Flagstaff, AZ: one of the few places in the US where you can wander onto a random hilltop not far from town and see this.

The picture at Astronomy Picture of the Day is from April 16, 2008 and they have the full-size picture, which is huge.

So… yes. The sky really does look like that. Wow.

It would be so weird to be able to see that from my window. And also kind of scary. Certainly such a view would make me think about space more. When I see these pictures, I tend to think of scenes in various SF books I read, and understand them rather more. I have to admit that most of the pictures in my head come from The Last Colony at the moment, because the main characters actually do some star gazing. As opposed to running from lasers and fighting aliens and having political curb stomps and so on, which feels like most of SF (and also the rest of the book).

I found one very screamy site that is furious the night sky is not visible like this. I’m not sure that vandalism is really the way to go to reduce light pollution.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

We don’t see it because of light pollution these days… these days we see a black night punctured by a few stars.

Before the light pollution started to really hit the sky, Van Gogh painted his most famous work, “The Starry Night”:

So the swirls aren’t clouds—they’re clouds of stars, a galaxy or the Milky Way crossing the sky or similar. He painted this scene from memory as well, so there’s an extra layer of interpretation to go through, I suppose… but now I think the painting is quite beautiful.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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The musical cue is from The Village, amazingly enough, and it’s not one that’s available on the CD. Darn it. It’s just so beautiful all by itself.

Best seen in full-screen mode.

Via Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Incessantly

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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So … in the interest of sticking my hand in a blender in a different way, here’s an allegory of sorts for folks who wonder why people of color get so upset sometimes about cultural appropriation. I feel like I’m going to end up trivializing race here, but many people have a strong identity of themselves as being of Geek Culture, whatever that means to them, so perhaps this is a good starting point.

Remember that awful “I Am a Geek” video?

Yeah, that one, which involved Wil Wheaton and changed entirely from conception to execution. The end result, many people felt, was a betrayal of who they were as geeks. Exploitation, even, from mainstream media, shuffling off real geeks and replacing with celebrities who did not understand even the most basic things about being a geek—even shunned such things and put them down. Parts of our culture. Damn it.

As Wil Wheaton eloquently put it:

When you’re speaking to people who read TMZ and People magazine, getting contributions from MC Hammer, Ashton Kutcher and Shaq is a logical choice. But when you’re speaking to geeks, it’s insulting to us to pretend that they are part of and speak for our culture. Those people are not geeks; they’re celebrities who happen to use Twitter. Featuring them as “geeks” undermines the whole effort, because they aren’t like us. I’ve been a geek my whole life. I’ve suffered for it, I’ve struggled because of it, and I’ve worked incredibly hard to remove the social stigma associated with all these things we love, like gaming and programming. It’s like a slap in the face to be associated with these people who claim to be like me, and want to be part of our culture, but couldn’t tell you the difference between Slackware and Debian, a d8 and a d10, or how to use vi or emacs. In other words, they haven’t earned it, but they’re wrapping themselves in our flag because their PR people told them to.

In other words, mainstream appropriated geek culture and turned it into something that no geek would have been part of willingly. It gets worse, and hasn’t stopped; anywhere from TV shows and movies that claim to show geeks but don’t, to attempts to list, say, sexiest geeks, but almost nobody on the list is actually geeky.

This upset a lot of people.

This is what people of other appropriated cultures feel like. Well. Perhaps a proximity. But the outrage is there. The anger is there. The reaction of indignant is there.

Who are people, who’ve never been outside of mainstream, know about us geeks? What do people who’ve only gone on African safaris know about the black experience in America?

Of course, neither are simple black-and-white affairs, but perhaps you see my point here—or perhaps not. I don’t care. I just wanted to say this, because I’ve been living with seeing these parallel reactions and I wanted to get it off my chest before it drove me crazy, particularly with the current hubbub around Spinrad and cultural appropriation.

I give points to Spinrad for trying to express something about cultural appropriation. Unfortunately, like that video, he started with good intentions—probably—and it morphed into something that pissed people off instead, that was itself a gross misunderstanding. And people of course feel betrayed. Of course there is anger. Of course we felt that the people who created that video are tools; of course people of color feel that Spinrad was a tool.

And, you know, have you ever tried explaining geek culture and why that video pissed you off to someone who didn’t see a problem because they just didn’t know how much, say, D&D and tech and comics and fantasy and SF and Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica and on and on and on—they didn’t know how much that means to us. They also often don’t try to understand. Like talking to a brick wall, sometimes, eh?

That’s how people of color feel—or, let’s cast the net more widely and include people of cultures in general, like Irish who are pissed off about mainstream’s appropriation of their culture, starting with St. Patrick’s Day and going downhill from there; or Italians who are pissed off about having their culture shown off as being a mob culture; or Americans who are pissed off about how Europe doesn’t understand us in our diversity; and so on and so forth—this is how people of culture feel when they try to explain things to an outsider.

And that outsider thinks that because they use Twitter, or because they spent a year in Paris, or because they watched American reality shows, or because they read manga, that they know better than geeks, the French, Americans, or the Japanese, about how they live, about how they feel about mainstream culture misrepresenting them.

Plus, geek culture is quite varied. So are the cultures of other people. But mainstream doesn’t see us that way, they think we’re a caricature, a stereotype, and that’s that. And sometimes geeks don’t see people of color that way, they see a caricature, a stereotype. Oh, people can say that every stereotype has a grain of truth in it; but what stereotypes really are is a misunderstanding and over-simplification of an entire group of people.

There is one more thing I want to cover. And that’s the concept of safe spaces. I feel like this happens every time people talk about “safe spaces” for stories—you know, like all-female anthologies, or all-Asian anthologies, or suchlike. Why are these safe spaces, but white male anthologies, say, aren’t?

Well, when you were a geek in high school, did you feel like hanging out with the rest of the non-geeks and talk about D&D? Of course not. They would make fun of you. They would put things down. They wouldn’t understand. They’re mainstream; they didn’t need a safe space to discuss sci-fi or role-playing games or Linux distributions or what have you. We did. Sometimes individual parts of geek culture need safe spaces from all the other ones.

But we would never say that mainstream needed a safe space. They already have all the space they could ever want. They marginalize us, not the other way around. Many of them don’t mean to. It just happens. It’s how things are—at present.

This is similar to how white male writers marginalize—even if they don’t mean to—female writers, or writers of color, or transgender writers, or gay/lesbian writers, or indeed, anything that’s not the “mainstream” of SF and fantasy. And that’s why safe spaces are more important for the marginalized than they are for the mainstream—indeed, one could say that the mainstream doesn’t need it.

And of course, the fact that anthologies that are specifically all SF or specifically all fantasy, or even sub-genres of such, exist is because they are themselves safe spaces for us from the wider mainstream media.

Anyways, these are the parallels I want to draw. Maybe they’ll help you understand things better. Or not. After all, allegories aren’t perfect, and there are some things about race that run deeper than being a geek.

I could give up my geek habits—indeed, I have done so numerous times—but I cannot forget that I am Vietnamese, because that is simply part of my longer heritage. Or, more practically speaking, I look Vietnamese—I can never not look Vietnamese.¹ Mainstream culture will treat me the way I look, not the way I am.

Of course, this is why I’m online so much. And why I tend to take on white male avatars and a white male identity. Because then I can forget, for a little while. This is not right to do. It’s kind of like melding with mainstream culture and throwing away your role-playing games in an attempt to “grow up” and fit in. Only perhaps kind of worse.²

Anyhoo. Those are my thoughts on yaoi race.

And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can get my hand out of the blender fast enough this time. In fact, I’m turning off comments, though not pingbacks… probably. I just don’t want to deal with this stuff. I hate dealing with this stuff. I’m sure sometimes y’all hate trying to explain to non-geek overly religious people with crazy ideas why D&D is not the downfall of teenage morality. It’s kind of like that.

Thank you for reading, even if you hate me.

1. North Vietnamese. Not so much South.
2. For the full story of my self-hatred of my race, you can read this.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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Ah… no, not yet. I’m out of breath, we’ve determined it’s neither bronchitis nor pneumonia, and maybe we should wait.

So we wait for Monday, or sommat. I’m still sick and mostly the problem is that I’m out of breath almost all the time. If I could be constantly hooked to my inhaler I would. They gave me a nebulizer treatment at the clinic, and it helped a lot (and even restored color to my cheeks, apparently), and it has helped a lot. It’ll probably go away later this evening.

In the meantime I’m thinking about either sleep or work. Probably sleep first, then work. Or it might be sleep all evening. Only my body knows at this point.

I hope it’s happy I’ve seen the doctor and we’re not dying.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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Anyways, my dream was only scary towards the end and not because of my parents. I remember fragments, but a lot more than I usually do. For instance:

• I remember trying to buy this game¹ and all its only-imaginary-for-now expansions, only it had changed to also involve tile-laying and a big plastic dragon at the villain side of the board, for the shizzle.

• Somehow this lead to a restaurant I tried buying food from… either in another dream or from something I remember during my flight from some of the Nothing in the Midwest, a lot of which felt like a dream all by itself. It was a rather strange restaurant, one of those places where you get the food from a half-door “counter”.

• Somehow this led to me working at a sort of hospital for older people, or rather, people who are sick but considered “older” so they ended up there. Probably something to do with HCR going on right now, the gods only know why. Also, I was very concerned with how to store the many, many new plastic pieces from the above game (I decided on color, by the way, in special zip-pocketed clear plastic album pages).

• The guy I was assigned to, I think, resembled a sort of amalgam of all the looks-like-40 faces of people I’ve seen and, for some reason, I keep thinking that’s mostly from author jackets as well, you know, where you can see the picture of the author in the back and it usually doesn’t look like him right now. He was nice, but frustrated.

• He got a really, really crappy touchscreen computer assigned to him. I think it was just standard procedure in possibly The Future, everyone gets an iPad-like device, even if it sux0rs and has a really ancient Mac OS installed on it. I searched the Interwebs for instructions on how to install Linux on it, to make it somewhat better, if we possibly could. He politely turned this down at the end.

• Then I got sick. Really, really sick. Blackout (in a freaking dream) kind of sick. I ended up in the same hospital of minor, kind of negligent care, because… because… I don’t know… I might have lot my job in the dream, I didn’t remember having a job. The guy I had been taking care of visited me once during this delirium-within-a-dream, and I was horrified because he was out of bed and shouldn’t be.

Then I woke up, and as short enough of breath to be really scary. I do get asthma from colds and flu, but usually not that badly. Or has it been that badly? Anyways, I took some stuff from my inhaler and am okayish now, but standard procedure for me is to go see the doctor in case either bronchitis or pneumonia have taken up residence.

I was really quite scared I was dying for a few minutes after I woke up. It doesn’t help that I’ve been having a lot of trouble swallowing pills for my nightly medication. I’m going to be seeing the doctor this afternoon.

I’m fortunately not completely disabled, and damn it if this stupid thing is going to keep me in bed and away from work (though I am working from home). I hate being sick so much. It breaks a lot of my obligations and just…. oh, I hate it.

Anyways, I’ll see what the doctor says. My regular doctor isn’t in today, so I’ll be seeing one of the other doctors. I skipped over seeing the nasty one and went with the nice but yet overreactive one. I hope she doesn’t overreact too much, but I really don’t want to see the nasty one, who usually thinks I’m making up my symptoms. I am not completely sure how one makes up a constricted throat like I had last year, but that was her opinion, and maybe there’s something in that, because surely a doctor wouldn’t be really dismissive.

Or maybe they would. Or maybe they aren’t, and I’m really making everything up in my head. I’m pretty sure the last part is not true, but I’m not completely sure.

It’s hard to think sometimes about certain things, because I remember having had to believe some quite incredible things to survive a time with my mostly illogical father. As a result, the true relation of cause and effect in life outside of my job (programming, system administration) is at times only coincidental, and what people say cause and effect is takes precedence, even if it’s technically messed up and even if I know it is.

Gods I’m messed up.

And I don’t see my bartender for a while. He has a lot of cases to work with, most of them in jobs like mine.

1. Tom Vassel does awesome board game reviews. He’s reviewing Heroscape in a 5 part series right now. I so love that game.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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The comment is from Jeff VanderMeer, and in it he says:

Yes, the comment is stupid and ignorant. Rather than righteous indignation, though, perhaps you might’ve had patience and engaged with the rest of it, or even contacted Spinrad first and seen what he had to say, started a dialogue and seen where it took you. I guess what I’m saying is I totally understand why, for example, Nnedi would shake with rage, but you’re farther removed from the center of that comment.

Emphasis mine.

This part of Jeff’s very long comment (which had mostly other stuff in it too, apart from this bit that sticks in my mind) was upon Jason Sanford getting so angry, even though he is not black, and thus not directly affected and thus should not be too angry to engage in discourse with Spinrad.

That is… an ignorant paragraph, even though it’s part of a much longer comment full of other stuff. It’s presumptuous even though you’re Jeff VanderMeer. Sorry. I don’t think it’s surprising for Jason Sanford to be so angry that it distracts him. I don’t think it’s surprising at all if anyone has this reaction to Spinrad’s essay, whatever race or culture they’re part of.

<about me>
And yes… I tend to take the lead from the privileged when it comes to “why so angry?” and I should stop doing that.
</about me>

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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• Cheryl Morgan talks about markets and international SF

• Editorial: The Dilemma of the Term “World SF” Redux at the World SF News Blog by Charles Tan — in which he is far kinder than many, but at the same time doesn’t always pull his punches

• Where Is International SF? at the SFWA Blog also by Charles Tan — in which he provides a long list of recommendations for international science fiction that people can really dig into

• N. K. Jemisin dissects a specific point in Spinrad’s essay — and she does not pull her punches.

• Also a comment by Saladin Ahmed about using the downfall of Spinrad to praise other white writers who “really get it” as opposed to, you know, writers from the actual cultures involved.¹

• A Whiff of Colonialism at Publishers Weekly’s Genreville by Rose Fox

And Rose Fox’s post also has a link to Nisi Shawl’s Appropriate Cultural Appropriation, which is light years ahead of anything Spinrad has to say. I wish I had known about it, say, a year ago.

You should really read that instead of Spinrad.

I’m currently popping the Internet popcorn for tomorrow. Sadly popcorn is a bit too expansive for bento boxes. There has been a lot of fuming on Twitter and on comments to currently existing blog responses to Spinrad, and it will almost certainly explode over the next few days.

And, Norman Spinrad?

1. In my opinion, this is like committing a divide-by-zero infinite recursion of fail. It makes no sense and yet is the fail that keeps on failing.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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The Itawamba County school board announced today it would cancel the Itawamba County Agricultural High School prom after a gay student challenged the district on its policy forbidding same-sex dates.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be a teenager’s overreaction, and does indeed appear to be the school board being… I don’t even know. They actually ban same-sex dates over there. It’s actually a school policy. The ACLU is involved.

I am particularly fascinated by this part:

School officials told McMillen last month that she could not bring her sophomore girlfriend to the prom and also told her she could not wear a tuxedo.

(Emphasis mine.)

I wonder what school officials were thinking to accomplish with the ban on tuxedo-wearing gals. Were they thinking, “If we let the gals wear tuxedos, then we’d have to let the boys wear gowns, and that’s wrong!”?

Of course, I remember my prom. There were a lot of things wrong with it, primarily involving my father, but one of the things wrong with it was that I hated gowns. I hated fancy dresses. I hated spaghetti straps and especially the kind of bra you have to wear with a spaghetti strap/shoulder-less dress. I hated pantyhose. I hated heels. I still hate all those, actually.

But you had to wear that kind of ensemble for prom if you were a girl. Back then it didn’t have to be a school policy, it was simply an implied, immutable law of nature: Girls wear dresses, boys wear suits. Girls could wear dresses that were only as long as their upper thighs, and boys could wear suits that burned your retinas, but as long as the clothing was correct gender-wise, that was okay. (Both happened at that prom.)

And that was that.

Things didn’t change for me in college, except that I learned a lot more about the kinds of people I was attracted to (both male and female, which is worrying to someone whose sex education came only from a special field trip made in high school¹), and observe more closely the difference between male and female clothing. Especially when it came to formal wear.

No, I never got involved with anybody; I just made a trip with a guy who needed to get a nice interview suit, and he had money, and needed shopping support.² I was impressed at how sensible men’s clothing tended to be, sizing-wise; actually measured in inches by inseam and outer seam, for instance, whereas with women’s clothing you could define a “size 10″ to mean almost anything.

And while men’s clothing tended to be more or less same-y, there was no pantyhose, and there were quite comfortable shoes. There wasn’t freezing your shoulders off with some paper-thin scarf that did nothing but set off your, your, I don’t know; there were jackets, which you could take off and fling over one shoulder to look cool, or at least attempt to.

And vests. Vests fascinated me for some reason, possibly in ways that bodices fascinate others.

Granted, men’s clothing could be rather over-warm, but there is such a thing as shirt sleeves. And ties, one could definitely do without ties, but there are such things as clip-ons (now, if there was a clip-on that actually looked like a real tie…).

I did not dare mention any of this to my parents. To tell the truth, this was little more than a minute side interest compared with trying to survive my parents’ controlling intentions and abuse.

Perhaps it’s telling that literally two days after I cut off all contact with my parents³ I bought a tux.

Well. Not really a tux. My friends wouldn’t allow me to go into the men’s clothing store. So I got a women’s knockoff, which was one step away from a tuxedo anyways. It didn’t matter that the only color it was available in was shiny powder blue. It was a tux. -ish.

But it didn’t really matter. I never got to wear the tux to any of the functions for professors/students. My friends strongly discouraged it, because it would attract ire from professors, and if you’re trying to hang onto a teaching or research assistantship, you do not want to do that. So I had to get… a short spaghetti strap dress. With pantyhose. And heels. I believe they’re the type of heels that are called “fuck-me heels.”

Eventually I lost the tux, along with a lot of other things. But hell. It wasn’t a real tux anyways.

These days I work for a dot.com, so suits and dresses don’t really matter in any way at all. Everyone is in some variant of a t-shirt and jeans (or kilt). Recently I also discovered that loose skirts are wonderful and I think everyone should try them.

But really… I still want my tux.

1. I know people like certain kinds of traits in other people they’re attracted to. I prefer people who look androgynous, and are as at home in a gown as they are in a tux. Still do, it’s never gotten “fixed.”
2. I love shopping. It’s the gatherer in me. In person. Via catalog. Online. Clothes? Books? Hardware? It doesn’t matter. It’s shopping!
3. And after an exciting weekend of my parents sending me a death threat, then my parents threatening my dorm’s clerk, then my parents showing up on my friends’ doorsteps!

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

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