Latest Posts by nesterov81 - Page 3

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. 

My own theory is that a majority of the new Air Nation is made up of former Earth Kingdom subjects for two main reasons. First of all, the simple fact that the Earth Kingdom is the most populous nation in the world means that, if the number of people developing airbending was equally distributed, the lion’s share of new airbenders would appear in the Earth Kingdom. Secondly, it seems like Tenzin got the majority of his “recruits” from Ba Sing Se, where they were refugees fleeing conscription and had no choice but to leave the EK, while others presumably came to Republic City as civil war broke out falling the Earth Queen’s assassination. By contrast, the Korra-era Fire Nation and the two Water Tribes were relatively stable and humane places, so the new airbenders probably had less of an impetus to emigrate. I imagine some did, but it wasn’t a matter of life or death for them. As for the airbenders who stayed behind in the Earth Kingdom, I had a dark idea about that. A few years ago, I was playing with story ideas for a potential Kuvira fic, and I hit upon this idea of a bunch of pro-Kuvira EK airbenders joining her army and being put into a special unit. With a training regiment crudely based off of whatever old books about airbending were floating around the EK, these airbenders would learn to control and manipulate poison gas as an offensive weapon against opposing armies and in fortification-clearing operations. While they would seem rather graceless and clumsy compared to someone like Tenzin, the fact that these “gasbenders” would be wielding clouds of the Avatarverse’s equivalents of mustard gas, phosgene, and chlorine would make them terrifying in their own right, and they would be one of the many things that turned the world against Kuvira. Sadly I never came up with an actual story to put this idea in, but I still have the gasbenders in my back pocket for a rainy day.

Were there no new Air benders in the Fire Nation of Water Tribes? We saw the Air benders pop up in Republic City (EK colony) and Lin had reports of Air benders in the Earth Kingdom.

Does this mean Air benders come from “the people of the earth element” or that the other two nations just kept quiet about it?  It certainly would have been interesting to see how the modern Fire Nation deals Air benders in their midst. 

Where did the Air benders come from in the pre- fire- conquest days? Where they all born within the nomadic- monk society? That seems very unlikely. Where they born elsewhere and joined the order as a “higher calling”? Where they Air benders from all nations or just the Earth kingdom? and if so, why? 

While Tenzin & Krew pressured the new Air benders to join it was a voluntary choice in the end. Was it always that way?  what I’m getting at is … there may be people with Air bending abilities that are not part of the Air bending culture/ society. Are they self taught? are they lying dormant? What are the stories of the non joiners?

I used to have a friend who was pretty big into both WW2 militaria and animé, and she used to argue that people in both these groups have a bad habit of adopting imagery from Wilhelmite Germany in substitution for Nazi imagery as a way to glamorizing German militarism without being immediately accused of pro-Nazi sympathies. Now she was very hard-left politically, and some of this may have been hyperbolic. Still, this something that has given me pause, and I feel that Tanya the Evil does straddle the line, particularly in the later installments when WW2-era technology starts appearing. Still, while I don’t want to die on the “let people dress like Nazis!” hill, I would not ban Tanya cosplay on the grounds that it depicts a “fictitious Nazi organization,” because it bloody well doesn’t and a personal interpretation of subtext is not the same thing as out-and-out pro-Nazi propaganda, and if it is then we might as well cut out the middleman and just start arresting people because we don’t like them.

Well… that’s dumb.

I must confess that one of the things I’ve always found interesting about Kuvira is how she expresses her gender identity within her role as the head of a revolutionary nationalist army. After all, modern military hierarchies tend to be drenched in masculinity even when they attempt to be egalitarian. At the same time, while revolutions offer the possibility of dissolving old roles and limits on behavior, they also tend to keep a few and develop some of their own. (There’s also the whole issue of how right-wing movements tend to describe the order they are rebelling against as “decadent” and effeminate, while their own movements offer a “healthy” masculine alternative. Of course, Korra never dug too deeply into the gender dynamics of Kuvira’s army, so any speculation would on this would essentially be building castles in the sky. What I can say, though, is that I’ve always felt Kuvira’s character design was harkening to this idea of what you could call “the soldier as woman.” She dresses and presents herself in such a way as to show that she and her army are one, even to the point where the only major difference between her and her soldiers is her collar and the armor on her upper back. At the same time, she isn’t trying to erase her gender and appear masculine/androgynous. She even keeps her hair long and tied up in a bun rather than shaving it off or going for the army-standard undercut. I think all this is what people have been getting at with this “butch/femme” discussion, but I don’t think that’s the best way to look at this particular issue. All that said, I’m not exactly a fan of this outfit from the upcoming comic.

I’ve always seen Kuvira as a woman with a rather austere sense of dress. As I pointed out above, instead of wearing a uniform with gold braid, sheets of medals and ribbon, or a cape and pauldron with elaborate armored segments like in her concept art, she wears a uniform that’s basically the same as every other one in her military. While this outfit isn’t too flossy or “femmy,” the tailoring, color coordination, and that big belt buckle feel a little too...well, bourgeois for Kuvira. It’s simple, yes, but it’s still an outfit you have to put together when you get up in the morning. Personally (and this is just my inner dirty socialist talking), I could easily see Kuvira rocking the zhongshan (”Mao”) suit, or something more akin to the military tunics Stalin wore in the 1920s and 1930s. (Hmm...Jenros, I think I have a Kuvira picture I’d like to pitch to you...)

Question: Why do people call Kuvira butch? Because she has muscle and doesn’t wear dresses or some shit? Are all women with muscle a butch?

Cause really when I think of butch I think of women who are suuuper big and muscular (rocking that T) like Zarya and Scorpia. Kuvira is more or less just a well built/toned female who looks classy as hell in anything she wears. She’s not super duper feminine but she’s not really butch either. She’s more or less in the middle.

Daily Kuvira #205

When there’s nothin’ else to do in prison. You might as well try some meditating.

She’s probably meditating along with one of the greats.

I’m not going to say it again: #bertie wooster deserves to win first place.

Incredible, but true: @coppermarigolds deserves to have a good day today.

This is distressingly on-point. You should share that demo tape with me sometime, @coppermarigolds.

I heard @coppermarigolds wrote an eight verse song about #kuvira ?????

Surprisingly often, to be honest.

You ever just... yell about #star trek the next generation??

I can actually give you most of that with one stop, complete with orthographic views and a rotatable 3D model, thanks to the artist’s ArtStation page! https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4b6mK2 I can’t help as much with schematics, but the artist did do a little period-appropriate systems display schematic with Photoshop. https://twitter.com/thomasthecat/status/1104090439232024576

nesterov81 submitted:

Have you seen the Georgiou-class from Star Trek Online yet? It’s a bonus skin for the Walker they made for a DSC-themed discount pack, and rather than go with the game’s 25th century aesthetic the designer decided to go for a movie-era aesthetic and made a neat contemporary of the Excelsior. The links below have some nice pictures.

https://www.herocollector.com/en-gb/Article/star-trek-online-uss-georgiou https://twitter.com/thomasthecat/status/1094065137202253826

Very cool, thanks for submitting!

Now that’s interesting: Su rebuilt the domes of Zaofu. I always thought Kuvira’s order to dismantle the domes was a very important symbolic act. While her order was a practical directive to acquire enough refined platinum to build her mech, it also illustrated a fundamental difference between Suyin and Kuvira. Su’s concern was always to maintain Zaofu as a personal fiefdom separate from the Earth Kingdom. The city was built in a valley and each district had its own dome to isolate it from both the outside world and its neighbors. By contrast, Kuvira saw Zaofu as a model for how the EK could become a modern multinational "nation” that Su kept for herself. By dismantling the domes, Kuvira not only asserted her ownership of Zaofu, she also broke down the barriers that Su had erected to isolate Zaofu from the EK. To spread the gospel of Zaofu to the rest of the EK, Zaofu needed to come out of its shell and join the EK as a city like Omashu or Ba Sing Se. Seeing the domes rebuilt makes me feel that Su ultimately didn’t learn anything from her experiences in Book 4, and her main concern after returning home was to put everything back to the way it was and pretend the last four years never happened...which is a very Su thing to do. Unless, of course, this is a flash back, in which case disregard all that I have written. (Gonna tag @coppermarigolds and @the-moon-avatar in this post for funsies.)

The metalbending city of Zaofu, from The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part Two.

Where did this picture come from? It can’t be a player’s ship, since the game’s naming system won’t let you name a ship Enterprise, Defiant, or Voyager or use their registry numbers.

Enterprise B

She’s trying her best. :3

I've good a good Kuvira sketch idea for you: little Kuv, age 10, in a homemade Avatar Kyoshi costume (think store-bought or low-rent Halloween) and messy makeup, taking her role VERY seriously.

Daily Kuvira #136

Someone help this poor child.

Bane/Bad Sean Connery Impression: “Oi am Rehpublic Schity’s rehkoning.”

Daily Kuvira #132

You know I had to.

well life just isnt fucking fair is it humpback whale 85

Millennial Sisyphus keeps entering all the information from his resume into the web form, only for it to delete everything when he tries to move to the next page. He just goes back and types it all up again, over and over again, forever, and he never gets a job.

With 3 “a”s, even!

It’s Madiha Day!

Daily Kuvira #103 - Glasses

I had to go see the eye doc today..

My go-to source for the history of scientific romances is Brian Stableford’s 1985 book Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. (While long out of print, this book is worth its weight in gold.) In Stableford’s account, scientific romances are very much the products of the environment they evolved from. Before the 1890s, publishing in Britain was divided into two rigid categories. On the “respectable” side were the great triple-decker novels, conservative in both style and content, and physically inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t wealthy or who didn’t have access to a circulating library. On the less reputable side were, of course, the penny dreadfuls; cheap to make, quick to read, easy to forget, and not that well-written. Scientific romances (and to a certain extent modern sf) tend to work best in the range between short stories, novellas, and single novels; long enough to properly extrapolate from a central idea, but not so long as to wear out their welcome. It was only at the end of the 19th century, with the decline of the triple-decker, the rise of a literate middle class, publications that catered to them, and of writers that could comfortably support themselves writing for this new audience, that scientific romances had the space and opportunity to emerge. Naturally, this was a different class of writers with different influences that those who had written the gothic works from earlier in the century, so scientific romances evolved in both style and content in a much different direction. (As an example, scientists in 19th-century Britain had a unique tradition of penning essays to explain their theories and their significance to a more general audience, a tendency that was absorbed wholeheartedly into the scientific romance, to the point that both scientists and novelists tried their hands at both essays and stories every so often.)

I was thinking about the literature of 1897 and it got me thinking about the Scientific Romances and how they differ from the Gothic Romances or Gothic Horrors of the age. Clearly, there is some overlap and Frankenstein (much earlier but still relevant) crosses those borders many time without showing a passport for either but by the late 19th you couldn't really compare say 'The War of the Worlds' to 'Dracula'. Where did they diverge so wildly? Or did they?

That’s a really good point, and I’m sorry I took so long to get to this question!  Arguably, Frankenstein himself brings this up- he started out reading ancient mystic texts and moved to more scientific ones later- but I guess there started to be a clearer divide between what we’d call fantasy and what we’d call science fiction as science itself became better known.  You could probably write gothic science fiction in the mode of Asimov, where the science is there to set up philosophical and psychological issues- I’d certainly read about the drama between robot heirs to their creators’ estate and legacy- but the divide certainly feels there.  Returning to H. G. Welles, maybe The Invisible Man is the midpoint?  Or maybe it’s when “scientist” became a common enough profession to not seem mysterious?  Any followers with ideas on this subject, help me out here!

Through determination and sheer bloody-mindedness, that’s how! Seriously, though, congrats. :D

Daily Kuvira #100

Holy crap how have I gone 100 gawt damn days of doing this so far?

Mind you, Trek isn’t quite as bad as Star Wars in this regard. I can still type the name of, say, Jenna D’Sora or Susanna Leijtin into Memory Beta and discover that they’ve never appeared in any of the novels since their appearances on TNG.

star trek character who appears for 3 lines of dialogue: hello, my name is Blek’tho, i’m a Zeeyopian dishwasher repairman

star trek beta canon: Blek’tho, the secret prince who had newly become king of all zeeyop,

This is something Trek fans have been arguing about since Discovery was announced. While the high production values of a limited-run can’t be beat, there are a lot of areas where the storytelling style of serials struggles. With serials, you can’t really have many low-stakes “monster of the week” episodes or put different sets of characters together for an episode to explore their interactions. Everything in the show has to contribute to THE ARC. There’s also the problem where these shows don’t have the time to experiment or retool elements if things aren’t working. If a relationship falls flat on the screen or if an antagonist doesn’t come out right and you’ve built your scripts around them, too bad.

I think TV show producers need to stop making shows with 13 or fewer episode seasons. I don’t know why they think it’s such a good idea.

Notice that good shows like ATLA or Star Wars: TCW are longer 20+ episode seasons because they have more time to think and draw things out while 13 episodes feels like a rushed mess like Voltron and Legend of Korra.

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

Explaining Twin Peaks

Picard: “...well, fuck me, I guess.”

Credit @Aelkus on Twitter

There’s a line in George Orwell’s 1946 essay “In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse” where, in the course of discussing how Wodehouse’s work hewed closer to a fantasy Edwardian England than a fantasy interwar Britain, he wrote “...and Bertie Wooster, if he did exist, was killed in 1915.” That line has always haunted me in a way, and I believe that both for his good and our own, Bertie should always be kept far away from the horrors of the Great War.