You May Indulge Yourselves

feel free to customise your own bar ambience.
Is there a setting to add sleaze?

It needs an air of disrepute, with patrons belching and scratching themselves, and grumbling about the state of the toilets.
But enough about this establishment, what about the bar website ?

Is there a setting to add sleaze?
I think that’s what the business next door to David’s fine establishment was for. Funny that the girls never wandered in here to ask us to buy them drinks. [surveys grimy tables.]

I’ll have you know the toilets were given a once-over two Thursdays ago.
Oh, I’m so behind on the current slang … so that’s a “once-over” now? We used to call it a “spray-and-pray”

Back in the day a few decades ago, with friends I’d visit the Hopscotch Bar in Fort Pierre South Dakota. At the back were the pinball games we played. At the front were the strippers, under strict orders from management not to go fully nude, so of course they did. I always thought the strippers looked better from the distance of the pinball games. Proximity had the effect of putting years, miles and pounds on their faces and figures. The Hopscotch held a balance between safe sleaze and outright debauchery. If you really wanted rough-and-tumble, you could find it down the street.
The place is still in operation as the Hop Scotch Nite Club. It seems to have strayed little from its roots. Check out the single yelp review from a ‘travel dancer’.
https://www.yelp.com/biz/hop-scotch-club-fort-pierre?adjust_creative=mapquest&hrid=f_YVL-FEQ_WhRMDfQYog-A&utm_campaign=yelp_feed&utm_medium=feed_v2&utm_source=mapquest

WandaVision has only three episodes left and is still not very good.
I gave up on the cheese after only one episode. And I am a great admirer of Ms. Olsens… attributes.
On a relevant tangent, I would like to take the opportunity to poll your transatlantic audience (phrasing) and ask if anyone can help me find what I am looking for.
I too enjoy a dollop of the cinematic arts and old fashioned speculative fiction but whenever I go on the interwebs and try and read a relevant current culture website all I find are woke scolds, purple haired “scribes” and dolefully banal studio/publisher press releases reposted as “content”
I refer of course to the dreck found at websites such as AVClub, Den of Geek, IO9, etc.. where they offer such sh*te as “Was Ming the Merciless a prototype Orange Man Bad” or “Dr. Who defeats evil space BoJo”
Is there any website where one can find something akin to the ramblings of “The Critical Drinker” but in text form ? ie: conservative preferably but politically neutral at least
UK based is preferable to American (sorry Yanquis) but anything from the Anglosphere will do considering the cultural unicorn I am hunting for.
Thanks in advance, your humble servant, etc.. ad nauseum.

Saw this at Insty this a.m.:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-take-the-penis-off-its-pedestal/
Haven’t we been doing that for the past 40 years? Or is she talking about one particularly stubborn penis?

one particularly stubborn penis
..but enough about Bill Clinton

I’ve completely fallen down the rabbit hole of sailing blogs on YouTube. When the temperatures outside get to a place where distinctions between Fahrenheit and Celsius lose their meaning, spending an hour sailing from Antigua to Guadeloupe with a couple of plucky thirtysomethings is a great escape.
On the plus side, I spent a few hours mending canvaswork for my sailboat while I was at it.

SRC above raises a point which reminds me of a little chore I set myself in December.
I set out to find and download a number of movies I remembered enjoying in the past, and others I have not seen but always meant to. Most of them are out of copyright, so no harm done. There are few films of the past 40 years which even intrigue me. The exception was The Death of Stalin, which I believe was panned by the “critics” and yes, I enjoyed it. If you have not seen it, you will discover that Zhukov was from rural Yorkshire, Stalin was an East End wide boy, Khrushchev was a New York Jew, and there was a Python on the Central Committee.
I started with Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, passing on the link to a delighted lady friend, found the original The Italian Job, and went on from there. Now I have about 40 films, which I will store on a backup drive, and send CDs/DVDs to grandsons who are not impressed by current HollyWeird offerings.
To find the movies, I use BitChute mainly, with occasional forays to the Tube, searching for films by name. To download, I have a program called ClipGrab, which does so well I made a donation.
If anyone knows where I can find a decent print of Bondarchuk’s Waterloo, 1967 I think, I would be very grateful for a link.
I have a feeling that much of the older, good stuff is destined for the Memory Hole one day, but archiving it now keeps it alive.

Not quite a limerick –
There was a young lass from Loch Innis
Whose fondness for sex ran to penis.
She took it in halls, flower beds, and horse stall,
But liked best to be mounted on pedestals.

Some of it is clever, or at least clever-clever, but little of it is interesting
Supernatural had an episode in which the brothers are tossed into a succession of television show knockoffs by a malevolent spirit in order to teach them a lesson. It also goes from cheesy comedy to horror very quickly, and it works very well. Probably because it only lasts for 45 minutes.
Am I going to ruin anyone’s day if I spoil The Big Reveal in WandaVision? Anyone who’s ever read an X-Men comic knows what’s coming, and I’m surprised they’re dragging it out this long.

Journo: “Did you realize there’s a lockdown?”

websites such as AVClub, Den of Geek, IO9, etc
Just one fantasy author – but highly entertaining (both his books and blog).

Fighting the White Devil with breakfast cereal: Get ready for Proud Puffs, a chocolate-flavored, vegan cereal formed in the shape of a Black fist.

More from Chris Rufo.

In practical terms, it is unclear how these “antiracist” programs will translate into academic outcomes. The gap between rhetoric and reality at schools such as William Kelley is almost beyond comprehension: the vast majority of the ten- and eleven-year-olds marching for the utopia of “black communism” can barely read and write. Rather than come to terms with the pedagogical failure of Philadelphia public schools, however, educators have shifted the blame to “systemic racism” and promises of “revolution.”

The desired academic outcome is an ever growing army of unemployed, deranged people ready to kill whoever leftists designate as the enemy? As a famous communist said, “the worse, the better”.

This is just occurring to Scott Adams? This is something that has bugged me about science reporting since I was in college, if not before. Not that I’ve seen much discussion of it in all these years…
https://mobile.twitter.com/ScottAdamsSays/status/1361317499673866245

It also goes from cheesy comedy to horror very quickly, and it works very well. Probably because it only lasts for 45 minutes.
Yes, the slow pacing and overplayed central conceit really doesn’t help WandaVision. They’ve stretched the sitcom idea beyond its tolerance. Or beyond mine, anyway. For the first three or four episodes, you sit through a flat, unfunny recreation of flat, unfunny sitcoms, complete with flat, unfunny jokes. It’s almost grating. Only when this sitcom world is disturbed or glitching in some way is there a brief respite, a brief sense of drama. And by the time the wider situation – events outside of the Hex – become clear, a large chunk of the audience will have tuned out.
It’s not entirely bad – there are good moments, and it keeps teasing something fairly wild to come. It isn’t without ambition. But the structure and pacing, and the weekly release format, haven’t done the actual drama, the core of it, any favours. I’m rather puzzled by the seemingly unanimous praise the thing has received.

Do you torrent? Waterloo, decent resolution, readily available. https://www1.thepiratebay3.to/s/?q=waterloo

It can’t be that old. It just can’t be.
I was tickled by the rave courier whose fits of having-it-large are triggered by the beep of a pedestrian crossing.

What is there to parody or to spend three episodes developing?
That’s the thing. As an idea, on paper, it’s not entirely unamusing, and there’s clearly been some thought put into the recreations, lots of detail. But that, in itself, isn’t particularly interesting. It isn’t compelling or much of a reason to keep watching, week after week. Just as the ironic nods to comics lore and continuity – which I’m guessing we’re supposed to find clever and terribly funny – aren’t in themselves particularly interesting. Whatever its cleverness, or imagined cleverness, the thing still has to work dramatically, with pace and tension, and a sense of narrative momentum. Which, so far, it doesn’t. At least, nowhere near enough.

Thank you, Fred, I will have a go.

I’m rather puzzled by the seemingly unanimous praise the thing has received
There’s a sizable contingent of people that are so happy to see their favorite geek fetishes produced with a large budget and real actors that they’ll forgive mediocre writing. And really, WandaVision‘s slow pacing is minor compared to what passes for the standard fans are used to. On a spectrum that has Titans at one end and Mutant X at the other, WandaVision is closer to the former than the latter, and farther along than, say, Inhumans.
the ironic nods to comics lore and continuity – which I’m guessing we’re supposed to find clever and terribly funny
The mark of a good genre show – like, say, Smallville or season one of The Mandalorian – is whether you can inject all the easter eggs and clever references and have the episode still work for someone who has no idea what you’re talking about. Ideally they shouldn’t even notice that you’ve made a reference.
Kevin Feige knew what he was doing, and I get the feeling he saw the train wreck coming and stepped away from the MCU before he could be tainted with the inevitable decline.

Bill Gates is making more pronouncements about how we commoners must give up all the good things in life while he continues to live a life of extreme luxury.
I used to joke that Bill Gates was a better person than Steve Jobs because although Bill wanted all our money Steve wanted our souls too. I was very wrong about Bill.

I used to joke that Bill Gates was a better person than Steve Jobs because although Bill wanted all our money Steve wanted our souls too. I was very wrong about Bill.
If Revenge of the Nerds dystopian style. Gates, Bezos and Zuckerberg

“It’s been the convention for decades now to depict the 1950’s as picket fence noir. Audiences would be surprised if harmonious suburban communities (compulsory aside: which never existed) didn’t have dark forebodings.”
One of the oddities of the “culturally sensitive“ crowd is their strange inability (or perhaps “outright refusal” might be closer to the mark) to display any sensitivity at all to the culture of their own parents and grandparents.

They didn’t read any books that weren’t mass market fantasy/SF, or watch any movies or shows that weren’t at least adjacent to their particular niche. As a result, their standards for quality were badly miscalibrated.
That is a very good insight. Thank you! (That might explain how A E Van Vogt’s popularity declined so precipitously after the sixties: when fans began to encounter better-written stories they finally lost interest in him and other poor stylists.)
We might be able to make a long thread on this topic, pondering other factors. For instance, I have met fans who love the Starship Troopers movie as a straight adventure of entirely admirable people: they cannot see the Nazi elements that Paul Verhoeven inserted into it, and I find it astonishing that this could be the case. They might be lying, but I have encountered this blindness in other circumstances too. I have postulated that they tend to be geeks who are capable of deep perception only of engineering/scientific matters but this remains merely speculation.

I find it astonishing that this could be the case
“Fans are Slans” analogizes SF fans to secret mutants that were intended to be a metaphor for pre-WWII Jewry. Because being mocked for reading SF is totally like being a Jew in Nazi Germany.
Self-awareness is not fandom’s strong suit.
Up to a certain point in the 20th century, F/SF authors were generally people who had done other things in their lives, and had turned to F/SF either as a way to pay the bills or a side gig or a retirement hobby. Robert E. Howard mostly wrote cowboy and boxing novels, for instance. Leaving aside quality for a moment, this meant that authors were bringing real-world experiences into the stories they wrote.
Around the early 80’s, we saw the first crop of F/SF writers who went straight from college into writing, and whose only life experiences were college and reading other F/SF lit. The result is a genre that’s been steadily shrinking in on itself and getting increasingly unmoored from any real-world relevance. Most of the best-selling fantasy book series and at least three TV shows of the last twenty years have been novelizations of the author’s college D&D campaign. I don’t think there’s an author out there any more who could write even a Hammer’s Slammers or a Chronicles of Amber, much less Dune or Lord of the Rings.
Three chapters in and I’m not very impressed
Heinlein was an atheist and a conservative libertarian, which meant neither the left nor the right liked him very much. It’s also been noted – fairly – that Heinlein doesn’t write characters; every character is just Heinlein, spouting Heinlein’s sociopolitical opinions in Heinlein’s voice. The extent to which you like Heinlein tends to depend on how much you agree with him.
It just seemed like a campy/silly romp of a military-ish movie
When I saw it in high school none of us had read the original and we all just chalked it up to SF films being cheesy, low-budget and badly written. The TV series Space: Above and Beyond is basically Starship Troopers without the political subversion, which is to say a campy/silly romp of a military-ish show.

Verhoeven, who seems doomed to forever make films that he thinks viciously lampoon his political opposites
I’m still reeling from the revelation that Robocop was intended as a Christ allegory.
I haven’t had much contact with the SF/F fan communities
There are two groups of fans – the ones that just read and enjoy F/SF works as a favoured genre of literature, and the ones that self-identify as fans, and make up clever names for themselves and go to cons and so on. That second group has become increasingly more visibly disturbing over time as the genres have been mainstreamed. It’s truly unfortunate that Harlan Ellison refused to allow Xenogenesis to be reprinted because its depiction of the more disturbed fan-type-2 might, if promulgated more widely, have led to some self-reflection on the part of the community.
And then there’s the recent revelations about Marion Zimmer Bradley and other older lions of the field.
I’ve used the phrase “creative human centipede”
I’ve used the phrase “like an ourobouros consuming its own tail, getting smaller and smaller all the time” but I’m stealing yours because it’s more punchy.
TVTropes has a lot to answer for. Being curated almost entirely by millennials who think they’re media-savvy but have no knowledge of anything prior to 1995 or so, it’s full of these kind of “I can tell this is a trope but I don’t know where it comes from or why it exists” entries. The other thing I see is that as F/SF goes mainstream, its primary media has become film, TV and video games. Many, possibly even most people who call themselves F/SF fans now have never read a F/SF book. And the writing for film/TV/video games is by necessity simpler and of poorer quality than a full-sized novel, and relies heavily on communicating via tropes.

Daniel Ream: “Fans are Slans” analogizes SF fans to secret mutants that were intended to be a metaphor for pre-WWII Jewry.
And A. E. Van Vogt’s novel Slan was published in the late 40’s so it seems likely that he had that in mind at least to some extent.
Self-awareness is not fandom’s strong suit.
Sadly true.
Around the early 80’s, we saw the first crop of F/SF writers who went straight from college into writing, and whose only life experiences were college and reading other F/SF lit. The result is a genre that’s been steadily shrinking in on itself…
Does that explain Delany’s later fiction? 🙂
Let’s see: Gregory Benford is a physicist, Gene Wolfe was an engineer, Joe Haldeman was a combat engineer, Asimov was a phd Chemist at Boston, Pratchett was a newspaper man, Pournelle was many things, but I seem to be talking only about old guys like myself which supports your point. 🙁
I don’t think there’s an author out there any more who could write even a Hammer’s Slammers
By David Drake, Vietnam War veteran.
How about Michael Z. Williamson who is a more recent veteran and who maintains parallel careers in making/repairing firearms and edged weapons and in related consulting for Hollywood? I’ve only read one of his novels so far, so I am not in a position to say one way or the other.

Daniel Ream: There are two groups of fans – the ones that just read and enjoy F/SF works as a favoured genre of literature, and the ones that self-identify as fans, and make up clever names for themselves and go to cons and so on.
There are some who fall in between: They are primarily readers. They occasionally go to cons but do not wear costumes, give themselves clever names, or speak Klingon. 🙂 I occasionally have gone to cons, when the announced program had numerous items that seemed worth attending–one can see highly knowledgable people discussing interesting things, and ask questions. But slowly the internet replaced that as a more convenient source, and the chief reason to attend was to meet old friends: I have had many wonderful lunches and dinners (at which sf was rarely discussed) with one highly respected writer who was one of the most intelligent and humane people I have known.
Many, possibly even most people who call themselves F/SF fans now have never read a F/SF book.
As exemplified, perhaps, by the fact that those media-oriented Comic Cons get tens of thousands of guests while the typical old style con gets hundreds. I have tried to interest media fans in related written fiction but with very limited success. In part it seems as if some people just stop reading.

In part it seems as if some people just stop reading.
People nowadays “consume” media.
Teaching does not take place in schools, “programming” does.
The mind has been decoupled from the activity. You need to be able to think to learn concepts, to read books.
I love finding some pulpy old paperback of speculative SF from the 50s or thereabouts in a used bookstore, for a couple bucks. It’s amazing what they thought the future held. Interplanetary travel, no, but other tech, and social changes – they were surprisingly prescient.

I’ve been re-reading Andre Norton’s juveniles, starting with Sargasso of Space
I have a couple Andre Norton paperbacks in my collection, but I don’t know if they were juveniles or not.
I’ve always been a fan of a good adventure story, whether space-based or fantasy-based. I can tolerate some social commentary in my fictional escapes, as long as it isn’t too preachy and beat me about the head. I think that is why I tend to prefer the older stuff – either there was less preachiness, or it was just much better-disguised in a rollicking good tale.