the next financial bubble collapse, dystopian nightmare reality, and anxiety burnout

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas just dropped a new video on YouTube that's a 2-hour deep dive into NFTs (the stupidity! the scam! the nightmarish memes and the bad computer-generated art!), and the context of the 2008 financial crash. I found it very satisfying to watch, like all his videos, although the subject matter being so unavoidably heavy sort of reminded me even more about our dystopian present, not that I had forgotten or anything.

Really, though, 'dystopian' seems like a dated term - a term inevitably rooted in the highly context-dependent concepts of historical progress and an almost Star Trekian (Enlightenment, I guess?) sunny view of history and human nature. Aside from the historically unprecedented climate crisis/climate bubble/global warming threatening apocalypse, all the other disheartening aspects of current reality are recognizable and/or foreseeable outgrowths of the same human nature, circumstance, and historical forces that have made life into a struggle against oppressors for all of human history. Capitaliism and globalization have accelerated all kinds of bad trends and empowered all kinds of bad actors, leading to a lot of clusterfucks that weren't necessarily possible before, but they're still the same assholes taking advantage of anything they can in the same predictable ways. I don't think 'dystopian' is really a concept he leans on in his video; it's just a word that's leapt to my mind a lot to describe various trends and forces making reality a living nightmare, and this is just my train of thought about that.

I keep writing paragraphs and deleting them. I guess there's just so much free-floating anxiety and so many different things to be anxious about that it actually occupies a significant amount of brain power just like, trying to organize them mentally and remember them, let alone deal with them in any sense. Wax has been going through a bad period of anxiety lately, even physical symptoms, and it's almost laughable to talk about "why" you're anxious. I suppose the question is if anything has changed recently that could be a proximate cause of a spike in anxiety, because in the broader sense - not even existentially, like global warming or nuclear apocalypse or whatever, but like... just nationally and locally and even personally because we're living through a deadly pandemic on top of everything else and it's been going on for years and we're also mostly topped out on rage about corrupt and ineffective leadership not even taking the most obvious steps to ameliorate it - we're all topped out on anxiety, so burnt out of it that if you could permanently run out we probably all would have. You can't, which is probably a good thing when it comes to like a survival mechanism, but on the other hand, you can't just live forever at peak adrenaline, and it's getting harder and harder to differentiate threats and... triage your emergency processing power? Mostly there's not anything we can do about any of the HUGE things we have to be anxious about, not even the ones that threaten us personally in the day to day. Although next month I think we can get our (first) boosters: the SOLE exception to this! Here's hoping some corrupt EU politicians wake up to reality or the vaccine apartheid otherwise breaks before we need the next set.

reading

After I ran out of CJ Cherryh's Foreigner books I went back to my current favorite series, Catriona McPherson's Dandy Gilver mysteries. I had actually waited long enough between that there were TWO new Dandy Gilver books. The sleuth is a member of the Scottish landed gentry in the 1920s (first book) - 30s (she's up to 1937 now), and they combine several of my favorite things in this way. First was The Turning Tide, a rather quirky visit to southern Scotland and a case involving a river ferrywoman going mad and then being murdered and a Roman archaeology intrigue. But the latest book, The Mirror Dance, was fantastic! It starts with the murder of a Punch and Judy puppeteer (or Punchinello man) during the puppet show in a public park while Dandy is in the audience with her lady's maid, cook, and parlor maid - a bit of a locked-room puzzle because he's murdered in a tiny tent with nowhere to hide and no escape routes. And he's been murdered on the 50-year anniversary of the murder of ANOTHER Punch and Judy puppeteer who had the same first and last name as him BUT IS NO RELATION. Absolutely delightful! Also I've tried to Google about the Commedia dell'arte roots of Punch and Judy before: it's an evolution from the stock characters of Commedia. Punch is Punchinello, and this book told me for the first time that the 'traditional' or old-style Punch and Judy shows also included Scaramouche, another of the well-known stock characters from Commedia! I guess I need to find an actual book about it to read. I've been meaning to find translations of some early modern Commedia plays to read as well, but I sort of fell out of Harlequin and Pierrot fandom before I unearthed any (I had started looking a few years ago). As always, the whole Dandy Gilver series is most highly recommended. The first one is called After the Armistice Ball.

I wanted to read some more sff after that. I tried the free sample of Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie for a second time. I can't actually remember why I put it down the first time I started, but I bounced off it again. I can't put my finger on exactly why. Then I read the much-recommended The Tea Master and The Detective by Aliette de Bodard, which is, as everybody says, a clear tribute to Sherlock Holmes, but in a pan-Asian space opera setting predicated on a technology similar to the brainships of Anne McCaffrey's Ship Who Sang verse. And more importantly, with female characters: all the important characters. I did find it good reading, but I had some reservations about the narrator and the relationship between the Watson and Holmes figures (I won't say these reservations are fair, because, obviously, this isn't even a fanfic or a reboot, it's a transformative take in conversation with Holmes! But that said, I'm not exactly satisfied with the potential WHY for the specific changes that make the Watson character a lot more adversarial and hesitant to trust and build very little rapport with the Holmes figure for the bulk of the story. They look suspiciously like some of the changes you see simply in bad Holmes fanworks.) It seems this book was not the start of a series about these characters, but a side novella in a larger universe that is mostly about other characters.

I've been ambivalent about the Murderbot series by Martha Wells simply because it's so popular, and I tend to be suspicious of standout popularity. I usually don't find the things that come to my attention that way to my taste. But I read the first, All Systems Red, and enjoyed it a lot. I can also understand the runaway popularity better now. They aren't 100% unique and separate from genre history, but they do have a rather fresh angle to them. The point of view is unusually tight, and the narrator's pecularities (as a Murderbot!) make sense and are also charming. The plots of the first two books, at least, are well-judged to be a bit more bite-sized than the expected weighty sf tome - they're novels, but they're on the short side, and they're focused and well-constructed within the boundaries of their size. A bit like a nice 90-minute episode of a prestige tv miniseries with a self-contained episodic plot. Then there's the murderbot's positioning itself explicitly outside humanity and its exasperated fondness for humanity, which to me, at least, is both funny and cute - I can't help thinking it's like a herding dog, if herding dogs had that intelligence. Anyway, I also read the second one, Artificial Condition, and it was really good too. I'm not going to read them all in one gulp, because I want a bit more time to digest things as I go. I do still intend to read the rest.

Then I started to feel like I really wanted to read some high fantasy, and what I wound up with was Naomi Novik's Uprooted, which I hadn't got around to yet. It was about exactly as good and enjoyable as expected. I kept thinking, as I was reading, that it's funny and kind of charming how strong her authorial voice is. Her writing is just so... HER. It's recognizable in pretty much everything she writes, this book a bit more so than the Temeraire series, which I think is because the Temeraire series imposes a sort of Patrick O'Brien pastiche constraint on her natural style. She does retain some of those 19th-century quirks in her non-Temeraire stuff of course, particularly the old-fashioned sentence-joining with a colon, and those features were more noticeable here. As the story went along I saw reflections of Beauty and the Beast (of course), Howl's Moving Castle (Diana Wynne Jones), the Enchanted Forest a little bit, particularly a faint reflection of Morwen and Telemain towards the end (Patricia C. Wrede), maybe a sort of Robin McKinleyness about the scenes in the capital, Tolkien Ents, GRRM forest people (or whatever he calls them), and then... maybe a faint feel of Robin McKinley themes and ideas in the whole final part of the story, really.

Then I grabbed the ebook of Vonda McIntyre's The Moon and the Sun, which won a Nebula or a Hugo in 1997 and was one of my favorite fantasy novels in high school. I actually presented a book report about it in history class senior year (that'd be 2001). I had forgotten most of the details of the plot, and looked them up on Wikipedia yesterday when I saw Hello Tailor (Daily Dot media critic Gavia Baker-Whitelaw) tweeting about the movie they've just released that was based on it. Apparently the movie had a bizarrely huge budget, but looks pretty bad. Also it's just being released now when it was filmed in 2014? I guess it's gonna be a clusterfuck there, and the movie still cover pasted on the ebook just confirms that, looking like a flashback scene from Disney's Once Upon a Time, with prom hair and makeup along with... not really a very Versailles court gown exactly, but better than the hair and makeup. So I guess I'll reread that next.

I also REALLY enjoyed this series of essays about the (non)historicity of Game of Thrones yesterday:
Collections: That Dothraki Horde (4-part series) on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry. A representative sample:

But Martin has done more damage than simply watching The Mongols (1961) would today. He has taken those old, inaccurate, racially tinged stereotypes and repackaged them, with an extra dash of contemporary cynicism to lend them the feeling of ‘reality’ and then used his reputation as a writer of more historically grounded fantasy (a reputation, I think we may say at this point, which ought to be discarded; Martin is an engaging writer but a poor historian) to give those old stereotypes the air of ‘real history’ and how things ‘really were.’ And so, just as Westeros became the vision of the Middle Ages that inhabits the mind of so many people (including quite a few of my students), the Dothraki become the mental model for the Generic Nomad: brutal, sexually violent, uncreative, unartistic, uncivilized. [...] And it is a lie. And I want to be clear here, it is not a misunderstanding. It is not a regrettable implication. It is not an unfortunate spot blind-spot of ignorance. It is a lie, made repeatedly, now by many people in both the promotion of the books and the show who ought to have known better. And it is a lie that has been believed by millions of fans.