbian, smoking cigars, and of course, upon hearing a man say of her “Here you simply need a whip, there’s no other way with this creature”, in return “she rushed to a young man completely unknown to her who was standing two steps away and holding a thin, braided riding crop, tore it out of his hand, and struck the offender accross the face as hard as she could”.  Iconique. Of course, her story ends tragically but we’ll get into that later.

To quickly touch on Aglaya Epanchina, because I love her, she is one of the daughters of the Epanchin family, she and Myshkin almost get married, and she ends the novel by running off with a foreigner and becoming (horrified whisper) Catholic. Anyway she and Nastya have a brief but horribly gay dicourse where Nastya confesses her love (platonic of course. That is definitely how I, a lesbian, read this) for Aglaya and Aglaya refuses to believe her. Aglaya says she wants to marry Myshkin specifically because then she wouldn’t have to be a wife and a mother and could pursue what she wants and continue to learn. Also at one point Aglaya adopts a hedgehog. That’s Lesbianism Baybee. Her ending is supposed to be tragic but I choose to believe that her marriage is a lavender marriage and she and her gay husband are having wild fun around Europe. Let me have this.

Now for what you’ve all been waiting for — more homoeroticism.

Myshkin and Rogoshin’s dynamic is, like, fully insane. After their first meeting on the train, Rogozhin says to Myshkin “Prince, I don’t know why I’ve come to love you. . . . Come and see me, Prince. We’ll take those wretched gaiters off you; I’ll dress you in a top-notch marten coat; I’ll have the best of tailcoats made for you, a white waistcoat, or whatever you like; I’ll stuff your pockets with money”. Slow down lover boy you met this man five minutes ago and you’re already trying to sugar daddy him?? It only gets worse from here.

Part II of the novel picks up six months after the name day party. Rogozhin and Myshkin have in the intervening time “often happened to spend long hours together, and there had even been several moments during their meetings that had left an all too memorable imprint upon their hearts”. Yeah. It’s also said that Rogozhin is jealous of Myshkin maybe holding some of Nastya’s affection but like. It just reads a lot like Rogozhin is torn between Nastya and Myshkin, which he is in a way because being in love with friends with Myshkin and Nastya  (lavender) marrying Myshkin (that’s not an exaggeration it’s basically out right stated that if Myshkin and Nastya married they would not have sex), would mean giving up the weird destructive obsession he and Nastya have with each other. This is supposed to imply coming to Jesus. I take it as accepting your homosexuality because Dostoevsky is dead and I can do what I want.

So Myshkin shows up at Rogozhin’s house and things are a bit awkward (Rogozhin has maybe been stalking Myshkin??) His “affectionate” smile is described “as if something had been broken, and try as he might, he was unable to glue it back together.” Anyway.

They begin actually talking and oh boy. I’ll just present these without comment.

“I’ve come to bring you peace, because you, too, are dear to me. I love you very much Parfyon. And now I’ll go and never come again. Farewell.” “‘Stay with me a little’ Parfyon said quietly, without getting up from his place and leaning his head on his right hand, ‘I haven’t seen you in a very long time.’”

“When you’re not in front of me, I feel spite for you Lev Nikolaevich. . . . Now you haven’t sat with me a quarter of an hour and all my spite is gone, and I love you like before. Stay with me a little . . .’”

“Nobody’s asking our opinion. It got decided without us. And we love differently too.”

“I didn’t want to come here! I wanted to forget everything here, tear it out of my heart!”

Not to mention the jealousy Rogozhin has for the perceived relationship between Myshkin and Nastya. Hmmmm. Anyway after all That, Rogozhin insists that he and Myshkin trade crosses, his golden one for Myshkin’s tin one.

And THEN Rogozhin proceeds to stop Myshkin from leaving again, and takes him to get his mother’s blessing, which is the same thing he did with Nastasya!!!!!! I feel insane.

After this Myshkin returns to his hotel but then Rogozhin follows him and um. Tries to stab him. With the knife that’s been built up as a phallic symbol through the whole novel. But then Myshkin falls into an epileptic fit and Rogozhin flees. Like this is deeply fucked up but What The Hell am I supposed to be thinking rn??

Anyway the next time they meet it’s in the countryside and Myshkin has fully forgiven him for the murder attempt. Indeed “struck by Rogozhin’s sudden appearance, the prince was unable to collect his thoughts for sometime, and a painful sensation rose again in his heart.”

Rogoshin has apparently not forgiven himself for trying to kill Myshkin, to which Myshkin responds “all that you went through that day I now know as well as I know my own self. What you were imagining did not and could not exist.” *jenny slate scream*

Myshkin proceeds to invite Rogozhin home with him, saying “I have some wine, we’ll drink wine, you must wish me something I myself don’t know how to wish for now, and it’s precisely you who must wish it, and I’ll wish you your fullest happiness. Or else give me back my cross! You didn’t even send it back to me the next day! You’re wearing it? Wearing it even now?” and THEN he says “I don’t want to meet my new life without you because my new life has begun! Don’t you know that my new life begins today?” and then they head home together.

Okay skipping over a bunch of stuff because 1) I havent read the novel in a year and while i know there’s more stuff in there I don’t know exactly where and I don’t want to be flipping pages for another hour and 2) this is already insanely long so. For context in the intervening time Rogozhin and Nastya do end up getting married (which everyone including the two of them kind of agree that it’s just a way for them both to kill each other/basically comit suicide. Fun!). So that’s exactly what happens, and Myshkin runs to their house, arriving too late and finding that Rogozhin has stabbed Nastya and she is dead. Thus ensues a scene that makes me so insane I cant... look here just take this:

“‘So let her lie here now, next to us, next to me and you...’

‘Yes, yes!’ the prince agreed warmly.”

And

“‘I’ll make up the bed and you can lie down... and I’ll lie down with you... and we’ll listen... because I don’t know yet man... I don’t know everything yet, man, so I’m telling you about it ahead of time, so you’ll know all about it ahead of time...’”

And

“But two people could not lie on the sofa, and he absolutely wanted to make up beds now side by side, and that way why, with great effort, he now dragged pillows of various sizesfrom both sofas all the way across the room, right up to the opening in the curtain. The bed got made up anyhow; he went over to the prince, took him tenderly and rapturously by the arm, got him to his feet, and led him to the bed”

And

“[Rogozhin was] laying the prince down on the left, better, pillows, himself on the right”

And

“‘What did you use? A knife? That same one?’

‘That same one’”

And

“The prince would reach out his trembling hand to him and quietly touch his head, his hair, stroke it and stroke his cheeks... there was nothing more he could do! . . . and pressed his face to the pale and motionless face of Rogozhin; tears flowed from his eyes onto Rogozhin’s cheeks”

And

“He quietly hastened to pass his trembling hand over his hair and cheeks, as if caressing and soothing him”

And then the cops show up and there’s a brief epilogue talking about how everything is terrible now and Myshkin goes back to Switzerland because he’s incoherent with grief. Insane.

So there’s also a lot in this novel about what is actually good, and how people react when confronted with goodness, etc. etc. but this is five pages in google docs and I need to. Stop. Anyway if you made it to the end cheers this novel is awful and insane and I love it. Dostoevsky do not interact I hate your crusty ass even if your prose makes me feel things.

[magaprima]

Part 1 Episode 3 thoughts

The scene in the bathroom, where she appears suddenly behind an upset Sabrina, the paper towel she holds out is so scrunched and she holds it out so awkwardly, that it tells us how fake this all is, even if it’s not currently visible to Sabrina. Combined with the purposefully licking her thumb to wipe away a mark from Sabrina’s face which is a very typical thing of the archetypal Mother, shows that she’s generally and actively trying to be maternal, that’s the angle she’s using. She knows Sabrina is without an official, biological Mother in her life, and Lilith is perhaps hoping that being maternal is the way in. And this does, in time, work (but as a lot of people have said both in headcanon posts as well as joke ones, Lilith narrative as regards Sabrina is essentially ‘I will fake caring for her’ and then her constantly fighting genuinely caring before finally being like ‘fuck it, my plan has backfired on me terribly’)

After Sabrina leaves, as she turns to the mirror and checks her lipstick, Lilith looks a mixture of smug and fucking tired of this shit. There’s the smugness that she has ensured Sabrina knows she’s there to help, she’s there caring about her, a maternal hand reaching out, but she also seems so fucking done with the shit she has to do. This could also be her thoughts on Sabrina’s reaction to the visit from Satan in Hawthorne’s office, like ‘well fucking done, Lucifer. You’ve just sent her running a mile. She’s not going to sign any book when you’re freaking her out at school’. Lilith may be abused and conditioned to follow the Dark Lord without question, to do as he asks her, do his bidding, but that doesn’t mean she can’t still think he’s an idiot man-angel whose terrible tactics she’s going to have to fix. 

When in Blackwood’s office, the phrase ‘The girl is my charge’ is an interesting one. The term ‘charge’ as well as the possessive ‘my’ implies that Satan has not just told her to get Sabrina to sign the book, but also to watch over her, keep her safe. Lilith, at this point, is presuming that reason is because Sabrina needs to be alive to sign the Book (and as I said above, she’s conditioned not to question him), but we, now with retrospect and hindsight, know the real reason he wanted Lilith looking after Sabrina; both because he intended the girl to be his Queen and because he intended Lilith to be her ‘satanic fairy godmother’. 

When she flicks Blackwood’s pages without looking at them, this has such a vibe of being the taunting child here, as she is deliberately messing with his stuff and deliberately losing him his page. It just really reveals their dynamic and what she thinks of him, how dismissive she is and how much she wants to irritate him at best and get rid of him entirely at worst. He is literally so beneath in her view that she doesn’t even have to pay full attention. 

“As is my way. A hand on her shoulder, a whisper in her ear” tells us not only that Lilith is the queen of subtle manipulation and corruption, but that this hasn’t been the first assignment of this kind. The fact she doesn’t think his obsession with getting Sabrina to sign the book makes her anything special, implies Satan has had others he’s focused on for one reason or another and that Lilith is often the one sent in to sort it. Also the fact she goes straight for the booze shows us that not only does the woman need a drink, but there’s at least one thing about the mortal realm she actually likes. 

“But she was at the altar; you failed to get the signature”; Lilith is already well aware of who the more capable of the two are. It’s that thing where she doesn’t think there’s a competition because she doesn’t consider Blackwood to even be in her league. 

“My dear demoness” seems to imply that while Blackwood knows what she is, he might not know who she is. Lilith is quite a renowned person within their world (obviously, but it’s also shown by Edward mentioning her in his manifesto and Faustus giving her a co-starring role in his play) so I can’t help but feel a warlock would be a bit more respectful to the Mother of Demons. But I don’t write Blackwood and I’ve never done on meta on him, so I wouldn’t like to say any of that is definite. 

Lilith glares one flash of a sharp glare when he says her methods are weak, because that’s offending her tactics and she’s damn proud of the way she works and knows it gets the job done, so she’s professionally offended here. But when he adds ‘your will is womanly’, she rolls her eyes, because this isn’t professional, this isn’t constructive criticism to be taken seriously, this is the same old male refrain she’s heard a thousand times before. 

"Yes, you’re blunt like a hammer, that’s true” Implies they’ve spoken quite a few times before we see this meeting, though how much I don’t know, but there’s a familiarity here, that perhaps she even went to the Academy the night she arrived (after she killed Wardwell, because...first things first)

Her eyes flicker with thought when she says ‘But don’t underestimate her, warlock’, as she thinks back on her own interchanges with Sabrina. It’s less warning him here and more a case of Lilith thinking aloud. She is consciously realising how clever and determined Sabrina is, how much more complicated this task she’s been set will be, and perhaps there’s even a flicker of admiration there (though it’s quashed by Lilith’s current ambitions, intent and where her then loyalties lay).

The true warning to Blackwood comes when she adds ‘and don’t disrespect me’. She loses her thoughtful gaze here and turns to look at him with something that is sharp and dangerous. There’s no doubt she is deadly serious here. Emphasis on deadly. 

“High priest or not, you’re still a man. And I feast on male flesh” This is an epic implied threat, heck it’s barely implied, she will eat him if he doesn’t get in line, but it’s hysterical how you see his smile fall of his face suddenly like ‘wait, what?’. 

When we go to the school and Lilith is all ‘You’ll never guess, Sabrina’ she totally ignores Harvey until she is forced to acknowledge him. But even then her wording ‘That’s W.I.C.C.A to you, Mr Kinkle’ is distancing language. Whereas she’s shoulder to shoulder with Sabrina, close, implying allies, two women working together on the same side. But when she adds ‘making their voices heard’ she seems to genuinely smile and it’s possible that there’s something that even in mortals she has to admire; women taking charge. 

Lilith takes far too much time and detail and attention in making that scrapbook of newspaper cutting. She even hovers pieces over the book to check it’s the right place and it will be aesthetically pleasing before she sticks them down. Lilith basically went all out on that Blue Peter project (and she does it again with the Gingerbread house in the Solstice episode. Lilith puts her heart and soul into magic art projects)

Also, as a side note, I’m not quite sure how taunting the lawyer with the image of his dead daughter was supposed to change his mind about helping Sabrina. I mean, Lilith, what are you doing? That’s only going to motivate him to fight the devil even more, surely? She definitely did a better job trying to break the team up by giving Sabrina the book of news articles, but in the end, it merely led him to telling her the truth about his devil deal, as well as the tragedy of his daughter’s death, and basically Lilith inadvertently made the team stronger. Or it might be a subconscious level of self-sabotage. Unlikely, but a nice thought. 

“Have you come to congratulate me?” “No. And congratulate you on what?”

The no, is a simple, pfft, of course I haven’t come to congratulate you. But the added ‘and congratulate you on what’ seems to be like ‘wait, what the fuck would I even be congratulating you for?’. And as she says ‘a half victory is no victory at all’ she literally frowns at him like ‘are you an actual idiot? You want congratulations for....you’re confusing me with your idiocy’. She’s also messing with his stuff again as she talks. These two needed more scenes, because it could have been really fun...just with her taunting him really, haha. 

“It’s always brute force with you men, isn’t it?” 

This heavily implies Lilith’s experiences throughout her life. She had brute force from Adam wanting her to submit to him, brute force from the False God who kicked her out of the garden to die when she didn’t follow his rules, brute force from Satan who has made her in his serving handmaiden with his abuse. And of course there will be other instances with other men, mortal and demon, that we haven’t heard about specifically from the show. This is Lilith’s established base line for men, it’s always about brute force. It’s why Adam 2.0 is such a shock for her, because there’s no brute force, no physical violence there. 

“But real corruption is a thin, subtle blade”

Yes, this is Lilith’s tactic, but I think it’s also reflective of what Satan did to her. To change her from human/witch to demoness, woman to handmaiden. I don’t believe either of those things happened over night, and I don’t believe her character, her nature, changed that completely and suddenly either. It was slow and subtle, all with Satan’s easing and encouragement, his abuse, both mental and physical, and then his rewards, taking and giving as he saw fit, his talks with her....all of it a thin subtle blade until Lilith didn’t realise how deep it was and she’s lost to it. 

“I am quite good at tearing souls apart. One piece at a time” Everyone needs a hobby and apparently this is Lilith’s. 

Yet, despite that, what is her plan for tearing souls? It’s a freaking bookclub. That we see do nothing in the series except give them great books to read, forbidden books that allow them to rebel against the establishment, to bond over said rebellion, to explore their true selves...and basically all become a lot more learned and self-actualised and confident because of it. She freaking improves their lives here. Is this subconscious sabotage? Or is Lilith just really bad at trying to corrupt young woman because her own experiences just make her natural instinct to free them? Or is that we’re in such a horror of a male patriarchal nightmare that Lilith is needed?

Theo is, of course, smiling constantly throughout this scene. They look directly at Lilith, smiling, and then they smile and everyone else. They’re constantly right at Lilith’s side. They laugh at her saying ‘Juicy, forbidden novels’. This is either a crush of all crushes, or Lilith is just giving off a vibe that Theo is loving. Or maybe it’s both. Both is good. 

Also the juice forbidden novels line is a totally mirror to the juice forbidden apple which Eve ate. 

“A little something for each of you” She says menacingly, looking at them all with silent, evil plot face. You gave them a book club, Lilith. Of banned books. You’re becoming their dream teacher, not their nightmare. This is not evil. This is brilliant. 

[nigelgodrichproducer]

Ultraista-era Nigel interview

Magoo: I am curious about how the project came together before you met Laura, when it was just you and Joey. Were you just hanging out between schedules when you were in the same town?

Nigel: Exactly. He and I and another friend named Guss. So many times we just got together and we would be recording or jamming. Most of it we did in London but we are working all over the place. Guss and Joey both have little studios and I have a big studio. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, we just made a concerted effort to get a bunch of backing tracks together. We spoke about a certain aesthetic about electronics and a repetitive rhythm which is played. Obviously electronic music that is repeated is exactly the same. You get a human being in and they can repeat but it will sound different every time. Afrobeat was the reference point. So that’s how it started and then we had an intense 3 day session, like a right ol’ recording party and ended up with bits of music that we would then … essentially what I did was took all the music off and kept the rhythm and started again. That’s the basis of the record.

M: How much of this stuff did you have together before you thought you had to find yourself a singer?

N: Quite a lot actually because we’d done tiny snippets which might have been a minute long or three minutes or whatever. It would be a feeling, a little movement and we would leave it at that and move on to the next one. After a while we would go back and look at things and see how they could build and be structured.

M: Were you at any stage trying to do it without vocals?

N: Originally yeah, it could have been just instrumental. It was a bit of an experiment really just to see how substantial something could be like that.

M: Just to see how it evolves?

N: Yes, because it is always a terrifying prospect to say OK we are going to make some music and find a singer… you’d find a singer first and get them involved. I think it’s very hard to find a singer. With the peculiar relationships that we have… mine and Joeys is such a specific one, once in a lifetime, unique buddy becomes muse becomes .. you know!

M: You have worked with each other for years …

N: Yes, To get someone else in with that chemistry is terrifying. It’s something that is not taken lightly anyway. We only did it because we felt that we would be real pussies if we didn’t try. You know, let’s push this and I think we were very fortunate to meet Laura. She’s incredibly down to earth and rational. One of the most important things about relationships is about being able to communicate with that person.

M: I read about how you put up posters at an art college. You were trying to  find someone who was not even necessarily a musician to sing. Did you actually audition anyone form that process?

N: We actually got replies with music that they had made. We were trying to find someone who was an interesting character, who could sing but maybe hadn’t thought about taking it seriously.

M: An amateur?

N: Exactly. The last thing we wanted to do was have a singer songwriter with their chops together who had their version of what they wanted to do already sorted out. What we did end up finding in Laura, was someone who did have their own thing going, but it was very compatible and didn’t work against what we trying to do.

M: How much did the songs change when she came into the picture?

N: What would happen, is that I would write with her. There are a couple of tunes I wrote myself.

M: With lyrics and melodies?

N: Yeah, lyrics, melodies and me singing and she’d re-do it. We’d improve them and finish them off with her singing then there are things that she wrote over the top of what I’d done and we’d finesse that. Then there’s like a ping-pong thing where you are just throwing stuff at each other and putting it together as you go. There are all sorts of ways of doing it and lyrically it is the same thing. We’d play word puzzles.

M: So did you have that aesthetic before Laura joined, that historic Ultarist poetry movement  (The Ultraist movement was a Bohemian-style literary movement born in Spain in 1918)

N: That was already happening before that word came along. People have said you must have been sitting there with an Ultraista manifesto following the instructions. Well no, it was just a coincidence but it works very well. That word suggested what I was feeling, what I could see along with that music.

M: Do you ever have free time Nigel?

N: Oh I do. I have an awful lot of time to stare at the wall and think about what I am doing. I have a very unstructured life. It’s a blessing and a curse because it can actually drive me crazy but it allows me to drop anything and do something on a whim. I have this amazing studio. I can just run in if I have an idea. A lot of this record was collaborative in that we were all in the same room but quite a bit happened in isolation. I wrote a bit of stuff at home. Laura wrote stuff on her own.

M: Was there a lot of sending files over email?

N: Yes a lot of that. Exactly.

M: When you got to the stage of setting up your own studio, was this something that was ticking away at the back of your head?

N: No, this is not like a career move. I think what happened was that there was gap in the schedule. This stuff had been kicking  around a little bit. It was like let’s get this finished. Am I a man or a mouse?

M: You don’t seem like the kind of guy that is going to have a holiday sitting on a beach drinking cocktails?

N: I really wish I did. I think I really give myself a hard time with time! I have read about so many incredible people, incredibly productive people who describe themselves as lazy… and I think that I am lazy. One of my best friends, Nicholas Godin from Air, who is full of wisdom … says lazy people are the smartest because they always try to get the most using the least effort. I think I am one of those. I’m not like idiots who just work for nothing. There has to be a good economy of your effort. It is very important to being creative. You can’t waste your energy on something that is not really going to contribute to the end result. That goes for anything. If you are a recording engineer and producer, then you know what I am talking about. If something sounds, finished or good, you don’t need to take it apart and put it back together again.

M: I am curious about what kind of hours you work. Will you bash your head against a wall trying to get something done, keep at it. Or are you more … let’s take a break, come back tomorrow and this idea will come to fruition.

N: I think I would answer that question by saying I would probably stop.  Generally what would happen is that I would say stop, this isn’t working and at that moment, something will happen.

M: I always find that I have my best ideas on the toilet. You have that break and have that golden moment, pardon the pun

N: It’s like when people started using Pro Tools, they’d say I miss pushing rewind. When you used to rewind you had this moment to think about things. You don’t get that space any more. I think that I work better at night when everybody else is asleep. The world is quiet, there are no distractions. I am terrible in the mornings as a human being. I am just not a good morning guy. Nothing really good happens until after dinner. That’s fine when it is just me. When I  am working with other people, it’s hard because people don’t all keep the same schedule. Generally the work that I do which is good and happens very quickly is between the hours of 11 and 4 in the morning.

M: I hear quite a bit of Brian Eno in his David Byrne type phase in your work. Is he a bit of an influence?

N: I guess so. I am a big fan of that era Talking Heads

M: The Remain in Light period?

N: Yeah, that was huge to me. It was an incredible piece of work but I’m not a fan of Heroes. There are things I am a fan of and things I am not. Obviously there is an idea behind Music For Airports, the ambient moments which I totally understand and love. I have an enormous amount of respect for the guy but I don’t try to emulate anything he has done and never would. Whereas I would try and emulate Trevor Horn. This is a good example of how things happen actualIy. I try to do Trevor Horn and it sounds like Brian Eno. I understand why you say that. He thinks outside the box. He is not hemmed in by a set of rules he thinks he has to follow. At times he has done things in his career that changed the way that everybody does things.

M: Have you met Brian Eno?

N: I have met him a few times. He is very gracious, a very nice man. The thing that I like about Trevor Horn is … even if it is too pop for me, like Frankie Goes To Hollywood or something, even within this mainstream pop thing, he is incredibly obtuse and bold. Such big, bold things happen that go against the grain and you can feel that intention. That’s the thing I really do try to emulate as an idea, rather than a sonic palate. With Brian Eno … I like the sound of space, the ambience and echo and reverb. I like to see big spaces when I listen to things because I see things when I hear things.

M: Getting back to the Ultraista album … without getting too technical … is that just the way Joey plays, or is there a bit of manipulation going on or a bit of both? To me it sounds like there are a few layers of drums in the way that dance music has multiple loops or some sort of loop and a bit of programming underneath. It feels like you’ve gone for that aesthetic but done it live …

N: That’s exactly right. Basically there are electronics going on that he is playing to which is woven into his sound. Sometimes the drums are being processed through a piece of electronics that is making a rhythm that he is playing to. It’s like they’re rubbing against each other.

M: I just wanted to ask how you go  being on the other side of the glass so to speak, promoting an album?

N: It’s fine. It feels a little bit like uncomfortable but I think that is good. It’s a nice change and it is important to make yourself vulnerable. It’s important not to be afraid of things… and it’s important to just do … stuff! I mean the nature of the business is changing. I think producers are more artists now anyway. I’m not going to just find a band and make a record with them anymore. It’s just not that much fun. I would rather work with people that are my friends, have my input, be upfront and be able to write music. It is stuff I have always done. I don’t know what I will do next. I enjoy the playing, that’s fun.

[movieswithkevin27]

Repo Man

Born out of the counter-culture revolution, Alex Cox's Repo Man is a cynical, madcap, and absolutely absurd critique of the world of 1984 made by a man who had very little he liked and a very nihilistic view of the world around him. Set in small town California with young rebel Otto (Emilio Estevez) unwittingly having to remove his oversized earrings to become a repo man alongside Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), Repo Man is the kind of cultural critique that hits every possible area of American life to the point that it becomes a bit much. Fortunately, Repo Man's frantic pace, wacky plot, and delightfully odd characters, make it a film that as hard to resist as being offered by speed by a middle aged repo man as you cruise around town talking being repo men. Honestly, no film may better sum up 1980s cinema than Repo Man. Goofy effects, douchey young adults, Harry Dean Stanton, inventive ideas, and an anti-consumerist undercurrent running throughout the film.

Using the repo man profession as an entry into this wacky science fiction comedy, Repo Man is interesting in how little it actually focuses on science fiction. Aside from a few mentions of aliens or the possibility of getting a Chevy Malibu as a repo (which is the car carrying those aliens), much of this film is just Otto, Bud, and Lite (Sy Richardson) picking up cars. As a result, Cox is able to mock and criticize the consumerist culture we have in America. With people constantly pissed off at the fact their car is being taken even though it is their fault, Repo Man sets the tone by showing just how dumb people can really be. The poor buy cars they cannot afford or need. The rich buy cars and feel superior to having to pay them. To Cox, both of these sides are idiotic and those who get upset about losing their car in a repo deserve to get their ass whooped by a gang of repo men with bats. Yet, the reason is not because of capitalist ideology or anything of the like. Instead, it is based upon one's word. As Bud states, credit is the only thing in this world that really matters. It separates us from the communists, yes, and Cox clearly does not like communism as he openly mocks it and the idea of things being "free", but the obligation to pay in the mind of Repo Man is not out of making the economy work. Rather, it is because somebody gave you money to buy something, thus you must pay them back. Credit shows how trustworthy a person is to return that money and, to the film, that defines a person's character. Somebody with bad credit is a bad person and vice versa. By not having credit as a way to determine somebody's trustworthiness, it makes communism inherently bad.

That said, in true nihilistic fashion, Cox hardly appreciates capitalism either. Critiquing the hustling televangelist who has Otto's parents in a trance and demands thousands of dollars in the name of God or by simply having Otto lament about television shows where people just consume, consume, and consume, Repo Man is a film that rails against consumerism and, by extension, capitalism. Showing the stress on society of a culture defined by what you have, the film shows the lengths people have resorted to as a result. With people not paying their cars, engaging in carjacking, or shooting people over repossessing their car, this car becomes an extension of who they are and how they define themselves, making it a personal affront to take it or to put obstacles in the way of them owning the car. This blase attitude to purchasing, in spite of consumerism, is really exemplified in the group of kids who go around engaging in robberies. Robbing the same store repeatedly, stealing the Chevy Malibu, and constantly questioning authority, the group is morally opposed to buying things, lest they appear poor. By stealing, they still get to identify themselves as members of this capitalist society and, by extension, as adults.

To a comedic degree, Repo Man consistently demonstrates just how immature these characters are by simply showing their interactions with one another. With criminals Duke (Dick Rude) and Debbi (Jennifer Balgobin) robbing stores, the two seem to really gel only when committing crimes. In one line, Duke demonstrates his maturity level by looking at Debbi and saying, "Let's go get sushi and not pay." Juvenile and a child's definition of living life on the edge and not paying, these robberies clearly make him and Debbi feel like adults. It gives them some control and a semblance of an adult life in spite of their childish surroundings and behavior. Underscoring these actions as ones from a wannabe adult, Cox shows Duke asking Debbi to "have my baby" with the reasoning that it is what people seem to do from what he has noticed. These are lost kids, trying to find meaning in a world without any. By the time they are adults, the television-obsessed and consumerist adults have demonstrated two things has being marks of adulthood: having things and having kids. Who can blame these kids for then becoming materialist and young parents? To their childish minds, those are the only two things that matter and with them both secured, their status as adults would be confirmed.

Lashing out at every power that be in the world around him, Alex Cox demonstrates a willingness to take on both Christianity and Scientology in Repo Man. Bud expressly forbids Christians from being in his car and numerous people recommend the book Diaretix (a clear play on Dianetics), citing it as a life changing book. Mocking the spread of Scientology in Los Angeles and demonstrating a resentment to organized religion as a whole, Repo Man is a film that shows religious folks as being gullible suckers ready to waste their money on pointless fundraising for televangelists, instead of actually using it for smart purposes. With great contempt for those that are religious, Repo Man has the likelihood of offending those who do believe in God, but as a believer myself, the film never truly feels malicious. If anything, it largely takes aim at those who are akin to zombies with religion, much like Otto's parents. Unquestioning and simply floating by waiting for a pastor to tell them what to do next, these mindless zombies are truly dangerous beings, prone to beg you to donate to providing Bibles to El Salvador or leaving Bible verse tips at a restaurant. Cox's frustration is clearly at religion as a whole - as evidenced by Bud allowing no exceptions to his Christian ban in his car - but feels aimed at a specific segment of the religious population that pushes religion on others and refuse to actually think critically about religion.

In presenting its counter-culture nihilism, Repo Man is prone to the same problem that all nihilistic works encounter: self-assurance. In critiquing everybody else, it is impossible to not wish for Cox to be knocked off of his high horse a bit. To this film, everybody else is wrong, stupid, and lunatics. The government is covering up aliens. The youth are stupid and immature. Religious people are hypnotized morons. The general population is materialistic, valuing goods over other people. Incredibly know-it-all and confident that it is correct on all fronts, Repo Man's assured position can be rather grating at times with Cox's film coming off as a manifesto about everything he feels to be wrong in society. Oozing with superiority, Repo Man is one of those anti-consumerist films that is so angry with everybody else's faults that it forgets that it is a Hollywood-funded film released to make money for a megastudio. While the film works and is blast to watch, the irony of its creation seems to be lost on the film. In fairness, to what degree Cox is mocking those who complain about everybody and everything due to their own inadequacy is certainly a matter of debate. There is certainly a perilous balance between the two walked by the film, which it does not always walk perfectly between whiny anti-everybody nihilism and tongue-in-cheek nihilism.

Quintessential 1980s, Repo Man is a cultural critique about the world of 1984 as seen by Alex Cox. A bit grating at times as the film's character just lash out at everything Cox hates about the world, it is nearly impossible to not come away wondering if there is anything he does like. That said, the film is so entertaining, smartly scripted, and funny, it is equally impossible to not come away enjoying Repo Man. A terrific cast, good writing, and a unique plot make Repo Man one of those one-of-a-kind film experiences that seems to get crazier and crazier as it goes on with its overall quality only getting better-and-better with each step off the ledge that it takes.

[deareffie]

19 April 2017

Dear Effie,

After every BBC politics news alert these days:

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah, political party in-fighting. Thrilling stuff, eh? So UKIP are born, and nothing really happens with that for a while. In fact, there were a bunch of small parties that sprung up in the early 1990s to contest elections on the basis of opposition to (at least some element of) the EU, and UKIP was probably the least successful.

Meanwhile, the Conservative party get beaten by the Labour party at the 1997 general election, so Tony Blair become Prime Minister, big Donald Dewar gets his Scottish Parliament, and we finally get a national minimum wage. That’s right, more than 100 years after New Zealand introduced minimum wage legislation, right up until you were about 18 months old, the UK still had no minimum wage. Don’t believe anyone who speaks fondly of the good old days.

And then there was also Iraq. But we’ll get into that another time.

Anyway, ‘New Labour’ arrives (so called as this government said they weren’t *really* socialists, not like the crazy Russians, they just thought that capitalism needing reigning in sometimes, and that businesses were usually a good thing because jobs, and if someone’s making loads of money, that’s fine because then they have to spend it and that means other people get some too. Or something.) and the Conservatives do what every political party does when it loses an election - it takes a good look at itself, does some soul searching and tries to find someone to blame. 

Of course, like every other time a political party does this (ahem, Scottish Labour, ahem), they don’t seem to realise that ‘talk amongst yourselves’ is an instruction that a teacher gives a room of students while they’re fannying about fixing a projector, not a viable election strategy. 

Political parties’ obsession with introspection and navel gazing is one of the reasons ‘ordinary people’ (vomit) hate them. To any unaffiliated voter, it seems blindingly obvious that the main reasons political parties lose elections are either a) lack of money/media pals, or c) being horrendously out of touch. You don’t become more in touch with voters by locking yourself in a cupboard, having a leadership crisis and accusing each other of factionalism. 

Like, I don’t know about you, but every time I’ve taken a long hard look at myself in the mirror, I just become convinced that I should really start taking better care of my skin and that maybe it’s time for a haircut. If I talked to other people instead, maybe I’d find out that no one else really cares about my skin or my hair and most folk are actually much more concerned about employment, education, health and welfare. Maybe. Who can possibly say. 

(And breathe) 

So the Conservative Party is banished to the opposition benches at Westminster for 13 years, and doesn’t even make it as far as the opposition benches in the new shiny Holyrood for almost 20 years. We’ll definitely come back to Holyrood and devolution and all that another time, but I’m trying(ish) to get through Brexit first (aren’t we all, eh?).

Between 1997 and 2004, a bunch of semi-important people die, a bunch of other people are born, and somehow, as the Conservative Party tries to work out how they’ve suddenly become irrelevant, UKIP fail at making any inroads at general elections, but get three MEPs elected in the European Parliamentary elections of 1999, and start making headlines. Partly because they’ve attracted semi-famous, old people celebrity, talk show host and former Labour MP, Robert Kilroy-Silk. He joined UKIP in 2004, about the same time he got his show cancelled by the Beeb for writing a controversial article headlined “We owe Arabs nothing”. Weirdly, Joan Collins also got in on this action for a bit. 

Hanging out with UKIP, that is. Not writing inflammatory articles generalising varied and diverse peoples. As far as I know. 

However, as Kilroy-Silk resigned from UKIP, formed his own party, and then resigned from that in the space of the next 15 months, the more important thing to note about UKIP in 2004 is that they beat the Conservative party in an election for the first time (hilariously, an election caused by someone resigning as an MP to go and work in the EU). 

“Ah-hah!”, thought some members of the Conservative party. It was UKIP’s fault that they had lost the 1997 and 2001 elections! Of course! 

And when people still didn’t elect a Conservative government in 2005, even though Iraq, and even though Gordon Brown, it must be because those baddies over at UKIP were stealing traditional Conservative votes, right?! 

A few more years pass. Nigel Farage becomes leader of UKIP. He gets a disproportionate amount of airtime on the BBC despite the party (initially) not having any MPs. What he does have are opinions. Loads of them. And the reason he got on the Beeb so much is because they have a legal duty to provide 'balanced' coverage of issues. 

Presenting two sides of every story sometimes means that the BBC is actually not very representative of UK majority opinion. Or sometimes it has to look quite hard to find someone who’ll present what is a minority view. For example, take “equal marriage”. A majority of people in the UK agree with the statement “Gay or lesbian couples should have the right to marry one another if they want to” (and have done since 2012). However, the way the BBC fulfill their “balance” duty means that if they want to discuss gay marriage on a news, current affairs or comment show, they need to find someone who disagrees with that statement.

Enter one Nigel Paul Farage. This BBC “balance” throws up a diverse cast of characters, but most of them fade into obscurity again relatively quickly, or they have limited interest in party politics. Farage however, is relatively articulate, not afraid of saying controversial things (often for the sake of it, as far as I can tell) and available for all your Question Time booking needs. Viewing levels spike, because we’re all complicit in this mess, and suddenly Farage and UKIP have a way bigger platform than expected, and a heap of cash from some grumpy former Tories. 

So, the new version of the Maastricht Rebels in the Conservative Party start rumbling that maybe they’ll join UKIP if the Conservatives don’t start listening to them about the big bad EU, and that maybe the Conservatives will keep losing votes to UKIP.

Meanwhile, David Cameron’s all “I’m a cool young guy, stop crushing my big society vibes with all your crotchety old man shouting. Nobody cares about the EU apart from crazy Scottish fisherman and Welsh farmers!”

Turns out he was wrong and Davey’s vibes continued to be crushed until he agreed to include a cheeky wee manifesto pledge for the Conservative Party’s next general election manifesto in 2010. 

A referendum on EU membership. A surefire vote winner, that will be easily won by the majority of the Conservative party who want to stay as members of the EU because it’s where all the holidays and champagne comes from.

The Lib Dems put it off for five years but are ultimately ineffective. 

MASSIVE EDIT BECAUSE I FORGOT A REALLY KEY EVENT AND TOTALLY LIED ABOUT THE 2010 CONSERVATIVE MANIFESTO BECAUSE I’M AN IDIOT SORRY. I realised on reading this back that I had missed a couple things. 

The 2010 manifesto pledge was actually to “amend the 1972 European Communities Act so that any proposed future Treaty that transferred areas of power, or competences, would be subject to a referendum – a ‘referendum lock’”. My bad, sorry Dave.

And in fact, the Liberal Democrats’ manifesto did include a commitment to an in/out referendum on the EU, but only if a British government signs up for “fundamental change in the relationship between the UK and the EU”, including joining the Euro.   

But the really rather big thing that I missed, that just sort of passed me by because of all the excitement of #indyref1 in Scotland at the time was the 2014 European elections. In 2014, UKIP won the European elections in the UK, with 24 seats to Labour’s 20 and the Conservatives’ 19. Last time (in 2009), the Conservatives won as many as the other two put together (26 v 13 and 13).

Know how I’m always going about how Scotland isn’t the cool, internationalist socially-liberal, economically left-wing paradise it kids on it is? Well, in the first example of many, even the Glorious People’s Republic of Haggisland elected a UKIP MEP (Member of the European Parliament) in 2014: the baffling David Coburn (see previous and below caveat re: legit reasons for not being keen on the EU that may have prompted folk for vote for him), alongside two Labour MEPs, two SNP MEPs, and one Conservative MEP. 

It’s worth noting that Labour gained seats in this election. Under David Miliband, Labour increased their percentage of votes by almost as much as UKIP (around 10%) and they also won the most number of votes in the English local authority elections held the same day. Although only about a third of the people eligible to vote actually voted, and a lot of people who voted Lib Dem in 2010 had pretty much abandoned the party by this point, it’s a nice wee stat to keep on hand when anyone says that Labour has to do more to appeal to UKIP voters.

Anyway, that 2014 European election, although overshadowed up here by all the flag waving, seemed to be the final straw for the Conservative Party. This led to the 2015 manifesto commitment (I checked this time) for “the British people – not politicians – to have their say... over whether we should stay in or leave the EU, with an in-out referendum by the end of 2017″.

And so, in June 2016, the entire UK is asked to vote on remaining or leaving the EU basically because the Tories were having a tiff with themselves. A tiny number of very loud, very entitled people managed to be annoying enough that we literally had a referendum to try and get them to shut up.

Now, we talked before about how there are some totally legitimate, reasonable and not-racist reasons for opposing the EU. A really good example of this is in Scotland, where the fishing industry has had a long standing scepticism about the EU. It’s based on criticism of a EU rule called the Common Fisheries Policy that decides who can fish what kind of fish (and how much fish), and where. The EU policy is meant to protect the sustainability of fishing for the future (i.e. stopping someone accidentally catching all the fish, and there being none left), ensure all EU countries share their fish/fishing waters (e.g. Spain can’t stop Portgual fishing off its coasts), and ensure that fishing is carried out in a relatively environmentally friendly way (i.e. don’t throw loads of dead fish or gross chemicals back in the sea). However, the Scottish fishing industry says that in practice, the policy means that Scotland does not get a fair share of its own fishing waters, and that they love the environment as much as the next guy but that following the rules is cripplingly expensive. This means that people lose their jobs, or put up with terrible working conditions to make up for the policy costs, and/or that the price of a fish supper goes way up. See? Totes legit, not racist. Essentially about jobs and fish suppers.

That is not why the Government held this referendum.

Another totally legitimate, reasonable and not-racist reason for opposing the EU is that some of the trade deals the EU negotiates look like they might damage workers rights in the EU. Criticism of an agreement called TTIP ( which stands for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, not just me spelling T in the Park wrong) between the US and the EU suggests it’ll mean that companies will be able to sue governments if their health and safety or environmental rules are seen to affect that company’s profit. Leaving the EU could be a way to ensure companies don’t have that power, and have to respect things like national minimum wage and trade union membership.See? Again, totes legit, not racist. 

That is not why the Government held this referendum.

The Government held this referendum to stitch together its Frankenstein’s monster of a party for a bit longer. The driving force behind all the decisions leading to this referendum was internal party politics. Whatever the fallout is (and we still don’t know because they literally didn’t even consider the possibility it might happen so didn’t draft any plan), it’s being imposed on 64 million people as a result of the Conservative Party playing chicken. With itself. Except we’re the ones who somehow get run over. And that’s partly why Brexit makes me grumpy. 

I swear I’ll try and get onto Scottish independence at some point. 

Big love, 

x

P.S. If I seem to meander a bit when I’m meant to be talking about Scottish independence, I’m sorry… 

Except mine are all about politics. I do want to bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles though. I feel that’d be one initiative that could muster cross-party support.