Towers in Sand / From Feudal Serf to Spender

EPILOGUE OF A SERIES.

Abstimmung an der Landsgemeinde, Adrian Sulc, 2006

This series of posts started out three years ago with a reprint of a college essay (so more like eight years ago) on the definition of Marxism and the failure of the Soviet Union. At the time I stated that I had loosely considered myself a Trotskyist if only because I understood it in my teens as in opposition to Stalinist totalitarianism, and in exploring the subject across ten thousand words I have found myself reaching back into the nineteenth century roots of socialism. The value of these essays, and this blog, is basically a personal learning tool - in writing this series I have managed to organise my ideas about political theory into something structured that I can recognise myself and refine. Thus, instead of complain about elements of society and politics, I can present my ideas for their own critique. To do so I must first re-summarise the problems with the Bolshevik revolution.

Word Problems, Level 1

Green Eagle, Quinn Dombrowski, 2010

Despite conlanging being a long-lasting hobby of mine that I can't talk to anyone about offline lest I receive a lovely long-sleeved jacket, a post about conlanging hasn't appeared on this blog since 2011. In October that year I presented what little I had to show of the conlang I was working on. Getic (aka Not-Albanian) is an attempt to derive a sister language to Albanian from Proto-Albanian under the pretence that the Dacians were their ancestors and one tribe went South (our world's Albanians) and another remained in the Carpathians (the Getae). The Getae were actually located near the Danube and possibly a Thracian tribe, but ethnicity and identity in the Paleo-Balkans is a hell of a mess - I'm just using the name. What I've been working on the almost two years alone are the sound changes from Proto-Indo-European. In that time I ripped most of it up and reorganised the whole thing at least once in order to get the right output. At first it was difficult given the paucity of information on Proto-Albanian. Before I eventually bought A Concise Historical Grammar of the Albanian Language for £80 I had to painstakingly gleam some fundamentals from the Wikipedia page on Albanian - the fronting of long PIE back vowels and monophthongisation of PIE diphthongs and the incidences of palatalisation before front vowels built up a crude chronology. The juicy stuff in that book was of course unavailable at Google Books, so I put down some real money on this hobby. That allowed me to finally progress onto creating the beginnings of a grammar this summer.

Police and Thieves

GTA San Andreas, promo artwork, 2004

It would be hard not to notice the landing of a new instalment of Grand Theft Auto if only because the media becomes saturated with moral panic articles on each launch. Not that this bothers Rockstar or Take 2 Interactive who make millions either way. As they say, any publicity is good publicity and it all feeds into the hype. However, in this day and age of aggressive promotion of entertainment products in which the first act of the script of an upcoming episode of an animated show is read by the voice artists at Comic-con and blockbuster films have almost year long mysterious viral marketing campaigns to engage fans, sometimes the meal is overcooked (see Prometheus, The Dark Knight Rises, et al). The first trailer for GTA V was released way back in November 2011 - almost two years before release - and since then we've been drip fed screenshots and cryptic twitter feeds with the expectation that the pressure will have risen so much that people will necessarily cream their pants the moment they so much as touch their copy. It might sound like I'm setting up for a scathing review. That is not the case - let's just not pretend this is the perfect game. Spoilers follow.

Threnody

US poster, public domain, 1945

But you must remember there was never a war when crimes weren't committed, and there never will be.
-Rochus Misch

All too often alternative history fiction revolves around the concept of the Axis forces winning the Second World War. Robert Harris' Fatherland used it as the setting for an Orwellian murder-mystery, yet it's largely a cliché of the genre. Likely because alternative history often hinges on decisive military actions, and the most over-used conflict in popular media is the centrepiece struggle of the 20th century against the unambiguously evil enemy in the form of the Nazis. Germany is made to bear the responsibility alone while the other axis members are often overlooked (especially any other than the following two); the armed forces of Fascist Italy are always seen as something of a joke, and Imperial Japan's conduct of the war was downplayed with the emergence of the Cold War and maintained with its rise as an economic superpower. Japan was, however, the scene of the spectacular conclusion of the conflict. You need only mention the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki - I don't even need to implicitly state what happened in 1945. As someone who has dabbled in alternative history, it's struck me for a number of years that far more interesting than a world in which the axis triumphed would be a history like our own where they were defeated, with the key exception that nuclear weapons were not available and the invasion of Japan was necessitated. The debate about the use of those weapons started before they were even dropped, and for me it's a subject that I've wished to write about since the very first post on this blog.

The Drift of Air

DeLorean DMC-12, foshie, 2007

Is there anything I haven't said about Gran Turismo 5 yet? I know it's an open-ended game, but you'd think with the impending arrival of the sixth instalment of the series I wouldn't be approaching ten thousand words about playing this game. It has been six months, though, since I last waffled on about activities prolonging my interest in the game beyond the core of beating A-Spec mode. I've gone through several phases of losing interest only to buy a new car and bring life back into using the wheel and pedals: I didn't play much after beating the 24 Hours of Le Mans until I dabbled with muscle cars last November and continued along with the novelty of the wheel and pedals, then designing eight custom tracks. After that, GT5 lost out to other concerns for a number of weeks. My interest came round again when I decided to try out some rides amongst Gran Turismo's copious garages. Perhaps you can guess.

Activation Theme / Windowlicker

Windows 3.1, Microsoft Corp. 1992

Tomorrow it's two entire decades since Windows 3.11 was released. The anniversary of a service pack for Windows 3.1 is a poor excuse to launch into this post, I know. You'll have to forgive the nostalgia - my first computer was an IBM PS/2 running 3.1. A technician had to be called out several times at expense to reinstall Windows as a result of my exploring the system. That computer is long gone after being replaced with a new Aptiva in 1998 - itself twice succeeded. Something about the old system still lingers fondly in my memory. I recall the last times I used that old operating system.

Orbiting Your Living Room, Cashing in The Bill of Rights

Prism Demo [...], ubiquit23, 2013

Batman: Beautiful, isn't it?
Lucius Fox: Beautiful... unethical... dangerous. You've turned every cellphone in Gotham into a microphone.
Batman: And a high-frequency generator-receiver.
Lucius Fox: You took my sonar concept and applied it to every phone in the city. With half the city feeding you sonar, you can image all of Gotham. This is wrong.
Batman: I've gotta find this man, Lucius.
Lucius Fox: At what cost?
Batman: The database is null-key encrypted. It can only be accessed by one person.
Lucius Fox: This is too much power for one person.
Batman: That's why I gave it to you. Only you can use it.
Lucius Fox: Spying on 30 million people isn't part of my job description.
- The Dark Knight, 2008