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Quoted in a BBC article about Shakespeare's lost play Love's Labor's Won:
The 420-year-search for Shakespeare's lost play
The 420-year-search for Shakespeare's lost play
Link: Lecture/Interview with R.F. Kuang
May. 2nd, 2021 12:29 pmListening to this lecture this morning and it is *so good.* I finished reading The Poppy War last night and am now a little obsessed; I ordered the other two books in the series.
Her points are super interesting. Waaaaay back ca. 2000 I took an Asian American Lit class, taught by a white person, and while I really enjoyed the class there was very much a focus on trauma. (The book list as I remember it: Memories of My Ghost Brother, The Woman Warrior, Obasan, No-No Boy, annnnnnd one other I'm blanking on.) Asian American SFF of the last few years--The Tensorate Series, The Dandelion Dynasty, and The Poppy War books--have engaged with this too. Kuang says here that Asian American SFF is incredibly reductionist and Orientalist and she's right. (She talks about people getting her confused with SL Huang.) So much to think about and I have a new literary crush, basically.
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Also something that struck me about The Poppy War is how it was A LOT like the cdramas I watch while also not having the cdrama tropes I'm familiar with (no background queers, for instance). Also lack of filial piety. Like, I do not think anyone is going to be punished for their bad relationships with parents and sifus. Like this is not Daoist at all, which makes it VERY different.
Anyhow, new hyperfixation and I want to write paper now...
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Also something that struck me about The Poppy War is how it was A LOT like the cdramas I watch while also not having the cdrama tropes I'm familiar with (no background queers, for instance). Also lack of filial piety. Like, I do not think anyone is going to be punished for their bad relationships with parents and sifus. Like this is not Daoist at all, which makes it VERY different.
Anyhow, new hyperfixation and I want to write paper now...
Journalist goes through 125 years of book reviews looking for women, people of color, queerness.
Revisiting the midcentury: "I’d innocently turn a corner and find you back at it, comparing a woman writer to a trout — as praise."
The relevant line from the original review, of an autobiography called "That Pellet Woman!" by Betty Pellet: "Nevertheless, a valiant woman comes through, an indomitable spirit leaping at life with the drive of a Dolores River trout."
The relevant line from the original review, of an autobiography called "That Pellet Woman!" by Betty Pellet: "Nevertheless, a valiant woman comes through, an indomitable spirit leaping at life with the drive of a Dolores River trout."
Snip:
It was a clubby world put into a panic by the success of “the lit’ry lady,” as a 1907 article termed her. Early issues of the Book Review were lively with alarm. Why Are Women Using Male Pseudonyms? How Dare Women Write From the Point of View of Male Characters? Why Are Women’s Books Selling So Well? “Is Woman Crowding Out Man From the Field of Fiction?”
(NB All these reviews are hyperlinked in the article.)
Bookmark: On Book-Buying in the Pandemic
Feb. 24th, 2021 09:44 pm BLACK, LATINX, AND MILLENNIAL READERS ARE THE BACKBONE OF THE BOOK WORLD by Kelly Jensen
Snip:
Hilariously, they link to the study results which is apparently a Google doc in someone's trash. OOPS.
Snip:
The research, undertaken amid the COVID-19 pandemic, involved surveying over 4,300 qualified individuals across an array of age groups, races, and locales in the United States. To qualify, individuals have to have indicated engaging with one book over the course of the previous year. The data explored three age groups: Baby Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials. Researchers also looked at five US regions and numerous racial demographics. It is believed to be the first such study and offers conclusions to questions and assumptions many in the industry, from booksellers to publishers to librarians and book influencers, have been eager to learn.
...
...
Of the three age groups studied, it was Millennials who engaged with books more than any other. But more specifically, it was avid Black, Latinx, and male-identifying Millennials who engaged with books the most, though across all age groups, it was individuals who did not identify as white who engaged the most. The singular exception was when it came to the context of buying books as gifts. This was the one space where white, female-identifying Baby Boomers outpaced any other group.
Books sales over the last year during COVID-19 saw an increase of over 8 percent, and study participants reported not changing their habits during that time. It was instead avid book engagers — those who engaged with four or more books per month — who helped drive that spike in sales."
Hilariously, they link to the study results which is apparently a Google doc in someone's trash. OOPS.
Class, Reading, and Regions in America
Jan. 21st, 2021 02:42 pm "The New National American Elite" by Michael Lind
A fairly long piece on class in America, which says a lot of interesting things, some of which I doubt. For one thing, towards the end there's a section on "woke speech" as "a ruling-class dialect" which I think is almost but by no means entirely true. (Look, I've spent the better part of a year overhearing technocrat meetings.) But the overarching argument about America's past of regional elites (northeastern, mid-Atlantic, southern, western, etc.) seemed on point. And then THIS fascinating nugget:
A fairly long piece on class in America, which says a lot of interesting things, some of which I doubt. For one thing, towards the end there's a section on "woke speech" as "a ruling-class dialect" which I think is almost but by no means entirely true. (Look, I've spent the better part of a year overhearing technocrat meetings.) But the overarching argument about America's past of regional elites (northeastern, mid-Atlantic, southern, western, etc.) seemed on point. And then THIS fascinating nugget:
"Local patriciates tried to boost their own authors at the expense of those in other American regions. My maternal grandmother, a schoolteacher for part of her career, belonged to the minor Southern gentry. She saw to it that my brother and I were introduced to the literary canon as educated white Southerners of the early 20th century conceived of it: A British substrate, consisting of Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling, overlain by Southern writers like Sidney Lanier, whose “The Marshes of Glynn” introduced me to the wonders of verse. The equivalent New England literary canon ran directly from Shakespeare and Milton and Pope and Scott and Tennyson to Emerson, Longfellow and Whittier and the other “Fireside Poets” (Whitman, Hawthorne, and Melville only acquired their present status later, thanks to mid-20th-century academics)."
Now the regionalization of reading, especially in terms of school canon, is something I think is accurate. Today I imagine it would be somewhat mitigated by increasingly standardized class curricula as well as the replacement of bookshops by mega-chains/Amazon. (Although that I can speak less well to since the local bookshop where we had to go buy the handful of books we were expected to purchase was largely dominated by Dickens Village and Precious Moments tchotchkes rather than, you know, BOOKS.) But I do know the books that I had to read, in rural Georgia, were very different from those Scott had to read in Boulder Colorado: I got To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby while he got Bless Me, Ultima and Death Comes for the Archbishop. There's definitely more to untangle on this.
Probably the money-quote from the piece:
"When I explain all of this to friends from other countries, they tend to be surprised, if not suspicious of my account. What about frontier egalitarianism? Wasn’t America dominated by the just-folks middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t America in danger now, for the first time in its history, of becoming an Old World style hierarchy?
"When I explain all of this to friends from other countries, they tend to be surprised, if not suspicious of my account. What about frontier egalitarianism? Wasn’t America dominated by the just-folks middle class in the 19th and 20th centuries? Isn’t America in danger now, for the first time in its history, of becoming an Old World style hierarchy?
The egalitarianism of the American frontier is greatly exaggerated. Some of the myth comes from European tourists like Alexis de Tocqueville, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens. For ideological reasons or just for entertainment, they played up how classless and vulgar Americans were for audiences back in Europe. On their trips they mostly encountered the wealthy and educated, who might have been informal by the standards of British dukes or French royalty, but who were hardly yeoman farmers. If these famous tourists had spent their time in slave cabins, immigrant tenements, miners camps, and cowboy bunkhouses, they might have gotten a different sense of how egalitarian America actually was. Elite Americans might have been more likely than elite Brits to smile politely when dealing with working-class people, but they were no more likely to welcome them into the family."
This was also interesting to read following a piece I'm reading for work, “Pushing Back From the Table: Fighting to Maintain My Voice as a Pre-tenure Minority Female in the White Academy” by Dr. Nicole Cooke, which keeps coming back to the questions of "Who belongs at the table (in white academia)?" and "Do I even want to be at this table (in white academia)?" (Some of y'all know that I've struggled in cycles with that last question.)
This was also interesting to read following a piece I'm reading for work, “Pushing Back From the Table: Fighting to Maintain My Voice as a Pre-tenure Minority Female in the White Academy” by Dr. Nicole Cooke, which keeps coming back to the questions of "Who belongs at the table (in white academia)?" and "Do I even want to be at this table (in white academia)?" (Some of y'all know that I've struggled in cycles with that last question.)
I've caught snippets of this building the last couple weeks, but hadn't caught all of it, and of course this has been an ongoing issue for YEARS. If you are active in fandom and/or fan studies, and use AO3, please consider signing:
Open Letter to the OTW on Racism in Fandom
Open Letter to the OTW on Racism in Fandom
Linkie: Welcoming the Dark Side?
Dec. 27th, 2017 11:52 amI have a new article out with my friend Karen: Welcoming the Dark Side?: Exploring Whitelash and Actual Space Nazis in TFA Fanfiction
Gratuitous Self-promotion
Oct. 3rd, 2017 01:12 pmThe Women's Book History Bibliography now has a storefront and official merchandise!
Need to let the world know that you're a Feminist Bibliographer or a Lady Printer? Fret no more! All proceeds will go towards maintenance fees for our site; if we should ever make more than that, we will donate them to charitable causes for women's issues. Take note that there's a sale today--$14 teeshirts!--and more merch to come! There's a variety of tshirts, mugs, notebooks, stickers, and more!
Need to let the world know that you're a Feminist Bibliographer or a Lady Printer? Fret no more! All proceeds will go towards maintenance fees for our site; if we should ever make more than that, we will donate them to charitable causes for women's issues. Take note that there's a sale today--$14 teeshirts!--and more merch to come! There's a variety of tshirts, mugs, notebooks, stickers, and more!
Anthropomorphized Mice and Other News
Sep. 21st, 2017 02:19 pmI just saw this Kickstarter for an adorable-looking book that contains some of my favorite things: Tea!! Cakes! Anthropomorphized mice!!!
I could do with some tea now, to be honest. I feel like I'm on the edge of a cold. (Which bodes ill, as it were, since I'm supposed to go to the clinic for blood work tomorrow. Catch-22: Shall I go and get it over with, and exacerbate the cold, or postpone it til Monday, then likely get another cold from being in the waiting room anyway? *is such a pathetic little canary of a human*)
I'm going to be interviewed for a blogpost and am trying to draft answers to the questions. I'm sure the incipient cold doesn't help, but I'm a little frustrated--if I could have put my research into 1500 words in a meaningful way, I would have done so and moved on! So instead I am dithering and backing up my files because....I need to do that anyway. And it's brainless, so.
I could do with some tea now, to be honest. I feel like I'm on the edge of a cold. (Which bodes ill, as it were, since I'm supposed to go to the clinic for blood work tomorrow. Catch-22: Shall I go and get it over with, and exacerbate the cold, or postpone it til Monday, then likely get another cold from being in the waiting room anyway? *is such a pathetic little canary of a human*)
I'm going to be interviewed for a blogpost and am trying to draft answers to the questions. I'm sure the incipient cold doesn't help, but I'm a little frustrated--if I could have put my research into 1500 words in a meaningful way, I would have done so and moved on! So instead I am dithering and backing up my files because....I need to do that anyway. And it's brainless, so.
New Article Out, and Other Stuff
Sep. 15th, 2017 12:02 pmToday is a lovely fall day with a dark blue sky, golden sunshine, apples on the air, and in the distance, dark clouds over the mountains promising snow up there. It is also decorative gourd season, motherfuckers, as I was reminded when running errands this morning; I impulsively added a small bag of candy corn and a can of pumpkin puree (to make pumpkin espresso bread!) to my grocery run, because while I feel functional I'm going to work it.
I have a new article out at TWC: The margins of print? Fan fiction as book history. I also got cited in another article in the same journal issue, which is exciting!! With my colleague Kate O, we also relaunched the Women in Book History Bibliography last week with a new searchable interface, and I've been doing a lot of data entry from our backlog with it, adding some 250 citations in the past week so that we're at over 900 now! This is extra exciting since when we started we had just over 100, so yay blooming and growing!
I've really appreciated the messages of support I've gotten from you guys about working my way through depression--it really helps knowing that others share the feeling, and so on. <3
I have a new article out at TWC: The margins of print? Fan fiction as book history. I also got cited in another article in the same journal issue, which is exciting!! With my colleague Kate O, we also relaunched the Women in Book History Bibliography last week with a new searchable interface, and I've been doing a lot of data entry from our backlog with it, adding some 250 citations in the past week so that we're at over 900 now! This is extra exciting since when we started we had just over 100, so yay blooming and growing!
I've really appreciated the messages of support I've gotten from you guys about working my way through depression--it really helps knowing that others share the feeling, and so on. <3
Over at Bustle: "Why Fan Fiction Shaming Is A Feminist Issue" by Emma Lord
Snip:
The two most "famous" fan fictions aside, the shame associated with fan fiction originated long before these works reached readers outside of their usual sphere. Unfortunately, fan fiction at large lends itself to mockery in a much safer and subtler way than other forms of female desire-driven works: the writers are, for the most part, anonymous and unpaid, with little training. They are often young women, subjecting the works to the same dismissive attitude society frequently takes over things that young women enjoy. And while there is a wide range of writers and types of fic on the internet, a majority of fic — the fic that most people are aware of — is written primarily by women, for women, holding it to the kind of scrutiny from people who do not consume it that makes it all too easy to mock. ...
If you don't think that fan fiction shaming in particular is a feminist issue, then consider what we're really doing when we shame fan fiction writers: we are shaming women — often young women, who are just starting to get a sense for what they want not just in a narrative, but in their adult lives — for expressing their desires. We are setting up women to apologize for their writing before it even leaves the keyboard. We are attacking them not only personally, but professionally; we are discouraging them owning a part of themselves, and from profiting from it, should they ever decide to write their own original work down the road.
More than that, though, we are discouraging them from engaging in the incredibly diverse and open learning environment that fan fiction provides. Fan fiction has historically been a safe place to experiment with and read about all kinds of romance — no matter the gender or the orientation, be it the cheesiest trope or the most specific kink. It is a place without judgment, and a place that introduces young writers to perspectives outside of their own — sometimes normalizing diverse relationships for writers who would otherwise not be exposed to them, ultimately making them more accepting and empathetic not just as writers, but as human beings.
With that in mind, it is all the more disheartening that the judgment of others so critically affects the writers and readers of fan fiction, which itself is such an open, nonjudgmental place. But once that misplaced shame is there, it never really goes away. Even now, fully aware of the root of my feelings, I see it in motion in myself and the people around me. I write my own fiction now, and whenever somebody asks about it, I frequently preface any plot descriptions with "it's silly," or "it's dumb". I hide my fiction writing with the same kind of crippling embarrassment that I shielded my fan fiction usernames. And I hear the same apologies from other female writers everywhere I go — be it with other fic writers on Tumblr, or fiction writers who write in genres targeted at women that I meet out in the real world, there is all too often a disclaimer to soften any exchange of their work. The very work that should empower us and embolden us, the same work we feel safe celebrating in anonymous corners of the internet, often makes us cower in the light of day.
Of course, ending the fan fiction shaming isn't going to solve everything; fan fiction shaming is just one of countless things lurking under the umbrella of things women are conditioned to feel shame for. But it is high time to recognizing fan fiction shaming for what it is at its core: the shaming of women's desires, and their daring to take control of them.
Snip:
The two most "famous" fan fictions aside, the shame associated with fan fiction originated long before these works reached readers outside of their usual sphere. Unfortunately, fan fiction at large lends itself to mockery in a much safer and subtler way than other forms of female desire-driven works: the writers are, for the most part, anonymous and unpaid, with little training. They are often young women, subjecting the works to the same dismissive attitude society frequently takes over things that young women enjoy. And while there is a wide range of writers and types of fic on the internet, a majority of fic — the fic that most people are aware of — is written primarily by women, for women, holding it to the kind of scrutiny from people who do not consume it that makes it all too easy to mock. ...
If you don't think that fan fiction shaming in particular is a feminist issue, then consider what we're really doing when we shame fan fiction writers: we are shaming women — often young women, who are just starting to get a sense for what they want not just in a narrative, but in their adult lives — for expressing their desires. We are setting up women to apologize for their writing before it even leaves the keyboard. We are attacking them not only personally, but professionally; we are discouraging them owning a part of themselves, and from profiting from it, should they ever decide to write their own original work down the road.
More than that, though, we are discouraging them from engaging in the incredibly diverse and open learning environment that fan fiction provides. Fan fiction has historically been a safe place to experiment with and read about all kinds of romance — no matter the gender or the orientation, be it the cheesiest trope or the most specific kink. It is a place without judgment, and a place that introduces young writers to perspectives outside of their own — sometimes normalizing diverse relationships for writers who would otherwise not be exposed to them, ultimately making them more accepting and empathetic not just as writers, but as human beings.
With that in mind, it is all the more disheartening that the judgment of others so critically affects the writers and readers of fan fiction, which itself is such an open, nonjudgmental place. But once that misplaced shame is there, it never really goes away. Even now, fully aware of the root of my feelings, I see it in motion in myself and the people around me. I write my own fiction now, and whenever somebody asks about it, I frequently preface any plot descriptions with "it's silly," or "it's dumb". I hide my fiction writing with the same kind of crippling embarrassment that I shielded my fan fiction usernames. And I hear the same apologies from other female writers everywhere I go — be it with other fic writers on Tumblr, or fiction writers who write in genres targeted at women that I meet out in the real world, there is all too often a disclaimer to soften any exchange of their work. The very work that should empower us and embolden us, the same work we feel safe celebrating in anonymous corners of the internet, often makes us cower in the light of day.
Of course, ending the fan fiction shaming isn't going to solve everything; fan fiction shaming is just one of countless things lurking under the umbrella of things women are conditioned to feel shame for. But it is high time to recognizing fan fiction shaming for what it is at its core: the shaming of women's desires, and their daring to take control of them.
"In Defense of Linguistic Infrastructure" by Summer Brennan:
In George Orwell’s 1984, the first act of rebellion undertaken by Winston, the protagonist, is to acquire a blank book and begin to write down his thoughts and memories. He does so despite the glare of a Big Brother poster, and under the watchful eye and keen ear of the two-way telescreen.
...
Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. He wrote that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past. If you can colonize the minds of a population with untruths and confusion, you forcibly re-write reality. This is done with stories. It’s done with language. How we speak about the world is a reflection of how we see it.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the first act of rebellion undertaken by Winston, the protagonist, is to acquire a blank book and begin to write down his thoughts and memories. He does so despite the glare of a Big Brother poster, and under the watchful eye and keen ear of the two-way telescreen.
...
Orwell wrote that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. He wrote that he who controls the past controls the future, and that he who controls the present controls the past. If you can colonize the minds of a population with untruths and confusion, you forcibly re-write reality. This is done with stories. It’s done with language. How we speak about the world is a reflection of how we see it.
Trump, himself a man with a strikingly limited vocabulary, has launched an assault on the American psyche, and already our linguistic infrastructure is beginning to shift and crumble. Less familiar words have been pushed to the fore, or have taken on new meaning: contrarian, snowflake, gaslighting, normalization, nationalist, rigged, hacked, resist, emolument.
We have been beset with dangerous euphemisms. A neo-nazi becomes “an economic populist.” A lie becomes “a claim.” A propagandist becomes “a maverick” or “a provocateur.” Equality becomes “identity politics.” A public school privatizer becomes “a school reformer.” A climate change denier becomes “a climate contrarian” and a climate scientist “a climate alarmist.” Journalists are being called “presstitutes” or “lügenpress,” which is German for “lying press,” a term adopted by the Third Reich. There has been a kind of doublespeak silencing on social media in which those speaking out against white supremacists are themselves called “racists,” and those pointing out misogyny are called “sexist.” A protestor becomes “an economic terrorist.” White people become “the working class.”
Words have power.
We fight back by correctly labeling; by calling a white supremacist a white supremacist, a fascist a fascist, a sexual assault a sexual assault. We name what is happening or about to happen around us: kleptocracy, kakistocracy, authoritarianism, fraud, corruption, embezzlement. We can creatively add to the taxonomy of tyranny even as we feel ourselves buried alive by it: idiocracy, dystocracy, misogynocracy.
We in America are already being told that two plus two equals five. In time, just like Winston in 1984, we may even come to believe it. Or we may cease to care whether we believe it or not. Under the cover of that uncaring darkness, any number of atrocities may occur.
No one person can defend everything in America that will need defending in the age of Trump. What we must do, instead, is to find our particular hills to defend, and then to defend them as if our freedom depended on it. Even if these battles are lost, the very act of writing down the progression of that loss, as Winston did, is an act of resistance. The hijacking of public language, as is happening now, is a way to shift perception—to bend and control thought—and must be resisted.
I would like to invite readers to join me in doing this. Get a diary or journal and write down as many words as you can that relate to the things that you value. Fascism favors sameness; it represents a desertification of language and thinking. You can fight sameness with diversity. Inside this thought-desert, we must learn to be jungle oases. If you plan to defend nature, write down the names of birds and landscape as a start. Write phoebe, warbler, wren, heron, starling, swift, swallow. Write dale, dell, coppice, coomb, swale, swarth. Let your language soar and spread. Get closer and write root, leaf, stem, stamen, stigma, filament, sepal, pistil, petal. Write down how the world and words around you change.
This beautiful poem made me happy-cry
Dec. 1st, 2016 03:15 pmRevenge by e.c.c.:
Revenge
Since you mention it, I think I will start that race war.
I could’ve swung either way? But now I’m definitely spending
the next 4 years converting your daughters to lesbianism;
I’m gonna eat all your guns. Swallow them lock stock and barrel
and spit bullet casings onto the dinner table;
I’ll give birth to an army of mixed-race babies.
With fathers from every continent and genders to outnumber the stars,
my legion of multiracial babies will be intersectional as fuck
and your swastikas will not be enough to save you,
because real talk, you didn’t stop the future from coming.
You just delayed our coronation.
We have the same deviant haircuts we had yesterday;
we are still getting gay-married like nobody’s business
because it’s still nobody’s business;
there’s a Muslim kid in Kansas who has already written the schematic
for the robot that will steal your job in manufacturing,
and that robot? Will also be gay, so get used to it:
we didn’t manifest the mountain by speaking its name,
the buildings here are not on your side just because
you make them spray-painted accomplices.
These walls do not have genders and they all think you suck.
Even the earth found common ground with us in the way
you bootstrap across us both,
oh yeah: there will be signs, and rainbow-colored drum circles,
and folks arguing ideology until even I want to punch them
but I won’t, because they’re my family,
in that blood-of-the-covenant sense.
If you’ve never loved someone like that
you cannot outwaltz us, we have all the good dancers anyway.
I’ll confess I don’t know if I’m alive right now;
I haven’t heard my heart beat in days,
I keep holding my breath for the moment the plane goes down
and I have to save enough oxygen to get my friends through.
But I finally found the argument against suicide and it’s us.
We’re the effigies that haunt America’s nights harder
the longer they spend burning us,
we are scaring the shit out of people by spreading,
by refusing to die: what are we but a fire?
We know everything we do is so the kids after us
will be able to follow something towards safety;
what can I call us but lighthouse,
of course I’m terrified. Of course I’m a shroud.
And of course it’s not fair but rest assured,
anxious America, you brought your fists to a glitter fight.
This is a taco truck rally and all you have is cole slaw.
You cannot deport our minds; we won’t
hold funerals for our potential. We have always been
what makes America great.
-e.c.c.
ETA: LJ is being LJ and not showing the text breaks properly, so go to the link to read it properly and in rhythm. But this is so beautiful I want it on a poster, you guys.
ETA: LJ is being LJ and not showing the text breaks properly, so go to the link to read it properly and in rhythm. But this is so beautiful I want it on a poster, you guys.
Bookmark: Fan is A Tool-Using Animal
Sep. 6th, 2016 10:58 amhttp://idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a_tool_using_animal.htm>Fan is a Tool-Using Animal, a transcript of a talk by Maciej Cegłowski from 2013 on fans, tags, the Delicious blow-up, and how his perception of fans changed over time. Basically he created Pinboard and reached out to fans after Delicious died so that they could use the tagging system there, and then fandom did.
In 2009, when I started my own bookmarking site, called Pinboard, I really wanted to lure over fans with their amazing tag collections.
But fans are loyal people. And they were really attached to Delicious, especially to a very elaborate Firefox plugin that made life a breeze for people with thousands of tags. I didn't have much success in getting them to cross over.
Until in 2010 Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, the founders of YouTube, came along and made my career. I don't know them personally. Maybe they're lovely people in person—kind to animals, beloved by children.
But they bungled their way through acquiring Delicious so badly that the site never recovered.
Chad looked at Steve and was like:
“Bro, you want to buy Delicious?”
And Steve looked at Chad and was like:
“Bro let's totally buy it!”
And they high-fived and that was it.
A few months after the acquisition, there was a grand uncloaking of their new design, much of which involved destroying features of Delicious that fans were utterly dependent on.
The new Delicious removed the ability to see your full list of tags, which as you can imagine for someone with an intricate tagging system is the end of the world.
They got rid of tag bundles, a crucial feature for fans.
And in an inspired stroke, they took down their support forum, so no one could complain about anything on the site itself.
But the single change that killed fandom dead on Delicious was no longer being able to type "/" into the search box.
There is no God, life has no meaning, it's all over when you can't search on the slash character. And fandom started freaking out on Twitter.
Being a canny businessman, I posted a gentle reminder that there was still a bookmarking site that let you search on a slash tag.
So fandom dispatched a probe to see if I was worth further study. The emissaries talked to me a bit and explained that my site was missing some features that fans relied on.
In my foolishness I asked, "Could you make me a list of those features? I'll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement."
Oh yes, they could make make a list.
I had summoned a very friendly Balrog.
For three days, I watched this collaborative Google doc grow and grow before my eyes. It ended up being fifty-two pages long. I want to show you some of the highlights.
At times, there were so many people editing the document at that it tucked its tail between its legs and went into a panicked ‘read only’ mode. Even the mighty engineers at Google couldn’t cope with the sustained attention of fandom.
My favorite bit:
Here I've shown a paragraph where someone asks me if I can build a user search feature, and I reply at length about why that's not trivial. At that point someone decides that it's easier for them to just go build the feature on the spot. They set up a little app in Heroku that mapped Pinboard usernames to Delicious usernames.
In the time it took me to explain why I couldn't build the feature, someone did it for me and stuck a hyperlink into this document that is spiraling out of control.
In 2009, when I started my own bookmarking site, called Pinboard, I really wanted to lure over fans with their amazing tag collections.
But fans are loyal people. And they were really attached to Delicious, especially to a very elaborate Firefox plugin that made life a breeze for people with thousands of tags. I didn't have much success in getting them to cross over.
Until in 2010 Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, the founders of YouTube, came along and made my career. I don't know them personally. Maybe they're lovely people in person—kind to animals, beloved by children.
But they bungled their way through acquiring Delicious so badly that the site never recovered.
Chad looked at Steve and was like:
“Bro, you want to buy Delicious?”
And Steve looked at Chad and was like:
“Bro let's totally buy it!”
And they high-fived and that was it.
A few months after the acquisition, there was a grand uncloaking of their new design, much of which involved destroying features of Delicious that fans were utterly dependent on.
The new Delicious removed the ability to see your full list of tags, which as you can imagine for someone with an intricate tagging system is the end of the world.
They got rid of tag bundles, a crucial feature for fans.
And in an inspired stroke, they took down their support forum, so no one could complain about anything on the site itself.
But the single change that killed fandom dead on Delicious was no longer being able to type "/" into the search box.
There is no God, life has no meaning, it's all over when you can't search on the slash character. And fandom started freaking out on Twitter.
Being a canny businessman, I posted a gentle reminder that there was still a bookmarking site that let you search on a slash tag.
So fandom dispatched a probe to see if I was worth further study. The emissaries talked to me a bit and explained that my site was missing some features that fans relied on.
In my foolishness I asked, "Could you make me a list of those features? I'll take a look, maybe some of it is easy to implement."
Oh yes, they could make make a list.
I had summoned a very friendly Balrog.
For three days, I watched this collaborative Google doc grow and grow before my eyes. It ended up being fifty-two pages long. I want to show you some of the highlights.
At times, there were so many people editing the document at that it tucked its tail between its legs and went into a panicked ‘read only’ mode. Even the mighty engineers at Google couldn’t cope with the sustained attention of fandom.
My favorite bit:
Here I've shown a paragraph where someone asks me if I can build a user search feature, and I reply at length about why that's not trivial. At that point someone decides that it's easier for them to just go build the feature on the spot. They set up a little app in Heroku that mapped Pinboard usernames to Delicious usernames.
In the time it took me to explain why I couldn't build the feature, someone did it for me and stuck a hyperlink into this document that is spiraling out of control.
Signalboost: Women's Book History
Apr. 25th, 2016 10:10 pmSo my colleague Kate and I made a thing: Women in Book History Bibliography.
It is very much a work-in-progress, but we've been working on it for two days, so....it still looks shiny. But basically we're trying to pull together every scrap of scholarship on women in book history we can find, and put it all in one place. When we're happy with it, we're gonna advertise it on the book history listservs, and try to crowdsource more stuff, especially for non Anglo-European material. (Lemme tell ya, if you want to feel depressed, look at finding only three books under the Library heading "Women in the Book Trades--England" and then finding only ONE book in "Women in the Book Trades--Japan."
It is very much a work-in-progress, but we've been working on it for two days, so....it still looks shiny. But basically we're trying to pull together every scrap of scholarship on women in book history we can find, and put it all in one place. When we're happy with it, we're gonna advertise it on the book history listservs, and try to crowdsource more stuff, especially for non Anglo-European material. (Lemme tell ya, if you want to feel depressed, look at finding only three books under the Library heading "Women in the Book Trades--England" and then finding only ONE book in "Women in the Book Trades--Japan."
"Shiva and Octavia" by Sam J. Miller
I think it’s difficult for writers and readers who carry privilege, whether of class, race, gender, or sexuality, to understand just how crippling it is to look around at the books and magazines that you love, and not see yourself there. How deep the internalized wounds can go, when everyone around you from high school on up is holding up a book that looks nothing like you, and saying “THIS IS GREAT LITERATURE. THIS IS A STORY WORTH TELLING.” Every writer faces an uphill battle getting their words in print--my hero Octavia Butler said “everyone who tries to write experiences savage rejection, and it just goes on and on until finally you begin to break through”--but the savagery is compounded when you add in the external obstacles outsider writers face when their stories feature experiences and arcs that white straight middle class college-educated editors have no personal experience of ... and the staggering, sometimes crippling, internalized obstacles: the self-doubt and the self-rejection. Brilliant writer of color Lisa Bolekaja tweeted about facing the need to “work through shit just 2 feel comfortable putting sentences on paper. Somedays 1 sentence is a miracle.”
This is why queers need to destroy science fiction. It’s why women--and people of color--and writers working in languages other than English--and other marginalized communities need to destroy science fiction. We need to undermine the Straight White American Male Underpinnings of the genre.
I think it’s difficult for writers and readers who carry privilege, whether of class, race, gender, or sexuality, to understand just how crippling it is to look around at the books and magazines that you love, and not see yourself there. How deep the internalized wounds can go, when everyone around you from high school on up is holding up a book that looks nothing like you, and saying “THIS IS GREAT LITERATURE. THIS IS A STORY WORTH TELLING.” Every writer faces an uphill battle getting their words in print--my hero Octavia Butler said “everyone who tries to write experiences savage rejection, and it just goes on and on until finally you begin to break through”--but the savagery is compounded when you add in the external obstacles outsider writers face when their stories feature experiences and arcs that white straight middle class college-educated editors have no personal experience of ... and the staggering, sometimes crippling, internalized obstacles: the self-doubt and the self-rejection. Brilliant writer of color Lisa Bolekaja tweeted about facing the need to “work through shit just 2 feel comfortable putting sentences on paper. Somedays 1 sentence is a miracle.”
This is why queers need to destroy science fiction. It’s why women--and people of color--and writers working in languages other than English--and other marginalized communities need to destroy science fiction. We need to undermine the Straight White American Male Underpinnings of the genre.
Made of Awesome, On Multiple Levels
Oct. 24th, 2010 06:05 pmSo ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
itiliana had a link to this awesome blog called Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things, which awesomely refutes the "Muslims are weird and scary ridiculousness!" that is out there.
Anyway, I was surfing it and came across the awesome entry for Kareem Salama, who like all Muslim country singers from Oklahoma, never leaves home without his hat.
And so I decided I have to share some vids of his music, which I adore:
With Bonus fanvid for TOS K/S using one of my fav songs of all times, "Aristotle and Averroes":
itiliana had a link to this awesome blog called Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things, which awesomely refutes the "Muslims are weird and scary ridiculousness!" that is out there.Anyway, I was surfing it and came across the awesome entry for Kareem Salama, who like all Muslim country singers from Oklahoma, never leaves home without his hat.
And so I decided I have to share some vids of his music, which I adore:
With Bonus fanvid for TOS K/S using one of my fav songs of all times, "Aristotle and Averroes":
