Month: September 2023

Didn’t you watch the film?

Someone posted this screenshot on Mastodon the other day, and it kind of demands a sarcastic response like the one in the post title… however, I was sufficiently curious about the video to see exactly what the hell it was about, and lo, it’s actually really about the myth of the Titanic being “unsinkable”, and how it came to be described that way. Quite interesting stuff about how one carefully worded claim can be kind of wilfully misread. Here’s the video:

Throat-Warbler Mangrove mac Roth

One of the riddles of the ages has finally been solved! …well, maybe. When I were a lad I grew up on comics like 2000AD, none of this Marvel or DC nonsense, so one of the strips I grew up with was Pat Mills’ Slaine. The latter was my first, somewhat roundabout acquaintance with Celtic myth, a sort of Conanesque heroic fantasy with occasional SF elements…

…getting off to a marvellous start with our eponymous hero facing off with some sort of dinosaur-like monstrosity. Couldn’t not get drawn in by that sort of thing when I was 8. But how to pronounce the name of said hero? Cos we’re dealing with something old Irish here so I remember some befuddlement in the letters page about the “correct” pronunciation of an admittedly fictional name (I particularly recall one who explained at some length that it was actually “Dennis”)… which would probably have been something like Slawn-ye or Shlawn-ye. Wikipedia accepts the former but how did Pat Mills intend it to be said?

Well, somewhat randomly, I got recommended Pat Mills’ Youtube channel, where he handily has a video about a book he’s written on the subject of Slaine. And he pronounces “Slaine” as… well… “slain”, as if it were an English rather than Irish name. So there it finally is, straight from the author’s mouth… weirdly anticlimactic after 40 years somehow and a wee bit racist towards my Irish ancestors (like *I* know bugger all about Irish?), but there you go.

The most annoying man on the Internet?

This guy Jash Dholani has been getting ripped on social media recently for his “masterlist” of 15 differences between good and bad art, and, frankly, with some good cause. I don’t know much about him, but the bit of digging I’ve done has been enough to give me some picture of him. For example, this response he made to his critics:

I feel for some reason this by itself adequately sums up where he’s coming from ideologically, but for further evidence I visited his Substack, which redirected me to a site called Memo’d, which appears to be kind of like Pinterest but for text instead of pictures. Jash has three main boards called Write Like A God, Critics of Modernity, and Reading List For Aristocrats, which strike me as illuminating how our man clearly sees himself. I was weirdly unsurprised to find the “Critics” board includes a post on Julius Evola, which is enough by itself to suggest Jash leans, well, fash.

Plus one of his “memos” is called “Why You Need a Hero to Emulate”, talking about Andre Malraux and T.E. Lawrence, which ends thusly:

Bottom line. Having a hero you can emulate orients and inspires humans like nothing else can. Looking for a hero to emulate? Check out the jaw-dropping achievements of Julius Caesar, or read the sharp and bracing words of Napoleon the Great.

Julius Caesar was assassinated and Napoleon exiled to a trifling island in the Atlantic Ocean 2000km from the nearest continent. Are these things Jash thinks we should also emulate? And the less said about his Jordan Peterson piece the better. But never mind that, let’s consider the good vs bad art list…

So this… thing is what other people have been ragging on him for, and no wonder. What the fuck does most of it even mean? I mean, I may be a bit weird in this respect but in general art does NOTHING for my mood per se, neither improving it nor making me feel weird. That’s not how I respond to art. Also, “boosts energy”—what, is Michelangelo’s David supposed to shoot me full of speed when I look at it? Momentum and stagnation? WHAT THE FUCK IS A “MALEVOLENTLY BAD” MAP, JASH?

But it’s the “values” columns that kind of give the game away, particularly the “forgotten values” bit. What values might those be? I just invoked David, who I’ve no doubt Jash would consider “good art”, what forgotten values from before 1500 does he hint at? But Jash isn’t really thinking in those terms, of course, he’s thinking in terms of the modern world, of which he is clearly not a fan, and of values he sees as lacking in that modern world. Values you might describe as… not entartet, perhaps?

Actually, no. That’s not a nice choice of word in this context. But I do think think Jash Dholani is… not that far from people who would use it unironically. There’s something kind of unpleasant about this list, and there’s something about him I really dislike. Somewhere down the track I can envisage him forming a little cult of like-minded drones, he strikes me somehow as the sort of person who’d do that…

Joooooooooos did it

I know the Anti-Defamation League is problematic on various levels, and I think it can be fairly critiqued without resorting to antisemitism, but the current Twitter shitstorm surrounding them seems… excessive. I saw a few days ago a hashtag “BanTheADL” was trending there, some dickhead started it and then you-know-who liked it so obviously that just amplified it for days. Here’s an example from a particularly shining beacon:

This is why I say I’m not really a free speech advocate, because I actually don’t believe everyone automatically and naturally deserves that right, not if their speech is essentially about causing harm. The difference between me and Charlie, and all these other “free speech absolutists”, is that I’m honest about that. These chuds are always really about free speech for themselves, not for people they don’t like. “I don’t want to ban anyone’s free speech, but fuck these guys”.

Anyway, Oolong has been upping the stakes:

I don’t know if Oolong is a proper antisemite or racist or not, but it’s kind of undeniable that he’s enabled people who are, which frankly makes him as bad as them. And don’t think they don’t appreciate his efforts on their behalf:

Andrew Torba is the founder of Gab, which was, of course, Twitter for the far-right before Twitter became that itself. “Our largest enemy”, eh? And I feel weirdly certain that he’s not referring to the ADL in particular (though I’ve no doubt he considers them an enemy just for having a page about him), but, you know, the people behind the ADL. The people the ADL was formed to support. Sometimes also called “our traditional enemies” by people like David Irving.

Over on Bluesky, Yair Rosenberg reckons Musk wouldn’t actually sue the ADL cos he would lose, which I suppose is a fair point, but equally I can see it working for him either way… if he wins, that’s great for him and makes him look strong, and if he loses, well, it’s not exactly going to bankrupt him and his friends, and the latter will get some nice propaganda out of it about how of COURSE them perfidious Yids WOULD win, they bought the best lawyers, the best judges, etc. Whatever else happens, at least I suppose it’s nice to know the far right may be obsessed with trans folk these days but they haven’t forgotten the old hatreds…

Burn!

I always thought Burning Man sounded like peak American hipster bullshit ever since I first heard of it (Techgnosis by Erik Davis? Can’t remember any more. That book certainly does mention it, I know cos I just checked, but doesn’t actually say much about it, so I must have learned the details somewhere else), especially in more recent years as the big money started getting involved…

…and because I’m a bad person, I’m kind of greatly enjoying the way this year’s event has become a weather disaster. I mean, I don’t like the news that one person has apparently died because I’m not that much of a dick, but I feel there’s always been something smug at the core of Burning Man and I’m not feeling too sorry for the victims of the weather (nor am I the only one, evidently; there was apparently a rumour that Oolong was among them but alas that seems to have been wishful thinking on somebody’s part)…

Still, at least they did have this delightful rainbow to inspire them in the midst of the shitty situation.

Publish first, ignore questions later

So Chuckles Tinyface was gloating about this guy doing this “Trump mugshot mural”…

…but somehow the video he was hyping up neglected to show the finished work, and it’s clearly the same guy working on it and not someone else adding to it after the fact. Weird how they didn’t follow the creative process all the way to the end, almost as if they deliberately left this last detail out for some reason I can’t fathom…

What stopped them?

Human Ancestors Nearly Went Extinct 900,000 Years Ago

Nearly a million years ago, some devastating event nearly wiped out humanity’s ancestors.
Genomic data from 3,154 modern humans suggests the population was reduced from approximately 100,000 to just 1,280 breeding individuals around 900,000 years ago. That’s a jaw-dropping population decline of 98.7 percent that lasted 117,000 years and could have brought humanity to extinction.
The fact we’re here today, and so numerous, is evidence that it wasn’t. But the results, according to a team led by geneticists Haipeng Li of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Yi-Hsuan Pan of East China Normal University in China, would explain a curious gap in the human fossil record in the Pleistocene. […]
For this latest analysis, the research team developed a new method called the fast infinitesimal time coalescent process (FitCoal) to circumvent the accumulation of numerical errors usually associated with trying to unravel these past events.
They used FitCoal to analyze the genomic data of 3,154 people from around the world, from 10 African and 40 non-African populations, looking at how gene lineages have diverged over time. Their results showed a significant population bottleneck from around 930,000 to 813,000 years ago, which saw a current genetic diversity loss of up to 65.85 percent.

As the article notes, we’ll never know what actually caused this population bottleneck… which means someone out there has to build a time machine so we can go back in time to find out. And, in doing so, hopefully encourage the process so that H. sapiens sapiens never happens…

The Doctors dress up

Ah, so forthcoming 15th Doctor Ncuti Gatwa is bringing out the homophobes before he’s even started:

You’ll be missed, I’m sure

I say “homophobes” specifically because it appears that Ncuti has acknowledged being queer in a new interview (it’s been suspected for a while, apparently, but he’s never said anything one way or the other himself until this thing in Elle). In this case he brought out a misogynist as a bonus:

Fairly sure that actually is a man, bro, he just looks better in that than you probably do…

Well, the Doctor may or may not be a man, depending on how such concepts operate in such an alien culture as the Time Lords, but some of the actors in the role have had no issues dressing up like the distaff:

Colin Baker in Privates on Parade in the early 90s. That top hat was the very thing his Doctor’s costume needed…

Matt Smith also on stage in the late oughts. Indeed, this performance was apparently a big part of why he got signed up as the Doctor.

Plus his immediate predecessor and successor both played actual trans characters back in the day.

And there’s whatever the fuck Tom Baker was doing with Douglas Adams here. Also…

Did we all forget that episode where Jon Pertwee’s Doctor dressed up as a cleaning lady IN THE SHOW ITSELF? “The Green Death” episode 4. Don’t show it to your kids, it’ll warp them and make them want to dress up as unconvincing middle-aged women from the 1970s… It’s a good thing episode 3 of “The Highlanders” is one of the still missing ones, otherwise the young people might be exposed to Patrick Troughton’s 18th century Scottish washerwoman…

…Oh. Damn you John Cura and your valiant efforts to preserve a visual record of TV programming at a time when the BBC couldn’t be bothered.

Anyway, the important thing is that messrs Troughton, Pertwee, T. and C. Baker, Tennant, Smith, and Capaldi are all white men, and Ncuti Gatwa is conspicuously… not, and I feel that detail is as important to the people getting angry at his casting as his ability to rock a skirt. Pleasingly, Ncuti is already coming out swinging:

I feel this Doctor is not going to take anyone’s shit, on the screen or off it.