Crap from the internet for December 7th, 2024

 I use "crap" in the most mild, generalistic sense here. The primary impetus for this post comes from this video.

The reason that I watched the video was because I'm subscribed to the creator. I like the creator of the video and the point of this post isn't to throw shade. There were some aspects of the video that I agreed with. Still, it motivated me to write this one up. And most of the points in the video strike me as, at best, misguided.

Back in my Clean Harbors days, a recurring theme was that I kept getting tagged to support the beleaguered "team" for the King County Solid Waste contract. I started typing up a bit of a rant as to why I was doing this work, but it felt too much like airing someone else's dirty laundry. Also, it's too much of a tangent. So skip that. There were reasons why. I'm cognizant of them. Doesn't really matter. I was stuck working on these sites a lot.

On one particular day, I was running the Auburn Supermall HHW site with two technicians from a different branch of the company to help me. This was moderately unusual both because usually this particular site was one that our own people staffed and also because the company would usually short-staff the site on days when I was sent there and only give me one other person. Still, this would have been utterly forgettable if not for the fact that one of these technicians had no real experience with the sort of work we were doing, while the other one had considerable experience. So throughout the day, the new guy was effectively getting on-the-job training from both of us. There were a lot of questions, and eventually the conversation turned toward queries on the nature of a "labpack."

 Labpacks were, at the time, my primary job function. My actual job title was, I think, field chemist. But I could more specifically have been labeled a "labpacker" (if that wasn't a term more often used for a cardboard box than for a person). Anyway, I was a labpacker. The experienced technician working with me that day was not, but he'd worked on enough sites where he was assisting someone who was labpacking and he'd seen enough of it to have a general idea of the concept. He was also a generally knowledgeable guy, so in cases where labpack staff were new or incompetent, he might actually have known more than they did. This led the conversation to his someone exaggerated claim, "I have an app on my phone that can do your job."

He did not. There is no phone app that can comprehensively provide the information to prepare labpacks, especially not to the degree of expertise I have (or had). There still isn't, and there certainly wasn't back in 2015, which would have been when this little story took place. Even without playing around with the phone app, I knew that this guy was both underestimating the complexity of labpacks on the sorts of job sites where he normally wouldn't be around to see them (university research labs, for instance) and overestimating the capabilities of the app that he'd played around with. It's not that he was stupid: like I said, this was a generally knowledgeable guy. He knew way more about labpacks than the average person. He also didn't know enough to know what he didn't know. He wouldn't have been in a position to stress-test the app. Also, I think that his limited experience with the app misled him as to just how much human input was needed for it to function. So, it was maybe cool software with some potential, but the problem was that anyone with only cursory familiarity with the subject matter would be likely to drastically underestimate the gulf between the capabilities of the software and the hypothetical capabilities that would be needed for it to "do your job." Not only could the app not do my job, it couldn't even come close. This got me wondering, "But what if it could?" And almost immediately, the obvious rejoinder to that occurred to me, "Then I'd lose my job."

I don't know how to make this clear without coming across as protesting too much, but I wasn't worried about this. At this point, I'd probably only relatively recently seen CGPGrey's "Humans Need Not Apply" video. So the general concept of humans losing their jobs due to new technology was relatively fresh in my mind. And almost immediately, I found myself arriving a some corollaries. We started with "Technology cannot replace my function at work, and really it's a long way off from being able to." From there, I moved on to "But what if it could?" followed by "Then I'd lose my job." Next came "And no one would care." Finally, there was "Not even me."

No one thinks that I am somehow owed the right to eke out my existence through my proficiency in labpacking. If I machine could do it better, then every customer would gladly use the machine. I'd have to find some other line of work, and it would be silly of me to think otherwise. If human labpackers were to raise a fuss at being replaced by machines, they'd be the subject of disdain and derision, the laughing stock of the entire hazardous waste industry.

Ever since the hullabaloo regarding "AI art" started, I think back to that day in 2015. I think about it a lot. I've been characterized as "smart." Sometimes, that was due to distorted perspectives on the part of others. But at least I've maybe been mistaken for being "smart" or "intelligent" or "brainy." I've never been mistaken for being "artistically talented." And maybe that's for the best. It sure seems like the so-called "intelligent" kids all eventually get their lessons in humility. Think too highly of your own cognitive abilities and the world will slam you face-first into a reality check. But art is subjective. Once enamored with ones own "creative" powers, how can one be brought to earth?

Perhaps the biggest story of the 2020's will be the gargantuan, protracted hissy fit thrown by spoiled brats who grew up being told that they were "creatives" and that their artistic talents were wonderful. The video I watched today wasn't the first one to blather on about some notion that AI art is soulless or to bemoan the loss of genuine artistic genius in a sea of "AI." No, I could have written most of this in response to numerous other videos or posts I found on the internet. It's a common sentiment. And sure, technically I never asked any of these artists whether they'd care if an app could replace labpack field chemists. But I don't need to. I already know the answer. And no one would care. Not even me.

The people who produce this content won't actually come out and say that of course it's fine if technology replaces other jobs, but that creative jobs are different because they're sacred or something. But they'll dance right up to that line. I guess that's what I like so much about the CGPGrey video. He never does any of that. He contemplates the topic from as many angles as he can. He tries to present it in a balanced way.

Anyway, that's my message to all the "creatives" out there. You are a beautiful and unique snowflake. But also, you know, nobody owes you lunch for that. So suck it up. The mundane commonfolk around you, lacking your magical artistic spark, have been dealing with this stuff the whole time. Welcome to the club.

An aspect of the CircleToons video that I hadn't really noticed in previous screeds against "AI" art was the drastic overestimation of "AI" capabilities in non-artistic matters. It's an echo of that conversation from back in 2015. Artists know art, and they are keen on all the flaws in "AI" art that I might not notice so easily. I haven't looked for examples, but I'd imagine that musicians might similarly deride the obvious-to-them flaws in "AI" musical compositions. And just like that environmental technician knew enough about labpacks to have some idea, but not enough to realize how deficient his phone app really was when it came to its capacity to do my job, it seems that most artists severely overestimate the capabilities of "AI" to write longform content, or accurately provide information on technical topics, or really to do anything outside their sphere of art. The know that the machine is bad at making art, but they assume that it is good at doing other things (it's actually still pretty bad).

Heinlein juveniles

Robert Heinlein was a great writer, generally considered the #1 science fiction author in the world for most of his lifetime. Between 1947 and 1958, he wrote twelve "juvenile" novels that were published by Scribner's. One of his most famous novels, Starship Troopers, was rejected by Scribner's. This ended that particular relationship, but he went on to write another "YA" novel and some short stories.

It occurs to me that I missed out on Heinlein in my own youth. I believe that I've used this blog to reminisce about how I discovered Asimov's work back in 1997. I would have loved Heinlein's "juveniles" back then. It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land, and this sparked my interest enough to read some of his other work.

I thought it would be a fun project to go through all fourteen of these books before I turn 40. I've got just under a year. The plan is to read each one in publication order and to blog my thoughts here.

Prior to brainstorming this little project, I'd already owned three of the fourteen books: The Star Beast, Starship Troopers, and Podkayne of Mars. In addition to having already read those three, I've also read Space Cadet, Between Planets, Starman Jones, and Tunnel in the Sky. That's exactly half of them. However, for this project I'm going to reread the ones that I already read at some point in the past. So I really will go through all fourteen books in publication order.

As I write this post, I've got copies of thirteen of these books in my house: Have Space Suit—Will Travel was the most elusive, but it has been ordered and should arrive soon. I have no current plans to track down Heinlein's "YA" styled short stories.

I'm going to finish the book that I'm currently reading before I jump into Rocket Ship Galileo. So there might not be any updates here until well into December. But watch this space for some hot takes on seventy-year-old science fiction books for teenagers, written by me, a thirty-nine-year-old!

Crap from various places on the internet: Bear Edition

 We're doing this. It's technically not "Crap from Facebook" this time because I saw it crop up through various internet media. Because I have apparently not learned to leave well enough alone after all this time, I was lured into finding this stupid article (written by one Kate Lister). Well, here we go...

There is a fascinating theoretical discussion currently playing out across social media: would you rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear? Overwhelmingly, women have chosen the bear. They didn’t have to take their time with it either, just said “bear” straight away.

The first thought that came to mind when I first heard this stupid meme was, "Well yeah, you'd get the same answer if you reversed the gender." Ask men whether they'd rather be stuck in the forest with a woman or with a bear. You'd get similar results. Neither result is really meaningful, by the way.

I'll just say this part now because I need to get it out of the way early on in my rebuttal. The reason that the result is "overwhelmingly" bear for women, and it would also be for men, is because the question itself is inherently silly, and most people pick up on that right away. It's a bizarre, vague, hypothetical scenario. The respondents do not seriously believe that they'll ever be in this situation. The whole thing is a joke, even to the people taking it seriously.

Of course "bear" is the better joke answer! By its nature, the question is setting things up for that. Also, some feminists hate men so much that they'd answer "bear" and truly mean it, with venom behind the answer. But even non-misandrists are primed to answer "bear" in a whimsical sort of way. Hell, I'd probably render such an answer myself.

The answer came as quickly as if they were asked if they would rather have a basket full of kittens or a swift kick in the teeth. “Men are scary,” one woman said. “I said bear because the advice to stay safe is to play dead, but that won’t always work with a man,” said another.

I somehow doubt that the woman in question has ever successfully foiled a bear attack by playing dead.

I’ve been asking myself the same viral question again and again for most of the last week. Man or bear? Bear or man? I still can’t make my mind up and that troubles me. This should be a very easy question!

Yes and no. On the one hand, the question offers no specifics. What does it mean to be "stuck in the forest"? Why would one be "stuck"? What kind of forest is it? How long is one "stuck"? The question doesn't mention things like hypothermia, dehydration, shelter, distance traveled, etc. There are plenty of relevant variables to consider if we're to take the scenario seriously. Under some conditions, having another human with you in a forest could provide safety in numbers and dramatically improve your odds of survival. In other conditions, having two human mouths to feed could rapidly worsen your odds of survival. Even if we ignore the bear entirely and even if we ignore the gender issue entirely, there's not a definitive right answer for whether you want another person with you when you're "stuck in the forest."

On the other hand, it's pretty obvious that the right (non-joke) answer is "man." 

I want to say the man, I really do, but I can’t shake the idea that I would be safer with the bear. I am not sure if it is men or bears that are being most maligned in all of this, but there is no denying that is this a very revealing question.

No, that's just stupid.

I have put this thought experiment to most of my female friends now, and the response is always the same: there’s a pause and then they ask, “what kind of bear?”

I'd have thought that at least one of them asked, "What kind of man?"

That’s not good. Even if they eventually chose the man, the fact they wanted more information on the bear first is concerning. Watching my mum weighing up her options of surviving a polar bear attack before finally settling on “man” was a sobering experience.

Polar bears don't live in the forest, you fucking moron.

The experiment doesn’t work as well if you change the parameters with specifics. If you identify the man or the bear, for example, then it becomes a much easier question to answer. “Would you rather be stuck in the woods with Tom Hardy or a panda?” Tom Hardy.

Wait, what?

“Would you rather be stuck in the woods with Boris Johnson or a grizzly bear?” Then it’s the grizzly, obviously. 

Shouldn't the panda and the grizzly be switched in order to make this point? From what I can gather, the author is citing Boris Johnson as a repulsive man, and presumably finds Tom Hardy attractive. But in that case it would be easy to make the comparison with the pairings of attractive man vs. scary bear and repulsive man vs. innocuous bear.

 At this point I'm legitimately questioning whether the author simply messed up and switched the two bears in the example, or whether there's something else I'm missing.

The beauty of the question lies in its vagueness because that forces you to work with averages. On average, is a woman safer in the woods with a man or a bear?

Man. Easy.

Let’s start with the bears. Bear attacks are highly sensationalised but rare. According to research published in the Nature journal, there are around 40 brown bear attacks on humans worldwide each year and most of these are when the bear feels threatened. Of these 40 attacks, 14.3 per cent were fatal. Between 1870 and 2014, there were 73 attacks worldwide on humans by wild polar bears, 20 of which were fatal. Black bears attack and kill around one human per year in America, and because of humans encroaching on their territories, black bear attacks are on the rise in Japan.

Statistics like this aren't really helpful for your scenario. To illustrate this, consider a different hypothetical: one in which you are tossed into a large tank with a shark swimming around inside it. It's pretty obvious that your danger from a shark attack before you were thrown into the tank was zero, and the danger now that you're in there with a shark is much higher. Real-world statistics on animal attacks aren't pertinent here because the scenario, by its very nature, establishes that you're "stuck in the forest with a bear."

 It would be patently idiotic to be forced into this bizarre hypothetical, to be stuck in a forested location with a black bear staring you down and to think, "Black bears only kill around one human per year in America. Seems like the odds are pretty good that it's not me!"

Bears generally leave humans alone and will alter their behaviour to avoid us where possible. In fact, we pose a far greater danger to them than the other way around. According to Western Wildlife Outreach, 50,000 black bears are legally hunted in North America each year alone, while over 800 polar bears are killed by humans every year. I don’t know if anyone is asking the bears who they would rather be stuck in the forest with, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t choose the man either.

Oh yeah. I didn't even cover the "do you have a gun in this hypothetical?" issue.

Now for the men. Male violence against women is incredibly common and not sensationalised nearly enough.

Considering that it's just about the most sensationalized thing on the entire planet, I'm wondering when enough will finally be enough.

On average, two women per week are murdered by their partner or ex-partner in the UK.

Hold up. You can't make the hypothetical just use some random bear but then immediately bait-and-switch a random man for "my murderous ex."

According to the UN, 55 per cent of all female homicides worldwide are committed by intimate partners or other family members, at a rate of five deaths every single hour. Their research also found that “most violence against women is perpetrated by current or former husbands or intimate partners. More than 640 million or 26 per cent of women aged 15 and older have been subjected to intimate partner violence.”

If more women were dating bears, then I bet the bears would overtake the men pretty easily on the whole intimate partner violence thing.

According to an investigation by UN Women UK, “71 per cent of women of all ages in the UK have experienced some form of sexual harassment in a public space – this number rises to 86 per cent among 18-24-year-olds.”

How many of those instances of sexual harassment took place in a forest?

An estimated 41 per cent of women have been cyber-flashed online.

Oh, come on.

While one in four UK women will experience a physical sexual assault during their lifetimes. (That rises to one in three globally.)

What does this have to do with being stuck in a forest?

Now can you see why the bear is the obvious answer for so many women? When all’s said and done, no bear has ever followed me home or sent me a photo of his penis.

What are the statistics on men seeking out isolated women lost alone in forests and forcing them to look at dick pics? How often does that happen?

If we are looking at averages, the plain truth is that women are safer in the woods with a bear than they are with a man, and that is just incredibly sad.

Well, it's wrong and you're an idiot. So there's that.

A bear will act like a bear. It’s predictable and it’s going to avoid you if it can.

What if the bear is hungry and you're made of meat?

It’s not going to pester you for a date and then monologue about the Godfather trilogy.

Uh, that example sounds rather specific.

It’s not going to try and have sex with you or get violent if you turn it down.

If the bear tries to have sex with you and you do turn it down, then you can be sure it will get violent.

The bear won’t stalk you if you break up with it.

Will too!

Bears are not killing five women every hour and if they were, action would be taken to stop it immediately.

What? That's not how statistics work, even if they were relevant here.

Then there is the fact that if I was attacked by a bear, no one would tell me I was making it up.

I would.

I wouldn’t be asked what I was wearing, if I was drunk, or what I had done to provoke the bear.

Actually, yes, you would probably get asked those questions too.

It wouldn’t matter if I had seen the bear before in the past, or if I am the kind of woman who likes seeing a lot of bears.

Again, all of those would also matter! You're remarkably bad at this.

No one would say I was asking for it, and as far as I am aware, #NotAllBears has never trended on Twitter.

I don't know anything about Twitter, but considering the author's track record, I'm going to guess that this is, somehow, also wrong.

The online response from men has largely been one of bafflement and confusion. “Why on earth would you choose to be around an apex predator that could overpower and kill you in seconds if it wanted to? Don’t you know how dangerous that is? You can’t reason with a bear or ask it to leave you alone if it becomes aggressive. This is madness!”

The only response I've seen from men has been making fun of how stupid this is.

I hate to tell you this lads, but for many women, this is the same risk that comes with dating a man. 

Dating them while stuck in a forest?

Is it all men?

It had damn well better be. Or else shut up.

No, of course it’s not, but when 71 per cent of women have been sexually harassed by men and 26 per cent of women will experience intimate partner violence, how can you tell which man will hurt you and which one will not? You can’t.

You usually can.

There is no way of knowing who is dangerous until it’s too late, so women have to play the odds and assume all men are a threat. In much the same way as you should assume all bears could hurt you in the woods.

Whenever this topic comes up, I see women concoct this twisted fantasy in which men are not merely stronger than they are, but are invincible killing machines. If a woman stabs me in the neck with a knife, I'm just as dead as if a man had done it.

Men are statistically more prone to employ direct, violent attacks and are statistically more likely to have physicality that could make such attacks successful. We can acknowledge this. But when this particular topic comes up, I see women, as a whole, portrayed as utterly harmless, always victims, never attackers. And I see men portrayed as unpredictable whirlwinds of destruction.

In fact, quite a lot of the bear safety advice is applicable to a woman trying to get away from a creepy man in the pub. Keep calm, talk to it in a low tone so it recognises you are not a threat, and no sudden movements. Don’t feed it, leave the area as soon as you can, and never travel alone. Oh, and always remember your pepper spray.

What?

As a group, men pose a far greater threat to women than bears do, and humans kill far more bears every year than the other way around. The thought experiment is fun but flawed as it sets up a false dichotomy. Humans don’t live in close proximity with bears like we do with each other. If we did, we might have far more incidents of violence.

 Congratulations, you got there! Better late than never.

I’m no zoologist but I imagine bear attacks on humans would rocket if we tried to move in with them and have their kids.

OK, so I can't believe I have to say this, but bears and humans are not genetically compatible. They cannot produce offspring with each other.

But what the question does is expose is the fact for many women, a strange man in the woods is still an obvious threat. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is.

That cuts both ways. A strange woman in the woods could be an obvious threat to a man. She could stab him or hit him on the head with a rock. She could wait until he falls asleep and then steal all of his supplies or whatever. Yeah, if she's simply going to give him warning, unleash a battle cry, and charge in with her bare hands, then most men would have an advantage. But unless she does that specific thing, the differences between the sexes aren't really a big consideration here.

I hope that we are collectively working towards a world where gender-based violence is a thing of the past, but we are not there yet, not by a long shot. Maybe future generations will look back and laugh at the absurdity of anyone choosing the bear, but for now, give me Yogi and BooBoo any day of the week.

Ooh, I didn't realize that "What kind of bear?" extended to cartoon bears.

It's OK.

I preface this post with my obligatory statement along the lines of "I can't believe that this stupid bullshit is the thing that is bringing me back to my blog." At this point, it's a tradition. I don't like it, but for now, I must accept this truth.

I generally reserve the CPA as my outlet for longform content on the topic of Magic: the Gathering. On occasion, I find myself wanting to opine on something that I just don't deem suitable for the CPA as a forum. Seems a bit strange considering that the CPA has effectively been a dead website since 2018 or so, and it's limping along just because a few people happen to visit regularly and post whatever they want to post. Most of my content there receives no engagement anyway, so what's the big deal? Well, I do still have some sense of propriety here, and I tailor my CPA posts to, at least theoretically, be meaningful relevant to hypothetical CPA lurkers. And some things, despite being Magic-related, go much too far in evoking the image of me standing on a soap box. As a courtesy to no one in particular, I self-censor enough to confine that sort of content to this blog space, rather than to my posts on someone else's forum.

Just over a decade ago, there was a controversy of sorts in Magic, which I vaguely recall. I had a lot going on at the time. I can't quite place where I saw this topic crop up back then, nor whether I had any sort of response or even opinion at the time. Like I said, I had a lot going on. In my hazy memories, this controversy was mostly insignificant. Then again, it got enough press that I heard about it, so maybe my impression there is overstated. Well, I was just reminded of this by an article on Commander's Herald, written by one Ciel Collins. I'll excerpt the relevant portion.

In the year 2013 (over a decade ago, egads), there were a grand total of 41 planeswalker cards, depicting 22 distinct characters. Of those characters, 14 were men and only 6 were women (Karn and Ashiok both exist outside the binary, though the terms weren't fully developed). This would be brought to Wizards of the Coast's attention in due time. I dug around some old forum posts and saw... timely discussions of the matter that wouldn't be worth the mental hazard to bring up, but there were posts from Mark Rosewater that I remembered from the era.

Two in particular are of interest, linked here and here and show below. Just bear in mind that these are relics of an older design philosophy, and Rosewater has since noted this line of reasoning was erroneous.

Although I truly believe that I remember this being an issue somewhere back when I was a college student, there's actually nothing special about the year 2013 when it comes to planeswalkers, and anchoring things to that year seems, in hindsight, pretty arbitrary. The Mark Rosewater "tumblr" posts cited in the article are from 2012, and it's worth noting that Mark Rosewater was not part of the Creative team, so he presumably had no say in what the gender of planeswalkers depicted on planeswalker cards would be. He may have been knowledgeably representing the viewpoint of someone else within WotC who was responsible for this, or he may have just been spitballing. From what I've seen of Mark Rosewater's statements over the years, both possibilities seem equally likely.

So I'll admit that as soon as I read this part of the article, I started doing some searches on Scryfall, skeptical of the whole controversy. Why pick 2013? Why not 2007, when planeswalkers were first introduced? Why not 2017, on the tenth anniversary of planeswalkers being introduced? Why not 2012, when those Mark Rosewater posts were originally published? Why not 2018, before War of the Spark introduced a deluge of planeswalker cards? Why not right now? And why count clearly monstrous planeswalkers as one gender or another? Ajani is a leonin, a lion-man. Does he have a lion-dick or does he have a man-dick? I don't think it's ever come up! Does a lion-man really count as being part of the boy's team? Nicol Bolas is a dragon! Presumably he has a dragon-dick. Or not. I don't know dragon anatomy. I guess Nicol Bolas was always canonically a "he." But then again, so was Karn, and yet this very article seems to be claiming Karn for the "non-binary" column. Why? Why can Nicol Bolas be masculine, but not Karn? And why the emphasis on the individual planeswalker characters that appear on cards? Do the ones that get a card, or the ones that didn't get a card yet not count? Counting by character instead of by planeswalker card is a choice too, because you can tally Tezzeret, Venser, and Koth all in the "man" column, but is it not also significant that Chandra, a woman, has always held the record for getting the most individual planeswalker cards? For whatever reason, WotC's track record for most of the history of planeswalker cards has been to introduce more male characters, but to usually only give them a single card or to wait a very long time before giving them a second card, while female planeswalkers have more frequently gotten multiple planeswalker cards much sooner, and in greater numbers. Does that even matter? The article on Commander's Herald frames this in a discussion about planeswalker cards, and even despite doing this in the context of talking about planeswalker characters that have lost their planeswalker spark and have since appeared as creature cards instead of planeswalker cards, there's actually some conflation here, because if you care so much about tallying up genders or whatever, there's a distinction between planeswalker characters and planeswalker cards. For instance, Dyfed is a planewalker character, but not a planeswalker card. The Royal Scions is a planeswalker card, but not a planeswalker character. Grandmother Sengir is a planeswalker character and is also a card, but is not a planeswalker card. So if we're going to tally these things, we have to decide which thing we care about.

I was coming up with all these questions and more, reflexively probing the weaknesses of this whole dredged-up controversy as presented in the article, scrutinizing the entire argument from multiple angles. And then I paused, took a moment to back away from the whole issue, and pondered the matter from the beginning. I realized that I'd been sucked in. I'd seen someone pointing at something and calling it sexist, and I'd perhaps gotten a bit defensive on behalf of people I don't even know. So let's start at the beginning here.

However you tally things up, whether you're counting creatures, planeswalkers, characters, cards, characters on cards, characters not on cards, planeswalker characters, planeswalker cards, planeswalkers named in flavor text on cards, or whatever, no matter what category you decided to focus on, once the count is done, you'll probably have a difference. You probably won't have an exact 50/50 split between men and women. And that's OK. It's OK for there to be more planeswalker characters on cards that are men than ones that are women. There's nothing wrong with that. The article accidentally baited me into getting hung up on details, but once I step back, I realize that this whole "controversy" is silly to begin with. And I don't just mean something so dismissive as "it's silly because this is all just a card game anyway." Rather, I mean it's silly because the controversy is premised upon the idea that "representation" matters here, and that notion, on its face, is pretty ridiculous in this context.

Koth is a man with metal spikes built into his body. His hair is made of metal. His body glows with the heat of a a forge and he can magically control metal, earth, and stone. Sorin is a man whose grandfather forced him to become a vampire, and he has lived for over 7,000 years as a vampire. Garruk is a man who has used magic to enhance his own size and strength to superhuman proportions, and who can control animals. I am a man. I do not especially relate to any of these fictional characters because they are also men. I am not "represented" by them on account of our shared maleness.

I see this in other places too. People seem to believe that if they tally things up and there's a difference between the categories they tallied, that this is proof of some injustice. It isn't. It's OK for there to be more male characters on planeswalker cards than female characters on planeswalker cards. It would be OK for it to be the other way around. There's nothing good or bad about this. It's all happenstance after decades of storytelling by swaths of people who have come and gone, all working to tell fantasy stories in a fantasy world that gets used in a card game. Expecting gender ratios in every conceivable part of this mess to be perfectly balanced is silly. Finding them imbalanced is OK. It's OK to be male.

 

Crap from Facebook for December 13th, 2023

Image has a poll with the title "What's your favorite tech innovation?" The choices are "Illegal cab company", "Illegal hotel chain", "Fake money for criminals", and "Plagiarism machine."

My choice, which isn't listed in this poll, would be "The privilege of living in a world in which some idiot creates this poll in the first place." And I don't even mean that in the classic sense of noting that modern technology has given us an unprecedented quality of life, although that's true too. What I mean is that modern technology has allowed us to build a society in which some smoothbrained jackasses have been able to base their entire personalities around complaining about technology, while using technology to do so. I'd say that it's a sign we're doing pretty well.

I was amused enough to put this one on the blog. I was just going to include my initial thought, which I've captured in the above paragraph. But now that I've already typed that up, it occurs to me that some would get "fall of the Roman Empire" vibes from this. They see vile, useless people using lazy misrepresentations to lash out at the very society that gives them all of the comforts they take for granted and they think, "This is a cancer. This is a sign that things are going bad." Something like that. Well, I disagree. It's a topic that's better suited to some long-form essay, and not one of my wistful "Crap from Facebook" posts. So I probably won't get around to that. But I disagree. Ask me about it some time.

It's been 510 days since I posted anything in this space.

There's a lot I want to write about on this blog, but I never seem to have the energy or to take the time for that. I am breaking my silence with two topics that have been bugging me recently, both related to Magic: the Gathering. They're not necessarily related to each other, though. Two things happened last month, totally unrelated to each other. Both times, I'd thought that I should write something. And then I procrastinated. Well, earlier this week, I read an article that annoyed me and brought both topics back to the surface of my thoughts.

I don't really know where this is going. I'll probably rant a little. But don't expect a persuasive essay or for this mess to even have a central thesis at all. This is how it goes. I'm rusty at the whole blog thing. It's been like a year and a half since our last little chat.

Event One

In late 2003, I came across a Magic: the Gathering website called "The Casual Players Alliance." A little later, I got my own account there and started participating in discussions on their forum. I've been active at the "CPA" this whole time, for more than 21 years of my life. It could be said that the forum is slowly dying, that our site is a relic of an earlier age of the internet. We're down to about eight to ten active users, and only about half of those seem to be checking in consistently. But I'm one of them, and I've been logging in just about every day.

The main admin, also the most active user of the forum, is in the habit of posting well wishes right before major holidays, especially if he's going on vacation himself and wants us to know he'll be out of touch for a bit. Sometimes he'll pop in after a holiday and create a thread anyway, just telling us he hopes we had a good holiday. Pretty innocuous. So far, so good. Not much to talk about there.

On July 5th, a thread was created for the recent Independence Day. The message was just, "Hope it was safe and grand!" Two of us popped in to echo the same sentiment (we used to have more international members, but all but one of the people I've seen post anything lately have been Americans).

And then we got a post that said, "You're kidding, right?" There was a crying emoji after that. So the rest of us were worried and asking this person what was wrong. The result was this exchange (which I stayed out of). I'll color-code the participants rather than using their user names here. I rather like everyone involved, and I don't want this to in any way appear to be a gripe about them. It's not about that.

No, but [Highland Park, where a mass shooting was perpetrated at an Independence Day parade] is not too far from my house. I'm just more actually depressed about the way the country's going altogether right now. On the one side we have the Fascists, who tried to overthrow the government once already, who've gotten into bed with the Christofascists (a theme emerges) who've started dictating policy through the Supreme Court. On the other, a president that tipped his hand way too early on green energy, leaving himself vulnerable to the oil companies who want him voted out and will keep oil prices high as long as they can to blackmail us into abandoning environmental issues. They're pretty much already there anyway from what I understand, after SCOTUS pulled the EPA's "teeth" leaving them unable to enforce penalties, but those guys are kinda vindictive (and more money is, after all, more money) so we'll see just what happens to gas prices.

And SCOTUS, again, starting to rule on gun laws misinterpreting the 2nd Amendment (they always forget about the "well-regulated militia" part, even though it's right up front) and making it okay for idiot punks with a death wish to buy any weapon they want and all the damn ammo they can carry and go kill innocent people.

I guess I'm not feeling too patriotic atm...

Mmmm.... I know what you're saying. But from what I understand, it was Manchin who has really derailed/controlled the agenda bc his vote is necessary (since no Republicans are going to cross over) but he didn't go along with it all.

I think it's more the control that SCOTUS has demonstrated, and that we seem to have no real way to fix it besides impeaching/adding more justices. I'd love to see them impeach Clarence Thomas (especially after the bit about going after contraception and same-sex marriage in his opinion on the Roe travesty), and Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and ACB all lied during their job interviews, but that'll likely end like Trump's impeachments did when not enough Reps broke ranks to get a conviction. And I'm not in favor of expanding the court based on the number of Circuit Courts, unless you want to change the way the justices are chosen and have them be representative of their court districts (not a bad idea, but no way they go for that...lol).

I also think the filibuster serves a purpose, and Manchin isn't entirely wrong. As much as the thought depresses me, come 2024 if Biden hasn't been able to fix things things by then we'll be looking at a regime change. If the Dems lose control the only thing standing between us and total tyranny might be the filibuster, and since our government usually ping-pongs between the parties (over the years) it's bound to eventually happen. Lord knows it's been used against the Dems often enough.

Look, I'm kind of a centrist (politically). I think both parties (at their core) have solid values and bring important perspectives to any negotiation. I think our government works best when bipartisan actually happens. This polarization of our parties is just stupid, and it will destroy us if we let it. And it's getting worse, though the J6th Committee using lifelong Republicans testifying under oath to tell their story is meaningful, and may plant seeds that will encourage at least listening to the other party and maybe even being more open-minded to what they propose.

I'm so naive...

SCOTUS "only" got that way thanks to the McConnell and the Republican stranglehold on Senate, which in turn is due to massive gerrymandering, which in turn is due to the Republican control of the majority of state statehouses, thanks to them "waking up" after the 2008 elections and realizing that the Dems gained power and they were about to lose it for the next decade if they didn't do anything. Which sadly the Dems didn't realize themselves...

I totally agree that the filibuster should stay and I don't know the details of Manchin's objection of all of the attempted Dem bills, but he was pretty much the lone holdout that without his vote, none of them could pass, like the ones on green energy and environmental issues that you originally mentioned. I don't know how Biden "tipped his hand early", as you say, because he realistically only had 2 years to try to get anything done while the Dems had a majority in the Representatives and an even split in the Senate, because now there's a good chance the Repubs will gain back the majority and nothing will have a chance to being done.

Now, if only we had alternatives to voting besides two parties...

technically we do but the current system is *way* stacked against them

Yeah, thanks to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine and the creation of Citizens' United it makes it too easy for the two party system to keep Americans firmly divided against each other when we should be working against the actual politicians...

The thing that gets to me here isn't that this was a political discussion. In fact, this forum used to have lots of political discussions, often heated ones. And the people I quoted here were among the more sane, mediating voices back then. And that is the part that gets to me. When the forum was thriving and had far more participants, at the height of the Bush presidency and with all the political crap that entailed, these were the guys who tried to to bring reason, caution, levelheadedness, etc. to the discussions. They seemed grounded back then. They didn't go around calling people fascists. 

It's not so much that I disagree with the talking points here (although generally, I do). It's that I remember when political debates came up in other threads 15 or so years ago, these were the guys asking pointed questions, using logic, calling out spurious claims, and such. I don't want to call it "Trump Derangement Syndrome." I think this is all far more complicated than that. But I'm left wondering what the hell happened.

• There hasn't been an attempted fascist overthrow of our government. Fascism is a dead 20th century concept from Italy that became vaguely dissociated from its original definition and became a pejorative in America. Occasionally some idiot will self-identify as a fascist, but that's an idiot talking. There are no fascists in America. Stop using that label.
• Christofascism isn't a thing. Come on, man.
  
• The Democratic Party has been attempting to use the Supreme Court to "dicate policy" since FDR. It's disingenuous to become mad about it only once they go against that party line. Want to force the Supreme Court to stick to constitutional interpretation and to have the law of the land go through the proper channels? You've not only got me on board, you've probably got most of the Republican Party, virtually all independents, third parties, and probably even most of the justices themselves. Better late than never, I guess?
• "Green energy" is not in competition with oil companies and never has been. Oil companies are some of the biggest, most successful supporters of "green energy."
• Gas prices are practically a red herring. They do matter, but not in the way that either major political party has ever presented them in discourse. Don't fall for propaganda.
• The Second Amendment does not say that the right to bear arms is contingent on the existence of a well-regulated militia. It says that the security of a free state is contingent on the existence of a well-regulated militia.
• Joe Manchin did exactly what he was meant to do. If you think anything else, I've got a bridge to sell you.
• "The Supreme Court did something I don't like. Pack the bench!" What is this? 1937? Are you for real?
• A judicial confirmation hearing is not a "job interview." No one thought that way before the Trump presidency, and it's disconcerting how a stupid meme meant to distort the functions of our government can just spread so easily and infect normal people.
• If you think that one of the two major political parties represents tyranny and the other one represents the vanguard against tyranny, then I'm sorry. You've gone off the deep end. You've been turned into a useful idiot.
  
• Weird how all the "I'm a centrist" folks are either falling in line with the Democrats at every juncture or insisting that the Democrats don't go far enough. The Overton window. Where's it at?
  
• I said myself, after the 2020 elections, that regardless of whatever else happened, the Democrats effectively had a mandate. I didn't mean a moral one, just in the practical, political sense. And the corollary to that was that whatever they fucked up, we'd all know it was them fucking it up. They couldn't blame Republicans. Not this time. Well, how's that going?

 Of course, I didn't say any of that. Not in the forum, anyway. But it's what I was thinking. Have I gone soft? And if I have, is that a bad thing? I don't know.

Event Two

That first one is only related to the game of Magic because it happened on a Magic-related website. This one deals with the game itself. On June 10th, 2020, Wizards of the Coast made an announcement castigating seven of their own old cards for "racism." There were some circumstances surrounding this at the time and I delved into this topic pretty exhaustively back then, just not on this blog. I'm not inclined to use this space for recapitulating the whole affair. If you're curious, feel free to ask for details.

On July 21st of this year, Wizards of the Coast announced that they'd been including freshly-opened packs of archival 1994 product in the upcoming set (which releases next month). This brought the "Salty Seven" cards and the allegations of racism back. They didn't actually come out and say that more cards were racist, but they did publish a list of cards that would not be included in booster packs. Four cards on that list were from the existing list of seven "racist" cards. No surprises there. But the implication seems to be that the other twelve cards they have elected not to seed into the new booster packs are also deemed offensive. Since they've remained silent on the why, there's been rampant speculation on the matter.

I don't know if it's a coincidence, but this coincided with the introduction of a new column at the Commander's Herald website called "Beyond Rule Zero." The topic for the first article in the series was tame, tepid, and generally something I'd agree with. It also set the tone for the rest of the series. These articles seem disjointed, rambling, and lacking in a central thesis. Whatever structure is present seems haphazard and possibly edited in afterward at the last minute. Sort of like this blog post, actually. But yeah, that first article offered primarily points I agreed with or was neutral toward.

The second article? Not so much. It was about creating safe spaces, and much of the article seemed focused on the idea that local game stores should post codes of conduct for public viewing. I wanted to dispute almost everything in the article, but I kept silent. Like I said, I think I've gone soft. The third article dealt with the notions of "racist" cards, though. So here we go again! Well, kind of. The article brought up several cards, but the biggest focus seemed to be on a card that the author didn't really understand, and I don't mean that in some disparaging or condescending way. The card is called "Reparations." It has some unusual artwork, and discussions of what the artwork means or implies have come up in the past. Even the guy who wrote the flavor text for the card was confused by the artwork, and he originally wrote the flavor text as a gag based on this, but then it ended up being used in the final version of the card. The story has come up before in various places. Since this article seemed to go with the notion that the art and flavor text were one offensive package, I chimed in without disputing any of the stuff that bugged me, but simply clarifying this bit about the flavor text. I guess that I thought it might be informative. I might have also been using that as a way to keep myself from arguing with the article. If I just stick to the facts and leave it at that, then I can feel like at least I've done something.

All this left me pondering why I'm inclined to bother. A company that publishes a game decides that one of its old game pieces from 1994 is racist. I disagree with their conclusion. So what? It's just a game. It's their game and their decision anyway. So what if think they're wrong? I think that lots of people are wrong about lots of things all the time. I don't usually spend much time on it. It's a game, not a lifestyle.

I've built 31 EDH decks this year, at a rate that would be one per week except I missed a single week back in January. I've piloted those decks at tables in a local game store every Wednesday evening, and I take some time to write about them too. I've been playing Magic for over 25 years. Between all the time I've dedicated to playing decks, testing decks, building decks, writing about the game, talking about the game, reading about the game, sorting cards, trading cards, buying cards, collecting cards, and organizing it all, I've spent more of my time on Magic-related activities than some people spend on their religions. Of course it's not my religion, but have spent more time on it than a lot of people do. So yeah, I know it's "just a game." I don't think that I've lost sight of that. It's also a game I'm invested in, financially, creatively, emotionally, etc.

Also, there's this bit in that article.

There is this pervasive thought in spaces like the Magic community that politics should be kept separate from the general dialogue. When they say politics they often mean anything involving what is often categorized as identity politics. That is to say the issues revolving around marginalized ethnicities and identities. Because let's be transparent - there is no real worry about a thread opening up in the Magic subreddit on local election primaries or the philosophical differences between socialism and communism. They just don't want to hear the minorities get uppity.

And there it is. Tell us how you really feel.

Crap from Facebook for March 21st, 2021

 

This has what appears to be a headline: "Snowflake students claim Frankenstein's monster was 'misunderstood' — and is in fact a VICTIM"

Someone responds with, "but that's........that's the book. that's what the book is about"

Unlike most of my "Crap from Facebook" blog posts, I actually commented when I saw this one. My initial response was...

He murdered a five-year old child and framed the babysitter for it because the kid happened to be related to his creator.

It was before I went to bed this morning. I was tired. It seemed like a suitable response at the time. No one replied to me, so don't worry about me having gotten into an argument on this one. But I thought about it again and it bugs me. Mostly, it bugs me that I can't get away from Frankenstein. I find myself impelled to think about this book more than almost any other book, and it's a pretty bad book!

I mentioned it in another Crap from Facebook entry, back in May of last year, but I'll always associate this book with poor Hank Galmish, who picked it for variety as part of the curriculum in a college class about novels. I watched it dawn on him that he'd messed up, that he'd forgotten just how bad of a read Frankenstein actually is. And he just wanted to escape. He was bored out of his mind reading the book himself and possibly even felt like he owed the class an apology for picking it as one of the books we'd all read that quarter.

If I remember correctly, the post last year dealt with the idea that Frankenstein was "the first science fiction story." What I didn't talk about then was the idea that "it's a tragedy." On the one hand, this could be less annoying because it's true. Frankenstein definitely uses tragic elements. It's fair to classify the story as a tragedy. On the other hand, at least the "it was the first science fiction story" is mostly unique to Frankenstein, and not a tired excuse trotted out for lots of other shitty "classics."

Without regurgitating everything I can remember about the plot of Frankenstein, I'll note that it involves a lot of stupid decisions by both Victor Frankenstein and his creation. Some of those are morally wicked things too (like the bit I mentioned in the Facebook comment), but mostly, they're just foolish approaches to situations that could have been mitigated with even a jot of forethought. The book is about bad people doing bad things and having bad things happen to them for it. Some innocent victims get caught in the crossfire, but they're not the focus of the story anyway.

The whole structure of the narrative, in the first place, is superfluous and annoying. The plot is tedious. The prose is bland. The characters have essentially no development and behave strangely. Reading this book for any reason, even in the most cursory and clinical sort of way for literary analysis, is a dull experience. However, the genre classification in this case is correct: Frankenstein is a tragedy. Well spotted indeed. The parallels to tragic tales already well-known in the literary canon at the time are evident. The book tells a tragic story and Mary Shelley wrote it that way on purpose. So good job: you figured it out. It's a tragedy.

You wanna know what else is a tragedy? That anyone ever had to read the damn thing. By the way, I'm not mad at Mary Shelley. She was 20 when she wrote the book. If some crap I'd written at 20 were touted as a great classic, it would be crappy too. No one is a great writer at 20. Developing those skills takes time, practice, and experience.