Rantage

Hello! You just used the “damned if you do/don’t” fallacy!

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Hello! If you’ve been directed to this blog post, it’s because you just said something akin to “Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t” (DIYD2) in a discussion about bigotry, misrepresentation, or cultural misappropriation in fiction. I’ve written this blog post to save me time so that in the future I won’t have to write a unique comment on each of the endless occasions that I hear this fallacy repeated. As you can probably guess, it happens a lot. So let’s get started! Here are some common conversation topics which might spur the DIYD2 response: White writers who write […]

Hello! You just used the “damned if you do/don’t” fallacy! KEEP READING

Concern trolling and “gratuitous diversity”

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I really wasn’t planning to engage with this semicoherent muddle by Felicity Savage over at Amazing Stories. Half my Twitter feed has been laughing at this article for days — it’s usually amusing when people who don’t understand a thing attempt to critique it — but I don’t find it funny, just sadly exemplary of the kind of cluelessness that abounds within this genre, and Anglophone society as a whole. But it got pointed out to me that Steve Davidson, the AS editor, has jumped into the discussion to try and clarify the muddle. It hasn’t helped much, but I

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Gamefail bluescreen

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Apologies, ya’ll. I know you haven’t heard much from me lately. Partly it’s that I’ve been busy; this is the time of year when my day job ratchets up, and since I’m still plowing full speed ahead on the UMSP, I don’t have a ton of spare brain. What little I’ve got has mostly been channeled into stress relief — hanging out with local folks, long meditative walks on snowy evenings, and among other things, gaming. But lately the gaming has been… shall we say, less than fun?

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Things People Need to Understand, issue 223.2

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For the past few days I’ve been engaged in a series of conversations on Twitter and Facebook about SFF fandom and its safety/egalitarianism — or lack thereof. I’ll just share some of what I’ve already said there, here: Some bits of a conversation on Twitter that started with me generally ranting about how unsafe I feel at Worldcon and progressed to an argument with someone who said s/he spoke for the SMOFs (“secret masters of fandom”, i.e. convention organizers). I basically pointed out that if fandom wants to change, the resources to assist with doing so have been around for

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This is how you destroy something beautiful.

/ 53 Comments / Controversies, Rantage, Shorts, WTF World? / By

This is how my Monday morning began: with a slap in the face, courtesy of new Weird Tales editor Marvin Kaye. If you haven’t been following the “controversy” over author Victoria Foyt’s self-published novel Revealing Eden, here’s a good analysis of it with links to others. I put air quotes around controversy in this case because there really isn’t one. On the one side of the discussion you’ve got the author and a handful of defenders — many of whom seem to be sockpuppets of the author herself — insisting that the book isn’t racist because… something. On the other

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Dear Fandom: Grow the Fuck Up

/ 9 Comments / Controversies, Rantage, WTF World? / By

I’ve been in a state of apoplexy for the last 48 hours or so, because a) I’m still in recovery mode from Comic Con (short version: it was awesome and overwhelming, more later), and b) coming back from Comic Con has left me maybe hyperaware of all that’s both right and wrong about the entire media-consuming community. Comic Con itself is an example of what’s right. 100,000+ people took over downtown San Diego for 5 days and there were no riots, nobody got shot, and while there was one unfortunate incident, for the most part things went remarkably well. SDCC

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But, but, but — WHY does magic have to make sense?

/ 114 Comments / On Writing, Rantage, Thinkythoughts / By

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science. -Agatha Heterodyne (Girl Genius) by way of Larry Niven by way of Clarke La la la can’t hear you. -Me This is a whine, not a rant. I rant when I’m angry; right now I’m just frustrated and annoyed. It’s hard out here for a fantasy writer, after all; there’s all these rules I’m supposed to follow, or the Fantasy Police might come and make me do hard labor in the Cold Iron Mines. For example: I keep hearing that magic

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There’s no such thing as a good stereotype.

/ 96 Comments / Controversies, Rantage, Thinkythoughts, WTF World? / By

Rantytime. Warning for profanity — although I’m going to try and rein it in, as best I can. Nobody listens to Angry Black Women, after all. This rant has been partially triggered by yet another discussion of “strong female characters” circulating in the blogosphere. (A good jumping-off point for this discussion is this io9 article, where I butted into the comments for a minute to pretty much make this same point.) This isn’t a new discussion, of course; people have been talking about it for awhile on and off. It’s just the latest hiccup. The strong female character (SFC) is

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Ignorant Mail, and Linkspam

/ 18 Comments / On Writing, Pimping, Rantage, Shorts / By

::sigh:: I get emails from readers from time to time, and 99% of these emails are positive and welcome. (Thank you!) But every so often I get one that’s… soooo very not. It isn’t exactly “hate mail”. Generally I only get those via the comments on my more “controversial” blog posts, like when I complain about messed-up video games or movies. (Yeah, I don’t think those are controversial either, but the fact remains; I get more crap over the stuff I watch/play than the stuff I write.) I’m quick on the banhammer, so most of you don’t have to see

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A Writer’s Education

/ 16 Comments / On Writing, Rantage, WTF World? / By

Apologies in advance; not gonna talk about writing for the moment. Instead I’m going to talk about the writing life, in a way. See, I took the GRE on Saturday. I did OK. Astounding on the verbal and abysmal on the quantitative, as I expected. I’ve been using my verbal skills steadily and with increasing intensity throughout my adult life, after all, and I haven’t done combinatorics in 20 years. No amount of short-term cramming can really make up for that, and I didn’t expect it to. All I really wanted to do was not embarrass myself, and I think

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