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Posts Tagged ‘ranty’

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.”

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.

Staring it in the eye

Every time I try to start drafting a post about Trayvon Martin, I run up against the impossible reach of the issue.

There’s enough to say about the kid to fill an entire post, about the injustice of what happened to him. But I can’t tease those things out from all the other things: Zimmerman and his history of neighborhood vigilantism; Geraldo Rivera and the bullshit about hoodies; the appalling failure to investigate this crime as it should have been, when it should have been; the Sanford Police Department and their previous failures to deal appropriately with this kind of thing; the Stand Your Ground law in Florida and elsewhere (which I had not heard of before, and which makes my blood run cold); all the way out to parenting black children in this country, or ALEC and its influence on the legislative agenda of many states. It’s some kind of monster out of Lovecraft, with tentacles reaching everywhere — and I don’t mean that metaphor in a trivializing fashion. I look at this, and feel my sanity die a little. Along with my hope for humanity.

It’s too much to take in, let alone talk about coherently.

Especially when my thoughts sweep outward to take in Shaima Alawadi, or the people whose names no one asks about. And skimming through my browser window to find where those tabs had got to, I passed a bunch I’m keeping for a later post, about capitalism and economic inequality and I’m fooling myself if I pretend these things don’t tie together down at the root.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist was talking the other day about how depressing The Wire is, not despite of but because of its brilliance: it shows you how deeply ingrained these issues are in the institutions that make up our society, and how near to impossible change is. I haven’t watched more than maybe half a dozen episodes of the show because I can’t deal with looking that sort of thing in the eye; I need to stay away in order to preserve my belief that we can improve things. But the problem isn’t in the TV show — it’s in the real world. And sometimes you can’t avoid staring it in the eye.

The Sanford Police Department will likely face some consequences. Maybe we’ll get the Stand Your Ground laws struck down in a few places. But hacking out those roots and digging the whole mess out of the soil of our country . . . I don’t know how you do that. Days like this one, I wonder if you can.

Things Not to Say

Hey, guys?

If you are upset about something, and you want to yell at somebody about it, it’s worth taking a moment to make sure you’re yelling at the right person.

For example, do not blame the author for Amazon’s decision to ship print copies of a novel two weeks before the sale date, but not to send out the e-books at the same time. Aside from the fact that retailers aren’t supposed to ship anything before the street date, the author has precisely ZERO control over what Amazon chooses to do. (And is probably even more upset than you are, because that potentially screws her over in career-affecting ways.)

And if you are upset about something, take a careful look at how you’re expressing your feelings.

For example, is it productive to call the author “stupid,” “greedy,” “ungrateful,” or “a narcissist”? Probably not.

And it is definitely not productive — nor even okay — to call her a “bitch,” a “whore,” or a “cunt.”

Seriously. The person on the other end of that e-mail you’re about to send? Is a person. One who, in this case, has no actual control over the thing you are upset about; she didn’t cause it, and she can’t fix it, and she’s upset about it, too. But even if those things weren’t true . . . what the hell, people. How fragile is your world if the UTTER APOCALYPTIC DISASTER of NOT BEING ABLE TO GET YOUR E-BOOK NOW NOW NOW justifies heaping misogynistic abuse on the person who produces the thing you love?

Please. Be smart enough to aim your criticism in an appropriate direction, not at a fellow victim. But more than anything . . . act like a human, not a hyena.

Every Part of Your Life Is Real

You know how sometimes you find yourself losing patience for something, entirely without warning? Yeah. I’ve lost patience with the phrase “real life.”

It’s an extension of the gripe I had when I was in graduate school, about people referring to academia as “the ivory tower” — as if a job there was somehow not a (hmm, this sounds familiar) a real job. Trust me, universities have just as much in the way of politics and bureaucracy and such things as any other workplace. People in them do work, get paid money . . . just like people do in a corporation or store.

Lately I’ve seen writers talking about how “real life” has distracted them from writing. I’m not just talking about hobbyists (though my point would stand even if I were); I’m talking about professionals, for whom writing is, if not their sole job, at least one they file taxes for. Why is that part of their lives somehow less valid than the rest of it? I hear people saying the same thing when they talk about things in contrast with their hobbies. What exactly is real life, anyway?

I don’t think there’s a single answer. People use the phrase in a lot of different ways, for a lot of different reasons. Work is real life and hobbies aren’t, because work isn’t fun, and we all know (thank you, Puritans) that fun things are of the devil. If work is fun, it becomes not-real. Trouble is real. The things you can’t get away from are real. But all the rest of it . . . that doesn’t count. You have to deprecate it, apologize for devoting energy and attention to it, because it’s a diversion and therefore fake.

I say, screw that. Every part of your life is real. Even the optional parts, and the ones you enjoy. I’m not saying there isn’t any such thing as prioritization; obviously some things demand or deserve more investment from you. But that doesn’t make them more real — just more important. Let’s say what we actually mean, and not something else, that makes people feel like the things they care about are for some reason invalid.

My job and my hobbies, almost everything I do, involves imaginary people and events. But that doesn’t make my life not real.

Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Originally posted by at Mississippi Personhood Amendment

Okay, so I don't usually do this, but this is an issue near and dear to me and this is getting very little no attention in the mainstream media.

Mississippi is voting on November 8th on whether to pass Amendment 26, the "Personhood Amendment". This amendment would grant fertilized eggs and fetuses personhood status.

Putting aside the contentious issue of abortion, this would effectively outlaw birth control and criminalize women who have miscarriages. This is not a good thing.

Jackson Women's Health Organization is the only place women can get abortions in the entire state, and they are trying to launch a grassroots movement against this amendment. This doesn't just apply to Mississippi, though, as Personhood USA, the group that introduced this amendment, is trying to introduce identical amendments in all 50 states.

What's more, in Mississippi, this amendment is expected to pass. It even has Mississippi Democrats, including the Attorney General, Jim Hood, backing it.

The reason I'm posting this here is because I made a meager donation to the Jackson Women's Health Organization this morning, and I received a personal email back hours later – on a Sunday – thanking me and noting that I'm one of the first "outside" people to contribute.

So if you sometimes pass on political action because you figure that enough other people will do something to make a difference, make an exception on this one. My RSS reader is near silent on this amendment. I only found out about it through a feminist blog. The mainstream media is not reporting on it.

If there is ever a time to donate or send a letter in protest, this would be it.

What to do?

– Read up on it. Wake Up, Mississippi is the home of the grassroots effort to fight this amendment. Daily Kos also has a thorough story on it.

– If you can afford it, you can donate at the site's link.

– You can contact the Democratic National Committee to see why more of our representatives aren't speaking out against this.

– Like this Facebook page to help spread awareness.

Amazon is not the good guy

I’ve piled up four links in short order that detail some of the problems with Amazon, and why, despite an increasing insistence in their PR that they’re your ally, they’re on the side of the consumer, they’re your friend against those meanie-face businesses like publishers . . . they are not the good guy. At best, they are a guy, who will sometimes help you and sometimes screw you over. (The problem is, a lot of the “help” is of the sort that evaporates as soon as they’re in a position to screw you over.)

So, the links:

Cat Valente first, on the notion of book subscriptions, and how Amazon keeps muscling their way toward monopoly.

Next Borderlands Books (San Francisco indie bookstore), on their sketchy business behavior. (Scroll down to “From the Office” to find the relevant part.)

And then, Anand Giridharadas in the NYT, on the fraying of decency, and what Amazon does to achieve such low prices and fast shipping.

Finally, just as a chaser, the privacy issues with the new Kindle Fire.

I won’t deny that Amazon is useful. I still order things from them occasionally. But I’ve taken my book business elsewhere whenever possible — Powell’s, IndieBound, and local stores — and I am not looking forward to the Brave New World in which everything is published through Amazon, for reading on an Amazon device, so that Amazon knows everything I do, with Amazon deciding how much I pay for that material or get paid when people buy what I wrote, because they’ve ground all their competitors out of existence.

It’s like a hybrid of 1984 and Snow Crash. Stephenson was almost right about corporations ruling the future; his error was in using the plural.

Yes to Gay YA

Rachel Manija Brown (rachelmanija) and Sherwood Smith (sartorias) have an important essay up at Publishers Weekly, Say Yes to Gay YA, where they recount how an agent offered them representation for a YA novel on the condition that they either straighten a gay point-of-view character, or remove him from the book entirely.

You can read the details there, as well as suggestions for how to put an end to this kind of thing. You can do the same on Rachel’s journal, if you prefer LJ, but the PW post includes a mechanism for posting anonymously, if you’d prefer that. They’re particularly interested in hearing from any authors who have experienced similar pushback from agents or editors, so as to explore just how widespread the problem is. The reader-side viewpoint is also valuable, to help prove there is an audience for these books.

If you’re on Twitter, the hashtag is #YesGayYA.

China Mieville is not your Facebook friend

When we say “identity theft,” we usually mean something having to do with credit cards and the like. But at least when that happens, you can notify the various powers that be, and they’ll do something about it.

Not so with Facebook. China Miéville has notified them several times of at least one person (possibly more) impersonating him on Facebook, and so far has gotten jack in the way of reply. Are his life savings being wiped out by this? No, of course not. But if you think this couldn’t hurt him, think again. As a writer, he’s a public figure, albeit a minor one; his ability to work depends partly upon his reputation. If the impersonator wanted to, they could tarnish that reputation, by sending messages or joining groups or otherwise doing things that would reflect badly on him. Even if they don’t, they are in a fashion acting in his name, without his permission. Which is not something anybody should be allowed to do.

But Facebook doesn’t care. As Deanna reports, their old system was that you had to be a Facebook user in the first place to complain about somebody impersonating you on the service; at least they’ve made the small step of changing that. But in general, their policy is still abysmal. No system of verification; no grievance process worth the name. Your ex could create a profile, pretend to be you, “like” a bunch of groups that make you look like a terrible person, and then when you apply for a job your prospective employer finds that profile and decides they don’t want to hire somebody who’s a fan of “Immigrants Go Home.” And there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it.

How obvious does Facebook have to make it that they don’t give a shit about anybody — their users included — before people will stop using the service?

I canceled my account a while ago, when they went one round too many of “we’re going to share info you thought was private! And you have to jump through hoops to stop us!” I tried not to proselytize too much back then, because I don’t want to piss off people who are content to keep their Facebook accounts, but Jesus H. The flash games just aren’t worth it, especially when the company is mining data about you and selling it to advertisers. As for getting in touch with old friends . . . there are other ways to be findable online. Seeing random updates about how somebody I haven’t seen since graduation didn’t get enough sleep last night is, again, not worth it to me. There are other ways to get in touch if you want to have a real conversation, and the more I see of Facebook’s evil, the harder time I have understanding why anybody else should play along.

I cannot say much about bullying.

My friends-list is full of posts about bullying, or more precisely the experience of being bullied, because I am friends with a lot of geeks and nerds and other such target types. They’re heart-wrenching to read, but not because they call up echoes of my own past. You see, I was never bullied. And to all the adults who tell the victims “It’s your fault, you must have done something to provoke them,” I have this to say:

The sole reason I didn’t get bullied is that I was lucky.

It’s the only explanation I can find. I was freakishly skinny — seriously, I look at pictures of myself and wonder how I didn’t snap in half — I wore thick glasses all the way through elementary school, I was an unabashed smart kid and book nerd. I was in the band. I had a weird name. There was an abudance of reasons to pick on me . . . but to the best of my recollection, nobody really did.

See, I went to school in the kind of affluent area where parents generally drove their kids to school (as mine did), so I never experienced the rolling hyena cage that is the school bus. During my early years, the only time I rode one of those was when a group of us were bussed to the once-a-week gifted program, held in another school — a program that was large enough, and included enough like-minded kids, that I had plenty of friends. We had honors and AP classes as I got to junior high and high school, so that I never even saw a whole subset of the student body, the subset that might have thought being smart was something to mock you for. The band in my high school was roughly 150 students out of 1500 — ten percent, and a large enough block that we could (and did) just socialize with each other, filling up entire lunch tables, going to practice after school, storing our things in the extra lockers we got by the band hall. Hell, our head drum major was voted homecoming king one year, because the drill team thought he was the cutest thing ever, and that plus the band was enough to lift him above the various football players who were his competitors. Our solidarity protected us.

Not a single piece of that was my own doing. I didn’t conform, didn’t scare the bullies off, didn’t do any of the things adults might advise to prevent the crimes of others. I was lucky.

But even luck may not save you. One of my classmates — a guy I’d known since elementary school, who’d gone through the same system I had, who was in the band — committed suicide during high school. I don’t know if he was bullied, but I know the football team talked some appallingly ugly shit about him afterward. He left behind a community, though; the entire band was devastated, and a posse very nearly went after the football players who were saying those things. That’s a lot more than most bullied kids have. But he didn’t have it because he did anything, other than being himself; he had it because the circumstances made it possible.

The kids who get picked on do not have power over their situations. Telling them it’s their responsibility to make change happen isn’t just unfair, it’s adding to the problem. It’s like grabbing the kid’s hand and smacking him with it while saying, “stop hitting yourself.” We need to not blame the victims. We need authority to step in, the same way we ask authority to step in when adults get stalked or assaulted or harassed. And for the love of god, we need to remember that our instincts are animal ones, and that altruism and compassion and so on don’t happen because a fairy waves a wand, they’re things that need to be fostered — that children need to be taught how not to act like beasts. We need to improve our math scores and everything else, too, at least here in the U.S., but I think I’d happily trade that for a school system that raises kids to be human beings, rather than hyenas.

I don’t know how to do that. But I know it needs to happen, because not everybody is lucky, and even luck can’t save everyone.

first of (probably) many

I have so many things piled up in my head, waiting for the time and energy to say them; I decided to start with this one.

There is still discussion going around concerning the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” (Which is neither, of course — but “downtown Islamic community center” doesn’t sound as scary, no matter how much the word “community” has been beaten up by those who will say anything to score points against their enemies.) There is still debate about its appropriateness. There is still outrage.

Folks, I am one of those outraged.

I am outraged that this is an issue. That people from thousands of miles away, who maybe have never set foot in New York and never will, have decided it’s their job to tell New Yorkers (of the Muslim persuasion or not) what they can and cannot build in their own city; that so many of them are willfully spreading lies on the subject so as to drum up more fear and hatred. I am outraged that our national response to this situation has skewed so far toward xenophobia, bigotry, and intolerance. I am outraged by this, and the later portions of this, and the attitude so ably skewered by this.

Not only do I want this community center, I want one built on Ground Zero. For real. It would have put me over the moon if I woke up one morning and found the internet blazing with the news that the 9/11 memorial was going to be a tasteful stone carved with the names of those who died, surrounded by an interfaith center dedicated to the peaceful co-existence of Christianity and Islam. Toss in Judaism, too, while you’re at it. With maybe a few wings for Hinduism and Buddhism and Wicca and all the rest. To get to the stone, you have to walk through galleries that explain the basic tenets of each religion, acknowledging the different interpretations that have been put on those tenets in different places and times. (And to get through the last door, you have to pass a quiz? No, no, we’re trying to be welcoming, here.) I want our memorial to that day to be a giant thumb in the eye of everybody on both sides who believes Christianity and Islam are and must be at war, everybody who wants a return of the Crusades. Show our true enemies that their best efforts will not achieve their goals; our commitment to the ideals of the United States is too strong to be broken by lies and fear.

Except it isn’t true. I’m not sure it ever has been; this country stumbles rather than strides toward a more perfect union, bettering itself by accident and the occasional spasm of purposeful change. And sometimes, like now, the spasms yank us in the opposite direction. It’s happened to one minority group after another: blacks, Latinos, Japanese, Chinese, Irish back in their day. All I can do is try to make sure I’m not out-shouted by the bigots, that I speak for tolerance whenever I can, to give the lie to the notion that “Americans” feel this way or that. No matter what the news may say, not all of us think the community center is a bad idea. My only problem with it is that I want more, and I’m afraid we won’t even get a little.

I’m perfectly capable of speaking for myself.

Kate Elliott on authorial intent.

Word.

I’m smart enough not to respond publicly to reviews, of course; that pretty much never ends well. But if you want to know which ones get up my nose the worst, it’s the ones that make unfounded declarations about what was in my head while writing. If you read a particular thing out of the story, fine — far be it from me to say ur doin it wrong. But please don’t claim you know why I did things that way.

Mind you, the line between the two isn’t entirely clear. Sometimes — as Kate’s contrasting examples show — a lot of it comes down to phrasing; if you say “it seems the author felt X,” that creates a different impression than “the author felt X.” This is one case where I think it’s a good idea to use qualifiers for your assertions, even though in other circumstances it’s better to just say things directly. And, of course, if you’ve been reading my blog or an interview with me or whatever, anything I say there is fair game for use later; your review can say “because Marie Brennan is concerned with not taking events out of the hands of the real, historical people who were involved, she does Z” — though even there, it would be better to say you presume there’s a causal relationship, because when you get down to it I may have forgotten my own agenda and done Z simply because it looked nifty, or the rest of my plot required it.

Talk all you like about the product. What you say may sound very odd to me; I may blink in surprise at the cool thing I apparently did without noticing, or wonder exactly what novel you read, but in the end “the book” is the product of a chemical reaction between the words on the page and the contents of the reader’s head, and I only control one half of the ingredients. The contents of my own head, on the other hand, do not belong to the reader, and so I would prefer that reviewers phrase any speculation as speculation. Don’t be the guy who went around telling people what Ursula LeGuin “intended” with the Earthsea books. Don’t presume to speak for the author. If I’m going to bite my tongue and not tell you how to read my work, don’t tell me how I wrote it.

Not *again*.

Dear Book:

I hate you.

No, really. We’ve gotten to that stage of the writing, the stage where I really just want to light you on fire. It happens almost every book (except for the rare ones that just sail straight out of my head — of which you are SO not one), but this time, I really, really mean it. Why? Because I just figured out that I could solve about 90% of my pacing problems . . . by moving your start date back three months.

This falls into the category of “annoying change” rather than “major seismic upheaval,” since most of what I have to do is change the dates on scenes. But that’s about 100K worth of scenes I have to re-date

FUCK I just realized that doesn’t work.

Because there’s a scene that has to happen on a specific date, and that specific date is before what I thought would be the new start date. But there are other events that have to happen on other specific dates, and SON OF A BITCH I HATE YOU.

<beats head into desk>

Never again, people. Never again. I am so very done with this historical fiction thing, where I can’t just decide when stuff happens because history says otherwise. I’ve been doing this for four books, and I will never subject myself to it again*.

I’m sure I’ll find a way through this. But it is going to cost a lot of pain and suffering along the way. (It already has.) And right now, I kinda want to light the book on fire.

No love at all,
Your Writer.

*Of course I’m lying. It’s like childbirth. In a few years, when I’ve forgotten the pain, I’ll probably decide this is a good idea again. But right now, I mean it.

museum (shop) gripe

Why is it that, without fail, museum shops never have the thing I want to buy?

I’ll go through an exhibit and there will be some painting or sculpture or artifact or whatever that just charms me or blows me away, and when I get to the museum shop, I begin an eager race around the room, wanting to take some memento of that piece home with me . . . but there’s nothing. No print of the painting. No postcard showing the artifact. Nada.

The worst offender in my memory was probably the touring exhibit of The Lord of the Rings films. I walked out of that thing prepared to buy anything, man — replica costumes, replica weapons, replica jewelry, you name it, I would have bought it, because seeing the craftsmanship of the props up close had impressed me so much I was ready to pay for a cheap knockoff of my own. Instead they had some hoodies, some jewelry not from the films, a bunch of books, and that was about it. The incident sparking this post was my visit to the Asian Art Museum’s Shanghai exhibit yesterday: among the works showing how Shanghainese artists experimented with combining western and traditional Chinese techniques, there was a giant wall scroll depicting plum blossoms in moonlight, and it was stunning. The brushwork of Chinese ink painting, and the play of light and shadow of Western art; it wouldn’t have looked as cool on a postcard, probably, losing the vibrancy of the real thing, but I would have bought it as a way of sparking my brain to recall the original.

Nope. No dice.

The Impressionist exhibit at the Legion of Honor had a neat thing set up on a computer screen in their shop: you could pick a work of art, pick a size, pick a frame, and have a custom print shipped to your house. Awesome — except the selection of works you could do this with was tiny. (And, naturally, didn’t include any of the ones I really liked.) I do understand there are practical limitations on producing memorabilia of everything in an exhibit, but my batting average on this is abysmal. The things I like are never the ones chosen for reproduction. Oh museum shops, why do you hate me so?

People get paid for this crap?

I don’t know what it is, but within the last year or two, the synopses on the Apple movie trailers site have just become abysmal. Not so much in content — though a few of them are irritatingly content-free, leaving me with no sense of what the film is about — but style. A sentence from the synopsis for Lovely, Still: “What begins as an odd and awkward encounter quickly blossoms into what appears to be a romantic late life love affair that takes us on a heartfelt and wonderful journey which takes an unexpected turn.”

Okay, seriously? The first thing that caught me was the repetition of “takes,” which made me notice they had this whole daisy-chain of subordinate clauses, plus you’ve got that “appears to be” (what, is it actually a CIA plot? a behavioral experiment by a psych student? a dream in the head of an old man in a nursing home, that he’ll wake up from at the end?) cluttering up your sentence, and gahhhhhhhhh. Not to mention the tendency in these things to tell me how heartfelt and moving or thrilling or hilarious or whatever the film will be, which really makes me want to hit the writer with a raw fish, because if you tell me that, I automatically disbelieve you. And don’t get me started on the hideous cliches that get deployed in some of these things.

I don’t know where they get them from, but I hope to god it isn’t the marketing department for the films themselves. It would be appalling to think the people who pour months or years of their lives into making a movie would pay somebody to promote it so badly.

Memes that AREN’T so good

So this meme goes around, where you plug in a sample of text and it tells you who you write like.

I give it four selections from the prologue of Midnight Never Come and get four different results, ranging from Dan Brown to James Fenimore Cooper. I roll my eyes at the uselessness of the meme and move on.

Then nojojojo links to this post, which points out that <sigh> yet again it’s the same old carnival of white guys, with a tiny number of white women (and Jewish men) tossed in for “variety.” Sure, it’s a stupid meme, who really cares — except some of us do care, because that’s a problem that gets iterated over and over in other places, and it got old a long time ago. (Especially the responses the guy gave when called on the homogeneity of his list.)

THEN, just to thicken the plot, Jim MacDonald at Making Light points out that the meme results come with advertising for a well-known (and well-criticized) vanity press. Yes, folks, this appears to be a promotional tool for a scam.

So. What started out looking like a dumb meme turns out to be sketchy from several different directions, quite apart from its failure to carry out its supposed purpose in an effective way.

Meh. Give me more Old Spice riffs, please. This one was broken from the start.

Edit: It appears that the promotion of the vanity press came after the meme took off. Still. Not cool.

In which the Cat preaches it, again

Cat Valente on Lost:

But here’s the thing, guys. If you don’t want to get tarred with the SF brush, you don’t get to play with our toys, either. That means you do not get any of the following exciting action figures: monsters, immortal beings, time travel, alternate universes, glowcaves, Egyptian mythology, electromagnetic magic, insta-healing, psychic powers, Dark Lords, Lords of Light, magical touched by an angel fatecakes, teleportation, mystical islands, or bodily possession. Get your sticky hands off them–you’ll only break them. Make a sitcom and shut up, if you want to howl about not being SF. Make a gritty procedural. Make Thirty-Something, I don’t know. But don’t make an SF show and then prance around telling everyone it’s SUPER REALISTIC while trying to conceal your painful giant quantum rabbit erection. You can’t trot out all those shiny SF baubles and then refuse to develop them or treat them seriously.

And while we’re on the topic of TV and not respecting stuff? I’m at a point where I would like to ban all shows from touching the topic of sf/f community, including but not limited to: comic book fans, LARPers, Renfest folk, players of video games, and anything else of a remotely geeky stripe. Just leave them alone, TV people. You don’t understand those groups, and what’s worse, you don’t want to understand them; you just want to toss them in because you’ve decided to do an episode about people who are totally detached from reality and can’t keep their non-fantasy lives in balance with anything else. And you’ve decided we are those people. Kindly piss off, leave the geeks out of your police procedural or whatever it is you’re making, and stick with things you actually have respect for.

It’s not what Cat was ranting about, but it was on my mind, so I decided to kill two birds with one ineffectual blog post. After all, that’s what the internets are for.

reasons for leaving Facebook, longer version

Here’s the visual version, showing the recent expansion of information not only to your friends, but to your networks, to all of Facebook, and to the entire Internet.

The good news is, Facebook won’t be doing much more to undermine your privacy — because they’ve already decided to show just about everything to just about everybody.

The graphic is a representation of the information from this EFF article. Wired has more generalized discussion of the issues with Facebook, and Business Insider gives 10 Reasons to Delete Your Facebook Account. If you decide to do that, though, read this, because Facebook uses just about every trick short of outright lying to prevent you from actually deleting your account.

I’ve never given Facebook much private information; the furthest I went was to list my schools and graduation years, my marital status, and a few interests, none of which are particular secrets. But Facebook, unlike (say) LJ, allows for — sorry, let’s update our terms, is actively taking steps to facilitate — organized mining of that data. This bothers me on three fronts.

First, I can control what data I post about myself, but I can’t control what data my friends post about me. And while this is true of the Internet in general, on Facebook, any photo tagged with my name is automatically and unambiguously connected to me, in a way that I cannot avoid. Also, changes have made it such that I’m not just sharing that info with friends, and with Facebook-the-company, but with everybody who develops an application for them. Do I trust all of those people?

Second, this is a cynical violation of the principles on which Facebook was founded. After years of saying your information would be private, visible only to friends (thus encouraging you to submit a lot of it — after all, isn’t the point of the service to share news with your friends?), now the founder is claiming that our society’s privacy standards have changed and he’s just keeping up with the times. We all totally want to live our lives in public on the Internet, right?

Third — most offensively — this is opt-out, not opt-in. Facebook did not ask me, “would you like to share these pieces of information by connecting them to these public pages?” It said, “You’re now going to share all of this! Or you can pick individually.” And then I had to manually deselect every single item, because I didn’t get a “no, thanks” option. Given the way Facebook has implemented changes, I have no certainty at all that I’ve successfully kept myself out of that loop, because they bury the “stay private” options as deeply as they can — when they even provide them. Sometimes the only way to stay clear is to completely delete information about yourself: you can no longer have private “likes.” You either have them, and they’re auto-linked to public pages, or you leave them blank. So much for sharing private info with friends. To use the service now is to use it for all the Internet to see.

Which is faintly annoying when it’s just a matter of me listing, oh, music as a hobby. But what if you’ve listed “gay marriage rights”? Or “abortion rights”? Or something else politically sensitive? Now your activism is visible to your boss (who maybe voted Yes on 8), and to people who maybe like harassing activists like you.

There are more details in the articles I’ve linked, but those are enough for me. The value I get from Facebook is marginal: yeah, I’ve connected to old friends from high school, etc, but we’ve done nothing more than connect; I haven’t struck up conversations with them. The signal-to-noise ratio of my news feed is so abysmal I don’t even bother reading it most of the time. I hate the layout of the service, and as for the applications, they’re time-wasters I really, really don’t need.

And I don’t feel like continuing to patronize a service that behaves this badly, even if the actual damage to me is likewise marginal.