Three anti corporate posts in one

 Okay so this post will encompass two previous draft posts because I noticed that after I began a third post with a rant about a negative experience I recently had with an app and when I started to write the post, this post, I realized that the other two incomplete posts in my notes were cluttering up my hagenart post notes and interfering with the flow of my diatribe about Linearity, the people who purchased Vectornator, the company that made an app that I purchased but who somehow also owned what I had already purchased and decided that I hadn’t purchased it but I would be able to use it for free if I created a linearity account and used their cloud. 

But instead of deleting the other incomplete posts it occurred to me that I didn’t want to delete them and hey they kind of dovetailed with the flow of the diatribe against linearity, which is a German company if you get my drift.  So, in a masterstroke of laziness and sloppy writing I have combined all three posts into one post. 

part one, the app:

I’ve been using a drawing app on my iPad for a long time, months and years. It was called Vectornator and I did not ever unreservedly love it because they did a lot of unnecessary bells and whistles type updating, possibly because they knew they might be purchased or wanted to get purchased but in any case and but for whatever reasons they did get purchased by Linearity, who originally didn’t do anything with the app but install an orange background on the icon and rename it Linearity. 

It’s interesting to note at this point that it is now the nature of software purchases to never be final. I’m saying this because if I had purchased a rake or a TV I could theoretically have just used it and wouldn’t care what the company I bought it from was doing with their time. But when you buy an app you have to keep dealing with all the updates by the publisher. You could be perfectly happy with what you bought, but the company is not happy with the deal, oh no. Because you’re just you, just one consumer, and they don’t want one consumer, they want a lot, so too bad for you, you shouldn’t have bought the app before they improved it. 

So I had to keep dealing with Vectornator updates. Then it got worse, and after renaming the app and painting it orange, Linearity made the app free.  The app that I bought a copy of for money. Then they forced me to create a linearity account before I could open the app and get to the drawing files that I’d been working on for months and years, and then they forced me to migrate all those files from my device to their cloud- because it’s better for me, right? I can work on multiple devices. But here’s the thing, I don’t want to work on the cloud. The cloud is slow and unresponsive with vector files with lots of shapes and layers. It’s better to work on the device and move files to the cloud sometimes, when I need to move them. The cloud still sucks sometimes.  

The real reason Linearity forced the move to the cloud is that they have control over the files that way. My files become their files. Like Amazon and their super creepy kindle business practices. They don’t want to make money by providing value to consumers, they want to make money by controlling consumer choices, a la Microsoft. 

 

At this stage of the post we need to stitch the anti-Linearity material with the corporate organization material. When I say stitch I mean paste into. Stitching implies some kind of effort. 

Automation will start from the top

It’s always robots in the movies though, isn’t it?

Don’t believe it, that’s the vision of the future that the studio execs daydream about, along with their CEO friends. They dream about replacing all the weak, irritating, disobedient, complaining and disrespectful human workers with a host of compliant, psychologically healthy robots that will receive orders at light speed and complete any task with perfect execution seconds later, while the human workers nap at their desk. 

But it’s turning out that those menial tasks the robots will perform take a lot more mental processing than anybody thought. Programming a robot to clean a bathroom seems to involve hellishly complicated algorithms beyond the capacity of current technology.  It’s the simple physical tasks that everyone takes for granted that are turning out to be the toughest to program.  Oh we’ve definitely worked out assembly line robotics, where the environment is completely controlled and mechanized and there are no surprises. We can send drones flying in the sky where the environment is basically air. We’ve made some limited advances with self driving cars, on streets and roads, artificial environments that we try to control as much as possible. But to navigate the chaotic human daily environment, sometimes semi-controlled and sometimes not, it seems like you need a human brain, with the underrated ability to navigate around disorganized places and manipulate irregular objects and communicate with irregular and disorganized other humans. The robot worker army is a long ways away. 

But the bodiless bots, with no physical senses or mechanisms are a different story. We call them AIs because it sounds cool, and it turns out that they can do accounting, predict stock prices, even diagnose illnesses. They can remember every legal precedent, design optimized computer code, even churn out advertising copy and idiotic news headlines. In other words, they can perform all the tasks that we associate with the educated and higher income echelons of society. White collar jobs and professionals. Jobs with no or little element in physical reality. Maybe that explains the stern warnings about AI that we hear from CEOs, another incredibly replaceable job title. I’ve read some of the more prominent warning messages by the most prominent CEOs and other Rich people, and the text of those public warnings were so vapid and without any identifiable logic that I suspected they’d been composed by AI. 

And when I suggest that an AI could do a CEO’s job, I’m being over-polite. A well balanced coin could perform 80 percent of a CEO’s job, and an additional 80 percent of the remainder of the job could be performed by… Air, basically.  I mean, seriously, I don’t think we really need CEOs.  They’re basically just tournament winners. 

That’s right, corporations are a tournament, a competition, not a real “organizational structure.” If you observe the structure of machines or living organisms, you see a structure based on function, not status levels. Status levels are how you organize a tournament.  Perhaps that’s the real reason the CEOs fear the AIs. They fear the change to organic, functionally based structures that AIs might cause. The janitors aren’t going anywhere. The bosses don’t want to lose their trophy jobs. 

Okay here’s part 3, the original post about Aethelred the Unready

Great name. A real name, actually, of a real person, a King of Wessex who lost his kingdom to Viking invaders. I’ve been reading about Aethelred and feeling his pain and his failure and fear. 

Winston Churchill despised him as an idiot, but it seems to me that he might have not been an idiot and just had a lot of strong willed idiots around him who convinced him they knew what they were doing. Or maybe he really believed they knew what they were doing, or maybe he just wanted to keep them happy. He became king of Wessex after some political shenanigans, after some different groups tried to make different sons of the previous king the new king and the people who made him king won because they managed to poison his brother or his brother suddenly died.  But they probably poisoned him. Apparently people suddenly dropped dead back then so often that politicians could get away with poisoning their rivals and no one could prove anything. And apparently the Kings, who were just basically gang leaders, had a lot of kids by multiple women and you never knew which kid would end up being the next King because you never knew who might be hanging around the treasury when the incumbent dropped dead for no reason or because of poison or a stab wound or an infection from an old stab wound and when he died from whatever the attendants would loot the corpse and his kids would get on horses and ride to the treasury with their swords drawn, and the earls and counts and barons and bishops would take an inventory of all the poisons in their castles and start sending out dinner invitations to all the old king’s kids and choose sides and send gangs of soldiers on horses to deliver the invites in an unrefusable format and in 978 the earls and bishops holding Aethelred and his brother King Edward decided that Aethelred would be the king now and that King Edward would be Edward the Martyr. 

Curiously, Aethelred’s main counselor was a religious reformer named Aethelwold.  And at this point, since we’ve referred to two people with an identical first name prefix, we can from now on refer to Aethelred as Ared and Aethelwold as Awold. Awold probably pushed a lot of semi-practical religious policies that might have been a bit of a distraction from the multiple Viking raids and invasions that Ared had to deal with.  But Awold and his gang seemed to have pushed the idea that God was using the Viking raids to punish the saxons for being sinful, and so instead of military preparations, Ared needed to prioritize religious reform. This sounds wrong-headed and impractical if not delusional to me and probably you. I don’t believe in a God that encourages murder and plunder in order to get people to go to church. But some people do believe in that sort of God, even nowadays. And Ared lived in a time without airplanes and iPhones and vaccines, when people took religious wackos very seriously. So when Awold said the God sent the Vikings to punish the Saxons for their sins, Ared had no choice but to give him money for churches and celibate priests and dumb processions. 

But it sounds like Ared may have welcomed all the silly religious distractions. He did not seem to be particularly keen on physical combat - it was a thing. People talked about it, probably, because there are apparently surviving manuscripts apologizing for Ared because he wouldn’t ride at the front of his armies and fight his enemies. He would try to pay off his enemies, and he would send other people to fight them, but apparently he was a scaredy cat and didn’t want to go fight people himself. I sympathize with him for being a scaredy cat and paying the Viking armies to not invade his kingdom. I think it’s reasonable to want to avoid getting stabbed. But he also sent other people to go fight and possibly get stabbed for him, and it’s difficult to sympathize with him after reading about that. I felt even less sympathy for Ared after reading about the Saint Brice’s Day Massacre. On that day in 1002, Ared ordered  the death of all the Danish people in his kingdom, or maybe just the Danish men. It sounds like an awful thing to do, even if the Danes were occupying a lot of England as conquerors at the time. It was a complicated situation where there were Danish kingdoms in England, who were sometimes at war with Wessex, Ared’s kingdom, and sometimes at peace, and Danish people living in English kingdoms who may have been mercenaries and may have been families. And the mercenary Danes may have been working for Ared’s court. 

Or maybe all the Danes really were jerks who were going to start attacking the Saxons anyway. It wouldn’t surprise me at all - I knew a lot of Danes, growing up in Utah.

Anyway, some of the massacre victims happened to be related, according to some accounts, to the King of Denmark, Sven Forkbeard. Big mistake on Ared’s part. Sven Forkbeard invaded England and Ared fled to his second wife’s relatives in Normandy, France. Then Sven died and the people of Wessex invited Ared back but in the recorded verbiage of their invitation they chose to include a pretty insulting reference to his previous job performance as a ruler, which Ared may have resented or maybe he promised to do better because he probably desperately wanted to leave Normandy. I like to imagine Ared as a personality like William H Macy’s character in Fargo, Jerry Lundergard, and I like to imagine his father in law, the Duke of Normandy, treated him like the father in law in Fargo treats Jerry; with an insulting lack of respect. I picture Ared pestering the Duke for an army just like Jerry begs Wade Gustafson for a loan, and all the time the Duke and his flunkies are thinking; “Hey, that’s actually a good idea, invading England. Let’s look into that. But not with that guy.” Duke Richard never got around to England, but his great grandson William must have heard about the idea fifty years later. 

At this point, or more probably long before this point you have wondered what Aethelred the Unready has to do with automation and terrible apps. So now here’s the stitching together part that I should have done earlier: Aethelred was a terrible king and the people of his kingdom suffered because he was terrible. And there were lots of people who thought some other guy would make a better king. But it didn’t really occur to them that having a king at all was a terrible form of government. There are still people nowadays who really believe a monarchy is a better form of government than democracy. Do they think they’ll get to be the King?

So maybe just like democracy is better than a monarchy for government, there’s a better way to run companies that doesn’t occur to us. Maybe AI will eventually come up with something better than the hierarchy and the CEO. 

Part 3, what does Linearity have to do with Aethelred and automation? 

With Aethelred, we explored an incompetent king and asked why people thought kings were a good idea, and if maybe management is a bad idea too. With automation, we explored replacing people with AI, and we asked if maybe we should be replacing management with AI would be a good idea. With Linearity, we behold a rotten company, and we might if maybe the management was what made the company so rotten.  

Software is a new kind of product- the awful people that run companies have been tolerated when they give us rakes or cars. But with software this kind of behavior will impact our most private lives. Maybe people will stop tolerating these kinds of companies if the products they provide can be jerked out of our hands and messed around with even after we buy them. 

Hagenart comic 07/29/22

 

Hagenart comic 04/18/21

 

Hagenart comic 05/27/20

Hagenart comic 04/10/20

Hagenart comic 03/23/20

Hagenart comic 03/11/20

Hi I’m John, I work in Quality Assurance

 I recently posted something about unpleasant careers, which reminds me that for the past decade or so, even reaching back into the time before IPhones, I’ve worked in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, in Quality Assurance. Why Quality Assurance? Why Pharmaceuticals? Entirely by accident, of course. I was working temporary jobs, which I rather enjoyed actually, and had an assignment to go work at a pharmaceutical plant, and eventually got a permanent job there. It could easily have gone the other way, if I hadn’t gotten that particular job I would probably have moved to other assignments and maybe stumbled into some other career, and I’m betting that if I hadn’t gotten a push from a Manager there who happened to view me with second hand approval (I was a friend of their star employee), the position would have gone to someone else more deserving. But here I am, working in a heavily-regulated, science based industry where management prefers humanities degrees with a minimum of two years Creative Writing experience. Haha! Gotcha! They’re actually pretty easy-going about the creative writing experience.
And yes, I do some writing for this job, mostly emails of one sentence or less - and they are spell-binding, I assure you! I mock myself, but I would love to teach a college course in emails, procedures, and investigations; the only reading and writing I’ve done in pharmaceuticals, and they probably comprise over 90% of the professional reading and writing performed by English majors in the pharmaceutical industry and possibly anywhere. Humanities Professors would probably prefer to completely ignore the existence of this kind of English, but I can’t think of a better way to gain appreciation for “literature” as we call it, the English designed to tell a story, than to study it alongside the everyday English, the English that organization people use to avoid telling any story at all. I would call it “camouflage writing”. It’s actually a lesser form of fiction, meant to bore and repel rather than enchant and distract. You may write it to hide your lack of knowledge on a subject, or to avoid telling people all you know about the subject to safeguard your job, or like the greater part of working people you may have never really learned to write except in the organization where everyone writes in camouflage and you don’t actually know how to write in any other way.
And of course, in a regulated industry, the regulating authority will read your procedures and your investigations. Maybe they will read them in front of your managers. Maybe their eyes will glaze, and they will stifle a yawn, and the managers will sign you a thumbs up, and offer them a blanket and a pillow.
People ask me; “What is Quality Assurance? What do you do exactly?” And I answer...
Gotcha again! Nobody has ever asked, literally ever, in all the years I’ve told people that I work in Quality Assurance. Not only have they not asked what it is, they usually stop asking me anything, as if my answer was so awful, so surprising in a very bad way, that they don’t dare ask anything more, as I might construe the slightest hint of interest on their part as a signal to vomit forth every nasty dribble of information on quality assurance that I’ve been holding in all these years and they so do not want to hear about it that they are conversationally frozen with fear.
I completely understand, of course. The name “quality assurance” was devised by the same people who devised standard operating procedures and please believe me when I say that they are not interested in being interesting. See notes on camouflage writing above.

I complain a lot about my English degree

I  complain a lot about my English degree and how people with English degrees don’t get paid like engineers unless they get a law degree too, but to be honest I have met or heard of dozens of successful people who incidentally happened to have an English degree. I believe that if you’re a tiger and a go getter you can do well no matter what degree you earned, but if you’re not a tiger or a similarly type-A animal, you should study engineering. I’ve actually toyed with the idea of abbreviating my degree as “Eng.” on my resume, just to get by HR keyword searches.
I’ve developed my own theories to explain why English degrees might be undervalued by businesses. Most people would tell you that business managers want to be lean and want results, and hiring someone to just write things when technically any college graduate should be able to write, and when there might not be a business need for cleverly worded essays every day, seems like a waste of money to most of them. Why not just hire an engineer who can write?
And many people in the sciences definitely believe that English degrees are easy degrees, and that therefore the people with English degrees haven’t worked hard or learned to problem solve like the science majors have, so that a bunch of soft-headed poets with no grasp on reality have glutted the job market.
To clarify, no engineer or manager has used those harsh and judgmental words in my presence, I have interpolated their formless, nonverbal twitches and mutterings and as an English BA can form those thoughts in a more verbally direct manner.
Forgive me, I mentioned that I have my own theory: Humanities studies have suffered an evolutionary reversal similar to what peacocks might suffer if wild dogs developed a lasso. Previous to this hypothetical lasso, young people of the upper classes invented English and other Humanities degrees to learn art and poetry, in order to impress potential romantic partners or spouses. Nobody saw any actual utility in an English Degree, it functioned like a magnificent peacock’s tail to impress other young people by its utter uselessness, back when a person’s uselessness signified
At this point you may believe that I am about to say, in agreement with prevailing belief, that the job market was the lasso, but I believe it was the Civil Rights movements of the 60s. The purveyors of English and Humanities degrees, like High Priests, had used the so-called Dead White Males of British Literature as their Idols, and used the DWM’s Works as their Magic Totems, in order to add the facade of sanctity and seriousness to the peacock’s tail. The egalitarian values of the Civil Rights movement eroded and discredited the DWM’s authority, and so destroyed the romantic magic of the English degrees. Young people sought out alternative forms of magic; rock music and beat poetry, sourced by the new Idol of Social Activism. Some High Priests stayed true to the old idols, but the rest switched to align their teachings with the new egalitarianism. They escaped the worship of the DWMs, but in the mad rush to Social Activism, they unhinged the bread and butter roots of the degrees, the utilitarian mechanics of writing and textual analysis, unfortunately associating them with the old hierarchy. They trained a generation of English BAs with uplifted values and sloppy, unfocused writing skills. The orthodox High Priests denounced these methods, but even more unfortunately, associated them with the new Social Activism. The engineering faculty, who respected the old

 Humanities DWMs as the gods of a neighboring tribe, viewed the new, lose, free wheeling Humanities curricula with contempt.
So the state of the humanities at the time of my own studies. I took classes with both sects, and as you might expect I did not take a side. I chose a Creative Writing emphasis, as you might expect, but I enjoyed the disciplined critical analysis classes, as you might not expect.
The University of Utah offered a creative writing MA, which I did not pursue, because I believed, and still believe, that you need to find something to write about. The people who believe that you need to find something to write about will usually, after arriving at this decision or realization, boldly go off to Antarctica or New Guinea, offering up their mortal frame to the tribulations of unpleasant weather or unpleasant people in order to compile a database of sufferings to spin into lucrative, matter of fact accounts that readers like me will devour appreciatively in the comforts of the suburbs. I didn’t do that either, so I followed a third alternative, listless pursuit of unpleasant careers. So that’s what I have to write about.

Hagenart comic 02/08/20

Crossing the streams, a Hagenart fiction

I’d like to say that we will now resume the CS Lewis HP Lovecraft series, but I still have not performed the re-read. A wise man once said “Character is Fate”, and another person, a reasonably intelligent person, has said that character is 98% of any story.
If both statements are true, then Fate is 98% of the story too. Or maybe Fate is the story, and there really there is no 2%. Or maybe the fellow who wrote “character is fate” really meant character is 98% fate, but just rounded up, in which case we’ve identified the missing 2% and it’s whatever of character isn’t Fate, or is it a tiny bit of Fate that isn’t Character?
I believe both are true and as a result this blog is fated to unreliably planned, and I personally won’t ever get to direct “Star Wars / Star Trek: Crossing the Streams”. Which I have already written as the sequel to “Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet”, as written by George Lucas if he were the son of HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis and married Gene Roddenberry and they had a son who was me and I grew up rich and got to sleep in all the time.
Crossing the Streams Act 1:
A spaceship glides seductively across a dazzling field of stars. The camera pans in to a huge window on the front of the spaceship, the windshield if you will. A man in a form fitting black suit stands looking thoughtfully at the starscape. It’s actually me, I’m playing the Captain as well as the director. I’m not sure if I’ll be wearing a hat for this scene. We might do a steampunk thing where I’d be wearing a stovepipe hat and a monocle
The scene changes, to inside the spaceship. An alarm goes off, with flashing lights. A crew member in a snazzy uniform turns to the captain and says they’ve detected an ancient radio signal coming from an older quadrant of the galaxy. I indicate in Trekkie that they should play the message on the spaceship’s dope holodeck. I go into the holodeck with my holodeck crew. The Trekkie holodeck actually recreates reality, it’s like stepping into a video game that you can touch and experience with all your senses. The holodeck plays the ancient radio message, which is the whole Star Wars saga, except that I play a taller and better looking version of yoda. In this magisterial role, I recognize the badly written plot elements and use my magic powers to edit them out. My crew members play my acolytes, and they applaud my rewrites. The emperor and I fight a light saber duel. I win, but he tries to cheat with force lightning. He removes his mask. It’s George Lucas. He condemns my rewrite, but I counter that as the original creator of Star Wars he can not exist in this reality and is therefore without power here. Either he exists and it’s all a badly written fantasy, or it’s reality and he cannot exist. He disappears. My acolytes applaud. I declare myself supreme space admiral. They look wary and confused. I mow them down with force lightning.
Well that’s just a taste, I envision the full series will cover several volumes and possibly a plot with characters

Hagenart comic 01/29/20

Hagenart comic 01/22/20

Addendum to a continuing series that got discontinued in the middle of trying not to apologize for discontinuing

We’re taking a hiatus from the CS Lewis HP Lovecraft series to initiate a new series, not really a series but more like an addendum to an already continuing series, and this new addendum to an already continuing series puts me in the mind to make a little announcement about series in general on this website, which I have always envisioned and dreamed would kind of follow a non-profit TV station type format, with regular series that would air at a certain time on a certain day and specials that air once, and live sporting events and a few documentaries.
But so far this blog has followed more of a slowly-going-bankrupt non-profit with no programming director type of format, where a series runs for a few episodes and then with no closure or warning another series starts and each series runs on less and less budget until it’s just me, the station manager, standing on a naked stage in a sad, crumpled t-shirt, mumbling about his hopes and dreams and ignoring the frantic signals from the cameraman that he’s leaving but the camera is still recording, and the cameraman finally just takes a deep breath and steps away from the camera, which Is not a hand held camera or yes, it’s a hand held camera that he’s mounted on a makeshift stand and duct taped in place. So he backs away from the iPhone on the makeshift stand, knowing as he does so that he has completely abandoned all hope of getting paid for his hours of work for this sad little failing YouTube channel, but he walks fast out of the studio that can only be used on weekends when the carpentry shop in the front isn’t open. He’s angry and disgusted and aimless and desperate, but he’s one of those happy people with actual technical expertise in something that more responsible and with it and together people pay money for and he’ll be fine after a few drinks and a short casual job search but his girlfriend who was always so nice and warm and seemed like such a wonderful person at the station parties will convince him to sue the sad failing station for back pay and drive what’s left of it into bankruptcy that the station manager works at two minimum wage jobs for years to pay off while the cameraman and his girlfriend move into a sweet house in Park City and they drive Teslas to their union gig camerawork and acting auditions and they get their kids into child acting and drink themselves to death while the Station Manager tries to think of something to write for his internet web-log.

Hagenart comic 01/14/20

Hagenart comic 01/07/20

Unexpected treat; CS Lewis HP Lovecraft mashup

I actually have a grand plan in mind for the CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft series, wherein we delve into some wild theories about their inner mind and homosexual tendencies and all that spicy stuff, but before we do that I have to re-read the books again.  But before I do that, I believe it’s time for a mashup, wherein we attempt to tell a short story as if the two of them got together for some kind of literary retreat in 1925, when Lovecraft was falling apart financially and about to leave New York, and Lewis had just become a professor at Oxford. For the purposes of the mashup, in this scenario they get married. Why? Because it seems to me that the differences in the philosophies of the two of them would ordinarily make it extremely unlikely that they could ever willingly collaborate, but people tend to overlook all types of differences if they have romantic feelings for someone, so I believe they would have fall in love and get married in order for the mashup to happen. After getting married they live in England where Lewis can support them, since Lewis in reality had a far better job than Lovecraft did.
And they write a story together:

Something Hideous Came Out of the Silent Planet
I write these sentences supine, lying in a bed in the Miskatonic University Center for Invalids and Convalescent Scholars. The daily effort to lift pen to paper drains the last vestiges of my waning strength, yet a fierce desire to warn the public of the threat from within, while seeking to protect and advocate for the furry peoples of Malacandra, impels me to my painful, remorselessly damaging daily toil.
For the Reader’s sake I will attempt to organize and cohere my tangled memories into an understandable narrative.
To begin: My name is Elwin A Ransom. I am a professor of linguistics at Magdalene College, Miskatonic Campus. Until recently, I had been immersed in my studies and my teaching duties, living my quiet, inoffensive life, writing the occasional short story about magic elves and sharing them with close friends and never dreaming that I would someday visit another world where I would meet ghastly aliens that turned out to be Anglicans and perfectly reasonable if you overlooked their tendency to be a bit judgmental and a kind of purposeful abtrusiveness that set me on edge at times but I’m not really a people person and I’ve come to terms with that.
My adventures began when I - against my better judgement - accepted an invitation for late tea from an old schoolmate who I ran into at a tavern whilst on a walking tour of New England. He claimed to live on an estate, which turned out to be true, with his friend , a genius named Weston, which turned out to be only partially true. The estate was an old mansion, filthy in a grand old way, one of those old houses that looks as if it had somehow enjoyed more weather than any of the houses around it. Weston turned out to be a sociopath, but not in an interesting-conversation-over-bottle-of-wine sort of way. I was drunk enough to misconstrue his offer to show me “the spaceship” and follow him into the backyard, where I passed out. I came to on the spaceship, on route to Mars, if you can believe it. Pretending to have Stockholm Syndrome to get their guard down, I cooked a delicious lasagne, with the unintended result that my old friend Devine developed reverse Stockholm syndrome and tried to set me free immediately, and Weston developed Oslo syndrome, consuming so much pasta that he could not fit through the kitchen doorway, in effect kidnapping himself. At this point Weston admitted that they had planned to sell me to the native Martians for meat, which is what atheists do. Devine said he was sorry and told me I could go and tried to push me into the airlock. We fought, but the ship crash landed on Mars at the exact moment that my knee liberated his front teeth. “Take that, Dicky!” I shouted, and regretted it instantly. I spent my first day on a new planet trying to think up a better line. Eventually I sought Devine out after dinner and shouted “Welcome to Mars, Dicky! Love, the Tooth Fairy!” I tried to kick his mouth again, but he dodged and heeled my instep, dropping me like a sack. We stopped speaking after that, except for making fart noises whenever Weston asked for help moving supplies. Weston eventually produced a pistol and motioned me into the nearby trees, where we met several inhumanly tall, monstrously countenanced creatures who intoned unnerving syllables in a ghastly, unknown language. Sensing that my end credits were commencing to roll, I resolved that my screams would haunt these abominations to the end of their unearthly days.

And so on... it’s a special thrill to read the collaboration of these Gand masters!

Hagenart comi 12/12/19

More on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft

So last week we began a series on CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft
Usually when people publish a blog post on a topic, they draw upon years of professional experience and study, or upon painstaking research on the subject they wish to discuss. I’m saying this in a knowitall tone, as of if I’m an expert in these things, but I just recently found this out, in the last few days or so actually, because It did not occur to me to research the subject I wanted to write about until after I had attempted to write about it, that is until I re-read what I had written and found it to be paragraph after paragraph of utter nonsense without any discernible point. Appalled, I dug out the CS Lewis space trilogy and the Lovecraft compilation, and also searched the web to see what smart people had already said about CS Lewis and HP Lovecraft.  
I read some interesting stuff, all apparently written by Christians who ultimately disagreed with Lovecraft but still said nice things about his stories. Lovecraft depressed them, they all said, and then Lewis talked them away from the window. I completely agree with their immediate emotional reaction to reading Lovecraft, his stories will leave you with a feeling of queasy disquiet, and then Lewis inevitably reassures you. But his reassurance only works if you’re religious, it’s all about how god will take care of the scary stuff.  And so I have to wonder how come those religious people got depressed by Lovecraft at all. Don’t you have to find his point of view compelling to find it depressing and scary? 
If you believe in God, how can you be frightened of ghosts and spirits?   But if you believe in God, but are also frightened of supernatural gibberish, you may like to have protective mental walls around you, and Lewis paints a beautiful wall of stained glass with renaissance scenes all around the universe.  Wherever you go in his stories, you’re still in church. I do not personally like that feeling. My memories of church are of groaning inside while I  struggled to stay awake during the interminable sermons. No matter how compelling I find the imagery of his worlds, I find myself repeatedly disappointed by his mental cloistering of his own stories. But for a religious person, that is an intelligent religious person who reads and therefore probably thinks about things from time to time, I believe this cloistering is a comfort, a shelter. 
Lovecraft seems to completely understand the terror of ideas. His narrators often express a desire not to know what they have discovered. But Lovecraft was not his narrators, and he couldn’t possibly have agreed with that sentiment, since all the monsters in his stories came out of his own head.  What his narrators found horrible and uncanny, he may have found magical and beautiful.  His protagonists often end up embracing their monstrous, otherworldly fate. The narrator in Shadow over Innsmouth speaks euphorically of his future life as a grotesque fish-person, in the ending passages. The narrator in Mountains of Madness speaks of the Old Ones as fellow creatures, as “men, of a sort.”  And he waxes euphoric over the achievements and civilization of the “Great Race” in the Shadow Out of Time. It’s actually a little disturbing how sympathetic he is with aliens who switch minds with creatures against their will, but there’s an undeniable joy in his writing, a delight with the ideas for their own sake. I think Lovecraft secretly found the universe to be a much more wonderful place than he let’s on in his stories. But in his fiction he’s always speaking in character as the narrator, and his narrators are basically 19th century gentlemen, who see the world through a very moralistic lens.  Was that Lovecraft? It seems to be part of him, but he had an uncanny side, a side with tentacles dripping ichor and and scaly skin and multiple staring eyes.

Hagenart comic 12/03/19