It's been too long, hasn't it? - January-February 02019

To begin with, in another world where you can effortlessly teleport to the people you care about, school violence resolves with a lot less massacre and tears. [Updated with correct origin link, thanks alexseanchai.]

notasupervillain posted a request asking about what technologies directly lead to social justice outcomes.

Most things we think of as grammar rules are really the constructions of prescriptivists somewhere in the 18th or 19th centuries CE. So if someone takes the idea that fundamentally, writing is about making good sentences rather than obedience to arbitrary rules, then you might get a style guide that's about style, rather than grammar.

Suggestions on good practice for citing authors that may have changed their names, pronouns, or gender markers so as to avoid deadnaming or other offenses.

Adults need vaccination as well as children.

( And then there's all the rest of what's in the post. )

To end with, A palliative care doctor talks about the things in our lives that help us accept the inevitability of our deaths, and some of the things she's learned in caring for the dying that might make that idea easier on the one dying and the ones who have to deal with the dying.

An iconic organ piece on harp instead.

And a further improvement to the bookmarklet for making posts with excerpts - it now uses the right user tags for sites that Dreamwidth understands how to find their user pictures for.

How activities might become corruptions, a musing in a few fannish activities

alisx posited three major branches of fandom - the consumptive, the curative, and the transformative. Reading the comments on the original post is worthwhile, in that there's further explanations and some differences and teasing out that sometimes we work with a language where the right word sometimes also has unintended meanings along with the one we wanted.

What I got out of the post, hough, was that it was a succinct way of describing the corrupting influences on those branches. Not that there's a Platonic form of these activities, free from things that can be corrupting, because humans participate in fandom, and humans have chemical feedback mechanisms that have us chasing things that feel good but might not actually be good.

In any case, the three branches are consumptive fandom, curative fandom, and creative (or transformative) fandom.

( Let's get into the details )

We all get caught up in the chase here and there, because we want to get something out of our fandom. If there were such a thing as the Platonic Form of fandom, it would be that space where everybody gets the things they're looking for, has a space of their own to participate with, and none of those things have to be mediated or ranked in importance by outside corrupting factors. It would be a nice place to be, I think, where everyone could get what they liked, create what they liked, and not get bit by any of the bugs that demand "more" or "better" as a way of valuing yourself.

But that's just me. One data point in a vast place. I'm pretty sure all of you have different opinions on the matter, so let's have a conversation.