Zephyr Dear

Kirk writes, "This weekend we upgraded my 14-year-old son's laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 10. Today I got a creepy-ass email from Microsoft titled 'Weekly activity report for [my kid]', including which websites he's visited, how many hours per day he's used it, and how many minutes he used each of his favorite apps."

I don't want this. I have no desire to spy on my boy. I fixed it by going into my Microsoft account's website, hitting the "Family" section, then turning off "Email weekly reports to me" and "Activity reporting".

OK, I admit that the timing might be coincidental but that would be one hell of a coincidence. I've never seen anything like this until we upgraded to Windows 10, and then I got the spy report the following business day.

A message to young readers: if you have Windows 10 now, your parents might be getting the same kind of report I did. Don't assume your own computer has your back.

spacetwinks:

honestly when the manga bubble was at its peak in america was a really fucked time in comics publishing, especially among (but not limited to) the big 2, where they were simultaneously dismissive as hell of manga but desperately wanted all these readers who were coming out of nowhere. and they just… didn’t understand it! refused to understand it! did no research, didn’t talk to anyone. everyone’s reading CLAMP and inu-yasha and bad yaoi manga and all these other things they never could’ve gotten on the american print market and marvel and dc and a whole buncha indies were going “huh? what? what’s the appeal?”

and like you get marvel’s level of engagement with it, where they made the fucking “marvel mangaverse” and hired ben dunn, the guy behind goddamn oldass Ninja High School, to spearhead the whole thing, and of course that didn’t pay off, because it was all rooted in 80s anime shit while everyone else was moving onto new stuff (not to mention, ben dunn’s stuff kinda sucks to begin with, but). they didn’t even keep up with shit getting hot like Gundam Wing dropping on toonami in 2000, going from what’d been a fandom mostly cultivated through bootleg fansubs to something much, much wider in appeal. it was this incredibly cynical thing where they wanted to cash grab but refused to even learn a damn thing about the readership they were trying to get. people buying and reading shojo volumes by the thousands and they kinda didn’t even know what that was? kinda didn’t want to. again, they didn’t wanna learn about the readership, the market.

and once tokyopop fucked everything up and the manga bubble popped, that dismissiveness really kicked into high gear, and you can hear horror stories everywhere of everyone from big ol’ publishers down to the smallest editor or artist in the industry dismissing anything that looked “manga inspired”. mia schwartz had a whole convo on twitter about this, and how a lot of that dismissal specifically happened to women doing art, in or out of the industry, or even just as early as friggin middle or high school art classes, this vast dismissal of manga influences. since manga weren’t flying off the shelves anymore once the market had been flooded, the industry, from marvel to dc to just about everywhere (with rare exceptions, like at dark horse and such - lord knows a lot of the indie comic biz still would have that dismissiveness, to outside voices in general) felt more assured in just going “none of that, none of that, that won’t work”. you’d hear and see artists and writers dismissing manga and manga influences wholesale, in terms of readership, sales, and even artistic value. lots of “everything is the same there”, probably done through a cursory glance of shonen or whatever, but the mind just springs to “let’s see you motherfuckers try and make and sell a comic about football”.

and the real motherfucker of it is how with that kind of dismissal, they keep pushing out not only vast potential readership, but also creators themselves, people who now grew up on oldass scanlations of just about everything and go “no, no, that’ll never work”. so it goes straight to webcomics and self-publishing instead, where they can garner their own fanbases and stories which frequently outshine the industry publishing.

i’m no fan of attack on titan, but there was a string of articles pointing out how just about every major comic site was not reporting on and generally ignoring how that thing, once published in the US, was already selling millions of volumes, dwarfing anything the major comics publishers were putting out. and that’s while everyone already could, and probably did, read it for free online! that’s incredible!

and so you get this lumbering dinosaur that 15 years later is still looking at manga and people reading it and going “huh? what? what’s the appeal?” and is still playing catch up to that 2000 bubble in terms of content and genre and just appealing to broader demographics. you get marvel, who, after scoring big wins with diversifying both their character variety and their story styles (Ms. Marvel winning big on a slower, more slice-of-life superheroics tone and pacing), come back to post-Secret Wars announcements that look more and more homogenized. and you still hear the horror stories of people with “manga” influences in their work, mostly women, getting their stuff dismissed out of hand by publishers and creators. and it all ties back together in these really interesting but incredibly frustrating ways. a lot of things that seem minor in their connections to each other having bigger bonds in the mess than you’d think.

you got this big industry, this field, that looks at this massive readership, even after the initial manga bubble pop, and it just goes “i don’t get it” or “it’s all the same” or “they don’t matter” and where you’d think they’d chase endlessly after where the money is, they pretend it doesn’t exist.

the american comic industry/field is really fucked up, and really fucking slow to adjust to a damn thing!

You know reading over this I’m struck by the weirdness of it all from the academic side of things. Comics Theory was founded in the US by Scott McCloud, who wears his manga influence on his sleeve and talks at length in all three of his theory books about the importance of manga for everything from the market itself to the way comics is designed

And yet I almost never see analysis of manga! There’s none in my thesis, certainly–I’m just as guilty of it as anyone else! The flat out best sustained analysis of composition in manga has come from McCloud, from Thierry Groensteen who’s part of the Franco-Belgian comics theory tradition which is about two decades ahead of the American theory tradition god help us, and… people on Tumblr.

I think some of this is reluctance by Americans to get into analysis of comics that they may not be able to read in the original language, which have inevitably been altered for Western consumption, and for my own work I just decided to pretend both Europe and Asia flat out didn’t exist because for goodness sake I only had 100 pages, but like… I have to wonder if part of that is still the stigma that manga and anime have, particularly since the comics theory world still is fixated on a handful of British artists from Vertigo, and sad black and white autobiographical comics.

You know when you look at all the characters that are apparently going to be in Civil War side by side you really realize that… this movie’s gonna be a fucking mess unless the Russos can pull off a straight up miracle.

Granted, I really, really liked their work in Winter Soldier but jeeeeeeeesus

krxs10:

opedope:

krxs10:

Sandra Bland’s toxicology report was just released today, and of course just with the rest of this case, nothing adds up.

Waller County District Attorney Elton Mathis made the disclosure in a text message to attorney Cannon Lambert, who has called the state’s autopsy on the Chicago-area woman defective, Lambert said.

“Looking at the autopsy results and toxicology, it appears she swallowed a large quantity of marijuana or smoked it in the jail,” Mathis said in a text message to Lambert that the attorney provided to Reuters.

The lab reports confirm high amounts of THC found in her blood streams that, according to many experienced toxicologists, would mean she’d have ingested it while in jail, and as recently has 5 hours before her death.

Questions being raised:

• If she had it on her, then why did The Waller County Police Department confirm that they checked her when she arrived and didn’t report finding any type of drug?
  
• How would she have been able to change into her standard jail jumpsuit and still keep the weed on her?
• If she smoked it, how could she have done it without anyone smelling or catching her?
• If she was depressed, as they claim she was, wouldn’t the marijuana have helped to prevent her from committing suicide in the first place? as it is used to help treat people with suicidal tendencies. 

It just isn’t making sense….

#StayWoke

Do any of you know how much a half an ounce of marijuana actually is? One person wouldn’t be able to eat that much in one day on her own, let alone smoke it before/while she was detained. Believe me, if she had ingested that much THC willingly she wouldn’t have been able to talk back to the officer, let alone drive. It’s like they’re not even trying to make sense anymore tbh

For those who don’t understand how much that is let me put it to you this way:

Most people buy a single brownie to get massively baked, and usually they’ll eat it in increments because everyone knows that it takes half an hour to kick in and they’re usually very strong. 

The standard for an entire batch of brownies is an Ounce of weed. Saying she consumed half an Ounce of Marijuana is basically saying that she would have had to consume half an entire BATCH of brownies. 

Still not getting it? How about this. 

An ounce (28.35 grams) typically makes about 60 marijuana cigarettes, or “joints.” But this will, of course, vary depending on the potency of the joint: an ounce could produce as many as 100 joints or as few as 30.

It’s not only extremely unlikely, it’s also impossible seeing as she would have either been extremely sick or unable to smoke 60 fucking blunts in her jail cell, alone, without anyone noticing or any sort of repercussions. It’s fucking ludicrous.

jesus see what I mean with overwhelming power plus overwhelming incompetence?

this is nightmarish

Two women in northwest Georgia are facing child cruelty charges after police officers discovered an 11-year-old boy trapped in a makeshift cage in a bedroom.

The boy was described as a child with “special needs” by police. An 8 year old girl, his sister, also lived in the home. She was routinely kept in a cage of her own.

Stephanie Stone, 34, and Wanda Redfern, 49, were arrested Thursday. The charges against them include first-degree cruelty to children and false imprisonment. Investigators found methamphetamine.

From AP:

The deputy was given permission to enter the home and inside found the 11-year-old boy in a cage made from one twin bed turned over on top of another and with bars on the sides in one bedroom, Ramey said. Zip ties held the cage together and kept the boy from getting out.

“He had about a 2-by-2-foot area that was not encumbered by toys, clothing and other debris,” Ramey said, adding that the child was not able to sit up in the enclosure.

In a second bedroom, the deputy found a makeshift cage made of wood. That cage was empty, but Ramey said investigators had reason to believe the 8-year-old girl was sometimes kept in there.

This being Georgia, the family situation is complex. Stone is two children's mom. Redfern is the fiancée of Stone’s stepfather. A third arrest is possible, and the case remains under investigation today.

Meth. Not even once.

bitterpunktrash:

So this new Stonewall movie also has this weird “coast vs flyover” culture thing going on right? Beyond the fact that it’s blatant white-washing and cis-washing, there’s also this character who is from Kansas (read: religious, backward, rural) to New York (read: urban, progressive, secular).

This is a really popular rich progressive gay trend. It’s why whenever I tell people I’m from Kansas, they always apologize or tell me that I “don’t act like someone from Kansas.” Even after I tell them that I have been threatened more for being queer and trans in California than in Kansas, they still act like I must have “escaped.” So positioning gay and trans liberation as the acceptance of white liberal secularism is obviously an implicit part of a progressive liberal rendition of Stonewall.

But once again, this telling erases the reality. Thinking of two of the women who have been sidelined in this entire mess (Silvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson), both of them were influenced at least somewhat by their religious activity. As far as I can tell, for Rivera this was later in her life, but with Marsha P. Johnson, she has accounts of religious visions. This complication both works against the progressive western gay  =/= religious dichotomy, and also raises the spectre of religious activity medicalized as mental illness.

This secularization of the beginners of gay liberation is just another way that the new movie flattens gay lives for the purposes of progressive white and western liberal sensibilities

In the dozen hours since the end of last night's Republican debate, I've seen a lot of people with very different takes on who did well and how the debate shook out. Nate Cohn has a very sophisticated take at the Times which looks at the very different audiences for debates - particularly the difference between the crowd and the immediate response from viewers and the more complex battle for buy-in from party elites. All good points. He thinks Rubio, Walker, and Kasich were strong and Trump and Bush did poorly. A lot of my shrewder friends think Rubio did well, too.

Read More →

Foxbots to Trump: Are you not a fraud, a cretin and a scoundrel.

Trump: I'm very rich. Fuck yourself. I have no time for your nonsense.

Crowd: Cheers wildly.

I talked a bit about it here, but basically I grew up in an abusive cultish religious environment, and for a long time I passionately hated religion because of that. But everyone has their thing that hurt them. It was easy for me to focus on that one thing and view it as the source of all the world’s evils, when they’re often symptoms of a deeper systemic problem. Getting too hung up on a pet hate can distract from the tangible concerns of survival, and having room in a heart for friends.

It was very hard to cope with the violence of last year, and I spent a long time on the floor in a very different mental place. I thought a lot about how you survive when your narrative has progressed into hadopelagic zones, and those aspects of religion that deal with the body enduring extreme states, like how a person could feel a way that would make them flagellate themselves.

I participated in a study on spiritual women with chronic pain, and one thing I said was how it felt like being a statue in a frozen garden, frost melting down your stone face, these austere and feelingless analogues to flesh and saltwater.

So sometimes I find solace in the aesthetics and moods of religion, especially those related to feminine pain. I’m interested in how really intense pain can lead to religious states (that feeling of breaking through to the other side, like finding sunlight on the bottom of the ocean), or martyrdom as a way of reframing victory for people who are utterly denied conventional victory, or how marginalized genders have historically carved out niches inside religion, or fasting as a means of control for women, or how certain religious practices allow the expression of extreme anguish or ecstasy (speaking in tongues, etc).

9:25 PM: Trump knows how to do this. Always go on offense. Ignore the question. Assertion. Aggression. And Jeb looks terribly weak.

9:27 PM: Every time Trump speaks, you can see the GOP paying a price for years of politics as a fact-free zone.

9:30 PM: I'm not sure Chris Wallace can really beat Donald Trump on this. Is he really going to have the rest of the questions be asking other candidates to say Trump didn't answer his question?

9:39 PM: It may take a bully like Chris Christie to cut a fraud like Rand Paul down to size.

9:41 PM: Cruz is an aggressive, tendentious bullshit artist. But Trump just does it better.

9:43 PM: "A caliphate the size of Indiana."

9:45 PM: Carson unwilling to answer the question because if he does the terrorists will win. Got it.

9:47 PM: So Trump thinks single payer works pretty well in Canada and Scotland and would have worked in a different era (here?), i.e., 2000? But he wants to get rid of state based insurance regulation and also institute something like Obamacare. But Obamacare is a disaster. And yet, answer seems to have gone over pretty well.

9:52 PM: I think what Ben Carson's talking about is just a single tax rate.

literally everything about this description is fucking fascinating to me

masculine = wrong

mercury = yes

air = completely

no comment on thievery but putting it ‘under the tongue for eloquence’ has me reeling

tobermoriansass:

am i depressed because i insist on listening to the wall or do i insist on listening to the wall because i am depressed? - me, always

At least you have really good taste?

(honestly I find that totally bleak music makes me feel better so I think it’s a reasonable coping mechanism)

warrenellis:

Drinking Soylent With The Last Of The California War Boys

There are doubtless a ton of hot takes about Soylent founder Rob Rhinehart’s recent detailed statement about his current lifestyle and philosophy.  Everyone’s done jokes about Soylent, including me, so we’ll leave that to the side.  One summation of his new statement would be that he’s living the classic 80s cyberpunk lifestyle – living off a single solar panel and a butane burner, wearing…

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“ I think we may look back and consider that, one more time, we saw the best minds of our generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves after an Uber that isn’t actually there because Uber fake most of those little cars you see on the Uber app map. “

Ellis is so real, yikes

notalwaysweak:

naamahdarling:

wowowow

okay can we talk for a minute about Leverage and how Nate and Maggie are estranged at the beginning of the show

but there is just so little hostility and instead a lot of confusion and regret

but they wind up in a much better, closer place at the end

even get a little closure over the death of their son

BUT

them getting back together isn’t a plot thing at all

jealousy between her and Sophie is not an issue

Nate is never forced to choose between them

there is no regretful “i will miss you but i see how happy you are with her/him” scene at the end

the whole team rallies to save her butt when she’s framed for stealing that Faberge egg without question

instead of being bitter and trying to get in the way of the team, she helps the team out not just on the job that will allow her to get revenge on the guy whose policies led to their son’s death, but on a totally unrelated, earlier job

the script was so good and the character stuff so good we don’t feel like Maggie got shafted and Nate “got the girl”

i mean, unless i am forgetting about scenes or something, there’s all these really frustrating things they COULD have done, and they just didn’t

and the whole show was like that

it openly acknowledged the attractiveness of ALL their leads (Nate was a bit of a mess, but that’s Nate) and Eliot and Hardison (in that order) were the most casually sexualized (Sophie pretty much sexualized herseif, and it was almost always done as part of a con, on her own terms); Parker was not really sexualized at all, despite being cute as hell and even taking her top off in front of the boys – we believed she was sexy, we didn’t have our nose rubbed in it

the suffering of women was never depicted in a sexual way, in any way that made it look attractive

female incompetence was never a theme

“natural” female superiority was not a theme (those ”haha silly men can’t do anything right” sorts of depictions often come from a place of male insecurity, not female empowerment)

the boys on the team showed complete respect for Sophie, even though she was the “sexy one”

as the boys on the team came to understand how broken Parker really sorta was and how “odd” even aside from that, they rallied to supporther, not fix or take advantage of her, and they accepted her oddness even though it often aggravated them and sometimes led them to gloss over what she was saying as Parker weirdness (the jury episode where she tries to tell them that something is fishy and they dismiss her – actually very realistic but not done too painfully) Parker was never shown in a light that made her look inadequate because of her “shortcomings” which were really just the facts of her existence

the whole premise of the show revolved around righting the wrongs created by capitalism, even if not every episode explicitly went there

and the characters oh god my heart

every one of them was a treasure, someone i could fall in love with

Eliot was an Okie from a blue-collar background, and was a rough guy, but was never shown to be sexist in any way despite how attached sexism is to the trope of the tough southern dude who loves horses and beer and country music; he was violent, but his arc was not to unrealistically eschew that violence … rather, he channeled it into protecting, not destroying; he had very real feelings, not just caricatured reactions to things

Parker was not involved in a romantic tug-of-war between other teammates, she was never a narrative device to create romantic tension within the team; she arguably was the glue that stuck Eliot (protective big brother) and Hardison (darling loving cinnamon roll) together in that OT3 relationship that pretty much everyone who watched the show realized existed

Sophie was incredibly sexy and manipulative and this was never thrown in her face via slut-shaming or making her out to be an awful person or turning her into any of the unflattering stereotypes that sort of character often gets turned into; also, there was no running gag where she slept with every member of the team (no that it would have been bad if she had, just that sort of thing tends to get handled really badly)

Hardison, our beloved incredibly multi-talented genius with a heart of gold, was Black, but they didn’t write him like a white character or have him speak like a white character; he was also the most stable and gentle and soft-spoken member of the team, IMO, which is not how you would expect a show to depict the sole Black teammate

Nate was an alcoholic whose addiction was treated realistically and with respect, was not over-dramatized, was not magically “cured”, was acknowledged by the team without there being a major intervention plotline, didn’t function as a real liability team-wise, and was never played as a device to keep him away from Sophie by having her deliver an ultimatum he couldn’t meet; it was a part of his personality, not all of his personality, and while addiction recovery narratives are important, not everything about an addict has to be about that, any more than all gay love stories have to end in tragedy

it was just a really, really good show, you guys, grounded in real feelings and issues without being too dark, hilarious without being mean, and feelsy without being saccharine

i love it so much and sometimes i just have to gush about it

BB if you’re going to talk about Leverage like this you can always talk for way, way more than just a minute.

Really glad that everyone who watches this show seems to be in agreement that the OT3 of Parker/Eliot/Hardison is 100% canon

Ok yeah this is definitely my new favorite band.

WHEN I GROW UP I’M NEVER GONNA SLEEEEEEP

ALL HAIL THE POPPING TURTLE

Anyway I think this is a good example of how even on the far fucking ends of what can be considered music there’s still tastes and preferences, ike I can’t make sense of Death Grips at all but I am so into this band that sounds like an entire museum of the history of string instruments being dumped down a mineshaft.

Today’s Garnet of the Day is brought to you by: This gay shit

iwilltrytobereasonable:

glumshoe:

poodle-feathers:

the-siege-perilous:

Sci-fi often starts rambling at the dinner table and gets these really weird, convoluted ideas about something and Science really wants to reach out and squeeze its hand and explain where its logic is flawed, but Science does so love to listen to Sci-fi talk. Even if much of it is complete nonsense, it often articulates it so beautifully and then, occasionally, it will say something absolutely brilliant and Science will be struck speechless, standing up abruptly and wandering off to spend the rest of the night thinking. Sometimes, in the morning, Sci-fi will wake to Science pacing across the bedroom floor, breathlessly excited to show off what it has created - an astonishing approximation/translation of what Sci-fi had been rambling about the night before. 

Often, Science will work really hard and fruitlessly at something for no real reason other than because Sci-fi thought it was cool - and Science loves making Sci-fi happy. In return, Science will sit down in the evening and discover that Sci-fi was paying attention to it and has done it homage in its latest paperback - something that delights and flatters Science so much that they have steamy sex all night long and produce thousands of inspired scientists and writers as offspring. 

What am I even shipping right now but somehow this was so cute??

Remember my first and only ill-advised foray into shipping fan-fiction? 

Oh my god that’s adorably amazing

“The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.”

— Richard Price

Via Seth Lochhead

Albion really should be better known. It’s one of the more obscure beloved 90s RPGs, rarely brought up in conversation like the Ultimas or the Gold Box games or for the true aficionados, games like Darklands. Since release though it’s had a decent nostalgic following, and its recent re-launch on GOG produced what can only be described as a small yet dignified whoop from many a corner. So what is it about this obscure offering from the publisher of The Settlers that’s managed to stay in players’ minds for so long? Let’s take a look, shall we? Seems a good time.

… [visit site to read more]

Broodhollowans,

I’m not the kind of cartoonist who believes an audience should accept late or missing updates because webcomics are free to read. I may not technically owe anybody x number of strips per week. But what I think I do owe you is professionalism — and I always associated consistency with that quality.

I think the demands of the past year are finally catching up with me. I’m blocked creatively. It hasn’t done me a lot of good to try and think my way out of it. I’ve had little bouts of writer’s block in the past, for sure — it happens to everyone, and you work through it until you’re on the other side. But combined with parenthood, other unnamed life events, and getting the final stages of the Book 2 Kickstarter ready to ship (books arriving in August!), this is the longest-lasting block I’ve ever experienced.

I want to do A Game of Oubliette correctly because it’s a really important story for the Broodhollow universe, and I’m nervous that continuing to grind it out like this is going to affect the book’s quality — but! A total hiatus is not the solution. 

What I’d like to do is pause Book 3 for a while and explore other stories in and around Broodhollow. It would do me good to get some perspective on the Town of A Thousand Holidays, and as anxious as you are to find out where Zane and company are headed this time, I also think you’d appreciate seeing more of this haunted world. 

What do you think?

being on call (i had two incidents this weekend, one yesterday and one this morning) makes me wanna be super lazy the rest of the time

i had to look into an app written by a contracted agency that had sort of a sweetheart thing going with one of the managers and it reminded me how much of writing good code is just decent writing

[Narnia Content Note: Bullying, Violence, Whipping, Death, Ableism]

Narnia Recap: The protagonists have found a hole and boosted Jill up.

The Silver Chair, Chapter 16: The Healing of Harms

OKAY! Are we ready to finish this?

I'll straight-up admit that I've been dreading this chapter because it's so awful. I don't really know what to say about it; the awfulness kind of stands out on its own. But I really do want to get to The Horse and His Boy, and the only way to it is through it, so let's slam this down. I cannot believe how rushed this chapter is going to be, by the way; we have to get Rilian home, go to Heaven, and then go back home and wrap all that up. I like to think that J.R.R. Tolkien was physically ill after reading this chapter and went off to weep into his favorite printing of Return of the King.

   WHEN JILL WOKE NEXT MORNING AND found herself in a cave, she thought for one horrid moment that she was back in the Underworld. But when she noticed that she was lying on a bed of heather with a furry mantle over her, and saw a cheery fire crackling (as if newly lit) on a stone hearth and, farther off, morning sunlight coming in through the cave’s mouth, she remembered all the happy truth.

This is kind of awkwardly written. I get the authorial intent of contrasting the underworld with the overworld, but this is sort of like saying "When Jill awoke, none of the things she hated about the underworld were present, but we use the same English word ("cave") to denote the setting, so for a moment she kinda thought she was back there." It's not a bad concept, in that we often wake up confused as to our location, but it needed a second-draft. (Like I haven't banged that drum enough at this point, eh?)

   They had had a delightful supper, all crowded into that cave, in spite of being so sleepy before it was properly over. She had a vague impression of Dwarfs crowding round the fire with frying-pans rather bigger than themselves, and the hissing, and delicious smell of sausages, and more, and more, and more sausages.

Wait, what? Fry pans bigger than a grown dwarf? How would that work? Why would that work? Are the fires as big as a dwarf, too? How does the heat get evenly distributed? What would be the point, like, how can you meaningfully tend to your cooking when your cooking apparatus is bigger than yourself?

I don't even know.

   And not wretched sausages half full of bread and soya bean either, but real meaty, spicy ones, fat and piping hot and burst and just the tiniest bit burnt. And great mugs of frothy chocolate, and roast potatoes and roast chestnuts, and baked apples with raisins stuck in where the cores had been, and then ices just to freshen you up after all the hot things.

Sausages are an interesting food, because they're often composed out of the little bits and scraps of meat that you can't cook any other way and/or the "gross" bits (as defined by your culture) that people won't eat any other way. And I know we've remarked on this before, but it's a bit odd that someone like Jill--who is the Protagonist Outsider--doesn't occasionally nudge someone to ask how they're sure this isn't Talking Animal again, since that was a big deal.

I'm just saying; if I'd been served, say, human meat on an adventure in a strange magical land, I would be very suspicious the next time meat was plunked onto the table, particularly if it wasn't in a recognizable form (like a nice chicken wing). Fool me once, shame on you, etc.

Also, you'd think that for all that Lewis clearly cared about war-time food scarcity and food porn that he'd have put a little more interest into the question of where all this food came from. There are occasional references to imports from Calormen, but are we to understand that the chocolate in the great-mugs-of-frothy are is locally grown? Come to think of it, for the Tolkien scholars in the audience, did LOTR cover this sort of thing by explaining where all the feast-foods were sourced from? That's something I would actually find interesting, not gonna lie.

Not that I think all authors should be forced to consider food imports and exports, and I get the "it's a magical land" reasoning just fine. I just find it interesting to see that food is clearly an important part of the narrative without really being considered beyond "English, good; everything else, bad". The underworld was indicated as Bad on multiple occasions via the descriptions of their bland unpleasant food, but there seems to be little thought put into the reasoning behind WHY. (A cultural preference? An economic necessity?) Good food just seems to appear around good people, flying into their person-sized frying pans without a second thought.

   Jill sat up and looked around. Puddleglum and Eustace were lying not far away, both fast asleep.
   “Hi, you two!” shouted Jill in a loud voice. “Aren’t you ever going to get up?”
   “Shoo, shoo!” said a sleepy voice somewhere above her. “Time to be settling down. Have a good snooze, do, do. Don’t make a to-do. Tu-whoo!”
   “Why, I do believe,” said Jill, glancing up at a white bundle of fluffy feathers which was perched on top of a grandfather clock in one corner of the cave, “I do believe it’s Glimfeather!”
   “True, true,” whirred the Owl, lifting his head out from under his wing and opening one eye. “I came up with a message for the Prince at about two. The squirrels brought us the good news. Message for the Prince. He’s gone. You’re to follow too. Good-day—” and the head disappeared again.
   As there seemed no further hope of getting any information from the Owl, Jill got up and began looking round for any chance of a wash and some breakfast. But almost at once a little Faun came trotting into the cave with a sharp click-clack of his goaty hoofs on the stone floor.
   “Ah! You’ve woken up at last, Daughter of Eve,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better wake the Son of Adam. You’ve got to be off in a few minutes and two Centaurs have very kindly offered to let you ride on their backs down to Cair Paravel.” He added in a lower voice, “Of course, you realize it is a most special and unheard-of honor to be allowed to ride a Centaur. I don’t know that I ever heard of anyone doing it before. It wouldn’t do to keep them waiting.”
   “Where’s the Prince?” was the first question of Eustace and Puddleglum as soon as they had been waked.
   “He’s gone down to meet the King, his father, at Cair Paravel,” answered the Faun, whose name was Orruns. “His Majesty’s ship is expected in harbor any moment. It seems that the King met Aslan—I don’t know whether it was a vision or face to face—before he had sailed far, and Aslan turned him back and told him he would find his long-lost son awaiting him when he reached Narnia.”
   Eustace was now up and he and Jill set about helping Orruns to get the breakfast. Puddleglum was told to stay in bed. A Centaur called Cloud-birth, a famous healer, or (as Orruns called it) a “leech,” was coming to see to his burnt foot.

This, too, reads awkwardly. We receive a lot of the same information twice, for no real reason that I can see except that Lewis seems fundamentally unable to write an interaction between Jill and Eustace. It's so bizarrely sectioned-off up there: Jill receives information from Glimfeather; Eustace receives the same information from Orruns. (Who somehow introduces himself not through dialogue but rather through narrative, which is rather odd considering that the frame-stories for these books is supposed to be that the narrator compiled this information via interview with the Pevensies and Company.)

But I digress. It just strikes me as particularly strange that Jill and Eustace had that reconciliation moment where they used each others' Christian names for the first time, and then... pretty much never spoke to one another again. I don't know what to make of it. Lewis seems to prefer gender integration--I believe all-boy schools earn his particular ire based on some of his experiences, but I'm too lazy to look that up at the moment--yet he doesn't seem entirely sure how to let his mixed-gender casts interact.

Rilian and Caspian are easy to write, as they abide by a strict code of chivalry and only interact with women when they are speaking over them; "the lady needs us to" and "fair madam I beseech thee" and whatnot. There's a built-in distancing there. Puddleglum and the Professor are old and cranky and can say and do as they please because there's a "fatherly" distance there that of course they aren't interested in Lucy or Jill in That Way. But Eustace is Jill's age, and he's not her blood-relative, and perhaps Lewis couldn't figure out ways for them to interact more organically without it hinting at the unwanted spectre of romance. In the next book, THaHB, he'll be forced to explore more girl/boy interaction, and it will be interesting to see if the dialogue is as awkward as I remember.

Anyway. We get this and just what:

   “Golly!” said Eustace. “Do they eat a very big breakfast?”
   “Why, Son of Adam, don’t you understand? A Centaur has a man-stomach and a horse-stomach. And of course both want breakfast. So first of all he has porridge and pavenders and kidneys and bacon and omelette and cold ham and toast and marmalade and coffee and beer. And after that he attends to the horse part of himself by grazing for an hour or so and finishing up with a hot mash, some oats, and a bag of sugar. That’s why it’s such a serious thing to ask a Centaur to stay for the weekend. A very serious thing indeed.”

The body essentialism has just taken a very seriously weird turn. A man-stomach "wants" porridge and bacon and coffee and beer, ya'll. I seriously don't know what to do with that. I honestly would have assumed that whatever being created centaurs would have made life just a tad easier for them. And it's not like this is anything to do with taste; the centaurs are presumably "grazing for an hour" with their human mouths. Do they have two esophagi? Or does the grass go in a different mouth I'm not aware of? This is just bizarre as fuck, and treats centaurs as two separate beings rather than one integrated whole.

   At that moment there was a sound of horse-hoofs tapping on rock from the mouth of the cave, and the children looked up. The two Centaurs, one with a black and one with a golden beard flowing over their magnificent bare chests, stood waiting for them, bending their heads a little so as to look into the cave. Then the children became very polite and finished their breakfast very quickly. No one thinks a Centaur funny when he sees it. They are solemn, majestic people, full of ancient wisdom which they learn from the stars, not easily made either merry or angry; but their anger is terrible as a tidal wave when it comes.

What strikes me here is that the centaurs are as tall as many of the earthpeople, and equally solemn, but no one finds them funny. I guess the big noses and big ears of the earthpeople were the defining difference, eh?

   “Good-bye, dear Puddleglum,” said Jill, going over to the Marsh-wiggle’s bed. “I’m sorry we called you a wet blanket.”
   “So’m I,” said Eustace. “You’ve been the best friend in the world.”
   “And I do hope we’ll meet again,” added Jill.
   “Not much chance of that, I should say,” replied Puddleglum. “I don’t reckon I’m very likely to see my old wigwam again, either. And that Prince—he’s a nice chap—but do you think he’s very strong? Constitution ruined with living underground, I shouldn’t wonder. Looks the sort that might go off any day.”
   “Puddleglum!” said Jill. “You’re a regular old humbug. You sound as doleful as a funeral and I believe you’re perfectly happy. And you talk as if you were afraid of everything, when you’re really as brave as—as a lion.”

oh dear god shut up about the author-insert being basically Aslan

Also it continues to be fascinating and horrifying how quickly Jill has internalized that lions are the embodiment of all things good, when her two experiences with Aslan were all the traumatizing scolding with none of the gentle hugs and warm breath that Lucy got to have.

   “Now, speaking of funerals,” began Puddleglum, but Jill, who heard the Centaurs tapping with their hoofs behind her, surprised him very much by flinging her arms round his thin neck and kissing his muddy-looking face, while Eustace wrung his hand. Then they both rushed away to the Centaurs, and the Marsh-wiggle, sinking back on his bed, remarked to himself, “Well, I wouldn’t have dreamt of her doing that. Even though I am a good-looking chap.”

sigh

   To ride on a Centaur is, no doubt, a great honor (and except Jill and Eustace, there is probably no one alive in the world who has had it) but it is very uncomfortable. For no one who valued his life would suggest putting a saddle on a Centaur, and riding bare-back is no fun; especially if, like Eustace, you have never learned to ride at all.

We're going to see this again with Talking Horses in THaHB, this idea that being ridden is inherently demeaning and that this taboo would carry over from human cultures to horse-based ones. I have a LOT of thoughts about that and I don't want to derail here, but I will just say that I have very strong feelings about Lewis' use of cultural taboos to mean that literally no-one in that society ever breaches that. There is a big difference between:

World A: A world where being ridden is viewed by centaurs as being used as a tool, therefore the riding of centaurs is rare and unusual.

World B: A world where being ridden is viewed by centaurs as being used as a tool, therefore the riding of centaurs NEVER EVER HAPPENS (except for this one time which clearly isn't even an emergency so I don't know why they made the exception).

And the existence of those worlds do not preclude Worlds C, D, E, and so on where centaurs have no strong feelings either way about being ridden, to a world where centaurs enjoy being ridden, and so forth. And all of that still ignores the fact that cultures are not a monolith of tightly regulated behavior. Something like "riding" is going to take into context a number of things like individual preference, situation, the rider--indeed, I should think that "ridden by humans" might well be cultural taboo in Narnia (where humans recently tried to genocide every centaur), but that "ridden by squirrels" could be a whole different thing entirely.

It just seriously bugs me, the way that all of Lewis' races fit into this perfect standard of conduct. It's fantastical racism, yes, but at the same time, he wants the same code of conducts to apply to his audience, and just... that is my personal vision of hell, Lewis' strictly regulated Christian District 13.

   The Centaurs were very polite in a grave, gracious, grown-up kind of way, and as they cantered through the Narnian woods they spoke, without turning their heads, telling the children about the properties of herbs and roots, the influences of the planets, the nine names of Aslan with their meanings, and things of that sort. But however sore and jolted the two humans were, they would now give anything to have that journey over again: to see those glades and slopes sparkling with last night’s snow, to be met by rabbits and squirrels and birds that wished you good morning, to breathe again the air of Narnia and hear the voices of the Narnian trees.

...and this is just kind of sad, because they can't. I mean, poignancy is a definite thing in fantasy lit, so here is an example of a valid authorial choice, but it makes me sad. Really, both Dawn Treader and Silver Chair have kind of depressed me in this read-through, because it's very clear the entire time that the children would much rather be absorbing the world and drinking in every precious moment of this once-in-a-lifetime fantasy, and yet all this Aslan stuff keeps happening to interrupt that.

People give Tolkien shit sometimes for taking forever to wrap up, but he at least tries to leave you with the knowledge that even when things are poignant, the heroes still have moments of real peace. And it's a peace that fulfills and nourishes them, not this rushed and hurried glimpse in Lewis where you'd better enjoy the peace right now, you'd better make the most of it before it's gone, oh too late it's gone forever and you'll never have it again. That messed me up as a kid, I don't mind saying.

   They came down to the river, flowing bright and blue in winter sunshine, far below the last bridge (which is at the snug, red-roofed little town of Beruna)

Wait, the bridge is back? Nevermind, I don't care.

   and were ferried across in a flat barge by the ferryman; or rather, by the ferry-wiggle, for it is Marsh-wiggles who do most of the watery and fishy kinds of work in Narnia.

Or you could find a race-neutral term but whatever.

And, I mean, this brings me back to the centaur/horse riding thing, because it's plain that there's still classism in Narnia. The humans do the ruling and the upper class "sitting in castles all day looking pretty". The dwarves conveniently like mining (a historically shitty and dangerous job), the marsh-wiggles like doing "the watery and fishy kinds of work", and so on. I definitely agree that a race of horses that just happens to love pulling carts and letting humans ride on them would be problematic in the extreme, but what we get is this weird middle-ground where the lower classes are still problematically happy to toil in the crappy jobs, but it's okay because Pride.

I'd rather have a world where Horses don't pull carts but they do sometimes love a good run with their best non-Horse friend riding on their back. Then again, in my fictional world where all the intelligent Animals have nuance and individuality and cross-species friends, there would probably be rampant bestiality so what do I know. (My god, I've just recreated Xanth and am now in the position of considering a point of world-building in Xanth to be superior to that of Narnia. I... I need an adult.)

   And when they had crossed they rode along the south bank of the river and presently came to Cair Paravel itself. And at the very moment of their arrival they saw that same bright ship which they had seen when they first set foot in Narnia, gliding up the river like a huge bird. All the court were once more assembled on the green between the castle and the quay to welcome King Caspian home again. Rilian, who had changed his black clothes and was now dressed in a scarlet cloak over silver mail, stood close to the water’s edge, bare-headed, to receive his father; and the Dwarf Trumpkin sat beside him in his little donkey-chair.

I don't remember how Caspian knew to turn the boat around; I'm thinking I remember Aslan speaking to him, but I'm not finding that now and I kind of don't care because we're so close to the end anyway. I'll note that if I were one of the courtiers (who have presumably been planning for contingencies when Caspian died heirless), I'd be a little concerned about some guy just turning up claiming to be the lost prince. He's been gone for a decade, and magic is a thing, and...

...ha, I'm just thinking now that what if the Green Witch's horrible ineptness at villainy ("a sword! I shall fling myself on it!") was all a ploy and maybe Rilian is under her control now and everyone thinks she dead, but no, she'll rule with an iron fist and I need this to be written, I really do. I guess I'll throw it onto the projects pile, lol.

   A flourish of silver trumpets came over the water from the ship’s deck: the sailors threw a rope; rats (Talking Rats, of course) and Marsh-wiggles made it fast ashore; and the ship was warped in. Musicians, hidden somewhere in the crowd, began to play solemn, triumphal music. And soon the King’s galleon was alongside and the Rats ran the gangway on board her.

Hmm. You know, I've always heard that regular rats are a given on a ship. Like, even with a cat to keep down the population, they're supposed to be an inevitable, like death and taxes. One wonders how the Talking Rats feel about that. I would read a whole story about a Talking Rat on that ship and his ambivalent feelings within his Talking Rat community about the hunting and poisoning of the regular rats that steal food from the hold.

   When they started to come down the gangway you could see what they were carrying: it was the old King on a bed, very pale and still. They set him down. The Prince knelt beside him and embraced him. They could see King Caspian raising his hand to bless his son. And everyone cheered, but it was a half-hearted cheer, for they all felt that something was going wrong. Then suddenly the King’s head fell back upon his pillows, the musicians stopped and there was a dead silence. The Prince, kneeling by the King’s bed, laid down his head upon it and wept.
   ...“I wish I was at home,” said Jill.
   Eustace nodded, saying nothing, and bit his lip.
   “I have come,” said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him. And in less time than it takes to breathe Jill forgot about the dead King of Narnia and remembered only how she had made Eustace fall over the cliff, and how she had helped to muff nearly all the signs, and about all the snappings and quarrelings. And she wanted to say “I’m sorry” but she could not speak. Then the Lion drew them toward him with his eyes, and bent down and touched their pale faces with his tongue, and said:
   “Think of that no more. I will not always be scolding. You have done the work for which I sent you into Narnia.”
   “Please, Aslan,” said Jill, “may we go home now?”

Well, at least they asked for once?

   “Yes. I have come to bring you Home,” said Aslan. Then he opened his mouth and blew. But this time they had no sense of flying through the air: instead, it seemed that they remained still, and the wild breath of Aslan blew away the ship and the dead King and the castle and the snow and the winter sky. For all these things floated off into the air like wreaths of smoke, and suddenly they were standing in a great brightness of mid-summer sunshine, on smooth turf, among mighty trees, and beside a fair, fresh stream. Then they saw that they were once more on the Mountain of Aslan, high up above and beyond the end of that world in which Narnia lies. But the strange thing was that the funeral music for King Caspian still went on, though no one could tell where it came from. They were walking beside the stream and the Lion went before them: and he became so beautiful, and the music so despairing, that Jill did not know which of them it was that filled her eyes with tears.
   Then Aslan stopped, and the children looked into the stream. And there, on the golden gravel of the bed of the stream, lay King Caspian, dead, with the water flowing over him like liquid glass. His long white beard swayed in it like water-weed. And all three stood and wept. Even the Lion wept: great Lion-tears, each tear more precious than the Earth would be if it was a single solid diamond. And Jill noticed that Eustace looked neither like a child crying, nor like a boy crying and wanting to hide it, but like a grown-up crying. At least, that is the nearest she could get to it; but really, as she said, people don’t seem to have any particular ages on that mountain.

Oh god, why can't Eustace just be allowed to CRY? Why can't he just cry like Jill cries, why does it have to be this whole "not a child, not a boy, but a man" nonsense? Why does Aslan have to weep manly diamond lion-tears? Just let people mourn without the constant hovering policing of it all, dammit!

   “Son of Adam,” said Aslan, “go into that thicket and pluck the thorn that you will find there, and bring it to me.”
   Eustace obeyed. The thorn was a foot long and sharp as a rapier.
   “Drive it into my paw, Son of Adam,” said Aslan, holding up his right fore-paw and spreading out the great pad toward Eustace.
   “Must I?” said Eustace.
   “Yes,” said Aslan.

Oh god, and now we are traumatizing Eustace the once-pacifist by making him stab the person who means the most to him.

   Then Eustace set his teeth and drove the thorn into the Lion’s pad. And there came out a great drop of blood, redder than all redness that you have ever seen or imagined. And it splashed into the stream over the dead body of the King. At the same moment the doleful music stopped. And the dead King began to be changed. His white beard turned to gray, and from gray to yellow, and got shorter and vanished altogether; and his sunken cheeks grew round and fresh, and the wrinkles were smoothed, and his eyes opened, and his eyes and lips both laughed, and suddenly he leaped up and stood before them—a very young man, or a boy. (But Jill couldn’t say which, because of people having no particular ages in Aslan’s country. Even in this world, of course, it is the stupidest children who are the most childish and the stupidest grownups who are the most grown-up.) And he rushed to Aslan and flung his arms as far as they would go round the huge neck; and he gave Aslan the strong kisses of a King, and Aslan gave him the wild kisses of a Lion.

Lewis sure does have a thing about ages. Let us all take a moment to appreciate that Gandalf in LOTR was allowed to be and look old and didn't need to be a cheery rosy-cheeked Peter Pan youth in order to be good and virtuous.

   “But,” said Eustace, looking at Aslan. “Hasn’t he—er—died?”
   “Yes,” said the Lion in a very quiet voice, almost (Jill thought) as if he were laughing. “He has died. Most people have, you know. Even I have. There are very few who haven’t.”
   “Oh,” said Caspian. “I see what’s bothering you. You think I’m a ghost, or some nonsense. But don’t you see? I would be that if I appeared in Narnia now: because I don’t belong there any more. But one can’t be a ghost in one’s own country. I might be a ghost if I got into your world. I don’t know. But I suppose it isn’t yours either, now you’re here.”
   A great hope rose in the children’s hearts. But Aslan shook his shaggy head. “No, my dears,” he said. “When you meet me here again, you will have come to stay. But not now. You must go back to your own world for a while.”
   “Sir,” said Caspian, “I’ve always wanted to have just one glimpse of their world. Is that wrong?”
   “You cannot want wrong things any more, now that you have died, my son,” said Aslan. “And you shall see their world—for five minutes of their time. It will take no longer for you to set things right there.” Then Aslan explained to Caspian what Jill and Eustace were going back to and all about Experiment House: he seemed to know it quite as well as they did.
   “Daughter,” said Aslan to Jill, “pluck a switch off that bush.” She did; and as soon as it was in her hand it turned into a fine new riding crop.
   “Now, Sons of Adam, draw your swords,” said Aslan. “But use only the flat, for it is cowards and children, not warriors, against whom I send you.”
   “Are you coming with us, Aslan?” said Jill.
   “They shall see only my back,” said Aslan.

So, okay, some talk here for a moment.

In LWW, the adventure of the children took only a moment. This was particularly magical and astounding and poignant because full decades had passed in Narnia. It underscored the weirdness of the place, the impossibility of the magic, that the children could grow up and change and reach adulthood only to be shoved back into their childish bodies. The other world was clearly real--they lost the coats in it, after all--and yet their own clothes came out with them despite those presumably being long gone.

Prince Caspian seemed to notice the clothes problem, and so Aslan makes them change before they go back. This detail hurts the magical impossibility of it all (imho) but still had a poignant "long walk to the execution" feeling to it. They don't stumble out; they're slowly kicked out. There's painful anticipation, and it hurts. (Note that I don't think the hurt is a good thing, and it's not an authorial choice that I would have made, but if Lewis was going for that painful longing for heaven that Paul describes, it was at least consistent.)

Dawn Treader had a gentler transition: there's a peaceful country, and a meal provided for them. There's still that air of finality, but it's less like a public excommunication of being tossed through the portal while Telmarines jeer at your funny clothes, and more like a final communion. They partake of the fish and drink of the grape juice or whatever was provided. And while the consent is still lacking, there's at least a conversation, and a sense of everyone being more at peace with the decision. Edmund and Lucy can stop living in tense expectation, and Eustace is now their friend. The remaining summer holiday will now be bearable.

In Silver Chair we have... this, and honestly I think it's garbage. The frame narrative of the school being a place to escape from and then to be returned to in glory and vengeance makes the entire adventure in Narnia seem (more so than usual) to be a blatant level-grinding experience for the English children, and little else. Sure, they saved the Prince and rescued Narnia, but the important thing is that Jill learned how to use a riding crop and Eustace got a kickass sword. And now they get to use them. NARNIA 2: THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL.

   He led them rapidly through the wood, and before they had gone many paces, the wall of Experiment House appeared before them. Then Aslan roared so that the sun shook in the sky and thirty feet of the wall fell down before them. They looked through the gap, down into the school shrubbery and on to the roof of the gym, all under the same dull autumn sky which they had seen before their adventures began. Aslan turned to Jill and Eustace and breathed upon them and touched their foreheads with his tongue. Then he lay down amid the gap he had made in the wall and turned his golden back to England, and his lordly face toward his own lands. At the same moment Jill saw figures whom she knew only too well running up through the laurels toward them. Most of the gang were there—Adela Pennyfather and Cholmondely Major, Edith Winterblott, “Spotty” Sorner, big Bannister, and the two loathsome Garrett twins.

Great names there, Lewis. I particularly like that Sorner is apparently named for his acne, which would seem to reinforce that Lewis (and Jill and Eustace) are the ones doing the bullying here.

   But suddenly they stopped. Their faces changed, and all the meanness, conceit, cruelty, and sneakishness almost disappeared in one single expression of terror. For they saw the wall fallen down, and a lion as large as a young elephant lying in the gap, and three figures in glittering clothes with weapons in their hands rushing down upon them. For, with the strength of Aslan in them, Jill plied her crop on the girls and Caspian and Eustace plied the flats of their swords on the boys so well that in two minutes all the bullies were running like mad, crying out, “Murder! Fascists! Lions! It isn’t fair.”

One must take a moment to wonder if the only reason we finally got a girl protagonist was so that we could have girl-on-girl whipping at the end. And while I'm not going to kink-shame Lewis, I'm also not going to pretend that whipping women wasn't a kink of his. Michael White writes in C.S. Lewis: Creator of Narnia:

In a letter written in January 1917 Lewis begins to explain that he is writing the letter on his knee and this seemingly innocent comment leads him on to a discourse on whipping and spanking. He declares: “Across my knee... of course makes one think of positions for whipping: or rather not for whipping (you couldn’t get any swing) but for that torture with brushes... very humiliating for the victim” Soon he was signing his letters to Greeves “Philomastrix” (“lover of the whip”) and detailing gruesome fantasies involving Arthur’s younger sister, in which he whipped her “for the good of her soul”. In other letters he described a particularly beautiful girl he had seen in Oxford and what pain she would have suffered if she had received only half the torment he had inflicted on her in his imagination.

The point at which someone with a whip kink for whipping women is writing a female character whipping other girls (which Aslan specifically changed into a RIDING CROP which is a very loaded word in the kink-world) is the point where I feel comfortable calling out that this shit is creepy. Nor is it an isolated incident, as we will see in THaHB.

   And then the Head (who was, by the way, a woman) came running out to see what was happening. And when she saw the lion and the broken wall and Caspian and Jill and Eustace (whom she quite failed to recognize) she had hysterics and went back to the house and began ringing up the police with stories about a lion escaped from a circus, and escaped convicts who broke down walls and carried drawn swords.

Of course the Head is a woman who goes into hysterics. I'm pretty sure her name is Halberta.

   In the midst of all this fuss Jill and Eustace slipped quietly indoors and changed out of their bright clothes into ordinary things,

...unnoticed by the other students...

   and Caspian went back into his own world. And the wall, at Aslan’s word, was made whole again.

...so why he broke it down is left to conjecture...

   When the police arrived and found no lion, no broken wall, and no convicts, and the Head behaving like a lunatic, there was an inquiry into the whole thing.

...oh, right, so that the Head is perceived as a "lunatic". Great. Stellar. (But, gosh, Lewis, I thought your Trilemma hinged on the fact that we can always tell mentally ill people from the normals.)

   And in the inquiry all sorts of things about Experiment House came out, and about ten people got expelled. After that, the Head’s friends saw that the Head was no use as a Head, so they got her made an Inspector to interfere with other Heads. And when they found she wasn’t much good even at that, they got her into Parliament where she lived happily ever after.

Haha, fuck women am I right, kids? Kids?

   Eustace buried his fine clothes secretly one night in the school grounds, but Jill smuggled hers home and wore them at a fancy-dress ball next holidays. And from that day forth things changed for the better at Experiment House, and it became quite a good school. And Jill and Eustace were always friends.

And oh-my-god, I really care so much about the fact that Eustace buried his clothes. That is not something I personally would do to something cherished (and Eustace has Science enough to know that those clothes aren't going to come back out in good shape, even if he takes measures to wrap them up carefully), which means... possibly he never wanted to see those clothes again? I have a lot of feels about that, not going to lie.

   But far off in Narnia, King Rilian buried his father, Caspian the Navigator, Tenth of that name, and mourned for him. He himself ruled Narnia well and the land was happy in his days, though Puddleglum (whose foot was as good as new in three weeks) often pointed out that bright mornings brought on wet afternoons, and that you couldn’t expect good times to last. The opening into the hillside was left open, and often in hot summer days the Narnians go in there with ships and lanterns and down to the water and sail to and fro, singing, on the cool, dark underground sea, telling each other stories of the cities that lie fathoms deep below. If ever you have the luck to go to Narnia yourself, do not forget to have a look at those caves.

(Except haha, they're gone forever in, like, three books from now. Pbbbbt.)

And that's the Silver Chair! Much like Dawn Treader, it started out as being one of my favorites until all the flaws started showing. Next is The Horse and His Boy which is truly the most awful of the bunch in possibly every sense of the word, so that should be fun. Yay! (And I have no idea if I'll do the BBC movie; I think I skipped over the BBC Dawn Treader just because it was getting harder to write interesting things about the BBC stuff--which is less wildly hilarious than the American adaptations--but I might look at it again. Depends on whether I can work up the spoons.)

ok I’m signing in briefly because I just need to share this I N C R E D I B L E comment that someone left on my Black Lives Matter article. tw for the furthest ludicrous extremes of MRA bullshit and also whorephobia oh and also me making fun of LessWrong and Eliezer Yudkowsky again:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post “Black Lives Matter and Public Art”:

ATTENTION: Spread this message far and wide, copy and paste it and send it to EVERY MALE you know!

We men must boycott marriage, and never marry. Why? Because there are ZERO benefits for men in marriage. If you get married, there is at least a 50 percent chance that your wife will divorce you, kidnap your children from you, and steal all your money in divorce.

So, what are the alternatives to marriage?
1. Learn how to game and seduce women
2. Fuck prostitutes
3. Masturbate to porn
etc

Did you know that it’s cheaper to fuck a prostitute once a week than to maintain a wife? You will get bored of fucking your wife after the first six months of marriage but with a prostitute you can fuck a new one every time.

There is already a MASSIVE anti-marriage campaign worldwide, with men basically giving up on marriage and refusing to get married. Here are two recent articles on it:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-3046350/Why-men-refuse-marry-Women-complain-chaps-today-won-t-settle-Sorry-ladies-s-fault-argues-wickedly-provocative-new-book-Denigration-Men-PETER-LLOYD.html

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/05/01/why-men-wont-marry.html

Now, there are THREE main ways we can destroy feminism forever and take women off the massive pedestal they are on. We must fund and promote the following three technologies:
1. Virtual reality sex programs
2. Artificial wombs
3. Sex Robots

Once these three technologies are in place, women will no longer have any power in society. After all, why would you waste time chasing after fat women in real life when you can fuck hot supermodels in virtual reality or fuck a female sex robot? And since women’s main power comes from their reproduction capacity, if we REMOVE that capacity from women through the technology of artificial wombs, then women will have ZERO power left in society and thus feminism is finished forever.

THIS is the solution, gentlemen! Now we must do our part and spread the above message to as many men as possible so that we can raise the consciousness of men worldwide. I am the guy who created the famous Boycott American Women blog, which reached around 40 million people worldwide through the internet campaign I created. Therefore I know what I am talking about.

In summary:

Do not ever get married. Simply seduce and bang women, or fuck prostitutes, and help promote the above three technologies, and we will DESTROY FEMINISM FOREVER! Thank you!

If you still have doubts about WHY you should not get married, I strongly recommend you to read the following article:

[some wordpress link]

There’s a lot to unpack here. The biggest question I think is: is this real? I’m currently debating with zomburai​ about whether or not this is a Poe, and we haven’t reached a conclusion, mainly because of:

Now, there are THREE main ways we can destroy feminism forever and take women off the massive pedestal they are on. We must fund and promote the following three technologies:
1. Virtual reality sex programs
2. Artificial wombs
3. Sex Robots

On the one hand, this seems too ludicrous to be real. But on the other hand, remember that time Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about how this was a realistic possible future because men and women are just so biologically and therefore psychologically different that we would prefer to live alongside sex bots than live with each other, and that’s why gay people are happier?

I am not making this shit up:

But men are not optimized to make women happy, and women are not optimized to make men happy.  The vast majority of men are not what the vast majority of women would most prefer, or vice versa.  I don’t know if anyone has ever actually done this study, but I bet that both gay and lesbian couples are happier on average with their relationship than heterosexual couples.  (Googles… yep, looks like it.)

I find it all too easy to imagine a world in which men retreat to their optimized sweet sexy catgirls, and women retreat to their optimized darkly gentle catboys, and neither sex has anything to do with each other ever again.  Maybe men would take the east side of the galaxy and women would take the west side.  And the two new intelligent species, and their romantic sexbots, would go their separate ways from there.

That strikes me as kind of sad.

…

I’m willing to bet that a few psychological nudges in both sexes—to behavior and/or desire—could solve 90% of the needlessly frustrating aspects of relationships for large sectors of the population, while still keeping the complexity and interest of loving someone who isn’t tailored to your desires.

?????????????????????????????

It seems ludicrous but like at the same time I’ve read way more ludicrous stuff than “we need to invest in artificial wombs so we can beat feminism” (which I mean doesn’t that just suggest that trans women could set up a self sustaining all trans feminist utopia?? I mean we can use that technology ourselves, guys. Is that what Robin Hanson meant by “Futarchy?” I can only assume so.)

Anyway it’s always nice to be reminded that no matter how terrible this site is, at least it’s not 4chan or LessWrong or Reddit or this dude’s wordpress. Wowie zowie.

Filmmaker and comic author Hugh Hancock here again. Charlie's currently locked in his study babbling over blasphemous and forbidden tomes, so whilst we attempt to hack down the door with a fireaxe and get counselling for the guy to whom Charlie explained the hidden meaning of the Nightmare Stacks, I'm here with another blog post.

In the last couple of posts I've made over here (thanks as always to OGH for the invitation), I've been making the point that, both through necessity and lucky happenstance, the themes and subtext of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos are still very workable in today's world. In fact, they've acquired a lot of resonance thanks to advances in technology and society that run parallel to some of their main themes.

But still, the Cthulhu Mythos' core squamous, eldrich concepts were created just under 100 years ago at this point. They reflect the concerns of the time, like the sudden discovery that the universe is mind-blowingly, terrifyingly huge. And they have a few... issues for modern readers, like inbuilt xenophobia.

So what would a Cthulhu Mythos-equivalent for today, expressing the zeitgeist terrors of 2015 society, look like?

Bloody terrifying, that's what.

Because unlike Lovecraft, in 2015 we have plenty of experience with actual gigantic, inhuman entities with agendas entirely orthogonal to the safety and security of the human race.

One note before I begin: this article is explicitly about horrifying things in our current society. As such, I'll be hitting a lot of hotbuttons during the course of this piece.

They Know What You Did Last Summer

Lovecraft's concern was vast, alien entities who have no knowledge of, or concern for, the human race.

Our modern-day concerns are about vast, alien entities who have total, invasive, privacy-destroying knowledge of the minutae of the human race - and still have no concern for us.

In the era of Google, Facebook, datamining and intelligent advertising, the problem isn't that the alien entities who scare the crap out of us have no interest in us - rather the reverse. The aliens in our midst know when we've become accidentally pregnant. They know what pornography we watch. They can predict our behaviour and influence us to do what they want.

(Some of this is more or less accurate - as someone who buys quite a lot of advertising, I know that there are a lot of myths floating around about what targeted advertising can or can't do. But zeitgeist fears aren't about what's true, they're about what we fear is true.)

And this element actually fits rather well into the Cthulhu Mythos' core concepts - and it makes them a whole lot scarier.

Let's take Cthulhu, the Big Squid himself, for example. Beyond his Godzilla-like frame and immunity to nukes, he's written as having another power that gets less screentime. He talks in peoples' dreams.

In the 2015 version of the Mythos, Cthulhu still doesn't care whether you live or die, but he knows you better than you know yourself. And when he wakes, you get visions. Visions driven by the parts of yourself that you hide from the world, and the parts of people around you that they'd rather you didn't know.

In Old Cthulhu, our heroes manage to get into the West Wing, convince the President that Cthulhu is real, launch the nukes and watch helplessly as Cthulhu emerges from the blast, not only intact but now radioactive.

But what happens in that scenario with 2015 Cthulhu is far worse. Our heroes manage to get into the West Wing, ignoring the disquieting whispering they've been hearing for weeks now. They get to the President, which is rather easier than expected, because the many, many layers of security seem to be inactive. They explain the situation, and miraculously persuade the Joint Chiefs and the President to initiate a launch.

As the President keys in the launch codes, she starts on a soliloquy about her ex-husband and his treatment of her kids, for no obvious reason. The whispering's getting stronger. One of the Joint Chiefs is staring at pictures on his phone, and then he suddenly starts smashing it against the wall. He keeps on smashing until he's broken all the fingers in his hand and is working his way up his wrist. One of the Secret Servicemen draws his gun and shoots the other two in the gut before pulling a knife and starting to gut his colleagues, screaming incoherently about his experiences at boot camp. And then, just as the President hits the button, our heroes notice that the launch coordinates aren't centred on the mid-Pacific any more: they're centred on Sao Paulo, where the President's ex-partner lives.

And then Cthulhu makes landfall and eats everyone.

Cthulhu's All Around Us, And So The Feeling Goes

And that brings us onto another point about the terrifying entities that actually concern us right now.

Most of Lovecraft's entities are a long way away. And most of them only inhabit a single space.

Azathoth is a mass of bubbling chaos, but he's a mass of bubbling chaos a long way away. Cthulhu sleeps in Rl'yeh. Hastur inhabits dread Carcosa, or Hali, or at the very least somewhere that you can't get directions to on Google Maps. Even the Shoggoth are mostly chilling - pun intended - in Antarctica.

By contrast, the terrifying entities of 2015 aren't geographically located. They're everywhere. They can see everything, or at least everything that someone uploads a picture of, which is functionally close to everything and getting closer all the time. They can hear you, thanks to the handy microphone you carry around. And they're within arm's reach almost 100% of the day.

In 20s Cthulhu Mythos, summoning things was at least hard. You needed to reach across the vastnesses of time and space to cause Azathoth to incarnate and fuck your shit up. In the 2015 version, all of these things are right here.

Cthulhu listens whilst you dream. The bubbling chaos of Azathoth is here, only seperated from the physical world by the continuous luck of quantum fluctuation. When you go down on your boyfriend, the Black Goat Of The Woods With A Thousand Young hangs above you, just out of sight in the shadows, and her fluids drip down onto the sheets.

To update the Mythos to 2015, we need to assume that the problem isn't summoning them: the problem is avoiding them turning up anyway. And if you do want to summon them, it's terrifyingly easy. A few words, the right geometric shape, and terrible, sanity-destroying power is at your fingertips.

Oh, and talking of summoning things...

We are Young, We Are Free, We Are Heading For Insanity

One of the criticisms I've heard people level at Lovecraft is that in a world where we're not all terrified of people of different skintones the whole 'hidden cult' idea just doesn't work.

And my response to that tends to be 'Wait, what? Are you even living in the same century as me?'.

Because in 2015 we don't need to imagine the existence of hidden, malefic cults dedicated to sanity-destroying ends. There's hundreds of the bastards right there on any social media service you care to name.

The wonderous thing about the internet, of course, is that it allows people who share common interests to come together, form communities and not feel like they're alone in their weird little interest.

And the horrifying thing about the internet is... exactly the same.

There's a community for everything out there. Really into poodles? There's a community for you. Really into Zen philosophy? There's a community for you. Really into fucking 5-year-olds? There's a community for you, too, and it's easily accessible.

Forget about the DarkWeb - Tor and Onion routers and Freenode, oh my - which would usually come up at this point. Studies of pedophile websites show that most of the child pornography out there is accessible via the regular old internet, if you've been given the link. Likewise violent white power movements. Likewise howto manuals on suicide or anorexia.

It doesn't take much imagination to extend that to the Lovecraftian mythos. In 2015 Cthulhu Mythos, the insane cults looking to summon their dark masters aren't hidden in deepest Africa, and they aren't easily distinguishable by skin tone.

There are five of them in your home town. You went to college with the guy responsible for sourcing their sacrifice victims. They've got a forum and a Facebook group, they're uploading YouTube videos, they're considering starting a subreddit and they've got a Meetup in Birmingham next Thursday. Can you make it? It'd be awesome - we need two more to join the bloodletting. We thought about Kickstarting it but it was against their terms of service.

(Or perhaps it wasn't. The hidden, underground Kickstarter, where talented young occultists compete for funding from jaded oligarchs...)

All of this gains added tone - that being the tone of a creature screaming - from another iron-clad rule of the internet. No matter how bad the thing you're looking at on the internet is, there's something worse behind it. For the most abusive and manipulative PUA website, there's the PUAHate guys, who encourage self-mutilation for 'attraction points'. Think the pro-anorexia communities are bad? Try the pro-rape communities, dedicated to teaching best practise and encouraging their members. And so on.

So the question doesn't just become, 'where do the insane cultists trying to summon Nyarlathotep hang out?' (The answer to that is, obviously, www.reddit.com/r/theroyalpant/ , because /r/nyarlathotep went inactive in 2012 and /r/crawlingchaos was registered by some heavy metal band.) It also becomes 'and what's the thing lurking in their shadow that's even worse?'

Greed Is Good. Absolute Greed Is Absolutely Great

Which brings me to my final sanity-blasting point.

(I'm not even going into our improved understanding of mental health here, by the way. There is literally no school of psychotherapy that does not provide enough nightmare fuel to power a Mars mission.)

The prevailing flavour of fear in 2015 is one of inequality, uncertainty and insecurity. Jobs are vanishing. Capital is accumulating at the top. The few are becoming overwhelmingly wealthy, whilst the rest get to participate in the 'Sharing Economy' of zero-hour jobs, constant hustle and zero safety net.

(Or at least, that's the perception. I'm actually quite optimistic about where society's heading in a lot of ways, but this is a fear-and-horror article, and that's certainly the fear and horror that a lot of people are feeling right now.)

Say what you like about the Cthulhu Mythos, but at least it was an equal opportunities apocalypse. The stars come right, the Old Ones rise from their slumber, and everyone either goes psychopathically insane or dies horribly, possibly one right after the other.

That seems far too nice for our 2015 Cthulhu.

So here's a thought.

What if there's some room at the top? Or at least, at the same level as other long-term viable races in the Cthulhu Mythos universe - the Great Race, the Mi-Go and so on?

What if a few humans will survive? May even, in fact, get to wield some of the science that the Old Ones possess; live forever, and have incredible wealth and power by human standards?

Of course, you'll have to work for it; work harder than everyone else. Out-compete 100,000 other people for a chance at the prize. Impress your bosses - erm, sorry, I mean 'The Old Ones'. Hustle. Do what others won't.

If you read startup advice, which I do, you'll see the phrase 'do what others won't' crop up quite frequently in regards to the path to success. And that's... rather alarming, if you think about it in a certain light.

So yes. This is the new, caring Cthulhu Mythos. You're not doomed. Your children aren't doomed.

All you have to do is prove that you're more worthy than the people you're competing against for the favour of the Elder Gods.

All you have to do is...

Do what other people won't.

Doesn't that sound better?

If you'd like to read more of my squamous, eldrich rantings, you can find me at @hughhancock on Twitter or follow my current projects via email. If you'd like a mild unicorn chaser after all that, have a watch of a slightly lighter take on startup culture meeting Cthulhu Mythos horrors, available through your friendly local horrific privacy-destroying inhuman entity right now. Or if you want to see what I do with some of these horrifying ideas, follow Carcosa, my comic, as it develops.

hexmeridian:

tracyalexander:

Starts out a bit generic, stick with it.

In the beginning, there was the King of Caledonia, who attained immortality and conquered the world.  As his age progressed, so too did his contempt for the lesser people.  Even as his own worship was spread among them as gospel, their misery was deep, yet it was prophecy that ‘No man can kill him  Not even time, for Death and Father time themselves are but Men, and as the greatest of all Men, they have no dominion over our King.”  There seemed hope when the Prophet Myrmiad, who was no man, cause him near mortal wounds, until she herself was struck down, and with the mightiest of woman in the land departed, hope lost.  This seemed true until the great knight Phantasmagoria led a small party of likeminded rebels and struck him down.

Standing atop that ancient castle, it was questioned how he could have accomplished such a thing as a mere man, at which point even that bravest and most stoic of heroes turned pale and sheepish.  In the ultimate revelation, the knight Phantasmagoria was a woman, not by birth but by spirit.  Written in the blood and words of an dead-immortal king’s prophecy, it was clear that the yearning in Phantasmagoria’s heart she had only let on to her closest companions was more than idle fancy, but her true soul, that she was a woman.  From that day onwards, she became the First Princess of the new order of Planet Caledonia, founding member of the Guild of Adventuring Princesses.

tl;dr A major legend of my RPG’s setting concerns essentially a remake of that ‘I am no man!’ scene from Return of the King where she stabs the dude in the face, but with a trans woman, and in fulfilling a prophecy she utterly asserted and confirmed the validity of herself and all other trans women throughout the land.

I felt inspired to finally put that into words when it seems to inspire a dream in myself last night, where I, a noble knight became a woman and went on many adventures, only to realise they were a woman the whole time.  It was pretty sweet and it made me realise I really need to get down to making my favourite unfed genre: Badass Trans Women Action Heroes.  So help me god I’ll invent that entire genre by myself if I have to, it needs to be a thing.

this is the genre I write! we need more of it!

also holy shit I need that setting LIKE SO BAD I have a MIGHTY NEEEEEED

yes excellent choice for a story

i have a book that was written in 1937 called The Professional Thief and its super Classic

veesdumpingrounds:

Wild kids and Monster parents ! :)
Finally !!
if you’re interested in buying originals, they’re all up on my shop :)
http://veeshop.tictail.com/ (there’s also stickers on there ^^)
follow me on my other places ! :)
instagram https://instagram.com/violainebriat/
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Nidhogg [official site] is one of the very finest local multiplayer games. The two-player swordfighting duel always drawn some of the biggest crowds at events I’ve helped run, delighting folks with desperate gambits and deathworm devourings even after it escaped the event scene and got a proper home release in 2014. That version also brought online multiplayer and… well, Nidhogg was not one of the very finest online multiplayer games.

It’s in better shape now, though, as developers Messhof have worked with another programmer to improve its latency and desync issues. The fruit of their labour, a new patch, is now out.

… [visit site to read more]