![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptGreetings. Having seen more clearly that the rat race is endless wheel-spinning, more than a few people are trying to tone down or remove ambition to be a better corporate cog and start living a life that they will be okay with. With the pandemic, we proved that we could do work in a different way, and there are always going to be people who remember that and think it was a far better deal than having to worry about commute times and all the additional stresses that come with having to go into the office or chasing a higher position and its accompanying extra pay and stressors. Wouldn't it be nice if our corporate overlords had looked at it and decided the health and well-being of the workforce would make them far more profitable than forcing everyone who didn't need to be at the office to be at the office.
In the liminal places are both the greatest possibility for chaos and the greatest possibility for forging or reforging a new story out of that chaos. And that sometimes, as has been said by many an activist, you have to step away from being constantly on the front lines, so that you can continue doing the work and living a life that will make the work doable. That you have to trust that someone else will hold up their end of the fight while you focus on yours. And, sometimes, that you have to retreat from being as visible as you otherwise would be, because you have other responsibilities. (And, sometimes, that you have to accept forward movement as reward, even if it's not the walls of Jericho falling down.)
A 14 year-old in Ulster County, New York, has designed what might very well be the county's "I Voted" sticker, a human head on a spider body painted in bright and garish colors. People who see the design think it's entirely apt for the trash fire that US politics has become in most recent years, and the raw design seems to be inspiring people to make sure they cast their ballots so as to receive this piece of graffiti-adjacent art. It's clearly a success in encouraging voter turnout, so it seems like other places across the United States should consider adopting similar measures.
Fires broke out during the recent heat wave in the UK. And the US is already well into their own fire and heat season, so I'm sure there are some of these stories as well.
A biographical sketch of a gay atheist, Bill McIlroy, who moved himself and his family out of a country where to be either of those things would mean the real possibility of violence in addition to the social stigma. The environment described there certainly seems like some of the more rabidly theocratic sections of the United States, doesn't it? It's not a "in the past this was bad" idea, either - there's plenty of that going on right now, especially in the States, where we are expected to wear our (cultural) Christianity in as many public ways as possible to reassure everyone else that we are one of Us, and not one of Them.
Bathroom panics are almost always about exclusion of people, and especially about exclusion of people who are too clearly Not Us, sometimes without concern for who else it might exclude, and sometimes with malice aforethought about who will also be excluded from the public sphere if they cannot use toilets. Almost all of the excuses offered as to why someone has to be excluded are predicated on a falsehood - if you are concerned about sex work, then be concerned about making sex work as safe as it can be, since trying to get rid of it will only make sex work unsafe. If you are concerned about drug usage, try to understand the conditions by which someone might use drugs and work to relieve those, rather than making places of public accommodation more difficult for the people you do want to be in public. And so forth.
Large protests at Downing Street about the UK Government's toothless and entirely ineffective "ban" on conversion therapy activities, where the ban itself has enough loopholes that it's not really banning anything. By design, the ban doesn't extend to people trying to get trans people to stop being trans, and so the protest was meant to coincide with and refute the idea of the UK holding a conference called "Safe to Be Me" that purported to be about all of LGBT rights.
By focusing on everything except what the impacts of their legislation and Court decisions are, Republicans and theocrats try to sell the idea that what they're doing isn't that bad, or to deflect the attention rightly focused on them toward others. They would like to position themselves as having the moral high ground, and they do not. Because, often enough, they have plenty of reasons not to help others through a perpetual belief that there's always someone more worthy or deserving of help.
I feel that these two things are related to each other, even if I haven't yet fully teased out the whys. Since they appeared next to each other in![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse, I'm probably just being a pattern-making creature, but there's similar topics under discussion in them. A Meditation on Ambiguous Relationships and Kissing as Artistic Shorthand for Romance describes what is very clearly a relationship with kissing in the Fitz and Fool series, where, more often than not, the kissing is for purposes other than romance, but also, it's clear that there's at least a one-sided romantic interest, even if it isn't reciprocated, and Fitz has to decide on whether there's a label that accurately depicts what's going on with him and the Fool. It's possible that Fitz is romantically interested but has to work through internalized issues before committing to the bit, but it's also possible that Fitz lacks the concept of what being romantic is, or that their relationship could use the introduction of the word "queerplatonic" into it. The piece is about how the complexity of the relationship collapses (much like a souffle) if you go in with the assumption that it's got to be romantic and sexual and the kissing proves it and the only thing getting in the way of Fitz is Fitz, rather than letting the relationship be its complex, possibly label-defying self and trusting that the characters in the relationship are the ones who are best equipped to make decisions about what it is.
Which I then put next to "https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/2804805">The Sexless Menace: Moralizing & Valorizing Sexuality in Media Criticism, which is also about an unstated assumption that good work needs to have sex and sexuality in it, while criticizing several ill-formed essays that often want to be about other things entirely but instead end up being about sexuality, instead of criticizing, say, the saturation of pro-military propaganda and the tightness of the military with Hollywood productions, or the way in which asexuality and aromanticism are treated with the same kind of visceral revulsion that smaller me would have seen regarding a man who was openly gay and trying to find someone else who was also gay. (Lesbian women were seen much more as needing "correction" and confident women were seen as oppressors and who would infantilize all men if they ever got any power over them. All of which I saw on display when small regarding then-Mrs. Rodham-Clinton and which I then saw again on display when she was a Presidential candidate.) Or even an acknowledgement that works sometimes have different goals, and that not everyone believes the same things are attractive or desirable, and that people should not take their own personal preferences and assume they are (or try to make them) universally held among all of the people.
(Which makes me wonder: How many critically well-reviewed asexual romances are on the market? Not "waiting for the right man," not "have to work through my trauma, then I'm more than happily going to be sexual," but "nope, not interested in that, but I do like you as a person and want to be romantic with you.")
I also think there's a reasonable place to push back against people actively trying to render other people's experiences as sexless or to deny them both information and entertainment that they will find sexy or romantic, but I think the writer of the original post isn't championing them (and would likely find them equally as facile and terrible as the people who are showcasing their insecurity about the existence of people who are different then them in what they do or don't find sexy or romantic.) There's a marked uptick in US politics toward trying to make heterosexuality the only socially acceptable sexuality, while simultaneously trying to prevent anyone who could become pregnant from being able to have a sexuality at all that isn't tightly controlled by the nearest man to her. Which leads to the "lol" reaction when someone tries to claim that a millionaire playboy and hypercompetent crime-fighter wouldn't do something that would suggest he listens to his partners or is invested in their pleasure as well. (Or maybe it is a hard no for him, but if it is, I'm pretty sure he has many other tools at his disposal.) When your political context seems to be "our media will be full of highly attractive people doing very (strictly heterosexual, cisgender, and raunch-culture-specific) sexy things, but actual people will not be allowed to do these things, because they're not attractive enough / not interested in heterosexuality," then it can seem like the appropriate pushback to that is to make everybody do all sorts of sexy things that respect the reality of how everyone is attracted to all sorts of different things. But it doesn't mean that sexiness is the default or a universal.
Relating to gender and sexuality through autism sometimes means staring in confusion at all the NTs who have all these weird and arbitrary rules about the things. And, in proper fashion, if the rules don't make sense, why follow them? And especially in a situation where whether you try to follow the rules or not, someone's going to call you weird and bully you or make fun of you. (Regardless of autism or other neuroatypicalities, I wonder what the prevalence of being not-cis is among people who have had the opportunity to examine their gender identity and its ramifications in a supportive and nonjudgmental environment. I would expect it to be "about the percentage of people as a whole," honestly, but I would also hope that people given that opportunity are a lot less judgmental about everyone else's identities.
The idea that the Hunger Games trilogy would have been better adapted for television, rather than movies, because of the way it paces itself and takes advantage of the chapter breaks as cliffhangers. And that the major structure of the story itself is also broken up into bigger cliffhangers. The compelling reading part of it would probably translate well into various half-hour or hour-long episodes, each on a hook waiting for the next one to begin. I suppose the question there would be whether it would do best on a weekly release schedule, so as to enforce the white space with waiting, or in a season-at-once model, where the white space is there, but you're encouraged to keep going because you have to find out how it resolved.
If you review works or want to discuss them, it's good practice not to tag the author if the tagging would send a notification to them, especially not if you're being critical. Many of the authors don't want to have reviews of their work shoved in their face, because they're too busy working on the next work, and also because if they want to read reviews they'll read reviews from people they think of as trustworthy and professional.
The outsourcing of serial publication to other countries, so that there's always a mill of werewolf or billionaire romances to be purchased, chapter by chapter. And companies to make a profit underpaying the writers and charging the readers. (As opposed to AO3 and other fanworks sites, which usually provide the stories for free for Reasons, but are also a similar mix of short pieces and long ones on all sorts of topics, including werewolves and billionaires.) Equally as potentially eeeeep is the idea of American's Next Great Author, a reality show about pulling a NaNoWriMo-style situation for reality show contestants.
People who advocate for giving not just from your excesses, but from your reserves aren't always willing to admit that they could be wrong about what programs are actually effective. And there's the part where if you give all the way to the spot recommended, based on someone else's perception, you may be giving well past the point where you are hurting yourself in your attempt to help others. (That, and a lot of people who insist that there's a lot of excess wealth to be had tend to try and guilt people who have a conscience, rather than those who build their profit through the exploitation of others.)
Photographs of puffins, battling a crab to get a seismometer in place without interference, turning an invasive species of crab into whiskey, where each bottle requires a fairly significant amount of the invaders to produce, beavers as engineers that make their habitats better, cooler, and more resistant to changes, a three-dimensional fossil of a fish, a touring elephant seal around Australia, another touring walrus in Scandinavia, flying squirrels!
In technology, an app, paired with a thermometer, that purports to (eventually) be able to tell a person whether they will get pregnant if they have unprotected sex. It takes time for the app to get to know you, and also, there's an entire amount of embedded assumptions in the thing that makes it unsuitable for a lot of people who might want to have an app doing the work of tracking them.
Revisiting the ideas of patronage and trying to create a stock market for shares in creative works, now with more environmental destruction, because of course someone believes something like this can be done with blockchain so that the early investors in a creative work can continue to earn their investor's stake in the royalties that come from the work. Essentially, crowdfunding, but on the same general terms as traditional publishers and venture capitalists. With everyone looking for the next big cash cow that they can invest in and get rich passively with.
Finding temperate zones on Luna, which could become places where human bases could be constructed for long-term research without having to deal with the temperature extremes of Luna.
Last for this post, the slipperiness of fandom terminology, in this case on what "meta" actually means. And A Space For Meta, which laments that when LiveJournal became unsafe, a major place for the discussion of meta disappeared and the people who were interested migrated to platforms that are even less suitable for long-form discussion. (As with many things about the lamentable unsagfeness of Livejournal, there's always Dreamwidth, but Dreamwidth is the kind of place that works well as a small site with small groups instead of being a large site where everything collides into everything else.)
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
In the liminal places are both the greatest possibility for chaos and the greatest possibility for forging or reforging a new story out of that chaos. And that sometimes, as has been said by many an activist, you have to step away from being constantly on the front lines, so that you can continue doing the work and living a life that will make the work doable. That you have to trust that someone else will hold up their end of the fight while you focus on yours. And, sometimes, that you have to retreat from being as visible as you otherwise would be, because you have other responsibilities. (And, sometimes, that you have to accept forward movement as reward, even if it's not the walls of Jericho falling down.)
A 14 year-old in Ulster County, New York, has designed what might very well be the county's "I Voted" sticker, a human head on a spider body painted in bright and garish colors. People who see the design think it's entirely apt for the trash fire that US politics has become in most recent years, and the raw design seems to be inspiring people to make sure they cast their ballots so as to receive this piece of graffiti-adjacent art. It's clearly a success in encouraging voter turnout, so it seems like other places across the United States should consider adopting similar measures.
Fires broke out during the recent heat wave in the UK. And the US is already well into their own fire and heat season, so I'm sure there are some of these stories as well.
A biographical sketch of a gay atheist, Bill McIlroy, who moved himself and his family out of a country where to be either of those things would mean the real possibility of violence in addition to the social stigma. The environment described there certainly seems like some of the more rabidly theocratic sections of the United States, doesn't it? It's not a "in the past this was bad" idea, either - there's plenty of that going on right now, especially in the States, where we are expected to wear our (cultural) Christianity in as many public ways as possible to reassure everyone else that we are one of Us, and not one of Them.
Bathroom panics are almost always about exclusion of people, and especially about exclusion of people who are too clearly Not Us, sometimes without concern for who else it might exclude, and sometimes with malice aforethought about who will also be excluded from the public sphere if they cannot use toilets. Almost all of the excuses offered as to why someone has to be excluded are predicated on a falsehood - if you are concerned about sex work, then be concerned about making sex work as safe as it can be, since trying to get rid of it will only make sex work unsafe. If you are concerned about drug usage, try to understand the conditions by which someone might use drugs and work to relieve those, rather than making places of public accommodation more difficult for the people you do want to be in public. And so forth.
Large protests at Downing Street about the UK Government's toothless and entirely ineffective "ban" on conversion therapy activities, where the ban itself has enough loopholes that it's not really banning anything. By design, the ban doesn't extend to people trying to get trans people to stop being trans, and so the protest was meant to coincide with and refute the idea of the UK holding a conference called "Safe to Be Me" that purported to be about all of LGBT rights.
By focusing on everything except what the impacts of their legislation and Court decisions are, Republicans and theocrats try to sell the idea that what they're doing isn't that bad, or to deflect the attention rightly focused on them toward others. They would like to position themselves as having the moral high ground, and they do not. Because, often enough, they have plenty of reasons not to help others through a perpetual belief that there's always someone more worthy or deserving of help.
I feel that these two things are related to each other, even if I haven't yet fully teased out the whys. Since they appeared next to each other in
meta_warehouse, I'm probably just being a pattern-making creature, but there's similar topics under discussion in them. A Meditation on Ambiguous Relationships and Kissing as Artistic Shorthand for Romance describes what is very clearly a relationship with kissing in the Fitz and Fool series, where, more often than not, the kissing is for purposes other than romance, but also, it's clear that there's at least a one-sided romantic interest, even if it isn't reciprocated, and Fitz has to decide on whether there's a label that accurately depicts what's going on with him and the Fool. It's possible that Fitz is romantically interested but has to work through internalized issues before committing to the bit, but it's also possible that Fitz lacks the concept of what being romantic is, or that their relationship could use the introduction of the word "queerplatonic" into it. The piece is about how the complexity of the relationship collapses (much like a souffle) if you go in with the assumption that it's got to be romantic and sexual and the kissing proves it and the only thing getting in the way of Fitz is Fitz, rather than letting the relationship be its complex, possibly label-defying self and trusting that the characters in the relationship are the ones who are best equipped to make decisions about what it is.Which I then put next to "https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/2804805">The Sexless Menace: Moralizing & Valorizing Sexuality in Media Criticism, which is also about an unstated assumption that good work needs to have sex and sexuality in it, while criticizing several ill-formed essays that often want to be about other things entirely but instead end up being about sexuality, instead of criticizing, say, the saturation of pro-military propaganda and the tightness of the military with Hollywood productions, or the way in which asexuality and aromanticism are treated with the same kind of visceral revulsion that smaller me would have seen regarding a man who was openly gay and trying to find someone else who was also gay. (Lesbian women were seen much more as needing "correction" and confident women were seen as oppressors and who would infantilize all men if they ever got any power over them. All of which I saw on display when small regarding then-Mrs. Rodham-Clinton and which I then saw again on display when she was a Presidential candidate.) Or even an acknowledgement that works sometimes have different goals, and that not everyone believes the same things are attractive or desirable, and that people should not take their own personal preferences and assume they are (or try to make them) universally held among all of the people.
(Which makes me wonder: How many critically well-reviewed asexual romances are on the market? Not "waiting for the right man," not "have to work through my trauma, then I'm more than happily going to be sexual," but "nope, not interested in that, but I do like you as a person and want to be romantic with you.")
I also think there's a reasonable place to push back against people actively trying to render other people's experiences as sexless or to deny them both information and entertainment that they will find sexy or romantic, but I think the writer of the original post isn't championing them (and would likely find them equally as facile and terrible as the people who are showcasing their insecurity about the existence of people who are different then them in what they do or don't find sexy or romantic.) There's a marked uptick in US politics toward trying to make heterosexuality the only socially acceptable sexuality, while simultaneously trying to prevent anyone who could become pregnant from being able to have a sexuality at all that isn't tightly controlled by the nearest man to her. Which leads to the "lol" reaction when someone tries to claim that a millionaire playboy and hypercompetent crime-fighter wouldn't do something that would suggest he listens to his partners or is invested in their pleasure as well. (Or maybe it is a hard no for him, but if it is, I'm pretty sure he has many other tools at his disposal.) When your political context seems to be "our media will be full of highly attractive people doing very (strictly heterosexual, cisgender, and raunch-culture-specific) sexy things, but actual people will not be allowed to do these things, because they're not attractive enough / not interested in heterosexuality," then it can seem like the appropriate pushback to that is to make everybody do all sorts of sexy things that respect the reality of how everyone is attracted to all sorts of different things. But it doesn't mean that sexiness is the default or a universal.
Relating to gender and sexuality through autism sometimes means staring in confusion at all the NTs who have all these weird and arbitrary rules about the things. And, in proper fashion, if the rules don't make sense, why follow them? And especially in a situation where whether you try to follow the rules or not, someone's going to call you weird and bully you or make fun of you. (Regardless of autism or other neuroatypicalities, I wonder what the prevalence of being not-cis is among people who have had the opportunity to examine their gender identity and its ramifications in a supportive and nonjudgmental environment. I would expect it to be "about the percentage of people as a whole," honestly, but I would also hope that people given that opportunity are a lot less judgmental about everyone else's identities.
The idea that the Hunger Games trilogy would have been better adapted for television, rather than movies, because of the way it paces itself and takes advantage of the chapter breaks as cliffhangers. And that the major structure of the story itself is also broken up into bigger cliffhangers. The compelling reading part of it would probably translate well into various half-hour or hour-long episodes, each on a hook waiting for the next one to begin. I suppose the question there would be whether it would do best on a weekly release schedule, so as to enforce the white space with waiting, or in a season-at-once model, where the white space is there, but you're encouraged to keep going because you have to find out how it resolved.
If you review works or want to discuss them, it's good practice not to tag the author if the tagging would send a notification to them, especially not if you're being critical. Many of the authors don't want to have reviews of their work shoved in their face, because they're too busy working on the next work, and also because if they want to read reviews they'll read reviews from people they think of as trustworthy and professional.
The outsourcing of serial publication to other countries, so that there's always a mill of werewolf or billionaire romances to be purchased, chapter by chapter. And companies to make a profit underpaying the writers and charging the readers. (As opposed to AO3 and other fanworks sites, which usually provide the stories for free for Reasons, but are also a similar mix of short pieces and long ones on all sorts of topics, including werewolves and billionaires.) Equally as potentially eeeeep is the idea of American's Next Great Author, a reality show about pulling a NaNoWriMo-style situation for reality show contestants.
People who advocate for giving not just from your excesses, but from your reserves aren't always willing to admit that they could be wrong about what programs are actually effective. And there's the part where if you give all the way to the spot recommended, based on someone else's perception, you may be giving well past the point where you are hurting yourself in your attempt to help others. (That, and a lot of people who insist that there's a lot of excess wealth to be had tend to try and guilt people who have a conscience, rather than those who build their profit through the exploitation of others.)
Photographs of puffins, battling a crab to get a seismometer in place without interference, turning an invasive species of crab into whiskey, where each bottle requires a fairly significant amount of the invaders to produce, beavers as engineers that make their habitats better, cooler, and more resistant to changes, a three-dimensional fossil of a fish, a touring elephant seal around Australia, another touring walrus in Scandinavia, flying squirrels!
In technology, an app, paired with a thermometer, that purports to (eventually) be able to tell a person whether they will get pregnant if they have unprotected sex. It takes time for the app to get to know you, and also, there's an entire amount of embedded assumptions in the thing that makes it unsuitable for a lot of people who might want to have an app doing the work of tracking them.
Revisiting the ideas of patronage and trying to create a stock market for shares in creative works, now with more environmental destruction, because of course someone believes something like this can be done with blockchain so that the early investors in a creative work can continue to earn their investor's stake in the royalties that come from the work. Essentially, crowdfunding, but on the same general terms as traditional publishers and venture capitalists. With everyone looking for the next big cash cow that they can invest in and get rich passively with.
Finding temperate zones on Luna, which could become places where human bases could be constructed for long-term research without having to deal with the temperature extremes of Luna.
Last for this post, the slipperiness of fandom terminology, in this case on what "meta" actually means. And A Space For Meta, which laments that when LiveJournal became unsafe, a major place for the discussion of meta disappeared and the people who were interested migrated to platforms that are even less suitable for long-form discussion. (As with many things about the lamentable unsagfeness of Livejournal, there's always Dreamwidth, but Dreamwidth is the kind of place that works well as a small site with small groups instead of being a large site where everything collides into everything else.)
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, and anyone else that's I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
no subject
Date: 2022-08-01 06:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-08-01 07:21 am (UTC)