Publishing

I was wrong, I DO have more to say about the current SFWA-related brouhaha

First, let me say that a couple of people have pointed out to me, quite correctly, that this particular brouhaha is not actually on the shoulders of the people currently in charge of SFWA–but rather, on those of the signatories of the petition going around. So this is me acknowledging that. Everything I’ve seen so far indicates that SFWA themselves are trying to do the right thing here, as a direct result of last year’s mess, and now they’re getting called out on it because apparently certain persons think last year’s mess is what they actually want? Or something? I DON’T EVEN KNOW.

But what I do know is this. It’s come out that the originator of this petition, back in 2007, took it upon himself to try to be satirical about someone else’s post complaining about the male-heavy Hugo ballot. And by “try”, I mean FAIL MISERABLY. He threw out those inflammatory first few paragraphs, and then goes into “HA HA I WAS ONLY KIDDING if I really meant that the feminists would get all angry at me! Also, if you thought I really meant that you’re crazy!” mode. And then proceeds to castigate the poster of the complaint about the Hugo ballots, taking the tactic of “why is it okay for her to use that language about a male-heavy ballot, and it’s not okay for me to do the same about a female-heavy one?”

In other words: BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ?

Y’know what, Chuckles? You were right. Feminists will get angry at you, but not for the reasons you think.

Because here’s the thing. We see this BUT WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ? thing all the damn time. It’s a diversionary tactic to try to silence a woman speaking out. Because OHNOEZ HER LANGUAGE IS INFLAMMATORY, and that’s way, way more important than the actual point she was trying to make. I got news, Chuckles. This diversionary tactic is still bullshit. It’s the tactic of a group in power to make the group NOT in power keep their place.

Now okay, yeah, that post was back in 2007, so you could argue it’s old news. But you’d be wrong, given that now, seven years later, we’re still having these arguments.

And I for one am deeply saddened at seeing the list of people who think this chucklehead is worthy of their support.

Dara has her thoughts on the matter here.

ETA: It has just been brought to my attention that as per this statement from Mr. Gould, president of SFWA, the petitioners’ uproar is over something that isn’t even happening.

February 11, 2014 by
About Me

In other news: a present for ME!

YOU GUYS. Remember this blog post, in which I described how I had this picture in my head of all of my various fandoms over the years having a kitchen party in my head?

My friend Yngvar in Norway, crafty devil that he is, commissioned no less an august personage than Sonny Strait to sketch it for me, as a combination Christmas/birthday present! Sonny Strait, comma, who’s best known to me with his background in Elfquest! Behold!

The Many Fandoms of Anna the Piper, by Sonny Strait

The Many Fandoms of Anna the Piper, by Sonny Strait

And that’ll be Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer referenced in this sketch for my TV fandoms, as well as Great Big Sea and Elvis being the most obvious musical fandoms–but with the baby!me babbling in French being a callout to my Quebec trad fandom, not to mention my rampageous affection for learning French in general. 😀 I particularly like how baby!me looks a lot like the pic of baby!me I’ve posted before! Somebody was clearly given a reference source!

All hail Yngvar and Sonny Strait for making this happen! Thank you, gentlemen!

February 10, 2014 by
Publishing

SFWA Explodes IV: The Revenge of SFWA

Got up this morning to see there’s yet another SFWA explosion. How many are we up to now, then?

There’s a petition going around, it seems. A petition protesting that the SFWA Bulletin is instituting procedures to try to avoid things like what happened this past summer, during the LAST round of SFWA explosions. Apparently, some people out there are still upset that people might, just might, be justifiably cranky about sexism in the genre.

I first spotted the news when James Nicoll posted about a Twitter thread on it, here. Then I went out to run some morning errands, and when I came back, Dara reported that the petition alluded to in that post had in fact surfaced. James talks about it here, linking in turn to Radish Reviews’ in-depth post.

Radish Reviews has reported that there are in fact two versions of this thing floating around, and addresses both of them here. I read them. And I knew I was in for some hurting the instant I saw the phrase “politically correct” bandied about right out of the gate. In the petition TITLE, even, as well the first paragraph.

Oh, and it gets more fun from there. I particularly like how scare quotes are thrown around “sexism” and “offensive”. And by like, I actually mean, if I facepalm any harder I’ll give myself a concussion.

I’d rant further on this if I could think of anything to say that I haven’t posted about a dozen times already–about how, if the first words out of your mouth are to cry “political correctness!”, that chances are very, very high that you are in fact part of the problem. But then, people who are inclined to cry “political correctness!” aren’t going to put much credence in what I have to say anyway.

So I’m going to simply stick with noting that yeah, I’m still feeling pretty much at peace with my having decided that I’d just as soon stay out of any organization that continues to be this toxic.

Further commentary on the matter:

February 10, 2014 by
Sportsball

Fun with Seahawks parades!

So as y’all know, the Seahawks won the Super Bowl! And while I’m not a football person, Dara and Paul DO enjoy watching the Hawks. And all three of us wanted to check out the festivities the city had this past Wednesday, throwing a huge parade in honor of the team. My workplace even gave us sanction to be out of the office to be on hand, so we figured, what the hey! Historic street party? SIGN US UP.

Continue Reading

February 9, 2014 by
Television

Open letter to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Dear cast and crew of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,

After seeing this interview linked to by userinfojames_nicoll, I’ve got to ask: seriously? Seriously? Did your lead actor just call those of us who’ve bailed on watching your show “not geeks”? And “losers”?

If so, I’d like to note that just in case you were wondering, this is not an effective strategy to get those of us who tried your show and bailed to come back and check you out again. I’M JUST SAYIN’.

Because look. I get the whole idea of “not all heroes are super”. I really do. I am coming at this out of general love for the universe that Marvel’s set up in the movies; I don’t have any particular history with Marvel comics outside a few years in my adolescence reading the X-Men, so I have no particular investment in whether specific characters out of the comics show up in your show. But specifically because of the affection I’ve built up for the portrayed universe in the movies, I wanted to like your show. I really did. I swear.

I didn’t bail because you had no superheros in your cast. I bailed because with the exception of Coulson and maybe Agent May, I didn’t like any of your main characters. And for the most part, I’m sorry to say, your stories just were not engaging me, and that’s not accounting for the parts where they were actively pissing me off.

This isn’t a question of me being impatient for stuff to happen, either. I also understand the notion of a show sometimes needing several episodes to get its feet under it. I gave Torchwood a good season and a half before I finally bailed on it–again with the primary reason being “not liking any of the characters”.

And I’m sorry, if I just don’t like your main cast, I don’t see much reason to be spending time hanging around hoping they’ll change my mind. What incidental other characters you bring in to drive the plots means very little to me if I’m not invested in your central cast and what happens to them.

Before you tell me I’m not patient enough either, I’ll point out that I hung in there through Babylon 5’s first season as it got its act together–because even though it was rough out of the gate, I was nonetheless engaged by the characters and the plots. Likewise with Castle. Castle was REALLY rough in its first short season, and Castle as a character had all SORTS of flaws. But he was engagingly flawed, enough to keep me watching.

I’m just not getting that with S.H.I.E.L.D.

I’d say I’m sorry if you think this makes me “not a real geek”, except I’m less sorry and more pissed off by that, too. If any of you have awareness of geek culture at all, you’ll be aware that geek women have been fighting against accusations of not being real geeks for too damn long as it is.

For the record, cracks like “those aren’t geeks, those are losers”?

NOT HELPING.

Disappointedly,
Me

Edited to add:

Other places reporting on this. I’m seeing in particular in those articles that Mr. Gregg appears to have realized that shooting his mouth off in this particular fashion is, shall we say, unwise. I’m glad he’s realized this, but still, I’m not pleased at the waffly tone of “I guess I don’t mean to say that people who have been frustrated by that discovery period are necessarily losers. I just think they should be, perhaps, a little more patient.”

February 4, 2014 by
Sportsball

Super Bowl!

So yeah, I am entirely clueless about football. But Dara and Paul like it, and they do watch the Hawks, so we did indeed watch the Super Bowl today. And we had our friends Kathryn and Erik over, with their kids, to watch with us. While the kids (ages 7 and 3) gave exactly zero damns about the game, they were VERY eager to join in on the Sportsball cheer with us every time the Hawks scored. Which goes like this: “OUR TEAM DID THE POINTS! OUR TEAM DID THE POINTS! OUR TEAM DID THE POINTS! GOOOOOOO SPORTSBALL!”

And taking under consideration that I am indeed football-clueless, I’m pretty sure 43-8 is good. ;D In fact, the reaction of the room at large was “Wait? What? We actually won the Super Bowl? That’s good, right?” And, “wait there’s a trophy ceremony after this thing? We had no idea! How will we know when to turn off the TV? Usually we’ve turned off the TV in disgust by now!”

I hear that the Denver coach has been quoted as saying “we ran into a buzzsaw”. To which I have to go “aww”. I want to give the poor guy a hug. And possibly a beer.

Me, not being an actual football fan, mostly I’m just pleased that the city gets to have this to cheer about for the next several days. I just hope all the actual Hawks fans don’t destroy downtown tonight. I gotta commute through there in the morning!

And on Wednesday there’s going to be a parade to welcome the Hawks home. I suspect a lot of the city’s population will be taking suspiciously long lunches on Wednesday. And I daresay there will be a morale event at work about this!

Anyway: GO SPORTSBALL! For those of you who actually do regularly follow the Hawks, congrats to you all! To those of you who follow the Broncos, commiserations!

We were mostly pleasantly surprised by the commercials. The racism and sexism quotient wasn’t completely down this year, but it was surprisingly low. Favorite commercial amongst those watching was definitely the Radio Shack commercial. And my two personal followups for favorite were the Budweiser commercial with the puppy and the Clydesdales, and the Highlander one with the Muppets, and the British Villains commercial with Tom Hiddleston. Because all things are made better by puppies, Muppets, and Tom Hiddleston.

Honorable grudging mention also has to go to Axe for a surprisingly non-gross commercial about kissing for peace. And to GoDaddy for the commercial about the spray tan salon. Yes, I know, Internets, I’m shocked too!

Honorable actual mention to Coca-cola for the commercial about America being sung in different languages. That was really nice.

Also, here are my favorite bits of reaction from Twitter, as well:

https://twitter.com/ThePhoenixO/status/430155524974587905

https://twitter.com/theresa_lauren/status/430153344921763842

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/430175030308511744

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/430197678182789120

https://twitter.com/demonbaby/status/430190800572391425

And here is some local coverage:

February 2, 2014 by
Comics

Elfquest: The Final Quest #1

Elfquest: The Final Quest

Elfquest: The Final Quest

And while we’re on the topic of Ways Dark Horse Comics is Going to Command My Money in 2014, we’ve also got the joy of a brand new Elfquest story starting up!

Hold on a minute, Internets, while I stand back and savor the rhythm of the phrase “new Elfquest story”. Ahem! Where was I? Ah yes!

Now that we’ve got the prologue out of the way, now we’re getting down to business with the opening chapter of this new story. And what a chapter it is. For this longstanding fan’s eyes, the Donning-Starblaze era of Elfquest is still the most lovely–but that’s not to say that this art isn’t also beautiful, because it is. Wendy Pini has hit her happy place with doing her art digitally, and there are times now in this new area of her work when I feel she comes close to the amazing lushness of the Donning-Starblaze days. So make no mistake, this issue is a pleasure to look at. I bought mine digitally, but I’ll be buying this again once there’s a graphic novel to be had, and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how this color palette renders in print.

As for the story itself, well. Most of the Wolfriders of Cutter’s branch of the tribe are beginning to feel like they’re losing track of the Way, and so we see them getting back to good old-fashioned basics with a rough-and-tumble hunt. But not everybody in the tribe is down with this plan, and the outlier certainly raised my eyebrows. Meanwhile, Ember’s branch of the Wolfriders faces a new human threat, one that makes Teir come face to face with the killer of his mother–Kahvi, the chieftess of the Go-Backs.

I’m still processing what I think about this so far, but I’m definitely intrigued, and am looking forward to the next installment! Let’s talk about the issue in the comments, y’all!

January 29, 2014 by