george santos

Closing out the Year

/ geotrickster / 3 Comments

It is not, nor will it become, my habit to do yearly reviews. But I figure that since last year I specifically ended on the note of making particular predictions in order to see how accurate they would be, it is worth following up on them.

“The Ukraine War will continue through most if not all of the year“
Correct.

“China will NOT invade Taiwan“

Correct.

“Republican internal meltdowns will be hilarious“

Correct. I also mentioned that Kevin McCarthy was ‘a doofus’, which turned out to be proven in the most hilarious way as he lost the speakership to his own party’s antics. And while I did correctly foresee that DeSantis would not the be the titan he was predicted by others to be, the extent of his floundering so far surprised even me.

“2022 Was Peak GenderTrender for the U.S. and 2023 will be Peak GenderTrender for the U.K.“

Correct with almost a 100% accuracy on all details when you read the full section I wrote last year for this call. I did not know a year ago about the then coming book ‘Time to Think‘, and the SNP’s sloppy attempt to shore up its floundering with culture war really sealed the deal.

“After his inevitable removal from ”””’power””””’, Juan Guaido will go the way of Saakashvili“

Mixed. I was correct that he is now entirely irrelevant, but even Saakashvilli made headlines with his Brooklyn Hipster antics for a year or two. Guaido can’t even do that. Truly the biggest tool and cuck of our time.

” OneDnD will Rival the Galactic Starcruiser in terms of corporate entertainment fiasco“

Correct, but not nearly correct enough. The Galactic Failcruiser was indeed put out of its misery just a few months ago, and Hasbro/Wizards continues on, but its apparent ‘living’ is really more the jerkings of the rigor mortis afflicted undead. OneDnD itself looks like it will be a terrible product, but this is hardly even the main story anymore. Now its about mismanagement, squandering a cornered market and turning success into failure, layoffs and stock losses, former fans leaving in droves, poisoned relations throughout the hobby, and even sending Pinkertons to intimidate product reviewers. 2023 was such a year of unmitigated failure for Hasbro that if it were not for the entire nation of Canada one-upping them with even more ridiculousness (Trudeau saying Canada’s global contribution was ‘gender language’, Parliament giving a standing ovation to an SS veteran, the entire country being on fire all summer, collapse in relations with the two most populous nations on Earth in the same year, etc) I would just give them the Fail of the Year award outright. So while I could see the clear downward trends for the company a year ago, I still missed just how catastrophic it would be. Its honestly extremely funny. Any player of TTRPGs worth their salt has long since left that company and its products behind. It is good for the hobby not to be tethered to this bloated monstrosity anymore.

So my predictions were extremely on point for 2023. I would like to make one correction to an old post however, especially in light of the Hasbro thing. When I ranked the editions of a game that even then I no longer played, I overrated DnD 5E’s accessibility considering its bland generic nature. These days, I would switch the places of 5 and 2 in that ranking. 2 was a mess in some ways, but it was still the most similar to 1, the only truly good edition. And above all, it had a ton of character. The beige grab-bag casserole of 5E tries to be everything for everyone and thus is really for no one. We see the costs of this game design philosophy now with the implosion of its parent company and the re-writing of all their materials in corporate sensitivity training HR speak.

2023 Year Rankings

Now lets do something a bit different. Lets name the best of year.

Person [lolcow] of the Year:

George Santos of course!

(Runner Up: Yevgeny Prigozhin)

Film of the Year: Oppenheimer. Most basic answer I have ever given to that question ever, but it really is. Once in a blue moon, Hollywood can still deliver. Just don’t bet on it. (Runner Up: When Evil Lurks)

Book of the Year (nonfiction): The Ideology of Democratism by Emily Finley. I can’t stop citing it. Yes, it came out in 2022, but I always count books by the year I first read them, not their publication date.(Runners Up: The Turkish War of Independence by Edward J Erickson, End Times by Peter Turchin).

Book of the Year (fiction): A Different Darkness and Other Abominations by Luigi Musolino. I read so many short story collections in the horror/new weird genre that it takes a lot to impress me, and this one really delivered. (Runners Up: Inhibitor Phase by Alastair Reynolds and Sometimes Lofty Towers by David C Smith).

Album of the Year: Panopticon- The Rime of Memory.

There never has been a year since I have discovered them when Panopticon released an album and it wasn’t either a contender or victor for album of the year. (Runner Up: Pale Jay- Bewilderment).

Game of the Year: Lunacid. You will see Lunacid described as a ‘King’s Field or Shadow Tower like’, and it is. But to me, who never played those games until far more recently, its something else entirely. A kind of game I always wanted. Namely, the atmosphere and setting of Arx Fatalis without the interface jank and buggy default setting. An all dungeon world of mood and shadows with a killer score and weird monsters. After decades of waiting, I finally got that game I have long pined for. Comes just a tad short of Arx in the atmosphere department (but only barely) and surpasses it in all other ways. (Runners Up: Trepang2, Hrot).

Interpretation of a Mare, one of the more memorable enemies in the game.

All in all it was a good year for me. I finally got to take my grandmother’s ashes to Japan, and I was very productive on the creative writing front with multiple projects. I got to give a lecture on Western Hemisphere geopolitics in Buenos Aires and take some side trips. Next year, I am hoping, will shape up like 2022 in being a strong year for professional output.

Santos Steals the Sun

/ geotrickster / 1 Comment
Raven/Santos transformation mask, Southeast Alaska, early 21rst Century.

The Old Man at the Head of the Nass River hoarded the sun, moon, and stars in boxes within his home. Raven, living in a dark and primordial world, was curious as to what such things looked like. He slipped into the Old Man’s daughter as a seed, and then was born to her as a child. He would then cry in the presence of his new ‘family’ to see what was in the boxes. Being shown by his exasperated grandfather, he would then ‘accidentally’ spill their contents. This gave us the first the night and then the daytime sky. Finally caught, he transformed back into his raven-form and escaped up the Old Man’s chimney, being stained black in the process of egress by either the burning of the sun in his beak or the ashes of the firepit (depending on which version is told).

George Santos is no Raven, of course. But while he lacks the true long term cleverness of a proper trickster figure (an archetype I often enjoy covering here for obvious thematic reasons) he is currently playing a very similar role.

The litany of lies this man-now hilariously serving as a Congressman from New York- has told is too lengthy to even bother listing out here. Some are still ambiguous as to what extent the claim is false, though all are at least partly lies. The way this is presented by actors in Congress and the media, however, is as a scandal of a pathological liar that looks bad on Santos himself. But the problem with this narrative is that Santos’ lies are precisely why this desperate Howdy-Doody-looking nobody got a seat in the most powerful legislature in the world. The lies, at least temporarily, worked. It was republican party candidate vetting, democratic party opposition research, and national level media that failed. Santos is a fool, yes, but a fool who exposes the foolishness of those who pretend they are not also fools. The fact that Kevin McCarthy had to entertain this man for weeks just to get his vote to be confirmed speaker, is the pinnacle of farce. Forget your airport bookstore political thrillers, this is real life written by Jack Vance.

In this way, George Santos has (unintentionally) rendered a civic service to the country, even if not his particular congressional district. He has proven that local media is the front line of vetting, and how an over-nationalized and corporatized news industry has undercut and sidelined this vital role. He has shown how many people, especially political elites, rely on this hollowed out media apparatus for their own world view, failing even the most basic of operations in an electorally competitive district. Santos has even shown the folly of choosing candidates based around identity politics style checklists when the lines between Jewish and ‘Jew-ish’, gay and married to a woman, waging GOP culture war on drag queens while being a drag queen, and having ones family die in every tragic event of the last 80 years multiple times over effectively mean nothing. In a world were presentation is all that matters it becomes an inevitability that public personas will arise that only tell others what they want to hear.

But Santos, being so over the top, so positively clownpilled, makes a mockery of this unstated process. It is now so obvious that it cannot be denied or ignored any longer. The house of lies creates its own parodies. The execrable late night news-comedy shows, whose last gasp of relevancy was ten years ago, never could have made a politician parody so on point as this even at their former heights. When our comedians drop the ball on parodic delivery, the people who they are supposed to be observing must stand up to the task.

You could make the case that right now, at this exact moment, George Santos is the single most illuminating figure in Congress. Much like how Raven, breaking out from the Old Man’s house with the sun in his beak, once lit up the sky of the Pacific Northwest. From that point onwards there was no going back to the willful ignorance of the murky world.