cry havoc

I mean, there's practice involved. No one is born a master of this stuff, y'know. You gotta earn your, err, stripes.

More pictures here.

Mom's comment: "Your dog is a fruitcake."

Quoted from Clients from Hell:

“We want a total of 8 languages: English, French, Spanish, Canadian…”

Also, meet Zai-zai.

If you suffer from any kind of a chronic condition -- and I do think many of the mental disabilities/illnesses could fall into this category -- you should read this letter to patients with chronic disease, from a Dr. Rob. A short bit from it, to give you an idea of why I think it's particularly valuable reading (and something not often said or admitted by doctors):

...chronic unsolvable disease stands square in our way. You don’t get better, and it makes many of us frustrated, and it makes some of us mad at you. We don’t want to face things we can’t fix because it shows our limits. We want the miraculous, and you deny us that chance.

And since this is the perspective you have when you see doctors, your view of them is quite different. You see us getting frustrated. You see us when we feel like giving up. When we take care of you, we have to leave behind the illusion of control, of power over disease. We get angry, feel insecure, and want to move on to a patient who we can fix, save, or impress. You are the rock that proves how easily the ship can be sunk. So your view of doctors is quite different.

(h/t to readerofasaph)

Alright. Have survey. Need eyeballs to make sure I'm not going off-the-rails at any point. I don't mean in a formal sense (unless, of course, you know the formalities of surveys) but in a way that's very specific to me: I tend to use a lot of colloquialisms, US-ian and not, and that can be confusing for non-native English speakers. Being aware of that doesn't mean I always catch where I'm confusing a reader, and that's where I need someone (several someones) to double-check for me, if you have about ten minutes.

ETA: wow, there are a lot of folks on my list willing to help! I am inundated, but very much appreciative at the same time. I will be emailing you, just give me a day to climb out from under various other swampage. Very very much thank you, everyone who replied!

(I closed comments since that's probably enough eyeballs, whew, many helpful and awesome eyeballs!)

And now, for something completely different.

This is an old post (c 2006) from Making Light, that I came across while googling for something completely different, but being me, clicked out of curiosity. And herein follows the insight, from TNH:

Storytelling is basic to our species. It’s one of the ways we parse our experience of the universe. Whatever moves us or matters to us will show up in the stories we tell, whether or not we have a socially approved outlet for those stories. It might surprise you to find out how many writers have works of personal erotica tucked away in their unpublished-or-unpublishable manuscript trunks. There’s no good way to get those published, but they write them anyway, because they’re writers, and eroticism is an important part of our lives.

Good fiction gets under our skin. It can change the way we see the world. But whatever its effect, it’s a significant experience. It would be a bizarre thing—unnatural, even—for writers to not engage with that experience. They always have. I could show you stuff centuries old—heck, some of it’s millennia old—that’s fanfic by any modern definition.

Of course, it would have to be a modern definition. In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction this year went to March, a novel by Geraldine Brooks, published by Viking. It’s a re-imagining of the life of the father of the four March girls in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Can you see a particle of difference between that and a work of declared fanfiction? I can’t. I can only see two differences: first, Louisa May Alcott is out of copyright; and second, Louisa May Alcott, Geraldine Brooks, and Viking are dreadfully respectable.

I’m just a tad cynical about authors who rage against fanfic. Their own work may be original to them, but even if their writing is so outre that it’s barely readable, they’ll still be using tropes and techniques and conventions they picked up from other writers. We have a system that counts some borrowings as legitimate, others as illegitimate. They stick with the legit sort, but they’re still writing out of and into the shared web of literature. They’re not so different as all that.

Fanfic means someone cares about what you wrote.

Personally, I’m convinced that the legends of the Holy Grail are fanfic about the Eucharist.

This really is a basic impulse.

And the addendum is the cherry on top.

I came across this post at Pandagon, and it's well worth the read if you're in the dating pool: Red Flags. For those of you who get a little skeevy at the notion of visiting a feminist, libertarian/liberal, big-d Democrat blog, this particular post isn't ultra-politicized. It's just a list of simple things to watch out for when dating, signs of whether a guy can (or will) treat you decently, as a fellow human being.

An excerpt:

...I’ve never seen this red flag fail to pan out---if a guy can’t think of any female musicians or writers he admires, then he’s a giant, honking sexist and you will regret dating him. The deeper he is into being a fan of an art form, the more women in that field he should admire. ...

What’s funny about this red flag and most others is that you don’t have to be on some hunt for them. These red flags are things men pay very little price for waving, generally speaking, so they see no reason not to wave these red flags. I’ve noticed that guys---even ones that claim to be feminist---don’t often go out of their way to hide their contempt for female abilities in this field or that. Very often, a guy’ll be deep into something, and if he feels this way about women, he won’t hesitate to proclaim it, with lots and lots of bullshit attached. Often of the evo psych variety. I’ve heard men deny that women can rap, that women can really play lead guitar, that women can’t write a great novel or even a sci-fi novel. If a man makes blanket statements about the lack of female genius, this will not work out well. The exception to this rule is that if a man seems to believe women can’t play in the NFL, then he’s just observing a fact. However, I’d monitor how gleeful he is about that fact, and whether or not he stretches this observation to suggest women can’t golf or something of that nature.

The entire post is a very handy, and concrete, list. I think the Leo scored damn well on it, but then, we dated after I'd done my time meeting and un-meeting losers, so by then I had a better grasp on the red flags, even if I never articulated it quite as clearly as Amanda does in the linked post.

Come to think of it, the only advice my mother could articulate for who'd be worth my time were that (a) a guy who'd wear pink was a man secure in his sexuality, and (b) if you want to know how a guy will treat you in twenty years, look at how he treats his mother now. Though I admit it took me a few years to realize she didn't just mean whether he's courteous. It's that, but also things like whether he talks to her at all, or does he not tell her on the grounds it's better off if 'she just doesn't know' or worse, 'she wouldn't understand, anyway'. Eventually a man with that attitude will see his partner in the same light. Frustrating, but true.

Regardless, if you're dating now or might be later, the linked post is some damn good advice. Worth reading.

In the aftermath of my post on digression in online discussions, I followed several suggested links. By a process I can no longer track, I ended up on an essay by Claire Light, Outrage, Pullback, Punishment: The Structure of One Common Antiracist Post. Her description of the dynamics in an Antiracist post really crystallized my understanding of what fundamental conflict lies within the issue of derailment vs digression.

The three concepts -- outrage, pullback, and punishment -- she defines as:

Outrage: something racist happens in the world. A blogger or group of bloggers pick up on it. They note it in their blogs and express outrage at it. The item gets passed on from blog to blog.

Pullback: of the bloggers who post on this topic, less than half will express anything other than outrage. But a subset of these bloggers will spend a little time pulling back from the outrage to contextualize this incident of racism and explain why it's a problem. They will go into the history of these types of incidents, they'll go into academic theories of X, they'll give talking points on why this sort of thing is bad for people of color, bad for justice, and bad for the world in general.

Punishment: of the bloggers who pull back and contextualize, an even smaller subset will propose or initiate action. This action is dual: it proposes advocacy of a particular view, action (usually apology and some sort of remediation), and threatens punishment if this action isn't taken up immediately.

There can be -- and I have seen -- additional conflicts (of an emotional type) [eta] tension even between otherwise agreeing positions [/eta] when some bloggers begin the pullback before the main core have exhausted the outrage. The timing of that second step is crucial lest it come across not as a valid digression and exploration, but as a derailment. Beyond that, though, this is the part in Light's essay that really got me thinking about what might be going on:

If you look back on any effective movement of the 20th century (suffrage, civil rights, Vietnam) their communication structure all had these things in common:

1. A clear, articulated overall goal towards which all participants were willing to work for years.


2. A set, but evolving discourse and vocabulary, which the movement controlled.


3. Media: alternative media organs (papers and magazines) dedicated to promoting this message and discourse; and, over time, allies in the mainstream media dedicated to promoting this message and discourse.


4. The necessity of responding deliberately and thoughtfully, owing to the lack of instantaneous communications technology. Because everything written was printed and had to be edited and proofread, everything broadcast had to be accepted by media corporations and could be heavily controlled, the message and discourse were very polished, thoughtful, respectful, and carefully tailored to appeal to listeners who may have held a differing opinion.

If you think about it, OPP simply cannot exist in a movement in which the above conditions obtain. Chaos and Freedom are the twin faces of the same internet beast. The viral responsiveness and speed of protests like Jena 6 and A&F owes to the Freedom face. The lack of a goal, a message, a discourse, and deliberate or thoughtful response owes to the Chaos face.

Go, read. Well worth it.