81 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 5/27/17 She’s A Pixel Queen, Dynamite With A Laser Beam, Guaranteed To Scroll Your Mind”

1. (7) WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

   I would have loved to have seen that; both Leckie and Hurley are incredibly clever and witty. I hope someone recorded it.

2. (14) PUPPY REDUX.

   Ho hum. Another sad, pathetic attempt to retcon the Puppy movement to a “reeeeely, it was all about the books” faux narrative. 🙄

3. (1) SLATOFF’S NEW COMMISSION.

   If anyone is interested in reading more about this (as I was), check the following links:

   It’s Time to Honor, It’s Time to Remember: Enduring Heroes

   Families win fight for Pasadena’s Defenders Parkway sculpture honoring slain soldiers

4. [tick]

5. Yeah, I have to say, (7) piqued my interest. Pity they had to spoil such a profound and serious topic with what the photo seems to indicate was intemperate laughter.

   Especially without me getting to hear what they just said.

6. (15) Does he really think that the traditional literature studied in humanities departments wasn’t political?

7. Aaron on May 27, 2017 at 9:48 pm said:
   I have to assume he somehow got all the way through school without meeting Shakespeare or Dickens, the first two that I thought of.

8. Also, “Center for Academic Renewal” sounds like the kind of euphemism a totalitarian regime would come up with.

9. (14) I suppose one could argue that Chris Chan is trying to make the Sad Puppies seem reasonable by so far only talking about the works from 2013. I wonder how he will justify the Sad Puppy slate, much less the Rabid Puppies.

10. Nope, no art was ever political until today. All that older art? It’s just about dead people, and all those dead kings and ministers and presidents have nothing to do with politics! 😀

11. Woohoo, I contributed a scroll title!

    I am contemplating whether to head out for more Baycon parties … or continue to chill in my room watching a Samurai Jack marathon.

12. [popcorn tick]

13. (3) Isn’t a transgender character not cisgender?

    (14) This again, really?

    (15) This again, really?

    …back to trying to catch up with series and etc..

14. [8] …buh? I’ve seen the Kinder Joy eggs at 7-11 stores around the SFBA for at least a year. Was this a test market before it goes nationwide or something?

15. [15] The “James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal” is the academic equivalent of the Sad Puppies, calling for education guided by “the principles that have traditionally guided public policy in the United States: limits on government; freedom to pursue goals through voluntary means, both for-profit and nonprofit; accountability through private property rights; and the belief that competition is an excellent regulating force”.

16. (7) (Hi Sanna!) While the panels of Swecons have been recorded regularly for the last few years, a sudden transition in the recording team and technical issues in the large program room meant that we’ve only been recording in one of the smaller programme rooms.

    (14) Oy vey.

17. @Charon! I keep missing you! Hope to see you tomorrow; I think the Royal Manticorean Navy and I KNOW the OPA/Ceres/Expanse bar will party again tomorrow night, as will Worldcon San Jose.

    I got a ribbon promoting something called “Alpennia”, has anyone here ever heard of it? 🙂

18. (15) GRAPHIC EXAMPLES.

    I don’t get it. Where’s the problem?

19. @Hampus, clearly, whippersnappers who read graphic novels will then be emboldened to not get off this guy’s lawn.

20. @7 sounds like the sort of thing that can be fun if the panelists are good at it (and I know Leckie is good, but I haven’t seen Hurley live). Now we just need “How to Write White Characters”, to be followed by “How to Write Straight Characters”, “How to Write Cis Characters”, … I wonder whether someone has done such a panel before; I remember Brust running a very entertaining “Writing Fantasy for Adults” in 1993.s

    @15: all you need to know about the JGM Center for Academic “Freedom” comes from Google; the first thing after the name in the top cite is “Academic Freedom in the Age of Political Correctness”. Sounds more like “Academic Correctness in the Age of Political Freedom” to me, even if that isn’t fully accurate either.

21. 15. A. this trend has been on-going since at least the late 70s; By my sophomore year, my university was already allowing me to take masters level courses in English because they’d gutted the English department in favor of their business school; business majors only had to make it through “English 101” (a string of words followed by a period is called a sentence and is made up of several parts…Yes, imagine that, there are many words that are spelled the same but that have different meanings…for the next month I will attempt to explain allegory to you…but since none of you read, why am I bothering…)
    Also, at some time around the same time, I noticed that our local McDonalds had replaced their traditional cash registers with electronic monstrosities that had a whole bank of pictograms – small fry, medium fry, large fry, big mag, fish-whatever – so that the illiterate could work the damn thing. It was at that point (largely coinciding with the release of Star Wars) that I determined western civilization was doomed….

    I like graphic novels, but the kinds of courses described above are not being offered to advanced literature students, they’re being offered as a way for the illiterate business students to satisfy their core requirement for English without having to really read. A good professor will undoubtedly be able to entice a handful of students into reading more (without pictures) but professors at those schools should be asking themselves whether or not their department’s budgets have been shrinking year to year…they could end up deciding that English lit is not part of what they do anymore, just like my alma mater.

22. @Bruce A. he’s not. he has carefully elided all of the anti-puppy stuff; that piece is designed to make pups seem completely reasonable and everyone else a crazed jackass? Why do those stupid fans keep trying to keep good literature out of their own award?

23. @Chip: I’d say it’s more like “Reactionary Correctness in the Age of Academic Freedom.”
    ***
    (3) CRITICAL OMISSION.

    and a Bay Area transgender woman. […]
    And yet…

    Not a single genderqueer person anywhere.

    Is it just me, or does this seem a little weird? What is it I’m missing here?

    ***
    (7) WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
    I see that Leckie and Hurley was also on a worldbuilding panel with Siri Pettersen. I’ll take the opportunity to plug her Raven Rings trilogy, starting with Odin’s Child. Norse myth-inspired fantasy, slightly YA-ish but not quite. I don’t think they’ve been published in English, but they’ve been translated to several other languages and I recommend them for those who find them in a language they understand.

    ***

    and re (4): The “guman”? (I’ll pour myself a drink.)

24. 14) Fella has missed a memo somewhere if he’s trying to be sympathetic to pups: Hugo voters aren’t a mass of people nominating super popular works, we’re a top secret cabal of quasi-literary snoots with a vendetta against white male mediocrity who are heartlessly spurning the favoured texts of the common man-fan. It’s the Dragons which are bringing awards back to the people and rewarding extremely popular and deserving indie authors like Bran Nuttynugs through the votes of seven millionty unique Con attendees. Do keep up!

25. It seems a bit ridiculous to me that a person would appear on a panel at a convention or similar event and ask not to be quoted on social media. This isn’t a dinner party attended by friends at which discretion is normally expected. It’s a public gathering of people who paid money to see people speak.

    Expecting social media users not to share a provocative or thoughtful comment they heard at a public conference is asking a lot.

    Asking for no tweets has little chance of being honored if something controversial occurs. If Dave Truesdale began his trainwreck Worldcon panel with that request, I still expect that attendees would’ve talked about it as the controversy bloomed on Twitter and elsewhere.

26. Is it just me, or does this seem a little weird? What is it I’m missing here?

    If I understand correctly, their complaint is that Nomi is transgender, but she still identifies as female – one of the two gender binaries. They are using the term “genderqueer” to refer to people who don’t identify as either male or female. It seems like a really picky complaint to me.

27. @rcade: I agree that it’s weird–I think the primary argument for this policy is that it appears to be an academic conference for its own members to present their research (hence the line about “might be ready for a conference audience but not ready for The World At Large”). From their website, it looks like non-ICA members can attend, but they pay at least twice as much as members do.

    For SF/F conventions that are open to the public, this policy would be extra-weird.

28. @Lurker I meant to go to parties like a real extrovert (honest) but Samurai Jack met this girl, and they battled their way past thousands of spiky venomous slugs, but then she turned out to be the daughter of … spoiler.

    I am involved in a fierce bidding war over a painting of a little baby jackalope so you might encounter me in the art room.

29. *LOVE LOVE LOVE* for the title!

    And via Jim Hines: a Meredith moment! All four of Octavia Butler’s Patternist series for $1.70 on Kindle (probably only US):

    https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008HALOVO?ie=UTF8&tag=jchines-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B008HALOVO

30. @rcade

    “Expecting social media users not to share a provocative or thoughtful comment they heard at a public conference is asking a lot.”

    (6) TO TWEET OR NOT TO TWEET.

    I find it to be a perfectly reasonable request, by a guest panelist. Especially in this day and age.

    I have attended author readings at conventions where an author is reading a rough draft sample chapter from their highly anticipated next book. The author might be expecting to make changes to that book between that moment and the publication of the book. But that guest author/panelist is choosing to share a piece of what they have written so far with the individuals sitting in that room and that room only. Not the whole world. The rest of the world is not paying membership fees to that convention, and therefore they may or may not be entitled to that content.

    I do not use twitter, but in the past I have been guilty of calling and or emailing friends and fellow fans, with the news of unknown revelations in an author’s ongoing series. I will have to be more mindful about doing that in the future.

31. robinareid on May 28, 2017 at 9:27 am said:
    $2.99 at Kobo.

32. @Steve Davidson: It’s clear that Chris Chan is trying to make the Sad Puppies the victims of the story, as the only people quoted in the opinion piece are the leaders of the Sad Puppies. I just wonder how he’ll be able to make them seem reasonable or relevant after Vox Day hijacked their cause to promote his publishing house.

33. For the UK crowd: The Handmaid’s Tale is starting tonight, C4, 9pm. Apologies if this is obvious but as I rarely watch live TV I hadn’t seen the trailers for it before.

34. @Kathodus

    (3) Isn’t a transgender character not cisgender?

    What Aaron said. Also, have a look at the sidebar in Reddit’s /r/transgender forum which explains why they largely avoid the term “transgender.”

    I’m still trying to get a handle on the whole “nonbinary” thing. So far, I’ve found several views on it:

    1) Some female-to-male transsexuals find that if they take the hormones and skip the surgery, they can get 90% of the benefit. That is, the dysphoria mostly goes away. Since the result is a person with breasts and facial hair, these folks really are nonbinary by any reasonable definition. I’ve met two so far, both were very nice, and on the pronoun issue, they both told me to pick whatever made me comfortable. These are the only self-identified nonbinary people I’ve spoken to in person.

    2) I had a very pleasant chat on Reddit with an intersexed person who considered him/herself nonbinary. The person told me that he/she felt alienated from the intersex community, which as a whole fiercely resents being told they have indeterminate gender (although it varies somewhat with the type of intersexuality). We discussed the possibility that you can be intersexed and transsexual. Regardless, even if they’re very rare, intersexed people who claim to be nonbinary also have a pretty solid case.

    3) Science fiction writers have tried to take the term literally, with very imaginative results (especially in the pronoun department). In this respect, the writer in (3) displays his/her ignorance of SF/F–probably thinks solely in terms of dramatic presentation, not writing.

    4) A few friends (all gay men) have told me “it’s a style, not an identity–like being a goth.” In this view, anyone can be nonbinary for an evening, and it’s a fun thing but of no consequence. (I didn’t ask about pronouns; I was afraid I’d get “your highness.”) 🙂

    5) It is a big fad among young lesbians at the moment to call themselves nonbinary. A lesbian writer friend told me “there aren’t any young lesbians anymore. Even my wife insists she’s nonbinary.” These seem to be the only people who really care about pronouns.

    I haven’t found any gay men who identify themselves as nonbinary yet, although I’ve asked around. It might have something to do with the fact that most guys (even gay ones) are extremely upset with anything that implies we’re “not real men.” To my ears, calling yourself “nonbinary” sounds too close to agreeing with what our tormentors have said about us all along.

    The author does make an excellent point right at the end of the article. The LGBT community really has pushed hard for people to “act normal,” and in the process we’ve unquestionably left some folks behind. We’ve also quasi-legitimized the persecution of “sissy boys and tomboy girls”–straight or gay–and that’s clearly wrong. It should come as no surprise that there are a lot of folks who feel oppressed by the tyranny of gender expectations, and the first step to freeing yourself from oppression is to stop oppressing yourself. “I’m not a defective man/woman–I’m a normal nonbinary person” makes a lot of sense to me in that context.

    Truthfully, I’m not convinced at all that nonbinary is the right term for anything but cases 1 and 2 above. (Well, some of 3 is pretty clever.) But #5 does speak to a real problem–a real injustice–that needs to be addressed. I just don’t think it’s going to be done with pronouns.

    So, given all that, I would guess that the complaint in the Advocate article is that the show should include a very mannish lesbian (a “tomboy”) who insists on a nonbinary pronoun.

35. The rest of the world is not paying membership fees to that convention, and therefore they may or may not be entitled to that content.

    I’m a big believer in the principle that we own our life experiences and the right to tell them.

    A person who attends a public event is entitled to share details of the experience. I think it’s reasonable to ask people not to film or record the event, because sharing it in full would likely be a violation of copyright, but requesting that no one quote or paraphase anything is too much.

    (I’m speaking in general. There are exceptions where secrecy is a more fair request. My wife has attended conferences where victims of child sex abuse are the speakers.)

    Before you stop sharing juicy details with your friends about author events, consider that a lot of authors want fans to discuss their work on social media and elsewhere.

    P.s. Are details still “juicy”? Seeing those words together seems weirdly out of date, like I just called something the “bee’s knees.”

36. (14) PUPPY REDUX
    Here’s my history of the Puppies:

    Come and listen to a story of a man named Ted
    A poor editor, barely kept his ilk in dread
    Then one day he was typing at his blog
    When up through the ether come a Whimpering Dog.
    Puppies, that is
    Sad ones

    Well the next thing you know Ted wants him an award
    Wants to get himself a Hugo, wants to get himself adored.
    Said that the Worldcon is the place he oughta crash
    So he loaded up the ballot and he went to make a splash.
    Rocket ships
    More than Scalzi…

    [This one was so easy to write I can’t believe no one’s ever used this song before. If they have and I missed it — or worse, I subconsciously remembered it — my deepest apologies.]

37. 15) The Martin Center is a bit late to the party. Not that I’m a big fan of wedging comics/graphic novels into the literature curriculum, but this outfit has an agenda that marries skills to values in a familiar way–one suspects that the works of art they would prefer, that “truly challenge [students’] minds and strengthen their ability to reason,” would align with the rest of their conservative/libertarian value-set. (Would they prefer a sure-enough text-only reading list consisting of, say, Dickens, Jack London, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman, Pohl & Kornbluth, Grace Paley. . . ? One suspects not.)

    On the other hand: Challenges to the old, pre-1960s canon started while I was in grad school (in the 1960s), and as refreshing and broadening as they have been, not all of them have been good for the discipline, especially as belts have tightened and university resources for the humanities have decreased. (I guarantee that as budgets shrink, less-demanding and more “fun” courses drive out more difficult ones*.) I realize that many F770 participants are comics/graphic-novel enthusiasts, but I have to say that the skills required for understanding them are distinct from those needed to get through a complex and/or historically-culturally distant text. And by “historically-culturally distant,” I mean, say, All Quiet on the Western Front, which is part of my wife’s current course.

    * There are economies of effort as well as of money. Requirements protect students from their own avoidance-of-effort. Every English major needs a course in linguistics, but few want to take one. Required courses and core-curriculum systems are the basic-training equivalents of the academy.

38. Lisa Goldtsein: Incredible!

    http://www.lerctr.org/~transit/healy/brilliant.wav

39. @Lisa Goldstein – Well done!

    @Greg – Re: transgender – dammit! I was thinking transsexual is the word to avoid.

    I figured the author was making a point about non-binary as opposed to cis/trans, but then they specifically called out Sense 8 for having only cisgender characters. Maybe a mistake missed in editing?

    In the SF Bay Area I’ve begun seeing people who I suspect identify as non-binary. It’s something I’d never considered before in other than a theoretical way. I’m sure gender essentialists would disagree, but there’s something really cool about seeing people who just don’t care at all about gender, and adopt whatever signifiers they feel like. I’m sure it’s much easier to do here, but I hope it quickly spreads.

40. The concept of ownership of ideas or content is inherently immoral, a restriction of the freedom of those who become aware of them. So even asking for your words not to be shared is sketchy, and no one should feel obligated to honor such a request.

41. @kathodus

    I figured the author was making a point about non-binary as opposed to cis/trans, but then they specifically called out Sense 8 for having only cisgender characters. Maybe a mistake missed in editing?

    Oh, yeah. That had to have been an editing error. I think what’s missing is a good word for people who adhere to a binary sexual identity. I propose “orthosexual.” (And instead of “queer,” I propose “metasexual,” which seems to be a cool word that’s really crying out for someone to use it.) 🙂

    In the SF Bay Area I’ve begun seeing people who I suspect identify as non-binary. It’s something I’d never considered before in other than a theoretical way. I’m sure gender essentialists would disagree, but there’s something really cool about seeing people who just don’t care at all about gender, and adopt whatever signifiers they feel like. I’m sure it’s much easier to do here, but I hope it quickly spreads.

    I think we need to let people feel free to be who they really are and not be ashamed of that. I think most people will always be “orthosexual,” but there’s nothing wrong with that as long as they don’t denigrate the people who aren’t. By the same token, though, it isn’t reasonable to demand that everyone try to be “metasexual,” which is what I hear some people demanding.

42. Its not about ownership of ideas, its about controlling what will be done with your own work. Its also about the rights on your own picture and not everyone wants to be immortalized in the internet, at least not as a shaky image.
    TBS I agree its one thing to honour a guests wishes in these respects (for example because he wants to share an early draft of a novel or wants to break some contract signing news to his most devoted fans) , but another to completly ban all tweets.

43. There is an enormous difference between feeling oppressed by the tyranny of gender expectations (as most of us do from time to time) and actually feeling that one is being incorrectly identified. I went through a brief period of saying I wanted to be a boy when I was ten or eleven. I really, really don’t think it was the same experience as people who have genuine gender dysphoria, nor the same as that of people who really don’t care about gender and get tired of being told they should. I just didn’t want to be the KIND of girl people seemed to want me to be, and the only other option I knew of was boy, so. (I mistakenly thought that boys were under less pressure to conform than girls. Cue mirthless laughter.)

    I also found puberty painful and confusing, to the point where I really wished I wasn’t growing breasts. But the reason I didn’t want them was because they hurt and itched and attracted unwelcome attention — not because I felt that I wasn’t the sort of person who would have breasts. Anyone would have hated them under those circumstances. That wasn’t gender dysphoria, any more than it’s dysphoria to feel a great distaste for one’s nose during a particularly annoying cold.

    Now I would say of myself that I identify quite strongly as a cis woman, and figure that I am as good an example of such as anyone, so whatever I happen to like may ipso facto be considered feminine (as far as that term has any meaning at all).

    It bothers me to hear of people’s stated gender being called a “fad.” Sure, there may be cultural pressures involved, but it’s still for the person themselves to say. People get to figure these things out themselves, in dialogue with what ideas happen to be current.

44. Disclaimer: I’m cisgender, and basing this on what some of my friends have told me, and things I’ve read elsewhere. If anyone nonbinary weighs in here, please pay attention to their lived experience, but it’s not their job to come over here and educate us.

    The people I know, or know of, who identify as nonbinary do care about gender. There is variation in how important gender is to people’s identity, but that’s a separate matter from whether a person is trans* or cis. I know both cis and trans* people whose gender is more important to them than mine is to me.

    * Some nonbinary people feel that both “female” and “male” are as wrong to describe them as “male” would be for me, because they are neither women nor men. As far as I know, people are still working on words for that gender (or genders).

    * Some nonbinary people find that their experienced gender varies: they might be/feel female one day, male another, and somewhere in between on a third.

    * I have at least one online acquaintance who is agender, meaning they have no gender.

    All of those things are, at least for now, grouped under the trans* umbrella, but there are differences between an AMAB (assigned male at birth) trans* woman and an AMAB genderqueer person (who is neither a woman nor a man).

45. “The concept of ownership of ideas or content is inherently immoral, a restriction of the freedom of those who become aware of them. So even asking for your words not to be shared is sketchy, and no one should feel obligated to honor such a request.”

    Nah, it is an agreement. If I say to you that I will talk to you if you do not record it, then it is your choice to agree or not. If you do not, I will not talk to you. My right to choose to whom I speak and under what conditions has been preserved. As has yours regarding to accept such an agreement or not.

46. Update on Vlad-kitteh:

    I have learned that I have to have ultraintensive play time with him at least three times a day of 15 minutes each or he will be an utter terror. To give the other cat a bit of peace, I will put Vlad into his own room for nap time, so the other cat can roam free in hos own home without feeling harassed. They seem to accept each other mostly (with some hissing when kitteh is to enthusiastic).

    Otherwise it is the sweetest of kittehs, sleeping beside me, constantly purring and constantly killing everything within reach.

47. Its also about the rights on your own picture and not everyone wants to be immortalized in the internet, at least not as a shaky image.

    I don’t think we own the rights to a picture taken of us in a public place. The photographer does. But the photographer can’t sell the photo without our permission because we have publicity rights in our likeness. At least in some states. The whole thing is confusing.

    I always want to take pictures of convention panels and author appearances I attend but never do it.

    Looking back, I wish I had because I’d have photos of Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Scott McLeod, Jim Woodring and the many other greats who came through Dallas for the Fantasy Fair when it hosted the Harvey Awards in the 1980s and 1990s.

    Some of my favorite photos on File 770 are the ones from conventions of yore.

48. @Hampus
    If I say to you that I will talk to you if you do not record it, then it is your choice to agree or not. If you do not, I will not talk to you. My right to choose to whom I speak and under what conditions has been preserved. As has yours regarding to accept such an agreement or not.

    But is it appropriate for a person on a panel at a convention to enforce these sorts of limitations at the beginning of a panel? Some attendees have expectations of being able to live-tweet, etc., and that may have been the historical norm. If panel members want to change that norm, doing it by decree at the start of the panel seems heavy-handed. I’m not saying it can’t or shouldn’t happen at all, but the process of getting there should somehow allow for attendees to consider that when deciding to go to the con, and when deciding which activities to participate in once there.

    And yesterday was Dashiell Hammett’s birthday, something I wish I had realized when talking about the Maltese Falcon earlier in the week.

49. “But is it appropriate for a person on a panel at a convention to enforce these sorts of limitations at the beginning of a panel? “

    Maybe, maybe not? I absolutely think so for persons harassed by gamergate as an example. If people have expectations that a panel can’t fulfill, they can skip that panel.

    Should no panels have existed before twitter? To tweet on social media is hardly a matter of life and death. If you are interested in a panel, you should survive without twitter for a while. The historical norm is that twitter didn’t exist until 10 years ago.

50. The historical norm is that twitter didn’t exist until 10 years ago.

    Twitter isn’t really the issue. A panelist who objects to being discussed by others could have made the same complaint about MySpace in 2007, AOL groups in 1997 or CompuServe forums in 1987.

    I covered a Dallas Fantasy Fair in the late 1980s for Comics Buyer’s Guide and caught hell from some pros because I quoted what they said during panels. Neither my editor Maggie Thompson nor I thought there was an expectation of privacy in what you say to a crowd at a con.

    If people have expectations that a panel can’t fulfill, they can skip that panel.

    The same goes for panelist expectations, doesn’t it? Any audience today is full of social media users. If a panelist believes that a no-tweet policy can be upheld, I think they are setting themselves up for disappointment if the panel becomes controversial. They shouldn’t say anything that they wouldn’t want to see go viral.

    It seems easier to me that we accept the norm: Things we say and do at public events might be talked about on social media.

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