I came home tonight to two hungry and affectionate cats, a pile of bills, a sink whose formerly precarious dishes my husband had done entirely before leaving for work, and my contributor's copy of GlitterShip Year One, ed. Keffy R.M. Kehrli. It is a wide-ranging compilation of queer speculative fiction in all kinds of genres, moods, and perspectives, with a gorgeous wraparound cover by Likhain; it includes my short story "The True Alchemist," originally published in 2014 in Not One of Us #51 and dedicated in all appearances to ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ashlyme. You can of course read all of these stories for free online, but since GlitterShip is a paying market with a single editor, I strongly recommend throwing money at them. I want to be able to look forward to many more of these annual collections in future. Their latest publication is Craig Laurance Gidney's "Circus Boy Without a Safety Net." They're worth your time.
In further reminders that the past was not some kind of know-nothing conservative monolith, James Agee's review of MGM's Dragon Seed (1944) is dated August 5, 1944 and opens with a short overview of the picture's good qualities, which are mostly its intentions: "Such matters aside, however, Dragon Seed is an almost unimaginably bad movie. Mrs. Buck persists in a questionable habit of making her Chinese peasants talk like a Bible revised by Butcher-Leaf-Lang-and-Myers . . . The California countryside they chose for location shots, Mrs. Buck is reported to have said, was a dead-ringer for parts of China before they got busy terracing it, reterracing it, and finally painting the terraces to make sure they would show . . . Against these unearthly, sepia-tinted landscapes, speaking their inhuman language, move such distinguished Chinese as Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston and Aline MacMahon and Akim Tamiroff and Henry Travers and Agnes Moorehead and Turhan Bey; indeed, I've never seen another picture so full of wrong slants. Since there are plenty of genuine and good Chinese actors around Hollywood, some of whom appear as the Japanese in this film, it was entirely unnecessary for these principals to undertake their hopeless assignments, and I shan't even try to say how awful and silly they looked—Miss Hepburn especially, in her shrewdly tailored, Peck-&-Peck-ish pajamas—with the occasional exception of Miss MacMahon and the rather frequent exception of Mr. Huston. Both of them obviously realized it was much more important to convey the emotions of human beings than the charade mannerisms of Little Theater Chinese . . . To mention only two more of the main things wrong with this picture, 'quaint' pseudo-Chinese background-music was never more insultingly out of place." That millennial special snowflake, James Agee.
In less delightful developments, I cannot tell if the upstairs neighbors are smoking some kind of cigar or just a particularly unpalatable strain of weed, but it has filled the stairwell and driven me out of my office. The division of these apartments is not what you would call airtight. They never did understand the courtesy of putting a towel against the doorsill. I can take this oversight when the downward drift is just spicy or skunky, but tonight's strain smells like a tragically literal garbage fire: it is making my stomach churn. I recognize this is nowhere near as apocalyptic as the national and global news these days, but I could still do without it.
P.S. And for a stroke of financial brilliance, I have just learned that Patreon is overhauling their payment structure in such a fashion as to offload their third-party service charges onto patrons instead of creators. "Starting on December 18th, a new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 will be paid by patrons for each individual pledge." This includes pledges of one (1) dollar. This is silly. I understand the current system attracts a high volume of complaints, and I admit it is aggravating to take home a visibly smaller chunk of money than my patrons have pledged me each month, but I do not see this particular revision doing much to raise my net income so much as risk losing me patrons and goodwill. I pay bills with this Patreon. Most of my patrons are not high rollers. I'd rather eat the service charges—as I have been doing since I set up this account—than drive off patrons who will discover, unless my film reviews are so lucky as to be the sole recipient of their largesse, that footing a variable percentage of processing and transaction fees for multiple creators adds up. It will not benefit me more than it benefits Patreon. And I am not the only creator worrying about the change: Natalie Luhrs has data tables and Kate Wagner has a petition. I have signed it myself and also written a letter of complaint. I can't afford to lose any income right now. And I certainly don't want to lose it for a reason this chiseling. God damn it, capitalism.
ashlyme. You can of course read all of these stories for free online, but since GlitterShip is a paying market with a single editor, I strongly recommend throwing money at them. I want to be able to look forward to many more of these annual collections in future. Their latest publication is Craig Laurance Gidney's "Circus Boy Without a Safety Net." They're worth your time.In further reminders that the past was not some kind of know-nothing conservative monolith, James Agee's review of MGM's Dragon Seed (1944) is dated August 5, 1944 and opens with a short overview of the picture's good qualities, which are mostly its intentions: "Such matters aside, however, Dragon Seed is an almost unimaginably bad movie. Mrs. Buck persists in a questionable habit of making her Chinese peasants talk like a Bible revised by Butcher-Leaf-Lang-and-Myers . . . The California countryside they chose for location shots, Mrs. Buck is reported to have said, was a dead-ringer for parts of China before they got busy terracing it, reterracing it, and finally painting the terraces to make sure they would show . . . Against these unearthly, sepia-tinted landscapes, speaking their inhuman language, move such distinguished Chinese as Katharine Hepburn and Walter Huston and Aline MacMahon and Akim Tamiroff and Henry Travers and Agnes Moorehead and Turhan Bey; indeed, I've never seen another picture so full of wrong slants. Since there are plenty of genuine and good Chinese actors around Hollywood, some of whom appear as the Japanese in this film, it was entirely unnecessary for these principals to undertake their hopeless assignments, and I shan't even try to say how awful and silly they looked—Miss Hepburn especially, in her shrewdly tailored, Peck-&-Peck-ish pajamas—with the occasional exception of Miss MacMahon and the rather frequent exception of Mr. Huston. Both of them obviously realized it was much more important to convey the emotions of human beings than the charade mannerisms of Little Theater Chinese . . . To mention only two more of the main things wrong with this picture, 'quaint' pseudo-Chinese background-music was never more insultingly out of place." That millennial special snowflake, James Agee.
In less delightful developments, I cannot tell if the upstairs neighbors are smoking some kind of cigar or just a particularly unpalatable strain of weed, but it has filled the stairwell and driven me out of my office. The division of these apartments is not what you would call airtight. They never did understand the courtesy of putting a towel against the doorsill. I can take this oversight when the downward drift is just spicy or skunky, but tonight's strain smells like a tragically literal garbage fire: it is making my stomach churn. I recognize this is nowhere near as apocalyptic as the national and global news these days, but I could still do without it.
P.S. And for a stroke of financial brilliance, I have just learned that Patreon is overhauling their payment structure in such a fashion as to offload their third-party service charges onto patrons instead of creators. "Starting on December 18th, a new service fee of 2.9% + $0.35 will be paid by patrons for each individual pledge." This includes pledges of one (1) dollar. This is silly. I understand the current system attracts a high volume of complaints, and I admit it is aggravating to take home a visibly smaller chunk of money than my patrons have pledged me each month, but I do not see this particular revision doing much to raise my net income so much as risk losing me patrons and goodwill. I pay bills with this Patreon. Most of my patrons are not high rollers. I'd rather eat the service charges—as I have been doing since I set up this account—than drive off patrons who will discover, unless my film reviews are so lucky as to be the sole recipient of their largesse, that footing a variable percentage of processing and transaction fees for multiple creators adds up. It will not benefit me more than it benefits Patreon. And I am not the only creator worrying about the change: Natalie Luhrs has data tables and Kate Wagner has a petition. I have signed it myself and also written a letter of complaint. I can't afford to lose any income right now. And I certainly don't want to lose it for a reason this chiseling. God damn it, capitalism.
