Fun Fact: In The Early Stages Of Production For “The Pegasus”, The Script Initially Called For The

As someone who has an interest in sf/fantasy depictions of WWI, I’ve been puzzling for years as to why authors dabbling in steampunk have been reluctant to tackle the conflict. My own theory is that steampunk is, at heart, an American creation, and the Great War is an event that has mostly vanished from the American consciousness. For most American writers, steampunk is a fantasy world set in an imagined version of 19th-century Britain or America which draws more from other stories than from reality, and the question of international politics and war doesn’t really come into it. That said, I have found British authors working in steampunk to be far more willing to broach the subject of World War I, both because the war had such a huge impact on the British national psyche, and because it ties into the greater question of what Britain is, its relationship to the empire, what role Britain has in the world after empire, and so on. As for examples, two authors stand out to me. While a hard sf writer by trade, Stephen Baxter’s steampunk excursions always seem to be haunted by the war. His 1993 novel Anti-Ice is for the most part a romp about a 19th-century excursion from the Earth to the Moon thanks to the titular substance, an exotic form of antimatter. However, by the end of the book the use and exploitation of anti-ice has led to Britain, France, and Germany locking themselves into a Cold War-style nuclear arms race. His 1995 book The Time Ships is a sequel to the The Time Machine that riffs in all manner of ways on HG Wells’ work, but the middle third of the book is set in an alternate 1938 where the First World War has dragged on for decades, transforming Britain into a dystopian state influences by Wells’ most pessimistic views. (While I haven’t read Baxter’s 2017 followup to The War of the Worlds, entitled The Massacre of Mankind, some of the elements I’ve seen, like a police-state Britain and a bloody Russo-German war in Eastern Europe, suggests that the Martian invasion of the original book has become the Great War of the sequel’s world.) For something a little more literary, Ian R. MacLeod’s Aether duology, The Light Ages (2003) and The House of Storms (2005), is set in an England where a magical substance called “aether” has locked the country (and by extension the rest of the world) in a sort of static industrial revolution for centuries in some ways reminiscent of Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968). Change does eventually come to this static eternal England, sadly in the form of a civil war whose depiction draws heavily from that of the Western Front.

I didn’t include it in the list of favorite stories because I like it more in idea than in execution, but Caitlin R, Kiernan’s story Goggles really hit me hard.  She says it was her idea of where all steampunk is leading, but most authors don’t want to admit: the conflict that became World War I in our world destroys the steampunk world in technologically advanced nuclear fire.  I read it yesterday and I can’t get the concept out of my head.

Isn’t this the final level of Hitman: Codename 47? Is there a mass grave full of dead bald guys in suits in back of this place?

GOOD EVENING

i just found the most fucked up property currently for sale in austria

THIS LOOKS NICE RIGHT JUST A BIG OLD HALL

CUTE RIGHT? NO. FUCK NO

I FEEL SO MUCH DREAD SEEING THIS HALLWAY

YOU WON`T LEAVE THIS ALIVE

IT HAS AN INDUSTRIAL KITCHEN AND BATHROOM IDK FOR WHAT BUT I HATE IT

THIS CUBE IS WHERE YOU GO TO DIE

like this is advertised as just a curious amazing thing with no explaination to what the fuck is going on or what THE ACTUAL FUCK HAPPENED IN THERE

but you can buy it for 99,000€. you might die looking at it but like. you can fucking try to get this

here is a link to the listing i guess. i hate this so much https://www.immowelt.at/expose/2b46g4c

The important thing to remember about the Star Trek universe is that the formula for Coca-Cola was lost during the Eugenics Wars, while PepsiCo was forcibly nationalized in the 2050s by Colonel Green, who dismantled their bottling plants and had much of the workforce executed on the grounds that they produced, quote, “an impure beverage”. (RC Cola still exists in the 24th century, but nobody drinks it.)

The most unrealistic part of Star Trek Deep Space Nine is the idea that root beer is exceedingly popular. Root beer is gross and a hyper-advanced humanity isn't going to embarrass themselves by drinking that in front of the aliens

Damned right.

Regardless of what cynics still resentful of their 11th grade English class experience might tell you, you’re allowed to identify with Holden. You’re allowed to root for Heathcliff. You’re allowed to feel gooey over Romeo and Juliet. 

We got over the idea that literature was meant to always reflect reality and to offer moral instruction a long time ago. Interacting with all the gross, ugly, embarrassing, and/or destructive emotions we encounter in books is part of the reason they’re there.

Can and should! All those polar bears sitting around up there, thinking they’re better than me! I’ll settle their hash!!!!

I wish all writers who haven’t been able to write in a long time bc of depression a very I love u and I promise u will write again

Based on my own experience with Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Rabbits, and Inland Empire...yep, that’s pretty much it.

Explaining Twin Peaks

@nick-nocturn, isn’t this basically what Keratin Garden was?

a beauty guru that is haunted by a demonic entity

In Nagle’s defense, Kill All Normies was going to the publishers just as Milo’s star was starting to fall. Personally, I found that Nagle’s discussion of combined with the events surrounding his fall from grace suggested to me that he was ultimately an unknowing “useful idiot” for two parties at once. More traditional conservatives (or at least the more utilitarian ones focused on campaign strategy) saw him as a way to drum up support from a younger, traditionally anti-conservative cohort and get them to vote Republican. Meanwhile, people with genuine racist, white supremacist, or hard-right views wanted to use him both to drum up support from a new younger demographic and to use him as a Trojan horse to inject “alt-right” arguments into the political mainstream. After the election and he had served his purpose, neither of these groups had any more use or fondness for him, so away he went. (I may be speaking beyond the evidence, but I feel like part of the mainstream conservative turn against Milo was due to the fact that, for all their many sins, conservatives actually didn’t want to let potential neo-Nazis into the Republican Party.) As for your main point, I sometimes feel that modern American leftism has a problem with knowing how to criticize but not knowing how to rule. Even in places where leftists are in positions of authority, there is still a tendency to see themselves as rebels pushing against a white patriarchal conservative Other, even when the Other in question is far smaller and less influential than they are. It leads to situations where people are fighting battles that have already been fought and won, or in attacking people rather than trying to persuade or cajole them. (These are very fragmentary thoughts that I haven’t put much concerted effort into articulating, so take everything in this last paragraph with a grain of salt.)

Those who claim that the new right-wing sensibility online today is just more of the same old right, undeserving of attention of differentiation, are wrong. Although it is constantly changing, in this important early stage of its appeal, it’s ability to assume the aesthetics of counterculture transgression and nonconformity tells us many things about its appeal. It has more in common with the 1968 left’s slogan, “It is forbidden to forbid” than it does anything most recognize as part of any traditionalist right. – Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies

Thought it was a good idea to revisit this book. Even though it’s only a couple years old, some of it – the idea of Milo sustaining any sort of status or influence – seems quaint now, but this is what is most disorienting for older leftists. If the right is the underground, the cultural renegades, then we are its moral police, and we don’t do moral policing well. We lose too much by tightening the reigns and saying, “no, you can’t say this… you can’t THINK this.” I lived through the 90s version of political correctness (watch the movie PCU – I swear it’s documentary), and it was customary for even those on the far left to mock it. The left being any kind of moral majority is laughable. 

So it would seem that the only place we could go after season 1 was “to hell.” I am frightened, yet wait for the podcast with bated breath. (At this point, I’m half expecting that Hitoe has developed a wicked morphine habit to overcome her curse and have friends again.)

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