Under your spell

One of the most interesting role-playing games out there is Mage: The Ascension. This is part of the World of Darkness, a shared world that dates back to the peak-Trent Reznor years of the 90s. The game centers on magical warfare between different camps of wizards, so obviously it's in the fantasy zone. But what's most interesting about it are the ways it's grounded in reality.

To begin with, there's the actual practice of magic in the game. You can't actually, for example, just point at someone and make them disappear to Elsewhere. People who have been doing magic for a very long time might be able to do something like that, but player characters start out as newbies, so it's out of their league. Besides which, big shows of force are called "vulgar" and the universe tends to punish them. So what the player's character actually does is a variety of small rites and procedures that may influence things in a supernatural way, but not so's anyone would notice.

Morality is relative, but the mages most aligned with "good" values of freedom and equality are in the Council of Nine Traditions. The Nine Traditions are aligned but varied. There's a shaman tradition, a witch tradition, a tradition that draws on the beliefs of Western religions, and a couple of "magic from science" traditions, for example.

The players on the other side(s) provide the second dose of realism. While the Nephandi are the most evil and the Marauders are probably the most dangerous, the most persistent opponents are the Technocracy. Descended from the groups who first invented money and agriculture, among other things, they've made their form of magic so commonly accepted that it just gets called "science" and "technology." The technocracy can be represented by telecoms who've vanished phone booths so that their mobile phones will have a place in every pocket, and pharmaceutical companies who can "treat" any idiosyncratic belief with SSRIs.

Are corporate America and the tech world literally run by sinister warlocks with a tight grip on arcane powers. No, I don't believe this. Again, not literally. But on another level, maybe? The COVID panic felt like something akin to the Technocracy flexing its muscles.

Young, man, there's no need to feel down

I was listening to a DJ today and could tell by her voice that she was in her twenties. At one point she said that she had "missed the blog era". I'd known for some time that blogging wasn't the craze it once was, but it hadn't occurred to me to think of it as a bygone era, one that youngsters don't recall. Welcome to my fossil collection.

That's as good a setup as any to a music post. I've been thinking about the late 60s emergence of Neil Young as a solo artist, something of a classic reversal. Just a couple of years earlier, he had been a guitarist and secondary vocalist in Buffalo Springfield. And in that time, at least as I see it, he was in Stephen Stills's shadow. Stills, who'd turned down the chance to be a Monkee*, had a great husky voice and a precocious collection of songs. Young was clearly talented, but seemed destined to be in the background.

Once the band broke up, things changed. Stills didn't stop being a good singer or songwriter. But it started to become apparent that the gawky Canadian was just on another level. Which might be why Young didn't have a consistent interest in being the fourth side of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. He was already flying.

*The guitarist job in the Monkees went to Stills's fellow Texan Mike Nesmith, although Stills sounds a lot more Texan than Nesmith when he talks.

Bye for now to the big blue box

One recent bit of news is that Doctor Who's 2026 Christmas special has been cancelled. With several other factors―lead Ncuti Gatwa leaving with no replacement, Russell T. Davies stepping down, Disney pulling its stake, etc.―this essentially means that the second age of Doctor Who is coming to a close. The age, that is, that started in 2005 when Christopher Eccleston debuted as the Ninth Doctor. 

There are many things that could be said about Doctor Who and the artistic decisions that led to this point. But what I feel more like talking about now is the Whovian culture war.

When I started paying attention to the fandom early in the century, when rumors started that the show would soon be revived, I found that a number were quite right wing. This is meant as a statement of fact, not an insult. These were often more personable than the average internet poster. But they had very set notions, one being how the Doctor should never be played by a woman or by a person of color. Now that both things have happened and the show has been canceled, you might expect them to be very smug. If you could still find them, that is.

These attitudes have more to do with history than anything else. Doctor Who has always been a fairly liberal enterprise, taking stands on war, pollution, and economic exploitation since the early 60s. This form of conservatism is really a kind of nostalgia for the British Empire. The Empire was dead by Doctor Who's 1963 premiere, being one big casualty of World War II. But it would stay in living memory for years afterward.

More recently a rival ideology has arisen amongst Who fans. Inevitable, perhaps. These have taken an extremely forward, borderline nihilistic line on social progress. Doctor Who must always make itself queerer and more rainbow-colored, in order to lead humanity to its post-gender and post-whiteness future.

The thing is that this newer ideology is just as much a product of historical forces as its opposite. It's a product of Britain's folding into the American Empire, and then copying the trends and manias that arise in the States.

And that historical circumstance is also changing. The 21st century's exact balance of power is still being decided. But what is for all intents and purposes certain is that China will ever rise as an economic and military power. Some others might as well. In any case, neither the UK nor the US will be an unrivaled power. If Doctor Who comes back for a third go-round―which is likely―it will be into another new world.

All the people

Leo XIV is not only the Pope. He is, of course, also the first American pope, as in, from the US. (Francis, as an Argentinian, was American in a more general sense.) That brings a couple of things to the fore, especially when he weighs in on something like AI.

Firstly, while various waves of immigration have made the US more Catholic in a demographic sense, it remains in a real sense a very Protestant country. A Catholic prelate reflects in public in what the right thing to do is, what it means to follow the example of Christ. But for those who believe on some level in predestination, this moral angst is faggoty at best and possibly blasphemous.

Secondly, more specifically, a kind of Protestant ethic―certainly not endemic to all Protestants, but prevalent―sees wealth as a virtue in itself and an earthly measure of wisdom. Thus Silicon Valley honchos have leveraged being billionaires with at least one trillionaire among them into a new status as public sages. This is not a first.

This thoughtful article gives a counter-read on the Dark Enlightenment, possibly the most common philosophy used in justifying the elevation of tech CEOs into a new aristocracy. Which is something that they support for obvious reasons, but there's no reason for the rest of us to roll over for it. At the very least we can dare to call it the Dork Enlightenment. 

Formidable guardian

King Edmund, also considered a saint, remains an important figure in Bury St. Edmunds, which is named after him. It's a rather wild story. The Vikings killed Edmund for not renouncing his religion and threw his head into the briars. There, the head was guarded by a wolf, and became a relic.

Doris Zinkeisen does justice to it here. She was a theatrical costume designer in addition to being a painter. A sense of the theatrical is what it needs. You can hardly miss that the head is in a spotlight.

Back & forth

Earlier today I read Lisa Selin Davis on Democrats and gender medicine. That's a subject that I'm not going to go into because I don't think too often about it. But it did make me think about debate, and what's happened to it.

Public debates on hot topics became a big thing (again) in the 60s. And they were not the kinds of debate where liberals tiptoe around other liberals. Very often what you'd see is, "Norman Mailer and Random Black Panther call each other the Antichrist, agree women belong in the kitchen." You don't miss it until it's gone. 

And nobody expected it to ever be gone. Because what it was was open argument. Whether or not they had explicitly agreed to disagree, everyone knew they'd be disagreeing. There was no reason to hold back, to be anything less than honest.

"Liberals tiptoeing around each other" was more a feature of turn-of-the-millennium rhetoric. And of course smartphones have made the problem worse because the groups who discuss things amongst themselves are now so much more homogeneous.  And then when a truly extreme idea arises, no one knows what to do with it. Except maybe give in.

Shifty character

I'm currently reading The Impostor Heiress, by Annie Reed. It's about Cassie Chadwick, who was born Elizabeth Bigley.

Chadwick was Canadian by birth, but mostly operated in the bigger cities of Ohio. She had a varied career, which included both a pretty much run-of-the-mill check kiting scheme and a clairvoyant act. Her biggest caper was attempting to pass herself off as Andrew Carnegie's illegitimate daughter.

How did all of this work out for her? Not well. While there are careers that strive for immortality, impostors and con artists prefer to remain anonymous. This doesn't really require explanation. But if Cassie Chadwick wasn't exactly a success in her choice of criminal enterprise, she did manage to make the world a more colorful place while she was in it.