Pensées

More thoughts. Hey, at least you know they won't be Jansenist, like the original.

• The matter of the "war" on Christmas is revealing—namely, it reveals how stupid you apes are. When one says "Merry Christmas", one is not, in fact, making any assumptions about the audience's practices. One is wishing them well, owing to the presence of the holiday. That is, one is saying "May the blessings of this day I regard as holy bring good to you and yours."
  
  Plainly, hate-speech.
  
  I don't know what you call it, the belief that a country that's 80% Christian in creed and 95% Christian in heritage can't even nod in the direction of that fact once in a while. Not democracy, I'll tell you that for free.


• And yes, "war" is an entirely appropriate term; the anti-Christmas nonsense is conducted in the precise same manner as the original Kulturkampf. The phrase "culture war", after all, comes from Bismarck's conscious policy of undermining the beliefs and mores of the Catholic parts of the German Empire. Historians are divided as to whether he did it to pander to the Protestant principalities, or simply to cut the Catholic ones off from Austria. Most of the Catholic parts of "Germany", after all, were territories stolen by Frederick II Hohenzollern, and his successors, from Prussia's ostensible ally, the Holy Roman Empire.
  
  One prefers to avoid having stolen territory remember that it's actually a part of another country, and if one can undermine the religion the abductees share with their former compatriots, it's a major step toward brainwashing them into thinking that your state is their actual home. It worked, by the way: most Bavarians nowadays actually think there's such a place as "Germany". Quaint, isn't it?


• Didja know "concubine" doesn't mean anything remotely approximating "sex-slave"? Yeah, hate to break it to you, but its actual meaning was, basically, "common-law wife", and "concubinage" basically means "cohabitation".
  
  Speaking of things stupid people don't know about premodern sexuality, the F-word isn't an acronym. The word first shows up centuries before anyone in England would've been using acronyms that way. The text abbreviations used in the Middle Ages weren't acronyms as we'd understand them; while the ancient Romans used our type of acronym, pronouncing them phonetically is a modern thing. Also, nobody, except possibly a Georgian (as in "former Soviet republic", not the Peach State), can pronounce "SPQR".


• I didn't mention it before, because it's somewhat depressing, but exposure to the puerility of Warhammer Fantasy has tipped me over the brink. I'm lashing out, because that setting is so lame, and it uses the 8-arrows Chaos symbol created by Michael Moorcock. Warhammer, and to a slightly lesser extent 40K, are indicative of everything wrong with the Moorcock school of fantasy.
  
  Anyway. The only person I ever knew who actually liked the Elric books, later became a drug-addicted male prostitute. I'm not asserting a causal link, but nevertheless, if Moorcock's fantasy is your thing, all I can say is that selling your ass for dope-money might be too.


• I also didn't mention, as it was embarrassing, that I completely whizzed my "write every day" thing down my leg, last month. I just wasn't in the mood to write, and without a firm deadline it's difficult to put the spurs to a writer. Probably to any creative worker, really.
  
  But then, yesterday, I wrote something like 5000 words. In a day. As in, at that pace, I could've done NaNoWriMo in 10 days, and my usual length of book in one month. Now, of course, I can't keep that pace up (and neither can you, I dare you to try), and my process requires periodic research breaks for new inspiration, but still, pretty cool, huh?


• So this guy I'm reading is discussing whether it's legit to take inspiration, in fantasy-writing, from video games. And then, he mentions Baldur's Gate, Skyrim and one of the other Elder Scrolls games, and Dragon Age.
  
  Uh-huh. Really? You don't think you forgot something? A game that, pretty much single-handedly, is the main reason we think of orcs and goblins as green (because, and it's a credit to your species, nobody knows about Warhammer)? Here's a hint, there are probably whole generations, in some places, that think elves are purple.
  
  Seriously, how can you talk about fantasy vidyagames and not mention Warcraft?


• Then again, the same person also said Harry Potter has complex villains. Compared to...? They're a shallow parody of the standard English caricature of "toffs", pretty much up until the last book, when they become full-fledged Nazis.
  
  Death Eaters are not even as complex as the real things they're based on. The toffs who cared about lineage were the ones who stood up for the common people of England, against the Whigs' plot to convert their nation into a pure plutocracy (and the negative caricature actually stems from the Whigs' reaction—the Whig always denigrates his opponents, since it makes his favored tactics of rape and murder a lot easier later on). Almost all the German resistance to Nazism was the Junkers, and they were emphatically motivated by their aristocratic sensibilities—Nazism not only showed "poor form", its ideology was rabble-rousingly egalitarian (as long as you were German) and, frankly, vulgar.


• I have commented on this before, but the reason you apes hate dwarves, goblins, and especially elves in fantasy is because you won't take the time to do 'em right. Other than Blizzard: both the Night Elves and the Blood Elves are a fresh take on the concept, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
  
  I say again: return to the legends. Or, shortcut, watch some anime. And not fantasy anime (though Deedlit is the most perfectly "chaotic good" elf ever). Watch yokai anime, and I guarantee you'll never look at elves the same way again: every one of my elves owes more to Sesshômaru than to Legolas.
  
  Also, dammit, dwarves: seriously, Tolkien's are Jewish, not Scottish. Does Gimli have to actually rock back and forth, wailing, at the walls of Moria, before you realize that? As I've said before, there's more ways to do "clannish mountain-dwellers" than the two ways (Tolkien's and everyone else's) that dwarves are portrayed. How about Gorkhas? How about Tibetans, or Sherpas? Or the Hopi? Or hey, who says it needs to be mountain tribes? Put the mountain in the middle of the ocean: how about Okinawan dwarves, whose martial art reflects their rootedness in the earth? (I admit, that's blatantly an Avatar ripoff, earth-bending's Hùhng Ga and karate are related.) Or hey, Polynesian dwarves, with an elaborate gift-economy?


• You know those character sheets you can find upon the web? Not for RPGs, but for writing? Yeah, well, I find them needlessly human-centric. When I'm filling one out for a bipedal ambush predator with bones made of silica or a fairy god whose people saw the Big Bang, too many of the questions have to be answered "NA".
  
  One might, of course, say "oh well those weren't made for SF or fantasy". Which I would believe, if not for the fact I've only ever found them at SF- and fantasy-writing sites: not once have I seen one at a site for writers of mainstream fiction.
  
  Occam's razor, though, or maybe Heinlein, the folks who run the sites probably just got them from some mainstream writer, and didn't modify them for genres where your characters don't have to be ugly apes half-assing their way through pack-hunting.


• A commenter a long time ago said that he didn't agree with my theory that only apex predators would become sapient, because most apex predators have other adaptations that render sapience unnecessary.
  
  That, of course, would be an argument against the statement "all apex predators become sapient", but that statement would be stupid, and I never made it. I said "all sapients will be apex predators". That is, you'll only get sapience from that narrow band of apex predators whose evolution favors intelligence, rather than pure flesh-shredding ability, as a strategy.
  
  Another of his (supposed) counter-examples is humans' thumbs and upright posture. Only, quick: what's the other group of animals with thumbs and bipedal posture? Oh, right, predatory therapods. QED.