Gamer Girls

Cory Doctorow's got a new short up at Salon.com - about gamer girls and kicking ass. Highly recommended read:

Anda didn't really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was 12, and up until then, she'd played a boy-elf, because her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she'd ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy's idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini-armour. Bintware, she called it.

But when Anda was 12, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female, but had sensible tits and sensible armour and a bloody great sword that she was clearly very good with.

Watch him go with this one - sugarfree zones around the schools, book and meal tokens, school weigh-ins, unionizing gamers... I love this guy.

Not Pissed Off Enough to Rant, Today

So, I'm not pissed off enough to rant today.

Saw a mediocre production of Equus last night (It's such a great script that it's difficult to imagine a truly *bad* production of this show) that didn't really piss me off. Got a bunch of crap on book one finished, and today I've just got one last Roh chapter to lengthen, and then I'll have fit in all the new plot elements I wanted to add to clean up the pacing. Today I'll be working on Jihad, which is so behind it's not even amusing. I really want to have another finished book in hand next year that I can start peddling. I need to pick up the pace.

Expressed interest in some volunteer positions at Planned Parenthood yesterday, and also applied to the local city college (automatic admission) where I'll signing up for a French class on Tues/Thurs, all willing. Gotta keep busy...

So - unless I find something amusing to share, I'll see you all tomorrow.

Snapshots From my Worklife, 5

Got an e-mail circular from the lead A/E guy here at the Workplace of Silliness - looks like we're going to get 2 proposals we've currently got out that are closing up right now. One of our clients also just gave a glowing review of our A/E guy working in Iraq, so we've got kudos with them.

More document formatting, less writing for me. Ha.

Along with said e-mail, we were forwarded a snipped and scanned PDF of this lovely trite piece of crap about how evil it is to "foster a negative attitude."

Us? Negative? Hell, I'm the least cynical person here... Like all Americans, we deal really well with conflict resolution.

Today's Diversions

Bush, Rumsfeld, and Powell take some time off to model for the Banana Republic catalog...

Matt Cheney's got a post up about some of the flack Strange Horizons appears to be taking for publishing a soft SF story... that's about the sexual relationship between two women. Though I agree that the story would have been better placed in an erotica anthology (and for erotica, it's not all that great either), I applaud SH for taking it on - if nothing else, it leads to discussions like this about what the hell SF is. Ideally, this story should have been weightier, and explored some issues, really gotten me in the gut - instead, it was like "Huh. Time travelers. The Love That Cannot Speak Its Name. Prostitution. What's the point?" As someone who was drawn to writing SF/fantasy because I felt it was the best place to explore worlds that were *really* different (including social roles), I've since become frustrated with just how narrow and conservative most of the genre really is. Like Matt said: "Science fiction, the literature of yesterday's future!" (to be fair, there are a number of writers doing great stuff - Kelly Link being a good example, but they get flack for it, and haven't been as commercially successful as they should be. Read her collection Stranger Things Happen).

For those interested, Nick Mamatas has also shown up in the comments section of that post, and sparks will fly.

And you may be interested in this double-speak Forbes article about how Americans are living longer, healthier lives... yet 69% of older Americans are "overweight", which is EVIL. Yet, we're living longer, healthier lives... yet...

Yea. C'mon you guys, when are you going to fess up and tell us that most people have an 80lb "healthy weight" range, not a 10lb one, and people's set weights and metabolisms are very different? When are you going to admit it's more important to move your ass than to have less of an ass?

Bah. These people exhaust me.

Thoughts for Singletons on a Friday Night

My roomie has a date tonight, and I'm sitting here watching Rocky movies, eating Thai food, doing line edits and arguing with myself again about what a lame person I must be to be sitting here finding some kind of happiness in line edits and Rocky movies. Aren't I incomplete? Isn't there something wrong with me? All the magazines say so. The TV says so. They say how I'm supposed to be, and how I'm supposed to feel, and I'm supposed to feel lame, sitting here at home by myself, doing line edits and watching movies.

I should go out tonight. Go to Second City. Go around the corner to the Green Mill. Really should go out tonight. Should do something.

I should be dating.

Ack.

Scratch that. Go back. Rewind.

Me: We've discussed this.

Evil Kameron: You're a freak.

Me: Whoa. Hold on. First: you're channeling all the bullshit pressure again. You were totally fine until your roomie started dating. You're internalizing social expectations for the way women are supposed to live. Step back, deep breath. Are you wholly comfortable yet with the idea of being in a relationship? Are you secure enough in your sense of self that you know you wouldn't let it be subsumed by the desires of someone else? We've been down this road before, honey - if you want to be strong, if you want this life, if you want to be happy right now, this is how you have to play it. Once you've got your stuff together, once you're more comfortable in your skin, with who you are, we'll have this conversation again. That's what the journey's about, honey. That's what the traveling is about, the writing is about. That's everything. And until you have a handle on yourself, you can't go dragging anybody into your life.

Evil Kameron: But isn't that really cynical? Why the hell are you sitting around here on a Friday night eating Thai food and doing line edits on some fantasy book nobody's ever expressed any interest in and watching lame Rocky movies?

Me: Cause it's the one day a week I get Thai food, I'd rather write fantasy books than do anything else, and I've got boxing class tomorrow.

Evil Kameron: So this is the life you chose for yourself?

Me: Yea. For now. This is a journey, like all the rest of them. And when you're traveling, you'll have some lonely Friday nights. That's what makes you love the crazy, people-filled nights all the more.

Evil Kameron: Dammit, you're getting all philosophical and Old Woman Wise again.

Me: It's called perspective. I know what it is to be in the corner, in the shitter, in poverty, without anything or any hope for anything else. This world, this night, these things I've chosen - I'm so fucking lucky to be here. I'm so happy to be here.

Evil Kameron: Get yourself a drink. You have another 680 pages to work on.

Me: Damn straight.

Evil Kameron: Bungee jumping in New Zealand next year?

Me: Count on it.

Evil Kameron: Dorky guy in tow?

Me: Don't push it.

Have a great weekend, all.

Teaching Gaiman

And, one more before I get started on these 700 pages of line edits (arg): check out Matt Cheney's reflections on teaching Neil Gaiman's American Gods to his highschool AP English class.

I just think it's damn cool he got away assigning a real book - with swearing and vagina dentate and non-white people and non-Christian mythology and everything.

I would have killed to get assigned books like this in highschool.

Random Linkage, My Chiklits

Charge `em by the pound. Yea, that's right, fat girls. What the hell is up with places like Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean that don't charge you for plus sizes? Who do they think they are? Hey, let's start putting a "woman tax" on shirts. Afterall, if a woman's got breasts bigger than a B, she should be paying extra, lousy bitty.

And here are some local blue-state hysterics who are pitching fits about the idea of the existence of Bad Ass coffee. No, no, they're not even protesting by just not going to the place (you know, boycotting is the usual sort of protest for this thing) they're just pissed that the damn place even exists. Messes up their cozy view of the world, apparently. Only good asses live in their world.

Speaking of boycotting and freedom of speech, Jeff Jarvis has been doing some research into the big bout of FCC fining bullshit that's been going on this year (showing a white woman jumping into the arms of a black quarterback still rankles, apparently). Want to know how many of the 260M Americans in this country it takes to get a show fined and send all the networks into a censorship frenzy?

About three.

Over a million women had to march on Washington to get the government just to *think twice* about further tampering with reproductive rights and enforcing the ban on partial birth abortion.

But three people can scare the media into censorship.

Stand up. Write back. Send letters to the FCC saying that you're against the censorship of free speech. Even 30,000 is more than 3, last time I checked. But then, this administration has fuzzy math.

Enough, Already. No, Really, ENOUGH.

I did a bad thing last night.

I rented and watched Enough with Jennifer Lopez.

Oh, gag me with a spoon.

To be fair, I knew this was going to be a wretched movie, but I'd heard she learned a bunch of Krav Maga for it, and I've had a higher-than-usual interest in fighting movies since I've started learning to fight. I enjoy watching training sequences now and going, "I've done that! I know how to do that!"

And I've also begun to understand why my buddy Patrick - who's a fifth-degree black belt in Kenpo karate - gets so frustrated with fight scenes.

"Enough" is one of those domestic-abuse movies that's obviously been written and directed by a man.

"What, you mean, he'll just hit her, and she'll be a stay-home mom, and he makes all the money? That's not scary enough! How about he has serial affairs, too? No, no, MORE, EVIL! How about he hires thugs to pose as FBI agents and go after her? How about he taps her phones? No, more! How about we find out that he conspired with a friend to get her into bed in the first time! Yay!"

Oh, puleez.

Want to know the scariest moment in the movie? It's not when the pseudo-FBI agents come after her, or when some other guy is tracking her, or whatever else totally over-the-top crap happened that was thrown in there to make the guy REALLY SCARY. It's the moment when, after he's hit her, he goes into her purse and takes her keys and her wallet.

Really, that's scary enough. So is canceling all of her credit cards and closing her accounts. That's what it's all about, keeping control over women. That's why women owning their own property was such a big deal of a law to change, and why so many men balked at it for thousands of years. That's why women still aren't allowed to drive in some countries. Take away the money and the transport, and you control people.

So, unfortunately, instead of being a woman-training-to-kick-ass-and-finding-the-strength-in-herself-movie, this movie was just a really poor knockoff of Sleeping With the Enemy (which was way better, in my opinion), only really disjointed, over-the-top and bordering on the frickin' ridiculous. I started fast-forwading through the husband-stalking-the-wife scenes, and about 2/3rds of the way through the movie, I realized I wasn't going to get much Krav Maga, and the point of the movie wasn't about the awesome realization of her power as a human being or anything. It was just about killing her husband.

"Oh, crap," I said to my roomie, "it's going to be one of those two-and-a-half-minute training sequences, isn't it? The one's with the music, where she learns how to move like a super ninja in three days?"

And, lo and behold:

All the Krav Maga we got was one of those two-and-a-half-minute training sequences with a nameless trainer, complete with the music.

And, BAM: Jennifer Lopez is a super ninja.

No, no really: she goes into the husband's house and climbs around in the rafters and sets up this fighting trap for him, and moves all the guns around and closes her eyes and figures out the number of steps to all the furniture, and brings a bag of gear so that she can scamble cell phone signals in the house. It's like the Karate Kid, only without all the actual, you know, training and self-discovery and shit like that. And, obviously, without any attempt whatsoever at realism.

That's right, two-and-a-half-minutes of Krav Maga, and a former waitress has becomes James Bond.

Me, screaming in the background, "What the fuck is this???"

So Jennifer Lopez the Super Krav Maga Ninja kills her husband with her Krav Maga super powers, and the police arrive, and tell her she's lucky to be alive, and then super ninja and her daughter go back to Seattle to shack up with the nice dorky guy she broke up with in high school and should have married in the first place.

The End.

What a lame movie.

Good Women Are Thin Women

Amazon.com is sponsoring a series of rather dull, boring short movies that then try and "make money" by advertising products seen in the short. They've got one up with Minnie Driver called "Portrait" in which the office fat girl - who's seen eating in *every damn scene* - at a modeling agency gets her photo taken at a Glamour Shots type of place that says she'll have her "inner beauty" revealed by the photographer.

At work, she's looked down on by all the thin-bitch-women who've screamed their way to the top, and she's always walking three steps behind everyone. She's a sloppy dresser, hesitant, unnoticed, and flighty. Did I mention she's eating ALL the time? Nobody seemed to realize that lots of overweight women actually don't eat in front of people - yea, there are binge sessions at home, but most of them don't consist of enough food to take up THE ENTIRETY OF THE COUCH AND COFFEE TABLE. And hello, jerk-offs, skinny people binge too: they either have happy metabolisms that slough it back out, or they vomit it up. Don't throw your fat girl stereotypes at me.

So, after having her photo taken, our heroine wakes up the next morning, and ta-da!!

She's thin.

Yes. That's right. Her inner "goodness" has shone through and sloughed off all the fat that was hiding the "good" thin woman inside of her! Now, she goes to work wearing stylish clothes, tosses her hair a lot, flirts with guys at the watercooler, gets a better job, and becomes the envy of the thin-bitch-women.

Imagine me screaming in the background, "What the fuck is this???"

As someone who's gone up and done the sliding size-scale from a 12-22 (since I was twelve years old - yea, that's right I was a size 12 at 12, again at 16, again at 20, and likely will be again at 25 - see a pattern here?) and back again, once, twice, working on three times down the size loop again, I can tell you this: I'm the exact same person at a 22 as I am at a 12. I guess this must mean that I'm not a "good" person on the inside, as I'm not thin and blond, and really don't have much desire to be.

I think what always offends me so much about thin actresses going around in fat drag is that the women who do it may have a deep, deep fear of being fat, but they've never *been* fat. They don't realize that life goes on, that you're the same person, that the world doesn't end. For most actresses in Hollywood, and in the minds of some ridiculous amount of women, being fat is the absolute worst thing that can happen to them. How can you have people who think this giving us the popular media idea of fat women? How can you so blantantly tell people that "goodness" means being thin, and "badness" means being fat?

And how come fat girls have to dress like shit, and walk five steps behind everybody? Why can't they laugh out loud and dress really great, and not be flighty and stupid? Why do they have to show fat women gorging themselves at work all the time?

These writers and directors and actors need to move the hell out of Hollywood and go write something from the real world.

Further Hysterics

So, one of the guys in the office just forwarded all the women in the office this stupid urban legend thing, passing it off as him being this concerned male citizen of virtue. You know this one, the *677 cell phone feature (in CANADA) that'll save a poor helpless woman who's got an unmarked police car on her ass and thinks it may be a nefarious villain out for rape and plunder and not a real police officer.

This is a lot like the traumatizing story I got of the rapists who would hide underneath your car at shopping malls holding knives, and cut your ankles to distract you while they pinned you to the hood of your car and raped you. For some reason, my young adolescent self never realized that the sheer physical dynamics involved in him cutting your ankles and then *sliding out from underneath the car and managing to disable you before you screamed, bit, gouged, and ran away* would pretty much prevent all but the stupidest attackers from trying this bit of menacing.

My well-meaning mother sends me these hysteric stories all the time. If you get them forwarded to you, check out truthorfiction.com to get the real deal.

Now, while I appreciate (though am exasperated by) these forwarded e-mails from my mother, I'm irritated and more than a little angry to find myself receiving one from a co-worker whom I rarely work with and barely know, whose social life is nil and work life lackluster and who suffers from a severe Napoleon complex.

Put me and this guy in a fight, and I can tell you right now who'll win.

I want to shake this guy and tell him I've got a Master's degree and have trekked 160 kilometres into rural Africa. I can lift some ungodly amount of weight, jog three miles, and have a whopping amount of anger just ready to be directed at a potential attacker.

Rapist? BRING IT ON, BITCH!!!

Here's the deal, right... the guy was thinking he was doing his helpful male protector thing. He was alerting all of the women in the office that maybe that unmarked police car behind you isn't really a police car (yea, cause *guys* would never fall for this sort of thing), and you should be really hysterical about it, because BAD THINGS happen to women EVERY DAY.

And yes, I agree. Bad things happen every day. What I hate is the automatic assumption that because I'm a woman, I'm going to be the victim of a crime, and I need special consideration, and the guys in the office don't need to know this stuff, cause only 77% of the murdered are men. It's automatically assumed that I'm weaker and stupider and I need more protection. Is rape a woman-specific crime? Mostly, yea: but it's these goddamn I'd-rather-die-than-be-raped stigmas surrounding it that keep women silent about it and keep men doing it, and keep us all in so much fear of some stranger's swollen flesh that we send hysteric e-mails to each other instead of saying, "Yea. Just bite it off." Then report the fucker. You'll have a great DNA sample.

Yes, on the domestic abuse and sexual assault front, women are abused more than men, and it's bullshit, and the abuse needs to stop, and women need to stand up to it, and we live in a society that doesn't give most women the tools, skills, or resources to do so. But men are more likely to be the victim of a car jacking than women. 77% of murder victims are men. And, to top it all off, crime rates have been falling steadily for the last 20 years.

And I'm still getting hysterical e-mails.

Yea, there's still crime, but the pressure on women to be good or get violently assaulted for it is largely social. We're more likely (in the US) to be threatened with a crime or sit around in fear of a crime than to actually experience once.

As somebody who's spent a year and a half in South Africa terrifed out of my skull by rape rates/crime rates & etc. and *still* traveled alone through East London to King William's Town to Alice - the heartland of nowhere - and *still* came out alive... well, I can tell you that this fear bullshit is crippling and false.

Learn how to fight. Hold yourself a little taller. Don't take shit from anybody. Don't let anybody invade your personal space.

I stand by my earlier assertions: if more women knew how to fight back, more men would think twice about fucking with them. I'm a big believer in this one (this ideal could change, of course, I'm young). But as long as men and women are raised up believing that women exist as pretty ornaments instead of friends and partners, I'm going to keep getting these well-meaning e-mails that talk down to me instead of treating me like an equal.

And treating me like an equal means forwarding that hysteric message to everybody in the office, not just me.

And being a decent co-worker is about checking stupid fucking truthorfiction.com before forwarding said co-workers THIS BULLSHIT.

The end.

Dynamic Personalities

This one is fascinating, from New Scientist:

Students who thought of Superman volunteered much less of their time than those who thought about other superheroes. Furthermore, Superman-primed subjects were significantly less likely to show up at a meeting for volunteers held three months after they were initially asked to participate.

The reason, believes Nelson, is that asking people to compare themselves to an exceptional individual makes them realise their shortcomings. Whereas thinking about a general category encourages people to identify the strengths they have in common.

What I want to know is, was there any difference if they primed them for Superwoman instead of Superman?

The Fighting Life, etc

So, almost six months into fighting classes, and I'm still loving this kicking-ass thing.

Had a good class last night. Wore a newer sort of shirt that really, only waifish petite women should wear (says the media - smaller straps, more breathable material, tight-fitting), but damn I was comfortable, and when I got a look at myself in the mirror, I didn't look ridiculous so much as I looked scary. My upper body is starting to get slightly impressive, and I'm a lot denser than I used to be. Still, I'm big. I can hurt people. I always wonder if bigger-than-average guys (height and weight) internalize the Fat Kid label as much as women like me absorbed the Fat Girl label. I always suspect that big guys were told they were just Really Impressive.

So I'm looking forward to Wednesday classes more this time around (format changes every month, to keep our bodies guessing) because we're doing bag work and no jump roping. Worked on krav maga drills, broken up by squats, push-ups, and plank position feats of fancy requiring good balance and a really strong core.

I've been looking at my Saturday morning pilates class as a low-intesity warmup before boxing class or just a great way to start my Saturday morning (on the days I skip the boxing class that follows it), but after a couple of pilates classes in addition to my usual routine, I've really noticed a difference in strength levels. I wonder how much of it has to do with just breaking up my routine and doing something totally different.

My leg strength is also finally starting to catch up to my upper body (yea, I have no problem carrying my roommate around the house on a lark, but doing wallsits for a minute is still painful). I was doing front leg roundhouse kick drills last night, and it's this really elegant thing - you've got your left foot turned out away from where you're kicking, and you take up your right leg and snap it at the bag, pointing the toe, and wallop with the front of your pointed foot. Then snap back, bring the pointed toe to the floor, then do it again.

It requires a lot of balance, which means a lot of strength in your legs and abs, and last night was the first time I'd done the kicks where I consistently felt really elegant doing them. Sure, it's still like, "Wow, I have this huge body," (I've actually stopped comparing myself to most of the women in class except the Amazons, and started comparing myself to the men of my same belt rank - we're closer in height/weight and of course, experience level) but this time around it was, "Wow, I have this huge body, and I can really make it do this elegant, powerful stuff."

Looking pretty when you wallop someone is a great added bonus.

Ha.

Ain't No Goat

I don't understand what a bunch of hysterics find so scary about some rural 17-year-old kid who says that yea, mom and dad, I think guys are pretty hot.

I mean, *I've* been a rural, 17-year-old-kid who was like, "Yea, mom and dad, I think guys are pretty hot (and that chick in speech class isn't bad either)."

And you know, I don't consider myself very scary.

Certainly not scary enough to warrant this sort of behavior from Westboro Baptist minister Fred Phelps and his hysterical flock. This guy rallied up and shipped out some good Christian folks and sent them to picket this kid Michael's home town - and his local church - to tell him he was a demon freak and all of the people around him who hadn't stoned him to death were evil sinners and going to hell.

What happened to "Jesus loves everybody" and "Don't judge lest ye be judged" and "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"?

Are these people Christians, or hate-mongers?

The town's response to this is telling - you can't bring in "foreigners" to a small town and have them try and alienate the town and one of their own because they accept somebody the way he is... well, no, his town doesn't really accept him the way he is. They keep hoping he'll change, which is why they keep letting him back into church. But let's ignore that for a minute, and just say that you can't get a bunch of people riled up and send them out after a small-town kid, cause you'll get a backlash. You'll get locals saying stuff like, "Stay away from our homos."

He's ours. Not yours. Fuck off.

It's a starting point, I guess.

In truth, the best part of this article for me, and the part that I really connected with, was when The Human Rights Campaign offered to fly Michael into DC to attend their national dinner. Michael went with his sister Shelly, after getting his mother's very hesitant permission to go. And, in DC:

The next day there was a luncheon and sightseeing of the monuments. A lesbian couple with a 3-year-old daughter took Michael and Shelly to dinner in Dupont Circle. Walking around the gay neighborhood, Michael was in awe. "It was like being around family," he said. "Seeing all those successful people, that could be me."

As somebody who's from a small town, it was this bit of the article that really struck me. That realization:

There are other ways to live. Things can be really different.

This isn't all there is. Everybody doesn't marry the guy they dated in high school, have a miserable or lackluster marriage of obligation, and spend their lives raising kids that they may not really want but feel are expected to have.

You can know these things on a rational level, but until you actually see it at work, it remains about as tangible a reality as the North Pole. Sure, you know it's there, but you can't see a way to get there, or how it being there would affect you. Except insofar as it affects the weather, and magnetism, and the tilt of the earth, and...

The first time I walked into a gay-friendly neighborhood, I was twenty years old and attending Clarion West in Seattle.

My realization happened quite suddenly. I was walking around, mapping out the local neighborhood, looking for the grocery store, the pharmacy - and then this odd thing happened. I looked up and realized I was walking down the street next to same-sex couples holding hands.

And no one was jeering at them.

Nobody looked furtive or harassed. Happy couples ate out at the sidewalk cafes. Groups of women in practical clothing ordered real food and laughed and talked in big voices. Men held long conversations with each other about personal relationships and clothing.

Now, I'm one of those illusion-of-heterosexuality types who identifies as hetero, but is probably a 3-3.5 on the sliding scale of human sexuality. That is, I mostly go crazy about boys, and I identify as straight, but I've been known to goggle at the occasional girl. So really, as a self-identified "straight" person, I shouldn't have felt this huge relief I felt when I was walking around. I should have just been like, "Wow. That's cool."

Instead, I felt, for the first time, like I could totally relax. It was a bit like going to a science fiction convention (bear with me here), where everybody's a fat dork, and has these really fascinating sexual relationships or lack thereof, and it's all OK.

As I grew up, I stumbled into the "fat girl" stereotype, and the "fat dork" label that I draped over my head and started to internalize. I recognized that I was bigger and taller than most women. I didn't wear makeup. I didn't know how to flirt. I had the braces/glasses/headgear thing going on. I lived on books. People were always making fun of me. They were stealing things from me. They were throwing stuff at me on the bus.

Like most people, I got rid of most of my dorkly attire as I got older, lost weight and got even taller, but I still had this feeling, this feeling like, "This isn't the right world for me. What other people want isn't what I want. I don't want what I'm supposed to want."

I didn't want to get married. I wasn't thrilled at the idea of having kids. I wanted to run around the world with a backpack. I wanted to live in a little cabin in the woods and write books. I wanted to ride motorcycles in Rome. I was a lot more crazy about hopping into bed with people than women were supposed to be. I was still too big and too tall, to be a woman. That's what the media told me. That's what seeing all these hetero couples and their screaming children told me. I was wrong to not want these things.

But walking down that street in Seattle, in that neighborhood, with all those comfortable people, it occurred to me that I had found a safe place. Nobody would likely ask me why I wasn't married. Nobody would say that since I wasn't dating I must be a lesbian (and if they did, they wouldn't say it like it was a *bad* thing). Nobody would call me a fatty or say I read too much or ate too much or sneer at me for talking about feminism. Why not? - cause I believed that most of these people knew *exactly* what it was like to be hated for something about yourself that made you comfortable and happy.

Oh, sure, nobody's a saint - there are lots of people, no matter their sexuality or skin color or nationality or religion or whatever, who have a deep fear and resentment for stuff like fat and dorkdom - but again, no matter what the rational part of my brain was saying, the rest of my body was comfortable, relaxed, and yes, relieved. I could just walk. Nobody here would hurt me. That's what my body told me.

I get that same feeling browsing at the Women and Children First Bookstore in Andersonville, and dining next to four women on a double-date at Andie's. It's that thought, like:

I can say liberal things, and talk about female revolutionaries, and sit here looking the way I look, and nobody's going to pat me on the head and say I'm a silly girl, or the wrong kind of girl, or tell me I'm going to hell cause I'm not married.

I'm OK here.

This is what I don't understand about people who hate. People who seek to attack others who have done them no harm, who are not thinking to do them harm, and then start screaming at them and throwing stones - the way I felt screamed at in a town that always felt too small for me.

I like to think of myself as being really accepting of people, because I know what it's like to feel suffocated by a world that doesn't seem right for you. But I can't understand the need to hate. I can't understand standing on a sidewalk and screaming that some 17-year-old should die and his whole congregation is going to hell cause they "let" him into church, and love him for being a person.

Yes. A person. You know, like everybody else.

All I can figure is that these are very, very, terrified people who believe that if others exist who are different than they are, then those people threaten their own belief about the lives they've chosen. After all, if there are people in the world who your version of the Bible says shouldn't exist, how can you be so absolute in your faith? If there really are places where you don't have to grow up and get married and kow-tow to a physically superior husband who makes more money than you do, then you might have to question why *you're* doing it.

There are a lot of men and women who are very happy with the cozy nuclear family lifestyle - though not nearly so many as the cultural illusion would have you think. I respect stay-at-home mothers more than I respect many people, because I have an understanding of just what an incredible undertaking it is to bear and raise children. But there's a fear that came true for a lot of conservatives in an explosive and very public way in the 70s: there's a fear that if women, especially, are given another way of living, that they'll take it. That they'll jump ship, and start making up lives of their own.

Wouldn't that be terrible?

These rebel women would threaten your way of life with their very existence, because god wouldn't strike them down, their children wouldn't all be deformed, they wouldn't get into some disfiguring accident, and no, Massachusetts wouldn't sink into the sea...

And then...

And then...

Who's left to hate? Who do you blame for your own unhappiness? Who do you blame for your own dissastisfaction? Who's carrying all the sin in the world?

Back in the day, little communities started the new year by transferring all of their sins to a goat. The goat was then sacrificed to god or the gods, purging the town of it's yearly sins and feelings of ill-will.

And you know what? I don't wanna be anybody's fucking goat. And my friends and neighbors ain't goats either.

I think that all of us dangerous women and rebel men hold up a mirror - I think it scares the shit out of people.

I think we should do more of it.

There are other ways to live. We're making them, and we're living them.

And yes, I do believe that other people need to hear about them.

Because my heart bleeds for all these 17-year-old kids in these little towns, the ones who don't know that there's another way to live, and so stay home raising goats.

There’s another way to live.

Things can be really different.

And yes, that's an OK thing. The world will not explode. Nobody's going to abolish happy hetero twosomes. Nobody's going to take away your Bible. Another person's happiness doesn't threaten yours.

What I want out of my life doesn't affect the lives of Phelps's hysterics - unless some of those hysterics see my life and realize they don't much like their own lives. Unless seeing me and my buddies living as single (or unmarried-partnered/married-open relationship/poly/same-sex partnered), successful, strong women who can lift 120lbs and knock somebody out with a right cross means that they start to question Phelps.

I suppose I can understand, then, what a shepherd like Phelps finds so terrifying.

He's afraid his sheep will turn into people. He's afraid they'll start thinking like people.

Random Odds and Various Ends

So, which of these is the Washington Post article, and which is the satirical Onion article? Sorry, these are getting uncomfortably close for me.

No wonder Jon Stewart's doing so damn well.

And my, my my - more pulp magazine covers! (not quite work safe)Pagan lesbians and all (definately a freeper's worst nightmare)! I just break into uncontrollable giggling.

Check out more hysterics here. This time, we get this great freak-out quote from a mother protesting the mere idea that there's such a thing as a school dance where men and women are expected to switch social roles. She seemed to believe this meant crossdressing - as opposed to, say, the Sadie Hawkins women-ask-the-guy-out-and-pay-the-tab dances that prep women for real life - you know, life after highschool.

My favorite quote from this hysteric: "It's like experimenting with drugs," Davies said. "You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary. ... If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?"

It's not OK? Wow. I must live way way too close to boys' town Belmont and Andersonville, then, cause in my world, all sorts of non-compulsory-hetero-social-role bullshit is OK... I really do live in a different world than these 58 million Americans. I really do. More on this later.

I've also submitted my newsfeed to - and been picked up by - Feminist Blogs, a cool compilation of feeds from a bunch of feminist and pro-feminist blogs. Check it out.

And for those interested - I'm currently reading and recommend the Penguin Book of Modern Fantasy by Women. For literary snobs who can't be bothered with "fantasy" you'll find "literary" luminaries in here like Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark, Leguin, and P.D. James. And you'll get to meet swoon-worthy Angela Carter and that most epic of brutal women, Joanna Russ.

Writing Today. Seriously. Yes. Seriously.

In the mean time, you may be interested in amusing yourselves with John Rickards's latest pet procrastinating project - and check out these inspiring passages from John Kerry: the novel.

Ahem. Yes. Anyway. Back into the trenches with King Nathin...

Take Me to Little Africa!

Today's WTF moment, from boingboing:

There's apparentely a Superman comic from the 1970s in which Lois Lane is turned into a black woman in order to get information for a story she's working on.



Seriously.

"The story begins with Lois assigned to do a story on Metropolis's urban area that Lois refers to Little Africa. It seems that all black people refuse to submit to an interview done by Miss Whitey. Young children, old blind ladies, and even people on the street hate white people. With Superman's help Lois is placed inside the Plastimold and the Transformoflux Pack invented by Dahr-Nel, Kryptonian Surgeon. Apparently this machine is meant to change white people to black people. You have to wonder if Superman uses this machine often?"

Lois is just trying to be a Good Rudyard Kipling White Woman and Help Out the Ghetto Folk, all of whom treat her, like, ummmm... like a black woman in a white neighborhood. So she becomes a black woman so she can "mix" with Little Africa and get her story.

Luckily, our heroine not only gets her story but teaches the Uppity Black Panther-type guy a lesson. Don't hate whitey! It turns out that he and she share the same blood type, and she gives him a life-saving blood transfusion.

What would these black people do, without white people?

This is one of those comics that looks like it was honestly trying to be Good and work on Race Relations... but it came at it the usual way: the white people are all nice and good and trying to work for change and trying to reach out to you, and the it's the evil liberal black people who need to change their angry ways and stop being soooo mean.

A step forward at the time, sure, but it could have used a little more thought.

Squid. Yes. Squid.

I look forward to writing a science fiction short one day where everyone lives off squid and uses them for everyday chores.

I don't need to bother, of course, cause I've finally gotten through Vandermeer's King Squid.

I set myself the task of finishing up Vandermeer's City of Saints and Madmen, which I'd gotten halfway through and then put aside because Secret Life wasn't out yet, and I wanted another Vandermeer to read before I finished the first one. Now Secret Life's been out for months and months (it just keeps sitting in my amazon.com shopping cart, because I keep blowing my book allowance at the Borders across the street, and V's books won't hit the mainstream shelves until next year - it's all special order till then), so City of Saints isn't done, but I'm in the home stretch.

And last night, I suddenly understood all the to-do about the squid. I read King Squid, and the pages and pages of annotated bibliography that follow it (I think the bibliography is longer than the actual story - but, then, the cool thing about Vandermeer is the stories-within-stories). Calamari's just never going to taste the same. If you don't know what I mean, I'm not going to explain it. Just read the book. Obsessive dorks like me will appreciate it.

In any case, I've been wanting to address some themes in a couple of Vandermeer's peices that really jumped out at me, and are big contributers to my interest in his work.

There are spoilers here, so if you'd like to be shaken awake by these endings, particularly that of Dradin, please read Dradin, in Love first, then come back here. It's the ending that did it for me in Dradin and Veniss Underground.

Weird and grotesque as the stories are (in a good way), I approach my reading with a fine eye toward love/friendship/desire between and among the sexes, and you'll find that there's a lot of SF/F crap out there that doesn't take these relationships apart and examine them, or does it in a way that's badly written and boring, or thinks it's examining them and then does the same tired old thing.

Vandermeer's work isn't primarily addressing these issues, either, but I've seen some themes he's working with that I like.

The two peices that interest me the most are "Dradin, In Love" and Veniss Underground; they're peices that deal with madness and desire - and, particularly - the obsessions of a male protagonist directed at the idea of a woman.

In Dradin, Dradin becomes obsessed with a woman he glimpses in a storefront, and his desire for this ideal woman drives him toward the unraveling of his own delusions.

Dradin's overwhelming obessesion with the woman in the window, the obsession that begins to uncover for the reader his spiral from madness to murder to deepening madness... culminates in his rushing to the third floor of the storefront and confronting the woman - only to discover that he's become obsessed with a mannequin. The love of his life isn't a real person.

And that's not even the best part - the best part is he realizes how wonderful it is that she's not real:

"It did not matter that she was in pieces, that she was not real, for he could see now that she was his salvation. Had he not been in love with what he saw in the third story window, and had what he had seen through that window changed his essential nature? Wasn't she better suited to him than if she had been real, with all the avarices and hungers and needs and awkwardnesses that create dissapointment? He had invented an entire history for this woman and now his expectations of her would never change and she would never age, never criticize him, never tell him he was too fat or too sloppy or too neat, and he would never have to raise his voice to her."

Dradin flees the scene carrying the mannequin's head under his arm - escaping the city with his perfect princess, rescued from the high tower.

The total fuck-up of the classic fairytale is just gorgeous.

And it's that moment of utter understanding of the character you've followed over the course of this story - the understanding that he doesn't see people, and doesn't *want* to see people - that left me floored. It's watching a character accept the fact that what he's really in love with is a thing, an idea.

What makes it powerful is reading it while sitting here in a self-obsessed consumer culture, in cities where we don't see each other, in a society that chooses its mates based on their dress sizes and the prettiness of their faces; where a person's moral character is judged entirely by how much fat they have on their bodies and what clothes they wear. We're not complex people anymore: just things.

And women, of course, most of all.

In Veniss, Shadrach's quest for Nicola - the woman who does not love him - also looks like a classic male protagonist going through hell to win the woman he loves. He feels the need to rescue her from what is essentially the organic-punk version of the seven levels of hell.

What makes this story for me, as well, is that in the ending where the Male Hero and Damsel in Distress crawl back up into the light and look out over the city - she doesn't fall into his arms and declare her undying love. They aren't a happy romantic couple at book's end. Her feelings haven't changed. Nor have his. He rescued her because he loved her, and throughout, Shadrach never expects that she will love him. There's no sexual reward for the male lead, no expectation of an obligated wife who feels that she can never leave him because he chose to save her. It was his choice to go after her, and neither he nor she expects that there is a debt for this.

This was probably one of the best illustrations I've seen (as yet - which is telling about how rare this sort of affection is, protrayed in the media) of the love-without-obligation (unconditional love) between a man and a woman who are or have been sexually attracted to one another. You'll see lots of brotherly love in war movies and stories, and mothers' unconditional love for children, but very, very rarely do you see a man risk his life for a woman he's not related to and who he doesn't appear to expect he'll "get" (all that comes to mind right now is Andrew Lloyd Weber's version of The Phantom of the Opera, and in that case, the hounds were closing in and the male lead was a dead guy anyway) Instead, you'll often see this behavior with a gender switch: the too smart/too fat/too ugly background female character (slave girl, prostitute) will sacrifice herself for the smart/built/handsome male lead who doesn't love her, so that he can go on to save the princess.

Along these same lines, another short, "The Cage" (compiled in City of Saints) features antiquities dealer Robert Hoegbotton, who loves and desires his wife primarily because of her helplessness (as he regards her blindness) and her dependence on him.

I've read some critiques of Vandermeer's characters - mainly that his people feel two-dimensional in their fleshy settings. But I think that I'm not reading two-dimensional characters so much as I'm reading about entirely self-obsessed male protagonists (I'm having trouble finishing Adam Robert's Stone for this reason - self-obsession in shorts is fine, but over 300 or 400 pages, it gets exhausting). What I'm seeing when I read V's shorts are protagnoists who see the people in their lives as things (this is not as true for Shadrach, but I do believe that rescuing Nicola becomes more to him about the gesture than the person, by the end of the book).

There's a strange lack of female POV characters in most of the Vandermeer work I've read, which didn't start to bug me until about halfway through City of Saints (In Veniss, Nicola's POV takes up roughly 1/3 of the book, the other two characters being the men in her life - her POV is neatly and appropriately sandwiched between them, as she exists as the plot-point damsel that drives Shadrach's actions, and - as I recall - serves as her brother's currency).

Most of the characters serving as background are men, and the Ambergris of City of Saints is a very Victorian, men-in-the-streets type of city, though there are offhand references to some dynamic female thinkers, writers, and explorers. Some of them even make a brief appearance, but most of the women outside of the plot-pivot point of the story are the requisite mentions of sisters, daughers and mad mothers (to be fair, all the fathers are pretty mad, too).

In any other writer - like a writer whose endings to Dradin and Veniss would have been more safe and predictable - I'd throw my hands up and start over with somebody else's stuff, but with Vandermeer, you can see him working through all of these different themes, and you can watch them popping up in other stories and being worked through in subsequent books. Madness/lust/desire/obsession - they're great story pieces, and you throw onto that these exotic settings, dense wording, and that underlying sense of the macabre (I had a friend tell me that after reading City of Saints he had nightmares about mushrooms - ) and you're gonna get something really interesting to gnaw on.

I think a part of my fascination is seeing where Vandermeer's going to go next with this stuff. He's just sold mass market rights to the works above, and has a new book, Shriek coming out next year.

He's a writer whose pet themes I like...

Thoughts on War Driving

More fear-mongering here.

Your wireless network could be in danger!!!! EVIL THINGS WILL HAPPEN! Spammers could sit outside your house and... and... SEND SPAM.

Oh, please. Wardrivers are primarily just geeky guys who go around using other people's internet connections, for fun, and marking out for other people where they can get a handy connection to send a couple e-mails or download some songs. Unless you've got shared files on your network, the chances of anything on any of your computers being hacked into by these geeky guys (as if you'd have anything they wanted!) is practically nil.

For those who bother to get to bottom of CNN's stupid article, you get this admission:

Not one of the calls D-Link's technical support line has received over the years has been about loss of information through a wireless hack, spokesman Darek Connole says. "It's like seatbelts," he says. "Everybody knows you should put them on, but if you haven't heard of anyone who's been hurt, you won't do it."

"People are more scared as a concept than as a reality," says Moynihan. "I'm not saying people shouldn't secure their wireless networks, but they are probably more vulnerable when they are receiving e-mails."

Bah. War drivers are welcome outside my house any time - spammers who slow down said network will be charged a large fee.

Cause that's what it's *really* about, isn't it? "Protecting" *your* network, keeping it from everybody else cause you're paying for it and they're not. I'm a big proponent of free, state-funded internet, baby. My tax dollars at work. Can you imagine the stink Republicans would have with that one?

"Our tax dollars are going toward allowing people to look at porn!"

And read blogs. And stay informed of politics. And read Wikipedia.

Ha.

On Fantasy Sagas

Working on Over Burning Cities this morning, creating files for all of the outlined chapters that are yet to be done, so I can get a sense of pacing. I've got them looking like this: Chapter 10 (RB).doc; Chapter 11 (Roh).doc; Chapter 12 (L).doc -- The letters in parentheses tell me which POV character that chapter should be written from, as per my outline.

Because I've got five different POVs and only two sets of two of them intersect - and then only about halfway through - I can write POV chapters as one long story or narrative until the point where events in POVs merge, then I have to write chapter-by-chapter in order again (I tend to have to work chronologically. Very rarely do I write chapters out of order that are meant to intersect - largely because no matter how good my outline is, I go all organic and weird shit happens and characters pop up that ain't in the outline). So I'm writing up another Zezili chapter, and I wanted to have file markers in my folder to use as a bench marker as to how well I'm doing with my pacing (pacing was one of my biggest problems with book one).

So, as Chapter Title markers in each file, I put the character's name - and I was reminded of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, in which each of his chapter titles were character names. Damn, such great shorthand.

And it reminded me to check and see if his latest book is done.

It's not. But he's got a rant up about the election.

Ha. I love all us hippies.

Brutal Women, Babies, and Boy Bands

OK, I hate Condi Rice's foreign policy. I think she's a big bully. But you gotta give the woman props. I do agree with the critique of the choice: Bush is getting everybody in top positions who agrees with his politics (yes. This is a Bad Thing. Surrounding yourself with a bunch of people who have the same opinions as you do means you're gonna come out lopsided and uninformed. Even *I* have been known to troll conservative and moderate blogs) - Colin Powell dissented with him over a number of big decisions, including blowing off the Geneva Convention while dealing with prisoners in Guantanomo. Of course, nobody listened to Powell...

In other news, my Clarion buddy Patrick and his wife Karin are now the proud parents of Garret Jameson, and I am quite happy to say that he seems very cool. So, welcome, Little G! And if you ever find yourself in the position to ask, when we're out of fossil fuel and Condi Rice is president: no, your parents didn't vote for him either.

I have also found a new pet boy band called The Secret Machines who I recommend. I love geeky band boys. I'd gotten numb to boy-bands for a long time, as most of the ones I was seeing all the time were the too-pretty talentless hacks who went on to star in tabloid magazines and reality TV. Vomit. Anyhow, tSM have got a video here, but I think the album is better, and the best part - it's performed and produced as an album, not an amalgamation of poppish songs written by other people. More about them here.