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saltygilmores · 1 year

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Thoughts While Watching Gilmore Girls, Season 2, Episode 13 ("A Tisket A Tasket") Part 3 of ????

Parts 1 & 2 and all of my previous pickings-apart can be found in my pinned post. Where we last left off, RoryGil appeared to be in deep contemplation about the current shitshow that is her life.

Rory and Jess embark on their Shitshow Picnic, then we cut to Jackson trying to buy Sookie's basket back from Kirk, who complains about the lack of carrot sticks in the basket before proceeding to trauma- dump on Jackson (not about carrots but about how no one loves him). Kirk also looks like he is questioning existence.

Jackson quickly whips out a checkbook which he apparently carries with him at all times (because it's 2002) and pays Kirk $250, and after popping that number into an inflation calculator, Jackson paid Kirk the 2023 equivalent of $423 for a picnic basket with no carrot sticks. Not only does Stars Hollow need group therapy I think they could use a group audit to see exactly where some of these people are getting their money.

As If a checkbook didn't age this show enough, the cut to a payphone immediately afterwards finishes the job quite nicely. You guys are waiting for that whole Rory and Jess on the bridge thing aren't you. Well, let's keep it moving then. It feels like a minute since we've heard some Luke Danes Wisdom. Lorelai (sitting in the gazebo with Luke): We're supposed to be eating a picnic on the ground. Luke: Every time I've seen a picture of people eating on the ground, I've thought, "What the hell are you people doing eating on the ground? Spring for some beach chairs ya cheapskates." Finding the payphone broken (which puts a dent in her complicated scheme to meet Henry), Lane comes running to Lorelai to ask if she has her cellphone. In the third moment of the show aging itself in under a minute, Lane asking Lorelai if she's carrying her cellphone reminds us that the few people who did have cellphones during this time period didn't always carry them 24/7. Somehow even though this is early 2002 Lane (and everyone else seen using a cellphone) manages to get perfect reception at a random spot of her choosng which is honestly pretty impressive for a town that I'm convinced is still a good 10 years away (at LEAST) from getting cable TV and moving away from dial-up internet.

"Morality in an ever-changing world." What do the people of The Hollow know about morality or world-changing? Stars Hollow never fucking changes. Ever. Changes? No one noticed Luke mis-spelled "tomatoes" on his menu board and let that shit slide for a good 6 years. The citizens thought a drawing in sidewalk chalk was the height of immorality. Well, maybe Lorelai could stand to listen to a sermon or two about the immmorality of sleeping with your daughter's underage boyfriend, but I digress. (I really wanted just wanted an excuse to write "Speaking of Satan" and introduce Dean back into the story, but instead it's Henry.

Because this show loves to do poor Lane so, SO SOOO dirty, Henry called Lane's house when she didn't call from the payphone as she promised. Much to Lane's relief, he somehow managed to trick Mrs Kim into thinking he was just a telemarketer and not A Boy (or so he thinks). But afer hearing Lane describe another insane scheme she's cooked up to hide him from her mother, he's tired of playing games.

Wahhhhh my heart breaks for Lane. In my gritty adult Gilmore Girls reboot titled The Hollow all of the women who were dealt an unfair hand on this show will be made whole again. Lane will reunite with Dave or Henry and live happily ever after, Lindsay will have Dean Forrester's head in her freezer, and so on and so forth. Henry says he can't be breaking up with Lane because he's never actually been out with her. He says I want to be able to pick you up, get out of the car, take you out somewhere. And then he has to TWIST THE KNIFE IN MY POOR GIRL'S HEART JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE.

SPOILER ALERT/TRIGGER WARNING: UNABASHED CRUELTY AHEAD

*her I AM NO LONGER TEAM HENRY. THAT PIECE OF SHIT. That was the most heartbreaking thing I've witnessed on this show up to this point!!!! JUSTICE FOR LANE!!!!! LANE AND DAVE ONLY!!!!!! And the cherry on top of the Shit Sundae for poor poor Lane is that of course Mrs. Kim has caught on and is none too happy and they scream at each other.

This coat.... and these pants. *deep breath* Look, Jesstopher, I love you and you know you're the only fictional character I'd go to the ends of the earth for. And I'm sorry your uncle is clueless and wears the same thing every day and couldn't style another person no less a child to save his life and I'm also sorry that it's a miracle you even survived your Mom's parenting and she has a very busy schedule of Full Time Child Neglect so making sure her son wears properly fitting clothes is low on her list of prorities. I'm sorry neither cared enough to make sure you didn't look like Vincent Adultman from BoJack Horseman.

Another perfect "okuh" that no silent screen shot could ever capture.

When it comes to Rory and Jess, sometimes I like to quiet my Snark for a moment and just enjoy. Jess tells Rory that he bid on her basket because seeing Dean get annoyed makes him laugh. Any time Jess tries to annoy Dean to get closer to Rory, an angel gets its wings.

I know you don't, but when you're dating such a putz like Dean, That's kinda written in the contract. Date Dean Forrester, lose your will to live. Read the fine print. I just remembered there's still almost another full season left before Jess and Rory are officially dating.

The lighting in this scene is really beautiful to me, and the way the light hits MIlo's face here makes him look angelic.

I can never un-see Milo and Alexis falling in love in real life through their characters. Once you know it will never escape you. It will burrow into your brain, much like the worms in whatever slop Rory put into that Tupperware. I'm tempted to say Rory missed another opportunity to poison Dean's food (like the time she baked him cookies but didn't add poison to the batter), but since Jess ended up eating it instead and because it would be very obvious that she was the perpetrator since it was her basket, I won't hold it against her this time. Keep trying, Rory Gil.

Well, this screen shot isn't exactly going on the cover of People's Sexiest Men Alive magazine any time soon but he speaks the truest four words in Gilmoredom.

There are still 18 minutes left in this episode. HOW???!!! Part 4 coming whenever.

#denise rewatches gilmore girls #gilmore girls #rory gilmore #lorelai gilmore #luke danes #lane kim #jess mariano #literati #gilmore girls season 2 #a tisket a tasket #a-tisket a-tasket #Not Team Henry #ugly coat #ugly ass coat #ugli coat #dean is an idiot #justice for lindsay #justice for lane #Vincent Adultman

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mostlysignssomeportents · 13 days

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The true post-cyberpunk hero is a noir forensic accountant

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TOMORROW (Apr 17) in CHICAGO, then Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

I was reared on cyberpunk fiction, I ended up spending 25 years at my EFF day-job working at the weird edge of tech and human rights, even as I wrote sf that tried to fuse my love of cyberpunk with my urgent, lifelong struggle over who computers do things for and who they do them to.

That makes me an official "post-cyberpunk" writer (TM). Don't take my word for it: I'm in the canon:

https://tachyonpublications.com/product/rewired-the-post-cyberpunk-anthology-2/

One of the editors of that "post-cyberpunk" anthology was John Kessel, who is, not coincidentally, the first writer to expose me to the power of literary criticism to change the way I felt about a novel, both as a writer and a reader:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

It was Kessel's 2004 Foundation essay, "Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender's Game, Intention, and Morality," that helped me understand litcrit. Kessel expertly surfaces the subtext of Card's Ender's Game and connects it to Card's politics. In so doing, he completely reframed how I felt about a book I'd read several times and had considered a favorite:

https://johnjosephkessel.wixsite.com/kessel-website/creating-the-innocent-killer

This is a head-spinning experience for a reader, but it's even wilder to experience it as a writer. Thankfully, the majority of literary criticism about my work has been positive, but even then, discovering something that's clearly present in one of my novels, but which I didn't consciously include, is a (very pleasant!) mind-fuck.

A recent example: Blair Fix's review of my 2023 novel Red Team Blues which he calls "an anti-finance finance thriller":

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2023/05/13/red-team-blues-cory-doctorows-anti-finance-thriller/

Fix – a radical economist – perfectly captures the correspondence between my hero, the forensic accountant Martin Hench, and the heroes of noir detective novels. Namely, that a noir detective is a kind of unlicensed policeman, going to the places the cops can't go, asking the questions the cops can't ask, and thus solving the crimes the cops can't solve. What makes this noir is what happens next: the private dick realizes that these were places the cops didn't want to go, questions the cops didn't want to ask and crimes the cops didn't want to solve ("It's Chinatown, Jake").

Marty Hench – a forensic accountant who finds the money that has been disappeared through the cells in cleverly constructed spreadsheets – is an unlicensed tax inspector. He's finding the money the IRS can't find – only to be reminded, time and again, that this is money the IRS chooses not to find.

This is how the tax authorities work, after all. Anyone who followed the coverage of the big finance leaks knows that the most shocking revelation they contain is how stupid the ruses of the ultra-wealthy are. The IRS could prevent that tax-fraud, they just choose not to. Not for nothing, I call the Martin Hench books "Panama Papers fanfic."

I've read plenty of noir fiction and I'm a long-term finance-leaks obsessive, but until I read Fix's article, it never occurred to me that a forensic accountant was actually squarely within the noir tradition. Hench's perfect noir fit is either a happy accident or the result of a subconscious intuition that I didn't know I had until Fix put his finger on it.

The second Hench novel is The Bezzle. It's been out since February, and I'm still touring with it (Chicago tonight! Then Turin, Marin County, Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, etc). It's paying off – the book's a national bestseller.

Writing in his newsletter, Henry Farrell connects Fix's observation to one of his own, about the nature of "hackers" and their role in cyberpunk (and post-cyberpunk) fiction:

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-accountant-as-cyberpunk-hero

Farrell cites Bruce Schneier's 2023 book, A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules and How to Bend Them Back:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/06/trickster-makes-the-world/

Schneier, a security expert, broadens the category of "hacker" to include anyone who studies systems with an eye to finding and exploiting their defects. Under this definition, the more fearsome hackers are "working for a hedge fund, finding a loophole in financial regulations that lets her siphon extra profits out of the system." Hackers work in corporate offices, or as government lobbyists.

As Henry says, hacking isn't intrinsically countercultural ("Most of the hacking you might care about is done by boring seeming people in boring seeming clothes"). Hacking reinforces – rather than undermining power asymmetries ("The rich have far more resources to figure out how to gimmick the rules"). We are mostly not the hackers – we are the hacked.

For Henry, Marty Hench is a hacker (the rare hacker that works for the good guys), even though "he doesn’t wear mirrorshades or get wasted chatting to bartenders with Soviet military-surplus mechanical arms." He's a gun for hire, that most traditional of cyberpunk heroes, and while he doesn't stand against the system, he's not for it, either.

Henry's pinning down something I've been circling around for nearly 30 years: the idea that though "the street finds its own use for things," Wall Street and Madison Avenue are among the streets that might find those uses:

https://craphound.com/nonfic/street.html

Henry also connects Martin Hench to Marcus Yallow, the hero of my YA Little Brother series. I have tried to make this connection myself, opining that while Marcus is a character who is fighting to save an internet that he loves, Marty is living in the ashes of the internet he lost:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/07/dont-curb-your-enthusiasm/

But Henry's Marty-as-hacker notion surfaces a far more interesting connection between the two characters. Marcus is a vehicle for conveying the excitement and power of hacking to young readers, while Marty is a vessel for older readers who know the stark terror of being hacked, by the sadistic wolves who're coming for all of us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I44L1pzi4gk

Both Marcus and Marty are explainers, as am I. Some people say that exposition makes for bad narrative. Those people are wrong:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

"Explaining" makes for great fiction. As Maria Farrell writes in her Crooked Timber review of The Bezzle, the secret sauce of some of the best novels is "information about how things work. Things like locks, rifles, security systems":

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/03/06/the-bezzle/

Where these things are integrated into the story's "reason and urgency," they become "specialist knowledge [that] cuts new paths to move through the world." Hacking, in other words.

This is a theme Paul Di Filippo picked up on in his review of The Bezzle for Locus:

https://locusmag.com/2024/04/paul-di-filippo-reviews-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/

Heinlein was always known—and always came across in his writings—as The Man Who Knew How the World Worked. Doctorow delivers the same sense of putting yourself in the hands of a fellow who has peered behind Oz’s curtain. When he fills you in lucidly about some arcane bit of economics or computer tech or social media scam, you feel, first, that you understand it completely and, second, that you can trust Doctorow’s analysis and insights.

Knowledge is power, and so expository fiction that delivers news you can use is novel that makes you more powerful – powerful enough to resist the hackers who want to hack you.

Henry and I were both friends of Aaron Swartz, and the Little Brother books are closely connected to Aaron, who helped me with Homeland, the second volume, and wrote a great afterword for it (Schneier wrote an afterword for the first book). That book – and Aaron's afterword – has radicalized a gratifying number of principled technologists. I know, because I meet them when I tour, and because they send me emails. I like to think that these hackers are part of Aaron's legacy.

Henry argues that the Hench books are "purpose-designed to inspire a thousand Max Schrems – people who are probably past their teenage years, have some grounding in the relevant professions, and really want to see things change."

(Schrems is the Austrian privacy activist who, as a law student, set in motion the events that led to the passage of the EU's General Data Privacy Regulation:)

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/15/out-here-everything-hurts/#noyb

Henry points out that William Gibson's Neuromancer doesn't mention the word "internet" – rather, Gibson coined the term cyberspace, which, as Henry says, is "more ‘capitalism’ than ‘computerized information'… If you really want to penetrate the system, you need to really grasp what money is and what it does."

Maria also wrote one of my all-time favorite reviews of Red Team Blues, also for Crooked Timber:

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/05/11/when-crypto-meant-cryptography/

In it, she compares Hench to Dickens' Bleak House, but for the modern tech world:

You put the book down feeling it’s not just a fascinating, enjoyable novel, but a document of how Silicon Valley’s very own 1% live and a teeming, energy-emitting snapshot of a critical moment on Earth.

All my life, I've written to find out what's going on in my own head. It's a remarkably effective technique. But it's only recently that I've come to appreciate that reading what other people write about my writing can reveal things that I can't see.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/17/panama-papers-fanfic/#the-1337est-h4x0rs

Image: Frédéric Poirot (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/fredarmitage/1057613629 CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #science fiction #cyberpunk #literary criticism #maria farrell #henry farrell #noir #martin hench #marty hench #red team blues #the bezzle #forensic accountants #hackers #bruce schneier #post-cyberpunk #blair fix

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