Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Don’t ever stop talking to each other

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This is a long rant by Cat Valente – and it’s really, really good. Though I’m quoting a particularly good bit from the end, it’s worth reading the whole thing.

Don’t ever stop talking to each other. It’s what the internet is really and truly for. Talk to each other and listen to each other. But don’t ever stop connecting. Be a prodigy of the new world. Stand up for the truth no matter how often they take our voices away and try to replace the idea of reality with fucking insane Lovecraftian shit. Don’t give up, don’t let them have this world. Love things. Love people. Love the small and the weird and the new.

Because that’s what fascists can’t do. They don’t love white people or straight people or silent women or binary enforced gender or forced birth or even really money. They want those things to be the only acceptable or even visible choices, but they don’t love them. They don’t even want to think about them. They want them to be automatically considered superior and universally mandated so they don’t have to think about them—or else what do you think the fury over other people wearing masks was ever about? The need to be right without thinking about it, and never have to see anything that wakens a spark of doubt in their own choices.

Obey, do not imagine, do not differ.

That’s nothing to do with love. Love is gentle, love is kind, remember? They need the attention being terrible brings them, but they don’t love it any more than a car loves gas. Sometimes I don’t even think they love themselves. Sometimes I’m pretty sure of it. They certainly never seem happy, even when they win. Musk doesn’t seem happy at all.

Geeks, though. Us weird geeks making communities in the ether? We love. We love so stupidly hard. We try to be happy. We get enthusiastic and devote ourselves to saving whales and trees and cancelled science fiction shows and each other. The energy we make in these spaces, the energy we make when we support and uplift and encourage and excite each other is something people like Musk can never understand or experience, which is why they keep smashing the windows in to try and get it, only to find the light they hungered for is already gone. Moved on, always a little beyond their reach.

📚 Joy to the Worlds by Maia Chance, Janine A. Southard, Raven Oak, and G. Clemans

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62/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Eight tales of holiday-themed speculative fiction mysteries by four authors, all from the Seattle area (at least at the time of publication, according to their bios), each contributing two stories. Space Santa and the mob, time traveling through Germanic folklore, a retro-future pageant mystery…quite a few of the offering here were very enjoyable. G. Clemans’ ‘Bevel & Turn’ and Raven Oak’s ‘The Ringers’ were my particular favorites.

Michael holding Joy to the Worlds

🎥 Spirited

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Spirited (2022): ⭐️⭐️: This shouldn’t have been a musical.

It’s a good cast, an amusing take on the Christmas Carol story, some very clever lines, and several fun nods to several other famous Christmas Carol adaptations (plus at least one other famous Christmas film). And yet, every time they break into song (with one exception), it all drags down to a rather painful slog — and they break into song a lot.

It’s not a bad film, but it’s also not nearly as good as it could have been. It either needed to be just a comedy, or perhaps different songwriters, but the most enjoyable parts — save for a very rousing “good afternoon” — were the non-musical parts.

📚 Bimbos of the Death Sun by Sharyn McCrumb

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60/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I’d call this a guilty pleasure, except that I don’t think I need to feel guilt about the things I enjoy, even if they have their issues…which this book definitely has. I first discovered it in the early ‘00s, and loved its lighthearted take on a murder mystery at a SF/F convention. At some point I lost my copy, but recently found one at a used bookstore. Re-reading it now, its flaws are a little more apparent, but it’s still mostly enjoyable fluff.

Pros: The general sense of weirdness of the con atmosphere, with its disparate groups of fans connected by their overall fandom. The surreality of the mix of costumes and mundanes, and what it must be like for people unconnected to a con to find themselves in the middle of it. And, yes, the recognizable tendency for some fen to be a little too wrapped up in things. Plus, I really enjoy that because the book was written in the late ‘80s, this is a con of the time, with things like video programming rooms and a “high tech” room with things like demonstrations of personal computers.

Cons: There is a relatively heavy reliance on the “poorly socialized misfits” trope that’s often seen when cons or SF/F fans are part of the setting or plot; though the main characters tend to be real-people-who-are-fans, most of the peripheral characters fall solidly into barely-functional-in-the-real-world territory. But the biggest flaw is the ongoing fat-shaming, where one character exists entirely as an extended “laugh at the overweight woman and her quest to find a partner socially inept enough to accept her” joke. Nothing about this plot line advances or even really engages with the main plot, and it really stands out as a misstep.

Michael holding Bimbos of the Death Sun

Mastodon RSS Tips

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  1. Get an RSS feed for any user by appending .rss to the end of their profile URL. For example, my profile is tenforward.social/@djwudi, so the RSS feed of my posts is tenforward.social/@djwudi.rss.

  2. This also works for hashtag searches; handy for keeping an eye on hashtags (without worrying you’ll miss them in your feed). In my case, as our social media manager, I watch for mentions of Norwescon. Since that hashtag search URL is <your server>/tags/norwescon, the RSS feed is <your server>/tags/norwescon.rss. (I’ve also subscribed to feeds for norwescon45, nwc45, and philipkdickaward.)

The feeds-for-users tip I’ve seen going around, but I’d not seen this applied to hashtag searches, so I gave it a shot, and was happy to see it worked. Figured I’d put both in one post for those who might not have known either.

In Search of a MarsEdit Equivalent for iOS

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A question for macOS WordPress bloggers who use Red Sweater Software’s excellent MarsEdit: What’s your go-to mobile iOS blogging tool?

MarsEdit is a great example of a “do one thing and do it really well” piece of software, and I’ve yet to find anything equivalent for mobile blogging. I just want exactly what MarsEdit gives me: A list of my most recent posts and pages, a solid plain-text Markdown editor, and access to all the standard WordPress fields and features.

Every other editor I’ve tried either doesn’t do one or more of those things or is otherwise not quite right in some way. Ulysses was the closest and I tried it for a while, but while it’s a great editor, it doesn’t pull a list of posts and pages from the blog, just works with whatever’s local or in its own cloud sync or Dropbox or whatever, and last time I used it, had a bug where alt text wasn’t getting applied to images correctly.

(The WordPress native app drives me up the wall. I don’t want block editing. I want text and Markdown.)

Really, what I want is an iOS version of MarsEdit. But failing that: any recommendations?

📚 Startide Rising by David Brin

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59/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1984 Hugo Best Novel

Dolphins in space! Which sounds jokey, but it’s not at all. Minimal connections to Sundiver, other than being in the same universe, but 200 years later. I really enjoyed this – the uplifted dolphins are a neat choice for a spacefaring crew, and Brin mixes in touches of plenty other alien races as they battle each other and chase the dolphins for the secret they stumbled across. Brin also does a good job of making this part of a much larger universe, dropping in bits and pieces and adding mysteries that don’t get solved, without making it frustrating or feeling like a tease.

Michael holding Startide Rising