Hiking » Fantasy

This weekend, my wife and I restarted our hikes in the Midwest. Last year we did a number of them, exploring northern Midwestern areas from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northern (lower peninsula) Michigan to the Hocking Hills State Park in southern Ohio, nearly on the Kentucky border. Most of the hikes were, of course, fairly tame. We're in our early 50s, not in great shape, and my wife has an old knee injury and hates being outside after dark in case there's any kind of animal about, or someone suggests that maybe she should camp or build a campfire. She's strictly a day-hiker.

We drove a fair bit up to the so-called "tip of the thumb" of Michigan, near Port Austin. I've been around a fair bit of Michigan and Ohio in particular the last years since living in the northern Midwest, but my exposure to "the thumb" has been nonexistant. I've spent more time in the upper peninsula than in the thumb, in spite of the fact that it's considerably harder to reach. On the way, we also did some listed hikes near Bay City, which is I guess at the point where the thumb and the rest of the "mitten" come together at the bottom of Saginaw Bay. There we hiked the Pinnebog Trail at the Bay City State Park, and up near Port Austin we also did the Port Crescent State Park trail.

Maybe I have a problem psychologically with being satisfied with things as they are, but whenever I drive around in these rural areas, seeing the interesting names of little rivers, tiny little towns, and then walk around in the woods, forests, hills, dunes, cliffs, mountains, or whatever other feature I'm hiking through, it inspires my imagination for fantasy versions of the same. I've spent a lot of the last few months with my imagination in space opera mode, but if there's anything that may tend to bring it back to fantasy, going on hikes out in the natural (naturalish, anyway. I don't really go very deep in the wilderness) world and poking around through sleepy little farming towns will do it. I've always said that if I had to choose, I'd pick fantasy over space opera, but I'm also glad that I don't have to choose.

To be fair, my love of space opera has less to do with the attitude that it originally engendered of futuristic excitement. I like space opera in particular because it's a retro genre, and it reminds me of the 30s-50s and what people thought the future would be like back then. I like the old pulps where people were in the future, but still acted like they were people from our own cultural past. A sense of nostalgia for what has been lost is a part of my love of both fantasy and space opera; sure—they're both genres that are exotic and fantastic, but they are also both genres that are rooted in the past and my sense of nostalgia for a time when things were better than they are now.

As an aside, this nostalgia baiting is big business, it seems. When I was a kid in the 80s, nostalgia baiting for the 50s was big business, and lots of movies and TV shows were set in that era, perhaps most famously Back to the Future... although it was hardly the only one. 50s songs were even released; I bought 7" records of "Yakety-Yak", "Runaway" and a few others. Nowadays, it seems like 80s nostalgia bait is pretty keen; the whole synthwave musical genre is based around it, and stuff like the popularity of Stranger Things and the music used in the show is just one example of it. Nostalgia, even for things that you never actually had (like me having 50s nostalgia, to the extent that I did) is a powerful thing, and Americans in particular, being a new nation split off from an older one but in a new land, seem like we've always been in the search for roots and a past so we don't feel unmoored in the world, tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine, as James says.

Curiously, we seem to have turned our back on formative eras of our own American history; the Old West and the Colonial and Revolutionary period. This is largely because our public square has been taken over by self-hating liberals and foreigners, especially Jews, who have no understanding or appreciation of our founding or what it means... because to them it means very little if anything.

Anyway, what does all of this mean? Am I finally ready to talk about Dark Fantasy X again? I'm not sure. Maybe.

Johhn as the Droidmaster

I've mostly moved my SWTOR discussions to Space Opera X, but here's an interesting screenshot of Johhn using elements that give him lots of floating droids. A Droidmaster, if you will. There's five floating droids here.

New X-files

https://www.cbr.com/x-files-creator-looking-forward-reboot/

Coogler has actually done a decent job with breathing new life into the Rocky franchise via the Creed movies, so there's that. Disney/Fox have been teasing how this will be woke, though, and Coogler is so incredibly pro-black (he's also the director of the Black Panther movies in addition to the Creed movies) that it's hard to see how this isn't Moldy and Scolder haranguing the audience in typical woke fashion. I know that the first Black Panther movie was financially very successful, but I haven't heard anyone other than some black young men who really thought it was all that memorable or was a cultural touchstone; rather it was kind of a perfect storm of a specific kind of demand at exactly the right time to peak. Once it was over, the reaction from most that I've seen was—the movie was actually kind of mediocre and forgettable, and the blackness of it was in the long-run a turnoff, because it wasn't really made to be universal, but to be a black story.

The second Black Panther, of course, was much less successful and was received even more poorly. It wasn't exactly a flop, but it was a financial disappointment vs expectations and hopes, I believe, and I also believe that it killed any interest in another iteration of the franchise. It proved that the Black Panther franchise had nowhere to go, in my opinion. 

Anyway, I was a fan of the X-files in the 90s. The last two revival seasons were pretty pointless, and it's also clear that Chris Carter never had a plan to end the show; he thought he'd just keep going with it forever. But when we thought that maybe it would actually end on a reasonable time and in a satisfying manner; up to and maybe a bit beyond the theatrical movie that came after the 5th season or so, the X-files was amazing, innovative, and fascinating. 

It is, however, a great example of a TV show that's a victim of its own success. Because it was so successful, rather than wrap it up, the producers and the network and even the creator got the idea that they could just keep treading water and making money indefinitely. Carter even specifically thought that he had many more seasons left to go, when the series was already getting tired, the main actors were getting done with the series, and he seemed unwilling to understand that the chemistry and relationship between Scully and Moulder were among the couple of keys to the show's success. Not that the new replacement characters were bad, but people just didn't care about them as much and they didn't grab the audience's attention the same was as Duchovny and Anderson did. 

I've seen both Duchovny and Anderson in various interviews and talk shows, etc. Duchovny actually seems like a reasonably sharp guy for an actor, who got more and more involved in the show as not just its star, but someone really invested in it behind the scenes over time. Kind of the like the Alan Wilder of the X-files, if you will, to make a Depeche Mode reference. Anderson, on the other hand, doesn't strike me as too bright, and most of her interview "performances" make her come across as a bubble-headed bimbo. Kind of the opposite of the character that she most famously played, I suppose.

Not that that's super shocking. The myth of the absolute brilliant STEM woman is largely a myth. They do exist here and there, but in such statistically low numbers as to not really be something worth expecting ever. Most of the so-called "STEM" women I've ever met didn't actually do much science or engineering, or whatever, but gravitated to "soft" elements within a science or engineering organization, related to OB or social stuff or whatever. And the more strident a woman is about trumpeting her STEM credentials, the less likely I am to believe that they really mean much. 

Anyway, all this to say that my expectations for a rebooted X-files show by a pro-black icon (albeit one that's had some success in rebooting franchises to be all black but still being pretty good; I really like the first Creed movie, for instance) and handled by Disney are pretty low. I couldn't get behind the attempts to revive the series with the original cast. I also think the climate is different. What people in Hollywood think are conspiracies among the plebs to be made fun of are actually spoiler alerts, while they have their own bizarre conspiracy theories of their own that they believe whole-heartedly. Nobody trusts the government anymore, but for the exact opposite reasons that liberals don't trust the government, and unless they're talking about government conspiracies to displace, jail or persecute normal Americans and Christians, instead of hiding aliens, it's going to feel like a bizarre artifact of the past rather than a timely social show, like the original X-files was.

Scolds

Edited and shortened from: https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=31806 

[T]he last half century of the internet demonstrates the reality of large societies, whether they are digital or analog. Once a society gets to a certain size factionalism is inevitable. The message board experience is the best example, as these platforms created lots of tools to allow people to exist on the same platform but ignore the people from factions they did not like. It never worked. The only solution was peaceful separation in the form of separate private platforms.

This makes perfect sense when you learn about the Dunbar number. This is the number of stable relationships people are cognitively able to maintain at once. The generally agreed upon number is one-hundred-and-fifty. For many people, the number is much lower, so this means in any large group, the typical person will have a sense of belonging with a minority of the people. Consequently, they will be alienated from the rest and there is a short trip from alienation to hostility.

This explains the general sense of unhappiness in modern America. The mass media age has not brought people together as our politicians endless[ly] blather on about all the time, but rather increased the sense of alienation. The normal person is now bombarded with the presence of alien, perhaps hostile strangers. Every online experience comes with someone trying to scold you, lecture you, harass you or they are simply outside what you consider to be normal and acceptable.

Digital life is making analog life less tolerable. [...] [W]e see the horrors of the virtual world jumping into the analog world, as these people now do to our institutions what they did to the internet. For example, spiteful mutants have taken over the court system in New York. Just as we saw with social media, they are using their power to harass normal people. They have litigated VDare into closure simply because they can. This is not much different from what the scolds did to social media platforms with moderation.

New York is like Twitter before Musk. They have law-fared the NRA into bankruptcy, charged Trump with various invented crimes, levied a fine on Trump for denying he committed a crime that has never been demonstrated, litigated VDare out of existence despite never alleging any wrongdoing and sent a growing number of innocent white men to prison for the crime of being white men. Douglas Mackey is the most famous, but there are others like Maxwell Hare and John Kinsman.

There is another important lesson here, a scary one too. The internet has proven too big to control in this way. The scolds got the upper hand for a while, but the cost of endless policing exceeded the carrying capacity. People forget, but the reason Musk was able to buy Twitter is they were in serious financial trouble. He fired over two-thirds of the staff, the scolds, and harpies, because these people did nothing but immiserate the people who kept the site running.

This will apply even more to a continent sized country. New York can make itself hostile to normal people, but normal people can leave. After what New York has done to VDare, every reformer now knows they have to shop for safe jurisdictions to avoid this sort of problem. The same will be true for industries that know they are threatened by the kook squads. The gun makers are fleeing the Northeast because they know better than anyone that there is no reasoning with fanatics.

The point here is that we will see in the analog world what we have seen in the digital world for the last decades. A great disaggregation is unfolding in which normal people seek refuge from the areas now controlled by the fanatics. Further, the social media experience has shown that you cannot last long when you are overrun by fanatics, even when you are systematically robbing them. Even if peaceful separation is not possible, people will seek it anyway.

In the end, this is the reason to be optimistic. A society in which people like Fani Willis and Letitia James are doing anything more than pulling a cart is a society that will eventually destroy itself. For any human organization to survive it must be run for the interest of [the] normal by the sober minded and talented. This is true for a social media platform, and it is true for a country. Nature cannot long tolerate the unfit and human nature will be compelled to do the same eventually.

This is the only reason we had peace throughout the late 19th and 20th century. Following the scolds declaring war against the South, the men of the South mostly sought peace afterwards by migrating West to the empty frontier, to escape the predatory existence of the scolds. It's only been (relatively) recently that that is no longer possible; that the frontier, and separation by distance and local culture has failed to protect people from their toxic presence. I still remember in the 80s when I was young that different places had different culture, and everyone pretty much understood and accepted that, except for a handful of spiteful busybodies who felt it was their purpose in life to hall monitor the entire world. This has always been the Yankee burden, and the critical flaw in their national? regional? cultural? character. Not sure exactly what a Yankee is in this regard. Are they a nation unto themselves; separate and distinct from the Tidewater gentility or the backwoods borderers, like my own people? Or, to use David Hackett Fisher's term, maybe they're a "folkway", although I'd argue that few people understand what it meant by that word exactly.

The Z-man seems to be pointing towards separation, however, which indicates the eventual disaggregation of what was once "One Nation Under God" into more than one nation, and likely few of them having anything to do with God. Of course, what "nation" is the scold? Sure, they tend to congregate and have a high preponderance amongst the original Yankee population, which is why the Northeast is so toxic. But they have spread all over the country, intermarried and intermingled everywhere. The Left Coast is essentially a Yankee colony, and most large urban areas have their stink on them, even in Red States. Their admission of tens of millions of hostile and culturally incompatible aliens into our country was a deliberate design to weaken the ability of normal people everywhere to easily withstand or separate from them, because the hostile aliens tend to get favored treatment from the scolds. 

But he makes a good point. There's no living with these people, and eventually people will completely run out of options in trying to avoid them. What happens then?