The Lizard Thing, part 3
in which we meet some redcaps
Super-quick, tonight is our monthly game night at Gate City Growlers, 6:30-9pm. Wear whatever headgear you like, preferably unbloodied.
While I was poking around, I ran across Project Redcap, which is a fan site for a great old tabletop RPG called Ars Magica, which recently got a 5th edition using an open Creative Commons license (for the creators out there). There’s also a thematically related board game, which we may try out at a future session.
Which makes me wonder: Would you all be interested in reading reviews of these games we’re playing? There’s a lot of that kind of thing out there already.
And as if you didn’t know, tomorrow is Election Day. I was punning around with alternatives on RhymeZone (Erection Day — ew) and discovered that eclection is a recognized word meaning “eclectic selection,” as well as
a British rock band from the late 60s
a coffee shop / gallery in Kernersville.
Who knew?
Cartoon Politics
There are many aspects of the whole QAnon phenomenon that I have little to no personal experience of. I was never on 4chan, or 8chan, or 8kun, or any of those anything-for-attention message boards. So I found the documentary Feels Good Man, which chronicles the rise of Pepe the Frog from his creator Matt Furie’s hand-scanned MySpace page to becoming the go-to meme for the alt-right, to be really helpful.
In England, the acronym was NEET: Not in Education, Employment, or Training. In Japan the word was hikikomori. Furie called it Boys’ Club, a comic about four dudes in their 20s smoking pot and eating pizza (like the Ninja Turtles, but lazier). When they collected it, Fantagraphics called it “a stoner classic for the Tumblr generation.”
I was impressed that the film makers went and found Susan Blackmore, the pink-haired social scientist who first made her name as a serious paranormal investigator. Having given up on that, she then wrote a book called The Meme Machine, which I read as a postdoc in Houston and still have a copy of around here somewhere. I did not cite it in Spelunking the Noosphere because I thought a later book called The Electric Meme was more complete.
Anyway, Furie was pretty hands-off at first, and by the time his creation had gone so viral that non-losers were using it, the cultural tug-of-war doomed his attempts to ca$h in with a clothing line. The 4chan types decided to poison the well, in
“a classic punk response — we’ll make things so offensive that you can’t possibly co-opt them!”
Well, guess what? Cultural drift is a thing. What used to be over-the-line offensive can become conventional wisdom in a remarkably short time. Irony can melt away in the heat of competitive repetition.
By this time, the 80s Revenge of the Nerds prank wars had become the Beta Uprising lets-literally-go-shoot-people rhetoric.
It’s not just that the memes generate violence;
it’s that the violence becomes a meme.
The violence itself becomes an imitatable act, a venue for status competition. And having the actual President of the United States of America re-tweet one of your stupid memes must feel pretty sweet, status-wise. Pretty motivating. Hearing your meme shouted out by an anonymous heckler holding a Harry Potter wand during the opponent’s speech, though? Priceless. Intoxicating.
And then when the media took it up as a boogeyman? Even better, because they could bask in the fear of those they hated AND mock them for being afraid at the same time.
“So then it started to get strange”
Somebody on the chans, nobody knows who, found an ancient Egyptian frog god whose name was Kek. He looked like an anthropomorphic figure with a frog’s head rather like Pepe. Obviously that had to be shared and . . . the chans went ape.
Some of them became convinced that they could actually affect reality through focused willpower. And what should they use their newly discovered magic powers for? Trolling the world by electing Trump.
Meanwhile, having Pepe designated as a hate symbol meant that Furie’s clothing line was sitting in boxes in his neighbor’s garage, and they were $45,000 in the hole. So rather than suing the Anti-Defamation League , he teamed up with them for a “Save Pepe” campaign, and when that didn’t work, he killed off the character.
That never works.
And then there’s some crypto tech-bro in a Lamborghini? What the hell?
Switching gears just a bit, here’s our previous introduction to Pyrite the goblin illusionist
and the first two installments of the first story in this hopefully ongoing serial.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand here we go with Part 3. Enjoy.
The Lizard Thing, part 3
by Randall Hayes
Quetzal found me, days later, standing on a stepladder in front of a giant-sized wall of slate in a classroom, wielding a piece of chalk in each hand, of different colors, with another in my mouth. Kumquat, my favorite.
“You’ll spoil your supper,” she called, “snacking on minerals like that.”
I ignored her. The multi-colored mind map on the board extended beyond arms’ reach in four directions, a graph of labeled nodes and lines. Some of the nodes were buyers of my amulets, which I had started advertising more broadly to draw people in (and raised the price!). Other nodes in other colors were victims, people who had been targets of accusation or violence. Still other were the accusers and aggressors.
I slid down the ladder and backed away from the board to get it all into my visual field.
Quetzal, clearly bored, was preening her primaries with oil from a gland on her chin. “A little thinking music?” I asked, to occupy her more constructively.
Her chest swelled out to about twice its normal size, and she began to whistle in two different tones at once. Where I have only one set of vocal cords, she has two, located lower in the airways where they branch. That and her long neck, with its adjustable resonance, means she has an amazing range.
She kept it simple, letting the melodies skirl repetitively around one another while she kept a simple beat by clicking her toe-talons on the stone floor.
“Excellent,” I murmured, already prepping a spell. “No dancing, though, I need my visual system focused up there.”
My illusion spell used my diagram as a scaffold, peeling it off the board into the air, but then expanded it outwards into three dimensions, so I could rotate it, look at it from different angles, change colors and distances between the vertices — generally massage it until some kind of pattern popped out at me. None did.
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