Who Are You?

(It probably helps to know that kid in the clip is an evil god who likes to toy with people before murdering them.)

This article, about how atheists almost universally argue against a God who's actually just a god, just a being rather than Being, reminded me of something a little weird and frivolous. (I wouldn't read the comments on that article unless you want to see very impolite atheists make the author's point for him.)

Namely, in Slayers (I believe it comes up in the anime but they don't go into any detail, but definitely in the books), Lina's version of the Giga Slave, based on her translation of a fragment of the Claire Bible, has the line, "混沌の海にたゆたいし 金色なりし闇の王/Konton no umi ni tayutaishi, konjiki narishi yami no Ô/Golden king of darkness drifting upon the Sea of Chaos".

But then, when she actually "reads" the Claire Bible itself—or rather is infused with the memories of the Water Dragon King, which are the Claire Bible in its original form—she modifies the invocation. Her second version says, "混沌の海よ　たゆたいし存在 金色なりし闇の王/Konton no umi, tayutaishi sonzai, konjiki narishi yami no Ô/Golden king of darkness, drifting being, Sea of Chaos"—because the Lord of Nightmares is not something that can drift upon the Sea of Chaos, she is the Sea of Chaos, because she's the Ground of Being of the setting's pantheistic cosmology, and all things, including the gods and demons as well as the Four Worlds they fight over, were brought forth from her.

How sad is it, though, that a book series whose target audience is in middle school, from a country where people go to their temples exactly once a year (plus births and funerals), has more understanding of natural theology than people who dedicate their lives to attempting to refute other people's religion? The significance of L being "Mother of All Things", as Xelloss calls her, is more or less irrelevant to Slayers, it's something I doubt 9/10 of people pick up on even when they're seen the novels as well as the show, but seriously, Kanzaka put more philosophical work into what is pretty much a MacGuffin than Anglophone atheists put into their whole worldview.

More of the Same

More random thoughts.

• It occurs to me, given the two meanings of Latin carus and its descendents (cher and caro), that caritas has the base meaning of "valuation". Carus and its reflexes mean both "beloved" and "expensive", so plainly "valuation" is the domain that caritas pertains to. And consider: what is Christian charity, if not constantly keeping before your mind the infinite value of each person, as the image of God? That is what all the "charitable" precepts, from almsgiving to forgiveness to evangelization, spring from.
  
  (And when it's asked why we value others for the image of God, and not themselves, we reply that we only value ourselves for our imaging of God—or put another way we only value ourselves because of our experience of existence. "Image of God" is the same as saying "self-awareness capable of conceiving of existence", cf. Summa Theologica Pt. I, Q. 93, Art. 6.)
• Recently watched an anime called PSYCHO-PASS. It's future dystopia police drama in a Judge Dredd-meets-Minority Report kinda way, and the whole time I'm thinking "shades of Gil Hamilton" (although organlegging ain't just the stuff of science fiction anymore).
  
  I really like the cultural setting and props—how, for instance, people go to offline meetups in holo-cosplay of their virtual avatars, and everyone's furniture (and, it seems, their clothes) is some basic utilitarian thing dressed up by holograms. It's especially cool in the scene where they turn the hologram on in a dead guy's house, and there's a hologram couch only half overlapping the real one...because the couch was moved. It's probably the coolest science fiction cop series I've ever seen.
  
  If the central conceit seems farfetched to you, don't worry, they do explain it. Also the ending could've been better, but it could've been a lot worse.
• It would be fun, if anyone were actually concerned with justice in the historiography of science (so, in a perfect imaginary dream-world), to rename the three laws of motion to reflect reality, rather than Isaac Newton's lies. Only the third (any body acted upon exerts an equal force on the body acting upon it) is Newton's. The second (the acceleration of a body is directly proportional to, and in the direction of, the net force acting upon it, and inversely proportional to its mass) is Descartes's—hence why Newton very carefully went over his notes and erased all reference to Descartes. And the first (in an inertial reference frame, an object is either at rest or moving at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by an external force), is Jean Buridan's, who died in probably the early 1360s.
  
  Now, Newton cleaned up a lot of the sawdust from Descartes's and Buridan's formulations of those principles, and related them to Kepler's laws of planetary motion, so that's not to say Newton was just a plagiarist. He was only occasionally a plagiarist, and he built and improved upon what he stole. Plus Descartes was probably asking for it for having ripped off his coordinate system from Buridan's student Nicol Oresme. Newton also got his Nemesis (she sees all and hears all, and men do groan beneath her righteous chains) in the form of that ugly dispute with Leibniz over calculus, although neither one could ever really establish himself as having definitively had the idea first, which may not be quite as satisfying as one having plagiarized the other and then getting credit for what he stole, as Newton did to Descartes, but the frustration they both endured is certainly a sufficiently Sisyphean fate.
• It's really weird, but a lot of people seem outright offended by the idea that marriage is primarily a sexual relationship. This came to my attention discussing gay marriage; I pointed out that strictly speaking a gay couple can never have "sexual intercourse" as biologists define the term, and the other guy freaked out and accused me of thinking marriage is just about sex. But...marriage is sex. (Seriously, the Sacrament of Matrimony? Not the wedding, bud.) Everything else about it follows from sex, it is the form "mated pair" takes for a sapient species, and what exactly is "mating"?
  
  I kinda think a lot of people don't think of sex as a biological imperative. Sure, they think they need it (and at an individual level you actually don't), but they don't think of what "biological imperative" actually means, or the reason that that particular thing is one—or indeed, it's the origin of all the others, but nobody seems to ask themselves how or why that's so. If sex was food they wouldn't even see the joke, much less get it, in that gag in Baka Test where Yuuji buys all that food for himself, then tells Akihisa he bought food for him too—diet cola, konjac jelly, and jellied agar. (Total calories: 0.)
• I think I might have to work in a reference, in my SF, to the fact that each individual function of the brain is basically an independent "weak" AI. Every single thing you do is essentially processed by a separate computer system specialized in that one area, with hundreds of times more situational-analysis capability than the very state of the art in our computer science. And that's not even bringing in cognition, which is something else entirely.
  
  The fact that the dumb lizard in charge of your fight-or-flight response is, in actual fact, a program of complexity exceeding the greatest our computer science can achieve, and that by orders of magnitude, is important perspective for the excessively sanguine predictors of mind-uploading. We can just about program situational analysis on par with a rather impaired reptilian hindbrain—can the greatest heights of human cognition be far behind?!
• The real problem with Wikipedia is not that anyone can edit it; it's that they sometimes can't. The article on medieval cuisine is currently a collection of screeds by people that would like to keep calling that era the Dark Ages—with "dark" as a euphemism for a racial slur starting with N. It's because exactly two books, by literature professors not historians, are used as the source; and any time you edit it to look less like Humberto Fontova on Castro (except Fontova is fact-checked), and more like non-polemical academic history, the change gets deleted.
  
  The other example of how Wikipedia doesn't get edited when it needs to, is, if you want the ranks and insignia of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, yeah, you're gonna have to hunt around a bit, 'cause the Wikipedia article? It's got the English and the kanji, but romanized Japanese? Nope. The formatting for those tables is such a nightmare that that thing is pretty much never gonna get fixed. I was gonna do it myself, I opened the edit window and everything—and then ran away from a giant dense morass of weird code. I don't even think those are normal Wikipedia tables.
  
  Eventually I did find the International Encylopedia of Uniform Insignia, although finding the Air and Maritime JSDF was kinda a hassle (that link's just Ground). Fortunately, Asia doesn't have branch-specific ranks; just change "Riku" (ground) in the army ranks to "Kai" (sea) to get naval ranks and to "Kû" (sky) to get air-force.
• In my previous post I described Buddhism as having its "πάντα ῥεῖ" atomism/nominalism "closely bound up" with metempsychosis. But I understated the case. India does not have atomism "closely bound up" with metempsychosis; its atomism-nominalism is functionally identical with metempsychosis.
  
  This is another thing I realized in that fateful debate with a Hare Krishna that made a Thomist of me. See, he argued that one cannot disbelieve in reincarnation, because at every moment the mind inhabits new bodies. Much like the question "Do you ever step in the same river twice?", in his view—which is the version of atomism found throughout Indian thought—the changing traits of the body, as it is subjected to decay and regeneration, utterly annihilated the very concept of "the same body".
  
  This troubled me greatly; I found myself falling back on dimly-remembered, half-understood Thomistic formulations about essence and accidents, simply to assert that things are themselves moment by moment, no matter what their parts do. This is, by the bye, the essence of Aristotelianism, its shahada; if you're not a mitigated realist you do not follow the Philosopher.
• Finally, another anime I recently saw is (the anime of the game) Sengoku Basara. It rocks. Aside from that being what warfare in a D&D setting probably looks like (a bunch of spear-carriers and a couple lunatics with lightning bolts), it's just so damn cool. "Hot blooded" is a thing I tend to favor in a character, and Sengoku Basara has it in spades; they should've named the series "Testosterone: The Animated Series" (I guess the games should be "Testosterone: The Game"?). It's probably best if you think of the thing as taking place in Valhalla; if you try to compare it to real history you'll hurt yourself.
  
  I especially like the scene where Yukimura claims the burning of a man's soul outlasts the dissolution predicted in Buddhist cosmology—yeap, he claims to be too macho for the Three Marks of Conditioned Existence. And the part where Oda Nobunaga (played with appropriate levels of arrogance by Wakamoto Norio) introduces himself as "The darkness in men's hearts given human shape." And just anything with Date Masamune or the rest of the Date clan, really, like how they mostly don't wear helmets, except for Masamune himself, because it'd mess up their pompadours—or how Masamune's horse has handlebars on its bridle and novelty tailpipes on its stirrups.

Footwear, Navigation, Packaging, Agriculture, Monarchy, Sea Temperatures, Porcine Aviation (2)

It's that time again, the walrus said. Random thoughts.

Did you know 495 is 99×5? It's really obvious with a moment's thought. I recently chose not to put in that moment's thought, and then I felt silly. (Its prime factorization is 3²×11×5.)

• I just discovered that the thing Mugai in "Joujuu Senjin!! Mushibugyo" says several times in both the anime and the manga—太秦は神とも神と聞こえくる 常世の神を 打ち懲ますも/Uzumasa wa kamitomo kami to kikoekuru, tokoyo no kami wo uchikitamasumo/Uzumasa is famed as a god among gods, for he slew an eternal god—is from the Nihon Shoki.
  
  The "eternal god" in question is the Eternal Worm (常世虫), a strange worm-cult that seems to have been put down by Hata Uzumasa-no-kimi Sukune, first head of the Hata clan (Chinese immigrants who brought silk-worms to Japan). The Eternal Worm is the main villain at least of the Mushibugyo anime (the manga isn't translated that far).
  
  Imagine if America had TV shows with huge swaths of the plot based on the Venerable Bede, with characters quoting passages from his writing during fights. Japan...is there a definition of "Crazy Awesome" you haven't made it your goal in life to act out?
• Ironically, in a Cracked article about things being attributed to the wrong countries, the crackbabies—four of them!—said the Maya worshiped Huitzilopochtli. Not only is that true of exactly zero Mayan peoples ("Huitzilopochtli" is Nahuatl, not a Mayan language, for either "Left Hand to the South" or "Hummingbird on the Left Side"), not even all Aztecs (or rather, Mexica) worshiped him. He was specifically the tribal tutelary of the Tenochca, who elevated their patron god to the spot in the pantheon originally belonging to Nanahuatzin.
  
  The Tenochca are the people you think of when we say "Aztec", the ones with the terror-state and the mass-scale human sacrifice. The other major Mexica alliance, the Tlaxcaltecah, had human sacrifice, but on a much smaller scale. Where the Tenochca had a "triple alliance" whose "three" power-centers were actually one capital (Tenochtitlan) and its de facto vassals (Texcoco and Tlacopan), Tlaxcala's four centers (Ocotelolco, Quiahuiztlan, Tepeticpac, and Tizatlan) all actually did share power in their confederacy.
• Apparently some Buddhists, or Westerners who self-identify as Buddhists, object to characterizing Buddhist non-duality as a form of Monism. But...nothing Buddhists say about non-duality is notably different from what Neoplatonists say about the Source (which is, of course, the One, Τὸ Ἕν, the Monad). Indeed, the same things are pretty much said about God by some Christians. Essentially, those Buddhists' objection is like those very simple, sheltered Christians one sometimes gets, who absolutely lose it when they discover parallels between Christianity and pagan thought (Christianity is a heathen religion, from the Buddhist point of view).
  
  The fact of the matter is that everybody inhabits the same cosmos, and there are only a limited number of ways to think about it. Especially when your ideas share a pedigree with the other ideas in question. Buddhism, an Indian school of thought, has a hell of a lot of background in common with Greek thought even if we assume Alexander the Great and Hellenism had no influence on it, and they did. Buddhism is the idea that the Problem of Universals is resolved by positing that the Universals are an illusion born of transitory epiphenomena—some of which are "awareness" of various kinds—attempting to impose order on the the underlying formlessness of πάντα ῥεῖ ("everything flows").
  
  It's different from Neoplatonism in its Heraclitean nominalist-atomism, and in that atomism being closely bound up with metempsychosis (which Indian philosophy tends to assume as a given)...and in pretty much nothing else.
• If you needed yet another reason to loathe and despise Mass Effect, how about that its FTL communicators are called "quantum entanglement communicators"? And the number of idiots, e.g. at Cracked and Kotaku, who think that you actually could get that? They all got it from Mass Effect, demonstrably, since if (like Xenosaga) they'd come by the error honestly, they would probably have said something about the EPR paradox and "spooky action at a distance", but no, only "quantum entanglement". Because they mistook Mass Effect for a science text.
  
  I realize that a major component of my being more forgiving in Xenosaga's case is that I simply like Xenosaga better, but a part of why I like Xenosaga more is that it doesn't posture as other than what it is (which is a JRPG where the collective unconscious is used as a warp drive). Mass Effect is basically Dragon Age in space, with all that that implies, only it gets treated as something more than "space opera bordering on science-fantasy" (which is what Xenosaga is, too).
• My younger sister had an interesting point about Ender's Game, namely that knowing "the point is to seize the objective, not kill all the enemy" does not make you a genius, it makes everyone else a moron. Ender is perpetually triumphing over pathetic strawmen, some of them ethnic stereotypes that were dead when the book was written, let alone when it's set ("Spanish honor", in a book written a decade after Franco died). Because, again, Ender's Game is just a Mary Sue self-insert fic vindication fantasy.
  
  At the time of these remarks, though, I'd just been binging on the Baka Test novels. And it occurred to me, when Yuuji is described as a strategist, that's because he does things like deliberately tank his grades to lure another class into attacking, then ramp his score up just before the fight, and single-handedly wipes out their assault team. You know, actual strategies. I would say that Card was more concerned with other aspects of the story than coming up with real strategies to demonstrate Ender's genius (despite Ender's genius being what the book's about), but what other aspects? The aliens that behave exactly like Hymenoptera and even have DNA? The politics we're told next to nothing of?
  
  The only thing that shows a lick of work being put into it is the elaborate moral rationalizations—like a computer programmer who put the most work into a piece of code that turned out to be a bug.
• I just saw the anime of Katanagatari. It is terrible, but you won't know that till ten episodes in—and it's a 12-episode show—so I will tell you how it's terrible so you don't waste your time. The cursed swords they're after are not cursed, they're all made with technology stolen from the future by Shikizaki Kiki's clan of fortune-tellers. Then nearly everybody dies very stupidly, pretty much just because coming up with satisfying endings is hard, and light novels are the absolute bottom of the barrel in terms of Japanese fiction. (Also because the kind of pseudo-intellectual Jakigan-kei who is the target audience of all too many fantasy light novels is, like his American cousin, still in a stage of "impacted adolescence" where plots that deliberately don't satisfy seem "honest" and "mature".)
  
  I also really, really hate Shichika's sister, she's a Villain Sue. But she gave me a very interesting idea for a scene. First you set up a "I can copy your moves by seeing them once or twice" character like her, by having them kill a bunch of sympathetic Red Shirts. Then you bring in another person (the real antagonist of the plot), probably along the lines of Kuroudo Akabane from GetBackers—or Xelloss. The move-copier starts to basically say, "It's useless, I can copy any technique I see", etc....but falls silent halfway through, as their body falls one way and their head another—and then the real antagonist clicks his sword back into its sheath. "That sounded like a cool ability," he says cheerfully, and then nods to the corpse before stepping over it and continuing on his way.
• It seems to be especially prevalent in anime, but why does anyone treat "Tepes" as a surname for vampires? Leaving to one side the "no connection except an Irish guy naming one after him 400 years later" issue, "Tepes" (the first and last letters should have commas under them) is not a surname. It is an epithet; Vlad's surname was Basarab. Romanian history refers to noblemen by epithets; aside from "Vlad of the Stakes" you have "Mihai the Brave" (Mihai Viteazul) and "Radu the Great" (Radu cel Mare) and "Vlad the Monk" (Vlad Călugărul)...all of whom were surnamed "Basarab", it was a big clan, hence the epithets.
  
  But since it shows up in anime so much, I kinda want to ask the people who do it, what if a Romanian thought Dokuganryû ("One-Eyed Dragon") or Dairokutenmaô ("Devil King of the Sixth Heaven") or Oni no Fukuchou("Ogre Vice-Head") was a heritable surname? (Of course, they might counter that Katakura Kagetsuna's nickname of "Kojûrô" was passed down in the Katakura family, but the point still stands.)
• The question, which I am sure has plagued your sleepless nights, "What Indo-European languages, other than Welsh, have the voiceless (alveolar) lateral fricative?", has an answer. That answer is, "One Tuscan dialect spoken in northern Sardinia—'Sassarese'—and three Scandinavian languages—Faroese, Icelandic, and the 'Trønder dialect' of Norwegian."
  
  Another question that doubtless keeps you from deep healing sleep is "What are two uvular consonants in the last places I expected to find them (you expect to find them among Semitic languages, what with q and all)?" And it, too, has answers (actually it has a bunch, but past a certain point it's not actually "I didn't expect that" but "I expected nothing"). The R in most dialects of French and German is a uvular fricative (sometimes it's a trill), and the "syllable-final" (actually moraic) N in Japanese is actually a uvular nasal.

Thought of the deliberately unsatisfying ending of Katanagatari reminds me of something. As in so many things, Keima says what we're all thinking.

Sierra Foxtrot 3

This is post 494, 2×13×19. More about science fiction.

• Many and various are the ills that can be laid at the door of science fiction writers. One example that's come up recently (thanks to the newly-discovered Higgs boson casting doubt upon "naturalness") is that people conflate "multiverse" with "many worlds". This is science fiction's fault, because every stupid alternate-reality story (there are no intelligent alternate reality stories except one that is mostly not one, "Cascade Point" by Timothy Zahn) is based on many-worlds, but it calls the set of many worlds "the multiverse". But "multiverse theory", though a poor name, actually refers to something totally different.
  
  See, the "multiverse" the Higgs boson may point to simply means that this "universe" is actually only the portion of space-time geometry (however many dimensions it may have) that functions by what we think of as the laws of physics, and that we can exist in. "Many worlds interpretation" is that goofball idea that every probability wave-form creates a universe for each possible result, because you're not comfortable with the Copenhagen interpretation showing that there's something special about minds. Basically, the "multiverse" vs. "many worlds" is like the difference, in Dungeons and Dragons, between the Prime Material, Astral, Ethereal, Outer, and Inner Planes—only the first of which does not intrinsically involve rules modifications—and between two different Prime Material Planes, which generally follow the same rules with only minor modifications.
  
  Hmm. Maybe this isn't entirely the fault of science fiction writers, but rather also the fault of scientists who read science-fiction and didn't notice that the name they borrowed from those stories already applied to a different theory.
• I often carelessly describe myself as writing hard SF, and I probably shouldn't. "Hard SF" tends to mean that the stories are about specific technical things and the way some (technically gifted) person deals with them. The Known Space stories that don't have to be Known Space stories, because they're about dudes orbiting Venus or exploring Pluto, would be examples (so is "Neutron Star", though that's avowedly Known Space thanks to having Puppeteers and General Products hulls).
  
  My science fiction is mostly about politics, and scheming therein, and the way some person whose technical expertise mostly involves killing people deals with it. I do explain my devices by reference to actual theory (rather than handwavium), including the artificial gravity and the FTL, but I also have psionics (though I only call them "psi", and deliberately subvert pseudo-science explanations for them). I think I probably sit halfway between science fiction (strictly defined, which pretty much means "hard") and space opera, without going too far into soft SF.
  
  Though I also have...other things...used as an end-around for, e.g., AI (also as the only rational source for defense from psi), I don't think it makes sense to classify my thing as "science fantasy". I am not writing fantasy stories set in a traditionally SF setting, I am writing science fiction stories set in a broader cosmos than the comfort-zone that philosophical "naturalism" made up, with no rational basis, because its adherents are afraid of ghosts.
  
  I think I write "chewy" science fiction, as I have said previously. Much of it actually has a genuinely hard crunchy shell.
• Where do people get the idea that War of the Worlds is against imperialism (something I was reading while writing this said so)? Again, as I have said before, Wells was an absolutely rabid imperialist (all Fabians were—the least imperialist British socialist was Orwell, and he was still a froth-mouthed no-Popery Jingo). By and large, and until indecently recent times, British Socialists acquired their Pink by mixing the supremacy of the White Race with painting the map Imperial Red. (Now they're just straight-up Marxists, painting the map red in service to a different, even more bloodstained and illegitimate, empire.)
  
  War of the Worlds is simple biological determinism, Social Darwinism, about as anti-imperial as Robert Heinlein's theme that humanity will continue genociding other species until some other species genocides it. That is in fact basically what it is about, the idea that races have destinies and life-spans and "appointed times", and when your time is up, go out like a gentleman. But even then—have you actually read the thing?—you may have noticed the humans still @#$%ing win in the end, by a deus ex machina no less, because Wells' Jingo heart couldn't bring itself to finish it logically.
  
  (The ending is just as illogical and deus ex machina if it's an anti-imperialist allegory, by the bye, but everything Wells said in any other context shows it isn't one.)
• I think I have elsewhere remarked on the fact that Gagarin is only the first man in space, he did not make the first manned spaceflight (because "flight", to count as successful, must involve landing, and Gagarin's craft was designed with the assumption he'd bail out partway down). But did you know Sputnik, also, is only an achievement in a very qualified sense?
  
  It's a metal beach-ball with a very primitive transmitter attached to it, and four big antennas. Its surface is polished enough to let it be seen from Earth, and it broadcasts meaningless beeps on AM radio. That's all it does. Well, that, and galvanize America into the biggest industrial gear-up since World War II, revamping an entire generation's math and science education and leading to America's victory not only in space (the Moon Landing was pretty much the end of the Space Race) but in the Cold War, since the semiconductors and microprocessors that spelled the USSR's doom were direct results of the space program.
  
  And no, the fact the Russians did much more work with space stations than we did does not affect the question of who won the Space Race. The main reason the US didn't do as much there (though Skylab stacks up favorably with the Salyuts and Mir any day of the week) is because we had much better communication satellites (see "semiconductors and microprocessors", above), which did a good 7/8 of the things you want space stations for.
• One of the several articles out there about Orientalism in Firefly notes that it lacks the idea of "Oriental despotism"—because if it did its braindead political morality-play might look racist, instead of just stupid—but it neglects to note that "Oriental despotism" mostly referred, in its actual usages, to the Ottoman Turks. And the Ottomans, on an average day, made the Qing Dynasty look like Jeffersonian democracy.
  
  Of course, then again, the writer actually thought Edward Said's take on Orientalism was valid, when it is in fact just an early example of Post-Colonialism, i.e. the Yankee myth and the Marxist myth stuffed into a blender and made even stupider. Then again a lot of people think Said originated the idea that "Orientalism" meant cultural appropriation, but really that criticism has always been implicit in many uses of the term.
• There's a Gundam series I never knew about, and I don't mean one of the more obscure UC spinoffs. "Gundam AGE" is the latest normal Gundam show with its own timeline. It's pretty decent, although it's got a middle school-age cast for the first part, and an obnoxious talking ball (Haro), the absence of which from Wing was providential, as if it'd had one I almost certainly would've hated that show (I had only recently recovered from the original Battlestar Galactica's thrice-accursed robot dog), and thence probably the whole franchise.
  
  One nitpick was the whole thing at the beginning where they're evacuating the space colony. They say they can't get to the escape craft because each only holds 100 people, and since it's an O'Neill Island 3 cylinder it can be assumed to have a population of several million, but...that's a glaring design flaw. If your craft has lifeboats, it should always carry enough for everyone, did the Titanic sinking teach you nothing? Besides, on a space-station colony, a designer would have to be stupid not to build a shelter that can double as an escape pod into every building—big ones, in bigger buildings.
• If you were collecting examples of how Doctor Who not only is not science fiction, but continuing to air it demonstrates that the British public are the sworn enemies of science, how about "TARDIS"? TARDIS is an acronym. It stands for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space". Now, aside from how that can in no way be the name of a time-machine, or any other machine, since the name does not tell you what it does...time is also a relative dimension. Or multiple relative dimensions, in some models.
  
  Even if TARDIS were originally "TARDIS machine", i.e. a time-machine but also a relative-dimension-in-space-machine, it doesn't change dimensions of anything, except possibly its own interior. The TARDIS doesn't change size or make anything else bigger, it moves. That's not change of dimensions, it's change of coordinates! (Oh, I guess Doctor Who also demonstrates the British public are the sworn enemies of geometry. That's nice to know.)
• What do I have to give you or threaten you with, O my camaradoes, to get you to knock off writing "head vs. heart" stories? Star Trek and Doctor Who have, between them, beaten that dead horse to stiff peaks. Stop it. Leaving to one side you're just rehashing the head-injury ward version of certain Protestant movements, everybody who argues against emotions always argues emotionally. "The most sentimental thing in the world is to hide your feelings; it is making too much of them. Stoicism is the direct product of sentimentalism," as Chesterton said.
  
  The fact of the matter is that emotions are cognitive macros, pre-set parameters for your nervous system, to quickly put your body in the optimum configuration for reacting to certain common situations. They are, like all macros, broad strokes, and may need to be corrected manually to avoid errors. That's it. That's their sole significance; they are nothing more nor less than that. The factory pre-sets are not considered the definitive feature of any mechanism I am aware of.
  
  Also? This.
  

De Romanicorum Theoriarum VI

Thoughts on (or at least easily relatable to) speculative fiction.

• I am very curious to know why there are basically no aliens in science fiction who are half as alien to the modern Euro-American mindset as the average African or East Asian. If there were obvious conscious worldbuilding involved—the aliens had particular movements that paralleled the history of Western thought—I wouldn't mind it. But cultures in science fiction, whether they're a eugenicist military dictatorship, effete artisans of Byzantine complexity, an all-encompassing bureacracy, a rapacious merchant culture, a Proud Warrior Race—really any of the many space-versions of Nazis, Communists, or various caricatures of the Japanese—always have, except where it would directly interfere with their "hat", the mores of 21st century First World Anglophones from the Northern Hemisphere (okay, in Farscape they're from the Southern Hemisphere).
  
  I mean, hell, the closest even Farscape ever got to "don't take things from tombs, you'll get cursed" is a goofball, mummy's curse B-plot in one episode. But that's not how the belief works. You won't be cursed because curses were laid on graves to protect them. You'll be cursed because the dead don't like being stolen from, and their wrath ruins your luck. Again: Western assumption, that someone has to do something special before the supernatural happens. Plainly the Catholic priesthood is living rent-free inside your atheo-agnostico-Protty heads. Every other person on the planet thinks that that kind of stuff just happens, getting cursed is as natural as being pregnant because you had sex (yes, yes, the Tiwi—you're only proving my point, because the Tiwi not knowing where babies come from is freaking weird).
• Logically, "demihuman" should refer to things like half-elves and half-orcs. The "demi" is the "demi" from "demitasse", it means "half". And while "demihuman" was coined in obvious imitation of "demigod", "demigod" refers to the half-divine nature of the being in question. It's also not any kind of actual mythological term, it was coined in the 16th century by Renaissance writers. The Greeks called those people "heroes"; they didn't need the divine-nature issue spelled out for them, because almost all the heroes of myth had cultic status.
  
  The "almost" implication may, perhaps, be viewed as insulting. A lot of stupid manga translators render the Japanese equivalent of "demihuman", ajin, as "subhuman" (the "A", 亜, means "second, next, after"...also "Asia")—it's probably related to that "subspecies" thing—and "demigods" are less than full gods. So how about "perihumans"? "Peri-" just means "close to, around", no direction specified; the Japanese equivalent would be "kinjin" or "konjin", written 近人 (unfortunately that is also the Chinese for "neighbor", but given the Japanese for "daughter" means "mother" in Chinese, and "OK" means "man of honor", I don't think we're setting any dangerous precedents here).
• I realized, Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones is just an unusual lag-time on mid-90s Darker and Edgier. The first book came out the year before Spawn got a live action movie and the same year that Rob Liefeld was hired to "re-envision" a number of iconic Marvel heroes, the year after the first Sin City trade came out, and during Mark Millar's run on Swamp Thing.
  
  So plainly, the pay-cable miniseries was not the way to go—though admittedly pay-cable soft-porn was a big 90s thing. But to truly capture the spirit of Martin's opus (it's really more a Bill the Cat), it should be a graphic novel from Image Comics (or Liefeld's other label, Awesome Comics, no really), written by Millar and drawn by Liefeld. Todd MacFarlane could make the action figures.
• Saw the new Judge Dredd movie. It is much more like the comics, but that is not a point in its favor. Except everything and everyone in the comics was 80s-90s Comic Book Punk, a design movement also seen in Lobo, Dark Knight Returns, and Tank Girl. The movie? Only the Judges are not simply wearing our clothes, using our appliances, and driving our cars. And given even the Judges just wear the helmet, gun, and badge from the comics over off-the-rack biker safety-gear, it seems like the production designer (I checked, they actually did have one, Mark Digby) should've had a lot of free time to design future stuff. They also pretty much just took Phoenix or LA and Photoshopped a few slightly bigger buildings here and there. Uh...this, you should really have just blindly copied the comics on. Because Mega-City One is a claustrophobic urban hell where the ground is more or less invisible from where most of the action happens—your version is less claustrophobic than modern New York. The Stallone version actually did it pretty good. Or Coruscant in Star Wars.
  
  Also, the only reason to make a movie that graphically violent is if you think it's going to impress the eighth graders, maybe get them to let you sit with them at the big-kid table. And if you must have extremely detailed shots of people being blown apart, it might behoove you to study the differences between humans and nematodes. I refer to the fact that people have bones—even if you reduce someone to the consistency of peanut butter, it's going to be crunchy-style. (Also, Slo-Mo was basically Red Eye (or Bloody Eye), from the very first episode of Cowboy Bebop, and, given its particular neurologial effects, it should not be primarily a recreational drug but a performance-enhancing one, and thus could've made for a much better final confrontation.)
• I wonder if I should actually have a paragraph explaining that the translators in my books combine rules-based with statistical corpus-analysis? We can't do that yet—checking our rules against a corpus or our statistical against rules—because of hardware constraints, but 24th century technology is just a bit more capable.
  
  Google Translate uses a statistical algorithm rather than rules-based, and while rules-based breaks down with long sentences, Google Translate generally can't even do a single, one-clause Chinese or Japanese sentence without spitting out gibberish. Half the time when it does Chinese, it would've done better with a literal word-for-word translation—many English-based creoles (Jamaican Patois, for instance) work almost exactly like literally-translated Chinese, and most English speakers have only occasional difficulties understanding those when they're not spelled phonetically.
  
  When your translator's algorithm yields a worse result than literal word-for-word, your algorithm is broken. Sorry.
• I was thinking about the fact that ideas are not bound by the limits of material commodities. Analyzed in those terms, the "marketplace of ideas" (to use a phrase that should be banned) is roughly a post-scarcity economy. And that made me realize why post-scarcity economies don't and can't actually exist, and why so many of the people who think they could also fall for the Glazier's Fallacy. The issue is opportunity costs. Even ideas have those, in a way: if you think one thing is true, you can no longer think that of its contradictions. If you fix broken windows, that's time you can't use making new windows.
  
  Of course, most of the idiots who prattle about post-scarcity economies also think immortality is achievable through technology. The less stupid of them think it will be by mind-uploading, and I've talked about the problems with that. The more stupid think it can be achieved by medicine, only for some reason they always imagine it as a one-time deal, rather than perpetually needing to re-apply (probably quite invasive) anti-aging treatments. Think vampires, not Olympian gods—"You'll never grow old, Michael, and you'll never die. But you must feed ." Just like how, though cars and planes have essentially ended food-scarcity (except in places with Communist or nonexistent governments), once-worthless petroleum is now the foundation of entire national economies. Every elimination of scarcity brings a new scarcity, connected to the means by which the old one was eliminated.
• I have elsewhere talked about "alpha males", which properly means "married men with children", but I haven't mentioned "beta males". You know what's funny about it? In 9/10 of your interactions, the most dominant person is the beta, and cannot aspire to anything higher. A beta, in a wolf-pack (where the idea comes from) is the eldest or otherwise most dominant child (beta males are eldest sons, beta females eldest daughters). It's usually an adult from a previous litter of the alpha pair. It tends to its younger siblings, and gets to eat before they do.
  
  Now, as I've said, "society" is just a peace-treaty between families not to kill each other over territory. This peace is maintained by treating unrelated conspecifics, who are not being sought as mates, as kin. And since in the vast majority of such interactions, nobody stands to you as a father or a child, the only relationship is siblings (again, "spirit of brotherhood" is entirely accurate). The beta is the most dominant sibling, so properly, a person who dominates socially without becoming a father figure should not be called an alpha (fe)male, but a beta.
  
  Interestingly, the Chinese word for "Mister", that gives us "sensei" in Japanese, literally means "eldest brother".
• On the subject of "put some damn work into your xenobiology", have you seen the more recent reconstructions of pterosaurs? The main length of their forelegs (which were only wings when they took off, which they apparently did by jumping) was their metacarpals! Seriously, they have a fairly short upper arm, then a short forearm, and then the bones of their hands make up at least the same length as the previous two joints combined.
  
  This, of course, looks freakish, like their forelimbs are backwards dog-legs with the toes on backwards. The load-bearing part of their foreleg was just the first three fingers (the fourth being the one that supports the wing), and they had a weird little bone that might be a modified hand- or wrist-bone or might be something pterosaurs evolved all on their own, probably with help from shoggoths. The weird thing is, while their wrists were so freaky long? Their hind feet were plantigrade. Lovecraftian giraffe-crocodile in the front, black bear in the back, like some twisted walking mullet.
  
  The reason this is important, of course, is we never thought an animal would use its metacarpals the way dogs use their metatarsals. Think of possible modifications to the basic "four limbs, head full of sensory-organs" that's very likely for alien life, at least when designing alien animals if not for designing aliens themselves.
• But hey, what about, say, trilateral or pentilateral or n-lateral symmetries, for aliens? I confess to being doubtful. A very few animals, almost none of them with anything you'd really call a brain, and some plants, have that kind of rotational symmetry.
  
  Pretty much nothing but cnidarians, things we used to think were the same as cnidarians, and echinoderms has rotational symmetry, and the echinoderms have bilateral as larvae. I think it might have to do with gravity; "up" and "down" are the same for every animal on the planet, and most echinoderms, cnidarians, and ctenophores, like plants, largely orient toward up and down motion (think how jellyfish or sea cucumbers move). Other animals move forward and back, instead, but still inside a gravity well, so four of their dimensions are determined for them, hence bilateral symmetry. Maybe it's a rule that organisms are symmetrical only across an axis that isn't determined for them by motion (gravity is motion)?
  
  And I think if a creature is not going to be a flying mushroom (seriously, think about what jellyfish actually do—and sea anemones aren't even moving mushrooms), it's unlikely to orient toward vertical motion (the orientation of vegetation), and thus unlikely to develop radial symmetry. And if it does have a lifestyle where being shaped like a mushroom is helpful, why's it develop brains?

Finally Fresh Enough

I've looked and looked and looked and could never find video of Herbert West's most quintessential speech, the one from Bride of Re-Animator that I quoted before. Now I did.
I also found out it is possible to include an end-time in an embedded Youtube link.

This, incidentally, is why Jeffrey Combs is the best mad scientist ever.

Stuff and Stuff IV

Material culture thoughts, mostly fictional/speculative.

• I have been misled for years! I had always thought that one tried to catch an opponent's sword with the edge of one's own, but no, you use the flat (possibly the back, if your sword is single-edged). The term in German longsword fighting (the best-documented historic style in Europe) is "mit der Flech", literally "with the flat". I had been inappropriately analogizing from how you block with your arm in unarmed fighting, but steel is much more flexible than bone...except when it's been hardened to create a cutting edge, and then, because "hard = brittle", you can actually create fractures that will spread till your blade shatters.
  
  I guess it just goes to demonstrate the cardinal rule: research, research, research. I need to go have a look through several things I've written (also make it clearer that swordsman don't so much "block" as parry, i.e. deflect, more the sort of thing associated with, say, wihng cheun rather than karate—something I have always known, but been somewhat careless about conveying).
• Why do people act like caseless ammunition is some huge sci-fi innovation? The Franco-Prussian War was fought with caseless ammunition, the Dreyse and Chassepot "needle" rifles (named for the shape of their firing pins), whose cartridges had paper wrappers that burned up when the round was fired. I don't know how well the paper burned, or if it fouled the barrel, but plainly it worked well enough "to be going on with", as the British expression goes.
  
  I imagine, however, that the paper wrapper, which didn't keep the powder dry and could probably get messed up any number of other ways, was just another variable you didn't need on the battlefield, and so they replaced it with brass. Those were also single-shot guns, you couldn't load multiple paper cartridges from a magazine.
• Was thinking of maybe redoing my story so the zledo are using handheld railguns, but there are definite physical limits to that tech. And the metric-patching guns have far more wiggle-room, we know just a skosh more about magnets than we do about using the Casimir effect to create negative-mass exotic matter and patch together stress-energy tensor metrics. Also, I don't think we (or anyone else) are ever gonna have rail-pistols, again, "definite physical limits".
  
  One idea I've seen kicked around is a one- or two-shot anti-tank railgun, basically a purely kinetic recoilless gun. One problem, though: the means by which "recoilless" was achieved for rockets probably aren't available with a railgun. The exhaust, after all, pushes the gun forward as the projectile leaves it, keeping the shooter from being knocked back (which is why it's dangerous to stand behind someone who has one, unless becoming a demonstration of the Kzinti Lesson appeals to you).
• Know what the bike-helmet of the future might well look like? A stocking cap. We're actually making them in limited numbers now, for things like snowboarding. They have a layer of shear-thickening fluid inside them. I would really like to know if the shear-thickening fluid in question, trademarked as "d3o", has to be bright orange, or if they just chose to make it bright orange because they're awesome.
  
  Another idea that I'm definitely going to add to my book (the city where most of the first and third ones take place is at its planet's equator) is refrigerated clothes. The technology we currently only use in pro-sports mascot suits and movie costumes would be quite a boon to the populace of warmer climes—not only for the sake of fashion (and not getting your legs shredded by brush or bit by snakes) but also in terms of ecology. Coolant linings, if properly disposed once they wear out, almost certainly have less ecological impact than air-conditioning a whole office building.
• In the interest of pointing out to people that giant robots are not unrealistic (though their portrayal usually is), consider the following. Titanium alloy as used in armor plating is much less dense than steel, 4.45 g/cm³ to dense steel's 8.05. A known walking robot like Asimo is 48 kg and 1.3 m tall (a human as small as Asimo would weigh 30 kg, an Asimo the size of a human would weigh 165 kg). If, for simplicity's sake, we assume that all of Asimo except the battery (6 kg) is made of automotive magnesium alloy, density 1.8 g/cm³, then replacing it all with armor-grade titanium gives us an Asimo massing 103.8 kg. Making that 10 meters tall would give a mass 455 times greater ((10/1.3)³), which comes to 47.26 megagrams, the same mass as an M60 Patton tank.
  
  Of course, no actual military hardware is made entirely of armor; even most tanks are made, in many of their components, of the aforementioned automotive magnesium alloy, with only a relatively thin shell of armor. It's entirely realistic for a mecha to be 10 meters tall and mass 25-30 tons. Given that automotive alloy is only 70% denser than a human body (1.06 g/cm³), it may well be more realistic to model a walking robot as a man in a suit of armor. A human being averages 70 kg and 1.73 meters tall; a man made of automotive alloy would mass 119 kg. A suit of full plate armor made of titanium alloy would mass 11 kg (steel armor is 20 kg), bringing an armored magnesium man's mass to 130 kg. Making him 10 meters tall increases his mass 193 times, to 25.11 megagrams, the mass of a Bradley (which is a light-to-medium tank in everything but treads and lacking a big main cannon).
• So...a bunch of people think we're going to 3D-print our clothes in the future. I doubt it, since 3D-printers are never going to be "one in every household" affairs, any more than laser-etchers or lathes are, and there is more to fashion than "personal expression" (actually, "personal expression" is virtually nonexistent in fashion, the only thing fashion generally "expresses" is in-group identification). Remember how, parallel with electronic books, we were all going to get paper books printed to-order at bookstores? Yeah, that didn't happen either.
  
  Which is not to say no garments will come out of 3D printers. Custom clothes will probably expand well outside their current tiny market share, being so much simpler now. A certain amount of self-indulgence is probably likely at some point—all of society now being in the position of aristocrats with tailors on retainer. We may be looking forward to fashion-movements as weird as the ones that France had just after the Terror, like the Muscadins and the Incroyables, only probably without the political element.
  
  Also? We might print underwear, or more to the point bras—I have two sisters, do you my fellow dudes know what a hassle bras are? Apparently they are sized on somewhat the same basis as Eastern Bloc computer parts, only without the uniformity, and even the alleged authorities disagree with each other over how much to round a given measurement ("nearest inch? or two inches?" being apparently a hotly debated point). Plus manufacturers appear not to believe that certain size combinations exist, much like how in my youth I could never find pants that were long enough that weren't too loose at the waist.
• This article pretty much speaks for itself, and is extremely interesting. I know I unconsciously incorporated most of that "gestural vocabulary" when my characters interact with volumetric displays—even the alien ones. I'm a little ashamed of myself for not having consciously designed a gestural interface, but then again I probably would've gone with most of the same ideas anyway. I mean, how is an alien going to dismiss something, if he's using his hands (or hand-analogues)? Well, he's going to wave it off, dogs understand that gesture.
  
  Of course, when people complain that aliens have the same gestures as humans, it's almost completely beside the point to ask them if they know that a particular gesture is only found in a particular culture, or is unique to humans. Of course they don't, learning about other cultures and animal behavior is hard, and sometimes involves discovering that some things are universal. It's much easier to congratulate themselves on "knowing" that everything about their culture is only found in their culture, and everyone else's culture is completely different. That's why to this day nobody from Europe has even been able to gesticulate his meaning to a Korean, Zulu, or Zuñi, nor vice-versa, let alone actually learn each other's languages. Right?
• It looks like we're not going to be getting away from silicon as an information-storage material any time soon. Mostly because the next gen of optical storage, probably never be replaced, involves laser-etching nanostructural changes into quartz. And quartz, as we all know, is silicon dioxide (little pieces of it are called "sand").
  
  I kinda want to stab every single journalist who reported on this, as well as whoever decided to call it "superman memory crystal". A lot of stabbing to get through, I realize. But dammit, it's made of quartz, that doesn't mean it looks like a freaking trigonal crystal, so why did every single media outlet (and again, seemingly the scientists themselves) go out of their way to make the public picture the Fortress of Freaking Solitude?
  
  Besides, everyone knows that's Kryptonian sunstone, not quartz.

Family Resemblance?

So I was reading bioethics blogs, trying to jumpstart the creative process (I needed to revise a bioethics issue in one of my SF books), and I came across a quote.

Every human being should have not only that right but the passionate duty to reach out with all his or her strength to help others, even if it involves such controversial technology as cloning. If that means playing God, then it is playing God in a good way.
—Michael West, Ph.D., Advanced Cell Technologies; therapeutic cloning advocate

I'm guessing this is a scion of the Arkham Wests? Is his PhD from Miskatonic?

Blasphemy? Before what? God? A God repulsed by the miserable humanity He created in His own image? I will not be shackled by the failures of your God. The only blasphemy is to wallow in insignificance. I have taken the refuse of your God's failures and I have triumphed. There! THERE is my creation!
—Herbert West, Bride of Reanimator

(Unnamed scifi thoughts post)

Self-explanatory really.

• Because I read a lot of speculative fiction, with other species in it, I keep seeing people use "subspecies" to mean "inferior species". And seriously, where the hell would you get the idea that's what it means? Do you also think "subdivision" is a euphemism for "ghetto"? Do you think a "subcommittee" is where they stick the bureaucrats they don't like, with leaky roofs and old equipment in its meeting rooms?
  
  I realize that prepositional idioms are weird, but nobody not exerting deliberate effort to be offended would make this error. If you think "he's under you" and "he's beneath you" are the same thing...then you have been trained to treat synonyms as entirely interchangeable in all circumstances! A vile habit inculcated by thesauruses—devil's catechisms!
  
  ...Sorry, got a bit excited there, I realized the root of the problem as I was writing about it. Thesauruses, ancient enemy of man, once again you sow misery wherever you go.
• There appears to be universal agreement among science fiction bloggers that science fiction requires adherence to the "Enlightenment" worldview. Very often they speak of the Enlightenment as inventing the idea of "modern progress", whereas every civilization before it had looked back to a Golden Age in the past. Leftists see in the Enlightenment the beginnings of their own egalitarianism; Libertarians locate the ideal of limited government in its thought.
  
  But...some of us have actually learned history. The Enlightenment was just the second (terminal) phase of Renaissance Classicism; all of its thinkers looked back to a Golden Age, either in the Classical era or in some imaginary prehistory of the "Noble Savage". It was the age of political absolutism, its most quintessential figures being aspiring utopian dictators like Rousseau and Voltaire or cynical despots like Frederick II von Hohenzollern and Joseph II von Hapsburg. It was also the age of the blood-and-soil nation-state, when minority languages were systematically denigrated, sometimes (as in Ireland and many Native Americans) almost to the point of eradication, and when the central government's culture was imposed on all its subjects by compulsory education.
  
  Of course, given that everyone who talks this way is treating the Enlightenment as a Golden Age, in direct contradiction of what they claim is the whole point of the Enlightenment, it seems unlikely they'll notice a few measly contradictory facts. (Another of the facts they will ignore is that "modern" and "progress" are both Medieval concepts—the Medievals having much less of the "Golden Age" belief than the Enlightenment, since all the eras they could look back to were pagan...and they saw man in the unfallen state as inferior to man in the redeemed state, kindly recall that their favorite paradox was "felix pecca Adae", the "fortunate sin of Adam".)
• A lot of soft-SF fans, rightly defensive over their stuff's genre cred, try to say "Oh, well, economics and sociology and anthropology are sciences too!" Well and good, quite true...now can I trouble you to point me to a single work of soft science fiction that actually incorporates them?
  
  Seriously, the vast majority of soft science fiction is based on the unexamined orthodoxies of some political theory. Most of the time it's leftist—socialist, post-colonial, feminist, etc.—but sometimes it's Libertarian. I cannot think of any soft science fiction that is actually based on the "soft" sciences themselves, certainly never without a heavy Lysenkoist admixture.
• I have said elsewhere that most of the complaining about cliches is actually substituting "have I seen this before?" (a very easy question to answer) for "is this worth a tinker's damn?" (much more complex). And I stand by it, because there is not a single "cliche" that isn't one for a reason, you can even do fantasy prophecies and Chosen Ones well (hint, study the history of fatalism).
  
  But for some reason, a lot of the things people say are cliches, are no more cliche than "things fall down instead of sideways" ("down" is "the direction that things fall", sorry). This seems to be more of a problem in science fiction—I've gone over how aliens are actually fairly likely to have endoskeletons, four limbs, and heads that have all their sensory organs on them, and are going to have emotions and instincts comparable to ours; and how every attempt to do something else in science fiction has pretty much resulted in reinventing the wheel, only going with an octagon instead of a circle.
  
  I just read a blog where a person complains about rocket ships being unrealistic, because we now do everything virtually. Now, this was not a science fiction blog, this was one of the stinking mundanes, but can you actually get to the age of majority in this society and not know about the light-speed limit, and the massive scale of space? Mars is four minutes away at its closest point, for radio signals. The nearest star is four years. There is no way to do anything in space-travel "virtually" without actually schlepping to the place where you want to do it.
• It occurs to me to wonder if, perhaps, some things are obscured by our limited perspective. This is occasioned by people praising the astronomical alignment of Aztec and Mayan sites—which alignments are also features of advanced Neolithic sites in the Old World, e.g. Stonehenge. The people of Neolithic Eurasia also built great megalithic sites, some of them comparable to to Mayan or Aztec ones (Göbekli Tepe, for example), and also lacked the wheel. It could well be, in other words, that those cultures had astronomy (and perhaps even math) as advanced as that of the Maya or Aztecs, and simply abandoned it when they developed algorithmic math and the wheel. Possibly the ritual life that was centered on sites like Stonehenge and Göbekli Tepe was rendered obsolete by new cults brought in with the increased trade that wagons made possible, or maybe the cults themselves decayed since they could ship in food when the crops were bad.
  
  Most young people now are much worse at math than the generation immediately preceding the invention of calculators. As a new technology (and algorithms are a technology) comes in, it may make skills associated with the old one atrophy; nobody nowadays is capable of making even the most routine item of Neolithic flint cutlery, and you don't know much about caring for horses, now do you? People in the 40s and 50s wrote science fiction about future generations that were illiterate, because everything was recorded—I want to say they were wrong, because reading things is so much easier, but the number of people who seem to prefer videos to transcripts suggests I might be in a (sane) minority on that. Nevertheless, think about what skills a society may abandon as its technology changes. Also, the fact that we cannot see the Neolithic origins of civilization in the Old World (which should objectively be called that because it is 5 times the age of the New World, in terms of human habitation) suggests boundless possibilities to any science fiction writer worth his salt.
• One with a taste for social pathology might find an interesting subject in the endless, wearisome provinciality of the token-mongering PCniks. Would you believe their actual objection to the ethnic mix of Star Trek casts is that there's only ever one black person and one Asian? Rather than, what should offend far more, that everyone is an American? Sulu's from Hawaii, Harry Kim is from San Francisco, Hoshi Sato is from...California, I think...can anyone writing Star Trek find "Asia" on a map? All the white people except Chekov, O'Brien, and Picard are from America. The black people are uniformly African-American, except in the first series, which had both Uhura and Doctor Mbenga.
  
  Also? There's a whole continent that is completely ignored: where the hell is Latin America in Star Trek? For that matter, India? Southeast Asia? The only person whose ethnicity isn't "Anglo as hell" is the doctor in DS9, who's Levantine of some description (Syrian, I want to say?). Voyager had two Hispanic actors, but one of them plays a "half-Klingon" (treated as full), and the other is their offensive television Indian, Chakotay, and the only time we remember he's Native is when there's some kind of "vision quest" no Pacific Northwest culture has—and I'm pretty sure they don't do facial tattooing, either, that's Sioux women.
  
  While we're on the subject, "uhuru" is the Swahili word for "freedom", I don't know if it's ever used as a girl's name but if it were it wouldn't end in "a", can we maybe not impose a Western European naming pattern on a totally unrelated language? (That one doesn't even go for Greek or Sanskrit, "systema" and "chandra" are both masculine nouns.) "Hoshi" is seldom used as a girl's name on its own—Japanese names are usually two kanji, that's only one, and the single-kanji ones almost always have three syllables. That kanji also has much more common name-readings, like "Akari" and "Kirara" (the latter literally means "twinkly", but it's written with the kanji for "star"). Don't even get me started on "Sulu", which (leaving the "L does not exist" issue to one side) is like naming a Mexican character "Hacer".
• Finally, my brother and I were re-watching Farscape, and I realized, the "vaguely-Eastern female vocals = space" thing, visible in things like Halo and BSG and a bajillion other things, starts with that show.

De fabularum mirabilium II

Fantasy thoughts.

• This article, about nebulously defined magic systems, really doesn't cover any ground TVTropes doesn't cover in the entry on the same topic (well, and also "NewPowersAsThePlotDemands"). One thing both articles mention is that the phrase, and trope-title, "AWizardDidIt" originated with a Simpsons episode with Lucy Lawless in it. The one thing the Mythic Scribes article points out that TVTropes doesn't is that there are lots of gods in Xena, but nary a single wizard.
  
  And it occurred to me, re: "AGodDidIt", it would actually have been a genuinely Simpsons-like gag (nerdiness from an unexpected quarter) to have Lucy Lawless, who was mostly known for looking good in a leather cheerleader outfit, deliver a small lecture about pre-Socratic Greek thought. (They ascribed all events, even human actions, to the capricious whims of the gods.) Of course, that wouldn't have involved a catch-phrase that Browncoats with degrees in (Insert Victim Identity) Studies could immortalize as a trope-title, but still, it would've been more accurate to the show, and just as funny.
• Jackasses like to say, when it's brought up that George Martin writes laughable caricatures on par with Learned Elders of Zion, "Oh, well, maybe medieval wars weren't that bad, but they were pretty brutal, and they were pretty up-close and personal when they got bad". They then often cite things that happened in China, because China had a Middle Ages, just like how Charlemagne ruled Tang Dynasty France, right? Yes I'm thinking of a particular person, they shall remain nameless but it's a pretty common argument (if that's what you want to call it).
  
  Obviously the basic question to ask these halfwits is, "Brutal compared to what imaginary wars where everyone acted the perfect gentleman?" I have quoted, on this blog, the death tolls of the Crusades and Hundred Years War compared to the US Civil War or World War II, or to the wars of Asian "feudalism" (only Japan actually had anything like feudalism, I don't care what Maoist historians try to cram into Marx's timeline). The fact of the matter is that medieval wars stack up favorably with 19th-century "officer and gentleman" wars, which were probably about as nice as wars ever get.
  
  Also, RE: that second part, ask, "Up-close and personal...compared to the half-million women the Soviets alone raped in Poland alone, in the single year 1945? Compared to probably hundreds of thousands of comfort women in East Asia, whose conditions I will not describe because it would involve thinking about them? Compared to the Rape of Nanking?" World War II was the worst war to be a woman in, sorry, despite the fact its combatants enjoyed the best conditions, in terms of provisions and medicine, of all soldiers in all wars up to their time.
• Also point out Japan's Ônin War, which started the Warring States Era and is roughly comparable to the war in Song of Ice and Fire in being a succession dispute that half-destroyed a country—but ask Martin's fans why none of Westeros has been taken over by peasant uprisings or religious militias, as happened to probably a third of Japan's provinces a few years into the Ônin War. Why do you think Oda Nobunaga was so concerned to break the monasteries? I have said it before and I'll say it again, this is why Japan can write dark fantasy: they know exactly what really brutal feudal warlords are like, and their national self-respect hinges on being able to think of them as human beings rather than cackling caricatures.
  
  Speaking of historical models, remember, Martin claims he based Westeros on the War of the Roses. (Stark and Lannister = York and Lancaster, isn't he just a freaking genius?) But, in fact, that makes it even more laughable than if he were trying to caricature medieval war generally (aside from how that war happened in the Renaissance). The War of the Roses was a damn quilting bee, they deliberately kept the battles small in order not to disrupt trade (possibly because they didn't want to do to their own country what they, or their fathers, had just got through doing to France, in the Hundred Years War).
  
  If you are an honest person rather than a bigot-pandering hack caricaturist (see also what I mentioned in that post there about the Apartheid account of the Zulu expansion), you could basically only get a setting like Westeros if you based it on the Basarab clan of Romania. But even then you'd pretty much have to assume that only the things people's enemies said about them were true. For instance, most of the things said about that clan's most famous member, Vlad III Draculea, were spread by Matthias Corvinus of Hungary...who had embezzled money he was supposed to use to fight the Turks, and framed Vlad for it.
• I've re-done my fiction based on a D&D style world, yet again, and this time I'm using the same setting as my campaign. I'm mostly using ideas from New World mythologies for the cosmology, although I'm combining them with some stuff from Japanese legend and old pulp fantasy, too. One thing I need to figure out is how to work the gnomes in; I resent their being excluded from 4th Edition so it'd be hypocritical to do it myself, but I can't figure out how to do them. I actually have an idea relating to the creation myth of the elves that might work—I do know I'm not going to have them be tinker(er)s (which Warcraft got from Dragonlance, which ceded them to Spelljammer), but rather the illusionist-artists from their original appearance (if you have The Complete Book of Gnomes and Halflings, PHBR9, you know giving them bard instead of illusionist as a favored class wasn't such a stretch, though it was a break with three editions of precedent).
  
  One thing I did was make my humans resemble absolutely no real human ethnicities, by the simple expedient of giving them Asian or African shapes and European or Asian/Native American colors. Most humans look Asian, with straight (sometimes wavy) hair and eyes with epicanthic folds—but they have pink-to-olive/swarthy skin; blond, brown, or black hair; and blue, brown, or black eyes (one of the two major ethnicities tends to have lighter hair and eyes but darker skin than the other). An extinct civilization known to most humans simply as "the Ancients" had red hair, green eyes, and ivory, yellowish, or red-brown skin, but facial features and hair-texture resembling sub-Saharan Africans. (Though their civilization is extinct, except for a few enclaves—because no fantasy people ever really goes extinct, we expect the Dwemer back any day now—many of them were absorbed by the other civilizations, who regard round and/or green eyes and red hair as signs of "Ancient" blood.)
• I am fascinated by the people who get into a lather about "race" in fantasy, specifically because they knee-jerk demand token blacks (who must resemble Black Americans rather than anyone in Africa) in every single work. Not only do they set ridiculous, color-obsessed hiring quotas for your cast of characters, but if you base a fantasy culture on actual Sub-Saharan Africa, well that's racist too, just like it's racist to talk about the actual cultures of Native Americans or East Asians rather than the versions of them that hippies fantasize about.
  
  What's really funny is when they do it to non-Western stuff, e.g. a question I've heard from several quarters, "Why isn't Link black?" Now aside from the fact he's not white, he's "mukokuseki" ("countryless style") and has pointed ears, that? Yeah, that's cultural freaking imperialism, right there. Newsflash, you self-righteous honky, you do not get to ask that a work, made on the other side of the planet by people with wholly different ethnic issues from you, cater to your race-politics. Shit, do Russians ask why Marcus Phoenix isn't a Chukchi? Do the Chinese ask why Duke Nukem's not an Uighur?
• You know those people who complain that X fantasy book is full of cliche characters "ripped straight from Tolkien"? Yes, well, sorry, but that complaint is itself a cliche, and more often than not, it's not even true. I just got done reading some hack who said it of Dragonlance. Uh...there are complaints about Dragonlance one could make, it does indeed contain a number of cliches, but "straight from Tolkien"? No. Tell me, infant, which of those two works are you only pretending to have read? I mean, Tanis is a stereotyped indecisive hero vis-à-vis both his love-triangle and his half-breedness (itself a tired cliche), but neither of those ever really happens in Tolkien. Caramon's a dumb bruiser with a heart of gold, Raistlin's a tortured megalomaniac, those are cliches but they're not in Tolkien (compare Saruman). Riverwind and Goldmoon are Television Indians, of which there are very faint traces in Tolkien but nothing this overt. Flint is closest, and he's really nothing like any Tolkien dwarf. Tasslehoff is the epitome of D&D's attempts to distance halflings from Hobbits, and "immune to fear" is just about the last thing you can say 'bout Hobbits. Fizban has nothing in common with Gandalf except a look and being more powerful than he seems, and that trope is older than Tolkien, he got it from the Volsungasaga.
  
  Indeed, those things most typical of Dragonlance are 180° off from Tolkien. The snooty elves are the same half-wit reaction against Tolkien elves that you get 1,728 other places in fantasy by B-grade adolescents. The dragons are, well, D&D freaking dragons, basically, they are themselves and nothing else. And the big thing of the setting, the "balance between Good and Evil" thing? Yeah, well, Tracy Hickman is a Mormon. Mormonism, like Kabala, is a type of Gnosticism that hypostasizes negation (it asserts that evil is a thing in its own right, rather than the lack of goodness) and says that evil—identified in Mormonism with sexuality and the body, in Kabala with self-interest—is necessary to a complete cosmos.
• If you have ever praised Robin Hobb, you probably aren't allowed to criticize even Robert Jordan on the matter of stupid fantasy names. I mean, (Fitz)Chivalry? King Shrewd? Lady Patience? Puritans had names like that because they were as revolutionary-loco as the people who gave us ten-day "decades" in months with names like "Germinal", or five-day workweeks where everyone had different weekends. Most normal societies only have obviously meaningful names about as often as you meet a person named Faith (yes, every Japanese name is meaningful, but you usually have to see the kanji to know what the meaning is). And seriously, "King Shrewd" sounds like they're trying Kirby out against someone other than Dedede.
  
  Personally I think if you're going to be serious about writing fantasy, you should at the very least create naming languages—possibly several of them—so your names will be consistent. Tolkien did it. I think to an extent C. J. Cherryh does it. George Martin doesn't do it...but he does name a character something that, if there are any rules to phonetics at all, can only be pronounced "dænerüs targarü-en" (nothing says "epic fantasy" like making Swedish Chef noises with your lips pursed) and misspell "sir" (perhaps we should all praise his restraint in not going with what was doubtless his first impulse, namely spelling it "syr"?). Also, his villain's name is Jeff, there is no amount of misspelling that will hide the fact he named a fantasy villain Jeff!
• It is bizarre to me that people persist in writing (R. A. Salvatore is a bad one for this) that swordfighting or martial arts that resemble "dancing" are good ones (Artemis Entreri, AKA "Evil Drizzt", is an obvious halfwit caricature of kenjutsu, while Drizzt does Wire Fu With Swords). I know of one martial art that resembles dancing that I'd trust in a real fight, and most people who do that don't actually know how to make it dangerous (the guys who make it look the most like dancing, however, are the ones to watch out for—a mestre's ginga often looks like a little jig, and then he busts your eardrums with the palms of his hands).
  
  Swordfighting, meanwhile, should involve as little wasted motion as possible. A real swordfight should pretty much look like two guys standing and glaring at each other, while holding swords—then they move and somebody dies. You can make it more cinematic by having the first attack get parried, which should segue into a counterattack, and over and over until, again, somebody dies, but there should be no damn spinning. Also, thing to include: a good cut feels like nothing. You swing, you think you missed, pieces of your target fall off. It's sweet.