bruceb

This is a farewell post to LiveJournal, Facebook, and Twitter. When I finish writing it and get it posted, I'll be deactivating my Facebook account and deleting my Twitter account, and setting my LiveJournal account to lapse to free status. I'm not sure what I'll do about LJ comments yet, so that's to think about later. This is going to be long, so see below the cut tag if you'd like to see my reasons and plans.

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Still not dead, just still enjoying net inactivity.

I'm also into my second month of my new agenda: throw lots and lots of politically heavy weblogs and forums into my /etc/hosts file so that I can't read them, and budget some each month to give to groups fighting fights I consider worthwhile. There's precious little I can do as an individual, particularly in an era when the issues important to me are treated routinely as promises to trample on not reluctantly but gleefully once candidates who promise to address them get elected. So I'm giving money to groups outside the Democratic Party that can put pressure on issues that matter to me. It's not a lot, but it is something, and it is way better than nothing.

I'm feeling a lot less of that despairing sense of futility, and this makes it much easier to disengage from pointless arguments.

Recommended.

....when you went and just bought a gorilla suit, dammit, and none of this fooling around. Typical American degradation by overspecialization.

For a while now I've been noting two parallel phenomena:

#1. I've been detaching from a lot of kinds of online interaction—blogs, forums, instant messaging, etc.,
and,
#2. I've been doing a lot of self-appraisal and reappraisal in general around counseling and medical matters.

A bit of philosophical context is in order here. There is (I'm pretty sure) a real world and things within it either are or aren't a particular way. But both the kinds of categories we recognize—species, for instance, and planets versus other kinds of things orbiting stars—and the range of options within them—like the number of kingdoms of living species—are our constructions. The real world seems to have a lot of "yes, but" and "well, mostly" and such-like fudge factors built into it very deeply. We draw lines, but the lines are there because we chose to put them there rather than because they are all necessarily truer and better lines than any alternatives, and the fact of the line may not coincide nearly as well with the facts about what's out there in the world on each side of it as we'd like.

I've got a lot of personal taxonomy to revisit just right now. For instance, now that I know more about what the effects of acute low blood sugar are for hypoglycemics and diabetics, I find that I need to rethink how I've labeled past acute episodes I've associated with the immune problems I have. Likewise, as I think about what kinds of help I need and what kinds of help I'm gettting, I'm shuffling around some of my sense of priorities about medicine-related politics. The list goes on and on, and into a bunch of categories and options I'm not really up for writing bout at the moment. All, of course, while I am trying to get work done. :) (And doing some, and enjoying it, too, I must say. It's great when that works out.)

What dawned on me today was this:

I've been detaching from a lot of kinds of online interaction—blogs, forums, instant messaging, etc.,
in order to
do a lot of self-appraisal and reappraisal in general around counseling and medical matters.

Here's the connection: any argument rests on terms. There are—there have to be—some assumptions about who we are, and who any "them" outside is, and about the scope of the argument we're having, and the means of argument that are acceptable and what they imply about what good argument (and arguers) look like, and on and on. But that this point, a lot of that isn't a given for me. I'm not sure what I want to grant or rule out. I mean, what I know for sure is that I have habits developed to try and deal with the world despite being horribly depressed and dragged down by a bunch of junk I hope to shed. How far that'll matter for any particular kind of interaction I have, I don't know, but I'd really rather not assume that it's all okay-fine unless something really explicitly pokes me hard. I'd much rather set it aside and lay pieces back only after I've had a chance to think them over, look at them from new angles, polish them up as may be, and then return them to the board.

Written out like this, it seems kind of obvious to me. Maybe it was obvious to some of you already. But the shift from "and" to "in order to" is one that feels illuminating to the landscape here inside my head, and it's light I'm glad to have.

If you want to know something—not everything, but enough to get a basic competence—about a subject, right now your best bet is very likely to be Oxford University Press' Very Short Introduction series. This is wonderful. Each volume is less than 200 pages long and is written by someone with real clues about their subject, often an up-and-coming scholar making their mark on the field. I've read half a dozen of these now and found them to range from very good up to outright excellent; I've no doubt some others in the series won't be as good, but that's life for you. I am so happy to have tried these out, and recommend them very highly.

Turns out that nearly everything I have about fake IDs, pseudonyms, cover identities, and the like in the early 20th century is espionage-related. Anyone want to recommend resources about the use of identity deceptions in civilian life?

You betcha this is New Horizons fodder.

I remain alive.

Actually, I remain alive, mostly mellow, and increasingly productive.

I finished up my first quarter on Weight Watchers with a total reduction of 19.2 pounds, and I'm done with my three-session diabetes training course. The last one, on long-term care, was tremendously informative and greatly encouraging in its emphasis on prevention and management of complications.

My #1 thing right now is fatigue, and it comes because my sleep cycle's even more chaotic than usual. It will stabilize, though, I just need to keep experimenting with times and circumstances of rest.

And now you know!

I've been depressed lately and realized that, yes, part of it is from my research reading. Kevin Boyle's Arc of Justice is the single most discouraging thing I've yet read for New Horizons.

It's not the most horrifying and enraging. That would be Slavery By Another Name, by Douglas Blackmon. Blackmon's book is about just how much of the slave-owning structure of Southern society survived and even flourished in the decades from the end of the American Civil War until World War II. Anyone who can read it and not come away enraged and horrified isn't someone I'd care to know. But there's this: it's about the abuses of power, and every decent person of any political outlook must know that power...I don't think power corrupts, just that it offers more opportunities to indulge in whatever corruption is already lurking within. The raw theme that people with power can and will do monstrous things won't be a surprise to many of my readers, even though the scope and nature of particular abuses may be surprising indeed.

Arc of Justice is different because of its focus, the racial violence in Detroit in the summer of 1925 that culminated in the trial of Dr. Ossian Sweet and 10 others for murder, with the lives that brought them and others to that spot. It's depressing in that it looks at the violence and cruelty of those without power, the working-class neighborhoods which could and did turn out hundreds of people to attack black people and destroy their property. The big picture is, again, not likely to be news to many of you: prejudice is alive and well, and flourished then and there. It's the depth of it, and the stupidity of it, and the horrors of the deformations wrought in lives because of it.

(Edit: Specifically, it's watching person after person in the lynching mobs explain how they as working-class white people felt that having a black doctor move into the neighborhood would bring the threat of violence for their men, rape for their women, and general degradation and chaos, and that therefore they had to engage in violence and various kinds of assault to protect their peace and well being. Reading this while seeing anti-health-care mobs on the news was particularly grinding, and certainly contributed to increased pessimism about the risks of violence this time around, too. The lies told by authorities then and now to back up the mobs and protect them once incited contributed, too.)

I just didn't expect it to be quite such a drain on my soul, and I note it in a cautionary way for others. It's an important subject and Boyle handles it well. Just...wow. It's time for a few days with fluff, I think.

Kynn brings the awesome to D&D 4th edition GMing with this set of printable templates for skill challenges strongly inspired by power cards. Check it out!

This is a first take on something that's actually going into New Horizons.

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One of the most important questions you need to ask yourself, as player or GM, about a campaign involving characters outside the social mainstream is, "Who are the heroes here?" There's a particular trap that's really easy to fall into that I want to give particular attention to.

Western literature is rich in characters whom it's very sensible to call "outsider heroes", both historical and imaginary. One of our classic frameworks is the community where something is wrong—an external threat, internal strife, or both—into which an outsider comes who illuminates the problems and plays a crucial role in their solution. We see it in the lives of prophets, in tales of chivalry, and right on down into pulp's own era with Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (successively riffed on in film as Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, and Last Man Standing, among others). When roleplaying games take up social interaction, they often do it in this spirit, too, with the characters bringing to bear something the rest of their environment lacks and needs.

It's good stuff, too. If you think I'm going to tell you to knock it off, fear not, nothing of the sort.

But there is nonetheless a recurring problem here when it comes to stories involving people of color, or groups of women, or GLBTQ (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transexual/transgendered, and otherwise queer), or politically marginalized, or for some other reason cut off from the political, social, and economic center of their world.

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There's some controversy in the sf world about Mike Ashley's The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF, and about the defense of its author list mounted by Paul di Filippo. Angry Black Woman has the roundup, in her inimitable style, and it would be fair to say that di Filippo is not covering himself with glory on this one.

The key question is, should an editor trying to sample the field widely pay attention to writers' personal backgrounds—their ethnicity and sex, for starters—or not? I want to argue here that an editor interested in the best sweep should for the simple reason that writers' lives matter.

Lives don't determine writing. There are lots of engineering magazine editors and only one Gene Wolfe, but he writes the way he does partly because of what he did at Plant Engineering. I don't know of any other trout fishermen and masters of frugal living who write like Howard Waldrop, but his life shapes his prose, and the way he writes them. Robert Heinlein didn't write The Forever War or 1968 and it seems like a safe bet that Joe Haldeman isn't going to write Starship Troopers, in part because each had such a different experience of war. The Draegera series wouldn't be what it is without a painful divorce along the way. And so on.

This is all a commonplace. We—that is to say, the readership that is mostly white and mostly male—recognizes all of this, as entirely true on the individual level. We are not surprised to learn that Caitlin Kiernan is a paleontologist or Peter Watts a biologist, and while we may be surprised to find that behind the facades of Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree Jr. were two people who knew the intelligence community from the inside, we take that information and see fresh things in their work. We accept it: lives matter.

The idea that, however, lives across the big social fault lines, like ethnicity and sex and gender and orientation, do not matter rests on nothing much more solid than the desire that they not. In spirit it's not wildly different from the creationist's grudging admission that, sure, breeds exist and breeding works, micro-scale evolution like antibiotic resistance in bacteria does happen, and all of that, but there mustn't be larger-scale evolution because there just musn't be. But lives keep on mattering. Steve Barnes has lived through things none of his co-authors have, and they've all had experiences he can't, because he's black and they're not. Alice Sheldon dealt with things Eric Linebarger didn't. And so on, and so on.

So yes, if you want to survey a field in search of the sweep of its current set of cool ideas, you need to cast your net widely enough to actually get out of your particular little cove, no matter how important it may seem from this vantage point. It may actually be important: you may be fishing in San Francisco Bay, or Puget Sound, or off Cape Cod. But there are still bays and rivers and oceans beyond where you are, and if you don't make an effort to go look in them, you simply can't have any idea what you're missing.

Weight: Well YEAH! Down 2.2 pounds for the week, and across my first threshold. I now weigh a touch under 95% of what I did when I started on Weight Watchers, 11 weeks ago. I'm in touch with my doctor about the pace, and he agrees that it's fine, and mostly the result of early improvements from changes in carbohydrate intake for the sake of diabetes management.

New Horizons: Solidly back in the research groove, and hoping to commit actual prose this week. I've also got a hook my playtesters like - essentially, Leverage 1925. More on that during the week, I hope.

I feel a bit chattier, so I've got iChat on again for the moment. I'll see how I do with it over the weekend. No promises, but I feel like it's time to experiment.

I'm getting multiple friends all telling me about this purely delightful story of a bobcat kitten making friends with a fawn after both were rescued from one of the fires in the Santa Barbara area. You should go read it too, it's good for you. (And thinking about donating to those rescue folks. They're in a bind.)

Weight Watchers, week 9: down 2.6 pounds for the week, for a total of 11.2 in 9 weeks. And this takes me across a weight threshold, so that my daily point total goes from 44 down to 43. Progress!

New Horizons: I think I'm over the highest hurdles of this ongoing set of new medical challenges, and I'm settling back in to research and zeroth-drafting chunks of the introduction and general advice. Progress!

It's hot and I'm tired and I do have a lot of broody spells, but I'd say the trend is solidly good.

I'm posting this on behalf of a friend:

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C. was playing back some of our little Digital8 videos from her childhood to a friend today, and some of them are getting choppy and bad. It is clear that we have an extremely urgent situation and need to archive all the videos as quickly and as professionally as possible, while not on a professional budget.

We are thinking that, cost-wise, putting the NOT-compressed raw data onto a lot of giant hard drives would be best, then re-archiving them to new drives every few years to  maintain the archive.

We have located only one playback machine for this format: Sony GV-D200 but we are not sure if it will be higher quality and able to send the video smoothly to a computer.

We also don't know if there is a more appropriate software than iMovie for archiving on the computer side. Maybe something that can help patch together the choppiness? Like a video Photoshop kind of thing?

We really need to salvage what we can as soon as possible, and we want to make sure that what we actually archive ends up being usable.

Money is tight, but this obviously can't wait. :(  There are several hundred tapes, and we need to just do this around the clock once we find something that will reliably and accurately transcribe them.

I'm really stressed out about having all these tapes lost permanently--we had no idea they were failing already. :(

Thanks for any help locating a solution.

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