Nyan cat is like most things on the Internet. It is a confluence of various parts, gathered and assembled that somehow make up an magical whole.
First there was the song Nyanyanyanyanyanyanya that features vocaloid Htsune Miku.
Then there was a remix of the song using a voice synthesizer with the Momone Momo voice that added the nyan lyrics.
A gif of a cat with a pop tart body somehow popped up because a guy was taking drawing requests online and people kept asking for drawings of cats and pop tarts so he just drew one drawing that contained both. He called it Pop Tart Cat.
How it all got added together is the magical part. The gif got mashed up with the song and uploaded to YouTube titled “nyan cat” and we are left with the pinnacle of 21st century culture, Nyan Cat. A “crowdsourced” work of art with no definite purpose or meaning combining disparate elements harvested from the Internet.
Explains so much about the twentyfirst century so far, doesn’t it? It’s silly, it’s dumb, but an endless source of creativity nonetheless and certainly more fun and harmless than what socalled responsible people were up to in the real world…
For a change, why don’t we take a post that I mostly agree with and take a side issue to nitpick? Here’s a short extract from Gareth Rees’ excellent credo for critics
This objection eventually amounts to a denial of the legitimacy of criticism on political or moral grounds: that an author’s choice of setting and political ethos for a work of fiction cannot be subject to criticism. Brahm: “Writing does not need to be didactic or satirical in order to be important or insightful: you seem to view the situation as that either Martin should be condemned because he supports the medieval feudalist system or that he should be damned because his work is not a satire and therefore meaningless. Why he can’t simply write a story in a medieval world, that realistically shows the workings and limitations of the system as well as the mindsets of those that inhabit it, is beyond me.”
Ethical criticism has got itself a bad name because it’s at the root of the Victorian idea that books must be morally improving. But you can reject that position without denying the legitimacy of ethical criticism tout court. I don’t necessarily agree with every point McCalmont makes but I think his argument is basically right: fiction that treats of kings and queens without any kind of satire, irony or other form of undermining is implicitly endorsing conservative and authoritarian ideas.
I think that is wrong, or at least not the whole truth. Sure, on the one hand there are fantasy authors, with the most obvious example being Tolkien himself, who do believe in the idea of a rightful king and all the baggage that implies, while on the other hand there are legions of lesser writers following the footsteps of a Tolkien, unthinkingly taking the same bagage with them, but that doesn’t mean that all fantasy set in a medievaloid setting with kings and queens has this bagage, or that fantasy authors explicitely have to reject these ideas not to have it. There needs to be room for writers who want to use a medieval like setting to tell stories that aren’t political in the sense Gareth is talking about, who take the political and sociological implications of such a setting as a given, rather than something to be endorsed or condemned.
Memo to self: do not listen to maudlin Sandy Denny songs when already feeling a bit blue. This and Meet on the Ledge can always get me.
I never really rated Fairport Convention, or Richard Thompson or any of the other English folk rock acts until recently. Too quiet, too earnest, too embarassing to like if you’re not an aging baby boomer. All prejudices I had to rid myself off before I could get to appreciate these sort of artists. I’m glad I did, even if it hurts sometimes listening to these songs.
It started in November when Xtra refused to honour artist Elisha Lim’s request to be referred to by the pronoun “they.” Although the magazine did run a story quoting Lim saying these words, it would not honour the pronoun switch. A few weeks later Xtra interviewed Lexi Tronic, a trans and sex worker’s rights activists. Edmontonians may remember her for the time she spent hosting weekly drag shows here and others might have caught her as one of the original stars of Showcase’s breakthrough sex series KinK. The story’s editor, Danny Glenwright, decided to share the story on his personal Facebook wall and when he did so he added Tronic’s birth name. Tronic was naturally uncomfortable with this, especially since it turned out the two had known each other since childhood in Winnipeg and shared many acquaintances. Glenwright, an editor at an LGBTQ paper, claimed he didn’t know sharing the birth name of a trans person was a faux pas, which would mostly be OK if he had just removed it after Tronic asked. Instead he defended himself profusely, used the creepy “some of my best friends are trans!” argument and basically reacted in a variety of transphobic ways.
Among the excuses offered for this faux pas has been the argument that singular they isn’t good English, an ugly neologism that’ll confuse readers. Something that, as the Wikipedia article on singular they shows, would be news to some of the greatest English language writers:
Eche of theym sholde … make theymselfe redy. — Caxton, Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489)
Arise; one knocks. / … / Hark, how they knock! — Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595)
‘Tis meet that some more audience than a mother, since nature makes them partial, should o’erhear the speech. — Shakespeare, Hamlet
I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly. — Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)
That’s always your way, Maim—always sailing in to help somebody before they’re hurt. — Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Caesar: “No, Cleopatra. No man goes to battle to be killed.” / Cleopatra: “But they do get killed”. — Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1901)
Even if this argument did hold merit, surely a basic politeness should trump a rigid adherence to inadequate grammar rules? If it is all that confusing, just explain it up front. There seems to be a certain mulish willingness here to cause offence, an anger at people being so awkward as to insist to want their identity represented a certain way, something a bit surprising in a magazine for people who quite likely have some experience at being misrepresented… It’s not active malice perhaps, but more the sort of stupidity you get when you do something dumb and insensitive, get called upon and get angry about being shown your errors. It’s a trap progressive people especially can fall in when we do say something unwittingly racist/sexist/othering, because it’s obvious we’re not bigots and how dare people assume we are!
It shouldn’t be hard to be polite and respect the wishes of others about how they would like to be addressed, but we can get right nowty when we do get it wrong and are corrected, something I still struggle with myself.
Ivan’s War
Catherine Merridale
396 pages including index
published in 2005
Though things have improved a lot since the end of the Cold War, the Eastern Front is still underrepresented in western histories of World War II. Quite naturally British and American historians have focused mostly on their own countries’ experiences in the war but even so the Russian experience is still under-represented. And often when the Eastern Front is looked at, it is from a German rather than a Russian perspective. German historians, generals and others were quite quick in putting forward their experiences in order to put the record straight in their favour, German sources were much more available to western historians than Russian sources, stuck behind the Iron Curtain as they were. So we got plenty of Konsalik novels talking about poor, intelligent middle class German officers stuck in the hell of the Ostfront facing the Slavic hordes, not so much about the poor Russian soldiers trying to liberate their homelands. What’s more, Cold War ideology, which presented an outnumbered NATO alliance trying to defend itself against the vast communist tank armies poised to overrun Western Europe at any moment, quite easily identified itself with the German experience and was fed by the same German generals that had been defeated by the Russians on how best to fight the bolshevik menace.
So it’s good to see a book like Ivan’s War be published. It’s the first book I’ve read about the Eastern Front that looks at the war there not just through a Russian perspective, but looks at the ordinary soldier’s experiences, somewhat comparable to e.g. Stud Terkel’s “The Good War” about American experiences of WWII. Catherine Merridale went to Russia not just to look at archives long inaccessible to western scholars, but also to talk to the veterans themselves and get their stories. What’s more, she didn’t just show the stories of the common soldiers, but also those of their officers and political commissars too and does so without editorialising. It’s important to hear those stories, to get an idea of what the Great Patriotic War was really like for those who fought it, without seeing it filtered through American or Western European, let alone German eyes for a change.
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.
Incidently, one of the things Charlie predicted widespread use of 3-d printers/matter fabbers would be used for is the distribution of particularly nasty, highly illegal sex dolls. Hope this doesn’t come true too…
