Spot Check II

With this post, you could read one of these a day for a whole year. You'd be really weird to do that, though.

Another combination reality-check/random-thoughts post.

• One of the canards about the Middle Ages, from some spam-email called "Life in the 1500s" (which doesn't know the 1500s is the Renaissance—but most of its lies are usually told about the Middle Ages, even though they aren't even true of the Renaissance), is, quote,

  Lead cups were used to drink ale or whisky. The combination would sometimes knock the imbibers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake."

  Wow, it's just a smorgasbord of idiocy. First off, there isn't enough lead leeched out of a pewter cup to have any such psychoactive effect—you'd die of alcohol poisoning, or even of over-hydration, long before the lead's dosage was appreciable. Second, ale and wine were the staple drinks, with whiskey being consumed more as a liqueur (it was first consumed in 1405, so it missed the High Middle Ages). Third and finally, sitting vigil with a corpse is a universal custom; did the Japanese or Jews routinely get found dead drunk in the street? Because they have wakes too.
  
  Really, the whole spamphlet is a series of long-exploded canards and risible folk-etymology. Mention any of these ideas to a real historian—of the period, of course, academic specialization tends to mean most "scholars" are actually laymen, except in one over-narrow subject—and he'll laugh in your face and insult your mother.


• When people act like things like the sex-abuse scandal or the various bad Popes invalidate the Catholic faith, I always point out the teaching of Original Sin. To quote a character in one of my own books, "What school of logic is it, where a theory is considered invalidated when its predictions come true?"


• I was thinking about the "Song of Rape and Torture" school of fantasy, since there are things almost as dark in the Elder Scrolls setting—Tiber Septim was an asshole, for instance—but it doesn't affect me the same way. I think it's because the really dark stuff is few and far between, and meanwhile you're doing things like getting an apothecary news of her soldier daughter, or stopping evil cults from resurrecting necromancer-queens. Then again, I do make it a point to avoid most of the Daedra missions, other than for relatively civilized Princes like Meridia and Azura.
  
  Incidentally, I have a suspicion that "Talos", the apotheosized Tiber Septim, is actually Wulfharth the Ash-King—who sometimes impersonated Tiber Septim, and who the Nords already revered as Ysmir, the name they later gave to Talos (it's just the title of all Dragonborn, the Graybeards give it to you, too). And given that Wulfharth's power as a god only came from Shor, basically Talos/Ysmir is just the ancient Nord worship of Shor, so the Thalmor are getting their smallclothes in a bunch over nothing. Also the Nine becoming the Eight is just a recapitulation of the expulsion of Lorkhan, and Talos/Ysmir, as humans, would've been Lorkhanic beings anyway, so...plainly I get too into the lore of these games.


• The whole fighting-game sexism thing, seen here, is completely missing the point. Whether or no the people involved are sexist—which is a term we redefine every week, depending on whether the woman in question is Republican or not—they are undeniably shitty-ass sportsmen. And poor sportsmanship invalidates the whole enterprise.
  
  Newsflash, shitheels, it's a game. It is not a war. Especially since half of you probably worked your high horses into a lather when that Canadian sniper made a joke about killing freaking terrorists. Or were you just incensed that he was saying that about the Taliban, who appear to share your attitude toward women?


• BioWare may well be the most useless game company ever. Between Dragon Age and Mass Effect, i.e. Marxist Racial Oppression Narratives in a fantasy RPG, and Biology Means Nothing When We Need to Put Superfluous Sex-Scenes in Our Game (Also, F***ing Elements, How Do They Work?), they have wholly invalidated themselves as creators. Aside from how the Reapers were better when they were called Berserkers.
  
  Speaking of, it is mindboggling how many royalties Fred Saberhagen could, conceivably, claim. Battlestar Galactica, Terminator (the future setting, anyway), Mass Effect...there's more, I'm sure of it, but they are all the Berserkers. Had anyone done quite that take on the "rogue robot" trope, before him? Even the Manhunters are basically the same thing.


• Those large, woolly ox-beasts of the New World, are called buffalo. Yes, I know, "bison"—only, couple things.
  
  1. Buffalo and bison both mean "ox", the former in French, the latter in Greek.
  2. They were called buffalo first, in 1635, while they weren't called bison until 1774.
  3. Binomial nomenclature exists, so there is no possibility of confusion in scientific writing.
  4. Finally and most importantly, the people where the damn animal is actually found overwhelmingly call it a buffalo, so screw the rest of you.


• People's bizarre reaction to the phenomenon of bronies amuses me. Only, you even see it with guys like Deej from Sci Fi Catholic, and he's writing a magical girl book, so he should know better. It's the same phenomenon as happened in anime fandom. There's a reason the majority of magical-girl anime are made for college-age guys nowadays.
  
  Discounting the (fringe, even in Japan) lolicon thing, this is no bad development; it's neutral at worst. Especially in the case of Ponies (especially since the bronies have been very good at excising the Rule 34 contingent); I view it as a positive development in our society, when many young men are fond of a show about a bunch of girls being genuinely girlish, even if they are actually talking horses and they live in a magical world ruled by an immortal winged unicorn.
  
  By the way, an alicorn is not a winged unicorn, it's the alchemist's word for unicorn horn, considered as a commodity.


• Any discussion of "censorship", or indeed of social mores in general, benefits from what I like to call the "Argumentum ab Johane Homicida Insanem" (the argument from Johnny the Homicidal Maniac). I name it that because Nny is both hair-trigger psycho, and highly erotophobic, because the argument is this:

  Any argument in favor of sexual "liberation" is only valid if the equivalent would be true of violence.

  E.g., the claim that some sexual veto arises purely from "private" religious sentiment (a concept that no religion except some forms of Protestantism acknowledges) also undercuts your quaint taboos against honor-killing and armed robbery, both of which have been practiced by many great cultures in history. Or, you get to teach our sixth-graders about masturbation when I get to teach yours how to kill a man with their bare hands, and you can give them birth-control without our consent when I can give yours guns.


• That, it occurs to me, is the basic point of all of Nietzsche: the "Enlightenment" undermining of traditional morals undermines all morals. And anyone who believes otherwise is simply admitting that they are an Anglo with a shallow brainpan (ein englisch Flachkopf). That's the meaning of "God is dead", and of the New Morality.


• Finally, so apparently Richard Dawkins has said he's actually an agnostic. Which, on the one hand, "Guh!? Beh?! Deh...ah...why?! What have you been doing the past couple decades, then?!"
  
  But on the other, it is entirely possible that his spiritual journey (gah, what an ass-lancing expression) will end, as so many others have ended, in Rome. So let us be charitable to the dope.