Zephyr Dear

Max writes, "I made a small 'web-thing' that renders a 100x100 square of colored pixels based on an equation input by the user. You can use it to explore mathematics, or just enjoy the pretty colors. All creations are easily share-able by copying the URL."

For girls: Radiation Immunity; Surviving in Nature; Controlling Plants With Minds; Advanced Knife Fighting Techniques; for boys: Invisibility.

The strange odyssey of Irek Hamidullan has taken him from the former Soviet Army, to the Taliban, and now to a U.S. federal courtroom in Virginia. Hamidullan, who U.S. officials describe as a “Russian veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan” is believed to have stayed in the country after the war and joined the Taliban. He is accused of taking part in a 2009 attack on an Afghan and U.S. army border post in Khost Province. Incarcerated at Bagram ever since, Hamidullan is now the latest detainee to be put on trial in the criminal court system. He faces potential life imprisonment in the U.S. as a result of his activities in Afghanistan.

It may sound strange to hear that former Soviet soldiers are still living and fighting in Afghanistan decades after that war ended and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist, but Hamidullan is only one of many Russians who ended up staying around after the occupation. At the outset of the American invasion in 2001, U.S. officials estimated that somewhere between 300 to 500 former Soviet troops were still living in Afghanistan. Some of these were soldiers who defected due to ethnic ties or sympathy with Afghan mujahideen, while others were former prisoners who converted to Islam and ended up integrating into Afghan society.

Unlike Hamidullan, most of the Russian Afghans (of whom we know) went on to live normal lives in the country and remained largely aloof from conflict during the years of the American occupation.

Bakhretdin Khakimov was a young Russian soldier who was thought to have been killed in the country over thirty years ago. It turns out, however, that after being wounded and separated from his unit, he was discovered by sympathetic locals and nursed back to health. Now known as Sheikh Abdullah, he lives “a semi-nomadic life with the people who sheltered him” and works as an “herbal healer.” Nek Muhammad – once a young Ukrainian conscript named Gennady Tseuma — ended up converting to Islam after straying away from his base and being captured by local mujahideen fighters. He since married and raised children in the country, and says that he has “not shot one bullet since becoming Muslim.”

There is not much we know about Irek Hamidullan (a nom de guerre), including what he did during the interim between the Russian withdrawal from the country and the U.S. invasion. He is the first foreign combatant captured in Afghanistan to be transferred to U.S. soil to face criminal prosecution. Alleged to be connected to an insurgent group affiliated with the Afghan Taliban, he faces terrorism charges for his role in an assault against a U.S-Afghan military post that went awry and ended with his capture.

While his case is significant both for eschewing trial by military commission and for employing a very expansive definition of the term “terrorism”, it also serves a reminder of the individual lives which have been caught up in Afghanistan’s modern history of invasions and occupations. Hamidullan is only one of countless Russian soldiers who ended up staying in the country after the war ended, and becoming, more or less, Afghans.

As Ahmad – once a Soviet soldier named Alexander Levenets — said ten years ago of his decision to stay in the country: “Here I have relatives, my clan. Even if I am unemployed now, my wife’s brothers are helping me. They respect me; they need me. Who needs me back home?”

Photo: Reuters/CORBIS

The post Former Soviet Soldiers Still Haunt Afghanistan — and American Forces There appeared first on The Intercept.

lgbtqblogs:

In a world where trans representation in film is non-existent or disastrously insulting, it is impossible to greet Boy Meets Girl with anything less than wild excitement.

This sweet, sassy, funny movie stars real-life trans girl Michelle Hendley as Rikki, growing up transgender in rural Kentucky.

Yes, it has some of the tropes of LGBTI filmmaking. But bisexual Rikki’s flirtations with other women and journey to her future ambitions wins hearts and deserves to win a global audience.

It’s still not on general release in many territories – overlooked by a lazy LGBTI film distribution industry more interested in cute-boy-comes-out stories. But it has been applauded at LGBTI film festivals, most recently at the international Iris Prize Festival where judges – without a dry eye between them – awarded it best film.

Co-star Michael Welch, best known as the geek competing with a wolf and vampire for Bella’s affections in Twilight, also scooped best actor at Iris for his role as Bobby, Rikki’s best friend.

All trans portrayals are controversial – most of all within the transgender community – but the judges saw Hendley’s performance as utterly authentic and moving.

We caught up with her to find out how much the film really reflected her life and the brave moment when she emerges naked from the water.

a movie about a trans woman starring an actual trans woman?? sign me up

The Art of Not Working at Work:

"In OECD countries, productivity has more than doubled since the ’70s. Yet there has been no perceptible movement to reduce workers’ hours in relation to this increased productivity; instead, the virtues of "creating jobs" are trumpeted by both Democrats and Republicans. "

Hey!

There is something I want to talk about.  No big deal.  It’s basically this: I don’t care if people trace my comics for fun.

My comics often get traced with characters replaced.  They get turned into memes.  That’s a thing that happens, and I guess my particular easy-to-copy style (let’s be honest, Leonardo da Vinci, I am not) and gag comic format makes that easy!  I have, in the past, voiced displeasure at this, only because the joke and the drawings would be traced without my name anywhere on it and shared a jillion times.  I think when it started happening a lot, I was seeing it everywhere, and didn’t know what to make of it.  

If you go to a site like Know Your Meme, there are even my words there saying so!  PRESERVED FOREVER, to my embarrassment.

I can’t deny those are my words, but hey, we all have bad days.  I wish I never did say them, but I don’t even know when I did, only that it was some years ago.  Guess I was really down about memewhore!  Memewhore, what a nemesis! 

The thing about saying anything on the internet is that it lives forever.  But the thing about living on the earth is, your opinions can change over time, and also, you have good days and bad days where you are a cranky poo poo head on twitter.  Twitter is basically the worst thing to have within arms reach when you’re cranky.

And because things that you say live on the internet forever, I still get people talking about how these traced comics upset me, because for all they know, I said that yesterday.  But nah, I’m fine, I’m good.  I’ve even said this before!  On this very same subject.  If the Know Your Meme people are listening, they can take note (please do!).  Because, I feel really crummy whenever it comes up again and someone says “just so you know she HATES THAT.”  No I don’t.  It’s harmless.  Have fun.  

And try not to say dumb things on twitter that will be attached to your life forever.  That’s my advice of the week.  

Becky Ferreira gushes, “In what may well be the cutest scientific study ever conducted, ecologists dressed a rover up as a baby penguin in order to infiltrate the notoriously shy bird’s ranks”:

The study, published Sunday in Nature Methods, argues that undercover robots are able to monitor and extract information about animals without causing them stress – which both is a bummer for the animals, and affects the validity of the science itself. “Investigating wild animals while minimizing human disturbance remains an important methodological challenge,” the authors, led by Yvon Le Maho of the University of Strasbourg, wrote in the paper. “Approaching wild animals to collect data on their phenotypic traits induces stress, escape behavior and, potentially, breeding failure and therefore jeopardizes the quality of the collected data.”

Answer: undercover robot penguin baby.

(Photo: Frederique Olivier/John Downer Productions, Le Maho, et. al., Nature Methods)

spinsterprivilege:

noirnites:

Macabre statues to keep me company outside my new office.

Congratulations on the job. I didn’t know Hell was even hiring.

Hell is the only place hiring lets be real

vamptech:

aishilidenanren:

vamptech:

give me one reason boys shouldn’t wear lipstick

Because the reason women wear lipstick in red tones like this is to mimic sexual arousal. The “sex flush” starts in a woman’s genitals, spreads across her chest and into her face. A woman with very red lips is sexually aroused. Lipstick mimics this particular biological function and has traditionally been utilized in attracting male attention.

well it’s a damn good thing i’m gay and want male attention then isn’t it

While vamptech clearly has this situation well under control, I want to add:

SEX FLUSHES DO NOT WORK LIKE THAT.

The sex flush is a response that occurs in only a certain proportion of people, and is not sex-specific.  (I used to date a cis guy who got spectacularly flushed.)  It usually starts at the chest and spreads across the torso and up to the face.  It’s actually a rather unbecoming look, by conventional beauty standards—it’s not a delicate pinkening but a “just carried a sofa up the stairs” splotchy redness.  I think it’s sexy as hell, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t look a damn thing like makeup.

…Anyway, “a woman with very red lips is sexually aroused” is just completely not true, on a level where it’s almost baffling, like hearing someone say “of course everyone knows when a woman gets sexually aroused, her concealed antennae extend.”

Souvenir:

[wow intensifies]

React vs. Ember - Alex Matchneer - EmberNYC meetup - Google Slides:

good presentation though i lack full context

Roland Paulsen, the author of Empty Labor: Idleness and Workplace Resistance, reviews the research on slacking off:

Most work sociologists tend toward the view that non-work at work is a marginal, if not negligible, phenomenon. What all statistics point towards is a general intensification of work with more and more burnouts and other stress syndromes troubling us.

Yet there are more-detailed surveys reporting that the average time spent on private activities at work is between 1.5 and three hours a day. By measuring the flows of audiences for certain websites, it has also been observed that, by the turn of the century, 70 percent of the U.S. internet traffic passing through pornographic sites did so during working hours, and that 60 percent of all online purchases were made between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. … Even if the percentage of workers who claim they are working at the pinnacle of their capacity all the time is slowly increasing, the majority still remains unaffected. In fact, the proportion of people who say they never work hard has long been far greater than those who say they always do.

unbeatablesquirrelgirl:

I’ve been looking into some ideas for SG cosplay and I figured I’d share with you what I’ve found.

First, the main piece of the suit is a halter, so I found this retro swimsuit pattern: Alison #BS-002 It could be easily altered to match Squirrel Girl’s suit.

For the jacket I’m thinking some Frankenstein mixture of these two: A cropped version of this Athletic Jacket 05/2014 #110 and this Frenchglen Barn Jacket Pattern or if you can track down a copy of Great Copy Patterns Bomber Jacket

And hey! Here’s a link to a utility belt tutorial with a link to the pouch tutorial at the bottom!

I can’t help you with the boots. When I was first drawing them in the sketch phases, back before we even knew if this book was happening, they were Uggs, but they’ve evolved and taken on a life of their own since then.

I don’t know nothing about fashion, and it’s always great to be working with people who do!  Thanks to Erica, everyone in our comic is going to have clothes that are based on “here are the outfits that this particular person would put together” and not “I dunno, t-shirt and jeans, those are easy to draw”.

Braden and Shelli did the same on Adventure Time: PB and Marceline, in particular, always had different looks, because their closets have more than one piece of clothing in them.  (And yes, Finn only owns that one outfit, OBVIOUSLY THAT WOULD BE THE CASE)

cephalodogs:

the temeraire series is incredible, the entire plot is like

"neurotic gentleman gets a dragon. dragon gets really into activism. napoleon was there."

Sorry about missing last week's post; hope you all enjoyed seeing the blogqueen back in action.  I was in the American South, where it's apparently reasonable for train stations to have signs that expressly forbid all weapons "except firearms (with a permit)", which says all that is necessary about that.  On the plus side, I spent some more time with my American friends, makers of the excellent YouStar web series.  (I play EruditeConnoisseur64 and try to keep a straight face.)   So the risk was acceptable.  Everyone was very nice and I met very few huge racists.

Now, back to the Wheel of Time.

(Content: gender essentialism. Fun content: how excited are you about blatant theft from random cultures, languages, and mythologies?  No?  What about Mallory Ortberg?)


There's a lot of advice out there about how to start your book: with action, with things happening, with decisions being made, with whatever the real inciting event is.  Famously, fantasy novels are bad at this, spending endless quantities of time meandering about with farm chores and pub crawls to be more like Lord of the Rings before they get around to the plot.  I am unsurprised that EOTW is a great example of the latter.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

Nice for them as likes it, I guess.

Our Hero, Rand al'Thor (and his dad) are walking down the Quarry Road that I thought was a river but in fact just ends at the start of a river, feeling uncomfortable in his wet cloak on a blustery day, other hand on his bow in case of wolves.  Summarising the first three pages: wind, trees, foresty, cold, Dad al'Thor is a tough salt-of-the-earth man, Mom al'Thor is long dead (although it's preemptive, I'm still going to call that Fridged Women Tally: 2).  Four pages in, Rand sees a mysterious black rider on a black horse on the road behind them, who has disappeared by the time Rand points him out to dad.  They agree they need to go smoke and booze in a warm house, and dad suggests Rand wants to see Egwene, the mayor's daughter, though Rand silently disagrees because she makes him feel funny in his bathing suit area without even meaning to.

He we hoping his father had not noticed he was afraid when Tam said, "Remember the flame, lad, and the void." 

It was an odd thing Tam had taught him. Concentrate on a single flame and feed all your passions into it--fear, hate, anger--until your mind became empty. Become one with the void, Tam said, and you could do anything. Nobody else in Emond's Field talked that way. But Tam had won the archery competition at Bel Tine every year with his flame and his void.

Now we've got this randomly introduced pseudo-zen thing from Tam, but also an obvious reference to Beltane, so evidence continues to lean towards this story randomly hodgepodging cool things from various cultures however Robert Jordan whims.  Is there an actual reason this farmer dude is a zen archer?  I'm hoping so, but I'm also worried it's going to be terrible.

They arrive in Emond's Field, where the heads of houses are called "goodmen" and "goodwives" and gender roles are enforced by cosmic law.

Whether or not leaves had appeared on the trees, no woman would let Bel Tine come before her spring cleaning was done. [....] On roof after roof the goodman of the house clamebered about, checking the thatch to see if the winter's damage meant calling on old Cenn Buie, the thatcher.

I feel like I'm in the medieval fantasy version of Pepperidge Farm, except that would probably be more like Mallory Ortberg's Letters from Chris Kimball, which are masterpieces of sothothic horror.  Someone named Wit Congar stops the al'Thors to complain about the Wisdom of Emond's Field, Nynaeve, who is apparently a person and chosen by women.  She apparently badly mispredicted the severity of the last winter, and Wit wants the Village Council to overrule the Women's Circle, but he gets called out by his wife Daise, "twice as wide as Wit, a hard-faced woman without an ounce of fat on her", so as we can see when people don't conform to their expected gender positions they are whiners and nags.  The al'Thors book it before Daise notices them, because they are both single men and therefore the women of Emond's Field would like nothing more than to set Tam (and now Rand) with a widowed friend or someone's daughter.  Rand is much too stubborn to allow himself to be set up with any farmgirl he likes, or something.

I'm skipping a lot of description of the layout of the grounds and of Pepperidge-Farm-remembers type narrative, like the Pole (obviously a maypole): "No one knew when the custom began or why--it was another thing that was the way it had always been--but it was an excuse to sing and dance, and nobody in the Two Rivers needed much excuse but that."  ITS FOLKSY, GOT IT?  DO YOU GET IT?

They're also very excited about the prospect of fireworks for the first time in a decade.

The al'Thors arrive at the al'Veres' place, home of the mayor/innkeeper, and they all talk grumpily about the weather and the prospect of next winter never ending and everyone freezing to death, et cetera.  Rand instead talks with his buddy Mat, who plans to set an old badger loose in town to scare the girls, but by sheer coincidence he also immediately brings up that he recently saw "a man in a black cloak, on a black horse [...] and his cloak doesn't move in the wind" , just as Rand did, and then he vanished as soon as Mat looked away.

"I actually thought--just for a minute, mind--it might be the Dark One." He tried another laugh, but no sound at all came out this time. 

Rand took a deep breath. As much to remind himself as for any other reason, he said by rote, "The Dark One and all of the Forsaken are bound in Shayol Ghul,beyond the Great Blight, bound by the Creator at the moment of Creation, bound until the end of time. The hand of the Creator shelters the world, and the Light shines on us all."

Well, that's one way of getting exposition out of the way.  Just so we're clear on this, that's Shayol as in the Hebrew Sheol, and Ghul as in demon.  Jordan must have spent at least half an hour creating his mythology.

Mat gets roped into helping unload the booze from the cart, with the promise of then getting to go see the visiting gleeman, who is apparently made of awesome.

To have one there actually during Bel Tine, with his harp and his flute and his stories and all... Emond's Field would still be talking about this Festival ten years off, even if there were not any fireworks.

I'm going to assume that 'gleeman' is a euphemism for 'marijuana dealer'.  Nothing much else happens for the rest of the chapter as far as I can tell, beyond talking about how much people will be excited and how much the fireworks cost.


The Village Council (which appears to be all men--please tell me that the neutrally-named council isn't the male counterpart to the Women's Circle, please please please) are gathering in the mayor's home, looking grim and smoking and suchlike.  The mayor's wife arrives with food, of course, and Rand likes her because she doesn't try to set his dad up with anyone.

Toward Rand her motherliness extended to warm smiles and a quick snack whenever he came by the inn, but she did as much for every young man in the area. If she occasionally looked at him as if she wanted to do more, at least she took it no further than looks, for which he was deeply grateful.

The mayor's wife wants to jump our teenage hero, but she only gawks, so he's grateful for the relative lack of inappropriate actions.  Le sigh.  That is not how gratitude is supposed to work.  I suppose/hope Jordan just means grateful in the sense of glad, but the connotation is not the same.  Rand and Mat finish hauling in the booze kegs and meet a younger boy, Ewin, who tells them all about the strangers in town.  Not the black rider:

"And his cloak is green. Or maybe gray. It changes. It seems to fade into wherever he's standing. Sometimes you don't see him even when you look right at him, not unless he moves. And hers is blue, like the sky, and ten times fancier than any feastday clothes I ever saw. She's ten times prettier than anybody I ever saw, too."

I'm kind of charmed by the way everyone in this book at the same time has no familiarity with magic but are constantly like 'Did you see someone teleporting on the road today?' 'Yeah, and the dude in the inn can turn invisible!'  It's almost like magic realism, minus the realism.  Also, while the dudes thus far have been characterised with their skills, their philosophies, their senses of humour, their jobs, all that jazz, all of the women have been characterised based on their interactions with men and/or their physical attractiveness.  That's a lot less charming.

Oh, wait, no, we play Six Degrees of Bechdel Separation, because Rand hears from Ewin who overheard the visiting lady Moiraine talking to the village Wisdom, Nynaeve, who got all huffy because Moiraine called her "child" while asking for directions.  She apologised upon realising she was talking to the Wisdom, and asked a bunch more respectful questions.  So our two plot-relevant living women have now been characterised by their failure to get along and Nynaeve's uncontrolled temper.

Outside, Rand gets another unpleasant feeling of being watched, which apparently comes from a raven on the roof of the inn.  He and Mat both whip stones at it, but it sidesteps them, and then takes off when Moiraine appears and calls it "A vile bird [...] to be mistrusted in the best of times."  Harsh, gal.  #notallravens

Moiraine is indeed the tiny woman from the cover, only as tall as Rand's chest, young but "there was a maturity about her large, dark eyes, a hint of knowing that no one could have gotten young".  Her clothes and jewelry get a half-page of dedicated description.  They all trip over their tongues introducing themselves, and Moiraine explains that she's a historian, come to Two Rivers as "a collector of old stories".  There's some rambling chatter about the Wheel of Time and the Great Pattern and how the names for things and people change over time,and then she leaves,"appearing to glide over the ground rather than walk, her cloak spreading on either side of her like wings."

So far I have no reason to believe Rand is a more interesting protagonist than Moiraine would be.

They finally spot her bodyguard, Lan, standing by the inn, stealthy and hard-faced with a hand on his sword.  Ewin guesses he's a Warder, but Mat shoots this down because Warders are 1) fictional and 2) covered in gold and jewels and spend all their time slaying monsters in the Great Blight up north, which... look, are they real or not?  If your case is 'that's not real', maybe just stick with that, rather than adding the details of the not-real thing you're saying doesn't exist?

Moiraine hired them all as assistants while in town, and pressed a silver coin on each of them that Rand estimates is worth a good horse.  They each agree that it seems like it would be wrong to spend it, and will keep it as their bond with Moiraine, and then they see a huge eight-horse wagon rolling into town, the peddler.

It was going to be the best Bel Tine ever.

Christmas is going to be ruined and I'm legitimately looking forward to it.

So, apart from the rubbish representation of women so far, what I'm noticing is mostly that if I had actual affection for this story, instead of the cold stony husk that is my unbeating heart, I could imagine finding this crawlingly slow opening rather relaxing, the kind of thing that I would look forward to rereading on days when I just wanted something soothing and familiar to dwell in, the literary equivalent of petting a cat.  However, it should probably be noted that I recently started some really great antidepressants and I find damn near everything soothing compared to how I felt a month ago, so maybe I'm not the most unbiased opinion on such matters.

The Associated Press has learned that in the days after the August 9th shooting death of Mike Brown, the no-fly zone requested by the Ferguson, MO police was meant specifically to avoid airborne media coverage. Read the rest

"Education reform," the charter school movement (that siphons state funding for well-off kids into private hands), the racialized segregation of inner-city and suburban school districts, No Child Left Behind, and the scapegoating of teachers' unions has produced an education system that hardly even qualifies as a 12-year babysitting service. Read the rest

yeah

also i dont necessarily like the messaging of this original post either

in that, is coming out a personal choice? i don’t think that it is

not that you “owe” it to other people, you manifestly owe them jack shit viz your sexuality

but other people owe it to you to make support, resources, and political agency available to you to protect and cultivate you

saying it is personal puts all the responsibility for your safety on you, and while we often have to live that way to survive (i know i have), that is not as important a message as:

"come out, because we will protect you unconditionally, and here is how"

but we don’t want to form the political awareness to give that support to queer people, so instead we tell them “well we forgive you for not being able to live honestly because we won’t do jack shit to keep you safe”

officialjeffgoldblum:

slowly watching all yr tumblr mutuals become anti-capitalists 

Sen. Mary Landrieu's comment that the South "has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans" spurs outraged Republican demands for an apology and show of heartfelt contrition.

The above image comes from a new study that comparatively mapped the brain activity of people on placebos (left) and psilocybin (right):

Each circle depicts relationships between networks — the dots and colours correspond not to brain regions, but to especially connection-rich networks — with normal-state brains at left, and psilocybin-influenced brains at right. In mathematical terms, said [researcher Giovanni] Petri, normal brains have a well-ordered correlation state. There’s not much cross-linking between networks. That changes after the psilocybin dose. Suddenly the networks are cross-linking like crazy, but not in random ways. New types of order emerge.

“We can speculate on the implications of such an organisation,” wrote the researchers, who were led by neurobiologist Paul Expert of King’s College London. “One possible by-product of this greater communication across the whole brain is the phenomenon of synaesthesia” — the experience, common during psychedelic experiences, of sensory mix-up: tasting colours, feeling sounds, seeing smells, and so on.

Previous Dish on psilocybin here.

The Scottish Political Singularity is not only far from over, it's showing every sign of recomplicating, bizarrely.

From The Guardian:

a new poll by Ipsos Mori for STV showed that a record 52% of Scottish voters would vote SNP if there were an immediate general election, implying the SNP would win 54 Westminster seats - a nine-fold increase on the six seats it currently holds - leaving Labour with just four. Carried out in part after Scottish Labour leader Johann Lamont's sudden resignation last Friday, the poll put Labour at just 23% - its lowest figure in over six years, with the Tories cut to 10% and the Lib Dems down to 6%, tying with the Scottish Green party.

What does this mean?

Firstly, it's important not to read too much into this poll. It's been criticized elsewhere, and the timing (coincidental with the Scottish Labour leader and deputy leader's resignations) is iffy.

However, Scotland runs on first-past-the-post, like the rest of the UK, in general elections (of which one is due next June). And even if we knock 10% off the SNP voting intentions across the board, Labour is going to take a very deep, very cold, bath—punishment by their voters for running an unremittingly negative campaign during the referendum. Lots of Scots didn't actually want to leave the UK, but deeply resented being told that they were too wee, too poor, and too stupid to go it alone: this is the payback.

How crazy is it going to get?

Well, if the SNP pick up on the order of 50 MPs, they'll be the third largest party in Westminster (replacing the Liberal Democrats, who are in meltdown as voters desert them—the LibDem core are mostly centre-left, and the coalition with the Conservative party was pure poison for that base).

Alex Salmond, the former SNP First Minister of Scotland, has been rather coy when asked if he was going to run for Westminster in next summer's election. But he's been an MP before, and he'd be a shoo-in for a safe seat as party leader if he wanted one. In the wake of a "No" vote on independence, a Westminster seat would give him a good base on which to campaign to hold the UK party leaders' feet to the fire over promises they made during the campaign.

There are (still) going to be 650 seats in play at the election. A number will go to independents and minor parties: one or two Greens, a handful of Ulster Unionists, an indeterminate number (5-15) Liberal Democrats, plus independent MPs and maybe even a few UKIP. (My sticking-my-neck-out prognostication is that UKIP will get lots of votes, but distributed thinly enough that they win relatively few seats.) The Conservatives and Labour would, as before, each win roughly 250-300 seats. With 50 seats, the SNP would be the turd in the punchbowl: it would literally be almost impossible to form a stable government without them (unless we look at the apocalyptic scenario of a Labour/Tory coalition, which in the past has only happened during a World War government of national unity). It would be hard to spin Alex Salmond smirking and demanding Devo Max as being tantamount to Hitler! so quite possibly some sort of deal would be done. As the SNP already firmly ruled out a pact with the Conservatives (it'd be a political suicide pill for their base in Scotland), that leaves two likely options:

1. A full formal coalition with the Labour Party. (I think this is unlikely, although Labour might have learned a lesson from the consequences of Brown's refusal to compromise with Nick Clegg in 2010: Labour and the SNP are natural rivals for the governing party/centre-left niche in Scotland.) Terms would be: the SNP get Devo Max and some ministerial posts, and in return they vote in line with Labour policy on any items that the parties don't actually disagree on, and abstain from voting on purely English non-budgetary matters.

2. An understanding (like the Lib-Lab Pact of 1977) whereby a minority Labour government operates with SNP support contingent on them not pissing in the SNP's wheaties. This might work, if Labour are willing to cut a deal over Scottish powers. Otherwise ...

I could be wrong.

The most unpredictable alternative would be a landslide in the direction of UKIP. I find it hard to imagine UKIP picking up more seats than the SNP, because while they may have more voters across the UK, the SNP's are concentrated in constituencies where they stand a chance of winning: but if UKIP were to pick up 50 or so MPs, roughly matching the SNP's showing, then we're into total terra incognita in British politics. I don't think we're going to get into "rainbow coalition" territory in just one election—Labour and the Conservatives—aren't going to completely crumble just six months from now—but the number of possible combinations that could form governments in Westminster just exploded. And so did the outcomes. UKIP appear, ironically, to be intensely hostile to Scottish nationalism and devolution in general (they're a vastly stronger party in England than in Scotland, where they are out-polled three to one by the Scottish Greens). So we have the prospect of two historically ideologically polarized major parties (neither of whom can form a government without external assistance), and two ideologically polarized minor parties (one or both of whom might enable one or other of the larger parties to govern, with a tail-wind and some independent help).

Anyway: I can't be sure of the outcome, but as far as I can tell British politics is about to go sideways, very fast, next June—largely as a delayed consequence of the Scottish independence referendum. Order up the pop-corn: this is going to be interesting.

Alyssa Rosenberg, addressing a recent post of mine, sharpens a point in our current debate:

How much does masculine culture depend on women and femininity as a reference point? To what extent does asserting what it means to be a man necessitate pointing out and denigrating what men are not and what masculinity is not supposed to be?

If cheerleaders suddenly vanished from the sidelines of NFL games, would those contests suddenly be less fun? In action movies, do you find the hero’s bona fides less credible if a woman contributes to his successes, or if she rescues him? If you are playing video games, how much of your enjoyment has to do with opportunities to treat women in-game in ways that are not available to you in real life?

It occurs to me that I am somewhat (ahem) deficient in personal experience to address this point, which is why I encourage straight male readers to respond. And even when I have been immersed in masculine culture – such as a rowdy, rugby-loving, all-male high school – I wasn’t very attuned to how heterosexual attraction and views of women contributed to the atmosphere. I couldn’t bond with other adolescent boys over their difficulties with and longing for the opposite sex. I had no real struggle to date women, no frustrations or anxieties about the opposite sex, and so was oddly neutral – to the extent of having a real blind spot – in this eternal hetero-dilemma.

But I don’t want to duck Alyssa’s point, so let me think of it another way: to what extent can hetero male culture retain its quintessential maleness while losing its homophobia?

One way is to hope and pray that every cool straight dude ends up like Chris Kluwe and totally gets that it’s not kosher – and actually immature – to demean or demonize those men who do not fit into the classic male macho archetype. Another is to reassure straight men that gay men do not want to change the core part of male culture, but merely want to be accepted as fully part of it.

I think we’re making a lot of progress on both fronts. From the mainstreaming of gay culture to the emergence of openly gay men in highly masculinized cultures – think Tim Cook in nerdland or Michael Sam in sports – the sharper edges of homophobia have been rounded a bit. But that is partly because of a strategy of engagement rather than confrontation. My own inclination from the 1980s on – and it was not shared very enthusiastically by many on the gay left – was to emphasize what gay men and straight men have in common: a need for emotional commitment and stability as well as to get our rocks off from time to time; the desire and will to serve one’s country in the military; the commonalities of sports and drinking and the gym and dirty jokes. And part of our success, I think, is that we absolutely constructed this as a non-zero-sum project. I think a feminism that started with a love and appreciation for classic male culture – and then sought to persuade men that it doesn’t have to be sexist toward women – would be more productive than treating all men as inherently suspect or privileged, and attempting to police their culture from the outside.

But – and here’s the thing – I don’t think we’ll ever live in a world where homophobia is absent among many men, especially younger ones. Our primate nature – exacerbated by cresting levels of testosterone in the teen and early adult years – will always trend toward loyalty to in-groups and disdain of out-groups. We can mitigate this, but it’s utopian to think we can abolish it. So, yeah, I can live with the word “fag” as something that will always be a part of hetero-male culture. I can live with religious groups demonizing me. I can ignore the insults and smears – on the street or online. It’s just part of the price for living in a free society.

Equally, the young testosteroned male’s desire for and incomprehension of the opposite gender can be mitigated, it seems to me, but not abolished. And in the case of male attitudes toward women, of course, the “other” is also the object of often-crippling and overwhelming sexual desire. These are powerful – often internally conflicting – forces and they will not easily be constrained by abstract rules or “social justice warriors”.

And so I think we just have to live with a certain amount of straight-very-male homophobia and sexism, and leave it be. Young men want to live out fantasies of rescuing big-boobed women while being encased in a steroidal muscle culture (precisely because, for so many, it is utterly beyond their actual day-to-day lives). And my inclination is simply: give them a break. Sure, offer alternatives – but the most appealing ones should work with the grain of masculinity rather than against it. Keep the cheer-leaders – but add some dudes to the mix. Don’t insist that straight men have to change their way of life; suggest ways in which it can become more inclusive of others within its own rules and ethos. Do not pathologize some deep parts of human nature – because you are pathologizing human beings simply for being who they are, which means that the level of coercion to change them for the better can be dangerously high. I don’t think Alyssa and I are that far apart on this.

What I think is counterproductive is precisely an agenda that refuses to see real, biological differences, physical and mental, between men and women, whose first item on the agenda is to get men to “check their privilege”, and who want to police speech and urgently stamp out sexism and homophobia. This will often compound the problem, create a zero-sum environment, and in a world where Twitter gives everyone a completely unaccountable megaphone, generate levels of public toxicity we can all live without.

My position on this is therefore, essentially, conservative-libertarian. It sees human nature as something to be enjoyed and not always reformed, or fully reformable. It revels in the differences between groups of people, rather than being terrified by them. It does not traffic in either the delusion that we can never make our society in general less bigoted or prejudiced or hateful (we can and we have) or the delusion that such emotions will ever be abolished or eradicated. It seeks coexistence of various, often contradictory, subcultures, rather than the imperative of “social justice.” And it tends to prefer anarchic and sometimes ugly freedom to well-intentioned and admirable attempts at social control.

There is a happy medium here. But it appears that our ideological polarization is making it increasingly impossible to sustain, even as we have an amazing example – our progress on gay rights – that shows just how fruitful it can be.

If you’re looking for methods of staying spooked this All Hallows’ Evening, here are some new horror/suspense/creepy pieces of media I’ve been enjoying:

• False Positive: Webcomic Tales of the Surreal, Fantastic and Macabre. Some pretty gross stuff here — a fair share of body horror. Reminds me a lot of the pacing and tone of Creepshow or Tales from the Crypt. Good in doses.
• Wilde Life by Pascalle Lepas. A new horror adventure comic with novel setting that draws from Native American and Southern folklore — which despite its richness and nightmarish ideas, we barely see any of in horror. Bring me these unknown beasts.
• Lights Out (horror short film). It opens with a great conceit, and the first minute contains one of the most memorable (and thoughtful) jump scares I can recall. Very frightening in my opinion — right up to the (unnecessary) reveal in the last split second.
• A Reading of Carmilla by Shannon Saar. Shannon brings a lovely voice to this audio reading of J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Victorian vampire novella, published in 1871 and predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 26 years. Also notable for its depiction of lesbianism, which at the time may have been scarier than a vampire.
• Eric Heisserer’s concerned posting on /r/nosleep. Eric is a wonderful man who wrote the online epistolary scary story The Dionaea House, and he returns to the form in this series of posts. A great read with another chilling conceit.
• Abby Howard’s The Last Halloween. A fun and creepy tale with Abby’s Gorey-esque lines and shadows. Her monster design is unparalleled.
• Emily Carroll’s The Prince and the Sea. Emily is the reigning charming horror comics champion. Broodhollow is but foam in her wake. All her comics are incredible uses of the form, but The Prince and the Sea stayed with me for weeks afterward.

And a semi-honorable self-mention, Ichor Falls: A Visitor’s Guide — my collection of short horror stories, including Candle Cove, is available on Gumroad in PDF form. You can enter “$0″ as your price and download it for free.

If you know any more, let me have them in the comments!

In a virulently anti-Western and uncharacteristically blunt speech, Russian spy-turned-president Vladimir Putin set out his agenda for Russia and its relationship to "western elites." The speech wasn't widely reported in the west, but Dmitry Orlov has helpfully translated, transcribed and summarized it. Read the rest

Paul Davidson tells you everything you ever wanted to know about the Ark of the Covenant but were afraid to ask: “Readers of the Lost Ark: Following the Literary Trail of an Ancient Religious Symbol.” After tracing the various (conflicting) biblical traditions and narratives about the ark, Davidson notes that “diverse traditions about the ark continued to develop into the Christian era.” His post also, of course, includes some Indiana Jones allusions and images as a lighthearted touch.

But I take those Raiders references seriously, because even though Stephen Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan and George Lucas didn’t intend to reshape our understanding of the Ark of the Covenant, they contributed mightily to the way we imagine it, the way we think of it, and thus the way we read and tell and understand all those biblical stories.

When you read Davidson’s summary of the work of actual biblical scholars, you can’t help but notice that their understanding of these stories is very different in many ways from the popular understanding most Christians acquire in Sunday school. And it’s not just that scholars know more than what is communicated in those popular lessons. In many cases, the difference is that scholars “know” less — the popular lessons include all kinds of little details and glosses, embellishments and assumptions that can’t be found anywhere in the text.

The text itself gets popularized and its stories are retold. Its stories provide the basis for other stories about those stories, and details from those new stories seep back into the popular understanding as though they were part of the original. The revised and expanded idea of the original then provides the basis for even more new stories, and the cycle repeats itself. The text feeds into popular culture and popular culture, in turn, feeds back into the text, and after multiple repetitions of that cycle we lose the ability to distinguish one from the other.

That’s where 90 percent of what most Christians “know” about Hell or Satan or “the Antichrist” comes from. They’re confident that all this stuff they “know” is in the Bible somewhere, but you can’t find it in the text itself, only in the idea of the text that exists after generations of this text-culture-text cycle has done its work.

We learn new stories and then we carry those stories with us when we go back to the text and those stories influence what we see and don’t see when we read the text. This is true of horrible stories that intend to reshape the way we read the text itself, such as for example Left Behind. But it’s also true of really good stories that don’t seem intended to do this — like Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Omen or Dante’s Divine Comedy or The Vision of Tundale.

The new stories employ vocabulary that comes from the text, and those new stories give the words from the text new connotations and new associations that we carry with us when we go back to the text. And in that return to the text, we begin to imagine that we find those new connotations and new associations there in the original story. We read a Bible verse with the word “Hell” in it and we bring 2,000 years of other stories with us, assuming that all of that is what the writer meant when it’s neither true nor possible that the writer could have meant any of that.

Indiana Jones may not be a character you’ll find in the Bible, but then “The Antichrist” isn’t a character you’ll find in the Bible either, and that hasn’t stopped generations of Christian readers from finding him there.

Ok, that’s kind of funny.

Anita Sarkeesian had a lovely piece in the NYT yesterday, explaining why she is happy that “gamer culture” as it once was is a much diluted phenomenon. Its points are as valid as the foul attacks on her (and so many others) are indefensible in any shape or form. Money quote:

The time for invisible boundaries that guard the “purity” of gaming as a niche subculture is over. The violent macho power fantasy will no longer define what gaming is all about. Those who police the borders of our hobby, the ones who try to shame and threaten women like me into silence, have already lost. The new reality is that video games are maturing, evolving and becoming more diverse.

Those of us who critique the industry are simply saying that games matter. We know games can tell different, broader stories, be quirky and emotional, and give us more ways to win and have fun. As others have recently suggested, the term “gamer” is no longer useful as an identity because games are for everyone.

This is basically an echo of my “let a thousand nerds bloom”. But then you come across some recent tweets of hers:

Reading right along, you realize she’s actually not that interested in letting a thousand nerds bloom. She’s interested in suppressing a certain subculture because of her contention that it leads to violence, rape and murder. That subculture is what she regards as “toxic masculinity”:

Since so many seem confused. Masculinity ≠ male. Masculinity is a socially constructed and performed gender identity: http://t.co/JpPQd6zwkg

— Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 25, 2014

This agenda leads her to see a school shooting thus:

Watching the news about a school shooting today in Seattle and honestly I’m sorta shaking with fear and with rage. — Feminist Frequency (@femfreq) October 24, 2014

Her op-ed is, I’d say, in this broader context, a little disingenuous. In one version of her argument, gamer culture is simply dying out as it is supplanted and complemented by a new diversity. On the other hand:

Women are being driven out, they’re being driven offline; this isn’t just in gaming, this is happening across the board online, especially with women who participate in or work in male-dominated industries.

So which is it: women are being drummed out of games and male-dominated industries (on Democracy Now)? Or are they so triumphant that even her mom is playing games now? In the NYT, she’s proclaiming a great, diverse future for games and gamers; in her Twitter feed, she clearly wants to see this very male subculture “addressed” as a matter of urgency.

I’m not pointing this out to defend the gamergaters. After reading all your emails, and diving further into the virtual vortex of madness that has come to define this eruption, I’ve been convinced I’ve been a little too even-handed in sympathizing with the plight of the angry white nerd. I can’t see a world in which their version of gamer culture is truly under threat. But Sarkeesian clearly wishes it were:

“In the #games industry, we have a problem with sexism and misogyny — and we need to do something about it.” http://t.co/Ns9PZ1tLuC @femfreq

— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) October 21, 2014

Underlying this belief in the importance of changing other people’s subculture is an argument. For Sarkeesian, it seems that all differences between men and women, or between masculine or feminine identities, are entirely a function of culture, and can only be understood within a paradigm of patriarchy. All I can say is that I disagree. Of course culture matters a lot – but it doesn’t go all the way down. To deny the power of testosterone, or the stark difference it makes in all species on planet earth, can therefore lead you to misread what can and cannot be changed. My view is that there are certain aspects of testosterone that will always make men and male culture different: it’s gonna be inherently more aggressive, more physical, and more sexual in an objectifying way, and more promiscuous. The task of a mature society is not to abolish this difference (which is impossible), but to harness it to more constructive ends.

And so , in advanced Western cultures, we divert male physical aggression and in-group loyalty away from militias and gang warfare toward the spectacle of the NFL or professional wrestling or recreational hunting; we create a culture of sports that can channel a lot of what men want to do in peaceful and socially integrative ways; we allow safe spaces for this kind of culture to exist – and that includes things like violent video games and objectifying porn. And we attempt to offer a model of masculinity that can coopt the pride and ego of a testosteroned will to power into something more gentle. We praise good fathers and diligent husbands.

What a mature society does not seek to do is expunge human nature itself. All such projects backfire, or result in new forms of oppression. And there is a tendency – certainly in Sarkeesian’s work – to problematize maleness itself, to seek to expunge it, to remove all differences between the sexes for the sake of justice and fairness. Her defense will be that she is not attacking men as such – just a “toxic culture of masculinity.” And yet her prose often slips into generalizations that would never be tolerated if used against another group; and it’s hard to see what characteristics of maleness she believes are innate or at least unchangeable.

What worries me in this new era of “checking your privilege” is that men may be punished merely for being men. When liberals actually defend the conviction of the innocent in a murky world of “affirmative consent” pour décourager les autres, you see exactly where this can lead. And my concern is not just that it will not work, but that it may well provoke a backlash that compounds the problem. And that backlash, in turn, will only encourage well-intentioned people to double down on the project.

A little moderation can go a long way. And a little realism even further. Leave Kenny McCormick alone.

This afternoon, Marvel held a mystery event that everyone was invited to and knew about, thus making the meaning of a secret event kind of meaningless. But at any rate, the studio unveiled a bunch of new info about their upcoming projects, so hold on to your comics, because we're gonna do this bullet style: -Let's start with new projects: Namely "Captain Marvel," the studio's first female lead movie which is set for a July 6, 2018 release date.“This Captain Marvel’s name is Carol Danvers," Kevin Feige said. "This film has been in the works almost as long as Doctor Strange or Guardians of the Galaxy before it came out, and one of the key things was figuring out...

GOG weren’t the first joint in cyberspace slinging vintage video games, but they did get publishers digging a lot deeper into their archives (Good Old Games, they called themselves back in the day). Most publishers came to realise that hey, maybe it’s good for everyone if folks can buy our old games, but some were tangled in knots or lost in mysteries for yonks. It took almost five years for a group to free System Shock 2, and we’re still waiting for the best parts of the LucasArts catalogue.

Or we were, anyway. Here, they’re coming! Sam & Max Hit the Road, X-Wing, and TIE Fighter are now on GOG – the first time they’ve been on sale in years – as heralds of a re-release-o-rama.

… [visit site to read more]