cry havoc

Reading several of the books I got in Philly (among them, currently, Berry's Hideyoshi and Borschberg/Roy's The Memoirs and Memorials of Jacques de Coutre), but also just yesterday got a hankering for fiction and picked up three more, although The Goblin Emporer has been set aside as an award for later.

( Short comments about 'The Coffee Trader' and 'The Boy with the Porcelain Blade'. )

Eh, well. I'll keep slogging.

Over on Dribble of Ink, there's an essay that had me pondering the way we write fantasy, in the modern world. “Broader Fantasy Foundations Pt IV: The Tale of Genji, and Building the World of the Shining Prince”, in which Gladstone comments:

[Demonic possession and ghosts in Tale of Genji] are unexplained, but they’re not treated as explicitly supernatural within the narrative, since we’re talking about a time before Enlightenment nature-supernature distinctions arose. Ghosts and demons and gods are edge cases of Genji’s reality, but they’re not any less real than the people he encounters on a day to day basis.

[The] fantastical does not seem fantastical to locals. Genji’s reaction to a ghost, or to a demonic possession, is not the Lovecraftian narrator’s “THAT IS UNPOSSIBLE” followed by a prolonged paragraph on circles of firelight, mad dancing beyond the edges of reality, etc., so much as “HOLY SHIT, GHOST!” He—and the other people in his world—are afraid of ghosts because they are dangerous and terrifying, not because they represent a hole in a world system that does not incorporate them.

I didn't even need to add that emphasis; Gladstone did it already for me.

In a sidebar, Gladstone also notes:

Notably, the reaction to a hole in one’s world system varies widely even within the modern age. Folks who just live in the modern world system tend to have the Lovecraft reaction to the holes they discover; scientists, though—and philosophers—respond, or should respond, by examining the edges of the hole and trying to peer through. I can think of two great examples of this in modern fantasy: in Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky novels, the wizards of Tsarepeth are presented as scientists and scholars with a near-modern understanding of the spread of disease. When they discover a demon plague that spreads through miasma, they’re initially flummoxed—since they’ve long known miasma theory to be false. Facts force them to revise their theory, in proper fashion. The Myth of the Man-Mother in Pat Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear is another example, played for humor—hyper-rational Kvothe fails to convince a friend of his that men have any role in the conception of children, since his arguments all devolve to an appeal to authority. The best part about this: it’s entirely possible that pregnancy just works differently in the Four Corners universe—or works differently among different peoples there.

A day or so later, Katherine Addison (Sarah Monette) wrote The Emperor and the Scullery Boy: Quests and Coming-of-Age Stories, in which she remarked that

...there are female protagonists in fantasy who quest. Mary Brown’s The Unlikely Ones, to pick a random example, is as straightforward a plot coupon fantasy quest as you can ask for (and it still ends in marriage). But they’re swimming valiantly against an undertow, which is the great preponderance of young men who come of age in fantasy by questing. I’m thinking particularly of the trope of the Scullery Boy Who Would Be King, and I can reel off examples by the cartload, from Lloyd Alexander’s Taran to Robert Jordan’s Rand Al’Thor. (Scullery Girls Who Would Be Queen are so rare as to be nearly nonexistent.) Fairy tales, too, are full of these young men, scullery boys or woodcutters’ youngest sons or vagrants, and there’s even a version of the motif in The Lord of the Rings: although Aragorn is not a child, his path through the trilogy is very distinctly from undervalued outsider to King of Gondor. All of them are the protagonists of bildungsromans, of quests, and the pattern they trace inexorably has shaped and continues to shape the way we think about fantasy as a genre and what we think it can do.

I don’t want to argue against bildungsromans in fantasy—far from it. I don’t want to argue against quests, or even against scullery boys. But I want to argue for awareness of the patterns that we have inherited—the grooves in the record of the genre, if you don’t mind a pun—and for awareness that patterns are all that they are. There’s no reason that scullery boys have to turn out to be kings. There’s no reason that women’s bildungsromans have to end in marriage. There’s no reason that fantasy novels have to be quests. It’s just the pattern, and it’s always easier to follow the pattern than to disrupt it.

Both essays are (obviously) worth reading, but that single line -- "Scullery Girls Who Would Be Queen are so rare as to be nearly nonexistent" -- started me thinking. There must be at least one out there, somewhere. Isn't there?

Hello? Hello? Don't tell me those are crickets I'm hearing.

Isn't there a responsive layout on dw? This non-responsive crap is almost impossible to read on my phone.

Followup post for whatistigerbalm, but anyone else interested, here's the entire sad list. Maybe a quarter of these are available on the web; the rest are from Jstor. Check your local city library. You might have a free Jstor account. If not, and you're as whacked as I am about research, I have the pdfs. I can email zipped version. Just don't ask for all of them because that's just lazy, and besides, there's 895 of them. (and these don't include images and other non-pdf formats).

( THE LIST, OMFG, IT'S A LIST. )

Hello, fandom, my old friend. Been so long I've almost forgotten how crazy you are. Almost. It's okay, don't call me, I won't call you.

ANYWAY. So. Noragami. One of the first anime in like forever to really capture me, which tl;dr means: why the hell have I not seen in-depth, sparkling, thought-provoking commentary from either of the Emilys? -- branchandroot and annotated_em, that is. Or even starlady who is not an Emily, but does begin with a vowel, so that's close enough. ONE OF YOU. Satisfy my need for analysis! Or I shall be pushed to poke ivoryandhorn or phoebe_zeitgeist to carry the weight. Which I might do anyway, because analysis.

SOMEONE. AVAIL ME. My former fandom status as a near-BNF compels you!

Also, I just got home after enjoying two glasses of some really nice reisling, the name of which I totally meant to get and did not. In case you couldn't tell from the random name-dropping. Where is my next episode of Noragami? Or my next scanlated chapter? I'm retired from scanlating, so I'm able to say again that scanlators are toooooo slow. Damn it.

Should reisling be capitalized? Inquiring minds want to know. Leik yesterday.

I actually had to explain tl;dr to my sister this evening (while texting). Either I'm hipper than I realize, or my sister is seriously out of touch. I'm guessing the latter. Very eye-rolling, so sigh.

Also also, I realized while talking to my other sister that I AM the disruption at work. Go me! Doing prototypes and shit that will cause nothing but trouble for other departments, and this is WHY I was hired. This is awesome. I'm causing trouble and I'm getting PRAISE for it.

I'm considering changing my tag from "analysis is my chocolate cake" to "analysis is my greek beignet" because holy fuck you people, this shit is awesome. I am addicted to greek beignets. I shouldn't be, but I am.

I just realized that 'reisling' is another exception to the i-before-e rule. Which reminds me of the time I got sent to the principal's office because I demanded to know why 'science' broke the rule of 'i before e except after e'. Yes, newsflash, I have always been a troublemaker.

There was some other also to add, but I forget now. Where's my extensive analysis on Noragami already?

Has anyone else missed and/or not gotten DW comment alerts in email? I realized I was getting msgs only sporadically, and then they stopped altogether somewhere around early November. I've gotten notifies of replies on other journals, though, but that only since early December. Since then, nothing, and I can tell I've gotten comments because I've seen them here. Just no emails. I checked my settings and whatnot, so I'm stumped. Anyone else having this issue, or is it just me (again)?

Figured it out. Somehow my settings were changed so I had to opt in on getting email. That's not the kind of thing I would've turned off, so I'm guessing there was an upgrade and that flag got switched. Who knows, but we'll see now if I suddenly start getting emails again.

If you have a minute and don't mind, drop a comment so I can test this theory. Thanks!

ETA2: ahahah shoot me it works now. yay! thanks for the help, everyone. (I figured out that while I'd changed the email... I hadn't confirmed it. Once I did that, now I am back to regularly scheduled emails. It's been that kind of a day, really.)

Let's set aside the fact that I really want to kill my team-at-work right now, and think about more cheerful things! ...which means setting aside the fact that killing my team would make me VERY cheerful. OMG it's only the second day of the year and already I'm pondering bloodshed.

Well. Anyway.

I remember reading Hunt for Red October back in college or whenever, and what seemed like so many intricate details. I do recall that this added to the veracity or the realism of the story, but I don't recall if the details really ever became pertinent. I mean, some of them did, like how radar worked (and why the Red October could slip past), and how nuclear subs worked (thus helping to explain why the sub could/would be evacuated). Not sure about the rest, or maybe those other details were meant as red herrings: talk about keeping the resolution a surprise. If you're drowning in red herrings, how the hell do you know which is gonna matter?

As relates to me, specifically, I've been reading all kinds of awesome stuff over the past few months. Much of it would never show up in a story, or at least no more than in passing: who really cares about the monetary systems and coin debasement and other economic missteps, let alone what/how centralized banking works and why it's so important in the development of modern capitalism -- but omg this stuff is just so fascinating.

In case you missed the tumblr reblog, yes, I'm a dork.

This is just mostly the craft question, where when I come across in-depth details about something (regardless of the story or genre) I find myself stepping back. Not in a bad way, but in a "I need to back up to see the whole picture here" way, and I mean that in a craft sense, not a reader-can't-cope sense. I like looking at how someone else tackled that all-important issue of the infodump, especially when I know (or can trust) that this info is still very, very important.

I really feel like that's an art, in its own right.

I decided I really wanted to see Pacific Rim (again), and the local bookstore had it, so Friday night I rewatched. (Yay!) Then on Saturday I rewatched, this time with the director's commentary. There are people who think Godzilla is cool, and people who like mecha, and then there's the level of geekery from del Toro: names, names, little trivia about the origins of Godzilla (and the makings of), and the various mecha series (no shout-outs to Eva, but certainly plenty of discussion about Mazinger). If I was in any doubt about the man's geek cred, I am in doubt no longer.

Much of what he had to say -- while really fascinating in terms of the additional visual layers of the story, like the color-coding -- was cool but not really pertinent to verbal/on-page storytelling. And he also had me totes nodding along when he complained about CGI tending to make things look ungrounded, as in, no actual weight/substance. (His emphasis on the fight scenes being in rain and water were to offset that groundlessness; by seeing the water splashing around, and things flying through the air and cars hopping as the kaiju walks, it gives your brain the message that this CGI thing is on the same ground as everything else you see.)

( Other things he had to say just made me go AHA. In no particular order... )

I need something to say to a coworker (who is otherwise a cool person) when for whatever reason he decides to play devil's advocate. Especially when what I'm arguing is something that he later admits is something he also believes in, or at least would like to recognize as valuable. It feels like he's either winding me up for his own amusement (though he doesn't seem amused at the time, so probably not) or just doesn't realize that I can't tell whether he's serious -- and the upshot is that I lose respect for him. It's like, oi, if you're that much of an asshole, then maybe I need to change my opinion about you. Or something.

Today there was talk about UX/user testing. G was somewhat dismissive of there being any value in this. I've done user studies for ten years (contextual analysis and ethnographic studies most especially, which means lots and lots of talking to users at length), I told him every single time I did a user test or interview, I learned something new.

It was almost always it was something that opened my eyes about my own privilege: that I'm abled, that my language skills are top-notch even for a native, that my eye-hand coordination is pretty damn good, that I don't have motor skill issues, that my hearing's good enough, that my sight is good enough despite needing glasses, that I don't have significant learning or cognitive issues that get in the way of my comprehension. Doing user studies, as CP later commented, reminds we designers and developers -- we makers -- that we are not The User. It reminds us to be thankful for the ways in which we're fortunate, and to be humbled about the ways in which we have it easy.

All those things I do when coding like larger click-areas and story-answers on alerts and proper color contrast -- just like all the things some architects do in corporate buildings like wider doorways and bar-handles instead of round handles and ramps at every entrance -- these are all invisible if you're abled, but they're crucial if you're not. And the onus does not, should not, lie on the person who is disabled to make do; the onus should lie on us, as the makers to make the web/world inclusive. Because we have the good fortune and the ability to do so.

But he was arguing against this, and I went along until the point where I said, the web should be inclusive, for everyone; the web exists for everyone. G replied, no, the web exists to make money. (Someone tell that to all we fans who runs sites at a loss out of pure love, but I didn't go there.) The whole 'make money' thing was so cynical, and enough opposite his usual attitude, that I just called it quits right there. We're going to end this conversation right here, I said, and that was that (whew).

I'm not sure whether to be pleased or roll my eyes that he told me afterwards that the reason he loves talking to me about stuff/work is that he always learns something new. Except he excused his responses -- though not in so many words -- as devil's advocate. I'm so freaking sick of oh, I'm just playing devil's advocate. It's going on my list as second-hated phrase, right behind, can't you take a joke?

Dear internets, please give me a good witty comeback for the next time G says he's playing devil's advocate. Not too nuclear, since I do have to keep working with him, but something that makes it clear he's playing a game that I don't respect and don't have time for. Anyone?