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silveradeptGreetings. Let's begin with the last essay of Congressman John Lewis, exhorting us to be the generation that finally achieves what has been long sought. Which will involve finding ways to center the BIPOC in the academy, regardless of what level of the academy they are in. That means there's a lot of work for white people to do. I'm less fond of the construction in this piece that is "White people, you have to stop oppressing. People of color, you have to stop using being oppressed as an excuse." Because that makes it sound like both sides have an equal amount of work to do, and that's a ludicrous proposition to entertain, as well as being an easy escape for someone who doesn't want to do the work on their side to start pointing fingers about a "culture of victimhood" or other such things to smugly declare that they'll do their work only after everyone else does theirs.
We continue with the problem of the emcee of the Hugo Awards for CoNZealand, first in that short form (and which contains help for me to pronounce the name of FIYAH magazine correctly from this point forward. Had I done more than seen the name around, I would like to believe that I would have picked up the right pronounciation from clues, context, or a pronunciation guide, but, I haven't engaged any more than seeing the name, so my own ignorance is my own fault) and then in more detail with the entirely-warranted idea that GRRM should be yote into the sun in terms of his prestige and pull for this particular debacle. The actual winners had great speeches, as did some of the presenters, which made the contrast between where the fandom is now versus the extended insistence that the time of fascists and exclusively white men in science fiction was preferable coming from the Toastmaster that much more jarring (and the mispronunciation of names, which a professional audiobook narrator points out was something that could have been easily avoided with asking and with practicing, neither of which said Toastmaster seemed interested in, from accounts).
All of this culminates in When The Toastmaster Talks Less, the CoNZealand Hugo Awards ceremony bereft of the part of the ceremony that was a paen to the old past where white men could be safe and secure in the understanding that they were the only people who would ever be allowed into science fiction.
It very much feels like this particular decision, such that it is, is in conversation with the continuing reluctance of large publishing houses and imprints to put out a lot of anything from BIPOC authors (with things discussed like "I couldn't bid on a really popular book because my publishing house said we already had our Black author") with not unwarranted speculation that GRRM, Silverberg, and the concom all put on a show that was an extended backlash at all the BIPOC who continue to win awards and use their platforms to talk about the problems of the past. Because as this year's Astounding Award Winner points out, being not white means having to deal with a lot of extra crap, getting harrassed, and only having specific things bought that reflect white prejudices, for a lot less money than a white author would get. Which is the same conversation as this year's Best Related Work Acceptance Speech from last year's Astounding Award winner that talked about the legacy of the person the award used to be named for and the message that sent to fans of the genre. It is, as one of the Hugo Award winner for Best Novel spoke about, a question of welcome, and who is welcome, and what being welcome in the community means, and this particular ceremony is bringing to the fore in unmistakable ways what had been underneath the surface. Much like the greater conversations around race, power, and systems of oppression that are happening on the surface instead of below it.
For more than a few people who have had the privilege of being able not to notice, of being surrounded by people like them who talked about what they thought of as acceptable discourse, they seem to think that the landscape of spec fic has suddenly changed to reflect our current times and problems, as if this were somehow novel and not exactly what speculative fiction has been doing all the time. The only thing that changed was that instead of reflecting a fairly narrow lane of perspectives about what the problems of the present are that get solved or projected into the future, there's now a much broader pipeline of people in the conversation, making and selling their own stories, both inside and outside of traditional publishing, and in different media that strictly prose or poetry.
There's also the context of the large amount of electronic bits spilled over the Archive Of Our Own Hugo win from 2019 in this mix, because transformative works are doing a lot of the things that don't ever make it to the Hugo nomination stage, even if they could be nominated, as the fan community were ever so patiently scolded. And AO3 is also in the mix, as a place where initial designs and ideas for the structure of the archive were in conversation with specific issues, and now there are more issues that need design decisions about, specifically to create a more welcoming environment for non-white creators. (Which are conversations that need to be and continue happening in the library and archives worlds so we can produce some best practices and some guides so that other people who are creating and working with archives can avoid making the same mistakes we did.) But the idea of fanworks telling stories, imagining alternate possibilities, recasting, filling in the things that were left out or only implied, that's the conversation of creatives, and a lot of that is the bailiwick of the speculative fiction department, to take what is and imagine what could be, or what might have been, but for things being a little different.
So, it's in the context of a certain amoun of official acknowledgement and legitimacy granted to the fan creators (a domain stereotpically composed of women), the high-profile wins of BIPOC writers and their willingness to call out the racist and gatekeeping history of speculative fiction, most prominently the Astounding Award speech that spoke to John W. Campbell's legacy (even though that was already known, now it was being highlighted) and that lead to the dropping of Campbell's name from the award, that we have the decisions (or lack of decisions) made to produce this particular show, where the fandom and the voters continued to move in the direction of recognizing and rewarding people who would have been shut out of publishing and the Hugos not all that long ago and the face of the award ceremony waxing poetic about how great the racist, sexist, and fascist white men of the past were and their continuing relevance to the genre.
What could have been with this Hugo award ceremony, had the people running it been interested in nuturing and encouraging the wider perspective, instead of desperately trying to cling to a past that only privileges a few and tries to gatekeep the rest out.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens in 2021, The concom there has a pretty good blueprint to recognize which parts of this year's ceremony to keep and which ones to jettison entirely. It doesn't have to be perfect, but we are certainly hoping that the obvious mistakes can be recognized and rectified.
The characterization of Black women as forever strong and independent reduces them to caricature and stereotype just as much as every other characterization without nuance does. Because there's always space for more complete understanding, even in the lyrics of a diss track.
One of the people who wrote up a walkthrough of one of the first Alternate Reality Games (the one focused around the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence) explains how the same things that drive people to participate in ARGs are the same kinds of things that can drive them to dangerous conspiracy theories, like QAnon. Both of them play on the skill and desire of humans to solve puzzles and see patterns and discover the uncontrovertible, real truth. The biggest difficulty is that sources that should be authoritative, transparent, and truthful have been politicized and have hidden things that did eventually come out, which caused massive reputational and trust damages that can't easily be fixed. (The not-really-solution proposed in the piece is that more people could support, join, or otherwise do the work of building truth from what is available, rather than getting snared into conspiracy theories and explanations that increasingly complexify and provide new rabbit holes to jump down without ever producing a stop point or any sort of simple and cohesive explanation.)
Good governance produces simple and unambiguous rules that constrain the behavior of people in exchange for the leaders indicating who gets to make decisions, the leaders making actual decisions, leaving a channel for people to ask for exceptions (and then explaining the reasons why they will or won't grant them), and demonstrating there are consequences for not following along with the governance. And now I have a slightly clearer idea in mind about why it's such a pain in the ass to get anything done in my organization, as well as the reasons why it feels like decisions getting made come disconnected from anything else.
The narrative that a basic income would encourage idleness is bullshit, as people who have been getting enough to live on from expanded unemployment benefits are improving their lives and their health with the additional money. Considering that they're also making a lot more than what their wages are with the boost, that points out the problem with people struggling to survive and do well has been with the capitalists that believe people are disposable and should be required to work for the smallest wage possible so they can enjoy more zeroes in their accounts to buy politicians and lawmakers with.
The Current Administrator demands changes to regulations about water pressure because he wants his hair to look good. While also having installed someone at the post office with the sole intent of destroying it so that people who don't like him can't vote by mail and have to potentially risk their lives for the franchise, where the previous election's tactics designed to prevent people who don't like him from voting will be in full display. He's also got the Census to proclaim they're going to be done by the end of September, which will result in a complete undercount of people who don't like him and will hand his own party the power to set election districts and other such things that are drawn with the decennial census. Because no custom nor law binds him in his pursuit of seeking power again and he hopes to make it difficult enough for all the people that dislike him to vote that their votes can't be counted. If ever there was an administrator whose successor essentially needs to have reviewed all the actions by the first day so they can say "Except for these things, where the stopped clock was right, everything he did is reversed, effective immediately." Where such things can be reversed. With a friendly Congress, a lot more can be reversed than just trying to do it himself.
In addition to all of the things that are being done and requested to make the country less of a trash fire, plan to vote as early as you possibly can, with the idea of hand-delivering your ballot in person, if you can. Which means, get yourself registered, if you aren't, and check to make sure you're still registered, if you are, then vote as early as possibly, and, if you can, hand-deliver your ballot to the appropriate place. Because an entire political party wants to make sure that if you're not voting for four more years of this nonsense, your vote never gets counted. Vote out every single Republican everywhere, both nationally and locally, because that's the only way to knock this particular authoritarian infection out.
What often seems to be a thing of novelty can be found in the past, if you look in the right places. For example, a queer intimacy in an earlier period of history, where three people shared a relationship that was definitely more than simple friendship, two of the three were married to each other, and two of the three were siblings, but in all of that, the space opened up for the two women to have the intense relationship that sparked the whole arrangement. (I'm probably not describing it well.)
Also, not every culture has strict gender divisions, so what might seem to be a novel thing in a WASPy tradition isn't necessarily so across the world. [Video.]
Reading in public with the hope of attracting a companion is not nearly the romantic thing that our novels would have thought, and we might better be reading with the presence of people who are already known to be excellent, so as to avoid attracting the attention of the longing man, the one who wishes for others to be women on a pedestal, or the long-suffering behind-the-scenes to their genius or some other thing that absolutely denies the agency of the woman the Longing Man seeks.
A 2011 interview from Samuel R Delany on fiction and writing (and a lot of the things that go into creating fiction and writing that are not dtrictly about words. Which comes in context with Ash Wednesday, an essay Delany writes about the experience of going to a sex party for older gay men as well as seeing other partners outside of the and Radicalism Begins In The Body, an interview with Delany about the writing of that essay (and other things that influence the writing of such that don't necessarily have to do with either the words or the experience).
Rebecca Solnit's "Men Explain Things To Me", the still-accurate problem of how men with mediocre knowledge (or no knowledge) of a subject still feel compelled to explain it to women, despite those women being far more knokwledgeable about the subject, sometimes even having written a book on the matter. In what feels like is the same department, The Reclaim Her Name project, publishing famous works written by women under male or androgyne pseudonyms, which has a laudable goal of raising the recognition of just how many women there are writing good books, but I can't give a full endorsement to the idea of publishing the works under names not chosen by the authors themselves, because each of them had a reason to select the name they did, even if it was "so that those buffoons would take the work seriously." and, y'know, call people by the names they wish to be called by. Because there's still a certain delight, at least in 20th and 21st c. Terra, of committing xkcd #385 when it comes to finding out that an author whose work you despise was in fact a pseudonym from a different author that you also despite. In the Robert Galbraith example, this was before it was commonly known JKR was a TERF as well, so a lot of the glee and giddiness was "this mystery author whose work I hated is a pseud of the author of this other series I dislike because it is written by a woman, and popular with children and a fantasy, rather than men writing the the square-jawed manly heroes I want and/or the incomprehensibly angsty male pain litfic I claim is my favorite." There are likely better ways to highlight the pseudonymous nature of good works, especially when their authors are dead and cannot be physically harmed, than completely erasing away the choice to use a pseud.
In matters of the virus, nearly 8 in 10 people who didn't require hospitalization from COVID have had cardiovascualar damage from the infection. Yet another reason to not increase your infection risk unnecessarily. Risk involves being close to people where there's a lot of heavy breathing (or other such things that are high respiration). (Risk information in an infographic form.) Masks capture some amount of infectious particles and keep them from infecting others, so wear yours. And they don't always have to be boring, so long as they're made from effective materials. Like this facehugger concept.
The necessity of wearing masks is made more difficult by a sheriff who says they will require everyone to take their masks off when entering police space, and whose officers will be required not to wear masks. Which they claim is so that people can easily be identified in their space and to lower miscommunication possibilities, but mask wearing has become politicized, so it is probably both a political statement about the efficacy of masks and a discouragement for specific audiences to use police services, such that they have to choose between reporting or otherwise interacting with police and being potentially infected by a space that will have a high risk. (This calculation only applies to people who will have something resembling a positive interaction with police. For most, it's even more confirmation that the police want you to die and will willingly figure out as many ways as they can to kill you that they can't be blamed for.)
Disney can buy your local movie theaters, or their chains, should they so desire, or set rules such that a theater that wants a big Disney film has to devote the rest of their screens to other Disney content, or any number of other anticompetitive practices that are now allowed due to the vacating of a consent decree preventing vertical integration in the movie business. The ruling in question apparently believes that Netflix and other streaming options will be effective competition for movies and other shows, showing the judge either fails to understand how much weight Disney can throw around or that the judge found a price that was acceptable to them that could be delivered sufficiently discreetly so as not to connect the decision to the sweetener. Of course, depending on how much longer the pandemic's response is incoherent and ruinous, there may not be a theater business to buy out for a good long while.
Last for tonight, the concept of the beginner's mind in the guise of using play as a way of stepping around the stresses that come with wanting to do something well. Because I see a lot of advice on this matter about approaching things like a child, and being playful, and being able to let go of having to get it done perfectly so that you can get it done at all, and it doesn't quite stick the landing I think the people giving that advice does. It's why I tend to recommend the taste-skill gap piece by Ira Glass to people who feel stuck that they're not creating the works that they want to.
A person who is just starting is someone who doesn't know what they can and can't do, outside of learning what's entailed in the thing. Learning the rules and the techniques has a certain amount of forgiveness attached to it, because, well, you're learning the thing, and mistakes are part of the learning process. And then, there are experts on the thing, people who have done the thing enough times that they have the confidence of being able to continue doing it, and when something uexpected arises, can draw on their knowledge of having fixed or had to deal with enough similar situations that it's not something that causes them to crash or get stuck. It's that in-between state, the one where you see what the experts are producing and want to do the same, but the skill and experience available is not the same, and attempting to do that thing will result in something that's not the thing that's seen. That's where the discouragement happens, where the stress and the paralysis take form, because people have a pretty accurate idea of what their skills are and a pretty accurate idea of what's good, and they know that what they can do isn't what's up to their conception of what's good.
Ira's advice on the matter is to acknowledge the gap and keep doing stuff anyway, knowing fully that it's not yet going to be up to your taste. And I think it's in that middle space where advice like "go back to playing" has the most possibility of working, where trying to get back to the mind of the beginner is most useful, because it helps reframe things from "trying to produce a thing that's good" to "trying to produce a thing because you want to try and produce it." Down the path of "trying to do things that are good" lies the idea that hobbies should become side hustles, and the entire horde that is more than willing to tell you that what you've created isn't up to their tastes, either, and often times for reasons that are unrelated at all to the actual thing itself, not that the Hugo Award ceremony material at the top of this post is in any way related to this concept, not at all, and why would you think it would be related? (Narrator: Laying the sarcasm on a bit thick, aren't we?)
The transformative works concept of "Don't like? Don't read." is both "Don't waste your time raeding something you're not going to get enjoyment out of" and "Save your 'constructive' criticism of a work for a space that the creator isn't going to see." Because a lot of supposed concrit that I've seen has very little to do with the work itself and a lot more to do with the supposed relative social statuses of the critic (who believes themself doing a favor/service to the creator by pointing out how wrong everything is, often based on their own idea of what a thing should be) and the creator (who may have done the thing on a lark or has made very specific decisions about something and is extrapolating from there, and often comes with receipts about those same decisions). See Solnit's "Men Explain Things To Me" link above on how the pattern of critic and creator usually pans out, just with extra condescension or derision to the creator for failing to match what the critic's conception of everything is.
"Don't like? Don't read." is specifically acknowledging that many transformative works and creations aren't made with the primary goal of improving skills, but instead are in celebration of shared fandom, or interested in telling a story that should have been there and isn't, or in telling a story differently than the one presented. The secret, of course, being that every time someone creates a thing, they have practiced their skills, and possibly learned a couple others as well. And eventually, with enough practice, skill catches up to taste, and assuming they haven't been run off by jerkasses who don't understand the concept or who think that people who don't look like them or think like them should be ever allowed to create things that don't cater solely to their tastes, those creators become experts and create the stuff that comes from a whole lot of experience that might start someone else on the path toward gaining sufficient experience, and the cycle begins again. It's been going for particular populations for quite a while now, so now the work is in expanding it to everyone. (And in blocking and excluding the jerkasses who don't get it early on.)
We continue with the problem of the emcee of the Hugo Awards for CoNZealand, first in that short form (and which contains help for me to pronounce the name of FIYAH magazine correctly from this point forward. Had I done more than seen the name around, I would like to believe that I would have picked up the right pronounciation from clues, context, or a pronunciation guide, but, I haven't engaged any more than seeing the name, so my own ignorance is my own fault) and then in more detail with the entirely-warranted idea that GRRM should be yote into the sun in terms of his prestige and pull for this particular debacle. The actual winners had great speeches, as did some of the presenters, which made the contrast between where the fandom is now versus the extended insistence that the time of fascists and exclusively white men in science fiction was preferable coming from the Toastmaster that much more jarring (and the mispronunciation of names, which a professional audiobook narrator points out was something that could have been easily avoided with asking and with practicing, neither of which said Toastmaster seemed interested in, from accounts).
All of this culminates in When The Toastmaster Talks Less, the CoNZealand Hugo Awards ceremony bereft of the part of the ceremony that was a paen to the old past where white men could be safe and secure in the understanding that they were the only people who would ever be allowed into science fiction.
It very much feels like this particular decision, such that it is, is in conversation with the continuing reluctance of large publishing houses and imprints to put out a lot of anything from BIPOC authors (with things discussed like "I couldn't bid on a really popular book because my publishing house said we already had our Black author") with not unwarranted speculation that GRRM, Silverberg, and the concom all put on a show that was an extended backlash at all the BIPOC who continue to win awards and use their platforms to talk about the problems of the past. Because as this year's Astounding Award Winner points out, being not white means having to deal with a lot of extra crap, getting harrassed, and only having specific things bought that reflect white prejudices, for a lot less money than a white author would get. Which is the same conversation as this year's Best Related Work Acceptance Speech from last year's Astounding Award winner that talked about the legacy of the person the award used to be named for and the message that sent to fans of the genre. It is, as one of the Hugo Award winner for Best Novel spoke about, a question of welcome, and who is welcome, and what being welcome in the community means, and this particular ceremony is bringing to the fore in unmistakable ways what had been underneath the surface. Much like the greater conversations around race, power, and systems of oppression that are happening on the surface instead of below it.
For more than a few people who have had the privilege of being able not to notice, of being surrounded by people like them who talked about what they thought of as acceptable discourse, they seem to think that the landscape of spec fic has suddenly changed to reflect our current times and problems, as if this were somehow novel and not exactly what speculative fiction has been doing all the time. The only thing that changed was that instead of reflecting a fairly narrow lane of perspectives about what the problems of the present are that get solved or projected into the future, there's now a much broader pipeline of people in the conversation, making and selling their own stories, both inside and outside of traditional publishing, and in different media that strictly prose or poetry.
There's also the context of the large amount of electronic bits spilled over the Archive Of Our Own Hugo win from 2019 in this mix, because transformative works are doing a lot of the things that don't ever make it to the Hugo nomination stage, even if they could be nominated, as the fan community were ever so patiently scolded. And AO3 is also in the mix, as a place where initial designs and ideas for the structure of the archive were in conversation with specific issues, and now there are more issues that need design decisions about, specifically to create a more welcoming environment for non-white creators. (Which are conversations that need to be and continue happening in the library and archives worlds so we can produce some best practices and some guides so that other people who are creating and working with archives can avoid making the same mistakes we did.) But the idea of fanworks telling stories, imagining alternate possibilities, recasting, filling in the things that were left out or only implied, that's the conversation of creatives, and a lot of that is the bailiwick of the speculative fiction department, to take what is and imagine what could be, or what might have been, but for things being a little different.
So, it's in the context of a certain amoun of official acknowledgement and legitimacy granted to the fan creators (a domain stereotpically composed of women), the high-profile wins of BIPOC writers and their willingness to call out the racist and gatekeeping history of speculative fiction, most prominently the Astounding Award speech that spoke to John W. Campbell's legacy (even though that was already known, now it was being highlighted) and that lead to the dropping of Campbell's name from the award, that we have the decisions (or lack of decisions) made to produce this particular show, where the fandom and the voters continued to move in the direction of recognizing and rewarding people who would have been shut out of publishing and the Hugos not all that long ago and the face of the award ceremony waxing poetic about how great the racist, sexist, and fascist white men of the past were and their continuing relevance to the genre.
What could have been with this Hugo award ceremony, had the people running it been interested in nuturing and encouraging the wider perspective, instead of desperately trying to cling to a past that only privileges a few and tries to gatekeep the rest out.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens in 2021, The concom there has a pretty good blueprint to recognize which parts of this year's ceremony to keep and which ones to jettison entirely. It doesn't have to be perfect, but we are certainly hoping that the obvious mistakes can be recognized and rectified.
The characterization of Black women as forever strong and independent reduces them to caricature and stereotype just as much as every other characterization without nuance does. Because there's always space for more complete understanding, even in the lyrics of a diss track.
One of the people who wrote up a walkthrough of one of the first Alternate Reality Games (the one focused around the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence) explains how the same things that drive people to participate in ARGs are the same kinds of things that can drive them to dangerous conspiracy theories, like QAnon. Both of them play on the skill and desire of humans to solve puzzles and see patterns and discover the uncontrovertible, real truth. The biggest difficulty is that sources that should be authoritative, transparent, and truthful have been politicized and have hidden things that did eventually come out, which caused massive reputational and trust damages that can't easily be fixed. (The not-really-solution proposed in the piece is that more people could support, join, or otherwise do the work of building truth from what is available, rather than getting snared into conspiracy theories and explanations that increasingly complexify and provide new rabbit holes to jump down without ever producing a stop point or any sort of simple and cohesive explanation.)
Good governance produces simple and unambiguous rules that constrain the behavior of people in exchange for the leaders indicating who gets to make decisions, the leaders making actual decisions, leaving a channel for people to ask for exceptions (and then explaining the reasons why they will or won't grant them), and demonstrating there are consequences for not following along with the governance. And now I have a slightly clearer idea in mind about why it's such a pain in the ass to get anything done in my organization, as well as the reasons why it feels like decisions getting made come disconnected from anything else.
The narrative that a basic income would encourage idleness is bullshit, as people who have been getting enough to live on from expanded unemployment benefits are improving their lives and their health with the additional money. Considering that they're also making a lot more than what their wages are with the boost, that points out the problem with people struggling to survive and do well has been with the capitalists that believe people are disposable and should be required to work for the smallest wage possible so they can enjoy more zeroes in their accounts to buy politicians and lawmakers with.
The Current Administrator demands changes to regulations about water pressure because he wants his hair to look good. While also having installed someone at the post office with the sole intent of destroying it so that people who don't like him can't vote by mail and have to potentially risk their lives for the franchise, where the previous election's tactics designed to prevent people who don't like him from voting will be in full display. He's also got the Census to proclaim they're going to be done by the end of September, which will result in a complete undercount of people who don't like him and will hand his own party the power to set election districts and other such things that are drawn with the decennial census. Because no custom nor law binds him in his pursuit of seeking power again and he hopes to make it difficult enough for all the people that dislike him to vote that their votes can't be counted. If ever there was an administrator whose successor essentially needs to have reviewed all the actions by the first day so they can say "Except for these things, where the stopped clock was right, everything he did is reversed, effective immediately." Where such things can be reversed. With a friendly Congress, a lot more can be reversed than just trying to do it himself.
In addition to all of the things that are being done and requested to make the country less of a trash fire, plan to vote as early as you possibly can, with the idea of hand-delivering your ballot in person, if you can. Which means, get yourself registered, if you aren't, and check to make sure you're still registered, if you are, then vote as early as possibly, and, if you can, hand-deliver your ballot to the appropriate place. Because an entire political party wants to make sure that if you're not voting for four more years of this nonsense, your vote never gets counted. Vote out every single Republican everywhere, both nationally and locally, because that's the only way to knock this particular authoritarian infection out.
What often seems to be a thing of novelty can be found in the past, if you look in the right places. For example, a queer intimacy in an earlier period of history, where three people shared a relationship that was definitely more than simple friendship, two of the three were married to each other, and two of the three were siblings, but in all of that, the space opened up for the two women to have the intense relationship that sparked the whole arrangement. (I'm probably not describing it well.)
Also, not every culture has strict gender divisions, so what might seem to be a novel thing in a WASPy tradition isn't necessarily so across the world. [Video.]
Reading in public with the hope of attracting a companion is not nearly the romantic thing that our novels would have thought, and we might better be reading with the presence of people who are already known to be excellent, so as to avoid attracting the attention of the longing man, the one who wishes for others to be women on a pedestal, or the long-suffering behind-the-scenes to their genius or some other thing that absolutely denies the agency of the woman the Longing Man seeks.
A 2011 interview from Samuel R Delany on fiction and writing (and a lot of the things that go into creating fiction and writing that are not dtrictly about words. Which comes in context with Ash Wednesday, an essay Delany writes about the experience of going to a sex party for older gay men as well as seeing other partners outside of the and Radicalism Begins In The Body, an interview with Delany about the writing of that essay (and other things that influence the writing of such that don't necessarily have to do with either the words or the experience).
Rebecca Solnit's "Men Explain Things To Me", the still-accurate problem of how men with mediocre knowledge (or no knowledge) of a subject still feel compelled to explain it to women, despite those women being far more knokwledgeable about the subject, sometimes even having written a book on the matter. In what feels like is the same department, The Reclaim Her Name project, publishing famous works written by women under male or androgyne pseudonyms, which has a laudable goal of raising the recognition of just how many women there are writing good books, but I can't give a full endorsement to the idea of publishing the works under names not chosen by the authors themselves, because each of them had a reason to select the name they did, even if it was "so that those buffoons would take the work seriously." and, y'know, call people by the names they wish to be called by. Because there's still a certain delight, at least in 20th and 21st c. Terra, of committing xkcd #385 when it comes to finding out that an author whose work you despise was in fact a pseudonym from a different author that you also despite. In the Robert Galbraith example, this was before it was commonly known JKR was a TERF as well, so a lot of the glee and giddiness was "this mystery author whose work I hated is a pseud of the author of this other series I dislike because it is written by a woman, and popular with children and a fantasy, rather than men writing the the square-jawed manly heroes I want and/or the incomprehensibly angsty male pain litfic I claim is my favorite." There are likely better ways to highlight the pseudonymous nature of good works, especially when their authors are dead and cannot be physically harmed, than completely erasing away the choice to use a pseud.
In matters of the virus, nearly 8 in 10 people who didn't require hospitalization from COVID have had cardiovascualar damage from the infection. Yet another reason to not increase your infection risk unnecessarily. Risk involves being close to people where there's a lot of heavy breathing (or other such things that are high respiration). (Risk information in an infographic form.) Masks capture some amount of infectious particles and keep them from infecting others, so wear yours. And they don't always have to be boring, so long as they're made from effective materials. Like this facehugger concept.
The necessity of wearing masks is made more difficult by a sheriff who says they will require everyone to take their masks off when entering police space, and whose officers will be required not to wear masks. Which they claim is so that people can easily be identified in their space and to lower miscommunication possibilities, but mask wearing has become politicized, so it is probably both a political statement about the efficacy of masks and a discouragement for specific audiences to use police services, such that they have to choose between reporting or otherwise interacting with police and being potentially infected by a space that will have a high risk. (This calculation only applies to people who will have something resembling a positive interaction with police. For most, it's even more confirmation that the police want you to die and will willingly figure out as many ways as they can to kill you that they can't be blamed for.)
Disney can buy your local movie theaters, or their chains, should they so desire, or set rules such that a theater that wants a big Disney film has to devote the rest of their screens to other Disney content, or any number of other anticompetitive practices that are now allowed due to the vacating of a consent decree preventing vertical integration in the movie business. The ruling in question apparently believes that Netflix and other streaming options will be effective competition for movies and other shows, showing the judge either fails to understand how much weight Disney can throw around or that the judge found a price that was acceptable to them that could be delivered sufficiently discreetly so as not to connect the decision to the sweetener. Of course, depending on how much longer the pandemic's response is incoherent and ruinous, there may not be a theater business to buy out for a good long while.
Last for tonight, the concept of the beginner's mind in the guise of using play as a way of stepping around the stresses that come with wanting to do something well. Because I see a lot of advice on this matter about approaching things like a child, and being playful, and being able to let go of having to get it done perfectly so that you can get it done at all, and it doesn't quite stick the landing I think the people giving that advice does. It's why I tend to recommend the taste-skill gap piece by Ira Glass to people who feel stuck that they're not creating the works that they want to.
A person who is just starting is someone who doesn't know what they can and can't do, outside of learning what's entailed in the thing. Learning the rules and the techniques has a certain amount of forgiveness attached to it, because, well, you're learning the thing, and mistakes are part of the learning process. And then, there are experts on the thing, people who have done the thing enough times that they have the confidence of being able to continue doing it, and when something uexpected arises, can draw on their knowledge of having fixed or had to deal with enough similar situations that it's not something that causes them to crash or get stuck. It's that in-between state, the one where you see what the experts are producing and want to do the same, but the skill and experience available is not the same, and attempting to do that thing will result in something that's not the thing that's seen. That's where the discouragement happens, where the stress and the paralysis take form, because people have a pretty accurate idea of what their skills are and a pretty accurate idea of what's good, and they know that what they can do isn't what's up to their conception of what's good.
Ira's advice on the matter is to acknowledge the gap and keep doing stuff anyway, knowing fully that it's not yet going to be up to your taste. And I think it's in that middle space where advice like "go back to playing" has the most possibility of working, where trying to get back to the mind of the beginner is most useful, because it helps reframe things from "trying to produce a thing that's good" to "trying to produce a thing because you want to try and produce it." Down the path of "trying to do things that are good" lies the idea that hobbies should become side hustles, and the entire horde that is more than willing to tell you that what you've created isn't up to their tastes, either, and often times for reasons that are unrelated at all to the actual thing itself, not that the Hugo Award ceremony material at the top of this post is in any way related to this concept, not at all, and why would you think it would be related? (Narrator: Laying the sarcasm on a bit thick, aren't we?)
The transformative works concept of "Don't like? Don't read." is both "Don't waste your time raeding something you're not going to get enjoyment out of" and "Save your 'constructive' criticism of a work for a space that the creator isn't going to see." Because a lot of supposed concrit that I've seen has very little to do with the work itself and a lot more to do with the supposed relative social statuses of the critic (who believes themself doing a favor/service to the creator by pointing out how wrong everything is, often based on their own idea of what a thing should be) and the creator (who may have done the thing on a lark or has made very specific decisions about something and is extrapolating from there, and often comes with receipts about those same decisions). See Solnit's "Men Explain Things To Me" link above on how the pattern of critic and creator usually pans out, just with extra condescension or derision to the creator for failing to match what the critic's conception of everything is.
"Don't like? Don't read." is specifically acknowledging that many transformative works and creations aren't made with the primary goal of improving skills, but instead are in celebration of shared fandom, or interested in telling a story that should have been there and isn't, or in telling a story differently than the one presented. The secret, of course, being that every time someone creates a thing, they have practiced their skills, and possibly learned a couple others as well. And eventually, with enough practice, skill catches up to taste, and assuming they haven't been run off by jerkasses who don't understand the concept or who think that people who don't look like them or think like them should be ever allowed to create things that don't cater solely to their tastes, those creators become experts and create the stuff that comes from a whole lot of experience that might start someone else on the path toward gaining sufficient experience, and the cycle begins again. It's been going for particular populations for quite a while now, so now the work is in expanding it to everyone. (And in blocking and excluding the jerkasses who don't get it early on.)
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Date: 2020-08-15 11:15 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2020-08-15 03:49 pm (UTC)I'm heartened that many people from post-baby boomer, post-Reagan generations are pretty clear-eyed about the negative consequences of this greed and the need to redistribute wealth and opportunity, but equally frightened that the current political and business oligarchies have distorted the system to the point that it will require very few of them to maintain it.
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Date: 2020-08-16 03:54 am (UTC)I'm reminded of profiles done in the late 90s or early 2000s of various rich people, and they always seemed framed in such a way that we got the impression they were riff because they were the kind of people who saved spare ketchup packets and plastic silverware to use, rather than throwing them away, and consequently little talked about how they made the money they had, preferring the narrative of "they saved more than you do, so if you save like them, you'll have their wealth in a few years."
It seems now that there's less call for those types of pieces as the boom continues to cling to the levers of power, afraid of what the younger generation will do to them once they have the ability to enforce the consequences of the unwise decisions that continue to be made by this slowly dying fragment. It's almost like they're worried we'll be ungrateful over the mess they've left for the younger ones to have to clean up.