Testing Chat V: The Final Mysterious Island: Miami Beach

[evilsoup]

I think it's because it's like being a little bit drunk: it lowers your inhibitions just a little bit. One of my favourite quotes (though I can't remember who said it) WRT writing is 'there's no such thing as writer's block, only an unwillingness to write shit', and that applies to other arts too I think. And the ideas start coming much more readily when you're already writing, for me at least.

[adr]

i'm often most productive in the later evening, like right before my regular bed time

but i think it is because that's the point i have less distractions and actually start to work for real so i have something to deliver after just pretending to work the rest of the day lol

'there's no such thing as writer's block, only an unwillingness to write shit'

true dat

[Infinity Biscuit]

I would feel a lot better if every bit of writing about Freud, even the criticism or refutations, were to be erased and replaced with

"Freud was wrong. He was so wrong that we're not sure how he was able to feed or dress himself. Moving on."

[thejester]

[F.J. Prefect, Esq]

But without Freud there would be no Xenogears

[Dooey Jo]

man this list of Lexx episodes is the best thing

Goaded by the first lady, Priest does a deal with Stan to kill Prince, but ends up wiping out Orlando, Florida. In a plan to "save the presidency", he blames Cuba, but Prince isn't convinced, so organises a trip down Dealey Plaza to drill home the importance of loyalty, having the first lady sniped. Genevieve G Rota is elected pope, randomly from a real estate guide. A cat becomes possessed by a carrot.

The prize for the survivor of Xevivor is Xev. Stan gets entered as a "wildcard" contestant by 790, to compete against beefcakes. As the TV crew and contestants get turned into carrot zombies, Farley (reincarnated Schlemmi, from Season 2, and Fifi, from season 3), the producer is largely concerned with his possible homosexuality. Meanwhile at Longbore's space lab, Tina tries to seduce Kai, while showing him pictures from Transylvania.

He attempts to seduce Xev using a bad rendition of Greensleeves on his portable keyboard. 790 pushes him off the command deck. Meanwhile Stan is lynched, and Kai plays the tavern pianoman, with endless variations of "Yo Way Yo". Priest nukes Newfoundland.

Kai needs to go to Transylvania to explore his curiosity. In the tavern, they bump into bats, superstitious villagers, Van Helsing, and 3 goth girls. They are invited to the castle for the Walpurgis feast, which is hosted by a British actor playing Dracul. Stan has "dead thing pie".

The crew buy a house in Prime Ridge, using money from ATMs that 790 rigs for them. Xev's cooking is atrocious, Kai doesn't like his new fridge, and after a day they get bored of TV.

[Dooey Jo]

Xev is angry with Stan for using all of Lexx' money to buy video games and pushes him down a flight of stairs. Kai appears and we learn that this was not the first time this had happened and that Stan was previously told about stairs. Norway flies off into space.

[joviwan]

Lexx is the best thing

FTFY

[adr]

i'm the WORST at breaking up with ppl

i told the missionaries today that i don't actually want to join their church and doing a baptism might wash away old sins, but the act itself would be a sin; a lie, and we definitely don't want that

and they managed to spin that as a positive thing (i'm really taking this seriously!).... and at the end i said i'll talk to them again next week


blargh. if they were rude it'd be easy, but they are nice people and i actually do enjoy our weekly conversations

i'm just not a mormon

[Jung]

So I've been reading a bunch of the stuff on this site.

It's interesting to compare what Lovecraft actually wrote to the internet telephone game version of what he was about.

Like actually reading his stuff it seems to me that what he was about was something along the lines of that speech Q gives Picard in Q Who about how the universe is full of wonders and terrors

And the wonders half of that gets completely left out of the telephone game version of Lovecraft you pick up from the internet.

Like once you know to look for it you can see it even in the 'archetypal' Lovecraft stuff, like the bit at the end of Shadow Over Innsmouth where the narrator is talking about how he's going to live in wonder and glory forever among the Deep Ones

I mean yeah it's horror but at the same time I read that and I think of the dreamlands in Celephais and the luminous existence in Beyond the Wall of Sleep.

[Civil War Man]

A lot of it is that the wonders are described as equally incomprehensible to the human mind as the horrors, so for some there is not much difference between the two. In both cases, the protagonist cannot encounter it without being fundamentally changed in some way. In some instances, the horrors may actually be more merciful, since they would merely kill the main character.

Another thing I find interesting is that most of Lovecraft's creations originated from at least one of three places: the deep ocean, outer space, and the human mind, and almost 100 years later all three of those have remained largely unexplored.

[evilsoup]

mang adr just make it clear that you're not going to convert (it sounds like you've done this already really). If you enjoy your conversations with them, I don't see why you'd want them to go away; to be fair to them you should be honest about your intentions, and if they want to keep coming with that made clear, is it really a problem?

also jung yeah, internet lovecraft is to the original what steampunk is to the Victorian era (a shitty oh-so-ironic simplification)

[Infinity Biscuit]

Isn't original lovecraft about how black people are scary and evil or have I been mislead from not having read the source material myself :L

[evilsoup]

that's certainly an aspect of some of it, yeah, but it's by no means the main thing

[Jung]

Isn't original lovecraft about how black people are scary and evil or have I been mislead from not having read the source material myself :L

I'm not familiar with Lovecraft's IRL views aside from vague internet people mentions of him being a massive racist shitlord, but I find that pretty believable looking at his writings. For one thing there are direct treatments of race and class that are problematic to outright horrible (see: the black boxer in Herbert West - Reanimator, the cult in The Horror at Red Hook, the virulent classist contempt for Joe Slater in Beyond the Wall of Sleep*). I also notice a tendency to have basically no woman characters of any note.

More generally, a lot of his horror seems to be very much about xenophobic fears of otherness and pollution (often hereditary pollution). If you read Shadow Over Innsmouth, for instance, the horror really seems focused not so much on any tangible threat the Deep Ones and the townspeople represent but the fact they exist and are alien and gross, and it's not hard to think that a more tolerant narrator might have a somewhat different perspective on the whole thing. For instance, if you actually look at what happens to them when other humans find out about them it's not hard to see their guarding the secret with intimidation and murder as very justified.

Probably the story where this is most visible is Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family, which is all about people freaking out at finding out they had a nonhuman ancestor (up to a murder-suicide to purge the world of the blood pollution), with no indication of their being any "objective" reason for such alarm, just the fact that they had an ancestor that was a different species is regarded as some terrible horror and the narrative seems to treat this as reasonable. It was like reading a story about somebody going into a murderous gay panic after finding out they had sex with a transwoman - why exactly am I supposed to sympathize with people who seem to be having this reaction only as a function of their own massive intolerant shitlordness? Said nonhuman ancestor was from Africa and there's some pretty icky undertones about it too.

Generally it does seem in the stream of the kind of ideology/psychology that ultimately produced the Nazis.

* Which is actually kind of interesting in that there's basically one line that if you changed would open the story to a much more progressive interpretation in which Joe Slater's dreams serve as an escape from the world that oppresses him and validation that he is something more than that world would make him, and in the dreamworld the classist shitlord psychiatrist who holds him in contempt has to acknowledge him as a "brother of light" - an equal.

[evilsoup]

Here's a thing reviewing the DSM-5 as a postmodernist dystopian novel

[Infinity Biscuit]

I appreciated that

[Infinity Biscuit]

So I read something earlier today that was specific but I feel the generalised version is great in general for any measure of privilege one has:

I need you to not ask yourself, “am I a [bigot]?”. It is the wrong question.

The right question is: “How does [bigotry] affect how I interact with [people said bigotry affects]?”. This is an uncomfortable question to ask yourself, because it assumes an a priori [bigotry] on your part. This is an accurate assumption.

(here is the original just so I don't erase a great post about something specific for a generalisation I want to make (because that post is great))

[Bakustra]

Isn't original lovecraft about how black people are scary and evil or have I been mislead from not having read the source material myself :L

lovecraft's racism is a major part of his writing, but his arguably best work (At The Mountains of Madness) reverses from that somewhat

and really it's more about how non-WASPs are evil, since he had a breakdown after learning he might have welsh ancestry

lovecraft's earlier/dreamlands stuff is heavily inspired by lord dunsany, who basically was all about the sublime and mysterious

one particular thing that always bugs me about lovecraft pastiche is that it relies on the assumption that craziness is a universal constant, whereas a lot of his works suggest that "going crazy" is really just what sanity looks like when you understand that the universe is generated by idiocy and goats are the ultimate symbol of fertility

also i'd love to work out a cold war cthulhu RPG setting where the focus is on earth as a colonial/post-colonial nation, with PCs as basically mau mau or FLN terror squads against the mi-go/yith colonial powers, though it needs some work to make it more interesting than just alien conspiracy #23324

[Dooey Jo]

i thought sanity was a well defined quantity and "going crazy" was what caused you to tilt your head to the side and say "this isn't really happening" as this quantity drops to zero from seeing the same zombie for the tenth time

[>:3]

i thought sanity was a well defined quantity and "going crazy" was what caused you to tilt your head to the side and say "this isn't really happening" as this quantity drops to zero from seeing the same zombie for the tenth time

[Jung]

Charlotte, minor nitpick:

It is an interesting sidelight that our language - created and codified by men - does not have one unflattering term to describe men who vent their anger at women. even such epithets as ‘bastard’ and ‘son of a bitch’ do not condemn the man but place the blame on a woman - his Mother!

I find the idea that 50% of the population had no influence on the English language or basically any living spoken language very dubious.

[evilsoup]

well it was certainly codified by men
I'm sure there are women working on dictionaries now (in fact I'm sure I've heard one from the OED on the radio before), but they were all established and their first few editions compiled by men
plus nearly all the great producers of influential, defining artworks -- Shakespeare and Chaucer and so on -- were men

[Jung]

well it was certainly codified by men
I'm sure there are women working on dictionaries now (in fact I'm sure I've heard one from the OED on the radio before), but they were all established and their first few editions compiled by men
plus nearly all the great producers of influential, defining artworks -- Shakespeare and Chaucer and so on -- were men

Yeah, that part I don't have a problem with. My issue with it is spoken language is so ubiquitous and its influences so diffuse I find the idea that women would have no influence on it pretty hard to believe.

[evilsoup]

well yeah, I think I agree with you there
women internalising sexism and enforcing patriarchy is a well-noted thing, and I think that's enough to explain the effect that snippet is describing