While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Darksaber1]

You're right, without government, tanks would be a lot cheaper - and a lot suckier.

Of course not! Free market competition would drive for only the highest quality! ...or clever advertising would lead to the proliferation of cheap, poor quality, planned obsolesce models.

 

[Amon Savag]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/congress-reluctant-to-cut-funding-for-tank-that-ju,36099/

Sure.

 

[North King]

Wow, citing the Onion. A bold move.

 

[Arrow Gamer]

At this point you're almost certainly trolling.

 

[Crezth]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/congress-reluctant-to-cut-funding-for-tank-that-ju,36099/

Sure.

So when you play a game of Civ, do you find yourself thinking "Hm, I'd be doing a lot better if I had no control of any of this"?

Of course not! Free market competition would drive for only the highest quality! ...or clever advertising would lead to the proliferation of cheap, poor quality, planned obsolesce models.

It's just a typical example of putting the cart before the horse. Unless the average consumer in Libertopia has a truly spectacular level of disposable income, the Bob 'n' Jim's Homestyle Tank Depot will be selling Asad Babil's, also probably at inflated prices since they'd be the only show in town (unless we're seriously expected to believe the average outlet radius would have enough demand volume for two Bob 'n' Jim's).

US military expenditures are pretty wasteful. I think we're all cognizant of that. But you can afford to be wasteful when you have billions to throw at R&D. Something will stick, and when it does, you can go kill people with it. But that kind of behavior from a company that is expected to show profits? Not so much.

I can potentially imagine an auto manufacturer upgrading and moving in to tank production, first with premium models and then eventually standardizing the Sherman for the American palate, but even Hank Hill can recognize a lack of focus issue there. Technical learning is the biggie, and the #1 rule of industry is that technical learning isn't free, and isn't profitable in the short-term.

 

[Luckymoose]

TheOnion is a well-known anarchist media source.

 

[Darksaber1]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/congress-reluctant-to-cut-funding-for-tank-that-ju,36099/

Sure.

Hrm, there is a certain element of truth, such as the current and ongoing F-22 or F-35 fiasco (highly visible to myself as a Canadian) but not on it's own an absolute proof of anything. They continue as a rambling zombie due to a radical need in America to posses the most cutting edge and advanced technologies available, coupled with cost-sunk fallacy and international diplomacy.

Both represent the need the need to posses the highest tier; but this is not expulsive to the American government, indeed, with the government it is merely a symptom of the issue, as are things like seven-foot TV, massive sports cars and replacing a electronic device worth hundreds of dollars every few months when a slightly updated version is released.

However, a plane is not a tank. A tank is a much more simple design, and less expensive. Compare the F-22 to the M1 Abrams. The f-22 costs 150 million USD a piece, while the Abrams casts a mere 8.5 million or so. Compare the T-72 at no more than about 2 million a piece. Or the reliable workhorse plane that is the F-18, which cost 29-57 million variably.

Could the Abrams be produced cheaper without corruption, kickbacks and the likes? Very possibly. You could maybe knock one, possibly two million off of the price. Go any less than that, though, and you have to start reducing systems and versatility. You could produce a dead cheap tank, and long as your enemies are only using anti-tank weapons from no latter than 1950. Or tanks of similar age. Reactive composite armour is both very expensive, and very necessary on the modern battle field. Why do you think so many tanks get damaged or destroyed when fielded against people with 20 year old rockets; even those are death an unlucky modern tank, and you can build an RPG-7 for far, far less than you can a tank that can survive it.


So go ahead, declare independence while driving around in a cheap, all steel tank. Have fun laughing in your cleaver, low cost ride. An Afghan peasant soldier can kill you, and break your toy for far less value.

 

[Amon Savag]

I refuse to play civ, because I oppose the systematic oppression that the game promotes.

I imagine no household would be complete in an anarchist area without carl-gustavs. You don't exactly need tanks to take out bad guy tanks.

 

[bombshoo]

Today at work, I noticed something.

Most people (adults) seem to suck at taking constructive criticism. I'm talking about people in their 20s-60s here.

If I had to say one good thing NESing has done for me, it's made me very good at taking criticism, both constructive and not.

Has anyone else noticed this benefit from being on here? What's another benefit people have noticed from NESing, long term, if any?

 

[Nuka-sama]

Yea, considering that I joined NESing when I was 12, and everyone else was 3-5 years older than me. I wasn't up to par to the standards of the forum, and so I got a lot of criticism. If I wanted to stay around, I had to be able to take it

 

[Lord_Iggy]

I still think I'm pretty bad at taking criticism well. I don't necessarily react with hostility, but I still don't enjoy the process of getting criticized. Still, it would probably help me to improve my work a lot more.

 

[Symphony D.]

Symph, you identified in your initial post enough stylistic similarities between cyberpunk and steampunk to at least not make steampunk a solely unique genre celebration of white privilege.

I think you missed the point that it's a far more egregious celebration of white privilege since it caters purely to the elite viewpoint and neglects historical atrocities and basically venerates them. A poor person's power fantasy set in the "future" is inherently less problematic than a rich person's power fantasy set in the past.

I noticed that you avoided directly saying "white celebrations of white culture are bad," though that was the implication behind your post. I'd just caution against where that line of thinking leads us, since kabuki theatre and opera and a bunch of other "elitist" art forms are condemned via the same logical pathway.

I don't have a problem saying that basically all art is subjectively questionable.

First off, I don't know how familiar you are with steampunk as a genre, but I don't think that accusing it of being chauvinist is gonna fly.

Chauvinism clearly wasn't the primary point. (P.S. it is harder to establish equality of the genders in something very clearly derived from a historical setting that was infamously misogynist than in a future setting that can be literally whatever.)

Girl Genius has a lot of problems, but one of those problems is not a sufficient number of active, independent female protagonists.

I really don't think you want to point to Agatha Queen Ubermensch to Rule All Ubermensch, Bangladesh DuPree Queen of All Air Pirates, and Zeetha Daughter of Chump Orientalist Anime Native American Amazon Warrior as examples of well-adjusted and identifiable Strong Female Characters. (P.S. "And then Ada Lovelace invented programming and everyone immediately decided to treat women as equals forever and ever! The end!" doesn't work for most other Steampunk settings either.)

(and you seem to conflate the three without examining them on their individual merits)

Pretty sure you just weren't paying attention.

I'd also be careful not to conflate steampunk as a genre with the world (Victorian Britain) it was inspired by. Both Tolkien and Nazis were inspired by Nordic mythology but they took it in very different directions.

As I recall, Lord of the Rings did not take place in Scandinavia in the year 700 and the Nazis essentially fabricated a custom-built history more or less entirely from scratch utilizing wholly falsified archaeology, a dash of Wagner, and a man who claimed he could relive past lives over the prior 10,000 years.

I think your experience with steampunk as a genre is highly colored by Girl Genius

Actually, it's highly colored by people who like Steampunk.

which few people would classify as steampunk but I would due to the presence of aristocratic British culture and a large number of floating inflatable craft

Congratulations, you've confirmed the basic thrust of my argument.

in my opinion more an accident of geography than a case of deliberate racism.

How many Steampunk works are you familiar with that deal with people in the Congo?

Hunt's book, in particular, reaches extreme narrative creativity with a steampunk robot culture based largely around Tibetan Buddhism, complete with a belief in robotic reincarnation which I really enjoyed as an expression of steampunk's willingness as a genre to occasionally reach outside of its roots.

"Ah, yes, the noble and mysterious oriental and his fanciful spiritualism, how quaint! Let's recast them as robots so we're immune to criticism that we're not treating them as real people while engaging in objectification, because then they won't be people!" (P.S. have you ever wondered at the routine use of mechanical troops to get away from the moral quandaries posed by killing inevitably almost always poor conscript soldiers?)

Interestingly enough, on a side note, Philip Pullman (author of His Dark Materials) has written some excellent Victorian-era fiction which does engage with the rampant poverty, illiteracy, and other issues of the day. I am a particular fan of The Tin Princess which features a young Cockney girl who finds herself inheriting the throne of a small fictional German statelet due to mischance, and how her humble origins allow her to build bridges between the Austro-Hungarian and German negotiators over control of the nation's mineral wealth. It's a pseudo sequel to the Sally Lockhart trilogy, again Victorian with a female protagonist, which is equally well-written. Most of the tragic accidents of the plot are borne of poverty.

Token poor white people to round out the white people experience. Are there a kid in a wheelchair, a ginger, and a black kid that likes science too?

It is true that steampunk characters are largely white Europeans, but I don't think this poses a particular problem since ethnic literature written by a group for a group is an acceptable and common practice in human societies.

Are you denying that the first era of globalization featured white people cavorting about the world doing things on a routine basis? You do understand that it is "interesting" that action-adventure literature actually from the period in question routinely features people going abroad and encountering people from other cultures, while Steampunk routinely does not, yes?

Coming back to Achebe, nobody's going to cry racism on Things Fall Apart because the majority of characters are black and live in a black world. That's just the setting of the story.

You have failed to grasp the meaning of the invocation of Achebe and Conrad.

And maybe, if we're going to call all of the actually good works of cyberpunk (namely, the ones that are willing to look outside the protagonist for salvation) post-cyberpunk

1. That's not what Postcyberpunk means (I direct you to a recent discussion in Ideas) nor is there much merit to the assertion that Postcyberpunk is "better" than Cyberpunk, it's merely a different point of view (I would also argue Neuromancer and Snow Crash were more interesting stories) and 2. I would argue that Diamond Age is more in the vein of Conrad; unlike Steampunk it does acknowledge and make central characters both (A) the poor and (B) other ethno-cultural groups; it just sets up the relationship between them as quintessentially being a race war or "clash of civilizations," and while it does depict Judge Fang et al. as real people, it continues to clearly privilege the white cast, meaning it's just slightly ahead of the "bloody racist" Conrad despite a 100 year advantage.

we can look for something similar in a hypothetical post-steampunk

You once again fail to understand the meaning of what "Post-" is doing in that genre label construction.

But yeah, I am gonna have to call you on the carpet for your assertion that steampunk and associated genre fiction never engages with poor people's problems in a serious way.

You've done a very poor job of it and it's pretty clear you don't know much about literature outside Steampunk to boot. You can fanboy over your favorite genre all you want, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have racist, classist, and misogynist elements, mostly because it happens to be set in an environment imminently and lovingly derived from one where all those things were not only common and permissible, but actively promoted. The good comes with the bad. Those things are intrinsic and inherent to Steampunk. Steampunk is a celebration of rich white men and what they do. By being set in the past, even a romanticized and idealistic one, it is also a celebration of what they did: make empires on the blood and bones of others.

 

[Lord of Elves]

So is steampunk morally questionable literature produced by and for people too cowardly to admit they are burgeoning Stormfront members or what, guys? I'm legitimately asking. I can't tell if this is some kind of amusing takedown or an actual moral objection with the idea that people would even tell the kinds of stories present in steampunk.

 

[Symphony D.]

So is steampunk morally questionable literature produced by and for people too cowardly to admit they are burgeoning Stormfront members or what, guys? I'm legitimately asking. I can't tell if this is some kind of amusing takedown or an actual moral objection with the idea that people would even tell the kinds of stories present in steampunk.

I would peg it as being roughly as obnoxious as romanticism of or nostalgia for the Confederate States of America on the scale of offensiveness. The fact that a fair amount of it is Americans exercising some sort of weird Anglophilia for the British Empire (and to a lesser extent Continentalism toward the various European monarchies) is also off-putting.

People want their escapist fantasy, sure. But when you appropriate history, even alternate history, you appropriate its baggage. That's how it works. If you're going to pick something to tart up, at least have the decency to pick something more than a thousand years old.

e: I find it less disturbing that say, zombie literature, which inevitably appeals to people who enjoy thinking about the collapse of modern society after which that they can commit wanton acts of violence in everyday settings against sub-Human enemies without consequence and which permits the abandonment of things like decency, ethics, or morality in the name of "thinking tactically." (The best of which, e.g., The Walking Dead [which I don't watch] at least returns to a Man vs. Man narrative focused around rebuilding with the zombies as a mobile terrain obstacle and is otherwise more or less 1:1 with other kinds of Post-Apocalypse fiction.) And yes, what you like in media does actually say a lot about you.

 

[Crezth]

I imagine no household would be complete in an anarchist area without carl-gustavs. You don't exactly need tanks to take out bad guy tanks.

Well, now I have you. I, as an individual anarchist, cannot possibly expect to take down the bad guys by myself. I could help others do so, but alone I am not worth much. This being the case, why should I, as an individual anarchist in a neighborhood of anarchists, pay money out of my own pocket for expensive weapons of warfare? Why don't I just buy a surround-sound home-theater system and let my neighbors do all the fighting?

You have unknowingly constructed a prisoner's dilemma in which it is advantageous for me to not help fight statists either by assuming that my neighbors will for me, in which case +1 manpower will help not at all; or that my neighbors will think as I do, in which case we never stood a chance in the first place, so I'm going to move to Sweden.

 

[Darksaber1]

I imagine no household would be complete in an anarchist area without carl-gustavs. You don't exactly need tanks to take out bad guy tanks.

Then why bring up cheap tanks earlier?

No matter, what about other equipment? When the enemy has superior infantry power and related small arms; the exact circumstances tanks were built for. Your anti-vehicle rocket will be of limited use against fifty riflemen who know what they are doing. What about artillery, anti-aircraft weaponry, aircraft? What about Crzeth's point above? Will every household spend vast amounts of resources on home defense when their are more desirable things and well at the time to train in their use, or will you default to hiring others to do so, opening yourself to my previously raised point about mercenary armies and their loyalty. Or will you simply depend on your neighbours acquiring these resources, and them considering you worth aiding?

 

[Symphony D.]

How about you guys cut to the chase of this argument and debate the ethics and potential failings of every single person owning a nuclear bomb kept near their person and rigged to detonate if they die in an untimely fashion, since that's literally the only way you could more or less absolutely guarantee your safety against (or reprisal upon) someone anywhere in line of sight in atmosphere with similar hardware? (Also feel free to debate the ease with which this is circumvented by things like stand-off weapons.)

Who will watch the nuclear bomb makers?

Will everyone have to be like a proud Jedi warrior and make their own?

 

[Luckymoose]

@Symph: I'm not sure why you'd view steampunk as a genre as inherently anything. Sure, the people who write it now are indulging in Victorian fancies, but that doesn't mean the genre itself is racist, imperialist, or any of that. Tropes can be applied however you damn well see them. I could write a steampunk novel devoted entirely to universal education, if I wanted. I just think viewing one genre as this or that--by nature--is bad form for a writer. You should know you can do anything you please with the written word, tropes and genres and norms be damned.

 

[Symphony D.]

You don't get to pick a historical setting or diverge from a historical setting over a limited amount of time (e.g., <50 years) and then get to just utterly ignore history. Your story can be about whatever but by placing it in that historical or pseudo-historical context everything else is still happening in that fictional world regardless of whether or not it appears in the text. By picking a racist, classist, and misogynist time period, you are setting your story in a racist, classist, and misogynist world. You don't need to spend chapters agonizing over it, or even acknowledge it in the text, but you do have to acknowledge it's what you're doing as an author (and as a reader), even if none of your characters behave in a racist, classist, or misogynist fashion. Otherwise, you're basically whitewashing the past, with all that entails.

Unless you can come up with a convincing reason as to how and why a Steampunk setting derived from the actual historical Victorian Era has somehow dispensed with all those things, they are still inherent to the setting. Now if you create a Steampunk fantasy that has nothing to do with the Victorian Era or Earth for that matter, then sure, fine, you can do whatever you want. That's not what most Steampunk is though.

And at any rate, if it focused on aristocrats, it's also still not -punk.

This cuts both ways. When Spike Lee criticized Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers (and Eastwood himself) for being racist because he didn't have black soldiers fighting on screen on Iwo Jima, he was an idiot because not many black soldiers fought on Iwo Jima.

 

[Luckymoose]

You don't get to pick a historical setting or diverge from a historical setting over a limited amount of time (e.g., <50 years) and then get to just utterly ignore history. Your story can be about whatever but by placing it in that historical or pseudo-historical context everything else is still happening in that fictional world regardless of whether or not it appears in the text. By picking a racist, classist, and misogynist time period, you are setting your story in a racist, classist, and misogynist world. You don't need to spend chapters agonizing over it, or even acknowledge it in the text, but you do have to acknowledge it's what you're doing as an author (and as a reader), even if none of your characters behave in a racist, classist, or misogynist fashion. Otherwise, you're basically whitewashing the past, with all that entails.

Unless you can come up with a convincing reason as to how and why a Steampunk setting derived from the actual historical Victorian Era has somehow dispensed with all those things, they are still inherent to the setting. Now if you create a Steampunk fantasy that has nothing to do with the Victorian Era or Earth for that matter, then sure, fine, you can do whatever you want. That's not what most Steampunk is though.

And at any rate, if it focused on aristocrats, it's also still not -punk.

Firstly, you're making an error in assuming steampunk has to be set in a Victorian style era, when it doesn't. I'm not defending the whitewashing of racism or issues of the day, but the genre. Steampunk itself is just technological fantasy, based around steam machinery. As I said, just because the mainstream genre authors put out Victorian wanks it doesn't mean it has to be set in that time period, on earth, or even in societies built the same way. To assume it has to be is a limiting of literary genre and tropes.

On the word -punk. Aristocrats can be punk in the classic sense of the definition, as it isn't a class definition but an alienation/marginalized teenager thing. Punk teens are the origin of the word, but I'm almost certain that is classic punk, and the genre has evolved beyond that. Things change and adapt as writers make it so. If you want to write a steampunk setting that isn't an imperialist , then do so. Not all fantasy has to be Tolkienesque, so why would this?

I guess you could just make alternative fantastical versions of punk genres into weird, if you want. New Weird is the name, right?