Barry Deutsch Cartoon

Barry Deutsch is one of my favorite political cartoonists. I support him on Patreon, and enjoy his work very much.

He just posted a timely cartoon, and encouraged us to share it. I think it's pretty on point, so I'm doing so.

This Is Me

In case you missed The Greatest Showman, the musical about PT Barnum, it has some completely awesome music. This is my favorite song, from a workshop session they did while trying to get the movie greenlit.

Keala Settle plays the fat, bearded lady in the movie, and is sort of the leader/focus of all the people from the "freak show" part of Barnum's show. The movie is pretty kind to Barnum generally, playing him as a guy who was all down with and empathetic toward society's cast-offs [coughcough] but in one part of the movie he's been caught up in his infatuation with Jenny Lind, the opera singer, and there's this high-society reception for her. He tries to keep the circus people out, because he suddenly cares what the creme de la creme think of him. Settle's character is all, "You did NOT just do that!" and that leads to this song. Which is awesome.

I had water leaking down my face by about halfway through.



Check out this song, then go see the movie.

Angie

Apparently Girls Shouldn't Say No

So the Kanesville Elementary School in Utah thought it was an awesome idea to make a rule for their 6th grade dance saying that if someone asks you to dance with them, you have to say yes.

Because teaching kids that if a boy makes a romantic offer, a girl has to say yes is such a good idea. For both the boys and the girls -- teaching girls that they have to say yes, and teaching boys that girls can't say no. Yeah, that's not going to cause any problems in the future. [headdesk]

A number of parents objected, because they have functional brains, and the school is backpedalling. But I'd really like to know what rock the school authorities -- whoever it was who came up with this -- have been living under for the last year. Or actually, the last few decades.

They framed the original policy in terms of being kind to one another, and okay, I can get behind that. But surely it's much better to teach kids how to say "No thank you" kindly, without making the person who asked you feel bad. That also gives the asker practice in accepting a "No thank you" with civility, rather than turning agressive out of humiliation or anger. Yes, being turned down hurts (ask any writer [cough]) but learning to handle a rejection without melting down is part of becoming a functional adult.

At least this got nipped in the bud, but if my kid went to this school, I'd be doubly vigilant to make sure they didn't make similarly horrible decisions in the future. Best of luck to the kids.

Angie

Something Uplifting

Let's start the month with something bright and beautiful. The MarySue blog has a post collecting pics and videos of people being completely awesome down in Texas today.

Spiderman visits kids in an evacuation center, a huge line of people wait in the rain so they can sign up to volunteer to help, and a bunch of random people form a human chain into the racing flood waters to rescue an elderly man.

Sometimes we need to be reminded that people are still mostly made of awesome. Check it out.

Angie

Nice to Know It's Not Just Us?

It seems Norwegian racists are just as idiotic as their American counterparts.

A Norwegian troll named Johan Slåttavik posted a pic of a bunch of empty bus seats to an anti-immigrant web site called "Fedrelandet viktigst" which means "Fatherland First." The geniuses on the group interpreted the tall, padded bus seats as burqas, and the comments were pretty much what you'd expect from that kind of person. Check it out.

Not only is this racist and Islamophobic, it's yet another case of a bunch of dudes trying to police what women wear. If there are Islamic women who don't want to wear a burqa, or a hijab, or whatever, then sure, support them. But plenty of Islamic women are perfectly happy covering up, and in fact feel uncomfortable in public without their traditional garments. They should be able to wear what they want, just like everyone else.

Angie

Neil Gaiman on Impostor Syndrome

Ever get the feeling that you're not really all that good at whatever you do? That people who praise you are just being nice, or they don't really get you, and when they figure out how ordinary you are they'll be angry and start sneering?

I feel like that sometimes. I think most people who've found some success do. Neil Gaiman does, and he talks about it in a really excellent Tumblr post. Check it out.

Angie

Model Deals with Dirtbags Online

So Emily Sears is a model, and like many models, she posts pics of herself online regularly. It's part of the job, building her reputation and brand, all that good stuff.

But there are dudes online who think it's just neato-kewl to send her pics of their penises, just... because? I don't even know. Do these guys really think some woman they've never met is going to look at a crappy phone-pic of their junk and think, "OMG I wanna this guy to bang me hard!!" Really? [eyeroll]

Eventually Ms. Sears got sick of this crap, and decided to start doing something about it. She looked at the guy's online profile, and found his wife or girlfriend, and sent her a screenshot of what the guy sent, with a note saying she thought the woman should be aware of what her husband/boyfriend was doing online.

I think this is an awesome solution. :) A friend of Ms. Sears, a DJ named Laura, who also gets dick pics on a regular basis, has started doing the same thing.

Good stuff, click through and read about it. The comments are actually worth reading too. I particularly like the one where a woman tells about how, when she was fourteen, some dude sent her a dick pic and she sent him a picture of cutting a banana. [smirk] I hope that had him crossing his legs for a while.

Angie

Block on Collaboration

I'm currently reading Lawrence Block's Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which is a great book on writing, a collection of his Writer's Digest columns from the seventies. There's a lot of good advice and enlightening ruminations in it, but one bit (of what I've read so far) made me laugh.

In "Writing with Two Heads," the chapter on collaboration, he says:

Here's [Donald E.] Westlake's description of the process: "First we sat down and discussed the whole thing at length. Then I wrote a fifteen-page outline of what we had discussed. I gave this to Brian [Garfield], and he expanded it to forty pages, putting in all the historical context and everything. Then he gave it back to me and I cut it back down to twenty-five pages. At this point we were thinking screenplay, and this version was shown around as a treatment. When it didn't fly, we decided to do it as a novel first.

"I wrote the first draft, limiting myself to action and dialogue -- not where they were or what they were wearing, just what they did and said. My draft ran about thirty thousand words. I gave it to Brian and he doubled it, turning each of my pages into two pages, putting in all the background and such. Then he gave me his sixty-thousand-word version and I edited it, and I gave it back to him and he edited it, and then we gave the whole mess to an editor."

"It sounds," I ventured, "like five times as much work as sitting down and writing a book."

"Yes," he agreed, "and about a quarter as much fun, and for half the money."

I've never collaborated with anyone on anything I/we intended to publish. When you're focused on the product, and thinking about how readers will like it and react to it, it does seem like the process could become rather fraught, and tempers might flare. Any writer I'd care to collaborate with is someone I'd like to remain friends with, you know?

I've done collaborations for fun, where about ninety percent of the point was the process rather than the product. Another word for this is "playing," and you can do it with two or more people in a chat room, or e-mailing each other. Everyone is playing a character, and you go back and forth, typing what your character is saying/doing. (Yes, it's pretty much exactly like kids playing Batman or cowboys or cops-n-robbers, although hopefully the folks in the chat room write better than eight-year-olds.) With the right people, and the right characters and set-up, this can be a blast and a half. I've participated in this kind of collaborative writing in stories that went on for years. We posted them online as we went and hardly anyone read them, but that wasn't the point. Hanging with friends and having fun developing characters and creating story was the point, and the fact that hardly anything produced this way is worth publishing commercially is completely irrelevant.

Some writers collaborate a lot, and they've clearly figured out a way to make the product worth whatever aggravation the process causes. Or maybe they've worked out a process is smooth and efficient, in which case I'd love to read about it.

Angie

Writing Characters Who Aren't Like You

Someone on a mailing list posted this link (thanks Lyn!) and I had to pass it on. Daniel Jose Older, an SFF writer and editor, wrote an article called 12 Fundamentals of Writing "The Other" (And The Self). If you write, or have considered writing, about characters who are different from you in some basic way, this'll give you some good stuff to think about.

I particularly like #5 -- "Racist writing is craft failure." Absolutely. It's easy to reach for obvious traits or characteristics without thinking about it, and have your hand fall onto a racist (sexist, homophobic, etc.) cliche. If bigoted cliches end up in your story, they're like any other cliches and make the writing weaker and more shallow.

Good stuff, check it out.

Angie

Marriage Equality, Finally

The Supreme Court finally grants marriage equality.

Try as they might, people opposed to marriage equality haven't been able to come up with any rational reasons for their stand. "Because our god disapproves," is not a rational reason in a nation with separation of church and state. "Because the children," is not supported by any legitimate research. (In fact, I can't give a link because I didn't save it at the time, but I remember reading an article a few years ago discussing research that showed the best outcome for children, looking at emotional adjustment, behavior, and performance in school, came from having two lesbian parents.) "Because pedophiles," is a null argument because adults having sex with minors (ignoring the complications of what that means and where the lines are drawn) is still illegal. And that idiot in California who tried to get a proposition on the ballot requiring that anyone who commits "sodomy" be executed by whatever member of the general public got to them first (no, seriously) just makes the anti-GLBT side look even more whacked than it actually is.

I'm sure there are plenty of people moaning and gnashing their teeth today. But look, the sky isn't falling. If you think gay sex is icky, then good news: you're not required to have gay sex. Your kids are no more likely to be gay now than they were last week. And if your kid does come out to you, you're still free to disown him or her, and the people around you who disapprove would probably have disapproved last week, while people who would've agreed you did the right thing last week will probably still think that now. And if your church doesn't recognize gay marriage, your church still isn't required to marry gay couples. Nothing has changed for straight people.

Which is the whole point. Nothing has changed for straight people. We can go about our lives as we always have, because the world still treats us the way it always did.

And in fact, only thirteen states still banned marriage between same-sex couples yesterday. We were already mostly there; the Supremes just acknowledged the way society was moving.

Note, though, that this decision doesn't mean homophobia is dead in the US, any more than the election of President Obama meant racism is dead. There are still plenty of people who see straight as "normal" and gay as "deviant," and who want the laws of the land to reflect their views, some of whom are active on the political stage.

Ted Cruz and Scott Walker are two Republican presidential hopefuls who support a Constitutional amendment allowing states to ban same-sex marriage. Considering that the majority of states allowed it yesterday, and polls show a majority of Americans are in favor of it, I have no idea where these guys thought that amendment would come from. There's no way they'd ever get the two-thirds ratification required to pass it, so...? Marriage equality doesn't affect them, so it looks like either their own fears and squicks on display, or (more likely IMO) it's a flag-waving act, aimed at the very small but very loud radical-right voting pool. "Hey, look how conservative I am! Vote for me!" Of course, that tactic hasn't worked in the last couple of presidential elections, but if these guys want to give it another whirl, bully for them.

And others have already discussed Clarence Thomas's dissenting opinion against marriage equality. From Thomas's opinion:

The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.

Seriously? Because being a slave, confined and beaten and raped, isn't at all undignified. Because being dragged away from your property (often losing it permanently) and locked up in an internment camp, declared a danger to the country of which you're a citizen, hated and reviled by your fellow citizens, isn't at all undignified. And having people sneer and snark at your marriage, telling you it's just pretend, and having your children harassed and mocked because their parents aren't really married and they don't really have a normal family, that's not at all undignified.

The fact that Justice Thomas, who's married to a white woman, clearly benefits from the results of Loving v. the State of Virginia, and yet declares that Obergefell v. Hodges -- which grants the exact same kind of marriage rights (and dignity) to a group of people who were discriminated against exactly the way interracial couples were discriminated against before Loving -- is wrong and pointless, is bogglingly irrational. It reflects a lack of compassion, and an "I've got mine so you all can go suck it" attitude.

There are plenty of people, though, even in conservative states, who are ready to jump right into getting gay and lesbian couples married, because "conservative" is not the same as "asshole."

Gerard Rickhoff, who oversees marriage licenses in Bexar County, which includes San Antonio, has removed the words "male" and "female" from the licenses. He's prepared extra work stations and is ready to keep the office open late. He's planning to have security on site to deal with protesters, "so there's no possibility of discomfort or hate speech." And if same-sex couples are turned away by clerks in other counties, he has a message for them: "Just get in your car and come on down the highway. You'll be embraced here."

Props to Mr. Rickhoff, and others like him in Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Michigan, mentioned in the above HuffPo article, and to people in all states, of all political orientations around the country whose action and support, however loud or quiet, let this happen.

I'll wrap with a quote from President Obama: "Today we can say in no uncertain terms that we've made our union a little more perfect ... America should be very proud."

World's Biggest Christmas Stocking

If you knit or crochet, or are willing to learn, this is an incredibly cool project for a great charity.

The Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation helps kids who've lost a military parent in the line of duty pay for college. Caron, the yarn manufacturer, is putting together a project to make the world's biggest Christmas stocking, and is asking people to knit or crochet three-foot squares and send them in to be assembled. They're going for an entry in the Guinness Book, which is also cool.

If you buy your yarn from Caron, they'll give fifteen cents per skein to the CFPF. If you just want to participate in the world's-biggest-Christmas-stocking project, you can buy your yarn from someone else, or use yarn from your stash, so long as it's worsted weight. There are knit patterns and crochet patterns you can download and print out. All the crochet patterns are Beginner or Easy, and the knitting patterns are mostly Beginner or Easy, with a couple of Intermediates that use mosaic colorwork. Even if you're just learning, you can find a pattern that'll work for you. It might take a while to do a three-by-three square, but if you use a Beginner level pattern, it won't be hard. If you have a favorite pattern you want to use instead, you can do that, so long as you end up with a three-by-three foot square.

If you're worried that you'll be too slow, note that they've been working on this since last November, as far as I can tell. They planned for it to go into this year, and sure enough, they're only 20% through right now. Looks like there'll be time for fast workers to do several squares if they want, and for beginners or people who are just busy to do one without knocking themselves out. :)

The main page, with a progress meter, is here.

Genre and Boundaries

Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro have a great conversation about Breaking the Boundaries Between Fantasy and Literary Fiction over at The New Republic. They range all around the topic, looking at the history of genre and how literature with fantastical elements was viewed in the past.

Gaiman: When Dickens published A Christmas Carol nobody went, "Ah, this respectable social novelist has suddenly become a fantasy novelist: look, there are ghosts and magic."

Very true. And there's still some of that today. Some literary writers get a pass on fantastical elements; others are shoved into the genre mudhole while the rest of the literary artistes point and laugh. And of course, in Dickens's day, he was pretty much considered a sentimental hack who catered to the ignorant masses, so there's that; even though there wasn't a genre mudhole to push him into when he published A Christmas Carol, he wasn't exactly revered by the literary establishment of his day. That came later.

It's a great conversation, with touches on Westerns and porn and musicals and improving literature. Go read it. :)

Angie

Watch Ireland Passing Marriage Equality

This is a wonderful video, just under 7.5 minutes long, by Raymond Braun who travelled to Ireland for the vote. He travelled around and talked to people, both straight and gay, about what it meant to them. It was pretty awesome seeing the up-welling of support for marriage equality, enough so that there was an entire store in a mall selling just pro-equality items.

This is the first time a country has adopted marriage equality through a popular vote. Props to Ireland. I hope it spreads.

Your Brain on Fiction

A writer friend on a mailing list linked to an article called Your Brain on Fiction, which talks about how the brain responds when one is reading fiction.

It seems that reading vivid adjectives or active verbs stimulates the same parts of your brain that activate when you're actually experiencing the adjective or doing the verb. For example:

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for “perfume” and “coffee,” their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean “chair” and “key,” this region remained dark.

This also works with social interactions. Reading about characters going through emotional experiences and relationships makes readers more able to understand other people, empathize with them, and navigate social situations.

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind — an effect that was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents, they may experience more “parent-children conversations about mental states” when it comes to films.)

Although that last bit made me wonder. It sounds weird that kids would pick up more about social interaction from movies than from television, and I don't really buy the "going to the movies with parents" thing. When a little kid is really into a TV show, they're going to want to talk about it, whether or not Mom or Dad knows who all Spongebob's friends are. And what about watching movies on TV? Maybe they meant to differentiate between watching television and going to a movie theater, rather than between TV shows and movies. It still sounds iffy; I'd have liked to get more info on that.

Still, this is pretty cool. Definitely click through and read the whole thing.

Angie

Interview

Vanessa MacLellan, one of the contributors to the 2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, has been posting interviews of other writers who have stories in that book, and my interview went up today.

As with the anthology itself, the emphasis in the interview is diversity in fiction. I write diverse characters because I want to accurately reflect the world around me in my work, but it goes farther than that. Click through to see why.

Thanks to Van for doing these interviews!

Angie

How Not to Be Awkward Around People With Disabilities

This is a fun video, with lots of great info and some laughs. Thanks to Lee Wind for the link!



Angie

Amazing Historical Archery

Like most people, I grew up thinking that the ultimate display of archery skill was the stationary shooter aiming at a target. When I was in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism -- a sort of learn-by-doing history club) I learned about war archers, who massed behind the infantry and shot arrows in volleys, aiming high shoot their arrows in parabolic arcs over the heads of their own fighters to come down onto the enemy. War archers in the SCA counted on the massing of arrows for effectiveness, to make them difficult or impossible to dodge.

Lars Andersen studied historical documents and illustrations and has learned to shoot the way combat archers shot in pre-gunpowder days. This guy is amazingly fast, accurate, versatile and mobile. Watching this video makes me want to dive into historical fantasy just so I can write about a serious archer. :) Check it out:



Thanks to BoingBoing for sharing this.

Angie

Putting Ferguson Into Perspective

Yes, what's going on in Ferguson is awful, and is causing hardship for a lot of people, most of them black. Yes, it would be better for everyone if they'd go home and get on with their lives, as Michael Brown's family has asked. But at least in this case, the people rioting have a significant reason to be angry -- a pretty clear miscarriage of justice, with an obvious racial motive. All the white people looking down their noses and crying shame on those violent black rioters for being so violent (salted with racist epithets, because of course all this violence is because that's what people of their race do) should perhaps remember all the So Much More Worthy [cough] reasons for which white people have violently rioted.

Thanks to Jason for sending me a link to this. Very telling.

Angie

This Woman Rocks!

I've said a few times that I don't have any age issues. This video is a great example of why.



This woman is 86 and can still do that. O_O I couldn't have done that at twenty. Health and fitness often vary with age, but if you're unhealthy or out of shape it's not necessarily because you're old. You might not even be old. And you can be old and still be able to do a pretty darned impressive gymnastics routine, if you work at it and have good genes. Being healthy is great and being unhealthy sucks, and you can be either one at any age.

Okay, maybe the lady wouldn't win any Olympic medals with that routine, but damn! She still rocks! :D

Angie

PS -- yes, I changed the template for this blog, because I'm really tired of not being able to post YouTube videos. I don't do it often, but when I want to it's annoying to have them not fit on that skinny post window the default-default gives you. :/ I like wider post windows anyway, so here we are. :)

Follow-Up on the Libel of Quoting

I'm ridiculously busy right now so this is going to be short, but Mr. Sean Fodera, referenced in my previous post, has hired a lawyer to tell him that linking to an article that quotes him saying something stupid is not, in fact, a libelous action for which one can be sued. He's posted a very thorough apology to Mary Robinette Kowal in which he also points out that he does not represent his employer (MacMillan) in any way when he says stupid things in public.

There are a few interesting roundaboutations and caveats in said apology, but whatever. I only hope he's learned something, and is planning to duck out of sight for a while.

Angie, who still has about 90 stories to get through by Saturday