The Digital Antiquarian on Wing Commander, ancestor of all popamole

[octavius]

I've followed this guy for years and read god-knows many of his articles, but I can't take it anymore. The signal-to-noise is simply to low, and as a non-native English speaker I find that for the last 3 or 4 years his prose has gotten more complex and roundabout in a pretentious way. Sometimes painful to read. Feels like eating twelve boxes of fine chocolates at the same time. Too much. Not tasty anymore.

He's just woke, man. Can't read his stuff too - constant uses of "she/her" instead of "he/him" alone makes it hard to read.

I wonder if Maher is her real name.

 

[A horse of course]

Roberts is one of the early examples of a really terrible trend in games, where they get made by people who really wanted to make movies but knew they weren't good enough to ever make it in Hollywood.

That's the traditional narrative regarding him. I don't necessarily disagree, and post Wing Commander movie Roberts truly tried his hardest to ram into the scene through shady shit and married your garden variety failed-actress skank. Roberts had also real skills in gamemaking when he got into Origin, he wasn't a failed screenwriter/Academia reject like our contemporary crop of "video game writing teams".

Wing Commander 1999 from what I read tho, strikes me more as an almost "honest" Neil Breen type of thing: he made big money with something else, gaming, and wanted to earnestly show the world how it was done. Maybe it's me, but there's an honest attempt to make a real movie in the dismal failure, he simply lacked the skills.

Contemporary Roberts is just a grifter, tho.

Sandy is NOT a skank!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Dayyālu]

Sandy is NOT a skank!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I stand corrected.

"Softcore fetish porn star" is more accurate.

 

[Calthaer]

I try not to say negative things about people, but I cannot fucking stand this guy. Everything he writes is trashing people who are better than him. And he's so goddamn smug. Who the fuck is he? He's just some guy with a blog and he acts like you're supposed to respect his (usually really fucking moronic) opinions about stuff that he usually doesn't understand.

What irritates me the most is how his video game blog always posts trying to get you to read his other blog. While this guy was writing about Sid Meier and getting into Civilization, he started to wax woke and pontificate about history and how awful Trump & Republicans are. Then he retreated to his other blog to write a thirty-entry tome about the Oracle of Delphi and he's come back to his main blog sounding like all the tweed-wearing suits he must surely be reading for his ancient history thing. Maybe he's trying to re-write the history of gaming so that it's more woke? He can cast aspersions on the classics and get everyone to play more "enlightened" modern stuff.

 

[Nutria]

Where he lost me was early on when he called Ray Bradbury an "arch-conservative" or something like that and treated Fahrenheit 451 like it was Mein Kampf or something. It was so out of nowhere. His whole shtick is that he's putting these games in the context of their time but then he says Fahrenheit 451 was right-wing because... uhh... oh, I get it. It's about free speech and the left is against free speech now so they're going to retroactively pretend that in the 1950s only "arch-conservatives" cared about free speech. Bitch should watch Manchurian Candidate a few times.

he started to wax woke and pontificate about history and how awful Trump & Republicans are

As someone who hates Trump, I can tell you the last fucking thing I need in my life is some whiny far-left dickhead writing a blog about how ACKSHUALLY Trump is bad because Marx said so or something.

 

[Dayyālu]

Where he lost me was early on when he called Ray Bradbury an "arch-conservative" or something like that and treated Fahrenheit 451 like it was Mein Kampf or something.

Ah, if he remember right he hates/hated Bradbury because it was "too pulp" and "too focused on defending an outdated concept of culture" while 1984 and Orwell was of course masterful and believable. Also, attractive female characters, baaaad.

I'd seriously wonder if nowadays he would revise his opinion as 1984 is nowadays a fetish for /pol/ wingnuts of every deranged variant. Sooner or later Orwell too will become unpalatable by association, I guess.

 

[Calthaer]

As someone who hates Trump, I can tell you the last fucking thing I need in my life is some whiny far-left dickhead writing a blog about how ACKSHUALLY Trump is bad because Marx said so or something.

I'm over-dramatizing it a little bit, because usually it took the form of snide comments that clearly referenced his "movement" but not by name...things like this:

Still, even at the time of the game’s release, when the American right tended to be more trusting of science and objective truth than they’ve become today

...or, in general, things like his muckraking hit piece on Daryl Gates (https://www.filfre.net/2019/07/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama/)...
...or his general denigration of Reagan (https://www.filfre.net/2015/01/t-plus-5-bombs-in-space/ among other places)...

Like most leftists, he just can't seem to shut up about politics even when he's talking about video games. I like to play games to get away from that tripe, not purée and swill it alongside.

 

[Nutria]

This is exactly what I'm talking about. I am by no fucking stretch of the imagination a fan of Daryl Gates but that was the last straw for me, when I realized I hated this asshole even more than Daryl Gates. What happened in Los Angeles in 1992 was ethnic cleansing of Asians through arson and murder. You can't just spin that away because you're a racist and don't care about Asians. He reminds me of a lot of people I know where their entire personality is trying to be as far left as possible because they don't really care about ideas, they just don't want to be left out of the whole punk rock scene. Now you can do that if you're an instagram thot or a 15-year old, but you can't do that when you're pushing out these really long and tedious blog posts and acting like you're some kind of fucking intellectual.

As for the Reagan thing, again, I'm not a fan of his, but the idea that he was in love with nuclear weapons and the Soviets really were the good guys is Q-Anon-level Flat Earth delusional bullshit.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I've followed this guy for years and read god-knows many of his articles, but I can't take it anymore. The signal-to-noise is simply to low, and as a non-native English speaker I find that for the last 3 or 4 years his prose has gotten more complex and roundabout in a pretentious way. Sometimes painful to read. Feels like eating twelve boxes of fine chocolates at the same time. Too much. Not tasty anymore.

spot on. i thought i was the master of unnecessary convoluted but damn, this guy is on a complely different level.

I never got into Wing Commander (the gameplay never clicked with me properly)

shame. the first one (the only one available on amiga) was so good that in turn i got so good at it i routinely lost missiles engaged on me and had them lock enemies (something not even freespace 2 lets) and could finish the whole game by destroying every single enemy. alone. without wingman who i killed at chapter start. it's where the "mad max" accompanying "hellfire" was born, because the game requested a first and second name with the callsign.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

What irritates me the most is how his video game blog always posts trying to get you to read his other blog. While this guy was writing about Sid Meier and getting into Civilization, he started to wax woke and pontificate about history and how awful Trump & Republicans are. Then he retreated to his other blog to write a thirty-entry tome about the Oracle of Delphi and he's come back to his main blog sounding like all the tweed-wearing suits he must surely be reading for his ancient history thing. Maybe he's trying to re-write the history of gaming so that it's more woke? He can cast aspersions on the classics and get everyone to play more "enlightened" modern stuff.

Whoa, I didn't realize all that "Analog Antiquarian" stuff was actually about something. I thought it was about vinyl adventures or a podcast or something. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the same for quite a few of his readers. Someone who already constantly has errors in his recent history has no business in handling ancient history. Its like hiring Jason Voorhees to be a high school janitor. As I was reading this I was surprised to see the guy has a Twitter, and even moreso surprised to see he isn't constantly spouting politics on it.

Also, did he really use "arch-conservative"? I didn't know people seriously used that, I only ever heard it used in the game Liberal Crime Squad, a joke game, the only place that term belongs.

 

[MRY]

Where he lost me was early on when he called Ray Bradbury an "arch-conservative" or something like that and treated Fahrenheit 451 like it was Mein Kampf or something.

Ah, if he remember right he hates/hated Bradbury because it was "too pulp" and "too focused on defending an outdated concept of culture" while 1984 and Orwell was of course masterful and believable.

I dug up his article, and while my own take on Bradbury had always been a bit mixed (loved some of the stories in The October Country and Something Wicked This Way Comes when I was a kid, but didn't like Martian Chronicles; enjoyed an audiobook of Fahrenheit 451 recently, which I had avoided after disliking Martian Chronicles. I found his article quite off-putting, and the political claim seemed implausible to me. So I went out and got The Bradbury Chronicles, which I've just about finished reading. It's an "authorized" biography, so it is something of a hagiography; but I don't need to rely on the author's characterization since the facts--and the characterization of sources the author quotes--are much more compelling.

In sum: the DA Bradbury article is insane. I had not appreciated how acclaimed Bradbury was in his own time, not just by the genre crowd, but by the snobbiest of the snobby -- Harper's, The New Yorker, public intellectuals, academics, etc. He was acclaimed not just as a story writer and novelist, but also for radio and screen plays -- and, again, acclaimed not just by your Harryhausen types but by Hitchcock, Welles, Huston, etc. Each chapter of the book starts with another big name lavishing praise of Bradbury: Wozniak, King, Spielberg, etc. But, again, the point is not that he was a huge inspiration to geeks everywhere; it's that the ultra elite snobs of the world, people who occupy a stratosphere into which DA would never be permitted, no matter what Pegasus he mounted, believed Bradbury to be "a true poet," "a master of plotting," "one of the greatest writers of the 20th century," "the equal of Poe," etc.

(I will address the political point in a moment.)

So, what I would say is: DA's article represents the ugliest kind of tourism, the kind that DA would call "ugly Americanism" no doubt, where, visiting someone else's home, you scream about why you can't find the food you like, sneer at the backwards culture and primitive rituals, gawp and leer at the local women, perhaps remark how the children would be cute if they didn't grow up to be so hideous -- that is his review of Bradbury. There is not even the faintest effort to understand the culture toward which he is directing his contempt.

To be more concrete: DA has basically taken the position that, having found something not to his taste in Bradbury, the explanation is not that something is underdeveloped in his tastes, but that everyone who loved Bradbury is wrong -- not just the scum-of-the-earth nerds who DA is so desperate to distance himself from, but also the top-flight critics who praised Bradbury to high heaven. Every single one of them was praising as poetry a style that actually just sucked; every single one of them was praising as richly psychological characters who actually were just "manic pixie dreamgirls"; every single one of them was praising as masterfully plotted stories that were really just trite.

I mean, it's possible that some dude with a blog actually knows better than all of those critics. Why not? But it seems to me that, as a dork on a message board myself, the better posture is one of humility: rather than shielding oneself from the pleasure the work might bring with the armor of contempt, perhaps, let your guard down, ask: "Why do these people praise it? Why do they love it?" As when you visit someone else's home, you don't demand that it conform to your taste; the point of the visit is to broaden yourself, not to narrow the foreign land.

Now, as for politics, among the things Bradbury did was be one of the few public dissenters from a vote to ban blacklisted screenwriters from the WGA, pen in the 1950s short stories about racial prejudice, deportation, and McCarthyism -- all viewed as career-ending by various agents. Many of his stories could find publication only in far-left magazines (I believe one in The Nation) even after he had established himself with stories published in Harper's, New Yorker, Mademoiselle, etc. (Fahrenheit 451 could find publication, initially, only in Playboy.) Of course 1950s liberal politics were (along some dimensions) less left-wing than 2020 politics. But the point is that Bradbury espoused left-wing views when doing so carried real risk, rather than as a means of protection (as appears to be the case with DA).

Taken together, I think DA's piece of Bradbury represents one of the worst kinds of mentalities -- the coupling of the egocentric view of art (pushed on people of his and my generation) in which the reader's impulsive reaction is paramount with an iconoclastic view of art in which the destruction of anything that is considered canonical is presumptively good. If you don't immediately enjoy a Renaissance painting, nothing could be nobler than hurling a bucket of excrement at it.

Again, I say all of this having a mixed reaction to Bradbury. It could, of course, be that Bradbury is overrated. But I think it's more likely that I went to The Martian Chronicles wanting Heinlein; the fault is in me, not in Mars.

 

[Nutria]

So, what I would say is: DA's article represents the ugliest kind of tourism, the kind that DA would call "ugly Americanism" no doubt, where, visiting someone else's home, you scream about why you can't find the food you like

Yeah, these people have no idea who the hell you are or how you came to believe what you do. They have no idea that maybe you've had a harder life than they did, but they think they can come into your place and lecture you.

the scum-of-the-earth nerds who DA is so desperate to distance himself from

So I'm not the only one who noticed this. He tries way too goddamn hard to prove that he's not one of the bad nerds. Really makes you think.

But the point is that Bradbury espoused left-wing views when doing so carried real risk, rather than as a means of protection (as appears to be the case with DA).

This. It's really hard for people now to try to imagine what the mentality was at the time, but there was a very real threat of nuclear war happening at any time. And a hell of a lot of communist spies had just been caught. There was an extreme level of fear and suspicion in the country. Opposing the blacklist was not the safe move at the time. I wonder if DA has made any move in his life that wasn't safe.

Again, I say all of this having a mixed reaction to Bradbury. It could, of course, be that Bradbury is overrated. But I think it's more likely that I went to The Martian Chronicles wanting Heinlein; the fault is in me, not in Mars.

I think I was about 11 when I first started reading his stuff and I loved it. I think it helps if you're from the western United States because that's really what his Mars is. I can't really put it into words, but you somehow feel at home there.

 

[octavius]

MRY, can't say I agree with you.
I just read the article myself; I assume it's this one.

I'd say she gets it more right than wrong.
I've "researched" SF from 1926 to 1960, and I've read nearly every story Bradbury published, at least until he got too popular, too "cute" and fluffy, and too banal in the late 1950s.

Bradbury was disliked by the geeks, at least if you let the SF fans writing fanzines represent geekhood.
The reason? Probably twofold.
1. Bradbury was a luddite, and didn't write "real" SF. That's the reason I initially disliked Martian Chronicles myself, but when rereading it as more general literature I think that was his peak. And it's so very ironic that his best stories (at least most enjoyable to me) were originally published in the pulpiest of the pulp magazines - Planet Stories. When Bradbury got popular with the "snobs" he tried really hard to distance himself from his pulp past.

2. That he was popular with the literary snobs who would usually sneer at SF made the geeks even more wary of Bradbury. There is some merit in the notion that the snobs "didn't get it". They would hail something like "On the Beach" and other SF novels written by mainstream writers, as long as they didn't have the offensive words "Science Fiction" on the cover, even though the novels were derivative and used ideas already old among the SF writers.

As for politics Bradbury had a healthy and natural development, becoming more conservative as he got older, and becoming a Republican. If Maher remembers the older Bradbury best I guess that may cloud her judgement of the younger Bradbury. Similar to how Heinlein is viewed by "a modern audience".

And I think Bradbury was overall a bit overrated. Fahrenheit 451 is a good read, but pales compared to 1984. And the original novella The Fireman, published in Galaxy magazine, was better than the book, IMO.

 

[AndyS]

As when you visit someone else's home, you don't demand that it conform to your taste

Haha, I have had the misfortune of knowing some people who did just that. They were not invited back.

DA first rubbed me the wrong way with her views on adventure games, and I felt there was something more seriously amiss when she started inserting little political jabs in articles where it wasn't necessary. I stopped reading a while ago. I don't begrudge her freedom to have a blog and write whatever, but I do think it's a tad concerning that more people seem to be citing the blog as a trusted source of gaming history. Some of the information is fine, but there's too much editorializing and and too many errors that people have pointed out.

 

[MRY]

At the risk of offending—isn’t DA male? (Jimmy Maher.)

 

[LudensCogitet]

At the risk of offending—isn’t DA male? (Jimmy Maher.)

This is the opening of his about me page:

I’m an American who now lives with my wife Dorte in Odense, Denmark. Dorte is kind enough to allow me to write and occupy myself with various paying and non-paying projects, some of which I tell you about on the blog and on other parts of my home pages. She demands only that I provide her with dinner every night. What a deal!

So... unclear.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

At the risk of offending—isn’t DA male? (Jimmy Maher.)

why are you assuming it's not an apache helicopter?

 

[AndyS]

Eh, I was just snarking on Maher's gimmicky use of she/her in his (?) writing.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

At the risk of offending—isn’t DA male? (Jimmy Maher.)

Although the Digital Antiquarian has typically been depicted as male, we at the Codex have adopted female pronouns to do our bit for gender equality, contradict dominant stereotypes, fight outdated attitudes, improve aesthetics, and avoid deadnaming.

 

[c2007]

I've followed this guy for years and read god-knows many of his articles, but I can't take it anymore. The signal-to-noise is simply to low, and as a non-native English speaker I find that for the last 3 or 4 years his prose has gotten more complex and roundabout in a pretentious way. Sometimes painful to read. Feels like eating twelve boxes of fine chocolates at the same time. Too much. Not tasty anymore.

The word you are looking for is "masturbatory".

 

[octavius]

At the risk of offending—isn’t DA male? (Jimmy Maher.)

I'm just using Maher's preferred pronoun.

 

[MRY]

I've "researched" SF from 1926 to 1960, and I've read nearly every story Bradbury published, at least until he got too popular, too "cute" and fluffy, and too banal in the late 1950s.

I bow to your expertise!

Here is my problem with the article:

(1) The casual arrogance (e.g., "just about the only one of his peers aware of a deeper, richer literary tradition than the one that began with the first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926, the only one who tried to craft beautiful"; "this tripe that sounds like something I might have written for my high-school creative-writing class"; "You’re trying way too hard, Ray…").

(2) The refusal to ponder "why" when it is easier to ascribe senselessness to the thing he's criticizing -- a sort of anti-Chestertonianism. For instance: "he piles on a nuclear war from out of nowhere at the end of the book because, hey, why not add to the dystopian litany?" I'm not as smart as DA, but jeez, even I grasped that an atomic holocaust was presented as book-burning writ large -- holocaust, after all, was used first to describe the Nazis' burning of books before it was used to describe their burning of humans.

To DA, that he dislikes something (or cannot publicly admit to liking it) is reason enough to burn it: it's not that F451 isn't liberal enough, it's "reactionary"; it's not that Bradbury's style isn't to DA's s taste; it is "bloated verbiage" that belongs in "a computer-game instruction manual"; F451's ideas are "thoroughly banal"; etc.

Ultimately, DA is quite explicit that destroying the masterworks of the past is no big deal because there will always be a "kid who picks up a pen, paintbrush, instrument, or computer." DA writes about Italian prisoners performing Shakespeare as if that performance exists apart from Shakespeare; but those prisoners did not pick up a pen and write their own stage play. The past spoke to them, and through them -- for them, as for most human beings, the masterpieces of the past offered a window to look out of gray grim reality at something beautiful. Of course we can find those windows in the works of the present, too. But (1) there are not so many such windows that we should board up any of them, particularly because we each are capable of only seeing through some of them; and (2) there is something peculiarly special about the experience of communing with the past because it gives us a taste of the eternal (or at least persistent) in mankind. When someone today reads Dandelion Wine and feels a yearning for his own childhood -- even though his childhood was in 1980s Washington, DC and not the 1920s midwest -- the experience is not akin to watching some VH1 Gen-X nostalgia countdown. I can see the argument that the latter can yield an ingrown mentality. But when we find in ourselves the same emotion expressed by an alien soul, we grow outward.

Anyway, too much sentimentality for a thread about Wing Commander! As Kefka DA would say, "You sound like chapters from a self-help book computer-game manual."

(I use "DA" here as I realize there is a performative aspect of blogging in which people overstate their opinions for effect; my assumption is that the man himself actually is much more moderate in his feelings than the blogger-character expresses.)

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

To DA, that he dislikes something (or cannot publicly admit to liking it) is reason enough to burn it: it's not that F451 isn't liberal enough, it's "reactionary"; it's not that Bradbury's style isn't to DA's s taste; it is "bloated verbiage" that belongs in "a computer-game instruction manual"; F451's ideas are "thoroughly banal"; etc.

I had to check if he seriously used "bloated verbiage". Yep, he used "bloated verbiage", I see the pot is still calling the kettle black. Come to think of it, unless you're being ironic, bloated verbiage is itself an example of bloated verbiage.

 

[LudensCogitet]

I've "researched" SF from 1926 to 1960, and I've read nearly every story Bradbury published, at least until he got too popular, too "cute" and fluffy, and too banal in the late 1950s.

I bow to your expertise!

Here is my problem with the article: ...

Not to add too much to the sentimentality, but it's no wonder you were able to make such a great modern example of the classic adventure game genre. Well said!

 

[Nutria]

"he piles on a nuclear war from out of nowhere at the end of the book because, hey, why not add to the dystopian litany?"

This is one that personally offends me because you have to be actively trying to not understand things if you don't get that during the Cold War there was a constant threat that you could be literally fucking vaporized with no warning. That was a fact, not a goddamn literary genre.