The Means of Conversion - The Lagrange Point Vol. I, Iss. 20

Welcome to issue #20 of The Lagrange Point! Big welcome to the latest subscribers. If you need a primer on what this e-newsletter is, check it out here.

Thank you for signing on, and please, continue to spread the word to others!

I think a big change will be coming to this e-newsletter soon. I had an interesting conversation with a journalist friend about what I might want out of The Lagrange Point, and it's weighing on my mind.

For now though, it's status quo!

In This Issue

Distant Early Warnings

• Some nifty new books, including recent and upcoming releases!

Crafter's Corner

• Warhammer: the Old World - Halfling Heroes

Rantables

• The Means of Conversion — How do We Recapture Mass Media?

We are chock-a-block with new books this week! Some of these are already available, but they're definitely worth highlighting.

But before we dive into the book pile, let's turn to Kickstarter, where a nifty new "escape room in a box" experience is up for funding. The Golden Pharaoh is the latest endeavour from Mystery Games Inc., a company created by Andy Gilker in Montreal. They make premium puzzle boxes with incredible interactive elements. Previously, they've done wondrously carved wooden boxes with a Tesla theme, and "defuse the bomb" packages that have electronics and circuitry. They're not cheap, but I quite like the idea of a business making and selling just a handful of items to a select audience.

This past week, At Bay Press released The Forgotten Frontier, a graphic novel that tackles the Wild West era from an Indigenous perspective. Written by Toronto author Tristan Jones, who comes from mixed Black Mi'kmaq and Anishnaabe heritage, and illustrated by Hungarian artist Alexander Bumbulut, The Forgotten Frontier follows runaway-turned deputy sherriff Ela Tahoe as she confronts a Confederate invasion of her New Mexican town following the end of the Civil War.

Another recent release from this month to get caught up on is Stranger Skies, the second novel of Ottawa-born author Pascale Lacelle's Drowned Gods trilogy. A dark academia fantasy novel, Stranger Skies follows up on Curious Tides, catching up with characters Emory, Baz, Romie, and Kai on their desperate quests through space and time. There's a "book within a book" narrative at the heart of the story, as they group find themselves in the fantasy world of the book "Song of the Drowned Gods."

Finally, some creepy horror is bubbling up from the ocean with Nick Cutter's The Deep, coming from Simon and Schuster on December 10. A strange plague is ravaging humanity, and the only cure may rest beneath the ocean, where a research lab has found a universal healer. But when the lab goes silent, a small team is sent to investigate...and finds something far darker and more evil than even the worst plague.

Following up on my last post, where I set out to complete an entire Warhammer Fantasy army, I've moved on to the character models in my Halfling regiments that form the detachments in my Empire army.

I really must remember to take more in-progress photos; I know people like to see these step-by-step as a point of curiosity. Here, at least, you can see the early stage.

Essentially, the colour scheme remains the same as with the general soldiery, but it's applied in a fancier way. You'll also notice that there's a big honking rifle there...it turns out I didn't care for that. But firstly, we have the Sherriff/Captain.

No conversion work on this one! It's a pretty straightforward miniature, with a nice, open pose to make getting the details easy. I placed a quarter alongside him so you can get an idea of the scale I'm working in here. I do love that he's pointing the way with a chicken drumstick. "Come on, men, second breakfast is waiting for us!"

The Engineer took a little extra work.

As you can see, partway through I decided I'd rather arm him with pigeon bombs instead of a Hochland Long Rifle. Pigeon bombs — literally, homing pigeons that drop bombs on the enemy — seem more in keeping with a halfling mentality. This was originally an archer, but I chopped his bow off and pivoted his arm, allowing me to replace it with hand-sculpted telescope.

I couldn't do much about the drawstring arm, but in this pose, I think it makes it look like he's either scratching his chin in thought or about to pop the telescope back closed.

The bird I found in my bits box. I think it came from a Warmachine kit, but I have no idea which one. He turned out pretty good for being less than a centimeter long!

I'm going to keep on with this army until it's done. Here's what I've got to finish up:

• 8 Inner Circle Knights
• 1 Great Cannon (and crew)
• 1 Helblaster Volley Gun (and crew)
• 2 Halfling Hot Pots/Mortars (and crews)
• 12 Halfling Huntsmen
• 25 Greatswords
• 1 Captain
• 1 General
• 1 Mounted Wizard
• 1 Wizard on foot
• 5 Outriders
• 1 Steam Tank

I'm going to try to push myself to get it all done by the end of the year, but that might be a bit out of reach. We'll see!

I'd been planning to write this particular rant for a while, but it became especially interesting and pertinent in the wake of the recent BlueSky effect.

If you haven't heard, there's been a mass exodus from Twitter (well, another one, anyway), and the main beneficiary has been upstart microblogging app BlueSky, the creation of 33-year-old software engineer Jay Graber. The numbers are significant. In September 2022, it had about 2 million users.

As of this past week, that number has jumped tenfold to over 20 million, and is still growing. Quickly.

Twitter, meanwhile, has been shrinking, and while owner Elon Musk, the answer to "what if a comment section became a person," has insisted that usage remains higher than ever, his metrics crumble under the slightest scrutiny and basic evidence.

There's a lot of reasons for that change. Brazil's blocking of X. Musk's bizarre tweet about the UK entering "civil war." The bizarre decisions around verification, then stripping users of the ability to actually block anyone, and most lately, news that anything posted to Twitter will become AI fodder.

But beyond that, there's the sensation that people truly are becoming fed up with the right-wing cult of the United States. Looking at BlueSky's main proponents and user growth, there's an outsized amount of rhetoric directed at how toxic Twitter had become, and how that was directly tied up in Elon Musk and him going all-in on bringing literal Nazis and hatemongers back in droves to the platform he bought, explicitly, it is now apparent, to help win an election where he would govern as a shadow-President.

Over on BlueSky, you'll see people not just content with mass-blocking any influx of rage-baiting Trump trolls and their ilk, but outright proud of it. Numerous whinging articles by media outlets like The Globe and Mail or The Atlantic about how BlueSky is destined to become an "echo chamber" are laughed out of the timeline. The fact is, progressives are happily finding a home there. And they're slamming the door in the face of the tormenters who drove them off other platforms in the first place.

All of this adds up to what could be a serious missing link in what has, so far, been a losing war for progressive politics. In US and Canadian politics, people who staunchly believe in socialist ideas, trans rights, environmental protection and labour movements have increasingly found themselves shut out of major parties. The Democrats, for instance, have completely alienated the left wing, half-assing on progressive ideas like fair taxation and abortion protection while also giving the same cover to increasingly rogue Israel that the Republicans have offered.

But where progressive politics has really struggled to make inroads is in broad outreach.

It is not merely that the message is more complicated, and therefore harder to digest, for audiences of many demographics. It is that the message is not being carried by any major platform or organization. Musk bought up Twitter. We also know that papers like the Washington Post and the LA Times were held hostage by corporate owners like Jeff Bezos, who interfered directly in their editorial processes and prevented them from endorsing Kamala Harris.

The notion by the right-wing that the media is inherently biased against them, is, like so much of their identity, a projection, when in truth the largest and most powerful institutions of thought are owned and beholden to right-wing interests.

So how do we fight back?

BlueSky is painting an interesting portrait of a network in infancy. It is vulnerable to seizure, as any social network is, but it nonetheless offers insight into how necessary controlling these levers of communication is to fighting back against global fascism.

Where, for instance, is the left-wing's equivalent of Joe Rogan? Where is the Jordan Peterson? If you find those comparisons objectionable, consider that the right-wing has no compunctions about putting ideas into the heads of young people by any means necessary. Why do we twist ourselves into knots of anxiety about dumbing things down or playing to the lowest common denominator when our enemies clearly do not care to play by any rules at all?

And regardless, this is not a call to simplistic brainwashing. It is a call to begin organizing and promoting individuals and organizations that are disseminating left-wing information in a digestible and viral manner. It is a call to begin the work that the right-wing is decades ahead of us on, boosting and centralizing the voices that can convert impressionable minds seeking an alternative to corruption, failed neo-liberalism and peak capitalism who are being misled.

BlueSky is a tantalizing start. But we need podcasters. We need news organizations. We need journalists and thinkers and leaders. Replace Joe Rogan with the next Noam Chomsky. Replace Jordan Peterson with the next Carl Sagan.

These voices are out there. They need our support. They need our following.

And we need to start fighting back.

That wraps up issue #20 of The Lagrange Point! If you enjoyed this little e-newsletter, please consider subscribing, or, if you're already subscribed, sharing it with a friend or family member!

I can't grow this e-newsletter alone. I need lots of mouths spreading lots of words about why people should read The Lagrange Point.

Until next Monday, thank you for reading!

-Tim