Zompist Bboard Again

Raga Bhairavi: https://youtu.be/v488qzY6kpA

For much of last night, instead of sleeping, I was up, reading through the archives of Nathan Goldwag's blog, which I had discovered late yesterday evening: https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com

It's a bit weird that I hadn't discovered that blog before, given how many interests and opinions I seem to share with the author. In fact, given Goldwag's interest in things like alt history and SF, I find it a bit surprising that, as far as I can tell, no one has mentioned him on the ZBB so far.

Among my early favorites were his tongue-in-cheek argument that Napoleon I was actually a comic-book-style supervillain (https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/201 ... ervillain/), and his Wildest True Stories of the Napoleonic Wars (https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/202 ... onic-wars/), which starts with a paragraph summing up the "supervillain" idea:

The Napoleonic Wars are an objectively absurd historical time period, and I think only the fact that we’re so used to prevents us from seeing that. I mean, think about it. You’re reading European history, you’re going through the Middle Ages and feudalism and then the Religious Wars of the 16th century and the Discovery of the New World and the Columbian Exchange and then mercantilism and capitalism and the rise of Absolute Monarchy rivalry between the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons and then, oh yeah, Dr. Doom took over Europe for a decade and everyone had to team up to take him down. Seriously!

The blog even taught me some things about European history I hadn't known before, and I think I know a lot about European history.

Cross dressing in the classical arts: https://youtu.be/3RISY7LU3u0

Name: Vasant Ras means "spring mood".

Scene: Village girls dancing with a cowherd playing the flute.

Note: The village girls are not virgins. Radha is married to someone else.

Philosophy: The cowherd represents the divine (Krishna). The village girls are souls seeking union with the divine. Infidelity signifies the priority of the divine over temporal affairs.

Practical meaning: Please don't eat the cows.

---

I'm reading Negative Dialectics by Adorno. I like it so far. It's a good starting point to explain why 21st century "geniuses" are exhibit A for arguing that humans are mindless automatons. I might like it less if it goes full reactionary later.

Things I randomly found:

History of Modern Art: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hFGN68 ... r77iM/view

Video on procrastination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHxDZPS ... =4&pp=iAQB

Operatic arias with AI images: https://youtu.be/8TslVGAhZ-I

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue May 06, 2025 10:56 am

Ares Land wrote: Philip K. Dick is in a class of his own. I don't know if he can really be explained!

Nah, his fiction is just straightforwardly paranoid. Now, RA Lafferty, on the other hand…

(To wrench this thread back on topic: Lafferty has a book about an AGI, namely Arrive at Easterwine, which I happen to be reading right now. Or rather, attempting to read — apparently it’s considered the most opaque of his books, and when you’re talking about Lafferty, that’s quite something to behold.)

I don’t often discuss the books which I’ve read. However, since I mentioned this one already, and have now finished it, I feel that I ought to review it…

Briefly put, this book is bizarre. I’m strongly tempted to describe it as surrealistic, but it doesn’t feel like it makes no sense. Rather, it feels like it makes a sort of sense which my brain isn’t quite yet able to comprehend. The experience may be the closest I can currently get to talking to an alien.

The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly the autobiography of the machine ‘Epiktistes’. (The name is glossed as ‘creative one’, though I don’t know where Lafferty got that from — it looks Greek but Wiktionary gives δημιουργός for ‘creative’.) The machine is created at the ‘Institute of Impure Science’, which is populated by nine of Lafferty’s most odd characters. (No-one can name characters like Lafferty: ‘Aloysius Shiplap’, ‘Charles Cogsworth’, ‘Diogenes Pontifex’…) And these characters set the machine three tasks: ‘to establish or create a Leader […], a Love […] and a Liaison’. All three tasks fail, which isn’t a spoiler because Epiktistes says so himself just after being given them.

Beyond this basic structure, it’s a very hard book to summarise in any way. Lafferty was much better at short stories than he was at novels, and it shows — each of those three tasks is essentially a short story in itself (or even multiple short stories), and the links between them are thematic rather than establishing a single coherent plot.

Furthermore, Lafferty’s imagination is clearly a very strange place to be. There’s one episode where three goats are let loose throughout the machinery of Episktistes, in order to be bloodily devoured by an anthropophagous alien and by the former director of the Institute. There’s another where a ‘Sky-Rocket’ preaches a sermon on love, then takes off and explodes like a firework. In a third, an Institute member tries to find messages written on snakes’ bellies. The whole thing is absurdly rich with symbolism and metaphor (often Epiktistes talks entirely in metaphors, only sometimes bothering to laboriously explain them for the benefit of us mere humans), and I don’t pretend to understand much of it at all.

Oh, but the other thing is that Lafferty is funny! Admittedly not so much in this book, where the density gets in the way of humour. But nonetheless, it has great turns of phrase scattered liberally throughout. Like: ‘The only thing more disquieting than coming on a snake suddenly is to have one disappear suddenly into nothing.’ Or: ’It still is not certain whether Ganymede was first settled from Tartary, or Tartary from Ganymede; the countries are remarkably alike.’ (It’s not very quotable, though, since much of it makes less sense out of context. It makes little enough sense in context…)

Anyway, in case any of this has piqued anyone’s interest at all, let me recommend some of Lafferty’s more approachable short stories (of those openly available): Seven-Day Terror, All the People, or Dream World.

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 4:22 am

The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly the autobiography of the machine ‘Epiktistes’. (The name is glossed as ‘creative one’, though I don’t know where Lafferty got that from — it looks Greek but Wiktionary gives δημιουργός for ‘creative’.) The machine is created at the ‘Institute of Impure Science’, which is populated by nine of Lafferty’s most odd characters.

I'll have to check this one out! I see Lafferty also coined the wonderful and (seemingly) Greek-Nahuatl ktistec machine.

κτίστης is apparently used once in the New Testament in the sense of 'creator'. In Modern Greek it means a mason.
No idea what kind of meaning the epi- prefix would add.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 10:00 am

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 4:22 am

The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly the autobiography of the machine ‘Epiktistes’. (The name is glossed as ‘creative one’, though I don’t know where Lafferty got that from — it looks Greek but Wiktionary gives δημιουργός for ‘creative’.) The machine is created at the ‘Institute of Impure Science’, which is populated by nine of Lafferty’s most odd characters.

I'll have to check this one out! I see Lafferty also coined the wonderful and (seemingly) Greek-Nahuatl ktistec machine.

Yes, Epiktistes is described as ‘the first Ktistec machine’. I didn’t pick up on it myself, but I guess the suffix is Nahuatl — I wouldn’t put it past Lafferty to play such a trick…

(Indeed, just yesterday I encountered another story of his — Continued on Next Rock — where he explicitly mentions Nahuatl writing, though I have no idea if his description is accurate or not: ‘The old Nahuatlan glyphs for Time are the Chimney glyphs. Present time is a lower part of a chimney and fire burning at the base. Past time is black smoke from a chimney, and future time is white smoke from a chimney’. Mind you, earlier in the story he mentions ‘Nahuat-Tanoan, cousins-german to the Aztec’, which of course is simply nonsense.)

κτίστης is apparently used once in the New Testament in the sense of 'creator'. In Modern Greek it means a mason.
No idea what kind of meaning the epi- prefix would add.

Ah-ha. As a devout Catholic, it would certainly make sense for Lafferty to have been aware of this.

As for epi-, according to Wiktionary the Greek preposition can mean ‘having’: e.g. έπὶ τῶν πραγμάτων ‘in power’. It gives a similar gloss for the prefixal form, though with no examples. So ‘Epiktistes’ could mean ‘having the ability of creation’ — which accords both with the gloss in the book, and what he actually does.

I discovered a webcomic this week that puts some effort into developing its conculture and uses conlangs, including showing code switching. The art style is a bit amateurish, but some of you may find it interesting.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Fri May 23, 2025 7:50 am I discovered a webcomic this week that puts some effort into developing its conculture and uses conlangs, including showing code switching. The art style is a bit amateurish, but some of you may find it interesting.

Very cool! I've been looking for new webcomics too so you sharing this is just perfect timing for me to get into something new.

I recently finished The Handmaid's Tale. It seems downright quaint that Atwood assumed the theocratic reactionaries would need force majeure to take power. It turns out they just needed to wait for egg prices to spike and accuse Haitians of eating our pets.

I'm out of time to read, but The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, et al. on Audible is a fascinating listen. It's a revealing novel about the IT management's mindset. There are a lot of details about DevOps, which every CS student apparently wants to learn these days.

The Dominion card game has a Steam Windows app, an Android app and a website: https://dominion.games/ They are all free to play except for expansions. You don't need to pay for expansions if your opponent has them, and most do. The games are short and fascinating. It's a deck building game where the rules change every time. Basically, you play cards to buy cards into your discard pile, which gets recycled back into your draw deck once the cards run out. It's fairer than most card games because the same cards are drawn for all the players. Weirdly, you win by getting victory points by buying cards that don't do anything except occupy space in your deck and hand, gumming up the works. Getting victory points hampers your ability to keep getting victory points, so the goal of the game is to build up a card economy from a randomized ruleset that can withstand what it has been built to do: gain victory points. The most important mechanics are, in order: trashing worthless cards from your deck including your starting victory point cards, chaining cards that give you more actions on your turn whenever possible, playing cards that let you buy more cards on your turn and finally attack/defense. Every mechanic is not guaranteed to be present in every game.

I somewhat recently finished The Red and the Black by Stendhal, was amused generally by its plot although it isn't really intended to be funny, I think; it merely involves an extraordinarily hypocritical protagonist. I believe Stendhal said something to the effect that it required someone like him to like and be willing to write about such an unlikable person, although the protagonist has some merits greater than the merits of the secondary characters.
Recently graduated and therefore am reading a fair amount of material for an upcoming exam, but it's all laid out for me, so hopefully will be able to add some other stuff in the evenings or whatever.

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 9:51 pm Ah-ha. As a devout Catholic, it would certainly make sense for Lafferty to have been aware of this.

This reminds me, has anyone here read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, and have an opinion they care to share? The reason I ask is because the source which brought this series to my attention noted that Wolfe was apparently very Catholic.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sat May 24, 2025 4:54 am I'm out of time to read, but The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, et al. on Audible is a fascinating listen. It's a revealing novel about the IT management's mindset. There are a lot of details about DevOps, which every CS student apparently wants to learn these days.

I'll second that assessment. I had a supervisor once who gave us all copies of the book and found it a fascinating read. The story was actually pretty good, even if it was mainly an engine to pass along DevOps and Lean info.

Civil War Bugle wrote: ↑Sun May 25, 2025 5:16 pm

bradrn wrote: ↑Tue May 13, 2025 9:51 pm Ah-ha. As a devout Catholic, it would certainly make sense for Lafferty to have been aware of this.

This reminds me, has anyone here read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, and have an opinion they care to share? The reason I ask is because the source which brought this series to my attention noted that Wolfe was apparently very Catholic.

No, but I have read one of his other stories, namely The Fifth Head of Cerberus. I struggle to detect any Catholic themes in it, but that probably has more to do with my own unfamiliarity with Catholicism (and Christianity in general, really). I have heard that The Book of the New Sun is strongly influenced by Catholic themes.

Civil War Bugle wrote: ↑Sun May 25, 2025 5:16 pm I somewhat recently finished The Red and the Black by Stendhal, was amused generally by its plot although it isn't really intended to be funny, I think; it merely involves an extraordinarily hypocritical protagonist. I believe Stendhal said something to the effect that it required someone like him to like and be willing to write about such an unlikable person, although the protagonist has some merits greater than the merits of the secondary characters.

I read it long ago, but I found it funny too and I'm pretty sure Sorel is intended to be more than a little ridiculous.
The Charterhouse of Parma is similar.

This reminds me, has anyone here read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, and have an opinion they care to share? The reason I ask is because the source which brought this series to my attention noted that Wolfe was apparently very Catholic.

I started but did not finish Shadow of the Torturer. It didn't really grab my attention, but I remember the intriguing post-apocalyptic setting.

I read A Case of Conscience, by James Blish this week end. Coincidentally, it features a Jesuit making first contact. It's not a great book, TBH -- or even a good one, but the ideas are intriguing. The grotesque characters reminded me of Alfred Bester -- though Bester was better.
One part I did like was Catholic priests are a mandatory feature of first contact novels, or so it seems! I wasn't really convinced by the characters or plot of the Sparrow.
Orson Scott Card was a lot more convincing in Speaker for the Dead -- he's a Mormon but the Catholicism felt realistic to this agnostic.

Ares Land wrote: ↑Tue May 27, 2025 5:16 am I read A Case of Conscience, by James Blish this week end. Coincidentally, it features a Jesuit making first contact.

More: show

with an alien species, implied to be Satanic

It's not a great book, TBH -- or even a good one, but the ideas are intriguing. The grotesque characters reminded me of Alfred Bester -- though Bester was better.
One part I did like was

More: show

An intriguing subplot where an alien raised on Earth becomes, basically, an influencer, of the kind that preys on disaffected teenagers. That bit was eerily prescient!

Oddly enough, I have a physical copy of this (well, my father does), and looked through it briefly just the other day. It didn’t look too appealing to me.

Reading this while the last half of this was on in the background.

Reading a book of historical speeches while, at the same time, trying to get some writing done. Now I have to keep reminding myself that the things I'm trying to write are not speeches, and therefore, rhetorical tricks and methods that would be perfectly good ideas in a speech are not good ideas there.

I just read this brief biography of a 20th Century Chinese historical figure:

https://nathangoldwag.wordpress.com/202 ... ng-career/

Fascinating!