nothing here but satanic artworks
issue 265, 18th August, 2024
CJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. This time around, no only is it not just me, but we also have returning guest Maddison Stoff on board.
With the 5 of us we’ve created a bumper issue, so I’ve decided to cut some bits and pieces from the email, so if you want to see the full issue, click the “View in Browser” link at the top of this email.
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The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Maddison Stoff (MXS) - Author, critic, and occasional musician. The girl she tells you not to worry about.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Middle-aged goth.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, world eater.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts.
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: It’s Oil That Makes LA Boil - Jonathan Blake at Noema
The north side is entirely taken up by a multistory office tower. Behind the dirty-beige tower’s open picket black metal fence, the lawn is mowed but there are few other signs of life. The gates are all padlocked and the guard post is empty — at least on two recent visits. There are no windows in the building’s exterior, nor does it have a roof. These features would be weird for an office building or a residence but totally normal, I suppose, for a structural shell meant to conceal at least 50 oil and gas wells.
The Packard well site, built by Standard Oil in 1967, once had a visitors’ lobby and viewing gallery to show off its operations to a curious public, but they have been closed for many years. From the sidewalk, you can make out the remnants of the informational displays through the lobby’s grimy glass walls, but the only front-facing exterior sign today reads “private property.” Walking around the whole site, a pedestrian could easily have no clue what’s happening within — which is, of course, the whole point.
A piece on oil drilling in LA, with lots of interesting little details, like the oil wells hidden inside fake buildings or behind other structures so residents don't realise what is happening in, or near, their communities.
Currently writing a novel set in LA, so I can see this getting at least a mention…
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CJW: ‘Massive disinformation campaign’ is slowing global transition to green energy - Fiona Harvey at The Guardian
Selwin Hart, the assistant secretary general of the UN, said that talk of a global “backlash” against climate action was being stoked by the fossil fuel industry, in an effort to persuade world leaders to delay emissions-cutting policies. The perception among many political observers of a rejection of climate policies was a result of this campaign, rather than reflecting the reality of what people think, he added.
Every fossil fuel company executive, board member, owner, etc for the past 40 years should be strung up, company funds and holdings expropriated, and the companies nationalised with a view to rapid shutdown. Like, if they're going to continue to fight against a future where we can live relatively stable lives, we should fight against them having any sort of future.
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The Cure for Disposable Plastic Crap Is Here—and It’s Loony - Clive Thompson at Wired - CJW: Ignore the cringe headline, this is actually an interesting piece on alternatives to single-use plastics.
“Hot weather inflamed by carbon pollution killed nearly 50,000 people in Europe last year, with the continent warming at a much faster rate than other parts of the world, research has found.” Heat aggravated by carbon pollution killed 50,000 in Europe last year – study By Ajit Niranjan The Guardian
Inside Silicon Valley’s Grand Ambitions To Control Our Planet’s Thermostat by Stephen Robert Miller at Noema
Geopolitics & Empire
DCH: ‘Order from Amazon’: How tech giants are storing mass data for Israel’s war by Yuval Abraham at 972 Magazine
According to multiple sources, the exponential capacity of the AWS public cloud system allows the army to have “endless storage” for holding intelligence on almost “everyone” in Gaza. One source who used the cloud-based system during the current war described making “orders from Amazon” for information while carrying out their operational tasks, and working with two screens — one connected to the army’s private systems, and the other connected to AWS.
Amazon is a direct participant in the genocide in Gaza.
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Video of Sexual Abuse at Israeli Prison Is Just Latest Evidence Sde Teiman Is a Torture Site - Jonah Valdez at The Intercept
The U.S. Fueled Saudi Jets Bombing Yemen. Now the Saudis Won't Pay Their Gas Bill. - Nick These at The Intercept - CJW: 9/11, Jamal Khashoggi, 15 million in unpaid military debt, and still the Biden administration is desperately simping for Saudi Arabia.
https://www.972mag.com/pezeshkian-israel-iran-haniyeh-war/ - Lior Sternfield at +972 Magazine
What Tim Walz Could Mean For Kamala Harris’s Stance on Gaza and Israel By Jonah Valdez The Intercept (DCH: I’m holding out hope this signals a turn toward a real ceasefire.)
Armed and Underground: Inside the Turbulent, Secret World of an American Militia by Joshua Kaplan at Propublica
Science & Space
DCH: Mars water: Reservoir found deep in Martian rocks BBC
However, they point out, the location of this Martian groundwater is not good news for billionaires with Mars colonisation plans who might want to tap into it.
"It's sequestered 10-20km deep in the crust," explained Prof Manga.
Insert image of Nelson pointing at laughing at Elon Musk.
Tech & Design
DCH: Monopoly Money By Edward Zitron
And Google, no doubt, will fight this ruling to the very end, using every possible avenue of appeal until they’re either successful or run out of options. It will use every trick in the book — looking for procedural errors, or errors in Mehta’s interpretation of the law — to overturn the ruling, or to water down any punishment.
And I’m a little worried it might work.
Me too. I haven’t spoken to anyone in the industry who actually thinks this will hit Google as hard as MSFT got hit back in the day. Paris Marx is not hopeful. Hopefully we’re all wrong. I want to be wrong.
So start deleting shit. Do it now. Think deeply about what it is you really need — be it the accounts you have and the services you need — and take action.
They’re not scared of you, and they should be.
Ed’s right. You can’t wait for the courts to do something about all of this. Hit them where it hurts… in the data.
“Organizing language by probability rather than intention produces a kind of pure entropy, the heat death of consciousness.” - Rob Horning
‘This is the beginning of the end of the generative AI boom’ - Brian Merchant at Blood in the Machine - MXS: I’ve argued for a while now that “generative AI” is going to be the next cryptocurrency/NFTs, just another collapse-era tech scam in the history of collapse-era tech scams that hopefully someone will be around to talk about the implications of in the future. It looks as though the people funding it are waking up to it too. This essay has a wealth of information about how/why it’s happening right now, though I disagree that there was ever much there in terms of social utility compared to the other tech scams mentioned in the article.
Inside the FBI's Dashboard for Wiretapping the World By Joseph Cox at 404 Media
Just the headlines:
DOJ, states win Google search antitrust case - Josh Sisco at Yahoo News
Society & The Culture
MJW: Neil Gaiman: Three Women Accuse Author of Sexual Assault by Daniel Kreps at Rolling Stone
Claire said at the time, she kissed him back despite feeling “gross,” because “it was Neil Gaiman,” describing the power she said he had over her because of his status. “He said to me, ‘I’m a very wealthy man, and I’m used to getting what I want,’” Claire recounted on the podcast. Sometime later, Claire said she sent Gaiman a letter expressing her feelings about her experience. “His response caught me totally off guard,” she said of when they spoke on the phone following the letter. His apology felt so genuine. He told me he had no idea, and he wished I had told him sooner. He said he was glad that I told him so he could learn.”
This is pretty gross and a little harrowing, and you might not want to read it. I’ve been a little rocked by this whole thing. Why is it always the ones who claim allyship who end up being the worst of them all?
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'Amid the chaos of far-right protests and violence I saw the best of Bristol' - Tristan Cork at the Bristol Post - CJW: It's heartening to see regular people coming out and standing against the threat of fascist violence. This was the first instance I saw, but since this showdown in Bristol we've seen more folks across the UK coming out in droves and utterly outnumbering the fascists.
‘Is JK Rowling's brain actually full of black mould? An investigation’ - Patrick Lenton at Heterosexual Nonsense - MXS: Twitter is a cesspool, but being on it as a trans woman in the middle of 2024 has a kind of “we’re not stuck here with you, you’re stuck here with us,” energy that leads to funny memes from time to time. Perhaps the best one in the last few months has been the theorycrafting around a profile picture JK Rowling posted recently that may or may not have black mould in the background, and what that may or may not say about her slide into transphobia over the last few years. Patrick’s essay on the subject for his newsletter (where I’ve also written essays a couple of times,) is hilarious and definitely worth your time. The newsletter itself is worth it too, paying (mostly local,) queer authors to talk about queer issues that wouldn’t really get much coverage anywhere else.
‘What I’m Reading’ - MXS: Melbourne trans author Amelia C. Winter writes for Brisbane-based literary magazine Meanjin on autofiction as a literary mode for trans people and the flattening effect it’s had on trans literature as a concept worldwide. As well as (somewhat ironically,) serving as a good primer/introduction to what “trans literature” even is, I think it’s also an important essay to consider in the wake of organised censorship campaigns against even the most benign trans books in Australia and overseas.
“Attorneys for Disney World are seeking to dismiss a wrongful death lawsuit brought by a husband over the death of his wife last year because of the terms and conditions he agreed to when signing up for Disney+ streaming service several years earlier.” Disney seeks to dismiss wrongful death lawsuit over widower’s Disney+ free trial by Anna Betts at The Guardian
Health, Cooking, and Related
DCH: Why Does Ozempic Cure All Diseases? By Scott Alexander at astral codex ten
Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s,alcoholism, and drug addiction.
Jesus. This stuff already sounded like a scammy wonder drug and this does not do it any favours… good to see a rationalist try to answer why (admittedly without much success). Medicine isn’t always great at explaining why something works the way it does.
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DCH: A Logo on a Prosthesis Is Like a Tattoo You Didn’t Ask For By Chloé Valentine Toscano at The Atlantic
I’ve had this experience myself. Like many other amputees, after seeing a cosmetic prosthesis that reminded me most of a severed hand, I opted for a more mechanical mien. But plastered across the top of the bionic hand I wanted, in traffic-cone orange and black, was the device’s name, bebionic. Wearing parts that nearly all have logos on them feels like someone else now owns bits and pieces of me. The silicone liner that my prosthesis attaches to has a QR code near the top and willowwood printed along its length. My elbow joint reads ottobock, and the adjuster used to tighten my socket has boa running across it in silver letters. Imagine someone approaching you with a tattoo gun and asking to put a QR code on your body. Such marks on a prosthesis send the message that the limb isn’t fully yours.
An absolutely eye-opening article. Hopefully prosthetic manufacturers take this sentiment on-board in the future.
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Just the headlines:
FDA rejects MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD By Berkeley Lovelace Jr. NBC News (DCH: Pity. This looked like it was really making headway.)
Meta Allows Drug Ads Selling Everything from Opioids to Cocaine at Tech Transparency Project
Labour & Economics
"The ineffectiveness of “cutting-edge” military technology shown in Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the spillover conflicts undermines the notion that the military-industrial complex aims to win wars. Instead, it reveals its true objective: profiting from ongoing conflicts." - The Incompetence of Masters of War - Samuel Geddes at Jacobin
The Process
MXS: I’ve been writing lots of collab stories this year, something I’ve been doing with other local trans writers since around 2019 or so. Generally, I set my fiction in its own continuous universe for several psychological and metafictional reasons I mentioned last time I was featured in this newsletter. Most of my collaborations are the same.
But lately I’ve been branching out from that a little into side universes, including a new isolated timespace of self-contained short fiction I’m working on with Corey at the moment that orbits around transgenderism, self-aware weapons, and cybernetics, which hopefully you’ll see more of in the coming months.
I like it because not only is it a good way to get out of my own head, as doing so much work on Patreon has made my fiction increasingly intertextual and self-referential, (for better and for worse,) but also since it’s a fun way to write that offers both of us the chance to tell new stories that we probably wouldn’t have come up with otherwise.
As well as the short stories I’m working on with Corey, I’ve also written literary fiction and humorous space operas about a non-binary cable repair person with my partner Josie Suzanne, a poet whose work mixes sci-fi and other pop cultural imagery with politics, her life experiences, and philosophy in way that’s similar in focus but different in style to my own.
I think I like the sense of cultural history and community that working with other writers close to me builds too? Writing often feels like such a solitary activity, so it’s nice to come out with these hybrid stories we can point to as a symbol for the broader culture that we’re actually a part of.
The Self-Promotion
MXS: Avast! Pirate Stories from Transgender Authors & My Patreon
Earlier this year saw the release of Avast! Pirate Stories from Transgender Authors, an anthology released by Fremantle Press, and edited by Michael Earp and Alison Evan. It features a story of mine, Catgrrls to the Front, about a chronically ill, non-binary woman with synthetic dysphoria (when you want to be a robot so badly it hurts, a subject that I’ve written on before), in a gang of disabled trans drone pirates who steal medical supplies from rich people and corporations for distribution to the disabled poor. The rest of the anthology includes fantastic contributions from other writers in different genres and even formats (verse and comic for instance). Order it online or you might be able to find it in bookstores around Australia.
I also have a wealth of queer and disability inclusive anarchist sci-fi available from Patreon, where for just $1 (US) per month you can read almost every short story I’ve ever published, a couple of good/interesting older ones that never got released and multiple ongoing sequential narratives I add new entries to from time to time. I work hard to make it worth subscribing to, adding new material regularly including essays on my life and literary praxis for people on the higher tiers as well.
CJW: I can highly recommend both Avast! and Maddison's Patreon - Catgrrls to the Front does something really interesting with pronouns that I am absolutely going to steal, and her Patreon has so many great sci-fi stories in the archives, not to mention the new ones to come.
Books
MJW: Eaters of the Dead by Michael Crichton
I love The 13th Warrior, so I decided to read the book it was based on, Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead. Many reviews of the audiobook gave it few stars because it was written like a history book, and it is - as if the OG travel writer, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, wrote a book about hanging out with some vikings in the 10th century, and it’s then being annotated by some historian dude in the 20th century. So, I dug it okay. We join Ahmad as he is sent, at the behest of a soothsayer, as the 13th warrior (hence the movie with Antonio Banderas as our man Ahmad) to slay mist-monsters who prey on a village in the north. Anyway, beware if you don’t like dry accounts of viking adventures, also if you have issue with the constant ‘ravishment’ of ‘slave girls’, which I do.
Movies + TV
LZ: I, Tonya
I learned recently that this movie was "promoted" into the femcel must-watch list. So me, an absolute sucker for this kind of shit, decided to finally watch it. And after doing so, I don't really understand how the film ended up there. Ok, I see that the movie portrays the life of an ice skater that has been abused her whole life, first by her mother and then by her husband, and how she still succeeded and achieved things other women in her country (the US) never had. That's pretty empowering, as well as Tonya not being a girly girl, but a "proud redneck". Fuck the coquette girlies, all praise to the foul mouthed women who will hit you back if you mess with them – just please know when to leave and leave for real.
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MXS: The Curse
I’m a little late to the party on this one, ironically because I’m such a huge fan of Nathan Fielder’s work in general that I wanted to watch it with someone because I knew it would probably end up being important to me. Part drama, part psychological horror, part social commentary and part very black cringe comedy, the show is about a couple of rich, Millennial-coded showrunners doing a house flipper show about building eco-friendly homes in a lower income hispanic community that they’re gentrifying while lying to themselves that they’re helping instead. I’m only 3-4 episodes in so far but every one has been so densely packed with narrative, political and even psychological subtext that I already want to gush about it even though I’m barely halfway through it yet. It’s probably the smartest bit of television I’ve ever seen and one of the few pieces of visual media more generally that takes up all of the attention in my ADHD-addled brain whenever I turn it on, and a damning (but empathic,) take down of a certain kind of narrow-minded liberalism too. I highly recommend you check it out.
Games
LZ: Baldur's Gate 3, or my new obsession
I am always late to hypes. I am that kind of annoying person who always distrusts hyped stuff but eventually might fall for them. It was like that with Lana Del Rey, Overwatch, Diablo, and now Baldur's Gate 3.
I never played the other games, but I started playing DnD recently, and the DM (dungeon master, or the person who narrates the adventure and helps check if your actions succeed or not) told me that BG3 was just like DnD since you also roll dice, use the same spells and weapons. So, why not? Also, the cover features a guy with silver hair and red eyes – what else do I need to convince me?
So yes, I confess I have been playing this fucking game every day, sometimes during lunch breaks, for 5-7 hours. I am absolutely obsessed with the silver haired guy, who is named Astarion and is of course a vampire. I feel like a teenager again getting pumped up by anime characters and going after fanfiction, except that you kinda live the fanfiction by playing the game.
And the game is so nuanced that even the smallest decisions, outcomes, or dialogues that you have can influence a lot the paths you may take, the characters you may meet, the quests you may receive. I have one billion saves because I want to go back and try everything before going on with the story. That happened mostly after I realized Astarion wasn't that much into my character, so I started over from a certain point in the game.
The major flaw is, however, that the game itself has very few automatic quick saves, so if you are a bit of a control freak or hates to go much further back in time after you die, then you'll be pressing F5 (hot key for quicksave) all the time. Ah, there's also the possibility of playing online with other people, but I didn't try that yet as I prefer fictional characters (lol kill me please).
Another note is that I started playing this game in an attempt to kind of run away from my real life problems. When you are an adult, you realize that sometimes you can't do much besides waiting to see how things will unroll. But if you are anxious, like me, living through that is absolutely painful, so I need to have a distraction, something that pulls me out of real life… it can be a book, a series, a game… I also learned from a friend that a friend of hers just broke up with her boyfriend and started playing BG3, got so immersed that she's coping better with that.
That's possibly not good advice, as in, how to get away from reality, but honestly sometimes you just can't bear and I think that's ok. I had mentioned this to a former therapist when I was obsessed with Medieval Dynasty and he seemed to be ok with that, even joked about wishing me luck on being a medieval peasant.
The point is knowing that it's not true and not asking that reality bends to meet your expectations coming from fiction, and I know this is something that can be not so easy for some people, so yea, careful with this one haha.
Music
MXS: Don’t Hurt Girls When You Dance (Or Any Other Time)
A lot of trans woman think that Kurt Cobain was also a trans woman and this heartfelt article by trans writer Juno Stump details the case for why. I think in the wake of our ongoing erasure/enforced otherness from history that re-evaluations of assumed cis male artists like Cobain are important, not just for the affirmation that their reinterpretation might provide our closeted young selves, but also to combat the sense that some cis people have of transness as a new phenomena instead of just a heavily suppressed one. I’d love to see an article like this on Chester from Linkin Park too, because the lyrics of a few of his songs I liked as an angry, dysphoric teenager read an awful lot like gender dysphoria to my adult eyes…
CJW: I have a strange relationship to Nirvana in that it was my sister's favourite band when I was too young to understand their music. So while I respect their music and what they tried to do inside a music industry that was desperate to commodify them endlessly, they were never mine.
That said, this piece by Juno Stump is absolutely fantastic, and I think undeniable. But I would say that.
Art
LZ: Joseph Rops and his satanic, pornographic decadent artworks (NSFW)
I am currently reading this book called Satanic Feminism and at some point there's a chapter about Decadence as an art movement, and how this Belgian artist represented a lot of its mood in, well, rather pornographic illustrations. Almost a proto-Giger, he adds penises everywhere he can, but it's mostly the illustrations featuring women and the devil which caught my attention.
The Memes
