(1) THAT’S WHO. Paul Cornell has a few paragraphs about Gallifrey One, the Doctor Who convention he attended in LA last weekend.
An edition of The Cornell Collective recorded there will be going live in a few days, but in the meantime, you can find me guesting on another podcast from the convention, Doctor Who: The Writers’ Room, where myself, Graeme Burk, Stephen Schapansky and regular host Kyle talk about the career of Robert Holmes.
I also appear in this edition of Doctor Who: The Fan Show, recorded on the convention floor, and providing a wonderful snapshot of everything that makes ‘gally’ special.
Conrunner Shaun Lyon, Fifth Doctor Peter Davison, Paul Cornell, Laura Sirikul (Nerd Reactor), Sarah Dollard, and Steven Schapansky (Radio Free Skaro), all appear.
(2) GWEN COOPER R.I.P. ScienceFiction.com says it’s over: “’Torchwood’: Eve Myles Lays Gwen Cooper To Rest”.
The actress took to Twitter to respond to fan inquiries regarding the nebulous status of ‘Torchwood’ which aired its last episode in 2011, after the show was picked up by Starz and relocated to the U.S. Fans have held out hope that the show would revert back exclusively to the BBC, but Captain Jack, Gwen and whoever was still alive haven’t materialized on ‘Doctor Who’ or anywhere else. It’s been five years and at least Myles has given up hope and said goodbye to Gwen.
@HThorrington_ yea. well Iv made my mind up and GC is now Laid to rest..thanks guys for living/hating her… Nightnight.
— Eve Myles (@TeamEveMyles) February 13, 2016
(3) YOUR WRITE. Joseph Bentz has an outstanding post about writing – “Don’t Let Them Squash Your Creativity”.
Growing up, I always felt vaguely embarrassed about wanting to be a writer. I feared that if I said too much about it, I was simply opening myself up to mockery. It felt so pretentious to want to write a novel. Who was I?
So I hid it. I wrote my first novel almost secretly. When I would go off to write, I would be vague with family and friends about what I was doing, telling them simply that I had work to do. In college, I was so paranoid about my roommates reading over my shoulder that I developed a secret coded language in which I could write when others were around, which I then had to decode later.
Today I am still tempted to let my creativity be squashed, not so much by naysayers, but by other enemies such as procrastination, the pressures of life, fear of rejection, weariness.
Yet the words, the ideas, keep bubbling up. When the ideas come, I think, I have to write this. Why is no one else saying this? I find myself writing as fast as I can, letting the momentum carry me. In those great moments, the creativity blasts right through the doubts, tiredness, discouragement, and second-guessing. I write. I create.
(4) TOCK OF THE WALK. From UPI: “Harry Potter fan builds working GPS replica of Weasley clock”
Tbornottb used a gutted broken clock that he purchased from an antique store as the base and had a friend illustrate the new face of the clock, which featured locations such as on the way, home, work, holiday, forest and mortal peril.
He then used a Particle Photon that would communicate with an application known as “If This Then That” that would move the clock’s hand depending on each family members GPS location.
Each family member then set the parameters for what each geographical location would be represented by on the clock.
“Most of the rules are location-based (setting me to WORK if I enter my university library, HOME if I enter my dorm), but you can set other triggers too (set me to HOLIDAY if the forecast calls for snow, set me to MORTAL PERIL if the stock of the company I’ll be working for next year drops too low),” tbornottb wrote.
(5) VR. Steven Spielberg tries The VOID and declares, “Woah, that was a great adventure!”
Steve Spielberg headed into The VOID’s unique brand of free-roaming, mixed-reality VR experience at TED 2016, and it seems he was pleasantly surprised.
“Woah, that was a great adventure!”, was Steven Spielberg’s exclamation after stepping out of the bespoke, made-for-TED mixed-reality, VR experience constructed by the team behind the VOID.
Spielberg, who recently co-founded the immersive production startup The Virtual Reality Company, stepped through the specially constructed, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style VR experience, which has players exploring ancient ruins, avoiding traps and snakes and, we understand, some clever heart-quickening physical stage manipulation to coincide with some worrying virtual events.
David Doering says, “The Void’s scenarios will come from the pen of master storyteller Tracy Hickman, our own hometown hero of fantasy fame.”
(6) MORE VR. The New York Times has its own VR story — “Virtual Reality Companies Look to Science Fiction for Their Next Play”. Ready Player One’s Ernest Cline gets more ink, and so does Neal Stephenson –
Magic Leap, based in Dania Beach, Fla., and which counts Google as one of its big investors, has gone even further than most companies by hiring three science fiction and fantasy writers on staff. Its most famous sci-fi recruit is Neal Stephenson, who depicted the virtual world of the Metaverse in his seminal 1992 novel “Snow Crash.”
In an interview, Mr. Stephenson — whose title is chief futurist — declined to say what he was working on at Magic Leap, describing it as one of several “content projects” underway at the company.
More broadly, Mr. Stephenson said science fiction books and movies are often useful within tech companies for rallying employees around a shared vision.
“My theory is that science fiction can actually have some value in that it gets everyone on the same page without the kind of expensive and tedious process of PowerPoint,” he said. But the influence of the genre within tech companies is “surprising and mysterious to me as well,” he added.
(7) A MIGHTY OATH. George R.R. Martin pledged to a Not A Blog commenter yesterday:
I am not writing anything until I deliver WINDS OF WINTER. Teleplays, screenplays, short stories, introductions, forewords, nothing.
And I’ve dropped all my editing projects but Wild Cards.
(8) CON OR BUST DONATION. Crystal Huff, Worldcon 75 Co-Chair, announced —
Worldcon 75 [the 2017 World Science Fiction Convention, to be held in Helsinki, Finland] has donated 25 memberships and hotel room nights to Con or Bust to help People of Color attend our convention. We appreciate any assistance in spreading the news to interested fans. More details can be found at the Con or Bust website, including their application process: http://con-or-bust.org/2016/02/con-or-bust-now-accepting-requests-for-assistance-9/
(9) CREATIVITY DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT. Jim C. Hines has a good post “My Mental Illness is Not Your Inspirational Post-it Note” that doesn’t lend itself to out-of-context excerpts… so just go read it anyway.
(10) LAUNCHING MADE SIMPLE. How To Go To Space (with XKCD!) was posted last November but I don’t recall linking to it, and in any event, these things are always news to somebody!
(11) MARK JUSTICE OBIT. Horror author and radio host Mark Justice (1959-2016) passed away February 10 from a heart attack. Brian Keene discussed his writing in a memorial post.
Mark’s books included Looking at the World with Broken Glass in My Eye and (with David Wilbanks) the Dead Earth series. He also ran one of the first — and best — horror fiction-centric podcasts, Pod of Horror [with Nancy Kalanta].
He was also a long-time morning show disc jockey in Ashland, Kentucky. He occasionally used that morning show to promote horror fiction, featuring friends and peers like Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, F. Paul Wilson, Joe R. Lansdale, J.F. Gonzalez, and myself. I’ve signed in Ashland numerous times throughout the last twenty years, and Mark was always happy to have me on the show anytime…
He was generous and genuine, and very, very funny. He knew this genre’s history like few others. He will be missed.
(12) HELP BY BUYING BUD’S BOOKS. ReAnimus Press has a plan to benefit the late Bud Webster’s wife, Mary:
To help Mary with the financial burden, I wanted to announce that ReAnimus Press will be donating our publisher’s share of sales from all sales of Bud’s book back to Mary, so sales of those titles will be entirely to help Mary. We’ve published the ebook editions of Bud’s ANTHOPOLOGY 101 (http://reanimus.com/store/?i=1256 ) and THE JOY OF BOOKING ( www.reanimus.com/1409 ). We have PAST MASTERS in process.
I would also note that, if you can, purchasing through those links is of almost 50% more benefit to Mary, since there’s no chunk being paid to Amazon. (FYI this is for the ebook editions only; another publisher, Merry Blacksmith, has the print editions.)
Also, anyone know who I can contact who’s handling the Marscon donations? I’d like to offer copies of the ebooks to donors to sweeten the pot, say, one ebook for a $25 donation, all three for $50, and all three plus any three other ebooks from the ReAnimus store for $100+. (Retroactive to anyone who’s already donated, so don’t wait to donate.)
(13) TODAY IN HISTORY
- February 17, 1922 — Terrified audiences gaze upon FW Murnau’s Nosferatu for the very first time.
(14) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRL
- Born February 17, 1912 — Andre Norton
(15) THEY SWEAR THESE ARE GOOD IDEAS. In Comic Riffs at the Washington Post, Michael Cavna and David Betancourt attribute Deadpool’s huge success to its attracting both superhero fans and people who enjoy R-rated snark such as is found in Judd Apatow films. Then they say — “These are the ‘R-rated’ comics that Hollywood should put on the screen next”.
MICHAEL CAVNA: So you and I knew that “Deadpool” would do reasonably well, but these monster box-office numbers that practically rival “The Dark Knight’s” debut certainly speak to a thirst for R-rated comics adaptations that don’t feel like the same old tales of origin reboots and capes-vs.-urban apocalypses. So if you were a Hollywood executive, what’s the first “mature content” comic you’d now try to option and adapt?
DAVID BETANCOURT: The top two that come to my mind are American Vampire and Y: The Last Man. Last Man [which was adapted in 2011 in short form] has been in movie limbo for a while now, and I’m surprised someone hasn’t scooped up American Vampire. Fox has somewhat of a fun dilemma on their hands. “Deadpool” literally made twice what most folks were thinking it would for its opening weekend. So if you can spawn X-Force out of “Deadpool,” given Deadpool’s connection with Cable, do you continue the “R” momentum and make an X-Force movie rated R as well? If X-Force was in development [prior to “Deadpool’s” release], Fox must have been thinking PG-13 — just like the X-Men films. But now, seeing the success of “Deadpool,: maybe Fox executives have more than one R-rated franchise. They have to at least be thinking about it. And because of “Deadpool’s” success, if that character [now] appears in an X-film, does he [himself[ seem diluted if he’s in a PG-13 movie?
(16) HE WAS THERE. Matthew Surridge looks back on “The Great Hugo Wars of 2015”, and devotes many paragraphs to how he decided to decline his Hugo nomination.
Then the next night I opened my email to find a message from the Worldcon administrators congratulating me for being nominated for a Hugo. If I wouldn’t be at Worldcon, could I please select someone who’d be able to pick up the award for me if I won?
I emailed Black Gate editor John O’Neill, and asked him if he’d be in Spokane. He said he wouldn’t, and also mentioned that Black Gate had been nominated for a Fanzine Hugo. That meant I’d now heard of three Puppy picks who’d gotten nominations. I poked around some message boards and found speculation from various people plugged into the field guessing that the Puppies would do spectacularly well when the full list of nominees was made public. One (non-Puppy) editor said that he’d heard that the Puppies had three of the nominations for Best Novel—the most prestigious category. I began to wonder if I wanted to be nominated for an award that was being shaped by the Puppy tactics. If nothing else, what kind of backlash would this create?
Over the next few days I did more research on the Puppy program. Beyond politics, it was clear I didn’t share the Sad Puppy sense of what was good and bad in fiction. Beale only spoke about “the science fiction right,” but Torgersen was putting forward an aesthetic argument about the value of adventure writing over “message fiction.” I like good pulp fiction, but prefer experimental writing. More: it became clear to me that Torgersen and Beale knew that what they were doing was a slap in the face of the SF community—the people who attended events like Worldcon and administered the Hugos. As far as they were concerned, many of the existing institutions of science fiction fandom were not only dominated by liberals, but corrupt, and therefore had to be either reformed or burned down. The Puppies were looking for a fight.
Black Gate put up a link to the post as well, which led to an exchange of comments between Surridge and his former admirer, Wild Ape.
(17) GRAPHIC ARTS. Camestros Felapton in “SP4 Book Families” proves Hugo voters and Sad Puppies 4 recommenders are equally innocent. Or equally guilty. Never mind, look at the pretty graph.
Another stray observation from SP4 Best Novel data partly inspired by an odd claim at Mad Genius that ‘weak correlations’ in Hugo2015 nomination data was evidence of secret-slate/cabals/whatever (um, nope it is what you’d expect).
I looked at which books had nominators in common and how many nominators in common they had. I then tabulated those books with more than 2 in common and drew a pretty picture.
(18) NEBULA PREDICTION. Chaos Horizon looked at the SFWA Recommended Reading List data from 2011-2014.
3/4 times, the top vote getter from the Recommended List went on to win the Nebula. Schoen must be dancing right now for Barsk, which topped the 2015 list with 35 votes (Gannon did get 33, and Wilde 29, so Schoen shouldn’t start celebrating yet). The only exception to this rule was Kim Stanley Robinson in 2012. Maybe KSR, who had 11 prior Nebula nominations and 2 prior wins, was just so much better known to the voting audience than his fellow nominees, although that’s just speculation. That KSR win from the #4 spot does stand out as a real outlier to the other years.
The Top 6 recommended works got nominated 19/24 times, for a staggering 79.1% nomination rate. If you’re predicting the Nebulas, are you going to find any better correlation than this? Just pick the top 6, and bask in your 80% success rate.
(19) LEGO. This year Lego will release 25 Star Wars-themed sets. The “Assault on Hoth” set, coming May 1, has 2,144 pieces and costs $250.
(20) MONOPOLY UPDATE. No paper money in Hasbro’s “Ultimate Banking” version of the Monopoly game – bank cards only, fortunes are tracked electronically, and that’s not all —
The latest version of Monopoly adds a new spin to the debate over who gets to be the banker. The decades-old board game, a Hasbro Inc. brand, is getting a modern upgrade this fall with an “Ultimate Banking” version that does away with the game’s iconic paper money in favor of bank cards.
Transactions, including purchasing property and paying rent, will be handled as they are in modern-day real life, with the tap of a card on the “ultimate banking unit.”
And for the real-estate mogul in the making, the bank cards also track wealth and property values, which can rise and fall. Rents for properties on the board also fluctuate, according to Jonathan Berkowitz, senior vice president of the gaming division of Hasbro
(21) OVER THE TRANSOM. Alan Baumler sent this in email – a bit long to use as a Scroll title, so I’ll quote it here:
In place of a pixel, you would have a scroll!
Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn!
Treacherous as the sea!
Stronger than the foundations of the earth!
All shall love me, and despair!
(22) KYLO REN’S TEEN ANGST. Mamalaz has a whole series of ridiculous “Modern Solo Adventures”.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Mark-kitteh, and Dave Doering for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Brian Z.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Alexandra Erin refuses to answer my query as to whether Alexandra Erin has received benefits from Con-or-Bust
Perhaps if you started by providing some evidence that would substantiate your stupid claim, then maybe she would respond. Until then you’re just a bloviating racist making baseless evidence-free allegations. Why should anyone bother to respond to you?
JJ, I certainly hope you’re in no position that requires any comprehension of game theory.
If Alexandra Erin publicly denies that she, Alexandra Erin, or any of her aliases, has ever received any benefits from Con-or-Bust, money, hotel rooms, con admissions, anything of value, I will publicly apologize and donate $100 to Con-or-Bust as contrition.
Fair enough?
KT: Fair enough?
No. Why should Alexandra Erin have to publicly deny some shit you just made up due to your poor reading comprehension?
@KT –
I’ve been reading SF since I was a kid in the late ’70s, but I’ve never come across any planet on which that would be ‘fair enough’.
Fair enough?
No. You made the claim. Show it has some substance before you demand a denial.
At this point, until you do that you’re just proving that you are a liar again and again as you keep pushing your clearly made-up story.
Oh, well, environmental determinism is justly criticized, but I thought Diamond’s specific bit about animal domestication was pretty good, actually.
But I’m the sort of nerd who has been rooting for the domestic eland project and the Russian fox experiments for years, so y’know. Though my money’s on the musk-ox as the next actual domestic animal, if a ridiculously specialized one.
(Feel free to tell me that this is skirting too close to the line, Mike, and I’ll understand…)
JJ,
Why? To prove me a liar, humiliate me front of the world and get $100 for her favorite charity, of course.
My money is safe.
But please contribute all you can to Con-or-Bust. Alexandra wants to attend WorldCon in Kansas City.
Aaron, writes:
“No. You made the claim. Show it has some substance before you demand a denial.”
You are invited to my place for an evening of Texas Hold’em. Bring lots of money. Lots.
KT,
The rest of us do not share your cowardice about lifestyles we do not share, or your naked, obvious fear of those different. Half of us think Erin’s wickedly accurate descriptions of the neurosis of racist little trolls like you are both funny, and worthy of a Hugo.
KT: Why? To prove me a liar, humiliate me front of the world and get $100 for her favorite charity, of course.
You’ve already done a spectacular job of humiliating yourself in front of the large readership at File770 (where the threads with the highest attention get around 45,000 page views — there are a lot of people who read but don’t post here).
You don’t need help on that from Alexandra Erin or anyone else.
And I’m pretty sure that Con or Bust feels just fine about not getting $100 from a blatant racist.
“Half of us think Erin’s wickedly accurate descriptions of the neurosis of racist little trolls like you are both funny, and worthy of a Hugo.”
No doubt. I too think she is worthy of a Hugo.
@KT: Here’s a little exercise for you.
Let’s pretend I go by Alex. That’s a nice, ambiguous name. Difficult to tell on the internet whether I’m male or female. You’d be well within your rights to ask what I identified as (and I’d be well within my rights to keep it ambiguous).
Now, say I don’t go by Alex. Say I go by Alexander. That is, traditionally, a masculine name. You can assume, therefore, that my preferred pronouns would be “he/his”.
Or maybe I call myself Alexandra. Again, typically, this is a more feminine version of the same name. You could reasonably infer in this situation that my preferred pronouns would be “she/her”.
Stop being a dumbass.
Why? To prove me a liar, humiliate me front of the world
You’ve already proved yourself to be a liar and humiliated yourself in front of the world all by your own efforts. Are you so very clueless that you do not realize this?
@ KT –
Poker’s an apt analogy. Everyone’s called, but you refuse to show your hand.
Err…KT, does Erin have any idea who you are? Why would she care about proving you a liar?
Poker’s an apt analogy. Everyone’s called, but you refuse to show your hand.
I’m pretty sure that one could show up at KT’s for poker night with a nickel in your pocket and walk away owning the deed to his house although I’m not sure how much the deed to a spot under the bridge would actually be worth.
He’d still be claiming victory anyway, even after he lost everything he owned.
@ RedWombat – I was wondering that myself. Or why she would want to humiliate him.
She’s probably never even heard of him. And doesn’t care to.
@RedWombat: Do you really think the musk ox can become truly domesticated? What advantages would it have over other ungulates?
@Mike Glyer
Wahh I didn’t really get to be part of the pile on the troll. Your mean. Why you might be making me keep to my “don’t feed the trolls because it makes me say things I shouldn’t”. Did I mention Wahh? Well you left me a little wiggle room. LOL
@KT
Here’s the link to Scalzi’s blog where he & Erin raised $10k for Con-or-Bust . If she took one of their scholarships she raised more than enough to cover several other people’s scholarships also. You still need to find some proof she’s gotten a scholarship and the tweet wasn’t related to the fundraiser but that’s your problem not mine.
Oneiros,
No, you’re being the dumbass and show your lack of sophistication. In many circles it is considered offensive to use gender specific pronouns even if the name is normally used as male or female by Mundanes.
Who are you to tell xem what name xe should use? Maybe xe is asexual and just likes the sound of a vowel at the end of xem name?
Red Wombat writes,
“Err…KT, does Erin have any idea who you are?”
Oh she does, she does. That’s why she won’t deny it if I offered a $1000.
BGHilton and Aaron,
Never played poker of any kind, eh? You guys are not in the game. Only Alexandra Erin can call.
Do you know what is the best way to bluff?
Oh Tasha, sweet simple clueless Tasha, I don’t have to prove anything to you.
@lurkertype – The primary advantage, as I understand it, is qiviut, the muskox underwool. I’m not a knitter, but the ones I know who’ve encountered it talk about this stuff like it was the Holy Grail with orgasm sprinkles. Plus you get the usual range of milk and meat out of them, but it’s the qiviut and the fact they can take such extreme cold that make them interesting.
The downside–and the reason why I suspect they weren’t domesticated immediately by the indigenous peoples–is that as I understand it, what you want is a social animal (check) that you can herd (…less check.) Pastoral peoples need to be able to herd the animal from one food source to another, assuming the animals are grazers (which most of them are–we’ll leave pigs out of this for the moment, since pigs are special and weird and have other stuff going on.)
You can domesticate a horse or a sheep fairly easily,* for example, because it runs away from things it doesn’t like and follows a leader when it runs. You can’t really domesticate an African buffalo because it turns around and beats the ever-lovin’ shit outta things it doesn’t like, which makes it very difficult to herd. (Bison are also tricky for the same reason.) A dog that nips the heels of a cow or a sheep may get kicked, but the animal still runs away. A dog that nips the heels of an African buffalo is not long for this world. Many herd animals get fierce if they’re cornered, but their first instinct has to be run away or they’re a tough nut to domesticate.
Muskox run to a certain extent, but they also do the well-known ring behavior. So at that point, your herding dog is useless, because you can’t make them move the direction you want, they just get stubborn and bunchy.
Now, if I’ve got a permanent settlement with fences and I’m not moving my flock/herd/whatever from grazing area to grazing area, it doesn’t matter if the muskox gets all bunchy. But I think this might be a situation where you have to have the infrastructure to bring the food to the muskox rather than being able to drive the muskox to the food.
(This is all my understanding, I hasten to add–people who work with muskox or herding dogs are welcome to correct me!)
That said, I really don’t think we’ll see muskox as a major domestic beast any time soon–we’ve already got yak and reindeer, who are multiuse cold-weather animals, and who have a long history, and it’s unlikely muskox will be better than either of those for the purpose–but I think they could become a minor domestic species, as long as the qiviut market makes it worthwhile.
*Easily being a rather light term for the actual work involved, and jeez, whoever looked at the wild aurochs and said “I want to haul on that thing’s udders twice a day” is a tougher soul than I’ll ever be…
OK, two things.
1) I really need to stop being too lazy to figure out Stylish, and…
2) If I can find some muskox wool, I swear I am going to knit this on a sweater:
@KT
Why? To prove me a liar, humiliate me front of the world
I fear that self launched nautical vessel has already egressed.
If I can find some muskox wool, I swear I am going to knit this on a sweater:
Scarf or hat, maybe. It’s really pricey stuff.
Not a problem. I can manage a scarf, but any sweater I knitted would be wobbly and twisted and uneven and a terrible waste of wool much lowlier than that of the muskox. Perhaps I should just donate the value of the muskox wool to Con or Bust?
Plagues and Peoples. William H. MacNeil.
Read it. Forget Diamond.
BigelowT: Perhaps I should just donate the value of the muskox wool to Con or Bust?
JJ: < picturing the look on Kate Nepveu’s face when she opens the door to see the UPS guy standing there with a muskox >
Thanks, Crimson Marsupial! I agree it doesn’t look like they’re going to outdo yak or reindeer soon. They’re all big with giant horns and are a huge circle of grumpy. Not sure the wool is in demand enough to make up for the grumpy.
Con or Bust doesn’t need muskox. Gotta be tough to raise.
I thought his point about continental shapes was well made as well (i.e Eurasia having a long east-west axis along which domesticated plants and animals can move more easily between similar climates)
Also, can you IMAGINE what the cost for shipping a whole musk ox is? Averaging 630 lb!
(Also also, the discussion between PJ and Bigelow confused me b/c I had the brightness turned down and so was only registering “kitty” as their avatars, so at first I thought someone was talking to themselves. I didn’t sleep much last night.)
@Lurkertype
Get some sleep.
@KT
Done you’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are nothing but a troll. I’m past my troll feeding limit. May you find a better way to spend your life.
Definitely an harasser.
In terms of proving something that you claim, or imply, happened, there is no percentage in withholding any evidence or substantive reasons for believing it happened, other than as an elaborate gotcha. Since no-one doubts you’re bluffing, invoking the idea of a poker game rather confirms the mindset. You’re out to harass and smear Erin, playing a game with no stakes and lots of bluff.
@Lis
I’ll add Plagues and Peoples to my to-read list.
@Paul– True answer to the question “What book do you reread every few years?” Plagues and Peoples . Honest to God.
Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 AD is also fascinating. Originally written in 1986, it’s missing a bunch of recent discoveries and interpretations, but it’s still very solid.
@KT I refuse to answer that question until you tell me when you stopped beating your wife.
Has our troll even identified a specific tweet from Erin that they think is a smoking gun of some sort? The only thing I see is a link to Erin’s twitter feed in general.
I am shocked, simply shocked, that KT would try to enlist Filers to sealion Erin to try and further some weird agenda of his own.
Shocked, I tell you.
Poxy Harasser Attempts Harassment By Proxy.
KT, I will assume you’re not aware of this (I wasn’t, until a few years ago), but people of Asian ancestry have informed me that “Oriental” when used for anything other than rugs is an ethnic slur. It’s not as bad as the n-word, but it’s still offensive. You might wish to update your vocabulary.
@Cassy B:
I’ve been under the impression that the general rule of thumb is “animate is Asian, inanimate is Oriental” – so Asian people, Asian cuisine (formerly alive!), Oriental rugs, Oriental belief systems. Is that still solid, or is there a better rule I can learn?
Rev. Bob, yes, that’s correct, to the best of my knowledge. I was too specific when I said rugs.
@KT: Nice try, but if you truly believe that Erin prefers to go by gender-neutral pronouns, the safe bet is that she’d be offended by the use of “it”, since that’s generally considered dehumanising.
Re: Oriental. It’s too broad to be meaningful at all. It would be like referring to a teacup made in England as an Occidental teacup. It gives you basically no information. Tell me that something is an Oriental wall hanging and it could be a huge number of things; tell me that it’s a Thai wall hanging and I have a much better grasp on what it might look like.
Couple that with the racist undertones and it’s not a term I use very often, outside of specific things like when I was reading up on how Orientalism influenced the Romantics.
I am hugely confused as to what KT thought he/she/it was proving with the video by Alexandra Erin. Seriously, she wants to live with her boyfriend, his wife, and her cat. That sounds….normal to me. Ok, so my boyfriend’s wife has another sweetie, and between the four of us we have seven cats… But I can’t see why asking for help in a half-a-continent move is the least bit exceptionable. So confused, here. (And if the accusation is that she’s using Con or Bust to finance her move, why would she be putting out an appeal for help?)
Asian/Oriental really only work where there’s a single source of that culture. Otherwise you wind up with confusion between the people who infer Asian food to be curry, vs those that think General Tso’s chicken, vs those that think tempura.
It is probably a sign that I am old and fuddy duddy, but I’ve never quite worked out why referring to source countries has become a wrong thing. If I say that my friend’s wife is Korean Australian I certainly don’t mean to imply that she is not a loyal Aussie, harbouring some secret allegiance to Seoul, just I want to say something more specific than ‘Asian’ which could be derived from Turkey, from Sri Lanka, from Japan or any points in between.
Obviously (though I suspect not to everyone) persisting in something that the described party has said they don’t like and offered their preferred option is obnoxious. Even if their preferred option seems hopelessly vague.
NickPheas, to be fair, in the case we’re discussing, one vague term, “Oriental”, has been replaced with another vague term, “Asian”. I don’t think anyone is advocating that “Chinese” or “Pakistani” or “Philippino” or “Korean” be replaced…
Sure, but both terms are vague, while more specific terms are I think frowned on.
I suspect it’s an American thing more than British (could easily be wrong) as Americans are a bit keener on loyalty oaths and swearing allegiance to flags and things like that, which might clash with people defining themselves in terms of their grandparents embarkation ports. (thinks: Though ‘Irish’ people who have ever been closer to Dublin than Boston don’t seem to mind)
Certainly in Canada the tendency is towards being specific: the “Tamil-Canadian” or “Japanese-Canadian” community; I don’t think I’ve ever run across “Asian-Canadian” as a compound.