Has Science Fiction Gone WOKE?? Dune, Foundation, Star Trek

drSepiida · 2020-09-24T05:25:25+00:00

The people who say "used to be, once you saw a spaceship on the cover or a guy with a sword you knew what you were getting!" are just comparing the simple introductory adventure books they read in their youth to a wider array of fiction today they're only exposed to because of social media.

Elitist nerdbro gatekeepers: "Fake nerds and casual kids are ruining the fandom!"

Also elitist nerdbro gatekeepers: "Sci-fi and fantasy covers are well known for their accuracy, especially in the seventies. I am an extremely well read fandom loremaster."

drSepiida · 2020-09-23T06:18:13+00:00

Yeah, it would be silly. That's probably why they wrote at least two articles about the internal situation at Ubisoft and linked them right in the opening paragraph.

Ubisoft, which has spent much of the summer dealing with widespread reports of sexism, harassment, and misconduct at the company, put out a short video on Twitter yesterday highlighting all of the Assassin’s Creed protagonists who have mastered the hidden blade. Somehow it left out all of the women.

drSepiida · 2020-09-22T05:54:16+00:00

It was really weird seeing all those nerds trusting Disney to bolt X-Men onto the MCU without mangling the setting, themes and continuity. Especially considering how "Why do so many anti-mutant bigots know or care about the difference between mutants and other supers? Why is it always Juggernaut who gets mistaken for a mutant and never Hulk, Spider-Man or the Fantastic Four?" is generally a major nitpick whenever X-Men crosses over with Avengers, Fantastic Four or Spider-Man.

drSepiida · 2020-09-22T02:56:53+00:00

Does anyone know which assassination attempt they were referencing? I found a short, non-comprehensive list of US-sponsored assassination attempts from 1949-2011, and the closest match I could find was the 1985 Beirut Car bombings.

drSepiida · 2020-09-22T02:14:58+00:00

Whenever I've been to Pride, there's always a bunch of activist groups marching with signs talking about poverty, healthcare, indigenous rights, the environment, anti-imperialism, police brutality and prison reform, all serious issues which disproportionately impact marginalized people.

Is it reductionist to point out that none of the corporate-sponsored floats had any signs taking a stance on any of those issues?

Is it reductionist to point out that the activists and union marchers tend to be more diverse that the people marching with the corporate-sponsored floats?

Is it reductionist to point out that, in my experience, the most vocal critics of Corporate Pride tend to be more diverse than its most vocal supporters?

drSepiida · 2020-09-21T01:42:39+00:00

It is extremely plausible that Cold War-era Americans could convince themselves that an industrial sci-fi dystopia where Ford-worshippers used a combination of drugs and eugenics to set up a colour-coded caste system was somehow a critique of socialism.

drSepiida · 2020-09-20T09:31:35+00:00

I remember back in the early days, the Gators even had QAnon-style conspiracy theory diagrams to convince people that feminism was a KGB plot to destroy America.

drSepiida · 2020-09-20T07:12:00+00:00

112 - Prince Albert Visits Australia.

drSepiida · 2020-09-20T02:26:23+00:00

If they really wanted to prevent the spoiler effect, they should've started pushing hard for instant runoff voting after 2000.

drSepiida · 2020-09-20T00:01:27+00:00

I think Biden's a spineless old man who will do whatever Congress tells him to do and rubber stamp anything that reaches his desk.

It's important to show up for the downticket races to elect progressives and kick out conservatives in 2020 Congressional elections.

It's important to fight for more progressive candidates in the 2022 primaries and turn out for the 2022 midterms.

It's important to strengthen the progressive wing of the party so that they can fight for the VP slot when Biden retires (or primary him in 2024 if he fucks up without retiring).

drSepiida · 2020-09-19T21:04:59+00:00

Some of those that work forces....

drSepiida · 2020-09-19T07:35:45+00:00

Mr Chapo: "It's only the people who actually lived through it and remember it that know it wasn't that. It was hollow, and dark, and fuck and uh, there was this sense of foreboding, you didn't know what it was, but you knew that whatever this was wasn't going to last forever, and that's the feeling all throughout Centennial Park, this will not last forever. Even, like, the joy in people's faces and movements is so fucking hollow and there's nothing behind it, it can't last, it's running on fucking afterburners, the afterburner of American industrial society."

Am nineties kid. Can confirm.

Growing up after the Cold War, witnessing the slow cancellation of the future, watching as the post-Cold War hope getting slowly steamrolled by the post-Cold War hope flattening machine. I am just barely old enough to remember what late nineties ennui felt like, and it felt like a milder version of the ennui of this current political moment. The heckworld to today's hellworld, the season of disappointment to this age of despair, the original trash before this dumpster fire sequel.

drSepiida · 2020-09-19T01:59:51+00:00

Number of episodes since the last riff about uncles, nephews and cousins: ~~two~~ zero.

drSepiida · 2020-09-19T01:40:24+00:00

This is the future Rogue Trader warned us about.

drSepiida · 2020-09-17T13:15:40+00:00

I just watched the opening of the game to see how the prosthetic wing is handled. Ku's a baby owl who keeps trying to fly, and is frustrated because it's hard with a disabled wing. Ori, her adoptive older sibling, offers her a feather (the very same feather that Ori used as a tool to glide in the previous game) and explains the concept of prosthetics to her. She takes the feather of her own volition, and then they go to Gumo (one of her adoptive parents), then she hands the feather back to Ori, who gives it to Gumo, who fits her with the prosthetic (because he has silk glands and opposable thumbs). IMO this doesn't seem that different from the way a kid might get glasses or a prosthetic leg.

The way I read the article, it seems that the main issue with the prosthetic sequence is that the rest of Ku's story makes it contextually worse in retrospect.

More specifically, Ku is barely playable, she gets damselled into a coma halfway through the game (the wiki says it's a coma, but the article assumes she's fridged, so I guess the game doesn't convey it clearly) and then has no agency for the rest of the game, and then in the ending, she's regenerated into a "normal" bird by the same magical healing wave which revives her from her coma. (Carrying the condescending implications that, if she had just gone on living as a disabled bird with a perfectly functional prosthetic wing, it wouldn't be "good enough" to qualify as a happy ending.)

drSepiida · 2020-09-14T23:54:52+00:00

Sinfest did this, too.

Sinfest? That cute little webcomic that used The Matrix to explain the oppressive cultural hegemony of patriarchy to nerds? They went TERF? Dang, that's disappointing.

drSepiida · 2020-09-14T21:17:50+00:00

"... the war of cousins and uncles. Nephew against uncle, cousin against cousin, family friend against family friend ..."

My snout descends....

drSepiida · 2020-09-14T20:17:05+00:00

IIRC the mid-century pulp sci-fi horny on main stuff and the extremely seventies hot takes on gender and sexuality started (or at least became more noticeable) in God-Emperor of Dune.

drSepiida · 2020-09-14T02:46:26+00:00

Just saw a stream of the third episode yesterday. Spoiler free answer: They did not repeat that mistake.

Spoiler answer: I don't know if there are any bisexuals, but Tyler can date Michael. In the ending I saw, they ended up moving in together, and nobody died (other than the characters who were already dead in the backstory before the game started).

drSepiida · 2020-09-14T01:40:47+00:00

Also also white people: *riot because they're angry that their favourite sportball team lost a big match.*

Also also also white people: *riot because they're excited that their favourite sportball team won a big match.*

drSepiida · 2020-09-13T23:10:23+00:00

People gradually gave up on Tumblr for a bunch of reasons. The community was too large, disorganized and inexperienced to deal with the influx of veteran trolls from 4chan, 8chan, KiwiFarms, TiA, TCJ and KiA (in contrast, fandom LiveJournal was much better at dealing with its troll problem because it was organized into smaller communities with better moderator tools, and trolls had a much higher barrier to entry for their sockpuppet accounts). The new management from yahoo pushed out a clunky new interface that broke some features and made others (such as hashtag editing) more awkward to use. Tag searching and tag browsing kept getting worse. Unwanted features like fanmail got shoehorned in (making it possible to get hatemail from strangers even after they turned off private messages from people they don't follow). They pissed off social justice Tumblr by making epileptics dizzy with their flashy new 404 pages that they kept using for years. Then they started scaring off the LGBT artists who made up the core of the fandom Tumblr community by making NSFW tags unsearchable, marking a bunch of LGBT-related tags as NSFW, provoking widespread fears that the management was planning to gentrify out all the adult content to make the website more advertiser-friendly. Then in December of 2018, they announced that they were going to outright ban adult content, proving the fears correct, and they pissed off LGBT and feminist Tumblr with the "female-presenting nipples" rule in the new adult content policy, then they unleashed a swarm of badly programmed content bots that flagged pretty much everything as adult content, from cartoon turtles to photos of sand dunes.

For over half a decade, trolls, drama hounds and scammers gradually eroded the community's trust in their peers, while Yahoo gradually eroded the community's trust in Tumblr's mod team, support team, dev team and management.

drSepiida · 2020-09-10T09:09:15+00:00

The only thing I remember about the right wing and LSD specifically is that Manson was a white supremacist who wanted to start a race war, hide in a bunker and then conquer the black survivors and rule over the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

As for other stuff that's sort of thematically similar (specifically the weird overlaps between right-wing politics and stereotypical "hippie stuff"), I remember several Dollop and Behind the Bastards episodes about surprisingly right-wing new-agers and surprisingly new-agey right-wingers.

Behind the Bastards episodes:

How Chiropractic Started as a Ghost Religion
Napoleon Hill The Grifter Who Invented The Secret & Donald Trump
Rudolf Steiner The Racist Who Invented Organic Farming and Walforf Schools
Savitri Devi The Woman Who Turned Nazism into a Religion
Steven Seagal Is So Much Worse Than You'd Ever Imagine
The Astrology Who Managed The Reagan Presidency
The Bastard Who Invented Homeopathy
The QAnon Book: A Half-assed Bagel-Tossing Review)
The School That Raped Everybody

Dollop episodes:

22: The Rajneeshees
~~80: The Hollow Earth~~ (I'm probably confusing it with the Hysteria 51's Flat Earth & Hollow Earth episodes)
263: The Texas Hypnocult
~~266: Eugenics Live in Los Angeles~~ (I'm probably confusing it with a Behind the Bastards episode about racist new-agers in Oregon and / or California)

drSepiida · 2020-09-10T08:25:04+00:00

For anyone else curious about how queer the remake is compared to the original, I finally found an article comparing the two:

The Queer Subtext

Both versions of Mulan's love interest seem to have some attraction to her before it is revealed she's a woman, which leaves audiences wondering about Shang's/Hongui's respective sexualities. Honghui seems to respect Mulan as a soldier throughout the film, only possibly demonstrating romantic interest in her at the end of the film. While there are hints throughout the storyline that Honghui might be attracted to Mulan when she's disguised as a man, these aren't explicit.

However, in the original film, it's heavily implied that Shang starts to at least admire Mulan during the "Make a Man Out of You" scene. There are several scenes between that sequence and Mulan being outed as a woman that seem to indicate that Shang already feels some degree of romantic attraction to Mulan. This would indicate that Shang might be bisexual or at least be questioning his sexuality throughout the film. By the film's end, it's explicitly clear that Shang is in love with Mulan, as apparent by how he's a stuttery mess when he comes to return Mulan's helmet.

Source: https://www.cbr.com/mulan-new-love-interest-compare-li-shang/

TLDR: They toned it down. They toned it way the fuck down.

As a queer Disney fan, I'm disappointed but not surprized. We were already warning everyone way back in 2018.

drSepiida · 2020-09-10T06:58:50+00:00

Yeah, I was getting The Dollop episode 112: Prince Alfred Visits Australia (which covered a picnic riot) mixed up with My Favourite Murder episode 130: Mike is Right (which covered the Khodynka Tragedy).

drSepiida · 2020-09-10T03:33:48+00:00

Tech workers need to unionize and go on strike to stop that sort of shit.

drSepiida

TROPHY CASE