S.L. Huang's Blog, page 11

There’s a contract dispute going on right now between Amazon and Hatchette, one of the “Big 5″ publishers.  Lately, there has been some increasingly outsized rhetoric by people in the writing world, with some people trying to frame Amazon or Hatchette as the good guy and the other as an evil evilling evil monster.  I’m not going to link — Google if you must, but you’ll probably come away with a headache.

I don’t feel I know enough about the issues under dispute to have a firm opinion on what the outcome should be or whose tactics are more underhanded than whose.  From what I know I will tentatively say that I think it would probably be a good thing for the book market as a whole if Hatchette is able to (at least mostly) stand its ground against Amazon, but I’d be willing to be convinced otherwise on that.[1]

But one thing that’s happened lately is that a few voices in self-publishing have spoken up to plant self-publishers firmly on the side of Amazon The Glorious Let Us All Love Amazon, with Hatchette painted as the Reader-Hating Author-Trampling Hellhound, Slavering to Mash the Poor Book Industry in its Fanged Jaws.

I’m not sure quite what I think on this dispute, but I’m pretty damn certain it’s not going to be that.  Most things, in my experience, have a bit more nuance to them.

But here’s the crux of what I wanted to address here: I see self-publishers saying that others calling for boycotts of Amazon will disproportionately hurt their incomes (since most self-publishers make the majority of their sales through Amazon).  I see self-publishers complaining that others don’t understand how important Amazon is to self-publishers and that we all need to appreciate this fact more.

But I think Amazon taking it in the chin here would ultimately be better for self-publishers — for all authors and publishers, actually.  Oddly, I think that would be good for us regardless of whether they’re in the wrong.  To be clear: I’m not saying they should be punished if it turns out they were all rainbows and sunshine this whole time and just had horribly bad PR; I just see them being dinged as being ultimately beneficial to self-published authors rather than detrimental.

Yes, Amazon did a lot of really cool things with disruptive innovation that helped self-publishers.  I’m a HUGE fan of disruptive innovation!  I think it’s awesome.  I’m on record as saying that I think people should ALWAYS adapt new business models to changing technologies rather than try to restrict or destroy them — for instance, the answer to television piracy isn’t “sue people into oblivion,” it’s Hulu.  I love it when people do shit like that.  I loved the ideas Amazon had from the outset — I was going around telling people it would succeed when the stock price was a nickel and everyone said it was going to go bankrupt the next year.  And I love a lot of what Amazon did to help catapult the ebook market into existence.  (I don’t like other things it did in doing so, of course, as that is the nature of life — I’m bound to agree with some things and not with others — but I like a lot of it.)

Amazon has done a lot of cool things.  It’s also done a lot of shitty things, both as regards ebooks and not.  It has some shady business practices.  And it’s out for its own self-interests.  The fact that it’s done a lot of cool innovation in that self-interest doesn’t make the innovation any less cool — but, you know, it also means I’m not about to give Amazon much of my own personal loyalty.

And the fact that I think Amazon has done some really cool things doesn’t change the fact that it scares the shit out of me.  My impression of Amazon is that it is unrelentingly competitive: it weakens and gobbles up other markets and does its absolute damnedest to be the only game in town.  It’s like the Blob.  It wants to absorb the brains of everyone in the world and then control as much of the market of everything as it possibly can.

(Google scares me in much the same way, but at least Google’s PR machine has done a much better job of convincing me it would be a benevolent dictator, which probably speaks well to their PR.  Still doesn’t mean I want either company to take over the world.)

What happens if Amazon gains 80, 85, 90 percent of the book market?

I don’t know.  I don’t want to know.  I don’t think any other authors or publishers want to know, either.  I don’t think it would be good for any of us.  Because Amazon’s out for Amazon.

If people boycott Amazon because of the ongoing controversy — and let’s be clear, I am not advocating a boycott, nor do I think an effective one to be likely — then what happens?

Amazon isn’t much hurt much, really.  Most of what they sell isn’t books, and most people not in the book world probably don’t know or care that this is happening.  The biggest ding from any boycotting will happen in book purchases.  Yes, that might hurt self-publishers in the short term (though it may, assuming people are buying equal numbers of books, help independent bookstores on the other side — which I consider a good thing but may understandably be of cold comfort to self-publishers).  But it also potentially gets book buyers onto other platforms.

The more readers are on a diversity of platforms, the better I feel about my future as a self-publisher.  The more viable retailers there are, the better protected I feel by the competition among those retailers for a slice of my book sales.  It becomes an environment in which, I believe, the publishing atmosphere can better remain a viable one for self-publishing in the long term.  (And remember, much as Amazon helped self-publishers, they did not invent self-publishing — it exists independent of Amazon, and I wish it existed more independent of Amazon.)

Anyone with near-total control of the ebook market could easily make self-publishing into something people make hobby money off of only.  Heck, there’s been plenty of rhetoric in self-publishing already that making a little hobby money is better than not being published at all.  And I see this sort of thing happening in my other industry (movies) already: people are so desperate to work that they’ll sell themselves for almost nothing.

Like I said, I don’t know enough about the actual terms under dispute between Hatchette and Amazon to have an informed opinion on them.  Maybe Amazon’s being unreasonable.  Maybe Hatchette is.  Maybe (far more likely) they both are, and the situation’s all sorts of complicated and they’re both using underhanded tactics and authors are caught in the middle.

Here’s what I do think: whether in this dispute or any other, whether the other guy is more evil or not, it might be an overall good thing if Amazon’s book market share were to be disrupted.  Even if it were to mean fewer sales for self-publishers in the short term.  Because I worry about my ability to sell my books over the long term, and I can’t see how Amazon getting more and more of a stranglehold on the ebook market is a good thing for any of us.

I’m not urging anyone to have an opinion on the Amazon/Hatchette issues that they don’t hold.  By all means, hold whatever opinion you have after reading through the issues (or, like me, hold no firm opinion!).  I’m also not trying to suggest that people looking at what’s best for THEM should necessarily be the driving force behind what they think the outcome here should be.  But I do think people should re-think the rhetoric that any hurt to Amazon is a hurt to self-publishers — I, for one, suspect that the exact opposite is true.

I have no particular love for Hatchette, by the way — they’re probably the most anti-free data, pro-DRM of the Big 5.  My concerns are more broadly how this is going to affect the book industry, authors, and other publishers.↵

I’ve written about my face blindness before — what it means is that I generally recognize people by things like hair, clothes, context, and voice inflection before faces.  My face blindness isn’t as bad as it could be, and I mostly get along just fine, but it’s bad enough to interfere with my life, especially when I see people out of context or after long gaps.  As a gauge of severity, let’s put it this way: I’ve never not recognized my parents after not seeing them for a while, but I always worry I won’t.

So I was a bit nervous about trying to watch Orphan Black, despite the entire Internet telling me to.  Because, especially given the skills of the lead actress, I was afraid that there would be moments when the “reveal” would depend on me recognizing that two women with completely different deportments and hairstyles had the same face, and I wouldn’t.

Well, considering that I just watched two seasons of Orphan Black in two days, clearly my faceblindness didn’t impede me too much!  In fact, for anyone else who’s bad with faces who is hesitating over watching this show — you’ll be totally fine.  Once you pick up on who the clones are at the beginning, which the show is very, very clear about pointing out in multiple ways, it’s smooth sailing.  (In fact, since the show asks all viewers to differentiate the clones based on things other than face, it might be even easier to watch than other shows — I have a lot of trouble on some shows with people of the same gender/age/race having similar hairstyles and I mix them all up, whereas here, they have to make sure that doesn’t happen or everyone will mix them up.)

But if you want some interesting notes about the experience:

(here there be spoilers through the end of Season 2)

I was right that at the beginning I didn’t recognize any of her clones as being the same woman.  But that turned out to be okay.  First of all, I’m glad I went in spoiled for knowing the show was about a bunch of clones and that Sarah gets sucked into the world by one killing herself in front of her — I never would have known why she was reacting with surprise to Beth otherwise, and it was helpful at first to assume every new female character that Sarah reacted to with shock had her face.
And yeah, the reactions really helped, too.  Sarah even helpfully explains to Felix that Beth looked like her twin or something, and does similar things with the rest of them.  Who the lookalikes were was mostly signposted from early on, and that was very helpful.
I couldn’t tell with characters like Helena at first, but here’s where assuming came in handy.  Show about young female clones?  Another young female person is killing them off?  Well, it’s not nearly as interesting narratively if she’s not another clone, too.  Basically I just assumed all young white women Sarah’s age were clones until I got my feet.
But getting my feet was surprisingly easy, because there aren’t all that many clones.  I’d sort of expected a zillion clones wandering in and out, but the show basically only focuses on four in the first season, so once I knew what they looked like, I was set.  I didn’t have to recognize that they had the same face; I just had to know they did, and it worked out fine.
I did have trouble with Rachel’s introduction in Season 2 — I kept going back and forth on whether or not I was sure she was a clone (or the same type of clone, since they talk about her being a bit different).
The clones playing each other was surprisingly easy to pick up on, because there were enough subtle differences in hair/accent/deportment for it to be clear it was one clone playing another.  (I don’t think my faceblindness affected my viewing of these bits, which were just great — she is exactly as talented as everyone has been saying.)
TOTALLY missed (most of) the male clone reveal at the end of Season 2.  I had to wiki it.  This was the only place where my faceblindness really interfered with a big reveal moment — I mean, obviously I knew they were showing male clones, but I didn’t get that Gracie’s husband was one of them; I thought they were just juxtaposing the reveal against the wedding for some reason and I wasn’t sure why.  In fact, I’m decidedly unexcited about Gracie’s husband being the new clone guy, because I didn’t find him all that interesting…though that might be because I couldn’t tell him apart from the rest of the religious zealots, so the only scenes where he’s differentiated in my mind are the two or so he had with Gracie.  It’s quite likely he had other character development over the season that I saw as “one of the religious guys having doubts” rather than “the same religious guy having mounting doubts, who also happens to be Gracie’s guy” –  i.e., it was the result of normal faceblindness interference rather than clone-based faceblindness interference.  Anyway, I’m kinda unexcited about seeing more of him, but maybe the actor will surprise me.[1]

And on a general note, I join the chorus of the entire Internet saying this show is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Well, I’m also a bit unexcited because the religious zealots were my least favorite storyline and this show already has so many characters that I worry about my favorites being sidelined.  Which is another way of saying MORE FELIX IN SEASON 3, PLEASE.  Heh.  (And more Alison and Cosima, but they did okay for screen time in Season 2; I just consistently found their storylines more interesting than anyone else’s.  And by the way, am I the only one who would watch the Felix+Alison show?  No, everyone wants it?  Good, that’s what I thought.)↵

An insightful remark by one of my Twitter friends today sparked some thoughts about mathematics education — specifically, my thoughts about the new fads in math education that seem to crop up all the time in schools across the U.S. like ever-more creative varieties of fungus.  As someone who loudly and often condemns many of these new “methods” for teaching math, it turned out I had far too many thoughts for Twitter.

I’ve worked for many, many years as a private math tutor, at varying degrees of full/part time (right now I don’t do it for my main job, but maintain a few students because it’s fun and I like teaching and I like the company I work for).  My students have crossed a wide variety of middle and high schools, with a wide variety of curriculum tracks (from off-beat “hippie”-ish private schools to standard state curricula to college, and including a range of clients from students for whom math was not their forte to students who were brilliant and wanted more enrichment to students who were smart but lazy).  Pretty much the only selection bias my students have had in common is that they and their families tend to be in a financial bracket to hire me and care enough about academics to do so, which has slanted the demographic I work with to be much more likely to attend schools that purportedly each really try to have a good math curriculum.

And so many of them . . . well, don’t.

Education is a hard thing.  I realize that.  It’s really, really hard to figure out the optimal way of teaching a lot of disparate students with a lot of disparate skill levels some knowledge they don’t necessarily all want to learn.  Teachers are often underfunded, with too many students, and constrained by administrations or standardized tests that work against them.  I’m willing to cut teachers a lot of slack for not batting 1000 for all students at all times.  But what really gets my goat when it comes to mathematics education is what I call “fad math.”

Fad math is my students whose school thought the best way to teach them geometry was to put them in small groups and say, “figure it out” with no additional guidance (this is based on the textbook, by the way, which does not teach at all).  Fad math is my students whose curriculum jumps from topic to topic with no discernible connective tissue, and then assigns a mountain of problems . . . maybe three each on each of the wildly different topics.  Fad math is the private school that decided real-world math was more important than algebra and calculus, so taught taxes and mortgage amortization instead.  I could go on.  (And on.)

I get the motivations behind trying out these fads.  Mathematics teaching in this country is (in many ways correctly) perceived as broken, and people are looking for the magic formula, the Holy Grail, the thing that will work.  For example, in the first example above, I get that the idea was probably originally that more “figuring out” should happen in math teaching and less rote memorization; I support that in principle, but when we’ve reached a point at which any actual teaching has disappeared and students are basically being required to re-derive modern mathematics from scratch (with the end result that most of them just learn nothing), we’ve gone way, way, way, way too far.  The second curriculum I mentioned comes from the fear that students lose material when they study one topic in bulk rather than repeating the skills over a period of time, which, again, is a problem worth addressing — but gutting students’ ability to gain an in-depth understanding of any material is not the way to do that.  And while I applaud schools looking to teach students about real-world math like taxes and mortgages — again, a good idea! — lacking a more traditional math base completely derailed students who moved or transferred high schools and also snapped off the math foundation needed for any students who wanted to go on to a STEM field in college, including fields like pre-med and economics.

Fad math, in my view, seems more about people being proud of a shiny new idea — “this idea will work for pumping math knowledge into kids’ heads!” rather than being concerned with teaching, which is, in my opinion, where people should be concerned.  My best math teachers have never used any gimmicks, ever.  But they were really, really, really good at explaining things in a way that made sense.

(And that’s the kind of teacher I try to be, too: one who explains things in a way that makes the lightbulb go off and the student say, “Oh!  So then that’s why this happens!”  It’s amazing to be able to help someone reach that place.)

For what it’s worth, here are the main problems I see with math teaching in this country from working with my students:

Math taught as a “how to” instead of a “why.”  If all you’re doing is memorizing that this number should go here and that one should go there when you see a certain symbol, then that’s . . . . well, almost useless.  If all students are doing is following a flow chart by rote memorization, there’s no mathematical understanding going on.  Students have to know why a thing makes sense in order for it to, well, make sense.  Teachers need to teach the why instead of just giving a recipe for the how.[1]
No connection between mathematical ideas.  Math is ridiculously interconnected.  Every topic is related to every other.  And when you help a student relate a new topic back to an old one, it enhances understanding of the old one while giving the student an intuitive basis for the new one.  Trying to learn math concepts in isolation is a ridiculous proposition, and yet, that’s what students are so often asked to do.
A horrifying number of high school math teachers don’t seem to have a deep understanding of the concepts they’re  teaching.  I can’t count the number of times my students have come to me confused about explanations their teachers gave them — explanations that were off-base, muddled, or just plain wrong.[2]  The cynic in me bets that this is because the teachers learned math by learning “how” as well, so when students ask the “why,” the teachers might genuinely not know.  (This is not, of course, true of all math teachers, and is perhaps not even true of most math teachers — I don’t know — but that it is true of a noticeable number concerns me.)
A smaller number (but even more horrifying in its existence) of math teachers either just don’t care or are actively derogatory towards students.  This includes everything from being hostile toward giving extra help to sexism toward female students.
Math teachers also have roadblocks thrown in their path from every conceivable corner.  Class sizes are too large, stripping away teachers’ abilities to tailor explanations to individual needs or to give a struggling student the extra help that might make the difference.  Standardized tests and state-imposed math standards often do more harm than good, as they pressure teachers into hammering the “how” into students hard enough that they’ll get the right answers without ever addressing the “why.”  Teachers are underpaid, overworked, and often struggle against turgidly bureaucratic administrations.  And in math specifically, the sort of “fad math” I’ve referred to here is often forced on teachers from the outside, hobbling their ability to actually teach.

I don’t mean to sound hostile toward teachers.  Like I said, I’ve had some brilliant math teachers in my time — in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever had a single math teacher who was bad at what she or he did.  And god, look, that’s probably a huge part of the reason I fell in love with math and went into it: because of my teachers.  Two of my high school teachers in particular (one in my high school and one in a summer program) are probably directly responsible for me going to MIT and majoring in math.

But this just reinforces my point: Good teachers are so freakin’ important.  Not a single one of my math teachers ever used a gimmick or a fad or some krazy new-fangled new idea for gettin’ math into the heads of them dumb-dumb math-hatin’ students.  They used blackboards, white boards, or transparencies.  And — and now that I’m thinking about it, this was true without exception — they pretty much spent the entirety of each class period writing and talking and explaining things.  And it worked.  I mean, I know it might seem like, okay, this is me talking, and I’m smart and good at math so it worked for me — but no, it worked in general.  I still use visualizations taught to me by my geometry teacher 17 years ago with my students and they find them incredibly helpful.  My calculus teacher was exceedingly proud of the fact that every single one of her AP students would consistently get 4′s and 5′s on the AP exams.  Every single one, in a public school.  (A good public school, but still.)  And she didn’t teach to the test; she just taught well (and was incredibly beloved by students, not just me).

Yeah, I was very lucky.  But I’d like all students to be able to be that lucky.  To be as well-taught and inspired as I was.  To feel that they’re not just passing tests, but that they truly understand what they’re learning.

There’s a lot that is hard about education reform.  A lot.  But for Pete’s sake, one thing we can do is stop it with the fad math.  Stop dropping shiny new assembly line algorithms across school curricula in the hope that they’ll press out perfect little cubes of students who know how to factor properly.  You can’t teach math by plugging a student into a flow chart.

You teach math by teaching it.  There are many, many excellent ways and methods of teaching, of course, and I’m not saying discussing those isn’t valuable — I could probably write a book on all the different ways I’ve discovered to explain calculus.  But so many of these math fads stop valuing teaching entirely.  And that makes our education system, one in which there are already so many things to fix, just that much more broken.

There’s this commercial for an online tutoring service that drives me bonkers.  It’s meant to show a good math tutor.  The student calls up the tutor and says, “How do you find the area of a triangle?” The tutor says something like, “Well, [Student's Name], the area of a triangle is one-half base times height!  So you take the base, and multiply it by one-half and by the height!” and she writes A = 1/2 bh.  And the two of them smile at each other like this is just peaches.  And I scream every time I see this commercial, because teaching a kid to memorize a formula, that’s not teaching math.  In fact, area of a triangle is one of the easiest things to explain — A = bh is quite intuitive for a rectangle (and if not can easily be demonstrated via a visualization of 1×1 boxes), and then you can show the area of a triangle as being half the area of a rectangle by drawing a rectangle and slicing it down the diagonal to make two triangles, so for a triangle A = 1/2 bh.  (Slightly more rigorously, you can teach area of a parallelogram in between those, but “triangle as half a rectangle” is actually easier for most students when intuiting the reason for the formula, and the other connections can be drawn later.)  In any case, this commercial is everything I hate about bad math education in one thirty-second soundbite.↵
In most cases it’s pretty easy for me to tell when it’s just the student who’s confused versus when the teacher was actually confusing.↵

[image error]

Part of xkcd comic http://xkcd.com/561/. CC-BY-NC.

I love Firefly.

It’s is a brilliant show, and one of the parts I love most is worldbuilding that mixes the U.S. and China as the dominant cultures in a far-flung space-faring future.  The characters are all fluent in Chinese, wear Chinese-inspired clothing, eat with chopsticks, and wear white to funerals.

Therefore, the fact that the show has no Asian actors in leading roles is a very troubling and uncomfortable thing.  It’s hard enough for Asian actors to succeed in Hollywood; it’s even more depressing when a work of media steals the shiny bits of our culture and then gives no opportunities to Asian-American actors.

“Maybe there weren’t any Asian actors up to the job,” people say, every time this comes up.

Bullshit, says I.

Don’t get me wrong — I adore Firefly’s cast.  But . . . just for fun, behold my Asian Dream Cast!  The rules were as follows:

The actors had to be of East Asian descent and work in the U.S.,
The actors had to be actively doing television (as opposed to purely film actors),
As much as possible (just for my sake), I wanted actors I was familiar with,
To avoid driving myself crazy, I did this as if we were casting in 2014, rather than trying to figure out how old people were ten years ago.  Scanning the list, it looks like most of these actors could have played the same roles I’ve cast them in in 2002 anyway, and the ones who couldn’t would have been easy to cast with actors currently ten years older than the role (as noted below, River would have been far easier to cast older, and I had a list as long as my arm of possibilities for Kaylee).

I imposed rules #1 and #2 because I wanted to prove that it is just not true that there isn’t a fantastic slate of talented East Asian-descent actors doing American television.  #3 was just because it’s more fun for me if I’m familiar with the actors I’m talking about!  (#3 was the most limiting.  I’m famous among my friends for not having seen enough movies and never knowing who any of the actors are.)

Now, drum roll, please . . .

Firefly East Asian Dream Cast

(cut because of lots of video embeds)

Malcolm Reynolds — Randall Park (Fresh Off the Boat)

Nathan Fillion is a hard man to match, but I think Randall Park would nail it.  Park, an actor and comedian, is one of the reasons I’m so excited to see how ABC’s upcoming sitcom Fresh Off the Boat is (trailer here).  He’s one of the less-familiar names on this list, but check out his guest role on The Office above for some quick evidence of why I think he’s definitely up to the job.

 

Zoe — Ming-Na Wen (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

She can handle action and humor, and is a tremendous actress — we’ve seen Ming-Na in everything from Mulan to Stargate: Universe to Eureka.  And hey, look, there’s even current proof that she can headline a Joss Whedon show!  Don’t mind me, I’m just going to be over here imagining her as Zoe clotheslining someone with her mare’s leg.

 

Wash — Masi Oka (Heroes)

This was a no-brainer.  Masi Oka steals every scene of everything he’s ever been cast in, and his comic timing is pure genius.  Can’t you just see him in a Hawaiian shirt flipping his switches?  [Masi Oka voice]“I am a leaf on the wind . . .”[/Masi Oka voice]

 

Simon Tam — John Cho (Harold & Kumar, Star Trek 2009)

Simon’s a hard nut to crack — you need someone who can play the buttoned-up doctor and then straightman lines like, “Yep, it’s a cow fetus.”  The more clips of Harold and Sulu I watched on YouTube, the more I was convinced that John Cho is perfect.

 

River Tam – Victoria Park (Bunheads)

I wouldn’t have predicted it, but this was the hardest role to cast.  River is just so young — most actresses have a brief delta before they’d be well-known enough for an exercise like this, and I don’t watch a lot of high school shows (heck, all Summer Glau had done before Firefly was a single episode of Angel!).  Even the youngest Asian actresses I could think of (e.g., Jamie Chung, Ellen Wong, Jenna Ushkowitz) are in their late twenties.  So I did a little research and scanned some of the teen shows on IMDB, and who hit it home but Victoria Park, who had a recurring spot as a teen cheerleader on Bunheads.  Her reel shows she’s got the perfect mix of adorable and vulnerable to play River, she looks like she could be related to John Cho, AND she can dance!

There are so, so many relatively-unknown Asian actresses out there looking for exactly the type of breakout role that Firefly gave to Summer Glau.  If you think they don’t exist, ya just aren’t looking.

 

Inara Serra — Lucy Liu (Kill Bill, Elementary)

There were many possibilities for Inara.  But who could handle her mix of confident authority and intelligent wit better than Lucy Liu?  Elementary shows she’s got the snark to take Mal down a peg, and you only have to see how reminiscent O-Ren’s power entrance into the House of Blue Leaves is to Inara’s sweep into the sheriff’s station in “The Train Job” to know she would own Inara.

 

Jayne Cobb — Kenneth Choi (Captain America: The First Avenger)

Jayne was a bit more difficult; Asian and Asian-American actors, even the badass ones, don’t often get cast as the rougher, more vulgar types in U.S. projects.  (Dammit, Hollywood.)  But then I remembered Jim Morita from Captain America, and how Kenneth Choi made me double over laughing with, “I’m from Fresno, Ace.”  A quick check of his IMDB showed he’s also played a biker gang leader in Sons of Anarchy — sold.

 

Kaylee Frye — Kimiko Glenn (Orange is the New Black)

Plenty of young bubbly actresses would fit the mold, but I’m head over heels for Orange is the New Black right now.  Brook Soso’s sweet chatterbox is overwhelming enough at times for you to want someone to smother her face with their vagina (or duct tape her mouth and throw her in the hold for a month), but it’s easy to extrapolate how a little tweaking on Glenn’s part would give us the perfect Kaylee.

(Note: I couldn’t find a clip of her on OitNB, so here’s one of her singing.  The woman’s been on Broadway as well — talk about multi-talented.)

 

Shepherd Book — George Takei (Star Trek TOS, and then a life of too much awesome to list)

This is hands-down the casting I’m proudest of.  Can’t you just imagine Takei’s basso giving us the gravitas of Shepherd Book?  And we know he’d nail those humorous beats like no other — dammit, now I’m sitting here basking in the daydream of George Takei saying all of Shepherd’s lines.  “A special hell.”  Oh myyy!

 

Look, people — if I can think of amazing people for all eight of the not-a-teenage-girl roles just out of the actors I know — and I know so, so few actors — and still have a list of a couple dozen names of Asian actors I know and like left over, then I’m going to find the argument that “maybe there just aren’t enough Asian actors” very, VERY fishy. *eyes the internet*

Okay, enough snarking.  This was fun!  Who would your Asian actor picks be?

Cancer-lapsed correspondence ALMOST caught up on.  Thank you so much for your continued patience, everyone.

Now, on to something I missed –

I’m linking well after everything broke, so a lot of you may have heard about all this already.  But just in case there’s anyone who hasn’t . . . I can’t not link.  Because heck, a portion of these atrocities was well-known decades ago, but they’ve been swept under the rug enough or just not talked about enough that I had no idea at all until it all came up again this month.

The short version: Marion Zimmer Bradley, very influential SFF writer, trailblazer for women, not only facilitated her husband’s sexual molestation of children but horrifically abused her own children herself.  And portions of the SFF community enabled and defended them.

Links:

Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s timeline with links (read all the links)
Natalie Luhrs and Jim Hines with good discussion and more links
The Absolute Write thread with more discussion

The two things I’m personally determined to do in response to this: 1) stand with her/their victims by making an effort to continue awareness that these things happened (by linking, by informing, by helping make sure ugly truths aren’t buried because we want to put a shiny veneer on history), and 2) renew my commitment to speak up when I see something in the SFF community that I think is a problem.  I love fandom — I love our willingness, often, to accept and embrace people who have always been outsiders — but it is a real and dangerous problem when that push to accept without judgment snowballs into enforced blindness to abuse.

It is not counter to fandom’s acceptance of “quirkiness” to call out unacceptable behavior.  It is not a betrayal of our found SFF family to turn our backs on a member of that family who hurts others.  It is not making fandom a hostile place when we talk — or shout — loudly and freely and vigorously about the types of behaviors we think are not okay.

In fact, if there’s one thing I’m grateful for after learning all of this, it’s that there are so many people in SFF fandom right now who are unapologetically loud.  Who will speak up and won’t shut up.  Who will get angry.  Who will shout from the rooftops when things happen that they consider unacceptable in their community.

Keep it up, my friends.

One of these days I will NOT overestimate my ability to keep up with online obligations while dealing with health concerns, and will post one of these messages before I go dark.

Anyway: I’ve been mostly offline for the past month or so dealing with the final stages of my cancer treatment.  It went well (w00t!).  I am, hopefully, mostly done.

Completely over-optimistically, I did not set up an email autoresponder or, yanno, post something like this beforehand, because I thought, “oh, I’ll be able to work through it this time.”

Yeah . . . that didn’t happen.

I sincerely apologize to everyone in my piled-up email inbox and Twitter stream, not for going dark for cancer (I’m sure you’ll grant me that ;) ), but for being too stubborn to put up a notice or autoreply in advance.  Sometimes that sort of thing feels like admitting defeat, when really it’s just . . . having forethought.

*tiptoes sheepishly back online*

It will take me a little time to get through my backed-up correspondence, for which I beg your patience. Please feel free to re-email me if you’re afraid your message got lost in the shuffle.

Back at MIT, we pulled a lot of all-nighters.  Linguistically, it became convenient to know when “tomorrow” or “morning” happened.  Midnight?  Sunrise?  First class of the day? Do you have to sleep and wake up for it to qualify as tomorrow?

I don’t know who came up with this originally, and I can’t find it in an Internet search, but common MIT culture was to refer to the “hacker’s definition” of morning — namely, that “tomorrow” occurs when two out of the following three things happen:

You wake up.
The sun rises.
You eat breakfast.

I have just gotten home.  And I ate some eggs!  But since the sun hasn’t risen and I didn’t wake up, it’s not Saturday yet.  In fact, I’m going to go to sleep now, and when I wake up the sun will be in the sky, so even if I skip breakfast it’ll officially be Tomorrow.

I’ve been wanting to recommend this for a while, but the author’s website was down when I first read it, and I wanted to link to it, because ONCE YOU START READING IT YOU WILL WANT TO BUY IT BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME.

This is an epistolary romance novella (yes! I read a romance!) in the form of a journal, set in 1920′s London.  And it’s AMAZING.  We have delightful (and diverse!) characters, romance tropes turned completely on their heads, and a heroine who has sex purely because she’s curious.  She’s CURIOUS!

Jade’s wit is wonderfully incisive and she has a way of writing about her own life that is funny and intelligent and deliciously analytical.  I highly, HIGHLY recommend this book.  The whole thing is available for free, serialized on the author’s website:

http://zencho.org/category/my-stories/the-perilous-life-of-jade-yeo/

And here it is on Amazon because really, this novella deserves All the Sales: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0087NQRM2

Read it, buy it, and enjoy.

Someone started a hashtag last week called #coderbooks.  I was late to the party, but once I started doing it I COULDN’T STOP.  Rather than inflict them all on Twitter, I’m collecting my amusements here:

The Black Perl Script #coderbooks
The Man in the Iron Emacs #coderbooks
The Greatest Iteration #coderbooks
Henry vi #coderbooks
#000000 Beauty #coderbooks
Lord of the Files #coderbooks
Waiting for Sudo #coderbooks
The Secret LIFO of Bees #coderbooks
Root #coderbooks
Rikki-Tikki-Java #coderbooks
The Greps of Wrath #coderbooks
The Old Man and the C++ #coderbooks
To Kill -9 a Mockingbird #coderbooks

And here are some #codermovies, too!

My Big Fat Greek Threading #codermovies
Fatal Abstraction #codermovies

*snorfle*

Thanks to whoever created the hashtag!

This post is specifically about interacting with copyright in the U.S., but the ideas could probably be extrapolated to other countries.

I just read a very humble article by an author who got in legal trouble for using a copyrighted photograph on her blog without permission.  Beyond the details of her own case, she goes on to talk about things like screenshots from movies, about Tumblr and Pinterest, and about just how much rampant Internet activity is flagrantly violating copyright law.

I don’t know the details of the case the author got in trouble for — I might come down on the side of the photographer on that one (morally and logically, I mean; clearly he was in the right legally), because people cribbing someone else’s work for their blogs with no attribution does the original creator little good at all, and I think people should be recognized and compensated for their work.  But there are a whole lot of other categories the blogger talks about that make me highly uncomfortable in their illegality, speaking as someone online engaged in media and culture.

For instance, I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that this blogger is absolutely right when she says screenshots posted and reblogged on Tumblr or celebrity photos thumbtacked on Pinterest are, in fact, violations of copyright that the posters could easily get sued for.  The animated GIFs so popular in Goodreads reviews, the ironic LOL cat-esque screen grabs from the latest superhero movies, the fan-made trailers on YouTube: all against the law.  In author communities I’ve seen it considered common knowledge that a single song lyric quoted in a novel will bring the RIAA legal teams down on the poor hapless author, whether or not the singer or band is attributed.  Nobody’s taken fanfiction to court yet, but it could certainly happen.[1]

I dislike living in that world.

I dislike living in a world in which a creator can be forced into a legal snarl when he does a parody mashup of Buffy and Twilight.  I dislike living in a world in which a kid’s life can be ruined for downloading a few songs.  I dislike living in a world in which a Marvel fan on Tumblr has to choose between “they probably won’t sue me for this” and disengaging, removing something from her life that gives her great joy and only helps the movie franchise she’s celebrating.  I dislike living in a world in which celebrations of media by the fans of that media are under the Sword of Damocles, and the rights owners can any time decide to cut that thread.

Copyright is meant to protect both creators and society; it was historically an inducement for creators to share and engage with others as much as it was a protection for them.  In modern times it has swelled into a monstrous behemoth designed to stymie creativity as much as it encourages it.  The fact that certain types of common engagement by fans that actually help a franchise are actually illegal — and are not made legal by the people owning the rights — is at the heart of what I see as both the legal and cultural problems with copyright.

There are quite a few more liberal-minded authors these days who say they don’t mind fanfiction, or who turn a blind eye to piracy as something that is not a big deal and might even be helpful.  I applaud these authors — but the fact remains that their fans are still breaking the law.  Personally, I didn’t want to just say these things are okay, to assure any fans I was lucky enough to get that I wouldn’t sue them while still keeping the legal right to do so in my pocket.  Not when I had the power to do otherwise.

And thanks to Creative Commons, I do have that power.  I can declare that I am aligning the legal rights on my book with exactly the world I want to live in.  For any fans I might have, I can remove the Sword of Damocles from above their heads.[2]

Would I prefer it if people bought my book instead of pirating?  Well, yes, of course!  I would definitely prefer people buy it; the more I earn off the series, the more time I’ll be able to spend writing it, not to mention that I do want to be compensated for my work.  But do I think I need to retain the right to sue someone for pirating my work, especially when I believe that piracy might gain me a new fan?  Do I think I need the power to C&D fanfiction or fan art when those people are just celebrating my characters and giving me free advertisement?  In short, why on earth would I need to keep that Sword of Damocles up there, if I say my personal philosophy is that I never intend to use it?

The answer is: I don’t.  I’ve taken it down, and I wish other creators would, too. I wish movie and television studios would explicitly allow a lot of the variants of noncommercial fan activity that help build their fandoms, I wish authors with no objection to fanfiction would give the public a legal release, I wish more creators wouldn’t feel frightened of releasing under Creative Commons . . . More than anything, I wish we had broader legal protections of fair use, but absent that, I want the culture to make that decision independently even if the legal framework won’t.

So that’s what I’m doing, as a creator: on my own work, I’m decriminalizing the things I don’t think should be crimes.

I’m building the world I want to live in.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.  Everything mentioned in this post as regards U.S. copyright law is my own understanding of the law as far as I know, but I am not an expert and may be incorrect.

And note that “fair use” is, AFAIK, an affirmative defense: in other words, it doesn’t keep you from getting sued in the first place.↵
I’m immensely grateful to Creative Commons for this, by the way.  In the absence of the organization, I would not be able to hire a lawyer to draft my own licenses to protect me the way I wanted while still ensuring I could release the rights I desired.  The existence of Creative Commons is nontrivial, and it does  amazing things for culture.↵