Commentary 2

Random thoughts. This is #350, by the bye.

• So in Watchmen, Ozymandias tricks Dr. Manhattan into leaving by convincing him that being around a radioactive exhibitionist is giving people cancer. Only, I know Alan Moore's an anarchist who thinks he's a warlock and probably considers science "patriarchal" or some shit, but Dr. Manhattan glows a rather familiar shade of blue. And sorry, but if you're anywhere near something that glows that color in the air (rather than in water), well, in the immortal words of Winchell Chung, "The good news is you can probably live long enough to write your last will and testament. If you write very quickly."
  
  Also, RE: Moore's scientific illiteracy, Dr. Manhattan is supposedly nigh-omniscient due to his insight into the behavior of particles. Only, Moore, seriously? Dude, it's not 1925, we've got quantum physics now, and Heisenberg Indeterminacy rules that out. The only demon science ever disproved was Laplace's. It's just as well, too; aside from determinism being undignified, that bunny is an asshole.


• I mentioned here, a couple years ago, how I don't like pacifist characters with guns or swords, because, realistically, those things kill people—it's what they're designed for, and if you carry them, you need to be prepared to end lives.
  
  Well, did you know you can't actually knock people out, whether by impact or drugs, without major risks, too? Yeah. The first-aid rules say if you're knocked out longer than 5 minutes by a head injury, you need to call an ambulance, because you have suffered some kind of brain trauma—a concussion is your best-case scenario.
  
  As for drugs, fuggeddaboudit. There's a reason cops don't use tranquilizer guns, and also one why anesthesiology is a highly dedicated medical specialty. Humans are delicate against drugs, and if you get the dose wrong, people die or have brain damage. I don't have a statistic for what percentage of "surgical complications" involves some hiccup in the anesthesia, but it ain't a small one, I'll tell you that for free.
  
  Of course, in an SF setting, you're more free—I realized that electro-stun rounds would only be as effective as Tasers (so, not very—even the strongest stun guns don't knock people out, they just immobilize them all-too-briefly). Thus, now, my characters use nanomachines, contained in darts, to knock people out. You can even program those to tell what species' blood they're in, and adjust their operation accordingly.


• Remember how I said I was doing my D&D setting all Conan, Hyborian Age-y? Well, for research purposes, I got every Conan book (by Howard) that my library had, and the Kull book they had, and two Clark Ashton Smith books that had exactly three measly Zothique Cycle stories. Incidentally, Smith totally looked like John Waters, the gay horror director who's always interviewed on IFC. Though I suppose, if you're a whisper-thin cadavaerous gent with a pencil-mustache, it's pretty much "horror fiction" or "embalming", as career options.
  
  And then I went to the Interwebs, and researched legends of lost civilizations, because seriously, there sorta seems to be Atlantis, and...nothing. Lemuria is a 19th century zoological theory based on an obsolete theory of continents, Shamballa is a Buddhist Pure Land that can be walked to, Hyperborea is basically an Ancient Greek version of Shamballa, and Mu comes from a 1920s esotericist misreading Maya syllabary as if it was letters (I'd dearly love to know the real reading of those characters, though).
  
  However, given Atlantis' role is similarly minor (it's a very minor reference in Plato), I figured the Meso-American idea of Tollan was roughly appropriate. So (given Mu's supposed to be the ancestors of the Maya), basically I went with Mu and Atlantis. Except my Atlantis is copper-age Indo-Europeans, and my Mu is basically Olmecs. Except I decided to use Proto-Mayan as their language, because again, Olmecs spoke a Mixe-Zoquean language (possible Proto-Mixe-Zoquean), and good luck finding dictionaries for that.


• Speaking of, Conan and Kull stories are solid, clean, adventure stories of the Zane Grey school. Yes there're some questionable race-theories in Conan, but A) that was called "science" at the time, and B) he's much less of a racist than Lovecraft and probably even Leiber. The Man Eaters of Zamboula has black guys who eat people, sure, but you'll notice that it's just the people of one nation; Conan specifically notices a different black guy who isn't from that nation, and is just some dude. And hey guess what, the reason "nation" is a thing is that groups of people do behave in objectively similar ways, due to having a common upbringing and temperament.
  
  It is just a little jarring that the cannibal tribe hails from "Darfar", though, I'm pretty sure nobody in the Sudan ever practiced cannibalism. Also, you know, the people of Darfur are currently the victims of others' predatory appetites.


• On the other hand, Howard's Kull stories are the only place where I have encountered the anthropology concept of "prehuman flux" in all of fiction. The Atlanteans' attitude toward tigers (which may be saber-tooths, I think Howard left it deliberately vague) is exactly the one you'd really encounter in a hunter-gatherer society.


• So my mother thought it was weird that I know, without checking, that the Roswell incident was July 2, 1947. But hey, I'd still have to look up the time of the crash, and, well, come on. It's a major pop culture incident.
  
  Incidentally, I was reading a thing about UFO incidents by a guy from the USAF, who basically said, oh, hell yeah there's cover-ups, but most of them involve planes and maneuvers you have no clearance for. The military understandably doesn't like people poking their noses into that, and if you get visited by Men in Black, well, they're probably AFOSI (or NCIS or Army CID, depending on whose plane you might've seen), or maybe plainclothes MPs. They probably don't flash badges because technically speaking it's not a crime to be a nosy jackass, and nosy jackasses always assume the involvement of officials means they're on the right track.


• Apparently people don't like all the bilingual conversations in Star Wars? Only, the two places you see it done is with Wookiees and with people who speak Huttese; everyone else needs 3PO to translate. And nobody but Han and Lando actually understands Chewie—who, again, anatomically cannot speak Basic, however fluently he understands it—while Huttese is pretty much Spanish for the Star Wars galaxy, everyone took it in high school. It's just that people who are, or work for, the Hutts don't feel the need to deign to speak Basic (actually it's debatable if Rodians can, since they have those floppy mouth-parts).
  
  Incidentally, remember that idiot who runs the site about how the Empire could totally beat the Federation, ubiquitous teleportation and realtime FTL notwithstanding? Yeah, well he also got all up in arms over his (deliberate) misunderstanding of one of the allegations that the Neimoidians are a caricature of Asians. See, the dude's Chinese-Canadian, and apparently the Neimoidians were described by someone as having "slitted" eyes. Our jackass interlocutor chose to be offended by that, deliberately misinterpreting it to mean that Asians are inhuman and have slit pupils, like cats, lizards, and foxes.
  
  Seriously, dickweed, untune your G-string. "Slitted" eyes refers to what is known, in East Asia, as single eyelids, and over here, as "slanted eyes". And I will bet his life he actually knew that, but chose to deny the knowledge—sanity, after all, supplies so few opportunities to work oneself into a lather.


• Which reminds me, I'll have to tread careful-like, but I can probably describe the people in my fantasy story according to certain East Asian conventions (remember how I was having trouble making that come out in the text?). E.g., there's a girl who's both from a poor background and sensitive about her looks, who I might describe as thinking she has small or narrow eyes. That's associated with lower-class people in Asia, and "looks high-class" is pretty much identical with "attractive" over there. Hence why ganguro gals are a counterculture, dark skin has historically meant "clodhopper" in Asia (actually, worldwide, many of the secondary things like pale skin and long hair that most cultures find attractive in women are associated with wealth).


• According to militaryfactory.com, the people of France/Gaul have had 168 wars in their history. They won 109, lost 49, and had 10 draws.
  
  As a Cracked article put it, "We might want to knock off the 'coward' talk now, lest we find the impeccably-styled death squads smoking their thin cigarettes on our doorstep."
  
  Ça c'est la vérité vrai, fils de putain.