Day in the Life of an Idiot

 I don't actually have anything to say? I'm here and alive. It snowed, the first real snow we've had all winter. It's gorgeous and brilliantly sunny. that's kind of the big news.

I do feel like I should have something to say about the renewed Hugo Award scandal, but I really don't. I was a virtually attending member of the Chicago WorldCON, and, so, due to how the Hugo voting works, I was able to nominate for the Hugos. You then have to buy at least a voting membership for the current WorldCON in order to vote and, I'll be honest, I didn't want to give any of my money to the Chinese government in protest of their stance on free speech, GLBTQIA+ rights, and the oppression of Uyghur people. I understand that the Chinese fans are lovely and not to blame, but this was a choice I made. 

For the longest time, I was feeling kind of superior in a "what did you expect?" sort of way, but now I'm just utterly horrified by the fact that a bunch of Western fans decided to compile dossiers (what the f*cking f*ck) on the nominees (and then do it so very, very badly.) Thus, basically self-censoring the Hugo Award ballot. This is an absolute disgrace. Because the one take away I have held close to my heart since Trump was elected in 2016 and the shadow of fascism and totalitarianism grows ever longer in the United States is that we should NEVER, EVER comply in advance.  

We did this entirely to ourselves. 

However, generally, I am a supporter of WorldCON and the Hugo Awards. I have faith that we, as a community, can FIX this. As has been pointed out by many others, there's not a whole lot we can do in terms of righting wrongs, but we can do BETTER going forward.  In fact, I just signed up to be a virtual attendee in Glasgow next year. It cost me over a hundred bucks (US), but just as I did NOT buy a membership last year in protest, I'm buying one this year in support of the institutions of WorldCON and the Hugo Awards. 

This is, again, a personal choice and so this is why I feel, even though I just went on about it for several paragraphs, I don't really have a lot to say about this scandal. 

I'd love to hear your thoughts, however.

 I should probably comment on the LATEST SFWA disaster, but as an Old who has f*cking managed to keep up with the times I am losing patience and my mind. I will say, I think SFWA acted accordingly. Also, are we surprised? I would like future SFWA Grandmasters to be voted on by members of SFWA, honestly. 

Now to something completely boring, though possibly no less predictable. 


Image: Backyard shade garden. Blue Virginia bluebells in foreground; Pink bleeding hearts in the background.

 I've been doing a lot of gardening now that we are back from our big trip east to retrieve the kiddo. I understand the complaints, but I am fond of these cool mornings, myself. 

On Sunday, our good friends Gerriann and Barb gave me a whole bunch of natives from their garden. They gave me native bee balm (monarda), purple coneflower (Echinacea pupurea), hoary vervain (Verbena stricta), stiff goldenrod (Solidago rigida), common boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), and spotted joe-pye weed (Eutrochium maculatum.)  Also, among the non-natives, but pollinator-friendly, I picked up a BUNCH of Autumn Joy sedum.

Hopefully, the Lawns2Legumes people will accept those as "in kind" donations. I guess we'll have to see. I would take a picture, of where they are right now, but they honestly look like sad little transplants in dirt. I should probably snap a couple of photos for documentation, however. Hmmm, maybe before I do that, I ought to pick up a bit of mulch from Menards so that they look less haphazard. (A microcosm of my gardening right here, folks. Me: gets plants for free, slaps them in the ground without much thought, and then thinks: sh*t, I need to figure out how to make this actually look intentional.)

At any rate, Ger and Barb also gave me some ferns, hostas, and Solomon's Seal, all of which ended up in various empty spots in the shade gardens. 

I am hoping to go get the plants for my actual project at some point this week. Oh, which reminded me. The Lawns2Legumes folks assigned me a coach/gardening mentor at my request. We are mostly exchanging emails at this point. As usual, I am probably not taking full advantage of this mentorship. I should probably ask questions, but right now I'm all, "K. Gonna plant these and see if they live!"

At any rate, stay out of trouble, y'all. Hope you're having a lovely Monday!

We got Mason off for his robotics trip to Grand Forks, North Dakota. Alas, not without some static, when I thought I was being helpful. But, Mason is resisting ANY form of mothering me at the moment. It's like he's a toddler again with the whole, "IMA, I CAN DO IT." Even when, what I think I'm doing isn't mothering at all, but what i would do for anyone, like grabbing him a drink from the fridge.

But, I mean, we worked it out. I even got an apologetic "You do a lot for me. I'm sorry, I should appreciate you more," text. Which is huge. He is, really, as my friend Josey put it, a good lad. If I think back to my terrible teens? I was holy terror. Pretty sure I never told my mother i appreciated the things she did for me.

To be fair to everyone, this trip kind of came up suddenly, despite being on our calendar since forever.

Hell, I feel like March kind of came up suddenly, despite the natural progression of the calendar. Is it just me? How is it already the 13th?

But, it's Wednesday, so that means reading! I actually have some things to report, holy crap. I read SEMIOSIS by Sue Burke. At first I wasn't sure about it. I loved the first chapter and then felt a little dismayed when the second chapter jumped ahead a generation. I have, in my life, been very burned by time skips *cough*BLEACH*cough* *cough*HARRY POTTER*cough* But, I pushed through and discovered that EACH chapter is a different generation, which, in the end, worked out. I ended up enjoying the whole ride. So, ultimately: would recommend.

I'm now finally on to A RECORD OF A SPACE-BORN FEW by Becky Chambers, which I am likewise ambivalent about, but I'm rolling along with it because i have long been a fan of Chamber's narrative voice. There are some people who just READ well, in my head, and Chambers is one of them.

I haven't read much in the way of manga, which is.. I'm running out of new things to pick-up at the library, I think. I read the first two volumes of a manga that the library had about a serial killing magical blade, (Durarara!! Drrr!! Saika arc by Ryohgo Narita) but I didn't even review what I read because I just kind of went 'meh.' Which is weird, I should probably go back and do some kind of review, but I don't know. I did review From Green Kitchen by Ueda Aki (which I had read on-line), but I also read My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness finally, and I didn't review that.

I guess, I need to do a little review work and catch up.

Any-WAY, what are you all reading?

 I call this batch "A Sound of Thunder" for reasons.... 



For those that might not be familiar: "A Sound of Thunder" is the Ray Bradbury story in which a time traveling tourist goes back to the age of dinosaurs and is warned to stay on the predetermined path. They end up stepping off the path, accidentally killing a butterfly, and famously think, 'Ah, well, at least it wasn't anything important,' only to discover the world is monumentally changed by this single, 'insignificant' act. The term "the butterfly effect" was coined, in part, due to this story.

I made these nerdy cookies in order to share them with my cousin Tracy who lives in Saint Louis. She's a former chemist and all around geek, so I suspect that they will make her smile.

Yesterday, besides making and decorating these, I finished our Yule decorations, including prepping our Yule Log.  Our Yule Log is birch and was 'liberated' (read: stolen) from the Eloise Butler Nature Center by Shawn and our mutual friend Julie, back in the 1990s. We drilled three holes in it for candles and every year I staple some pine boughs to it and decorate it with pine cones and ornaments. If I remember, I'll take a picture of it at some point. It sits on top of our piano, which serves as our mantle, where we hang our stockings.

Yesterday, I also hung out with naomikritzer who has finished up her yearly "Gifts for People You Hate" post over on her WordPress blog, which is always a delight to read. 

Thanks to a conversation with her (and then again later with my wife Shawn) about the Loscon 45 incident with Gregory Benford, Shawn and I started to read the link he posted to about victimhood (in lieu of an apology) that seems to imply that people are just too sensitive today and are over-exaggerating issues of oppression in what the authors consider today's "victimhood culture."  Okay.  I'd been feeling sympathetic with Benford having been escorted out of the con in the middle of his signing--which I still think was overkill--but maybe just apologize for some bad behavior too? Instead of linking to an article that basically implies YOU PEOPLE ARE TOO SENSITIVE?

I think there are a number of issues going on here.

One of them is going to be an on-going problem until the next generation decides they whether or not to fully invest in the culture of live, in-person science fiction conventions, and, that is, "you get what you pay for." Which is to say that panels like the one Benford was on are assigned on VOLUNTEER basis.  

It sounds, in fact, like LosCon _tried_ to have decent representation on this panel--a woman panelist was a no-show and there _were_ two people of color on the panel (which led to Benford's other alleged comment about Latinx names having "too many" vowels for him to properly remember them). So, this con had enough volunteers to attempt to mitigate the "old, white guy" problem. Unfortunately, the more incidents like this, the less women and PoCs feel WELCOME both in the audience, but ESPECIALLY at the table, as it were--to volunteer to be on the panel. So, this sort of thing is likely to remain an issue until we swing the demographics in our favor--and provided that that's what we want. That is, people may chose to abandon cons entirely. I'm not sure I would blame the next generation if they did just that.  

Let me just say, that I love going to science fiction conventions and have been doing so, as a fan and as a professional, since some time before the internet.... which was when cons were particularly useful, as it was one of the ways to find one's fan group, one's people.

The thing is, I recently did a podcast with my friend Minster Faust, who is the author of COYOTE KINGS OF THE SPACE-AGE BACHELOR PAD (among other things.) I met him at a science fiction convention, NorwesCON, when we were both up for the Philip K. Dick award. He's Canadian and a PoC and when we chatted, WorldCON 76 was blowing up, and so we talked about all of this. He was very leery of the benefits of attending cons-because travel is expensive (in his case, international), and the question is: do you get anything out of it other than a slap in the face? I spent some time trying to convince Malcolm that the sense of community was worth it, but I ended up stopping myself from pushing that idea too hard, because this girl has all sorts of privilege that Malcolm would not. And, it's not just an issue of systematic racism, which is absolutely a factor, but also because I have a ton of advantages, including being well-known to my local capital-F, Fandom (which is to say, the in-person, con-going community, as opposed to a specific interest group) AND living in a town where you can hardly turn around without hitting a local science fiction convention that only costs me, at MOST, the price of admission. 

A lot more people out there are in Malcolm's shoes than mine, which is to say that they are trying to make financial decisions (as writers or fans) about travel, hotel costs, food expenses, etc., and weighing the question of "is all that money worth it" against the whole series of issues, including very basic ones, like, will they even get impanelled, as it were, being somewhat "unknown"? Add to that concerns of having to deal with being misgendered in the programming material or being actively harassed on a panel for having too many vowels in your name or just looking around thinking "WTF, am I the only [queer, trans, PoC, disabled] person here?? How uncomfortable is this??"

So, to me, this is the number one issue that these incidents like Benford's blow-up and non-apology represents. The more crap like this happens, the less likely it is to convince people that cons are a worthwhile venture. If fewer people show up, the smaller the list of panel volunteers there will be, and... you guessed it, the more of these fails will happen because all that will be left are the dinosaurs...

The other general issue that things like this keep bringing to mind is that authors of a certain age, but really, all of us, need to understand the ways in which "the interwebs" have changed con culture.

It used to be, back in the late Jurassic, a person could say something that was maybe even just an innocent "failure mode of humor" (= a$$hole) and only offend the 70 or so people in the room.  Now, you say something like that and there is a statistically significant chance that it might go viral. Or, at the very least, if you are an "esteemed con guest" be noteworthy of a site like File770.

I have no idea to the extent to which Benford's comments were, in fact, the failure mode of humor, but it doesn't matter.

As an author, he should know that authorial intent really doesn't mean diddly if the audience doesn't read things that way.  This is a lesson learned I learned in critique group when I was twenty-five years old: if six or so people, out of the seven who read your work don't GET the point and, in fact, take it the opposite way you intended the scene to read, you have FAILED to express the scene appropriately and the story needs revision. That's just how writing works. And, as it happens, real life. If you fail at a joke and accidentally fall into failure mode (aka a$$holery), you can apologize and try to be better the next time, aka, a kind of revision of the story of your life.

/rant

Anyway, the cookies are delicious. And, apparently, Mason's favorites.