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silveradeptHello again! Let's start with something that is easy to say and difficult to do: you do not have to be good to enjoy your hobby. The tricky part is that in our connected world, we quickly run into the taste-skill boundary because we have so many examples of our hobby around that are good and better than we are that the comparison game can get entrenched early. For that, I have Tenured Professor Rogers Talks About Impostor Syndrome.
The Doomsday Clock continues to be set at two minutes to midnight, a grim reminder that the current abnormality should not be seen as a good thing.
A significant amount of taxpayer money goes toward maintaining sites that promote the idea that the Confederacy was right, slavery was beneficial to the slaves, and the Civil War was about something other than abolition and the subjugation of black people.
Sentences that could use some extra commentary to clarify their meaning.
Unsurprisingly, with as much queer content as written directly into Steven Universe, plenty of people have found a trans-affirming message in the Homeworld sequence in the fifth season, as well as identifying with many of the struggles that Steven goes through in that arc. Which I'm going to place next totammaiya in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
disgracetoscholars pointing out that the tools you use to look at a property are influenced by culture, and therefore, if you're looking at a drama with a culture that's not about explicit, overt gestures of romance (for Reasons), it might be that strong hints are all you're going to get out of the show. (naye follows up with more information on some of the very specific reasons why there won't be anything nearly that explicit on Chinese television, and that even getting anywhere close to the line can result in terrible consequences.)
A Rat Creature Essay talking about Alternate Universes that gives support and nuance to the idea of "characters should make sense for their settings", and suggests that certain AU ideas fail because they don't manage to keep the focus on interrogating the canon through their point of divergence.
staranise points out that Buttercup, from the Princess Bride, is a void, and that if we just give her something to fill it, she becomes a much better character. opensummer takes that idea and runs with it, positing what the story might look like if Buttercup is completely Genre Savvy about what kind of story she's in, and using that knowledge to her advantage.
kore hits one out of the park about both what a shitpost and a shiptoast put together might be, by mentioning that there were definitely ship wars regarding Achilles and Patroclus. And then there are the comments.
Which condiments need refrigeration, and which ones might be able to sit on the shelf, assuming you go through them fast enough?
Some of the great cosplayers from the Black Comic Book Festival in New York City. I've heard from panels that sometimes cosplayers of color get flak for portraying characters that aren't the same skin color, as if skin color were some integral part of being able to recognize the character. That's nonsense noise, and I'm glad for both more characters of color to cosplay and more people of color cosplaying. The Sailor Milaje, for example, is a fabulous idea and needs cosplayers of color to pull off.
And places where people can take their heritage and their stories and make them part of forward-looking future stories, too.
Watching San Diego Comic Con from the perspective of a media critic is way interesting. Because you can see a lot of the ways in which the industry sees its fans and at last some of the fans see the industry in return. (There's also a very nice bit at the end about the occasional unscripted interaction between fan and celebrity, but it's placed in deliberate contrast to the more corporately-mediated experience that SDCC is.)
The "tradition" in prairie dresses as a resurgent fashion is one rife with racism and rigid gender roles, and while all things are always potentially reclaimable if done right, there's a good chance that most of the white women wearing the dresses don't know or don't care about the history that brought that fashion into existence.
kara_mckay notes that the ease at which someone can interact with content has a correlation with how easy assholes can descend on someone. Tumblr is the usual example culprit, given that they're currently the brightest-burning fire in that regard, but it's certainly not exclusive to them, as noted by kara_mckay. When you combine this with the anti-ship factions of various properties and their desire to be as loud and inflammatorily-accusatory as possible in the hopes that the ship they are against will be abandoned for fear of being tarred with liking taboos such as incest or pedophilia, or they can drive creators out of considering that possibility through vitriol (the Dogbert Loud Dog method, as I have had it slotted in my head), it becomes readily apparent that the language of social justice is being weaponized for things that it was not initially intended for. (And is likely to be an entirely poor fit in those situations.) Gatekeeping and other related behaviors are still not cool to engage in, and now, I guess, we need to add on to that the practice of using social justice language to justify your ship, perhaps.
There is a danger in being critical of fandom that you might commit the same mistakes you wanted to avoid. Which is less about ascribing corrupting motivations to people who don't see the source the same way you do and more the ideas that humor should punch up and that if you're going to make fun of someone for their biases and cognitive shortcuts or ignorances of "reality", then it's incumbent on you to make sure that you do a good job of analyzing and foregrounding your own biases.
Talking about the differences in orientation between AO3-as-arm-of-OTW-a-nonprofit and Wattpad as a platform specifically for monetization. There is a transcript.
Something nice and simple - designs for hijab to go along with kimono.
The Brood and the Sunshine, a common media pairing with variations, but that generally sorts out to one person being the more optimistic and one being the one that can't get out of their own head, and the two of them working together to balance each other very well.
Ask five writers about their writing process, and you'll get twelve answers. A story style that is mostly about using a magnet to draw through memories, a recognition that a trauma experience doesn't look like a polished news report, or a list of questions for characters to answer.
Chuck Wendig talks about all the other things in relation to your story that you might have to think about or write about to make that story sing.
Women and girls who are fans of bands are often portrayed as the temptresses and naifs that they definitely aren't. And bandom, such that it is, is one of the few places where a full-volume emotional response is considered entirely appropriate. Because it's girls. What kind of power do they have to run the world, say the people who want to make sure those girls can't.
Black women are at a painful intersection in fandom, as the culture around them often doesn't want to talk about race and race-related issues, even though it's not exactly hard to find accounts of racism in fandom, let's be real.
The microseasons of Japan, many of which are descriptive about a phenomenon that's going to happen as the signal of their time starting.
asakiyume has pictures and a documentary about how taking sand from Cambodia to build up the land of Singapore is affecting the Cambodians and their way of living.
A poem, spoken aloud, about how hard it is, how advice is often contradictory, how brains don't cooperate, and through all of this, why there is still reason to keep trying to get out of bed and live.
If the idea of nonviolent communication is used to tone police rather than discuss issues at hand, it can just as easily be used to reinforce structural oppression as to dismantle some part of it.
An interview about how one of the things that speculative fiction can do is show the possible, including the possible in relationships between humans. And also, the referenced story about magic and the time after and the birds that are to be feared.
The first printing of a Star Trek tie-in novel was way slashier than subsequent printings, as the first draft had managed to keep in content that Paramount definitely wanted excised. (Which I'm going to juxtapose with the return of an older way of marking your content as explicit when sites were looking for it in purges mostly...because I can.
tobermoriansass points out how the idea of the gift economy doesn't really fit well in fandom, because fandom doesn't do well when it tries to think of itself as existing in an economy. Whether because of social obligations and reciprocity, or the ways in which capitalism corrupts and twists something into being more and more about the numbers instead of the sentiment driving the creation or people leaving feedback.
soft toys shaped as wombats rated on their anatomical accuracy by scientists. A small fox in a snowstorm getting help to find their way home. Insects constructed out of plants.
In science and technology, Elon Musk wants you to work more hours so that he can seem like a great innovator. Or whichever disconnected headline you would like to have in that, because people definitely do manage to change the world on a lot less than a 40-hour workweek. (Most changing of the world is not done with work and devices, but with relationships, social things, and things that keep people happy.)
Amazon's desire to become a retailer that sells everything to everyone is, in its own way, making shopping online more confusing, not less.
Apple decided they were on board with helping American Telephone and Telegraph promote a 4G network as if it were 5G-lite and that phones with that capacity would be able to achieve 5G in the future. Let the lawsuits commence about the lack of veracity in everybody's claims, as Verizon apparently rolled out something very nonstandard to be able to claim they were the first to 5G.
You might be able to thank climate change for the polar vortex and significantly colder-than-usual temperatures in the northern United States.frayadjacent has more information about polar vortex and how it might be affected by climate change. ruuger has tips for actually staying safe in the cold. (The Onion pokes fun at the vortex, naturally, but this is an entirely new experience for a lot of people.)
You can thank a few states for the reasons why your credit card interest rates are so usurious, since they decided to drop their usury laws and then SCOTUS decided that companies chartered in a particular state could use that state's rules with any customers they have in other states.
Being the only person you know who uses a drug to help you function is an isolating experience, especially if that drug is occasionally also used recreationally for its psychotropic effects.
If a person suggests you need to shove herbs up your vagina to get rid of the presence of your ex from there, understand they need to think of less intrusive (and unsafe) methods of cleansing your aura.
Did we mention that more than forty percent of approved generic drugs aren't for sale, for a myriad of reasons, many of them that appear anti-competitive? And that for each company that declares bankruptcy because their artificial price hikes were rejected, there are plenty more raising prices for spurious reasons that manage it just fine.
Diseases on the drop thanks to vaccination procedures are starting to turn up again in greater numbers. While there's some blame on austerity, there's also blame for people who are against the idea of protecting their children against diseases.
Last for tonight, what qualifies as "unparliamentary language" for any given body varies from time to time and place. The Parliament of New Zealand offers some of the more choice phrases uttered that were questioned, at least to the 1980s or so, and Strong Language takes a look at some choice Canadian varieties. Some of them are fairly familiar curses and ablist terms, but there are especially good turns of phrase mixed in with them as well.
And, because it is always useful to have a record that everything we think of as new was said by someone before, An ebook copy of a collection of articles about fanzines that span the last 70s and 80s. This will be a very entertaining 200 pages or so to go through, because there's not really any talking about the technical aspects, and more about the philosophical and ideological parts.
Angie's List takes a look at the layouts of the captain's quarters from each of the Federation vessels or stations that we've been able to see the inside of.
And one very nice story about a robot finding not just a good show to watch, but a nice bunch of fans to collaborate writing with.
The Doomsday Clock continues to be set at two minutes to midnight, a grim reminder that the current abnormality should not be seen as a good thing.
A significant amount of taxpayer money goes toward maintaining sites that promote the idea that the Confederacy was right, slavery was beneficial to the slaves, and the Civil War was about something other than abolition and the subjugation of black people.
Sentences that could use some extra commentary to clarify their meaning.
Unsurprisingly, with as much queer content as written directly into Steven Universe, plenty of people have found a trans-affirming message in the Homeworld sequence in the fifth season, as well as identifying with many of the struggles that Steven goes through in that arc. Which I'm going to place next to
tammaiya in disgracetoscholars pointing out that the tools you use to look at a property are influenced by culture, and therefore, if you're looking at a drama with a culture that's not about explicit, overt gestures of romance (for Reasons), it might be that strong hints are all you're going to get out of the show. (naye follows up with more information on some of the very specific reasons why there won't be anything nearly that explicit on Chinese television, and that even getting anywhere close to the line can result in terrible consequences.)A Rat Creature Essay talking about Alternate Universes that gives support and nuance to the idea of "characters should make sense for their settings", and suggests that certain AU ideas fail because they don't manage to keep the focus on interrogating the canon through their point of divergence.
staranise points out that Buttercup, from the Princess Bride, is a void, and that if we just give her something to fill it, she becomes a much better character. opensummer takes that idea and runs with it, positing what the story might look like if Buttercup is completely Genre Savvy about what kind of story she's in, and using that knowledge to her advantage.kore hits one out of the park about both what a shitpost and a shiptoast put together might be, by mentioning that there were definitely ship wars regarding Achilles and Patroclus. And then there are the comments.Which condiments need refrigeration, and which ones might be able to sit on the shelf, assuming you go through them fast enough?
Some of the great cosplayers from the Black Comic Book Festival in New York City. I've heard from panels that sometimes cosplayers of color get flak for portraying characters that aren't the same skin color, as if skin color were some integral part of being able to recognize the character. That's nonsense noise, and I'm glad for both more characters of color to cosplay and more people of color cosplaying. The Sailor Milaje, for example, is a fabulous idea and needs cosplayers of color to pull off.
And places where people can take their heritage and their stories and make them part of forward-looking future stories, too.
Watching San Diego Comic Con from the perspective of a media critic is way interesting. Because you can see a lot of the ways in which the industry sees its fans and at last some of the fans see the industry in return. (There's also a very nice bit at the end about the occasional unscripted interaction between fan and celebrity, but it's placed in deliberate contrast to the more corporately-mediated experience that SDCC is.)
The "tradition" in prairie dresses as a resurgent fashion is one rife with racism and rigid gender roles, and while all things are always potentially reclaimable if done right, there's a good chance that most of the white women wearing the dresses don't know or don't care about the history that brought that fashion into existence.
kara_mckay notes that the ease at which someone can interact with content has a correlation with how easy assholes can descend on someone. Tumblr is the usual example culprit, given that they're currently the brightest-burning fire in that regard, but it's certainly not exclusive to them, as noted by kara_mckay. When you combine this with the anti-ship factions of various properties and their desire to be as loud and inflammatorily-accusatory as possible in the hopes that the ship they are against will be abandoned for fear of being tarred with liking taboos such as incest or pedophilia, or they can drive creators out of considering that possibility through vitriol (the Dogbert Loud Dog method, as I have had it slotted in my head), it becomes readily apparent that the language of social justice is being weaponized for things that it was not initially intended for. (And is likely to be an entirely poor fit in those situations.) Gatekeeping and other related behaviors are still not cool to engage in, and now, I guess, we need to add on to that the practice of using social justice language to justify your ship, perhaps.There is a danger in being critical of fandom that you might commit the same mistakes you wanted to avoid. Which is less about ascribing corrupting motivations to people who don't see the source the same way you do and more the ideas that humor should punch up and that if you're going to make fun of someone for their biases and cognitive shortcuts or ignorances of "reality", then it's incumbent on you to make sure that you do a good job of analyzing and foregrounding your own biases.
Talking about the differences in orientation between AO3-as-arm-of-OTW-a-nonprofit and Wattpad as a platform specifically for monetization. There is a transcript.
Something nice and simple - designs for hijab to go along with kimono.
The Brood and the Sunshine, a common media pairing with variations, but that generally sorts out to one person being the more optimistic and one being the one that can't get out of their own head, and the two of them working together to balance each other very well.
Ask five writers about their writing process, and you'll get twelve answers. A story style that is mostly about using a magnet to draw through memories, a recognition that a trauma experience doesn't look like a polished news report, or a list of questions for characters to answer.
Chuck Wendig talks about all the other things in relation to your story that you might have to think about or write about to make that story sing.
Women and girls who are fans of bands are often portrayed as the temptresses and naifs that they definitely aren't. And bandom, such that it is, is one of the few places where a full-volume emotional response is considered entirely appropriate. Because it's girls. What kind of power do they have to run the world, say the people who want to make sure those girls can't.
Black women are at a painful intersection in fandom, as the culture around them often doesn't want to talk about race and race-related issues, even though it's not exactly hard to find accounts of racism in fandom, let's be real.
The microseasons of Japan, many of which are descriptive about a phenomenon that's going to happen as the signal of their time starting.
asakiyume has pictures and a documentary about how taking sand from Cambodia to build up the land of Singapore is affecting the Cambodians and their way of living.A poem, spoken aloud, about how hard it is, how advice is often contradictory, how brains don't cooperate, and through all of this, why there is still reason to keep trying to get out of bed and live.
If the idea of nonviolent communication is used to tone police rather than discuss issues at hand, it can just as easily be used to reinforce structural oppression as to dismantle some part of it.
An interview about how one of the things that speculative fiction can do is show the possible, including the possible in relationships between humans. And also, the referenced story about magic and the time after and the birds that are to be feared.
The first printing of a Star Trek tie-in novel was way slashier than subsequent printings, as the first draft had managed to keep in content that Paramount definitely wanted excised. (Which I'm going to juxtapose with the return of an older way of marking your content as explicit when sites were looking for it in purges mostly...because I can.
tobermoriansass points out how the idea of the gift economy doesn't really fit well in fandom, because fandom doesn't do well when it tries to think of itself as existing in an economy. Whether because of social obligations and reciprocity, or the ways in which capitalism corrupts and twists something into being more and more about the numbers instead of the sentiment driving the creation or people leaving feedback.soft toys shaped as wombats rated on their anatomical accuracy by scientists. A small fox in a snowstorm getting help to find their way home. Insects constructed out of plants.
In science and technology, Elon Musk wants you to work more hours so that he can seem like a great innovator. Or whichever disconnected headline you would like to have in that, because people definitely do manage to change the world on a lot less than a 40-hour workweek. (Most changing of the world is not done with work and devices, but with relationships, social things, and things that keep people happy.)
Amazon's desire to become a retailer that sells everything to everyone is, in its own way, making shopping online more confusing, not less.
Apple decided they were on board with helping American Telephone and Telegraph promote a 4G network as if it were 5G-lite and that phones with that capacity would be able to achieve 5G in the future. Let the lawsuits commence about the lack of veracity in everybody's claims, as Verizon apparently rolled out something very nonstandard to be able to claim they were the first to 5G.
You might be able to thank climate change for the polar vortex and significantly colder-than-usual temperatures in the northern United States.
frayadjacent has more information about polar vortex and how it might be affected by climate change. ruuger has tips for actually staying safe in the cold. (The Onion pokes fun at the vortex, naturally, but this is an entirely new experience for a lot of people.) You can thank a few states for the reasons why your credit card interest rates are so usurious, since they decided to drop their usury laws and then SCOTUS decided that companies chartered in a particular state could use that state's rules with any customers they have in other states.
Being the only person you know who uses a drug to help you function is an isolating experience, especially if that drug is occasionally also used recreationally for its psychotropic effects.
If a person suggests you need to shove herbs up your vagina to get rid of the presence of your ex from there, understand they need to think of less intrusive (and unsafe) methods of cleansing your aura.
Did we mention that more than forty percent of approved generic drugs aren't for sale, for a myriad of reasons, many of them that appear anti-competitive? And that for each company that declares bankruptcy because their artificial price hikes were rejected, there are plenty more raising prices for spurious reasons that manage it just fine.
Diseases on the drop thanks to vaccination procedures are starting to turn up again in greater numbers. While there's some blame on austerity, there's also blame for people who are against the idea of protecting their children against diseases.
Last for tonight, what qualifies as "unparliamentary language" for any given body varies from time to time and place. The Parliament of New Zealand offers some of the more choice phrases uttered that were questioned, at least to the 1980s or so, and Strong Language takes a look at some choice Canadian varieties. Some of them are fairly familiar curses and ablist terms, but there are especially good turns of phrase mixed in with them as well.
And, because it is always useful to have a record that everything we think of as new was said by someone before, An ebook copy of a collection of articles about fanzines that span the last 70s and 80s. This will be a very entertaining 200 pages or so to go through, because there's not really any talking about the technical aspects, and more about the philosophical and ideological parts.
Angie's List takes a look at the layouts of the captain's quarters from each of the Federation vessels or stations that we've been able to see the inside of.
And one very nice story about a robot finding not just a good show to watch, but a nice bunch of fans to collaborate writing with.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-11 07:37 pm (UTC)I needed to know about condiment storage, an active topic in our kitchen (and near our refrigerator).
And I saw that you put out the toast right before the condiments, and I am already subscribing to your newsletter :,)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-11 08:00 pm (UTC)The condiment storage one is very useful, though.
Sometimes I deliberately put things next to each other, and sometimes they happen to work well together without deliberate placement.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-11 08:31 pm (UTC)*squeeing so hard I can't even*
(The rest of it is also your usual high quality linkspam! Just that one in particular. Oh my heart.)
no subject
Date: 2019-02-11 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-11 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-12 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-11 11:03 pm (UTC)Re Achilles: I uh heheheheh 'scuse me I am out of words.
Re prairie dresses: Alongside the political issues, I have aesthetic complaints. And I feel like there's something terribly, terribly ironic with the whole idea of making the "plain and simple" frilled, patterned, and piped dress out of specialty organic, imported fabric, sewn overseas by someone making too little money and then shipped and sold to someone who wishes to signal self-reliance.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-12 12:36 am (UTC)Prairie Dresses: indeed. There's a cottage industry, as it were, about making "homespun" to fit the most fashionable of ideas and people so that it looks rustic without actually having to be rustic.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-12 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-02-12 03:51 pm (UTC)