This is my last post on Cohost. I thought about writing something longer, and also highlighting people who were my mutuals and whose posts and comments I enjoyed. But I just don’t have the energy for it, and in any case I hope to resume our conversation in other places, whatever those places may be. I will only say that I have enjoyed writing on Cohost more than I have ever enjoyed writing on any other “social media” site, for reasons I laid out in a previous post. Put simply, I will miss Cohost, and I don’t know if I will find a suitable replacement for it.

In the meantime, you can find my idle comments on Bluesky at @frankhecker.com, my yuri reviews at Okazu, and my other writings and (hopefully) permanent online presence at frankhecker.com.

Thank you @staff for creating Cohost, thank you my followers for finding something interesting in what I write and then bothering to reshare or comment on it, and thank you those whom I followed for your writings in turn. Until we meet again . . .

Iro (@Iro) - 2024-09-29 16:48

I’m getting an error off your RSS feed, for what it’s worth

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-09-30 16:02

Ugh. Can you tell me what feed reader you’re using, and what the error message is? (If you’re too late to comment on Cohost, feel free to email me or ping me on Bluesky.)

Iro (@Iro) - 2024-09-30 16:04

Using Feedbro plugin on Firefox, it’s telling me:

URL https://frankhecker.com/index.xml is not a valid feed and contains no feed links.

If I just click on your feed button and not try to add it to a reader or anything then I get this error

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-09-30 16:10

Thanks for the additional info! The feed works OK in some readers (like Reeder), so I suspect it is not quite 100% compatible with other feed readers in ways I’ll need to track down. As for the error message, it’s possible that it’s due to my leaving off the “https://frankhecker.com” part of the URL when linking to images (and posts) elsewhere on the site.

Thanks again for reporting this. I will look at it as soon as I have time.

Now that I’m semi-regularly writing reviews for the Okazu site, I thought I should be a little more systematic in the way I rate things. I happened to stumble across the rating systems Robert Christgau has used for his consumer guides to music — one for music prior to 1990 and a second for music since then — and thought they might be worth adapting my own purposes.

Below is my attempt to harmonize these two schemes and adapt them to a 10-point scale. As always, any score I give will be a personal opinion expressed in the moment of my reviewing something. Howver, my goal is to score works such that when I look back at a given work, having reviewed more new works in the meantime, I would adjust my previous score by no more than one point either way.¹

In the list below I’ve included in parentheses the corresponding ratings that Christgau employs in his earlier and later reviews. Most of the phrasing is Christgau’s, modified to be more general.

• 10 (A+ / A+). A masterpiece of sustained beauty, power, and insight that should be experienced at least once by anyone even vaguely interested in the medium, and can be revisited repeatedly with pleasure by fans of it.

  I have not given a score of 10 to anything I’ve reviewed for Okazu, and I would be both surprised and delighted if in future I found something that deserved it.

• 9 (A / A), A great work that offers enduring pleasure and surprise with minimal moments of dullness or drops in quality; anyone who calls themselves a fan should experience it.

  I gave an overall score of 9 to volume 2 of Monthly in the Garden with My Landlord. I vacillated between an 8 and a 9, but ultimately decided on a 9 because the manga is consistently excellent.

• 8 (A- / A-). A very good work, at least half of which provides intense and consistent satisfaction to anyone open to its aesthetic.

  I gave overall scores of 8 to season 2 of Blank: The Series and to 23.5: The Series; both have issues here and there, but for the most part are very good.

• 7 (B+ / B+), A good work that is remarkable and of lasting interest in parts but also flirts with the humdrum or the half-assed.

  I gave overall scores of 7 to season 1 of Blank: The Series and to Chaser Game W; the former I marked down for the subtitles (among other things) and the latter for the rushed and somewhat unsatisfying ending.

• 6 (B / ***Honorable Mention). An enjoyable work that fans of the particular style or artists may treasure.

  I haven’t rated anything 6, 5, or 4, but will likely do so in future reviews.

• 5 (B- / **Honorable Mention). A competent or mildly interesting work that fans of the particular style or artists may enjoy.

• 4 (C+ / *Honorable Mention). A possible failed experiment or pleasant piece of hackwork that fans of the particular style or artist(s) may still like.

• 3 (C / Neither). A work that may impress in one or two parts with consistent craft or an arresting moment, but not elsewhere.

  I gave an overall score of 3 to the six episodes of Show Me Love that I watched. Heidi Amanda Jensen’s scenes were the only interesting parts of that show to me.

• 2 (C- / Choice Cut). A work worth consuming only in the form of an isolated scene on YouTube or a humorous meme.

• 1 (D+ / Dud). A work so bad that it’s not worth more than a moment’s thought, and then only to emphasize how bad it is.

Christgau’s first scheme includes even lower ratings, for example for works that “are frequently cited as proof that there is no God.” But I am not a cruel person, and I doubt I would ever review something that I’d score lower than 3.

Still Enjoying Manga (@StillEnjoyingManga) - 2024-07-05 18:34

The way the wording for the definitions of the numbers is formulated doesn’t seem like it’s really in terms of someone rating things according to their personal tastes.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-07-05 20:26

Personal taste comes into play in determining what is good and bad in a particular work. Chaser Game W is a good example. Because of traditional “kill/fridge/separate the gays” practices in TV shows and movies, a lot of people prefer happy endings to lesbian romances like that in Chaser Game W, and react negatively when that doesn’t happen. I’m cognizant of that, but I also value consistency and artistic unity in a work, and I thought the ending of Chaser Game W was (depending on your perspective) either not consistent with previous plot developments or not adequately prepared for. So I gave it a lower score where others might have given it a higher one.

Still Enjoying Manga (@StillEnjoyingManga) - 2024-07-06 02:47

Right, presumably you are rating according to your values. Different people would rate differently.

The problem is that those descriptions imply something else.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I recently contributed to a (ultimately successful) Kickstarter campaign for a new music service, Mirlo. I’ve also been reading off and on articles on the furialog blog, written by Glenn McDonald, who used to work at Spotify before he was laid off, and who (among other things) created the Every Noise at Once site mapping musical genres. McDonald’s latest post, “10 aspirational rules for the moral operation of a music service,” is particularly relevant to Mirlo and other would-be alternatives to Bandcamp, Spotify, etc.

You can read the full list yourself, but I was particularly struck by #3, “The feature goal is to connect individuals to communities. Music is a social energy.” This echoes things the folks in 65daysofstatic have been saying to the effect that music is always and everywhere a community phenomenon, in contrast to the view of music as “content” that LLMs can generate as well or better than people. It also reminds me of McDonald’s own comments that “[musical] genres are communities” that cannot be adequately captured by machine learning algorithms looking at sonic similarities.

McDonald has a book coming out later this month, You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favourite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. It looks interesting; I’ve preordered it.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

I’m not sure whether I’ll make a habit of writing posts like this. But after importing Megan Carnes’s discography into Apple Music and seeing who came next in alphabetical order in my music collection, I got the urge to once again listen to one of the most important groups of the 1980s post-punk British music scene, Mekons.

Mekons have at least two essential records. In the first, Fear and Whiskey (released in 1985), they had the brilliant idea of combining country music with 1980s leftist post-punk. Along with Meat Puppets II (released the previous year), it’s often credited with creating the genre of alt-country.

But Mekons were (and are) much more than an alt-country band. Their genius was taking the Christian idea behind much country music, that we are all sinners living in a fallen world, and recasting it in a Marxist context, in which the original sin was the creation of capitalism. Fear and Whiskey is haunted by the failure of the 1984 coal miners’ strike (see, for example, “Darkness and Doubt”), while The Mekons Rock ’n Roll (released in 1989, and more rock than country, as the name implies) looks upon Thatcherism and Reaganism triumphant. (“Empire of the Senseless” in particular namechecks Iran-Contra and Section 28—and takes its title from Kathy Acker’s 1988 experimental novel.)

Mekons are still going strong, almost 40 years later, and have lots of albums on Bandcamp. Give one or both of these a listen, and let me know what you think!

M. Campbell (@voidmoth) - 2024-04-09 18:01

such a cool band

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-04-09 19:19

And to think, they were only one of the great bands that came out of the University of Leeds in the 1970s. (I think I’ll post about another one in the coming days.) Thanks for commenting!

We’re well into March now, but it’s never too late to highlight @Goyavoyage’s Februaryuri reviews. I have some comments to add to her review of Goodbye, My Rose Garden:

First, like @Goyavoyage I will point you to Dee’s Anime Feminist article about Goodbye, My Rose Garden, which I think is a shining example of Anime Feminist at its best: review articles that combine stylish writing with rigorous sourcing and insightful analysis — like a good academic paper but without the academic stuffiness and obscurantism.

Second, a major virtue of Goodbye, My Rose Garden is that its characters actually think and act as one would expect of people living in that time and place. In a lot of manga and other works featuring historical and semi-historical settings, the protagonists come off as people of modern sensibilities isekai-ed into the past and cosplaying as natives. Like typical isekai protagonists, as characters they’re unrealistic at best, smug and annoying at worst.

On that note, if you want to get a good feel for the sorts of queer-coded fictions created by contemporary writers of that era, I strongly recommend checking out Sarah Orne Jewett’s story “Martha’s Lady,” referenced in the manga. It’s a lovely story in its own right, and also a good example of how a premise like that of Goodbye, My Rose Garden might have played out in real life.

Finally, if you’re inclined to write your own historical fiction on queer themes, you could do a lot worse than to consult the various articles Heather Rose Jones has created as part of her Lesbian Historic Motif Project, which collects and presents information “that would be useful in grounding a fictional lesbian character in the context of historic human experience.”

You know, I’d really rather be posting about poetry than writing yet another post about the travails of Cohost. But here I am, since a share of one of my posts has been “doing severals” and has occasioned some responses.

I would recommend in particular a post (now deleted) by @renkotsuban, which I think is fair and well-reasoned. I commented in response to it, and will expand a bit on those comments here, especially for people who don’t follow them. (Since they’ve locked the post from being shared, you’re not going to see it otherwise.)

First, my own position: I have a vested interest in seeing Cohost continue since I enjoy posting here, more so than on any other social media site I’ve used. I make more than $94K/year, so it’s not a burden on me to pay for more than one Cohost plus subscription, and my comments promoting the idea were directed solely at other people in my position. No one, let me repeat, no one, should be paying for Cohost plus, let alone paying for more than one subscription, if it would be a financial hardship for them. It should be like a decision between treating yourself to a lunch out or saving the money for something else you’d like better.

I also second the recommendation to not prioritize spending on Cohost over contributing to other causes. Over the past year I’ve contributed an order of magnitude more just to GoFundme’s than I have spent on Cohost, and supported a bunch of other good causes as well. Again, I recommend others do likewise. You should think of Cohost as something extra you can consider supporting once you’ve taken care of the important stuff.

Now, let’s talk about @staff and their actions. If I were treating this as a purely economic transaction I wouldn’t be paying for Cohost at all; I’d free ride on others’ contributions, not bother to comment on how the site is run, and be indifferent to whether it succeeded or failed. But since I am paying for Cohost plus, and am spending more on Cohost than the typical user, I have no problem with giving unsolicited advice to ASSC, and holding them accountable for taking whatever actions are necessary to keep the site running.

Given that labor expenses are the major issue, the obvious course of action is to either cut staff or cut salaries, or both, to try to reduce costs to a level that is sustainable longer-term. That includes stopping development on features that have no reasonable chance of contributing revenue in the short term. I would certainly put tipping in this category, if Cohost isn’t planning to take a percentage for itself, and likely subscriptions as well, since I suspect any short-term revenues from Cohost’s cut won’t be enough to justify the labor cost of developing the feature.

If ASSC still thinks it’s important to develop those features then they should consider ways to get other people involved without incurring significant costs. This does not necessarily mean releasing the Cohost source code as open source, i.e., under an open source license. They could keep the code under a proprietary license and just allow others to read and contribute to it, either as volunteers or as contractors paid a very minimal amount (maybe just $1 a year, in case they need to form an enforceable contract). They could also have contributors do copyright assignment to ASSC, so that ASSC can comply with whatever legal agreements they’ve made with their funder regarding ownership and disposition of the code.

Of course, lots of developers—probably, most developers—would balk at contributing their labor under these terms. Fine, they can and should contribute to other projects instead. And ASSC might balk at “exploiting” developers in this way. Fine, that leads to my next comment:

The bottom line is that ASSC needs to take actions to put the site on a sustainable footing within the next month or so. That does not include just taking out more loans, whether from the original funder or anyone else. That’s just extending the runway while still having little or no hope of taking off. I’m talking about having costs be less than revenue, both now and going forward. If ASSC can’t or won’t do that (for example, because it would violate one or more of the principles important to them) then I’d agree with folks who recommend stopping support of Cohost and letting economic reality take its course.

In the meantime, people should absolutely be saving a copy of anything they want to keep, under the assumption that the end of Cohost may well be chaotic and sudden rather than drawn out and well-planned. That includes making a list of your favorite posters and their handles or URLs on other sites, so you can continue to follow them, as well as advertising your own other social media accounts to your own followers.

One final thought: if you want to write or create art, music, games, whatever, the one thing you absolutely should do, before doing anything else, is to procure your own personal domain name and make plans to spend the relatively small amount it will cost every year for the rest of your life, or at least as long as you continue to be on the Internet. With some services (like Bluesky) you can have your domain name be your handle. And in any case you’ll always have the fallback of posting stuff to your own personal site, maintaining it yourself if you have the time and expertise to do that.

[The following comment by me was in response to a comment that was later deleted by the commenter.]

Frank Hecker ([@hecker][]) - 2024-03-16 08:53

Thanks for commenting! I don’t have a lot to add to what you said, most all of which I agree with. Some brief thoughts:

You’re correct that ASSC has no obligation to listen to what I, you, or anyone else says. My posts are basically expressions of opinions, with no expectation that anything I write will be heeded by, responded to, acknowledged, or read by ASSC.

Based on the latest financial post, it sounds like they have a few more months of runway, but no obvious path to sustainability. They (likely deliberately) don’t provide enough financial details to tell for sure, but it seems pretty clear that their basic problem is high fixed costs in salaries and that their hope is that between adding new users and getting more revenue from existing users they can cover those fixed costs. Time will tell.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Recently in an online forum I frequent there was a discussion about the currently-airing anime Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End. The gist of the discussion is that some people began watching Frieren intrigued by the first few episodes and their themes of the transience of human lives versus that of the long-lived elf Frieren. In subsequent episodes they were then confronted with, and repulsed by, Frieren’s attitude toward the demons who are positioned as humanity’s enemy.

The essence of their complaint was that Frieren (the character) was advocating that genocide be committed against the demons, that by implication Freiren (the story) was excusing genocide in the real world, and that (again by implication) those who enjoyed watching or reading Frieren risked becoming apologists for such genocide, and potentially complicit in it. One might be tempted to quickly dismiss this argument (“this is fiction, not reality”), but I happen to think their concern is a serious one worth addressing. This post is my attempt to address it.

Note: This post contains spoilers through the most recent episode 26 of Frieren the anime (which corresponds to chapters 54 and 55 of the manga it’s based on), as well as spoilers for the entire run of the webcomic Mage and Demon Queen, a work I contrast with Frieren.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

Frieren the anime (and manga) is set in a typical fantasy world inhabited by humans, elves, dwarves, and demons. Frieren the character was a member of the “heroes’ party” that defeated the Demon King. After a brief introduction, the story proper begins fifty years after that event, as Frieren begins a new journey with a new set of companions. In that journey they encounter more demons. Frieren kills them (sometimes with the aid of her companions) in a business-like manner, shows no remorse whatsoever after the fact, and flatly states her opinion that all demons should be killed likewise.

In the context of the story, demons are characterized as sentient monsters: they can talk like humans, but they have no human-like feelings. They do not have families as humans do, and are portrayed as extreme individualists whose relations with other demons are based solely on power. They show no gratitude to humans who help them, they lie freely, and their word cannot be trusted. They view humans solely as prey.

What is one to say about this? First, demons are clearly based on the common stereotype of a human psychopath: a person who views others solely as objects to be manipulated, tricked, exploited, and (potentially) killed.¹ According to the common stereotype such people cannot in any way be rehabilitated; at best they must be imprisoned for life, at worst they should be executed, judicially or otherwise. Likewise for demons as envisaged in Frieren.

Second, while an individual demon may be plausible (like an individual human psychopath), a whole society of them is much less so. If they know nothing of family and family ties, how could they ever be socialized into such a society? If they are so staunchly individualist, how could they ever organize themselves into a society that could rival and threaten that of humans? Great apes and other animals have dominance hierarchies based on brute strength, and demons could do likewise, but such societies are no match for humans, who are adept at cooperating with each other when they can jointly advance their mutual interests.

That I think is a key theme of Frieren: that the long war with the demons has driven human to band together and find more effective ways to fight them, learning how to use magic and how to turn the demons’ spells against them. And given that the story has “stacked the deck” in the way that it characterizes the demons as implacable and irredeemable antagonists, it implicitly endorses any measures humans (and elves like Frieren) might take in that war, up to and including total extermination of the demon race.

Frieren thus echoes in fiction the grim reality of human history, from prehistoric times onward, as organized societies found cause to attack and conquer other societies, often wiping them out entirely. We ourselves are the descendants of those successful conquerors. (For the most part the conquered left none.) We are heirs to their genetic and cultural legacy, one element of which is the tendency to characterize our enemies (real or imagined) as less than human and undeserving of mercy. Frieren and Frieren are uncomfortable reminders of that.

Lord of the Rings

Is Frieren the only work of fantasy that takes such an uncompromising position toward an entire race of beings? I would say, not at all. In fact, I claim that Lord of the Rings, one of the most important influences on modern fantasy (not excluding Frieren itself), is guilty of this.

Yes, as someone in our discussion pointed out, the wizard Gandalf, portrayed as one of the most wise and noble characters in LOTR, is not a straightforward advocate of genocide. Among other things, he praises Frodo’s decision to not kill Gollum: “Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. . . . I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it.”

It’s a heartfelt speech to be sure, but does Gandalf—or, for that matter, any of the other “good guys” in Lord of the Rings—apply its lesson to the orcs, the closest LOTR equivalent to the demons of Frieren? I don’t recall that being the case. Instead the orcs are portrayed solely as beings hostile to humans, elves, and dwarves, and large sections of LOTR are devoted to fighting them in battle. I don’t remember anyone showing mercy to orcs individually, or attempting to negotiate a peace settlement with them collectively. They are viewed as creatures of Sauron, no more and no less, and the preferred approach to dealing with them is simply to kill them.

Lord of the Rings also prejudices the reader against orcs in a way that is very similar to the way Frieren treats demons. We are not shown any elements of orc society apart from their armies: no orc couples or families, no innocent orc children, no orcs peacefully farming or following a trade, no orcs mourning the death of their friends and comrades. Indeed, orcs are depicted as being just as individualistic and untrustworthy as the demons of Frieren: in one of the few scenes where individual orcs are portrayed, when Frodo is held captive in the Tower of Cirith Ungol, they quarrel amongst themselves and ultimately kill each other in their zeal to take Frodo’s shirt of mithril mail.

The ultimate resolution of the story of Lord of the Rings also resembles that of Frieren: the leader of malign forces is overthrown, his armies are defeated, and eventually humans come to rule the world in the Fourth Age, with elves, hobbits, and dwarves having faded away, and the race of orcs presumably having been completely exterminated.

Yet Lord of the Rings is not typically seen simply as a tale of genocide, and its fans are not typically accused of being advocates and apologists for genocide. Why does it for the most part escape the criticisms being leveled at Frieren? I don’t have a completely satisfying answer to this, but I offer a tentative one below.

Mage and Demon Queen

But before I do that, I thought it would be interesting to consider the webcomic Mage and Demon Queen, a work that is a polar opposite of Frieren in its attitude toward demons, and indeed can be seen as going out of its way to cater to present-day sensibilities. Mage and Demon Queen is a relatively light-hearted romantic comedy, which helps account for some of that, but I think not all.

First, the demons of Mage and Demon Queen are not depicted as inherently and irredeemably evil. Velverosa, the demon queen herself, is imperious and hostile to humans, including the adventurer Malori who’s infatuated with her, but she is shown to have good reason for that hostility. And over the course of the series she softens that attitude, to the point of eventually succumbing to Malori’s charms and becoming her lover.²

This is a particular example of a general trend in modern fantasy, in which beings traditionally viewed as unrelievedly evil—demons, vampires, servants of Satan, etc. — are “de-fanged,” as it were. For example, contrast C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape, who is entirely sincere in his desire to tempt humans into sin and condemn them to eternal torment, with Crowley of the novel and TV series Good Omens or Dewiela of the manga Eniale and Dewiela. The latter demonic minions are portrayed as much more benign than Screwtape, even to the point of causing fans to ship them with their angelic counterparts.³

Mage and Demon Queen also continues the trend toward the “gamification” of modern fantasy, that is, carrying over tropes from video games into other works. Mage and Demon Queen does not go so far as to put stat screens above the characters’ heads, but it does feature the common trope that one can escape death simply by respawning in a different location. Others may differ, but I think one effect of this is to trivialize death and the suffering that accompanies it; in the opening chapters of Mage and Demon Queen Malori dies multiple times in her quest to get Velverosa’s attention, but is never shown to be traumatized by the experience.

Another gaming-related issue is not present in Mage and Demon Queen, but arose in our discussion: one person opined that Frieren disturbed them because the killing of demons was featured so prominently, and that they were more comfortable with games in which killing orcs and demons was much more of a background element, just another task needing to be completed in order to win the game.

Here I have to ask: assuming that art can influence life at all, what sort of work might be more likely to make someone indifferent to genocide: a work like Frieren in which the protagonists know the names of their enemies and kill them face to face in single combat, or a work in which nameless NPCs are summarily dispatched at the roll of a die, or in a frenzy of button mashing?

In the final arc of Mage and Demon Queen the bodies do in fact pile up by the scores—but, again, no worries, since the people they belong to will all be soon resurrected. In the meantime we’ve had the satisfaction of seeing the demons fight back against humans in a worthy cause: the demons are ultimately shown to be an oppressed and marginalized minority, who wish only to live in peace (and in fact do live in peace with one group of humans). But unfortunately they’ve been attacked by humans eager to displace them from their land, of which they now occupy only a tiny fragment.

Thus Mage and Demon Queen completely upends the traditional place of demonic beings in fiction: it purges itself of the racial essentialism that many find so distasteful in traditional fantasy works, and in the process turns demons into (or reduces demons to, some might say) humans who just happen to have horns and other unusual physical characteristics, who are more oppressed than oppressors, and whom one can find fulfillment in both saving and romancing. A far cry from Frieren.

A tentative conclusion

So to return to the question I asked above: why does Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End offend people in ways that other works like Lord of the Rings apparently do not? And what should our attitude be toward it?

Perhaps it’s because Frieren the work is so upfront and unequivocal about the stance Frieren and other characters take toward demons. Unlike Lord of the Rings, readers and viewers cannot point to fine speeches advocating mercy within the work, or to material outside the work in which the author in effect says, “no, mass murder even of orcs is not okay.”

The choice in Frieren is stark: though demons may be a minority, as in Mage and Demon Queen, they are shown to be aggressors against humankind, aggressors whom it’s impossible to make peace with. The real choice presented in Frieren is not between making war and making peace. It is between finding meaning and fulfillment in the continued fight against demons (the elf Serie appears to be in this camp) and wishing to conclude it as soon as possible in complete and total victory (as Frieren does), even if that means killing the enemy to the last being.

That’s an unpopular position to take in the present day, even in fiction, given how much it reminds people of real-world events. I can understand why some people might be repulsed by it, and I do not think less of them for that. Nevertheless I do not share that feeling. The author of Frieren has indeed manipulated its audience into applauding the extermination of sentient beings (just as the author of Mage and Demon Queen has manipulated its audience to different ends). But I’m under no compulsion to do the same in real life.

And in fact I think Frieren may subvert its own message, whether it knows it or not. As I noted above, the world of Frieren echoes in many respects human history and prehistory, an endless cycle of conquest and genocide, driven by innovation in ways to organize societies to better attack and defend. Would killing off all demons really bring lasting peace to Frieden’s world? Far more likely, I think, is that having gained the power of magic and successfully used it against demons, humans would then turn it against each other, seeing their enemies (real or imagined) in the same way they once saw demons, as wholly evil and deserving of death.

Thus to me Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End has an inevitable air of tragedy about it, beyond the themes of transience, remembrance, and building connections that first attracted people like me to it. To my mind that adds to, rather than detracting from, its appeal as a work of art.

maddie (@ninecoffees) - 2024-03-09 19:10

A good read, also Mage and Demon Queen is a good recommend if anyone’s looking for some more light-hearted yuri

hecker

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-03-09 19:55

I second the recommendation for Mage and Demon Queen. I was somewhat unfair in positioning it against Frieren, but it was relevant to the point I was making: that Frieren is in many ways a throwback to traditional fantasy works in its treatment of demons, while Mage and Demon Queen is a more acceptable modern version.

WallaceCrow (@WallaceCrow) - 2024-03-10 11:56

I find it interesting how Frieren interrogates the the idea of humanoid creatures that are fundamentally different from humans. Many Lord of the Rings inspired fantasy works inherited the concept of humanoid creatures that are “evil” and therefore fine to kill without interrogating the concept. Identifying that this parallels the dehumanization of groups of people in real life, many modern fantasy works will depict humanoid creatures as similar to humans but with different socialization. This makes humanoid creatures less of a monolith (“evil” creatures can be raised in a “good” society) and reframes “good” vs “evil” as a clash between societies.

Spoiler for Frieren chapters 77+:

The El Dorado arc keeps the idea that demons are fundamentally different from humans, but explores how the demons’ experience differs from humans. The demon Macht recognizes that “guilt” and “malice” are emotions that humans feel. However he does not experience those emotions, despite active attempts to do so, and thus cannot comprehend their meaning.

Rather than viewing humans as objects, Macht recognizes humans as sentient and seeks coexistence. Despite these intentions, the conflict in how demons and humans experience the world results in a lack of understanding of violence. He cannot understand how coexistince and killing are mutually exclusive ideas.

This approach feels more like Le Guin than Tolkien to me. The reader empathizes with the other despite our fundamental differences. The El Dorado arc is a tragedy, not a story of “good” overcoming “evil.”

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-03-10 16:11

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I haven’t read the manga past where the anime is now, but I’m sorely tempted (and I didn’t mind being spoiled in this case). Based on your description I’m looking forward to this arc. (However, I suspect it will have come too late for the folks who already noped out of the anime.)

Once again I am doing a time-delayed share of a @Goyavoyage yuri recommendation. To add to what she said about Even Though We’re Adults: In addition to featuring adults only (I don’t recall any teenage characters in the manga, though maybe I missed one),¹ it’s relatively unusual in having a male character who is treated somewhat sympathetically, not as either a villain or as a mere speed bump on the road to the main characters’ happy ending.

Regarding Sweet Blue Flowers, @Goyavoyage is correct that there are problematic aspects; however teacher-student relationships are not one of them. Never in the manga does a teacher (or any other adult) approach a student in an inappropriate way. And in each and every case where a student approaches a teacher that they have a crush on, the teacher quickly and unambiguously rejects them. Whether Shimura consciously intended this or not, the manga’s treatment of these incidents supports my theory that a major theme of Sweet Blue Flowers is a rejection of relationships based on a hierarchy of some type (e.g., senpai-kohai or teacher-student) in favor of relationships based on equality between individuals.

Finally, if anyone does want to check out my book on Sweet Blue Flowers, I’ve created a web version so that you can easily check out individual chapters — many of which started out as Tumblr posts. For example, see my discussion of Maria Watches Over Us, a series that I think, unlike Sweet Blue Flowers, very much advocates for and celebrates relationships embedded in an age-based hierarchical order.

[This post was originally published on Cohost. Where linked-to articles were not archived, I’ve updated the links to go to non-Cohost copies.]

Once again I’m sharing a @Goyavoyage post with one of her yuri manga recommendations, because I think these are great and deserve a wider audience. I like to add a bit to what she writes, so . . .

I’ve embedded above the 5-minutes-plus-credits “Kase-san and Morning Glories” video that @Goyavoyage mentioned. You can think of it either as a teaser trailer for what later became the Kase-san OVA or as a music video that stands alone. Either way it’s a lovely video, and you can tell that the people who made it really love the manga and put their hearts and souls into animating it. I’ve embedded the official Pony Canyon version, which I’m pretty sure won’t disappear. Unfortunately it doesn’t have English subtitles; here’s one that does.

One thing that is a virtue of the Kase-san series that I think eventually becomes a weakness: the series has a bright and rose-colored view of the world that is very endearing and inspiring. Pretty much everybody loves Kase-san and Yamada, both within the story and without. So whatever conflict and angst exists arises primarily from internal sources, e.g., Yamada’s fears and jealousies.

This works well while their relationship is being established, but once they become a couple for real and the story moves to them attending university (i.e., in the Kase-san and Yamada sequel) it gets to be a bit contrived and repetitive. It might have been better if Takeshima had turned the manga into a pure slice-of-life rather than trying to periodically inject fresh doses of drama into it.

But that’s a minor quibble. Overall the entire series is one of the best (if not the best) examples of “wholesome yuri.” (I mean, even the sex scenes are wholesome!)

I’ve been sick and not able to comment on these before now, but @Goyavoyage has a really solid list of recommended yuri titles and is doing a great job of highlighting them.

How Do We Relationship? in particular I would easily put in the top three of yuri titles currently being serialized. And here’s something @Goyavoyage didn’t mention: if you live in the US or Canada and can afford $1.99 a month (in the US) for a Viz Manga subscription (not to be confused with a Shonen Jump subscription) then you can read new chapters of HDWR as soon as they’re published in Japan (currently up to chapter 114). (The Viz Manga site is missing chapters 84-93, corresponding to volume 10, so you’d have to buy that separately.)

Voyage (@Goyavoyage) - 2024-02-06 01:21

I wish you a quick recovery! Also– thank you. Your words mean a lot.

And you’re right! I learned of that simultaneous publication thing super recently when seeing people commenting chapters beyond vol. 10. I’m realizing just now that it’s North America-restricted though. Bummer. (Well, I have vol. 9 and 10 to catch up to anyway!)

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

I had uninterrupted time this afternoon to sit down and watch the BD of the 2020 film Last and First Men. If you like

• the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon
• the music of Jóhann Jóhannsson (who also directed)
• the voice of Tilda Swinton
• brutalist architecture
• stately black-and-white cinematography on 16mm film stock

then I think you’ll agree with me that this film is pretty darned great.

Lucas Moura (@DrTeflon) - 2024-01-21 16:22

This movie is SO FREAKING GREAT

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-01-21 17:57

Isn’t it though?!

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2024-01-27 11:48

Ill check this out! Also, thanks for sharing the poetry as always!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-01-28 18:00

You’re quite welcome! I’m glad you’re enjoying the Sunday night poetry series; it’s great fun to research and write.

One of the people I read fairly regularly (though not enough to actually pay for a subscription) is Ted Gioia, who writes at honest-broker.com on Substack. His most recent post on the macroculture (mainstream media like the New York Times, Disney, etc.) vs the “microculture” (basically, people posting stuff on YouTube and other places) is free to read, and worth reading, given that pretty much everyone on Cohost, including me, is participating in the “microculture” one way or another.

You can read the article for yourself, so I won’t attempt to summarize it, but I do want to comment briefly on some of his points.

First, he doesn’t understand why people in the “macroculture” aren’t paying attention to what’s going on in the “microculture,” unlike the attitude of mainstream media to counter-culture media in the past. This is easy to explain: in the era he’s thinking of (1950s and 1960s), the major difference between mainstream media and “alternative” media was one of scale: your local alternative weekly was essentially the same sort of thing as your main local daily newspaper, except everything was smaller: it had writers and editors, it ran news stories and reviews, it had ads, it was printed on paper, and it was distributed either to readers’ homes or (more commonly) to places they frequented.

It was relatively easy for a talented writer or editor to move from the “minor leagues” of alternative media to “the show” of a mainstream newspaper, because those hiring them were the same sort of people doing the same sorts of things, and could evaluate them accordingly. Ditto for small presses vs. large book publishers, and indie music labels vs. large corporate labels.

But today there’s a world of difference between what mainstream media do and what people on YouTube, Patreon, etc., are doing. The medium is different, what it takes to succeed is different, how you get paid is different, and so on. No wonder people in mainstream media are out of touch; nothing in their experience has prepared them for this environment.

Second, when discussing why “microculture” will win, he doesn’t touch on a key point: YouTube, Patreon, Tiktok, Spotify, OnlyFans, etc., are brutally competitive environments that take in an extremely large number of aspirants to fame and fortune and pit them against each other in a contest to win the attention of readers, viewers, and listeners. Those who reach the top ranks have benefited from a fair measure of luck, but having bested others in the competitive free-for-all they are also on average very very good at doing what they need to do to attract an audience. No wonder their offerings can command audience sizes and the associated outsized rewards that rival those of the “macroculture.”

(And the rewards are indeed outsized. A writer in the 1960s working at the New York Times might make ten times more money than a writer at a 1960s alternative weekly, maybe a hundred times more at most. However, as I wrote in my post on the distribution of Patreon earnings, top Patreon projects make about a thousand times more money than typical projects.)

Finally, when Gioia writes that “even the biggest potential enemies of microculture (those billionaires in Silicon Valley) need it for their own survival,” he mistakes where the true power lies. Yes, YouTube (for example) creates very little on its own and instead relies on the work of people making and uploading videos (“user-generated content” or “UGC,” to use the ugly marketing term). But there are millions of them, and only one YouTube. If a top vlogger decides to leave YouTube, there’s a horde of people standing in line to take their place. But if YouTube kicks off a vlogger (big or small) then there are few if any comparable channels of distribution they can turn to.

That’s because hosting video at scale is a natural monopoly: only large and well-funded corporations can build the centralized hosting services required to serve an audience of hundreds of millions or more, the recommendation engines needed for artists to come to the attention of others and potentially “go viral,” and the ad networks that are typically the means by which artists can be paid.

It’s also the case that the money that these platforms make is mostly not from the top tier of artists: again, as I saw in my Patreon analysis, their revenue from the top 100 artists is likely matched by revenue from the next 1,000, which in turn is matched by revenue from the next 10,000, which in turn is matched by revenue from the next 100,000, and so on. Since most of their revenue is from a large mass of typical artists, each of whom individually has little power, the platform can afford to squeeze artists, retain as high a percentage of revenue as they feel they can get away with, and screw over artists in various ways both large and small.

So the chief winners in the “war between the macroculture and the microculture” are not going to be writers, musicians, or graphic and video artists. They are going to be the large corporations that control distribution in the (ironically-named) “creator economy,” and the “Silicon Valley billionaires” who own them and run them.

kastelpls (@highimpactsex) - 2023-12-06 21:01

yeah, reading this was interesting because it’s not like i necessarily disagree with the claim that microculture (or as i prefer to call it, subcultures) is “winning”. indeed, it’s the companies that provide the infrastructure/ecosystem of microcultures that are winning. they’ve bet on the rise of fresh talents providing “user-generated content” and basically won as people became skeptical of mainstream media.

it’s true that traditional media like NYT is failing at least and that’s because they refuse to adapt to the times or hire actual people outside their circle. but i expect them to truck on for a little bit longer because their prestige/brand is still wroth it – i’m more surprised that newspapers and magazines have not followed the cynical path of reuters leasing their brand to anyone who pays.

i think what will end up happening (if it hasn’t now) is the creation of social classes within microcultures. there’s clearly a group of people who has made a living out of this while many others don’t. it’s hard for me to see how this isn’t some fractured community.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2024-12-07 12:36

Thanks for stopping by to comment! You’ve hit the nail on the head — I have nothing to add to what you’ve said.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

As a certified old person, I find it fascinating to contrast my life experiences and attitudes with those of my younger online acquaintances. In particular, I’m struck by how many of them view capitalism as a totalizing force—omnipresent and inescapable. I also wonder how much that might be due to their watching television as children.

The basic idea is that the media we experience as children influence our view of the world—that, for example, because conservative Boomers see the 1950s as reflected in TV shows like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-66) and Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963) that they watched in their childhood, they see that decade as one reflecting traditional conservative family values, like heterosexual marriage between a male breadwinner and a female housewife. But the 1950s were also the decade of (for example) the Mattachine Society (1950), Playboy magazine (1953), and the Daughters of Bilitis (1955).

Which brings me back to cartoons: As a child I watched shows like The Flintstones (1960-66), The Jetsons (1962-63), George of the Jungle (1967), and so on. They were clearly commercial productions, but existed as standalone pieces of media for the most part, with few if any commercial tie-ins. I also watched some shows that were positioned as more than mere entertainment, like Captain Kangaroo (1955-84), but they were not clearly delineated from the other shows and ran on the same (commercial) television networks.

But as time went on and restrictions on advertising on US children’s shows were loosened, many if not most children’s shows became simply vehicles by which to sell children’s toys: He-Man (1983-85), G.I. Joe (1983-86), Transformers (1984-87), etc. The most prominent exceptions to this trend were shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001), Sesame Street (1969-), and Reading Rainbow (1983-2006) that were shown on public television and were explicitly promoted as noncommercial and (more or less) educational in nature.

Those who were children in the US in the 1980s and beyond thus lived in two disjoint worlds. The first was a world ruled by corporations, in which the distinction between “entertainment” and “advertising” was abolished, and children’s participation in media culture was implicitly reduced to an endless series of economic transactions—a model of oppressive capitalism. The second was a world shaped by governments and nonprofit organizations, from which commerce was banished and in which children were viewed primarily as the targets of instruction and advocacy for progressive values—a model of benign socialism.

This may just be me as a old person attempting some amateur psychoanalysis on the younger generation, but it seems as if this dichotomy might help explain some of the particular forms the “culture wars” and the controversies over “wokeness” have taken.

Thus, for example, the idea that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism,” that by watching a TV show or film, or reading a book or comic, one is inextricably entangled with capitalism in all its aspects (arguably true of those watching He-Man and similar series) and (more contentiously) that one is then implicated in all of capitalism’s crimes and ills.

But of course children in their innocence are not aware of all this, simply enjoying these shows and comics as entertainment. When grown to adulthood their remembrance of that enjoyment then exists in tension with their knowledge of the social and economic context in which those works were created and consumed, and the purposes to which they were put. And the implied continuation to “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is often “but I’m of a mind to do it anyway.”

Thus, then, the urge to retroactively redeem childhood favorites by importing into them the values of the public television shows they existed in opposition to: Not a new story of a growing love between two young lesbians, but a reboot of a He-Man spinoff in which Adora/She-Ra and Catra go from enemies to lovers. Not a contemporary bildungsroman featuring a biracial teenager thrust into “great responsibility,” but Miles Morales as a successor to the role of Spider-Man. And when the patriarchy is to be fought, Barbie is drafted to do it.¹

And thus, on the flip side, the reaction of people (usually male) who think such changes “ruined my childhood.” After all, these media “properties” are not in their eyes like the Mona Lisa, Seven Samurai, and other traditional works of art. They are instead products that as consumers they have paid for many times over during childhood and beyond, often to the tune of hundreds or even thousands of dollars. No wonder they react like regulars at a restaurant when the chef changes the recipes for their favorite dishes, complaining loudly to the manager and then hastening to Yelp to write negative reviews.

I enjoyed The Jetsons when I was in elementary school, but it holds no interest for me today. It was made as disposable entertainment for children, it served that purpose well, and it can now be tossed into the trash bin of history. I have no interest in reading an academic paper on how it propagandizes for “late capitalism,” or an opinion piece on its positive vision for “accelerationism.” And I definitely have no desire to see it rebooted as a “bone-chilling dystopia.”

Give me some new stories, and let the old ones stay in the past to which they belong. If I ever want to revisit them, I know that I’ll be entering a different country, and will be mindful of the flaws and injustices I find there—not forgetting or excusing them, but also not letting them completely obscure the power of a work of art to entertain or enlighten me.

@AndreL (@AndreL) - 2023-12-02 19:33

The fall of the Soviet Union is missing from your analysis. In the seventies there was was, so the story goes, a seemingly serious viable alternative to capitalism, which was soundly defeated and shown to have always been a false dream.

(My seventh grader says that Barbie is cool in a way it wasn’t a year ago — Barbie t-shirts are fashionable in middle school — and argues the movie is a shrewd way to buff the brand and increase sales.)

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-12-03 09:28

You are correct re the Soviet Union, though I suspect children at the time would have probably had limited awareness of that. (I can’t say, as I was already an adult by then.) But it’s certainly true that as adults looking back they might have seen it as the “end of socialism”; it was a fairly common sentiment at the time.

As for the Barbie movie affecting the Barbie brand, this seems another instance of what many people have seen as a central feature of capitalism: absorbing any criticism of itself and transforming it into a product to be sold.

Thanks for stopping by to comment!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost. The post is obviously moot now that Cohost is dead, but I think it’s still relevant as commentary on the difficulty of creating a financially-sustainable social media site that is not venture-funded. Some people accused me of trying to guilt-trip people into supporting what was in reality a commercial venture, or of ignoring the financial naïvety and frequent stumbles of the Cohost staff. However, I remain firm in my conviction that with any social media site where users are customers, not the product, they are going to have to step up and pay something.]

It’s hard out there to be a social media site. Tumblr is the latest high-profile casualty, put on life support after a failure to make it into a going concern. I haven’t used Tumblr in a while, but I read Cohost every day, and write something for it every week; it’s one of my favorite places on the Internet. I’m thus concerned that Cohost may at some point also end up on the scrap heap of failed social sites.

Based on the June 2023 financial update (the latest available at the time of writing), Cohost’s financial situation is improving, but it’s still not at the point where it can be self-sustaining without the need for additional investment. Patreon-style subscriptions are planned, from which Cohost would take a cut, and paid ads are at least a possibility.

But I’m still worried about Cohost’s future, especially with a population of users many of whom themselves seem to be financially stressed, based on the increasing number of GoFundMe posts showing up in my timeline. That’s why my thoughts turned to Andrew Carnegie.

Carnegie was a 19th-century millionaire (billionaire in present-day terms) who grew up in poverty in Scotland, emigrated to the US with his family, went to work at 12 in a textile mill, was rescued from that situation by a fellow countryman who saw talent in him, served an apprenticeship as a telegraph operator, worked for a leading railroad, became a financial speculator and made a pile of money, bought steel mills and worked to drive down the price of steel, then sold his steel company and made another pile of money. He then retired to devote himself full-time to giving away money according to his own personal philosophy, which he outlined in his essay “The Gospel of Wealth” (also included in his book The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays).

Shorn of its 19th century prose and attitudes, Carnegie’s essay can be summed up as follows:

• Capitalism is here to stay, having proved its success in raising the absolute wealth of the entire population.
• However, capitalism and the free market system by their nature increase relative wealth inequality, enabling a few people to become orders of magnitude richer than others.
• Given this inherent inequality, the wealthy have an obligation to use the vast majority of their wealth for the betterment of society, and to do so within their own lifetime.
• This task is best accomplished not by making indiscriminate donations to charitable causes, but by establishing community institutions such as libraries (Carnegie’s particular obsession), hospitals, universities, art galleries and museums, and the like.
• But such institutions should not be founded in the first place unless the communities that they serve agree to take on the responsibility of funding them once they’re established.

Carnegie’s attitude was an example of what’s sometimes referred to as noblesse oblige: that those who live in a society that has enabled them to become wealthy in turn have a responsibility to give back to that society.

The person who provided the initial funding for Cohost was—self-consciously or otherwise—acting in accordance with Carnegie’s philosophy. Yes, theirs was nominally an investment, with the investor getting ownership of the Cohost source code if ASSC can’t pay back the funds provided. But, seriously, does anyone think that that source code has any significant value divorced from the community of users it supports?

Better I think to see this anonymous benefactor as using their wealth to provide Cohost users the modern analog of a Carnegie library. We as users then collectively have an obligation to ensure that Cohost as a service receives the funding it needs to survive once the initial funding is exhausted. Fortunately, we have a vehicle ready to hand by which to do that, namely purchasing one or more Cohost Plus! subscriptions.

Of course, not every Cohost user can afford the $5 (US) a month for a subscription, but many others can. Furthermore, a few people can afford to spend $50, or even $500, as easily as others can afford to spend $5. It’s those people who can and should take on the responsibility of supporting Cohost on an ongoing basis, signing up for as many Cohost Plus! subscriptions as they can.

Some might object, “you don’t get much by buying a Cohost Plus! subscription, why would you ever buy more than one?” That risks succumbing to the logic of capitalism at its most extreme, in which a life that could be a rich tapestry of personal and social relations is reduced to an endless series of economic transactions—trading value for like value, continually vigilant in every exchange to ensure that one is not taken for a fool or (worse) a mark.

Others might object, “you’re just putting a bandage on the wounds inflicted by capitalism, under socialism Cohost wouldn’t need to beg for scraps from the rich.” Well, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see the Revolution happening any time soon. In the meantime, what’s wrong with building “socialism in one website,” according to the principle “from each according to their ability”?

The ultimate question is, do you want to keep shopping for new social media sites like you’d shop for bread or a new PC? Or is the community (or communities) you find on Cohost important enough to you that you want to help make sure the site sticks around for the long haul? As @staff noted in a previous financial update, social media sites are inherently unprofitable. So let’s stop treating them solely as businesses.

Let’s encourage those who can to go above and beyond to support the site, let’s recognize those who want to be recognized for doing so,¹ and let’s feel free to lay a guilt trip on people who use Cohost a lot, could afford to pay more, but don’t. That’s what Andrew Carnegie did back in the 19th century, and we should consider doing likewise in the 21st.

Plum (@plumpan) - 2023-11-19 15:55

Generally agree with this but 100% against showing your cohost plus status in your profile, even less so showing how many. Even if it’s optional, really really really don’t like the kinda class symbol that ends up being, even if it’s because they did a good thing. No golden eggbugs.

For better or worse I’m also of the opinion that, until we fix capitalism as a whole and while that should be a priority, if you’ve got enough money that you get to pick and choose your luxury expenses then you have some duty to try and spend it more responsibly. More money to people doing what they love and/or making the world better, less directly to awful people and big companies trying to eat the world. Yes no ethical consumption and all that, but people have used that as a hand wave enough before throwing their money directly to bad people for tiny dopamine hits that I’ve long stopped caring. Paying cohost monthly instead of say, a streaming subscription (or worse, paid youtube), is an excellent example of that.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-11-19 17:24

Thanks for stopping by to comment!

On the Cohost Plus! status thing, I personally wouldn’t take advantage of that, but some people might and (playing devil’s advocate) why not let them if it leads to them increasing support for the site? If other people think it’s cringe then they’re welcome to dunk on the folks doing it, like people dunk on the Twitter/X paid blue checks. But (as you note) spending money to support Cohost is a lot different and more justifiable than spending it on Twitter/X or many other things one could think of.

Brett (@bck356) - 2023-11-20 11:15

Man I have super mixed feelings about this

Carnegie’s fundamental point (the wealthy should distribute their wealth downward) is obviously correct and I have no objection to that

but my objection is with people becoming that rich in the first place? Especially when luck is by far the dominant determinant for that (including Carnegie himself given your provided context). I know that’s a direct contraction with one of his core points (capitalism is here to stay) but do we really want a system where our leaders are ultimately determined by chance? It sounds like Carnegie was mostly not an asshole (well sort of, you know what they say about it being impossible to become that rich without massive exploitation and I refuse to believe he was an exception) but you can’t hardly read the news without tripping over a story about the modern hyper wealthy being assholes who barely pretend to be philanthropic

And also if wealth distribution was like, even a LITTLE bit more even, people would have far more freedom to support causes and networks they care about. Carnegie is clearly not accounting for people who barely have enough for survival

So while I do get the idea of noblesse oblige it sounds like it would be far more optimized as an anarchic, socialist system. Which maybe he wouldn’t even necessarily object to if that was suggested to him, idk, he’s dead

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-11-20 17:27

Thanks for stopping by to comment!

The comment re anarchy is interesting, because in the 19th century all US governments (Federal, state, and local) were much much smaller than they are now, and provision of public goods was pretty minimal. Carnegie’s strategy was in effect to provide the startup investment for public goods (libraries, in his case) with the understanding that governments (local governments, in the case of libraries) would then take over their funding and operation. Of course, today we’re used to governments funding those things (albeit with that funding often under threat), so a Carnegie-style strategy today would focus on public goods that are not yet provided by governments but could be. (For example, things similar to the Internet Archive, arxive.org, an authorized version of Sci-Hub, etc.)

Re assholes, Carnegie was not an exception. He was a contradictory person in many ways: valorizing “honest work” but also making money with often dubious financial speculation; radically democratic in his views, but also a fan of Social Darwinism; expressing support for workers but also letting his business associates brutally suppress a strike. It’s worth reading some of his essays just to experience a 19th-century mentality at work.

Brett (@bck356) - 2023-11-21 11:24

Actually reading this comment again I realized that government funding is provided by taxpayers (obviously). So taxes going into public services is already Carnegie-style wealth distribution, just with representatives deciding what gets funding instead of individual people. The lack of new projects has more to do with representatives deciding that they are unworthy than a lack of actual funding existing for them

I don’t really blame Americans for being so insistent on low taxes when it feels like they just get siphoned up into things that don’t help anybody

AndreL (@AndreL) - 2023-11-21 02:38

I’ve wondered about whether public broadcasting provides a model for Cohost. But public broadcasting relies heavily on a combination of government support and grant money, neither of which are readily available to Cohost. And paid ads (“underwriting”) are also important to public broadcasting, with the advantage of a locality nexus which Cohost doesn’t have.

Would changing Cohost’s legal status from worker-owned co-op (I think that’s the current structure) to a tax-exempt organization help attract grants/donations? I don’t know. I have seen people complain that Beats Time and some extra Eggbug emojji aren’t worth the cost of Plus, and maybe they’d be happier paying if Cohost were legally non-profit (which in the US isn’t quite the same thing as not-for-profit). But I imagine some people are paying for Plus because they like supporting a co-op.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-11-21 09:23

Thanks for the comment!

Re attracting donations, currently in the US the standard deduction amount is so high that for the vast majority of people it doesn’t pay to itemize deductions, including charitable deductions. I’m actually about to stop keeping track of my charitable deductions in my tax record keeping.

Nonprofit status does mean an organization will do a basic level of public reporting, and is protected against being bought out by people not aligned with the nonprofit’s purpose. But ASSC already is fairly transparent re its finances, and as a worker co-op its owners are aligned with its stated goals and likely to remain so.

On the flip side, 501(c)(3) status in the US comes with a bunch of semi-arbitrary restrictions on how you can sell stuff and get revenue, and having seen how that works in action (as a nonprofit employee) I wouldn’t wish that on ASSC and Cohost.

AndreL (@AndreL) - 2024-04-11 14:32

This comment has been in the back of my mind, and I’m in the middle of the calculations right now… you’re right that federally it is doesn’t matter for most people, but in some high-tax states (California for me) the deduction is just high enough to make the paperwork hassle of tracking donations worthwhile.

All you DJ Sabrina virgins out there, consider taking some time out today or this weekend to listen to the (not quite) 4-hour magnum opus that is Destiny. And if you think you don’t have the time, you can instead skip watching yet another crappy Marvel movie and listen to the 1 hour 40 minute abridged version.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

For those watching the currently-airing anime of The Apothecary Diaries and wondering whether to read the manga or the light novels:

1. Like the anime, the manga (which I’ve not yet read in full) gives you a concentrated dose of the exquisite poison that is the story of Maomao. The LN is more like microdosing yourself; there are stretches where you’re just not going to feel the tingle.
2. Maomao and Jinshi have a seriously fucked-up relationship.
3. Speaking of that, the manga has not yet gotten to the conclusion of volume 8 of the LN, in which Jinshi [REDACTED] for reasons and Maomao has to [REDACTED].

So there’s that.

Lotte ‘just an idiot’ May (@LotteMakesStuff) - 2023-10-28 14:54

oh heck is that a good redacted or a bad redacted… actually I do not want to know

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 14:57

I’ll just say that I think you will appreciate the [REDACTED].

Lotte ‘just an idiot’ May (@LotteMakesStuff) - 2023-10-28 15:00

o7

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost. It was originally created in response to a question from a reader: “After reading your latest post, I’m curious: what was your early career like? Technology was very different back then.”]

First, thank you for the ask! This is the first one I’ve gotten. I am not by nature inclined toward nostalgia, computer-related or otherwise. (That’s why I spend my time on Cohost nowadays and not on Facebook.) But since you want to know, I will tell you how things were.

When people think about computing decades ago they normally contrast the hulking mainframes beloved of old movies, all spinning tape drives and flashing lights, with the “supercomputer in your pocket” that is the present-day smartphone. But many things have not changed as much as you might think, and in some cases I’d highlight changes in culture, especially including work culture, as much as I would changes in technology.

To expand on this in terms of my own career:

A corndog meets a computer

My first introduction to computers was when I visited the college I would later attend. Though a small school, they prided themselves on having modern facilities and equipment, one of which was a DEC PDP-8/E minicomputer. (I naïvely asked if it was an analog or digital computer; as D. Boon might say, I was a “fucking corndog.”) Once I was a student, I and others had fun learning BASIC, tediously pecking out programs on a Teletype machine to be recorded on paper tape and then read back and executed.

Later I assisted my physics professor with some programs he was creating. These were in FORTRAN, and to run them we had to drive half an hour to the nearest university computing center. There we spent our time typing out new punch cards for program changes, submitting them to the computing center help desk to be run on their IBM 370 mainframe, and then waiting for the output. We typically got in one run a day, and did this one day a week.

My last semester in college I spent at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, helping two researchers improve their computations of how electrons were absorbed by water (a problem relevant to radiation treatments for cancer). This was another FORTRAN batch job gig, but I was able to use a Wang 2200 system (see above) to do preliminary calculations in BASIC. (The full calculations were too much for the Wang.) This was my first experience with usable interactive computing.

My life as a software developer

After college I went to work as a software developer for a small (20 person or so) software company, SIMPLAN Systems, developing econometric modeling software. This was pretty interesting: the program featured an embedded interpreted language you could use to write and run econometric models on time series data. It included various statistical functions, and was in some ways similar to the later R language. The software itself (parser, runtime, etc.) was written in PL/I (not “PL/1,” thankyouverymuch), and I worked on adding new language features.

And here’s where the software development itself was not necessarily all that different from what is done today. The PL/I language was created by IBM as a successor to COBOL and FORTRAN, but never achieved their level of success. However as a language it was relatively advanced for its time, and except for the use of ALL CAPS (a holdover from the punch card era) a present-day C or Python developer would likely find the syntax of a PL/I program to be relatively familiar and its semantics readily understandable.

The actual development process may not have been all that alien to a modern developer either. When I started there, we didn’t have an actual computer in our office, but instead used Texas Instruments Silent 700 terminals to connect to a time-sharing system (IBM TSO, and later VM/CMS) at a university computing center some distance away. The Silent 700 combined a keyboard, a printer that used thermal paper, and a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem that you stuck your phone handset into.

This was a more congenial way to work than you might think. I can’t write code at a rate of more than 30 characters per second and I can’t read code much faster than that either, so the connection speed wasn’t much of a problem. The editor we used was similar to the “ed” line editor still found on Linux and macOS, and we used it in very much the same way: find where you wanted to change or add lines, print the code around it, make the change, print some more lines to check the change, save the file, compile and link it, and then run it with sample input to test the change. With VM/CMS we actually instantiated a virtual machine, attached our persistent storage to it, and ran the code in an isolated environment.

What strikes me as really different in retrospect is not the computing technology, but rather the environment in which we worked. When I started I got a real office (i.e., floor to ceiling walls) with a solid and pretty soundproof wooden door, an office I had all by myself for a while until a new developer came on board. We could work in our offices without distractions: no emails, no Slack notifications, no smartphone apps or websites to grab our attention, and (at least in our company) no endless rounds of staff meetings, code reviews, etc. And because the Silent 700s were portable, we could even take them home and work from there with even fewer distractions—not even phone calls could interrupt us, because the phone line would be tied up with the modem connection.

The real hassle came with software distribution. We sold the software to corporate economists (at about $50-100K US in present-day currency), and I was the main person tasked with installing it for them. I had to login and run a job to generate a copy of the software on magnetic tape, drive out to the university computing center to pick up the tape, and then drive to the nearby airport to fly out to the customer’s offices, there to give the tape to their computing center staff and work with them to get it installed.

Exit the mainframe, enter the supermini

Eventually SIMPLAN Systems got its own computer system, a “superminicomputer” from Prime Computer. Since the company didn’t have a lot of money we had a relatively low-end system, with only 512KB of memory and (I think) 80MB of disk storage. It also had an interactive operating system (PRIMOS) with a command line shell, and either then or a bit later a (non-GNU) version of the Emacs editor. That together with a Prime CRT terminal (similar to the famous DEC VT100, the ancestor of today’s terminal.app) was my introduction to full-screen editing.

After doing some work to help port the SIMPLAN software to the Prime system, I moved to Washington DC, left software development behind, and went to work for Prime Computer itself as a so-called “systems engineer” assisting with the sale of Prime systems to commercial and government customers. (I had enjoyed working with customers, got along well with salespeople, and was bored doing programming full-time.)

Prime and PRIMOS were also relatively advanced for the time. The operating system was written in PL/P, a dialect of PL/I, and since customers got source code for PRIMOS you could even make your own mods to the OS. Prime systems could also be connected to a (Prime-proprietary) local area network, and eventually we even got access to the Internet and acquired real email addresses to use with it, as well as FTP access to download software.

But even better than the Internet was getting access to actual text processing software. I’ve never been a fan of WYSIWG word processing software, so I was happy when Prime got us copies of the Scribe markup language software, and I later got a copy of the TeX mathematical typesetting software myself. These along with one of the recently-introduced laser printers enabled me to finally get away from using typewriters to create documents. (As an example of the crap output we were stuck with in the pre-TeX era, see the paper I wrote at Oak Ridge.)

As at SIMPLAN Systems, software distribution continued to be a pain in the ass. In addition to using magnetic tapes, we also resorted to carting around removable disk packs, which we pulled out of the actual drives (which resembled washing machines—see above), put in plastic containers, and then took on planes as carry-on items when we needed to visit the corporate HQ. Given that the disk platters were exposed to the open air while we were moving them around, I’m surprised we never had one crash on us.

My period at Prime also introduced me to Unix, as Prime created a new line of “super micro” systems based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor and running Unix System V. That’s when I made my entrance into the online historical record, since I ported GNU Emacs to the Prime EXL line and then posted about it to Usenet.

Or, to be more precise, I posted it to a mailing list that was gatewayed into a Usenet newsgroup. I didn’t have access to Usenet proper until a later job at which a co-worker of mine had set up a working connection to other Usenet nodes. He was an evangelical Christian, and I found it amusing (and never told him) that taking a full Usenet feed, including the alt.* newsgroups, meant that—in addition to innocuous stuff like the comp.sys.ibm and rec.arts.movies newsgroups—he was storing on company systems multiple megabytes of text-based erotica, along with even more megabytes of uuencoded erotic art and photos.

That brings me back to contrasting the differences in culture then and now vs. differences in technologies. The environment in which we worked was almost completely white, almost completely male, and pretty much completely cishet. Because we were expected to be “professional” and be ready to visit customers at any time, I had to wear a full suit and tie Every.Fucking.Day.

If I recall, we only had a few women in our sales office, one a salesperson and one a pre-sales technical person like me, plus a receptionist and secretary or two. The pre-sales technical person I suspected of being a closeted lesbian after I got invited to her going-away lunch (the only man to be invited, if I recall correctly) and met her very butch “friend”; she would never have dared to talk about this with her co-workers. Somewhat later I had a co-worker who was a trans woman, the first one I’d met, but this was a bit more understandable since she was a software developer and I was working at a small company again. (She’s still working in the tech field; I found her on LinkedIn when I did a search last night.)

This is all to say, that if those of you reading this on Cohost were transported back 30 years or so, I suspect you’d be far more shocked by the “backward” culture than you would be by the “backward” computing technologies.

Last days before the Web

During this general time (late 1980s, early 1990s) I also worked with a number of Unix-based workstations. I’ve written about this previously, so I’ll be brief and just say that I never want to see—let alone lift—a CRT-based workstation ever again.

This brings us to the mid-1990s, and I think an appropriate place to stop. Everything changed when the World Wide Web hit the scene, but in some senses a lot of things haven’t changed much since that time: I used Mac laptops then (Powerbook 140 and its successors), I use a Mac laptop now (MacBook Air). I used a web browser then (NCSA Mosaic and then Netscape Navigator), I use web browsers now (Safari, Firefox, and sometimes Chrome). I did occasional programming in an interpreted language then (Perl), I do occasional programming in an interpreted language now (Python). We had websites, blogs, and online forums then, we have websites, blogs, and online forums now.

There are in fact new things in computing in the 21st century: smartphones, cloud computing, maybe LLMs if they become more useful. But it’s also true that there were a lot of innovations in computing back in the day, innovations that in many cases got left by the wayside, never to be followed up or revisited. (Brett Victor hammers home this point in his presentation “The Future of Programming.”) They were interesting times to be in the computing field, and I hope this post has given you a bit of a taste for how things were.

effika (@effika) - 2023-10-28 10:26

This was very interesting! And I’m never going to be mad at a long download time again.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 10:56

Thanks for stopping by to comment! In a predominantly text-based online world, the slow speeds actually didn’t matter all that much; with software and anything else sizable you bought it in a box or downloaded it off-hours. But when the web hit and people went wild putting 1MB+ images on their sites, the pain was real.

Kay (@kaybee) - 2023-10-28 11:34

thanks for sharing, Frank! this was a fun read

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 11:49

I’m glad you enjoyed it. It’s now incumbent on you to write a post like this in 30 or 40 years :-)

vaporware (@vaporware) - 2023-10-28 13:05

oh i guess is should stop using perl huh… lol. thanks for posting!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 13:20

Heh. Well, I stopped using Perl, doesn’t mean everyone has to :-) Thanks for stopping by to comment!

Plum (@plumpan) - 2023-10-28 19:41

Thank you for sharing and my apologies for falling into the trope of “old computer stuff gets you more attention than anything else on cohost”

Blessing and a curse

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-28 22:35

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I’ll confess I was surprised by how popular this post was. I guess if you’ve lived through past eras of computing yourself it’s not nearly as interesting as it might be for those who haven’t.

Plum (@plumpan) - 2023-10-28 22:47

I can’t speak for others but I’ve found it interesting how computer stuff has changed just in the time I’ve been exposed to it, primarily in the context of building PCs at home. I find oral history stuff of old (read: beyond my time with them) computers fascinating, be it using mainframes in the 70s and 80s or people doing game dev in the late 90s and early 00s. I’ve used enough “old” computers now to also know that aside from a few very niche use cases they’re utterly useless and just take up space, at least for me!

I’ve heard similar less-nostalgic takes from those who used late 80s and early 90s home computers for music production in the early 90s, and how they’re so incredibly glad those things got replaced by something better. But I also know some big producers that weren’t around back then that now keep an old atari ST around for making tunes. Funny how that works.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

The past few days I’ve been going back and relistening to some of the early minimalist pieces I used to love. A lot of these are available on Bandcamp, so I thought I’d highlight some of my favorites here in case there’s ever a Bandcamp Friday again and you’d like to pick one or two of these up.

A word of advice: some of these pieces are very minimal, and if you’re not familiar with this style of music you might find yourself bored or annoyed or both. One of the keys to appreciating them is listening for the subtle changes and shifts that occur over the course of a piece. I find it helps to listen to them using headphones or ear buds, and to walk while you listen (I’m doing this every morning now); the slowly changing landscape matches the slowly changing music.

Also: the “low Kolmogorov complexity” thing is sort of a joke but also not: several of these pieces can be specified by a page or two of sheet music plus a few additional instructions describing how to repeat and vary the musical phrases.

So without further ado, some recommendations:

I’ll start with Philip Glass, probably the most famous of the “minimalists” as far as the general public is concerned, though by his own admission he hasn’t been a minimalist in the strict sense since 1974, when he completed Music in Twelve Parts (below).

Cluster Ensemble Plays Philip Glass. This includes five early Glass pieces from 1969 and 1970, which build from the extreme simplicity of Two Pages to the longer and more varied Music with Changing Parts.

Philip Glass: Music in Twelve Parts. This piece is from the early 1970s, and builds on the earlier pieces, in particular by introducing vocal lines using solfège (i.e., “do-re-mi” syllables.) This recording is from 1993; Bandcamp also has a more recent recording of Music in Twelve Parts from 2007, but I haven’t listened to it and can’t offer a comparison.

Next is Steve Reich, typically spoken of in the same breath as Glass; they were born only a few months apart, and Reich’s Piano Phase (below) influenced Glass’s turn to minimalism.

Piano Phase (Spotify link). Unfortunately Bandcamp doesn’t have any good recordings of this 1967 Reich piece, which features two identical piano lines going in and out of phase to interesting effect.

Music for 18 Musicians. One of the best-known recordings of this classic 1978 Reich piece, played by the Steve Reich Ensemble. Unfortunately, Bandcamp doesn’t have the version that I think is the very best, the original 1978 recording by the Steve Reich Ensemble (Spotify link).

Terry Riley and La Monte Young complete the list of the best-known minimalist composers, both born a couple of years before Reich and Glass. (And I should pause here to note what a blessing it is that all four are still alive.)

In C. Riley’s most famous piece (composed in 1964), here in a recording by the group Bang on a Can. There are a number of other recordings of this on Bandcamp, but I haven’t listened to them. The piece admits a fair bit of freedom of interpretation and instrumentation, so different versions can sound very different. I therefore encourage you to also check out the other ones.

A Rainbow in Curved Air (Spotify link). Another of Riley’s best-known pieces, here performed by Riley himself.

The Well​-​Tuned Piano in the Magenta Lights. This is a very long, slow, and contemplative piece, over six hours in length. Like Riley, La Monte Young was another notable early minimalist who predated Reich and Glass. Among other things, he’s known for having influenced John Cale of the Velvet Underground.

Now we come to some lesser known minimalist composers, one of whom (Dennis Johnson) has been claimed as the first person to pioneer the style.

An Hour for Piano. Exactly what it says on the tin: R. Andrew Lee’s performance of this 1971 Tom Johnson piece clocks in at 60 minutes to the very second. Bandcamp also has performances of this piece by Nicolas Horvath and Kai Schumacher. My introduction to the piece was the original 1974 recording (not on Bandcamp) by the composer Frederic Rzewski; at less than 55 minutes it runs a bit short but I think benefits from the slightly faster tempo.

November. This very early minimalist piece by Dennis Johnson (no relation to Tom Johnson) was composed in 1959, recorded in partial form in 1962 on cassette tape, then reconstructed over forty years later by the composer Kyle Gann. It is very contemplative and very long: over four hours in total in this recording. As with An Hour for Piano, a recording of November by Nicolas Horvath is also available on Bandcamp; it’s over seven hours in length.

Schlingen-Blängen (Spotify link). To finish off this post I thought I’d give you a break from piano music. This is a 1999 one-hour-plus organ drone piece by Charlemagne Palestine.

If you’re interested in more minimal music available on Bandcamp, see their “Masterpieces of Minimalism” article from last year, which includes several of the releases I mentioned above, and more besides. Enjoy!

Voyage (@Goyavoyage) - 2023-10-20 20:34

As a person who does math stuff that sometimes involves Kolmogorov complexity for a living, I was kind of mindblown - I did not expect to find these words here, just like that. That’s a really good title :’D

Thank you for the recommendations - I only know a little of Philip Glass’ works among all this, I think - but this makes me want to dig into more of these!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-10-20 21:07

Thanks for stopping by to comment! You see, the thing I love about cohost is that I can title a post like this and be confident that a goodly fraction of the people who follow me will get the reference. But… I could kick myself for not putting it in a tag.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I suppose I should start by confessing to an act of musical blasphemy. As those of a certain age and musical taste will recall, “Our band could be your life” is the famous first line of the song “History Lesson, Part 2” by the punk rock band Minutemen.

The contrast could not be greater with the BanG Dream! project and its MyGO!!!!! subproject: On the one hand the musically and politically uncompromising hardcore group, famous for their low-rent aesthetic (“We jam econo”), unsuccessful in their only attempt at making a more commercially accessible record (“I got it! We’ll have them write hit songs!”). On the other hand a media-mix property comprising manga, anime, live concerts, recordings, and mobile games with micro transactions, altogether yielding tens of billions of yen of annual revenue—the real “Project: Mersh.”

And yet . . .

I don’t watch many seasonal anime, and BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! was well off my radar. But as episode after episode aired, the folks in a discord I participate in kept saying good things about it, and I finally decided to take the plunge.

At first glance the show seemed unpromising: yet another variant on “cute girls doing cute things,” this time with a musical twist, starring a CGI cast distinguished mainly by their hair styles and colors, and with an in media res beginning that had me quite confused about what was going on. But I gradually caught on, became invested in the characters and their stories, was surprised to find that episode 10 was one of the best episodes of anime I’ve ever watched, and after completing the show went back and binged all 13 episodes again.

Then I thought to write down my thoughts on the show,¹ and for some reason a band came to mind that I hadn’t listened to or thought about for many years.²

Our band could be your life. It’s a line that admits of multiple interpretations, but the one intended by Mike Watt, bassist for Minutemen, was that it was directed toward younger members of the hardcore scene: that “there’s not a lot of difference between us,” that what Minutemen had done as a band they could do too, and make a life of music just as Watt and his bandmates D. Boon (guitarist) and George Hurley (drummer) had done. It’s a saying that could apply just as much to high school girls in Tokyo as it did to the punk bands of Southern California.

You could also change one of the pronouns: “your band could be your life,” coextensive and coterminous, as was true of Minutemen: the band disbanded after D. Boon’s death in an auto accident at the age of 27. That’s the meaning Tomori echoes in episode 4, as she contemplates joining another band after the implosion of CRYCHIC: “Let’s do it our whole lives.” While Soyo hesitates (“Our whole lives?”) and Anon protests (“Do you know the average lifespan?”), Taki signs on immediately (“If it’s with you, Tomori-chan, . . .”). By the end of the series, even though some members still express lingering doubts, they’ve committed to each other for the long haul: “layering lots and lots of moments like that . . . I think it will become a lifetime.”

Punk rock changed our life. Tomori is the emotional core of both MyGO!!!!! the band and MyGO!!!!! the series. After the end of CRYCHIC she retreats into her room and into her shell, obsessively writing notes to herself, trying to make sense of what her life has become and what it might yet be. Those notes become the lyrics of the songs created by the embryonic band that finally births itself as MyGO!!!!! The music itself isn’t really punk—as one redditor commented, they basically reinvented emo—but the angsty music the band creates is an perfect match for the angsty lives of the teenagers who created it, and the raw lyrics are as punk as they get.³

Tomori becomes the engine that pulls the other members of the band out of the ruts they’ve fallen into: Taki jumps at the chance to play with Tomori again, Anon wins back her self-respect after washing out of school in England, Soyo begins to move past her mourning for CRYCHIC, and Rāna finds people to take her in and provide her a (musical) home. “Changed our life,” indeed.

Me and Mike Watt, we played for years. Mike Watt and D. Boon met when they were both 13, slightly younger than the girls of MyGO!!!!!, and learned to play music together. “I wasn’t even a musician,” recalled Watt, “I just wanted to be with my friend.” They played in several bands together before forming Minutemen.

Someone once wrote that no man ever loved another man more than Mike Watt loved D. Boon. When Boon died he was grief-stricken, by his own admission not even able to listen to Minutemen’s music until many years later, when a filmmaker created a documentary about the band. Now in his sixties and still making music, every recording Watt has released since Boon’s death has been dedicated to his memory.

Those who read, watch, or play girl-centric manga, anime, or games often indulge themselves in shipping the girls together in romantic pairings. Fans of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! are no exception to that. But as someone who’s read a lot of yuri manga and watched a number of yuri and quasi-yuri anime, I detected few if any signs of deliberate “yuri baiting” in MyGO!!!!!: no flirtatious dialogue or gestures, no blushing at touching of hands or indirect kisses, no implied “doki doki.”

It’s clear though that the various members of MyGO!!!!! have closely bonded together, and hold special feelings for each other: Taki’s protectiveness toward Tomori, Tomori’s admiration of Anon, Anon and Soyo’s mutual recognition (and apparent forgiveness) of each other’s lies and scheming. If love is what we should call it (and I think we should), it’s a platonic love that—like that of Mike Watt for D. Boon—does not entail a romantic dimension, but is no less real and meaningful for that.

Real names’d be proof. Another ambiguous line, the second line of the song. The folks at Genius.com think that it means that “Minutemen are real people and not fake rock personas, hence they use their own names.” The girls of MyGO!!!!! do likewise—but not the band that appears in the final episode of the anime, the next entrants in the ongoing BanG Dream! franchise.

The members of Ave Mujica hide behind masks and stage names: “Oblivionis,” “Timoris,” and so on. Dressed in elaborate costumes (a far cry from the hastily thrown together outfits of MyGO!!!!!), the band’s conceit is that they are discarded dolls given brief life for the space of their performance. Off stage, some of the members’ motives are revealed as base and mercenary: restoring lost wealth, gaining new fans and followers.

Could there be a more apt metaphor for what the girls of BanG Dream! really are? Empty shells assembled from millions of polygons, their limbs moved by unseen hands, their lines spoken by unseen voices, their songs written and played by unseen musicians—all in the service of Bushiroad corporate OKRs.

And yet . . .

From seemingly unpromising elements in a thoroughly commercial endeavor, those who created the series BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! created a heartfelt and emotionally affecting work of art. Whether they can capture lightning in a bottle once more is an open question. Perhaps, as the last scene of episode 13 foreshadows, the sequel will simply descend into melodrama or even (as a discord acquaintance speculates) into high camp. But whatever happens, I’ll be there to watch.

[This post was originally published on Cohost. It was in response to another Cohost post by the user @things-to-read.]

Joanne McNeil comments about science fiction that “the prestige and mainstream acceptance arrived over the course of the past two decades . . . but at a cost, these new readers tend to straightjacket what’s interesting about the genre.” One symptom of that mainstream acceptance and respectability is the increasing number of science fiction authors whose work has been published in new editions by the Library of America, an organization self-described as “publishing America’s greatest writing.”

Such editions strive to make science fiction respectable partly by their cover design, which flattens the vast and wild corpus of American literature into a uniform package of restrained visual design. Note the contrast between the garish paperback originals shown above (from my own collection) and the same authors in Library of America livery.¹

Let’s start with Philip K. Dick. Dick has been a Library of America darling, with three separate collections of his novels and short stories, many of which he wrote while hopped up on amphetamines, trying to earn enough money to feed himself and make his alimony payments. As McNeil notes,

[Dick] was a serious weirdo and very frequently hilarious (and, yes, problematic). . . . But to be legible to scholars and critics, they construct a character out of his legacy: a serious man, . . . the sort of person who could show up on NPR and tell us exactly what the world is like and where it’s going.

McNeil continues, “This is happening with Octavia Butler in real time. Her daring and the moral complexity of her characters is swept away in recent assessments to create a coherent legacy—that of an earth mother tote bag caricature-icon.” Have these people even read Butler’s works? There’s some seriously fucked-up shit going on in most if not all of them.

As McNeil notes, Ursula K. Le Guin has also been welcomed into the pantheon of American literary giants; she now has six Library of America books in print (and two more available as ebooks), twice as many as Dick. She went from writing Ace paperback originals to being lauded by uber-critic Harold Bloom and appearing on a US Post Office stamp.

Finally, we now have an upcoming Library of America edition of works by Joanna Russ, another writer who got her start writing Ace paperback originals. This one I’m glad to see, as Russ is one of my favorite writers; I have over two dozen books by her or about her. I recommend checking this one out if you’ve never read any of her work. (A content warning, though: The Female Man, the 1975 feminist novel that’s her most famous work, has a pretty TERF-y scene for which Russ later publicly apologized.)

Now that science fiction has achieved a measure of respectability, McNeil speculates (albeit with little evidence) that the romance genre is a place where one might find the Octavia Butlers and J.G. Ballards of the future: “It is the one genre left that has evaded mainstream acceptance. . . . Romance writers work outside traditional measures of literary prestige.”

Russ herself wrote a romance of sorts, On Strike Against God, one of the works included in the Library of America edition. It’s one of her lesser works, mainly of interest as a semi-autobiographical account of Russ’s coming out as a lesbian, and pretty much of a piece with any of the lesbian romances you might find in the “LGBT” section of your local independent bookstore.²

So, although Russ was a leading light in the science fiction “new wave” of the 1960s and 1970s, I can’t imagine her as part of McNeil’s speculative “romance lit avant-guard [sic].” Which prompts the question: now that science fiction has been (mostly) mainstreamed, is there anyone at all writing in today’s sneered-at-by-literati romance genre whose work exhibits the loopiness of Dick, the bizarreness of Butler, the humanity of Le Guin, or the fierce intelligence of Russ? Enquiring minds want to know.

Following up on some off-the-cuff comments I made on the Okazu discord about Yuri Is My Job, here are some half-baked and incomplete thoughts trying to tie together the various strains of yuri (mainly manga, with some anime mixed in) in a semi-coherent way.

My aim is not to do a TV Tropes/“database animal”-style collection of common yuri tropes, but rather to try to account for the historical evolution of yuri in its various incarnations, and relate them to the Japanese social, cultural, economic, and political contexts in which yuri works were created. (I omit discussion of yuri outside of Japan, although it’s very interesting to see how non-Japanese yuri and “GL” content is both influenced by and differs from Japanese yuri.)

That is, it attempts to address why particular forms of yuri arose in particular environments and became popular, how they can be grouped into larger categories (e.g., how magical girl, isekai, and SF yuri like Otherside Picnic can be considered “species” within a higher-level “genus”), and how they underwent “descent with modification” and even occasionally went extinct in response to changing environments (like S literature post WW2).

I think this can help us understand what elements are essential in the evolution of particular forms of yuri and which are “accidental,” as it were. Thus, for example, one can imagine something like S literature without Christian iconography (lilies, crosses, etc.). However I don’t think one can imagine it arising or thriving without the combination of ideals of romantic love, all-girl schools, and universal early arranged marriage.

I think this also leads to interesting questions for further research. Here are two I can think of off the top of my head, to which I have only partial or fuzzy answers:

• What factors in past and present Japanese society account for the historical popularity of tales involving transformation, including transformations involving gender nonconformity?

• What factors in contemporary Japanese society account for the particular forms, plots, themes, etc., of shakaijin yuri?

“Moar reseach needed!” as they say.

Anyway, please consider this an opportunity to poke holes in my arguments and highlight important factors I totally missed. And with that, let’s get to it . . .

The five ages of yuri

I see the historical progression of yuri and its various forms as proceeding roughly as discussed below, with four major creative eras and associated literary forms, and one interregnum after World War 2:

• S literature (1900s—1930s).
• Post-war fallow period, with only isolated proto-yuri works (1950s through 1980s).
• Magical girl yuri and (later) isekai and SF yuri (1990s on).
• Class S yuri and schoolgirl yuri (2000s on), bookended by
  • Class S revival / revision: Maria Watches Over Us (circa 2000);
  • Deconstructed Class S yuri: Yuri Is My Job (2010s–2020s).
• Shakaijin yuri and queer yuri (2010s on).

Note that the three later eras are still ongoing, with works in all three categories continuing to be published.

Also note that I use the term “S literature” to refer to early 20th-century works like Hana monogatari and reserve the term “Class S” for later—and in my opinion entirely different—works like Maria Watches Over Us and its successors.

S literature

The creation of what we can consider to be proto-yuri works.

Timeframe: Early 20th century (late Meiji / Taishō / early Shōwa eras).

Key work: Nobuko Yoshiya’s Hana monogatari (with Yoshiya’s Yaneura no nishojo being a special case, escaping the bounds of typical S literature).

Central theme: Young Japanese women have deep and emotionally rewarding, but time-limited, relationships with (female) partners whom they freely choose, relationships ended by separation due to arranged marriages or death (sometimes by suicide).

Cultural influences: Christian iconography and ideals, Western ideals of romantic love.

Background context:

• Education of girls becoming an explicitly-stated part of Meiji modernization, with young middle-class women educated in mission-run girls’ schools and (later) similar state-run schools.
• Young women being near-universally compelled into arranged marriages at relatively early ages.
• Growth of a publishing industry catering to girls and young women and featuring their submitted contributions.
• Export-driven economic growth of Japan based on mass employment of working-class girls and young women in the textile industry.
• Education of middle-class girls and young women and employment of working-class girls and young women both made possible by relatively low cultural preference for female seclusion (in contrast, for example, to India and the Middle East).

Additional comments: Unlike many later “Class S” works, S literature was rooted in the lived experiences of Japanese schoolgirls, many of whom participated in S relationships at school and some of whom (including Yoshiya) wrote stories about S relationships.

The post-war fallow period

The post-WW2 decline of S literature and the rise of shōjo manga.

Timeframe: 1950s through 1970s and 1980s (mid to late Shōwa era).

Background context:

• Introduction of coeducation and promotion of romantic love by the American occupation authorities.
• Decline of arranged marriage throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
• Increasing popularity of manga and (later) anime.
• A still-entrenched patriarchical system despite occupation-sponsored measures to promote gender equality through legal and other measures.

Additional comments: In the postwar period, S literature was first replaced entirely by shōjo manga, and then shōjo manga were revolutionized by the first generation of mangaka who had grown up reading them. S works featuring relationships between girls and young women were succeeded by BL works, with early proto-BL works (e.g., The Heart of Thomas) featuring similar themes of doomed love within a restricted school environment. Works in this period thought of as yuri or proto-yuri are either similar to S and proto-BL works in their themes of doomed love (e.g., Shiroi Heya no Futari), feature themes of gender nonconformity and transformation that look forward to the next group of works (Rose of Versailles), or both (Dear Brother, Claudine).

Magical girl, isekai, and SF yuri

I treat all these as related due to the similarity of the central themes.

Timeframe: 1990s and beyond (Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

• Sailor Moon, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Puella Magi Madoka Magica (magical girl).
• I’m in Love with the Villainess, The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady, The Executioner and Her Way of Life (isekai).
• Otherside Picnic (SF).

Central theme(s): Girls and young women are transformed into new forms (magical girl yuri) or translated into another world/time/dimension (isekai and SF yuri) and thereby gain new powers, form homosocial and sometimes romantic relationships with other girls and young women, and fight various enemies.

Cultural influences: Takarazuka Revue, Princess Knight, Rose of Versailles, shōjo manga in general, tokusatsu series.

Related themes in manga and anime: cross-dressing, genderswapping.

Background context:

• Increased empowerment of girls and women in the cultural sphere but a still-entrenched patriarchal system.
• Rigidity of gender roles both in school (e.g., mandated uniforms) and afterward.

Class S and schoolgirl yuri

I consider these to be related due to the similarity of their central themes, with two sui generis works bookending the beginning of this genre and the present day.

Class S inspiration: Maria Watches Over Us

In the Heisei era new tropes arise that echo (but are only indirectly influenced by) tropes of Meiji/Taishō-era S literature.

Timeframe: Circa 2000 (Heisei era).

Central theme: A young woman-centered age-ordered hierarchy that through love and kindness supports and nurtures disparate personalities and prepares them for life.

Cultural touchstones (not necessarily direct influences): Catholic girls’ schools, S literature, Yoshiya’s comments on relationships between younger and older girls being critical to developing “a beautiful, moral, social, and non-self-centered character.”

Background context:

• Continuation of private Catholic girls’ schools as middle- and upper-class institutions.
• Japan’s “lost decade” of economic stagnation.
• Exposure of the emptiness of the promise of lifetime employment and “corporation as family” for anyone other than a minority of men.
• Increased employment and empowerment of women, but a still-entrenched patriarchal system.

Additional comments: A commenter on the original post claimed that Maria Watches Over Us was not directly influenced by S literature, but rather by the author’s experiences in an all-girl school. However, that school environment arguably was greatly influenced by the environments of the original girls’ mission schools of the Meiji and Taishō eras.

In line with the comment noted above, Maria Watches Over Us is distinguished from S literature by having a different central theme and a setting much more removed from its typical audience than S literature was from its. It is also distinguished from the works it inspired by their ignoring the moral and didactic aspects of relationships between girls and focusing much more on the emotionally affective, entertaining, and (at times) prurient aspects.

Post-Marimite Class S and schoolgirl yuri

The popularity of Maria Watches Over Us leads to the creation of a flood of works reusing and reworking its tropes to various different ends.

Timeframe: 2000s on (Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

• Strawberry Panic, Kiss and White Lily for My Dearest Girl, many others (Class S yuri).
• Whispered Words, Girl Friends, Kase-san series, many others (schoolgirl yuri).

Central themes:

• Schoolgirls enter into relationships with each other that can range from “passionate friendship” to actual sexual relations but are not explicitly lesbian (schoolgirl yuri), sometimes in a hermetically-sealed all-girl Catholic-tinged environment from which men are entirely absent and excluded (Class S yuri).

Cultural influences: Maria Watches Over Us, shōjo manga in general.

Background context:

• Increased visibility of lesbians, but primarily considered as objects for entertainment.
• Appeal of moe characters.
• Kawaii aesthetic.
• Rigidity of Japanese gender roles and social limits to accepted male behavior possibly driving male interest in yuri.
• Creation of Comic Yuri Hime and other magazines dedicated to yuri manga and related works, serving an all-genders audience.

Additional comments: I see Sweet Blue Flowers and Bloom Into You as being edge cases here: they both can be considered “schoolgirl yuri” (with Sweet Blue Flowers also reusing Class S tropes), but both prominently feature girls who are explicitly characterized as being obligate lesbians (Fumi and Sayaka respectively) and both feature adult lesbians who serve as role models and advisors to the younger girls.

Deconstructed Class S yuri: Yuri Is My Job

Yuri interrogates itself.

Timeframe: 2010s on (late Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Central theme: Young women explore themselves and their emotional and potentially romantic relationships with other young women via the performance of Class S tropes.

Cultural influences: Maria Watches Over Us, Class S yuri in general, academic and fan works of yuri criticism, maid/butler cafes, cosplay, and related phenomena.

Background context:

• Yuri as a genre mature enough (in both senses) to interrogate itself and its audience.
• Lesbians acknowledged to exist but not fully accepted into society, still excluded from marriage and other socializing institutions.
• Cosplay as identity construction.
• VNs, otome games, maid/butler cafes, etc., as structured training in social interaction for people ill-equipped by nature or experience for unscripted real-life interactions.

Shakaijin and queer yuri

Yuri grows up as an adult medium.

Timeframe: 2010s on (late Heisei and Reiwa eras), down to the present day.

Example works:

• I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up, Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, Catch These Hands (shakaijin yuri).
• Even Though We’re Adults, How Do We Relationship (queer yuri).

Central theme(s): Women enter into romantic and (sometimes) sexual relationships with each other at university or in the workplace, often explicitly identifying as lesbian and sometimes entering into marriage-like arrangements (or actual marriages in an imagined alternative/future Japan).

Cultural influences: Western and home-grown LGBTQ+ fiction and activism.

Background context:

• Increased LGBTQ+ visibility and political activism.
• Prefectural initiatives toward marriage equality thwarted by LDP intransigence at the national level.
• Increasing postponement of (heterosexual) marriage, including a substantial fraction of women experiencing “unplanned drifting into singlehood” due to ambivalence about marrying.
• Persistence of gender pay gap, driven by restriction of life-time employment to male workers as an corporate incentive to ensure their continued loyalty and hard work.
• Housing market oriented toward traditional heterosexual couples and their children, with housing for singles often of lower quality, and with some emerging options for alternative living arrangements (e.g., shared houses).
• Aging population, with an increasing number of people who will never marry.

Related themes in manga and anime: nonbinary/X-gender, asexual, transgender, and other GNC identities.

Additional comments: Like S literature, shakaijin yuri and queer yuri often reflect the lived experiences of many of their readers. Relationships sometimes seem to reflect a desire for companionship more than explicit romantic attraction, at least on the part of one of the parties, but it is common for the parties to move into together and enter into marriage-like arrangements.

Sources and further reading

Almost all of the following references are from the bibliography to my book, but I‘ve added a few new ones.

• Bacon, Alice Mabel. Japanese Girls and Women. Rev. ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919. https://​archive​.org​/details​/japanese​girls​wom​00​baco​_2. Status of girls and women in the Meiji era.
• Dollase, Hiromi Tsuchiya. Age of Shōjo: The Emergence, Evolution, and Power of Japanese Girls’ Magazine Fiction. Albany: SUNY Press, 2019. S literature and the emergence of a distinct shōjo culture in the early 20th century.
• Evans, Alice. “How Did East Asia Overtake South Asia?” The Great Gender Divergence (blog). March 13, 2021. https://​www​.draliceevans​.com​/post​/how​-did​-east​-asia​-overtake​-south​-asia. Low preference for female seclusion as driver of Japanese economic growth.
• ———. “Why are Gender Pay Gaps so Large in Japan and South Korea?” The Great Gender Divergence (blog). August 25, 2023. https://​draliceevans​.substack​.com​/p​/why​-are​-gender​-pay​-gaps​-so​-large. Gender pay gaps as a result of corporate incentives to male workers.
• Frederick, Sarah. Translator’s introduction to Yellow Rose, by Nokuko Yoshiya. Background to and discussion of one of Yoshiya’s stories from Hana monogatari.
• Friedman, Erica. By Your Side: The First 100 Years of Yuri Manga and Anime. Vista, CA: Journey Press, 2022. General history of yuri.
• Fujimoto, Yukari. “Where Is My Place in the World? Early Shōjo Manga Portrayals of Lesbianism.” Translated by Lucy Frazier. Mechademia 9 (2014), 25-42. https://​doi​.org​/10​.5749​/mech​.9​.2014​.0025. Replacement of S literature by shōjo manga.
• McLelland, Mark. Love, Sex, and Democracy in Japan during the American Occupation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Promotion of romantic love and discouragement of arranged marriages by the American occupation authorities.
• Maser, Verena. “Beautiful and Innocent: Female Same-Sex Intimacy in the Japanese Yuri Genre.” PhD diss., Universität Trier, 2015. https://​ubt​.opus​.hbz​-nrw​.de​/frontdoor​/index​/index​/docId​/695. Academic discussion of yuri and its history and themes.
• National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. “Marriage Process and Fertility of Japanese Married Couples / Attitudes toward Marriage and Family among Japanese Singles: Highlights of the Survey Results on Married Couples/Singles.” Tokyo: National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 2017. https://​www​.ipss​.go​.jp​/ps​-doukou​/e​/doukou15​/Nfs15R​_points​_eng​.pdf. Post-war decline of arranged marriage.
• Pflugfelder, Gregory M. “‘S’ Is for Sister: School Girl Intimacy and ‘Same-Sex Love’ in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” In Gendering Modern Japanese History, edited by Barbara Monoly and Kathleen Uno, 133-90. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1163​/9781684174171​_006. S relationships.
• Raymo, James M., Fumiya Uchikoshi, and Shohei Yoda. “Marriage intentions, desires, and pathways to later and less marriage in Japan.” Demographic Research 44 (January 12, 2021), 67–98. https://​doi​.org​/10​.4054​/demres​.2021​.44​.3. “Unplanned drift into singlehood.”
• Robertson, Jennifer. “The Politics of Androgyny in Japan: Sexuality and Subversion in the Theater and Beyond.” American Ethnologist 19, no. 3 (August 1992), 419-42. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1525​/ae​.1992​.19​.3​.02a00010. Takarazuka Revue and its influence.
• Ronald, Richard, and Lynne Nakano. “Single women and housing choices in urban Japan.” Gender, Place and Culture 20, no. 4 (2013), 451-469. http://​dx​.doi​.org​/10​.1080​/0966369X​.2012​.694357. Housing options for single women.
• Shamoon, Deborah. Passionate Friendship: The Aesthetics of Girls’ Culture in Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. S literature and relationships.
• Suzuki, Michiko. Becoming Modern Women: Love and Female Identity in Prewar Japanese Literature and Culture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009. S literature and relationships.
• ———. “The Translation of Edward Carpenter’s Intermediate Sex in Early Twentieth-Century Japan.” In Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters Across the Modern World, edited by Heike Bauer, 197-215. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015. Nobuko Yoshiya’s promotion of relationships between older and younger girls.
• Tsurumi, E. Patricia. Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Working-class girls and young women as drivers of Japanese economic growth.
• Welker, James. “From Women’s Liberation to Lesbian Feminism in Japan: Rezubian Feminizumu within and beyond the Ūman Ribu Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.” In Rethinking Japanese Feminisms, edited by Julia C. Bullock, Ayako Kano, and James Welker, 50-67. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2018. Origins of lesbian activism in Japan.

Thaliarchus (@thaliarchus) - 2023-09-03 10:26

Since it’s mostly implicit I might be wholly barking up the wrong tree here, but I think I’d sum that theory up as what we might call a ’strong social model’ of yuri content and theme, in which currents in Japanese society fundamentally drive what happens in yuri material and what that material thinks it is itself about.

I won’t say whether or not I think this is right, but it strikes me as at least useful, because fans (and not just fans of yuri) so often default to non-social ideas of a lineage of works which might influence each other but lack ties to their different historical moments.

I hesitate over the idea of genre maturity, which doesn’t map comfortably onto my sense of how such things work in some other areas, but I’m not nearly well-read enough to produce (say) S literature counterexamples that might trouble it.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-09-03 10:45

Thanks for stopping by to comment. To be honest, I was using the term “unified theory” very much tongue in cheek, as an ex-physics major it was irresistible. As you note, it’s really more a chronology, or I would argue, a description of yuri’s evolution (since a “chronology” could simply be “one d—-d thing after another”).

You are correct in that what I was really interested in was how the themes and core plots of yuri arise out of both Japanese society and previous works, what you call a “strong social model”. I set this against an account that focuses only on cataloging yuri tropes, or that focuses only on “texts” in isolation.’

And now that I think of it, if I were a biology major I would have called this “notes toward an evolutionary theory of yuri”, since what it really addresses is why particular forms of yuri arose in particular environments and became popular, how they can be grouped into larger categories (e.g., how magical girl, isekai, and SF yuri like Otherside Picnic can be considered species within a higher-level genus), and how they underwent “descent with modification” and even occasionally went extinct in response to changing environments (like S literature post WW2).

Still Enjoying Manga (@StillEnjoyingManga) - 2023-09-10 04:42

MariMite wasn’t inspired by S literature. Konno said in an interview with Eureka that she hadn’t heard of S until after she had created her series. She was inspired by BL LNs and real life.

To me, it’s wrong to use the label “class S” for series that focus on romance, such as StoPani and AnoKiss. While MariMite was very influential, what it mostly inspired was works catering to people who enjoyed the surface features but would have enjoyed it more if Yumi and Sachiko had become lovers. I’d go as far as to say there hasn’t been a series after MariMite that made a genuinely soeur-like relationship its focus. The close thing to the underlying substance of such a relationship is found in A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow.

Shakaijin yuri and also queer yuri was getting made before 2010. I’m not even sure it’s proportionally more common now. Love My Life started in 2000. Octave and Ohana Holoholo were among the earliest yuri manga to reach 6 volumes. Early Yuri-Hime was doing things like Conditions of Paradise and Apple Day Dream.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-09-10 10:01

Thank you for commenting! (I learn so much from these comments.)

“Maritime wasn’t inspired by S literature…” This confirms my theory that S literature went totally extinct post-war, and that the idea of same-gender relationships in a single-gender school setting was instead carried forward by BL. (But certainly S literature was rediscovered post-Marimite, e.g., we see Takako Shimura referencing Yoshiya and Hana monogatari in Aoi hana in the mid 2000s.)

“What [Marimite] mostly inspired …” The way I would put this is that the downstream influence was really from Marimite doujinshi rather than Marimite itself.

Regarding the term “Class S”, that’s a label that (Western) fans seem to apply to pretty much any work that features all-girls schools and lily-style imagery. I agree that it’s overused and misapplied, but I’m not sure the toothpaste can be put back in the tube.

“Shakaijin yuri and also queer yuri was getting made before 2010.” I was thinking of the recent trend of seeing such works get licensed English versions. But you’re absolutely correct that we see such works in the 2000s, really as far back as the 1990s (if I remember correctly).

Thanks again for stopping by!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Today is Bandcamp Friday and, as promised, I got some music from our dear friend, the medic (@listeninggarden on Cohost). I went ahead and got her whole discography, including the just-released as we observed the drifting whitecaps; if I like a musician, why not get everything they’ve recorded?

I thought at the same time I’d highlight some of the other music I’d bought on Bandcamp, in case any of you are looking for ideas on what to buy today. The following are from the last seven other artists I’ve bought music from, in reverse chronological order; I’ve bought pretty much everything these people have on Bandcamp, but for brevity’s sake I’ll only list selected albums and favorite tracks:

• Heavenly, Heavenly vs Satan. Late 1980s/early 1990s indie pop. Favorite tracks: “Shallow,” “Wish Me Gone,” and “Our Love is Heavenly.”
• TRPP, TRPP. Korean shoegaze. Favorite tracks: “Pause,” “Loss.”
• NoSo, “Kaitlin.” Korean-American singer-songwriter. Their previous album is also great.
• DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, Sabrina’s Hits #1. Outsider house. The artist I’ve listened to the most in the past two or three years. Favorite tracks (with great lo-fi YouTube videos): “Dance Now” and “Brave.”
• Rachika Nayar, fragments (expanded). I love albums of short pieces that make a statement then bow out gracefully. Favorite tracks: “parking lots,” “forgiveness,” “august 31st.”
• Tamara Valmar, “Too Many Hours.” Australian singer-songwriter. Note: their Bandcamp page is confusing, since the “Music” page shows only this release; go to their “Community” page for their other releases. (I didn’t notice this until checking links just now, so I didn’t buy anything else when I originally bought “Too Many Hours,” which is a shame because their other tracks are pretty good too. My apologies, Tamara! I’ve now remedied that oversight.) On Cohost as @tamkit.
• Polinski, Telex from MIDI City (Data111). Polinski is one-quarter of the band 65daysofstatic, one of my favorite groups. (“Remember when No Man’s Sky first came out, and it was really buggy and incomplete?” “Yeah, but the soundtrack was great!” Those guys.) On Cohost as @polinski. Favorite track: “Distant Friend I Love You.”

helleano)))r (@listeninggarden) - 2023-08-04 20:32

thank you again for your tremendous generosity and providing a spotlight for my work 💗

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-08-04 22:20

You’re quite welcome, I was happy to do it.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

. . . then Crossplay Love: Otaku x Punk might be right up your alley. If these adorable doofuses ever figure out the truth about each other—or, for that matter, about themselves—their heads might explode, but fortunately for them the mangaka seems to postponing that event indefinitely.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-08-03 18:43

Ooh thanks, ill check this out~

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

[I’m doing something a bit awkward here, reviewing a work by someone whom I follow on Cohost, and who follows me in turn. It’s overall a positive review, but I’ve tried to be objective about places where I think it comes up short.]

Anachronisms in a literary work are often held up as flaws, but they can have their own charm—for example, translations that introduce some modern vocabulary for dramatic effect (Maria Headley turning Beowulf’s initial “Hwæt!” into “Bro!”), ancient tales recast in wholly modern language (Christopher Logue’s reworking of the Iliad in War Music and All Day Permanent Red), or present-day stories that echo ancient ones (Derek Wolcott transplanting the Trojan War and the voyages of Odysseus into the Caribbean in his Omeros).

Or, in the case of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright by @Thaliarchus, stories set in the far future that reuse and evoke elements and works of the distant past.

If you were reading closely, you will have noticed that all the examples I gave were poems, and that is true of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright as well. In the past I was an avid reader of science fiction, and somewhat later became an avid reader of poetry. I would occasionally come across poems in an SF context—whether standalone efforts or embedded within a short story or novel—but I found them to be unsatisfying at best and cringeworthy at worst.¹

What then are we to make of Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright, described by its author as a “yuri mecha epic poem,” and claimed to be inspired by “[Space Runaway] Ideon, UC Gundam, the Aeneid, the Alliterative Morte Arthure, Simoun, and a good steeping in both classic mecha anime and 1300 years of English verse”?

In my case I’ve read the Iliad (multiple translations), the Odyssey, Beowulf, and parts of the Aeneid and Paradise Lost, as well as lots of poetry in English. I’ve also watched Neon Genesis Evangelion and Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, plus a few episodes of the original Gundam series. With that as background, I found Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to be an interesting, fun, and often compulsively readable attempt to tell a mecha story in verse. (I’ll leave the yuri aspect for later discussion.)

Rather than have me blather on about Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright (serious literary criticism not being my forte), it’s best to experience it for yourself. Here’s an excerpt from “Burning Foldspace,” the first section (or “book”, as the author calls it) of the poem, as our protagonist pilots her mecha (“armour”) in the vanguard of her people’s fleet:

She’d risen to the crest of one great wave
of Fold, the strange and undulating sea
between, beneath, beyond all real space,
the stretched elastic membrane of the true,
and with her armour skimming at the ridge,
her naked eye could see behind outspread
the vanguard squadrons in the trough, a-hunt
for subfold ships or other threats. Beyond,
the god was slicing down the facing slope,
advancing to conform with earlier call.

Many authors have compared outer space to an ocean, and many have imagined an alternative dimension as a way to enable faster-than-light travel. This is one of the best examples I‘ve read of combining those in a single striking image. (Incidentally, the “god” here resembles the EVAs of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the God Warriors of Nausicaä of the Valley of Wind: an enormous constructed (?) being of fearsome power and otherworldly aspect.)

Some of the lines in this first book also remind me of the demonic images in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Dante’s Inferno:

A broad, ungainly silhouette up-rose
atop the facing crest, with fighter cloud
attendant: generator vast, below
a set of edges horned and points grotesque,
the weaving gear for tying Fold to space,
with ship constructed round to bear it forth.

Note how putting the story into (competently-executed) verse elevates it from a conventional telling in prose, and the iambic pentameter (claimed as the most natural meter for English) propels the reader along.

Book I is a bravura tale of a battle between Kin-Bright’s people and an attacking fleet, in which Kin-Bright and her co-combatants are rescued by the appearance out of nowhere of a newfound ally, a nomadic group of spacefarers and their queen, fellow mecha pilot Qwerthart. If you read nothing else, read this part. If you then don’t want to read more, Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright is simply not for you.

Book II, “The Gods Depart,” I found less satisfying. This is partially because it turns away from the present to tell the backstory of how Kin-Bright’s people came to flee Tar, their native planet, and thus risks turning into an exposition dump. However, my main complaint is that it reuses a plot element that I thought clunky even in the original, made clunkier here because the author has to do extra work to paper over obvious objections and make it even superficially plausible in context.

Things pick up again in Book III, “A View from Cliffs,” which to my mind makes two key improvements over the tale told in the Iliad. First, it describes urban combat, an inherently more interesting setting than the thin strip of sand over which the Greeks and Trojans fought.

Second, the combat itself is more interesting. The dirty secret of the Iliad is that large stretches of it are relatively monotonous, like a video game with an endless series of near-identical mini-boss fights and an impoverished combat system: one warrior will take a spear in the throat, the next in the groin, and there’s not much more variety than that.²

Unlike Homer, Thaliarchus can and does take advantage of the full panoply of possible mecha weaponry, as in these lines in which Kin-Bright describes piloting her mecha “Caprice of Prickthorn” against an opponent:

Caprice descends, by fate or judgement fine,
direct onto her armour—her usual steed,
the Fane Tormenting—and I with scream
Caprice’s drills unleash: a set of four
flexible arms unrolls; they whip and catch
from different points oblique, and when
they land the drill-bits howl and shriek for falling Tar,
and inwards work. Some muffled shock I hear
on open comms before I mute the link.

Now that’s the way to do it!

Book IV, “Family Resemblance,” sees Kin-Bright’s people reach their original home system and attempt to reestablish themselves on one of its planets. Throughout Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright Thaliarchus includes various extended similes, in homage to their use in other epics. Most of these are based on nature (albeit an alien nature, as the author notes and a careful reader can discern); however, the following, one of my favorites, is from the world of technology:

At once the fleet the proffered course pursued,
and thrusters through the gathered ranks out-flared
 in groups, that each and every ship might keep
to station same when fiery burn was done;
as when a power-field that drinks from star
its myriad panels turns to heaven’s view,
when solar farmer knows the cleaning done—
the line of shifting planes as ripple runs
in half a minute’s span before the eye,
each panel straining cells the light to suck,
the energy from falling rays to wring—
just so, the nation-fleet to void-road turned.

(“Void-road” is a nice touch here, incidentally, echoing the use of “whale-road” for the ocean in Beowulf.)

A major theme of Book IV is the “first contact” between Kin-Bright’s people (not to mention Qwerthart’s) and a people living under a form of representative democracy. This is a favorite topic of mine, so I’ll briefly rant:

If we view things objectively, the heroes of epic poems—Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Beowulf, and their fellows—were basically glorified thugs running a “force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction system” (as the economist Brad deLong has characterized it). The same is true of Kin-Bright, as Thaliarchus notes in their afterword (downloadable from the main CWKB page):

Kin-Bright is not presented as a model: she is a terrible warrior-aristocrat who lords over other insiders and kills outsiders. . . . At root, she is someone who exploits the great mass of the Taru population for her own comfort and in order to kill her enemies.

We look past this, however, as we look past the thuggery of Achilles, Odysseus, et al. As Thaliarchus also notes,

Risks would lie in writing about terrible warrior-aristocrats if other ways offered themselves, but I’m not so sure that they do. A story becomes anti-egalitarian as soon as one starts handing out names.

Readers want their protagonists to have real agency, and such agency is hard to come by if the action is primarily driven by nameless bureaucrats and parliamentarians. So in reading Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright we unconsciously come to view things from the perspective of Kin-Bright and Qwerthart, thugs though they may be, and when they feel disrespected and dishonored by the treatment they receive at the hands of this new people’s government, we can’t help but share a bit of their contempt ourselves.

Of course, if Kin-Bright’s people were to act on their feelings and in future wage war on this democracy, then if history is any guide it’s quite likely that, though they might achieve some initial victories, they would ultimately be crushed in the same manner as were the Confederacy, Imperial Japan, and the Third Reich. But no one wants to read an epic poem about the military superiority of an advanced democratic society with mass conscription and a robust industrial base.

On to Book V, “Among the Tents.” In this book Kin-Bright and Qwerthart re-enact an episode from Beowulf, albeit with a happier outcome, and a coup begins to be plotted. Since Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright is still being written, Book V isn’t a conclusion but rather setting the stage for events yet to come.

How many events? The Iliad has 24 books and over 15,000 lines, while Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright in its present state is about a fifth the size in both number of books and number of lines. So depending on the author’s ambition and stamina we could be reading about the adventures of Kin-Bright and Qwerthart for some time to come—a happy prospect.

Thus far I’ve discussed Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright as epic poem and as mecha tale. Unfortunately, I think the third aspect of the work, namely yuri, is not as strong as the other two, for two reasons:

First, there hasn’t been a lot of development in the yuri relationships. Kin-Bright’s first companion is encountered only briefly in retelling the story of the fall of Tar, and unless I missed something in my reading I don’t recall her relationship with Qwerthart advancing that much since Book I. To the extent that there’s a romance embedded within the overall plot, it’s a relatively slow burn. Whether and how that changes in the upcoming books is an open question.

Second, Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright poses a puzzle: The society in which Kin-Bright lives appears, like those in many series set in the future (e.g., Dune), to be modeled on past European societies of the “dark” and “middle” ages, with future versions of peasants, clans, minor and major nobility, and monarchs. Given that, it’s difficult to imagine Kin-Bright fighting as a warrior and being (previously) married to a woman. It seems more likely that, lesbian or no, she would have been married off to a man on orders of her family’s patriarch, in order to cement some sort of political alliance. One could claim that Kin-Bright is “special,” as (say) Jeanne D’Arc was special, but that simply provokes the question, “what makes her so?”

One could also claim that this particular society is special, and in fact Thaliarchus does just that in the afterword (linked to above), providing an explanation of sorts regarding how Kin-Bright’s people view gender and sexuality. But to be candid I found it to be a bit hand-wavy, and (more important) I don’t recall that explanation being embedded in or emerging from the poem itself—which is really the only text that matters. I know this is a poem and not a treatise, but I would have liked at least a bit more comprehensive explanation rooted in the history and nature of Kin-Bright’s society.³

(To compare Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to The Witch from Mercury: the latter is set in a society that can be interpreted as a plausible evolution of our own, some centuries in the future. Given the increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals in today’s developed countries, it’s easy to believe Miorine when she tells Suletta, “that sort of thing is commonplace here.”)

My final judgment: despite the quibbles I expressed above, overall I found Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright to be an entertaining read. It’s well worth trying out if you’re a fan of epic poetry curious about how it might be used to tell a tale of the far future, or a mecha fan open to reading a genre story cast in a different form. If you’re a fan of both, you’re definitely in for a treat. On the other hand, the yuri I consider a bonus but not essential to the experience, like sprinkles on ice cream. If I were rating it on a five-star scale I’d rate it as four stars out of five: not perfect by any means, but well worth reading. I look forward to enjoying future installments.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-07 22:31

This is so awesome, thanks for sharing! VOID-ROAD

thaliarchus (@thaliarchus) - 2023-07-22 11:27

This is a really generous and thoughtful review—thank you!

Thoughtful and thought-provoking: I shall have to see if I can work up some kind of fuller exploration of some of these thoughts. But if I do, it won’t be like a defence or a rebuttal, only a further line of conversation!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-22 12:21

You’re quite welcome. I really liked the poem, so I tried to put some thought into the review.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

While out walking this morning, I decided to stop by and visit an old abandoned cemetery in the midst of my neighborhood. Like much of suburbia, the neighborhood I live in was formerly a farm, and like many farms it had a family cemetery, now gone to ruin. It was apparently vandalized sometime before or during the farm’s redevelopment in the 1950s, according to a note I found online, and I presume that all the bodies were exhumed and reinterred elsewhere. The cemetery has now been cleaned up somewhat, and boasts benches installed by local Boy Scouts.

The tomb pictured is that of Caleb T. Dorsey, one of several Calebs in the Dorsey family, once relatively prominent in the county. (Among other things, they gave their name to Dorsey’s Search Village of the Columbia new town development.) Most of the lettering on the tomb is eroded, including the dates of birth and death, but based on an online source this is probably the Caleb T. Dorsey who died in 1879 at the relatively young age of 41.

The title of this post plays off of the title of several Renaissance paintings and later works of art: Et in Arcadia Ego, or “even in Arcadia, there am I.” In other words, death and the dead can be found even in the midst of bucolic nature—or, in this case, American suburbia.

In an incredible coincidence, after deciding on the title I found out that the name of this particular farm was, in fact, “Arcadia.” Why didn’t the developer use that as the name of the newly-built neighborhood? Perhaps because, like most American suburbs, this is a place from which visible death has been banished, and a developer with a literary background did not want the combination of cemetery and name to serve as a reminder of how it could one day slip back in.

Cohost is a great example of “adding by subtracting”: enhancing the social media experience by stripping out features that are supposedly essential to social media.

• No algorithm. This reduces the serendipity of finding some interesting things published by random people, in order to make room for the serendipity of finding interesting things published or shared by the people one follows. It also limits virality—and virality is almost always bad (as in biology).
• No view counts, public or otherwise. This reduces the rewards of “posting for clout.” It also helps reduce the likelihood of a post being viewed based primarily on the number of other people who’ve already viewed it—the “famous for being famous” phenomenon that drives quasi-power-law distributions of user attention.
• No public “follower” counts. This discourages invidious comparisons of one’s self to other people and (again) reduces the rewards of posting for clout.
• No public “following” lists. This reduces a person’s vulnerability to being criticized or attacked based their following the “wrong people” (for anyone’s definition of “wrong people”).
• No public “followers” list. This also reduces a person’s vulnerability to being criticized or attacked based on their following a particular person.
• No full-text search. This reduces the vulnerability to attacks based on brute-force searches for controversial terms or topics.
• No notification on “unfollows.” This means that a person can follow someone on a whim and then stop doing so without feeling guilty.
• No built-in “direct message” function. This removes a potential channel for harassment, while still allowing a person to advertise ways for others to contact them using a mechanism of the person’s choice.

Now, this all has to do with trying to reduce certain unwanted phenomena, not eliminate them entirely. For example, half a minute’s thought supplies an easy way to bypass the lack of full-text search on Cohost itself, and someone with a “security mindset” could figure out ways to get other information not directly exposed in the Cohost UI.

But the fact that Cohost does not provide these affordances means that someone trying to find out things not found in the Cohost UI is in a sense violating norms around what it’s like to be a good Cohost user. For those inclined to respect norms, this encourages doing so. For those inclined to violate norms (or at least test their limits), this reduces the overall “attack surface” of Cohost and Cohost users.

Allowing sharing of posts and commenting on posts are interesting corner cases where there are trade-offs. Allowing sharing permits one form of virality where posts can be shared and reshared ad infinitum, which can clog timelines and (from a security point of view) allow an attacker to reconstruct parts of the Cohost social graph. But on the flip side it encourages the organic growth of one’s audience based on other people’s genuine interest in what one has to say.

Similarly, allowing comments on a post provides a channel for harassment and more benign forms of abuse (like wasting the time of the original poster and other commenters). On the other hand, it allows for direct personal feedback, among the most gratifying things for a writer (even when the feedback is not totally positive).

Overall I think Cohost @staff have struck a nice balance in terms of the features they’ve implemented. It’s one of the reasons why pretty much all of my writing is done on Cohost nowadays.

PS. I have deliberately omitted my thoughts on other features like muting, blocking, reporting, content warnings, etc., because I don’t use them and have no experience with them. Others can chime in if they’d like.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I’ve previously said my piece that people who want to write, at least in an original manner, should just try doing that instead of trying to get a large language model to do it for them. My opinion applies even more strongly to the idea of prompting LLMs to write poetry, whether that be parlor tricks like “write my VC pitch in rhyming couplets” or more serious attempts to create poems that one might confuse with poetical works of past or present.

Like a dog trained to walk on its hind legs, these attempts may entertain for a moment but offer no lasting pleasure. And as with making a dog play the biped, they’re an insult to the true nature of the entity: LLMs are best at producing an average of human creativity and commentary directed along on a dimension or dimensions of choice. However, the best poetry is singular, not collective, the product of particular moments of a particular life.

But recommending poetry and poets—that’s a different task, one where a smoothed-out average of critical consensus is exactly what one might want. That’s the task I set out for ChatGPT in its GPT-4 mode.

My question was relatively simple; note that in the interest of brevity I’ve here combined two prompts into one, and omitted the response to the first prompt:

Here is a list of my favorite poets, in alphabetical order: Frank Bidart, Emily Dickinson, Louise Glück, Adrienne Rich, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, and Walt Whitman. Please provide a summary of the types of poetry that I would probably like.

The ChatGPT response was as follows:

Based on your preference for poets such as [repeats list], it is apparent that you have an affinity for poetry that encompasses the following characteristics:

Emotional Depth and Intimacy: You seem to appreciate poetry that delves deeply into emotions and presents an intimate, personal voice. This can include confessional poetry and poems that explore psychological states.

Innovative Form and Structure: Your interest in poets like Frank Bidart and Walt Whitman suggests that you value innovation in poetic form, including free verse and experimental structures.

Intellectual and Philosophical Themes: With poets like Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson on your list, it’s evident that you enjoy poems that engage with philosophical questions, explore the nature of reality, and are intellectually stimulating.

Rich Imagery and Language: Poets like Whitman and Stevens are known for their evocative imagery and lush language. It seems you appreciate the poetic craft, where words are meticulously chosen to create vivid mental pictures.

Cultural and Mythological Allusions: Your preference for Louise Glück indicates an appreciation for poems that incorporate classical references and mythology to address contemporary themes.

Social and Political Engagement: With Adrienne Rich and Muriel Rukeyser among your favorites, it appears that poetry with social and political themes, especially those related to justice, feminism, and social change, resonate with you.

Exploration of Identity and Human Relationships: Many of the poets on your list explore complexities of identity, gender, and human relationships. It seems you appreciate poetry that delves into these aspects of human experience, including themes of loss and desire.

Historical and Documentary Elements: Your inclusion of Muriel Rukeyser suggests an interest in poetry that incorporates historical events and documents, engaging with history through a poetic lens.

Adaptation of Traditional Stories: Anne Sexton’s use of fairy tales indicates that you might enjoy poetry that reinvents or reimagines traditional stories in new and intriguing ways.

In summary, you likely appreciate poetry that is emotionally resonant, intellectually stimulating, innovative in form, rich in imagery, and engages with social, cultural, and historical themes. It seems that both the aesthetic qualities of the language and the depth of the themes are important to you.

This summary is somewhat generic, but the particular items called out are pretty spot-on: a smoothed-out critical average, but a relatively accurate one.

As a follow-on, my next prompt was to ask for a list of five other contemporary poets whose work I might like. Here’s what ChatGPT came back with:

Based on the types of poetry you appreciate, which include emotional depth, innovative forms, intellectual themes, rich imagery, social engagement, cultural allusions, and exploration of identity, here are five contemporary poets whose work you might enjoy:

Ocean Vuong: Why You Might Like Him: Ocean Vuong’s work often involves emotional depth and intimacy. His language is lush and he explores themes of identity, particularly regarding his Vietnamese-American background. His debut collection, “Night Sky with Exit Wounds,” deals with family, the legacy of war, and finding one’s place in the world.

Natalie Diaz: Why You Might Like Her: Natalie Diaz’s poetry is known for its vivid imagery and exploration of cultural identity, particularly her Mojave American and Latinx heritage. Her collection “Postcolonial Love Poem” addresses themes of love, colonialism, and environmental injustice.

Ilya Kaminsky: Why You Might Like Him: Ilya Kaminsky is a Ukrainian-American poet whose work often deals with issues of displacement, social justice, and the human capacity for resilience. His poetry collection “Deaf Republic” is noted for its narrative innovation and poignant social commentary.

Tracy K. Smith: Why You Might Like Her: Tracy K. Smith’s poetry often combines intellectual depth with emotional resonance. Her collection “Life on Mars” tackles themes ranging from science fiction and the universe to human relationships and loss, showcasing a unique blend of the cosmic and the intimate.

Danez Smith: Why You Might Like Them: Danez Smith’s work often engages with social issues such as race, gender, and sexuality. Their poems are both raw and beautifully crafted, offering innovative forms and a powerful voice. Their collection “Don’t Call Us Dead” is a remarkable exploration of what it means to be Black, queer, and HIV-positive in America.

These poets share some thematic and stylistic elements with the poets on your list, and their work encompasses a range of contemporary perspectives.

Now, this being GPT-4, I had to account for the possibility that some of the works—or even some of the poets—were made up. So I looked them all up on the Poetry Foundation website and checked out the various poems included for each of them. Here’s how I would score the recommendations, on a 1-5 star basis, where 5 stars is reserved for a poem that can pass the Emily Dickinson test:

• Ocean Vuong. 3 stars. Overall his work is solid, and he has some great lines, but no individual poems really stood out to me.

• Natalie Diaz. 4 stars. As Adrienne Rich did in a lot of her late poems, Diaz has a tendency to let politics overwhelm the personal, so that one hears not the voice of the poet but the assumed Voice of a People (or in Rich’s case, a movement). But the poems about her brother—“My Brother at 3 A.M.,” “My Brother My Wound,” and “No More Cake Here”—are outstanding.

• Ilya Kaminsky. 3 stars. I admire his ambition in Deaf Republic, but the poems included from it just don’t do it for me. I prefer the personal poems, particularly “Author’s Prayer” and “I Ask That I Do Not Die.”

• Tracy K. Smith. 4 stars. I especially like the SF-tinged poems from Life on Mars. Highlights: “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” which features a guest appearance by Charles Heston, and “Declaration,” which excerpts the Declaration of Independence to devastating effect.

• Danez Smith. 5 stars, because “acknowledgments” aced the test. Other highlights: “alternate names for black boys,” “broke n rice” (a brilliant use of a technique I hadn’t seen before), and “dogs!” (the next time they do an anthology of poetry about dogs, this deserves to be in it).

Overall this was a pretty good exercise, and I might try this exercise again with another list of poets I like. I‘ll definitely be buying a couple books of poetry off of this exercise—print, of course, the only way poetry should be read.

P.S. I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription, because I didn’t see it providing enough value to be worth the money.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

A little while ago I wrote about the Taiwanese political drama Wave Makers (now streaming on Netflix), and speculated on its impact on China. It turns out that its more immediate impact was on Taiwan itself, as the ruling Democratic Progressive Party finds itself embroiled in an ongoing scandal that echoes a #MeToo subplot in Wave Makers. (HT to James Turnbull for alerting me to this.)

When the show was originally released, President Tsai Ing-wen of the DPP tweeted, “I hope you all enjoy this peek into the workings of Taiwan’s democracy.” I guess she’s not enjoying it as much right now.

From The Information via Platformer:

Two years ago, Dmitry Shapiro and Sean Thielen were so optimistic about the booming creator economy that they pivoted their startup to a new product: a simple tool called Koji that lets influencers more easily link to their online tip jars, merch and other services in their social media bios. Sure, there were already dozens of other startups offering a similar type of product [emphasis added], but that didn’t stop the two men from raising $20 million for their company, GoMeta.

Now Shapiro and Thielen want out of the creator economy.

The link-in-bio business—Koji took a cut of transactions that occur through its product—never amounted to the big market the co-founders once thought it could be. That was in part because the target customers for Koji—the masses of creators with smaller followings than superstars like MrBeast and Emma Chamberlain—just aren’t making enough money for the startup and others like it to thrive, especially amid a downturn in advertising.

So, to recap, they raised (and probably burned through) $20M to find out what I could have told them after spending only $120: almost nobody is making any money in the “creator economy.” (And if no one is making any money, how can it possibly be an “economy”?)

But hope (or, I should say, absurd self-confidence) springs eternal:

Shapiro and Thielen have begun actively looking for a suitor to acquire Koji so they can focus on a new AI product they’re developing called YouAI.

(This started out as a comment on a post by @harphony, but it got to be so long I thought it was better to make it a standalone post.)

How to create something substantial—a work of art, a game, a novel, a nonfiction book—if you’re easily bored or find yourself struggling to complete even small projects? My personal experience is probably not that relevant to anyone else, but . . . I have written two books thus far, both completely self-formatted and self-published. I don’t have (diagnosed) ADHD, but I do get easily distracted at times and find it hard to make grand plans, much less carry them through to completion. I think the secret for me, especially for my second book, was that I (unconsciously) divided the work into multiple phases, with different tasks and motivations for each phase.

In the first phase I was just writing relatively small posts, heavy on personal opinion and light on research, with each post relatively complete in and of itself. For my second book this took the form of farting about on Tumblr, with no thought of doing anything more than that. Each post didn’t take that long to write and didn’t take much mental energy to complete, but I got a small feeling of satisfaction at having finished each one. That motivated me to keep writing more of them.

After doing that for a while, I could no longer muster the energy to keep writing more posts. But . . . I had accumulated enough material that I thought to myself, “it might be fun to make a book out of this.” So I started looking for common themes or arguments that I thought would provide an overall framework for the book, and tried to figure out what I needed to know to support those themes/arguments. The interest and enjoyment for me then became that of puzzle-solving: “why did thing X happen, and how did it influence thing Y?” I spent a lot of time doing reading and research, and much less time writing.

At the same time I started the third phase, turning the material into an actual formatted book suitable for either electronic or print distribution. I did this as a mental break from doing research and further writing: now my interest was in learning how the publishing system worked that I had decided to use, and my satisfaction came in the form of seeing my writing nicely formatted and typeset.

Eventually I was close enough to having something book-like that I was motivated to finish the job. In reading over draft chapters, I thought of additional things I wanted to write about. When I got bored of writing, I occupied myself in some tasks I didn’t need to think a lot about, most notably creating a comprehensive index of the appearances of the characters in the manga I was writing about. (After doing said index, I thought, “gee, I now have everything I need to do an analysis of the social graph of the characters,” so I extended my existing R knowledge to do that as well.) I also had fun learning new things about publishing: how to obtain an ISBN, how to register a copyrighted work, and how to license artwork and create a book cover.

I have a tendency to perfectionism, and that carried me through the remaining work of getting the book ready for publication: checking all the references and creating a complete bibliography, proofreading the text and tweaking the formatting, getting the book cover to a point where I wasn’t embarrassed to have people look at it, and validating the PDF and EPUB3 output. Again, I switched frequently between tasks as I got bored with doing one of them.

The final factor was that from the very beginning I worked hard to convince myself that I would never see any external rewards or validation from publishing the book: that no one would buy it, no one would even download it for free, and even if someone happened to read it I’d never get any feedback from them about it, good or bad. That freed me mentally to focus solely on the enjoyment that I myself would get from creating the book, and not persist in doing something I disliked in the (vain) hope of someone compensating me for it, monetarily or otherwise.

All in all, it worked out pretty well: I have something I can put on my bookshelf next to books by other people and think “that’s not too shabby, all things considered.” I sold a few copies, had a few more downloaded, and had one person tell me that they enjoyed reading it. I even had a pleasant surprise, when by a fortuitous circumstance a person came forward to create a Japanese translation—which in turn led to more fun experiences, like learning how to typeset Japanese. (It also improved the English version by having another person find typos.)

So, these are my personal conclusions—which, again, may not be applicable to anyone else—on how to create a substantial work:

• Start small, working in an opportunistic manner on things that interest you, can be done relatively quickly, and are self-contained enough to give you a sense of satisfaction that they exist once completed.
• If you get to a point where at least some of the small things look like they could go together to create something larger and more significant, think about how they might fit together, and what additional pieces might be needed to make the whole work.
• Stave off boredom by switching between different types of project work and trying things you haven’t done before but would like to learn.
• Set your expectations for the work’s reception to be extremely low. Don’t push yourself to work on it if you yourself are not getting any enjoyment from the process.

This is very much not advice for someone who wants to make a full-time living from their work—but in reality very few people will make anything at all from their personal writing, art, or related activities. My advice is rather for those like myself who will never see any significant external rewards from the things they create, but feel compelled to create them nonetheless.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

The Australian Broadcasting Company recently ran a TV episode (AD-enabled) and accompanying news article featuring Mick Curran and Jamie Teh, creators of the NVDA screen-reading software for blind and visually-impaired users of Microsoft Windows.

The “Australian Story” episode tells the human side of the story, but as someone involved with Mick and Jamie at a key point in their journey, I thought it might be of interest to at least a few people to know more of what’s behind it.

Briefly, ever since personal computers became popular there’s been a problem of how to make them accessible to people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired—a problem that became especially acute with the advent of window-based UIs like that of the Apple Macintosh or Microsoft Windows. The primary solution proposed was screen-reading software, which did exactly what its name implies: taking text displayed on the computer screen and reading it to the user in a synthesized voice.

Leaving aside the technical issues with screen-reading software products (which in the early days were essentially hacks that hooked into video driver modules), they had a fatal flaw from an economic perspective: more than most software, they took a lot of work to write and (especially) keep up to date with OS and application changes. However, that development cost had to be amortized over a relatively small target user base.

The result was that commercial screen-reading software was (and is) very expensive—so expensive that its cost is typically subsidized in one way or another. This leaves out the vast majority of people in the world who need such software but who can’t afford it themselves, and don’t have a government or an insurer that will help with the cost.

As we entered the twentieth century, multiple trends impacted the small and somewhat isolated industry creating assistive technologies, including most notably the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web and the increasing population of developers creating free and open source software. After working for a few years as a volunteer in the Mozilla project, in 2005 I went to work for the “new” Mozilla Foundation, after the bulk of the organization was split off to form the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, leaving behind a non-profit rump.¹ One of the first things brought to my attention (by Aaron Leventhal of the accessibility team at IBM) was the opportunity for the Mozilla Foundation to make a significant contribution to the future of accessibility technology, with a focus on open standards and free and open source software.

As a result of conversations with and suggestions from Aaron, the Mozilla Foundation started making some small grants in the area of web accessibility, and went public with that support in March 2006 at one of the premier conferences on assistive technology. That was a pretty successful debut for our efforts, and led to me turning my informal thoughts on what the Mozilla Foundation could do for web accessibility into a more coherent proposal.

Throughout this period we were making some relatively small grants to students and others working on various aspects of web and open source accessibility; for more details, see my reports on Mozilla Foundation grant activities for 2006 and 2007. We also had another successful appearance at the 2007 CSUN accessibility conference.

In the summer of 2007 we made an initial grant to NV Access, the newly formed nonprofit organization created to further develop the NVDA screen reader. We followed up in early 2008 with a larger grant to enable Jamie Teh to work full-time on NVDA.

I can’t remember exactly, but I think that may have been the last major accessibility work funded by the Mozilla Foundation itself. During this time the Mozilla Corporation was putting together its own accessibility team, many of whom were originally funded by the Foundation, and began funding other accessibility work as well. At the end of 2008 Microsoft also made a large grant to NV Access to allow Mick Curran to join Jamie in working on NVDA full-time.

As the last post notes, the Mozilla Foundation can thus best be thought of as providing “seed funding” for NVDA and related accessibility development. It was an investment that paid off handsomely: here we are fifteen years later and NVDA is the number two screenreader in the world, supports a host of different languages, and is used by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom would never have been able to access the Internet or use PC applications had NVDA not been created.²

So, if you have the time, please consider watching the show about Mick’s and Jamie’s lives and work. If you don’t have the time, but do have the money, please consider donating to NV Access. (Note that the suggested amounts are in Australian dollars, which are currently worth about two-thirds of US dollars.) And if you have neither but are still on Twitter, please consider sharing some of their tweets. Thanks!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Before I found Cohost, I posted a fair amount to a pseudonymous 2-follower account on Twitter; a lot of my Cohost posts started out there. Here’s another one of these: some brief thoughts on the final scene in Alice Wu’s film The Half of It, thoughts originally inspired by a thread by lourdeslasala on symbolism in the film.

My bringing it up now was due to seeing a post by @MayaGay mentioning The Half of It in passing, along with Wu’s earlier film Saving Face, which I hadn’t seen. I quickly remedied that lack (Saving Face is streaming on Prime Video), and then watched The Half of It again on Netflix, because I dearly love the film and wanted to write about it again.

NOTE: The following contains spoilers for The Half of It, and assumes that you know the overall plot and who the main characters are.

In the penultimate scene of The Half of It (above), Ellie and Aster face each other, separated by a double yellow line. As lourdeslasala notes, it symbolizes the boundaries between the two, with Ellie staying in her “comfort zone,” but then breaking out of it to cross the line, talk to Aster, and then kiss her.

The final scene is between Ellie and Paul. It starts with another shot with a similar perspective, but a key difference. In the previous scene Ellie and Aster were situated similarly to each other, in positions of relative equality within the shot itself, and also in a wider context: Ellie going off to Grinnell College, and Aster looking to leave Squahamish and go to art school.

But in this shot there’s no such equality. On one side is the train that will take Ellie away to Grinnell. On the other is the town in which Paul will remain, probably for the rest of his life, working in and then presumably inheriting the family business.

We next see Paul and Ellie’s parting conversation. Recall the earlier discussion between Paul and Ellie regarding “the look”: when you know someone wants to be kissed, and you should go ahead and kiss them—as indeed Ellie did to Aster in the previous scene. That was the third kiss in the film, and the only true one, the previous two having been given under false pretenses: Aster looking at Paul thinking that he was the person behind the letters Ellie wrote for him, and Ellie apparently looking at Paul but (it’s implied) looking past him at Aster.

But this scene is different. Here the look is not of two people who want to kiss, but two people who want to—need to—hug and be hugged. So why don’t they?

Because something is blocking them. That obstacle is literally a cooler, containing food prepared for Ellie’s journey. But as a metaphor it’s all the things that might act as barriers to Paul and Ellie’s friendship: interests and intellect, gender and sexuality, or even (as Alice Wu notes in an NPR interview) the jealousy of their partners, who might resent the level of intimacy Ellie and Paul have.

Or, at least, the intimacy they had. Here neither Ellie nor Paul can find the words they seem to want to say, and are blocked from the hugs they might want to give and receive. So, instead, Ellie resorts to sending Paul a text containing (only) emojis. It’s a harbinger of how their relationship may be in future: although they may meet again, they may never again experience the closeness they have right now, their future interactions mediated by distance and differing experiences, as it’s here mediated by technology.

But even in the face of all those barriers to their friendship, Paul can’t help chasing Ellie’s train, echoing a scene from the film Ek Villain that they had watched earlier—a scene that Ellie had scoffed at. Ellie again scoffs at the gesture, but she’s fighting back tears as she does. It’s a platonic parallel to the romantic moment between Ellie and Aster, and to my mind a perfect ending to a beautiful film. Or, as Ellie’s father would say as he pointed to his favorite movie scenes, “Best part.”

Ramona (@MayaGay) - 2023-06-09 18:50

Wonderful analysis!!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-06-09 18:54

Thanks! I really liked Saving Face, but The Half of It holds a special place in my heart. I wish for more Alice Wu films…

Ramona (@MayaGay) - 2023-06-09 18:59

So do I, I think she is such a talent! Here is hoping she is given many more chances to show how much she can do.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

If you follow me on Twitter you may have noticed that I’m a major fan of the UK house producer DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. This is a charming video (by PAHC) set to “Charmed Life,” the climactic track of DJ Sabrina’s 3-hour-plus magnum opus, Charmed. Charming all around.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

For some reason (which I now can’t remember) the past two or three weeks I’ve been obsessively (re)listening to the Smiths, in particular to The Smiths: Best playlist on Spotify. It’s an “artist playlist,” which apparently means it was endorsed by the Smiths themselves, or at least some of them, and is not to be confused with the Best: I and Best: II compilation albums. (There’s an almost endless string of repackagings of Smiths songs.)

It struck me that the Smiths recorded a lot of great songs, and a few days ago I started drafting a post listing my favorites. Then today came the sad news (tweeted out by Johnny Marr) of the death of Andy Rourke, bassist for the Smiths, and I felt an increased urgency to post this.

The Smiths recorded over a hundred songs (see Complete, which has 106 songs and is apparently still not actually complete), but I’ll confine myself to the 40 songs on the Best playlist. (As a comparison, the Best: I and Best: II albums had 28 songs in total.)

I divide these roughly into three categories:

• Great songs, period: the cream of the crop
• Great Smiths songs: excellent songs, but more for Smiths fans
• Smiths songs: yeah, the Smiths recorded these

The following are listed in the order they appear on the Best playlist, which in my opinion is not that well sequenced.

Great songs, period

• “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”
• “How Soon Is Now”
• “Bigmouth Strikes Again”
• “Panic”
• “Cemetry Gates”
• “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”
• “Ask”
• “The Queen is Dead”

Great Smiths songs

• “Hand in Glove”
• “Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want”
• “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”
• “This Charming Man”
• “Back to the Old House”
• “This Night Has Opened My Eyes”
• “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before”
• “What Difference Does It Make?”
• “Still Ill”
• “Girlfriend in a Coma”
• “William, It Was Really Nothing”
• “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others”
• “Half a Person”
• “Unloveable”
• “Girl Afraid”
• “Reel Around the Fountain”
• “The Headmaster Ritual”
• “I Want the One I Can’t Have”
• “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”
• “Barbarism Begins at Home”

Smiths songs

• “I Know It’s Over”
• “Well I Wonder”
• “Asleep”
• “Pretty Girls Make Graves”
• “Frankly, Mr. Shankly”
• “I Don’t Owe You Anything”
• “You’ve Got Everything Now”
• “I Won’t Share You”
• “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”
• “A Rush and a Push and the Land Is Ours”
• “Never Had No One Ever”
• “I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish”

Other great Smiths songs

I would add the following songs to the middle section of “great Smiths songs.” In my opinion these should have been included on the “Best” playlist in place of various inferior songs from Strangeways, Here We Come (the weakest Smiths album, in my opinion):

• “Sheila Take a Bow”
• “Shoplifters of the World Unite”
• “Rubber Ring”

The essential Smiths experience

If you are new to the Smiths and would prefer a more “organic” introduction, I suggest that you skip any “best of” compilations and instead listen to the following two albums:

• The Queen Is Dead. The Smiths’ best studio album, recorded at the height of their powers.
• Louder Than Bombs. The Smiths’ best compilation album, it’s very well sequenced, especially toward the end. (“Asleep” is merely an OK song on its own, but it’s a great closer.)

If you don’t like the Smiths after that then they’re just not for you.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

A few weeks ago I watched the 2020 film Minari, about the struggles of a Korean-American family that moves to rural Arkansas in the hope (at least, the father’s hope) of starting a farm to grow vegetables for a growing US population of Korean immigrants. The area where I live is home to a large Korean-American population so I had an inherent interest in the film, and it’s also been very well-reviewed.

In short, I saw the film, I really liked the film, and (as I often do) I wanted to read more about the film. The most interesting tidbit I found was that Lee Isaac Chung, the writer and director of Minari, was inspired to make the film by reading the 1918 novel My Ántonia (accent on the first syllable, please) by Willa Cather, a novel with a setting and plot that reminded Chung of his own childhood growing up on a farm in Arkansas.

I’d always meant to read something by Willa Cather, so I decided to remedy my lack by downloading a (public domain) copy of My Ántonia. I’m out of practice reading fiction, but I couldn’t stop reading the novel once I started it; I highly recommend it as well. And, as I also often do, I have thoughts (with minor spoilers for the film and novel) . . . .

The othered

Let’s start with the most notable controversy about Minari, the (universally ridiculed) decision to exclude it from consideration as a Golden Globes “Best Picture” nominee on the grounds that most of the dialogue was in Korean. In an interesting article on the film, subtitled “Why Do We Still See [Minari] As Foreign,” Alyssa Songsiridej claims that we don’t see My Ántonia as an “immigrant story” because “[Cather] writes about European immigrants, who are not othered in American culture.”

With all due respect, I think this is a misplaced criticism. First, if My Ántonia were in fact made into a film (as Chung initially thought of doing), a faithful adaptation would have much of the dialogue be in Czech—the titular Ántonia having migrated as a child from Bohemia, in the modern-day Czech Republic. Since it’s a novel, not a film, we miss the immediate experience of actually hearing the Czech language—or, for that matter, the Swedish, Norwegian, and Russian (or is it Ukrainian?) spoken by other characters in the novel.

Second, European immigrants were very much “othered” by the dominant American culture at the time; this is reflected in the novel, as Songsiridej acknowledges: “My Ántonia is actually considerably more concerned with xenophobia and culture clash than Minari.” “Othering” new immigrants is a consistent theme in American history from before the Revolution. To give but one example, Benjamin Franklin complained about German immigrants, asking “why should the Palatine boors [Germans] be suffered to swarm into our Settlements” and speculating that they “will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.”¹

As Songsiridej also notes, in Cather’s novel “[Ántonia] and the other foreign-born ‘hired girls’ are viewed as exotic [and] potentially dangerous.” (To be more specific, the danger is presented as specifically sexual—that the “exotic” immigrant girls would seduce native-born men.) Remember, we’re talking about Swedes and Norwegians here, people who (along with Germans) present-day white supremacists would hail as being of true “Aryan” stock. But, again, Franklin in particular did not include Swedes or Germans—or, for that matter, the French, Spaniards, Italians, or Russians—among “the Number of purely white People in the World.”

Men, women, and children

Another interesting point of comparison between Minari and My Ántonia is in gender roles. Minari is based on Lee Isaac Chung’s memories of his own family, with the character of the young boy David in the film modeled on himself, and David’s father Jacob based on Chung’s father.² In the film, Jacob is portrayed as motivated by a desire to provide for his family and build a better life for them, and Jacob passes this lesson down to David. In contrast David’s sister Anne is relatively undeveloped as a character, as is her relationship with her mother Monica.

In My Ántonia, on the other hand, women are very much at the forefront. The book’s narrator, Jim Burden, a young boy who moves to Nebraska at the age of 9 and meets 12-year-old Ántonia, is clearly a stand-in for Cather.³ Ántonia herself is based on Annie Sadilek, who was three years or so older than Cather, and who immigrated to the US at the same time Cather’s family moved from Virginia to Nebraska. I defy anyone to doubt that Cather was a lesbian after reading My Ántonia: much of the novel reads as a love letter from Jim/Willa to Ántonia/Annie.

The women of My Antonia almost leap from the page in their vitality, in particular Lena Lingard, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants who dominates the central section of the book. Some of the women get married, settle down, and have children. Others remain single and independent, making a living in fields as disparate as dressmaking and gold mining.

Politics and patriotism

A third aspect of both Minari and My Ántonia that I find interesting is their political stances—or rather, their apparent lack of them. As noted above, Minari is relatively silent regarding any difficulties caused by discrimination against Korean immigrants; the conflict and drama in the film are instead driven by the difficulty of farming and the growing estrangement between Jacob and Monica. It is similarly silent on the fact that Jacob and Monica would have been prohibited from immigrating to the US less than twenty years before the time of the film, and only briefly alludes to the political situation in South Korea that presumably led them to emigrate.⁴

My Ántonia is set in a time just after the conclusion of the main events of the “Indian Wars” (including the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876), and just before the rise of the populist movement in the Great Plains, which would culminate in the 1896 Presidential campaign of Nebraska congressman William Jennings Bryan. However, these events go almost totally unremarked in Cather’s novel.

I suspect that this lack of historical and political context is in large part because the primary events of both My Ántonia and Minari are viewed through a child’s eyes, explicitly so in the former and implicitly so in the latter—although My Ántonia extends through the college years of its narrator, and concludes with a final scene of him as an adult. To a child the world consists of their immediate family and environs, and events from afar and from before their birth affect them only if they impact that small world in which they live.

A final aspect of both Minari and My Ántonia is an understated patriotism that runs through both the film and the novel. (The imagery of the American flag in the Minari publicity shot above is not characteristic of the film itself; I suspect it may have been created to help convince audiences that, yes, this is really a movie about Americans.)

That patriotism I would characterize as a “patriotism of the land.” The land of My Ántonia and Minari is the site of past conflict (both between indigenous peoples and between those peoples and the newly-arrived settlers⁵), present beauty (gloriously depicted in the scenes of the film and the descriptions of the novel), and future possibilities.

Ethno-nationalists and white supremacists sneer at the idea of “magic dirt” with the power to convert non-Anglo immigrants into full-fledged Americans after they arrive on US soil. Yet in a way that is exactly what happens in both Minari and My Ántonia: the struggles of families to survive tie them more tightly to the land that they farm and the country of which it is part, a country they see as giving them new opportunities to make a better life for themselves and their children. The novel and the film were created almost a century apart, but in their essence are both very “American” stories, in the best sense of that term.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-05-17 10:43

Its fascinating hearing that remark fron Franklin- i was very aware of various groups like the irish not being considered white, but wasnt aware how narrow the perception of that was a mere 100 years prior. I feel like reactionary bullshit ideas always get more ridiculous and incoherent the further back you go, and their modern versions trotted out by conservatives, fascists, etc are essentially repeatedly cleaned up and rationalized versions of even more insane nonsense from the past, yet paired with posturing about coherent consistent tradition.

Its really cool that the women in Antonia are depicted in such a varied and strong way, for a novel that old. I know feminism was active then, but still.

With the criticism of the Golden Globes, i feel like your counterpoint partially falls flat because theres a difference between “whos othered now” vs “whos othered back then”. The point about medium seems relevant though.

I feel like theres a lot more to that notion about struggles and ties to the land/culture/etc - fundamental psychological and sociological and human things, but not able to articulate those loose notions right now..

Also, Its nice to see you post again!

Lastly, did you happen to read my recent longer posts - one about gnc people and the one about ww2? Would love to hear any thoughts you have on those, including what was the least known part about the former or if a particular mention in the latter struck you.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-05-17 17:30

Thanks for your comment! I always love hearing your thoughts. A couple quick comments in return:

On “othering”, maybe I didn’t express it well, but I guess my point was/is that today we don’t consider the story of My Ántonia to be “foreign” to us, but I’m not sure that would have been the case in 1918. After all, that was a time of very strong anti-immigrant sentiment, directed not only at Asian immigrants but also against those from Eastern Europe. So I was really making the analogy Minari : audience of 2021 :: My Ántonia : audience of 1918 in terms of their respective receptions. (But, really, before commenting further I should go back and see what sort of reception My Ántonia actually had from readers and reviewers in 1918. I may be totally wrong in what I wrote there and here.)

On the GNC post, I thought it was quite interesting, but as a non-GNC person myself I felt uncomfortable commenting on it. But I’ll go back and read both it and the WW2 post again and see if I have anything useful/interesting to add.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-05-17 17:47

Well, the criticism seemed to be about both Minaria and Antonia(and other stories about european immigrants) today, not about each in their release time. Maybe im misunderstanding something about us talking past each other, but perhaps a more relevant phrasing may be “why are stories about asian immigrants still ‘foreign’ while stories about later european immigrants have ceased to be foreign?” The timing analogy is generally useful, but I dont think its a rebuttal to the current-time-focused point in the article about the golden globes.

Im glad the GNC post was quite interesting! I understand feeling uncomfortable commenting on that for that type of reason, although I am curious as to the degree of knowledge/understanding people are at before they read articles like that(and theres nothing wrong or offensive with simply not knowing/understanding of course). When you see a varied series of somewhat infrequent misconceptions and then try to clarify a general set of things to counter that, it can be hard to know what’s actually new information to an average reader, including in various subaudiences of the readership. But if also you dont really have anything to say, thats fine too ofc.~

This to me is the key sentence: “in other words, we don’t simply see a kusoge as a commodity but as an array of humans and their social relations that culminated into this product.” The folks at 65DaysofStatic have said similar things. This to me leads to at least two conclusions.

First, non-mass-appeal art is important to you to the extent that you know the people making it and feel part of a community with them, or at least a kinship with them. I don’t do games, but I do listen to music. I may purchase music by a person X I follow on cohost (or who’s rechosted by people I follow), knowing full well that there may be dozens if not hundred of pieces similar in style and quality available on Bandcamp or wherever. But I don’t know the people who made those, and I do know X and the other people who know X.

Second, we don’t need to de-commodify the entire economy to allow non-mass-appeal art to flourish (bread is still a commodity, as are iPhones), or even the economy of mass-appeal art. But we do need to provide people a way to survive and make a living, at least of sorts, when they’re not making art.

I think of my favorite go-to example here, the people who created American modernist poetry in the early 20th century. They weren’t MFAs or state-sponsored writers, they were bank clerks and insurance executives and physicians and librarians and people who had some money from family or inheritances. But they were also, and more importantly poets, and part of a community of poets, a community whose works ultimately became important to people other than themselves. But their poetry was first and foremost important to them, and if that had not been the case it would not have been important to anyone else.

What then is the role of the critic? I leave that as an exercise for the reader, but I think kastelpls has provided a large part of the answer.

Now that I’m spending most of my reading and almost all of my writing time on a site (Cohost, of course) that doesn’t have an algorithmic-driven recommendation system, I tend to forget how omnipresent they are. I’ve been doing some reading up lately on LLM-generated content and social network amplification, and came across this essay on “Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms.” I think it wimps out a bit in its “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” conclusion, but overall it’s one of the more useful explanations I’ve seen regarding how recommendation algorithms work—or don’t work as the case may be. (It also has a good discussion of the sheer randomness in what “goes viral”, and how “shadowbanning” and related practices can inhibit virality.)

Spunney (@Spunney) - 2023-03-22 12:05

I always found it weird when people were talking about the Twitter algorithm in particular as if there isn’t a clearly labeled button at the top of the timeline that disables it. For the longest time I had literally no idea what anyone was talking about when they mentioned the “Twitter algorithm”. I guess what shows up on the trending tab and whatever is algorithm driven but, unless you’re trying to go viral, I don’t see how this effects anyone on a personal level.

But I don’t really know what other social media sites are like, I’ve never used them…

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-03-23 17:47

Thanks for the comment! My apologies for the delay in acknowledging it.

There have apparently been attempts by Twitter to make the “For You” timeline the default, or to switch back to it every time you came back to Twitter, which pissed off a lot of people. I think now if you set the timeline to “Following” then it will stay that way (at least on the iOS app).

I recently had a Twitter thread go semi-viral (just over 500 retweets), but I don’t know if it was promoted by the algorithm(s) into peoples’ “For you” feeds, or if people found it by searching for the (commonly-used) tags I included. (I don’t subscribe to Twitter Blue, so I’m pretty sure there wasn’t any artificial boosting of the thread.)

If you pay any attention at all to AI-related news, you know that today was the day that OpenAI.com released GPT-4, the newest version of its large language model (LLM), and made it available through the paid version of its ChatGPT web-based chatbot. I had already tried out the free version of ChatGPT (based on the previous GPT-3 LLM) and decided it was worth spending $20 for the paid version (ChatGPT Plus) to find out what all the hype was about.

Here are a few of my hype-free thoughts:

First, a minor comment: I really wish that people demoing LLMs would stop doing things like telling the LLM to make all words in the response start with the same letter, or having it produce the response in rhymed verse—both examples from the GPT-4 developer livestream today. These feel like fancy parlor tricks of minimal relevance for how LLMs might actually be used in real life, like showing off a border collie by having it dance on its hind legs.

Second, the most interesting application of GPT-4 I saw today was the Be My Eyes Virtual Volunteer, an app that leverages the new ability of GPT-4 to analyze images and provide a text description of what’s in them. The original Be My Eyes app allowed blind or otherwise visually impaired users to call upon the help of sighted human volunteers: the user would point their smartphone at something and the human volunteer would describe what was shown on camera. The Virtual Volunteer, as its name implies, substitutes GPT-4 for a human.

(Incidentally, this app illustrates an interesting point about how LLM-enabled apps will be tailored to the needs and expectations of users. In the brief demo video of Virtual Volunteer, the audio produced by the app seems very robotic and difficult to understand. This is a feature, not a bug. Experienced users of screen reader software can comprehend computer-generated text-to-speech “spoken” at speeds that would astound the typical sighted person, and in this context having the computer voices sound “natural” is a secondary consideration at best.)

Third, I tried out ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4 for what I would likely use it for, namely helping me write online essays like this one, and gave it a number of example tasks. (I’m skipping including the GPT-4 responses for reasons of length. If there’s real interest I’ll post the entire set of transcripts somewhere.)

In the first task I copied in the entire text of my post “I fought the power law and the power law won” and asked for it to be summarized. The resulting three-paragraph summary was pretty good, hitting all the main points I made. I could definitely see using this feature of GPT-4 as a way to summarize other people’s essays and news stories to see if it’s worth my reading them in full.

In the second task I asked the LLM to explain the meaning of the analogy “AI is to the world of ideas as index funds were to investing,” the topic of another of my posts. Here GPT-4 didn’t do much better than GPT-3 in explaining the analogy at more than a surface level.

I also tried asking about the meaning of a metaphor I was planning to feature in a future post. Here GPT-4 actually produced some useful and interesting meanings, but again not the particular meaning I intended.

As a final task I asked GPT-4 to explain the concept of a “fixation index,” a measure of distance between populations originally used in genetics and then adapted in the study of cultural evolution (a recent interest of mine). Here GPT-4 did very well, producing definitions of the fixation index that made sense in both contexts, and detailed explanations of how the measure might be calculated in both contexts.

But (and there’s often a “but” when it comes to LLMs), I can’t really use the GPT-4 output to help me learn about the concept, because based on others’ experiences with GPT-3 and similar LLMs I can’t trust that the output from GPT-4 is completely correct. I’d have to go back to the original source material and look up definitions and explanations there, and do some work to convince myself that the original source’s explanation matches what GPT-4 produced. But if I’m doing all that, why would I bother with GPT-4?

Some final thoughts:

Given the contempt heaped upon the heads of humanities majors by those promoting the “shape rotators vs. wordcels” meme, I find it amusing that GPT-4 does quite well on various physics and math tests and tests like the bar exam that test a combination of rote knowledge plus deductive ability, but has difficulties with advanced English language and literature tests. One speculation I’ve seen is that current LLMs are not that great at reasoning with abstract and fuzzy concepts, which sounds plausible based on my own experience.

But of course it’s possible that future versions of LLM, be it GPT-5 or others, will overcome this lack, which will only intensify further the confident, even giddy, pronouncements that LLMs will replace humans in most if not all professions involving mental activities. Certainly corporate executives across the business landscape will attempt to do just that—nobody ever got fired for pursuing reductions in labor costs as the primary if not only path to profitability—but how that scenario plays out remains to be seen.

As for me, I’ll pay my $20 a month for at least a little while longer to see how GPT-4 might help improve my own writing and research. But based on my experience thus far I suspect I may end up saving the money and using it either for more specialized LLM-enabled tools, or just buying more volumes of manga.

AndreL (@AndreL) - 2023-03-15 13:29

phind.com has an LLM which cites its sources. The catch is that it also generates plausible nonsense, complete with plausible citations.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Today is the one-year anniversary of my publishing my book That Type of Girl: Notes on Takako Shimura’s Sweet Blue Flowers. As it happened, about a month ago someone who read the book sent me a nice note about it. That prompted me in turn to revisit the book and reread several chapters in it, and in the course of doing that I discovered one typographical error in the English edition and a missing footnote in both the English and Japanese editions. (Hence the title of this post.)

Fortunately I still had about three days left on the license for the software I used to create the print versions, so I was able to make the changes and push the revised versions out to my own web site and to the various online bookstores I used for commercial distribution. I suspect that these will be the final changes I make, and now that it’s been a year since publication I thought it was also a good time to post my final thoughts on the book itself and the process of creating it. Even if you’re not interested in this particular book, if you’ve ever thought of writing and self-publishing a book yourself then this may be of interest.

Why write a book?

Writing a book takes an order of magnitude or more time than writing a blog post, or even a series of blog posts. So anyone thinking about doing it needs to answer the question, “why do I want to do this?” In my case I had already done a series of Tumblr posts about Sweet Blue Flowers, so I had to justify to myself why I should put in the effort to turn it into an actual book.

The first reason is that I wanted to explore in more depth some of the questions that came to my mind while writing my Tumblr posts. Some of these were questions about the historical background of the yuri genre: Why were so-called “S” relationships between schoolgirls, and “S” literature about such relationships, so prevalent in Japan in the first half of the twentieth century? Why did those relationships and that literature almost completely disappear in the second half of the twentieth century? And why did “S” literature seemingly reappear in the early twenty-first century in the form of Maria Watches Over Us and its successors, including Sweet Blue Flowers?

Others were questions about Sweet Blue Flowers itself: Why does it start the way it does? Why do Fumi and Akira act the way they do? What about Yasuko and Kyoko? Is there any special significance to the plays that Shimura features in the various school years and, if so, what is it? And my personal favorite: Why are there so many scenes relating to urination and incontinence?

I was able to come up with plausible (at least to me) answers to almost all of my questions. In some cases, as with questions about the rise and fall of S literature, I rediscovered or recapitulated answers already put forth by academics (including Yukari Fujimoto in particular), but I tried to add some additional context. In other cases, including questions about Sweet Blue Flowers, I haven’t seen my proposed answers echoed anywhere else—which of course could equally mean that I’m clever or a fool. I won’t comment any more here on my proposed answers; you can read the book if you’re curious.

The second reason I decide to write a book was because I wanted to explore the process of creating and publishing a book in more depth. I had previously written and published a book of purely local interest, but only as an ebook. I wanted to create an actual paperback book with better typography and cover art, and go through as many of the steps of “real” publishing that I could, within the constraints of my time and budget.

Note that I did not write the book expecting anyone to read it, much less pay me money for it. I wrote it for myself, and anything beyond that is a bonus.

Researching and writing the book

Prior to writing the book I was generally familiar with the history of the yuri genre and its “S” literature predecessor, but had huge gaps in my knowledge about Japanese history and society relevant to that history. And, of course, I didn’t then and still don’t know Japanese at all.

Fortunately there is a small but fairly active group of academics who have published extensively in English on topics relevant to the book, and I took as much advantage of their expertise as I could. I now have more than twenty books on my bookshelf that I bought in the course of researching my own book, and several more that I bought in Kindle format. Other books had open access copies available, made available either by the authors or the publishers, and a few were available on the Internet Archive for temporary borrowing.

Academic papers were a separate issue. A lot of papers are paywalled and are available from journal publishers only at extortionate rates ($20 per paper or even more). (It’s often cheaper to buy a book that’s an edited collection of papers, even if only a couple of papers are of interest.) Fortunately, as with books, many authors and even some publishers make copies available at no charge. Some judicious Internet searching in various places found the few remaining ones I needed.

When it came to the actual writing of the book I wanted it to adhere as closely as possible to academic conventions, including doing formal citations and a full bibliography. My guide to doing that was the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition), which I highly recommend. It’s available online as a subscription service, but I recommend getting the hardcover book; it’s handier to use if you consult it often, and you can sometimes find it available at 50% off during sales at the publisher’s website.

The good: The Internet and all the services it supports (Google Scholar and general Internet search engines, the Internet Archive, Amazon and Abebooks, etc.) put doing research like this within reach of the typical interested person, especially if you’re willing to spend a little money. The bad: academic publishing is a rip-off, and it’s no wonder that many people (including academics themselves) are turning to pirate sites to get copies of papers.

Formatting and publishing the book

As I noted previously, my first book was published as an ebook only. Because I wanted to learn how ebooks worked at a low level, I actually hand-coded the entire book in (X)HTML. That was not an option for this book, since I also wanted to create a PDF version that I could use to publish a paperback version. But I still wanted to work with a text-based format, so I could put the book under version control in a source repository, as opposed to creating Microsoft Word documents—the typical format used by self-publishers today.

Fortunately I was able to find an almost free solution in the Electric Book software suite, built on a variety of free and open source software products. The only software I had to pay for was the Prince XML software used to create the PDF version, and the image processing software I used for the cover art (see below).

The Electric Book software enabled me to write in Markdown format, which I also use for my blog, while still having fairly tight control over the formatting of the book in both PDF and EPUB3 versions (although for the most part I went with the default look). I was also able to leverage a set of high-quality typefaces available for download at no charge. The only downside is that the software was (and presumably still is) somewhat fragile, being based on an older version of Jekyll and various node.js modules, and requiring me to run an outdated version of Ubuntu.

The cover art proved to be a harder challenge. I had early on decided that I was not going to use any of Takako Shimura’s art either within the book itself or on the cover. I thought it would be difficult to impossible to get official permission to use it, and I didn’t want to risk a copyright dispute if I didn’t have such permission.

As a result I went looking for Creative Commons-licensed or public domain art that I could use for a cover. I went through at least three different cover designs (all featuring blue flowers of one sort or another) before concluding that none of them worked for me. I finally went to a commercial service (iStock, by Getty Images) and found a very nice piece of art that I could license for commercial use at a very reasonable price ($12). (The fact that it was a watercolor illustration was an unexpected bonus, since Shimura herself typically uses watercolor art in her own book covers.)

I used Pixelmator Pro to create the cover art itself, including the back cover, which I needed for the print version. The one major issue I had was with handling the colors for the print copy. My first attempt looked like crap when I had a proof copy printed, so I spent some time reading about CMYK colors (used for printing) vs. RGB colors (for online use), and ended up renting a copy of Adobe Photoshop for a couple of months in order to do the needed color corrections and conversions.

Between the book files themselves (PDF and EPUB3) and the cover art, I had almost everything I needed to publish. I decided to take the extra step of paying for ISBN numbers for myself, so that I could publish the book on platforms other than Amazon. (Amazon will assign you a so-called ASIN, but it’s usable only for Amazon itself.) I used Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to publish the Kindle and paperback versions, and the Draft2Digital service to get distribution of the ebook version on all other platforms (Apple Books, B&N, Kobo, etc.)

The good: The PDF version of the book came out looking well in terms of cover art, typography, and general formatting, and the quality of the print-on-demand paperbacks produced by Amazon was pretty high—not a whole lot of difference from a typical trade paperback. The bad: I’d probably do it again just on general principle (to oppose the Amazon monopoly), but realistically there wasn’t much point to publishing on non-Amazon online bookstores; I think I sold maybe one copy on those platforms over the entire year.

The Japanese translation

A truly unexpected bonus of publishing the book under a Creative Commons license was having a pseudonymous blogger, Konsuke (a Japanese scientist working in the US), translate the entire thing into Japanese. A fan of Takako Shimura, he saw a tweet from Shimura mentioning the book (after I sent her a complimentary copy), took advantage of the book’s Creative Commons license, and started publishing translated chapters from the book on his blog.

I should state for the record how amazing and gratifying this was to me. Konsuke’s English was reasonably but not perfectly fluent (though he’s been actively working to improve it), and no one has yet read the translation and given me an opinion on its quality. But even a low-cost commercial translation of a nonfiction book of this size (about eighty thousand words) would have cost several thousand dollars.

In addition, Konsuke also found a number of typographical errors that remained after my own editing, discovered a number of places where the English translation of the manga was debatable or outright incorrect, created a new appendix listing the probable sources of all the chapter titles in the manga, and helped me learn about Japanese typefaces and typesetting practices, all of which improved the final editions in both languages.

The good: I have a complete Japanese translation, available in the same format and from the same sources as the English translation, and a significantly improved English edition as a side effect. The bad: I haven’t gotten any feedback on the quality of the translation from someone truly fluent in both languages.

If you want to write a book

Writing That Type of Girl took a lot of time (two or three years), a lot of work (probably at least a couple of hundred hours total, if not more) and a fair amount of money (probably around a thousand dollars all told). But I’m very glad to have done it: it was a great experience, I learned a lot about Sweet Blue Flowers, Japanese society and history (especially with regard to LGBTQ+ issues), and book production, and I even got a few readers as well.

So if you’re thinking that you have a book in you, I encourage you to let it out. You can save a lot of the money I spent by using only FOSS software (like Bookdown) or using a self-publishing site that is free or low-cost. If you want to make the book available for sale as a paperback or ebook, I recommend sticking to Amazon, monopoly though it may be. And if you want to encourage other people to translate or other build on the book, I suggest that you release the book under a Creative Commons license, and make the underlying text source publicly available. Giving away the book or its source for free will not harm any book sales, which will likely be approximately zero in any case.

A final thought: If you’ve read my book and have thoughts about it, good or bad, please feel free to email me or leave a comment. Positive feedback is always gratifying, and constructive criticism about how the book could be improved is always welcome.

Renkon (@renkotsuban) - 2023-03-15 12:08

This was a super enlightening read on self-publishing, thank you so much for sharing!

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-03-15 12:51

You’re welcome. Thanks for stopping by!

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-03-15 10:59

Thanks for sharing all this! I hadnt thought of using source control for books but thats probably something id want too, heh. Really interesting to hear about Konsuke and also the paperback color issue.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-03-15 12:55

Yeah, using git for this was invaluable, even if no one else ever uses the repository. Konsuke and I went through a lot of revisions on the translations, where he would send me stuff to change. I’d then file an issue, create a branch, make the change, merge it back, then send him a copy of the diffs to confirm that the change had been made correctly. Since the book was first published I filed almost a hundred issues for stuff like this, both for the Japanese and the English editions.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

Recently @shel promoted the idea of paying attention to your local library board. Her comments can be extended to cover all things local.

There are always exceptions, but to a first approximation every minute you spend reading or (especially) tweeting about national politics is probably a bad use of your time, and every dollar you spend contributing to national political campaigns (or to political campaigns in other states) is probably a bad use of your money. Even if you “live on the Internet,” what happens in your neighborhood, town, city, county, or state affects you, negatively or otherwise—and these days it’s more often negatively than otherwise for many people.

So, what should you do?

You have three alternatives, summed up in the classic Albert Hirschman formulation: exit, voice, and loyalty. If everything is fine and dandy in your neck of the woods then you can ignore local politics and related doings, and by your silence indicate your loyalty to the present dispensation.

At the other end of the spectrum, if you feel actively threatened in the place where you live then I for one won’t think less of you if you decide to get the hell out of Dodge and exit to somewhere else where you believe you can live a safer and more secure life.

My concern here is with people who have ties to the place where they live, don’t want (or need) to leave it, and are looking to voice their concerns in some way as to effect change. Again, you have multiple alternatives.

The first is protests. I haven’t participated in a protest in many many years (for many reasons), so I’ll leave any judgements on their usefulness, etc., to others.

The second is political and charitable donations, for those who have more money than time. Almost all of my political donations for many years now have been to local candidates: for county council, county executive, board of education, or for the state legislature. A donation of even $10 counts a lot more to a local candidate than it does to a candidate in a presidential or congressional race; if you can afford to give as much as $100 a local candidate may even thank you personally. And by donating early to someone you support who’s running their first local race, you may be helping someone who will go on to higher offices, county-wide, city-wide, or even state-wide.

If you have the money to do so and are OK with attending crowded events with lots of strangers present, I also recommending attending at least one of the local fundraising receptions that almost all politicians hold from time to time. It’s good to meet people in person and introduce yourself; you won’t have an opportunity for a deep discussion of the issues that concern you, but you’ll be better positioned to follow up later with an email or letter.

This same local orientation makes sense for contributions to charities and advocacy groups as well. Instead of giving to national organizations, consider giving to their local chapters or affiliates, or to local groups working in the same space: food banks, advocates for affordable housing, LGBTQ+ activists, whatever. They know the local landscape and are typically more able to make effective use of your donations.

If you have more time than money, a third alternative is following local affairs, attending local meetings and (for issues of special concern to you) giving testimony. As a result of the pandemic many jurisdictions (including mine) have Zoom or similar options for attending meetings and giving testimony, so it’s much easier to do so. And if you’re uncomfortable with testifying ”in person” (physically or virtually), you can submit written testimony.

Showing up (even if virtually) and testifying is really important at the local level, because elected officials typically hear from only a small and unrepresentative slice of the local population, basically people who are old, white, relatively affluent, and either retired or with flexible work schedules. Getting better representation is especially important with topics like planning and zoning where the conversation (at least in jurisdictions like mine) is dominated by that particular group, a group that traditionally has been hostile to affordable housing initiatives, measures to house the unhoused, etc.

(I’d add that some jurisdictions are almost literally begging for people to participate more. For example, my county offers free classes for people who want to know more about the planning and zoning process.)

A final option is to directly participate yourself in local affairs, whether it be as a person blogging or tweeting about local issues, researching and reporting news of interest to your community, serving as a volunteer for a local charity or advocacy group, or volunteering for local political campaigns, including (if you’re up for it) doing canvassing on behalf of your favorite candidates or causes. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in how effective canvassing and related activities can actually be, including with regard to anti-trans legislation and voter initiatives, David Broockman’s papers are a good place to start.)

A couple of final thoughts: First, national conservative groups have for many many years pursued a strategy of promoting local candidates and voter initiatives and stoking political controversies at the local level; the news stories about activist groups coordinating regarding anti-trans legislation are just the latest example of this.

While national advocacy groups can help combat this, ultimately these battles will be won or lost at the local level. As I wrote several years ago, ”it will all come down to winning elections,” especially elections for state legislatures, but also for such supposedly nonpartisan bodies like boards of education.

Second, if you want to make a difference in your local community, be prepared to be in it for the long haul. (This is why I recommend doing this only if you’re committed to staying where you are.) Again, this is something conservative groups know well—many of them have been working for generations now to elect local candidates, promote their proposed legislation, and get their voter initiatives on the ballot.

I can speak from personal experience here. For over ten years now I’ve been writing on my local blog promoting the idea of using ranked choice voting in county elections, and also testified to the county council about it. One of the local politicians reading my blog, originally a Board of Education member, wanted to know more, so in the last couple of years I’ve corresponded with him about the issue, talked to him via Zoom, and met him in person. He was recently elected to the state legislature, and with a colleague introduced a bill authorizing the county to use ranked choice voting in Board of Education elections. I gave testimony on the bill at a hearing conducted by our state legislative delegation.

I fully expect his bill to die in committee this session—the fate of most first bills by first-time legislators. But the issue has now been raised at the state level, has the support of at least two members of the local legislative delegation (out of eleven), and with further work and some luck may result in signed legislation sometime down the road. If it does succeed then it will only be after I’ve spent almost a generation talking about it—a good example of the kind of timeframe you should probably expect.

But when it comes to issues that are personally important to you—and certainly there are issues far more critical to the lives of those reading this than ranked choice voting is to mine—I don’t think there’s any alternative. If you’re committed to your local community and want to make a difference in it then you’ll need to put in some work on an ongoing basis. Otherwise you’ll be at the mercy of those who wish you ill and are working every day to make that wish a reality.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Note to stats nerds: I too have read Clauset, et al., and am well aware that many things claimed to follow a power law actually do not. (For example, this appears to be true for Patreon earnings.) But “I fought the log-normal distribution and the log-normal distribution won” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

If you happen to listen to “Discover Weekly” on Spotify (as I do), or regularly check out musicians on Bandcamp (as I also do) then from time to time you may have thought to yourself, “Wow, this is really good! Why haven’t I ever heard of them?” Apparently there are more musicians with real talent than there are popular and successful musicians, and sometimes the most talented are not necessarily the most successful.

This experience is not confined to music, but applies to other areas as well. For example, I suspect that hidden in the lower half of Patreon projects by number of patrons there are writers and artists whose work is as worthy as that of those who occupy the top 100 places.

Why should this be? That’s the key question for today’s post. It’s a very political question, in that proposed answers are often used to justify existing distributions of fame and wealth, or alternately to deny those justifications. I’m still exploring this general topic, so you can consider this just one take on the subject, with others possibly to follow in future posts. (WARNING: This will be a bit long.)

The proposed answer I’m going to present in this post is adapted from Sornette, et al., “The fair reward problem: the illusion of success and how to solve it.” The general idea is that when we look at things like the number of views on YouTube, the number of listens on Spotify, or the distribution of Patreon earnings, we’re seeing the effects of 1) individual talents influenced by lots of little things that add up (and hence result in a normal distribution), which then 2) combine through multiplication to produce a log-normal distribution of overall skill at artistic (or other) endeavors, and are then 3) supplemented by luck to produce a power law distribution (at least at the high end, and possibly at the low end as well).

It all adds up

Let’s start with a specific talent, for example, having a good singing voice. I’m no anatomist or vocal coach, but I can think of lots of little things that might influence this: size, structure, and health of the vocal cords, size and structure of the mouth, throat, nasal passages, and sinuses; size, shape, and motility of the tongue, lung capacity and diaphragm strength; the ability to control one’s voice (e.g., to accurately hit certain pitches); and so on.¹

Some of these things might be determined at conception (genetic heritage), some in utero (by random acts of development), and some after birth (e.g., being able to get a music education and afford voice lessons). The relative importance of these can be and is debated, but my point here is simply that most of these influences act relatively independently of each other, and together they add up to determine the overall quality of a person’s singing voice.

If multiple independent things do add up together to determine vocal quality, the result when we look at voice quality across the population as a whole should be a so-called Gaussian or “normal”² distribution, with a hump in the middle representing people with average singing voices, a tail at the left representing people with below-average singing voices, and a similar tail at the right representing people with above-average singing voices.

Why should this be? Think of having a really excellent singing voice as being the equivalent of flipping a coin and having it come up heads (say) 95 or more times out of 100 times, and having a really bad singing voice as having it come up up tails 95 or more times out of 100 times. There are relatively few ways that you can have a coin flip come up heads (or tails) 95% of the time, but many (many) more ways that you can have a coin flip come up roughly half heads and half tails. So, in practice most people would end up in the middle, not at the tails—thus the central hump.

Go forth and multiply

Suppose a person has an excellent, or at least well above average, singing voice. Does that mean they’ll have success as, say, a singer-songwriter? No, because a singer-songwriter by definition also needs to be able to write songs; more specifically, they need to write both melodies and lyrics. So there are now three things that they should ideally be well above average in, and those things are relatively independent: there are people who can sing well but not write catchy melodies, people who can write catchy melodies but not write good lyrics, and so on.³

To pull some numbers out of the air, let’s say that 20% of the population can sing pretty well, but only 5% can write catchy melodies and only 10% can write reasonably good lyrics. Then out of 100 million people we’d expect 20 million (20% of 100 million) to be able to sing well, 1 million to be able to sing well and write catchy melodies (5% of 20 million), and 100,000 (10% of 1 million) to be able to do all three. So in this example only 1 in 1,000 (100,000 out of 100 million) people have what it takes to be a singer-songwriter.

But it doesn’t end there. A potential singer-songwriter who wants to be successful also has to have the drive and conscientiousness to write and record lots of songs, the energy to tour, the ability to connect with audiences, the savvy to navigate the music business, and so on. Each of these requirements further reduces the potential talent pool, so that it may be that in a population of 100 million people there’s only about one in a million people who have what it takes to be a successful singer-songwriter.⁴

You can apply a similar analysis to any creative endeavor: writing novels, drawing comics, filming movies, making interesting podcasts or entertaining game run-throughs, and so on. In all of these cases many relatively independent factors will multiply together to determine overall skill-based success. The result will be a log-normal distribution: instead of most people clustering around an average level of success, with smaller tails to the left and right (as in a normal distribution), almost all people will have little or no success, and will thus form a very large cluster to the left. There will then be a very long right tail, with only a very few people in the extreme right of the tail having great success.

So, to sum up thus far: individual talents are hypothesized to be due to the additive effects of many independent factors, and thus to be normally distributed. However, having an overall skill set conducive to success in a given field of endeavor is hypothesized to be depend on the multiplicative effects of many different and relatively independent talents, and thus to follow a log-normal distribution.⁵

Luck and pluck

However, having an individual talent or even an overall set of talents is not necessarily sufficient to achieve success; often a fair amount of luck contributes to success, artistic and otherwise. We are used to attributing people’s success to talent and hard work—and of course people who are themselves successful are often the most extreme proponents of this. (After all, who wants to think that their own success is partly—let alone mostly—a matter of chance?)

This habit is so pervasive that we often attribute success wholly to merit even when it’s explicitly made clear that that’s not the case. For example, when people think of the 19th century novels by Horatio Alger, Jr. (when they think of them at all), they think of them as portraying the rewards that come from hard work. But if you actually read some of them (as I did), it’s clear that they are really stories of “pluck” and “luck”, with the latter typically given pride of place.

For example, in Alger’s first two novels, “Ragged Dick”, a homeless shoe-shine boy, is hard-working, honest, and open to new opportunities. But he becomes the successful businessman “Richard Hunter” only through a series of circumstances that combine mundane good fortune with incredibly implausible coincidences.

So, how might the effects of luck be modeled? Sornette, et al., treat it as an random additive component on top of what they call “overall skill.” They assume that overall skill is log-normally distributed (as discussed above) and acts to increase one’s already-achieved success by some percentage during each time period, with the exact percentage depending on the overall skill. Luck then acts to randomly enhance or counteract this effect of overall skill in each time period.

However good or bad luck does not affect everyone equally, but rather depends on a person’s appetite for risk: those who take more risks may benefit more than others from a given event of good luck, or may suffer more than others from an event of bad luck.

We see this, for example, in the Horatio Alger novels discussed above: the luckiest event of Dick’s young life occurs when he rashly leaps from a ferry to save a young boy who’s fallen overboard. The boy turns out to be the son of a business owner, who rewards Dick with a job in his establishment; the boy’s mother subsequently gives Dick a thousand dollars as a token of her own gratitude.⁶ But of course, in real life Dick’s selfless act might have brought no reward at all, or even resulted in his own death.

Modeling the effects of luck

As with overall skill, Sornette, et al., model the degree of risk taking using a log-normal distribution, presumably because, as with skill, it arises from several factors multiplied together: personality, social and economic situation, and so on. Thus some people would have an order of magnitude or more appetite for risk than others, and would be disproportionately rewarded (or punished) for their good (or bad) luck. Based on their simulation exercises they come to two conclusions:

First, they claim that the effects of luck may combine with the effects of overall skill to convert the distribution of overall success from a log-normal distribution to a power law distribution (as shown in the right hand graph above): at the top end would be people who benefited from extraordinary good luck and a taste for risk, beyond what their overall skills might justify, and likewise at the bottom end could be people with relatively high overall skills who have suffered bad luck of various kinds.

Second, they point out that in the short term it may be difficult to impossible to separate the effects of talent vs. luck. Only after a few years or even decades will it likely become apparent who has real staying power based on true talent and whose success was simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time, and little more than that.

Sornette, et al., give the example of success in investing in this context, but we also see this in artistic fields such as music. For example, think of all the acts who had #1 hits in their day but have had no lasting impact whatsoever. Think also of those acts who never achieved success due to bad luck of various kinds—internal conflicts, label troubles, financial problems, ill health or the death of a band member, or simply being out of step with contemporary trends—but who were rediscovered years later and acknowledged as exceptional artists. (Of course, in the meantime they lost out on the cumulative rewards of the success that eluded them.)

Conclusion

Sornette, et al., present one view of the interaction between talent, luck, and the society that rewards them both. As I mentioned above, there are other possible models as well, some putting more stress on the importance of luck, some putting more stress on talent, and others highlighting different factors, like the initial circumstances from which artists emerge.

But the overall picture is fairly clear: almost all would-be artists will be unsuccessful in both relative and absolute terms, and only a few artists will be truly successful. The question then becomes, what, if anything, should society do in terms of changing this picture? In particular, what stance should we take in terms of supporting current artists, or encouraging more people to become artists?

This is an especially pertinent question given the fear (or hope, as some might say) that we will be overwhelmed with a flood of AI-generated art (or “art,” in quotes, as some might say). Should we just accept that this is the way things are, and that it’s pointless to try to change it? I don’t personally believe that, but my thoughts on the matter are not yet fully-formed enough to summarize here. I’ll try to do that in a future post.

Royal Assassin (@RoyalAssassin) - 2023-02-26 16:42

Imagine being lucky enough to be born with a predisposition for having a good work ethic. Alas.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-02-26 17:58

Yep, there are a lot of predispositions I wish I was born with :-(

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-02-26 16:46

Great post. Im also reminded of the quote by Gould “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.“

Even if you exclude economic factors, the vector of “did they pursue something they had talent for?” is a big factor imo. What are the chances of discovering different talents? Of pursuing those talents over other careers or other ways to spend time? Different cultures reward different talents and highlight different talents. Preexisting industries can be key to cultivate talents, like how voice acting in Japan is a lot more developed than most elsewhere. Audience size and language are also a major intersection- i think Finnish and Romanian are particularly beautiful languages, but they dont have the same audience to provide reverberating support for music and so on as English, Chinese, Spanish, etc.

Ill try to think more later about an idea of how things should be in this regard and maybe share those thoughts.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-02-26 18:03

Your comments on place and time are very much on point. One of the papers I didn’t highlight was about how succeeding in the contemporary art world (i.e,, the sorts of art featured in, say, ArtForum) is highly influenced by the prestige level of the institutions an artist is associated with very early in their careers: art schools, galleries, etc. A great artist who comes from the middle of nowhere is going to find it difficult to impossible to achieve success.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on “how things should be”. (As I said, my own are still half-baked.)

I finished watching the final episode 12 of GAP: The Series a couple of days ago. Here are some final thoughts on the show. (WARNING: This includes spoilers for episode 12 in particular.)

There are others better placed than me to do a comprehensive review of GAP, so I’ll just say that I enjoyed the show and looked forward to watching it each week. I have to confess though: I see a lot of fans commenting as if GAP were the greatest yuri/GL/lesbian series ever. I don’t normally watch live-action LGBTQ+ series, so I really can’t do an intelligent comparison, but this seems more than a bit overblown. I mean, what are they comparing it to?

In any case, I see GAP as an interesting hybrid: on one level it’s a glossy romantic drama (with some comedy sprinkled in) that bears more than a bit of resemblance to soap operas, telenovelas, Kdramas, and (the Thai equivalent) lakorn. But it was also consciously designed to promote a political message, albeit in a low-key suitable-for-the-mainstream way. See in particular the very interesting comments by Saint and P’Chen of IdolFactory, the production company that created the series, in which Saint claims “Every time I create a series . . . I see it as building/improving the [LGBTQA+] community.”

GAP follows a playbook for promoting LGBTQ+ equality that’s familiar from the US marriage equality campaign, but with a Thai-specific twist. There is the act of coming out, and having pride in oneself and those one loves; as Sam says in episode 9 (after Mon frets about what others might think of a public display of affection), “I just want to hold my lover’s hand.”

There’s also the classic “love is love” message, delivered by Saint himself in the final episode, when as “Sir Phoom” he drops in to pay his regards to Sam’s grandmother after she tells Sam to live her life as she chooses: “Love will always find a way. It transcends gender and sexuality.”¹

And, finally, there is the impact of having someone who was previously in opposition—namely Sam’s grandmother, and to a lesser extent Kirk—change their mind and endorse what they previously condemned. (In a US context, see Barack Obama’s endorsement of marriage equality, which people have claimed helped win the Black vote in the 2012 referendum in Maryland, where I live.)

GAP’s political message is adapted to Thai sensibilities. I’ve seen some people online protest that Sam won her freedom only because others permitted it, i.e., through Kirk’s change of heart and his intervention with Sam’s grandmother. Where is the righteous rebellion against heteronormativity and those who enforce it (men like Kirk, but also women like Sam’s grandmother)? Well, that occurred at the end of episode 11, in the form of Neung’s epic rant. But though cathartic for the audience (and perhaps for Sam herself), it was not the key that freed Sam from her fate.

That instead came about because Sam was a dutiful and loving granddaughter and showed her filial piety in the most extreme way possible, choosing to bury forever her chances for happiness in deference to her grandmother’s wishes. Prompted by Kirk’s comments, her grandmother then behaved as an elder should behave in a hierarchical family system (but often does not), taking note not only of her granddaughter’s obedience but also her unhappiness, and deciding to release Sam from her familial obligation in order to promote her ultimate well-being.

The result is to my mind the most dramatic moment of episode 12 (even more dramatic than the wedding), as Sam drops to the floor and kowtows to her grandmother, then hugs her while on her knees before finally standing to face her. Her grandmother then reciprocates by attending Sam’s wedding to Mon, sitting in the front row to bear witness to their vows and—by her presence—publicly endorse their relationship.

Sam and Mon’s story is thus not a story of rebellion against society’s strictures, but of society recognizing the desires of some of its children and evolving its attitudes to acknowledge and accommodate them. This is reinforced by Sir Phoom’s conversation with Sam’s grandmother, in which he seeks to calm the concerns that Sam’s grandmother has, and in particular emphasizes that his own aristocratic parents know about Sam and Mon’s relationship and are happy to see them together.²

Is this the much-sneered-at “respectability politics”? Why, yes, that’s exactly what it is. It’s an approach that Saint and his colleagues presumably thought was most likely to be successful in the context of Thai society: to emphasize the loyalty of LGBTQ+ Thais to that society and its traditional norms of respect and deference, and to ask in turn for themselves to be recognized as full and equal members of society. And from Saint’s public comments it seems that GAP was created in large part to be a means to that end.

This post continues the discussion from part 1, in which I attempt to explain the concept of logarithms to myself, in the guise of explaining it to a novice. As before, this is primarily for my entertainment and edification; other people will either not need the explanation or can find better ones elsewhere.

(You’re still reading this?! OK, I guess I can’t stop you, but don’t say you weren’t warned.)

Notations

So far I’ve discussed orders of magnitude, including negative and fractional orders of magnitude, and defined a logarithm of a number as the (possibly negative and/or fractional) order of magnitude corresponding to that number. Now it’s time to simplify the discussion by introducing some basic mathematical notation.¹

Using mathematical notation tends to freak some people out, because they see it as an entirely separate language which they don’t and can’t understand — like staring at text in Japanese if you don’t know any of the characters. But it’s better thought of as simply a shorthand way to express things that would take longer and be more cumbersome to express in conventional prose. Thus, for example, it’s easier to write 2 + 3 = 5 than it is to write “two plus three equals five,” and easier to write 10×10×10×10 or 10⋅10⋅10⋅10 (my preferred notation) than “ten times ten times ten times ten.”

With that in mind, let’s introduce the following notation: We represent a one order of magnitude increase as being multiplied by 10¹ = 10, a two order of magnitude increase as being multiplied by 10² = 10⋅10 = 100, a three order of magnitude increase as being multiplied by 10³ = 10⋅10⋅10 = 1,000, and so on. By convention we have 10⁰ = 1, i.e., a “zero order of magnitude” change or no change at all, as discussed previously.

Note that this notation makes it simple to see the effects of multiple increases by various orders of magnitude, using the addition rule discussed previously. For example, an increase of two orders of magnitude followed by an increase of three orders of magnitude is represented as multiplying by 10² ⋅10³ = 10²⁺³ = 10⁵ , or an increase by a factor of 10⋅10⋅10⋅10⋅10 = 100,000.

What about a one order of magnitude decrease? We represent that as being multiplied by 10^-1 = 1/10 = 0.1. Similarly, a two order of magnitude decrease is represented as being multiplied by 10^-2 = 1/(10⋅10) = 1/100 = 0.01, a three order of magnitude decrease as being multiplied by 10^-3 = 1/(10⋅10⋅10) = 1/1,000 = 0.001, and so on.

Again the effects of combined increases and decreases by various orders of magnitude can be found using the addition rule discussed previously. For example, an increase of two orders of magnitude followed by an decrease of three orders of magnitude is represented as multiplying by 10² ⋅10^-3 = 10^2-3 = 10^-1 , or an overall decrease by a factor of 10.

As a side note, an increase by, say, two orders of magnitude followed by a decrease by two orders of magnitude is represented as 10² ⋅10^-2 = 10^2-2 = 10⁰ . We previously adopted the convention 10⁰ = 1, and we see now that that makes sense, since in this case there was no overall change.

We also have 10^-2 = 1/100 = 1/(10² ). So a negative value for orders of magnitude (i.e., decreasing by one or more orders of magnitude) converts multiplication into division, as we’ve discussed previously. We also have 1/(10^-2 ) = 1/(1/100) = 100 = 10² , by symmetry.

What about fractional orders of magnitude? We can represent an increase by half an order of magnitude as being multiplied by 10^1/2 = 3.1623 (approximately). Again the addition rule for orders of magnitude can be used: an increase by half an order of magnitude followed by another increase by half an order of magnitude is represented as being multiplied by 10^1/2 ⋅ 10^1/2 = 10^{1/2 + 1/2} = 10¹ = 10, as we would expect from the previous discussion.

Finally, how do we represent the logarithm of a number? We use the word “log,” of course: log(10³ ) = 3, for example. Often the parentheses are omitted: log 10^-1 = -1.

Multiplication by addition

Now let’s talk about something that was very important historically but is almost a curiosity now. Suppose you don’t have access to a computer, a calculator, or even an abacus. How can you do calculations like multiplying larger numbers, like 16 times 126, without resorting to pen and paper?

Let’s go back to the examples of fractional orders of magnitude I used previously, that multiplying by a factor of 16 corresponds to an approximately 1.2 order of magnitude increase, and 126 corresponds to an approximately 2.1 order of magnitude increase. In our new notation we have 16 = 10^1.2 and 126 = 10^2.1 . Alternately, 1.2 = log(16) and 2.1 = log(126), using the notation for logarithms.

Let’s also get better values for the logarithms of 16 and 126. Fortunately, way back in 1624 someone compiled a table of logarithms of numbers from 1 to 20,000 and from 90,001 to 100,000; on page 35 we find that the logarithm of 16 is 1.2041 (to four digits) and on page 36 we find that the logarithm of 126 is 2.1004 (also to four digits).²

Using our new notation we then have 16⋅126 = 10^1.2041 ⋅10^2.1004 . But by our rule of adding orders of magnitude we have 10^1.2041 ⋅10^2.1004 = 10^{1.2041+2.1004} = 10^3.3045 .

So we are looking for a number X = 10^3.3045 ; this is equivalent to writing log(X) = 3.3045. We can look in the same table we used before to find a number whose logarithm is 3.3045, and on page 55 we find that that number is 2016. This is the value we are looking for, the number corresponding to 16 times 126.

Of course, it would be tedious to carry around a large book just to do multiplication. The solution was the slide rule. The following is a gross simplification of how it might work:

We have two straight rules made of wood, plastic, or metal, each with numbers marked on it, increasing left to right from one end to the other. For example, on one rule the number 16 is marked at a distance of 1.2 cm from the left end of the rule, and the number 2016 marked 3.3 cm from the left end. On the second rule the number 126 is marked at a distance 2.1 cm from the left end of that rule. In other words, in all three cases the distances in cm from the left end of the rule are the logarithms of the numbers in question.

If we line up the left end of the second rule with the number 16 on the first rule (i.e., 1.2 cm to the right of the left end of the first rule), on the second rule the number 126 will line up opposite the number 2016 on the first rule (since 1.2 cm + 2.1 cm = 3.3 cm). Thus we’ve found the result of the multiplication 16 times 126.

Of course, for such a rule to be useful it would need to have all numbers marked on it, and at the size mentioned would be too small to be useful. Actual slide rules used for multiplication contain only the numbers from 1 though 10, since any multiplication with larger numbers can be done by fiddling with the decimal places. For example, we have 16⋅126 = (1.6⋅10)⋅(1.26⋅100) = (1.6⋅1.26)⋅(10⋅100) = (1.6⋅1.26)⋅1,000. So we really only need to multiply 1.6 times 1.26, and then multiply the resulting value by 1,000.

This concludes the second post. I may or may not make more posts in this series.

I get nervous when I write about something I don’t totally understand. As a result, I sometimes resort to writing down an explanation of that something to myself, in an effort to understand it better. While writing an upcoming post I realized that I wasn’t doing a good job of explaining what a log-normal distribution was, and in particular needed a better understanding of what a logarithm was.

This post is my attempt to explain the concept of logarithms to myself, which I do in my usual way by writing as if I’m explaining it to someone else with no background in the subject. If you’re already familiar with the concept of logarithms then you can skip this, and if you’re not then you can find better explanations elsewhere. In other words, nobody should read this post except me.

(Is everyone else gone? OK, here goes…)

Orders of magnitude

I think the best place to start to understand logarithms may be with the concept of “orders of magnitude,” a concept people use all the time. For example, consider the statement “there are an order of magnitude more users of Facebook than of Twitter, and two orders of magnitude more users of Twitter than of Mastodon.” Here an “order of magnitude more” means “about 10 times more,” and “two orders of magnitude more” means “about 100 times more.”¹

The first thing to note is that orders of magnitude can add together: If Twitter has two orders of magnitude more users than Mastodon, and Facebook has an order of magnitude more users than Twitter, then Facebook has three orders of magnitude more users than Mastodon (2 + 1 = 3).

Let’s drop the “about” and for this discussion assume that “an order of magnitude more” means “exactly 10 times more.” Then “two orders of magnitude more” would mean (exactly) 100 times more, “three orders of magnitude more” would mean (exactly) 1,000 times more, and so on.

Adding and subtracting orders of magnitude

But we also have 100 = 10 times 10, and 1,000 = 10 times 100 = 10 times 10 times 10. So an order of magnitude increase means the original amount was multiplied by 10, a two orders of magnitude increase means the original amount was multiplied by 10 and then by 10 again (i.e., by 100), and a three orders of magnitude increase means the original amount was multiplied by 10 and then by 10 again and then by 10 once more (i.e., by 1,000).

In other words, the number of orders of magnitude by which the original amount was increased is the number of times you multiply by 10. If you do successive increases first by, say, two orders of magnitude, and then by three orders of magnitude, the resulting amount corresponds to an increase by five orders of magnitude, or 2 + 3.

Now let’s consider the case where something is an order of magnitude less than something else. For example, when we say “Twitter has an order of magnitude fewer users than Facebook,” we typically mean “Twitter has about one tenth the number of users of Facebook,” and when we say “Mastodon has two orders of magnitude fewer users than Twitter,” we typically mean “Mastodon has about one hundredth the number of users of Twitter.”

Again, let’s be exact about this. Then an order of magnitude decrease means the original amount was divided by 10, a two orders of magnitude decrease means the original amount was divided by 10 and then by 10 again (i.e., by 100), a three orders of magnitude increase means the original amount was divided by 10 and then by 10 again and then by 10 once more (i.e., by 1,000). In other words, the number of orders of magnitude by which the original amount was decreased is the number of times you divide by 10.

What about an increase followed by a decrease? Let’s suppose the number of Twitter users increases by five orders of magnitude over a period of years, and then it decreases by two orders of magnitude within a year. That means that the original amount first got multiplied by 10 five times (10 times 10 times 10 times 10 times 10, or 100,000), and then the resulting amount got divided by 10 twice (i.e., by 10 times 10 or 100). The final amount is 1,000 times the initial amount, corresponding to an overall three orders of magnitude increase. We have 3 = 5 - 2, so another way to get the final amount is to add the number of orders of magnitude by which the number of users increased, and then subtract the number of orders of magnitude by which it decreased.

What if something increases by (say) three orders of magnitude and subsequently decreases by three orders of magnitude; in other words it gets multiplied by 10 three times (i.e., by 1,000) and then gets divided by 10 three times (again, by 1,000). The net effect is to return to where it started. But using our rule above, an increase by three orders of magnitude followed by a decrease by three orders of magnitude nets out to an overall increase of 3 - 3 or 0 orders of magnitude. So we can equate “0 orders of magnitude” to mean “no change” or (what’s the same thing) “multiplied by 1.”

Fractional orders of magnitude

Here’s an interesting question: What does it mean (if it means anything at all) to say that something increased by half an order of magnitude? If something increases by half an order of magnitude, and then increases by another half order of magnitude, then overall it’s natural to say that overall there was an increase by one order of magnitude. After all, we’ve been using a rule that you add orders of magnitude when doing a first increase by a certain number of orders of magnitude followed by a second increase by another number of orders of magnitude. And one half plus one half equals one.

Since an increase of one order of magnitude is equivalent to multiplying by 10, an increase of one half an order of magnitude is equivalent to multiplying by some number X, such that multiplying by X and then multiplying by X again is the same as multiplying by 10. In other words, we should have X times X equal to 10.

Does such a number exist and, if so, how could we find it? Well, we know that 3 times 3 is 9, and 4 times 4 is 16, so X should be somewhere between 3 and 4. If we try 3.5 times 3.5, that comes out to 12.25, which is too high. Trying a smaller number, 3.2 times 3.2 is 10.24, which is still too high, but closer. 3.1 times 3.1 is 9.61, which is too low. So X should be somewhere between 3.1 and 3.2. We have 3.15 times 3.15 equal to 9.925, again too low, and 3.17 times 3.17 equal to 10.0489, again too high, but getting very close. If you do this exercise a couple more times on your phone’s calculator app you will find that 3.1623 times 3.1623 is almost exactly equal to 10. So we can say that an increase of half an order of magnitude corresponds to multiplying the original amount by (a number very close to) 3.1623.²

Similarly, we can imagine a third of an order of magnitude increase as corresponding to a number Y such that multiplying an initial amount by Y three times produces an order of magnitude increase. In other words, Y times Y times Y is equal to 10. We have 2 times 2 times 2 equal to 8, and 3 times 3 times 3 equal to 27. So Y must be a number between 2 and 3, and is probably closer to 2. Trying numbers out like was done above, we end up with 2.154 times 2.154 times 2.154 being almost exactly equal to 10.

What about an increase of tenth of an order of magnitude? This would correspond to a number Z such that multiplying an initial amount by Z ten times produces an order of magnitude increase. In other words, Z times Z times Z times Z time Z times Z times Z times Z times Z times Z is equal to 10. A little thought will convince one that Z must be between 1 and 2, and likely closer to 1. Using the same techniques as above, we end up with 1.2589 as a number that when multiplied by itself ten times is (almost exactly) equal to 10.

From orders of magnitude to logarithms

Continuing from the discussion in the previous section, what does it mean to have an increase of, say, 2.3 orders of magnitude? If we follow the rule of adding orders of magnitude, we see that 2.3 is 2 plus 1/10 plus 1/10 plus 1/10, and conclude that an increase of 2.3 orders of magnitude corresponds to first multiplying by 100 (two orders of magnitude), then multiplying by (approximately) 1.2589 (one tenth of an order of magnitude), then multiplying by 1.2589 again, and then multiplying by 1.2589 once more. We have 100 times 1.2589 times 1.2589 times 1.2589 equal to (approximately) 199.5141. So a 2.3 order of magnitude increase corresponds to an increase by a factor of approximately 200.

We can then turn this around and say that multiplying by a factor of 200 corresponds to a 2.3 order of magnitude increase. We can do something similar for other numbers. For example, what order of magnitude increase corresponds to multiplying by a factor of 16? Multiplying by a factor of 10 corresponds to one order of magnitude, and multiplying by a factor of 100 corresponds to two orders of magnitude, so multiplying by 16 must correspond to an order of magnitude between 1 and 2.

Based on the discussion above, a 1.1 order of magnitude increase corresponds to multiplying by 10 (one order of magnitude) and then by 1.2589 (one tenth of an order of magnitude), or 10 times 1.2589, equal to 12.5889. This is less than 16, so the order of magnitude corresponding to multiplying by a factor of 16 is more than 1.1. What about an order of magnitude increase of 1.2? That corresponds to multiplying by 10 times 1.2589 times 1.2589, or 15.8483. This is very close to 16, so the order of magnitude increase corresponding to a factor of 16 is likely just a bit more than 1.2. (The actual number is approximately 1.2041.)

We can do similar calculations for other numbers. For example, multiplying by a factor of 126 corresponds to an approximately 2.1 order of magnitude increase, multiplying by 2,500 corresponds to an approximately 3.4 order of magnitude increase, and so on.

We can now say what a logarithm is: the logarithm of a number is the order of magnitude increase corresponding to multiplying by that number.³ Thus the logarithm of 10 is 1 (one order of magnitude increase), the logarithm of 16 is approximately 1.2 (1.2 orders of magnitude increase), the logarithm of 100 is 2, the logarithm of 126 is approximately 2.1, the logarithm of 1,000 is 3, the logarithm of 2,500 is approximately 3.4, and so on.

Negative (and zero) logarithm values

What about decreases by some orders of magnitude? They correspond to negative values of the logarithm. A decrease by one order of magnitude corresponds to dividing by 10, and an increase of three orders of magnitude followed by a decrease of one order of magnitude amounts to an overall increase by 3 - 1 = 2 orders of magnitude, according to the rule of adding and subtracting orders of magnitude discussed above. Since dividing by 10 is equivalent to multiplying by one tenth or 0.1, the logarithm of 0.1 is -1. Similarly, the logarithm of one hundredth or 0.01 is -2, the logarithm of one thousandth or 0.001 is -3, and so on.

Also, above we concluded that a “0 orders of magnitude” increase means “no change” or “multiplied by 1.” So the logarithm of 1 is 0.

There is no order of magnitude increase corresponding to multiplying by 0, and no order of magnitude decrease corresponding to dividing by 0 (which isn’t even defined). So the logarithm of 0 is undefined.

There is also no order of magnitude increase corresponding to multiplying by a number less than zero (like -1), and no order of magnitude decrease corresponding to dividing by a number less than zero. So the logarithm is also undefined for numbers less than zero (“negative numbers”).⁴

The logarithm as we have defined it is thus defined only for numbers greater than zero (“positive numbers”). For numbers greater than one the logarithm is greater than zero, for numbers between 0 and 1 the logarithm is less than zero, and for the number 1 the logarithm is exactly zero.

This is getting pretty long, so I’ll continue the discussion in part 2.

This is another brief follow-up to my “Life in Patreonia” post, based on this analysis. It can be summed up as follows: there is no significant correlation between the number of patrons of a Patreon project and the earnings per patron, although the earnings per patron does decline very slightly as projects become more popular.

The numbers: across almost 130,000 projects reporting nonzero earnings from monthly charges in December 2022, average earnings per patron was $6.83 and median earnings per patron was $4.50. Fitting a simple linear model predicts that each additional patron is worth $3.98. There’s a fair amount of variability, though: one project earned less than a penny per patron, while another earned over a thousand dollars from just one patron. (As you might have guessed, it was an NFSW project.)

I also looked into the (in)famous Kevin Kelly claim that creators aiming to make a living in the Internet age just need to find “1,000 true fans” willing to pony up $100 or more per year. How’s that working out for Patreon projects?

Only 31 Patreon projects (about 0.02% of all projects with nonzero monthly earnings) met the specific criteria of having 1,000 or more patrons and per patron earnings of $100 or more per year (assuming December 2022 earnings were representative). If we use the looser criterion of earning $100,000 or more per year (regardless of the number of patrons), 238 projects met that, about 0.18% of all projects with nonzero monthly earnings in December 2022. I think finding 1,000 “true fans” is a lot harder than Kelly thought.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-02-07 19:54

i literally just watched an overall good video that pushed the 1000 true fans thing as a partial solution to the issues of the attention economy, this puts it into a lot of perspective…

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-02-07 20:56

Thanks for stopping by! Yeah, Kevin Kelly in particular has been dining out on the “1000 true fans” thing for years; it’s still the most popular post on his site. (But to give Kelly his due, his “scenius” post is excellent and I think essentially correct, even though he didn’t invent the term himself.)

[I originally published this post on Cohost as a follow-up to a Cohost post by @saralily, but I thought it was worth publishing on its own.]

I’ve read all of the ones @saralily recommends that have been released in English, except for A Tropical Fish Yearns for Snow, and agree with her comments. Here are some of my own recommendations, in no particular order:

Bloom Into You: Regarding Saeki Sayaka light novels. This takes a character who was given somewhat short shrift in the main Bloom Into You manga, and tells her story in her own voice. It may be blasphemous of me, but I prefer this to the manga.

Goodbye, My Rose Garden. A story set in the late Victorian era that is realistic about the barriers society placed in the way of lesbian relationships.

Yuri Is My Job! Starts out as an affectionate parody of yuri schoolgirl tropes as exemplified by Maria Watches Over Us, but then gets increasingly serious (and lesbian) in later volumes. (Some people apparently hate this change; I think it’s great.)

How Do We Relationship? This reverses the usual course of yuri stories: the protagonists meet and sleep with each other, then figure out what to do after that.

I Can’t Believe I Slept with You! A dubious (consent) premise redeemed as the story evolves. (And now that I think of it, it also reverses the usual yuri plot sequence.)

She, Her Camera, and Her Seasons. This features a love triangle in which one of the vertices is a high-school boy, and some yuri fans may reject it for that reason. But it’s really well-done, and the way photography is woven into the story and the characters’ lives is quite interesting: it‘s so important to the two main protagonists that they take pictures of each other even in—really, especially in—their most intimate and vulnerable moments.

Otherside Picnic light novels. I’m not generally a fan of horror, but I love these. Like the Regarding Saeki Sayaka light novels, they benefit tremendously from being told in the first-person. It’s worth noting that this is one of several works that trace their heritage back to the Strugatsky Brothers’ SF novel Roadside Picnic, a group that famously includes Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker as well as the video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

After Hours. Another adult yuri work, about an interesting subject, namely DJing. (It even has a couple of panels that name-check contemporary Japanese bands and DJs.) Like How Do We Relationship? and I Can’t Believe I Slept with You!, it starts with sex and then moves on to more interesting things.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

(My apologies, I couldn’t think of a clever headline for this.) In a comment on my “Life in Patreonia” post, @tekgo asked whether the number of patrons of Patreon projects was distributed in a similar way to the earnings for Patreon projects.

The short answer is “yes, it is.” The long answer is here. The in-between answer is that in the sample of about 218,000 projects, the number of patrons per project appears to have a log-normal distribution (like earnings), with a median number of 6 patrons per project. The chances of having more than 10 patrons is about 40%, the chances of having more than 100 is less than 10%, and the chances of having more than 1,000 is less than 1%.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

If you’re like me, you probably contribute to a project on Patreon. You may have even started a project on Patreon yourself, or are considering doing so.

Patreon boasts about its success: “8 million+ monthly active patrons … 250,000+ creators on Patreon … $3.5 billion paid out to creators.” Other sites run articles like “How Much Money Can You Make on Patreon?” and “25 Patreon Statistics You Need to Know.” There’s even a Patreon project devoted to collecting and publishing such statistics on an ongoing basis.

Occasionally you’ll find someone injecting a note of caution, as in a relatively in-depth analysis from five years ago. But the one set of statistics I could never find was about exactly how Patreon earnings were distributed across the whole set of projects, including what typical Patreon projects could expect to earn, and whether there was a straightforward way to characterize that distribution of earnings. So I decided to try doing that myself.

If you’re interested in the gory details, see “Distribution of Earnings Among Patreon Projects Charging by the Month.” The document is CC0-licensed, as is the R code used to create it. However the actual dataset I used (from Graphtreon) is not publicly available; if you want to replicate my work you’ll need to pay for the data yourself. (For what it’s worth, I don’t have a problem with Graphtreon charging for this; it took work to collect this data, and it has commercial value.)

One way to think about Patreon is to think of it as its own country (or state, or province), one with a population of over a hundred thousand. More specifically, Patreon had about 220,000 projects that reported their number of patrons as of December 2022, but only about 130,000 of them reported nonzero earnings from monthly charges. (About 80,000 projects didn’t report their earnings publicly at all, a few thousand charge by the podcast or video, not by the month, and a few hundred reported zero earnings.) Those are the projects I looked at in my analysis.

If Patreon were a country (“Patreonia”) then it would be by far the most unequal country on earth. As you can see in the left graph above, project earnings drop off extremely fast once you go past the top-ranked projects. In fact, the drop-off is so extreme that it’s better visualized using a so-called “log-log” plot, like the right graph above. While the top projects on Patreon earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, the median project (half earn more, half earn less) earns $25 a month, or less than a dollar a day.

This level of inequality is greater than in any country in the world; if you’re familiar with Gini coefficients, the coefficient for “Patreonia” is 0.84, while the country with the highest level of inequality is apparently South Africa, with a coefficient of 0.63. (A Gini value of 0 means income is equally shared, while a value of 1 indicates “perfect inequality” — one person gets all the income, everyone else gets nothing.)

I find it helpful to consider “Patreonia” as consisting of four separate groups of projects, each ten times larger than the last; together these four subsets account for almost all of the projects that I had valid data for. You can think of them as communities of different sizes and economic circumstances.

Patreon Heights

The first group, the “0.1%” of “Patreonia,” consists of the top 100 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreon Heights” had almost 3,900 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of almost $25,000, or about $300,000 a year. This corresponds to an especially affluent neighborhood in an especially affluent county in the US, like Loudoun County, Virginia, which has a median household income of around $150,000, the highest of any US county.

Patreon Grove

The second group, the “1%” of “Patreonia,” consists of the next 1,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreon Grove” had almost 800 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $4,200, or about $50,400 a year. This is well under the current median household income in the US, which is about $70,000. A US county with a comparable median household income and population is Crockett County, Texas, a rural county in the western part of the state.

Patreonville

The third group consists of the next 10,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in “Patreonville” had just over 100 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $650, or about $7,800 a year. This is well below the US Federal poverty line of $12,880 for a single-person household, and is lower than the median household income for any county in the US, even lower than that for Adjuntas, Puerto Rico, the poorest jurisdiction for which the US Census Bureau has data. (The median household income for Adjuntas is around $12,000 a year.)

The rest of Patreonia

The fourth and final group consists of the next 100,000 projects with nonzero earnings from monthly charges. The median project in the rest of “Patreonia” had 5 patrons and a monthly income in December 2022 of about $28, or about $340 a year. This is comparable to incomes in the poorest countries on Earth, places like Somalia, Uzbekistan, or the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Patreon and the “creator economy”

At this point you might say to me, “Frank, these are really stupid comparisons. You can’t compare someone running a side gig on Patreon to a person eking out a meager living in the world’s poorest countries.” And you’re right, but: Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans, and similar services are pitched to “creators” as a way to earn at least a partial living by “monetizing” their “content.”

Not a month goes by without another blog post, news story, or website heralding the “creator economy.” It’s attracting the attention of venture capitalists, who’ve funded a host of startups, all eager to help you realize your dreams as an artist, writer, musician, filmmaker, game designer, or “influencer,” in return for just a few percent off the top.

But the reality? Not so rosy. What I’ve tried to do is to put some more numbers behind that assertion.

P.S. to math-savvy web developers: If you’d like to put together a different kind of “how much money can you make on Patreon?” calculator, it’s pretty easy to calculate the odds of a project earning more than a given amount of money on Patreon. Patreon earnings for the month I analyzed were best fit by a log-normal distribution with μ of 3.33 and σ of 1.84. So to estimate the probability of earning more than x dollars, you can plug x into the formula for the log-normal cumulative distribution function (you’ll need the erf() function for this), and then subtract the result from 1. For example, the probability of earning more than $100 a month is 0.24, or about 1 in 4, while the probability of earning more than $1,000 a month is 0.026, or less than 3 percent.

@Janet (@Janet) - 2023-01-21 11:05

messed up.

but you dont even have to go online. same goes for GEMA in germany. thats the state org handling musical rights, only a few percent of artists (mostly song writers and producers) earn anything at all. if you are a tiny band, there is no way you will ever get money from GEMA, yet any music made will automatically be handled by GEMA, except in case you find another org, but GEMA had a monopoly so you were sool. Some years ago another such org was founded just so you wouldnt have to deal with GEMA anymore… ah but im not really in the know, i only read about it when the new org C3S was founded

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 12:38

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I believe the US has the same system for music, a duopoly between ASCAP and BMI.

june (@junelinked) - 2023-01-22 05:54

a little different; ASCAP/BMI are performance rights only (and do have some small, private, for-profit competitors - notably SESAC) whereas GEMA is an integrated CMO (mechanical + performance), and actually has more restrictive assignment provisions at least in part since ASCAP/BMI are under consent decrees. the market dynamics end up similar though, small writers are lucky to make enough to hit the payout threshold

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 11:52

Thank you for correcting me!

jeroknite (@jeroknite) - 2023-01-21 13:46

… Of course the poorest place in the US is in Puerto Rico :c

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 14:15

Thanks for the comment! I was curious about this, and checked the median household income statistics on Wikipedia. The 40 poorest jurisdictions in the US and its territories are in Puerto Rico, as are 58 of the 60 poorest.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 14:20

is there large variance in the size of patreon projects (≈ number of people involved)? If we account for this by, say, dividing earnings by number of people, do the graphs seriously change?

(My first reaction to the graph was that ”this makes sense; the large projects get the most funding but also have to pay out to more people”. But actually I have no clue what the distribution of project sizes on patreon looks like, nor if size correlates with earnings)

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 14:32

Say we very generously assume that all Patreon Heights projects are run by 100 people, Patreon Grove projects by 10, Patreonville projects by 1, and that the rest of Patreonia consist of abandoned projects that people forgot to unsubscribe from.

Then in Patreon Heights we have median income per person per month of $250; in Patreon Grove we get $420; and in Patreonville we get $650

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 15:53

You can find a list of the highest-earning Patreon projects at https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-earners. You can check them out yourself (I haven’t), I suspect that the highest-earning projects aren’t run by anywhere near 100 people.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:07

Hmm, yeah. Looks like at least the top few are mostly podcasts featuring a handful of people. Presumably they employ editors and publicizers, etc, but I would be shocked if any number was approaching 100

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:19

A four-host podcast making almost $200k a MONTH is absolutely bonkers; holy shit

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-21 15:49

Thanks for commenting! I cover some of this in the detailed document I linked to, in the section ”How are earnings and the number of patrons related?”; I’m not sure if you’ve had the chance to look at that or not. The short answer is that mean earnings per patron was $6.83 (with a standard deviation of $12.01), and the median earnings per patron was $4.50. Only 15% of projects have earnings per patron over $10, and very few have earnings per patron over $20.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-01-21 22:18

Ah, I had missed that link; sorry! (That is a very nice analysis)

I think I phrased my question poorly. I’m not interested in earnings versus number of patreons, but versus number of creators. Looking at Graphtreon, seems like this data isn’t available? I guess if it’s not something Patreon asks for people to self-report on, then it’s not really possible to generate in bulk.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 00:30

To my knowledge there’s no source of data on the number of people per Patreon project. That’s why I was careful to refer to ”projects” not ”creators”.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-01-21 21:44

Im not sure how related this is, but this reminds me of an experiment a music site did where they released two beta versions: One where you could see the number of views a song got, and one where you couldnt. The one where you could see the views, completely random songs would get a snowball effect of views and people would be really into them, but those songs were not significant at all on the other.

I feel like that sort of ”attention economy snowballing” is a key part of disproportionate success dynamics like this.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-22 00:32

A very good comment, thank you for foreshadowing some of what I hope to be able to write about in future.

㋬Zen1th (@zenith391) - 2023-01-23 16:16

That’s very true, and it’s also why I like cohost. You can’t see like counts or follow numbers which brings us closer to the version where ’we can’t see the number of views’. I might be following complete nobodies or the most popular account here, I can’t tell the difference.

Pat (@tekgo) - 2023-01-23 16:29

As you noted in the caveats a number of projects with high patron counts don’t report earnings. Looking at the Graphtreon top projects list only 14 of 50 report their earnings. I’m curious if you graph all the projects by number of patrons(that report that data) does it have a similar distribution to the earnings rank graphs?

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-23 16:59

Thanks for commenting! Yes, the distribution of number of patrons per project has a similar sharp drop-off once you get past the top 100, 1000, etc. I actually did an analysis of this as well, but the analysis document was getting really long and I decided to focus primarily on earnings. I may do a separate document discussing the number of patrons vs. rank in number of patrons. I’m going to guess that it follows a log-normal distribution too.

exodrifter (@exodrifter) - 2023-01-24 02:35

I have a lot of complicated feelings about the ”creator economy” and this is part of it. Many of the people I know that participate only do it on the side for fun and use the extra income to afford a few things relevant to the creative pursuit they are doing for fun. And although we are small, we also like to support each other, but every time money changes hands, the platform takes a cut…

Meanwhile, I would like to work full time on my creative pursuits, but it’s hard to imagine how that would work given the slim odds. I don’t really think I’m trying to say anything in particular here, it’s just difficult for me to think about.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-24 19:28

Thanks for commenting! To repeat what I wrote earlier, I am not trying to discourage people who want to supplement their income via Patreon or similar services. My main target was/is VCs and startups that are pushing services like this as the answer for people who want to support themselves full-time (or nearly so) as artists.

Censa (@censa) - 2023-01-29 23:23

huh this was really interesting. Thank you for sharing your findings!

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

A recent post by @Halceon reinforced a thought I had while writing my post about magic: that the desire to read stories about people who seemingly have personal agency, and are not working as part of a faceless bureaucracy or corporation, is a major factor in the popularity of anime, manga, and light novels about magic, especially those set in pseudo-European, sort-of-medieval settings populated by monarchs and nobles. (As a matter of fact, I just finished reading one of them myself.)

In such works monarchs and nobles are often portrayed as essentially benign overseers of society; even those that purport to comment on the gap between commoners and the nobility will typically feature one or more examples of “good kings” or “parfit gentil knyghts.” We are invited to follow their doings, praise their heroics, sympathize with their troubles, and be entertained by their foibles, as if we were watching a cosplay performance at the local “Renaissance Faire.” But the historical reality was quite different.

The economist Brad DeLong put the case succinctly, writing of the world before the 19th century (including those “medieval times”), in which the logic of Malthus held sway:

In a poor world, with limited technology and upward pressure on the population creating resource scarcity, it was only possible for a few to have enough. Moreover, the way those few could get enough for themselves and their children was for them through force and fraud, to run an exploitation-and-extraction machine against the bulk of humanity. Humanity’s societal energies were thus directed not toward making humanity more productive but, rather, toward making the force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction system run more securely …. In such a world, those ideas that were promoted and thus flourished were not those that made humanity capable of doing more things more efficiently and effectively. They were, instead, the ideas that shored-up the force-and-fraud exploitation-and-extraction system.

In other words, it was a world run by thugs, supported by enablers of thugs, and justified by apologists for thugs. (Or, if you prefer Mancur Olson’s terminology, a world run by “stationary bandits,” who found it more profitable to rule a land and exploit its people than to steal from them and run.) Those thugs would beget other thugs to rule in their turn, and were occasionally overthrown by yet more thugs—a whole line of thugs, stretching from deep antiquity to almost the present day.

Who in the present day can equal the kings of yore? Perhaps the best candidate is Kim Jong-Un, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, President of the State Affairs, First Chairman of the National Defense Commission and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, “great successor to the revolutionary cause of Juche,” “outstanding leader of the party, army and people,” third of his line. His lineage is storied (his grandfather’s birth said to have been accompanied by auspicious omens), he is praised by millions, and he wields weapons far more powerful and terrible than any ancient monarch. He even sits proudly astride a white charger. If ever anyone had kingly agency, it is he.

But outside of North Korea there are no literary works retailing the many adventures, and extolling the noble virtues, of “Respected Comrade” Kim, “a great person born of heaven.” Instead he is the subject of scorn, the butt of jokes (as was his father). Why should this be so?

Kim Jong-Un is certainly an unprepossessing sort, with his rotund figure and awkward haircut. Like successful thugs before him, his main talents seem to lie in crushing internal rivals and indulging in various luxuries. But in this he likely resembles most monarchs in history; he certainly cuts a more kingly figure than, say, Charles II of Spain, the product of generations of inbreeding.

Of course, we moderns can see present-day monarchs as they are—unlike the ancients, who rarely if ever saw the faces of those who ruled over them—and implicitly judge them wanting compared to the fit and attractive celebrities who are the true royalty in today’s culture. Kim Jong-Un was bound to lose in this comparison.

But more importantly, we have an alternative. In the past two hundred plus years we have thrown off the yoke of our monarchs, or retain them only as tourist attractions and tabloid fodder. Only a few oddballs and neoreactionaries yearn for them to return in glory to rule us once more.

Still, I’m disappointed that people continue to fixate on tales of kings and queens, magicians and wizards, seeking in them the agency that many of us feel we lack in our own lives. 99% of our ancestors were peasants, chained to the land and oppressed by its rulers. Even the least of us likely has more agency in their life than the average person back then, and we command powers that ancient monarchs could only dream of. Sometimes I wish we had more of their stories, and not yet another tale of whitewashed thuggery.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

OK, OK, I get it—ChatGPT is indeed impressive in what it can do. But I must confess that I’m amused by all the people doing prompt engineering, that is, coming up with ever more elaborate ways to elicit certain types of output from ChatGPT. I can understand this when it comes to DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion. After all, one of the main selling points of those systems is that they enable the creation of art (of a sort) by people who are good with words but can’t paint or draw to save their lives.

But if you’re good enough with words to construct extremely complicated prompts for ChatGPT, why not devote some (or even all!) of that mental effort to figuring out what you want to say and how you want to say it. The part of writing that both requires the most attention and (in my opinion) is most rewarding is coming up with insightful ideas, apt metaphors and analogies, and stylish turns of phrase.

This post is an example of that. I had no need nor desire to have an AI expand an outline, or write it in the form of an academic paper, or create a limerick out of it. I just made a mental connection between the more elaborate forms of ChatGPT prompt engineering and Dustin Hoffman staying awake for multiple nights to prepare for his performance in the infamous dental torture scene in the movie Marathon Man—an extreme method technique that supposedly prompted his costar Laurence Olivier to ask, “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?” And the rest followed from that . . . .

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

Prompted by a book post by @JhoiraArtificer, I got a copy of the Maria Headley translation of Beowulf, which I greatly enjoyed. In a comment on that post I recommended Christopher Logue’s free translation/adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, contrasting it with more conventional translations. I’ve started reading Caroline Alexander’s translation of the Iliad, one of the more heralded modern translations, and thought it might be fun to present it side by side with Logue’s version, along with a classic translation, that of Alexander Pope.

Im my comment on the book post I noted that there are two ways to translate Homer. To expand on this: The first is to attempt to fully translate the original Greek, replicating all the nuances of word choice in the original. Having done that, then try to make the result read as poetry, and in particular as much like Homeric poetry as possible—keeping in mind that metrical conventions in ancient Greek were not the same as in modern English.

Caroline Alexander’s 2015 translation is a good example of this first choice. In the introduction to her translation, she explains how she went about translating the Iliad:

My approach has been to render a line-by-line translation as far as English grammar allows; my translation, therefore, has the same number of lines as the Greek text and generally accords with the Greek lineation. I have tried to carve the English as close to the bone of the Greek as possible. The translation is in unrhymed verse, with a cadence that attempts to capture the rhythmic flow and pacing, as well as the epic energy, of the Greek, and which like the Greek varies from verse to verse. It is meant to follow unforced rhythms of natural speech.

Here is how her translation starts:

Wrath—sing, goddess, of the ruinous wrath of Peleus’ son Achilles,
that inflicted woes without number upon the Achaeans,
hurled forth to Hades many strong souls of warriors
and rendered their bodies prey for the dogs, for all birds,
and the will of Zeus was accomplished;
sing from when they two first stood in conflict—
Atreus’ son, lord of men, and godlike Achilles.

This is serviceable enough, but with some clunkiness that was presumably unavoidable given that Alexander wished to keep the word choices and line numbering the same as the Greek original. The appended “for all birds” is especially jarring and unnatural.

The poem then sets up the basic setting and conflict of the first book of the Iliad: the Greeks (“Achaeans”) have been at war many years at Troy, but are still stuck on and near the beach, unable to advance beyond it. Agamemnon (“Atreus’ son”), the paramount king of the Greeks, has taken for himself a girl captured as a slave, Chryseïs, the daughter of Chryses, a priest of the god Apollo. Chryses tries to ransom her, Agamemnon refuses to return her, Chryses prays to Apollo to punish the Greeks, and Apollo sends a plague unto them. Another priest tells Agamemnon that to stop the plague he must return Chryseïs to Chryses, and he agrees to do so, but in recompense he takes Achilles’ favorite captured slave girl, Brieis. This angers Achilles to no end, and after bitching about it to Agamemnon he also complains to his mother, the sea nymph Thetis:

                                                  But Achilles,
weeping, quickly slipping away from his companions, sat
on the shore of the gray salt sea, and looked out to depths as dark as wine;
again and again, stretching forth his hands, he prayed to his beloved mother:
“Mother, since you bore me to be short-lived as I am,
Olympian Zeus who thunders on high ought to
grant me at least honor; but now he honors me not even a little.
For the son of Atreus, wide-ruling Agamemnon
has dishonored me; he keeps my prize, having seized it, he personally taking it.”

This, to me, does not read like poetry; to quote a phrase I read somewhere on Twitter in another context, it is “lineated prose.” The requirement to match the original line for line has forced some lines to be over-long, breaking the flow of the poem.

As I said, it’s a serviceable translation, but I’m wondering how far I’ll be able to get through it. (In fairness, this approach does have its advocates; see for example this enthusiastic review of Alexander’s translation.)

The other way to approach the Iliad is to remember that you’re creating a poem for general readers in your own time, not for ancient Greeks or classicists. The approach here is ignore the letter of the Iliad and to imbue it with spirit—which may not actually be the spirit as perceived by its readers in antiquity, but a spirit that resonates with contemporary readers, whose background and mindset are entirely different.

Thus we turn to Christopher Logue’s partial adaptation of the Iliad, published from 1991 to 2003 and collected in two books, War Music and All Day Permanent Red (a wonderful title, that one). Logue describes his own approach as follows, in the introduction to War Music:

Rather than a translation in the accepted sense of the word, I was writing what I hoped would turn out to be a poem in English dependent on whatever, through reading and through conversation, I could guess about a small part of the Iliad . . . . My reading on the subject of translation had produced at least one important opinion: ‘We must try its effect as an English poem,’ Boswell reports Johnson as saying; ‘that is the way to judge of the merit of a translation.’

Logue assumed that his readers knew the basic plot and characters of the Iliad, and thus he could skip the setup and the introductions. He presumably also knew that lazy reviewers judge the quality of an Iliad translation based on its famous first lines, and often don’t read much further than that. Logue violates that expectation by beginning in media res, as the unnamed Achilles leaves his tent to complain to his (also unnamed) mother:

Picture the east Aegean sea by night,
And on a beach aslant its shimmering
Upwards of 50,000 men
Asleep like spoons beside their lethal Fleet.

    Now look along that beach and see
Between the keels hatching its western dunes
A ten-foot-high reed wall faced with black clay
And split by a double-doored gate
Then through the gate a naked man
Whose beauty’s silent power stops your heart
Fast walk, face wet with tears, out past its guard
And having vanished from their sight
Run with what seems to break the speed of light
Across the dry, then damp, then sand invisible
Beneath inch-high waves that slide
Over each others’ luminescent panes;
Then kneel among those panes, beggar his arms, and say:

    “Source, hear my voice.
God is your friend. You had me to serve Him.
In turn, He swore: If I, your only child,
Chose to die young, by violence, far from home,
My standing would be first; be best;
The best of bests; here; and in perpetuity
And so I chose. nor have I changed. but now—
By which I mean today, this instant, now—
That Shepherd of the Clouds has seen me trashed
Surely as if He sent a hand to shoo
The army into one, and then, before its eyes,
Painted my body with fresh Trojan excrement.

Logue was not the first poet to “go wild” with Homer. In 1715 the young poet Alexander Pope, after making a name for himself with his first works, kicked off an audacious project to publish a new English translation of the Iliad using his favored poetic form, heroic couplets. (Pope’s was the second translation to English, the first being that of George Chapman over a hundred years before.)

Here are the opening lines; note that Pope uses the Roman names for the gods, not the Greek ones:

The wrath of Peleus’ son, the direful spring
Of all the Grecian woes, O Goddess, sing!
That wrath which hurled to Pluto’s gloomy reign
The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain,
Whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore,
Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore:
Since great Achilles and Atrides strove,
Such was the sovereign doom, and such the will of Jove!

Contrast Alexander’s “rendered their bodies prey for the dogs, for all birds” with Pope’s “whose limbs, unburied on the naked shore / Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore.” Fidelity to the Greek be damned, I can’t imagine anyone preferring Alexander to Pope here.

Again, for contrast, here is the section where Achilles leaves his tent to appeal to Thetis:

    Not so his loss the fierce Achilles bore,
But sad retiring to the sounding shore,
O’er the wild margin of the deep he hung,
That kindred deep from whence his mother sprung;
There, bathed in tears of anger and disdain,
Thus loud lamented to the stormy main:
    “O parent goddess! since in early bloom
Thy son must fall, by too severe a doom;
Sure, to so short a race of glory born,
Great Jove in justice should this span adorn;
Honour and fame at least the Thunderer owed;
And ill he pays the promise of a god,
If yon proud monarch thus thy son defies,
Obscures my glories, and resumes my prize.”

A contemporary of Pope’s remarked, “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” I don’t care whether we call it Homer or not, it’s a pretty great poem; I read the whole thing, all thousand-plus pages of it. Pope’s contemporaries agreed with me; the translation netted Pope the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars in today’s currency. Nobody remembers the name of the person who criticized it.

Vince Hancock (@vhhancock) - 2023-01-08 20:31

What a great essay about the problems of translation. Thank you. I’m making my way through Pope’s version now. His footnotes are making it a richer experience.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-09 12:57

Thanks for commenting! I actually think Pope’s version is the one version I was able to read all the way through; at least, it’s the only one I have on my bookshelf, and I don’t recall reading any other versions.

Iro (@Iro) - 2023-01-08 20:35

I’ve been enjoying Super Bunnyhop’s goofy audiobook Iliad project so far. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgdySZU6KUXLVEyoi0IuQN7vlkVFTAKse

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-09 12:59

Thanks for commenting! I checked out the first episode of this. It was a pretty cool undertaking, almost like a Homeric radio drama. I could definitely see listening to this in the car while commuting, if I still actually commuted to work.

stylo (@stylo) - 2023-01-09 14:07

I find that pope translation unbearable, indelibly stamped with the cultural hallmarks of British colonialism of that era. I have the Lattimore on my shelf

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-09 17:47

Thanks for stopping by to comment! The Pope translation is definitely of its time, no question. I don’t have the Larrimore, but I’m going to try a read-through of the Caroline Alexander translation once I finish reading Logue. (There’s something to be said for getting the whole story and not just the highlights.)

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-01-12 22:23

Thanks for sharing! It can be frustrating how people dont understand that there is no such thing as direct translation for anything sufficiently complicated- flow and nuanced meaning and structure all combined to make 1:1s completely impossible, and poetry is a nice way to convey this impossibility, partially since conveying the impossibility of mapping meaning and impact in prose is more difficult, less obvious.

That’s quite an enormous gap between Caroline Alexander’s translation and Logue/Pope’s translations. It may be illuminating to compare to another as well that is not as “not quite a translation” as Logue/Pope’s but takes fundamentally different tradeoffs compared to Caroline Alexander’s.

http://emilyshauser.weebly.com/news/a-step-by-step-guide-to-the-translations-of-homers-iliad This is nice, and the “Greekness” notion with Robert Fitzgerald’s is intriguign. Also, the book cover translations are fascinating- a photo of D-day for Lombardo’s?! Logue’s struck me similarly.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-01-13 20:08

As always, thank you for commenting! I confess I haven’t read any of the Iliad translations by Lattimore, Fagles, Fitzgerald, etc., so I can’t comment intelligibly on them. I have however read both Fagles’ and Fitzgerald’s translations of the Odyssey, and recall liking them. The Odyssey is a very different poem than the Iliad, though.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2023-01-13 21:28

Re: confess: No worries/surprise, I only read one translation back in university myself and lightly looked at a few others, haha. I bet theres some interesting articles giving a dive into that sort of comparison anyway.

[This post originally appeared as a series of five articles on Cohost. I thought it was worth publishing it on my own site, and have combined the five articles into one.]

Happy New Year! Today’s topic is perhaps my favorite film by perhaps my favorite director, Early Summer, directed by Yasujirō Ozu. (I’ve seen all but one of the over thirty Ozu films that have survived to this day.)

I’m an old straight white cisgender man, so I wouldn’t know about these things, but Early Summer has always struck me as a pretty gosh-darned queer film. I’ve seen other people make remarks to this effect (one of which I’ll address in due time), but have never seen a complete case laid out. This is my own attempt; you may judge for yourself to what extent it is successful.

NOTE: This post contains spoilers for all of Early Summer.

A bit about Ozu: Today he’s a critic’s darling, renowned for the formalist perfection of his films and often spoken of in reverent terms. (Adam Mars-Jones skewers some of the most overly-pretentious examples of such criticism in his book Noriko Smiling,¹ which does for Ozu’s 1949 film Late Spring what I’ll attempt in a much smaller way to do for Early Summer.)

But from his own point of view Ozu was not making arthouse films; he was making “home dramas,” movies pitched at the growing post-war Japanese middle class, with an audience composed predominantly of women. His films are about topics of concern to that middle-class audience, for example, families growing apart in an increasingly urbanized Japan (Tokyo Story, 1953), or children rejecting arranged marriages for love marriages (Equinox Flower, 1955).

Early Summer (1951) is yet another home drama. It’s the middle film in Ozu’s “Noriko trilogy”—so called because all three films feature main characters named “Noriko”—and is relatively neglected compared to the other two. Late Spring, which preceded Early Summer, is generally considered the first great work of Ozu’s mature period; it’s ranked number 21 on the latest Sight and Sound critics’ list of the greatest films of all time, and number 62 on the accompanying directors’ list. Tokyo Story, which followed Early Summer, is almost universally regarded as Ozu’s masterpiece, and is ranked at number 4 on both of the Sight and Sound lists.

Early Summer does not appear on either of these lists. However, it’s probably my favorite of all Ozu’s films, in part because its melancholy is accompanied by a humor—and even a measure of optimism—that is largely missing in Late Spring and Tokyo Story, and in part because it’s interesting to look at it through the lens of queerness in cinema—as I hope to do in this series of posts.

On the surface Early Summer tells the story of 28-year-old unmarried Noriko (played by the great Setsuko Hara) and her family’s and her employer’s attempts to arrange a marriage for her.

Going one level down, Early Summer is about the difference between the married and the unmarried, how the married try to persuade or (worse) coerce the unmarried into getting married, and how maybe that isn’t always such a good idea. This theme is explicitly called out more than once in the film.

Early Summer further implies that there may be a good reason why some unmarried people, including Noriko (but not just Noriko), don’t want to marry: they may be “that type of person,” as the young lesbian Fumi described herself in Takako Shimura’s manga Aoi hana. This subtext rises briefly to the level of text at least once before being ambiguously dismissed.

Both Ozu and Hara remained unmarried until their deaths, and to my knowledge neither were ever credibly reported as having a romantic relationship with anyone. Per Donald Richie’s commentary on the Criterion release (referenced in the next section), Ozu was reported to become angry at any talk of his marrying. Meanwhile Hara, though termed “the eternal virgin” by a film producer for her film image, in real life had close friendships with many women, including a hair and makeup artist whose friendship with Hara began early on and continued after Hara retired into obscurity at the height of her career.

In modern terms we could therefore hypothesize Early Summer as a queer film subtly but firmly protesting compulsory heterosexuality, made by a (possibly) queer director and starring a (possibly) queer actor. What exact flavor of “queer” this might be we can leave undefined for now.

Does the film itself support this hypothesis? I’ll discuss this in more detail beginning in the following sections, as I walk through the various scenes and plot points of the film. However it’s generally agreed that very little in an Ozu film is accidental: interiors were constructed to his exact specifications, and actors’ gestures were meticulously rehearsed and multiple takes shot until he was satisfied. If something seems “queer” in Early Summer, there’s a good chance that Ozu intended it thus.

First, a note on sources: Since I don’t speak Japanese, I’m relying almost completely on the subtitles in the two English releases of Early Summer. The first is a Criterion release from 2004, currently available for streaming in the US on the Criterion Channel and Max. There is also a British Film Institute release from 2010, currently available for streaming in the UK on the BFI Player. (Those without access to these are free to try to hunt the film down on other sites devoted to hosting videos or archiving Internet content.)

In general I’ll be quoting the Criterion subtitles; as I discuss later, there are at least a couple of places where the BFI translation is substantially different, and another place where the Criterion subtitles contain a major error.

(Before I get into the film itself, note that the title in Japanese is Bakushū, or “Barley Harvest Time.” This doesn’t directly bear on my thesis, but it’s worth noting for completeness, and as we shall see it ties in with the conclusion of the film.)

Early Summer opens with three establishing shots: first a shot of a dog walking freely on the beach with the ocean in the background, then a shot of a single bird in a cage outside, and then a final shot of birds in cages inside a house. This is the house in the oceanside town of Kamakura in which Noriko (Setsuko Hara’s character) lives, along with her brother Kōichi (Chishū Ryū), his wife Fumiko (Kuniko Miyake), Noriko and Koichi’s father (Ichiro Sugai) and mother (Chieko Higashiyama), and Kōichi and Fumiko’s two young boys.

If we wish, we can interpret the first and third shots as showing a strong contrast between freedom in nature on the one hand, and the restrictions imposed by society and the Japanese family system on the other. In this interpretation the second shot represents Noriko, who has a degree of independence that her mother and Fumiko do not have, but is still constrained by the bonds of family and society.

In the following scenes Kōichi takes an early train to his job as a physician, while Noriko goes to the Kita-Kamakura station to catch a later one. There she meets Kenkichi, another physician who works with Kōichi and who (along with his mother) is the family’s next-door neighbor. Kenkichi tells her that he’s been reading a book, implied to have been recommended by Noriko. The Criterion release describes it only as “this book,” but the BFI release names it as Les Thibaults.

Les Thibaults (published in Japanese as Chibō-ka no hitobito, and apparently relatively popular in Japan at the time) is a multi-volume French novel that begins as one of its protagonists is discovered writing passionate messages to a fellow schoolboy—something Ozu himself was apparently falsely accused of—and is then separated from his friend. Later volumes describe their diverging paths in life. Why might have Noriko recommended this particular novel to Kenkichi? Hold that thought.

We then see Noriko at work, as a secretary and executive assistant to the head of a small firm (Shūji Sano). As she talks with her boss regarding café recommendations, her best friend Aya (Chikage Awashima) arrives, there to collect payment for the boss’s spending at the restaurant her mother owns. Noriko’s boss wonders when they’ll both get married, and refers to them as “old maids.”

(Before becoming a movie actress, Chikage Awashima was a musumeyaku top star in the Takarazuka Revue and occasionally played “pants roles,” i.e., as a female character dressing as a man for plot reasons. Osamu Tezuka was a fan of hers, and she supposedly inspired the main character Sapphire, “born . . . with a blue heart of a boy and a pink heart of a girl,” in his manga Princess Knight. Why might this be relevant to Early Summer? Again, hold that thought.)

After work, Noriko meets Kōichi and Fumiko for dinner. While they eat, Kōichi complains about post-war women (“[They’ve] become so forward.”) and Noriko corrects him: “We’ve just taken our natural place.” Kōichi then claims that’s why Noriko can’t get married, and she rebukes him: “It’s not that I can’t. I could in a minute if I wanted to.” (Note: a bit of foreshadowing here.)

Next occur the two key events that set the main plot in motion. First, Noriko’s great-uncle (Seiji Miyaguchi) arrives for a visit. He wonders why she isn’t married yet. “Some women don’t want to get married,” he tells her. “Are you one of them?” Noriko laughs and leaves the room, but the seed has been planted in the minds of her family.

Noriko’s boss also thinks it’s time for her to get married, and he has just the man for her: “He’s never been married. Not sure if he’s still a virgin.” Her boss has photographs to show her, and won’t leave her leave without taking them.

Meanwhile Noriko and Aya mercilessly tease one of their married friends, and after attending another friend’s wedding have dinner with that friend and another married friend, with a side dish of sexual innuendo. One of the married friends brags about how she spent a rained-out honeymoon playing with a “spinning top”: “My husband is very good at it.” Her friend cautions her: “You shouldn’t flaunt it in front of the single girls.”

However, Aya is not impressed with the implied amazingness of heterosexual intercourse: “Silly! We don’t play with tops, do we?” Noriko enthusiastically agrees with her: “That’s for children, isn’t it?” The debate between the married and the unmarried continues, after which Noriko goes home, where Kōichi and Fumiko are scheming regarding the marital candidate proposed by Noriko’s boss.

Kenkichi’s mother then visits Noriko’s mother, and tells her that a man from a detective agency has been asking about Noriko: “I realized it was about her marriage.” We also learn that Kenkichi’s wife died two years ago (leaving him with a young daughter), and that he’s not interested in remarrying: “All he does since his wife died is read books” (like Les Thibaults). Finally, we learn that Kenkichi’s best friend, Noriko’s brother Shoji, went missing in the war.

We now come to the climax of the first half of the movie. As Noriko’s nephews and their friends play with their model train set downstairs (one nephew asking if their father will buy them more train track), Aya visits Noriko and they talk in her room upstairs. Their married friends have made various excuses for why they couldn’t also visit; Noriko recalls how close they were at school and laments their drifting apart.

Throughout the first half of Early Summer Noriko and Aya are shown as mirroring each other’s gestures and speech. That mirroring continues in this scene (for example, they sit down next to each other at the exact same time and in the exact same manner), and then a very interesting thing happens. Ozu’s typical modus operandi is to continue a shot until someone stops speaking or moving, or even until they leave the room. But here he cuts immediately from Noriko and Aya simultaneously raising their glasses to drink, to Noriko’s father and mother simultaneously bringing food to their lips, as they relax sitting on a street curb in town.

If I were to speculate about what this juxtaposition might mean, if anything, I’d speculate as follows: that Ozu intended to show that, whatever Aya and Noriko might be to each other, they are as close, secure, and happy in their relationship as Noriko’s mother and father are in theirs—as much a couple as any other in the film, but not formally recognized as such.

Noriko’s father tells his wife, “This may be the happiest time for our family,” although he’s sad at the thought of Noriko leaving. They continue their conversation, and then are interrupted by the site of a balloon rising into the sky. “Some child must be crying,” Noriko’s father remarks. “Remember how Kōichi cried when he lost his balloon?” And on that somewhat ominous note the film enters its second half, during which conflicts over Noriko and her proposed marriage will rise to the surface.

We left Noriko and her best friend Aya enjoying a pleasant chat in Noriko’s room (their married friends having begged off with various excuses) and Noriko’s mother and father enjoying a day out without the rest of the family, rejoicing in the happiness they have, albeit a bit sad at the thought of Noriko leaving to marry.

The good times continue as Noriko brings home a cake to eat with her sister-in-law Fumiko, and their neighbor Kenkichi drops in unexpectedly and is invited to share it with them. The scene re-introduces Kenkichi and brings up the subject of his remarrying—something he doesn’t want, but his mother (played by Haruko Sugimura) does.

(I can’t resist adding that, in addition to appearing in all three films of the Noriko trilogy, as well as in several other Ozu films, Haruko Sugimura was a noted stage actress. Among other things, in 1956 she debuted the role of Asako in Yukio Mishima’s Rokumeikan, a play I discuss at great length in my book on Takako Shimura’s manga Aoi hana / Sweet Blue Flowers.)

The scene also shows the importance of Noriko’s income to the family finances: the price of the cake is JPY 900, equivalent to over JPY 6,000 today, at a time when Japan was a relatively poor country with an economy just emerging from wartime destruction. No wonder Fumiko protests the purchase, and Noriko downplays the expense to Kenkichi.

In the meantime Noriko’s brother Kōichi has been pursuing the idea of a marriage between Noriko and an unseen bachelor first suggested by Noriko’s boss, including asking his friends and associates for more information on the proposed groom. The results are “very promising”: “He’s in the social register, and seems to be a fine businessman.” “How nice,” replies his mother, but, “how old is he?”

The answer—“about 40”—dismays both Kōichi’s mother and his wife. He may think that the age gap is not an issue, but the women do, and you can see their disapproval in their downcast expressions. This marks the beginning of a family conflict as Kōichi—the nearest thing to a villain in Early Summer—tries to exert his patriarchal authority and refuses to give up on the idea of the marriage.

Meanwhile Kōichi’s bratty sons run away after he scolds them (they were mad because he brought home bread instead of more model train tracks), and Noriko recruits Kenkichi to (successfully) help find them. While this is happening, Koichi is away from home, playing Go with a friend—again a contrast between Kōichi as an overbearing would-be patriarch and Kenkichi as a more caring father figure. (In the next scene we also see Kenkichi showing affection to his own child, “my good little girl.”)

We then have another precipitating event: Kenkichi, who (recall) is a doctor in the same facility as Kōichi, gets recommended by Kōichi for a plum position as a department head in a hospital way out in rural Japan, and tells his mother that he wants to accept it. She despairs at the thought of leaving their home, but his enthusiasm carries the day.

Then Noriko’s boss asks a few questions that we’ve been asking ourselves. While Noriko is away from work, Aya stops by, and the boss questions Aya on whether Noriko will go through with the match or not: “I don’t understand her . . . . Is she interested in men?” Aya at first demurs: “What do you think?” Noriko’s boss has seen indications both ways, and presses the question: “Has she always been like that?” Aya responds in the affirmative. The questioning goes on. Aya tells him that Noriko’s apparently never been in love, “but she has an album of . . . Hepburn photos this thick,” holding her thumb and forefinger about 4 centimeters apart.

Here we have the first of two translation issues. Aya actually refers to “Hepburn” without mentioning a given name. The Criterion subtitles—by Donald Richie, who should have known better—make this a reference to Audrey Hepburn, who’d had only small roles by then. It’s almost certain that this is instead a reference to Katherine Hepburn, who was a major star by the time Noriko would have entered middle school. Was the teenaged Noriko besotted by the androgynous beauty of Katharine Hepburn (who would have made a stunning otokoyaku)? It sure looks like it.

The subtext now threatens to become text, as Noriko’s boss learns that “Hepburn” refers to an American actress, and asks the obvious follow-up question about Noriko. In the Criterion subtitles it’s translated as “So she goes for women?” The BFI translation puts it more bluntly: “Is she queer?” What is Noriko’s boss really asking? Japanese speakers can correct me here, but I believe his actual question uses the term “hentai.”

Western fans are used to thinking of “hentai” as referring to pornography. However, my understanding is that at the time of the film “hentai” in colloquial Japanese would have referred specifically to sexual behavior that was considered abnormal. So if Noriko’s boss did use the term, another possible translation might have been “Is she a pervert?” Both the Criterion and BFI translations soften the question; in particular BFI’s “is she queer?”, while defensible, risks projecting our current ideas about “queer” (including its positive connotations) onto a film created in a different time.

In any case, Aya is determined to shut down any discussion of Noriko’s proclivities. “No!” she firmly replies. Noriko’s boss is apparently unconvinced: “You can never know. She’s very strange, in any case.” His prurient instincts aroused, Noriko’s boss then envisions another solution to the problem of Noriko, and queries Aya about it: “Why don’t you teach her?” “About what?” “Everything.” “What do you mean, everything?” He pats her shoulder and admonishes her: “Don’t try to be coy,” as we viewers pause to consider the implications of what he’s asking her to do.

Aya rejects this line of inquiry as well: “Don’t talk to me like that! That was rude!” Noriko’s boss laughs, offers a half-hearted apology, and then (after telling Aya that Noriko won’t be back that day) invites her to lunch and quizzes her on her preferences in sushi: “Tuna” she says. He continues, “How about an open clam?” (which Donald Richie’s commentary helpfully informs us is a euphemism for the vagina). “Sure,” she replies. “And a nice long rice roll?” “No, thank you!” His final words are, “You’re strange too,” and again I think I hear the word “hentai” enter the conversation.

We now switch to a scene featuring Noriko and her next-door neighbor Kenkichi. Recall that Kenkichi decided to accept an offer as a department head in a hospital in Akita, several hundred kilometers north of Tokyo and on the opposite coast. Noriko meets him in a café before her brother Kōichi is to host him at a farewell dinner party, and they talk about Shoji, Noriko’s other brother who went missing in action during the war. Kenkichi recalls how he and Shoji were best friends in school, often eating at this café, indeed at this very table. Kenkichi tells Noriko that he still keeps a letter that Shoji sent him, with a stalk of wheat enclosed (probably indicating that Shoji was deployed in northern China). Noriko asks if she can have the letter, and Kenkichi agrees.

Afterward Noriko visits Kenkichi’s mother, while Kenkichi himself is still at his farewell party. Kenkichi’s mother tells Noriko her secret dream (“please don’t tell Kenkichi”): “I just wish Kenkichi had gotten remarried to someone like you.” She apologizes and asks Noriko not to be angry (“It’s just a wish in my heart”), but Noriko stares at her with an intense expression (her usual smile absent), and asks her, “Do you mean it? . . . Do you really feel that way about me?” Kenkichi’s mother apologizes again, but Noriko presses on: “You wouldn’t mind an old maid like me?” Then before Kenkichi’s mother can respond, Noriko speaks: “Then I accept.”

Kenkichi’s mother is incredulous. She asks Noriko several times to confirm what she’s saying, thanks Noriko effusively and weeps tears of joy at her good fortune, but continues to question Noriko about her decision even as Noriko leaves to go home. (Incidentally, this scene features a bravura performance by Haruko Sugimura.)

After she leaves the house, Noriko encounters Kenkichi, just returned from his farewell party. Noriko exchanges some small talk with him, but says absolutely nothing about what she just told his mother.

Noriko’s decision then plays out across multiple scenes:

At first Kenkichi doesn’t understand what his mother is trying to tell him (“She accepted.” “Accepted what?”). When he finally gets the message (“She agreed to marry you. To become your wife!” “My wife?” “Yes. Isn’t it wonderful?”), he looks absolutely gobsmacked. His mother breaks down in tears again telling him how happy she is, and how happy he should be. He tries to play along (glumly echoing, “Yes, I’m happy”), but he looks for all the world like a man who would sooner eat nails than enter into another marriage.

Kenkichi’s mother doesn’t understand why he’s not happy. She concludes, “What an odd boy you are.” The Japanese word here appears to be “hen,” which I understand to be a softer adjective than “hentai,” and not sexual in nature. But note that Kenkichi is now the third person after Noriko and Aya to be referred to as not normal in some way.

Meanwhile Noriko is interrogated about her decision by her family, especially by Kōichi, in a beautifully framed and shot scene—Noriko in white, her head bowed, her brother in black, barking questions like a prosecutor cross-examining a criminal. Noriko is unrepentant: “When his mother talked to me, I didn’t feel a moment’s hesitation. I suddenly felt I’d be happy with him.” Her parents retire upstairs to chew on their disappointment—Noriko walking silently past them on her way to her room—while Kōichi tells Fumiko, “What could we do now? She’s made up her mind. You know how she is.”

The next day, after Kenkichi boards the train to Akita, his mother visits Noriko at her office, and they tiptoe around the question of what others thought: “Did your parents approve?” “Yes.” “And your brother?” “Don’t worry.” and “What did Kenkichi think?” “. . . He’s overjoyed. He didn’t sleep last night.”

The next two shots echo the beginning of the film, a shot of a bird in a cage outside, and then Noriko’s father inside with the other cages, caring for the birds. Noriko’s mother laments that Noriko didn’t make a better match, Fumiko nods in agreement, and Noriko’s father goes for a walk to buy more birdseed, silently contemplating their life going forward, in one of those quiet scenes that Ozu does so well.

Meanwhile Noriko and Aya have their last scene together. It starts by echoing and completing the action at the end of their previous scene: then they raised their glasses together to drink, now they lower their glasses in a simultaneous gesture. Aya tells Noriko that she can’t believe Noriko would ever end up like this: she thought Noriko would be a modern woman living “Western-style, with a flower garden, listening to Chopin,” “wearing a white sweater, with a terrier in tow,” and greeting Aya in English—“Hello, how are you?”

Instead Aya now imagines Noriko wearing farmers clothes in rural Japan, speaking the local dialect. She playfully imitates country speech, and Noriko responds in kind: “Ya don’t look it, but ya talk like the locals.” “I figure to live in Akita when me and my man get hitched.” The subtext here I read as follows: Noriko knows how to pretend to be something she is not—a conventional heterosexual woman in a conventional heterosexual marriage—and she will accept doing so in her self-imposed exile from Tokyo, the price she must pay for avoiding what she considered to be a worse fate.

The tone then turns serious. Aya recalls meeting Kenkichi when they were in school, on a hiking trip with Noriko and her brother Shoji, and presses Noriko about her choice: “Did you already love him then?” “No, I had no particular feeling for him. . . . I never imagined myself marrying him.” Noriko evades Aya’s questions about how she came to love Kenkichi, refusing time after time to acknowledge her feelings for him as those of love. Instead she insists, “No, I just feel I could trust him with all my heart and be happy.”

But trust Kenkichi for what? we want to ask Noriko. To respect her for who and what she is? To not want a conventional relationship with her? To not press her for sex or for children (after all, he already has one)? To keep her secrets, as she might keep any secret of his?

After this last meeting with Aya, Noriko comes back to a cold house and a dinner alone. Her parents and Kōichi leave the room to avoid greeting her, and only Fumiko is there to welcome her.

In the next scene she and Fumiko walk to the beach for one last look at the ocean, Ozu showing them walking up a sand dune in a gorgeous crane shot—supposedly the only one he ever used. In the earliest scenes in the film Noriko was dressed in stylish Western clothes, contrasted with Fumiko’s traditional Japanese attire. Now, instead of mirroring Aya, she is a mirror of Fumiko in her plain housewife’s outfit—but still freer and looser in her appearance.

Noriko tries to reassure Fumiko that she’ll be OK: “Are you worried that I’m marrying a man with a child? . . . I love children” (as we’ve seen earlier in the film with both her nephews and Kenkichi’s daughter). “Frankly, I felt I couldn’t trust a man who was still unattached and drifting around at 40. I think a man with a child is more trustworthy.” (Note again Noriko’s emphasis on trust and not love.) After discussing how they’ll be competing to scrimp and save in managing their families’ finances, they take a last walk down the beach by the ocean.

Just as she saw Aya for the last time (at least until/unless Kenkichi can return to Tokyo), Noriko now takes formal leave of her boss. He idly wonders if he himself could have been the right man for her. She does not encourage him in this line of thought.

The family then gathers for one last commemorative photo. Without Noriko’s salary they can no longer afford the house in Kamakura, so they break up: the parents to live with the great-uncle; Noriko to Akita with Kenkichi, his mother, and his daughter; and Kōichi, Fumiko, and their sons to some other less-expensive dwelling (perhaps an apartment in the Tokyo suburbs).

The parents recall when they moved into the house: “It was spring and Noriko had just turned 12.” Kōichi remembers that time as well: “She used to wear a ribbon in her hair, and she was always singing.” But “children grow up so quickly,” her parents remark, and living together forever, “that’s impossible.”

Her usual smile nowhere in evidence, Noriko takes it all upon herself: “I’m sorry, I’ve broken up the family.” Despite reassurances from her father (“It’s not your fault. It was inevitable.”) she flees from the room, goes upstairs to her own room, and cries her heart out, distraught about the turn that her and their lives have taken.

The final scene shows Noriko’s parents at the great-uncle’s house, far from the sea. They glance at a wedding procession walking through the fields (“Look there. A bride is passing by. I wonder what sort of family she’s marrying into?”), think of Noriko, and resign themselves to the family’s fate: “We shouldn’t ask for too much.” “We’ve been really happy.” The film closes with a tracking shot of a field of grain—perhaps the barley of the Japanese title?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, traditionally most mainstream critics writing about Ozu seem to have ignored or downplayed the potentially queer aspects of Early Summer. For example, they go unmentioned in the essays by David Bordwell and Jim Jarmusch included in the Criterion collection release, as well as in Bordwell’s book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. As Yuka Kanno remarks, “The self-regulation of the ‘Ozu criticism’ industry has too long suppressed the possibility of new readings of his films,” preferring to focus on the “existing and limited interpretive frameworks of auteurism or of Ozu as an alternative modernist.”²

One exception is Robin Wood, who specifically references the scene between Noriko’s boss and Aya, and the lesbian implications of Noriko’s idolization of Katherine Hepburn.³ Another is Kanno, who discusses the Hepburn/Noriko connection at greater length.

I also found it interesting how upfront Early Summer is in raising the possibility of Noriko and (especially) Aya not having conventional heterosexual desires; in particular, I can’t imagine any mainstream American film of the time having an exchange like that between Aya and Noriko’s boss. Beyond general cultural differences between Japan and the US regarding discussions of sex, it’s worth noting that after the war Japan saw a reaction against restrictions imposed by the imperial Japanese government (and to a lesser extent by the American occupation authorities) and an explosion of interest in sexual practices, both conventional and less so.

In particular, see the late Mark McLelland’s discussion of the phenomenon of ryōki or “curiosity hunting”: seeking out the bizarre and unusual, including unusual sexual practices, both by reading about them and (for some) experiencing them firsthand.⁴ The more risqué elements of Early Summer—Ozu’s first film after the end of occupation censorship—can perhaps be seen as an attempt to provide a bit of ryōki in a mainstream film suitable for viewing by a middle-class audience.

Finally, what are we to make of Early Summer today, over 70 years after its release?

In my opinion, it’s not worth arguing about exactly how “queer” the film’s characters really are. Is Aya a lesbian? Is Noriko aromantic and asexual? Are Aya and Noriko a couple and, if so, in what sense? Is Kenkichi reluctant to remarry because he harbors no desire toward women, and is mourning a past love for Noriko’s brother Shoji? These are questions that can be debated one way or the other. The more important point is that all three of these characters behave in ways that are—to one degree or another—inconsistent with conventional heterosexual norms.

I suspect that the original audience for Ozu’s “home dramas” would have picked up on this. They likely knew someone, or knew of someone, who refused to marry or remarry—single women approaching their thirties, bachelors in their forties and fifties, widowers content to live alone—and would have had some inkling as to why this was. They would have seen in the fates of the characters in the film the possible fates of some of their friends, co-workers, even family members.

In Early Summer the characters accept their fates with resignation, sighs, and (occasionally) tears. But consider another possible resolution to the plot: Noriko is no longer pestered into marrying by her employer and her family. She continues to work, contribute to the household, and help care for her nephews. The household in Kamakura remains intact and harmonious, even as Noriko and Kōichi’s parents leave to spend their final years with the great-uncle. Aya and Noriko continue to enjoy a close relationship with each other, while Aya takes over the restaurant owned by her mother and remains unmarried and independent. Kenkichi enjoys life with his books, and after his stint in Akita returns with his mother and daughter to once again be a good neighbor and friend to Noriko and her family.

If Ozu intended for Early Summer to have a message, I think it would be this: here is a traditional multi-generational Japanese family broken apart not by modernity, or feminism, or Western culture, or any other of the usual suspects, but by a refusal to think outside the bounds of conventional heterosexual norms. It’s too much, I think, to expect a film made in 1951 for a mainstream audience to propose an alternative to this; highlighting the problem is achievement enough.

What then can I conclude regarding my original hypothesis? Here I can do no better than to “reverse the argument,” shamelessly steal the words with which Adam Mars-Jones ended his book about Ozu’s Late Spring, and adapt them to my own purpose:

If Yasujirō Ozu did decide to make a film about the experience of being queer in postwar Japan, within the limits of what the studio and his audience could accept, what would it look like? Wouldn’t it look like Early Summer? Very much like Early Summer.

As the year ends, I thought about why I like this site and why I’m posting so much on it. Please indulge me while I ramble a bit.

First, Cohost is a good match with my writing style. I’m not the sort of person who can think fast and post snappy one-liners in response to the latest thing. That’s in large part what Twitter rewards, and I don’t see the various Twitter substitutes (Mastodon, Post, Hive, etc.) being any different. I once spent almost a year writing a single blog post because I felt I didn’t know enough about the topic to not embarrass myself. (Here it is, in case you’re curious; math, programming, and design fans might like it.)

Second, I like to have an audience, but I don’t need a big audience. Writing at my “official” site allowed to me to write at length, but I felt like I was shouting into the void—especially since I didn’t provide a way for people to add comments. To remedy that, I tried out Substack for a while. The problem there was that I didn’t feel like joining in the obsession with growing and (especially) monetizing your subscriber list that was promoted by the site’s owners. Here on Cohost I have about 3 dozen followers, which is enough for me to get an occasional like—or even a comment or two—to motivate me to continue writing.

(I also make a point of following everyone who follows me. That to me makes this place feel more like a community—or even someplace that might one day spawn a “scenius,” to use Brian Eno’s term. If you follow me and I don’t show up in your own followers list, and you are OK with me following you, please tell me in a comment—or even just like this post, so I’ll know to check—and I’ll remedy that oversight.)

Third, I like the Cohost interface, which is simple and straightforward, and the use of Markdown, which I also use for my official blog. I tried Tumblr for a while, and maybe it was just my age showing, but I could never get how Tumblr was supposed to work.

Finally, I like supporting (relatively) small-scale endeavors run by folks who believe in what they’re doing and are not looking to ride exponential growth curves to fame and fortune. One of the great things about the present day is that the combination of low-cost computing and free and open source software makes it possible for sites to be created with a minimal investment.

But, they still need some financial support in order to continue running, and the existence of (nearly) global payment networks makes it possible for us to provide that support. So, if you can afford it and haven’t done so yet, please go to your Settings page and sign up for Cohost Plus!

That’s all for this year. Tomorrow I’ll celebrate the new year with a mega-post (split into 5 posts for readability) on one of my favorite films. In the meantime, Happy New Year to you all!

Noel B (@NoelBWrites) - 2022-12-31 13:55

I feel the exact same way about the audience bit

I want people to see what I write so they can comment on it! If I write about something it’s because it matters to me, and if it matters to me, I want to talk about it with people.

But I am not interested in “growing” an audience to the point that other platforms seem to encourage in order to “monetize” it. At a certain size, your audience is no longer people and it’s just an abstract number, if that makes sense. And with a large enough audience, comments and stuff stop being for you and start being for other people in the audience.

It’s like if there’s nobody to read your stuff you’re talking to an empty room. But if there’s too many people reading your stuff, you’re screaming from a pulpit and then hiding backstage. Either way feels lonely.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-31 14:41

Your point about “comments and stuff stop being for you” is well-taken, and is definitely something I don’t like about Twitter: people replying to tweets (especially to tweets by people with a high follower count) as a way to show off how clever they are to other people following the original tweeter, hoping they can gain followers themselves.

exodrifter (@exodrifter) - 2024-12-31 14:16

I have pretty similar feelings to you and agree with almost everything you said about cohost. I never really got how Tumblr works despite being in its age demo and Twitter is much too short for my liking and I’ve resigned to use Twitter mostly as a way to push the equivalent of an RSS feed to whoever uses it. I really like how cohost somehow manages to land in the middle of high-effort and low-effort posting.

As for audience size, that’s something I’m struggling with in a different way. I want to grow, but my idea of growth is typically different from the platform’s idea of growth. For example: On Twitch they want you to gain more followers and subscribers, but I mostly just want more active chatters and fans so I can have an easier time sharing and marketing my completed games. Of course, making more money is great and that’s one of my goals too, but I think for me it is more important to have a healthy and active community even if it’s a smaller size.

It certainly doesn’t help that platforms use their own ideas of growth and what something “good” is in their recommendation engines to decide who gets seen more, and I’m very happy that cohost doesn’t really have anything like that.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-31 00:09

“it is more important to have a healthy and active community even if it’s a smaller size.” Yes, exactly. Thanks for the comment!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

I try to resist the siren call of “someone is wrong on the Internet,” and also try not to comment on topics where I have no personal knowledge or haven’t done much research. I’m going to break those two rules a bit today.

In reading about the Russo-Ukraine war, I’ve noticed a strain of commentary to the effect that everything would have been fine if NATO had not expanded eastward (or, alternatively, been invited to expand eastward) in the 1990s and 2000s. Counterfactuals are always tricky, and I don’t have any special knowledge that would make my opinion an informed one, so I’ll make no comment on that claim.

Another comment I’ve seen (and I’m kicking myself because I can’t find the source now) is that it is in the natural order of things, and a foreordained matter of geography, that Germany and Russia between themselves will control and exercise influence over the lands between Europe and Asia.

Is it possible that this will be the case in the future? Of course. Is it probable that this will be the case? I don’t know enough to judge this. Is it an absolute certainty that this will be the case? Almost certainly not, because within the last few hundred years there was an existence proof to the contrary, namely the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

I must confess that until recently I had never heard of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—an indication that the education of Americans like me neglected the history of Eastern Europe relative to that of Western Europe. (It’s not even a question of “Eurocentrism”; I recall my history classes having much more material on, say, China, India, and Japan than they did on Eastern Europe.)

You can read the Wikipedia article for yourself, but the basic idea is that up until the time of the American and French revolutions there was a polity (technically, a union of two polities) that at its maximum extent encompassed all or significant portions of the current nations of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, and even Russia. (See the left map above.)

The Commonwealth at its height had a territory of almost 1 million square kilometers and a population of about 12 million. (As a comparison, the population of England and then the United Kingdom did not exceed 10 million people until around 1800.) It had a relatively modern political system for its time, in which monarchs were elected by the aristocracy, with a legislature—also controlled by the aristocracy—that served as a check on the monarch. (Again, compare this to the political structure of England at the same time.)

Over time the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth dwindled in power, until in the late 18th century its territory was partitioned between the Kingdom of Prussia (the core of what eventually became Germany), the Russian Empire (precursor to the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation), and the Hapsburg Empire (which gave rise to present-day Austria and Hungary). (See the right map above.)

But before that there was a time when the people and lands between Europe and Asia were not under the sway of Germany and Russia, but pursued their own course. Could this be the case again in future? Again, I have no special expertise to bring to this question, but there are two suggestive factors.

The first is the extensive military and other support provided to Ukraine by Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia; together these comprise all of the countries whose territories made up the former Commonwealth, except for Belarus and (of course) Russia. Commentators have spoken of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic states, along with the Scandanavian countries of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, as potentially forming a new center of gravity within Europe, comparable to the historical grouping of France, Germany, and their Western European neighbors.

The second factor is more speculative. The ecologist-turned-historian Peter Turchin has claimed that the dynamics of the historical evolution of societies favor the creation of new empires on what he calls “metaethnic frontiers” or “metaethnic fault lines”: “A small group near such a boundary will be confronted by very different others, dwarfing in their ‘otherness’ neighboring groups that are on the same side of the metaethnic line.”¹ Turchin’s hypothesis is that conflicts are more likely at such boundaries, especially if they also coincide with political boundaries, and that such conflicts will cause co-ethnics to band together (or be forced together), intensify their common identification and cooperation with each other, and eventually found new and dominant polities.

Traditionally metaethnic formations were determined by such factors as common descent, common languages, and common religions. However one can also conceive of such formations as based on commonly-held political, economic, and cultural beliefs and tendencies—hence the idea that there is a “Europe” characterized by liberal democracy as the preferred form of government (however imperfectly implemented it may be at times), the free market system plus social insurance as the preferred form of the economy, and a fair degree of cultural toleration and even experimentation.

Today’s hypothesized metaethnic frontier would then consist of those countries that exist in the frontier zone between “Europe” in this sense and “not-Europe,” i.e., the countries that are not characterized by the beliefs and tendencies listed above. If Turchin’s theory is correct, one would expect to see the rise in power and influence of those countries over time if and as conflicts across that metaethnic boundary persist—the current war being one such.

Will the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth rise again from the ashes like a phoenix? Almost certainly not, at least in that form. But might we see new alignments arise that remind us of it? It‘s certainly a possibility, and I suspect more of a possibility than the geopolitical realities of 19th and 20th century Europe persisting through the 21st.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-30 23:42

It’s definitely true that Russia and Germany are not simply going to assert control over their inter-region. I think that’s very much a loose extrapolation from a narrow period of history. Russia has only had about 300 years of being particularly strong, which is significant and doesnt go away quickly, but pales in comparison to the geopolitical endurance of China, or (to a lesser extent) France and Iran. And new eras totally change the game of “What allows a country to be dominant?” Gunpowder nullifies nomadic armies, economic growth replaces the zero-sum focus on war, and the emphasis on ideological-moral-cultural axes make ~1920 onward fundamentally different.

I think it is very easy for people to forget that patterns from the last 30, 50, 100, 200 years are often temporary, contextual blips. There are so many things we take for granted- for example, ~200 years ago, the Russian language was very underdeveloped. Their literary culture had few forms and was incredibly awkward and limited, leading to educated Russians relying on French. Western European cultures were all in a similar situation 100-400 years prior. It is very difficult for people right now to imagine what it is like to have a vastly less developed language and literary culture, and the effects on the rest of culture, politics, etc etc are immense. Besides that being an interesting point, I think it also demonstrates how much and how rapidly things change in ways we have no real perspective for.

Taking any sort of “well, in realpolitik terms, obviously Russia is going to try to dominate this area, you just gotta accept it” approach is not only historically blind extrapolation but also morally questionable. Realism is good, but realism does not mean giving up action and acting like something is ossified.

Poland-Lithuania is definitely fascinating. I’ve wondered if it survived, or if Austria reformed into a democratic “Danubian United States” like Franz Ferdinand was considering, if that may’ve prevented a lot of the horrors of 20th century Europe due to Germany and Russia. If Prussia or the Ottomans hadn’t risen, the history of the area from the Balkans to the Baltic could’ve been very fundamentally different.

Europe east of Germany and Italy is definitely neglected in history classes, which is part of why I’ve always had a particular interest in central and eastern europe. I only learned about Poland-Lithuania relatively early(in high school) because I was a voracious history nerd with “contrarian” interests.

A more loosely adopted version of Turchin’s hypothesis like you mentioned is pretty fascinating. I do think it is pretty difficult to actually holistically analyze though. I can think of some massive cross-region conflicts- nomadic vs sedentary, religion vs religion, fascist vs nonfascist, democratic vs authoritarian, capitalist vs communist, but a lot of those are dominated by preexisting large powers rather than bands of smaller polities, so there’s not much ability to actually evaluate that supposed tendency on its own terms rather than on a “great power harnessing a sphere of influence” framework.

Also, this is verging off topic, but heres a random underdeveloped personal pet theory regarding spheres of power/motion: While things like economic power and what i will call “accountability and proficiency” are major vectors for power in the future, I suspect that another major one is communicative. I suspect a very large advantage that US culture has had is that English is spoken in the USA and the Commonwealth countries, allowing for a large base of easier cultural creation and exchange. The convenient talent pool is larger, the audience is larger, and thus the opportunities for cultural creation of all size is larger, allowing for more capacity to create media and ideas that are strong enough to sizably jump to other languages and affect other cultures. China is another example of another country that has a large ’base’ for this that could end up very potent. Japan is an example of something that punches above its language population in this regard- I suspect that part of this is due to distinctive visual culture’s ability to cross barriers.

Here is a video you may find fascinating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk0IZsshET0 I think people are generally unaware of how unstable the situation in central/eastern europe was for several years after WW1, and the video demonstrates some interesting aspecst during the nascent stages of Ukrainian nationalism.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-31 00:09

Thank you for your comment, and for the video link!

Incidentally, if you are interested in Turchin’s theories, he did treatments of them in War and Peace and War and Ultrasociety for general audiences. (Historical Dynamics is much more technical, with a fair amount of math and lots of computer simulations.) It’s all part of what he and others call “cliodynamics,” i.e., bringing extensive data collection and mathematical modeling to questions about the historical evolution of societies. There’s an open-access journal you might find interesting: Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-31 00:26

Interesting, thanks! I will check that out.

Everyone does it, and I will too: Some quick year-end thoughts on things I read, watched, or listened to this year, and liked well enough to write about them here. Where appropriate I’ve included links to the official source material. (I avoid scanlation sites because as a practical matter I want to encourage publishers to translate more works into English and distribute them as widely as possible.)

I don’t do rank ordering or numerical scores, these are just in semi-random order, starting with my top 5 yuri manga:

• Yuri Is My Job! (10 volumes in English, ongoing). This started out as a parody of class S tropes as filtered through Maria Watches Over Us, but has become deeper and more interesting over time, both as a story and as metatextual commentary on the yuri genre. It will be interesting to see whether the upcoming anime adaptation does it justice.
• How Do We Relationship? (7 volumes, ongoing). Unlike many yuri works, this manga doesn’t end when the main couple gets together; in fact that’s just the starting point, and now the main couple isn’t even a couple any more.
• Even Though We’re Adults (5 volumes, ongoing). The most adult yuri manga around, not in the “adult video” sense, but in the “adults having problems only adults have, and working through them as adults” sense. This is Takako Shimura’s best work published in English thus far.
• I Can’t Believe I Slept with You (3 volumes, complete). Another work which considerably transcends its (somewhat dubious) premise.
• She, Her Camera, and Her Seasons (5 volumes, complete). One of the better depictions of a love triangle around, and one which avoids a pat resolution. It also deftly uses photography as a running theme: taking photos is so central to two of the main characters’ lives that they do it even in—really, especially in—their most intimate and vulnerable moments.

Other non-manga yuri works worthy of note:

• Otherside Picnic light novel (7 volumes, ongoing). What really sells this work is the narration by and interior monologue of Sorawo, one of the two protagonists. I watched one episode of the anime, which was unexceptional, and am skipping the manga.
• Yurizen! Salon—Shirayuri’s Comforting Food Therapy super-light novel (23 volumes, complete). This is another entry in the genre of yuri works involving food, here made more interesting by featuring traditional Chinese medicinal recipes.
• GAP: The Series live-action TV series (6 episodes, ongoing). This Thai production features a rather clichéd trope—romance between an overbearing and emotionally cold boss and her younger naïve but spunky subordinate—but it’s more than redeemed by the incredible chemistry between the two co-stars. I wrote about this one as an example of the growing creation of yuri/GL works outside Japan. (There are several more upcoming yuri live-action series from Thailand, although Thai GL works are still far outnumbered by Thai BL works.)
• She Makes My Heart Flutter live-action web series (5 episodes, complete). This Korean work is a sweet “love comes late” story, featuring two generations of lesbians and their different perspectives.

Finally, some other things I enjoyed this year:

• Anime: I watched all episodes of well over a dozen series this year. These were my top 5, in no particular order: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, Akiba Maid War, Birdie Wing, Kaguya-sama: Love Is War, and My Dress-Up Darling.
• Film: Everything Everywhere All At Once. Unlike some, I didn’t think this was a masterpiece, but I enjoyed it well enough, and it’s good to see Michelle Yeoh get more recognition.
• Music: This was the year of DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ. According to Spotify I listened to over 125 hours of DJ Sabrina tracks (including over 80 replays of “Lose Myself”), and I probably listened to that much or more on the Apple Music app after I bought all her albums on Bandcamp.
• Books: Almost all of my reading was done as research for my book. Other than that I don’t think I read an entire book “for fun” all year, which is rather unusual for me. However I’ve started reading poetry in earnest again; right now I’m halfway through H.D.’s Selected Poems.

Finally, while (unlike some) I won’t do a “worst of 2022” list, I did want to mention two works that I found disappointing, and for which my opinion is somewhat of a minority one:

• I’m in Love with the Villainess light novel. If this series had ended with volume 3, I would have been perfectly happy (well, except for the stupid and unnecessary incest subplot). The last two volumes felt like the author was writing to satisfy the expectations of fans and the publisher for more material. I thought the conclusion of volume 5 in particular was an ass-pull that for me at least strained my suspension of disbelief to the breaking point.
• Spy x Family anime. There’s nothing inherently bad about this series, but I found myself continually putting off watching the latest episode, until finally I dropped it.

Thanks for reading, and here’s wishing you a Happy New Year!

[This post originally appeared on Cohost.]

Recently I stumbled across a blog post by Julian Gough. His post is both long and heartfelt, but the bare facts are follows:

Upon being solicited by Minecraft developer Markus “Notch” Persson, Gough agreed to write a text—the End Poem—to be displayed to players who beat the game in survival mode. After much back and forth, Persson’s company Mojang paid Gough GBP 20,000 for his work, but never got a formal copyright assignment, Gough having rejected the proposed contract as being too one-sided and not respecting his role as the writer.

Before the acquisition of Mojang by Microsoft was announced, Mojang executives again approached Gough to try to get him to sign a formal contract, but he again refused. Eventually after much agonizing—and some resentment of the financial rewards realized by Persson and others at Mojang—Gough decided to waive any rights he had with respect to the End Poem and dedicate it to the public domain.

There is much in this saga that touches on the topic of art vs. business; at its core it is a story of someone who thought he was an artist creating art trying—and failing—to communicate with people who thought they were businesspeople creating a product. But that topic is too big for me to discuss right now; instead I’ll focus on the reaction to Gough’s story, and then on the poem itself.

I’ll start with the commenters at Hacker News. I’ve been on the Internet a long time (back to the Usenet era), and am quite aware of the negativity that can be found there; however, I was taken aback at the intensity of the contempt directed at Gough. The various reactions can be paraphrased as follows:

“Gough is a nobody, he had nothing to do with the success of Minecraft.” “Gough got his money, then got greedy for more.” “I am not a lawyer, but here is my confidently-expressed argument that Gough didn’t have a legal leg to stand on.” “Gough probably didn’t spend more than a couple of hours writing that, it wasn’t worth 20,000 pounds.” “Gough wasn’t Notch’s friend, he was just a contractor.”

I find these last two classes of comments particularly interesting and ironic. The first is essentially an expression of the labor theory of value: that the economic value of an item should depend on the amount of work that went into producing it—hence the claim that Gough was grossly overpaid for (supposedly) a few hours work. But this claim applies with much greater force to Persson, who realized USD 1.5 billion in financial rewards for just a few years of work. Even if he worked 100 or more hours a week, that still equates to an hourly wage of about USD 50,000, an order of magnitude or two greater than what we’d expect to pay even a top-rank programmer.

Similarly, one of the commenters claimed that Gough had a “parasocial relationship” with Persson, thinking Persson was a friend when he was instead an entrepreneur looking for a hired hand. But it seems to me that many of the Hacker News commenters themselves have a parasocial relationship with the founders, VCs, and rockstar developers who form the elite of the technology industry.

They eagerly consume their idols’ blog posts and tweets, vociferously defend them from criticisms both large and small, and think themselves knowledgeable about the startup world and everything connected to it, so that if they were ever handed a term sheet they would be able to negotiate a Series A round as deftly as those whom they idolize. But I suspect that if the actual founders, VCs, and other power players were ever to come into contact with most Hacker News commenters, they would dismiss them as “Internet randos.”

Enough of Hacker News. If we turn to Gough’s blog post, we find an entirely different set of commenters, almost all expressing gratitude to Gough for both writing the End Poem and setting it free, with many telling him that the End Poem changed their lives. So it behooves us to look at the End Poem itself, a copy of which Gough appended to his post (and the beginning of which is shown above).

Strictly speaking, the End Poem is a prose poem: part story, part poem. It has enough poetic aspects that I will consider it—and judge it—as I would a poem. I’ve read much more poetry than the average person, have concentrated my reading among those considered “major poets” in the literary canon, and as a consequence have pretty high standards for what I consider a good poem (or prose poem).

So one might expect me to unfavorably compare the End Poem—an appendage to a “mere” video game—to “real” poems (such as one might find in the New Yorker or Poetry magazines). Or, if I were to acknowledge any excellence at all about it, to dismiss it with a variant of Noel Coward’s comment about the potency of “cheap music.”

But I’m not going to do that. As poetry the End Poem is as suited to its context, and to its audience, as are the poems that appear in the New Yorker or Poetry, and it seems to have meant far more to at least some of those who played Minecraft than the typical New Yorker or Poetry poem does to its readers. Why is that?

The End Poem does two things, and does them both very well. Recall its original context: it was shown only to players who had successfully completed the game. Those players would likely have spent dozens of hours attempting this, during which they would risk becoming estranged from the outside world, including their family and their friends. Some might have started playing Minecraft because they were already estranged from their family or others, and sought refuge from that estrangement in the game.

To those people, the End Poem first says: You have not wasted your time playing this game. This game—this “world that was flat, and infinite [where] the sun was a square of white”—is no less real—and no less worthy of your and our attention—than anything in the supposedly “real” world.

But it also says that likewise this other world—“on the thin crust of a spinning globe of molten rock”—is no less real than the world of the game, and that the player who is about to leave the game can achieve their goals in this world just as they have in that world:

and the universe said I love you and the universe said you have played the game well and the universe said everything you need is within you and the universe said you are stronger than you know

The length of the End Poem, and the nine minutes or so it takes to display, serve as a decompression chamber for players, to prepare them before they leave the world of the game to reenter the other world. That process culminates in the most famous affirmation in the End Poem:

and the universe said I love you because you are love

William Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” That line in the End Poem teeters on the edge between enough and more than enough, and even goes a bit over the edge (as Gough himself acknowledges), but I understand why Gough left it in, and why it meant so much to so many people.

As I see it, it says to the player: you can love, and you can be loved. The love you put into playing this game is a mirror of the love you can put into living your life and being with others, and if you do that then that love can and will be returned to you.

And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. . . .

You are the player.

Wake up.

And now, thanks to Gough, the End Poem is now part of our common heritage from which future artists can create more works of art. And Gough himself has seen his act of generosity been repaid by people subscribing to his newsletter and potentially buying his next book.

But what about all the other artists, the ones whose work languishes in obscurity or was sold for a mess of pottage in work-for-hire arrangements? Gough touches on their plight in his post, and has things to say about it. And so will I.

The title of this post is a paraphrase of a tweet by the opinion columnist and investment manager Conor Sen: “AI is potentially to the world of ideas what low-cost index funds were to investing.” (This was in turn in response to another tweet by Derek Thompson: “an AI that spits out the synthetic average of everything it’s been exposed to is an interesting metaphor for a lot of stuff ppl say, write, and think.”)

I found this to be a very interesting and potentially rich analogy, and thought it would be fun to explore it a bit.

But, first, here’s what an AI system itself (the AI-powered Lex online word processor) generated when asked to continue a text starting with that sentence; note that this is a representative example culled from a number of trials:

It has the potential to offer answers to questions and solutions to problems that may have previously been considered impossible to resolve. AI can help individuals and organizations alike to quickly analyze data in real-time, make predictions, and accurately identify patterns in a way that was not previously possible. AI may also be able to help us better understand the world’s most complex systems, from climate change to world markets. Ultimately, AI has the potential to create unprecedented solutions and insights that could revolutionize the way we view and interact with the world.

This is perfectly competent prose, but it totally misses the point of the analogy. So please allow me, a mere human, to take a shot at explaining what it means:

How index funds conquered the world

Prior to index funds, the accepted way to succeed at investing was to do a lot of work to analyze companies whose stocks are traded on public markets, and based on that analysis decide which companies’ stock prices would be likely to increase, and which would be likely to decrease—the point of course being to buy the former and sell the latter. Those investors not willing or able to do this work themselves would outsource it to an investment manager, who would charge a fee for the service (typically a small percentage of the total amount invested by the client). Rather than picking stocks, the job of the investor was then simply to pick a good investment manager.

With index funds the recommended strategy is not to try to pick stocks, or have someone pick them for you, but simply to invest in an overall collection of stocks of a certain type—for example, the S&P 500 (for the stocks of large companies), the Russell 2000 (for small companies), or a very broad collection of all stocks in the US or worldwide.

Index funds subverted the “active management” paradigm in multiple ways. First, they removed the need for human judgement and replaced it with a mechanical rule. This enabled companies like Vanguard offering index funds to charge significantly lower fees and thus enabled investors to retain a higher percentage of stock market gains. (This was especially significant since such gains would compound over time.)

Second, they lowered the risk for investors: the returns from an index fund were comparable to the returns achieved by an average active manager, and better than an average active manager after subtracting their higher fees. An investor would therefore be better off investing in an index fund than with a typical active manager. They wouldn’t get the extraordinary returns achieved by the very best active managers, but they also wouldn’t get the poor returns achieved by the worst.

Conversely, index funds made the job of an active manager harder, since they had to work more to try to get better returns than an index fund. Then, given that a typical active manager would not be able to beat the returns from an index fund, they had to justify why that work deserved a higher fee than one would pay for an index fund.

The horn of plenty and the worm Ouroboros

Now consider AI, in particular the type of AI exemplified by systems like GPT-3. The systems have so-called large language models (LLMs) trained on lots of human-generated text, and based on that text can perform what seems like magic: given a string of text, to predict a suitable string of text that would continue on from that point (as in the example today), or (as in the recent ChatGPT) given a question, to generate a plausible response.

Based on the analogy to index funds, we can imagine several responses by both readers and writers to the growing capabilities of LLMs. Readers may simply accept AI-generated texts as a “good enough” product for most purposes; this is very similar to how we use index funds or (closer to home) consult Wikipedia as a “good enough” substitute for trying to seek out other sources of information on a topic with which we’re unfamiliar. This approach leaves little or nothing for (human) writers to do, except to provide uncompensated “grist for the mill,” as their writings past or present get fed into the maw of the LLMs, then used to produce an almost inexhaustible stream of new writing. But under this scenario, who (but an AI) would bother to write?

And if no one (human) decides to write, where would the writing come from to feed LLMs in future? For example, one team has predicted that in the next five years the size of training sets used as input to LLMs will exceed the amount of “high-quality” data available (e.g., books, news articles, scientific papers), leaving them to be trained on lower-quality data (e.g., YouTube comments). We can imagine one possible future in which the input to LLMs (or their successors) will primarily consist of text previously generated by other AIs.

This resembles the scenario warned of by some opponents of index funds (for example, as cited in The Atlantic): that a stock market dominated by index funds will no longer perform its supposed function of efficiently allocating investor capital. Instead the price of a firm’s stock may simply rise and fall based on whether it is included in major indexes (like the S&P 500). Similarly, the popularity of certain ideas may in future depend on their reinforcement by various AIs, and not on the number of humans who actually believe in or espouse them.

Writing after the end of writing

So, what’s a writer to do in a world where AIs can generate more text than we humans could ever create?

A writer might commit wholeheartedly to the use of AI as an aid to writing, in the hopes that it might provide some sort of exploitable edge—perhaps a way to write faster, to surface previously obscure source material, to serve as inspiration, to come up with a striking turn of phrase, and so on—anything that might help them stand out from the crowd and reward them monetarily or otherwise. This is analogous to the “quants” in investing, who throw ever more elaborate mathematical models (and now machine learning) and ever-increasing amounts of compute power at the problem of finding exploitable trading opportunities.

Alternatively, a writer might scale back their ambitions to achieve widespread success, and focus intensively on either a particular group of readers or a particular niche topic. The former approach is analogous to that of local financial advisors, who may not provide any better returns than an index fund or any better advice than a robot, but have the advantage of knowing a particular set of local investors and providing a personal touch.

The latter approach is similar to that of investment advisors who specialize in particular areas (e.g., biotech, or energy) and don’t attempt to provide advice on well-covered areas like consumer Internet services. But there is a danger here: as AIs extend their reach to encompass more and more of human knowledge and writing, the territory untouched by them may become smaller and smaller, until writers on niche topics ultimately are writing about things of interest only to themselves.

Then there is another more speculative approach: In tweets adjacent to those above, the legal entrepreneur Scott Stevenson muses that we should stop thinking in words, as businesses and investment funds strive to become illegible and no longer use stories to explain their world, a world that “can only be understood as a matrix of numbers”.

Of course, producing words is what a writer does, and stories are the natural way we structure the world, whether they end in “happily every after” or “quod erat demonstrandum.” But there is a type of writing that relies much less on stories, especially in its most compressed and compact form. Perhaps writing about ideas should aspire to the condition of poetry, stringing concept after concept together for our appreciation and (ideally) elucidation, like a linear combination of vectors in a very high-dimensional space, pointing the reader to a destination previously unknown to them.

But writing good poetry is truly hard—as Randall Jarrell put it, like spending a lifetime standing in thunderstorms, waiting for lightning to strike. (The ratio for Sturgeon’s law in poetry is much closer to 0.99, or even 0.999, than 0.9.) And the audience for such “nonfiction poetry” would perhaps be small, since to truly appreciate it one would need to be familiar with all the concepts touched on and pointed to but not explained at length—like classical Japanese or Chinese poetry, where each individual poem seems banal unless you know the host of older poems that went into its making.

I myself am no poet, and so will take on a much less ambitious task: posting to my small group of cohost followers, about topics of peculiar interest to me, and surviving on the occasional like or share, or the very occasional comment.

[This post and its associated comments originally appeared on Cohost.]

When I wrote my self-published book about the yuri manga Sweet Blue Flowers, I not only included some chapters about the history of yuri and its predecessor genre, “S” literature, I also wrote an entire chapter about the fate of the “factory girls” who worked in the textile mills of Meiji and Taishō era Japan. If I were writing a real book with a real publisher, the very first thing my real editor would tell me to do would be to remove that chapter: it’s overly-long and almost totally disconnected from the rest of the book, including the chapters that precede and follow it. So why did I leave it in?

First, because I was tired of yuri works that featured rich girls attending expensive private schools. Where are the less fortunate girls, I thought, those who lived and live in poverty—what about their lives and their loves? I wondered where if anywhere I could find their stories, and I went looking for them.

Why did I focus on the factory girls specifically? Because they play a special role in the history of the yuri genre and the world in which it arose. We can better appreciate Sweet Blue Flowers if we know something about Maria Watches Over Us, the work whose tropes Sweet Blue Flowers both echoes and interrogates. We can in turn better appreciate Maria Watches Over Us if we know something about the girls’ literature of early 20th century Japan and its focus on “S” relationships between schoolgirls.

Why did that literature appear at that particular time, and in that particular form? Because in the Meiji era, Japan for the first time had a critical mass of middle-class girls and young women. They were educated to be literate in Japanese, able to afford subscriptions to magazines targeted at them, and provided the freedom to leave the family home, to go to school, and there—in the brief time before they were coerced into arranged marriages—to enter in relations of “passionate friendship” (and sometimes more than friendship) with other girls.

That growing middle class was made possible by the national wealth produced by Japan’s rapid industrialization, and that industrialization in turn depended on another equally-large but less-heralded group of girls and young women, those who toiled day and night in the many factories producing silk and cotton thread for export.

I strongly felt that the story I was telling in my book would not be complete without also telling the story of the factory girls: without them, no girls’ magazines and S stories, no Nobuko Yoshiya, no postwar Japanese “economic miracle,” no shōjo manga, no Maria Watches Over Us, and no Sweet Blue Flowers.

When I wrote that chapter, I was also making a larger point about our own lives, lives built upon the bones of the millions of human beings, and in particular girls and young women, without whose work—and whose suffering—our present-day world would not exist.

Why textile workers in particular? Those of us who are American are also aware (or should be aware) of other historic injustices that occurred in the creation and expansion of the United States, most notably the enslavement of millions of Africans and the wars against Native Americans. Their suffering far outweighs that of the factory girls, the vast majority of whom lived to leave the mills and return to their families.

However, slavery and genocide are nothing new in human history. The oppression of African Americans and the extermination of Native Americans loom large in our imagination because they were relatively recent in historical terms. But the conquest of one population by another, and the subsequent enslavement or killing of the conquered, is a constant theme over the thousands of years since complex societies and states first arose.

On the other hand, the plight of the factory girls is relatively recent, a key episode in the industrial revolution that kicked off the subsequent scientific and technological revolutions that have improved the lives of billions of people worldwide since the late 19th century. Textile workers are the shock troops of the industrial revolution: thread, cloth, and clothing are easy to export to international markets, textile production is supercharged by introducing machinery to the process of spinning thread and weaving cloth, and those machines need to be tended and fed by an army of workers newly arrived from the farm to the factory. They are typically predominantly young and predominantly women, like those shown in the pictures above.

This process has repeated—and is still repeating—in every country transitioning from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing and (later) services economy. The wealth it produces supports a growing middle class, whose spending and leisure time in turn give rise to a thriving cultural scene. Behind Nobuko Yoshiya were the girls who crossed Nomugi pass to work in the silk mills of Okaya. The comfortable life of Emily Dickinson in Amherst, Massachusetts, was made possible in part by the labor of the “mill girls” of Lowell. And the England of Jane Austen and the Brönte sisters was also the England of the cotton mills of Manchester.

Charlotte Brönte herself wrote a novel, Shirley, about the early stages of the English industrial revolution and the Luddite uprisings; it languishes in obscurity compared to Jane Eyre or even Villette. Similarly, we tend to forget the existence of the factory girls except in times of exceptional tragedy: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, or the collapse of Rana Plaza.

The lesser injuries—the overwork, dangerous conditions, wage theft, abuse and sexual harassment, and so on—pass beneath our notice. We simply take for granted our ability to go into a mall, or surf to a online store, and buy a wide range of relatively cheap and fashionable clothes—a situation impossible to imagine before the industrial revolution, when the typical person had only a few items of clothing, purchased dearly and patched until no longer wearable.

As I did the research for my book I came across the term “factory girls” and wondered who they were and how they lived. The result of my reading was an intense desire to tell their story, even in an out-of-place chapter in a book destined to be little-read. To quote from the final lines of that chapter, “in writing about the Class S stories of yesteryear and the yuri manga of today and tomorrow, I would be remiss if I did not take the opportunity to honor the memory of the girls and women whose work helped make that literature possible, but who rarely if ever grace its pages”—or, indeed, many pages at all.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-12-07 22:31

Thanks for sharing this. Playing Victoria 3 made me think about this sort of of thing—the game simulates 1836-1936, and it really makes you pay close attention to the intersection of economics, industrialization, political demographics, technology, and standard of living.

Often a player’s goal in the game is to increase the standard of living of their populace, so one of the main things youll do early on is move people from subsistence farming into various jobs like sewing, iron mines, etc. And thats a big bump up for them and for the economy—but its still really shitty. And even if you had a more even wealth distribution, you simply cannot make things decent for people without first developing more technology to enable more sophisticaed methods of production, and without first gradually developing more advanced chains of industry. When youre in like 1830-1880, it really just puts it in your face that you cannot secure prosperity for this generation of people in your country.

a similar note, certain strategies in victoria 1/2/3 revolve around like, “OK, now tax people a ton for the first decade so you can accelerate your economic growth a ton.” I always shudder at doing that, because I’m actively making peoples lives much shittier for years in order to accelerate the next generations. In a longterm utilitarian sense it is the greatest good, but the notion still gives me pause because of aspects like “They never gave me their consent in this project.”

I also think humans have similar dynamics with regards to ideas. It feels like our understandings of things like morality, the perils of different forms of government, etc only advance slowly through witnessing fuck ups repeatedly and slowly affecting our commonly mentioned notions. Something may be relatively easy to deduce and prove, but it takes time for it to really sink in culturally.

I’m also reminded of watching Pachinko, which is a good show based on a book about several generations of a Korean family from like 1920-1990, living in Korea, Japan, and the USA. Really interesting show/book—it has a lot of intercultural aspects(such as the son who spent 15 years in japan, then 15 years in USA, then is back in japan, but is korean, and so is very in between cultures). But it also is a pretty striking depiction of the enormous economic jumps between like 1920s korea, 1940s japan, and 1980s japan/usa/korea. The grandmother got to witness that enormous shift, she lived in multiple fundamentally different world separated primarily by time.

Stuff like that reminds me that so many people alive today were deeply affected by the enormous differences of past eras. The 1920s were 100 years ago, but that’s really not that long—especially considering that the people who grew up in, say, the 1960s were deeply affected by the people who grew up in the 1920s. I think that illustrates part of why cultural change struggles to keep up with the last 200 years of economic growth.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-08 01:45

Thank you for your thoughtful comments!

“And thats a big bump up for them and for the economy—but its still really shitty.” Yes, exactly—and the thing is, people have pointed out that employers ability to drive profit by repressing their employees in various ways—wage theft, overwork, suppression of strikes, etc—arguably accelerated their countries’ transition from agricultural to manufacturing economies. (I mention this in my book.) So making our ancestors’ lives more shitty arguably made our lives less so.

“I think that illustrates part of why cultural change struggles to keep up with the last 200 years of economic growth.” And political change too, Brad DeLong discusses this in his book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. I’ll probably do a review of it once I have time to read it.

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

For various reasons I recently decided to get a new laptop. Rather than continuing my habit of buying Apple hardware, I bought it from Framework, a relatively new company whose “unique selling proposition” is building a laptop that is easily repairable, customizable, and upgradeable.

This is not a “recommendation blog” (no affiliate links here), but at least so far I’m pretty happy with the purchase. The laptop runs both Windows 11 (off the main drive) and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (dual-booted from an expansion card); the Linux experience in particular is pretty good, with no hardware incompatibilities or other major glitches detected to date. (Well, I did have to customize the touchpad settings to make it work like I’m used to.)

But this post isn’t a product review—more a note about the wider implications of this thing I just bought.

First, there’s a “doing good” aspect to the purchase, one that Framework is quite happy to acknowledge in their marketing: Making products easier to repair and upgrade extends their lifetime and can help reduce electronic waste.

It also subtly changes buying patterns: traditionally I’ve been inclined to buy relatively high-end configurations for laptops, since I knew I wouldn’t be able to upgrade memory, disk, etc., after buying it. However in this case I chose a mid-range configuration because I knew that I could always upgrade the memory, storage, and even CPU later if I ever needed to. So the Framework approach also reduces wasteful spending as well.

But the main point I want to make is about everything it took to make a product like this come together and have everything work. With a Framework laptop this question comes to mind more than with (say) a MacBook Air, where Apple strives to present an integrated and seamless experience.

We can see and touch the material components of the Framework laptop, and explore how they are manufactured around the world, come together in a single place (in this case Taiwan) to be assembled together, and from there are shipped to customers in the US and elsewhere. This is the perspective people often take when they talk about “global trade” and “global supply chains.”

But there are other levels as well: First, the interface specifications by which you can plug component A into component B or substitute component C for component D, promulgated by a host of standards committees. Next the operating system software and applications, which for Linux in particular are produced with the participation of volunteers or quasi-volunteers (working on open source projects with the blessing of their employers) and (often) with the support of and governance by nonprofit organizations. Then the dense web of legal contracts and financial arrangements that enable component producer X to be a supplier to manufacturer Y and to be reasonably sure they’ll be compensated for it. And, finally, the governments that enforce the contracts, backstop the financial system, and provide laws and regulations under which trade proceeds, and their militaries (principally that of the US) that keep malicious actors from disrupting the shipping lanes and airways of global commerce.

All of these systems are interdependent, mutually reinforcing, and mostly invisible to the people like me who order a laptop online one day and wake up to find it on my doorstop a few days later. This “world machine” is not without its flaws, and many the unfortunate or unwary person has been crushed between its gears. (I’ll have more to say about this in future posts.) But for better or worse it underpins the world we live in, it is the machine that (to varying degrees) supports and sustains us.

beneficence (@bubblingbeebles) - 2022-12-06 13:35

i also got one of these recently! i appreciate your thoughts.

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-12-06 22:48

You’re welcome!

[This post and its associated comments were originally published on Cohost.]

The genre we call “yuri” originated in Japan, but some of its most interesting manifestations are in other nations in East and Southeast Asia, where it is typically marketed as “GL.” One recent example is the live-action Thai television drama GAP, also known as GAP: The Series (to distinguish it from the novel on which it is based), Pink Theory, and other names.

GAP is currently being broadcast weekly on Thai TV Channel 3, and then afterward being made available on YouTube with English subtitles, starting with episode 1, part 1. It’s an example of what’s sometimes called “shakaijin yuri”: yuri stories featuring adults doing adult things. In the series, one of the two main characters, Mon, starts her first job at a small media company run by the other main character, Sam, an older woman whom Mon has idolized ever since she was a child. However, Sam does not remember ever meeting Mon (or at least doesn’t admit to it), and their relationship gets off to a rocky start before love starts to blossom.

It’s a pretty good series overall, and well worth watching if you’re a yuri fan. I’m not going to attempt a review; Erica Friedman already posted one on the Okazu blog, and I basically agree with her assessment. Instead I wanted to comment on some other aspects of the series and how it came to be. (Warning: This will contain some minor spoilers for the first two episodes.)

First, while for some time now Thailand has been cranking out live-action BL series, GAP is apparently the first yuri/GL series produced in the country. It was created by a relatively new production company, Idol Factory, headed by 24-year-old Suppapong Udomkaewkanjana (nicknamed “Saint”). Saint became famous starring in the 2018 Thai BL series Love by Chance, produced by GMMTV (the 800-pound gorilla of Thai BL production companies), and then went off on his own to found Idol Factory.

Idol Factory’s first production was the popular BL series Secret Crush on You. That series, set in a high school, featured a side couple played by Sarocha Chankimha (“Freen”) and Rebecca Patricia Armstrong (“Becky”). GAP features the two in the lead roles, with Freen playing Sam and Becky playing Mon, with other actors in the Idol Factory stable playing various supporting roles.

It’s a credit to Saint and Idol Factory that they followed up their first BL series by taking a chance with a yuri series. That bet has apparently paid off, at least with international viewers: the first two GAP episodes have each racked up between one and two million views on YouTube, comparable to the two to three million views for each of the episodes of Secret Crush on You (which has been out at least seven months now).

Second, it’s interesting to see the mix of yuri tropes and social commentary in the series. The setup is reminiscent of Maria Watches Over Us, albeit translated to an office setting: a younger and relatively naïve but spunky young woman (our Yumi equivalent) meets an elegant and seemingly emotionally cold older woman from a very wealthy family (species designation tsunderensis sachiko). Meanwhile the older woman’s family disregards her own desires and expects her to enter into an arranged marriage with a man who presumably will take over her firm.

In GAP the main antagonist is Sam’s grandmother, who has given Sam a deadline of one year to make her business successful or quit it in favor of marriage. The grandmother has already interfered with the lives of Sam’s two older sisters.

Sam’s fiance Kirk appears to be another antagonist. He is a co-owner of Sam’s firm, but does nothing except drop by occasionally to hand out snacks to the employees and curry their favor. He seems to be positioning himself to take over full control of Sam’s firm, but is going about it in a low-key way that suggests that this is just the natural order of things. (See also the scene in the second episode where Sam offers to drive Mon home, and Kirk ends up taking the wheel of Sam’s Porsche Carrera, relegating Sam to be a passenger in her own car.)

A side character worth noting is one of Sam’s friends, someone whom in the West we’d characterize as a butch lesbian. But I presume that in Thai terms she’s actually a “tom” (for “tomboy”); I mean, her nickname is even “Tee.” The relationship between toms and their partners (“dees,” for “lady”/“ladies”) doesn’t necessarily conform to the Western butch/femme stereotype; for a fascinating discussion of the differences, see the paper “The Romance of the Queer: The Sexual and Gender Norms of Tom and Dee in Thailand,” by Megan Sinnott, included in the book AsiaPacifiQueer: Rethinking Genders and Sexualities.

The final thing worthy of note about GAP is how it applies to yuri/GL live-action series a common marketing strategy used in Thai BL productions, that of the khu jin, or “imagined couple.” The basic idea is that instead of fans shipping idols on their own initiative (with production companies then possibly responding to that), Thai production companies (in a strategy pioneered by GMMTV) create idol couples already “pre-shipped.” In other words, production companies encourage fans to think of the idols as couples on-screen and off- from the time that they debut. For a good introduction to this phenomenon see Thomas Baudinette’s talk “Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture” and his forthcoming book of the same title.

In the case of GAP the khu jin is Freen and Becky. They have very good chemistry on-screen and off-screen as well—although the point here is that there is no such thing as “off-screen,” since even seemingly unrehearsed interactions (many of which can be seen on YouTube by searching for “freenbecky”) have to be seen in the context of an Idol Factory marketing strategy to promote them as the company’s star GL couple. If GAP is successful (and it appears to be so far) then we can expect to see a lot more of Freen and Becky in future Idol Factory series.

Other Thai production companies are dipping their feet in the yuri ocean as well: GMMTV has a schoolgirl yuri series 23.5 debuting in 2023, starring Pansa Vosbein (”Milk”) and Pattranite Limpatiyakorn (”Love”); like Freen and Becky, they previously appeared as a side couple in BL productions before getting their own GL series. (You can find them on YouTube by searching for “milklove”).

There are other Thai GL series announced and on the way as well. It remains to be seen whether Thai production companies can create a “GL machine” to match the current “BL machine” (as Thomas Baudinette refers to it), but it will certainly be fun to watch them try.

Mightfo ([@Mightfo][]) - 2022-12-02 12:15

Fascinating! Also, I had no idea that Thailand made a lot of BL and yuri! Thanks for sharing this.

Frank Hecker ([@hecker][]) - 2022-12-02 12:19

You’re welcome! Thailand is actually the biggest producer of BL live-action series in all of East and Southeast Asia; Thomas Baudinette notes in his talk that in 2022 there were over a hundred Thai BL series produced, and that Thai BL series have now achieved widespread popularity in Japan, the country where BL was born.

Yesterday I ran across a post (chost?) talking about the indie pop band Wild Pink. They sounded intriguing, so I tried out one of their albums on Bandcamp (Yolk in the Fur), loved it, and bought it. And then I went to recall who posted about Wild Pink, so I could thank them for the recommendation, and for the live of me could not remember who it was. I even looked back through all the posts appearing on my feed in an attempt to track it down, with no luck. Tried searching the “Wild Pink’ on the site, again no luck—apparently whoever posted the reference didn’t include a tag.

A few comments:

First, if you are reading this and are the person who posted about Wild Pink, thank you! You helped me find a new band that I enjoy listening to.

Second, it would be great if the cohost search function searched for words inside posts. In the meantime, cohost peeps, please be generous in your tagging practices! It’s the best way for other people to discover what you write.

Finally, this reinforces once more the reality that the number of talented artists out there greatly exceeds the number of artists that receive significant recognition. Wild Pink isn’t exactly obscure (Pitchfork has reviewed several of their albums), but I’m a reasonably eclectic listener and I had never previously heard of them.

I have more thoughts about that, but they will have to wait for a future post.

[This post was originally published on Cohost. It has been slightly revised from the original.]

This post—and some future ones as well—was prompted by a book I once read about the prospects for creating a new university, as well as by general comments I’ve read about admissions policies at elite universities. Since I am decidedly not an expert on issues of higher education, I decided to approach this from the other direction: as a naïve observer doing a “spherical cow” analysis (as physicists like to call it), abstracting away all the complexity and seeing what results from analyzing a problem in as simple terms as possible.

Canadian higher education expert Alex Usher once referred to elite universities as the “apex predators” of the academic world, based on their continued appearances at the top of world rankings. With that in mind, let’s look at Harvard in particular, one of the best known and most elite universities, and consider it as we would a biological organism. What are its main characteristics, and how does it survive?

Harvard lives despite things that could kill it

First, considered as an organism the most notable characteristic of Harvard is how long-lived it is: nearly four hundred years old at this point. (And it is still relatively young in comparison to others of its species; Oxford and Cambridge are both almost a thousand years old.)

From this fact we can conclude that the first and foremost priority of Harvard is to ensure its own survival. If this were not the case then Harvard would likely have ceased to exist by now, as pursuing other priorities would have endangered its quest to survive.

What are the most important threats to Harvard’s survival? They are arguably financial reverses, political reverses, and cultural reverses:

Financial reverses, either local to itself or in the broader economy, could cause Harvard to go bankrupt and force its closure. Consistent with its long lifetime, Harvard must plan for possible financial reversals of a scale that might occur only once every couple of hundred years.

What about political reverses? These are potential government actions that would threaten Harvard as an institution. This might include, for example, taxing Harvard’s endowment or otherwise financially penalizing the university, forcing it to modify its admissions policies (see below), or otherwise interfering with the relative independence Harvard enjoys as a private university that is (mostly) privately funded.

Finally cultural reverses would threaten Harvard’s status as “Harvard”, its reputation as a world-leading university that others might seek to emulate in their own countries or regions (“the Harvard of X”) but can never equal, much less surpass. Harvard is vulnerable to such reverses because in some ways it is like Kim Kardashian and similar celebrities: to a nontrivial degree it is “famous for being famous”.

Harvard’s defenses

How does Harvard protect itself against such reverses? We can analyze this by again looking at Harvard as if it were an organism. To survive an organism takes in food, creates protein products and other structures to build and maintain the body it needs to survive in a hostile environment, and excretes whatever is excess to that function.

From that point of view, Harvard’s “food” is the very large group of people (over sixty thousand per year) striving to be admitted to Harvard. It uses that “food” to create the visible structures that people think of when they think of Harvard (the buildings and faculty), to create a store of “fat” for times of potential starvation (its endowment), and to build an “extended phenotype” consisting of the Harvard alumni network, the much smaller group of people (less than two thousand per year) who go out into the world with “admitted into Harvard” stamped on their foreheads. (I write “admitted into Harvard” instead of “graduated from Harvard” because, as examples like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg illustrate, arguably the important thing is getting into Harvard, not graduating from it.)

(Under this analogy, research results can be considered as Harvard’s excreta: the things it throws off as it survives as an institution down the years, and that have fertilized many fields.)

For purposes of this analysis I focus on the Harvard alumni network. How does it help Harvard address the threat of the various possible reverses discussed above?

The threat of financial reverses can be addressed by having Harvard alumni whose financial success can translate into donations to help Harvard maintain and grow its endowment. That endowment is currently over USD 50 billion; it provides about 36% of Harvard’s annual revenue, or over USD 2 billion a year.

USD 50 billion sounds like a lot of money, and it is; it’s the largest endowment of any US university. But that endowment needs to be so large because it needs to cover very rare “black swan” financial disasters. I’m sure that the folks who run Harvard would be happy to see it be two or three times its current size, if not larger.

The threat of political reverses can be addressed by having a large contingent of Harvard alumni in the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of government who are sympathetic to Harvard and who can be relied upon to block or water down any government actions that might disadvantage it.

Finally, the threat of cultural reverses can be addressed in a similar way, by having a large contingent of Harvard alumni in key cultural institutions – leading newspapers, magazines, publishers, and so on – that have the power to confer cachet upon Harvard and those associated with it.

Explaining the Harvard admissions process

Now, the above is nothing more than a cute and overly clever analogy unless it has some degree of explanatory power. So, given the above, what can we conclude about Harvard, and in particular about its key function, that of creating a select set of Harvard alumni?

First, to counter potential financial reverses Harvard needs to build an alumni population that is willing and able to financially support it in a major way, so that its endowment can grow ever larger. This can be done by preferentially taking in applicants who are wealthy already, or likely to be wealthy in future.

Harvard has at least three strategies available by which to do this: it has a “farm system” of exclusive (and expensive) prep schools whose staff have deep and enduring relationships with the Harvard admissions department, it gives preferential treatment to the children of Harvard alumni (“legacies”), and it can also of course just admit the children of major donors. The overall result is to build a pool of alumni who have benefited from special treatment in admissions, who are inclined to “give back” to Harvard in return, and who will have the financial means to do so.

Second, to counter potential political reverses Harvard needs to build a supportive network of legislators, judges, and executive branch senior leaders. Since most such figures are lawyers (by definition true for judges, and almost as true for legislators), it’s obviously key for Harvard to have a strong law school. But perhaps equally if not more important, Harvard needs to have a feel for which groups within American society have political power (or at least political influence) and then ensure that it admits students from such groups in proper proportion to such power and influence.

To put it in a more negative way: if (to pick a fictional example) Graustarkian-Americans have relatively little power or influence in the US political system, then Harvard has less incentive to admit them as students, even if they otherwise form a relatively large percentage of qualified applicants. Harvard would likely instead preferentially admit students from other groups with more political clout.

Finally, to counter potential cultural reverses Harvard needs a similar supportive network of journalists, public intellectuals, and other media figures at major cultural institutions. The presumed mechanism here is to put much more emphasis on admitting students who are verbally skilled and culturally fluent at the expense of students who are more STEM-focused.

To put it more bluntly, Harvard is not CalTech, and does not want to be; its place in American culture as the ultimate university experience is exemplified by Elle Woods in Legally Blonde, not by Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory. (It’s worth noting here that the original novel Legally Blonde is set at Stanford; presumably the people who made the movie felt that using Harvard as the setting would resonate more with the typical viewer.)

Harvard forever

Given the above, what predictions can we make about Harvard’s future, particularly with respect to its admission policies?

First, I predict that Harvard will not follow the urgings of those who advocate it doubling or even tripling the number of students it enrolls (presumably in order to give more students the “Harvard experience”.

Part of the reason is by analogy to long-lived organisms (like the Greenland shark pictured above), which have long lives in large part because their metabolism is very slow. Even a very low rate of growth in enrollment would cause Harvard to balloon to an enormous size when extended over a few hundred years. Another reason is that increased enrollment would put more pressure on the endowment, should it become necessary to draw it down during hard financial times.

But I think the most important reason is that the pool of suitable positions for Harvard alumni is limited, and will remain so: There are only 535 Senate and House seats, less than a thousand Federal judgeships, only so many jobs at presitigious investment banks and private equity firms, and similarly only so many positions at leading newspapers, magazines, and related cultural institutions. Given that, increasing the number of Harvard alumni (a form of “elite overproduction”) would only increase the already intense competition for those positions, with little or no benefit to Harvard itself and its ability to survive as an elite university.

Second, I predict that Harvard will not change its admissions policies in any major way (for example, by instituting a lottery for admittance), and will not be forced to do so by US courts or legislatures. (As, for example, is at stake in a case currently before the US Supreme Court.) As I argue above, Harvard’s long-term survival depends on its having the freedom to tailor its student body to address potential financial, political, and cultural threats. I believe that its political and legal support network is strong and motivated enough to ensure that it retains that freedom.

Finally, if Harvard by some chance is forced to modify its admissions policies, I predict that it will attempt to accomplish its previous goals by different means. For example, it would likely further de-emphasize criteria such as test scores, grades, and student background (race, ethnicity, class, etc.), and put even more emphasis on student personality, ability to fit into the Harvard environment, recommendations from alumni, general “promise”, and other intangible aspects used to assess an applicant’s suitability to be a “Harvard person”. (In other words, Harvard’s admissions process would become even more opaque than it already is.)

Harvard has survived nearly four hundred years by doggedly pursuing its own interests and acting to neutralize potential threats to its survival. I would not bet against its ability to survive four hundred more.

This will take a bit of explanation: Jorie Graham is a well-known American poet (well, at least among people who read poetry) who has a refined and sophisticated image ("… raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools … studied philosophy at the Sorbonne …"). So I was surprised today to find that she’s on Twitter and tweets a lot, primarily about political stuff.

(Her Twitter profile doesn’t even mention that she’s a poet; in fact it has no biographical information about her at all. But if you look at her past tweets and who she follows, you’ll know that she’s “our” Jorie Graham.)

I found it quite amusing to think of “one of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation” retired (she’s 72) and sitting at home sipping a glass of wine, obsessively watching MSNBC and tweeting about the mid-terms and how to get the most impact out of your political donations.

PS to any Anifam discord folks reading this: I’ll be featuring Graham in a future Sunday night poetry post.

[This post was originally published on Cohost.]

I‘ve been around long enough to notice that stories involving magic seem to be more popular now than they used to be, and I’ve often wondered why that might be. I was reminded of that once again while reading one of the most delightful and charming stories about magic, Kamome Shirahama’s manga series Witch Hat Atelier. In the manga the young girl Coco is initiated into the world of witches—a world she thought had been closed to her from birth, but which she discovers is open to anyone who can learn to draw the intricate designs by which spells are cast.

The world of Witch Hat Atelier is of course fictional, and its magic likewise. But here in the real world we can also perform magic by making drawings, like so-called Feynman diagrams (see above), and manipulating symbols in other ways. These manipulations have a deep connection to physical reality, and enable us to divine the secrets of the universe and shape matter and energy to our will. They are “magic that actually works.”

So why don’t people pay more attention to real magic than fake magic? Of course, fake magic is embedded in stories that are more entertaining than real life. But beyond that, I think there are two key reasons:

First, real magic is hard. Not as hard as people think—it’s possible to grasp the basics of something like quantum computing or even quantum mechanics with no more mathematics than what is taught in high school (algebra, complex numbers, and matrix multiplication). But it is indeed true that applying that knowledge to real physical systems calls for much more knowledge and expertise.

More important, I think, is that though our diagrams and calculations may capture the universe precisely, in and of themselves they are powerless to change it. To do that requires advanced engineering and precision manufacturing, using techniques refined over multiple generations by thousands of people. No one person can totally comprehend everything that goes in making, say, a modern smartphone; even mundane products like LED light bulbs and your cat’s laser pointer are incredibly sophisticated at their core. Unable to understand how these devices work and what goes into making them, we simply take them for granted.

Once upon a time technology was simpler to understand. I think one of the attractions of the steampunk genre is that it harks back to the last time technology was truly legible, all puffing steam engines and rotating gears. Even electric motors and generators are not incomprehensible, although they mark the transition from the intuitive physics of Michael Faraday (famed for giving lectures and demonstrations to enthusiastic crowds of Londoners) to the mathematical physics of James Clerk Maxwell and his equations of electromagnetism.

Maxwell published his key papers in the 1860s. Perhaps not so coincidentally, 1870 is when the economist Brad DeLong sees everything changing: “In 1870 industrial research labs, modern corporations, globalization, and the market economy . . . proved keys to the lock that had kept humanity in its desperately poor iron cage . . . . And previously unimaginable economic growth revolutionized human life over and over, generation by generation.”

Those developments brought advanced technology to millions and ultimately billions, but they also killed its magic, as the heroic lone inventor in their workshop (another steampunk staple) gave way to the corporate R&D department and globalized supply chains. So we seek the magic we crave in novels, comics, and films and TV—the latter themselves benefiting from the use of computer graphics to create increasingly fantastical special effects.

Now we can be (fake) magicians ourselves, thanks to software and its ability to create virtual worlds in which our actions can be translated instantly into effects, whether that be digging a hole in Minecraft or casting an elaborate spell in a fantasy MMO. I could be snobbish and dismiss all this as inauthentic wish fulfillment (for example, comparing “survival mode” in Minecraft to a true survival experience in a wilderness), but I think that’s a fundamental mistake: we have always created new environments for us to live in, and (for example) an urban street with quaint shops and comfy apartments is just as much an artificial creation as the latest AAA title. There is no virtue in elevating the former over the latter.

And just as science drives technology, so technology drives science in a feedback loop, for example from the early microscopes that discovered bacteria to the scanning tunneling microscopes that can visualize and manipulate individual atoms. It’s possible that software worlds and the tools used to create them will in turn enable new ways to do science and engineering, so that in the future the diagrams drawn by a real-life Coco can create real-life magic.

Mightfo (@Mightfo) - 2022-11-19 20:31

Nice thoughts! Theres a lot of interesting things to talk about here, but one aspect that comes to mind is the way that this relates to the role of agency in fiction.

For example, why are medieval fantasy themes popular? I suspect that part of this is because they are useful for both the writer and the reader in terms of providing a setting that allows for more flexible agency.

If you compare a medieval fantasy setting to a realistic modern setting, I think you’ll find differences such as:

• The state is less powerful(except at the author’s whims) and has less ability to distribute its power effectively. This means several things—such as that the interactions between friends and foes is less cordoned off, and the onus of fixing a problem can be relocated more to individuals.

• Warfare can conceivably make individual skill/effort a lot more relevant, especially when you introduce magic and unrealistic strength etc, which gives characters more agency and room for expression of their efforts

• There is more nature to act against and with- even without the fantasy element, nature is wild and untamed, back to when it was more of a threat to humans.

• There’s more unknowns, because of less state/more nature/less information/less ability to completely overwhelm individuals with modern structures and technologies, even prior to magic.

And there’s probably more that I’m just not remembering from the last time I thought about this, haha.

Because of these, the writer has more avenues to create and unfold conflicts dynamically to create drama, back and forth, themes, gravitas, specific ways things play out, etc without having to fight constantly to create plausibility. I guess the “Wild West” setting has a lot of similarities to it, now that I think about it.

Fictional magic, similarly, is an individual-scale avenue for potential/unknowns/agency that the writers can get more freedom with and readers can be connected to particular things they enjoy seeing expressed(again, agency of individuals).

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2022-11-20 00:54

Thank you for the comment! I think you are correct about historical/fantasy settings providing more agency to the characters. I’m guessing that a part of this is also that rule was/is personalized, being centered in the persons of the monarch and their courtiers/vassals/etc., as opposed to being exercised via a more impersonal bureaucracy.

squircular reasoning (@spiders) - 2023-07-24 23:19

i think an aspect of “real magic”, as you put (sub)atomic sciences, that makes it disinteresting to a large number of people (including myself) is how divorced from everyday sensory reality it is.

i say this as somepony who is intensely interested in earth sciences; geology, botany, paleontology, zoology, even microbiology and some aspects of astronomy, to a certain degree, are all fairly accessible, and influence ones life in very visible ways. i may not be able to see tectonic plates moving but i can feel earthquakes, and i can see rock structures that are only possible because of uplift. i don’t have a microscope, but if i wanted one, i could get one, and suddenly the cellular structures of the organisms around me would be open to me

even molecular biology, to a certain degree, is somewhat accessible. like, PCR is revolutionary not just because it is a powerful tool for multiplying and sequencing dna but also because it is such a wildly simple technique that you can literally do it over a fucking campfire, and someone has. the barrier to entry for dna sequencing as an amateur biologist is mostly the cost of the chemical components—you don’t need a college degree to understand and carry out the process.

quantum physics, and to a strong degree also much of astrophysics, by contrast, is not something that can readily be understood if you didn’t specialize in it. people can sell you analogies in pop sci books but my trust of such books has been basically irrevocably damaged after i’ve been burned too many times finding out that i’ve been fed a false explanation of how something worked and that the true explanation is just way over my head completely incomprehensible. and if i did manage to understand it, it would feel about as real to me as fictional magic.

i feel like i couldn’t go applying the things i learned in any real way, not the way that knowing about the genetic history of plant families makes you understand what your senses are experiencing better.

the closest i ever came to feeling like i got that kind of everyday application of quantum mechanics to my life was reading QED by richard feynman and him adding up arrows to explain why light bent on a hot road. which is pretty interesting, if a bit abstract! (and there’s that thing again, the real magic doesn’t actually feel particularly real or connected to reality) but meanwhile, i have never actually been able to “understand” quantum computing. ppl make videos trying to explain it and i’ve watched many of them, i’ve tried to even write qasm, but the conclusion i came to is that you can’t actually understand it unless you go into heavy maths and write code, and you can’t write code that actually does anything discernable on a quantum computer unless you have a lot of money reply

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:00

Thanks for stopping by to comment! You’re right about quantum phenomena being hard to see and visualize, though people do try: here’s an article about seeing single photons with the naked eye, and another one about replicating the famous double-slit experiment with a cheap laser pointer. You’re also right about Feynmann’s QED: it’s an interesting and fun book.

rose (@rosieposie) - 2023-07-25 03:05

for me the closest thing to ’fictional magic’ is ’cooking’. you follow a recipe passed down by the sages of old, you improvise a little every once in a while to make it better, and voila, you turned things that people don’t like so much into a magical substance that enamors everyone at the party and has them begging for you to do that trick again next month. and you can just do it in real life any time you want to.

and really if you think about it, the only difference between chemistry and cooking is that cooking is that cooking is limited (mostly) to human-safe substances. and has significantly less extreme effects, like your product probably won’t kill most people. also something something potion brewing. reply

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:01

Thanks for commenting! You’re right, cooking can be pretty magic at times, especially in the hands of a master chef.

ArBe (@arbe) - 2023-07-25 05:46

I’ve thought about these comparisons(often from slightly different angles, but definitely in the same vein, and often also inspired by fiction like WHA) many times, especially the frustrating disparity between [ the ability to understand the fascinating systems underlying everything ] and [ the ridiculously disproportional amount of time and effort required to actually utilise that knowledge practically, especially as an individual ].

This post really nicely expands on those thoughts in ways I never would’ve thought of, and introduces some entirely new threads of thought that feel really enjoyable to explore, like the point about artificial environments. Great post!

brackets added for readability, maybe I wouldn’t need this crutch if my punctuation were better. Sorry

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 08:02

Thanks for your comment! I’m glad you found the post interesting.

Maynard (@Quelklef) - 2023-07-25 12:00

this feels like a very wise and true analysis

i’ll add that programming is one field where you can still be a rag-tag do-it-yourself-magician. the stuff you produce will not have the production value and polish of a megacorporation, but it still just might be functional

Frank Hecker (@hecker) - 2023-07-25 12:53

Thanks for stopping by to comment! I apologize for being so late to follow-up. Yes, you’re absolutely right, software is the one place a sole creator can make a difference, especially given all the (mostly) free tools at their disposal nowadays.