Traverse Fantasy

Oh my God. That’s her. How about a double feature, baby? Black Athena It’s hard to explain to people how fucked the field of Classics is. There’s a guy who almost exclusively writes articles about how the Metamorphoses does not depict rape on the part of the gods and is actually about art and how it captures its object (uhh). There’s an article from I think 2015 which goes back and forth about whether we should see Greece/Rome as exceptional or not, because they obviously are (mhm), but it’s not woke to say that; and it’s written by a guy who argued that the Greek alphabet was invented (i.e., modified from Phoenician) specifically to record Homer’s poems. I was grateful to have had professors in college who weren’t freaks and saw that corner of the ancient world not as exceptional but as prototypical, and not because our “civilization” originates from them, but because they dealt with the same problems and questions as us—as did other people throughout the world at different points...

It’s not like I don’t have a VPN, but it’s not like I always have that shit on either. If BlueSky is going to comply in advance with the Texas government’s threat of internet censorship, I’m just not going to open it. Like, oh no, less social media for me! One less passive time sink. I’m not going to delete my account because I may log on occasionally but, besides that, you’ll know why I’ve gone quiet.

A specter is haunting elf-games… the specter of WORKER PLACEMENT! (Please, God, don't let people read this as if I was suggesting this was actually a manifesto and am not just playing to the theme.) Many years ago, I posted about an assumption of the original Dungeons & Dragons which was eventually forgotten: that characters are supposed to cooperate on difficult tasks and doing so is the only way the game makes sense . Think especially about opening doors or searching for secrets in a room. The likelihoods of those tasks are 2 / 6 or 1 / 6 for little folk, which means you don’t have a snowball’s chance of relying on the dice as an individual to get what you want. I think this, combined with the (fair!) advice that you should not allow infinite rerolls on a task, contributed partly to the so-called “old-school” play-style where dice are not your friend and you need to work outside the rules to get anywhere. That’s not OD&D , though. In OD&D , since three persons can...

I followed an independent tech journalist for a while because I don’t trust most big news firms to report on technology (or, really, most things) without falling in lockstep with the demands of the spectacular economy—that is, to manufacture demand because someone needs to buy all this shit to keep the lights on. And I liked this particular one since frankly I trust women in the field far more than men. Vocal fry has a disarming effect on me. But over the past few months, I noticed how she became increasingly cagey towards so-called artificial intelligence. Even in a video about how LLM firms are starting to target women, because the adoption of a technology by women is a sign of its adoption by wider society (which LLM firms had thus far failed to attain), she awkwardly gestured towards the poor average consumer who just uses LLMs to search and summarize online information, and that this is a genuine use-case which LLM firms prey upon (sure, why not?). I like to think of pop punk ban...

I’m considering this post to have been co-authored by my partner. She had seen the movie closer to when it had come out, and she told me it quite frustrated her because it felt like a movie gesturing towards a big statement—about school shootings in particular—without actually committing to a statement and doing something totally different instead by the end of it. All I had heard was that it involved children being turned into actual voudon-style zombies, and was surprised that what I thought was part and parcel with its premise was more like a twist out of left field. She didn’t spoil the whole thing in case I wanted to watch it later, but it took me a while because I am not super into horror movies (I would say except that now since horror has become the statement genre, but…), and I only just got around to it this weekend. Oh boy. So, it’s certainly trying to gesture towards school shootings, right? The narrator’s opening monologue clearly evokes the community trauma of a classroo...

Sorry in advance for shooting from the hip. This is a ramble. My friend Ènziramire shared with me a quote by some liberal economist or philosopher—can’t find it, so bear with me—that Marxist critics and politicians alike have all failed to consider the question of freedom, except for Marx himself. I said then that I would take the L on that because, yeah, [Mr. Liberal] got me there. But then we were talking about Reconstruction. There was a certain abolitionist, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who at first sided with the Radical Republicans in hastening emancipation, but during Reconstruction began siding with the Liberal Republicans because she believed that southerners should not have been deprived of their rights. Then the Compromise of 1877 hit, and Dickinson was so dismayed by the South’s reactionary barbarism that, even when she had gained the right to vote as a female citizen in 1919, she chose never to vote. It’s the basic bitch question of liberalism: how much freedom should be sa...

Alright, my babies. We need to talk about Attack on Titan . I’m not an anime head but, in 2013, the same friends who showed me Sword Art Online also showed me Attack on Titan which was that year’s big anime. I watched it, and so did a lot of others—cultural phenomenon—and I feel like a lot of us forgot about it (or, like me, just don’t follow anime bullshit) when the second and third seasons came out years later from 2017 to 2019. Ruben Ferdinand, months before the premiere of the third season in 2018, published a blog post about the story’s fascist aesthetics , as if the author was drip-feeding Hitler particles to his audience. A lot of us took it at face value, in my case because I wasn’t watching the rest of the show and the first season was already fascist enough in hindsight, with or without the analysis submitted by Ferdinand. Polygon picked up the baton in 2019 and extended Ferdinand’s analysis to the twist ending of the third season : that Eren’s father Grisha is a neo-fascis...