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Posts Tagged ‘linkage’

link dump

Two more on gun control:

American gun owners are under siege

The Second Amendment and the fantasy of revolution

Several on gender:

Kickstarter project for another Gamers movie (which is going into this category because of this update)

Rundown on the Readercon debacle

Finding That a “Dynamic” Pose is Defined by Gender (comic books, and not surprising, but the redraws really help hammer the point home)

Victoria’s Secret vs. Dove (a very striking contrast)

Just Another Princess Movie (an interesting analysis of Brave, that says it is not just another princess movie)

Awesome photos:

Imgur set

National Geographic set

Music humour:

“Early one day, a C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar . . .”

The truth about oboes

And now my browser can stop weeping for mercy.

another Clockwork Phoenix update

The Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter project has hit the first of its stretch goals. It’s less than $1400 away from the second stretch goal, with nine days to reach that target.

I can’t say anything in encouragement without it being kind of self-serving. The purpose of the stretch goals is to let Mike Allen (time_shark) pay the authors more money for their stories; if the project brings in $8000, he can pay five cents a word, which is the baseline professional rate. Since I intend to send him a story, I have a vested interest in seeing the project hit that target. But it’s broader than that, I promise you: the CP anthologies have been really good, and are the sort of thing for which authors in general deserve to be paid professional rates.

Mike has added a variety of new reward packages, so even if you’ve already pledged, you might want to check it out and see if there’s anything else you want. And if you haven’t, now is a dandy time to start.

Gun control

Sure, let’s go ahead and play with fire. I trust my readers to be civil to one another in the comments.

***

I simply cannot. understand. the state of gun laws in this country, and the direction they’re headed in. That people think private gun ownership should be legal, yes; that people think civilians ought to be able to walk around with a semi-automatic rifle, no. That you should be able to go hunting, yes; that you should be able to carry a concealed handgun anywhere you like, no.

And yet our current progress is toward less regulation of guns, not more.

I’ve seen the usual pro-gun arguments, and very few of them make sense to me. Hunting! Do you need an AR-15 to kill a deer? Defending my home! How many lives have been saved by shooting the intruder, and how many have been lost due to those guns being put to another purpose? If only somebody in that theater had been armed, they could have stopped Holmes! It’s a nice fantasy, but do you really think one or more civilians shooting in a darkened, panic- and smoke-filled, chaotic room — against a guy in body armor — would have resulted in fewer deaths, rather than more?

I could go on. Even if we ban guns, criminals will still find ways to get them. So this means we shouldn’t try to regulate them, to keep an eye on who’s buying what, and to keep the really dangerous things out of the hands of people without black market connections? People will still kill each other, just with different weapons. Weapons that can’t easily take out their victims in mass quantities; I’d call that an improvement. You’re far more likely to die in a car accident than from a gunshot! True, and I’m also in favor of improving automobile safety, as well as regulating guns.

But treating those two as equivalent is nonsense. Cars serve an absolutely vital purpose in our society that has nothing to do with inflicting violence on others. If we banned motor vehicles, this entire house of cards we call a country would fall down. Furthermore, there’s a balance point between minimizing risk and the costs thereof, and it’s hard to decide where that should fall. Most people agree that making cars incapable of going over twenty miles an hour would be an unacceptable cost, no matter how many lives it would save. We make calculations like this all the time, even if we don’t like to admit it.

But right now, we’re saying — as a society — that this is an acceptable cost for gun rights. So are this, and this, and this. And a bunch of this, though I can’t find a list that just covers the United States. And we’re saying that minimizing that risk would cost more than we’re willing to pay. That waiting periods, background checks, mandatory training, prohibitions against carrying a concealed handgun in particular places, bans on weapons that serve no purpose but to slaughter large numbers of people at high speed — those would take away something so precious that it’s worth the lives of all those people.

We’ll ban costumes at movie theaters instead. Because we all know that guns don’t kill people; people wearing costumes do. (With guns.)

And yeah, yeah, Second Amendment! This post is a very rational assessment of that, and I agree with a lot of what it says (including the follow-up). Our private gun ownership laws, in their current condition, are not providing us with “a well regulated militia,” nor are they contributing to “the security of a free state.” Quite the opposite, I’d say.

Mind you, I do agree with the guns versus cars post that we’re doing a terrible job of promoting solutions. Those of us who favor gun control need to find new tactics, a way to change the conversation to one the NRA hasn’t already won. I don’t know how to do that — but I do know we need to actually talk about it, and not just mouth platitudes about tragedy and then go our way as if Aurora was no more preventable than an earthquake.

I do take comfort from the statistics that say gun violence has actually declined in recent decades, and so has gun ownership. That’s good to hear. But when smallpox deaths declined, we didn’t celebrate that and stop there; we went ahead and eradicated the disease completely. Do I think we can eradicate gun violence? Of course not. But we can do better, and should.

Monday assortment

Belatedly, I am over at SF Novelists again this month, posting about why failure is good for you.

Also belatedly, I am in another Mind Meld at SF Signal, this one on the topic of monarchies in fantasy.

Clockwork Phoenix 4 is a go! Now it’s a matter of hitting the stretch goals. $6500 will allow Mike Allen to pay contributors four cents a word (instead of three); $8000 will allow him to pay five cents a word, which is the baseline for professional rates in science fiction and fantasy. There are still sixteen days in which to make those happen . . . .

Gorgeous sculptural book art by Guy Laramee. I think the first is my favorite — that hidden canyon.

Really clever designs for Avengers-inspired evening gowns. Not just the major heroes, either: it hits Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Coulson, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, though I had to go hunting to find Loki separately. (Full group shot here.)

Clockwork Phoenix 4 . . . ?

I’d like to take a break from fielding comments on my last post to announce something very exciting:

Clockwork Phoenix 4.

Or rather, a Kickstarter campaign for it. You may recall the first three Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, all three of which I was very pleased to have a story in. The anthologies did quite well, in terms of both recognition and sales . . . but Norilana Books, the publisher, has fallen on hard times due to non-business-related issues, and can’t do a fourth. Since the small press is a very precarious world — and anthologies are even more precarious — Kickstarter is the best way to go about continuing the series.

As you can tell by the fact that I’ve been in all three books so far, I really like the CP anthologies, and would love to see them continue. (Full disclosure: yes, of course I intend to submit something. And given my track record so far, I have high hopes of success.) So take a look at the project page, and if you see anything you like in the rewards, pledge a few bucks. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we can make this happen.

Forgot to mention

This month’s SF Novelists post went up on a weekend, and then I forgot to mention it in the rush to get ready for Fourth Street. But the wonderful thing about the Internet is, the post is still there, just waiting for you to read it! Exceptions are the rule.

Comment over there; no login required; first-time commenters will be slightly delayed while I fish them out of the moderation queue.

update on the New Tarot

I have to admit, it warms the cockles of my heart that in the day or so after I posted about my friend’s Kickstarter Project for the “New Tarot,” it gained something like seven hundred dollars in pledges. I have no way of knowing how much of that was due to my post, but given that it had been semi-stalled for a little while before then, I’d like to think I had something to do with the boost.

Which is why I’m bringing it up again. See, the project has not reached its funding goal. There are six days to go, and it needs a little less than two grand to cross the line. It would be sad to see the thing come so very close and then fall short, so I thought I’d post a reminder, and encourage you all to spread the word to other people who might be interested. I’d like to see this one hit its mark.

more tarot coolness

I’ve been meaning to post this one for a while: another friend of mine is also doing a tarot-oriented Kickstarter Project, for a “sequel” of sorts to the traditional deck. I have to say, I find the approach of this one rather shiny:

The Major Arcana of the Tarot proper are often understood as the way-stations of a “Fool’s Journey” towards self-knowledge and self-mastery. The Major Arcana of the New Tarot are meant to encapsulate a second and more outward-focused leg of that journey, in which the newly enlightened Fool steps out into the world to explore and to make his dreams a reality.

I especially like the new suits and their meaning. It’s a fascinating act of symbol-creation, that really makes the ears of my inner folklorist perk up.

The project is over halfway to its goal, but still has some distance to go, with eleven days left. Head on over and take a look. As with the Urban Tarot, you can lend your visage to a card, or pick from a variety of other rewards. Help get this one over the line!

Two reminders

1) The first of teleidoplex‘s costume auctions are ending soon — like, in about six hours. (Others have a bit longer to run.) Take a look, bid while you can, help her go to Clarion West!

2) I’m reading at SF in SF tomorrow night, with Ysabeau Wilce and Erin Hoffman. Hope to see some of you there!

This month at SF Novelists

I missed posting last month, for which I am kicking myself. (I also missed last December. Other than those two occasions, I have posted every single month since August of 2007. Whoa.)

But I’m back this month, with a new bit of musing on “The Effect She Can Have.” Usual drill: comment there, not here, no registration required, but have patience if you’re a first-time commenter and your words get delayed in the moderation queue.

Costume sale! For a good cause!

My friend teleidoplex has won herself a place in Clarion West, which is totally awesome.

But Clarion, regardless of direction, is kind of expensive — and that is not so awesome.

But! You can be awesome and help!

In addition to being a writer of much talent, teleidoplex is a veteran costumer. (In fact, she’s one of the people that infected me with the costuming bug when I started LARPing.) And she’s created an eBay store to sell off some of her hoard of outfits, wigs, shoes, and more, with proceeds going toward paying her way to Clarion. Some of the stuff is very costume-y; other stuff is perfectly legitimate street clothing. I heartily encourage you all (at least, all of you with a use for women’s clothing) to browse through it and see if there’s anything you might be interested in.

And if you don’t want stuff, but do want to help her out, there’s a donation button on her website, where you can chip in directly.

If a picture is worth a thousand words . . . .

. . . then we’re nearing a novel’s worth of argument here.

A while back, jimhines posted shots of himself posing like women on the covers of books. ocelott followed up with a compare-and-contrast of men’s poses vs. women’s, again with attempted reproduction.

Well, now Jim has done the other side of the equation, posing like some male cover models (from romance as well as fantasy). As he points out, not only are the poses less uncomfortable, their mode of objectification conveys power rather than sexualization. And those are really, really not the same thing.

And, for an encore, there’s Emily Asher-Perrin’s article on Tor.com, “Hey, Everyone — Stop Taking This Picture! (No, I Mean It.)” And, um, yeah. Quit it with the butt shots already.

If you can look at those things and still not think there’s a problematic pattern . . . oof. I think the kindest interpretation I can put on that is “willful stupidity.”

ANHoD Giveaway: the winner!

My high-tech not-quite-randomization system (which excludes certain people, like those who are already getting an advance look at the book via other means, or my mother) has picked a winner for the first ARC: Janet, from Goodreads!

I am still chewing on title thoughts, so feel free to go on suggesting things. In related news, Jim Hines’ fundraiser for rape crisis centers has raised more than $2500, which means another ARC of ANHoD and a copy of With Fate Conspire have both been added to the pool of prizes. If you chip in over there, you’ll have a chance at both of them, and also a host of other awesome things. (I should also note that donations to RAINN will be matched, so you get double money for your dollar, there.)

And now I shall ponder what to do with the remaining copies . . . .

ANHOD giveaway, Urban Tarot, and Jim Hines’ fundraiser

My thanks to everyone who sent me a title suggestion for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs! I received comments here, on Twitter, on Goodreads, by e-mail . . . the whole gamut. Give me a little while to sort through them, and then I’ll announce a winner.

Speaking of winners, Jim Hines’ fundraiser for rape crisis centers is less than $200 away from hitting the benchmark that tosses a signed copy of With Fate Conspire and a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons into the prize pot. There are new rewards, too, at levels up to $4000, and some of them are very shiny.

And finally, we’re in the last days of the Urban Tarot Project. $375 dollars more there will mean embroidered bags for everyone receiving the deck! And there are still signed copies of With Fate Conspire available there, too, so if you want one of those (along with all the other parts of the reward package), you have 71 hours left in which to get it.

Excelsior!

CQD. This is Titanic. CQD. This is Titanic.

Like sovay (from whom I got this), I had no intention of blogging about the sinking of the Titanic. But then she posted this.

This is the conversation that rattled across the North Atlantic the night the Titanic sank. You can hear the moment Jack Phillips stopped transmitting a personal message from a passenger, cutting off abruptly only to begin broadcasting again: “CQD. This is Titanic. CQD. This is Titanic.” The old distress call — SOS had only just been instituted, and wasn’t added to the message until later that night — followed by the announcement of the collision. And then the replies from other ships, fragments of information being passed back and forth, questions and offers of help until the chatter gets too thick and Phillips just sends, “Stop talking. Stop talking. Jamming.” And everybody shuts up until he starts again.

All of it so level, so lacking in inflection. Because this is the record of the wireless messages, run through voice synthesizers to translate that conversation into a form the layperson can understand. But you know what’s behind the words, and that makes it all the more devastating.

Then static creeps in, as Titanic’s signal weakens. And then silence.

Seeing the tragedy from that angle . . . it’s like a punch to the gut. Especially when you think that if the captain of the Californian hadn’t decided the ice was too thick to proceed, if he hadn’t ordered his ship’s boilers shut down for the night, if the wireless operator had stayed up a mere half hour later before going to bed, then the Californian would have heard the distress call, and would have come to help.

(Or, y’know, if there had been a firm code for the use of ship’s rockets, so the guys on the Californian who saw them fired off from the Titanic would have known for sure it was a distress signal. Or if the captain of the Titanic had paid attention to the Californian‘s warnings in the FIRST PLACE, and hadn’t gone charging full speed into an iceberg. If, if, if. There are so many ways the Titanic, or at least its people, could have been saved, but none of them happened.)

The link goes to an article, but if you click through to here you should be able to listen to the broadcast directly. Be warned, though: after the Titanic sends its last message, there’s a stretch of silence . . . and then a bloody advertisement starts up, before the program returns. And to add insult to injury, the ad I got — don’t know if it changes — was for a performance of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well. In Gujarati!

Yeeeeeeeeeeah. Not only is that probably the worst Shakespearean play title you could choose to interrupt the story with, the Gujarati singing is especially out of place.

But go read the article, and listen to the broadcast if you have the time. It’s worth it.

Fundraising for rape crisis center

The ever-awesome Jim Hines running a fundraiser this month for rape crisis centers. For every benchmark hit, he’ll be giving away one of a whole slew of books, which you can see at that link. And if the fundraising gets up to $2500 (which I devoutly hope it will!), then I’ll be tossing in two things to sweeten the pot: a signed copy of With Fate Conspire, and a signed ARC of A Natural History of Dragons.

(This is separate from the title-suggestion giveaway for the first ARC. Two chances to win!)

Head on over to his post for details, including how to donate. It’s an excellent cause, and I hope it raises enough money that he has to find more prizes to give away!

Urban Tarot update

I’m very pleased to say that with ten days to go, the Urban Tarot deck is just over a thousand dollars away from being fully funded. Close enough, in fact, that the artist Robert Scott has started making plans for what to do if he overshoots his funding goal.

The full updates (here and here) have more details, but the short form is that if the project goes $3K over the original total, he will add in custom silk spreadcloths for every donor above $65, and if it goes $5K over, then every donor receiving a deck will also get an embroidered velvet bag.

Also, Rob has added a second offer of the “Hermit and the Leviathans” reward package, which is the one where you get a personalized tour of the Fossil Halls at the American Museum of Natural History from one of the deck models, Chris Hall, who is a docent there. Why a second offer? Because the first one got snapped up in record time, and I can understand why. if I didn’t live on the other coast, I’d consider going for that option myself! (As it stands, I went for the option of being a card model instead. No, I’m not telling you which one. You’ll have to wait and see.)

And speaking of things that went fast . . . we’ve added five more to the “Marie Brennan” package, in which you get a signed copy of With Fate Conspire, along with my signature on the guidebook — which, if you recall, will include a short piece of introductory fiction from me. So if that tempts you, head on over to the project page and donate.

Death threats are part of the game we play

Whether you paid any attention to Christopher Priest’s rant about the Clarke shortlist or not, you should go read Cat Valente’s follow-up post, about what would have happened if a woman had said anything even half that scathing.

This is the reality women live with online, and sometimes in person. It isn’t even just a thing that happens when we yell at somebody, when we criticize something, when we get angry. It can happen when we say anything the reader doesn’t like. Express a political opinion? Post pictures of yourself online? Root for the wrong sports team? “Bitch, I hope you get raped to death like the ugly cow you are.”

Because for a frighteningly large segment of the populace, that’s what you say to shut a woman up. It’s a knee-jerk reflex, like swatting a fly.

How large of a segment? Who knows. Any number larger than “pathologically unwell people who are or should be seeing a mental health professional” is too large. And they’re loud. They swarm the internet, they take over the comment sections on various sites, they poison the water and drive out the good, and for whatever reason, we let them get away with it. We don’t band together like we should and say, start acting like a human, instead of something out of Lovecraft.

(I’m laying off the hyenas, out of consideration for my commenters.)

Sometimes we say it. Some of us do. I don’t do it often enough because, to be honest, I stay away from comment threads most of the time. When I see things like the response Jim Hines dissects, my hands go cold, my fingers start shaking, and whether I respond or not I spend the rest of the day chewing that piece of foul-tasting meat over and over and over again; it’s easier just to avoid the trap. But I need to go to bat for human decency more often. We all do. Again and again, until we’ve sent this malignance howling for the shadows.

Have I gotten death threats, rape threats, any of the hatred Cat describes? I haven’t, actually. But the sad thing is, I know that isn’t because I’m a nice person who doesn’t deserve it, a good, demure woman who doesn’t need to be put in her place.

It’s because not enough people are reading what I write. Give me a bigger microphone, and the sewage will come to swamp me, too.

We need to cut this shit out. The men who spew this kind of thing need to get over whatever misogynistic reflex makes them say it, and the rest of us, men and women alike, need to keep telling them so until they do. I don’t know how we do that — I don’t know how we get it through their skulls — but we have to try. Even the attempt is a form of support for the ones drowning in the bile, and they need all the support they can get.

For fuck’s sake, people. That is a person on the other end of the things you say. Remember that. And summon up the basic compassion to care.

In which I get ranty about money and politics

Or rather, in which I link you to other people being ranty. I’ve had some of these sitting around for a dog’s age, and I’m never going to wrangle my thoughts into anything like a coherent enough mass to make an actual post out of it, so instead you get other people being articulate for me.

Must the Rich be Lured into Investing? Who are the Real “Job Creators?” — Supply Side [economic theory] assumes that the rich have a zillion other uses for their cash and thus have to be lured into investing it! Now ponder that nonsense statement. Roll it around and try to imagine it making a scintilla of sense! Try actually asking a very rich person. Once you have a few mansions and their contents and cars and boats and such, actually spending it all holds little attraction. Rather, the next step is using the extra to become even richer.

How Capitalism Kills Companies — There’s no limit at all to the amount of growth that the public companies will demand: in 2007, for instance, after a year when Citigroup made an astonishing $21.5 billion in net income, Fortune was complaining about its “less-than-stellar earnings”, and saying — quite accurately — that if they didn’t improve, the CEO would soon be out of a job. We now know, of course, that most if not all of those earnings were illusory, a product of the housing bubble which was shortly to burst and bring the bank to the brink of insolvency. But even bubblicious illusory earnings aren’t good enough for the stock market.

Central Tendency in Skewed Distributions: A Lesson in Social Justice — The point being, the lesson of the positive skew, is that the distance between being middle class and being poor is very, very small.

Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality — There is something almost quaint — but decidedly refreshing — about the commissioners’ blunt language. “Effective action by Congress is required…,” the report proclaimed, “to check the growth of an hereditary aristocracy, which is foreign to every conception of American Government and menacing to the welfare of the people and the existence of the Nation as a democracy.” Far from debating whether “corporations are people,” the commission took for granted that concentrations of corporate power were undemocratic, that gigantic fortunes “constitute a menace to the State,” and that it was the duty of government to restore a balance of power.

Jubilee. Jubilee. Jubilee. — Reduce the principle, forgive a portion of the debt, proclaim a jubilee. It would save taxpayers money. It would keep hundreds of thousands of families in their homes.

But it can’t happen if we decide to act like jerks.

Person, Person, Corporate Asset.

And one I missed including in the race-related link dump, that you absolutely should read if you have not already: Teju Cole on The White Savior Industrial Complex.