colourless green ideas sleep furiously

they werent treated lesser, i was. they werent questioned on their identity, i was. they werent degendered constantly, i was.

the difference was like night and day no matter what i did.

As a white person raised in a white supremacist society, you’re gonna fuck up sometimes. That’s just a fact. But racialized people often aren’t able/comfortable speaking up when y’all do some shit because of the power imbalance/not feeling up to educating when you may be resistant/don’t think the “fight” will be Worth It.

Show initiative without making it A Struggle or playing the white guilt card. Show you actually care about them, their struggles, and the way you interact with them BEFORE they have to have a bigger Conversation with you, beyond when they need to yell about someone else being racist.

Even close friends or partners are not necessarily safe. I have had partners dismiss accusations of racism just off hand, I have had partners treat me like a repository for knowledge on Muslim cultural practices despite the fact that *my family has been Christian since Jesus,* hell I have had a partner say I was overplaying my pain at the genocide to get sympathy.

Taner Ceylan  

Ball 

Oil on canvas 

Myst turns 32 (released September 24, 1993)

Like, the single most clarifying fact about Myst, the one I'd staple to the front of every "games as art" retrospective, is that it's a HyperCard stack. The best-selling computer game of its decade, the one your aunt owned, was wired together in the free hypermedia thing that came in the box with every Macintosh, the same tool dentists used to build appointment databases. Two preacher's kids glued a few thousand still pictures to each other with digital index cards, and the result outsold everything in the industry until The Sims finally passed it in 2002.

And every step of how that happened is machinery, and the machinery is better than the retrospectives.

Start in 1987. Bill Atkinson builds HyperCard at Apple and insists it ship free with every Mac: cards, links, click a region of a picture and you go to another card. Hypertext, in shrinkwrap, years before the web is even a memo. Apple never figured out how to charge for the thing and starved it to death over fifteen years, which is its own post for another time.

Rand Miller, 1987, is a programmer at a bank in Texas. His younger brother Robyn is drifting through college in Washington state. Their father was a nondenominational preacher who moved the family wherever the next congregation was (Pennsylvania, Hawaii, Haiti), and the brothers came out of it with the specific skill set of kids who learned to entertain themselves: drawing maps of places that don't exist. Rand calls Robyn and proposes they make a children's program in HyperCard. The Manhole, 1988, a black-and-white world with no score and no goal. You click the fire hydrant, a beanstalk grows out of it, you climb the beanstalk.

In 1989 Activision presses The Manhole onto CD-ROM, the first computer game on the format. And here the story stops being about two brothers and becomes about the disc, because the disc is the whole thing.

1985: Sony and Philips publish the spec. 650 megabytes on a piece of polycarbonate that costs maybe a dollar fifty to press, in a year when a hard drive that size cost more than a car. The entire content industry looked at that ratio and lost its mind, in stages, for about a decade. The catch was the drive: seven hundred, a thousand dollars, single-speed, and nobody owned one. No drives means nobody presses discs means nobody buys drives. The industry's answer was the Multimedia PC standard, 1991, Microsoft and Tandy and a consortium of clone makers agreeing on a sticker (a 386SX, a CD drive, a sound card) so that a family could walk into Sears and buy "multimedia" as a noun.

What actually moved the drives into houses was guilt. The multimedia PC was sold to parents as an education appliance, and the flagship product of the guilt economy was the encyclopedia. Microsoft went to Encyclopaedia Britannica in the late '80s about licensing the text for a CD version. Britannica said no, and the no had nothing to do with prestige. Britannica was a door-to-door operation: roughly two thousand salesmen moving a set that ran $1,500 to $2,000, each sale paying a commission in the hundreds of dollars, revenue peaking around $650 million in 1990. A $99 disc would have put the sales force in open revolt, so the answer stayed no. Microsoft shrugged and licensed Funk & Wagnalls, the encyclopedia supermarkets sold one volume a week at the checkout, dressed it up with audio clips and video, and called it Encarta, 1993. By 1996 Britannica had been sold off for a fraction of its peak value and the salesmen were gone. The text on the disc was the same text the salesmen carried. What the disc destroyed was the commission.

Hold onto that mechanism, because it builds Myst too, from the supply side.

The money behind Myst is Sunsoft, the game label of Sun Corporation of Nagoya, whose core business was pachinko boards. The brothers were almost incidental to the deal. Sunsoft was betting that the CD consoles then being announced (Sega CD, CD-i, the 3DO) would be starving for content, and that the one genre a single-speed disc could do beautifully was the prerendered slideshow. So pachinko money, roughly $600,000 of it, funds two years of development in exchange for the console rights; Brøderbund (Carmen Sandiego, The Print Shop) takes the computer rights; and Cyan, half a dozen people in Mead, Washington, starts rendering an island on Macintosh Quadras left running overnight.

Every design decision the canonization later filed under artistic vision is disc physics. Still images instead of motion, because a single-speed drive needs most of a second to find anything. Almost nobody on screen, because video eats megabytes; the few characters you meet live inside QuickTime windows a couple of inches across, trapped in books, which the brothers turned into the plot. No death, no inventory, no combat. Some of that is temperament, preacher's kids who liked walking around imaginary places. But a game you cannot lose can be played by someone who has never held a controller, which is to say by the exact adults who had just bought the guilt appliance.

September 24, 1993, Macintosh first. Six million copies and change over the decade.

The number that explains that number: an enormous share of those copies moved as bundles, packed in with the drive or the whole machine or bought the same afternoon, the disc that proved the $2,500 purchase had been wise. Myst was the demo. It was what the Packard Bell ran when the neighbors came over. There's an entire genre of mid-'90s anecdote about copies that never got past the first island, and the retrospectives treat those as a melancholy fact about casual players in over their heads. The Britannica sets sat unread on the shelf too. Both purchases did their job.

Ten weeks later, December 10, 1993, Doom goes up free on a University of Wisconsin FTP server. Fits on floppies, real-time 3D, propagates through office LANs and BBSes and shareware racks without asking anyone's permission. People love the fork-in-the-road framing, Myst versus Doom, the gallery versus the gun, and fine. But the split that matters is underneath: one shipped on unit economics and one shipped on a network, and the one on the network is the future, though it takes the people selling discs another three years to feel it.

Because through 1994, 1995, the utopia is peaking. Philips is in the process of losing (the standard figure thrown around is a billion dollars) on CD-i, a living-room disc appliance for encyclopedias and golf instruction. Time Warner and Viacom stand up new-media divisions. The trade press says "Siliwood" without blushing. Bill Gates calls The 7th Guest the new standard in interactive entertainment. The Voyager Company does the highbrow version: A Hard Day's Night with the full screenplay on the disc, expanded books, a CD-ROM in every museum gift shop, bands putting out interactive albums where you click around the studio.

All of it runs on one premise: content is a SKU. Press for a dollar fifty, shrinkwrap at $49.95, forty retail points, shelf space at CompUSA, returns, a catalog, a fall list. Publishing people understood it on contact, which is why they all piled in. It was books. The whole CD-ROM utopia was the culture industries betting that the digital future would keep the unit economics of the warehouse, just shinier.

Riven, October 1997. Four years, a budget an order of magnitude past Myst's, five discs, four and a half million copies. And it's the last harvest off that ground. Within a year the 3D accelerator card makes prerendered stills read as antique, and the web does to the $50 content disc precisely what the disc did to the encyclopedia salesman. The new-media divisions close between 1996 and 1998. Voyager gets broken up. Encarta itself, the disc that killed the salesmen, gets killed in turn by Wikipedia and shuts down in 2009. The mechanism keeps running; it just takes new tenants.

Nobody stopped liking pretty islands. The SKU died, which is a different kind of event.

Cyan's next thirty years are the long aftermath, which the anniversary pieces mostly skip. Uru in 2003, Myst as a persistent online world, canceled mid-launch when Ubisoft ran the subscriber math; the company nearly dies. Then it finds its actual business: re-pressing the island. realMyst. Myst Masterpiece Edition. Ports to the Saturn, the Jaguar CD, the CD-i, the PSP, the Nintendo DS, your phone, a full rebuild in a modern engine for VR headsets in 2020. The same 1993 island re-sold on every format the industry has invented since, and I don't say that as a knock; it's the most honest catalog business in games, every reissue a dividend on the island the brothers capitalized in HyperCard.

And in 2013, Kickstarter: Obduction, $1.3 million from twenty-two thousand backers. Look at the shape of that. Direct sales, in advance, on a promise, to a named list of households. The door-to-door model came back. The salesman is an email list now.

May 2024, the Strong Museum puts Myst in the World Video Game Hall of Fame, next to SimCity and Resident Evil. March 2025, Cyan lays off twelve people, half the studio, citing the month-to-month realities of making games in 2025, and another round follows in the summer. The museum case and the layoff notice arriving inside the same twelve months sounds like irony and is actually the standard life cycle of a catalog company caught in a platform shift; ask whoever was holding AM radio stations in 1962.

So when the 32nd-anniversary essays get wistful, read closely for what they're wistful about. The islands themselves are fine; they're on your phone for a few bucks. What the nostalgia keeps reaching back for is the margin: the moment when one cultural object could be an appliance justification, a shelf SKU, and a commissioned sale all at once, when content had a box and the box had a price, and half a dozen people in Mead, Washington could ride the hardware industry's chicken-and-egg problem into six million living rooms.

Sun Corporation of Nagoya is still around, by the way. The pachinko-board company that paid for the gentlest blockbuster ever made now lives substantially off its stake in Cellebrite, the Israeli firm that unlocks phones for police departments. Restless money finds the format of the era.

on the alberta oil sands

If you want to understand the Alberta oil sands — and everyone should, at least a little, because they are among the strangest industrial artifacts in the Western hemisphere and the standard coverage of them is almost uniformly wrong — you have to start with the fact that what's in the ground is not oil. Oil, proper oil, the stuff Saudi Arabia and Texas and the North Sea have been pumping for a century and a quarter, comes out of the ground as a liquid. You drill a hole, pressure differentials do most of the work, and what comes up is roughly pourable. This is not what's in northeastern Alberta. What's in northeastern Alberta is bitumen, which is oil that has been sitting around for a hundred million years getting its light ends biodegraded out of it by bacteria, and what's left is a substance with the consistency, at room temperature, of cold molasses or peanut butter. You cannot pump it. You cannot drill it. If you cut a chunk of oil-sand out of the formation and put it on your desk it will sit there, looking like a dark sticky brick, being the least ambitious hydrocarbon in the history of hydrocarbons.

So the entire industry is, at a physical level, a workaround for the fact that the thing they're extracting is an embarrassment to the concept of petroleum.

There are two workarounds and they both cost a lot of energy. If the deposit is close to the surface — and only about a fifth of the reserves are — you can dig it. This means you strip off the boreal forest and the peat underneath it (the "overburden," in the terminology, which is one of those words like "collateral damage" or "surplus population" that you can tell was invented to not describe something) and you run the biggest trucks and shovels in the world, actually the biggest, 400-ton dump trucks that cost five million dollars each and tires that cost the price of a house, and you mine it like coal. The oil-sand goes into crushers and then into giant hot-water tumblers that separate the bitumen from the sand the way you'd separate wet paint from gravel, with a lot of help from caustic soda and even more help from steam. The water goes into tailings ponds, which are not ponds, they are lakes, they are visible from low earth orbit, and they are full of a mixture of fine clays and residual bitumen and a lot of other chemistry that is at best dubious and at worst a slow-motion environmental catastrophe nobody in Alberta can figure out how to clean up and which, by provincial law, the operators are supposed to eventually reclaim — a promise whose timeline keeps sliding to the right and whose financial reserves, if you actually cost them out, would bankrupt most of the companies that made them. That's the mining side.

The other eighty percent of the reserves are too deep to mine. For those you use SAGD, steam-assisted gravity drainage, which works like this: you drill two horizontal wells, one stacked a few meters above the other, you blast the upper one full of high-pressure steam until the bitumen down there gets hot enough to actually flow, and then you collect the flowable bitumen out of the lower well. You are, essentially, cooking the ground. To do this you need ungodly amounts of natural gas, because steam doesn't make itself, and the natural gas is piped in from elsewhere in the province, which is why the oil sands are sometimes described (accurately) as a process for converting natural gas, which is a reasonably clean fuel, into synthetic crude, which is not, at a thermodynamic efficiency that would make a nineteenth-century millwright wince.

The net energy math on this is — fine. It works. You put one unit of energy in, you get three or four out, that's the rough ratio, less than conventional oil's old ten-to-one but more than enough to make money at any oil price north of roughly fifty dollars a barrel, which the global oil price has been north of most of the time since about 2004. So it gets done. And once you've gotten the bitumen out of the ground — whether by digging or by cooking — you still can't ship it, because at pipeline temperature it's still too thick to flow, so you cut it with condensate (a light hydrocarbon imported specifically for this purpose, sometimes from the US Gulf, shipped north, used as a thinner) until it's a mix called dilbit, diluted bitumen, which is what actually goes down the pipe. About a third of every barrel of dilbit leaving Alberta is diluent. You are paying to ship the thinner.

This is, I want to stress, the normal operation of the industry. None of this is scandal. This is the regular Tuesday.

The scale of it is the part people don't absorb, because the numbers are all in units nobody has intuitions for. Canadian oil sands production is running around 3.5 million barrels a day as of 2025, which is more than every OPEC producer except Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which is almost half of all oil produced in Canada, which accounts for most of the difference between Canada being an oil-exporting country and Canada being a quiet resource backwater with a per-capita income that looks more like Ireland's. The industry is about thirty percent of Alberta's GDP. It is the entire reason Alberta's per-capita GDP is what it is. Until the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion came online in May 2024 — after twelve years of construction, at a cost of 34 billion Canadian dollars, after the federal government had to buy the project from Kinder Morgan because no private company could eat the political risk — basically all of it went to the United States, which meant Canadian producers had exactly one customer and priced accordingly, at whatever discount to WTI the American refiners felt like imposing. This was annoying to Canada in the way that having a single customer is always annoying to a supplier, and it's the thing the pipeline was supposed to fix, and fixing it is already looking like it wasn't as much of a fix as promised because production keeps growing faster than egress capacity can keep up.

Okay. That's the industrial situation. Here's the part that actually matters.

Fort McMurray is not a city in any sense that the word normally carries. It is a town of maybe 75,000 permanent residents, up near the 57th parallel, surrounded by boreal forest and muskeg, to which is attached — and the word "attached" is wrong, the word needs to be something more like "grafted" or "hosting" — a second population of roughly 35,000 workers who live in what are called camps. The camps are the actual operational engine of the industry. A camp is a cluster of prefab dormitory buildings attached to a cafeteria and a gym and maybe a movie room, plopped down in the bush near a mine or a SAGD plant, with capacity for anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand workers. Workers fly in from everywhere in Canada — Newfoundland, Cape Breton, New Brunswick, whatever backwater the post-industrial labor market has stranded them in — on two-week-on two-week-off rotations, work twelve-hour shifts, live in a room the size of a cell, and fly home to spend two weeks with their families before coming back. The term of art is "shadow population." The official census counts them separately.

And this arrangement is not incidental to how the industry works. It is the industry. You cannot run a facility the size of Syncrude's Mildred Lake mine with a labor force of people who live in the nearest city and commute to work. There is no nearest city. The nearest city is eight hundred kilometers away. You have to import the workforce, and because you have to import the workforce, you have to house them, and because you have to house them cheaply, you put them in camps, and because the camps are miserable, you pay the workers a lot of money, and because you pay the workers a lot of money, they put up with the camps, and the whole system is stable as long as the oil price is high enough to subsidize the discomfort premium. It is an entire industrial operation structured around the fact that nobody would voluntarily live where the bitumen is, and so the industry has to buy the labor's tolerance of not-living-there, over and over, shift after shift, for however many decades the deposit lasts.

Which brings me to Kate Beaton.

Beaton is from Mabou, Cape Breton, which is one of those Canadian places that the twentieth century was mostly unkind to. Cape Breton had coal, and Cape Breton had steel, and Cape Breton had fishing, and Cape Breton lost all three of these industries in the space of about forty years, and what it has now is diminished. The island's culture, which is Gaelic-inflected and absurdly musical and which has produced a shocking amount of art per capita, has as one of its load-bearing assumptions the idea that you will probably have to leave to make a living, and that this leaving will be sad but necessary, and that everyone you know will do it too, and that it's been going on since the Highland Clearances, and will go on after you. This is the Cape Breton structure of feeling. It predates the oil sands by about two hundred years. The oil sands are just the current destination.

So when Beaton graduated from Mount Allison in 2005 with an arts degree and a pile of student loans, she did what her cousins and the boys from her high school had already been doing for a decade, which was get on a plane to Alberta. She went to the camps. She worked tool cribs, she worked supply offices, she worked at Syncrude's Long Lake and at Shell's Albian Sands and at a couple of the smaller operators whose names I can't remember off the top of my head, and she kept a notebook, and eventually — many years later, after she'd become internet-famous for Hark! A Vagrant, which is a different story — she turned the notebook into a graphic memoir called Ducks, published in 2022 by Drawn & Quarterly, which won pretty much every prize available to graphic novels and landed on Obama's list that year, and which is, I think, the single best book anyone has written about what the oil sands actually are, which is a very specific kind of social machine.

The book is called Ducks because in 2008, while Beaton was there, 1,600 migratory ducks landed on a Syncrude tailings pond and died in it, which became briefly a global news story and got Syncrude fined three million dollars, which is roughly the kind of money Syncrude made every forty-five minutes that year. The ducks were the visible atrocity. The book is about the invisible one.

The invisible one is that the ratio of men to women in the camps was, depending on which camp and which shift, somewhere between 30-to-1 and 50-to-1. Beaton spent two years as one of the maybe two or three women at any given installation surrounded by several hundred men who were working twelve-hour shifts, living in single-occupancy dorms a hundred meters from hers, drinking heavily when off-shift because there was nothing else to do, doing cocaine at a rate that surprised even her, isolated from their wives and girlfriends and mothers and daughters, and — this is the part the book builds very patiently and very devastatingly — slowly losing the ability to behave like the people they used to be when they were still at home. The book is not a condemnation of the men. It is explicitly not that. The book's most painful move is that it keeps humanizing them, keeps showing how they're also trapped, also miserable, also being used up by the same machine, even as they do the things they do to her. Which, without getting into the specifics — read the book — include the full range of what several hundred isolated men will do to two women when the HR function is a phone number in Calgary that nobody is going to call.

And the thing Beaton sees, the thing she sets up with complete economy and then lets the rest of the book bear out, is that the machine is designed to produce exactly this. It's not a bug. The camp structure produces isolated men away from their social networks in exchange for money. Isolated men away from their social networks, given enough money and enough boredom, will do predictable things, and those predictable things are accepted by the operators as part of the cost of doing business, the way a mine accepts that a certain number of miners will get silicosis. It's a function of the design. Nobody up the chain at Suncor or Syncrude or Shell wants the women in the camps to be harassed. It's just that preventing the harassment would require reorganizing the entire labor-rotation structure of the industry, which would raise the cost per barrel, which would make the operation uncompetitive, and so the harassment is priced in as an externality. The women are told they have a bad attitude. The men are told to knock it off. The rotation continues. The oil flows.

What makes Ducks extraordinary, and what makes it a book about the oil sands rather than a book about harassment — though it is also that — is that Beaton also sees the men. She sees the welders from Cape Breton she grew up around, except here they're trapped in a way she recognizes because she's trapped in the same way, a way her dad would recognize from his own generation going to Boston or Toronto, a way her grandfather would recognize from the mines. The Maritime out-migration has been happening long enough that it has a folk repertoire, a whole tradition of songs about leaving, and the men in the camps are inside that tradition whether they know it or not. Some of them are actively dying inside it — there's a running count in the book, not emphasized, just there in the margin, of young men who die on the highway between Fort McMurray and Edmonton, or who kill themselves in their dorms, or who disappear. The mortality of the rotation is ambient. It's baked in. Nobody makes a particular fuss because making a particular fuss isn't what anyone there has the cultural equipment to do.

And the thing I keep coming back to, reading that book, is how precisely it maps onto earlier Canadian industrial extractions. Cape Breton exported its own men to its own mines in the 1890s and they died of black lung. Newfoundland exported its men to the Banks and they died drowning. The cod collapsed in 1992 and those men went to Fort Mac. There is a temporal rhyme here that Beaton doesn't belabor but that sits underneath the whole book: this is what Canadian industrial history is, a series of extractive operations that consume the bodies and social networks of men from places the previous extractive operation already hollowed out. The oil sands are just the current iteration. When the oil sands go — and they will go, either because the world stops buying the product or because the bitumen that's economically recoverable runs out or because a carbon regime finally prices the externalities — whatever comes next will be staffed by the grandsons of the men who died at Fort McKay, who were themselves the grandsons of the men who died at Glace Bay. Same as it ever was.

The industry knows all this, by the way. None of it is secret. The oil companies have sociologists on retainer. The turnover statistics are studied. The mental health crisis in the camps is a line item, it has a budget, there are contractors whose entire business is running crisis-response services for a workforce they know is coming apart. The 2016 wildfire — which evacuated 88,000 people from Fort McMurray in the largest wildfire evacuation in Canadian history, which burned down 2,400 homes, which briefly shut down most of the industry — revealed in passing that the regional municipality's shadow population was around 40,000 people at that moment, people who lived here but didn't live here, who were uncounted in most of the news coverage because they weren't from there, they were from somewhere else, and they all went back to their somewhere elses during the evacuation and some of them simply never came back. The 2018 post-fire census found the shadow population down fifteen percent. The oil didn't care. The oil kept flowing. The rotations restarted.

And the Indigenous piece, which I've been circling without saying directly, is that all of this is happening on land that belongs, by every reasonable reading of treaty and prior occupation, to the Athabasca Chipewyan and the Mikisew Cree and the Fort McKay First Nation and the Métis communities of the region, who have been variously co-opted, partnered-with, sued-into-submission, paid-off, or simply bulldozed over, depending on the decade and the specific negotiation. Some of the bands have significant ownership stakes in the operations now, which is a development the 1970s activist version of this story did not predict. Some are still in active litigation over water quality and cancer clusters downstream on the Athabasca River. Both things are true. The oil sands produce billionaires and elders dying of bile duct cancer and they produce them in the same watershed and if you want a tidy story about which is the real one you'll have to write it yourself because the ground doesn't offer one.

Beaton's book ends, more or less, with her going home to Cape Breton, having paid off her loans. She is permanently changed. She does not know if she is changed in a way she can live with. The book came out fourteen years after she left the camps and you can feel in it the time it took her to process what she'd seen, which tracks — it takes that long, usually, to figure out what a thing was, and sometimes you never figure it out, you just get old enough to stop being wrecked by it. She is one of the very few people who went through those camps and came out with the specific combination of linguistic ability and patience and moral seriousness to write about them. The others — the welders and the mechanics and the engineers and the heavy-equipment operators — mostly did not. They went home. They drank. They worked the next rotation. They raised kids who, statistically, also went to Alberta, because the Maritime economy did not improve. The book is as much about them as it is about her, and the fact that their version of the book doesn't exist, and won't, is part of what the book is finally about.

There is a thing you learn if you read enough industrial history, which is that the machine doesn't need you to understand it in order to keep running. Understanding the oil sands does not stop them. Beaton writing Ducks did not stop them. The 1,600 ducks in the tailings pond did not stop them. The 88,000-person wildfire evacuation did not stop them. The carbon math does not stop them. The Chipewyan cancer clusters have not stopped them. The only thing that will eventually stop them is the price, and the price is set in a market that does not weight any of the inputs I have just listed, and so the bitumen will keep coming out of the ground until it doesn't, and the men will keep flying in, and the women who work among them will keep being what they have to be to survive the rotation, and somewhere a Cape Breton teenager is right now considering her options and thinking about student loans.

Been practising my BG skills lately! process pics under the cut