But was it worth it? Other OELVN projects were… somewhat on the derpy side. They were generally marred by the use of rudimentary engines, amateurish writing, cheap art and crappy music — and when the entirety of the game is its UI engine, its writing, its art and its music, scoring so low across the board would’ve suggested that the American VN fan community simply didn’t have what it took to produce something on the level of a Japanese release. That is, of the more popular Japanese releases — honesty compels admission that visual novels, and especially doujinshi VNs, are as subject to Sturgeon’s Law as any other form of media.

Furthermore, and as a note of embarrassment to the American attempts, even the most popular VNs had numerous flaws. Umineko no Naku Koro ni, arguably more popular here than on its own native soil, was infamously plagued with bad art — characters were literally ham-fisted, blocky, and awkwardly rendered, though the series enjoyed sustained infamy via its convoluted and brain-wracking metaphorical writing and often jaw-dropping orchestral arrangements.

But the demos for Katawa Shoujo suggested that its rather large staff was uniquely earnest in their attempt, and at the bar they’ve set for it. The initial alphas were extremely shoddy, sure – the dark viridian school uniforms and blocky interfaces were more revolting than the already questionable base concept of overtly seducing a disabled female student, but the changes in artists and luring in of more talented programmers and writers finally presented a beta demo worth paying attention to.

So, I’ll play through it, route by route. And we’ll see if the final product lives up to the promise.

Naturally, everything under this cut is prone to spoilers.

Shizune Route didn’t live up well enough. Let’s get that out of the way first. It was not marred by problems of music or art — it can be safely said that the art for Katawa Shoujo is fully deserving of praise and respect. And while I find the music to be somewhat “generic” in sound — specifically in that it lacked any aural hooks or recognizable style to its composition — it was not at all harsh on the ears. In fact, if the purpose was to produce a very relaxed and gentle tone, it succeeded remarkably, and given the setting, a school for the disabled or otherwise infirmed, I would be shocked if this was not actually deliberate on part of the composer. It is, after all, a drama-heavy story, but necessarily light on actual “action” — music with high tension and emotional crescendos won’t quite fit, even during fits of high drama.

But… the writing is… not on that par.

The characterization is fine, I hasten to note. Ubiquitous to the visual novel is an earnest and very deliberate attempt to portray each heroine as humanly as possible, beyond matters of sympathy or admiration, and beyond matters of stereotype. Though with plenty of personal flaws and happenstances, Shizune comes off as defined by her ambition, not her deafness.

But that’s about the only thing her writer got right.

Her route had an excess of “fluff.” Scenes that were there for the sake of having such a scene, with little to develop her character by. Most glaringly, it is entirely possible to cut away every scene with her father, and lose no insight whatsoever as to her character. It doesn’t help that their interactions, on both sides, are entirely one-dimensional. He goes off on a lunatic rant, and he seems only capable of lunatic rants, more of a grown-up Kenji than a legitimate character, she ignores him. She signs to her boyfriend some infuriation over the minutiae of his conduct, but never actually interacts with him. We gain no insight as to the background familial structure that defines them, no reason to believe that they’ve had any tangible influence with each other. We only have Hisao’s guesswork – and that is a lamentable example of “telling” instead of “showing.”

The fact that it had no relevance whatsoever with the core drama of her story arc is even worse — not that the core drama is itself free from a piling list of problems. I was bored to sleep by it — while passive aggressiveness is certainly realistic, in some sense, spending thousands of words expounding on how they keep trying to track down Misha, and how Misha keeps running away, over and over again, is wearying to the reader. The fact that there is simply no emotional tension at all over the drama, which constitutes nothing more than a passive act of noncommunication?

Fucking dullsville.

It would be one thing to say that the pacing of the story was confusingly disjointed, but you can’t have confusion or joint problems if there wasn’t any pacing to speak of. It was nothing more than a mechanical progression from plot point to plot point, entirely without heart or strong emotions.

Speaking of lack of strong emotions: the sex scenes. There are three on her route, and all three are guilty of absolutely horrible scene transitions. Not graphically, but contextually. The very first one had about as much lead-up as a sudden and declarative “let’s fuck,” and the next two are only marginally better. And the only one that was successfully integrated into the plot in any way whatsoever was the one that triggers “Bad End.”

Back during the demo, Shizune Route’s Act 1 end was easily the most memorable of all the heroines (though, aha, arguably not the most memorable of all possible Act 1 endings). But it was a buildup towards an anticlimax.

So far, I’m not impressed.

Everything I want to say is being written by better, or at least more insightful, men and women.

Take, for example, a little eight-hundred-word piece I had started typing in here a few weeks back. A little analysis on the state of music now that Bandcamp and Soundcloud are real things, run and utilized by real musicians, and they’re everywhere, good god I can’t turn a metaphorical corner on the fandom side of the internet without running into a little ditty I’d be more than happy to cough 99 cents up for if I wasn’t unemployed and getting increasingly desperate.

I trashed it just now. Warren Ellis’s spoken, and I can’t add anything to that, or even reword it for a crude facsimile  of originality.

I’ll be honest. It’s a little frustrating. And I’m on a creative  high at the moment too, writing rather well-received fiction in a fandom I would’ve never expected to have been a part of, so it isn’t as if I’m short on words. Hell, if I were a hired columnist, lack of originality wouldn’t be stopping me.

But this is my blog, you know? And so satisfaction has to be met. And I just haven’t been very satisfied, lately, with my comparatively meager toolkit.

I think I have word envy.

Tournament Magic is what makes me care about the game. Period. If it wasn’t for the competitive scene, it’d be like yet another Steve Jackson game and expansion. Entertaining for a few sessions with a handful of friends that are conveniently in town AND with free time to spare, then packed up and left to dust.

Tournament Magic is the difference between playing Big 2 in the playground, and Texas Hold’Em at the Bellagio.

And Wizards is fucking stupid for not only just ignoring that allure, but going out of their way to tear it down.

Revamping their Elo system to degrade to a default value if left over time? Would’ve driven more play while still holding competitive value. Reducing per-tournament payout while increasing the number of major tournaments held? Would’ve solved whatever problem objectively existed with the Grand Prix -> Pro Tour system. And now even Nationals doesn’t play into a Worlds tournament.

Let me repeat:

National tournaments no longer play into an international setting. Each nation’s best of the best, regardless of the size or prestige of their local regional zone are told that that’s all they can aim for. They didn’t just split off bigger nations into regions of influence – no, they had to scrape it out entirely.

I hate the hardcore vs casual debates in gaming – mostly because they miss the point by wide margins sometimes. But it doesn’t mean that the debates in of itself don’t have value and substance.

Let me be clear: I don’t think the changes made will kill Magic. I’m not one of those who perpetually whine about every damn change made to the rules – even as I harass Mark Rosewater about double-faced cards, most of my actual debates about Magic are solidly in favor of the game’s exploration of design space. I think the game will continue to thrive – be for another year or another full decade, who knows? The design of Innistrad, besides the DFCs, was one of the game’s best in a while, and speaks favorably of how fun the actual game will be in the short future.

But the game isn’t for me anymore.

The game isn’t aimed at the competitive gamer, the tournament-goers, the dreamers and the contenders. Magic isn’t a game anymore for those that can see and appreciate the mechanical intricacies of stack order, of counterspell fencing, of tactical metagaming and mastery. It’s not for those that feel a frisson of delight for being able to outpredict their opponent, outdesign their decks and outplay the field.

They’ve neutered accessibility to the Pro Tour, sucked the incentives out of the Grand Prix, and now even their showcasing of international talent is getting the boot. Over the last few months, since the declaration that they were going to scrape clean the Elo system in the first place, Wizards has been knee-deep in the process of dismantling the competitive culture of Magic as we know it.

Magic just isn’t my game anymore.

I think…

I think I mourn that.

So I have a lot to say, and sometimes I feel too rusty, too embattled, to say it properly. But I’ll get around to saying it. 23 years, nearing ever so implacably to 24, and the only real skill I’ve picked up in all this time is a particular capability to communicate.

I might as well keep it sharp.

Until then, I’ll leave you with the Beatles’ “Let It Be.” Recent news, personal and national, has filled me with a certain quality of bile lately, and finding that the Westboro Church’s done a parody of a Beatles’ classic’s only made it worse – even if Sharon apparently has a very talented voice for a woman so twisted with rage and dogma it makes you despair for all the bodhisattvas.

But listening to McCartney soulfully plead for inner peace goes a long way, I think, towards making up for it.

It’s that the whole fucking shebang, as it is set up right now, is a haze of pure, fucking evil upon both the regulator and the marketer. That every level of it doesn’t so much skew the incentives of the financial practitioners and enforcers under its aegis, but defines the very practice of monetary trade.

A while ago, author John Scalzi had made a pointed and levelheaded post outlining why the common charge of sociopathy against corporate entities is, at least, not quite accurate. To summarize, while there may be problems aplenty with corporations and the business of monetary billions, sociopathy certainly doesn’t fit – the behavior of corporations is not fundamentally different from that of a sane and healthy individual, after all, even as they dodge the taxman and figure out loopholes. We certainly don’t begrudge our neighbors (or ourselves) when we ask the accountant to figure out a way to decrease our taxes – more foolish would be not to, in our estimates, when such an option is available to us.

I agree. Sociopathy isn’t the issue at hand here. The symptoms of it certainly don’t fit. CEOs, presidents and regulatory department heads are quite the other thing from sociopathy. As Matt Taibbi’s article illustrates in stark, defiant detail, it’s not that they’re antisocial, but that they’re excessively so.

The bankers and regulators have formed a fucking tribe on the rest of us. They’ve gotten chummy. There is, effectively, no line drawn between the SEC and Lehman Brothers. In terms of people involved, in terms of incentives at play, in terms of the lucrative, lucrative business they operate and oversee, their relationship is less that of cops and robbers, and more of occasionally fractious departments under the umbrella aegis of Dollar, Inc.

This isn’t a partisan issue. This isn’t a matter of governmental interference or big corp greed. This is a matter of both at once. There is no difference between Government and Financial Corporation on this issue – they are one and the same.

And anybody not disgusted by this, not willing to scream at their senators for not pushing the issue harder, not willing to commit whatever little noospheric manipulation and control they have available to push momentum against this farcical tide of wealth and corruption, is merely feeding their gluttony.

There is no justice, merely the mocking pretense of it, while our jails are stuffed to bursting with non-violent offenders whose only crime is wrecking their own health… and these fucks roam free, their colons unscathed by the raging stiffie of a three-hundred-pound murderer.

Trillions of dollars. A literally unimaginable quantity – one our brains had not evolved to deal comfortably with except in the abstract.

It represents every lost home. Every lost career. Millions upon millions of shattered dreams and forced hardships.

Yours and mine.

…seriously, fuck those assholes.

For those of you unfortunate enough not to have lived through it, my baby sister amongst them, let’s summarize it with “it was kind of a big deal.” I remember my first exposure to it – crowding around some long-forgotten classmate one recess with dozens of other kids, wowing as he played through Red version. I remember later buying a copy of Blue at a long-since gone Electronics Boutique, using a huge chunk of my saved-up allowance in the process, thanking whatever odd twist of fortune it was that found myself with an old, classic Gameboy that a family friend had gotten bored of and given to me.

(The rumors are true – the damn things ARE unbreakable.)

My first real Fandom – one that I had an identity with, a reputation amongst, and friends made in – was with Pokemon. I actually met my second girlfriend via that community (a memory that I can recall wryly now, but caused a lot of heartache and headache during my, ah, hormonal years). It was amongst them that I learned something about the pleasure of writing – and for good or ill, via them I developed a means of dealing with and channeling drama, both in and outside of the literary sense.

It’s maybe a little weird to talk of a game franchise in such poignant terms. Maybe. You’d have to have been of a certain age, I think, to understand – this is bedrock stuff for me. This was the communal culture for me, while I was growing up.

I’ve ignored it since Generation I. Never could afford a Gameboy Color or SP or subsequent models – and by the time Generation IV came about, emotional baggage and simple Time had turned me away from the franchise. At best, I can say that I was dimly aware that it was unusually popular amongst the college crowd. That there was, apparently, a competitive scene, and it was fairly evenly split between young (so very, very young) newcomers, and those that, like me, had grown up with it. I was aware that it had become progressively more complex with every iteration – friends uttered, almost out of hearing, about stats and breeding regimes, event collectibles, generational differences… hundreds of new Pokemon had been unleashed, at approximately 150ish or so per generation, not that I had known anything but of the original 150+1 (only those specifically of my age range, I think, can really remember all the hype and misinformation about how to acquire Mew, back in the Geocities and pre-Wiki era).

It’s only recently that I’ve taken a gander at the franchise again. People seemed, oddly, to talk more and more of it every year, and there was, you see, a cheap copy of Platinum at Gamestop. And I had a DS, and I had a bit of money.

And upon finishing it, to make a long story short, I found myself wanting more. A lot more.

It wasn’t nostalgia anymore – not nostalgia alone. They’d done something to my childhood. Weeded out all the bugs, for one (can I explain the devastation I felt when I found that my savefile in Blue had been erased by Missingno? I don’t think I have the skill). Added layers upon layers of complexity, for another – Psychic, notably, wasn’t the king of elemental typing anymore, though it still retained a nasty edge to its blade. While it was overwhelmingly familiar in so very many ways, from its nearly unchanged gameplay to the story progression (to the GODDAMN BATS IN EVERY CAVE AHHH HATE ZUBAT HAAATTTEEE), it wasn’t the same Pokemon I’d grown up with.

It was better in many, many ways.

But Platinum, for all of its heavy symbolism and philosophical undertones, lacked something. This was still a game about a pubescent youth (of either gender) out in the world to learn something of strength and purpose from a rather obvious set of Shinto-influenced kami stand-ins (along with worrying overtones of cockfighting). While the backdrop had grown thick with meaning and nuance, the foreground had been left nearly unchanged in both its simplicity and absurdity – both in graphical presentation, and in a thematic sense.

As it turns out, Gamefreak was fully aware of this. They’d simply waited for the next generation to address it.

I want to gush about the story changes they’ve made – first and foremost being gym leaders that don’t simply sit back and let preteens fight criminal organizations (first, you’re supposedly 16 in the game now; second, well, at least they shoulder SOME of the burden this time…). They address, or at least touch upon and acknowledge, some of the more troubling Fridge Horrors inherent in the franchise – even making it the centermost focus of the plot this time.

Don’t get me wrong – this is still a mainstream kid’s game, marketed at kids (if slightly older than with past iterations), and made for those kids. This isn’t going to change Roger Ebert’s rather eggheaded belief that video games can’t be art. But it isn’t just a step in the right direction – they’ve made their way deeply into more mature territory and more meaningful discourse, and not by accident. If Generation I was defined by its stark simplicity, being nothing more than a thin eggshell of a story wrapped around an autistic programmer’s desire to create something new to collect, then Generation V is defined by its ambiguity, where the role is reversed, and the game itself is merely the dressing around the enigma of the relationship and exploitation between Mankind and the world around us.

Some spoilers here: the dragons featured prominently on the cover of Black and White represent Truth and Ideal respectively. To add to the ambiguity of the story’s intentions, the main difference between the two games, in terms of the story, is which one you end up with as part of that version’s canon – while the other goes to support the game’s antagonist in his messianic goal of liberation and justice.

At no point, no point at all, are you ever explicitly told that you’re entirely in the right. Or that your enemy’s entirely in the wrong. The game has actually be criticized for this – its antagonists said to be too wishy-washy and hippie. Well, maybe. I can’t deny that Team Rocket had cojones the size of the moon – creating mindboggling powerful bioweapons, infiltrating a massively powerful corporation, even influencing the very League you sought fame within… they weren’t exactly subtle, but subtle was never the point. Team Rocket, at least the game version, has fans because they’re brash.

Plasma has converts, because people on 4chan’s /vp/ can’t entirely agree whether they were really wrong.

There’s a significant difference there.

Also? Updated graphics engines. The more familiar you are with the franchise, the more you’ll jawdrop at Skyarrow Bridge. Updated music too – having played a few emulations recently, I can tell you that the music’s generally been okay, if generic, for the genre and demographic the franchise targets.

Black/White takes it to another level entirely.

The climax. THAT GODDAMN CLIMAX.

I restarted the game. Why? SOLELY so that I can reach the main arc’s climax again.

I’m going to enjoy myself immensely.

Get the new Pokemon game. You might never be able to reclaim the innocent joys of your childhood, but that doesn’t mean that a riff on it can’t be better than the original.

At least I’m finally employed!

Anyhow, the last update was lengthy, thinky, and didn’t get much attention except, apparently, from one rather outraged dude. It’s a little late, but anybody that took their time to respond to this obscure a blog, angrily or not, deserves some attention.

To reader Jimmox, I have a short response:

A. See the italics, read the linked article on WEIRDness, and understand that I’m accusing the author of having an EIRD-based worldview. Not that he’s white. The use of whiteness in WEIRD is merely a side effect of the western monoculture and its European origins – it’s the concepts that matter, and whether or not they fit the person in question. Given that he writes from the perspective of an educated, western individual with a relatively affluent background, he still fits the psychological profile in question – and therefore is subject to the shortcomings and blind points of a worldview dependent on a WEIRD-specific background.

B. It’s cute that you think utilizing an argument-from-authority fallacy makes your points persuasive in any way. People herd to ideas that sympathize with their prejudices – numbers and blogs written in support of something only indicates support and the quantities thereof, not of the soundness of the arguments made. And there is no soundness in the “Futurist’s” screed against the political empowerment of a traditionally maltreated gender.

C. Did you read anything of what I’ve written on the subject, or was the idea that misogyny was and is still a bad thing just too much to stomach on its own? Seriously?

Anyhow, with that out of the way – again, I’m employed! Fuck yeah! Not the greatest job in the world, but it’s full-time, it’s not particularly demeaning or unethical, it doesn’t deal with customer interaction, and while occasionally repetitive, it pays well enough for me not to care about that.

It’s also game-related, so expect some posts on the subject some time in the future. Nothing related to my work – you will NOT find me amongst the sad, pathetic cases of bloggers, tweeters and facebookers that get fired because they make public, written works subject to libel laws online, and forget that their boss knows how to Google just as well, if not better, than they do. That, and I’m in no hurry to break the NDA.

But you might see me review their competitor’s products more often. And make more thoughts about the state of the industry, theories of game design, and a few notes on my own ambitions in relation to it all.

Y’know. Stuff.

He is, in fact, “merely” EIRD.

I’m lazy. Go ahead and mentally subtract all “W”s from any WEIRD references I make.

There was a comic made some long time ago by webcomicker John Campbell of Pictures for Sad Children, vitriolically shredding at the concept of transhumanism. The body of his criticism is fairly off the mark – on technicalities, at any rate. It’s no real secret, for example, that the development of communicative technology tends to self-propagate rapidly – cell phone towers and even laptops are finding their way to villages that even the bleedin’ Red Cross can’t reach. It’s also no real secret that increased computational power and sophistication is pretty much the bedrock to modern science – and even, from a screwy angle, to modern philosophy, given the crucial role of cybernetics and computer-aided neurology in the further understanding of the human mind.

Not to mention that, as Charles Stross (he of the bleak dystopian futures of vicious and vile mind-children and the lesser eldritch threats to sanity) has to admit, on balance, the technologies and efforts of the modern world’s done a lot more good than harm.

All that said, Campbell’s expressed attitude towards transhumanists might still be depressingly accurate. His rhetoric against the privileged white demographic that tends to espouse transhumanism is proven time and time again when clowns like this one open their damned metaphorical mouths. The Futurist’s post on “The Misandry Bubble” would, in a just world, be written as a parody of white privilege – the fact that a quick Googling demonstrates that it’s being taken seriously…

Well, I guess it’s only fitting that, after having attained 100,000 visitors recently, I hop back into the fray of the western monocultural noosphere:

If it looks, feels and smells like shit, you should probably stop holding that shit so close to your nose. And, man, The Misandry Bubble is full of shit. Here’s why…

Any thesis has its first principles. Those principles, in turn, must be sound. They must, in fact, be fucking bulletproof – especially on issues as controversial as “is feminism the doom of modern society?” It isn’t enough to have a thousand and one links that support your position – the delusion of the many is far too pervasive to simply ignore merely because they support your hypothesis, and if anything is assured, it’s that there are many delusions, and many are shared. Especially given the echo chamber nature of the digital era, mere citation isn’t enough – a critical analysis of the fundamentals must be conducted, or the writer is guilty of the intellectual sin of furthering a known untruth.

In that, “The Misandry Bubble” has a foundational basis made of whipping cream and cotton candy.

There are literally too many damn problems with the article for me to do an exhaustive point-by-point rebuttal on – literally every piece of evidence or rhetoric he dredges up can be countered easily with a clear mind – but there are at least two major issues with his general approach. I’ll hit on the details if they apply.

WEIRDness

The first is simply that the damn thing’s too WEIRD. No, I’m not saying that the article’s excessively odd or inscrutable in any way – it is, if anything, depressingly scrutable. I’m saying that its underlying foundation is that of a WEIRD perspective – that is, the author is a case study in the reactionary anxieties of the Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic demographic group. His decrying of the lack of male role models (speak for yourself, bub), the gender skew in divorce initiations, to even the institution of what he terms as “marriage 2.0″ – every last ounce of it is spoken from the perspective of white privilege – and, more importantly, the fear of losing it.

Here’s some counter-rhetoric: prior to the modern era and the rise of feminism, the status of women in even the most enlightened countries was, at best, as secondary citizens. Yes, of course they were in the work force – doing the shit jobs for no pay, for the majority of them. Their reproductive rights were not recognized as such, nor were their rights to self-defense – a problem that actually continues to this day, given the depressingly common reports of a young woman stuck in the Arabian peninsula jailed or even sentenced to death because of rape inflicted on her. Even in the modern, western monoculture, this problem persists – going by the reported instances of rape or sexual molestation in even liberal, women-friendly countries, and extrapolating to the instances of non-reported instances, it really shouldn’t be surprising to hear that the ratio of women to men manifested in genetic continuance seems so skewed.

The author makes a deadly mistake in assuming that the gender disparity is evidence of rampant female adultery. The opposite is far more likely, in light of the power disparity and social contexts. In fact, it would’ve been self-evidential to anybody outside of the WEIRD privilege bubble.

Going off of that, prior to the modern era and the rise of feminism, women’s participation in the overall economy was at best as “capital.” It was vanishingly rare that women were, in any way, controllers or agents of their own economic participation. As was mentioned earlier, they were, of course, in the work force – so are tools and slaves. The author decries the 10-30% of men “disincentivized” from participation in the economy due to various factors as a bad thing – without ever even giving lip service to the vastly increased presence of women decision-makers introduced to the economy solely because of the ascendance of the feminist movement.

Again, reactionary WEIRD privilege, and the fear of losing it. It is a demonstrated fact that an economy pre-feminism is outright weaker than one post-. The only reason one would argue against it is if one feared that economic growth was itself a scarce resource, and that the individual would lose out from it. This necessitates that one ignores the fact that the overall benefit effects a far wider range of sapients than the system prior to it – including men.

(edit: as evidence, might I note that the gender pay gap is not uniformly closing up? Between two equally trained entry-level candidates for the same medical practice, the female doctor gets the short stick – in fact, a shorter stick than she used to get.)

Speak For Yourself, Bub

Projection is an unlovely thing, forcing one’s fears and insecurities upon the targets of one’s fears and insecurities. As the studies on WEIRD culture’s indicated, more often than not, it is the members of that very demographic that are actually outliers in the general psychological makeup of the world population – despite being the center of the vast majority of psychological studies. Despite this, authors such as the “Futurist” attempt to generalize his fears and insecurities to the world in general.

In doing so, massive swathes of untruth are presented as riches, when “dross” would be a more aptly applied label.

Let’s start with a small and amusing thing: the author thinks that most women, pre-feminism, married as virgins. This inherently treats pubescent hormones, urges and the actions resultant as somehow something new. While it is certainly likely that families of privilege and influence were probably sticklers about these sort of things, let’s not forget that the social channels that could possibly uphold and enforce this facet of patriarchy were always rare – in fact, from an economic standpoint, the insistence on virginity was nothing short of dehumanizing exertion of claim. The reason for its insistence was simply to ensure that there were no prior claims upon the object of exchange – no risk, in other words, of somebody else’s genetic capital parasitizing upon your own.

The case for this for most of pre-industrial humanity, however? Hahahaha, right. Because teenagers wouldn’t find time to sneak off into the woods or into unattended barns or behind the tavern’s kitchen for a bit of boot-knocking. Sure. That’s completely believable. If there is any social dogma I’m willing to embrace, it’s the idea that there is no such thing as an ideal social interaction – our ideas of what should happen occur because the majority of us would do otherwise.

Quite frankly, though, the idea of what “should” be conducted often leaves much to be demanded. In fact, it often demands itself to be ignored. Take, for instance, the author’s insistence on the primacy of genetic continuation – his rallying against adulterous women, against contraceptives, against the dissolution of the institution of marriage (would this be the “nuclear family” of the American 1950s, the tribal family of an overwhelming number of other cultures, or that odd little arrangement amongst some Pacific Islanders where the children are raised by their uncle?) are all centered around the implied necessity of the dominate male being the sole contributing factor in “his” woman’s offsprings.

Where, then, is there space for adoption and sperm/egg donations? How does the author wrap his worldview to include polyamorous relations, infertility, or communal-upbringing cultures? Are we to treat couples that opt to adopt instead of contributing to overpopulation as lepers, or admirables?

Or is this so very desperately out of the WEIRD “norm” that the author simply opts to ignore it, despite its prevalence everywhere outside of that bubble?

Furthermore, when he espouses the positive factors of marriage, what form of it does he mean? Marriage for political and economic benefit between clans? Marriage due to psychosexual intimacy and compatibility? Marriage of convenience due to the local establishment’s tax laws in relation to the establishment? Or shotgun weddings because some idiot was unaware that the broad he knocked up has a dad with very set ideas on how his daughter ought to be treated?

From the onset, the author was projecting his own fears and insecurities upon a body that simply doesn’t share his worldview. Even the discussion of the “lack of male role models…” well, I dunno about you, Bub, but Jack Bauer seems exactly opposite to me of a well-reasoned and enlightened individual. If I’m supposed to look up to guys like him, I’d rather have no heroes, and instead work to inspire others myself. The acts of an intern rushing into harm’s way to save Representative Gifford’s life; the selfless efforts of firefighters working against monstrous blazes covering thousands of acres of combustibles; the countless millions shouldering quiet burdens, working thanklessly without ever finding it necessary to blame feminism, of all things, for the rote and ordinary setbacks that is par for the course of societal interaction:

I don’t need to look very hard to find role models. It takes a willing ignorance to find it hard to find a good role model. It takes a very disturbing intellectual dishonesty to then, in turn, confuse vicarious escapism with role models. Are we really to believe that sociopathy and anarchism are acceptable standards for males to work towards? Rather than decrying the lack of superheroes, should we not be looking at why we uphold the heroes we do or did have?

Or is it easier to defend a position than it is to analyze it?

Stones and Glass Houses

Preemptive defense is a common tactic in debate – shoring up known weaknesses in your rhetoric and position, or using it as a lure to attract or dissuade an opponent towards a position you’ve prepared for. Its usefulness in a rhetorical fight is dependent, of course, on style and skill – setting an opponent up for a devastating counter implicitly means you know what to expect from them.

The boxing metaphor is actually pretty apt – as with the idea of a counter, there is the rhetorical cross-counter, also known as the turn. The concept is elegantly simple: having your own argument figuratively turned against you. It is, in other words, the act of pointing out the hypocrisy of a position.

The “Misandry Bubble” attempts to defend itself against critique based on the concept of “shame dialogue.” Basically, it makes the claim that the majority of argumentation against it is merely name-calling, shaming, and the ilk – or, in other words, an insubstantial distraction from the arguments and points that the author attempts to make.

Points made with rhetorics such as “misandrists shrieking,” “carnival of bridezilla narcissism,” “unhinged lunacy,” and other such offerings of choice and well-reasoned rhetoric..

I agree with the author – usage of loaded terms and namecalling is merely a distraction from the weaknesses of one’s own position. There is no need for pathos-laden arguments when discussing… anything at all.

So, a turn: by the hypocritical usage of laden terms in his own rhetoric, the author knowingly solicits a vast range of untruths and weak rhetoric in the guise of debate. Through the lens of both his WEIRD bubble of privilege, the defense of it against those that accurately surmise that privilege (“private law,” as Terry Pratchett reminds us) comes at the cost of inequality to others, and the evidently deliberate usage of falsehoods and half-truths, the author commits the intellectual sin of insincerity of assertion.

Bugger Off – We’ve Got a Future to Attend To

It is a central irony that a self-proclaimed “Futurist” would fall back upon the 18-19th century rhetoric of anti-suffragists in order to forecast the future conditions of the western world, through the lens of gender politics. In opposition to his assertion of forward-looking transhumanism, the so-called Futurist is, in fact, a conservative reactionary – an old-school conservative reactionary, sharing traits with the ancient shades of industrialists and shipping magnates of ages past, reliant upon gender politics both westernized and desperately obsolete in his analysis of ongoing trends.

The fact of the matter is that gender inequality still persists – in favor of males. The fact of the matter is that patriarchy necessitates a socioeconomic lock-out of over half the population, and is by that fact alone something that needs to be torn down as efficiently and swiftly as possible. The fact of the matter is that absolutely everything the author has described as inappropriate and amoral on part of the female part of the race is implicitly treated, even by the author himself as acceptable and even normal for the male.

All this because of a difference in chromosomal shape? Seriously? Maybe I live in my own privileged bubble, where the thought of something that, on balance, has been provably demonstrated to be utterly insignificant in anything but the extremities of purely physical capability, should have such an overwhelming role in the fabric of our society is in itself an evil.

Or maybe not. Because I do recognize it. Because I do see it. Sometimes, I’m guilty of it myself. But, as a transhumanist, my vision for the future is both genderless and perhaps excessively gendered – where the primacy is not towards cutthroat Darwinian genetic propagation, but towards the self. A vision of a future where gender is a completely personal issue – an expression of one’s self-image and identity, and a celebratory one at that.

But!

But that vision is only possible in a world of gender equality. Because only when the female and male are on equal platform can the cultural pressures of gender be made obsolete. Because only in a world of gender equality can gender itself lose meaning. Because only in a world where the consensus reality of gender has lost meaning can the individual be empowered to create meaning unto themselves.

“When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the (Father's) domain].”

- Gospel of Thomas

The oft-leveraged accusation that transhumanism is merely the Rapture of the Nerds is not without foundation. There are many overlaps with the Christian idea of immanentizing the eschaton. In a way, transhumanism itself is old as rocks – it is the pursuit of a physical utopia and the obsolescence of common ills through the use of technology – the transition and transcendence from the flaws of humanity as-is.

It’s not such a bad pursuit. I would reckon it superior to the spiritual equivalent for one reason alone: in it is the idea that there is nothing that can’t be solved with sufficient hard work and effort. That progress isn’t found in prayer but practice. That all is within reach of a ready and willing hand.

The “Futurist” demands that we step back into an era where the only ones with power are those that look and think like him.

I say we push on.

Yeah, yeah – the album’s fifteen years old now, and I’m late to the game. I only got around to it just now, okay? I suppose it’s a comment on the quality of the album itself that a complete outsider, with no emotional connection to the band, no real investment in the music scene, and have only vaguely heard that the album exists and that it was noteworthy, decides upon first listening that it’s worth making a public note about it.

So here’s my TL;DR verdict:

It’s not bad.

What, you want more? Fine, have some pretentious analysis:

Apparently, this album tanked hard during its initial release. No surprise there – as limited as my music knowledge is (believe me, it’s very fucking limited), “Pinkerton” doesn’t sound much like a ’90s song. It does, however, sound like the musical blueprint or prototype for much of what’s come out in the last ten years or so – the foundational frequency of the alt rock and emo bands that emerged in its wake.

For that, I kind of want to punch Cuomo in the mouth.

Kind of. Even if “Pinkerton” was the underlying influence of a crippling wave of trashy, shallow and insincere pop rockers, it’s not the album’s fault, or Cuomo’s, that so damn many of them failed to capture “Pinkerton’s” spirit.  There’s a component in “Pinkerton” rarely found in its descendants, and even then in only one or two tracks at a time. It isn’t that Cuomo “keeps it real” better than the musicians he influenced, or that he’s more technically competent. “Pinkerton” swerves all over the charts on both – wavering between an almost tsundere insincerity and authenticity of emotional appeal, and between simplicity and complexity of its structure.

No, the difference between “Pinkerton” and its derivative albums is simply that derivative albums are merely influenced by “Pinkerton,” and merely try to capture that specific album’s essence. “Pinkerton” attempts to encapsulate teenage boyhood itself – its mock-cynicism, its stupidities, its shallowness, its hypocrisies and its few moments of glory. It is an origin-point album – it doesn’t attempt any emulation except that of the life of its singer. It doesn’t so much “confess” as it “illustrates.”

And, quite frankly, it illustrates that Rivers Cuomo, in 1996, was one emotionally fucked up dude.

(And, if I’m not terribly mistaken, he listened to a lot of The Pillows – I could’ve sworn I heard some j-rock influence, and he is, apparently, a fan of anime to some extent.)

Of course, so was everybody that lived long enough to ride the hormone wave. Which is why it failed then – the Weezer audience prior to Pinkerton was looking for shallow, trashy pop and not a mirror unto both Cuomo and themselves, and its critics then had outgrown the emotional immaturity that resonates best with the album’s entirety.

Which is why it’s succeeded since – because if you still remember the days when you had an embarrassingly ill-timed hard-on for everything in a skirt, and a sense that the world was about to kick you in the groin (and wasn’t everything pretty much centered around your dick back then), then there’s a part of you that thrums like a tuning fork with “Pinkerton.” And it’s had 15 years to strike people’s forks.

So it’s an important album. And, mostly, it sounds pretty good too. So I guess it’ll stay on my iPod, then. And I guess I’d recommend it to you.

Here’s hoping it’ll survive longer yet.

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

- Neil Gaiman

Copied completely without his permission (oh me, oh my, what a pirate am I…), but somehow I don’t think he’ll mind…