Traverse Fantasy

The phallus is masculine in the same way a penis is masculine. I wrote a primer on Lacan’s concept of phallic desire a month ago, and I realize—although my blog is mine and my target audience is one at least superficially familiar with concepts from Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, so I don’t feel particularly motivated to write introductions for people totally new to those fields of discourse—I kind of did that XKCD bit about how familiar the average person is with niche obscure bullshit. Again, it’s not my problem necessarily, but then people talk about how literal or abstract the phallus notion is supposed to be from Lacan’s mouth or my own. Is the phallus masculine (to quote WFS ) “the way a horse [think equus in Latin] is masculine”? Is classic D&D more “literally phallic” (by way of being masculinely horny) than I had “intended” in my critique of it ? Is usage of the word “phallus” a mere birthmark of a discourse originally grounded in bioessentialism from which it...

PART 2 last time we talked about the structural underpinnings of (old school) dungeons & dragons as a language or a system of interactions. i argued that what sets apart (old) d&d from other games is that it is open and infinite. d&d is open because instead of being contained inside its own explicitly-defined rules, it opens the set of interactions to anything the players say happens. d&d is also infinite because it is a game without an end, which it accomplishes by shifting goalposts in the form of experience levels. i talked about how these structural constraints (or lack thereof) allow d&d players to simulate their fantasy endlessly, and how the enjoyment derived from pursuing this fantasy differs between (typical) women and men. gygax is therefore correct to notice a difference in enjoyment of games along gendered lines, but he is wrong to attribute it to biological difference when it is actually a social function of how girls and boys are raised and social...

There's a cliché quote often falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." Thankfully, this isn't a boomer's Facebook page, so we can have the same point restated by Deleuze and Guattari and seem all the more intellectual for it: "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows." I've been ruminating on a handful of things lately, which I realize are interconnected. The angels ...

Exaggerating a little. This article came to me twice—on Twitter where it was posted by @ pourfairelevide , and again when my friend John B. of The Retired Adventurer shared it with me directly. " Phallocentricity in GPT-J's bizarre stratified ontology " by Matthew Watkins describes an experiment where the author generated a semiotic map of definitions used by GPT-J and found the meaning most likely to lead to any other meaning—as it were, the most specific definition to which others can be relative—is "a man's penis". I recently posted an article about Freud being 'literally correct', i.e., about the Oedipus Complex being the most accurate model we have of heterosexual socialization. There I mention Lacan's abstraction of Freud, that unconscious desires are not necessarily structured around the literal male penis (of the father) but around the phallus (to be specific: the symbolic phallus of the desiring-subject which compensates for the lack i...

Creationism doesn't get enough credit for being an essentially (post)modern ideology. "Evidence does not speak for itself," Jason Lisle and Ken Ham and others always say. The interpretation of evidence requires one to filter it through their own particular worldview and thus—since we can never comprehend the things themselves but only mental models of them—every interpretation is situated within the symbolic cosmos of its analyst's worldview. Of course, we're over 200 years past Kant's critique of reason, and we should know by now that a worldview has overstayed its welcome if it cannot reconcile evidence with its fundamental premises without (speaking figuratively or literally...) divine intervention. In other words, interpretation is also always an opportunity for immanent critique. Lacan's discursive algorithms illustrate this point well, but I'm not going to dig into that here ( borrowed illustration below from another blog ). Just gesturing. ...

simmons:  hey grif: yeah? simmons:  you ever wonder why we're here? grif: it's one of life's greatest mysteries, isn't it? why are we here? i mean, are we the product of some cosmic coincidence, or is there really a god watching everything? you know, with a plan for us and stuff. i don't know, man, but it keeps me up at night. simmons:  ... grif:  ... simmons: what!? i mean why are we out here, in this canyon? grif:  oh. uh... yeah. simmons:  what was all that stuff about god? grif:  uh... hm? nothing. ( red vs. blue  1.1 ) welcome to small town gothic , my vanity project about using the tabletop game as a medium to explore the christian apocalypse and its implications. some of you have noticed the thematic and mechanical similarities between STG  and the megami tensei  series (incl. persona ). you're totally right, and let me explain myself.

Sooooooooooo. Hi! I feel like my brain was fixed. Haven't thought about this stuff for a minute. Been writing fiction, like real actual fiction, plus reading books (lately: The Political Theology of Paul , Revolutionary Suicide , The Time That Remains , and Assata ). Baking cookies and brownies. Drinking and dancing. Let me talk about writing first because it's completely consumed my brain. I finally started writing the story I've imagined for years and years. Not as a tabletop system, not even as a tabletop adventure, but as honest fiction. It's prose rather than verse poetry but, if I really change my mind, I'll have this as basis. And it's not too shabby by itself! It's about an evangelical Christian conspiracy to deploy the apocalypse, and someone who sacrifices herself for selfish reasons which then throws the whole thing into confusion and disarray. It's an exploration of Christ versus Antichrist (and what difference it makes), the relationship bet...

I read Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg around December 2023, and I’ve vaguely gestured towards having opinions about that book in the two years since. I didn’t write a “review” (loosely speaking) of it because I started devaluing my own time spent writing then, and I felt that my feelings about the book could be boiled down to me not being the primary audience (or, rather, the subject about whom Feinberg speaks). These feelings did inform a certain analysis I wrote of trans discourse , and a FAQ but I did not refer to Feinberg or her work directly. So, this is a chance for me to actually get into the book, which solidly had me in the first half. It’s also a chance for me to exercise writing again, since I feel like I’ve lost some capability since I stopped blogging actively, especially in the context of what they call critical theory (makes jerk-off motion with my hand). Trans History The first part of the book is REALLY good. I was constantly gagging at the wealth of histo...

I was hanging out with my friend Ènziramire who told me about a certain page from Kevin Crawford’s recent cyberpunk rulebook Cities Without Number , about corporate genders. He was surprised that I hadn’t heard of it, so he explained it to me: in the world’s setting, corporations mass-produce new genders and sell them to targeted audiences. He was even more surprised when I said that sounded fascinating as hell. So, later, I got the book to find the page and read it for myself. In this post, I want to explore the context of gender discourse in which this page was written, as well as the relationship between that and digital-age structures of consumption. This is not meant to be a justification or reinterpretation of the page per se, especially in that I'm not trying to argue that the author was not intending to write something negative and conspiratorially-minded about trans people. Rather, this is sort of an "immanent critique" of the text. I want to poke at its deepe...

I’ve gotten comments from people asking questions that I thought would be nicer to answer in longer form! Thank y’all so much for your interest and responses :) Question 1: Commodity Fetishism From “ Marx’s Capital Vol. 1 For Dummies ”: I would like to add a thought/question that came to my mind a bit after commenting. You do use the term ‘social ilusion’ describing commodity fetishism and this may just be language issue but i have always had a bit of an issue with the translation of the german ‘Schein’ as ‘illusion’. In some other cases (Kant or Hegel) it gets translated as ‘semblance’. For me, neither seems coneptually accurate. Especially ‘illusion’ might lead people to think that acknowledging it would dispell it. But the fetish of the commodity seems a lot stickier. It is an illusion that only fades when the material modes of social (re)production have changed. Thanks, warenunförmig ! For context, throughout my pamphlet, I describe value (we need not qualify here—read Marx o...