serakit

I think I need to recalibrate what I want to read. I've now had several instances of looking at a book's summary and thinking "That sounds really interesting; I want to read it!" and then actually starting and going "No, no, DO NOT WANT".

It's important to note this isn't an instance of bad marketing copy; they're usually exactly what they claim they are-- it's just I have this self-perception that I really want to read Difficult Works With Heavy Abuse Underpinnings and every time I actually *try* to do so they're well-written, engaging, and horribly, horribly triggering such that I can't get more than a couple of chapters in.

This has now happened enough times that I think I need to stop and really interrogate whether I think I'm going to *like* a book before adding it to my list. And also think really hard about what causes me to like a book. (The book in question in this instance is "Still Missing" by Chevy Stevens, which I think Jessica Jones fans will really enjoy, as the villain appears to be basically Kilgrave without the superpowers.)

Wizards of the Coast did a THING again. Once again to do with prices, and the community is united in outrage but it's still going to sell.

The product is a new Secret Lair (remember Secret Lairs are individual or small groups of cards available for a limited time directly from Wizards): a Walking Dead crossover. Which seems kinda weird on the face of it, because Walking Dead's cultural moment has passed and while it's still popular it's not OVERTAKING SOCIETY anymore. I wonder if this is product placement or licensing-- did Wizards get paid to do this branding or are they paying to do this branding.

Now, the "another company's IP" part of this is annoying but not *inherently* problematic-- no one cared that much about the Godzilla alternate art skins they did for Ikoria. The problem here is that these cards are mechanically unique one-offs, not reskins of existing cards, and they are black-border.

I will pause for a moment here to explain the difference between black and silver borders. In the beginning, there was the black border, which meant it was a card from what was then called an "expert" set-- one that was all originals. Then there was the white border, used for Core Sets and other sets that were just reprints. They then retired the white border and just printed everything in black-border, which is now slang for "tournament legal" even though developments in card printing led to special edition borderless cards which were also tournament legal. Much later, there came the silver border, which was used for what are called the "Un-sets": joke Magic sets which do ridiculous things and are sometimes used by R&D to experiment with more out-there mechanics they might want to bring to black border someday. Silver-bordered cards are not tournament legal, in any format; they are for casual play at home only.

Promotional cards are also sometimes done in silver border. There was a My Little Pony charity collaboration that was very cute and well-liked. Silver-border cards can be silly and tailored to the crossover IP in a way black-border cards can't. The Godzilla collaboration was black-border, but they were just reskins of cards that were also in the accompanying (monster-themed) set, and they came with notations about how the Godzilla cards were, for the purposes of deck construction rules, considered the same card as the equivalent Magic card. (For Constructed play, you can only have four of any named card that isn't a basic land.)

The problem here is that these cards are *both* original, non-reskinned cards, *and* in black border. There's no way to get them in a set; there's no other way to get them except for this two-week period where they're on sale. They won't be printed until after the ordering period is done, which means there's no way of knowing of one of them is going to become a tournament staple until it's too late to get more-- which means your choice is "buy now" or "wait until it becomes horrifically expensive later but you need four copies of it to be competitive."

(There are also countries where you can't get them at *all*; Secret Lair is not available worldwide.)

They've done things like this before, and they've been massively problematic. Not two weeks before this announcement, Wizards announced that they were no longer going to include mechanically unique cards as the buy-a-box promotional cards because of negative player feedback-- they'd caused problems by completely taking over entire tournament scenes to the point where no one wanted to play, and meanwhile gotten so expensive that even if you wanted to be competitive you couldn't actually get your hands on a copy.

But those were at least still attached to *sets*. Back in the early days of Magic, there were the cards Nalanthi Dragon and Mana Crypt. Mana Crypt was a promotion for the Magic novels; you sent away a coupon in the book for the free card. It turned into one of the most sought-after and powerful cards, was hideously expensive, and took them a decade to reprint. By comparison, Nalanthi Dragon wasn't that exciting. It was a DragonCon promo card. It wasn't very good. But people were outraged because it was a collectible that only a certain subset of people had the opportunity to buy. People were so outraged, in fact, that Wizards included it as a "send away for" in Duellist magazine so people could get it even if they hadn't been at DragonCon, and swore to the community that NEVER AGAIN would they print new cards outside of a set.

This promise was sort of *bent* with the box topper-- which, again, *still* caused the same problems, and they announced they'd learned their lesson. Clearly this was an outright lie, because here they are again doing the thing they've long promised never do again, that has always, universally caused major problems.

In fact, the *only* promise to their players they seem bent on keeping is the Reserve List, and *that* one is one everybody would be much happier to see gone. But they insist they can't do that because they made a promise to their players. Not only that, but they're functionally printing these new cards directly to the Reserve List: it uses someone else's IP; it's almost certainly a one-time deal that they can't reprint no matter how essential or expensive it gets. They insist that they can reprint mechanically identical "Magic versions" of these cards-- but unless you change the rules, then you have the same card with two names and it becomes something you can have eight of in your deck. They also, while repeatedly insisting they *can* reprint this if necessary, refuse to commit to actually doing so. (And, historically, have refused to reprint things no matter how necessary they were; it took 11 years to reprint Mana Crypt.)

And that's just the main and major issue with this! There's also the issue of bypassing local game stores which rely on selling Magic for revenue-- and since the way people become enfranchised players is often the community at their local game store, this is being taken as another sign that Magic wants to cash out on their way to ending the physical cards altogether and just having Arena.

There's also some thematic issues, which are more subjective: Walking Dead is *very* not-child-appropriate yet here it is being introduced into a game in part aimed at children. We are putting a character who is known for being a rapist on a Magic card (though I do agree with the people who are suggesting *that* outrage is more performative than anything, since most of the people shouting about it have nothing to say about the horrendous amount of *actual* rape and sexual assault and driving out of women common in the broader Magic community). Wizards insists that we are never going to get a world any more steampunk than Kaladesh and never ever have anything gun-based or technology based because this is a FANTASY game, not a science fiction one... and yet is introducing a heavily gun-based franchise as a main card rather than alternate art. I'm not going to get into a lot of detail about those because, well, this is already really long.

I'll just note that one of the next sets is stated to be a magic school called Strixhaven that seems very Harry Potter, and given this new penchant for tie-ins there's probably a Harry Potter one already in the works that they're going to try to sell on the grounds they couldn't get out of it when Rowling went on her rant, and it is going to once again explode in their faces.

I still like playing the game, but I'm getting less and less interested in anything other than the cards-- I'm not following the competitive scene, I'm not really making an effort to be part of the community, I'm barely reading the story even though it's online now, I'm reluctant to open the Wizards announcements because they're always awful. And I don't think I'm the only one; I've been noticing a lot of the major podcasters get steadily disheartened and less and less enthusiastic about what they're doing.

Only not me this time; this is a recommendation for another article: Hot Allostatic Load.

An excellent essay about the way cancel culture is weaponized to go after the powerless in a lot of feminist spaces.

I'm seeing a lot of "RBG has the most amazing legacy" posts and a lot of "RBG wasn't perfect" posts and then a lot of people complaining about how it is inappropriate to bring up her mistakes either because we're mourning her or because it will incite the third party voters to get all "But PERFECTION!"

That last one is flat-out wrong. The third-party voters are not susceptible to logic or reason. Not that this stops me trying to engage them with logic or reason, but I don't ever make the mistake of expecting it will get me anywhere. Curtailing what you say in the hopes of not inciting them further is a fool's errand. They're much like flat-earthers: they are getting something out of being in this small group that knows THE TRUTH, and until *that* fades, they'll dismiss any evidence you offer that their path is the wrong one.

She's a public figure. It would be inappropriate to bring up the arguments about her legacy to someone who was mourning her *personally*-- let her family and friends be sad about her death without flinging this stuff at them. But if you're going to make posts praising her, you really do need to expect that others are going to make posts criticizing her, and if the things they're saying are true, they're not wrong to do so, and it's *certainly* wrong to suggest they shouldn't be posting their opinions about her in their own internet space because of some misguided notions of appropriateness or what will and won't incite the third party voters. (You are perfectly free to say "this, my post, is not a space for criticizing her; this is a space for mourning; I will block people who criticize her here." But other people get to do what they like in their own internet spaces.)

She was an actual human person. I actually really don't like the "Her mistakes are nothing compared to her greatness!" discourse because that does ignore that she was an actual human person-- I'm not going to suggest you shouldn't be posting that if that's your opinion but I am going to say that you're wrong. We need to do better at sitting with the idea that someone can be a person who has done great things and also a person who has made mistakes and these two things are not mutually exclusive. We need to do *much* better at not turning people into larger-than-life figures. It's another take on the Great Man theory of history-- "she was this figure who did so many great things that her mistakes are inconsequential and we shall never have another like her!" isn't helpful to the cause; it's *demoralizing*. It implies we should despair at having lost her rather than fight to get another like her. It implies we can't have another like her.

It's rational, given the current political environment, to be concerned about what her loss means for the future of the court, but *that* would be true if *any* of the liberals had died.

She did amazing things. The country is, overall, worse off for having lost her. But to suggest that puts her beyond criticism is to worsen the tendency to government-by-cult-of-personality, and that's *not* a long-term good for the country.

Theory: Marcia is Maeve.( Cut for whole series October Daye spoilers )

I've mentioned before that I really have got to start checking the content warnings *before* I listen to the episodes-- though in this particular instance there was one *in* the episode as well, since Jon *says* "it used to be a mental hospital" when they're talking to Basira before we get to the statement. I know enough about mental hospital horror tropes to know that while I absolutely trust this show to handle them well, there is a specific territory "this place used to be a mental hospital" is probably going to cover. As indeed it does, painfully and with a lot of nuance and hitting me right to the side of things I'm actually afraid of. (It's not *quite* the thing I'm afraid of, but it comes very, very close.)

Taking bets on how long it takes for the internet to demand that Jonny reveal whether he has any personal history with mental hospitals. (I'm not on the Discord so I can't see it.) Honestly, given the way the internet behaved over the addiction episode, I'm actively wondering if the bit where he explains bluntly to Basira that it's about "fear of bad therapists, filtered through the Stranger" in a way much blunter than the point of any given episode is usually explained might have been added during the hiatus as a *reaction* to previous backlash of that sort...

I have very specific tastes when it comes to stand-up comedy-- which is somewhat frustrating, because the ones I like, I really, *really* like. It's just that right now the only two that do that are Bo Burnham and Hannah Gadsby. For slightly different reasons. Hannah Gadsby is very obviously sophisticated and calling out important issues; you have to be paying a lot of attention to follow her. She's also talking about stuff I care a lot about. (I was so disappointed in the Netflix version of Douglas; I inveigled a friend out to see it live when she passed through here and Netflix cut, like, two hours of it, including what I thought was the most meaningful, poignant part, where she describes having a meltdown in front of her girlfriend and getting comforted through it and finding this a very important experience... and then seeing a text the girlfriend has sent to the rest of their friend group about this incident that reads "I really love Hannah, but she's like a retard or something." And she tells this as part of explaining how she came to break up with her girlfriend not long before the tour started.)

Bo Burnham, meanwhile, just *delights* me, because his show is heavy on spectacle and outward silliness while also being incredibly layered-- like, this is a guy who has a song called "Eat a Dick" that's actually having a really good conversation about gender roles in relationships and the way men treat women. He leans hard on irony and allusion, with occasional moments of really wonderful sincerity. He's also managed to have a song called "Kill Yourself" that I adore despite the fact that I normally absolutely hate humor that draws suicide in-- possibly because he really obviously understands the gravity of the issue and makes sure he leans into it for the song. (With most of his songs, though, you really do have to listen to the *whole* song, because he often uses mood whiplash between verses to make a point.)

So here are two comedians I really like. And I've tried to watch a number of other Netflix comedy specials and I've yet to find another one that even keeps me watching, let alone delighting and connecting with me the way these two do. And I have no idea what, precisely, their magic is.

You ever have those days where you start writing something to submit to a flash fiction market, get a few sentences into it, realize what your concept is, and then go "Welp, this is going to be longer than the 750 words this market allots?"

(Which is fine; it's harder science fiction than I normally write and there are, I think, actually *more* places to submit that than my usual space opera and fantasy. I'm just amused/exasperated at my concept deciding it has a mind of its own.)

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/07/mounting-poisonings-blindness-deaths-as-toxic-hand-sanitizers-flood-market/?fbclid=IwAR0VW7df86MJFVM7NPRroZxlxpShUbjVdlgmq_75rstX4rteGvZA4cGdA_o

The FDA has issued a warning for several sanitizer brands because they're containing methanol, which is toxic.

Seriously, super, incredibly toxic. It breaks down into *formaldehyde*, y'all.

I really like that liveshow! I mean, sure, the majority of it is statements we were already familiar with-- it's like a fix-up novel, two statements we already knew with a frame story. But the frame story is *hilarious* (Rosie is no longer the ghost; she's finally put in an appearance!).
( Cut for spoilers! )
Squeeing aside, it's also interesting to re-listen to what were the very earliest episodes-- statements one and two-- and realize that I've adjusted. When I first started listening to this show I was on edge for each episode and it sometimes took me a bit to get through a whole one, and even when I got past that and started racing through them, I was still very emotionally wrought by each one. I don't think it's just that I've now heard these ones before and so know how they go, or even that now I know the world so I know what the angler fish was after and what the deal is with that coffin. I think I've also just listened to enough Magnus Archives at this point that I'm acclimating to horror. I'm beginning to write the occasional horror (well, I tend to walk the line between Dark Fantasy and horror) and I'm starting to admit that I like horror in general, or at least certain types of horror, and with that admission and exploration I'm getting less jumpy at every story.