Unto Madness, 2013

I don't even want to talk about all the stuff in the news lately. Just... take this. You'll need it where you're going.

Curiosity of Politics: Vermont

I'm in the middle of packing my life into boxes, but there's something I've been meaning to share. I don't have as much time or battery life as I'd like, so I'll have to be quick, but I want to show you something strange: This.

That is the list of presidential election results, by state, for every election ever held in the United States of America. There was a version of this chart in one of my history books in college and then, as now, it fascinated me. See, the state I'm currently moving out of is Vermont, and Vermont has the longest party loyalty streak of any state for any party: from 1856 through 1960, Vermont voted Republican. In case you were wondering, this is what the electoral map of 1856 looked like:

There were 31 states that year. And Vermont remained a Republican stronghold for 104 years. Even when the cool states were voting Democratic, Vermont voted Republican. Even when it was FDR in World War II, Vermont voted Republican. In fact, even after going for LBJ in 1960, Vermont went back to being Republican until 1992. Now, it's one of the bluest of the blue states, with there being no indication of anything about that changing in this election. Why?

It's complicated in ways I wish I had the time to get into. The Republican and Democratic parties performed a very slow waltz over the course of the 20th century in which the two traded places as the liberal and conservative voices, and that had a lot to do with race. In the last few years, the remaining handful of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans have either jumped ship or died from old age.

One might think that that's what happened with Vermont: The conservative generation has passed on, giving way to liberals. But what I, personally, have seen is nothing like that: I went to an Occupy march last year at about this time and most of the people there had probably been college kids when Vietnam was happening. The liberals here are young and old.

More than that, however, is that the Republican Party here in Vermont looks nothing like the Republican Party nationally. There are different strains of Republicanism nationally - the Reaganites, the neo-cons, whatever Mitt Romney is classified as - but I'd say the Republicans here are Coolidge Republicans, taciturn to the point of being spartan and concerned with function over style for everything. At the height of Tea Party mania during the midterm elections of 2010... nothing happened here.

I'm too young to really know if they've stuck by their guns the whole time or if they've retracted from the high-water mark of Reagan flamboyance in the 1980s, but either way, they're not the rest of the party is nationally. Just a thought worth sharing as we head into an election in which both sides are convinced the other party's candidate will run the US into the ground.

Felix Baumgartner, You Rock

There's only so much to say when we all saw the same thing, but DAMN, it was one cool thing, huh?

Yesterday, Felix Baumgartner rode a balloon up into the stratosphere, completed an elaborate and not entirely clear checklist (what was switch F6 for? did he turn it on or off?) and stepped off the railing of his capsule and into the waiting arms of gravity.

I don't think I'll ever forget watching the capsule's odd hatch roll away, pocket-door style, revealing the ink-black sky and the glowing color of the Earth. That part, in addition to everything else, was especially amazing.

Watching it live, and even though it wasn't in any way a surprise, I still had a very real heart-in-throat moment watching Felix just... step... off. It was the capstone moment to a weird trip that had just previously featured Felix awkwardly moving around in his space suit to fulfill the commands being given to him from Joe Kittinger, the old holder of the high jump record, from the ground. There would be long, agonizing pauses between orders when I, personally, was afraid it was all going wrong somehow. Kittinger, at least, shared my feelings: He always seemed relived when Felix got back to the radio to ask for the next step. "Attaboy," he said a few times, and it was odd to hear him use such Americanisms in talking with a man whose radio circuit and Austrian accent made him sound like Microsoft Sam.

NASA watched the whole thing with interest (in case their people ever have to reenter the atmosphere under less-than-ideal conditions), but ultimately it was a civilian effort. Kittinger's record was set as part of a US Army project; Bumgartner's, in contrast, was done for the sake of doing it, watched by the world and financed by Red Bull.

If it had been done by the Army again, or by NASA, it would have been cool, but it's hard not to think it's so much cooler THIS way, simply as one man's crazy dream and the huge crew of people who wanted to help him make it happen. Felix's mom, Eva Baumgartner, was there in the control room. Kittinger was there too, and he smiled when things went right. And that is as it should be.

Felix Baumgartner, Legend in Training

This is sort of a placeholder, because the real event hasn't happened yet. But it's going to, soon. All the smaller variables have been worked out, and we're just waiting on the last great unknown: The weather.

Felix Baumgartner, amateur projectile and professional lunatic, is going to throw himself out a balloon in the stratosphere over New Mexico. It's believed his unaided body will crack the sound barrier on the way down. His chief adviser is the current record of the atmospheric high dive, conducted on behalf of the US military back in the 1960s. This couldn't be made more awesome.

And so, out in the desert, they wait for low wind, of all things. And we wish them luck.

Ayn Rand Was a Terrible Person: A Short Essay

Shared cultural experiences are one of the strongest ties people can have. A Star Wars fan is going to be fundamentally the same regardless of location or age, because you and he saw the same movies. Kuurion and I, living at either ends of a large-ish continent, have a few such shared cultural experiences. For instance, we both thought Atlas Shrugged was a terrible book. The key difference is that I called bullshit after 82 pages and he read the whole thing.

Atlas Shrugged was written by a very angry woman named Ayn Rand. Rand hated the idea that anyone in this world should have any more or any less than exactly what they worked for. Atlas Shrugged was her dense, heavy-handed, wrathful sermon on how most people in society are parasites sucking off of the creative power of a very few.

But that's not the worst of it. Rand's idea of the cultural hangers-on wasn't simply that they mooched off those who were better than they. She viewed them as anti-progress, and depicted them as such in a way that was the single most offensive thing in the part of the book I made myself read.

One of the major characters is an industrialist named Henry Rearden, a man who has created a metal alloy that does the work of steel, but better. Protagonist Dagney Taggart, sister to a buffoon who controls a railroad, wants to use it to make rails. Nobody else in the industry will touch the stuff, and her brother fights her on it. The gist of the argument against "Rearden metal" is that the railroad people dare not touch anything new.

That's really it. I know that's really it because that single point is harped upon in a way that goes beyond beneath subtlety. Industry leaders fear change.

That would be a really potent message if it were even remotely true. In practice, industry people cannot wait to get new ideas out the door. Look at thalidomide, for God's sake. The people who made that stuff pressured for its availability in the United States in the and didn't apologize for the things it did to people until three weeks ago. Thalidomide came out the same year as Atlas Shrugged, just for comparison.

Rand's book is populated by straw men who are shown to be retardant to progress. Her arrogant opinions, when transposed onto the real world (where they are indeed embraced by certain people), are the most unapologetic kinds of dangerous. Her ideal of growth and independence is the tumor.

I'm Gonna Be an Olympian

I've been holding off on blog posting because what I want to do is write another review of "Homestuck," which Kuurion reviewed back in June. I had originally hoped to have a review ready a month after his, but Homestuck is loooooooong, and it's slow going. But anyway: I'm going to be in the Olympics in 2016. You just wait. They had a thing on the Weather Channel today where one of the WC guys was shown how to throw discus by Olympic people (a trainer and athlete), and that looked doable, but there's the whole "aerodynamics" thing, which I know I'm bad at with frisbees already. So: shot put. Just throwin' a heavy ball around. I'm going to get my own and start practicing.

Webcomic Wednesday Review #7: Homestuck

Homestuck review

It has been too long since I wrote one of these. I wanted to keep up a schedule of one every 3 weeks at least when I started. That sure didn't pan out.
Regardless, I want to share my most recent read with you; one that, chances are, you're already familiar with as it has a MUCH larger fanbase than Our World. I daresay it is the largest and most popular comic on the web right now, and is my new favourite. It's called Homestuck, and I don't have a goddamned clue where to start
.
Warning: This review will contain harsh language and very minor spoilers.

THE COMIC
Is not really a comic at all. It is sequential art, but not arranged in pages or strips as is the norm. Every page consists of a single static image, or several animated frames, with accompanying text located below the image. This text can be in the form of narrative commentary, or delivered via Pesterlogs, Pesterchum being the Instant Messaging program that the main cast uses to communicate. Nearly all communication is done through typing and chatlogs, thus each individual's typing quirks become associated with and are an expression of, one's personality. It's very clever and I cannot say whether it was intentional or not (it may have originally been just another way to differentiate characters, due to lacking speech balloons), but the effect is there and it is great. Even when just talking to each other.

KARKAT: FUUUUUUUCK LET GO OF ME!

DAVE: gimme the pen

KARKAT: NO

DAVE: yes

KARKAT: NO

DAVE: yes

KARKAT: FINE TAKE IT!

DAVE: no

KARKAT: WHAT??

DAVE: were still drawing

KARKAT: LET GO

DAVE: are you kidding this is a fucking masterpiece we have to see this through

KARKAT: I'M TRYING TO LET GO OF THE STUPID PEN BUT YOU WON'T LET ME

DAVE: we are in the shit now

DAVE: we are motherfuckin entrenched in this bitch

KARKAT: YOU CRAZY FUCK

DAVE: were running out of room rose can you turn the page for us

KARKAT: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!

So the plot of the comic is basically that there is a game to be played. This game draws its players in, literally, while Earth gets destroyed by meteorites coming from the game world. There's just an obscene amount of smaller details that I can't even begin to detail here, but the point of the game is essentially to create new universes through the breeding of frogs. Plus enemies, minions, and bosses and levels to be gained, all that good stuff. What's great about it is that everything in every universe is linked up in so many coils of paradox time travel that none of it starts to make sense after a while.

And YOU DO NOT CARE. It's all introduced bit by bit at a time, with the kind of silly randomness humor that hooks you immediately, that even when you get confused it doesn't matter, you assume it'll all come in due time and keep on keeping on anyways. Eventually the craziest parts do start to make sense.

Every now and again there will be a short flash animation to stand in for a page. These are typically done with no words or dialogue at all, and it was during one of these animations that I realized this comic is more than just awesome, it is an incredible and unique experience. Nothing else on the net is like this. The internet seems to agree with me: this one broke newgrounds when it was originally hosted there through the sheer volume of his fans' traffic to see it. These short animations have given me a kind of pause to stop and think about what I just saw - the same kind of pause I tend to get after a very emotionally charged film, such as Schindler's List. How Andrew Hussie manages to pull this off, I have no fucking clue, but I imagine it has something to do with the legion of fans he has to contribute original art and originally composed music to these animations. (Yes, original music - to date, 24 albums exist with the Homestuck logo on them. TWENTY-FOUR.)

I even paid for this one. Seriously. I PAID for music, it's so good.

The art of the main comic is itself not all that impressive, but the simple graphics lend themselves well to the .GIF loops often used to hilarious effect.

All that said, there are qualms to be had. I did have to drag myself through a few sections of the archives as I was reading, before the comic had me truly hooked. There are a lot of character introductions - an almost absurd amount as you enter into act 5 and the trolls begin taking the stages. 12 trolls exist, and are all introduced with the same formula within one act's opening. Additionally, some of the trolls' typing quirks can get in the way of legibility - one iin particular liike2 two do thii2 thiing whiich 2lowed me down two almo2t a crawl, aNd ThEn ThErE wAs ThIs GuY wHo WaS eVeN wOrSe, SoMeHoW.

Oddly enough it seems almost all of my qualms are with the trolls, which could just be because I think there are too many of them. There are 4 main kids, but 12 trolls, and the kids are the main characters. Making everybody unique in their own way is bound to create some stretching of the limits, but every character has their fans. None of them seem haphazardly cobbled together, which is a good sign.

Final words: you need to check this comic out. I'm not just suggesting it, I am commanding it. (admittedly I have no way of enforcing this command, but you can't prove that I DON'T know where you sleep!) Homestuck is one of the few truly unique experiences out there, and the fact that it has gained such a following in 2 1/2 short years is only more evidence to its gripping power. I shared this comic with CV with the words

"You should read Homestuck."

He responded the next day with

"Dude, what did you do to me? This has eaten up so much of my time that I haven't written you that script. Which I have to work on. Right now."

You should read Homestuck.
Right now.