(1) Digg has the best space images from the month of August. They are beauties.
As we tediously while away our days down here on Earth, satellites are zooming through space, snapping incredible pictures of Earth, the solar system and outer space. Here are the highlights from August.
(2) Answer just 4 questions, and the William Shakespeare’s Star Wars Sonnet Generator will create a unique 14-line love sonnet just for you!
What Is Lovely As A Summer Slate
Based on the William Shakespeare Star Wars series by Ian Doescher
When sorely press’d by Sith-like enemy,
I think on thee, and soon have no regret.
My heart is lock’d, yet thou dost hold the key,
Our lives are join’d in lovers’ sweet duet.
Let us unto Naboo, its shores of green,
There meet the call of passion at our best.
If thou wert droid, I’d love thee, though machine
If thou would claim mine heart, I’ll not protest.
Love, like a lightsaber, one’s heart can slay,
Love is the new-grown fruit sprung from the heart,
Love plunges one headlong into the fray,
Love is the canvas, passion is the art.
Let rivals come, who chase me at the rear,
Thou hast e’er been my solace, dear.
(3) Radio Times learned nothing from Christopher Eccleston about Doctor Who in a recent interview.
When asked if he’d been watching his successor Peter Capaldi onscreen recently, Christopher Eccleston replied in the negative – in a pretty big way.
“I never watched Doctor Who when I was a child,” he retorted. “I never watched MYSELF as Doctor Who!”
(4) Pat Cadigan on Facebook
After recent events in which Bryan Thomas Schmidt did a solid for both me and everyone else working on MACII, I’ve had some thoughts:
Whatever else happens on social media, on websites, in review columns, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I want a kinder, gentler worldcon.
Worldon is our annual gathering of the clans, not a field of combat. We go there to enjoy ourselves and to be among friends. For a few days, we get to hang out on Planet Science Fiction/Fantasy.
Worldcon is *not* a battlefield.
This is not to say that those with opposing perspectives can’t have a meaningful, even spirited dialog. But there’s a big difference between a heated discussion between people who feel strongly about their respective positions and gladiatorial combat in the Colisseum for the lurid amusement of people who didn’t even bother to show up and in fact never intended to.
I don’t care what your point of view is; I don’t even care if you don’t like *me*––you’re welcome at MACII and I will do nothing to make you feel like you aren’t. But worldcon isn’t a passive, static thing like a department store. Worldcon is interactive (worldcon was interactive before it was fashionable)––what you get out of if, for the most part, is what you put into it. If you go to the panels, check out the dealers’ room and the art show, meet some writers or artists or other pros at kaffeeklatsches, literary beers, or signings, go to the bid parties, and make a little effort to meet new people, you’ll have a great time…
(5) Can you tell this book by the cover?
https://twitter.com/andrhia/status/639482703772024832
(6) Tom Knighton gives his “Thoughts on Sad Puppies 4”.
For most people, the idea of tens of thousands voting for the Hugos should make you giddy. For us, it has added benefits of rendering any small group influence on the awards non-existent. No, our favorites may not win, but you know what? That’s life. What we want to see win is the stuff the actual fan–the people that [George R.R.] Martin may dismiss but who buy books by the truckload–actually reads.
While Martin doesn’t think it will add to the prestige of the award, more fans voting on them will do one thing from my perspective. We’ll start to see some books win that actually look interesting and then deliver on the inside. With the exception of Three Body Problem (which I haven’t read yet, so I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt), that hasn’t been the default position of the Hugos in some time.
(7) Spacefaring Kitten on Spacefaring, Extradimensional Happy Kittens – “My first (seven) reactions to the surprise announcement of Sad Puppies 4”
4 reasons to pet the Puppies:
- Tone
The Puppy organizers Kate Paulk, Sarah A. Hoyt and Amanda S. Green have written things that I consider stupid, hateful and obnoxious, but the Sad Puppies 4 announcement was phrased very un-obnoxiously. Civility is a nice thing.
- It’s not a slate, really
Listing more works than one can nominate for the Hugos and stating up front that one should read the stuff before suggesting it are good and play down the slate aspect.
- No more shady correct taste comissars
With Sad Puppies 3, Brad Torgersen had a somewhat similar nominee suggestion phase (that had humorously few participants). After that, though, he ditched most of the stuff people had suggested and went on with the things that were written by his chums. There will be no more of that, it seems.
- Focus on MOAR
The Puppy trio has promised to focus on participation instead of ideological screeds. It remains to be seen if that is a promise they are able to keep.
(8) Barry Deutsch – “Don’t Be Fooled – Kate Paulk’s Kinder, Gentler Sad Puppy Slate Is Still A Slate”
For instance, in 2012 (before the puppies), 611 Hugo voters turned in ballots for short stories. The most popular short story, E. Lily Yu’s amazing The Cartographer Wasps and the Anarchist Bees, was listed on only 72 of those 611 ballots (about 12%). At least 60% of those 611 ballots didn’t vote for any of the top five nominated stories.
And that’s fine. That’s how the Hugo nominations are designed to work. 611 Hugo voters, acting as individuals, each nominate whatever short stories they think are award-worthy. From that list of hundreds of short stories, the five most-nominated make it to the final ballot.
Unfortunately, it’s an easy system to game, as the Puppies have proven. If you can form a voting bloc of just 100 people who will nominate an agreed-upon list, instead of voting as individuals, that’s enough to completely overwhelm the much larger number of Hugo voters who are voting as individuals. 100 people voting for just 5 works will beat out 500 people voting from among hundreds of works.
(9) Philip Sandifer – “Weird Kitties: An Organized Anti-Slate For The 2016 Hugos”
The good news is that there are five thousand of us, united, if nothing else, by the facts that 1) We voted in the Hugos, and 2) We are not Puppies of any stripe. We are not a campaign. We are not a political movement. We are not playing some elaborate game of four-dimensional chess in order to topple Christendom. Indeed we, in the sense of “me and everyone reading this,” are not even all five thousand voters. But nevertheless, we are a bunch of fans defined by the simple fact that we’re eligible to nominate things for Hugos next year, and we’re not Vox Day’s pack of rabid dogs.
One of the most helpful things, then, would be if all five thousand of us nominated, and if we nominated a full ballot. Among us, we’ve got 25,000 open slots on our ballots in every category with which to push a work over the slate-busting threshold of 541. That’s doable, but it’s also hard. A lot of us, myself included, don’t identify five eligible Hugo-worthy items in every category in a normal year’s reading. In many categories, a lot of us don’t identify one. We don’t all have writing Winds of Winter to be distracted from, after all. And we could use some help.
So I’m creating Weird Kitties for exactly that. It’s going to be an ongoing conversation about awesome science fiction and fantasy that’s come out and is coming out in 2015, conducted for people who want to fill in their Hugo ballots with things they love.
(10) Camestros Felapton – “How big should the Hugo Awards”
What is the ideal number of people to vote on the Hugo Awards? I’d say it should be around whatever the number of people is that feel they can make a reasonable decision on the least popular story category (Novelette? I haven’t checked historically) – i.e. how many people are taking an active interest in SF/F Novelettes published in English in a given year. I don’t know what that number is but those are the interesting people. Why? Because they are people looking at newer writers and people doing interesting things and who are interested in trends etc.
(11) John C. Wright – “Hugo Controversy Quiz Questions”
Theodore Beale, who writes under the pen name Vox Day, joined us as an ally, but disagreed with the goals. He thought the award could not be salvaged and restored to its former glory; indeed, the only thing that could be done would be to force the politically-correctness faction (which he calls by the mocking title Social Justice Warriors, at one time their own name for themselves) to reveal their true purposes. His plan was to make it clear to any honest onlooker that the awards were being given out not based on merit, but due to politics. For this reason, he promoted his own slate of suggested works for his fans to read and vote upon, called the Rabid Puppies.
The Social Justice Warriors did in fact react precisely as Mr Beale predicted, and after the Sad Puppies unexpectedly swept several categories in the nominations, the SJWs used their superior numbers to vote NO AWARD into that category rather than give the award to whichever work was most worthy among the candidates.
This was done purely and openly for political reasons. The mask is torn. No honest onlooker can doubt the motive of the Social Justice Warriors at this point, or ponder whether the claims made by the Sad Puppies were true or false.
(12) Sarah Mirk of Bitch Media interviews Ann Vandermeer in “’Sisters of the Revolution’ Collects Powerful Feminist Sci-Fi”
I was wondering what you think of the “puppies” pushback to the Awards and what that reveal.
Well I have to say I was really excited at the people that won. The best novel category, I was very, very excited about that, because I know both the writer and the translator, so that was—I mean the way that I look at the outcome of the entire awards ceremony is it was showing you that science fiction is bigger than just the United States and the U.K. That’s how I felt. The science fiction community is definitely making that outreach into the wider world. When you think about the Hugos, what you’re looking at is a popularity contest in a sense because the awards are going to be voted on by the people that buy the memberships. It’s plain and simple. It’s not a juried award, there’s no judge, it’s just who’s voting and how they’re voting. So it’s just by the numbers. When you look at it that way, the thing that was really exciting to me is that this past year they had more than double the average number of people voting than they’ve had in the past. I think they had close to 6,000 people who voted.
Did more people turn out to vote because they’d heard about the controversy over the awards?
Well, I think people were getting more involved in the discussion. If you take a look at the numbers, and you look at the number of people who are actually members of World Con, every single person who signs up for a membership, whether it’s supporting or attending, can vote. So, typically, only half of the people that have memberships, vote. Only half. It’s kind of like when you take a look at our Presidential elections, what’s the percentage of people that vote? Not everybody. But we had so many people that actually voted. Now, here’s the good thing about that. It’s not true for every voter, I’m not naïve, but a lot of voters went in and read the stories, which to me is amazing. So a lot of those stories got a larger audience than they ever would.
(13) Didact’s Reach – “So what now, Hugo?”
The detailed statistics behind the awards results showed very clearly that the voters at WorldCon and Sasquan were perfectly willing to undermine the legitimacy of their own award process in order to keep out those that they don’t like. LTC Tom Kratman, John C. Wright, Steve Rsaza, a number of Baen authors, and Toni Weisskopf herself, were all denied awards that they richly deserved and should have won for their respective categories.
Yet, instead of even bothering to consider the alternatives, five different categories were given “No Award”. The Hugo and Nebula Awards were, essentially, reduced to a farce. And all because politics overruled etiquette, courtesy, wisdom, and good judgement.
The SJWs who currently control the nomination and award process have made it perfectly clear that they intend to amend the (already incomprehensible) rules for next year’s ballot in order to prevent a similar uprising from happening again. Good luck with that; I have every reason to think that the Sad Puppies leaders for next year, Amanda Green, Kate Paulk, and Sarah A. Hoyt, will simply adapt, react, and overcome in order to get works by actual skilled authors that fans actually might want to read up for nominations.
(14) Jed Hartman on Lorem Ipsum – “Why I love the Hugos”
I acknowledge that the system is contentious and complicated and initially confusing, and I’m sad that people feel excluded, because I want everyone who’s interested to feel like they can be part of it. In general, I feel like bringing more people into the process means that the awards are more valid, because they’re less likely to represent the views of only a few people.
And there’s a whole lot of room for expansion. Even though I agree that the financial barrier to entry is high, that’s certainly not the only issue, because every year a large percentage of the Worldcon members who are eligible to vote don’t do so. So it’s great that the nominating and voting numbers have been going up and up in recent years, but there are still a lot of people who could vote but don’t, and a lot of other people who want to but can’t.
But even so. Despite all of the system’s flaws; despite my eye-rolling when an MC yet again does the “I’m going to make this ceremony last as long as possible” schtick; despite occasional bad behavior on the part of an MC or a presenter or a nominee; despite my personal disappointment that the magazine I edited for twelve years hasn’t yet won one (I’ve wanted a Hugo since I was a kid); despite the sometimes-contentious arguing about what should be nominated and what should win; despite my dubiousness about making nominees sit there tensely waiting to find out whether they’ve won, and about the basic idea of declaring one particular work or person to be the “best” of the year; despite everything—the Hugos are important to me.
And I especially love the Hugo ceremony itself, in all its disparate parts. The pause to honor the people in our field who’ve died over the past year, as their names scroll by on the screen. The awards honoring contributions to fandom, like the Big Heart award. The occasional very entertaining MCs. The beautiful designs for the Hugo award base. The passing-along of the Campbell tiara. The delight of most of the winners. The sometimes gracious and sometimes funny and sometimes overwhelmed acceptance speeches. The rush to analyze the stats afterward. The whole thing, flaws and all. It’s one of my favorite things about Worldcon, which is (despite its flaws) one of my favorite conventions.
(15) Robert Bevan on Caverns and Creatures – “Hugo Loss (Sad Puppies Can Eat a Dick.)”
- What do the Sad Puppies see as the problem?
SJW, the all-too-often abbreviated form of the “Social Justice Warrior”. It’s most often used as a lazy means for bigots to dismiss opinions which differ from whatever they were told by their daddy/preacher/grand wizard.
Having said that, I will admit to being annoyed by people I perceive as SJWs (in the derogatory sense) as well. In fact, they were an entry in my Reviewers Who Can Eat a Dick post right up until the final edit. I ended up removing that entry because I felt it made me sound like a whiny asshole, and because it’s so hard to differentiate an actual advocate for social justice, which is something that I admire, from an obnoxious loudmouth who’s only interested in scoring sensitivity points by pretending to be offended by innocuous words. (If enough people read this, I’ll get a few comments calling me a misogynist, in spite of the SJW nature of this post, for using the phrase “Cry like little bitches.” in the above entry.)
The puppies’ stated problem was that these SJWs had already compromised the integrity of the Hugos by voting along the lines of authors’ race, gender, sexuality, or politics, rather than based on the quality of the actual books they were voting on. Books with “messages” and meaning were winning out over good old-fashioned fun space romps, like the kind Puppies like to write.
That last sentence is paraphrased from what I read on one of the puppies’ blogs. The implication seemed to be that their books were more deserving of a prestigious award specifically because they were devoid of anything important to say. By that metric, my books should be pulling in Hugos left and right.
(16) Vox Day declares:
John Scalzi can ban all the parodies he likes. The VFM [Vile Faceless Minions] will just publish more bestsellers. Strike one down and two pop right back up to the top of the category within 24 hours.
(17) Scalzi looked over the goods and said…
Jerk: HA THE EBOOK YOU GOT TAKEN DOWN IS BACK WITH A NEW TITLE
Me: (looks; title doesn't falsely accuse me of rape) that's fine.
Jerk: …— John Scalzi (@scalzi) September 3, 2015
(18) Kevin Standlee is working on a proposal to drop some Hugo categories and add others.
I think we’ve reached a point, in small steps, where a significant proportion of the Hugo Award electorate doesn’t know how to actually nominate in at least three categories, and at worst derides those categories because they think they are so complicated or need specialist knowledge that they’ll never have. This is not good for the health of the Hugo Awards. I therefore propose that we should delete three existing categories that people find confusing and unclear and replace them with three new categories that, while not perfectly defined (it’s difficult to define things completely air-tight), are at least more accessible and understandable to the people picking up the ballot or reading the results list.
Categories to Delete
- Best Semiprozine
- Best Editor Long Form
- Best Editor Short Form
Categories to Add
- Best Professional Magazine
- Best Anthology or Collection
- Best Publisher
(19) Andrew Porter writes:
Couldn’t get to Smokane? The smoke made it to the East Coast … by the middle of last week, according to this report. That explains the haze and pollution so many places on the East Coast have been experiencing.
[Thanks to Andrew Porter, Steven H Silver, Mark, Barry Deutsch and John King Tarpinian for some of these links. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day John Seavey.]
Discover more from File 770
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
Thinking about it more, if you trace backwards along cinematic and TV SF, you get Irwin Allen productions on TV, the axis of SF, adventure and horror movies of the 50s and 60s, and before that Republic serials. All of which closer match what the Puppies claim to want in SF
@NelC: The thing about social constructions is that they are social constructions. It takes more than one or even a few people saying “I am this” or “That means that” to make one.
There’s also this article, which might be interesting:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2009/20091130/lilly-a.shtml
(I haven’t read it yet; as it’s now 5265, and more than 3000 years past my bedtime, I think I might leave it for another day. Perhaps 2:41pm tomorrow?)
@buwaya
Actually, it is about the sort of people you imagine she imagines, which says so much about you…
> “Astra – Naomi Foyle”
Will also pick this up, which sounds like my kind of thing, and will definitely consider the other two. I’ve heard lots of good things about Lagoon, and the Loki one sounds interesting …
She’s clearly referencing JCW’s “tire iron and axe-handles” comments, so there is no doubt the story was aimed at him personally.
Well that, or the people “she imagines doing this” are the kind of violent bigots who perpetrate such crimes in real life.
” the Puppies have a stereotype in their head, not of who beats people up, but of what “SJWs” think about who beats people up. ”
Well, there you go. That’s it precisely. The reason for this is the last n years of being beaten up by the intelligentsia in media of every kind. It is all one with the overt hatred of the American common man, especially the white man. He is the villain of every piece, the butt of every joke, the slowest of the slow, the dumbest of the dumb, and the cause of all disasters. By this time the attack and the response seem reflexive.
I am a foreigner, so I see it with a certain distance.
This is not unique to America, but elsewhere it is less intense, less gendered, less racial, and somewhat more class-based. I.e., in America it is more a matter of culture than economic class, though there is a great deal of this also.
Swirsky is clearly telling us that people who hate someone enough to beat them up hate them enough to beat them up. This is unconscionable slander of people who hate someone enough to beat them up.
“Swirsky is clearly telling us that people who hate someone enough to beat them up hate them enough to beat them up. This is unconscionable slander of people who hate someone enough to beat them up.”
But after decades of OTHER people telling us who, precisely, are the people “who hate someone enough to beat them up “, certain conclusions are not just likely, but automatic.
We have reached full circle.
It is now a terrible sin to portray violent bigots in a negative light. Or, indeed, to suggest that such creatures even exist.
@Kyra
Oh dear I’ve caused you to buy more books now.
BTW Joanne Harris, the author of The Gospel of Loki, is the same Joanne Harris who wrote Chocolat. She has written a wide range of stuff though including other fantasy(ish) stuff and even a Doctor Who novella.
Buwaya, I believe Swirsky’s said she was deliberately non-specific about the attackers. I suppose one can argue that there are “dog whistles” she put there without being consciously aware of it, but I tend to take her at her word: all you can really say definitively is that they beat the victim up for not being like them. Who a reader envisions the attackers as says something not about her intent but about the reader’s worldview. Wright and Hoyt have concluded Swirsky is one of THEM, so she must intend the attackers to be LIKE US. If they really see that in the text, it’s because it’s reflecting their own baggage back at them.
“We have reached full circle.”
Indeed. Context is everything. Hey, did I just do a Derrida here ?
Fact is that in the current context of generalized hate and distrust, there is no “innocent” interpretation of a piece like this.
Ken Josenhans:
Oh, I remember that one. It was seen as so important that for a while, it was actually translated into a swedish edition around 1958 – 1960. I think my father has them all.
“If they really see that in the text, it’s because it’s reflecting their own baggage back at them.”
Everyone involved has baggage, Swirsky included. There are no innocents.
@Mike Glyer
Was it enlightening? Will it make the next round-up?
@Mike–yes, I was wondering about the other Cat too. I would like to compare notes with this new Cat on the question of which one of us should modify our handle, or whether we like being ambiguous in that regard…
In other news, I’m becoming curious too.
buwaya on September 4, 2015 at 3:03 pm said:
Okay, so we’re talking about a group that contains at least five people, who (at least when they have the advantage of numbers) use epithets indicating that they are hostile to certain races/ethnicities and also to homosexuals and people they suspect of being ambigious in gender–whether or not those epithets apply. They then go on to become violent and nearly kill someone they have been taunting. Okay.
How is she tarring a group of people who don’t deserve it?
Seriously.
Pretend I’m a bit slow and lay it out for me. Who and what *is* she talking about here?
“Who and what *is* she talking about here?”
The great American object of hatred of course – the working-class white man.
Context is everything.
So you believe that working class white men hate non-whites and homosexuals?
There’s some prejudice there, but it isn’t Rachel’s. Fortunately few working class white men are in any position to be harmed by your prejudice.
The Real World is a lot more complicated than that, though. South America has had just as diverse immigration as the US and Canada. Take the current pope: born, raised, and until he got his new job, lived in Argentina – but his family is Italian in origin. Or the former president of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, who like many Peruvians has Japanese ancestry. The problem with all these largely artificial classifications is that the human tendency to put stuff in boxes is at odds with the human tendency to mingle and change.
Getting back to the vicinity of a topic: I’ll add my recommendation for Old Venus – I miss the old days of swamps and dinosaurs.
“So you believe that working class white men hate non-whites and homosexuals?”
No, I believe that most liberal American writers hate working class white men.
I enter in evidence the last 40 years of American popular culture.
And, I will add, based on direct experience, the nature and subject of instruction in the public schools.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Gwen_Araujo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Paul_Broussard
To name three. When you’re drawing your sources from real life, I’m not sure “unfair tarring a group of people” is quite applicable here. (I also wonder how the people objecting to this story feel about the murder in IT, for example.)
Which isn’t to say that the wealthier people in the US aren’t just as bigoted. They just have more power structures with which to carry it out. And likewise, while I feel that the working-class *is* unfairly a subject of hatred and discrimination, I don’t think the fault of that is SJWs or their fiction.
Since there’s some reminiscing – when I grew up (in Germany in the 1970s), one of my first exposures to science fiction was through re-runs of Raumpatrouille – a German science fiction TV series from 1966, all 7 episodes of it (an hour each). You can watch them, with English-language subtitles, on Youtube. Prepare to be amazed by the plot, the hard science, the storytelling, the acting, the special effects including the aliens – and of course, the dancing.
Really, though, it is a cult classic and for me at least, immensely nostalgic and still eminently watchable,
But do I want all Science Fiction to be like that? Of course not – part of the whole point, for me, is that there is just so much more and indeed so much that explores in different directions – things that show me new things including about myself sometimes.
I thought you said you weren’t from the US? Apologies if I misunderstood.
Just when you think buwaya couldn’t get more bigoted, stupid, and venal, he exceeds even your lowest expectations.
@Camestros
Nice catch.
@buwaya
So your evidence that Rachel is spreading nasty lies about white working class men is….
not present in the text of the story at all.
Thought so. Enough said.
“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard”
Re this and etc. – you can find even worse things with which to drum up a panic in a less politically convenient direction.
In a country of 300 million, over a decade or two, you can find an example of enough to sell any message.
“And likewise, while I feel that the working-class *is* unfairly a subject of hatred and discrimination, I don’t think the fault of that is SJWs or their fiction.”
No, the white working class is and has been the object of a deliberate propaganda campaign that has become a fashion that is now self sustaining. I did not bring up S** btw. This is not just a matter of bleeding heart progressives.
I think I’d go by Estimated Batting Average.
That is, not the publisher that published my favorite book, but the publisher that had the highest ratio of cool stuff to clinkers by my highly-personal judgment. And I can’t say I’d read everything, I’d just go by impression.
There are years Night Shade Books would have gotten my vote…
“Just when you think buwaya couldn’t get more bigoted, stupid, and venal, he exceeds even your lowest expectations.”
Aaron, I value our warm little chats. I am however feeling a certain coolness just now. It it something I said ?
“I thought you said you weren’t from the US? Apologies if I misunderstood.”
I was born in the Philippines, raised there mainly, and partly in Spain,. moved to the US for the first time @30 years ago, now living here in the SF Bay Area permanently.
From Wikipedia:
I thought I remembered “gin” being used idiomatically that way.
I’d recommend one of her short story collections, JIGS & REELS, as a great sampling of her work.
The story “Gastronomicon” alone is worth the cover price.
On JCW:
He writes, for a different audience: “The point of Literature is not merely to instruct the young in the due and proper emotional reactions to natural affections,”
While on his blog he says ““Those who would seek to instruct the young or promote a political philosophy by means of story telling are prostituting its original purpose.”
Didn’t you notice a powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity in this room?
Was the Dinosaur bar located on Hogarth’s Gin Lane by any chance?
Now, see, me, I see a 35 year campaign, that began under St. Ronald Reagan, of the monied class systematically DESTROYING the working class white (and others) man by carrying out the destruction of their unions, and shipping their jobs overseas to China, among other places. That pretty much gutted the middle class. For 35 years, the monied class has taken every last penny of wealth produced by the working class for themselves as rentiers. Go look at a graph of productivity vs. median wages (adjusted for inflation.) IF you don’t see the relationship, you are being as willfully blind as the people who claim to see Rachel Swirsky calling out white working class men instead of people who think killing the ‘other’ is a good thing to do.
So, sorry, buddy. Not worried about a few hurt fee fees over a story, when real economic murder has been committed.
“I thought I remembered “gin” being used idiomatically that way.”
It came from Britain in the 18th century when gin was the cheap distilled liquor of the times – see Hogarth, “Gin Lane”. This is however very obsolete, and probably has been since the late 19th century.
The cheap distilled liquor of these times is vodka. Don’t ask me how I know.
wink wink nudge nudge, say no more.
From Rachel Swirsky’s If You Were a Python, My Love, presumably.
Got to watch out for those Eric Idles.
(I’m from the year 8689. Woo!)
@Cat:
Indeed. So, so much projection, that entire careers in the cinema industry beckon.
@Lin McAllister:
I’ve always had a soft spot for the Liberator of Chile, Bernardo O’Higgins.
I know a (tall, blonde, fair) friend in Los Angeles who was born and raised in Bolivia by Danish missionary parents speaking Spanish as her first language (English much later, Danish never much). In consequence, she thinks of herself as an ex-pat Boliviana. She says she always writes ‘Hispanic’ on census and similar forms, considering it the term best applicable to her. Identity is often complex.
“of the monied class systematically DESTROYING the working class white”
Would it surprise you if I agree with you ?
It did not begin with Reagan, but you aren’t very far off.
Its not just their income that must be destroyed, but their self-confidence, their self-worth, their culture, their morals, their trust, their discipline, their enterprise, their initiative, their unity, all the “moral” matters (in the French military sense).
Swirsky is just piling on, as any fashion conscious member of the intelligentsia must.
Her piece is trivial in context, it is just a handy example for the last controversy. But there is an amazing inability to connect the dots in some circles.
Okay, I’ll spot you the gin. That’s just…weird, right? We working-class southern white men do not drink gin. Cheerfully conceded, is what I’m saying here.
But I mean, come on. Five men surround a guy, call him a fag and a she-male, and then beat him down with pool cues? That sounds so much like me and my buddies that you could have them wearing clown shoes and speaking Klingon and we’d still know it’s us.
It’s just got to be.
So…shame on you, I guess?
Jack Lint — I certainly played Starforce quite a bit, even solo. I found the 3D movement different to anything else around at the time, and very enjoyable to wrap my head around. It was certainly a great deal easier to comprehend than, say, the height levels and manoeuvres in SPI’s later Air War (where you kept track of several aircrafts’ height, attitude, energy, fuel, ammo, stores and whatnot on one of the most horrible counter tracks ever designed; the whole game was like the Chinese Room version of Microsoft Flight Simulator).
I also enjoyed Starsoldier, Outreach, and BattleFleet Mars, all of which I found had acceptable levels of science fiction-ess in their mechanics. The one most like a conventional game, I thought, was the galactic-scale Outreach, which was so large in scale (something like a thousand light years per hex, IIRC) that the abstract mechanics could have worked equally well for a Roman empire game of some sort. Except the Roman empire game wouldn’t have had that gorgeous map.
As a dog returneth to its vomit, so the fool returns to his folly.
Funny-sounding sort of a saying, anyway — though I’ve never owned a dog, so who knows, maybe this is an actual canine habit. (If so, I am glad I have never owned a dog…)
—
No library system within a few hundred miles of me has got a copy of “Lagoon”, and anyway the interlibrary loan system doesn’t allow requests of books published within the last seven months — and it’s going by the publish date of the particular edition you’re requesting, so of course as a US resident that’s the US edition. According to my calendar reminder telling me that it’ll be requestable come the ides of January, that means… it was published June this year? July?
Doubt Swirsky was trying to drum up a panic, but the Shepard story was big in popular consciousness, as was Brandon Teena’s. Drawing from those two is not an unreasonable thing.
No, the white working class is and has been the object of a deliberate propaganda campaign that has become a fashion that is now self sustaining. Er, citation needed.
Unless you’re theorizing that this is a SECRET propaganda campaign. Started by the reptile men in order to…something.
Otherwise, what TechGrrl 1972 says. There is certainly a campaign against the working class, but it’s people in the upper-class saying that they’re deadbeats and layabouts and why don’t they take better jobs. Otherwise, I’m going to need to see some evidence, not just handwaving and outrage.
And if you mean the Homer Simpson/Tim Taylor/etc type of character…well, the kyriarchy hurts everyone.
There’s that whole Gin and Juice thing the kids are always singing about.
In the words of Evan Dorkin’s Milk and Cheese, Gin makes a man mean.
Meredith: It’s a pointer for people interested in BS, which accounts for the traffic. Not anything substantive in itself.
We played the hell out of “SPI’s later Air War ”
Made our own new plane cards and everything.
It also had a UFO IIRC.
@Cat:
As live-in staff for the feline faction, I can testify that this would seem suitably cat-like. (Just reached the bit in The Rhesus Chart where Bob Howard gets emphatically adopted at the door to the Laundry by a stray black cat and is ‘leaving the hairy grifter to Trish’s tender mercies’.)
Air War – I remember watching two experienced SPI gamers do a simple training flight that took most of an evening. On the plus side, I vaguely remember a scenario where you got to attack some sort of kaiju.
To pull this back to SFF, SPI put out a game called Sword and Sorcery. It was mainly forgettable, but had a strange sense of humor. One character was called X the Unknown and I think there was another who was Algorithm who was son of Logarithm or vice versa. I believe X the Unknown could summon forth 60 foot electrical penguins. I would say it was very much of its time.
The Real World is a lot more complicated than that, though.
My parents had a foreign student renting a room one year. Chinese-ancestry, from Panama. (And one year my parents went to a wedding, where the bride’s family was from Mississippi. Chinese with a Southern accent: they were told by the groom’s side (their hosts) that it was hard to understand.)