1) Peanuts comics with Game of Thrones quotes.
2) The Tumblr I Work At A Public Library.
4) Energy harnessed from humidity can power small devices. Cool.
5) If JK Rowling had written the Harry Potter books from Voldemort’s point of view.
6) Remove cat before takeoff. Video.
7) Six SF/F authors who hated their legacy. Quick note to the universe: I don’t know if I would grow to hate a book of mine that became wildly successful, but I’m willing to risk it.
It will be difficult to keep this short. There is so much to talk about, and it’s all important, that the temptation to digress is powerful, and I’m easily distracted. But I want to keep this short and to the point.
On Wednesday, Dylann Roof, a 21yo white man, walked into a black church in Charleston and murdered nine people. You can read more about the victims here and you should.
Right now, as I write this, it’s late in the day on Thursday. I’m sure there is a lot of misinformation floating around, but one thing that seems clear is that he shot those people because he is a racist.
And there are ten thousand things to say here: from the prevalence of gun violence to the friends who said nothing when Roof made racist jokes, from Roof’s claim that he was defending white women to the Confederate flag still flying all over this country.
But what I want to point out is that, for too many white people, Dylann Roof is the face of racism in this country, and that’s a problem.
When yet another white guy freaks out because he’s been called on something racist he’s done or said, it’s because he thinks he’s being compared to people like Roof. Or Bull Connor. Or James Earl Ray. He’s outraged because that’s what he things racism means.
That’s too easy, though. That’s describing the problem by it’s most extreme manifestations, while ignoring the rest. These people want to define racism by its most egregious actions, then put a floor under it. Everything below that doesn’t count. Unfair hiring practices? Police profiling? Unequal education? Refusal to cast any black actors in shows set in racially diverse cities? None of those things, the argument goes, are as important as a mass shooting. None of those things, the argument continues, deserve such a heinous label as “racist”.
Except those things are racist. Absolutely so. And being called on racist behavior is not equivalent to being called another Dylann Roof. There’s a whole range of behaviors and assumptions that make up a racist society that don’t approach the level of mass murder. And those assumptions and behaviors–and worse, the complacency in the face of continued injustice–are what makes Roof possible. He may be the highest expression of the murderous contempt that makes up white supremacy, but he stands so high because we have given a gigantic foundation.
Now is the time to mourn the victims and to speak out against racism. Now is also the time to accept that Dylann Roof is not the face of racism. He’s just the far end of the bell curve. The rest of us–me included–need to do better.
I don’t play a lot of video games for one reason: it’s bad for me when I find a good one.
Frankly, that’s rare. With most games, it’s pretty at first, with some fun puzzles and an interesting setup. Maybe there will be a couple of easy fights (I don’t have a lot of patience with frantic, complicated fights) and the suggestion of a fun story.
Then shit starts to turn into a grind and I lose interest.
An exception was FREEDOM FORCE, and old squad-level superhero game, which had a sense of humor about it and let you pause the action to give the characters instructions. You fought giant ants, dinosaurs, alien invaders, minotaurs, the whole deal. I really enjoyed that game, and my poor wife saw nothing but the back of my head for two weeks. Not much writing got done, either. I finally had to delete the thing and put it away for good.
But I still own games and occasionally buy new ones. I keep hoping I’ll find a big name game that will really hook me, even though they all seem to grind.
Anyway, as a reward for finishing The Great Way, I bought myself the video game version of Sentinels of the Multiverse. We own the card game but never play it because a) it’s hard to read the text on those cards and b) the game has a simple structure but can become really complex. The video game version solved all that, because the cards were huge on the screen and the program kept track of all the little bullshit: how many plusses to damage, now many negatives, how many cards to play, etc.
When I say the structure is simple, I mean it. It’s a cooperative superhero-themed game, and each hero, villain, and environment has its own deck. The villain goes first, then each hero in turn, then the environment, then back to the villain again.
When playing a hero, you play a card from your hand, then use that hero’s power, then draw a new card. The villain and environment, in their turn, just play a card. That’s it. That’s how complicated it is.
However, some cards have an effect and go away, some stay around. Some take damage. Some let you play more cards, or draw more, or use extra powers.
In that sense, like M:TG, the cards are about breaking the games rules.
And I really, really liked playing it. It was absorbing as hell, with a lot of interesting complexity. The video game version turned a cooperative game into a solo one, but whatever, my wife and son didn’t like the game anyway.
When I played, I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t in pain. I just had flow. It was so great that I bought a year-long season pass to get all the new heroes, villains, and environments.
On Tuesday, I played one more game against Lex Luthor Baron Blade, and took him out with The Flash Tachyon, then deleted the game from my wife’s iPad. I lose all the characters and all the variants I’d unlocked, but the truth is I was becoming obsessive about it. I was falling behind on things (not writing this time, but other stuff) and even though each game was not very long–mainly because I know the cards so well I don’t have to think about strategy too much–I kept returning to them again and again. Yeah, it made me forget my numerous discomforts for a short while, but it was also drawing me in in a way I could no longer allow.
So, it’s gone. For now. When the next update is released, I’ll probably download it again to try out the new characters and face the villains, but until then it’ll feel good to recapture some of that time. The older I get, the more precious it is.
It’s a great game, though. If Steam would toss it into the Summer Sale, I’d recommend it to everyone.
Cue surprised reaction.
I’ve been arguing for a while that Kindle Unlimited is a bad idea for writers. Instead of taking a commission on book sales (don’t bother calling it a “royalty”, because it isn’t), they set up a fund and divvy it up among the authors.
That fund has been getting smaller. And that makes sense, since Amazon has long been in the business of squeezing other people’s margins. For authors who have been paying 30% or 65% commissions, it’s difficult to work out why they would agree to bigger cuts. Amazon’s idea of creating a subscription library that paid a share only if the reader read 10% of the book.
Naturally, authors began to game that system right away. Why dump a 400-page novel into the KU marketplace when you could drop in, say, 50 eight-page novels? If a reader merely opened to page one, that was enough to reach the 10% threshold and trigger payment.
That was clearly not a situation that was going to last (although it lasted much longer than I expected). Now Amazon has switched to a “pay per page” system. Instead of dividing their (arbitrarily-designed) kitty among partially-read books, they’re going to distribute it according to the number of pages people have read.
That improves a terrible program somewhat, but I still wouldn’t put my work in it.
1) One-bedroom home for sale in Minneapolis: $150K. Every picture is weirder than the one before it.
2) Eight of the best D&D modules of all time. Warning: gallery.
3) I have 227 browser tabs open, and my computer runs fine. Here’s my secret.
4) Things to never order at a fast food restaurant.
5) Beautiful hand-carved skateboards from Mumbai.
6) Like movies and reading screenplays? Simon Barrett’s shooting scripts for the films THE GUEST and YOU’RE NEXT are online.
7) The worst fucking shoes on the planet: Cowboy sandal boots.
I learned from Making Light that Bruce Durocher has died.
I didn’t know him well; we mostly spoke over LiveJournal. He was local to me, and he had a love of books that didn’t find a large audience but were good nonetheless. It was on his recommendation that I read Bucket Nut this year. He was also kind about my books.
I knew he was sick and had been for a long time. I’m sorry that he didn’t get more of this world, and that this world won’t get any more from him.
My condolences to everyone who knew and loved him.
This requires a fair amount of salt.
I can’t help but be curious to see how well this works for six-siders.
And the dude is a comic book artist.
The video makes the basement look cool enough, if you’re into that sort of thing (and I’m not) but I can’t help but wonder how much this dude earns for his comic book art. Also, what’s the cost of living in SLC? Apparently, he can afford a big house with a beautiful back yard.
The ka-CHING noises in the video are annoying: $8K for wooden furniture? That seems pretty cheap for all those pieces. I also wonder how much he saved by having his contractor father do the work with him. Maybe it ought to be a $125K fantasy basement.
A brief history: For years, Tor editor Jim Frenkel was widely known as a serial sexual harasser at conventions. What was done about it? Not much, for a very long time. Eventually, he was encouraged to resign after the public outcry became too much, which was announced with typical corporate blandness.
Last year, Tor contracts manager Sean Fodera publicly attacked one of Tor’s authors, Mary Robinette Kowal, in a typically gross and sexist way. He later apologized, in a half-assed way, and she graciously accepted.
In May of this year, on her personal Facebook page, Irene Gallo (Creative Director at Tor Books) described a group of extreme right wings fans who call themselves “Sad Puppies” as extreme right wing fans. She also described a group of fan who follow a neo-Nazi (he denies the label even though he fits it) who call themselves “Rabid Puppies” as neo-Nazis. That neo-Nazi screencapped her remark and filed it away so he could release it as the Nebula Awards were given out, to distract people from the award winning books.
Did Tor CEO Tom Doherty release a letter apologizing publicly for Frenkel’s or Fodera’s behavior, while insisting that they should have been smarter about separating the personal from the professional? Of course not. For one thing, Frenkel’s shitty behavior happened while he was representing Tor Books at public events. For another, they were dudes and their victims were women. Continue reading
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Book 11 of #15in2015
It’s not often I set aside genre works to read something regarded as a literary classic, but I’ve wanted to read this since the author died a few years ago.
The main character, Okonkwo, is a tragic figure determined to make a prominent place for himself within his (fictional, but based on the Igbo of southern Nigeria) people. His father was a lazy, good-for-nothing layabout, who played music and drank other people’s palm wine, and borrowed sums he never intended to pay back. In a culture that valued community he was a likable taker.
Deeply ashamed of his father, Okonkwo was determined to be everything he was not. He worked hard, fought fiercely in war, and won renown as a great wrestler. But while he could fight and work and create wealth, he couldn’t manage the things his father was good at: he couldn’t create strong social bonds within the community. He was prone to rages, and did terrible things because he was afraid to seem weak/feminine.
Naturally, he ends up dying an outcast’s death, just like his father, because he was ready to go to war with the British colonials but no one was willing to follow him.
Okonkwo is one of those literary protagonists that literary readers lose so much: he’s an asshole you wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with in real life, but as a reader you go deep into his history and his tragic flaws, watching from a superior position as his misguided instincts push him closer and closer to tragedy. The text portrays his errors but doesn’t allow much commentary on them, except in the context of the way he clashes with cultural traditions.
However, those cultural traditions are not spared overt criticism in the text at all. For a people who explicitly value community and the bonds of tribal identity, they have terrible blind spots. The vicious misogyny, the cruelty toward babies born twins, and more, create weak points in their society that the English missionaries, who show up late in the book, exploits. Okonkwo’s own son, whom he has treated with nothing but anger and criticism (in the hope that he would grow up hard and strong) is one of the first to flee his traditional tribal community for the Christian church. And just as with the man, so it is with the community as a whole: the lowest and most despised break away first, and once on the outside, attack the culture they were once a part of.
Not that the British are made into good guys, with their sham talk about justice while they destroy the Ibo traditions and kill their people.
It’s a sad book. I like sad. It’s also complex–much more so than this review makes it seem. I enjoyed it, but I don’t think I’ll be seeking out the subsequent books.