The curse of having Wisconsin as a neighbor

I had a terrible dream last night. I had to buy a gun, and not just any gun, but a high-powered assault rifle, to defend myself. I’d been browsing the interwebs before bed, and last thing I’d seen was this map.

How awful, I thought, that those irresponsible Wisconsonites next door are so slack in regulating their kangaroos.

So of course I dreamed of wanton kangaroos hopping across the border…wearing cheese hats and smuggling cases of LaCroix into my neighborhood. I had to shoot them.

Tonight I’m going to make a point of reading something less traumatic before bed — I’m about halfway through Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, so that should be soothing. So far, there aren’t any kangaroos in it at all. Or LaCroix.

IRIS IS BACK! And cancer sucks.

It’s been a rough couple of years for two of our bloggers at FtB. They had colon cancer. Caine at Affinity was open about her experience, and had a public cancer journal. Iris at Death to Squirrels kept it quiet, and only a few of us knew about it — she also maintained a private account of her travails, sent by email to a few friends. The experiences of both were harrowing, both approaches were valid, although I’ve got to say even getting second-hand accounts of their treatment was terrifying, and I can’t imagine what it was like to go through it personally.

The good news is that Iris’s cancer is gone, although as you’ll discover, the second-hand effects are going to be with her for years. She’s dealing with it by explaining everything in a webcomic. It’s very good. It will make you uncomfortable. It’s art. You really should read it.

As for Caine, she gets a significant mention. I miss her, and I’ve missed Iris.

Meanwhile, here at Skepticon, the first talk of the morning is going to be from Miri Mogilevsky, who is also a cancer survivor.

Kary Mullis, dead at 74

The guy who invented PCR has died. That’s an absolutely, utterly essential innovation that revolutionized molecular biology, but strangely, his death has gotten virtually no press. That link takes you to a newspaper that highlights the fact that he graduated from a local high school.

I guess that’s what happens when you make an important discovery, but spend the rest of your life in a drugged out haze, emerging now and then to defend astrology, or promote climate change denialism, or claim that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. It all just confirms that your discovery was a fortunate fluke.

Quillette is deliciously trolled…and they helped!

Quillette published an article titled “DSA is Doomed”, written by someone named Archie Carter who claimed to have attended meetings of the Democratic Socialists of America and found them pointless, riven by dissent, full of hipsters, and counterproductive. This was exactly what Quillette wanted to hear, and they fast-tracked it for publication.

One problem: the author lived in Illinois, had never attended a New York meeting, and was making it all up.

“Tell them I live in the area of [Jacobin managing editor] Micah Uetricht,” said the playful voice on the other line. Carter — this twenty-four-year-old Illinoian’s pseudonym — had reason to be happy. He had successfully baited Quillette — the self-described “platform for free thought,” though more widely known as a platform for phrenology — with a “little Sokal experiment.”

That little aside is a good snipe, but I must correct them. They are best known as a platform for craniometry, not phrenology, although both are equally bogus.

What’s most amazing, though, is not that someone got a fake article published in a magazine, but that the original copy wasn’t juicy enough for Quillette, as disparaging as it was, so the editors of that rag jazzed it up a bit, adding new details that they invented to the story.

Comparing the original draft Carter had written (verified through a Google Doc link included in his email correspondence with Quillette), it’s clear that the publication made an extra effort to add embellishing details to the story — separate from Carter’s original fabrication — in order to advance a right-wing narrative of DSA as hopeless, dithering, anti-working class snowflakes.

For example, it was Quillette, not Carter, that included the line, “My union friends were horrified. While these people spend hours reproaching themselves and each other, real people in America are suffering.”

Quillette also suggested that DSA meetings “would drag on forever in order to accommodate the neuroses of the participants and to ensure that the proceedings observed the norms of ‘inclusivity.’”

Wow. The article has been taken down now that it was revealed that it was a hoax, but it’s revealing that not only were they soundly trolled, but they assisted in amplifying their own trolling.

Quillette is just the worst.

At Skepticon!

I’m in St Louis for Skepticon, and I am disappointed. The rooms at this hotel are huge and clean — too clean — the shower is like a pressure washer, and the location is amazing, right off the Metrolink line*, so I got here from the airport for just a few bucks, walked up to the street level, and there was the hotel, right there, and it was probably the easiest access to a conference venue ever. However…

There are no spiders anywhere in this gigantic suite. I went around with a magnifying glass to verify. It’s sterile. So I’ve donned my spider hunting gear, and am about to embark on an exploration trip to a) find some breakfast, and b) survey the environs for spiders. I have collecting vials and am not afraid to use them.

Hey, if you’re in the neighborhood, come on down! The conference is free, it’s held in the Red Lion Inn right next to the Civic Center rail stop, and it’s up on the 13th floor.

*Oh, incidentally, about the Metrolink — it’s a nice rail line direct between city center and the airport, and when I got on, I was the only white guy on the train, which is not an issue, except that at one of the stops another white guy got on, looked over the occupants, and charged over to sit next to me, like the train wasn’t half empty anyway. Not a problem, of course, except that he was staggeringly drunk, and he wanted to talk about religion with me.

Why me? Do I look like a Lutheran pastor or something?

Anyway, the conversation didn’t go far. He was so drunk he could barely talk, and he chose to lecture me on the Trinity. You know, the Father, his Son, and…Jesus’s sister? I had to just ignore him, although the bait was awfully tempting.

Chop wood, carry water

I haven’t been sleeping well lately — I woke up at 4 this morning, got up at 5 after failing to fall back into sleep. So I got up, and did my morning thing on autopilot.

Go to the bathroom. Wash hands and face. Go to kitchen. Start water boiling. While I’m waiting, feed the cat. Wash the coffee press. Grind coffee beans. Wash two cups. Add milk to one. Pour boiling water over coffee. Stand, waiting, two minutes. Think about the day to come. Pour coffee into cups. Carry the one with milk to the bedroom for my wife. Carry the one without to my office. Sit. Turn on the computer. Write something…”chop wood, carry water.”

I’m thinking this is ritual. It’s a pattern that provides a solid foundation to my day, and as a bonus, it gets things done. It might not be a grand accomplishment, but it carries me forward day by day, and makes sure I get out of bed with a plan and a series of little actions, and sets a pattern for doing. Just doing.

Ritual can be a good thing.

I can also see where it’s a danger, when it changes into a pattern of not doing, when it becomes a rut that carries one to nowhere. I’m not concerned that making coffee and feeding the cat is a path to uselessness, but I can imagine a ritual of distraction and pointlessness that can consume day after day, so I also have to be prepared to break the rituals and take pleasure in change.

Chop wood, find a new spider, carry water, teach, make the coffee, write something you didn’t write before.

Nothing Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote should be perpetuated for another generation

No. No. No. Making a series of A Princess of Mars is a terrible idea.

The Internets have been in an uproar over the conclusion of HBO’s Game of Thrones television series, which ended after eight seasons in 2019.

Despite the potential for multiple spin-off series, fans are of course disappointed to have the adventure and drama come to an end. To be certain, it’s a bummer on the same scale as being decapitated – but wait, hold the door!

There is another literary fantasy series, with an equally amazing monarchical atmosphere of politics, drama, action and incredible beasts – with stories that are loved by thousands, including George R. R. Martin himself, and that undoubtedly inspired the GOT author to become a writer. I’m talking about, of course, John Carter of Mars!

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoomian series would be the perfect replacement for Game of Thrones. Despite the unjustly maligned 2012 film, John Carter (of Mars, dammit), the serialized Martian stories were made for the type of adult adaptation that HBO specializes in, and they would undoubtedly appeal to the GOT audience that will be soon be suffering from sword-and-sorcery withdrawals.

Oh my god. Has this person even read those books? I have. The whole lot. The Mars books. The Venus books. The ones about space pirates and the moons of Jupiter. The hollow earth stories. Tarzan. I am not proud of this fact. As an excuse, I offer up the fact that I was a child at the time, and that my father happened to have a collection of first edition, hardbound Burroughs novels (which I scribbled all over in crayon before I was old enough to read them), so I was deeply steeped in the lore before I was old enough to know better…which was when I was 12 or 13.

In their favor, I will admit that they are rip-roaring fast-paced pulp with chapters that end in cliffhangers every time, so you can’t stop. They are classic serialized pulp fiction of their time, which was about 1915-1940. They are perfect representatives of a genre that is now dead, dead, dead, and they simply won’t work anymore.

For one, they are terribly written. I’m talking newspaper prose, straightforward descriptive text, “enriched” by a liberal sprinkling of words scraped from a thesaurus. Burroughs was a hack. His strength was an ability to churn out words at a rapid pace. He did not put any thought into his stories at all; George RR Martin should be embarrassed at the comparison.

For another, these are not complex stories. There is almost no depth at all to them. Every single Burroughs novel follows an identical template: an aristocratic white man finds himself stranded in an exotic land (Mars and Africa were equally exotic to Burroughs) where the natives are barbaric and warlike. By virtue of his intrinsic superiority to these primitives, the hero conquers all and eventually finds himself a beautiful woman to be the object of his chivalrous attentions, but who is actually a maguffin to be used and reused in multiple sequels in which brave White Man must rescue her from brutish perils.

The racism and misogyny implicit in this formula ought to be obvious to all. It made them wildly popular in a more racist and misogynistic era (and to young children who didn’t know better), and the idea gets revived now and then to make them the foundation of a new franchise — the John Carter movie was an example of that — but they’re always going to founder on the fact that the source material is shallow, simplistic, and mindlessly bigoted, so you don’t have that rich vein of complex lore that Martin (and Tolkien, and other good fantasy authors) based their stories on. I thought the John Carter movie did a good job of skating over the bad stuff in the story, but as a franchise, it was doomed. I’m impressed it made it through one entire movie without collapsing on its flimsy framework.

The one thing that would make it good HBO fodder, though, is that in the Mars stories everyone was always naked except for jeweled harnesses or a sword belt or some such skimpy thread of leather. Burroughs did not dwell on the sex or nudity beyond tersely mentioning it and allowing the readers’ imaginations to work, but I’m sure HBO could turn it into a non-stop tits and asses show.

AXP has been axed

I closed comments and new posting, but The Atheist Experience was still left up here at FtB. Despite requesting some recommendations from the Atheist Community of Austin, what’s left of it, for what to do with the blog, I’ve heard nothing from them. So this evening a removed it from FtB’s roster for good.

What a freakin’ mess. Matt and his transphobic crew really did a great job of flushing a fine organization down the tubes.