Dream with Our Eyes Open

I read this on Book of Faces and it made a big impression on me. As the author says, this is not for people of color. It is for white folks who are smugly convinced that racism only happens Elsehwere.

White Woman, Racism and a Poodle

Work and the news cycle have totally eaten my brain lately. :-(

Possibly twice, as I read later. But here's the initial touchdown:

I want to know who the woman with the specs and long dark hair is (with the core team). She looks so wonderfully fem-geekish.

I am so blessedly relieved about the presidential election. I think people finally got good and scared of the anti-women knee-jerk hateful Republican party (and fed up with all the voting shenanigans), as well they should have! It was scary close: apparently a lot of people can lie to themselves about a flagrant lying liar if he smiles pretty and invokes God.

I am also proud to bursting about my home state! Go, Maryland, go! Now so many of our friends and neighbors can get married: it's a new morning, and they can become the families they've always wanted to be. And they can do it in Minnesota and Maine and (maybe) Washington state, too. And Maryland's Dream Act law was passed, as well!   \o/

Trees are thrashing, and authorities have closed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, cutting off the fastest access to and from the Maryland part of the Delmarva Peninsula.

It's been a bad couple of weeks to be a geek woman, what with the Readercon Creeper (see linkspam) and before that hit, the CNN article about how good-looking young women in skimpy costumes aren't really geeks (see Scalzi's blog, which has a link to the original piece).

Among the comments on the Scalzi "Who Gets to Be a Geek" piece was something that crystalized for me some uneasy feelings I'd been having myself about the recent co-evolution of geekdom in general and the women who are part of it. One commenter stated:

Speaking personally: I used to think that geek culture was one of the few places that I, as a non-femme fat chick, would find acceptance. It was exciting to know that I didn’t have to look like a bikini model in order to make friends and potentially find partners. Unfortunately, now that there really ARE bikini models running around in my spaces, I’m feeling more and more marginalized. My one refuge from my culture’s violent reinforcement of body standards is evaporating, and it’s upsetting.

I don't want to feel as this commenter does. But in my heart, I sometimes feel that way, even though I know it's wrong.

I've been reading, over the past few days, Debbie Reese's posts on her blog American Indians in Children's Literature about the recent fiasco in Tucson. In response to the mandate from the state government that specialized programs like Mexican-American Studies no longer be taught, school officials demanded that books used in these classes be removed from classrooms. The removal was carried out during school hours - in one case, right before the eyes of the students as a class was taught. The teachers will have to jettison the rest of the year's lesson plans and come up with new ones - for general literature instead.

Also troubling is Arizona Superintendent for Public Instruction John Huppenthal's statement about what he saw and heard when he visited one of the classes in question. He was outraged by a poster of Che Guevara on the wall and says that the teacher called Benjamin Franklin racist. This is rather puzzling: when I took Russian history in high school in 1975, we had pictures of Stalin etc. on the wall, and no one flipped out. As for what the teacher said about Franklin that day ... a student video crew was filming, and the video is available online (link from the AICL blog).

Meanwhile, Indian Country Today supplied a link to this video, which shows another type of response:

You can check out the group's Website as well.

On January 13, 1982, a plane crashed into the [14th Street Bridge in Washington, DC], killing all but four passengers and one flight attendant of the 79 people aboard the aircraft. Four motorists on the bridge also died in the accident. Pilot error and poor weather conditions were blamed ...

Rescue crews and ambulances struggled through traffic to reach the scene on that snowy afternoon. The federal government had released its employees early, and roads were jammed. Then came word about 30 minutes later that a crowded Orange Line train had slammed into a concrete pillar near the Smithsonian station.

The first fatal accident in the history of Metro would injure 25 passengers and kill three others.

- The Washington Post

I was about 18 months into my first full-time professional job that day, as a copy editor at the American Geophysical Union just north of Dupont Circle. AGU released its employees when the government did. My colleague Carole and I, who both lived in Arlington, Virginia, started home on the Metro. We could not make the transfer to the Orange line. Rumors flew around the crowded station platforms, and then the news about the plane crash started to get mixed into it. We bailed out of the crowded Metro station and walked to a nearby McDonalds for hot chocolate, and there the news started to come together. You must remember that almost no one had cellphones in 1982 and, even if they had, there were no online news services worth talking about. I think we may have eventually walked to Foggy Bottom, and picked up a train home from there.

A person named Keith Mander, who apparently has made most of his money by getting people to pay him for fluffing up their Google search positions by providing repetitive crud content, has bought a couple of fanfiction archives: LOTRFanfiction.com and a Twilight archive. He's talking out of both sides of his mouth, on the one hand claiming that he is going to improve the sites out of the goodness of his heart and on the other hand boasting about how he is going to make money from them.

The prospect of the arrival of lawyers from the Tolkien estate asking why he's making money off their clients' intellectual property apparently holds no dread for Mr. Mander.

There's more coverage on this from esteliel at Dreamwidth, and the Organization for Transformative Works is offering AO3 accounts and and import services for the authors whose work is posted at the two archives. The writers reportedly do not have the ability to cancel and scrub their accounts at these sites.

I know that there are certainly worse things happening in today's world, but this has still got me major-league ticked.

(via neotoma.)

I know some folks were surprised that the distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks that were dragging LJ down the tubes the past week or so are believed by many to be fallout from Russian politics.

synecdochic has written a really interesting article here about the subject, if you want to know more.

(x-posted to my LJ; thanks to james_nicoll for pointing this out.)

Press release here.

"Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku: The Inner Chambers (volumes 1 & 2) explores an alternate version of feudal Japan, in which a plague has killed three out of every four boys. In this world, young men are protected and sheltered; women have secretly taken positions of authority and power. The Japanese ruler or shogun and the feudal lords are women and much of the story takes place among the men in the shogun’s harem. The title of the work refers to the living quarters for the shogun’s harem, contained within Edo Castle.

"The selection of Ooku: The Inner Chambers marks the first time that manga has been chosen for the Tiptree Award. Though no one on the jury is an expert on manga or on Japanese history, the jurors fell in love with the detailed exploration of the world of these books ... ."

Thanks to james_nicoll for pointing this out.