Question: What do you want to read about on WISB?
I’d really like to know what kinds of things you enjoy about WISB (when it’s in full swing, of course) and what kind of stuff I don’t do that you’d be interested in. I was thinking, for example, of blogging about my first teaching experience in literature, since I taught a lot of stuff outside of my field. But would you all be interested in such things? Let me know! Feedback is always much loved around here. Anywho! P.S.: If there’s anything you dislike, let me know that too.
Homophobia: A Straight Male’s Experience
(I mentioned on Twitter that I was going to write a post on my personal experiences with homophobia. And so…here it is. Don’t expect too many of these kinds of posts, though. I want to get back to books and science fiction and fantasy and other such things.) I’ve made fun of gay people in my life. True, much of the fun-making was done when I was an ignorant, culturally-conditioned young person who didn’t understand that, well, gay people are just people. But I don’t think that excuses me in full. I contributed to homophobic bigotry in my youth. I still sometimes say things like “that’s gay” or “you’re gay,” though I have thankfully removed the word “faggot” from my vocabulary (except when I jokingly call someone a “faggot” and then remind them that it means a “cigarette”). Change didn’t really come for me until my mother came out to us (my sister, my brother, and myself). I don’t really remember that moment, to be honest, but I recall kind of shrugging about it (internally more than externally). My mother is gay. So what? And then the gay rights movement got in full swing. Maybe it had always been in full swing and we just hadn’t noticed it in the small town of Placerville, California (where we all eventually moved a year or so after my mother “came out”). I don’t know. But once I knew that my mother was gay, I also knew that a lot of the things I had done in my younger years (and was still doing at that time) were, at the very least, problematic (and, at the worst, offensive). I never hurt any gay people physically, because I have never been one for violence, but I know I hurt many people, gay or otherwise, by calling them names (I say “gay or otherwise” because I don’t know if any of the people I called “faggot” or “gay” were gay — they were usually those on the lower end of the social scale from where I stood, which was pretty damn low on that scale in the first place). And when my mother said she was gay and started bringing around other gay people, male and female, it brought home not only the need for personal reflection, which I was pretty poor at in my high school years, but also the bigotry and hatred so many gay people experience day in and day out. It started with a group whose name I have thankfully forgotten who used to park what they called “Truth Trucks” by the side of the highway (Placerville has three stoplights on H50, which is a fairly major highway in the Foothills above the Central Valley). The group would sit out there on the side of the road waving their signs, which are variations on things like this: But standing on the side of the road wasn’t enough for these people. They also stood outside elementary schools handing out pamphlets to little kids, inside of which were various explanations for why Jesus hates homosexuals, what will happen to people who support them (or are them), and so forth. Shortly after, the city passed a non-binding resolution to make Placerville a “No Hate Zone.” I say non-binding because they could not actually enforce the “zone” because that would be a violation of the 1st Amendment. But it set a tone for the debate in El Dorado County and had an impact on California’s fight for equality, however small. That’s when things got nasty. The “Truth Trucks” people didn’t like the “No Hate Zone” resolution, and they set out in full force to protest the passage. And so did we — my mother and siblings and a good chunk of the gay people in the county. We stood out there on the side of the road cheering for honks from cars. And we tried to ignore when the “Truth Trucks” people yelled at us or people in cars screamed obscenities or threw half-empty cups of soda at friends and supporters. When the skinheads showed up (no joke), things didn’t get much better. There were debates, screams, condemnations, and violent rhetoric, along with large influx of police officers (who, thankfully, acted as one would expect them to act — like they deserved the badges on their belts). I learned some time later that my brother was told he would burn in hell because our mother was gay (at a protest I couldn’t attend). Someone I worked with told me he didn’t want gay people teaching his kids because he didn’t want them to turn out queer (I got really upset and told him off; he apologized later for upsetting me, which was nice, but that didn’t really fix the issue). I know worse things were said to my mother, who attended many Gay Pride events in her slightly younger years, and participated in a few protests. When the protests “ended,” the “Truth Trucks” people didn’t. I had to drive past the “Truth Trucks” almost every single day for work. On MLK Day, they would hold up signs saying he didn’t support gay rights (when in fact he did, to a certain degree, having retracted earlier comments he made about gay people in his life; but using his words is really unfair, considering they are nearly 50 years old). Then I moved out of Placerville and things improved, in large part because Santa Cruz is where the Hippy Revolution went to be immortal. There were protesters in town, but I never saw them. Rather, I was surrounded, for the most part, by people who supported gay rights. It was a town where marching for what was right occurred frequently. And it continued: friends of mine were called names, and only by then did I understand the impact those words had on gay people (I had no gay friends when I was younger, but after my mother came out, I met more gay people and befriended
How To Be Annoying On Twitter
Twitter is a pretty awesome place. But it’s also a network like every other social network: full of weirdos, annoying people, and spammers. Thankfully, we don’t have to follow such people! We can pretend they don’t exist (or make fun of publicly, because that’s fun too). My question is: What are ways people annoy you on Twitter? Let me know in the comments. Here are the things that annoy me: Retweet Bonanza Twitter is about contributing to the stream. But some people think that means they need to retweet every damn thing other people are saying or linking to, so much so that their streams look something like this: retweet, retweet, retweet, retweet, @ message, retweet, original, retweet, retweet, retweet, @ message, retweet retweet, original… I’ve never followed people who do this, because they’re not saying anything I can’t find elsewhere. They’re parrots, and parrots are only cute when they’re in feather form with a mute button. Link Bonanza Related to the Retweet Bonanza is another Twitter foul which involves posting nothing but links. No @ messages. No original messages. No links with some kind of opinion thrown in. Just links with the title of the article (and sometimes no title at all). Links are nice, but it’s better to have links with mini commentary and a little original stuff. Hell, posting a random question once in a while is a drastic improvement. Otherwise you kind of look like the guy who shows up at a political event shouting liberal or conservative talking points: brainless. Plug Molestation People who send you links to their crap without provocation (either via DM or @ message) are people who engage in what I call “plug molestation.” They come out of nowhere, they tell you about their junk, and then they pretend like it didn’t happen until they do it again. They’re like Jehovah’s Witnesses who show up at your house a second time and tell your mother that you asked them about masturbation, prompting you to hide in your apartment every time they show up (this is a true story, by the way). To which I say: eh, no thanks. Desperate-For-Love Plug-Streams Twitter is a great place for writers to learn how not to market their books. Seriously. Spend a good month wandering around from writer feed to writer feed and look at all the ways people approach marketing their book via the Twitter stream. Some of them do it really well. Others look at Twitter the same way alcoholics look at unused microphones on the stage at their best friend’s wedding: they’d think twice about jumping on stage and screaming something ridiculous and embarrassing…if they weren’t drunk. A great deal of authors think plugging their book or website in every single tweet is the same thing as saying, “Hey, I’ve got a book.” In reality, what they’re saying is something like this: Auto-DM Plug Molestation Not unlike plug molestation, auto-DM plug molestation is a special form of self-flagellation that causes me to unfollow faster than FOX cancels awesome TV shows. These annoying DMs show up in your box when you’re least expecting them and are never anything more than “hey, look at my blog/book/art/underwear” coupled with “I iz awezum and you muzt luv me!” The only person who has auto-DMed me and didn’t get unfollowed was George Takei, whose auto-DM is emblematic of his public persona and, therefore, damned cute. Good on you, Takei. Language Gaps Incoherent tweets and excessive use of vulgar language is never anything but irritating. I’ll break these down one by one: Textspeak is not the same as English. Let me put my pretentiousness on my shoulder for a second by saying that using textspeak in daily conversation, even on the Internet, is kind of like the lady in the courtroom who types in shorthand to record the proceedings talking to people in the same language. Textspeak is the new shorthand, and within the context of text messages and the like, it makes perfect sense. On Twitter? No so much. Twitter has a character limit, not an intelligence and language limit. There are good reasons to use “u” for “you” on Twitter, but not as a standard. (Using “lol” is less problematic than “im 🙂 irl BC i hv chez.”) If censoring your tweet for younger audiences ends up looking something like this: “Holy f*** s**t, c**tbag f***ing ***hole s***head!” Well, maybe you need to expand your vocabulary. Because all I see is this: “Holy f st ctbag fing hole shead” (which I translate as “holy fisit, cotbag fing hole shed!” As far as I know, that’s not a sentence…). S-E-OH! (and Real Estate Whores) There are three brands of idiots on Twitter: people who don’t now how to use it, people who think they are experts because they put “SEO” or other buzzwords in their profile, and people who follow other people who clearly have no interest in whatever they are peddling. All of these people are annoying for different reasons, but its the last two that make me laugh maniacally when I don’t click the “follow” button in return. After all, my profile makes clear that I am a graduate student, which, last I checked, translates fairly closely to “too damned poor to buy a house.” Of course, they probably think I’m going to say something like this: “Why yes, I do want to follow you because you’re an SEO or real estate expert. I can’t wait! Please fill me with your completely irrelevant information. I need it. Put it inside me…PLEASE!” In reality, I’m thinking this: “Hmm. How many ways can I kill you with a laser from where I’m sitting…” ——————————————————————– Do any of these bother you on the lovely Twitter?
Debt is Wonderful (*deluding myself*)
I’ve got this whole Google+ thing going on, and today I posted this long comment about something that has been frustrating me today: I’m having one of those “WTF was I thinking when I decided to go to college and take on $31,000 in debt for an English degree, which I’d defer for 6 years while going to grad school, after which I’d be lucky to get a job in my field, let alone make anything over $20K a year” moments. And I’m telling myself that “yes, it’s worth it, because you love literature and teaching and all the things that come with being in academia and getting to study what you love and writing about it and spending your days participating in its communities.” Because I do. But that still leaves a debt on my head that I’ll spend the next 20 years trying to pay off on a salary that society deems I barely deserve, despite the fact that what I do is essential for society to function. The world crumbles without people like me teaching young kids and adults and the like how to read and write. The world cannot sustain itself without language. But heaven forbid that we pay the creators of society, the first line of defense against barbarism, anything close to what they deserve. Excuse me while I have some kind of weird existential crisis about life… I suppose some people would say, “Well, you decided to do this, so it’s your own fault that you’re in debt,” but then I think about all the countries where their citizens go to school for free or for very little whatsoever, without having to have full time jobs and the like, and it makes me wonder whether I got my early education in the right place. I once wanted to go to school in England. Maybe I should have. Don’t get me wrong. Where I’m at now, I’m not paying anything in loans (technically, unless I’m having financial stupidity), but my undergraduate career can be summed up as “this is how you rack up more debt than people in 1920 knew what to do with in cash form.” The sad truth is that this will keep going on, and nothing will change it. America is more classist now than it ever was, and it will stay that way until the people getting effed over do something about it, whether by voting or rising up and saying, “to hell with this bullshit.” But then again, maybe this is how you keep a disenfranchised populace complacent: load them up with too much debt for them to do anything sizable with their lives beyond pumping out more babies for the consumption machine and devoting themselves to the monthly-payment-model. I’ll shut up about my political mumbo jumbo now. Maybe something normal will spring up in the next day or so. By normal I mean “something science fiction or fantasy based.” You know, like a novel chapter, or some rant about a movie…
Syfy: Will it Destroy Science Fiction?
Criticizing the Syfy channel in the SF community is almost like fulfilling a requirement for entry. After all, the channel plays more wrestling and phony ghost-hunting/crypto-BS than any other channel on cable, which makes it really easy to hate if you’re not into such things. It wasn’t always that way, though. I remember watching old science fiction classics on Scifi (the name it used to have before they went moron and came up with Syfy). Godzilla, cheezy 80s flicks, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits. All of those wonderful shows were there. Now? Not so much. But is Syfy detrimental to science fiction as a genre? Kyle Mizokami thinks so. One of his recent tweets reads as follows: Syfy’s express purpose seems to be to destroy the genre of science fiction. Mizokami is certainly being facetious here, but it might be worth wondering whether Syfy, in a general sense, is good for science fiction. I highly doubt the creators or its current “controllers” intend to destroy SF, since that would make their station pointless, but they certainly have made many decisions which many would consider damaging to SF, or, at the very least, damn well questionable. In defense of Syfy, I think it’s necessary to point out that they are the only station dedicated to producing original SF/F television. They’ve brought us the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica and various incarnations of Stargate, saved Sliders from certain incomplete death, and created numerous other wholly original series (some of them, I’m told, are damned good), movies (most of which aren’t so great), and so on. True, they’ve resorted to playing wrestling and other garbage, but it’s the only channel that actually plays science fiction on a routine basis, and maintains SF/F series as part of its “package.” Most of the major networks haven’t a clue what to do with genre when they have it and that means most of the genre shows that appear there are canceled in quick order. I’d argue that cable television is where all good genre television goes to live, while network television is where it goes to die. That said, I do think we have a lot to be concerned about with Syfy. Rather than play SF/F classics in poor-performing slots (to boost ratings, as I see it), they’ve gone towards “popular” things like wrestling, paranormal investigation nonsense, and so on. I think this is a bad thing for the station in general, but it is also worrying for SF/F fans, since it means the one network devoted to what they love is putting too much attention into junk that should show up elsewhere. Throw in the fact that their TV movies are more often than not just this side of kill-yourself-awful and it’s hard to think of Syfy as a channel that knows what it is doing. Quality television and quality re-run selection is absolutely crucial for SF/F. In general, I disagree with Mizokami. I don’t think Syfy is damaging SF…yet. But it has the potential to ruin genre television if it isn’t careful. It’s hard to call Syfy the worst TV station on cable when it wasn’t all that long ago that the greatest science fiction show in the history of television graced their channel (BSG). But when you watch something like Battle of Los Angeles, which is possibly the worst film ever made, what else are you supposed to think other than “they really don’t give a crap?” What do you think? Is Syfy bad for science fiction?
The Florida Grapefruit/Orange Conspiracy
Something is amiss at my local Publix. Something…sinister. I’m calling it a conspiracy managed by disgruntled produce workers to screw with customers because it may very well be the cleverest attempt to force us to buy Florida oranges ever conceived. And they’re doing it through grapefruits. First, some back-story. I recently began eating grapefruits as snacks/meals in a sad attempt to lose weight and get in better shape. I suffer from what I’d like to call English Major Body, which is a rare condition that forces you to look something like the image below, but with all of your fat content evenly concentrated around the midsection. This is different from having a beer belly, which concentrates a lot of your fat in your stomach (I have no interest in demonstrating this via a picture). I want to get rid of this shape, and that means I have to start eating things that are supposed to make my insides act like they haven’t been chugging down processed plastic and grease. In all fairness, I am not very good at such things, though I have developed an expert ability to walk and read at the same time, which burns a lot of extra calories while making the act mildly entertaining. The result of this process of de-English-Majoring myself is that I now have grapefruits in my produce drawer. Or so I thought. Imagine, if you will, going into your fridge, searching for that beautiful pale orange (sometimes pinkish) fruit, plucking it from the drawer, and taking your knife to it…only to discover the insides aren’t the bright pink you’ve come to expect. No. The insides are orange, and you soon realize that the fruit you had purchased was, in fact, not a grapefruit, but a cousin by the name of orange (you probably saw this coming). “How did that happen?” you might ask. You picked all of your grapefruits from the grapefruit section. Why would there be oranges there? After all, putting grapefruits and oranges together is silly. Then imagine going back to the store and realizing that the produce department had put the oranges right next door to the grapefruits, but had covered the orange sign so all you could see was “Grapefruits / $1.99 lb.” And imagine being surprised that most of the grapefruits were not pinkish on the outside, which would give away their non-orange status, but surprisingly similarly colored and sized as the oranges next door, and that some buffoon had mixed the two fruits together so that only those in the know would realize what was going on (alternatively, people who make it a habit to smell their fruit would likely not be fooled, but I have never been one for sniffing fruit in public). What about all of this is a conspiracy? Probably nothing, but I like to think that the produce department people have devised a clever scheme to trick customers by mixing grapefruits and oranges together. Somewhere in the back is a guy giggling to himself about all the people he’s fooled, rolling over in fits of laughter at the thought of some unsuspecting customer cutting open a grapefruit and discovering an orange. This is all part of an even greater scheme to get customers to buy Florida oranges, which are, perhaps, the only produce from this State worth buying. (I rarely buy Florida produce, largely because California produce is often of better quality, despite the fact that it is shipped from California. I also don’t eat oranges, because orange juice is better anyway.) But forgive me if I don’t think this conspiracy will end with grapefruit. What’s next? Apples. You watch. One day I’ll go to the store to buy some Red Delicious apples (like the ones below). I’ll pick the best of the lot and head home thinking about the wonderfully sweet flavor of those apples (imported from Washington, no doubt). But when I finally bite into one, I’ll quickly discover that someone has painted over the apple with bright red lead paint in order to disguise the tangy Granny Smith flesh. At first, I’ll be upset, because I was expecting sweet rather than sour. Then it will dawn on me: I’ve just eaten lead paint. And somewhere in the back room of a grocery store sits a giggling produce man, who has managed to trick most of the town with his red lead paint disguise. Ten thousand people will die of lead poisoning and the Florida apple trade (assuming we grow apples here) will blow up. People will come from all over the world to buy our lead-free mediocre apples, and the produce man will get a $5,000,000 kickback for his good work. I’m sure they’ll move on to carrots and strawberries and celery next, because a conspiracy isn’t any good if you don’t expand your horizons. Just think about the Moon Landings, which were faked six separate times in order to make us believe we actually went to the Moon. They couldn’t stop with one! And so the produce people won’t stop with grapefruits or apples. They’ll take on the entire produce department, all for the glory of Florida produce, after which Rick Scott will declare fruit illegal because it’s too liberal looking… So be careful while you’re at the grocery store. You might get tricked and give a little troll in the back room a good laugh. And whenever a troll laughs, a puppy is eaten by a whale. That is all… P.S.: This is a joke I have concocted in order to avoid taking responsibility for accidentally buying oranges instead of grapefruits from my local Publix. Some of the above is true. Some of it is fictional. I won’t tell you which, because it’s funnier that way…for me. P.S.S.: Yes, I am aware that the Moon Landings really happened. That joke would be one of those fictional things…