The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by G. Jules:

PJ Evans: I may be one of those people, depending on what your definition of "slowly" is. I sometimes drive with my emergency lights on, when it's heavy traffic and it isn't practical to get into another lane and the person in front of me is one of the idiots who thinks the safest way to deal with Boston traffic is to drive under the speed limit and hope all those other cars go away. (Memo to idiots: It's not.)

Re: Mulletworld: Having everyone in mullets would be cool, but giving the mullet some kind of plot significance would be even cooler. Like, the quality of your mullet -- its adherence to some platonic ideal of mullet-ness -- determines how many super-cool powers you get. Meaning, of course, that the villain would be doing research into the ideal mullet, and the heroes would have to break into his heavily guarded fortress to try to steal the secret -- and of course they'd get caught, and the villain would shave their heads. But then the hero would be able to access his magical mullet-powers anyway to save the day, because the true platonic mullet is a state of mind -- a state of being -- a sort of innner mullet-ness that can be imitated, but never matched.

Wow, did that comment not go where I thought it was going. Right. Teatime.

Has anyone heard the latest "Bud Light Presents: Real Men of Genius" spot on the radio? The honoree is Mr. Really Loud Cell Phone Talker Guy. "Because nothing screams I'm important! like a man screaming 'I'm Important!' into his cell phone." (I don't drink beer, but I really love those Bud Light ads.)

Behavior and social norms change around technology. Cell phones don't just communicate with the person you're talking to; how you use them also communicates things to the people around you. "I'm busy and important" is the most common message, but it can also say "Please leave me alone," or "I am so interested in what you are saying that I am texting a friend about it, and thereby including you in my social network," or "I may be utterly lost, but I have people right here, on the other end of this line, and if I disappear in this sketchy neighborhood you're getting yours, buster."

I find people who communicate that they're busy and important by talking loudly into their cell phones really, really annoying... but I also find them annoying when they communicate the same message by talking really loudly to their compatriots, or by complaining really loudly to the flight attendant about a ten-minute flight delay (no, really, they do that). The cell phone is just a tool that makes the behavior easier to engage in. (Confession time: if I'm trapped at an airport, and it's been a long day, and there isn't anyone else in immediate voice radius and a Mr. Really Loud Cell Phone Talker Guy is getting on my nerves, I will engage in retaliatory Really Loud Cell Phone Talking. Thus far none of them has gotten the point.)

"Dandy," drawled Daryl dryly.

And I just realized that I should clarify that I'm not in any way questioning the validity of copyright or trademark. What I'm questioning is the use of the dilution argument to say fanfic hurts authors (aesthetically and, through the aesthetic effects, monetarily), because I'm not convinced one way or the other. (The trademark stuff snuck in there because of the mention of trademark dilution as roughly the same concept.)

(IANAL. But I know enough of them to use disclaimers!)

If I'm grasping the wiki'd discussion of (trademark) dilution correctly, the application is to some existing mark -- eg, let's say Mary Sue's trademarked VioletEye Plot Twister Juice -- to a product in some other area of commerce --eg, Ravyn Darkflayme starts selling VioletEye eye dye. Under other parts of trademark law, this would be fine and dandy, because there's no way the average consumer would confuse Plot Twister Juice with eye dye. But with dilution coming into play, Mary Sue gets to say Ravyn is totally coming on to her mark, the bitch, because VioletEye being associated with some skank ho's eye dye is totally going to bring down the perceived classiness of her VioletEye mark.

Is that more-or-less correct, or is my understanding of this somehow misleading? Because if I *am* getting this concept, I'm very confused by its application to fanfic. Is the argument that Mary Sue's classy original novel Torn in Love's Throbbing Arms is getting somehow blurred together in the reading public's mind with the TiLTA fanfic that Ravyn posted at the Pit of Voles? I mean, if Ravyn were commercially publishing it, it'd be a whole 'nother pit of throbbing love-weasels. But I'm really wondering how it'd be possible to prove that fanfic published online is causing damage to Mary Sue's career. I'm not convinced that people are likely to blur unpublished fanfic with published novels, and I'm not convinced that the fanfic has a demonstrably negative net effect. I'm only one datapoint, but fanart and fanfic got me to shell out for Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica on DVD.

Aesthetics: For those who don't believe fanfic can be good, I refer you to A J Hall's LOPiverse, which I was introduced to by the Namarie Sue post on this very blog. (Especially Relly.)

How did I miss hearing about this fistfight at the Witching Hour?

I think Michael's getting at an aspect of something I've been trying to wrap my head around for a long time now, something I've been having a hard time describing.

(Context: I grew up in a town of 420. I now live in a major city, but spend a great deal of time travelling, including trips to rural areas and lots of red states.)

Not being an outsider -- growing up as someone who belongs in a small community -- gives you certain protections. It's not a matter of being uneducated; it's a matter of not seeing the need to develop, say, external support systems that kick in when an extended family or church support system cannot. If you've always had your church or your family as a support network, it's harder to grasp that some people don't have access to that, and that the government program you don't want to fund may well be the only thing they have going for them.

(Yes, blue states contribute more to programs like these than they take out -- I know that. But that's not the perception.)

Similarly, there's a security to be found in obscurity. People who live in NYC have a completely different perspective on terrorism than people who live in, say, rural Indiana. Someone who lives in rural Indiana is much less likely to have been immediately impacted by terrorism, and is therefore less likely to have a context to place it in. I would argue that they experience the fear of terrorism in a different way. People like to point to the red state/blue state divide on opinions about terrorism, but I suspect there's more going on there than the red state/blue state thing.

One of the more frightening coversations I've ever heard was one I eavesdropped on in a Thai restaurant in rural Texas right before the 2004 election. The best bit was when one of the women explained that she was voting for Bush because the terrorists already knew that Bush would be upset if they attacked, whereas the terrorists really couldn't be sure about Kerry. Therefore, if Kerry was elected, the terrorists would be forced to attack again to find out how Kerry would react to it.

(No, really. I couldn't make that up.)

Quoted from Bill Blum, from the weblog of Theresa Nielsen Hayden, written 6/4/04, cited 6/4/04 (full citation available upon request): "Most professors were fairly savvy about it: you never just handed in a final draft at my school, you had to hand in all your rough drafts (general rule of thumb: they looked for TWO drafts)"

Ahhhh. Suddenly this policy makes so much more sense... I always hated handing in multiple drafts at the end, since if I really wanted to hand in a lousy version of something without getting advice, I'd just leave it there and get some sleep. Editing for me rarely breaks down into discrete drafts; I usually just change a few annoying things each day until the deadline. I've been known to retroengineer a rough draft from my final version. I've also been known to write/engineer a draft paper for an (intro) writing class specifically to see if I could get it chosen as one of those to be workshopped: just the right number of problems, readily apparent, nice and easy to fix, but not such that they strained credibility. (It worked, which I probably should be embarassed about.)

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