Continuing my effort to clear out my Firefox tabs and my brain, let’s talk about usernames.

yuki_onna posted about this a little while ago, and I have to say I’m on her side. But first, let’s talk about the original poster’s argument.

I feel like pretty much everything he says can be turned around from a positive into a negative. True, on Facebook you don’t have the problem of signing up only to find your customary username has already been taken. Instead you have the problem of signing up with a name that’s maybe shared by 7,142 other people. An improvement, or only a differently annoying issue? Also, he says you don’t have to use your real name, just a name — but hang on, isn’t that essentially the username thing all over again, except without the restriction that it must be unique? And maybe a requirement that your chosen name has to come in two parts (e.g. Pony McRainbow). If you can still use a made-up name, you still have the problem he describes, of realizing belatedly that somebody you know in person and somebody you know online are actually, y’know, the same person.

But that has an easy fix. If you want your legal name associated with your pseud, put it in your profile or wherever. If you want to keep them separate, you can.

Which is part of Cat’s point. Facebook wants you to use your real name (and other real information) so you can be more effectively tracked: pinned down, advertised to, your information sold to third-party vendors, linked up with things you never intended to touch. Oh, so you’re the Melanie Dunn whose grocery purchases swing erratically between Hostess snack cakes and green vegetables (better sell you some diet aids!), who’s a registered Democratic voter in Kansas (do your neighbors know?), whose medical history shows a procedure at a particular doctor’s office three years ago (and we can guess what that was). So when you go posting on your blog about how you think bigots should get over the whole Islamic community center thing, rest assured people will have an easy time connecting that with your weight and your political activities and the fact that maybe you had an abortion. Aren’t you glad they know who you are?

False names, whether unique usernames or non-unique pseudonyms, can protect people.

But you know, even if that were taken out of the equation, I’d still like usernames, and my reason is the other part of Cat’s point. Choosing a username is an act of identity creation — one we don’t often get to do in modern American society, or (so far as I’m aware) in other high-tech nations. Your parents pick your name, without any input from you, and changing it is a legal hassle. Nicknames are generally assigned by those around you, though you can try to show up to college or your job in a new city and sell people on the idea that while your name is William, usually you go by Bear. We have very few opportunities to choose something that reflects who and what we are, or want to be — or we did, until usernames came along and gave us a whole new field to play in.

The fantasy writer in me can’t help but think about the mystical power of names, and how the process of choice invests them once more with a whiff of that power. They have meaning. How is that not cool?

Is the meaning sometimes stupid? Of course. You may get to a point where you’re embarrassed to be known as shake_that_bootay. But unlike Aschlyee, who’s embarrassed by her parents’ enthusiastic leap onto the bandwagon of “let’s find a totally new way to spell this name!,” you can put it behind you pretty easily. You can escape your party-hard high school years, major in Classics, get involved in radical politics, and rename yourself alecto_reborn. Then, when you’re tired of being a Fury, go into the business world, and settle down as dahlia_blue.

There have been times and places in the world where that sort of change was normal and expected, where having six names by the time you died was nothing unusual. (Read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms if you don’t believe me.) We’ve reinvented a form of that here, and I for one like it.

Celebrate your username! Tell me the story of why you chose it, whether you’re tempted to change it, and if so, what to.

With various responses to the Prop 8 decision floating around out there, I was particularly struck by this tweet, which articulates a divide I’ve been chewing on for some time: Californians knows that marriage is a civil right, not a privilege.

“Privilege” is a word that’s seen widespread use lately, in the context of society’s treatment of different groups of people: white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, able-bodied privilege, etc. There are many lists out there pointing out what kinds of advantages a person is likely to enjoy if they fit into the preferred group, and how many of those advantages aren’t even the kind of thing you think about in your daily life (unless you don’t have them). But I think there’s a blurring that happens in some of those lists, which I want to look more closely at: the difference between privileges and rights.

Privilege is, literally, private law. It’s a special exception made for favored individuals or groups. Centuries ago, a nobleman might be given the privilege of hunting deer on the king’s land; today, I pay for the privilege of checking books out from Stanford’s libraries, which is otherwise reserved only to their students and staff. If the king decides he doesn’t want anybody shooting his deer, or Stanford decides they don’t want to deal with outside users, then they can take that privilege away.

A right, on the other hand, is something everybody has, unless we permit laws or behaviors that exclude disfavored individuals or groups from it. Voting is a right belonging to all U.S. citizens, unless they’re children (excluded on the basis of immaturity) or incarcerated felons (excluded as part of their punishment). Freedom of speech is a right. Fair trials are a right. You can’t take somebody’s rights away without a damn good reason.

The distinction is important because it affects how a problem can best be solved. One of the white-privilege lists I saw mentioned the privilege of being able to walk around in a store without the employees watching your every move to make certain you aren’t going to steal anything. I had a visceral reaction to that: for god’s sake, that should be a right! Our default should be to assume that a given customer is not a criminal, unless we have evidence to the contrary. (Evidence other than skin color, which doesn’t count.) You don’t fix that problem by telling your employees to give every customer the hairy eyeball; you fix it by telling them not to discriminate against the black (or Latino, or etc.) customers. On the other hand, being able to make an offensive joke about a member of a disfavored group and not suffer any consequences for it? That’s a privilege. You fix that by calling people on it, making sure there are consequences; the privilege harms other people, and so you take it away.

Both of these are important things. But I don’t want to lose sight of the rights, in all the talking about privilege; it downplays the importance of the former, while creating the sense that the only solution is to take things away from the advantaged groups. Sometimes that is the solution — but sometimes it’s better to share the advantages with everybody. Improving the world doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

In the case of Prop 8, you don’t resolve the situation by making civil marriage a privilege, granted by the government to those (heterosexual) couples of which it approves. You resolve it by acknowledging that marriage is a right, which cannot be withheld simply because the couple is same-sex — or mixed-race, or one or both parties are incarcerated felons, to choose a few of the relevant legal precedents. Nobody has to lose anything for other people to gain.

Once again, I’m building up a raft of tabs in my Firefox bar — but since I’m still trying to do that “more posts of substance” thing, I don’t want to knock them all off with a linkdump. So let me see if I can’t get around to discussing these things.

io9 had a good piece recently: Is “avoiding tropes” the same thing as telling fresh stories?

On the one hand, yes, if you define “trope” as “something that’s been done before” and “fresh” as “something that hasn’t been done before.” As Charlie Jane Anders points out, TV Tropes has gotten so obsessively detailed, the term has gone well beyond applying to full-on cliches (things that have been overused to the point of being worn out) to just about anything that might be seen as a pattern, however minor. But Anders goes on to say, Maybe we tend — and by “we,” I definitely mean “me,” among others — to fixate on the presence or absence of too-familiar story elements, instead of thinking about whether the story as a whole was fresh, or strong, and whether it moved us. And that suggests a different connotation for the word “fresh,” that doesn’t restrict it solely to a sense of “pure novelty.”

I’ve come to realize over time that I don’t care as much as some people seem to about novelty. Possibly because it’s both so easy and so hard to pull off: hard because any given idea, taken in isolation, has probably been done before (after all, we are the proverbial million monkeys with typewriters, telling stories for thousands of years), and easy because all you have to do is stick something random into an unexpected context. A guy moving to the big city with dreams of striking it rich is a trope; Jesus opting out of being crucified because he wants to make it as an actor in Rome is a novelty. The latter may be original, but that doesn’t make it good.

And the thing about tropes is, they happen because they work. The pattern is one that speaks to something within the audience’s hearts and minds. One person tries it; the story resonates with a lot of people; it becomes a piece of the toolkit for other storytellers. There’s a point at which trope-avoidance becomes an exercise in not doing any of the things you know will work.

Having said that, some caveats. Sometimes the thing a trope speaks to in the audience isn’t so good; What These People Need Is a Honky (the insertion of a white hero to save the poor beleaguered non-white people) is a splendid example of one that’s both common and problematic. Other times, the trope’s power to move the audience is diminished by overuse; the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense worked for many people because they weren’t expecting it, but then Shyamalan became known for sticking twists into the ends of his movies, so they lost the surprise factor and much of what made them effective. And what holds true on the micro level may fall apart on the macro; I won’t necessarily ding you for telling a story about a farmboy in a fantasy world who gets swept up into epic events, but if he also has a grey-bearded magical advisor and a faithful friend and an elf and a dwarf and a ranger and a magical artifact that needs to be destroyed in order stop the Dark Lord from taking over, then we’re not talking about a trope, we’re talking about an entire insta-kit of them that you’ve assembled according to the instruction booklet.

For me, “freshness” boils down to the ability to make me sit up and pay attention. Sometimes you can achieve that by doing the unexpected, but you can also do the expected so well that it comes to life as if I’ve never seen it before. The characters are so vivid, the plot developments so sharply executed, that I can’t spare the brain cells to think about other stories that have done the same thing before; I’m too absorbed in the drama you’ve pulled me into. There’s nothing wrong with using the tools your forebears crafted ages ago, so long as you use them with skill. Unlike the “entirely new” approach, there’s evidence that those tools actually work.

I’ve had this open in a tab for long enough that I no longer remember who I got the link from, but: back in 2009, the blog Only a Game did a series of posts on religion in various science fiction texts. Not invented religions, but real-world faiths (though sometimes in future-adapted forms), and the ways in which books or TV shows or movies either represent the practice of faith, or grapple with the concepts behind those faiths.

The series starts here with an introduction (which as a second part a few posts later); the first actual discussion of a text is here, tackling Frank Herbert’s Dune. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to link to the series specifically; the only tag they have is “serial,” and since the blog seems to do a lot of serial discussions, that pulls up a whole swath of more recent posts. But if you start at one of those two points, there are links at the bottom leading you onward to later installments, so you can skip the intervening entries on other topics.

I’ve touched briefly on the subject of religion in science fiction before, noting that the dominant message sent by SF as a whole seems to be that we’ll have gotten over that religion thing by the time the future arrives. There are exceptions, of course, texts that don’t assume the future will mean jettisoning faith, but they do seem like exceptions to me. And I suppose that view makes sense if you assume the primary cause and purpose of religion is the need to explain why the world works the way it does, and if you also make the corollary assumptions that 1) eventually science will be able to explain all of those things much better and 2) we are inevitably moving toward more science, not less. But I take issue with all three of those assumptions: contra Frazer, I think religion isn’t just for explaining the world’s functioning; I also think there are issues (like ethics) that science is poorly-equipped to handle*; and I know way too much about historical instances where scientific knowledge was lost to assume we’re just going to keep climbing that hill. If you define SF narrowly as featuring more advanced tech than we have now, then sure, clearly the future as seen in SF will not have to deal with the question of a new Dark Age. But I still think it’s facile to assume the impulse toward religion will have vanished along the way.

It will have changed, certainly. I never read more than the first Dune book, so until I read these posts I didn’t know Herbert had explored “Mahayana Christianity” and “Zensunni Catholicism” as speculative fusions of current religious traditions. I’d love to see more books that do something like that, imagining futuristic Buddhism or the Church of Christ Digital or what have you. So if you know of any, please recommend them in the comments.

*Please note that I don’t think religion is the only source of ethics. Atheists are perfectly capable of coming up with reasons not to steal from or murder one another; philosophers have been hashing out the issue of ethics for ages, and not always from a religious starting point. But if people have continue to have questions about why evil exists, or what their obligation is to their fellow man, I don’t think they’re likely to find satisfactory answers in string theory.