177 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/27/18 Pixels Scroll Good, Like An E-fanzine Should”

1. Here is the thing. People attending the panel who were live-tweeting (a widespread custom now, and very handy for people who can’t/don’t attend) expressed their distress, horror, and anger on Twitter. Wiscon did not take immediate real-world action at the panel, and may well have been unable to do so because unaware.

   The event didn’t just take place in the room where the panel was held. The event took place on Twitter, on the simulcast. Actual witnesses were on Twitter. If Wiscon hadn’t responded on the Internet, they would have been ignoring many of the people who were immediately affected.

   From a purely pragmatic perspective, once Wiscon realized that something had gone badly wrong, they needed to address the Internet as soon as they had something to say. Waiting lets the bad story drown out the response, whatever it may be. Wiscon may not have had time to talk to the panelist, but they did have time to talk to multiple witnesses who said that the speech complained of had happened. They threaded the needle by saying “yes, these appalling statements happened, but we’re not naming names until we’ve had a chance to talk to the perpetrator.”

2. @Cora Buhlert

   Besides, they could have avoided all this if they had kept Wonder Woman in a WWII setting, which also fits the history of the character.

   I don’t know if that would have helped. There seemed to be entirely too much of the first Captain America movie in the DNA of WW’s second half. Which is a shame, because I thoroughly enjoyed the first half as a unique experience.

   3) That’s a real shame. Gardner Dozois’ collections were my map of contemporary short sci-fi in the 90s and 00s. He really had an eye for stories that were multi-layered and kept you wandering back a week later to reread because something new clicked.

   8) Faith Goldy was one of the first to jump out and opine that the Incel who drove his van through the crowds in Toronto seemed Middle-Eastern and that the police were talking about a Muslim suspect. Both were complete lies for her racist fanbase. I’m not surprised that JDA is taking to the ramparts to support someone like her.

3. Wiscon’s history plus the fact that the controversy was already all over the internet means that saying nothing on the internet would not have been good.

   All my other thoughts are going to have to wait, because this tablet wants to shut down and charge. And in the meantime, who knows? Maybe these thoughts will not emerge.

4. Chip Hitchcock: I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that some people at CERN thought the web-as-planned was a distraction; not everyone gets that most of science is building the tools, not running the experiments.

   This anecdote may fit in with your point. Dr. Robert L. Forward, while making a presentation about potential antimatter spacedrives at LASFS, said CERN’s attitude was once antimatter had been shown to exist, “the rest was just engineering.”

5. Faith Goldy inspired me to compose my very first Policy 34 letter to UW’s Safety Officer, who has yet to respond to it. The cost of the proposed Nazi event soared after I sent the letter so it may have had an effect.

6. Den notes correctly: 8) Faith Goldy was one of the first to jump out and opine that the Incel who drove his van through the crowds in Toronto seemed Middle-Eastern and that the police were talking about a Muslim suspect. Both were complete lies for her racist fanbase. I’m not surprised that JDA is taking to the ramparts to support someone like her.

   The problem for people like Goldy is that the world is lot more complex when it comes to everything including acts of terrorism than their conceptual frame will allow as it doesn’t allow for the likes of a Theodore Kaczynski or the Toronto killer. They believe only one group are really terrorists and even one is of that group.

   Dean Ing’s Soft Targets which predates the 911 terrorist attack is more nuanced that JDA et al are and it wasn’t that nuanced.

7. Genes ‘n cells ain’t human culture! (I have a bit of an AC/DC earworm this morning…)

   I know at least some of our family tree. Confederates on one side; Native Americans on both sides; lots of mutt otherwise. What does any of it have to do with me though?

   The commercial where the guy gives up his ‘lederhosen for a kilt’ always seemed a bit sad to me in giving up the traditions he was raised in for some traditions linked only because of a genetic test. As if ‘ blood’ should outweigh all of a life’s experiences.

   On the other stream of conversation: certainly there were individually good German soldiers in WW2, nice to orphans and dogs etc, but showing that without white washing the evil of the system they were fighting for is a perilous tightrope. Which circles back I suppose to the essential complexities of the human condition and the banality that is the banality of evil.

8. Also an adoptee. Also involved in DNA databases like 23andMe and GEDmatch. I have found many awesome relatives through them. In the next few months I have meetups scheduled with my new half-brother, my niece and my cousin. Another biological cousin was the model for a character on my book Retrograde Horizon. My bio relatives are awesome and every bit as “real” as my adoptive relatives and I resent attempts to label some of them realer than others. 20th century US adoptees were subjected to a social experiment in the form of closed record adoption. Current practice is to include a multipage form with genetic info for even confidential adoptions. In most countries this info is available to adult adoptees but many places in the US still seal everything. I had to pay several thousand dollars to unseal mine from the state of Hawaii. I think closed records are BS. My DNA belongs to me and I will investigate it if I want to.

9. @Hampus: A bit of context: The “Many Confederates were conscripts” thing has been a way of minimizing the wrongs of the Confederacy for decades. It’s a part of the ancestor cult I was taking about. “You can’t say I’m a terrible person for having terrible ancestors because my terrible ancestors were conscripts, not volunteers.”

   You don’t generally hear it anywhere but from unreconstructed Southerners. (Around here, anyway.) It’s a Confederate apologetic.

   That the same construction now includes Nazis is generally taken as adding Nazis into the original apologetics.

   Now, this doesn’t seem to be what broke the panel. The livetweet I read yesterday indicates that there was discussion, consensus was sort of reached, panel tried to move on. Then the Nazis got pulled back into the conversation, this time in the context of disabled people in a dystopic setting. I think Barrayar’s Time of Isolation would have been a good topic for this part, but no, we have to bring the Nazis back.

10. @Cora, that was indeed a huge disappointment about Wonder Woman, particularly because it was a rare (for that movie) failure of the scriptwriters’ general ability to see and acknowledge shades of grey and complexity. (it was partially saved near the end, but not nearly early enough.)

    @John A Arkansawyer and others: As another adoptee, I share the bemusement at ancestor-worship and particularly at taking pride in ancestors’ deeds, which strikes me as the laziest and least impressive form of achievement ever contrived. Kinship has always struck me as more interesting than ancestry, if only because you might have actually known some of your kin. My kin are (FWIW) Norwegian-immigrant on Dad’s side, and eastern Kansans out of England on Mom’s. The latter of course were an interesting case in vilification of (in their case) one’s countrymen, as the memories of Bleeding Kansas long endured: At the time of the 1948 Presidential election, my then-teenage Mom heard to her surprise that her father and mother would absolutely not consider voting for Harry S Truman — because he was from Missouri and hence The Enemy. (Still, 98 years after the Border Ruffians, they remained The Enemy, evil people who should never be trusted.)

    During my and my wife’s taxicab ride in to Kansas City for MidAmericon II, the taxicab driver, a wonderful Missourian gentleman originally from Gambia, thoughtfully started telling me some local Missouri and Kansas history. I interjected that despite being a feckless Californian, I could tell him about most of his region’s historical grudges and current political redoubts, but appreciated his kind offer even though his town was, according to my mother’s folks, enemy territory.

    On an entirely different note, the world is already a sadder and less merry place without Gardner Dozois. I will always cherish the Liar’s Panels he used to do at Worldcons, where he and other veteran pro editors would dispense deliberately terrible advice to authors trying to get published. (‘Send lots more dinosaur stories!’)

11. And here I was wanted to talk about (2) and why I think Troll briudge is a great short story, I dont think there is enough for a movie in there. But alas.

    My grandfather fought for the Nazis. He was captured on the East front together with other Germany. The russians started to shoot his comrades, but an arriving officer stoped it and he became POW. He died when I was six and of course he never talked to me about the war, but he also didnt talk with my mother about it either. I liked him, he showed me plants and he could identify bids by their songs, which was very impressive.
    So, I know that poeple can be nuanced.
    That doesnt stop me to condemn nazi ideology, what nazis did or nazis in general. I dont need to be sympathize with them or ttry to understand it. If Germans are always villains in movies, then so be it – if it helps to prevent these events to ever happening again its something I gladly chose.

    Re: Winter soldier: I havent seen the movie in a while, but I thought of the German uniforms as a plot hole. The scene is playing inf Budapest, but was shot in Berlin. I just thought the directors took whatever uniforms was availible, because no one in the US would tell the difference between Hungarian and German uniforms. But of course, I might be totally wrong – then its a bit silly… On the other hand, Cap is a bit of a dick in that movie anyway, so…

12. As interesting as it can be, in an abstract kind of way, to find out about one’s forebears, I’ve always had trouble understanding the notion that who and what they were has anything to do with who I am. Well, maybe knowing about the previous couple generations can be significant, given the way shit rolls down the temporal hill in families. (One grandfather’s bad behavior, indulged by his father and exacerbated by the nightmares of WW1, accounts for many of my mother’s attitudes, which in turn affected how she raised me and my siblings.) But that line from “‘All You Zombies–‘” has stayed with me since I first read it: “Ancestors Are Just People.” To which I sometimes add, “And you never know what they’ll get up to.”

    On the other hand, a sense of cultural continuity is not to be sneered at, and having a sense of “my people” that includes actual genetic lineage needn’t be pathological, though given human breeding behavior, I would think that the uncertainty of it all would diminish its importance as a binding factor. (See my codicil to the Heinlein observation, above.)

13. In lighter news, Good Show Sir has a perfect description of how cats feel about fiction with cats in it (starring the cover to the anthology Magicats!). 🙂

14. My parents did genealogy for a long time, and the most important thing I took away was how poor my family was, and how many of them signed census forms with an “X”. I’m middle-class now thanks to a lot of heroic effort by my grandparents, given a rocket boost by the GI Bill and 1950s government grants for graduate science education.

    We also seem to have been born with a wandering foot; a lot of my forebears were born one place and died another. The poverty no doubt had something to do with that.

    Disclaimer: I’m ridiculously comfortable, and I don’t get any brownie points for “well, my forebears were poor!”

15. I had a friend in the peace movement who fought in the wehrmacht (his best friend was an englishman who fought in the RAF, he himself hsd spent time in a concentration camp for resistance against the nazis). He told me a bitter-sweet story once.

    He and his fe?low soldiers had been ordered to replace another group near the border. The first night they were there, suddenly a group of american soldiers dropped by with wine and bread. Turned out they had befriended the old group of german soldiers. As none of them wanted to fight, they had instead started to meet to play card, talk about their families and drink wine. Sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other.

    Sorry to say, the story did not end well. The new german officer was more by the book and the americans were taken prisoners. But it is yet another story of how many soldiers really didn’t want to fight. And even if war tries to drain out humanity, it will still find unexpected places to thrive.

16. @Rail
    Most Nazi soldiers actually were conscripts, particularly towards the end, when they started drafting 16-year-olds. Though many of them were also enthusiastic about fighting for Führer and Vaterland, particularly the 16-year-olds. And even for those who were exempted from military service due to having jobs crucial for the war effort, there was immense peer pressure to volunteer anyway. One of my grandfathers volunteered for military service, even though he would have been exempt due to working in airplane production, because he feared that he would be lynched in the streets if he didn’t. None of which even remotely excuses the fact that many of those Nazi soldiers, whether conscripts or volunteers, were involved in horrible atrocities.

    @Hampus
    There occasionally were officers who were war weary and smart enough to recognise that the war was lost and just tried to get their troops through to the end with minimal casualties. My uncle, one of those 16-year-old conscripts, got lucky and ended up under the command of such an officer who would always have them march wherever the front was not.

    @Peer
    It’s Civil War, not Winter Soldier, but yeah, that movie’s continuity and geography is a mess. Later on, they also try to pass off Halle-Leipzig airport as Berlin airport in spite of clearly legible signs saying Halle-Leipzig. Not to mention that Halle-Leipzig airport looks nothing like any of the Berlin airports. But then, the first Avengers movie tried to pass off Cleveland (I think) as Stuttgart and fooled no one, in spite of Loki throwing an authentic German police car around. Licence plate not legible, so I can’t tell if they got that right, and yes, I stopped the movie and checked.

    Coincidentally, Halle-Leipzig airport is actually located in the town of Schkeuditz halfway between Halle and Leipzig. My great-aunt lived in Schkeuditz, so in this house Captain America: Civil War is known as The Avengers ifn Schkeuditz.

17. On the subject of ancestry, and humanization, a couple of stories:

    1) One of my ancestors was among the last legal slaveholders in the United States (living in very southern New Jersey, his slaves were not freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.) . What has this taught me? It’s taught me that defending one’s ancestry has its limits, and that trying to stand on moral high ground on that basis, one way or another, is a very dangerous thing to do.

    (It’s also been very useful when I am accused of trying to extend guilt down through bloodlines, because I can point out, fairly, that I am just as guilty by that definition.

    2) My grandfather was a Jewish doctor in the U.S. Army at the liberation of Dachau.

    When I was 7, he saw me playing toy soldiers, with WWII Brits, Americans, and Germans. He insisted, right then and there (and offered to help by writing them on) that I name *each and every one* of those toy soldiers (I think there were about 30) so that when one of them died, I knew it was a person who had just died.

    To acknowledge someone’s humanity is not to forgive the evil that they’ve done — it’s simply to acknowledge that they’re also human.

    ObSF: Watching “The City and the City” undid all the aesthetic suffering from “Infinity Wars”, and I very heartily recommend Mary Gentle’s “The Black Opera” to most anyone.
    🙂

18. @Cora: It’s Civil War, not Winter Soldier, but yeah, that movie’s continuity and geography is a mess.
    To be fair, it’s not like movie studios do any better at continuity and geography for films set in the USA (most of which bears far less resemblance to British Columbia than you would infer from films and television). There was a thread not too long ago on exactly this topic.

19. I expect that if there is still anyone in RASFF, the Stupid Movie Geography thread is still at it. “They had someone walking into Moby Gym, and they came out a door in Lory Center! What a howler!”

    Moviemakers don’t care that a small part of the audience will notice it, and that fewer will be concerned over it, any more than they lose sleep over actors portraying people who are not them.

20. I think the topic for the panel ‘killable bodies’ is a very interesting one and also one that was unwise for a panel. There are so many aspects of that discussion that intersect between actual history/current events and media representation & gaming that on reflection it isn’t surprising that the discussion went badly awry.

    I wouldn’t want to talk off-the-cuff on that topic, as I would want to choose my words very carefully. The only safe answer (i.e. the only answer that might not end up being grossly offensive if you worded it badly)* would be that it there is no group of people that it is OK to kill in fiction – which I don’t believe and which anyway would immediately take the discussion into the WW2 Nazi issue.

    *[I don’t know exactly what was said, so note I’m not trying to excuse the panellist as simply wording something badly.]

21. My grandfather fought for the Nazis. He was captured on the East front together with other Germany. The russians started to shoot his comrades, but an arriving officer stoped it and he became POW. He died when I was six and of course he never talked to me about the war, but he also didnt talk with my mother about it either. I liked him, he showed me plants and he could identify bids by their songs, which was very impressive.
    So, I know that poeple can be nuanced.
    That doesnt stop me to condemn nazi ideology, what nazis did or nazis in general. I dont need to be sympathize with them or ttry to understand it. If Germans are always villains in movies, then so be it – if it helps to prevent these events to ever happening again its something I gladly chose.

    I have to say, having visited and known both Germans and Austrians (as well as, of course, Italians) that the Germans faced their past, despite the pain, and didn’t try to whiwash it. The Austrians and the Italians play the victim card – which we were, at the end, but plenty of people were all too happy to follow Mussolini to wherever he would lead them, up to and including stripping civil rights and citizenship from Italian Jews. Hell, they’re back at it again right now.

    Plus you know, Sophie Scholl.

    All of which means that I used to be against the death penalty and torture back when many people thought that torture was something onoy third world countries did. I wasn’t against it because I’m soft-hearted. It was because a metric fuckload of people died to prevent the idea that some humans are worth less than others to prevail. And I have a duty to them, which these days weighs very heavily on me.

    I am not sure hanging Mussolini by his ankles in the public square was wrong though. But that was the war he had wanted.

22. I’m reminded of Sarah Vowell, who has talked/written quite a bit about her issues with her ancestry – she is part-Cherokee, and also related to a member of Quantrill’s Raiders who murdered scores of people in the anti-slavery town of Lawrence Kansas.

23. I backed Troll Bridge lo those many moons ago, and it’s a short film, not a full movie.

    Mom did genealogy for the puzzle aspect, which has left me with a lifelong dislike for Ancestry.com – they absorbed the databases people like Mom made for free, and now they want to charge for it? Also the knowledge that, if I were in the Howard Family universe, I would be a member.

24. Years ago I realized that, if magical 100% perfect ancestry-tracing was possible, EVERY ONE of us, no exceptions, would discover that their ancestors included both rape victims and rapists. It is incredibly foolish to imagine that one’s ancestors would be “mostly good” in any way, the only guarantee is that they will turn out to have been people.

    In that vein, I wonder how long the white American South will continue to be ancestor-focused, as DNA tests reveal what every black family knows: that if you’re a white person any of whose ancestors owned slaves, you have black relatives. Guaranteed. I’m always astounded to hear that there are white Southerners, claiming to be “proud” of their “exalted” ancestry, who deny this. Haven’t they read Faulkner?!?

    Even here in 1656 this is plenty obvious.

25. @Andrew, the 1863 Lawrence Massacre got justified at the time by Quantrill’s forces as reprisal for the cruel and senseless destruction of Osceola, Missouri and countless smaller ‘jayhawking’ raids on the part of Kansans, and those in turn had been were justified by ‘Border Ruffian’ raids from the other (Missourian) side — both having been mostly murder and theft for profit, masquerading as fighting for their respective causes. Following the Lawrence Massacre, Union General Thomas Ewing saw fit to respond by issuing his infamous General Order No. 11 that decreed total depopulation of four entire western Missouri counties (that to this day remain underdeveloped, and were long called ‘The Burnt District’), sparing Kansas City only by a last-minute carve-out of that area. And so the cycle of suffering kept turning until exhaustion set in (far more than sanity did).

26. @Cora: Yep, a lot of Germans were conscripts/draftees. So were a lot of Confederates. That doesn’t change the point that we hear about that mostly as a part of apologetics.

    Interestingly, the same people who will talk endlessly about conscripts and how the horrible practices of the Confederacy (now with bonus Nazi Germany) were from “a few bad apples” become livid when you suggest that the Black Confederates weren’t volunteers.

27. @Jamoche:

    What’s the running time for “Troll Bridge”?

    I confess myself disappointed that Cohen doesn’t have a Yiddish accent. Although now in 2767 that may be not even an historic relic …

28. @Doctor Science: I guarantee that they have not willingly read Faulkner. If you mention him, the response will invariably be “My mother is a fish.”

29. Cora: The reason you mentioned is the reason my brothers hasn’t seen a DC universemovie since he tryed Men of Steel (which was bad). He has seen the NolanBatmanmovies, but since he has 0 interest in a WWI Story, and none of the other movies sounded in any way good he hasn’t watched them.

    About familys: I know that one part of my dads family comes from somewhere in Skandinavia, my mother has a french (I think minor) nobel among her ancestors.
    That was interesting.
    I have heared storys about the second world war, from my family of course.
    Mostly they told how hard a time it was, personal storys, the gave me empathy for family members, not so much for the murderers.
    I keep my sympathy for their victims, people who resisted in what way they could, or perhaps those who only tried to survive.
    The most interesting was about a group of Judges, who send their judgements trough other judges to keep people safe from the n…

30. @Doctor Science:

    In that vein, I wonder how long the white American South will continue to be ancestor-focused, as DNA tests reveal what every black family knows: that if you’re a white person any of whose ancestors owned slaves, you have black relatives.

    Not only that, quite a few “white” Americans find out they have black ancestors (presumably some of whom were able to pass due to sufficient white ancestry): there have been some articles about what happens when the white supremacists online disover their Pure Aryan Ancestry…..ain’t.

    https://www.statnews.com/2017/08/16/white-nationalists-genetic-ancestry-test/

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/neo-nazis-genetic-tests-white-supremacist-stormfront-racial-ethnic-african-jewish-asian-dna-a7899746.html

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/they-considered-themselves-white-but-dna-tests-told-a-more-complex-story/2018/02/06/16215d1a-e181-11e7-8679-a9728984779c_story.html?utm_term=.7a8436a6ae83

31. they absorbed the databases people like Mom made for free, and now they want to charge for it
    I had mine on Ancestry for years, and they didn’t “absorb” it; I took it down when I left, and if they’d done that, I’d be finding pieces during searches. (People took pieces for their own trees, some of which aren’t connected at all, but that’s because they don’t know how to do research, and Ancestry won’t, or can’t, teach that.)

32. So is anyone else now recalling that bit in John Sladek’s The Muller-Fokker Effect where the white supremacist leader finally decides that every member of his organization, including himself, is secretly black?

33. So apparently now (according to the linked blog post here in the comments) is now unacceptable to have any nuanced view of anyone who fought on the side of Germany or the Confederacy? Everybody must be a simple, black and white paper-thin stock character of a moustache-twirling villain? Good to know that dehumanizing the enemy is the message of the day.

    I don’t know of any of my ancestors being slave owners (the ones I have records for might have wisjed they could own a slave but probably couldn’t afford one) but I have multiple ancestors that I know of that fought for the south in the war. At least of my direct linear ancestors–my mother’s mother’s mother’s father’s father–died in the war. He died of pneumonia in an army hospital and was buried somewhere in Charleston, SC, hundreds of miles from home. I absolutely wish that I knew more about his life, and how his widow (with and my infant great-great-grandfater) survived survived afterwards, and how all of my ancestors of that time lived during the extreme stresses of the war and the decades afterwards as people, not as comic-book villians and mooks. And for anyone who would think I’m a horrible person for thinking that way, I invite them to use a period-authentic cannonball as a suppository.

34. So apparently now (according to the linked blog post here in the comments) is now unacceptable to have any nuanced view of anyone who fought on the side of Germany or the Confederacy?

    I think you’re stating a point that nobody here or at Wiscon has put forward. No absolute statements applicable to all situations have been made. The people who were actually there, who witnessed the panel, didn’t say “Get me my smelling salts, Clara, there’s nuance here!” They said “One panel member insisted on defending Nazis and Confederates while the panel pushed back, and then proceeded to defend euthanasia of the disabled.”

    If you read this live Twitter thread, you can get a brief eyewitness account.

35. [Quoted from B5 episode “A Voice in the Wilderness, Part 1”, one of many tidbits of evidence that JMS understands how war works:]

    Mollari: Negotiations are more enjoyable when certain individuals are not here.

    Delenn: There is a difference between being unreasonable and being angry. Ambassador G’Kar is angry, but even the greatest anger fades with time.

    Mollari: My dear Ambassador Delenn, I am sure that, for you, this is true. But, for G’Kar and his people, they will do anything to destroy us, until the universe itself decays and collapses. If the Narns stood in one place, and hated, all at the same time, that hatred could fly across light years and reduce Centauri Prime to ash. That’s how much they hate us.

    Delenn: You don’t have to respond in kind.

    Mollari: Of course we do. It’s a natural law. Physics tells us for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. They hate us, we hate them, they hate us back, and so, here we are, victims of mathematics.

36. @Anna Feruglio More generally, this idea that you . . . find easier to, empathise with people who are similar to you, in looks or ethnicity or nationality, I have always found deeply disturbing.
    To identify more strongly with one’s tribe than with others has been deeply burned into us over thousands of generations, and has always been a evolutionary benefit. I don’t know why it would be disturbing; it’s just how things are. (That doesn’t mean one can’t or shouldn’t be pleasantly surprised when someone overcomes that because the other members of the tribe have acted wrong.)

37. Here’s another blog post about the “Killable Bodies” panel, written by a Jewish person who was in the audience.

38. It is not slander to say that a Jew has expressed sympathy for Nazis, Confederates, and eugenicists. Again, there are multiple witnesses to the behavior. coffeeandink says that she decompressed with other Jews who had been present and were distressed; again, this is a statement of fact.

    Sometimes people who are in your minority/oppressed group decide to side with the oppressors. It happens.

    e: This is a reply to a now-deleted post.

39. David W.: As Lisa Freitag herself is Jewish, I’m going to say that coffeeandink really ought to know better than to engage in such slander.

    Firstly, being Jewish does not preclude someone from saying problematic things, any more than being married to a person of color precludes someone from being racist.

    Secondly, it is unbelievably uncool and malicious that you have deliberately linked a real name to a blogger despite the blogger’s profile saying “Please link to this journal only as “coffeeandink” or the name currently in my user profile.”

    WTF. What the hell is wrong with you.

40. JJ: I don’t know if David will be back to answer “What the hell is wrong with you.” Meanwhile, his comment is gone.

41. Thank you for being so responsive, Mike.

42. @Darren Garrison: No, we still have nuance. But it’s good to understand that some unpleasant people have tried to co-opt a particular argument and that anyone repeating it will be met with suspicion by those who have mostly encountered it via those unpleasant people.

    As to your ancestors, contact the local archivist and the local historical/genealogical society where they lived. You might be surprised at what you find. I had the enormous good fortune, when I started piecing together my genetic tree, to find that I was some sort of third or fourth cousin to the man who wrote the genealogy and history column in the local newspaper in the 1950s. That’s the good side of the Southern obsession with our ancestors; there are dozens of books and manuscripts from the early 20th Century, memoirs of perfectly ordinary people who wrote down the stories their parents and grandparents told them.

43. @Steve Wright

    I’m not familiar with that book but, robinareid’s post strongly reminded me of Dave Chapelle’s Frontline sketch which may be similar in satiric thrust…

44. So it appears that I’m that rare white Southern guy who was not adopted and has almost zero interest in or knowledge of his family tree.

    I do know a couple of things about the family of the guy who contributed DNA to create me. (I don’t refer to him as “father” or “male parent” or anything like that, because he wasn’t. They divorced when I was less than a year old, and I spent six weeks with him one summer which I have since learned may have been a closer brush with enduring trauma than I ever suspected.) One, I have him to “thank” for a particular inherited disability. Two, he was one of ten siblings, and the brother who married my aunt was rotten to her on a scale I will not describe here. Three, he was okay at drawing Spider-man. Basically, everything I hear about that side of my ancestry has made me quite happy not to know any more about them. Even my surname has made trouble for me on occasion, but I’ve pretty much accepted it.

    I know a bit more about my mother’s family, and on occasion I get curious about whether the Armstrongs and Cooks in that lineage connect to that Armstrong and that Cook… and, if so, how. I know about the split caused by the marriage which gives me my Cherokee heritage (such as it is), and it was neat to discover that a friend I met online was actually a cousin from the other branch of that split.

    I neither know nor care whether any of my ancestors (on either side) owned slaves or fought in wars – aside from my granddad, who was in WWII (US).

    As for the entirely unrelated matter of movie geography, I’ve been studying a small studio’s output purely for the way they reuse sets and locations. I couldn’t tell you what cities they use, but I can sure tell you that the same bar sign gets used for at least three different interiors. It’s particularly amusing when the exterior absolutely does not match the interior – for instance, having double doors with glass panels on the outside and a single door with no glass on the inside. (In one memorable case, they used three very different buildings to represent the outside of the same castle.) Sometimes this leads to the “he left a room in one house to enter a room in another” phenomenon, but I’m getting better at mapping things out to identify such shifts. They’re pretty crafty about using multiple exterior shots to disguise locations, but certain architectural details stand out. I was reviewing one film a few hours ago, and I’m fairly sure that one of its locations will turn out to be one I’ve seen from a different angle… based on looking at the roof’s style and pitch.

    Part of my goal is to reverse-engineer their shooting methodology. I’m interested in seeing what the best way is to shoot a coherent movie with multiple locations on a shoestring budget, and this is part of my “collecting data” phase. Later I’ll move on to sequence and timing… 🙂

45. @Rev. Bob
    That’s a little like looking at stuff set in NYC or SF and seeing palm trees. You know it’s not where theyrr’e telling you it is. (I understand that a lot of the 200x “King Kong” exteriors were set at night, probably because the queen palms and Strelitzia would have been a lot more obvious in daytime. Their “Madison Square Garden” entrance was at Pershing Square, so I got to see some of the sets in broad daylight.)

46. @PJ Evans:

    Oh, I don’t even try to correlate their “city street with no actors on it” shots with anything. I take for granted that those are either stock footage or cheap B-roll. I’m more interested in the places where I know they’re actually shooting scenes.

47. @Rev. Bob: I have a theory that adoptees are drawn to fannish communities because fandom groks “families of choice”.

48. @Doctor Science: I haven’t seen any specific times, but the original Kickstarter starts out with “Troll Bridge is an epic short film …” https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/snowgumfilms/terry-pratchetts-troll-bridge

    @Rev. Bob “That’s a little like looking at stuff set in NYC or SF and seeing palm trees”

    In SF it depends on the kind of palms – they’re imports, but they do exist.

49. Wiscon’s history plus the fact that the controversy was already all over the internet means that saying nothing on the internet would not have been good.

    True, but they could have just said that there was an incident, that they’re aware of it, that it’s being dealt with and a fuller report will come later.

    Giving enough detail to identify the culprit before you’ve actually notified the culprit that they’re banned technically isn’t naming names, but it’s ineffective at it. It’s possible to do more than say nothing and still not go that far.

    My kids’ school does this as needed — an e-mail goes out to all parents, sating that there was an incident, that the school is aware of it and are dealing with it, that police have been brought in (or whatever), and that safety and security are priorities, and the situation is in hand. But they don’t say that it happened in third-period algebra and then conspicuously delete one name from the class roster.

    Of course, people online who aren’t associated with con management will say things, just as my kids will come home and say “Fred McFunar got taken away by the cops because he had a grenade in his locker!”* But the school stays reassuring and terse about the details.

    *this did not actually happen. The McFunars are fine, if imaginary, people.

50. Rail on May 28, 2018 at 4:40 pm said:

    @Darren Garrison: No, we still have nuance

    I was refering to the blog post that called expressing a desire to sympathize with individual Nazis and individual Confederate soldiers “confusing, surprising, alarming, flabbergasting, frightening, and damaging.” That–to me–expresses no desire for nuance. A demand that all people involved be considered all the way bad all the time or else you are using “apologetics.”

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