Gormongous

Before the Second World War, most Southern American dialects of English were non-rhotic, and apparently it was considered more prestigious there than rhotic speech. "Nauh see he-uh, suh" in your best Foghorn Leghorn and all that. It's arguable that, beyond the generalized cultural pressure of the New South, most Southerners abandoned non-rhotic speech over the course of the twentieth century because African American Vernacular English had begun to assimilate the white South's non-rhotic tendencies and thereby "spoiled" that prestige. That said, the passage does actually appear to be from a Brit, an M.J. Shields writing to The Economist in 1971, and it acquired the association with Mark Twain when transferred over to the internet.

A recent article written in response to thinkpiece blaming the lack of female characters, especially protagonists, in sci-fi and fantasy on the lack of female authors just floated up on my newsfeed. It's explosive and, honestly, it calls out a problem that's existed in the industry and the fandom since genre fiction really began to be a thing. Even if you leave aside ignoring female-authored works like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, which is ridiculous given their fame and profitability, you're ignoring authors like Ursula K. LeGuin, C.J. Cherryh, Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Anne McCaffery... I could go on forever. As sci-fi and fantasy have been integrated into the mainstream cultural discourse, the fandom's unfortunate tendency to boil the development of those genres into a lineage from Tolkien to Brooks to Jordan to Martin has been ossified into accepted fact. Who cares if Mary Shelley wrote one of (if not the first) sci-fi/fantasy novels? Women haven't put in the sweat equity to deserve roles in adaptations of such works, obviously. It's frustrating and disgusting.

I have an acquaintance who wrote about the types of people whom you meet at a dog park and I've been meaning to share it here for a while.

I am skeptical that "reality doesn't contradict itself" is not an a priori proposition borne of the assumption that reality is entirely defined by comprehensible and ineluctable rules. If your evidence for all paradoxes being semantics is that reality appears to be internally consistent, and your evidence for why reality appears to be internally consistent is that all paradoxes are semantics, I don't really know that I can agree with you, not with counterintuitive things like quantum theory in play.

That is... a hell of a statement, even if we just confine it to philosophical abstracts. Do you have any more to this, or is it just an intuitively felt thing for you?

It's a hard thing to calibrate, because the visible amount has to be enough that it's worthy of consideration but not so much that it makes the contents of the opaque box irrelevant. It'd probably be different from person to person in most cases.

Fair point! I looked at the usage again ("For 'tis the sport, to have the engineer / Hoist with his own petar...") and it does appear that, as a holdover from Middle English, "hoise" is the present tense with "hoist" in the past, much like feel/felt, kneel/knelt, and lose/lost.

I'm not sure that it is, but what is interesting about "hoist" is that it and "heist" are the same word in different English dialects, given different meanings through different usages over time. "Heist" probably meant to lift someone's goods, in the same sense as "shoplift."

Actually, it's the other way around. The original Old French word, erbe, had no initial H when it was borrowed into Middle English in the twelfth century, and the H was added by analogy with the Latin root in the fifteenth century, though it remained mute until prescriptive grammarists in Britain during the nineteenth century campaigned for a voiced H to make English less French and more Latinate. Much like "ain't," dropping the G from "-ing," and virtually every other feature that American English gets "wrong," it's a lexical rule that Britain used for centuries, then changed its mind on and blasted ignorant colonials for continuing to use. Actually, that reminds me that Catullus, a Roman poet who was contemporary with (and a vocal critic of) Julius Caesar, wrote a poem mocking an anonymous acquaintance for putting an H before every word that could take one (Latin seldom voiced an initial H, but the Greek that most educated Romans knew did, so it was a fairly common affectation among the elite). This sort of thing has been a bone of contention for millennia, I guess!

Worth pointing out that both transforming the S to an SH before a stop and dropping the stop entirely are a common linguistic feature from English-speaking communities in the Appalachians that were settled by German-speaking immigrants. My father whose father grew up in central AK has that habit with a few words, as does my friend from central PA.

Not impossible, just difficult. There's a certain feel to these things, but the fact that it's happened for centuries and is quite clearly identified in hindsight suggests that it's not some fool's errand to point to certain combinations of laziness and entitlement as "cultural appropriation."

You are correct: white and Western culture has made cultural appropriation such a matter of business as usual that it's difficult to tell at a glance whether it's happening or not. The idea, I believe, is to be educated about the dynamic and to engage on it when the upshot is clear. That said, I think that knowing and caring enough about the Shinsengumi enough to wear an accurate costume and deliver impromptu lectures on them is, at worst, on the very low end of appropriation. After all, education and advocacy are the greatest bulwarks against appropriation!

I've had an article from NPR bookmarked on my phone for the better part of a month because I think that it explains cultural appropriation better than almost any mainstream outlet has. From the premise of blasting an extremely ignorant op-ed from the New York Times that basically conflated cultural appropriation (members of the mainstream or dominant culture taking a significant cultural work or idea from an oppressed minority without paying respect or giving credit) with cultural exchange and then wrung its hands about all the cuisine and rock music that wouldn't exist if cultures weren't allowed to borrow from each other, Bradford's article for NPR gives its answer clearly and definitively by framing it through the NYT article's final question about writing a character from another culture for a novel: if one is unable, unwilling, or uninterested in doing the research for such a character, engaging in a dialogue with the real-life people whom the character owes its identity, and giving credit to those people in subsequent discussions of the work, it's cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation is refusing to learn the context of other cultures' practices and own that context because you know you don't have to, as a white person, whether that's stealing minority music because those artists are not well-known, wearing dreads with no idea about their spiritual meaning, or running a restaurant that serves ethnic cuisine but doesn't give back either in financial terms or in cultural advocacy. I like it a lot.

It craps itself on certain configs, for some reason. Every patch has optimizations and it's slowly getting faster and more stable. It makes my computer run red-hot but that's all, which works for me in the end!

I finished the third season. Overall, I liked it, especially the female performances, although I think that it's weaker as a complete work than, say, the second or even the first season.

Sometimes the pervasive references to the Coens' visual and literary touches in the Fargo TV show wear thin, but I also just really like how clearly obsessed with Clive in A Serious Man saying that something is "mere surmise" the writers of the third season have been. The exact phrase, or the similar "mere surmising," has appeared at least four times, and characters in general seem much more likely to say "surmise" than "guess" or "think." It's that odd intersection between cod-pretentious and actually quite vivid and clever that makes Fargo enjoyable to me as a show.

I'm tentatively withdrawing my endorsement of The Kind Rewind. Their first half-dozen episodes, on Buffy, ET, and Cheers, were all good, if a little shaky and too prone to defending their feelings of nostalgia, but now Travis and Teresa are going through the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which they both profess to be among their favorite shows of all time, and it's... not good. As opposed to Buffy and ET, and to a lesser extent Cheers, where there were good moments and bad moments and they'd talk about what worked and didn't in all of them, every episode of Avatar is gushed over to no end, even when they start out with their harshest criticisms of it being "just fine" or "a solid entry" that "didn't move the needle." If there's something weird or uncomfortable, like Sokka displaying toxic masculinity or Uncle Iroh cops a feel off an unconscious woman, they'll both rush to one of two defusing tactics. Travis' preferred one is to talk about the characters like they're real people with agency who have made the conscious choice to behave in a certain way, and not fictional individuals written by writers who have chosen to make those individuals say and do things out of some artistic intent. Sokka's just immature! Iroh's a bit of a dirty old man! It wouldn't make sense for them to behave other than how they really are. Note, of course, that he didn't really have this problem with Xander in Buffy. Travis made some apologies for Xander, but more because he used to like him so much, as a teen, than because he thinks that Xander is justified in some of his shittier character moments. Meanwhile, Teresa prefers to write off any bad, tone deaf, boring, or uncomfortable moments as a consequence of Avatar being a kid's show. It's perfectly acceptable for children's programs to have actions without consequences or to be intermittently turgid and obvious, kids don't care! You can't have complex or subtle moments, kids will miss them! I don't know, I get loving a show a lot and how difficult that makes cogent criticism of it. The one formal review that I've written of a Mad Men episode was incredibly hard because I love that show to the point that I couldn't help seeing intention and meaning behind even its weakest moments. That said, the fact that the Buffy episodes were so good in their critique, despite Travis' obvious affection for the show, makes the fact that the podcast has broken down into a watery Avatar love-in really hard for me to bear. I don't need a dozen episodes arguing why I should love Avatar, warts and all, especially when it's a spoiler-filled cast that presupposes everyone has already seen Avatar!

I could have sworn that Complete or Redux or one of the total overhaul mods has a pick-and-choose installation mode where you can just do bug fixes, but I'm probably wrong.

I played and enjoyed Call of Pripyat a couple years after wallowing unsuccessfully in Shadows of Chernobyl for a dozen hours. I think it's generally agreed that SoC has the best plot and atmosphere, but CoP has much better (and better codified) gameplay.

Now that the third season of Fargo is done airing, I've been making my way through it and I've been enjoying myself a lot. What the TV iterations of Fargo have argued, with increasing success, is that we live in a universe that appears chaotic to us, with our limited perspective, because of all the moving parts interacting in hundreds of thousands of different ways. Each character creates their own partial narrative, to try to make sense of the seeming noise, but the truth (if you can call it the truth) is always bigger. Season 3 is no season 2, which managed to be a dizzying mess of which no one was in control, but it's still very entertaining as a wheels-within-wheels crime drama. Carrie Coon continues to be a revelation, after being the best part of The Leftovers by far, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead is pulling her weight, too. Ewan McGregor has the toughest row to hoe, playing two identical brothers, and he seems to be in over his head a little? Each of the characters is fine on his own as the "dupe" laid out by William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard in the original movie, but together they lack texture. David Thewlis is much better, probably his best stab at milquetoast sinister yet, but he's also responsible for what is probably the least good part of this season? Fargo characters usually get a chance, once or twice in the show, to explain their understanding of the every-growing and changing catastrophe that is the season's plot, usually as a proxy for explaining their worldview, but this latest season has a lot more of this than either of the two previous ones. I've watched five episodes, half the show, and Thewlis has had at least three protracted soliloquies about the power of money in a cold, chaotic, and uncaring universe. It's wearing out his character with too much talk. Hope it improves! Although it's already really good, so who can say.

I remember playing the demo and then watching the friend playing the full game, and the demo seems to have been a spiced-up version of the first hours of the game, up until shortly after the first gravity-flipping puzzle. As I understand it, the big problem is mostly just that it stops introducing new elements or even surprising ways to use existing elements, and is way too long for not doing that. Still, yeah, that atmosphere! Even as hokey as your character's development is presented, it's weirdly cool to have a First Nations dude as a video game protagonist in 2006.

I mean, like Jenna said, everything is pretty much guesswork all the time, if you think about it. We made up these things called numbers and then made up laws about how they interact. What's the point of physics when we're just going to discover that there's a more fundamental level of reality where none of our findings apply? In all seriousness, there is going to be some conjecture in the social sciences, especially history, but that doesn't mean that there aren't best practices that have come about through rigorous and peer-reviewed methodologies. I've spent a big chunk of my adult life learning how to read diverse sources, ascertain and account for biases, and synthesize narratives of human experience that are authentic to often-alien mindsets of past peoples. Sure, coming up with a definitive and authoritative set of conclusions in historical research is difficult to the point of practical impossibility, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted and those attempts don't have value. Math isn't useless because there are unsolvable theorems and paradoxes out there. And yeah, on a separate note, the challenges for twentieth-century historiography are largely a matter of temporal proximity, source proliferation, and the ubiquity of living memory as one avenue for those sources, as well as the fact that most of its actors still exist and have an interest in the resultant narrative. When you work in a field where the principal epistemological challenge is that your data is unreproducible and unfalsifiable, not to mention that it's hard to say exactly what happened a hundred years ago when you can't remember when and what you ate for lunch on the first Thursday of last month, there are going to be compromises, but the answer is a research process that accounts for and integrates compromise into its conclusions. If guesswork is an absence of absolute certainty, then history is inarguably guesswork, but given the nature of reality, I don't think that being absent of absolute certainty is a meaningful critique, at least not of an entire field. Incidentally, this is why I dislike physicists, ornithologists, neurologists, etc. coming at history from the outside, with no professional training on how to handle historical sources, and trying to "solve" the big questions in the field by applying data-driven, agency-agnostic models that tend to try and cancel out the "noise" of human experience. Human experience, especially in aggregate via society and culture, is possibly the most complex subject to exist, and the problems of uncertainty and ambiguity are inherent to it, not a problem of improper methodology. I've said as much many times, usually whenever I come across any "Big History" or "Big Data" scholarship.

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade, but... yeah, I don't like Jared Diamond. He's basically the Malcolm Gladwell of history. Guns, Germs, and Steel is probably his least problematic work, in terms of being composed of geographic/environmental/demographic "just so" stories, but it's the prototype for Diamond taking a result (the West rapidly became the dominant political and economic culture in the world over the course of a handful of centuries) and working backwards to find a plausible cause (people are people, so geographic and climatological factors must have differentiated the West from East Asia or South Asia or the Near and Middle East), then tracking down historical anecdotes that "prove" the correlative relationship to be causal (and disparaging those anecdotes that don't as chance or noise or "the exception that proves the rule"). At the end of the day, particularly in his more recent works, Diamond has fallen into a fairly deep rut of monocausotaxophilia (just-one-explanation-for-everything-itis) that tends to deny human agency in favor of environmental determinism, an environmental determinism that have miraculously favored the West in almost all respects, and that's no good, especially when many early modern and modern societies have "failed" as much because they have been colonized and brutalized by the West as because they didn't have Diamond's magical combination of maximal coastline, latitudinal orientation, labor-capable domestic fauna, and so on. As Tycho says, he's a common punching bag on /r/AskHistorians and /r/badhistory, with his "if the research doesn't fit with 'common sense' then the research is wrong" article being the perennial favorite (although he's said enough dumb shit that they've devoted an entire page of their wiki to him). In my experience, the best work to read to explode Diamond's arguments, as well as a lot of other arguments from pop-history worthies, is the late J.M. Blaut's Eight Eurocentric Historians, a collection of essays showing that the vast majority of assumptions about how nations of the past became powerful are based on, at best, lazy thinking legitimizing the status quo and, at worst, lightly coded white supremacy. It's economical, blunt, and totally explosive in its arguments (as is the first volume in the two-volume "trilogy" that was cut short by Blaut's death). I can't recommend it enough. Anyway, the good that I've found in Jared Diamond is that he encourages you to think about history in terms of environmental factors as much as human factors. Just be careful about placing one over the other, because a large number of the things that he states as fact have been disproven by research from actual historians (whom Diamond's fans often attack as "the establishment" just looking to protect itself, since Diamond is apparently an "outsider" with his physiology/ecology/geography training), sometimes years or decades before Diamond even started writing. Treat his works skeptically as thought exercises for how history might be, not how history is, and you should be find. EDIT: Hah, looking through old /r/badhistory threads, this one applying Diamond's arguments to wigs instead of geography is pretty good, too.

The thing that's really shocked me about it is that it's an open-world game that doesn't feel too big or unmanageable, despite being huge and having hundreds of quests and points of interest. You really just ride around to stuff that's your level on your horse, which is a marvelously hands-off experience, and people will just come up to you with quests or you'll check a notice board when you pass through town. It's really hard to bite off more than you can chew or stress yourself out with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Besides a good map presentation and (from what I understand, post-release design choice of) an inventory system that doesn't seem interested in punishing you for hoarding lots of junk, I'm not even completely sure what makes it so good... but it is!

I guess I'll spoil a little of Turn A Gundam in the hopes of advancing this conversation? It's only a mid-level plot twist in the first dozen episodes or so. Also, as I mentioned in our podcast that's going up on Monday, I like the gentle alternation between visceral-feeling robot combat and fairly intricate political drama. Apparently that's a hallmark of the Gundam franchise? It makes me want to watch more. I feel like War in the Pocket was a bad intro to the whole thing because it's really restricted to a child's point of view. EDIT: Oh, also, the other Moon Race factions, besides Dianna Counter, are Agrippa Maintainer and Ghingham Fleet. They're all great, it's that really charming way that Japanese shows use English "names."