(1) KEPLER STRAIGHTENS UP AND FLIES RIGHT. NASA reports that the Kepler spacecraft has been stabilized and is no longer wasting fuel. They won’t resume science operations until they think they know what went wrong.
(2) GALAKTIKA PIRACY. Author Malcolm F. Cross discusses what it feels like to discover his story was swiped by Hungary’s Galaktika magazine.
And the bad?
My short story, Pavlov’s House, which was both my first pro-sale and something I wrote as part of the early work on figuring out Dog Country, was ripped off by Galaktika.
What is Galaktika? It’s a Hungarian SFF magazine, which has over the past few years apparently ripped off a lot of authors. (There are some articles by A.G. Carpenter on the issue here: here) They went ahead and translated it into Magyar/Hungarian, then sold it in print, without asking me for translation rights, without notifying me, without offering me a contract or payment. They stole my story.
Getting my head around that has been kind of traumatic for me. My writing career is one of the most important things I have in my life, and part of that career is having a say in where and how my work appears. Stories are part of a conversation, by submitting my fiction for publication, by trying to sell it, by getting involved in where and how it appears, I am adding to that conversation. But when I get ripped off…? I’m not sure I’m part of that conversation anymore, and that’s been bugging me immensely.
For now I’m in touch with SFWA (I’m a member, if you did not know!) and figuring out what I can/should do about it.
In the meanwhile, though, if you haven’t already, go enjoy Pavlov’s House where it was originally published, at Strange Horizons, over here….
(3) BURNSIDE ON WEIGHING CREDIBILITY. At Medium, Ken Burnside takes issue with those skeptical about the sexism and assaults reported by women gamers, in “For Good Men To See Nothing”.
I specifically AM addressing this piece to the people of “my tribe”: white, heterosexual male gamers who wouldn’t dream of grabbing anyone in a non-consensual or sexual way in public, and find descriptions of these kinds of acts inconceivable, because they don’t happen in front of us.
Our starting point is an article by Emily Garland, who won a judgment from a Canadian court about entrenched sexism she experienced as a customer at a game store. It’s the “Tabletop Gaming Has a White Male Terrorism Problem” piece that came to public notice in early April 2016. To our credit as human beings, it’s gotten a lot of positive responses?—?positive in the sense of “Yes, this is believable, and we’ve got to do something about it.” However, it’s also gotten the “I think she’s making it up to get attention” backlash that’s common when discussing sexism.
No, guys. She isn’t. And as long litanies and lists of licentious license being taken won’t convince you…I’m going to pose this a different way….
The people who do this are incredibly facile with a plausible explanation for why what they’re doing is “not wrong” or “normal”?—?“It’s just a joke.” “Oh, she left something with me and I needed to return it to her.” They know that the vast majority of good men (like you, the people I’m writing this to) will accept that kind of explanation rather than act on it.
A friend of mine, New York Times bestselling author Steven Barnes, has a term for these kinds of people: “Smiling monsters.” They’ll smile and be cheerful to your face when you confront them, and expect you to forget them entirely while they go back to whatever it was you caught them at. These people rely on two facts: The first is that their victim doesn’t want to trigger a confrontation: even bold, brave women like the cosplayer I befriended at Sasquan get jittery about direct confrontation. The second is that good men, like you, won’t believe they’re doing what they’re doing, because they can’t imagine doing it. It’s easy to overlook smiling monsters when they give a glib answer and scuttle out of sight.
When you accept the explanation of the smiling monster, you give the victim the impression that you won’t listen to what they have to say. The smiling monster is betting on that, and 99% of the time, he’s right….
(4) A SPECULATIVE REVIEW. From Stephenie Sheung, “Review: Almost Infamous by Matt Carter” at The Speculative Herald.
If you’re a fan of comics and are looking for a clever, humorous, and merciless riff on the superhero genre, then Almost Infamous is most definitely the book for you! Matt Carter’s novel is a wildly entertaining, satirical take on the characters and worlds we imagine when we picture the Marvel or DC universes, and as a twist, his protagonist is a horny, uppity teenage supervillain.
To get a sense of the zaniness you’re in for, just take a peek at the book’s first few pages, featuring a “Brief History of Superheroes.” Super powers—whether you were born with them, cursed with them, granted them as a result of radioactive freak accident, changed by a gene-splicing experiment gone wrong, and so on and so forth—are just a common fact of life. Superhumans are real. Oh, and by the way, so are Atlanteans, Lemurians, magicians, aliens, demons, golems, mortal gods who walk the earth, and pretty much every kind of power-endowed beings you can think of. All real.
(5) A BRIEF HISTORY OF FANFIC. Andrew Liptak explores “Unauthorized Stories: Fan Fiction and Fandom” at Kirkus Reviews.
Looking at the phenomenon, Fan Fiction is a wholly new type of medium that arrived because of the close-knit genre communities, and it demonstrates the unique environment of these communities. They’re also coupled with the rise of larger media franchises that typically expand far beyond the reach of novels. Fan fiction has provided a unique opportunity for fans to push the boundaries of the stories that they’ve come to love, and contribute to it in their own ways.
(6) HOPPING. In part 8 of Black Gate’s Choosing Your Narrative Point of View Series, Tina Jens reveals “Things Your Writing Teacher Never Told You: The Multiple Personalities of Omniscient 3rd Person: Spotlight on ‘Head-Hopper’”, at Black Gate.
Virginia Woolf’s novel, To the Lighthouse, does a brilliant job with our next POV style:
7. Head-Hopper
If you’ve not read her novel, I urge you to do so. I also urge you to read it aloud, even if you’re sitting outside at a café, which I did a few summers ago. The book is graced with many long, complex sentences that loop and flow, and sometimes change point of view from one clause to the next. Reading it out loud helps the brain make sense of the phrases and clauses in a way that eyes-only reading can’t manage as well. When done well, as Ms. Woolf did, it is a brilliant writing stratagem. But it works best in stories where there is very little physical plot. The conflict comes mainly from the contrast of how different characters perceive the same moment, and in the shifting emotions of characters.
Which means, generally, it is not a good point of view choice for action-packed genre stories.
(7) ISLAMIC SF CONTEST. The Islamicate Science Fiction short story writing contest is open and will accept submissions until to the beginning of Ramadan/Ramzan/Ramjan (June 8, 2016). The winner will be announced on the day of Eid – July 6, 2016. Cash prizes will be given to the first, second and third place stories.
The Islam and Science Fiction project has been running since 2005, we just entered our second decade. While the depiction of Muslims in Science Fiction and Islamic cultures has improved we still have a lot way to go, as is the case with many other minority groups. To kickstart things in this genre we have decided to start a contest centered around Science Fiction with Muslim characters or Islamic cultures (Islam in the cultural sense and not necessarily in the religious sense)….
Scope:
Islamicate refers to the cultural output of predominantly Islamic culture or polity. Thus while the culture has its foundation and inspiration from the religion of Islam, it need not be produced by someone who is Muslim. The term Islamicate is thus similar to the term West as it encompasses a whole range of cultures, ethnicities and schools of thought with shared historical experience. The contest is open to all people regardless of their religious affiliation or lack there of. Thus a person of any religion, nationality, ethnicity race, gender, sexual orientation can submit. A collection of the best stories from the submissions will be released as an epub and available to download for free.
Submission rules:
- The stories must be either set in a predominantly Muslim culture AND/OR have Muslim protagonist(s).
- Short stories in almost any variant of Science Fiction (space opera, time-travel, apocalyptic, reimaging classic themes, techno-thrillers, bio-punk, science mystery, alternate history, steampunk, utopian, dystopian etc) is encouraged.
- No reprints: No simultaneous submissions: No multiple submissions.
- Submission are limited to one per person.
- Since we are talking about short stories, any story with less than 8,000 words will be accepted.
(8) A KITTEN’S PERSPECTIVE. “Happy Kittens Smile Back” at Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens.
Whew, Hugo nominations have closed and I managed to actually consume enough good SFF to nominate five things in most categories. The extraordinary new resources like Rocket Stack Rank and various longlists really came in handy.
Of course, the Hugo nomination deadline is just an excuse. Discovering new writers and fanzines you hadn’t heard of before is the thing, not some weird, phallic awards that never (or very very seldom) are given to your absolute top favorites anyway. I do like the fan community aspect of it — people reading the shortlisted works at the same time and discussing them, and getting together to throw the annual party — but it’s all more or less sideshow. The books, the stories and the other exciting things are what it’s about for me.
So, to some extent, nevermind what the eventual nomination results are going to look like on April 26th. Even if a certain former disco musician manages to make his MRA troll army sweep the ballot like he did last year, there will be terrific thing to read and watch on the various recommendation lists that many fans have put together. Next year, the necessary rule changes are ratified and we get rid of him. (Truth be told, I don’t think that it will be as easy for them to wreak havoc as it was last year, but who knows.)
(9) LOCUS AWARDS DEADLINE. Voting closes April 15.
Make the Locus Awards count! Deadline April 15. Vote today at https://t.co/Y1UqRoaBwE
Please retweet!
— Locus Magazine (@locusmag) April 11, 2016
(10) SF AUTHORS WRITE BREAKFAST STORIES. By gifting some virtual birthday waffles to Sarah Pinsker, A. C. Wise started a breakfast meme on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/KMSzpara/status/719605732304429058
@Wiswell @ac_wise @KMSzpara @SarahPinsker @andreapawley The Waffle House In the Woods
— Serenity “Leap Year Capybara” Dee ???? (@sapphixy) April 11, 2016
@ac_wise @Wiswell @asymbina @KMSzpara @andreapawley I Have No Mouth and I Must Eat Waffles
— Sarah Pinsker (@SarahPinsker) April 11, 2016
@asymbina @ac_wise @Wiswell @KMSzpara @andreapawley The Book of the New Sunny Side Up
— Sarah Pinsker (@SarahPinsker) April 11, 2016
@asymbina @SarahPinsker @Wiswell @KMSzpara @andreapawley The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelets.
— A.C. Wise (@ac_wise) April 11, 2016
And lots more where those came from….
(11) WE ARE IN KANSAS TOTO. What happens when you are accidentally assigned 600 million IP addresses? Learn about “How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell” at Fusion.
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat….
The trouble for the Taylor farm started in 2002, when a Massachusetts-based digital mapping company called MaxMind decided it wanted to provide “IP intelligence” to companies who wanted to know the geographic location of a computer to, for example, show the person using it relevant ads or to send the person a warning letter if they were pirating music or movies.
There are lots of different ways a company like MaxMind can try to figure out where an IP address is located. It can “war-drive,” sending cars around the U.S. looking for open wifi networks, getting those networks’ IP addresses, and recording their physical locations. It can gather information via apps on smartphones that note the GPS coordinates of the phone when it takes on a new IP address. It can look at which company owns an IP address, and then make an assumption that the IP address is linked to that company’s office.
(12) HANNA BARBERA. See the photos at Fred Seibert’s Tumblr, “Hanna & Barbera, the last portraits. By Jeff Sedlik”.
Without knowing it, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera presented me with the reasons I got into the cartoon business in 1992.
Looney Tunes, Popeye the Sailor, Tom and Jerry and Crusader Rabbit were the first favorites in my cartoon diet, but my fandom really kicked into gear with Hanna-Barbera’s The Huckleberry Hound Show, and their first wave that ended with The Jetsons. When I started traveling to Hollywood in my 30s, whenever I passed their classic Googie studios, I would wonder what went on in that hallowed fortress. Little could I know that I’d end up as the last president of the company.
One of the missions was to give some respect to Bill and Joe that I felt they’d missed over the decades when they’d disrupted the industry and vintage cartoon partisans never forgave them. They were abused as having limited creative imaginations, so I commissioned a series of essays written by Bill Burnett to set the record straight.
In 1996, towards the end of my tenure (owner Ted Turner sold his entire operation to Time-Warner), I commissioned a series of formal portraits by one of my favorite Los Angeles based photographers, Jeff Sedlik. Bill was 86, Joe 85, and they deserved to be remembered as the American cultural titans that they were.
(13) NEW SUICIDE SQUAD TRAILER. Aired during the MTV Movie Awards.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, JJ, Andrew Porter, Darren Garrison, Barry Newton, Will R., and Greg Hullender for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Sylvia Sotomayor.]
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JJ on April 11, 2016 at 8:25 pm said: That’s a very good piece by Burnside. I hope that it will sway some minds. It will be interesting to see whether the Puppies turn on him, now that he’s “sided with teh wimminz”. ?
Seriously? And people call -me- a troll.
@Doctor Science. Yes.
Remember, no matter where you Scroll, there you are.
It’s not my god damned Pixel Scroll, monkey boy!
(ticky)
Dr. Science, yes, Seanan McGuire’s name is pronounced Shaw-nan. She’s great on convention panels. Especially ones about horrible diseases….
Seanan’s also great on podcasts; I’m sad that the Squeecast has more-or-less ended, although I’m happy that it was for good busy-career-based reasons. Seanan, in a Squeecast episode, introduced me to Welcome to Night Vale; there was also another episode where she held forth at epic length about My Little Pony and it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.
[3] The trouble I have with the Burnside article is that men do see and react to this kind of thing – when it’s their women it happens to. “Get your hands off my wife/girlfriend.” And other men absolutely believe and support men when this happens. “He had it coming, he was messing with that guy’s wife.” Or the legendary fate of Leroy Brown.
The guys he quoted, who started to think, “What if it were my daughter?” are on the same page. They know perfectly well what goes on.
This is a general pattern than extends way beyond gaming and underlies all sorts of rape culture: a single woman is lawful prey.
If you enjoy Welcome to Night Vale, you should check out Hello from the Magic Tavern, which is sorta the same kind of humor, but… more adult.
It was brought to my attention by Myke Cole.
Why nobody at Warner Brothers ever handed Timm and Dini a hundred million dollars and said “Go make a live-action movie” I’ll never know. They really got those characters.
Perhaps in a decade it can come back, but they had really run out of things to squee about.
“Nothing To Squee About” — the lesser known (and much sadder) Bonnie Raitt song.
(Let’s Give Them) Pixels to Scroll About
The music is what makes the Suicide Squad trailers, both of them. And if you can’t make your trailer exciting without using “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Ballroom Blitz” (which would make unedited footage of a town council meeting look exciting), the movie is likely in trouble.
Besides, many of the Suicide Squad characters (except for Harley Quinn) have recently been seen in Arrow and those portrayals were pretty good.
Then there’s the Buffy musical episode filk, “Something to Squee About” … But it’ll take someone with more skills than me to actually write it.
This is related to this reply, but the word I just stumbled upon is so relevant, I thought I’d bump it to the most recent scroll. File770: an enabler to suffers of tsundoku.
@Cora Buhlert
Even Harley got a cameo in Arrow. Could still end up being more memorable.
Perhaps in a decade it can come back, but they had really run out of things to squee about.
I am somewhat amazed that someone could run out of new things to get excited about.
So now if I ever want to get a tattoo in kanji, I’ll know what it should be.
[The checkbox is ticked off! Seriously.]
@Hampus Eckerman It’s true that men don’t see things as sexism, sexual assault, predators, groping etc.
This. So. True. And it’s hard to find ways to get men to see/accept things which women/children know are sexism, sexual assault, predators, groping etc. as such.
I don’t know the solution. I have found stopping guys who insist it doesn’t happen here and pointing to situations happening right then helps but is exhausting. Workplace, family, and social situations – I’ll touch an arm and whisper where to look/explain what they are hearing/seeing. Kinda weird the first few times as usually I’m stepping in to diffuse/end the situation. Taking a few extra seconds to do a teaching moment before stepping forward felt wrong but how else were the non-believers going to have their eyes opened? Plus sometimes they would step in which usually worked out better than a woman and they learned more from that.
I love DVR where you can pause and play back a scene. Do this through a couple favorite shows and movies each time an incident happens and if the guy(s) can make it through the number of stops and reruns with commentary it really opens their eyes. But I find few guys can deal with a 30 minute sitcom turning into a 2-hour lesson nevermind a full 2 hour movie. It’s also exhausting on me, the complaining, is it really that bad, until they start realizing how many stops we are making, when the uncomfortable level goes up, well you must have picked an unusual episode (my favorite line as we pick something at random), but it’s a great tool if the guys are willing and one has the energy and patience. They seem to walk away noticing more in the real world afterwards. They also ask more questions about situations they see/participate in to find out if they should have done something and if so what to do in the future.
SF peripheral, but I think relevant to the discussion:
Stephen Fry criticised for telling self-pitying abuse victims to ‘grow up’
ffffffffffFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…
to world peace? I have thoughts on this having only suffered childhood emotional and psychological abuse. I had a long discussion today about how my internal filter turns every correction into “what the fuck is wrong with you?” in my brain. (Thanks, mother. I can’t even hate her, because I know she actually was touched by her uncle in that nasty place.)
I’m working through feeling angry and betrayed and let down by my family and society in lots of therapy. Do I feel sorry for myself? Yeah, I kind of do. That doesn’t prevent me from working hard to move forward with my life. If I didn’t, I’d have killed myself long ago.
And with regard to trigger warnings, which is how this quote came about, FUCK YES I want to be warned if something contains child abuse or suicide or self-harm so I can prepare myself to read it. Even then, sometimes I need to put it down for awhile to process. And I’m one of the lucky ones because I was never physically or sexually abused.
I know, I know, it’s hardly news. “Stephen Fry opens mouth, inserts foot.” But still. *table flip*
JJ: That’s a very good piece by Burnside. I hope that it will sway some minds. It will be interesting to see whether the Puppies turn on him, now that he’s “sided with teh wimminz”.
The Phantom: Seriously? And people call -me- a troll.
Yes, seriously. Look how the Puppies responded when Kary English and Eric Flint dared to speak up against the Puppy Party Doctrine. Why would they react any differently toward Burnside?
And people call you a Troll because you are a Troll.
3/Burnside: “Smiling monsters” is a good term. I can’t help but correlate the described aversion to confrontation with the stereotype of the bullied-in-childhood geek.
@snowcrash: “The mistake is in [Burnside] saying that there has been a failure in fiminism by a lack of “enlisting men”.”
Except that’s not what he said. JJ quotes the comment as “One of the failure modes of feminism in enlisting men to help is “lack of an even keel”.” IMO, Burnside isn’t saying that feminism (as an idea/movement) is failing, but talking about a way that an outreach method can fail. I might have the best idea ever, but will you listen if I express it by screaming in your face?
It’s hard to rally individual members of a group to your cause by attacking that group – and the men whom feminists most need to reach do associate feminism with man-bashing. The principle should be common sense: if you want to win someone over, don’t attack them.
@Paul Weimer: “complaints and issues by women only really get taken seriously when a man speaks up about them. That’s a problem with our culture, too.”
Sadly, sometimes it does take a man to start/enable that conversation with other men: “Hey, she’s got a solid point here. Listen up.” Yes, it’s ideologically purer to write those other guys off as backwards for not listening to women in the first place, but it’s not like there’s some Cultural Monarch that we can go to to affect everyone at once. (Hm. Is Prince available? 😉 ) If getting through to the backwards types can be as easy as using a man to get their attention, isn’t that a worthy tactic for an opening strategy?
@Lois Tilton: “This is a general pattern than extends way beyond gaming and underlies all sorts of rape culture: a single woman is lawful prey.”
Succinctly put and sadly accurate. That’s why I love the Australian video snowcrash linked to; it’s completely unambiguous in saying “no, this isn’t okay, and if you disagree, there’s no place for you in this organization.”
@Tasha:
That sounds like both a lot of effort and an effective technique. It’s almost as if changing firmly-entrenched views is hard work that a few magic words can’t achieve…
4/Almost Infamous: Added to list. Looks interesting, but (hearkening back to the pricing discussion of a few days ago) I’m not sure it looks ten bucks’ worth of interesting. I could buy the fourth and fifth “Daggers & Steele” books for that…
13/Suicide Squad: Loving the musical choices. According to IMDB, Affleck’s playing Batman in this one; that should be interesting.
@Ultragotha: “Remember, no matter where you Scroll, there you are.”
Hmm. “Wherever you pixel, there you scroll.”? Maybe not.
I Can Call You Pixel, And Pixel When You Call Me, You Can Call Me Scroll
“The Women (and the shit that happens to them) Men Don’t See”.
@Lois Tilton: So, so true.
@Tasha: Sounds like a lot of work. Which only men sympathetic to the cause to begin with would be willing to do. Dudebros and neckbeards wouldn’t.
This is Yuri’s Night, and it’s completely overcast here. Bah.
@Doctor Science: It’s SHAWN-an. Source: mutual friends. (I knew her when!) First syllable is about halfway between “shaw” and “shah”.
90’s DC cartoons were the best.* Put those people in charge of the scripts. Or even the current live-action people; that Supergirl-Flash crossover was awesome.
I couldn’t possibly be more meh about Suicide Squad. Early previews of Civil War are getting good reviews, esp. for interpersonal stuff.
Have they extended the tsundoku concept to ebooks? Virtual tsundoku?
*Also Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, all out of the same office.
Rev. Bob: Burnside isn’t saying that feminism (as an idea/movement) is failing, but talking about a way that an outreach method can fail. … It’s hard to rally individual members of a group to your cause by attacking that group – and the men whom feminists most need to reach do associate feminism with man-bashing. The principle should be common sense: if you want to win someone over, don’t attack them.
My point is that it shouldn’t be feminists’ job to get men to speak up against inappropriate behavior in the first place.
Complaining that “if only feminists approached the act of enlisting men to their cause properly, men would respond by doing the right thing”, as Burnside is doing, is completely missing the point that these men should do the right thing without having to be enlisted by feminists — and it’s just another form of victim-blaming.
ETA: Never mind that part of the problem is that a significant number of men consider having other mens’ bad behaviour pointed out to be a personal attack on themselves.
Pixellator, qu’est-ce que c’est?
It’s unfortunate but true that people in power often only see a problem if other people in power point it out. Look at how it took white kids from the North joining the American civil rights movement (and getting killed, like the black kids had been getting killed for generations), before the power structure really started to take notice… because the white adults really started to take notice, and theirs was the notice that mattered.
I’m not saying that this is right. It’s not right. It’s not fair. Unfortunately, what it is, is human. So, unfortunately, it shouldn’t be feminist’s jobs to enlist men, just like it shouldn’t be African-American’s jobs to enlist European Americans, in the fight for equal rights. But the struggle gets easier (not easy, but easier) if the power dynamics are not completely lopsided against the voices speaking out.
Victim blaming is wrong. Full stop. But it’s also useful to understand that recruiting voices from up the power curve is valuable.
I’m not phrasing this well. I apologize for the clumsiness of my wording, and hope my point gets across.
In re: The Burnside comment:
I’ve said this upthread, but I’ll say it again-my take on what Burnside is saying in the comment under discussion is that most men don’t SEE the behavior the way women do because they lack the same frame of reference. It would be like telling a story in French and expecting the portion of the audience which doesn’t understand French well, if at all, to fully understand what you just said.
There are men who understand that behaviors are being engaged in which are totally inappropriate and they know how to respond because they grasp what’s happening. There are men who need to be walked through what’s going on, complete with explanations of what they simply don’t grasp in terms they can understand.
There are men who wouldn’t figure it out if you gave them a flow chart and five years of intense instruction. Then there are the ones who understand and couldn’t care less.
It’s the men who need to be walked through things Burnside is addressing. Burnside follows the KISS Method when he finishes the comment thusly:
There are monsters.
Here’s how they’re hiding from you.
Here’s how to confront them.
Happy hunting.
It ties back into the sections of the article.
Expecting someone to act on a problem before they understand exactly what that problem is is counter-productive and a waste of time and energy. While you have reasons from your point of view to think that men should “do the right thing” without needing to be prompted by anyone, that’s unfortunately not always a realistic view to take when dealing with H. sapiens.
Not to excuse anything, but Fry has clearly not been well lately, fighting with bipolar disorder. Just as info. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22796593
ETA: mentions suicide.
Agree with Robert Reynolds.
And bipolar is no excuse for being an asshole. It should lead to MORE compassion about other people’s psyches, not less.
I Can Call You Pixel, And Pixel When You Call Me, You Can Call Me Scroll
A man scrolls down a thread,
It’s a thread on a strange scroll.
Maybe he didn’t read it right,
Maybe he’s the fifth one to post.
He doesn’t understand the lingo,
He doesn’t get the references.
He is a Sad Puppy.
He is surrounded by the scorn…
As per usual, Jim C. Hines has a great post on this:
http://www.jimchines.com/2016/04/trigger-warnings-are-censorship/
TW: may offend Stephen Fry and Puppies. Contains F word.
People who empathize with victims are the most likely to speak out. Burnside is trying to walk readers through to having greater empathy.
Mike Glyer: People who empathize with victims are the most likely to speak out. Burnside is trying to walk readers through to having greater empathy.
And that’s good. It’s the gratuitous kick at feminists he sticks in there while he’s at it which is not so good.
@IanP
You’re right, I forgot Harley’s cameo appearance in Arrow.
Cora: “Besides, many of the Suicide Squad characters (except for Harley Quinn) have recently been seen in Arrow and those portrayals were pretty good.”
Unfortunately irrelevant. The DC TVU and the DC MovieU are completely separate, both in continuity and creatives. For example, the movie Flash will be a completely different actor and character from the tv Flash, save for whatever original character tropes the movie folk want to use that the TV folk also used.
Re: Dini and Timm getting control of the DC MovieU. Don’t forget that a third person who had a lot to do with JLU is no longer available. Namely the unfortunately deceased Dwayne McDuffie, who per Wikipedia wrote, produced, or story-edited 69 out of the 91 JLU episodes. And there’s plenty of other evidence as to Dwayne’s skills as both writer and editor.
@lurkertype Like I said, not to excuse anything.
I have looked, in vain, for an entry in the Pixel Scroll to which I could respectably attach my comment, so screw that.
Why didn’t anyone tell me that Richard Parks is utterly amazing? I have been binge reading his stuff ever since I stumbled over All the Gates of Hell, and I do feel that my fellow rank and filers could have pointed me in that direction.
Did I mention that he’s utterly amazing?
ETA
The comments re Burnsides actions are a truly fantastic demonstration: the perfect is the enemy of the good
I can tell you how it happens, because it’s happening with me right now.
Because Garland’s article is based on my city, my SF community. I know her, though distantly.
First things first: I BELIEVE HER. I believe the things happened that she said happened. All of them. The facts are true, and she has been treated horribly by this community, in some cases, for outing some of the facts. (That trial against her boss based on a customer sexually harassing her? That was in the news, and every article the papers wrote about it was very VERY don’t read the comments, but reading the comments is harder to resist, and vastly more disturbing when you see handles you think you know both defending her and attacking her.)
I also feel like parts of her article really are pushing the point, are painting the story as “yes, all men”, and I have to back up and look closer to see if that is reading her rage at what has happened to her as an attack on men I might well know.
I also know background details — which I have to remind myself, “That is not in the article, that is not WHAT SHE SAID here and now.”
You know how you read a newspaper about an event you witnessed, or their summary of a new scientific study where you actually read the whole thing? You know how those are often both close enough to right for the layman, and yet wrong in a couple of points you feel matter? I feel like that about what she wrote. because it is my community, and it did happen, and there is at least one person who has been frequently on concom I could just about believe would say something that awful to a rape victim.
— and yet. And yet I know the other side of the community, the times when they have done right by people who make complaints,done right by people in trouble, when they have stood up to defend. It’s hard seeing her pound – rightly – on the ways she has been failed repeatedly, mistreated, abused, and not want to say, “But there’s this other side…”
I know moments of her own behaviour which were far from perfect, and I have to reel myself back, because the fact that she treated person X (a woman) like crud about Y doesn’t matter when she is talking about Z, even though both are within the same community.
No answers. Just saying, I get it. I get why even the most eager ally sometimes fails. I get why it gets harder to see when it’s your own people, your own community.
Stevie: Any scroll you choose to tell us how amazing Richard Parks is works for me. Thanks for throwing a spotlight in that direction.
lurkertype: And bipolar is no excuse for being an asshole. It should lead to MORE compassion about other people’s psyches, not less.
One of the more bizarre, but common, human responses is for those who themselves have suffered to take the stance toward others experiencing similar things: “*I* got over / got through it, so you should be able to do that, too.”
@lurkertype
Good link to Hines. The connection to vets really made the point for me because of the first time I ever realized that a book or film could open up psychic wounds. Back in the mid-80s, Cal the Physicist and I were team-teaching “Science Fact and Science Fiction” at UMaryland and included A Clockwork Orange for a variety of reasons, mainly related to whether fictional portrayals of conditioning/behavior modification involved real or rubber science. We also showed the film to help students understand what was going on in the book, but one student fled the room early on. When I talked to her later, I was the one who learned a lesson. The student was an active-duty Marine and much tougher than puny nails, but she had been gang-raped in her teen years. She said what Liz said in the comments to Hines–she personally could take it IF she knew in time to prepare mentally, but when caught off guard, well . . .
So since then I try to warn students ahead of time when I am alert enough. I’m teaching Watchmen for the first time this fall; any suggestions on the best way to prepare students for that?
Ceci n’est pas une Pixel Rouleau
Yes, seriously. Look how the Puppies responded when Kary English and Eric Flint dared to speak up against the Puppy Party Doctrine.
And Chuck Gannon, and Juliette Wade, and on and on. The Pups responding with rage and vitriol when one of “their own” doesn’t toe the party line isn’t just a pattern, it is a very well-established, thus far universal pattern.
@JJ
We see this in language learning. “Immersion” (really “submersion”) works well for SOME people and SOME learning styles, but it fails for others (think “It’s sink or swim, Billy!” in Slaughterhouse Five). However, the ones who rail the loudest at those who struggle are those who DID succeed in swimming rather than sinking..
Rev. Bob on April 12, 2016 at 2:52 pm said:
Ah, ok. I misread ‘failure mode’ as just ‘failure’ . I see the point he was trying to make now. (Btw, where are these comments? I can only see about 10 or so, and no option to see more)
Tom Galloway on April 12, 2016 at 4:28 pm said:
The more I hear about Dwayne Mcduffie, the greater the sense of loss is.
@JJ: “My point is that it shouldn’t be feminists’ job to get men to speak up against inappropriate behavior in the first place.”
I disagree with that very strongly, but I’d agree if one word was different:
“Feminist” is neither limited to nor synonymous with “woman,” and I am all in favor of feminists of any gender encouraging each other to be bolder in objecting to sexism.
“We shouldn’t have to” is whiny, counterproductive bullshit. It’s an excuse for complaining to the choir instead of working toward the goal. The world is how it is; observing that reality exists does nothing to change it.
Sure, fine, the world should be perfect in every way… but it isn’t. The only way the situation improves is through hard work, and someone has to do it. If it’s our goal, it’s our job. We can complain about that reality all day long, but that effort would be better spent doing the job.
The fact is that some men are more apt to listen to other men than to women. This is not unique. Members of most groups generally prefer in-group messaging to out-group messaging. It’s human nature. Male feminists can get through to men that female feminists can’t reach; that’s the nature of sexism. That means they have a duty to do so, and sometimes all of us could use a reminder about living up to our duties.
ETA, @Stevie: “The comments re Burnsides actions are a truly fantastic demonstration: the perfect is the enemy of the good”
Now there’s something I’ll agree with you on.
@Aaron: “The Pups responding with rage and vitriol when one of “their own” doesn’t toe the party line isn’t just a pattern, it is a very well-established, thus far universal pattern.”
It’s almost as if they’re punishing speech that fails some test for political correctness…
re: Burnside
I think it’s important not to make the perfect the enemy of the good here. What Burnside wrote isn’t aimed at some of the serial abusers, the “smiling monsters.” It’s aimed at the people whose discomfort with making a scene, or confronting those monsters- to think of unpleasant truths – makes the social environment and norms where those monsters can hunt without consequence.
Burnsides intended audience, I think, are those who view that their social environment is fundamentally benign or benevolent. Burnside does a very good job of explaining about how that is not so, and that it is on them to make the smiling monsters who make it not a benevolent or benign place to feel the consequences. I think he is tuning for persuasion to those people who do not now think it is there problem, and explaining why they should act, more than he is tuning for accuracy.
Because Burnside’s article is not the accurate description a fully-fledged discussion of privilege would be. But that word doesn’t pop up much, because he knows his readership shuts down as soon as they hear that word uttered. Is that a sign that his audience may have a blinkered view of society, or a certain emotional immaturity? Certainly. But if he’s aiming to persuade, not accurately describe, and so he’ll pitch it to the sensibilities of his readers. It’s hard to persuade anyone who won’t sit still to listen.