Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 74

FTL? FTW!

Blogging and travel go hand in hand today, but asakiyume  decided to go really really fast(er than light, that is.  At Apex)

The Saga Kind of Continues

Scrips are all called in; apparently my Doctor has closed his practice and is looking for a group to work for/with, but the office is open and giving me the opportunity to come in and get a data copy of my medical records.  So, yeah.  Kind of a pain in the ass, but as little a pain as one can expect from this kind of thing.

Fantasyscapes up at Black Gate

Take a walk to the Crossroads!

The Grimoire - The Left Hand Path

This could be one of my favorite comics ever. 

I want to write a soaring essay about this.  Unpack it.  But it has taken thirteen attempts and counting to get this much, and I think I have to let it go for the time being.  I feel as though the skin around my brain is hard rubber and it's squeezing.  I think I want to own that for a while.  Let's just say, I side with the mouse, but I do feel for the frog, and I have been both many, many times.  It's easy to offer concern and support that is more effective and genuine than what the frog offers.  It's hard to offer it in such a way that it is not meant to be transactional - to communicate that you're offering it without expectation that it must make the recipient better.  It's really fucking difficult to leave someone alone when you think they may need it, and it's almost fucking impossible to know when those times actually are.

But that isn't what I wanted to talk about, actually.  Given the title and the icon, I had a different thing in mind.  Something that I have kicked around my head in one form or another for a couple of years, and, maybe, this time, I can get it out.


Nope.  Maybe some other time.

I Ran into Mr. Jimmy, and Man, He Looked Pretty Ill

So my pharmacy is willing to hook me up with the meds which are not controlled substances.  Controlled substances being only "use as needed," I can afford to wait a little longer on those.

cucumberseed @ 2011-02-22T16:52:00

It appears that my doctor's office is closed.  Indefinitely.

Things I Need to Remember

Everything looks like shit at 2 o'clock. 
Especially everything I write. 
Also, everything looks like shit when my sinuses are hurting so bad it makes my eyes water. 
Do not write after lunch.

Run Blogging

It's not on RunKeeper, because it barely counts.  Maybe 3/4 mile before stopping then hundred yards at a time on to 10 for another mile. 

Not What They Seem

Returning home last night, I saw an owl swoop in front of my car and come to rest on the lines in front of my house.  I believe it was an Eastern Screech Owl (megascops asio);and a fierce little thing.  It sat on the line in front of my house and we spoke for a bit, though the owl did swear me to secrecy on the particulars. 

I've never seen a living owl before; I grew up in a house that had a mightily vocal great horned owl (bubo virginianus) as a neighbor, but we never met in person.

Rated M for Mature

It's a joke, really.  One with which the gamer in your life is undoubtedly well acquainted.  The M rating on video games in the states is almost always a marker of middle school level titillation in the form of, well, tits.  And blood, sure, lots and lots of blood, usually.  Sometimes the two are combined if you're really edgy, and that's pretty much the deal.  Not at all sophisticated, not terribly interesting; the bloody kill scenes get very old very quickly and pixiliated breasts are primarily interesting to those who haven't interacted with flesh and blood breasts, who would like to and haven't quite cottoned to the fact that they are appendages to a flesh and blood human being.  Not really mature in any sense of the word.

But then, the rating system is not meant for the games themselves; the rating is meant for the audience.  And the game, near as I can tell, is not meant for the audience for which it's rated.  Or, at least, the last M rated game I played had a sequence where a naked pixie girl hovered in the center of the screen and did semi-suggestive stretches while you did a puzzle sequence.  A really poorly designed puzzle sequence that had precisely fuck all to do with the rest of the game, so I surmise that the puzzle was there specifically to showcase naked pixie girl, and that the people who made the most recent Castlevania think I am a drooling fucking troglodyte whose limbic system responds positively to poorly rendered pandering. 

I don't hold myself up as a paragon of maturity, but it was a little bit insulting, and I haven't played the game since.  Not because I was insulted, but because that level of sloppiness holds true through the five hours I sank into the thing and made it more annoying than fun.  Also, you don't buy Patrick Stewart's time to have him do a Sean Connery impression.  That's insulting.  And he does a lousy Sean Connery.

The whole system is untenable; the ratings claim to require a level of maturity that doesn't view the features that make it require that level of maturity a selling point.  Because you're not selling to the M audience (cue moral panic in 3... 2...).  Then you go an choose to name the game ratings based on the ...I'm not going to say intended, because they are only intended to the extent that liability requires, the recommended audience.  This has the unfortunate unintended consequence of people who are, sadly, not all that bright when it comes to matters of nuance looking at the rating system and thinking that you're calling the game mature.  

By putting the word Mature on a game like Splatterhouse, you give any moral panicker the opportunity grab a copy of the game and say "and this is what they call mature!" 

And now I've gone five paragraphs to get to the thing I really wanted to talk about.  Aren't you glad you took time out of your day to read this?  sartorias  has a post up that references an article (warning, it's Breitbart) that superversive  linked, which is a pretty standard "the fantasy of these kids today is morally and creatively bankrupt and we need more Tolkien and Howard" - on the surface.  It's also laden with so many culture war dogwhistles that it gave me a nosebleed.  Particularly:Now do I think this guy was writing an explicitly white supremacist, tribalist screed disguised as a a grouse about modern fantasy?  Yeah, pretty much.  But if you didn't read it that way, you're not being unsophisticated, too trusting or naive.  See, it's not that simple and it really showcases the beauty of the dog whistle as a tool for multilayer communication.

Unless you know what you're looking for, you are only going to see an article about why the author thinks his sampling of modern fantasy sucks.  You might even agree with some of it.  If you like mythology and you like seeing people go all mythic in fantasy (and I do), you might agree with his thesis - I don't; his sampling and the way he characterized it undercuts his point, though Abercrombie didn't do anything for me.

YOU'RE NOT STUPID OR NAIVE IF YOU MISS THIS.  Seriously.  The dog whistle is pretty fiendishly clever and it's purpose is to say one thing and speak another. 

It's secondary purpose is to make me look like I read too much into things and that I am a raging paranoiac.

(Guilty on both counts, but I'M RIGHT DAMMIT).

If you are religious, you might catch a little religious vibe in there, and wonder when it was the last time you read a hero who exercised moral prowess in addition to martial or social or occult prowess.  And you might be a little nostalgic for it.  And I am, but I'm not blind to the dangers of writing a hero who is right, who knows they are right and who you know is right; that's a dangerous fucking path to walk, and you can tread on people pretty easily and then poof goes your moral prowess and also YOU STEPPED ON PEOPLE.

If you are a culture warrior, you get the tribal markers and know that this is something you need to arm up for and you know why.  Foreigners and heathens and liberals are poisoning the well of imagination with their poisonous poison of nonbelief and political correctness.  Also, some hacks are one upping each other at the played out end of GRIMDARK.  By placing the dog whistles into screeds about how awful some pretty admittedly awful sounding sequences in admittedly awful sounding books (I have not read most of them, he could be seriously mischaracterizing all of the books he mentioned.  I noticed him doing it with Iron Dragon's Daughter.), he can link the two inextricably in his audience's mind without having to make the connection explicit, let alone prove it.  Like taking Grand Theft Auto San Andreas' Hot Coffee mod and shouting "and it's rated M for Mature!"  You don't have to prove anything.  You don't have to posit anything.

If I have to go on record, this is the level at which I think the author is operating.  I would, however be fucking gobsmacked if he wasn't aware of the next level and I would be only frigging gobsmacked if he wasn't taking some deliberate advantage of it.  The real crazies are a powerful market in the world of Conservative media, and it would almost be a crime against capitalism not to take advantage of them.

Then, if you are an active white supremacist, you have your interpretation of Tolkien near and dear to your twisted little heart and you see this guy hit on markers and send signals that you recognize (go google Tolkien + heritage for the love of the gods when you are at home and tell me what you find).  You figure this guy "gets it" that he cares about the things you care about, so you'll read him when he publishes, his numbers go up, the publication's numbers go up, revenues go up. 
Shit, I really didn't want to talk about this, but I figure I better explain what I mean.  I was really angling for the question of "What do you think is 'mature' content as it applies to fantasy and how would you define it."  But instead I am bringing you poor people with me down the rabbit hole.  Okay, we'll save that question for another post.

*That is the specific tribal member/marker of the cultural political force in 21st century politics that calls itself Conservative.