I lost my fake ID, but you lost the motel key

[sovay]

How today has gone: the noises I just made on discovering a not completely empty bag of cough drops in the farthest corner of the counters in the kitchen are more traditionally associated with the lottery. Have some links.

1. I am delighted that sholio has made a gifset of Bill Maxwell from The Greatest American Hero (1981–83): "FBI agent and absolute weirdo."

2. Courtesy of moon_custafer: cogent thoughts on having feelings about problematic art. "And so if Harry Potter or BA or Voltron or whatever other problematic thing was your lifeline it's okay to be upset that it was yanked away from you by bigoted creators and racist corporations and bad writing. It's okay to mourn that thing, to miss the joy it brought you, to think back on the good memories you had of it, to not want to jump on the hate bandwagon, to be upset when people mock the people like you who cared about it."

3. Courtesy of ashlyme: Judith Bingham's Salt in the Blood (1995), a maritime ghost story for chorus and orchestra, full of chanteys and fragments of ships' logs. I want a libretto.

P.S. Courtesy of my father: "Meet the Sea Slugs That Chop Off Their Heads and Grow New Bodies." It should maybe come with a content warning for video, but personally I cannot resist statements like "Self-amputation, known as autotomy, isn't uncommon in the animal kingdom. Having the ability to jettison a body part, such as a tail, helps many animals avoid predation. However, no animal had ever been observed ditching its entire body."

Comments

[sovay]

Yes -- but capitalism blurs those lines.

Of course, but that's just another reason why we need libraries.

Plus there's the feeling of, if I have all too limited time to consume the many stories out there, do I want to engage with the thing whose problems I know about when I could instead be engaging with something that is at least theoretically better?

If you're the person making the decision to engage or not, yes, but I was thinking of it more in terms of community response—returning to the idea of art interpreted as signaling or branding, if you see someone on the subway reading what you consider a terribly problematic book, try not to assume it means that the person wholeheartedly agrees and endorses all the problems. To make it personal, I've got this icon that quotes the Dresden Dolls. It does not mean I co-sign every sketchy thing Amanda Palmer has ever done. And fortunately no one's ever come at me about it, but when Harlan Ellison died, it took me a very long time to put together a memorial post because the first thing that happened elsenet was I said that one of my most formative writers had died and all of a sudden people were piling receipts on me. The idea of good faith was part of the original post we're still tangentially discussing ("And if you're on the other side, if you see someone who is sad that a thing was ruined for them, maybe consider that they don't have malicious intent, that their ignorance was not on purpose"), so I am not proposing some kind of great innovation here, but the specificity seemed useful to me.

[swan_tower]

If you're the person making the decision to engage or not, yes, but I was thinking of it more in terms of community response—returning to the idea of art interpreted as signaling or branding, if you see someone on the subway reading what you consider a terribly problematic book, try not to assume it means that the person wholeheartedly agrees and endorses all the problems.

I read through something like fourteen Forgotten Realms novels about dark elves for a conference paper on the problems with dark elves in the Forgotten Realms. There are all kinds of reasons to read a thing. :-P

But yes, there's a difference between "is this what I want to engage with when I could be engaging with something else" and judging another person by assuming that if they're reading/watching/listening to X, that means they've decided the problems with it aren't real.

[sovay]

There are all kinds of reasons to read a thing.

Exactly! (Man, that's a lot of Forgotten Realms. P.S. Is your paper online?)

But yes, there's a difference between "is this what I want to engage with when I could be engaging with something else" and judging another person by assuming that if they're reading/watching/listening to X, that means they've decided the problems with it aren't real.

I understand it is legitimately difficult in a culture where I know queer-friendly, anti-racist, generally cool neopagans who are seriously having to consider removing or altering decades-old core-identity tattoos so as not to be mistaken for white supremacists, but I just want people to be less judgmental where it's not warranted. It's not helping.

[swan_tower]

Exactly! (Man, that's a lot of Forgotten Realms. P.S. Is your paper online?)

Fortunately, those kinds of books read quickly. But among other things, they hammered home to me how completely unnatural the "spell slot" system is, when you have to write about it in a story. :-P

The paper is not online, but I could email it to you if you want.

I understand it is legitimately difficult in a culture where I know queer-friendly, anti-racist, generally cool neopagans who are seriously having to consider removing or altering decades-old core-identity tattoos so as not to be mistaken for white supremacists

Ugh, yes. I saw a recent discussion about the sauvastika/swastika and its role in Buddhism, which is NOT AT ALL its role in Nazi ideology, but not everybody in the West realizes that.