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What I Learned From Submitting My “Best Movies of the 21st Century” Ballot

Last week I completed a bucket list item by submitting a ballot in a high-profile movie poll. Here’s what I learned in the process.

Prestige– After completing my list, I felt some anxiety that it was overly concerned with high art darlings and neglectful of more accessible fare. It’s a weird concern to have a list that features two animated family films, a fantasy movie, and a horror flick. As I examined the feeling further, I realized I was reacting to my own tendency to distinguish between movies that I like and movies that are “good” in some other sense.

There are pros and cons to such a distinction. Acknowledging value in movies that confound or infuriate us is important. But identifying value can be difficult, and often devolves into recapitulating received wisdom. I think this is how we get the worse of the film bros, who uncritically gobble the movies others deemed “good” and then feel superior because they can parrot back that they are, in fact, good movies.

Anyway, I felt a mild but complex blend of envy, admiration, and self-doubt when I saw my friends submit lists of genre flicks that were (seemingly) unconcerned with received notions of status. I genuinely like all the movies on my list, but I also reached for titles that seemed to do something more than entertain me. I don’t know if that was the best approach.

Popularity– When I was younger, I sometimes felt critical of popular movies that made these lists, assuming people voted for them due to some lack of creativity or knowledge. When making my list, it suddenly became obvious that your voting is limited to what you’ve seen. Popular movies show up more often because, by definition, more people have seen them so more people have the potential to vote for them.

Sincerity– Two days after making my list and sharing it with friends, I suddenly realized how obscure most of the titles were. I worried that others might think I was trying to look cool or smart with my picks. I wasn’t! Most of the obscure stuff is international, and I came across it from doing March Around The World for the past eight years.

For me, this is a lesson in giving list makers the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes people do try to project an air of sophistication, but just as often (or more) they sincerely like things that I don’t like, or haven’t heard of.

Individuality– I wanted a ballot that felt like “me.” I made sure my interest in animation was well represented. (Earlier versions of my list had up to five animated films!) I switched out Mulholland Drive for Pulse at the last minute because the latter felt more idiosyncratic to me. Anecdotally, I saw other people taking a similar approach. I wonder how this might change in more collectivist cultures.

Diversity: I didn’t select my movies based on the demographics of the directors, but I’m pleased with the diversity (of gender, race, and nationality) I ended up with. Since you’re limited to what you’ve seen when making your list, it’s important to do your homework on the front end.

Recency bias– Most of my movies are things I’ve seen in the last five years. Obviously the movies themselves are from a range of different years. I wonder how recency bias might have affected these sorts of polls before the advent of home media.

July 10, 2025 Add Comment

Dungeons and Dreamscapes

Here’s a great blog post on the early visual influences on DnD and other roleplaying games.


“That tradition was a subterranean one, largely outside the orbit of mainstream fantasy art. Psychedelic poster designers, Symbolist painters, and zinesters working on the margins of the counterculture all contributed, consciously or not, to the strange visual DNA of early roleplaying games. Before branding demanded consistency and legibility, Dungeons & Dragons was porous enough to absorb all of it.”

It makes wonder what’s on the fringes of modern visual culture. Snapchat filters? Adult Swim cartoons? Anthro furry art? AI slop? It’s hard for things to feel underground now, because as soon as you identify it you can get ten thousand other people who will latch onto your subreddit. Still, not everything has the same cachet.


“However, as D&D became a brand, this strangeness was steadily scrubbed away. Style guides were introduced. Idiosyncratic artists gave way to professionals. The game’s visuals became cleaner, more representational, more standardized. With that polish came a flattening of the imagination. D&D no longer looked like a vision; it looked like product.”


I’d argue DnD is still plenty flexible to accommodate weirdo visions. It’s no longer baked in, so you’d have to do more work on your own. As ever, that comes with pros and cons.

Anyway, check out the full article. It’s fun, and the author even hints that its influences made early DnD a vehicle for altered perception.

July 8, 2025 Add Comment

Interesting Wikipedia Articles I’ve Read Recently

Ziz: I was vaguely aware that the term “leviathan” referred to a creature with biblical-ish origins. And while I knew the word “behemoth,” I didn’t know it referred to a specific (fictional) creature, also from Jewish mythology. What I definitely didn’t know is that the leviathan and behemoth have an airborne cousin, the ziz. It is a bird said to be so huge that it can stand on the floor of the ocean with the water only reaching its ankles, and it lays eggs so massive that if they crack open they’ll flood sixty cities.

Three Hares: This is such a neat factoid I’m surprised I’ve never heard about it before. There’s a very specific art motif that features three rabbits arranged in a circle such that their ears are overlapping, and this symbol has popped up through through vast spans of time and space. The earliest examples we know of came from Chinese caves between the years 500 and 700. Later, the symbol appears in Islamic art in the late 1200s to early 1300s. Later still, it appears in western Europe, and even becomes particularly prevalent in the churches of southwestern England. There’s a theory that the symbol gradually diffused out of China along the “silk road” trading route. (For reasons I can’t really explain, this is my favorite hypothesis.) Others guess that the motif rose at least partially independently, and point out a long history of similar symbols in Celtic culture. One of the fun things about the Wikipedia article is reading all the different meanings the symbol had across times and places: everything from water to luck to the holy trinity to the Jewish diaspora.

Peter Lamborn Wilson: I came across Wilson as the person who coined the term “temporary autonomous zone” (TAZ). It’s a kinda useful, kinda fun idea about how we can make spaces that are mostly free of social control and use them to experiment with different ways of being. TAZs still get talked about a fair amount in anarchist circles, from what I can tell, though sometimes with some some caveats about Wilson’s personal life. In reading out his life on Wikipedia, two things jump out at me.

First the big one: apparently he also wrote for NAMBLA? I haven’t tracked down those writings and don’t care to, but they have been characterized by others (including Wilson’s former friends) as promoting sex between adults and children. So that fucking sucks. It’s weird how often this sort of thing crops up. Science fiction grand master Samuel Delany is a queer champion but also a supporter of NAMBLA1. (Both Wilson and Delany have had criticisms and mentions of pedophilia downplayed in their Wikipedia articles in the last year, which is disturbing). As this great thread on /r/AskHistorians points out, philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre signed a petition against age of consent laws. I think you find predators in every walk of life, and they often manipulate whatever ideas they have at their disposal to persuade others2.

Second, Wilson was seemingly obsessed with other cultures, particularly Islam. That’s always a phenomenon that interests me. On one end of the respectability spectrum, you have have college professors and anthropologists who specialize in this or that. At the other end, you have folks like Iron Eyes Cody or Rachel Dolezal who engage in 24-7 cosplay as a member of a different group. Wilson didn’t quite go that far, but he did convert his religion and produce a lot of his writing under an ethnic pen name. I want to better understand why people get involved with that sort of cultural adoption. That means I’ll probably mentally bookmark Wilson as a case study but never look much further because focused research isn’t actually fun for me.

Anyway, TAZs are a cool concept. I think it’s important to recognize value in social experiments even if they don’t last for a long time.

Digesting Duck: When I was in middle or high school, I read about an art instillation where some weirdo built a complex machine that mimicked human digestion. Food would be pushed in one end, get processed, and exit the other end as artificially-made shit3. The shits would then be vacuum sealed and sold to art collectors4. Anyway, the artist was (knowingly or not) working in conversation with Jacques de Vaucanson, a 1700s French inventor who created various machines and automata, including a mechanical duck that “ate” food out of the operator’s hand. Then, through some jiggery-pokery, the brass duck would appear to poop out the remains of the food. In reality, the food went into an internal pouch, while the “poop” (small, balled-up pieces of bread that were dyed green) were pre-loaded in a separate pouch. People at the time went gaga for the fake metal poop machine. The duck was lost in a fire, but has a robust afterlife making cameos in literature by everyone from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Frank Herbert.

  1. There’s a complex history between queer folks and organizations like NAMBLA that is beyond the scope of my knowledge but which surely provides important context. ↩︎
  2. According to the scant information on Wikipedia, there’s no evidence that Wilson abused children himself. Whether he was persuaded to his views by an abuser or came to them himself I don’t know. ↩︎
  3. Arguably an early example of machines taking over creative jobs. If you’re anti-AI, you shouldn’t settle for anything less than the real thing (SFW link, except for language). ↩︎
  4. The jokes write themselves. ↩︎

June 24, 2025 Add Comment

Buss Island

Here’s a delightful story (seemingly true, but who can tell) about someone trying to buy a fictional island from the oldest corporation in North America, which officially owned the island.

June 3, 2025 Add Comment

“Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism”

Over at Ancillary Review of Books (which I was previously unfamiliar with, but which I will be checking out more now), Zachary Gillan (ditto previous parenthetical) published a very good essay entitled “Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism.”

Essays that argue about the political content of various genres (e.g. fairy tales are inherently feminist / antifeminist) can be a little interesting, but they usually read like fan theories for self-important academics. Gillan elides this by instead asking how an antifascist might mine weird fiction for lessons / tools, were she so inclined. I find this approach way more palatable.

It boils down, I think, to two axioms:

  1. To become radical, politically, is to become aware that the dominant ideology shaping the way we view the world is Wrong, and needs revolutionary change from the root. 
  2. To be a character in a work of weird fiction is to see that the world is Wrong; whatever direction the author takes this sense of Wrongness, weird fiction hinges on a radical shift in awareness (Some weird fiction channels that sense of unsettlement into the awe-inspiring sublime or fascinating numinous; this is not the kind of weird fiction that I’m considering here.)

He goes on to elaborate on these ideas in clear and persuasive prose. Right near the end things get a little tedious as he quotes people who quote Marx. But overall I really liked this.

May 18, 2025 Add Comment

Ran Prieur recent linked to this back post in his blog. It’s got a lot of really interesting stuff, and it supports my idea that having access to variety is a good thing for humans (or at least for other primates).

May 6, 2025 Add Comment

Lucre

I’m currently reading the Husain Haddawy translation of The Arabian Nights, and I came across this quote:

He spent ten days in preparation, packing what he needed, together with the gifts together with the gifts the princes and merchants of the city had given him for his journey. Then he set out with the king with his heart on fire to be leaving his city for a whole year. He left, with fifty Mamluks and many guides and servants, bearing one hundred loads of gifts, rarities, and treasures, as well as money.

There’s something fun about this description of wealth. It really tickles my imagination with the variety of treasure it describes. It’s about the furthest thing from the abstracted, frictionless, digital conception of money we have today. Luckily, it seems older tradition of treasure is being kept alive in children’s media, and fantasy media, and especially the intersection of the two.

Scrooge McDuck in his giant vault of gold coins, mixed with stacks of paper money and a bucket of jewels off to the side.

Smaug the dragon atop his hoard of treasure: mostly gold coins but with tons of jewels, weapons, and rarities.

The Cave of Wonders from Aladdin (1992): Mountains of gold coins are mixed with a wide variety of other gold artifacts.

All of these examples use gold coins as a base (maybe because they’re simple to draw) but then mixes in other things because just having a bunch of gold coins would be boring. Gold is obviously valuable, so you might think it does a lot of the heavy lifting in conveying a sense of wealth. But I think the variety of treasure on display is also important.

Consider the graphic novel Bea Wolf, by Zach Weinersmith (who also does the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). Bea Wolf is a retelling of Beowulf, but set in modern day suburbia and charactered entirely by children. There are very fun descriptions and illustrations of the massive stockpile of candy these children amass. Care is taken to describe how many different kinds of sweets are in their hoard. It definitely creates the sense that these children are living the good life1.

Not too long ago the Srsly Wrong podcast did an episode on Ecological Luxury, in which they explore if and how we can secure a high standard of living while also staying sustainable. I think this is part of the solution. Having access to a wide variety of things probably feeds all sorts of built in biases- that’s why we see a tendency for it across times and cultures, and also in children. And if we can feed those biases in a sustainable way (e.g. with candy rather than with gold) we can create a sense of wealth that isn’t as socially ruinous as current versions of wealth.

Maybe. I don’t know if this would work, and I’m sure it would create it’s own problems. Have a glut of options isn’t a good thing for example. But it’s something to ponder.

  1. The word “wealth” can be slippery, so let me clarify that this is more or less what I mean: the ability to partake in lots of luxuries. ↩︎

April 19, 2025 Add Comment

Anti-Human Horror

Source

Cosmic horror, I think, is predicated on imagining a sort of “anti-human” universe. All horror is probably anti-human to some degree. Monsters and slashers want to kill or hurt humans, or violate their desires in some way. But cosmic horror goes several steps further. It imagines that the fundamental makeup of reality is intractable to human analysis. This is why Lovecraft’s protagonists often go insane. The universe is under no obligation to make sense; in fact, trying to make sense of it might be poisonous.

I was talking to my partner recently and realized that folk horror actually posits something similar. Folk horror is a big, nebulous term (much like cosmic horror, I suppose). Right now I mean the aspects of folk horror that emphasize the scariness of nature and ancient “pagan” rituals that were somehow more in tune with nature than modern civilization. These stories agree that reality isn’t human-centric, but brings the idea closer to home. Instead of encouraging us to imagine abstract physical laws or the vacuum of deep space, it invites us to imagine a forest. We don’t need to travel billions of years before we leave the familiar behind- one or two thousand will do the trick nicely.

And in thinking about this, it also brings to mind the stories of Franz Kafka, especially his hand-wringing about dehumanizing bureaucracies. Cosmic horror suggests that the universe, writ large, is incomprehensible and noxious to humans. Folk horror (at least some folk horror) says even the nature close at hand is antithetical to humans, though this effect is probably exacerbated by modern life1. And Kafka confirms the folk horror thesis by showing how modern society breeds neuroses and alienation.

All this sort of makes me think of a telescoping taxonomy, sort of like how physics contains chemistry, which in turn contains biology. But it also makes me think about how humans are pretty good at imagining themselves as separate from things. The universe isn’t for us, and nature isn’t for us, and society isn’t for us. Oh no, where to turn! But I think these impressions only hold if your starting point is to imagine the world as highly anthropomorphic and deliberate and good, with humans holding dominion over it all. In other words, these ideas are scary in the context of a a particular kind of Christian worldview. There’s a reason cosmic horror has a strong anti-Christian subtext, and it’s the same reason folk horror often pits Christianity against paganism. (I don’t remember Christianity being a strong theme in Kafka’s works, but it’s been a while since I’ve read him.)

Actually, in all of the above cases, the “thing” that isn’t for us is just stuff that we’re already part of. How could the universe not be for us when we’re clearly part of the universe? It’s like imagining the ocean isn’t “for” fish because fish can still die in the ocean. The same goes for our place in nature2 and society. Anti-human horror is great at blowing up a sort of western, Christian, Victorian worldview, but it’s not so good at replacing that worldview. For that, we need to understand continuousness between ourselves and the systems with exist inside.

  1. For example, think about the commune in Midsommar (2019). They still have to deal with tragedy and death like everyone else, but the have found an older way of living that mitigates some of the suffering that comes with the territory. ↩︎
  2. One of my pet peeves is the way people talk about nature as some concept with a tortuous boundary that excludes everything humans do, but includes all activities of all other animals. Defining nature as “stuff that doesn’t have to do with humans” is useful in some contexts, but it reinforces this concept that humans are somehow separate from the world around them. ↩︎

April 3, 2025 Add Comment

Review: The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon

I think I first learned about Frantz Fanon several years ago when a documentary about him (which I still haven’t seen) hit the Criterion Channel. Traditional psychology has generally been pretty bad about considering black folks, and I’ve been interested for a while in the intersection of mental health and black culture in movies. Fanon, I learned from the movie description, was a black man and a psychiatrist, born in Martinique and educated in Paris. He went on to do much of his work in Algeria during their bloody fight for independence from France.

Reading more about Fanon, I found he was almost always described with words like “important” and “influential,” especially for his ideas on racial identity and decolonization. I had just finished a graduate program in psychology a few years before, and one that took every opportunity to brag about its emphasis on diversity. But despite this, I had never heard of Frantz Fanon! My curiosity was piqued.

More recently, I stumbled across a comment that his book “The Wretched of the Earth” set out an argument that justified violence by colonized people against their oppressors. (Side note: I didn’t actually find any such argument in the book, though Fanon does take for granted that it’s ok for people to use violence to liberate themselves from an oppressive situation). With my curiosity newly inflamed, I got my hands on a copy of the audiobook, translated by Constance Farrington, and started listening.

Almost at once my interest evaporated. The book is front-loaded with embarrassingly bad anthropology. Fanon seems to suggest that colonized people (all colonized people, regardless of time or place) do things like dance or believe in ghosts because of some psychic conflict that’s wrought by colonialism. This obviously ignores the fact that some of these traditions very likely predate colonialism.1 (I’m not a historian or an anthropologist, so please correct me if I’m wrong).

It’s also emblematic of my main complaint about the book. Fanon talks in grand, sweeping generalizations. All colonial powers have the same agenda, all colonized people have the same experience, all cities are one way, and all rural areas another. Occasionally he will refer to specific examples, but he doesn’t seem to care about arguing his point beyond simply stating it. He almost never cites other thinkers (whether they agree or disagree) and certainly never incorporates quantitative evidence. He just rambles on and on, claiming this and that, and apparently assuming his ideas will be accepted without further question.

Fanon was a Marxist, and his tendency towards generalizations is characteristic of the few other Marxist writers I’ve read, especially around this period. They seem impressed with their theory of the world and uninterested or unaware that others might need convincing2.

It’s also an odd fit for Fanon’s other ideological stances. Psychology, as opposed to, say, sociology, is very interested in the particulars of individual people. One of the few interesting parts of the book were the psychiatric case studies of individuals suffering under colonialism. This is one of the only places where Fanon allows himself to zoom in to the particulars.

But also, Fanon argues persuasively against the idea of a general African or black culture. This idea, says Fanon, actually plays into the colonial mindset. It was white outsiders who came in and essentialized everyone as “black” without paying any attention to differences in culture and history. Despite making this point very well, he continues to talk about colonized people as if there were one solution that would serve all of them.

I glazed over for much of the book. The Wikipedia article is probably a much better resource if you’re interested in Fanon’s ideas. (It also shows that others were able to get much more out of the book than I was). But I did want to end by highlighting a couple of quotes and ideas from the text that I really appreciated3.

“It is commonly thought with criminal flippancy that to politicize the masses means from time to time haranguing them with a major political speech… But political education means opening up the mind, awakening the mind, and introducing it to the world. It is as Césaire said: ‘To invent the souls of men.’ It means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible, that there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone. In order to achieve such things, in order to actually embody them, we must, as we have already mentioned, decentralize to the utmost.”

Out of context this almost sounds like a call for anarchism! But Fanon quickly goes on to assert that his system would still have hierarchy. It’s just that the “upper echelons” would understand that their work depends on the work of the “rank and file.” Still, I like the point that if you want somebody to have more political consciousness, it’s not enough to occasionally talk at them.

“A memorable example, and one that takes on particular significance because it does not quite involve a colonial reality, was the reaction of white jazz fans when after the Second World War new styles such as bebop established themselves. For them jazz could only be the broken, desperate yearning of an old “Negro,” five whiskeys under his belt, bemoaning his own misfortune and the racism of the whites.”

I don’t know anything about jazz, but I do know about movies, this reminds me of some of the conversations around “black tragedy porn.” The overwhelmingly white film ecosystem will sometimes congratulate itself for making the occasional film about black people. But even when these films aren’t outright racist, and even when they don’t feature white saviors or other problematic tropes, they often heavily emphasize the tragedies that black people face due to racism. So even among white people willing to acknowledge racism, there are still ways to get it wrong.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I didn’t like this book, though it led me to some interesting ideas. We’ll see if I ever get around to that documentary about Fanon’s life.

  1. Fanon does have seem to have a larger theory about history that I failed to fully grok. Something about how utterly colonialism reshaped people’s lives, and what this means for formerly colonized folks who try to create their own culture. Maybe if I better understood this theory I’d have less objection to his seemingly bad anthropology. ↩︎
  2. Not trying to knock Marxists in general! A lot of Marxists have done really cool things! But I don’t think mid-20th century nonfiction writing is a good place to start engaging with them. ↩︎
  3. Unfortunately these are from a different translation. I couldn’t find an easy to access, online version of Farrington’s translation, which I prefer, at least based on the phrasing in these quotes. ↩︎

March 20, 2025 Add Comment