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

1. Commenting from BayCon with Charon egging me on to claim first.

2. Clickity

3. Heather was trying to get me to go for fifth but I’m too impatient.

4. Oh, Gardner…

5. (6) THE LATE ALAN BEAN.

   What a wonderful story! Some of Bean’s paintings can be seen here. Unsurprisingly, they are full of color.

6. Second fifth?

   The Wiscon thing makes me very sad, especially since I think I know and like the person who said the terrible things. I don’t really know how to process this. People are hard to deal with, y’all.

7. click!

8. Double-click!

9. (1) Good for Wiscon to react so quickly.

   However, I’m very unsure about the practice of cons publishing information on CoC violations, especially such detailed ones as this and before the entire issue has reached a resolution. If a con-wide notice is needed, there should be better ways to do so than putting it all over the Internet.

   (3) Sad to hear that. He will be missed.

10. Karl-Johan Norén: However, I’m very unsure about the practice of cons publishing information on CoC violations, especially such detailed ones as this and before the entire issue has reached a resolution. If a con-wide notice is needed, there should be better ways to do so than putting it all over the Internet.

    How would you recommend doing so, such that it would reach all attendees? Because I’m imagining trying to do that at Worldcon, and I don’t think it can be done. Once people have gone through Registration, there is no way to ensure that every member can be reached with a message. Wiscon has a responsibility to provide a healthy environment to their members, as well as to communicate with their members that they recognize this responsibility and are acting on it.

    I’m sure that they publicized it as well as they could at the con, but they also posted it on their website and on Twitter, where the issue was being seen by a larger audience. In the absence of that, it would have appeared to everyone on Twitter that they were not even acknowledging the situation, much less doing something about it. Ignoring it on Twitter would not have been a good way to handle it.

11. FYI Mike, in reference to “waiting for a witness,” another panelist names names in a blog post here:

    https://nicasioandresreed.com/2018/05/28/a-quick-mid-wiscon-post/

12. Karl-Johan Norén: However, I’m very unsure about the practice of cons publishing information on CoC violations, especially such detailed ones as this and before the entire issue has reached a resolution. If a con-wide notice is needed, there should be better ways to do so than putting it all over the Internet.

    Seems fair to me. If there is behaviour that will get you banned then they need to be open. Entirely fair not to name the individual unless there’s a compelling reason to warm others.

13. (1) Nicasio Reed, one of the panelists, have posted a blog post about the incident and names Lisa Freitag:
    https://nicasioandresreed.com/2018/05/28/a-quick-mid-wiscon-post/
    Reed also apologize for not being firm and quick enough in responding, a task that apparently fell to an audience member.

    (Mike, you ask “Please do not add your speculation about the person’s identity in comments. […]I’m waiting for a witness, or the con, to name the person.”
    – I hope this counts as referring to a witness and not as speculation – but feel free to edit my comment if you disagree.)

14. edit: Ninja’d never mind.

15. The relevant passage from the Code of Conduct is here…

    I’m not disputing that the panellist behaved inappropriately, but this seems a rather broad application of the term ‘harassment’.

16. @JJ on (1): First, I’m going to ask if there is an urgent need for a public (as in con-wide notice). I doubt there was in this case. At Loncon 3 there was an incident with a panelist, and there programme ops was out in force to greet all the people leaving the room, and grab the responsible party as soon as he exited. That strikes me as a better way to handle in-programming incidents. Here, Wiscon put out an Internet-wide notice without even having talked with all the principals.

    Second, at-con they likely have access to things like the hotel PA system, the con newsletter, and possibly the Grenadine app that can be used to push out information.

    Third, and perhaps most important, I question the need for information like this to be public. Code of Conduct violations are largely a safety issue, and making a big public splash is something that is decidedly unsafe. Sometimes, it’s necessary, but it should be the exception, not the rule.

17. (3) I devoured many a Dozois-edited anthology over the years, especially when I was a teenager during the nineties and they were my main source of short speculative fiction. He will be sorely missed.

18. (3) DOZOIS OBIT. Condolences to his family and friends! 🙁

    (8) FOLLOW ME BOYS. The first few hits for “freestrtr” are for JDA and File 770 and there are barely any results for it. Ah, it looks like it’s FreeStartr. with an “a” hidden in there. FYI, @Mike Glyer. (JDA has the same spelling.)

    Anyway, that platform appears to be home to real winners. ::eyeroll:: Like Beale!

19. @rob_matic: Yeah, the definition of harassment they use in their Code of Conduct is very unusual (perhaps unique).

    (Perhaps they should label the section “Harassment and Oppression” instead of “Harassment.”)

20. Karl-Johan Norén: I’m going to ask if there is an urgent need for a public (as in con-wide notice)

    There were a lot of people upset immediately after the panel. How was the con supposed to contact these people and reassure them that their concerns were being addressed?

    Karl-Johan Norén: At Loncon 3 there was an incident with a panelist, and there programme ops was out in force to greet all the people leaving the room, and grab the responsible party as soon as he exited. That strikes me as a better way to handle in-programming incidents.

    Sure, but that assumes that the con’s IRT was informed while the panel was in progress, and was able to get together outside the panel room in time. Do you know whether this was the case?

    Karl-Johan Norén: the con newsletter, and possibly the Grenadine app that can be used to push out information

    Neither of these is going to get anywhere close to all of the con attendees. A lot of people won’t be picking up the con newsletter, and a lot of people won’t be using the Grenadine app.

    Karl-Johan Norén: the hotel PA system

    I don’t know how European hotels are set up, but this would almost certainly not be workable for a U.S. hotel for several reasons, including disrupting panels in progress, disrupting other conventions/organizations in the same building, not being of good enough quality to be intelligible, not audible to people with hearing impairments, and making a huge fuss right in the face of the panelist in question before they have been spoken with. Not to mention missing the people who had fled back to their hotel rooms.

    The bottom line is that the con needed to reassure members that the incident was being taken seriously and addressed, and silence on social media would have led people to believe exactly the opposite. I think that Wiscon handled this the best that they could, under the circumstances.

21. Kendall: Perhaps they should label the section “Harassment and Oppression”

    Or possibly Harassment and Creating a Hostile Con Environment.

22. Checking in from what has been an excellent WisCon but is now a sad one, as no one seems to know exactly what has happened, but everyone has heard from people who have heard from other people that some things were said on a panel that got someone banned. I myself haven’t yet talked to anyone who had actually attended the panel.

    My concern is that WisCon may have acted too quickly. From what they said on their own blog, upon receiving a complaint they immediately banned the individual, but as of an hour or more later still hadn’t talked to them about the incident. Shouldn’t they have talked to the person before deciding on or announcing the ban?

    I think we are still just in the early days of these codes of conduct, that we have years to go of sometimes reacting correctly and sometimes incorrectly, of acting too soon or too late, of (hopefully) learning from each experience. But I think it will be quite a while before we can be confident that we are dealing with these incidents satisfactorily.

    And, of course, everyone is sad about Gardner. Saladin Ahmed didn’t know the news until it was announced immediately prior to him giving his guest of honor speech, so he had to take a moment before he began. (He, co-GoH Tananarive Due, and Tiptree winner Virginia Bergin all gave excellent talks.)

23. (1) COC INCIDENT.

    I think there’s an inherent tension between “we want to reach everybody harmed by this incident so they know it’s been taken care of” and “we want to minimize the impact of this incident”. Both are important, but each intrudes upon the other.

    I, like probably literally everybody else on the internet, have Opinions, but my most firmly-held Opinion here is to grant the convention my trust first, and let them do their thing. When we know more, then, maybe, I’ll have Opinions to offer.

    Or, maybe this is the last we’ll hear about it, no further information or lawyering will be forthcoming, and the matter will end here, as far as we know. If that winds up being the case, then by damn I will get to my feet and applaud.

24. I am puzzled by the idea that somebody needs to empathise with X group because they are their ancestors. No, you just have to keep firmly in mind that they are human beings, and as such respect is due to them, including not killing them gleefully, unneccessarily, or cruelly. Not because they are your blood, but because they are human beings. Bad human beings, but human beings none the less.

    Indeed that was the problem with Nazi and Confederate ideology to start with: that they only considered some people fully human. And they both started terrible wars and it was necessary to kill a large number of them, which is regrettable but not as regrettable as the systematic dehumanisation of people they preached and practiced and would have gone on to preach and practice if they had won.

    More generally, this idea that you have to, or you find easier to, empathise with people who are similar to you, in looks or ethnicity or nationality, I have always found deeply disturbing.

25. Goodbye, Gardner. I first met you when you were working on Asimov’s with George Scithers, in Philadelphia, and we’ve been saying hello, nodding at each other and passing by each other in hotel hallways and lobbys ever since. Hope to see you on the Riverworld some day. Family and closer friends, my condolences.

    (To say this sucks is an understatement.)

26. Standback on May 28, 2018 at 2:53 am said:

    (1) COC INCIDENT.

    I, like probably literally everybody else on the internet, have Opinions, but my most firmly-held Opinion here is to grant the convention my trust first, and let them do their thing. When we know more, then, maybe, I’ll have Opinions to offer.

    You are very wise Standback.

27. I wondered why the topics (triage/lifeboat ethics and Confederates/Nazis) came up on the panel, but, on consideration, on a panel about the question as to whether there are any acceptable targets/victims it is conceivable that they would be relevant.

28. @Anna: In certain segments of Southern US culture, there’s something approaching an ancestor cult, such that even people who know me well will tentatively ask how I feel about some new discovery in my genealogy research. (Most recently, it was finding my Dad’s grandfather was part of an irregular cavalry unit in the American Civil War. I think I was expected to be depressed over it.)

29. @Stewart: After reading the livetweeting thread someone linked to in the previous scroll, I think it was initially in context of the Wolfenstein games.

30. @Rail (and Anna): “In certain segments of Southern US culture, there’s something approaching an ancestor cult”

    A few years back, I was in an all-day training held by my very liberal religion, in which we were all supposed to think about who we came from, where we came from, our ancestors and all that. I’m usually bemused by this sort of thing*, being adopted and having no people**, but this time, I started thinking.

    As I took this workshop in, trying my best to get what was good from it (there was some), I kept thinking what a gift we were giving white nationalists.

    There’s been a rise in academic study of white Southern culture in the last twenty or so years. Some of it is solid scholarship and some of it is just polite cover for neo-Confederate ideology.*** Now I’d just experienced a model which would work wonders to justify oppressive elements of Southern culture.

    There’s a corrective force to this line of thought, but it needs to correct, not dominate.

    *It might seem identitarian. I heard it as the second-in-command in “No Truce with Kings” arguing for feudalism and the clan system. This line of thought has a greater force in the South than most might think, where feudalism still prospers. The North**** has more advanced, and to my mind mostly less horrible, ways of exploitation.
    **I’m obviously from the South, if I think like that.
    ***Thinking about the existence of solid scholarship which functions as cover for racist ideology is the sort of thing that drives me to drink, and the sun is just barely up.
    ****Here at the end I’m tacking on the observation that quite a few Northerners get all warm and runny about being a Son or Daughter of the American Revolution, or about tracking their ancestry back to the Mayflower. Southern culture is worse with the ancestor worship, sure, but the North has its own version.

31. @John A. Arkansawyer: adoptee here too (with tons of search time put in yeilding no results…def. a “gray market”, if not a “black market” baby).

    My ancestral cultures are all guesses: I could be Wold-Newton family, Howard Family, a Carter cousin, though most likely just a mutt. This aspect of personal identity is forever lost to me, and mystifies me, because when it comes right down to it, no one is beholden to any of it.

32. @6: that’s an impressive story.

    @10: I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that some people at CERN thought the web-as-planned was a distraction; not everyone gets that most of science is building the tools, not running the experiments. (There may also have been a touch of NIH syndrome: “What can random people from elsewhere contribute beyond the hundreds we have working here?”) OTOH, one wonders how much time at CERN is “lost” to websurfing. (This can be argued; most people have limits to how long they can usefully spend hammering on a problem without some sort of break.)

    @11: I’m not sure that’s ATom-specific — I think a number of artists had done very stylized/simplified drawings by then — but it does tell a bitter story; I’m reminded of Jubal Harshaw saying “Once [an editor] pisses on something he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.”

33. @steve davidson: I know the circumstances of my conception and adoption. They aren’t uninteresting, but they have very little to do with who I am today.

    Just being adopted, that has a lot to do with who I am.

    My friend Jim and I were talking outside his office one day and I mentioned being adopted. Something about me clicked in his head–I could hear it in his words–and he said that I and Bill (a writer whose office was right next to his) and Frank (a writer who was dead) had adoption in common. That our Romantic view of life came from it.

    I think there’s some truth there, in my case.

34. @John A Arkansawyer:

    I’m obviously from the South, if I think like that.

    Well met, fellow Southern adoptee. It’s an … interesting … place to observe this culture from.

    Here at the end I’m tacking on the observation that quite a few Northerners get all warm and runny about being a Son or Daughter of the American Revolution, or about tracking their ancestry back to the Mayflower. Southern culture is worse with the ancestor worship, sure, but the North has its own version.

    I’ve seen this among genealogists,* but lack the, hmm, proper sample size and composition to comment on anything more than a few Southern subcultures.

    *The people manning the NEGHS booth at a recent NGS convention were stunned that I was researching three separate Colonial-descent trees — my husband’s, my adoptive, and my genetic — and none of them had any New England connections. I offered them my genetic link to the Jamestown Society in compensation….

35. @steve davidson: DNA. Seriously. I’m not the only adoptee who went into DNA testing, found enough information to settle that hole in my cultural identity, and have never initiated contact with my birth families. The ones that have approached me think the search is tremendously exciting, but they have the same itch to solve these puzzles.

36. (8) I will say this for PLA: he’s putting his money where his mouth is, by choice. That speaks persuasively for him acting on actual conviction rather than putting on a dishonest show as a marketing stunt. He’s still acting on and reasoning from false postulates, mind – but actions like this put him more in the “rube” than “liar” category. Tragic, in a way.

    As for WisCon’s panel: many role-playing gamers raised on D&D are well acquainted with “the orc problem.” It gets even worse when one realizes that the game includes mechanisms for objectively determining whether a being is Good, Evil, or neutral… and that they can label a genocidal paladin as Good while condemning a peaceful orc as Evil. In this respect, White Wolf’s later morality system was a big step forward, especially when it branched out from the original “Humanity” stat to allow alternate ethical paths based on other philosophical positions.

    The issue is certainly worth discussing, and sometimes that can mean asking uncomfortable questions to expose and thereby examine unspoken assumptions. There’s a valid place for that; someone needs to be willing to question the unquestionable. Forbidding such inquiry can be dangerous, and I think specifically here of how oppressive regimes forbid conscientious people from questioning an official stance which paints the oppressed as less than human. (See Trump’s recent references to Mexicans as “animals” to justify his administration’s oppression of people who are fleeing tyrannical regimes.)

    The key is to know how to read one’s audience, properly and reasonably articulate such a train of thought, always be clear that understanding or empathizing with motives does not excuse or forgive deeds, and fer the luvva god know when to shut up and back off. Whatever intellectual merit your position may have, if the audience is unreceptive, articulating it is a waste of time at best.

    I speak in the abstract, in case there’s any doubt. Wasn’t at WisCon, don’t have a transcript of remarks, can’t possibly speak with knowledge on what the offending panelist did or did not say or do. With that in mind, and having consumed a lot of fiction (books, games, movies, et al.) where hordes of anonymous Nazis were used in the same way that the LotR movies used hordes of CGI orcs… yeah, I can certainly understand how questioning the use of orcs as uniformly evil can (even should) lead to at least mentioning the parallel case of Nazis in Castle Wolfenstein and other fictional works. (Alternatively, see “Hogan’s Heroes” – both as a show and behind the scenes. The show’s Nazis were opponents, but still people.) It’s an uncomfortable situation, where the existence of a real-world oppressive regime intersects with their troops’ dehumanization in fiction, and that’s worth examining.

    It’s also worth noting that an hour-long panel at an SF con is almost certainly not the right place for that examination. Such a discussion requires nuance and depth that simply cannot be adequately shoehorned into such a limited space, especially as a branch of a larger panel topic.

    Finally, lest anyone be less than clear on this: I am in no way sympathetic to the Nazi cause, to the defense of slavery, or to any other such ideology which stipulates that one group of people is less “human” than another. I’m only saying that if one wishes to examine the phenomenon of depersoning groups of people as “subhuman,” one should also be willing to look into a mirror and examine one’s own biases in the process. To do otherwise gets uncomfortably close to the “my beliefs aren’t politics, but merely common sense” blind spot.

37. Bear in mind Wiscon has reason to want to be seen dealing swiftly with harassment issues, to show they’ve learned something from the Frenkel clusterfuck.

38. @Anna

    I am puzzled by the idea that somebody needs to empathise with X group because they are their ancestors. No, you just have to keep firmly in mind that they are human beings, and as such respect is due to them, including not killing them gleefully, unneccessarily, or cruelly. Not because they are your blood, but because they are human beings. Bad human beings, but human beings none the less.

    As a person of German nationality, I do find it offensive that with very few exceptions (e.g. Nightcrawler and Maverick from the X-Men), Germans are only ever shown as villains, usually disposable villains at that, in international popular culture. And not just where having German villains makes sense, e.g. in WWII settings, but everywhere. For example, I don’t have a problem with Raiders of the Lost Ark or Captain America: The First Avenger, because their German villains (mostly played by non-German actors) make sense for the setting and period. I don’t mind the Wolfenstein games either, because I don’t expect a whole lot of nuance from videogames anyway.

    However, I was unexpectedly infuriated by a scene in Captain America: Civil War, where the German elite police force GSG-9 tried to apprehend Bucky and Bucky and Cap beat them up and probably kill several of them and then steal their helicopter, too. Now in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, made by the same directors, there is a scene where Nick Fury is surrounded and attacked by fake cops. The dialogue makes it very clear that these cops are fake and working for Hydra and indeed Fury makes sure they are fake before fighting back. Because American films, particularly those aimed at an all ages audience such as the Marvel movies, very rarely show the good guys beating up, let alone killing American police officers. However, the directors saw no problems treating contemporary German police officers, who were only doing their jobs (because Bucky, though a victim, was dangerous) as disposable cannon fodder. I was surprised how much this scene infuriated me, especially since I’m quite critical of the GSG-9.

    The film Atomic Blonde has a similar scene with Charlize Theron’s character beating up and probably killing a bunch of West German police officers. Not even GSG-9, but regular police officers. They didn’t even use East German uniforms, which would have made sense for a Cold War setting, but regular West German police uniforms that were still in use until maybe ten years ago.

    Using people of any nationality only as disposable villains is always problematic, whether it’s Germans, US Southerners, Arabs and Muslims in general, Serbs in the 1990s and early 2000s, Russians during the Cold War and even afterwards (the evil Russian mobster is an updated take on the evil Russian KGB agent), Italians who are always portrayed as mafiosi, Mexicans who are inevitably drug dealers, Irish people who are inevitably terrorists in certain British works, etc… The TV show Spooks was particularly bad ebout this, which was a pity, because they took great care to give us nuanced Muslim characters, but every Irish person who showed up was always an IRA terrorist.

    So if this was what the WisCon panelist wanted to say, then she might have had a point (and I wasn’t there, so I have no idea what was really said or how offensive it was). Of course, not treating certain ethnic groups as disposable villains doesn’t mean you should empathise with actual Nazis and slaveholders or that you shouldn’t have Nazi and Confederate villains, just that making your villain a member of group X, because people of group X are always villains, is lazy storytelling.

39. My dad was adopted. It’s a bit of a weird situation because he knows his family of origin (that’s why I have a double surname), in fact he was adopted by his eldest, married, sister.

    The thing is, the man he called father all his life, and I called grandfather, never wavered in his belief and knowledge that my father was his son. He was a man of towering integrity, intellect and humanity. We have no ties of blood with him, but we are his descendants, or we aim to be.

    I come from peasant stock, and peasants that stayed put at that: however, the rest of the world came. All Italy is pretty much like that, with the exception of two genetic islands in Tuscany and Sardenia who have managed somehow to maintain their genetic homogeniety. All the rest of us are mongrel. Wave after wave of immigration, some voluntary, some not, came and left traces, from Hannibal onwards, including at one point some White Russians.

    Of course, in my own family we have had people who fought on two sides in WWII (although to be honest only one of my uncles was on the side of the Salo Republic). And plenty of people from the South could and have fought on the Union’s side.

40. As a long-time friend of Lisa Freitag, I’m appalled by WisCon’s treatment of her. What happened to F.J. Bergmann was bad enough, but this ill-considered at-con ban is just abuse of a harassment policy to punish people for voicing uncomfortable thoughts. A convention founded on feminist principles should know better than that.

41. @Cora

    As a person of German nationality, I do find it offensive that with very few exceptions (e.g. Nightcrawler and Maverick from the X-Men), Germans are only ever shown as villains, usually disposable villains at that, in international popular culture.

    That was one of the reasons I hated, hated Wonder Woman. That and the way it trivialises war, as do most American entertainments but in this case it was WWI, which was fought on and around my home town and about which I know a lot – including the fact that my grandfather, who fought in it, had things to say about what war does to the human spirit, and he didn’t mean the enemy.

42. David W: With the caveat I was not there, it seems to me the guiding sin Is the usual one that leads troubling actions to become bannable offenses; being asked to stop, and refusing.

43. @Rev. Bob: I suspect there was some preparation for someone in the audience to try to shift the discussion to an apologetic, but not coming from a panelist.

    @James Davis Nicoll: That was also my first thought. Wiscon already had experience in where and how fast gossip about a problem gets disseminated, and they jumped into those conversations immediately.

44. The Orc problem is interesting right from the start in Tolkien. The heroes engage in light hearted orc-killing contests, yet now and then we get flashes that the orcs are enslaved people.

    Tolkien once wrote to Christopher:

    In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels. But it does make some difference who are your captains and whether they are orc-like per se!

45. I was afraid Wonder Woman was going to be appalling in this sense, swapping WW1 for WW2 but leaving the Germans as cartoon villains.

    But I think they used that expectation instead to set up a switch and teach WW that things are not that simple.

46. I’m not sure huge fan of Wonder Woman either for much the same reasons. They did try to inject some nuance at the end by showing all soldiers as victims of Ares, but it was too little too late. I also hate that they used a real historical person, General Ludendorff, as a villain. Especially since Ludendorff survived WWI.

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

47. @ John A, steve d, Rail: Another adoptee here who just Doesn’t Get It. And my mother’s family* is from the Deep South.

    @ Rail: I’m considering going the DNA route; it can’t be any worse than some of the stuff already in my family background.**

    * My policy is that unmarked relationship terms refer to my adoptive family, the only family I have ever known. If I’m talking about my bio-family, I specify that. This is deliberate pushback against the common notion that adoptive families aren’t “REAL families”.

    ** My maternal grandfather was the sheriff of Giles County in Tennessee in the 1920s. Given their family social position, there’s an excellent chance that he was a member of the KKK, and that there might be some slaveholders a generation or two prior to him.

48. Wiscon also let the issue drag on for years because they had no system to deal with harassment aside from flappy handed academic-style ineptitude.

49. More than 20 years ago, me and a friend did a WWII tour in Czechia and East + West Gernany. We visited concentration camps (Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen), massacre sites (Fünfeichen), firebombed cities (Pforzheim and Dresden). We did interviews with old germans about the massacres and their view. It was hard to see these men and women sometimes start to cry, for the first time talking about rapes, murder and imprisonment under brutal conditions to people who would listen.

    The germans were humans, just as everyone else. Some of them were even good people, even though they were nazis. Read about John Rabe sometime.

    US is in a cultural war now, so I understand the reaction, but if what Lisa Freitag tried to was to stop the dehumanisation of Germans who fought during WWII, then I say good done.

    Charlottesville nazis? They are more aking to germans who worked in deathcamps. Them I have a hard time to not dehumanise myself.

50. @Rail: I think in the North, ancestor-tracing is more of an elite sport. Everyone plays in the South. Staring at me from inside eight boxes just to my right are the eyes of maybe a thousand different people, mostly relatives and relations on my mom’s side. God knows who most of them are. I mean, my mom didn’t, or they’d all be marked.

    If there’s a horror story waiting to happen in my life, mark my words, it’s going to involve those damn boxes.

    Damned if I keep ’em, damned if I dump ’em. The latter outrages my conscience, so.

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