Tom Doyle

I think the locusts will just need a little nudge, and poof, no more Laura Ingalls problem.

Saw them at a couple of 9:30 Club shows back in the day--one of them on New Year's Eve with 3 other indies, and they were the most consistently enjoyable of the bunch.

Great tune.

Sorry for rambling on--anyway, I agree with you about 1984 and meta-design. As a kid, I thought that a totalitarian happiness engine like Brave New World was a more likely outcome, but societies have death drives, so 1984 seems more the platonic ideal. (The Matrix couldn't build a utopian fantasy.)

Not sure what to make of the Soviet model--it's like they tried several forms of authoritarianism under the umbrella of "communism." But they had a 70 year run. Now they're back to standard fascism, and though very destructive of our system and their own lives, doesn't seem like it has legs.

...and what we're doing doesn't seem stable at all.

--even Franco's relatively long-lived regime couldn't continue after the Basques killed his chosen successor. China seemed for a while to have come up with a more stable institutionalized group authoritarianism, but the cult of the individual leader seems to be reasserting itself...

But if our current fascists are just following that classic interwar playbook (and not looking meta like 1984), they don't seem to have solved the old problems of succession and overreach. They were vulnerable to the fall of the leader...

Yeah, definitely that. Too many current "dystopias" miss the design element--they're just bad things happening. Tyranny by dedicated group definitely can have more stability than the standard dictatorship--Big Brother seemed like a mostly fictional construct by the time of the story, right?

I think Orwell had to balance everything very precisely to make a stable system that could be a boot in our faces forever. What those who try to create such unhappiness engines will find is that they are inherently unstable. That doesn't do us much good--mostly just increases the mortality rate.

Um, I think I just stumbled on a very bad oracle indeed--something I'd forgotten from childhood because it wasn't important then. From the original table of contents/chronology for The Martian Chronicles: "August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains."

No, no, no! The problem is hypo- (and not hyper-) thermia. I checked the patient's temperature and they're Cold As Ice.

You trying seeing what love is when your eyes are filled with that double vision.

I reviewed the Chris Columbus film Young Sherlock Holmes back in the 80s--curious to see how it compares.

Agreed--my logical brain just shut down in the horror of the moment. IIRC, it was at the culmination of a downward narrative spiral for them.

The Bardo of the Toys. I think they actually "die" in that scene and in the end they incarnate into their new lives.

Whatever its ups and downs, LOTR has the perfect ending, with a sadness that readers learn to cherish. And given the prequel madness on large and small screens, that may be the only thing that's saved it from somebody attempting a sequel... so far.

On the writing side, it's a gift (and far from a given) to be able to end one's story, and on one's own terms. The patron saint of this for me is US Grant racing to finish his memoir as throat cancer was killing him. But we have plenty of examples in our genres where the author didn't get to finish

The part where Theseus feels the oncoming Thera disaster still haunts me.

Saw Michael Shannon's REM tribute band last night--the album for this tour is Life's Rich Pageant. Always loved this bit from "These Days"--maybe now more than ever:
"All the people gather, fly to carry each his burden
We are young despite the years
We are concern, we are hope despite the times"

You're saying you'd prefer a Mesoamerican end times? Me, I'm looking forward to the great anti-apocalypse, when humanity finally decides we're too old for this sh*t, and then declares to heaven & hell "come at us, ye bastards."

It was different (but not better) not too long ago, when power and status was still correlated with the number of people in one's sphere of control (like how Russian lords counted the number of "souls" on their land). But yeah, once that connection became less direct, we became extra.

On the plus side, I'm not sure this mass manifestation of Freud's thanatos drive is necessarily global--the US is getting hit particularly hard, but whether the afflicted nations succeed in bringing everyone else down too is still in play.

My internal head canon of this version of the end times is that we're a simulation designed to see how a world might get through its early nuclear age, but after the success of that experiment, they just left the thing running, w/ no further tweaks to keep it on the rails or deal w/ program entropy

Morning thought: in the Star Wars films, we get lineages, not families--if it's a family, it gets killed or broken fairly quickly after appearing on screen.

Eric H. Cline over Gibbon. @digkabri.bsky.social

Yeah, Claude is more like a name for the big AI from season 3 of Westworld.

The biggest apocalyptic heart breaker (though not a big hit) of the 80s was Chris De Burgh's "Transmission Ends."

Timing is interesting: 2 terms is kind of 3 1/2 years plus 3 1/2 years, but not quite. So following this line of interpretation, would he only get 3 years of the current term?

But he's no Sam Neill. Such a disappointment for the big bad. Even the mortal head wound was barely a scratch. But fits with one argument I've been making--that the warnings in Revelation are for believers who will be deceived, not "I told you sos" for nonbelievers...