Pixel Scroll 1/25/16 The Depixellated Man

(1) X-OUT THE X-MEN FAN VIDEO PROJECT. Joel Furtado, an animator from Vancouver, Canada has cancelled his fan film X-men: Danger Room Protocols due to legal issues with Marvel, which prevented the first video in the series from being hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.

Now, there’s word of another fan production falling to legal issues: Joel Furtado’s X-Men: Danger Room Protocols.

Furtado has been working on the web series for a long while now, with eighteen episodes planned to showcase different pairs of 1990s-era X-Men characters in animated adventures against iconic villains in a Danger Room scenario. Furtado told io9 via email: “I’ve always loved X-men since I was a little kid. It was something I gravitated to, reading the comics at that time even before the animated series,” adding, “When Fox’s cartoon came out that was it, I was hooked. I’ve done a few personal projects over the years, but nothing of this scale or scope. I decided I wanted to take a year off and do this thing for myself, as well as the fans. I knew there were X-men fans out there, wanting more than what the official powers that be were giving them.”

The first episode featured Jean Grey and Wolverine against the Sentinels, but was quickly pulled from YouTube. Furtado released it on Vimeo, but the video was pulled from there as well.

Furtado gave a valedictory talk to his supporters in a new video.

(2) USING YOUR POWER. Kameron Hurley was at Confusion over the weekend, and was inspired to write a wisdom-filled post, “On Kindness and Conventions”.

I have argued with authors for years about the power imbalance between authors and fans. By the very fact that you’re an author, that you’ve had worked published, it puts you in a position of perceived power, even if you don’t feel powerful. And what you do with that power is important. But first you need to realize, and accept, that you have it and people have given it to you….

Most importantly, though, when I was out at parties, or in the bar, I opened up the conversation circle to people. This is probably the most important thing you can do at either of these events. There is nothing worse than hanging on outside the circle hoping to try and get someone to invite you in. Here are these people who’ve known each other for years, and you’ve been told to socialize at the bar because it’s so great to network! and all you’re doing is standing outside these circles of people with a drink, feeling stupid….

I have talked a lot of talk over the last decade. It’s my turn to pay it forward, and to help build the community I’d like to see, instead of just complaining about how shitty things are elsewhere.

Because there is no greater joy than seeing the reactions of people who’ve had their first amazing convention, and who tear up all the way home because in a single weekend they’ve found their people, they feel included, they felt like part of something bigger than themselves.

Be the change you want to see, right? I need to act like the author I always wished I would have encountered when I was twenty-one years old at my first convention. Every time I talk to some new person, especially those at their first convention, I imagine that I’m talking to somebody who is going to come up fighting through here just like me. I’m holding out the hand I didn’t get that first time. I’m opening up the circle.

(3) FANFIC. Mindy Klasky’s “F is for Fanfiction” at Book View Café is an overview of the topic for professional writers that raises good questions writers should consider about setting boundaries on the use of their work, however, it was this paragraph that generated all the comments – most disagreeing that one must outgrow fanfic.

Fan fiction might be a great way for an author to exercise writing skills, learning to recreate an established author’s tone and/or using known characters expected to act in specific ways. But if you intend to publish your work, you’ll need to move beyond fanfic. That “moving beyond” should include at least “filing off the serial numbers”, erasing the specific references to character names, locations, and other details.  Thus, Bella Swan from Twilight became Anastasia Steele, and Edward Cullen became Christian Grey in Fifty Shades of Grey. The special world of sparkling vampires became the elite life of a billionaire.

(4) KING CONTEST SHORTLIST. The finalists have been announced in a short story competition to celebrate the publication of Stephen King’s collection The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. There were more than 800 entries.

A team of dedicated readers carefully selected stories worthy of putting forward to the long list.  20 stories were in serious contention and after due deliberation judges Claire Armitstead (Books Editor at the Guardian), Philippa Pride (Stephen King’s British editor) and Kate Lyall-Grant (our independent judge and Publisher at Severn House Publishers) unanimously chose six stand-out stories for the shortlist.

The judges were extremely impressed by the quality of the six stories which are now on their way to Stephen King.  The winner will be announced on or after 30 January. Watch this space…

Please join us in congratulating the talented authors on the shortlist:

‘The Spots’ by Paul Bassett Davies; ‘The Unpicking’ by Michael Button; ‘Wild Swimming’ by Elodie Harper;  ‘The Bear Trap’  by Neil Hudson; ‘La Mort De L’Amant’ by Stuart Johnstone; ‘Eau de Eric’ by Manuela Saragosa.

(5) THORNTON OBIT. SF Site News reports Kathy Thornton (1957-2016) died on January 16. She was one of the founding members of Con-Troll in Houston and worked on Texas NASFiCs and Worldcons. In 2005, she was the fan Guest of Honor at Apollocon.

Kathy Thornton and Derly Ramirez

(6) CAST IN THE HAT. As Nicole Hill warns, “We Sort the Cast of The Force Awakens into Their Hogwarts Houses” at B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog is MOSTLY SPOILERS. So no excerpt here. Fun article, though.

(7) LOVECRAFT. Submissions are being taken for the Dunhams Destroys Lovecraft anthology through February 6. What do they mean by the title?

Destroy it all.
Burn the tropes.
Smash the traditions.
The statues.
The awards.
The apologetics.
The so-called gatekeepers of Weird Fiction.
Mock the big fish in the small pond of Lovecraftian fiction.
Nothing is safe.
NO ONE IS SAFE.
Parody as a means to topple to regime.
Spoof the blowhards.
Take anything Lovecraftian and mock the hell out of it.

Payment is $25 and a contributor’s copy for 5-10K word stories. And they repeat, “We do NOT want traditional Lovecraftian fiction.”

(8) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY

  • Born January 25, 1920 – Jerry Maren, leader of The Lollipop Guild – last of the Munchkins.
Jerry Maren

Jerry Maren

(9) BROKEN NEWS. People asked Jim C. Hines what he thought about his name being mentioned in a Breitbart story based on a comment here. He told them in “Fact-Checking for Dummies. And Breitbart.”

This is what rates an article on Breitbart. “Hey, a commenter on the internet said that some unnamed person is talking to a couple of Toronto bookstores and showing them what some of the Sad/Rabid Puppies have said and asking them not to stock said puppies. Oh, and yeah, there’s no actual evidence of it having any effect.”

(10) SOMETHING IN COMMON. George R.R. Martin’s tribute to David Hartwell touched John C. Wright. He sent this note to Martin.

It grieves me that you and I should be at odds over unimportant political matters when science fiction as a genre, and the people in our lives, and much else besides are things we both have in common and outweigh any differences.

The shadow of our mutual loss of a friend sharply reminds me of what is important in life, and mutual ire is not one of those things.

You wrote not long ago of a desire for peace in the science fiction community; I second that sentiment and voice it also. Let there be peace between us.

(11) ELIGIBILITY POSTS. Cat Rambo favors Hugo eligibility posts.

I blogged about it as a result of Twitter conversation with Daniel Older and Shveta Ta; he’s posted his own and I urged people to post links to theirs in my post. Any help spreading the word is appreciated; too many people let themselves get silenced by fear of internet kerfuffles. I’m hoping that puppies feel free to post on there as well; too many people forget that as SFWA President I’m representing a range of writers, not a single crowd.

Rambo introduces the post on her personal blog with these sentiments:

Let us begin by acknowledging that this is a rancorous period, full of clashing agendas, bewildered onlookers, and all too many innocents caught in the crossfire (although it is not the first time we’ve seen these storms, nor will it be the last.). And that right now making an eligibility post particularly mentioning Hugo Award categories like Related Work is something that some of us are circling and wondering about.

And my answer is yes. Yes, you should. Why?

Check the post for her three arguments.

(12) RSR CAMPBELL LIST. Rocket Stack Rank has made a list of new writers whose stories were reviewed on their site who should be eligible for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award.

Here are 62 writers who are eligible for the 2016 Campbell Award. They were selected from the 565 stories reviewed by Rocket Stack Rank and eight other prolific reviewers in 2015. There are many more new writers out there, but their stories weren’t read by Rocket Stack Rank so they’re not included here.

(13) A LONGLIST OF HUGO RECOMMENDATIONS. Nerds of a Feather will be posting lists of recommendations drawn from its contributors. First up is the Hugo Award Longlist for fiction.

For the past couple years I’ve posted a draft Hugo ballot (2014, 2015). Last year’s slate voting controversy, however, made me rethink that practice. True, this blog has limited influence within fandom, and we’ve never tried to mobilize voters to further a cause or agenda either. But it still feels strange to call out slate-based voting campaigns while publishing something that looks, superficially at least, like a slate of our own. So instead of giving you my personal ballot, I asked the the thirteen nerds of a feather to contribute to a longlist of potential Hugo nominees.

The rules for inclusion were simple–just: (a) meet the eligibility criteria; and (b) be “award worthy” (i.e. good). Given the subjectivity of the latter, it should come as no surprise that the selections on our longlist reflect the spectrum of tastes, tendencies and predilections found among our group of writers. You’ll find selections ranging from the obscure and literary to the unabashedly popular and commercial, and from all corners and subdivisions of the genresphere

(14) UFO FILES. The Express has a photo-illustrated article, “Some of ‘world’s best ever UFO pictures’ go online with CIA former top secret files”.

The US intelligence agency, often accused by UFO conspiracy theorists of being involved in a major cover up to hide evidence of alien life from the public, has for some reason chosen to upload some of its formerly classified UFO case files to its website.

(15) RETROFUTURISM. Joshua Rothman comments on “The Nostalgic Science Fiction of ‘The X-Files’” in The New Yorker.

Scholars have a term for our fascination with the science fiction of the past: they call it “retrofuturism.” In the “Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction,” Elizabeth Guffey and Kate Lemay offer an elegant definition of the term: “Where futurism is sometimes called a ‘science’ bent on anticipating what will come,” they write, “retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation.” Retrofuturism tends to be both celebratory and regretful. On the one hand, the retrofuturist sensibility is drawn to old visions of the future because today’s have lost their appeal; on the other, it recognizes that those old visions had their downsides. Steampunk, for example, is attractive precisely because it rejects the disembodied corporatism of the digital world; still, the vision of the future in the film “Snowpiercer” is both refreshingly analogue and brutally Dickensian. (That’s not to say that retrofuturism is always ambivalent: “Star Wars” is, among other things, an upbeat retrofuturist response to the drug-addled sci-fi of the sixties and seventies.) “The X-Files” was a retrofuturist show. It celebrated the wide-eyed sense, prevalent in the forties, fifties, and sixties, that science was about to change everything. It also recalled the darkness of the Cold War, when individuals felt powerless against vast geopolitical forces, and science brought us to the edge of thermonuclear doom.

Because we live in a moment of reboots, remakes, and revivals, we seem to be surrounded by retrofuturism. Superhero movies, with their emphasis on mad-science mutation, have a retrofuturist appeal. So do the rebooted “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” and “Mad Max.” Even “Interstellar,” in many ways a forward-looking film, also looked back to the sci-fi of the past. If you’re of a theoretical cast of mind, you might wonder what it means to be nostalgic for a retrofuturist show like “The X-Files.” Is it possible, “Inception”-style, to square retrofuturism? Can you look back ambivalently at the way people used to look back ambivalently at a vision of the future?

(16) TV SUCCESS WOULD X-OUT THIRD X-FILES MOVIE. A third X-Files movie has been scripted by Chris Carter – but if the ratings are good for the TV series, he’d prefer to focus on that.

“I actually wrote a third movie, just because I was interested in the idea of where that might go,” Carter told the audience. When Fox approached him about bringing The X-Files back to television, Carter considered repurposing the script for the series. “I let my wife read the third movie,” he shared, “and she said ‘I think not for television.'”

Any chance of a third X-Files film will depend on how strong (or poor) the ratings for the upcoming mini-series are. If the ratings are good, Carter seems more interested it sticking to TV. “I’m waiting for Fox to come back and ask for more,” said Carter. “Then we’ll talk about it.”

And early reports are that ratings for the new show were good.

The preview of the mini-series premiered on Sunday night following the NFC Championship game between the Arizona Cardinals and Carolina Panthers and received strong ratings.

Monday’s debut on the mini-series’ normal night will be the true test, along with the subsequently five episodes. Should that run be as strong as many suspect that it will be, a third film might yet by in the cards

(17) SATIRE NOSTALGIA. The WSJ’s Speakeasy blog remembers “When Mulder and Scully Went to Springfield: An Oral History of the ‘Simpsons’ – ‘X-Files’ Crossover”.

Mike Reiss: We had the most illegal shot in TV history. [The episode has] a line-up of aliens where Homer is supposed to pick out which alien is his. We had Alf, Marvin the Martian, Chewbacca — they were all copyrighted. In one five-second shot, we violated five people’s copyrights. But the only comment we ever got was, we had Alf in there. Alf said “Yo!” and I got a call from the real Alf, who said, “Next time you do me, let me do it.”

(18) REV. BOB CROWNED. Our own Rev. Bob was king for about as long as it takes to boil an egg at the Whoisthekingrightnow site. He’s still searchable as Robert in the Hall of Kings, where his three decrees have been immortalized.

King Bob the Horizontal.

  • The denizens of Sensible Castle do not judge. Unless you’re a jerk.
  • Get thee down. Be thou funky.
  • In case of emergency, the masks that drop from the ceiling will make everyone’s final moments MOST interesting. You’re welcome.

[Thanks to Brian Z., John King Tarpinian, Gregory N. Hullender, and Nick Mamatas for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Nigel.]

Update 01/26/2016: Corrected Rev. Bob’s royal name to the right royal name, with the right decrees.

168 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 1/25/16 The Depixellated Man

  1. “Kinder Surprise Eggs are illegal in the United States. Yes, really. They’re not that hard to find if you want them but they’re illegal to import.”

    Heinous.

    Otherwise, we are several people here who are shy or do not know that many, so I think we can make everything a bit easier. I will arrive the day before the con (at the latest), so I can be at any place for a pre-con meeting. Easiest seems to be any of the hotel bars! This will also make it easier to find breakfast company which in its turn will help socializing.

    We can use a special socializing post here on File 770 to announce if we want company for lunch/dinner/whatever and approximately when. That would also be a good place to announce some kind of standard meeting point.

    In this post we could set up a standard for how to write comments to make it easier to find comments on meetups. Say normal text for the usual chatter, bold text for final decision on meetup place and time.

    I do think we are many enough to make it easier to help everyone have a nice time. Naaah, we’re not family, but we do know each other a bit at least.

  2. ULTRAGOTHA on January 26, 2016 at 2:26 pm said:
    Kinder Surprise Eggs are illegal in the United States. Yes, really. They’re not that hard to find if you want them but they’re illegal to import. That aside, this sounds like a great idea

    [GASP!] You poor people, you live in a tyranny! 😐

  3. (2) USING YOUR POWER. Kameron Hurley is groovy. (ETA: I haven’t read the whole blog post yet.)

    (6) CAST IN THE HAT. Cute; my favorite’s the last one, of course.

    @Hampus Eckerman: I’m a shy introvert, but I’d talk to you for a chance to win a kinderegg. 😀 (And ‘cuz you sound interesting, kindereggs aside.) Also: “By our wretchedness you shall know us.” 😉

    @Camestros Felapton: #1 WE ARE OPPRESSED! ;-( #2 I would say “send kindereggs,” but, well, see #1.

    @Ribbon Devotees: Maybe ones that say “Filer”? Which could sure confuse non-Filers, heh (“You do clerical work?”) – but if someone asks about it, BOOM, there’s your conversation starter. A dual-purpose ribbon!

    Despite being a shy introvert, I’m sorry I won’t be at Worldcon this year. Have fun, Filers!

  4. Campbell recommendation lists are all very useful, but my favorite 2015 debut authors are not on them – Peter Newman? Scott Hawkins? Tom Toner?. Eligible or not? I didn’t find any mention of their previous publications, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t have any.

  5. @Lfex

    The RSR list is based on short fiction writers appearing in the magazines and anthologies they’ve covered, so is inevitably going to be incomplete and not cover novels, and the writertopia site is dependent on submissions.
    I find that checking isfdb and their personal websites usually helps determine eligibility.
    I have Toner and Hawkins on my tbr – which is your favourite?

  6. @Lenora Rose

    Kudos to you for trying to stand up, and I’m sorry nobody at least acknowledged, much less validated, your reaction at the time.

    I remember being one of the idiots who didn’t validate one time, way back, when a director was ruining a show and another cast member stood up to him. Afterwards, I told her she was right… and she (with understandable anger) asked why the hell I didn’t say something during the confrontation. Well. I don’t know why, if it was stupidity, cowardice, or all five. I had no answer, and could only feel contemptible. Years later, in another place, I was the one standing up to somebody by myself, and someone gave me an attaboy later, and I couldn’t even ask why he couldn’t have said that at the time because I was feeling some combination of “so this is what it felt like then” and “I’m reaping what I sowed” with a hint of “maybe now I’ve paid some dues and I can feel a little less guilty over that other time.”‘

    Moral: Say something. Say it when it means something.

  7. @Mark

    II think Hawkins is more accessible, being sort of contemporary urban fantasy. Toner is a baroque space opera, somewhere between Banks and Jack Vance, and therefore not to everybody’s taste. Simple googling didn’t show me any previous short fiction by any of those three. I will probably do more thorough search and if results will be negative, all three will go into my Campbell nomination list.

  8. @ Nicole J. Bouef-Little:

    And then this one man offered his rendition of “The Two Magicians” to the circle, accompanying himself on hand-drum

    Oh dear. I wish I had been there. I hope I would have had the courage to join you in protesting. I have encountered that one fairly recently* (in one of its, sigh, many incarnations) and I have pointed out the problems with it, so there is a reasonable chance I would have steeled myself to join you in your courageous (yes, you are right; it *was* courageous) opposition.

    These attitudes don’t get stated in the clear; if someone stood up in circle and said “if a man wants to have sex and his prospective partner doesn’t, it’s okay for him to force her,” everyone would recoil. Nobody here is a monster (or at least no one is willing to be seen as such in public.) The memes creep into our brains in stories and songs and jokes that have this attitude, and we’re enjoying the melody and rhyme or the exciting magical shape-changing or whatever and don’t notice what else they are smuggling in. It was well done that you noticed, and poorly done that the rest of the circle didn’t support you.

    If you had said “he’s off-key” or “he can’t keep time” you’d have been going against filk culture (my understanding of it, but I’ve been doing this for a while.) When you said “that song is about rape” you were, as far as I’m concerned, completely in the right.

    And frankly we are filkers; we can change the words, and changing that chorus to one where the woman says “I’d love to–if you can match me” and starts changing shape pretty much eliminates the problems, I think.**

    *In my case it came up in a circle specifically designed to convince newbies that singing in a circle would be safe, with me as the old-hand “lifeguard,” which made it way easier on the one hand (authority figure of sorts) and a bit more difficult on the other (how to do this without squashing or being perceived as squashing the trembling new filker.)

    I had about a second to think and ended up saying something like “that song has a beautiful tune and you performed it very well. I personally don’t like that particular piece because of the consent issues around someone saying no and someone else pursuing and pressuring them to have sex.”

    **When I was in the SCA I used to sing this as:
    Hello, hello, hello, hello, you coal black smith.
    You’re seemly in my eyes,
    And yet you must exert yourself to win the final prize.
    I’d rather lie a maiden all in your arms and bid you do your worst
    But I will make you face me, pace me, race me, chase me,
    Catch me first! If in my arms you’d lie.

    I did not, at that point, have the terms “rape culture” or even (sigh) “consent issues” to talk about it, but I knew I didn’t like the original.

  9. @Cat: great modification. I am a fan of traditional music, and I have modified the hell out of some songs, which is a highly traditional things to do. I must try to think of some specific examples.

    As for “The Two Magicians”, I knew it from early childhood, and never noticed anything problematic about it, although it was never a favorite either. The first time someone objected to it in my presence, the guy singing it defended it and I’m afraid I backed him up. The bad thing about being steeped in this sort of thing forever. I spent the next few minutes thinking, though, and decided that the objector was right; by that time it was too late to say so. I have become much more bold about noticing and calling out problems since then.

  10. Vasha on January 27, 2016 at 1:18 pm said:
    @Cat: great modification. I am a fan of traditional music, and I have modified the hell out of some songs, which is a highly traditional things to do. I must try to think of some specific examples.

    As for “The Two Magicians”, I knew it from early childhood, and never noticed anything problematic about it, although it was never a favorite either. The first time someone objected to it in my presence, the guy singing it defended it and I’m afraid I backed him up. The bad thing about being steeped in this sort of thing forever. I spent the next few minutes thinking, though, and decided that the objector was right; by that time it was too late to say so. I have become much more bold about noticing and calling out problems since then.

    Years ago I was talking to a guy whose mom was a singer in Ireland, circa 1910s or so.
    There was a scholar going around collecting versions of things, and and he was recording her at work.
    At one point he chided her, because she had sung some traditional song and had left off lots of verses
    Well, she said not apologizing at all, that’s not the way I sang it tonight.
    Which basically brings up the scholar/singer split – creative people are just going to do things their own way, and, frankly, tradition is just a base they work from.
    That’s how the folk work, you know.
    And the filk too.

    It doesn’t matter how the song “really” goes, because in a living tradition, it goes where the singer and the audience want it to go.
    It’s not a dead letter.
    Change isn’t wrong, so when someone puts in a new ending, or changes the spin of a song’s story, that’s just the way it’s being sung tonight.
    Which is all a long way to say that just because something is historical isn’t enough to justify continuing to present an ugly narrative without even an attempt to deal with its message.
    Keep that version in the text book and let the song grow with the times.

  11. Lauowolf:

    It doesn’t matter how the song “really” goes, because in a living tradition, it goes where the singer and the audience want it to go.
    It’s not a dead letter.
    Change isn’t wrong, so when someone puts in a new ending, or changes the spin of a song’s story, that’s just the way it’s being sung tonight.
    Which is all a long way to say that just because something is historical isn’t enough to justify continuing to present an ugly narrative without even an attempt to deal with its message.
    Keep that version in the text book and let the song grow with the times.

    Oh, yes. I know that one well; mostly as a listener but sometimes as a singer. Kate Rusby has several traditional songs where she does some small part of the huge number of possible verses. Normally, this works (I love her version of the Unquiet Grave, though there’s variance enough in that one already), but I hate the fact that the Elfin Knight in her version is just a song about an elf who plays a song on a horn. The original, that song attracts a woman’s attention, he sneaks her away, threatens to kill her, noting she’d be the seventh woman he did this to, she lulls him to sleep and kills him in turn. Hurrah for the heroine! Somehow that seems like a lot of plot to just … skip. But it’s not wrong as a whole, just wrong for ME.

    (I also kinda feel like the Border Widow’s Lament started life as the first half of the Famous Flower of Serving Men — which opinion it seems Ellen Kushner must share, considering what she did in her novel Thomas the Rhymer.)

    For myself, in filk and folk circles, my version of the Two Sisters borrows the tune from one place, re-adds a couple verses that particular musician didn’t use but I felt needed to be there, and borrows a closing verse with a slightly-different-from-usual ending (grimmer, or at least more cynical) from yet somewhere else.

    So yes. If you love the Two Magicians but don’t like the rapiness, yay for changing verses!

  12. I’m a lot late to this thread but I have a couole of ideas on the question of “getting to know you” at cons.

    1: If you are looking for someone who is happy to see you, head to the games room. Even if people are in the middle of a play, they are normally happy to shove around so you can watch, and when the game’s over, deal you in for the next round.
    2: The con I go to has the Kaffeeklatsch usually featuring GoH and other “Faces” but we also have a sign on sheet for “just the fans” lunches and dinners. These are hosted by one of the committee and the idea is to get a different group of 10ish people together, purely for breaking the ice amongst old hands and newbs.

  13. @Tintinaus: I may be a bit shy for those “just the fans” things, but they sound like a kinda cool idea, especially with someone facilitating (con comm or otherwise).

    Con gaming rooms can be a mixed bag, IME. But the main thing is just . . . timing. If everyone’s hip deep in a game, oh well. But catch folks between games/about to start one, and they usually welcome random strangers. My other half is very social and spends most con time in gaming rooms, and has made friends this way (that we still game & socialize with when we see them at cons). 🙂

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  15. Y’all are wonderful people, you know that?

    I haven’t actually been back to File770 since posting to this thread. Mainly I was running as fast as I could just to stay ahead of all my workloads, and File770 always robs my day of at least 2 hours productivity; and then I got sick over the weekend. (Just a nasty sinus thing. Hoping to be back to full speed and at roller derby practice by tomorrow or Wednesday at the latest. I was looking forward to being On Time For Things this week, and also we have a bout on the 13th so practice is kinda important.)

    But the Filk Circle Horror Story apparently still has strong claws in my feels, and I can’t swear that my virtuous avoidance of The File 770 Temptation was not aided in part by feeling like I’d scorched and salted the earth where I’d posted that anecdote, and that I’d surely be shamed and scolded for being a Too-PC SJW with Bad Filk-Circle Manners and Unredeemable Problems. Not that such a reaction would at all be rational to expect from this here Hive of Scum and Villainy, but you know how the brain weasels can get.

    Finally reading the rest of the thread tonight, I can’t express how supported and affirmed I feel. Y’all are the best.

    Vasha just about brought me to tears: “And thus encouraged I’m going to talk about a story that was enthusiastically recommended by a couple of people yesterday…” If my story about trying to stand up and protest problematic crap years ago made you feel able to say something that you found difficult up until then to say — damn. I wish the me at that time could have known. Thank you for helping me realize that it was worth it.

    Cally, thank you for the pointer to Jim Macdonald’s improvised verse. I remember that thread (“Folk Songs Are Your Friends”) but not that comment; either I didn’t follow the thread long enough, or else the Filk Circle of Doom hadn’t happened yet so I didn’t have reason to notice. But I LOVE it.

    I also made up a verse in the aftermath, to try to make myself feel better, and wished I could have thunk it up on the spot and sung it there and then:

    Then she became a great big rock
    To fall from high to low,
    And she squashed the smith all flat as flat
    For to tell him that NO MEANS NO.

    I’m also very reassured to hear that other people dislike that song and have cited it as damn rapey. Thank you all.

    In other notes, “bookkake” just about killed me dead from the funny.

    The Watchmaker of Filigree Street is my latest purchase off Viggle (The Mechanical may be the next, unless I give in to temptation and pick up Robert J. Bennett’s backlist instead); I will be interested to see whether the problematic stuff others discussed pings my radar. I’m only as far as the first chapter in the new POV though.

    There was something else I was going to make a smart-ass response to, but it slips my mind now. But it would have been brilliantly witty.

    ANYway… After my assurances that I would try my damnedest to be at MidAmeriCon II, I went and looked at the date… and then I looked at the date for the Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby Division 2 playoffs, which are not yet known, as the hosts have not yet been determined, but will fall somewhere “in mid August to early September,” which also describes MidAmeriCon II weekend to a T. And even once we know the dates, unless *both* of them aren’t World Con weekend, I *still* can’t in good conscience register to go until I know *which* of them my league has been invited to. Our league’s charter has gone to D2 the last two years, so we expect and hope to go a third time this year–which is also the first year I have even a slim chance of skating in the tournament, as I’m an alternate to the charter roster and all alternates have been told “Come if you can.” (And who knows what mid-year travel team tryouts might bring?) And regardless of the roster, I want to be there to cheer my team on.

    So…. I don’t know if I’m going to make it to MidAmeriCon II. Dammit. I love this sport with all my heart and every inch of my aching bruised body, but damn it makes it hard to plan my year.

    On the good side, next year’s World Con will be early enough in August not, I hope, to be a factor. Helsinki or bust!!!

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