I seem to have missed the announcement from last month.  In case you missed it, Club Boys was much more my usual speed: M/M, consensual sex, flogging in a public space, a fair touch of intensity and confession.  It also has the “why Seattlites seem so fucked in the head sometimes” scene.

”But… how will I get back to my sarcophagus?”"You can hire a guide, if you need one.  They’re much cheaper than lawyers, I assure you.  Good day.”  With that, a tophat materialized in vir hand.  Vi placed it on vir head and walked down the empty passageway, disappearing around the corner, leaving Jess alone in the airlock cylinder, facing away from a circular door above which read Xajan (TRPV).

“Stick your linear navigator onto an analog scope and suck it!”  she shouted at vir retreating back.  ”Glider spaz!  R-Pento!  Barberpole! Block!” She angrily turned to face the airlock.  ”Fine,” she said,taking a deep breath.  ”Let’s see what mother left for me.

In other news, I’m sorry if you sent a comment to the blog and it didn’t get approved in a timely fashion.  It seems I’m not getting the emails I’m supposed to.  (I’m also having some very weird interactions between this blog and my LiveJournal account that I need to iron out.)

Our friends, the penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information — and, so, at times, it seems to us.

But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.

Question: what is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.

I suspect “the penguins” is Mamet’s way of writing “the suits.”  There’s much more, and I recommend you read it all.

  I would be totally remiss in my duties if I didn’t remind you that I had some Tron fanfic of my own, now wouldn’t I? Data Flow is M/M, and a warning for non-consensual sex.

Meanwhile, enjoy staring at the totally hot chick. If that’s Mercury, damn, that’s a lot of nice polygons.

Fouche’s starts by describing the premises of Nassim Nicholas Taleb: when historians look back on history for the cause of some famous historical catastrophe, they tend to look too far. They look for a narrative in history that connects all of the dots leading up to the horrible event they’re documenting, trying to discern which ones were causative and which ones were not. There are, naturally, academic objections to the narrative theory of history, which show that political catastrophes are not the result of long-term trends but are immediate chaotic perturbations that lead to disasters. Thus, for example, people link 9/11 to the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966, whereas the more proximate cause of 9/11 can be found in Saudi politics less than a decade earlier. (I think I’ll take issue with his characterization of the bank disaster; many economists agree the perturbations that lead to the great recession could have been damped by Glass-Steagel.)

Fouche then says, rightly I think, that what’s missing from the argument about whether or not long-term narrative or proximate perturbations of political equilibria can be used to describe the causes of catastrophe is this: the personal narrative of the actors. His example is WWI, but 9/11 works fine. Bin Laden had little interest in attacking “The West” in the 1980s: his interest was in rooting out corruption and the invasion of outsiders within the future Caliphate, most notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Qutb’s opinions on America, which were substantial, were minimal to Bin Laden’s overall ideology. After the invasion of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia allowed the US to operate on Saudi soil, and that slotted itself into Bin Laden’s personal narrative about the purity of the Caliphate, and generated a response.

If you’re a writer, this is a great idea.  Instead of deep and ancient narratives leading up to the emerging crisis, what you need is a villain with some authority who has had a long-standing personal narrative– of personal greatness, of ancient darkness, of national unity, whatever– and then craft a few small events that he can, in his mind, coerce into being part of his personal narrative.  How much coercion he must do to make it fit makes a great measure of his corruption.   You can even point out failures to contain the perturbations he creates, failures of personal action or legal frames, and show how his narrative is powerful enough to infest others, overcome such objections, and lead to disaster.

On the other hand, it also reduces the idea of heroism to a counter-point.  I’m still thinking about how to contain that.

It was easy then. Remove his infectious code, pull up the registry and edit out all the brutal redirects from his remotes, along with shutdown codes that prevent legitimate anti-malware from running.

The penguin doesn’t care about any of that. To me, all of that’s just bits and bytes, and tromping through it is routine.

Even in 2020, being a cocksucker in South Africa is dangerous outside of Capetown or Johannesburg, especially if you meet the rare angry religious type from the northeast corner. Being pale-skinned is unusual, but not worth remarking on except when getting joshed by your mates. But living with cyberwear that just works without daily permission from Seattle or San Jose? Now that’s queer.