Radio Friday: That South Sound Sound

These last few weeks have seen me chained to my desk running through endless data-sets to assemble a report.  I'm not doing anything complicated; the problem is simply one of scale.

That means I need a soundtrack to keep me awake whilst I shovel categorical variables into tables, and British Sea Power were kind enough to provide it.



BSP haven't impressed me at all with their studio albums since 2005's Open Season,  but the soundtrack they put together for the 1934 film Man of Aran is absolutely gorgeous; all melancholy violin and piano, with the sea surrounding it all.  I shall have to take it up with me the next time I haunt an island to see how well it works as a backdrop.  I can't promise it won't persuade me to never come back...

The Familiarity Curse

What is it about surprise horror hits that generates such a large amount of terrible sequels? Sequels are generally inferior anyway, of course, I haven't forgotten, but this particular sub-division of the horror genre seems awash in awful reprises.  Blair Witch 2 is amongst the very worst films I have ever watched. Hypercube isn't quite as bad as its reputation suggests, but it very nearly is.  Battle Royale 2 is a ridiculous mess.  Pitch Black - which we can count as horror with a wee bit of squinting - was followed by the plodding, po-faced Chronicles of Riddick.  The Japanese and American sequels to Ringu/Ring are horribly messy and horribly messy plus quite dull, respectively - and that's before we get into the fact that Ringu had an earlier sequel, Rasen, which is so legendarily bad it's been deleted from the public consciousness like a Star Wars Holiday Special based on spending Christmas with a dead chick down a well.

As of last week, I can now add REC2 to the list of horribly disappointing second instalments.  But what makes horror movies so abnormally susceptible to the curse of the shitty sequel? [1]

I actually think REC and its sequel make a good case study on where the problem lies.  To that end I'm going to spoil both films reasonably thoroughly, and therefore my musings are going below the fold.

History Is - I Am Awesome! - Important

Does falling between two stools always have to be a bad thing?  Interpreted one way, doesn't it just mean you avoided the shit on either side?

Grant Morrison's Supergods falls between two stools, and it certainly isn't shit.  Yes, it spends too much time considering events Morrison was uninvolved in (or even not yet alive for) to be an autobiography, and too concerned with the minutiae of Morrison's rise to global almost-dominance to be a detached history text, but so what? It would be a strange edict indeed to insist that history cannot be explained by those who shape it.  This way, you get your revelations straight from the source and, whilst the resulting bias is likely greater, at least it's easier to spot and correct for. If that's the price to be paid for reading one of the greatest ever comics writers discuss the work of his contemporaries (and reading this whilst Alan Moore launched a fairly punishing broadside at Morrison gave the experience a little extra kick), then it would be hard to argue it is too steep a fee.

Besides, this is Grant Morrison, a man who could probably have eked out a living trading in mysterious pronouncements and egomaniacal overkill even if he hadn't been writing best-selling comics along with them.  If anyone has demonstrated the writing chops for a dabble in gonzo journalism, it's him, though I confess the link may have only occurred to me due to Morrison's detailed-to-the-point-of-tedium descriptions of his various life-changing drug trips.

Except... what makes gonzo writing work at its best is the degree to which the subject and the writer overlap and merge. Morrison manages that more than once here, but more often the two strands sit uneasily next to each other, as though the author has grown bored of writing about the general scene and decided it's time for another expose of life in the world of Morrison.  This is compounded by the fact that Morrison's insights into the development of superheroes as a genre are far more gripping than his own story which, while hardly devoid of interest, are comparatively prosaic.  Particularly in the later chapters, when the struggle of a working-class Glaswegian to break into comics (an inspiring story, if not a particularly remarkable one except insofar as it worked out) is replaced by the tale of a rich man jetting around the world and deciding if he can be bothered to write another best-seller, interest rapidly wanes; again, this is not helped by Morrison's lengthy descriptions of his drug-birthed hallucinations, which are nowhere near intriguing or illuminating enough to justify the pages dedicated to them.

Morrison states in the afterword here that the book was originally conceived of as being closer to an autobiography, and only later was it decided to focus as well on the overall evolution of the superhero genre.  Judging the twin concerns of the book, it's difficult to argue this was a mistake. Still, whether it be because already-written material was not revisited, or for some other reason, the fault-lines extending from where the new concept was shoved into the old one are all too visible. It's like reading two books chopped up and clumsily stuck together.  Yes, one book is competent, and the other is pretty impressive, but a little more work on sensible splicing the two and a ride could have been smooth as well as pretty.

This Blog Endorses...

...This nice little rant over at Aimai's I SPY... blog.  In particular, the phrase "People really don't take any moral or intellectual responsibility for the logical implications of the acts they support or the legislation they write." should be written in the sky in blood-coloured smoke over the house of person who supported this bill. Except it shouldn't, because actually that would contribute to climate change!  DO YOU SEE HOW THIS WORKS, PEOPLE?

Also, too, this: "They are acting from what they perceive as a position of weakness, like a child that strikes out at a parent, breaks a lamp, and then wails "I didn't mean it!"" is deadly accurate.  The insistence among children and teenagers that they should only be held responsible for premeditated acts is one of the more frustrating elements of teaching. I have a friend who sometimes tells a story about the day he taught temperature curves by having kids heat water and regularly measure the temperature. "Don't put the thermometers directly into the flame for no fucking reason", he told them clearly (I may not be quoting him perfectly, though I imagine that's how he told the story to me).

So one kid decides to do just that, because of course he does.  A few seconds later he's showered in broken glass and hot mercury.

But it wasn't his fault. No-one had told him a thermometer explodes when placed in a flame!  He didn't know the specific bad results of his action.  He knew there would be some, because the man charged with his safety had told him so.  But he didn't no the actual bad thing that would happen, so deliberately causing it to occur can't possibly have been his fault!

The kind of conservative mind who gloms onto this kind of bill is no more developed than that second-set Year 10 chemistry student. It's entirely reasonable to do something others are warning have bad consequences so long as you don't know - or even work out; a kid of that age and intelligence has no business claiming he couldn't predict glass under heat would expand and shatter - exactly what will happen.  Possible problems don't count. Warnings from people who've thought about this more than you have don't count.  You are not responsible for what you do, only for what you intended to do.  And if you spend your life refusing to consider your intent beyond wanting to feed the beast of superstition and tribalism that has wrapped itself around your cortex, that leaves very little motivation for analysing your intent.

So nothing needs to be considered, and nothing can ever be your fault.  Thus does a culture drown itself.  Thus do the teenagers burn down the world.

Back Into The Swamp

Erick Erickson - AKA the world's most cowardly Viking - has a new screed up at RedState (I'm not linking to RedState, but it has the characteristically subtle title of "Shibboleths of the Damned") that's an almost perfect example of violating SpaceSquid's Sin Standard.  He starts off making what is genuinely a reasonable point (made in a thoroughly unreasonable way, natch); there's little point in haranguing homophobic Christians over their dislike of homosexuality by quoting Leviticus at them.  These people are hiding behind the New Testament as cover for their prejudices, hitting them with the Old Testament isn't going to get the job done.

With this small victory won, Erickson proceeds to entirely fall apart, by insisting Christian supporters who believe gay marriage is acceptable are deliberately ignoring Matthew 19:4-5.

"Haven't you read, he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'. 

(It's always "ignoring" with these people, isn't it? Never disagreeing. Never realising words offer themselves up to multiple interpretations.  I wonder what it's like to live in so wretchedly simple a world).

Notice anything strange about that extract? Seems to be a missing quotation mark, doesn't there? That's because Matthew 19:4-6 says

"Haven't you read, he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 

Erickson is quoting a passage on the Bible banning divorce to prove Christianity defines marriage as between a man and a woman.

I don't even want to bother with arguing as to whether that quote actually justifies refusing to accept that marriage need not be between a man and a woman.  I mean, you'd think if Jesus had a strong position on the matter he might have wanted to explain a bit better; "No backsies on them nuptials, pal, and while I'm on the subject; gay sex is totes icky." (I may not have gotten a handle on Biblical dialogue.) Because it doesn't matter here. Erickson's hilarious attempts at truncation aside (well done trying to FOX News Jesus, dickhead), Jesus clearly considers gay marriage as a less pressing issue than divorce.  Jesus says, right there; no divorce.

So if divorce is more clearly wrong than gay marriage, and given that divorce is clearly more common than gay marriage is ever likely to be (though doubtless the intersection that is gay divorces must give Erickson the chills), and given that gay marriage is being talked about at the secular level when divorce is already permitted by the vast majority of churches, why in God's name (quite literally) would you conclude the most important use of your time is speaking out against gay marriage rather than divorce?

Because you're a coward and a bigot, is why.  Because this battle looks like an easier battle than the other one.  Because this is the always the first impulse of men who refuse to understand what Jesus tried to explain to them again and again: you never punch down,

I've said before that the "God of the gaps" idea is a truly awful one; a shrinking cloud of proofs by contradiction that squeezes an Almighty being into an ever-smaller space as we learn more about the universe.  What, we're supposed to believe God wants us to find our own way to faith unless we happen to look at a particularly complicated shrimp-tail? Please.

What's even worse, though, is the God of the society gaps approach bullies like Erickson cling to. This is the idea that says anything society has agreed on for sufficiently long - e.g. divorce, but also for example bombing the shit out of innocent people because we don't like their leader, or insisting there is something noble in pulling in dollars faster than a singularity inside Scrooge McDuck's money-bin - must be something God wants, or it wouldn't have happened, and anything that hasn't happened yet must be against God's will.  There are many ways to do Christianity wrong, but working from the principle that the machineries of humanity derive divinity simply through success  must surely be one of the worst.

Friday Dreadfleet: Aa'll Tel Ye 'Boot The Worm

This being the creature in question: the leech wyrm. It doesn't do much in the game except slightly annoy people and die, but it was faster to paint than another warship, so it had that going for it.

Also in today's post: the rusted wreck of a Dwarven vessel.  What destroyed it?  The leech wyrm?  Who can say? I mean, Dwarves, man.  For all we know they all just happened to drink themselves to death at the same time.

Here's all four of my currently painted Dreadfleet miniatures arranged in some kind of fracas.

"If I Can't Ruin People's Freedom, How Can I Know I'm Free?"

I profoundly dislike Andrew Sullivan.  He's the living definition of a man who doesn't give a shit about anyone's problems until they become his own, and he has a nasty sideline in smearing those he disagrees with as liars and traitors.

Still, when something lands in the areas he actively cares about, he can do a fine job.

The law empowers any individual or business to refuse to interact with, do business with, or in any way come into contact with anyone who may have some connection to a gay civil union, or civil marriage or … well any “similar arrangement” (room-mates?). It gives the full backing of the law to any restaurant or bar-owner who puts up a sign that says “No Gays Served”. It empowers employees of the state government to refuse to interact with gay citizens as a group. Its scope is vast: it allows anyone to refuse to provide “services, accommodations, advantages, facilities, goods, or privileges; counseling, adoption, foster care and other social services; or provide employment or employment benefits” to anyone suspected of being complicit in celebrating or enabling the commitment of any kind of a gay couple...

If you want to taint the Republican right as nasty bigots who would do to gays today what Southerners did to segregated African-Americans in the past, you’ve now got a text-book case. The incidents of discrimination will surely follow, and, under the law, be seen to have impunity. Someone will be denied a seat at a lunch counter. The next day, dozens of customers will replace him. The state will have to enforce the owner’s right to refuse service. You can imagine the scenes. Or someone will be fired for marrying the person they love. The next day, his neighbors and friends will rally around.

If you were devising a strategy to make the Republicans look like the Bull Connors of our time, you just stumbled across a winner.

As always in these cases, this law fails the SpaceSquid Sin Standard: if you want to deny access to homosexuals, you have to do it with all forms of sin.  And not even sin currently being carried out - there is exactly zero chance this law was written because of a pandemic of people having their dirty gay sexy-sex on lunch counters and restaurant tables.  And if you want to keep people out because they have sinned, and because they will sin, then... what are you left with?

It is long past time we gave up trying to humour these people.  Considering homosexuality a sin bothers me, but hell, it's your life, to fill up with as much pointless fretting as you want. Considering a homosexuality as so great a sin as to require legislation to guarantee you can be a dick to people?  That's all on you, pal.  You could choose to focus on the people who kill, or who hoard their wealth, or who bear false witness - starting with the arseholes who drafted this bill, perhaps - but you don't.  You decided your time was better spent raging against people who do the least harm, but who also happen to have the least power.  You deliberately chose the "moral stance" that would be easiest for you, and most harmful to the people you bully.

Fuck each and every one of you.  Sullivan is right.  You're Bull Connors with a crucifix.  You are the last rampage of the dinosaur who just watched the sky darken and doesn't understand why.  You are the coward who realises making his life better would be hard, but making other lives worse would be easy, and has chosen accordingly.  In thirty years all you will be is mocked; in a hundred you will be forgotten forever, mourned only by those who can no longer use you to make the world worse.