Pixel Scroll 5/7/16 All True Scrollaroos Meeting At Worldcon Hinder Pixelman Agenda

(1) HOPEFULLY INCURABLE. Rhianna Pratchett reacted to the news item that also inspired #12 in yesterday’s Scroll (“Nailsworth teacher claims Harry Potter books cause mental illness”):

(2) CRAZY EX RATED. On NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me, “Not My Job: Actress Rachel Bloom Gets Quizzed On Crazy Ex-Boyfriends”.

Since she’s the expert on crazy ex-girlfriends we’ve decided to ask her three questions about some well-known crazy ex-boyfriends in a game called “No! Really! This time I’ll change!”

She mentions Ray Bradbury, subject of her 2011 Hugo-nominated song.

Rachel Bloom meets Ray Bradbury in 2010. Photo by John King Tarpinian.

Rachel Bloom meets Ray Bradbury in 2010. Photo by John King Tarpinian.

(3) GO AHEAD AND JUMP. David K.M. Klaus predicts, “Someday some Harry Potter fan is going to invent a practical personal jet pack or anti-gravity belt, just so he or she can play Quidditch.” ‘Til then we’ll make do with these skydiving Quidditch players from a Colombian phone commercial.

(4) PARTLY IMMORTAL. Fantasy Faction reposts “Foundations of Fantasy: The Epic of Gilgamesh”.

More than any other genre, fantasy tends to examine ancient epics. Whether it’s the study of archetypes and ectypes, or a historical understanding of narrative itself, or simply a desire to experience myths and legends that have lived for ages, these books remain alive to us. This series of posts will be about some of the more important mythic texts in history, and how they relate to modern fantasy.

The Story Behind the Story

The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest books we have on record. Original stories regarding the character date back as early as the eighteenth century BCE. The primary text was written between the 13th and tenth century BCE, in cuneiform on stone tablets. Then, it was lost for thousands of years, until it was rediscovered in 1850 in the excavation of Nineveh. Even then, it took decades to be translated into English.

Translations are tricky when dealing with situations like these. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the first people to read it translated. John Gardner (who also wrote the fantastic novel Grendel, a retelling of Beowulf from the monster’s point of view, and The Art of Fiction: Notes on the Craft for Young Authors) made a much more accurate, yet difficult to read translation, making certain to note each place the actual text was missing. Penguin Classics put out a two-volume translation by Andrew George which has received considerable acclaim. For a more poetic, if less rigorous version, Stephen Mitchell’s translation is quite readable, and uses inferences and the aforementioned earlier stories of Gilgamesh to fill in the missing gaps….

(5) GOOD STUFF. See Rachel Swirsky’s recommendation, “Friday read! ‘Hwang’s Billion Brilliant Daughters’ by Alice Sola Kim”.

One man watches the world evolve as he passes, sleep by sleep, into the future, trailing after his generations of descendants….

Hwang’s Bilion Brilliant Daughters” by Alice Sola Kim…

(6) THE MARQUIS OF TENTACLE RULES. Is the beer as good as the label? Octopus Wants To Fight IPA from Great Lakes Beer.

Octopus-Wants-to-Fight_can_label

It pours a beautiful burnt gold edging into a dull orange, like a orange creamsicle complete with a tight white head. As you can imagine, lots of tropical fruits abound from the glass with the first whiffs, followed by a walk in the woods as pine, evergreen and some herbaceous notes are picked up. The first sip provides some sweetness, some dank grass combined with pine needles and then onto “juicy fruit”.  Soft body with some middle mouthfeel bitterness that tastes like another.

The Story “Our pet octopus is a bit of a jerk. He’s that guy who has a couple then either tells you how much he loves you or threatens to fight you. So we brewed this IPA, with 8 varieties of hops and 8 types of malt. We targeted 88 IBU and 8.8% to appease him. Sadly, when he found out that we’d fabricated all of the above info, it only made him more volatile. We are starting to realize that Octopus was a poor choice for a pet.”

Food pairing recommendations

Calamari…

(7) DRAGONSCALE. Mark Yon has a fine review of Joe Hill’s The Fireman at SFFWorld.

The arrival of the latest book by Joe Hill has generally been seen as one of the highlights of the publishing year, and has been much anticipated here at SFFWorld.

Joe has said that The Fireman is his take on his father’s masterwork The Stand. I can see what he means, though the end-results are clearly different. Whereas The Stand begins with the spread of a killer flu germ (‘Captain Trips’), The Fireman begins with the dispersal of a 21st century equivalent – a spore named Dragonscale, of unknown origin, possibly weaponised, that has spread to the general public. The symptoms occur suddenly and are quite striking – a strange dark tattoo, interlaced with gold, appears on the body,  often followed by spontaneous combustion of the person infected….

(8) FELLOW ARTISTS. Rudy Rucker blogs about recent visits to SF MOMA and other cultural events, accompanied by plenty of photos and wry commentary.

I was happy to see they have Arneson’s “California Artist” on display, wearing shades whose lenses are holes revealing, oho, that he has an empty head, California artist that he is. I first saw this sculpture when we moved to California in 1986, and I was, like, yeah, I’m a California artist too. I just didn’t realize that before. It’s high time I got here. Solidarität!

(9) FREE WEIRD. From Europa SF I learned about the English-language magazine Finnish Weird:

Finnish Weird is a free magazine published by the Helsinki Science Fiction Society. It introduces the concept of “Finnish Weird”, showcases a few writers and also includes short stories by Johanna Sinisalo, Anne Leinonen, Helena Waris, Leena Likitalo and Magdalena Hai. The printed version will be available on select occasions (come and look for the Finnish party at Worldcon!), but you can also read the zine online or get an electronic version, either as a pdf or an ebook (epub).

(8) TODAY IN HISTORY.

  • May 7, 2010 — The Marvel Cinematic Universe gets its first sequel in Iron Man 2.

(9) LET IT RAIN. The Kickstarter for Quench seeks $20,312 to fund the creation of a computer game that allows players to control the weather and help herds of animals restore their home. Coming to PC & Mac in 2016.

Controlling the Weather

Using your divine powers over the weather, you will provide for your herds, help them as they take up their great pilgrimage, and ultimately restore the world.

Summon rain to bring life to withered plants, quench fires and calm enraged spirits.

Create gusts of wind to hurry your animals along, confuse attackers, and shift great dunes of sand.

Quake the earth to break open chasms and fountains, stun smokebeasts, and clear boulders blocking the way.

Strike lightning to start fires, revive fallen animals and obliterate foes. But don’t forget to take a moment to appreciate the beauty of nature!

There’s also an option for people to vote yes to greenlight the game on Steam.

(10) MORE ABOUT BLACK GATE. Rich Horton’s thoughts about the impact on fiction categories comes before this excerpt in his Black Gate post The Hugo Nominations, 2016; or, Sigh …”.

Of course Black Gate was nominated as Best Fanzine last year, due to Rabid Puppies support, and John O’Neill quite rightly withdrew its nomination. This year we again were (unwillingly) on the Rabid slate, and again John has decided to withdraw.

We discussed what to do – though the choice was always John’s – and there was a definite split. Many of us – myself included – at first inclined to the notion that perhaps we should stay on the ballot. I had four reasons for this: 1) I am certain that Black Gate got a good amount of support from non-Rabid nominators (but we have no way, for now, of knowing how much); 2) I though perhaps the point had been made last year; 3) I felt that withdrawing was ceding even more influence to Vox Day, and also was to an extent disenfranchising the non-Rabid nominators; and 4) I really do think Black Gate is a worthy choice.

But John made two very strong arguments in favor of withdrawing, arguments that now have swayed me so that I believe his decision is correct. First, and most important, by withdrawing it is guaranteed that there will be an entry on the Final Ballot not chosen by Vox Day. Second, in John’s estimation, it is likely that Black Gate wouldn’t have won anyway. I don’t think that’s nearly as important – but it’s probably true. (Alas, the very possible win for whoever replace Black Gate will be somewhat tainted as well if it’s perceived that it won as a default choice.)

(11) CAUSES ME TO TINGLE. Rachel Swirsky said if her Patreon reached $100 by the end of May she would write and send “If You Were a Butt, My Butt” to everyone who subscribes. Well, soon after this tweet, it did, and donations are still coming in. The funds will be given to Lyon-Martin health services.

(12) OF TWO MINDS. Damien G. Walter’s vlog, titled “Why is writing hard?”, never mentions Chuck Tingle, missing a golden opportunity. He previews the actual topic on his blog —

“Damien gets passionate about writing, and talks about the thing that makes it hard, the clash of two very different sides of our personality, the conscious mind and the subconscious imagination. OR. The crazy old hippy VS the corporate middle manager in all of us.”

 

(13) THREE GOLDEN MINUTES. Kendall turned us on to the amazing 2012 short film “The Device.”

[Thanks to Sunhawk, JJ, David K.M. Klaus, ULTRAGOTHA, Kendall, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Hampus Eckerman.]

245 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/7/16 All True Scrollaroos Meeting At Worldcon Hinder Pixelman Agenda

  1. Teemu Leisti
    A quick Google will give one at least a basic understanding of issues being discussed. Most of the people on file 770 have more than a basic understanding of CoCs. They’ve seen the links I’ve posted a few times here and other places they/we frequent. Some may have been a part of writing them.

    Search engines including Google have been around for over 20 years now. Yet people seem unwilling to spend 5-15 minutes to start educatig themselves on issues at any level before jumping into discussions. They either expect others to educate them or think they are the first to think of something. I react badly to this for a number of reasons. Which is no excuse for my poor behavior towards you.

    I’m sorry for snarking twice. I should have pointed you to 101 links, the links I provided, and links to why it’s not our job to educate everyone who wanders into an ongoing discussion. In the future I’ll try to be less of a jerk when someone does something I perceive as a microaggression while providing them with the information they’ve requested because it’s not a helpful way of communicating. I won’t ask for your forgiveness as my behavior in this thread makes any apology suspect.

    I hope in the future you might give consideration to taking a few moments to educate yourself before jumping into a conversation about a long-term issue.

    I hope in the future we can have more productive conversations.

  2. @Vicki Rosenzweig – Apologies for making it sound like I think sharing info about repeat offenders/predators/etc isn’t a good idea, I was just addressing the idea that it’s just a matter of writing out the appropriate rules clearly enough and covering all contingencies and then we’ll solve the problem of abusers getting into conventions. It’s also about the people enforcing and interpreting those rules, what biases they will inevitably bring to the table and whether they make an effort to be aware of those biases and adjust their decisions accordingly.

    For example, I’ve known some cons to have a short CoC that said basically “Don’t behave like an asshole” and then it’s up the admin/staff to decide what exactly is “asshole” behavior, and between conventions this standard is not likely to be identical. And that’s for something that’s a relatively neutral concept, asshole, when you get into discussing misogyny/sexism or racism, well I think even here on File 770 we’ve had/seen disagreement on whether something is sexist/racist or not, so that adds a further complication in trying to create a set of records to keep abusers out of conventions.

    I feel similar to Lydy in that I’m just nibbling around the edges of explaining/figuring out a problem that’s complex and sometimes hard to put into words. And similarly to her concerns about an appropriate response to situations, I think that any rules made about how to deal with abuse or issues cannot exist without figuring out how to we basically train people to deal with all the permutations of abuse/oppression appropriately, it requires a certain mental balance between keeping the larger social power dynamics in mind but also adapting to each situation AND learning to continuously adjust your strategies based on feedback you get from the people you are trying to keep safe or at least not actively abused/oppressed in the spaces you control.

  3. @Lydy Nickerson

    I think that it needs to be stressed that I want to hear from the reporter when the reporter is comfortable talking to me. If they feel it’s really urgent, and want to talk Right Fucking Now, I totally want to be there and listen RFN.

    I don’t think this has been coming through in your previous comments in this post. This is one of the reasons I believe JJ and I have been trying to stress is important with conventions making it easy for people to find out who to contact when they are super stressed. I’m sure JJ will correct me if I’m putting words into their mouth.

    However, if they’re shaken and want some time to calm down, I want them to understand that I still really want to hear from them, and if they really need to wait for an hour, or until after they’ve had time to have dinner, or whatever, that’s also ok with me. Their desire for a delay does not in any way lessen my interest in their report, or make the problem they need to talk about less of a problem. I think it’s important to ask the question “What do you need right now?” and also “Is there something going on, right now, that I need to intervene with.” But the answer to the second is no.

    This makes perfect sense to me. But they need to know who to contact and trust someone will be available when they are ready.

    Quick response is not the same as emergency response. My goal is to have a hotline answered for 18 to 20 hours a day, and for it to also take voice mail and text, and voice mail and text to be responded to promptly.

    I’m a bit uncomfortable with the unmanned hours but I understand there are only so many people to staff a con.

    The situations do need to be triaged on an emergency basis. As soon as a problem is identified, the convention does need to decide “Is this an emergency?.” But what I’m arguing is that harassment does not equate with emergency. I do agree that the most urgent thing is usually after care. The target is, by definition, upset; otherwise they wouldn’t be contacting us. They may need any number of things, and we should try to find out what they are, and insofar as is reasonable, provide them. But I don’t think that a targeted person is best served by trying to move them back into crisis-mode if they’ve moved out of it. Just as I don’t want the convention to decide that someone needs to be more or less upset about an incident. It’s their neurology, they should be free to feel whatever they feel.

    This is where I get a wibbly wobbly feeling. On the one hand you say it’s urgent after care. But when you switch to But I don’t think that a targeted person is best served by trying to move them back into crisis-mode if they’ve moved out of it. I start feeling uncomfortable. They’ve contacted you, yes take them where they are at, whether it’s a screaming crying mess or calm and factual, or something in between. But I feel like your wording here is being used to excuse not doing things like numbers on badges, signs up on walls, staff visibility, and other suggestions made over this thread.

  4. Everyone is different. For me the future is usually too far away and everything has to happen now, now, now! That is not crisis-mode, thatvis how I’m wired. I get extremely frustrated with waiting, and people have seen me just on reflex walk away without thinking.

    So I too have a little problem with this “something not being an emergency”. I am not neurotypical. For me everything will remain an emergency until I see something happening. Else I will just leave because I can’t handle staying.

    This is something I know from experience, so it is not something I’m making up. So I would be a bit careful with blanket comments like that.

  5. Tasha Turner: This is where I get a wibbly wobbly feeling. On the one hand you say it’s urgent after care. But when you switch to But I don’t think that a targeted person is best served by trying to move them back into crisis-mode if they’ve moved out of it. I start feeling uncomfortable. They’ve contacted you, yes take them where they are at, whether it’s a screaming crying mess or calm and factual, or something in between. But I feel like your wording here is being used to excuse not doing things like numbers on badges, signs up on walls, staff visibility, and other suggestions made over this thread.

    I see that this made you feel uncomfortable. I can only say that it seems to me Lydy Nickerson, in that specific part of her comment, was discussing how to help people cope with and report harassment incidents. Her ideas didn’t strike me as conflicting with ideas for communicating the policies and the availability of support.

  6. Update on MidAmeriCon II weapons policy:

    The policy has now been finalized and is available at http://midamericon2.org/home/registration-hotel-member-information/for-our-members/policies/

    We are also, as I know it has been a topic here, working on access issues and getting more spelled out information on the web. I can specifically note that access concerns for the Business Meeting (of which I am presiding officer) are being worked on and we hope to have information available soon for that very specific aspect of the convention. The greater access team is working on other aspects of the convention and updating the appropriate pages.

  7. @Mike Glyer
    I can’t tell if our different readings comes from my trying to put my finger on why her posts throughout this thread have put me on edge and used that paragraph to try to explain or if I’m overreacting to everything due to my personal experiences and ongoing lack of support that they happened and should be taken seriously.

    @Jared Dashoff
    Thanks for the link and information. I’m sure your all looking forward to many of us critiquing it. 😉

  8. This is where I get a wibbly wobbly feeling. On the one hand you say it’s urgent after care. But when you switch to But I don’t think that a targeted person is best served by trying to move them back into crisis-mode if they’ve moved out of it. I start feeling uncomfortable. They’ve contacted you, yes take them where they are at, whether it’s a screaming crying mess or calm and factual, or something in between. But I feel like your wording here is being used to excuse not doing things like numbers on badges, signs up on walls, staff visibility, and other suggestions made over this thread.

    With my mental health worker in training hat on, I would say that Listening for what the complainant wants is a marvelous idea. And I realize that one of the problems in implementing a CoC is that at the point of contact you want people with some skills that are not normally there unless one has had some experience in dealing with distress.

    As well as the problem of retraumatisation, there is also the fact that you want people to approach the staff even if they don’t want to make a formal complaint. You want to know what is going on, and you want to be there for them, before and if even if they don’t eventually make a complaint. They should not, IMHO, be pressured one way or another (although there are cases when you have to act even if they don’t want you to, specifically if there are children or the possibility of harm involved).

  9. @Jared Dashoff: (MAC II Weapons Policy)

    The last line of the policy does concern me just a little:

    Any item which is prohibited by governing law is prohibited under this policy.

    I fully agree with its intent, but I can see how some people could “translate” it as also meaning:

    Any item which is allowed by governing law is allowed under this policy.

    Yeah, I know that’s not right. So do you. But we also know some people will zero in on that line and see it that way.

  10. Any impressions that I have softly and silently vanished away are due entirely to my having work for the next two months. Work is am enjoying!

    The weapons policy looks good. It is clear and direct. And there is, unfortunately, no way to write any policy so that it will completely prevent any “creative reading”

  11. @Tasha: I think the conversation has gone a bit wibbly-wobbly, actually. The political problems I have with signage and stickers seems to be getting mixed into the problems I have with defining non-emergent situations as emergencies, and all of this seems to feed off of the very real and completely reasonable lack of trust that many members of the community have about harassment initiatives.

    I’m going to try to pull apart some different things, and hopefully that will make what I’m concerned about clearer. If I had my way, every badge would have a sticker on the back that had the CoC number on it, the number would be answered 24/7, and since I’m blue-skying, here, there would also be a separate emergency response team of trouble shooters available to deal with actual emergencies, such as health problems or incipient violence. Cally’s report earlier in this thread about her issues with knowing who to make a report to are really interesting to me, in part because Cally and I have been friends for more than two decades, and she’s been going to Minicon for more than three decades, I’m pretty sure. She is highly plugged in, so the fact that Cally was unsure who to talk to is a huge alert for me. The information needs to be much better disseminated.

    At the same time, disseminating that information is a real world political problem. I would like more signage. The hotel we are currently in is pretty frowny-faced about signage in public areas, but there are lots of good venues for signage, even so, and I need to think about those. I am also concerned with making that signage clear without being a buzz-kill. I really liked Convergence’s “Cosplay is not consent” posters, they hit just about the perfect note, but cosplay isn’t a big part of Minicon culture, and so they really aren’t directly importable. I need to design signs that basically say, “If your squee is being harshed, here’s a number you can call.” This is hugely complicated by the fact that there are members of the concom that Do Not Want signage at all. I am not anti-sign. Not even remotely. I am not anti-sticker. Not even remotely.

    The year before last, I did a real quick speech at opening ceremonies introducing myself as CCCC, and giving out the number. We didn’t do that this last year. I think we should probably do it again next year, but you know, less than 10% of the convention goes to opening ceremonies, and of those that do, almost none of them are going to whip out a note-taking device to note the number I give out. I do think I’m going to push harder on badge stickers, this coming year. I think that coupling it with other useful resources will a) make it more useful for everyone, and b) more palatable, generally. But I need to think about this. I know that there’s also some discussion about reinstating some sort of easily identifiable tag that concom members wear, so that they can be identified and approached if there is a problem. Again, I think this would be hugely helpful.

    My issues about equating harassment with emergencies has a lot to do with the ways people get emotionally invested in crises, and some of those things are actually counter-productive. This is actually something which I think is complicated, difficult, and really hard to talk about without sounding like I’m trying to minimize the experience of being harassed. Look at this conversation, where as far as I can tell, everyone is participating with extremely good will, and trying hard to listen.

    I worry about two large, different issues, as well as a bunch of smaller things. For a responder, if they feel that the situation being reported is always a crisis, they’re going to put on their crisis-management hat, and feel that making bold, rapid movements is the best possible outcome. I want them to slow down, and consider whether or not, at this moment, their best use of time and energy is to hare off after the subject of the report, or if its to get good information, and provide appropriate after-care to the target. I think that almost always, it’s more important to make sure that the target has the things they need, and it’s very rare that running off to Do Things is the right approach. And yet, when we think about it as an emergency, I think we tend to create a sense of urgency to Do Stuff that can be counterproductive. And if they are thinking that it’s a crisis, the temptation to Do Stuff to the reporter is there, and man do I want them to slow down and find out what’s actually necessary, rather than forcing their idea of appropriate stuff on the reporter.

    The other big thing is that I don’t want to enforce a narrative on the target. If they think it’s an emergency, that’s one thing. But so far, mostly what I see is that by the time people get around to making a report, they have worked through most of the immediate crap, and now what they’re looking for is to turn the remainder of the problem over to the con so that they can stop worrying about this shit. I have seen, in days of yore, people who were really good at crises who would turn things into a crisis so that they could manage that, sometimes at the cost of reinvolving the target and triggering them in ways that weren’t necessary. I want to avoid that. I also think that treating it as an emergency has the possibility of upping the stakes for the reporters in non-useful ways. One of the things that reporters worry about is “What will making this report cost me?” The more we act like it’s an emergency, the more likely they are to worry that the cost of reporting will be higher than they’re comfortable paying.

    Mostly what I want is for people to think carefully and clearly about each, individual incident and make appropriate and proportionate responses to actual events. I want to walk into the situation without too many pre-conceived notions about what is and isn’t going on.

    The center of the conundrum, though, is that people like me are starting to do the work in an environment that has decades and decades of poor management practices, broken promises, missing stairs, and genuinely malign behavior. And so people like you don’t trust me. You certainly have no reason to. Trust on this issue can only be built slowly, by doing it right over and over again, and gaining a reputation for being good at this shit. I haven’t been doing it very long, and I’m not very good at it, and I do not have a sterling reputation on these issues to back me up. The fact that you are functioning from a basic level of distrust is one of the many political facts of this landscape which has to be navigated. I am not criticizing you in the least. In fact, I’m really glad that you’ve trusted me enough to critique and criticize.

    (Yikes! Sorry for wall-o-text!)


  12. Lis Carey on May 10, 2016 at 8:41 pm said:
    Any impressions that I have softly and silently vanished away are due entirely to my having work for the next two months. Work is am enjoying!

    Mazel tov!

  13. Lis Carey: Any impressions that I have softly and silently vanished away are due entirely to my having work for the next two months.

    This is fantastic! Hopefully it will end up going long-term! 😀

  14. Leave a message? If someone does (insert all the examples here), I don’t wanna get a voicemail that tells me I’ve gotta wait to report it and get some not-very-urgent aftercare. Especially if the offender gets to walk around blithely unaware that what they did was a problem — or worse, go out and do it again for possibly another 6 hours and maybe leave. Or themselves get a beatdown if they get do it again and get caught without being warned that that particular behavior is something they shouldn’t be doing, something they’d stop if spoken to politely.

    Yes, I know cons are short-staffed, I’ve worked enough of them. But there needs to be someone who can be awakened and mumble a few comforting words on the phone right damn then, even if a formal report waits for a normal hour. And maybe triage it to “are you okay to wait till later to give a report?” or “OMGWTF, wake up all of security and call the cops.” Because sometimes, it IS an emergency.

    Hampus has a good point, too — fandom has a lot more neuro-atypical people than the average. I’d freak out at more than 15 min. wait and I’m so neurotypical you could probably base the standard on me. Do we want victims to freak out and leave the con, never to return, without getting a chance to tell their story? That leads to more trauma and more missing stairs.

    (Tasha, I haven’t suffered from any of the things that you have, and I’m having exactly the same reactions you are.)

    Lydy, I hope some of the discussions here can give you more impetus to push for signage and a number on the back of the badge, plus concom ID. That’s literally the least the con could do and doesn’t mean they have to take some dramatic position on things.

    IIRC, the name/service mark Westercon is owned by LASFS, so there’s some continuity there even though different organizations hold it each year like Worldcon. They might be able to keep and pass on a list of persona non grata after a thorough investigation. Whether they’d want to is another story — they like to leave it up to the individual cons, e.g. when no registered bids won for W 66, they told the W 64 members to handle it.

    But I think the slightly different structure of the con might mean that the by-laws could be changed to require passing along the ban list. Or at least encourage it, the way the casinos in Vegas are owned by different, competing corporations but share the names of cheaters with each other.

    Well done, KC on the Weapons policy!

    Valley Forge is looking not so good. No weapons policy. A facility that allows smoking right next to the convention center, which you have to go past to get to the con area. Accessibility issues. No CoC/Accessibility tab on the website menu or in the FAQ. And only 4 days after Worldcon. (Plus, suburbs of Philly vs. tropical island!)

  15. @Lydy Nickerson
    Lack of trust is a big problem. In the community, with specific cons, ConCom members we’ve seen screw up who haven’t made real apologies/don’t seem to understand where they went wrong, unfortunately even among some of my friends who run cons (I’m sure the wrong ones will think I’m talking about them).
    Hard to trust after decades and decades of poor management practices, broken promises, missing stairs, and genuinely malign behavior. A new scandal every year or two since 2010 hasn’t helped where ConComs aren’t seen to be enforcing their CoCs.

    Badges, signage, a way to tell who is staff, who to talk to whether it’s a medical, incipient violence, harassment is critical to me. I say this as an occasional congoer who usually knows enough staff personally I have a number of them in my speed dial. The political issues are a problem. I think our approaches to politics are very different.

    Yes. Different teams for medical, incipient violence, harassment 24/7 would be a dream but I understand it’s unrealistic for small cons.

    For a responder, if they feel that the situation being reported is always a crisis, they’re going to put on their crisis-management hat, and feel that making bold, rapid movements is the best possible outcome. I want them to slow down, and consider whether or not, at this moment, their best use of time and energy is to hare off after the subject of the report, or if its to get good information, and provide appropriate after-care to the target.

    I think we need to find new language for this or a better way to balance when talking. My concern is the targeted be heard and taken care of and I’m looking for an emphasis on that. You want to keep the listener from going into problem solving mode, taking action too quickly, and putting pressure on targeted. For a bad analogy: I want to let of steam and kvetch to my husband; instead of really listening starts offering solutions which isn’t helpful.

    Mostly what I want is for people to think carefully and clearly about each, individual incident and make appropriate and proportionate responses to actual events. I want to walk into the situation without too many pre-conceived notions about what is and isn’t going on.

    I don’t think that’s realistic. People have biases. They prejudge based on all sorts of factors – race, gender, age, sexual orientation, class, disability, people’s reputations, how well they know each person involved. Maybe I’m overthinking this?

    As I said I’ve been let down in the last few years. By friends, family, strangers. I’ve watched the scandals over the last 10 years unfold. A CoC is only as good as the team standing behind it. If I don’t know who to contact it does me little good. If the people I contact don’t listen to what I need, follow through, get back to me, lose my report, privilege redemption over my & other congoers comfort and safety, invite known offenders as GOH and panelists, let them be volunteers, the targeted have to take to the Internet to get action taken, well it’s going to be a while before trust in the community can be built. This is only going to change as good CoCs and procedures are implemented and enforced. As the bystanders over the last 5-40+ years accept and embrace the need instead of fighting it out of mistaken fears it will ruin their con experience.

    (Walls of text seem to be the thing today. Treat yourself to something special for making it to the end)

  16. Lydy Nickerson:

    Thank you for a very good answer. I absolutely agree with your reasoning.

    (Managed to avoid wall of text because work)

  17. lurkertype: Valley Forge is looking not so good. No weapons policy.

    Oh, the Valley Forge NASFiC bid has a weapons policy, all right. It’s “feel free to bring your weapon if you’ve got a concealed carry permit”. Which is why I am referring to it as GunNutCon.

    Start reading here. The attitude of the Valley Forge NASFiC Bid chair and committee members towards allowing concealed carry is utterly mind-blowing — a prime example of living in a regional bubble of groupthink and having no clue what the outside world thinks. 😐

    Conversely, the San Juan NASFiC bid has already come out quite sensibly with a “no weapons whatsoever” policy.

  18. @Lis Carey: Any impressions that I have softly and silently vanished away are due entirely to my having work for the next two months. Work is am enjoying!

    Congratulations. Work you enjoy is a blessing. May it be extended or another job come along.

    @Lurkertype
    Thanks for the support.

    Valley Forge does have a weapons policy. Bring yours as it would be impossible to prevent people from CC so weapons policies don’t prevent guns. Their comments on here explaining the policy were entertaining, repetitive, and sad. Their CoC states they know no one is actually going to harass anyone but here is their policy because. Didn’t leave me with confidence they’d be enforcing it but as we know I’m very strict in how policies are written (attitude) as well as what they cover. 😉

    ETA: ninja’d by JJ

  19. Tasha Turner: (Walls of text seem to be the thing today. Treat yourself to something special for making it to the end)

    I have appertained myself a beverage!

  20. One of the reasons I hate using a safety narrative to talk about harassment is because we end up in conversations like this, where medical emergencies are conflated with unpleasant conversations. I do see the value of having a single point of contact where a con-goer can go and be shunted to the correct department: disaster relief, EMS, Code of Conduct, etc. Back when Minicon was huge, we had such a system. Any problem, big or small, went to the Bridge, and clueful staff called in appropriate specialists. Need a whiteboard for your panel that starts in 5 minutes and it’s not there? Call the Bridge. See somebody fall down the escalator? Call the Bridge. Get harassed? Call the Bridge. And the bridge called a gopher, or a paramedic, or a troubleshooter, and they dealt with the issue. (It was a lovely thing that, itself, went badly toxic.) When we dramatically downsized, that’s one of the departments that we lost.

    Right now, this year, I don’t have that. I see no particular hope that the con chair will create such a function for the upcoming convention, and I cannot imagine how she would find sufficient volunteers to staff it. Possibly my conchair needs to do more work on emergency and disaster planning. Because we don’t have the over-arching Ops department, I am aware that my people may be called on to intervene in actual emergencies. That doesn’t make those things harassment. But since we might get called in, we need to actually think about the difference, because really, if one of my people tries to treat a heart attack like an harassment complaint, that would not be good, either.

  21. @Tasha: I think I agreed with everything you said. When I talk about things not being harassment, that doesn’t mean that I don’t think they’re important. Lots of them are hugely important. But they’re things that the concom in general needs to work on, and not necessarily things that my department can address. But sometimes when I say that, it sounds like I think it shouldn’t be done. I don’t mean that. I just mean that I can’t do everything, and that Codes of Conduct are concerned with certain, specific things and will not fix everything wrong with the convention.

  22. And this is again where I start to loose hope. Please, it does not help those who have been victims and harassment where no one cared, to hear that they will be low priority again.

    Because that is what it sounds like. This is the typical case where you have to be much more careful with your language.

    EDIT: The comment was regarding post May 11, 2016 at 1:33 am.

  23. Lydy Nickerson: Because we don’t have the over-arching Ops department, I am aware that my people may be called on to intervene in actual emergencies. That doesn’t make those things harassment. But since we might get called in, we need to actually think about the difference, because really, if one of my people tries to treat a heart attack like an harassment complaint, that would not be good, either.

    This is what my missing comment addressed.

    There are at least a couple kinds of con incident “emergencies”:

    1) We need to get < police / fire / paramedic / security > response onto this right now.
    2) We need to get someone to this person who can listen to them right now, and reassure them that their concerns will be taken seriously, and addressed as appropriate.

    I agree that it’s important that measures taken to address non-emergent incidents (including harassment) be handled in a measured, thoughtful way — which includes taking time to carefully evaluate the situation and the witness reports.

    But it’s also really important that someone who has made a report (I hesitate to label them as a “victim”, though I think that con staff should consider them as such) be made to feel as though someone cares and someone is willing to come listen to them right now, if that is what they want.

    Psychological studies have, in fact, shown that people who are given time to reflect after an incident, who are given time to talk things over with others in the wake of an incident will mentally revise what happened based on their personal referents, or the people with whom they are discussing — generally totally unconsciously, but this revision does happen.

    That is why I think that it is critical for a report to be taken as soon as the reporter has had a chance to calm down, but before they have had the chance for their recollection of the event to be affected and altered by outside influences.

    My personal experience is that someone who has been subjected to a traumatizing event will dwell, and repeat, and relive, and obsess — and possibly rewrite — an event until they are given the chance to unload. That’s why I think it is critical that there be a First Response Person whose main responsibilities are to a) Show up as soon as the reporter is ready to see them, b) Listen, c) Reassure, d) Record.

    And yes, it’s important to train the staff who will be responding to a report to understand the difference between 1) and 2), and who can do a) through d) in a competent manner.

    I don’t think that the value of someone showing up to validate and reassure a reporting person, as soon as possible, can be overestimated.

  24. @lurkertype:

    Leave a message? If someone does (insert all the examples here), I don’t wanna get a voicemail that tells me I’ve gotta wait to report it and get some not-very-urgent aftercare.

    Right now, the plan is to have the phone answered between 10:00 a.m and 4:00 a.m., leaving six hours where the cell phone will roll over to voicemail. Also sad but true is the fact that cell phones are crap, and often fail to ring, even when they’re on and have bars. That’s a problem with the modern world I can’t fix. I don’t like having gaps like that, either, but I really don’t see how to resolve it. The person coming on shift at 10:00 a.m. is supposed to check the phone, first thing, and respond right away to any messages or texts.

    But there needs to be someone who can be awakened and mumble a few comforting words on the phone right damn then, even if a formal report waits for a normal hour.

    By four am, there’s pretty nobody official, anywhere. Even the bar is usually shut down by then, and the consuite is often on auto-pilot. I’m thinking about your concern, but I’m unsure how to address it. I need the phone to be in a location where the next staffer can pick it up without waking up the person who went to bed at four in the morning. At this point, we’re using one physical phone and passing it around. This limits things, somewhat. The year I used Googlevoice, I could just have it ring to my phone during off hours, but for various reasons, I’m not doing that this year, and these days you can’t easily forward from one cell to another.

    And maybe triage it to “are you okay to wait till later to give a report?” or “OMGWTF, wake up all of security and call the cops.” Because sometimes, it IS an emergency.

    Yep, and that’s when you should call 911. Getting the convention involved is fine, but don’t wait on us, for heaven’s sake. If you need the cops, CALL THE COPS!

    Hampus has a good point, too — fandom has a lot more neuro-atypical people than the average. I’d freak out at more than 15 min. wait and I’m so neurotypical you could probably base the standard on me. Do we want victims to freak out and leave the con, never to return, without getting a chance to tell their story? That leads to more trauma and more missing stairs.

    No, no I don’t. Which is why the phone is ideally answered 18 hours a day. And I have real trouble getting enough staff for that. I’m not sure what else I can do.

    Lydy, I hope some of the discussions here can give you more impetus to push for signage and a number on the back of the badge, plus concom ID. That’s literally the least the con could do and doesn’t mean they have to take some dramatic position on things.

    Absolutely it has. I think I may even have said that, earlier. Cally’s comment, in particular, really drove home to me how utterly important this is, and how completely inadequate the current situation is. I will be talking with my conchair about these issues.

  25. Oh, Hampus! Again, I have said it wrong. I’m so sorry, and grieved that I am saying it badly.

    HARASSMENT IS NOT A LOW PRIORITY!!!

    The difference between priority and emergency is an important difference. But it not the difference between important and unimportant. Harassment is actually a much larger and more important issue to address that the occasional zebra, such as a member experiencing a psychotic break (which I have, in fact, witnessed and was involved in intervening with).

    I am trying to identify some clear distinctions between what is and isn’t harassment, so that we don’t minimize harassment. I want to have good conversations about how we change our social interactions, how we learn to do better by each other, how we stop driving away more vulnerable people. And I think that concentrating on the issue as if it were an emergency, we ignore that fact that what we have is a serious, chronic condition that needs many different things to be done.

    Treating a person who wants to make a report as a serious, urgent situation is definitely what I want. I want the listening piece, the after care and validation, to be the highest priority. I would love to be able to do it 24/7 but I don’t have the resources. I think it’s utterly vital that people be able to be heard, in their own voice and on their own schedule. And I want to do this in such a way that they can lay that burden down, with the assurance that the problem is now the problem of the convention, and no longer their problem.

    I also want people to understand that if they are not experiencing their harassment as an emergency I STILL CARE!!! You don’t have to be in crisis for this to be a problem that I want to know about and resolve. And the emergency paradigm can cause people who are not in crisis to wonder: should I say anything? Yes, yes you should. Because crisis or not, people should not be shitty to you without your consent.

  26. Lydy, will you be at MAC II? Because you are awesome, and it’s clear that you care so much, and I would so much love to be able to give you a hug. 🙂

  27. Well, I do have a broken nose since one of my friends had a psychotic breakdown, so I know they happen. And where I have been a volunteer we have had allergic chocks, faintings, relived traumas and what not. So yes, I do know what is seen as emergency for staff.

    Thing is, when we are discussing harassment, it is not good when the focus of the discussion will be on other things that might take priority. I know that there are priorities. Mad Man With Axe goes before sad child with broken doll. But it is not reassuring when the discussion focuses on saying that this is not an emergency, this is not a crisis, this is not as high priority as something else.

    That is not really what people need to hear.

  28. And I am very, very sorry if we sound like nitpickers and so on. That is not the meaning. I have been very impressed by your answers and the thought you have given to them. It is just that some expressions are a bit triggering.

    Which I guess is hard to avoid sometimes.

  29. Because we don’t have the over-arching Ops department

    Boggles! How can you function as a con without Ops? (bows three times to the Gods of Ops)

  30. But it is not reassuring when the discussion focuses on saying that this is not an emergency, this is not a crisis, this is not as high priority as something else.

    That is not really what people need to hear.

    Hampus, I am not sure people need to hear that their concerns are priority, emergency and crisis either. Because that might stop them making the complaint in the first place. That is, I am against imposing any kind of narrative on the person making the complaint (including victimhood). Something doesn’t need to be a Big Deal to be reported.

    This is a point raised by a friend of mine re the lifetime banning of people: people are already reluctant to come forward, if you dangle in front of them the possibility that they might be responsible for banning somebody from a convention forever, the weight of the responsibility might stop them (and also make the appropriate con staff take the decision to sanction the individual at all). It the litmus test is “Harrassment is A Crisis and A Tragedy”, then people might say, oh well, what I experienced was not that big a deal anyway. But it might be that a series of tiny harrassments, which could be solved with a friendly word, eventually mount up to creating an unpleasant environment.

  31. Anna Feruglio Dal Dan:

    “Hampus, I am not sure people need to hear that their concerns are priority, emergency and crisis either.”

    Which is something I’ve never said. It is not either or. And sometimes something being or becoming a crisis for a person depends on how it is handled.

    I will leave the discussion know, because I feel that I can’t handle it the way people are responding. If I continue to read and write, it will be too much in affect and I have promised myself to try to avoid that here.

  32. @JJ: I am planning on being at MACII and would love a hug. Shall we meet in the park?

    @Hampus: I am sorry that the conversation is upsetting you, and I hope you will find some spoons to return at some point in the future. These conversations are very difficult for everyone.

  33. @Lydy Nickerson
    Thanks for the ongoing discussion and long thoughtful responses. JJ addressed my concerns in their reply.

    I appreciate you are doing the best you believe you can with the resources you have available.

    I think one more place our conversation has gone sideways has been figuring out when your talking generalities versus your specific con. It may be me missing cues or you’ve been talking your specific situation from the start and I was slow to catch on. I suspect much of this is on me.

    One last point which came up when I was talking with my husband last night. In the case of a medical incident or incipient violence the person experiencing the problem or bystanders have a few options for who to call:
    1. Con ops/safety/whoever on staff they can think of
    2. Hotel front desk or grab any hotel staff they see
    3. 911

    Someone whose been harassed in many cases will feel they have one number:
    1. Appropriate con staff
    If the harassment is at criminal assault level they have the option to call the cops but if their uncomfortable getting someone banned from a con they are even less likely to want to see them in jail leaving aside the trauma and lack of results track record the US legal system has in this area.

  34. JJ: I should report that yesterday I went looking for your missing comment in the spam and trash — no luck.

  35. @Tasha: Am on my way to bed, must keep this short. I have been talking both about the general issue and about my specific con, and I’m sure I haven’t always signaled my turns, so it makes sense that you would be confused at times.

    I believe that the specific informs the general, which is why I have been talking about my personal situation. Also, I know that people don’t like watching sausage being made, but I’m hoping that by making my sausage in public, I’ll get valuable input. This has definitely been the case.

    I strongly believe that it is destructive to have policies that you cannot enforce. One of the best ways to determine if a policy is enforceable is to create procedures to support them. If you cannot articulate clear steps for how to implement a policy, it is a bad policy. Worse, it constitutes a lie to your membership. You are promising to do a thing that you cannot do. One of the things I’ve been trying to talk about is the way that that real world concerns limit policy. Given the trust deficit that we’re working with on harassment issues, it’s really important that conventions not make commitments they cannot meet.

    So far, the conversation has not led me to believe that I really need to add that additional six hours of responding time into my schedule, although I’m still thinking and listening. If I can figure out a way to do it that doesn’t require a very large additional set of resources, I certainly will. On the other hand, it has definitely led me to believe that I need to push much harder for clearly identified staff, better signage, and better communication about who to call if there’s an harassment issue. Stickers and signs! I so need them.

  36. Lydy Nickerson:

    Hi, calmer now. I have learned to read my signals (most of the time) and know when it will not be good if I answer.

    Just wanted to say that I really appreciate yours and everyone elses comments and thoughts. All the hugs!

    And now I’ll leave again.

  37. Tasha Turner on May 10, 2016 at 12:44 pm said:

    A quick Google will give one at least a basic understanding of issues being discussed. Most of the people on file 770 have more than a basic understanding of CoCs. They’ve seen the links I’ve posted a few times here and other places they/we frequent. Some may have been a part of writing them.

    Search engines including Google have been around for over 20 years now. Yet people seem unwilling to spend 5-15 minutes to start educatig themselves on issues at any level before jumping into discussions. They either expect others to educate them or think they are the first to think of something.

    I wasn’t actually expecting anyone to educate me. I made what I thought could have been a useful contribution to the discussion; just an idea thrown off the cuff. I really had no idea it could cause anyone grief.

    I react badly to this for a number of reasons. Which is no excuse for my poor behavior towards you. I’m sorry for snarking twice. I should have pointed you to 101 links, the links I provided, and links to why it’s not our job to educate everyone who wanders into an ongoing discussion.

    Yeah. Just saying something like “People have actually thought of this idea, here’s a list of links to existing model CoCs:” would have served to educate me and any other people following the discussion who also lacked a background in the subject — my understanding is that most public online conversations have many more readers than participants — while not being condescending.

    In the future I’ll try to be less of a jerk when someone does something I perceive as a microaggression while providing them with the information they’ve requested because it’s not a helpful way of communicating.

    That’s a good resolution, and I agree that it’s not really helpful to anyone to insult people while educating them. Perhaps you could also try putting things in perspective. Was my little off-the-cuff suggestion really a “microaggression”? Telling someone that they look foolish seems to me to fit the bill better.

    I’ve been called much worse in online conversations, and have a fairly thick skin. But since File 770 seems to have a generally pleasant atmosphere, and I really didn’t think my contribution was worth jumping on, I took your comments a bit badly.

    I won’t ask for your forgiveness as my behavior in this thread makes any apology suspect.

    I’ll give you my forgiveness anyway. Everybody has bad days, and I’m certainly not innocent of being less than pleasant to others online. I started participating in online conversations about 25 years ago, and the distancing nature of the medium — i.e., just having text to respond to, without any of the other clues that the people on the other side of the screen are people — made it easy at first to partake of the heady thrill of flaming. I could probably be justly accused of having been an asshole at times. But for a long time now, I’ve tried to live by the principle of not saying anything online to someone that I would not be comfortable saying in person to them — with the possible exception of people whose behaviour has made me lose all respect for them; and in most of those cases, I just quit the conversation.

    For what it’s worth, you seem to be a thoughful and intelligent person who generally makes good points, like most of the other regular commenters on File 770.

    I hope in the future you might give consideration to taking a few moments to educate yourself before jumping into a conversation about a long-term issue.

    I hope in the future we can have more productive conversations.

    Very well. For my part, I’ll stop stirring this storm in a teacup.

  38. Teemu Leisti Was my little off-the-cuff suggestion really a “microaggression”?

    Yes it was. Every single time this conversation comes up someone or several someone’s make the off the cuff suggestion you did. I’ve participated in hundreds of these discussions online and offline.

    This would be why I keep repeating do a little research before commenting.

    When I first started participating on technical writing groups, Jewish communities, later publishing communities, and feminist spaces, and now LGBTI and POC spaces I listen(ed), read, research(ed) things, and try to be careful of the questions I ask because I know they get asked the same things or get the same off the cuff simple suggestions all the time.

    Go watch any non-101 group on any topic you don’t know well. Watch the number of times in a single week you see the same questions asked and off-the-cuff suggests made. Watch how the group reacts. From gardening to racing cars to computers to boating.

    It can be difficult to discern where a group is at. If you don’t see a lot of 101 links being shared and the same simple and basic questions and concepts being discussed it’s better to assume most members of the discussion are quite knowledgeable about the topic and take time before jumping in. If people are sharing links and clearly helping others to understand basic stuff – for example: how to nominate, determine eligibility, and vote for the Hugos then jumping in with questions rather than statements when you have little knowledge about the topic is appropriate.

    Using these techniques has helped me look like an expert, someone to listen to, and take seriously as well as fit into a community sooner than I would otherwise.

    I also have over 25 years experience on the Internet. I’ve been amazed to see advice I was giving on using the internet, communications, and writing pops up even now. I’ve gotten snarkier over the last few years which goes against my own advice on How to seem smart online* (or is it: on the Internet?).

    *Article on my website

    Another long post. Suggest drinks and a snack if you made it to the end.

  39. Tasha Turner: So you refused that person’s attempt to make peace with you? Really?

  40. @Mike Glyer
    Is that a first for me for someone whose not a troll?

    In my current state of mind I was unable/unwilling to ignore the question Was my little off-the-cuff suggestion really a “microaggression”?

    Hard to believe how unreasonable I’ve been to poor Teemu Leisti for a misstep. It’s not at all in keeping with my usual online persona is it? I’m not following any of my rules for online behavior. I should take a timeout until my PTSD triggered by this long discussion of CoCs is under control and I’m back to being a positive member of file770 instead of negative drag.

  41. I don’t know if it will help anyone – I’m not trying to snark, honestly; I do want to be helpful – but for myself, a personal rule is, if I have the urge to write an apology for something at the end of my post (yes, like Tasha’s “Sorry for being so sarcastic” back at the beginning of this exchange, but there are other examples; “Sorry I couldn’t be arsed to post a link,” “Sorry I went on so long,” “Sorry to come down so hard on you….”) … that’s my personal cue to interrogate myself before I submit the post.

    I ask myself, “Am I? Am I truly sorry? If so, couldn’t I do something about it now, before I hit SEND? Is my post’s snarkiness, length, resemblance to a ton of bricks, lack of hypertext citations, truly necessary enough that I should commit the offense and belie my apology? If so, maybe I should erase the apology instead?”

    I don’t always decide the remove the thing I’m apologizing for. And sometimes I write “sorry-not-sorry?” at the end of a wall of text as a tongue in cheek way of saying “Yeah, maybe this was excessive, but I felt it was necessary.” I do not always behave well, or judge the line between acceptable mock-self-deprecating humor and assholishness as well as I’d like.

    But I am trying to foment a sort of trigger whereby when I see myself type “Sorry for X, but…” at the end of a post, I mentally react with, “It’s not too late to refrain from committing the very act I’m apologizing for. It’s also not too late, if I feel justified in that act, to refrain from making an insincere apology.”

    YMMV and all that.

  42. That said…

    @Tasha Turner: In my current state of mind I was unable/unwilling to ignore the question Was my little off-the-cuff suggestion really a “microaggression”?

    Yeah, that was the part of the post where I thought, “You were doing so well up to that moment.”

    When one person says they experience an act as a microagression, it’s really not up to another person to question that. Other things about the interaction may be open to negotiation, but each person owns and is the expert on their own experience. And women in particular are constantly having their reporting of their experience questioned and outright denied; surely no one here wants to be a part of that pattern?

    Yes, I just went meta. Telling a woman “Are you sure what I did to you can properly be called ‘microaggression’?” is itself a microaggression.

  43. Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little on May 11, 2016 at 10:03 pm said:

    Yeah, that was the part of the post where I thought, “You were doing so well up to that moment.”

    Yes, I just went meta. Telling a woman “Are you sure what I did to you can properly be called ‘microaggression’?” is itself a microaggression.

    It looks like I’m going to have to do some research on microaggression.

Comments are closed.