gaddis

more-whales:

nostalgebraist:

Franzen called him “Mr. Difficult,” the ultimate pretentious high-artist who followed only his own standards of perfection and didn’t care if readers enjoyed or even understood his work.  This is hard to square with Gaddis’ actual writing which is relatively comprehensible and often beautiful.

Two and a half years ago, I bought a copy of Gaddis’ book The Recognitions on a whim after Franzen made me curious about it.  I got about a third of the way through it before stopping — not because it was too difficult, but because it was long and I needed a change of pace, and I just never quite got back into it.  I’m staying home sick today and I just re-read the first chapter of The Recognitions, which is a sad, mordantly funny (I actually laughed out loud a number of times), beautifully written family drama about a minister’s growing fascination with the pagan roots of Christianity, the ire this draws from his family and community, and his son growing up confused and caught in the crossfire.  If this chapter had been published as a stand-alone novella, it would probably be considered a classic, and no one would complain about Gaddis being too difficult.

Instead it is stuck inside of a giant book famous for being unread, for being some sort of hipster cred object or masterpiece of pretentious wankery, for being “the most difficult book [Jonathan Franzen] ever voluntarily read.”  Why beat up on this skilled, passionate and relatively obscure author when every year thousands of bemused high school students are assigned baffling streams of consciousness by Joyce and Faulker and told to eat them like vegetables?  I don’t know whether I’ll ever finish The Recognitions (it is very long), but shame on you, Franzen.

I haven’t read The Recognitions, but this basically describes my experience reading J R, which is also moving, biting satire, laugh-out-loud funny, and beautifully written. I guess it’s shorter but more committed to the “dialogue only” style, which is what people find challenging? Like all these reviews talk about how there’s “little indication of which character is speaking.” But to me it seemed like giving all the characters strong distinct voices and leaving me to make those voice associations as they’re introduced made for more readable dialogue and left me more attuned to what was going on, as compared with a having the narrator tag every line of conversation. Maybe I had to be a little more active as a reader but it seemed mostly automatic. (I ended up dropping it about halfway through, because it’s long and I wanted a change of pace.)

Anyway Franzen’s a funny guy. Maybe you’ve seen it but this old review has been making the rounds:

Colson Whitehead’s first novel, ”The Intuitionist,” was a lively comic fantasy about a New York City elevator inspector named Lila Mae Watson. The book established Whitehead’s intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn’t too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author’s choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it’s technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all? I confess to being unappetized by all three possibilities; and so, fairly or not, I found myself wishing that Whitehead had written about a man.

But all is forgiven now. Whitehead’s new novel, ”John Henry Days,” not only features a male protagonist, a young freelance journalist named J. Sutter, but cannily engages the interior crisis of manhood in present-day America.

It’s nice to hear good things about JR.  I think if anything that’s the one that you can most easily raise the “spurious difficulty” charge against, because writing solely in unattributed dialogue looks very much like a gimmick meant to make things hard on the reader, even if (as you say) it ends up being less troublesome than one might think.  (ETA: The Recognitions is mostly narration as opposed to than dialogue, although the dialogue does the “dashes instead of quotes” thing, which some reviewers complained about.)

Yeah, I had seen that Franzen quote.  I almost feel like I’m just jumping on a bandwagon by hating on Franzen, because he seems to get a startling amount of hate on the internet.  But there really is something very annoying about him.

I guess it’s that he seems like a distillation of the archetype of the “guy who expects you to listen to his opinion just because he showed up”?  Like, he clearly considers himself an important literary figure, but why did he take that vocation?  What in literature is he passionate about?  He’s just sort of … there, with this null, neutral perspective that doesn’t seem to reflect any great interest in what he’s talking about.

E.g. in the Gaddis essay he complains that Gaddis doesn’t do enough to appeal to him, while at the same time saying he doesn’t actually enjoy the genre (“systems fiction”) he places Gaddis in.  Well, there’s the problem right there!  But then what is he doing talking about it in the first place?  If you don’t like this kind of music, dude, why are you at this show?  Or that quote about Whitehead is so bizarre – why would a man write a female protagonist?  Well, why write about anyone?  Isn’t it interesting to step into the perspectives of people different from yourself?  Isn’t that one of the great things about fiction?  You do like fiction, don’t you, Jonathan?  … Hello?  Hello?

(via more-whales)

raginrayguns:

nostalgebraist:

raginrayguns:

fnord888:

nostalgebraist:

In a curve-fitting method (such as polynomial regression), I may want to penalize very “wiggly” curves, because I know that noise tends to make small samples look wigglier than they are.  (Given a few noisy points from a straight line, I want my method to find the line and ignore the noise, not over-fit the noise with wiggles.)  However, I do not believe that “wiggly” curves are a priori unlikely!

If I may jump in here…

You don’t believe that “wiggly” curves in general are a priori unlikely (well, depending on your priors :P), but any particular “wiggly” curve has a lower probability than a particular linear curve. This is true for more or less the same reason that “wiggly” curves are prone to overfitting in the first place: because there are more parameters, each of which is individually uncertain.

okay imma try and develop this more when I get home, but that’s actually not the important thing either!

Point estimates of curves can be smooth even if the true curve is known not to be. I mean… if non-wiggly curves have lower probability or even no probability, then still the point estimate, which is an average over all possible curves, might not have wiggles.

(like how if a number is either 0 or 10 the best guess can be 5, even though there’s no chance of it being exactly right)

I think I can illustrate this with wavelet regression, i’ll maybe get around to it

raginrayguns: that’s true if we take the posterior mean, but I was figuring we were taking the posterior mode (“maximum a posteriori estimation”), since that’s how you can get the same point estimate out of ridge regression and Bayes with a Gaussian prior (see here).  Unless I’m misunderstanding your point.

*snop*

(Would anyone just come along and say “hey guys, my a priori prejudices about the parameters in this statistical model follow a normal distribution” if they weren’t doing it to justify the already existing practice of ridge regression?  Do you really believe in those Gaussians before any data comes in, or are they just a means to an end?  Would you accept bets on the basis of them?)

MAP estimates have no justification, as far as I know. Bayesians do use them sometimes… I’d guess? But I’ve also seen the phrase “MAP is crap” in the literature. (in the book Bayesian Methods in Structural Bioinformatics). My Bayes teachers bring up MAP but I’ve never been advised to use it in any particular case, while I have been advised not to use it.

So… I don’t think MAP estimates are the things to talk about when we’re talking about the point estimates that Bayesian methods produce. Certainly not if we’re trying to justify Bayesian methods, because as I said, MAP estimates have no justification even to a Bayesian.

The posterior mean on the other hand has a very natural justification: it’s the point estimate that minimizes the expected squared error. (hereafter MSE, mean squared error.) So it’s the more natural bayesian analogue of the frequentist idea of regularization, justified through the bias-variance decomposition of MSE.

The ridge regression estimate, besides being the MAP estimate, is also the posterior mean with a normal prior. This is how I’d explain its low MSE.

Because, do I believe that normal prior? Well, not really, not precisely, quantitatively. But think of the prior that corresponds to unpenalized regression, the uniform prior. Do I believe that each regression coefficient has the same probability of being in (1, 2) as in (1000001, 1000002)? Not usually, and even when the coefficient can be that high, there’s some value that’s just too astronomically high to be plausible. That’s what the normal prior gets right.

The normal shape is for conjugacy, for computation. Actually, I can quote Marina Vanucci to demonstrate that Real Bayesians think this way. I wrote down this quote during a lecture on variable selection in linear regression: “The construction is the conjugate case because that’s to make our lives easier when it comes to implementing the MCMC.” But there’s a parameter you can set in the conjugate prior to make it uniform, and we don’t, because of our knowledge that some proposed coefficients are just too big.

Oh, sorry, I missed that posterior mean would give you back the same thing as posterior mode here!  (I guess which point estimate to report depends on which loss function you care about, but MSE is probably much more practically relevant than the kind of loss function that would make the mode best, I think?)

I take your point about the Gaussian being more intuitive than the uniform here.  But what about the task of choosing between different regularizers?  Ridge regression corresponds to Gaussian priors, while Lasso regression corresponds to Laplace distribution priors.  (Well, OK, it only does if you use MSE, and if you use median or mean you get a “Bayesian Lasso” that gives results somewhere between ridge and Lasso.)  Note that the Laplace distribution also has the property you mention, of falling off as the weights get bigger.

It seems to me like one can look at constructing these methods in two different ways: an “engineering” way, where you think about giving the method some performance properties you want, and a “belief introspection” way, where you figure out what you really think about the weights a priori, and then Bayes update from there.

In this case – and perhaps in general with this sort of thing – the “engineering” way seems much more intuitive to me.  I can understand why someone might want to use Lasso regression because of its properties as a method (e.g. it tends to drive some weights to zero, which makes it easier to interpret).  I have a much harder time imagining someone just deciding “ah, my state of ignorance about these weights is represented by a Laplace distribution,” unless they had really done the engineering thought process first, and were then translating it into Bayesian terms.

I see this all as relevant to the broader questions about “Bayesianism” as a philosophy because when people talk about Bayesianism they always talk about people having these beliefs represented as probabilities.  But when we talk about Bayesian methods like this, it’s really very difficult to think about things that way.  (“Is your prior for the weights Gaussian or Laplace?” Wait, is that the sort of thing I’m supposed to have an opinion about?)  And it seems like what one ends up doing is running through the engineering analysis, and then going back and translating it into the prior you “must have had” to license applying the method you want to use.  But throw out the last step, and you’re just a frequentist.  (Except you get a whole distribution out instead of a point estimate which I guess is nice)

(via raginrayguns)

dannythestreet:

nostalgebraist:

slatestarscratchpad:

nostalgebraist:

twocubes replied to your post:LW and neoreaction (proposal/guess): If you sell…

again, you’d think a group interested in the science of cognitive biases would talk more about the cognitive biases involved in, say, sexism, or racism, or homophobia, or (etc), what with those things being thoroughly documented in the literature…

I remember there being a big (and bizarre) argument about this way back on Overcoming Bias ca. 2008

I think the line being pushed at the time was “we only talk about biases in the most general sense and leave specific applications up to you.”  This may have been an attempt to make the site more apolitical than social science academia, at the cost of ignoring some of its work?  This idea may have fallen out of favor since then, I dunno.

(As I’ve mentioned before I think a lot of biases only go away if you think about them in the context of “specific applications,” so I think “leaving the applications up to you” kills a lot of the point of talking about bias.)

We’ve tried talking about racism and sexism a bunch of times. Just to start with, and limiting myself to top-level posts:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/533/manufacturing_prejudice/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/53/the_implicit_association_test/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/5d/fight_biases_or_route_around_them/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/4w/bogus_pipeline_bona_fide_pipeline/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/134/sayeth_the_girl/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/fmw/lw_women_entries_creepiness/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/efs/call_for_anonymous_narratives_by_lw_women_and/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/8e2/transhumanism_and_gender_relations/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/13j/of_exclusionary_speech_and_gender_politics/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/374/gender_identity_and_rationality/

Some points:

1. That is about ten times more top-level posts than have ever been posted about neoreaction.

2. So anyone who says there’s an “imbalance” between discussion of racism/sexism and some opposing view doesn’t want discussion split 50:50. They don’t even want it split 10:1. They want all discussion agreeing with them and no one else allowed to talk. Anything else is an “imbalance”. I don’t think this is dishonest. They’re just used to spaces where it works that way, and any other way seems weird and off-kilter and unfair.

3. There’s only so much you can say about something everyone else is already talking about everywhere.

4. Anyone continues to be able to post anything they want on Less Wrong. The “balance” of posts there reflects solely who chooses to write something up and press that “post” button. Instead of complaining how no one ever writes about your favorite bias on Less Wrong, why not write about your favorite bias for Less Wrong?

You’ve cast a wider net here than the one that I am casting or that (I think) twocubes is casting.  These all fall into the category of “about race and gender,” but not all into the category of “about racism and sexism” — e.g. there’s no way to read “Transhumanism and Gender Relations” as saying anything about present-day sexism.

Indeed, it’s exactly as (un)related to present-day sexism as the original EY post about catgirls; I’m not sure what makes “Transhumanism and Gender Relations” more worthy of inclusion than the catgirls post, except the fact that its futurist projection is more palatable to the average feminist than EY’s.  But I’m not asking for posts that feminists would like, or even posts by feminists — I’m asking for analyses of (in this case) sexism from a heuristics and biases perspective.

Several of these posts (four by my count) seem to be part of community-internal discussions of sexism within the LW community — one discussion from 2009 (you included EY’s and Alicorn’s posts from a larger series of posts) about possible sexism in LW as an online space, and a later conversation from 2012 about creepy male behaviors in LW meetups (you chose two posts resulting from this discussion).  I think it is good that this happens, but it’s not an “LW analysis of sexism,” it’s “analysis of sexism in LW.”  No turning the rationalist telescope out on the wider world here.

Then there are a bunch of posts by you.  It feels weird to raise that as an objection — it sounds like I’m just making up weird objections at this point.  However, I already like your writing, much more than I like “LW culture” in general; for instance, I read your blog regularly, but not the main site.  So these posts don’t convince me that any thinking of this sort is going on within LW except for the kind that is going on at SSC, and at the moment seems to have isolated itself to SSC.  Moreover, even these posts aren’t especially good examples of what I’m looking for: the IAT post for instance uses the IAT’s role in prejudice research only as a stepping stone to more “general rationality” applications when it’s precisely discussion of prejudice as prejudice that I think is important for the sake of reducing bias.

(There are two entries on the list I haven’t talked about.  One, “Manufacturing Prejudice,” is in fact about analyzing prejudice, and isn’t by you, but it is also not very interesting; modulo language choices, it’s the kind of post I would expect to see on tumblr and scroll by quickly because I already know and agree with the kind of thing it’s trying to say.  If this is what LW has to offer on these subjects, I’ll just stay on tumblr.  The other, “Gender Identity and Rationality,” is at least about analyzing gender from a uniquely “LW” perspective, so I’d say it’s the closest thing to a “hit” this list has by my criteria.)

That was a lot of words, but what it all comes down to is that I’m looking for serious investigation into sexism and racism, preferably with reference to the academic literature, and treated as topics of general interest (for people interested in understanding society) rather than things to be used as stepping stones to “general rationality” insights or as things to be reluctantly addressed when they arise as community problems and then ignored later.  If that’s a tall order, so be it.  It’s not the same as just “talking about racism and sexism,” though.

(The “equal time” thing is a bit complicated, but much of my objection follows from the above — equal time between “gender/race” and “neoreaction” is not a fair standard because “gender/race” as it’s defined above is a gigantic net that appears to exclude stuff like Eliezer’s catgirls post only because they are not leftist enough.  It’s as though I had said there weren’t enough posts about whether learning to code was a good idea and you had linked me to every post that talked about programming, or every such post that you perceived as being sufficiently “on my side.”  ”Post fits my specific, perhaps restrictive interest criteria” != “post is far enough to my side of some ideological spectrum to balance out some other post I don’t like in some quota agreement.”  There may be plenty of posts on my side yet few I find interesting to read.)

Topics aside, “Neoreaction” vs “The left” is still an absurd framing especially when Scott is suggesting that a 50:50 split would be reasonable. Imagine if the boot was on the other foot, and LessWrong had a significant Posadist minority (not unreasonable on a site devoted to existential risk and superhuman intelligence, and they are much less pro-apocalypse than Nick Land&co, at least qualitatively if not quantitatively) with many of the liberals on the site taking Posadist thought quite seriously and putting some effort into engaging with them. 

Imagine this parallel universe Less Wrong has it’s own Scott Alexander, who has written an extremely long and well researched anti-Posadist FAQ, and is often heard to remark that the superficial details of Posadism - the guff about dolphins and deformed workers states and so on - are mostly just a sort of labyrinth for deterring and/or detaining the stupid, like the “Adso admires a door” chapter from The Name of The Rose, and that the meta-level ideas, regarding class and ideology and the possibility of acausal communication with inhuman intelligences, was the really interesting bit.

And imagine this alternate universe Scott responding to a commentator worried about the sites left wing bias by listing of all the topics on Less Wrong devoted to taxes and bureaucracy and the definition of marriage, pointing out that these far outnumber the topics devoted to the life and thought of Juan Posadas, whose supporters are only about as numerous on the site as conservatives or libertarians. 

It’s almost as if, our goateed mirror universe Scott scoffs, they don’t want a 50:50 split between discussion of the size of government and some opposing view, they want all discussion agreeing with them and regard any mention of the positive benefits of an all consuming nuclear fire, a final and deadly confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in which greater than half of mankind would perish, and a new and more noble humanity emerge from the ashes, forged in atomic fire, united by common purpose, and having obtained through unimaginable suffering a higher degree of consciousness, the illusions common to all previous ages of man shattered irrevocably by the intimate knowledge of the terrible power within their control, as being off-kilter and unreasonable.

I mean, it’s not really necessary to go that far, just imagine Crooked Timber tried to claim they were a politically unbiased site because they have about as many conservative commentators as they do communist ones. Nobody would take that seriously, would they? We’d agree that the mere fact they framed it that way indicated how far to the left they were.

This is perfect.  (And thanks for making me aware of the Posadists!)

(via clawsofpropinquity)

kadathinthecoldwaste:

nostalgebraist:

I have other things to do and shouldn’t waste time preaching to the choir about Aaron Diaz being wrong.  But his views on pinups and objectification seem wrong to me.

Okay, just the compressed version: I don’t think objectification can, or even should, be completely removed from sexuality.  Sometimes a nice ass is just a nice ass — which is to say, a geometric form, a literal object, whose shape appeals to you.  What is important is not to allow the enjoyment of people’s forms to become mutually exclusive with enjoyment of people as human beings.  But “enjoyment of people as human beings” is a thing that actually involves knowing people and cannot be conveyed through a picture alone.  Using the right poses or camera angles or whatever cannot not make a picture of a sexy person “less objectifying” and therefore “better.”  Ultimately, unless you know the person, you are still just looking at their body and thinking it’s a nicely shaped body.

The idea that certain camera angles or poses or the like are “more dehumanizing” than others is in fact kind of disturbing to me, as it suggests that the implied audience is unable to see a pictured person as a person unless those parameters are set just right.  And if that’s true then that is the sort of thing that needs to be fixed.  A picture is a picture is a picture.  Ogling someone in a picture does not become less about their physical form because they are in a different pose or something.  It’s still a picture, and it’s still ogling.

Disturbing or not, I think Diaz is right on this count. It seems pretty self-evident to me that it’s easier to recognize a full image of a human as a person than to recognize an image of a butt as such. We recognize that the butt belongs to a person, but that’s still one more level of removal from a human subject. And reducing people to parts is hardly the only way to do this. Propagandistic media are rife with examples of subtle tweaks to presentation, physical features, lighting, and so on, that cue the audience to view some of their subjects as inhuman. Conversely, there are a variety of ways that still images can convey characterization and narrative; it’s harder to find a renaissance painting that doesn’t do this to some extent, and many of them evoke responses to their characters even if one doesn’t know the story they depict. This doesn’t mean that we share a deep human relationship with Titian’s Salome or the Jesus of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, but it’s certainly easier to see them as people, as subjects within a narrative in which they’re taking action in their capacity as humans with thoughts, feelings, etc.

I also disagree that pinup art, porn, and the like are solely about the appreciation of attractive bodies. That’s a major part of it, to be sure, perhaps even the primary one, but another of the main purposes of porn and erotic art is to bring on sexual fantasies. Unless one is literally fantasizing about doing it with a sex doll or other inanimate object (which people do, but not most people most of the time as far as I can tell), another entity is of necessity going to enter into the scenario, and that entity can be envisioned as having varying degrees of subjectivity. (This is the point at which I skillfully (possibly in bullet time) dodge the issue of whether dehumanizing sexual fantasies and perceptions of images tend to lead to dehumanizing thoughts and behavior in the rest of one’s life, and if so to what extent, on which question most the actual ethical ramifications of objectifying art hinge.) While appreciating one’s idea of a fictive being’s subjectivity is certainly distinct from appreciating the subjectivity of an actual person, it’s also distinct from perceiving a fictive or real person as having no subjectivity.

I feel like I must not be giving you enough credit here. Your statement reads to me as saying “the presentation of an image of a person cannot influence the degree to which people attribute characteristics to that image/person, including greater and lesser degrees of subjectivity and personhood.” This seems to fly in the face of history, psychology, and common sense.

In any case, we agree on one point: this is disturbing. That people can be manipulated into liking or disliking a person or group, seeing them as subjects or objects, through visual presentation, which has no necessary relationship to that person’s character or actions, is pretty horrifying.

You’re right.  Images do work in these ways.  It does make a difference how people are posed and so forth.

I was trying to compress and straightforward-ify a response to Aaron Diaz’s particular configuration of ideas, and ended up saying something that just wasn’t true, so I’m going to try to be less compressed and more explicit about it.

Concerns about objectification in media make the most sense to me when they’re in the context of a narrative.  This is because there’s a conflict between telling a story about someone (making us think about them as a person) and using the kind of images that tend to make us think of that person as a sexual object.

Some pretty clear examples of this phenomenon can be found in the work of one, um, Aaron Diaz.

As I said in the OP, I think it’s hard to carve out a space called “sexy but not objectifying.”  If you’re trying to tell a story about someone that is not about their sex life (or sex fantasy life), depicting them in a way that calls attention to how hot they are is inherently a weird and potentially distracting choice.  Because, ultimately, “how hot they are” is largely a thing about the shape of their body.

In my mind, once we start agonizing over whether a single, decontextualized visual image is or is not “too objectifying,” we’re focusing on something kind of silly, because for better or for worse real life is full of visual images of hot people.  You don’t have to be a voyeur or a pervert to get presented, in the course of your day-to-day life, with the bodies of hot people.  This is why Diaz’s concern, in particular, with whether the pin-up subject is “in charge of their sexuality” is so strange to me.  There’s no cosmic censor ensuring that real life conform to this rule, and usually it won’t.

There are times – say, at parties – where one will see a hot person whose clothing and body language indicates that they’re very deliberately trying to be hot and aware of the effect they’re having.  And then there’s just the ordinary experience of noticing that a co-worker/classmate/etc. is good-looking (and again, I’m talking about the everyday bedrock of normal sexual attraction, not pervy staring-for-too-long or anything).  Reality does not warp itself so that when you happen to find a hot acquaintance in your visual field, the image that appears on your retina is composed according to Aaron Diaz’s non-objectification criteria.

Which is to say that unless we can configure our own minds to remember that people are people even when being presented with the “wrong” kinds of images, we’re screwed (no pun intended).  Because reality is full of the “wrong” kinds of images, and they’re of real people we sometimes actually know, which makes it especially consequential.

To sum up, I think that worrying over whether individual images are objectifying, using the kind of criteria Diaz uses, is wrong-headed because the problem should be fixed earlier on, in the mind.  If we want to have less-objectifying sexual fantasies, for instance, we should become people who can do this in response to “the wrong kind” of images because in real life those kinds of images will provide much of the base material for our day-to-day sexual attractions.  Someone who can’t look at an isolated sexy picture and imagine a real person unless the pictured subject is “in charge of their sexuality” is going to have big problems living in a world that is full of hot people just going about their daily business, and not carefully attending at every waking moment to the way they appear to others.

I recognize that the model I’ve presented in this post is overly simplistic.  A lot of people complain about objectification in, say, TV ads, which either have no narratives or very simple narratives that aren’t supposed to have well-developed characters.  The model above would say that this is nonsense because the ads are just images.  But I don’t really think these complaints are nonsense.  The reason is that these ads are part of a overall culture that is full of very sexualized images, which overall tends to send the signal that “female bodies are generators of sex fantasies, not things that contain people.”  But in my mind that’s a problem that has to do with over-saturation with sexy images, and can’t really be solved by making “better” sexy images; making the pictured woman “in control of her sexuality” reminds you that she has a mind but not in a way that interferes much with the generation of fantasies.  (This point was made well in Mary Cagle’s comic from yesterday – “look at me because I say so.”  As if that changes the resulting boner so much.)

As a final note, it’s worth keeping in mind the pictures that Diaz is talking about (NSFW link obviously) as models of good pin-ups.  To be honest I’m not really sure where the divide is between this and a lot of pin-up art; if anything the gaze in, say, the 4th picture is a lot more “voyeuristic” than, say, a standard “I am looking straight at the viewer with bedroom eyes” pose.  So this is an even weirder conversation for that reason – even if there should be a “right kind” of sexy picture I have a hard time believing that this is it.

The whole thing, to be honest, feels like Diaz drawing what turns him on and then mouthing recombined feminist tropes as a apologia/justification for it, without really thinking about what he’s saying.  As many people have said recently, Diaz would come off a lot better if he just came out and said “yeah, I’m drawing stuff I think is hot, DC is full of sexy poses because sexy poses are fun” rather than doing this whole holier-than-thou thing.

(via dagny-hashtaggart)

nostalgebraist.tumblr.com →

nostalgebraist.tumblr.com →

nostalgebraist.tumblr.com →

good lord what has gotten into me tonight

In response to these posts a bunch of you mentioned some things you considered good points of Act 6.  Some of them are good points in my very own opinion that I just forgot about, and some of them aren’t; I don’t wanna do a point-by-point response because I don’t have much to say about a lot of it.  There are two things I do want to talk about, though.

(Point 1 is not really very interesting and point 2 is the real purpose of this post, FYI)

1: Several people mentioned Caliborn.  I do like one aspect of Caliborn, which is that he uses the English language really awkwardly and I love it when Hussie does that thing.  (It’s part of why I like Tavros so much.)  Since there were already characters in the story who did that, it’s hard to count it too much as a point in Caliborn’s favor specifically, but it is one.

Other than that, though, Caliborn just doesn’t do that much for me – he’s not very effective as a villain (presumably on purpose, but it’s still boring), and he feels like a retread of characteristics (childish aggressiveness, sexual fetishism, etc.) that had already been present, and more interestingly dealt with, in some of the troll characters.

Also, there’s something about Caliborn that kinda needles me personally in that he feels like an invocation of the “childish misogynists are mentally ill and vice versa” trope – in particular, the circle drawing scene with the whole “I can’t do things normal people do but I find my own special ways of getting them done away” seemed like a weirdly overt and specific, and otherwise pointless (?), invocation of that trope.  Insofar as all Homestuck characters are references to broad recognizable “types,” I didn’t like that particular type appearing in the story the way it did.

2: Drunk Rose.  Drunk Rose bothered me for the same reason almost all of the meteor stuff bothered me, which is a broader problem I have with A6.  (I’m pretty sure I talked about this before, back when this was a Homestuck blog, but that was a very long time ago.)

The problem is this: A6 takes a bunch of stuff that was supposed to be stylized in A1-5, and forces you to interpret it as though it literally happened.  But the literal story that results isn’t as good as the original, stylized story.

Say you’re reading a metered poem that tells a story and has dialogue.  (Say it’s in a meter that doesn’t naturally fit dialogue, like a poem in English that’s not iambic.)  You can achieve a certain state of disbelief suspension where, on the one hand, you treat all of the words on the page as though they’re really being said, and on the other hand you don’t ask yourself questions like “how do the characters feel about talking so weirdly?”  You accept it as a stylistic choice, and like all stylistic choices, it’s in this weird but acceptable space between “actually happening” and “not actually happening.”

Then suppose there is a prose sequel to this poem where it is revealed/retconned that the characters used to speak in verse and now they don’t, because they had some strange mental condition that made them speak in verse, which had now been cured.  This would be frustrating in retrospect, in part because it would raise all sorts of awkward questions, like “did the characters in the original spend a lot of time thinking ‘gee isn’t this disease annoying’ while they were belting out hexameters?”  But also because, in a sense, it would mess up the poetry of the original – bring it down to earth.  What was once a deviation from pure realism for the sake of heightened emotion or grandeur or showmanship or distillation of archetypes or any of that other stuff that art’s all about is now simply something that “really happened.”  Those people weren’t speaking in verse because that was the appropriate way to depict this particular story; they were just doing it because they were afflicted with Dactylic Hexametritis.

(Andrew Rilstone has written a lot about this kind of thing, e.g. in this post about the Star Wars prequels.)

A lot of Homestuck is highly stylized.  It’s not just that it’s “silly” or “unrealistic”; there are plenty of stories that are unrealistic and simply bad as a result.  Homestuck is, in large part, “unrealistic” in careful, self-consistent ways that let you suspend your disbelief the way you could with a narrative poem, so that you can take these characters very seriously if you wish, even though they are transparently behaving in ways no human possibly could/would.

The chatlogs, for instance, don’t sound like “real” chatlogs – people never make typos, never talk past/around each other (something that is ubiquitous in real online chat), and adhere unfailingly to “typing quirks” so tedious to actually type that the author soon resorted to a text-converting script to apply them for him.  The very first John-Dave pesterlog is, IIRC, an edited transcript of an actual chat between Hussie and a friend, and as a result it reads very strangely in retrospect – it is very much unlike a proper “Homestuck pesterlog,” which is a established form distinct from the way real online chat sounds.

Likewise, and more relevantly, the characters’ ages in A1-5 can never be taken as literal rather than stylistic.  Hussie once said on Formspring that the characters’ status as 13-year-olds was like Calvin’s status as a 6-year-old in Calvin and Hobbes: relevant only when it needs to be.  Calvin frequently behaves in ways that no 6-year-old ever would, but is “6 years old” in a recognizable-but-stylized, consistent way that lets us read C&H without being constantly jarred.  The characters of A1-5 are “13 years old” in the same way; completely unbelievable as literal depictions of 13-year-olds, but coherent as stylized fictional beings who happen to be 13 years old.

There is more stylization than that, too.  For teenagers, the humans of Acts 1 to 4 are remarkably free of interpersonal drama, and respond to apocalyptic events and frightening challenges with a stoicism that would be unbelievable even in human adults.  Homestuck was a virtually “non-dramatic” work of fiction before Act 5 – a stylistic choice, like a verse form or a visual art style.  In Act 5, drama was very suddenly and forcefully added to the story in a manner consistent with the stylization of A1-4: the story moved to a different planet entirely and introduced a new set of characters with their own, new visual and textual styles – characters who were essentially drama incarnate.  The trolls are no more believable as depictions of real teenagers than the kids were; instead, they represented a different aspect of real teenagers.

All of this has to be taken non-literally, as a way of emphasizing or distilling certain aspects of human life, the way poetry or non-realistic art styles do.  The kids are not literally hyper-competent hyper-stoics, but characters in a deliberately light, non-dramatic story; the trolls are not literally infinitely petty little assholes with infinite patience for TyPiNg LiKe ThIs, but characters in a sub-story which is not only dramatic but about “drama,” in several senses of the word.  All of these characters are distilled archetypes or aspects.

When these two sides of the story began to interact, tensions in the style arose.  Things could have broken down at this point; that they didn’t was kind of a minor artistic miracle.  A5A2 worked, I think, because Hussie decided to roll with the sheer incongruityof the kids and the trolls rather than shoving it under the rug.  Archetypes from utterly different styles came into contact, sparks flew, and this was mined for laughs and tears.  It was like a comic putting Calvin in the same world as Katniss Everdeen, or one pitting Sailor Moon against Frank Miller’s Batman – a stylistic clash that if done with a straight face would be not only bad but almost literally incomprehensible (how can my suspension of disbelief do this while also doing that?), but can contain wonders if done with a deliberate eye to the tensions inherent in the experiment.

In A6, however, style was nearly forgotten, and everything became literal.  Don’t get me wrong: everything was still utterly silly and implausible, and Hussie continued playing with the comic format.  But the stylistic consistencies of the earlier acts fell apart.

The chatlogs were not the Chosen Verbal Form Of Homestuck; they were simply literal chatlogs by characters who now spoke.  Putting the characters in the same room as each other while having them carry on physical conversations broke one of the stylistic conventions of the original comic, which was that it was a sort of internet epic, told in a stylized version of internet communication, about a group of internet friends converging toward a potential physical meetup.  That meetup had to always be somewhere outside the frame for the frame itself to make sense; a story about the internet told in chatlogs between people who have never physically met can’t just have the characters physically meet up, proceed to have them talk in nearly the same way (through “Dialoglogs”), and act as though nothing has changed.  (Compare to Rilstone’s comments about how actually depicting the Old Republic in the Star Wars prequels screwed up the effect created by the mentions of “the Old Republic” in the original trilogy.)

It would be like Watterson writing a story arc in which Calvin grows up and “outgrows” believing in Hobbes.  How could this character be recognizably be “Calvin” when the very conceit of the comic has been broken?  Who was Calvin, anyway, and how was he making articulate social commentary about academia at an age when he believed his stuffed animal was real?

What is it really like to be Calvin (or Batman or Spider-Man or Rose Lalonde any other inherently stylized character), in mundane and specific detail, from morning to night, waking to sleep?  Don’t answer that.  There is no answer – or many answers, in many conceivable and equally valid fanfics.  But you can’t just literalize canon, because that gives you nonsense.  The Calvin in the “academia” strip can’t also literally be the Calvin of the strips about the real details of a 6-year-old’s life.  (Maybe Calvin is some kind of child prodigy.  But then why isn’t this ever acknowledged?)

A sequel in which Calvin “grew up,” and stuff like the above was dismissed as mere youthful pretension, would be jarring and unbelievable.  It wasn’t realistically depiction pretension – it was Bill Watterson using a stylized character as a mouthpiece for social commentary.

Similarly, some people have tried to downplay the competence and stoicism and articulacy of the A1-4 Homestuck kids by saying that these things were in some way mere facades.  Rose was “pretentious,” not a literary genius; Dave was merely trying to maintain the appearance of imperturbable wit and sangfroid.  And of course they were.  (Of course Rose was pretentious – remember the “Complacency” excerpt?)  But they still talked and acted like no real 13-year-old – like no real person – ever could.

Which is, to get to the point after far too long, why Rose getting drunk and forgetting about her date and acting in other ways like a typical teenager is so jarring to me.  It’s like Calvin “growing up,” or characters in poetry getting retconned into people with Dactylic Hexametritis.  It doesn’t feel like the characters are growing up; it feels like they’re aging backward, or aging onto a different plane of stylistic existence.  The trolls were once a symbolic distillation of online teen drama; now they’re actual teen aliens who go on awkward teen dates with actual teen humans.  The whole does not fit together coherently.  A real teenage girl might act like Rose does in the meteor scenes in A6, but “Rose Lalonde,” the stylized entity established in A1-4, would not.

Calvin grows up and goes to college; make it as realistic as you want, but what is the point?

Something significant happened when Homestuck, a comic about friends on the internet, stopped taking place “on the internet” and tried to pretend that virtually nothing had changed.

Here’s my 200-page Waiting For Godot fanfic where Godot shows up.  He turns out to be pretty cool!  He and Vladimir and Estragon have some pretty great times!  By the way, it turned out they were just talking funny because they were really tired.

Anyway, that’s 20 billion words inspired by blurds mentioning “drunk Rose” as a good point of Act 6 that barely mention “drunk Rose” at all