I am disappoint. Which is a total fucking understatement.
Context may be coming shortly.
Tag Archives: *facepalm*
Appropos of Something. Definitely Something.
ETAs below. And now even more.
It appears that sf_drama is hitting the high points of the post alluded to here. (I usually don’t connect to these things directly).
I’m disappointed that Elizabeth Moon and this guy now have more in common than just the genre they work in.
Things I give odds on:
- 1:1 odds this shows up on unfunny_business.
- 3:1 odds this shows up on fandom_wank.
- 10:1 odds that Andrew Sullivan discovers this and the Daily Dish linkorama starts and embarrasses us all.
- 25:1 odds that Wiscon uninvites her. ((I don’t blame them if they don’t; it’s a big thing to uninvite a guest of honor. At the same time, it is Wiscon.))
I hate this, so very much. Unlike with this guy ((Screw you, Google blog search…. Never leave me. :’()), I take zero pleasure in any of this.
Oh well. We’re all human. And hell, I’m actually evil, so. ((More on that later, I guess, in the next entry in Dancing with Psychologists.))
I suppose, though, that even evil has standards.
Update: Okay, now I have lost all respect for her, utterly and entirely. Perhaps I should have started with that. See below ETAs.
ETA: BAH-LEETION has now occurred to all the comments on Moon’s post. Hmmm.
ETA2: So apparently Moon also edited her post at the end. What the hell, Elizabeth Moon?
ETA3: bloodparade has screencaps. And apparently Wiscon will become aware of this. Bahleetion: it does not make things better 24 hours into the wank.
This is now elevated from FUCKUP to TRAINWRECK.
Truly Apropos of Nothing
But hey, have some more Star Trek facepalms and miscellaneous “*headdesk*” category images below the cut! Doubtless in the future I’ll have reasons to use them.
Apropos of Something Trois
You no can has context.
However, below the cut, you can has animated gifs.
Apropos of Something Deux
You no can has context, even though I am SORELY TEMPTED. Actually, there are two contexts you can’t have.
If the chair leg of truth shows up in the next few days or maybe weeks, it had its roots in yesterday and today.
Who Is This Norman Spinrad Guy?
Ah, so that’s who Norman Spinrad is. Thank you, Wikipedia! I did like “The Doomsday Machine” (here’s Tor.com’s rewatch). I did not otherwise really remember him.
On the other hand, now I will remember him.
Jason Sanford has the skinny. You have to read it to believe it. It starts along the lines of “There is really no non-European SF”, then leads to “Mike Resnick is a better black writer than Octavia Butler”, and….
At the moment, the reaction is mostly tweets of anger, shock, disbelief, and HEAD ASPLODE. Just search Twitter for “spinrad”.
But Tobias Buckell ((Tobias Buckell’s books are awesome by the way, and they are also all available on the Kindle now, as well as the ever-popular paper format!)) put it best:
Norman Spinrad. Tool.
And now, Mr. Spinrad, this is how I’ll remember you.
When I Stopped Thinking of Neil Gaiman as Perfect
I love Neil Gaiman’s work. His writing in combination with Terry Pratchett’s in Good Omens got me interested in two variants of non-stereotypical fantasy (and actually the first types of fantasy I became interested in) and provided a lot of relief from a bad parental situation.
Last night, I reread Endless Nights, seven short comic book stories about the Endless from Sandman, a series which I love.
It was Delirium’s story that made me go “argh, Neil Gaiman, why did you do this?!”
One of the crazy people is a raped girl who’s gone catatonic. Now. I didn’t mind that bit, because mental illness is mental illness whether someone is inserting Unfortunate Implications or not, and I think Gaiman was mostly not, for this part of the story.
No, it was the ending, where she wakes up and says, “I spent enough time there already, I’m done now.”
That was fine. I have felt this very way for years.
And then she says, “I’ll let it go.”
Four words that ruin the story.
It’s okay in one sense, in that even with chronic PTSD, there are things you can choose to do to heal over a long, looong period of time.
But it’s not okay in a lot of other senses. To name just two major ones: (a) that traumatic reactions are just a choice and not, you know, the result of hormones, body chemicals, or the long-term results of evolution/nurture; (b) that the traumatized are, basically, just victimizing themselves when they can just simply choose to let it go.
Dude, man. You for sure know it’s not that simple, right? You know that’s one of the worst examples of Armchair Psychology, almost verging on Family Unfriendly Aesop? Right? Right??
But, I quite liked the rest of the collection. He’s still a good storyteller, and we all make really, really, really stupid mistakes sometimes. There’s no help for it, except to listen when people tell you “I have a problem with this,” and also for people to say so in the first place. Fallibility is what it means to be human.
For any Neil Gaiman apologists, yes, I forgive him. No, I’m not rewriting this.
I’m going back to bed.
