Books

[Brantly B.]

You never know what a person's values really are unless it involves walking away from a paycheck.

[Thad]

Or, in this case, even if it does.

[Upthorn]

I think there might be more to the Chappelle situation than your garden-variety ignorance of trans issues. I think there might actually be some jealousy/resentment in black American communities about the relatively positive public perception of the trans rights movement compared to the black rights movement.

A few years back, I was watching an episode of the show Atlanta (written and directed by Childish Gambino), and there was a talk show where a man came on and announced he was trans-racial. He may look like a poor young 20-something black man, but he identifies as a middle-aged middle-class white man. The rest of the episode, was taken up in discussions of whether or not this trans-racial man was being brave or ridiculous.

And while there's definitely a huge failure here to recognize the amount of oppression that trans people face both before after their transitions, I think there is a kernel of something real here. If someone born in a body that society would typically identify as female announces that they're really a man and need people to treat them as male from this point forward, there is a large political sphere of people who will fundamentally respect and support that decision. But if a person born in a body that society typically labels as black announced that he's actually white and needs to be treated as a white man from this point forward, many of those same people will balk and call it completely ridiculous.

There are actually functional reasons for the difference in response, but they aren't immediately obvious. I can think of a few, but I think it's worth with-holding them as a practical demonstration of their obscurity. That, plus... I'm neither trans nor black, so I'm really uncertain as to how accurate my views on this matter are, or whether I'm simply rationalizing the opinions that I already hold, instead of doing the hard work of changing them.

Edit: And also, regardless of how valid these comparisons or complaints may be, obviously the problem is not trans people, but the difference in the way people who are neither trans nor black treat the two issues. Just as (to the extent it's even a real issue) "immigrants taking up all the jobs" is not actually the fault of immigrants, but of the hiring managers in charge of those positions, but jealousy tends to be directed at the perceived beneficiaries of the perceived unfairness, rather than the perpetrators.

[mharr]

As you allude, it's probably a good idea to listen to some people who are both trans and black on that score. I suspect they'd find it wildly unhelpful on both fronts. Nothing is more useful to the powers that be than marginalised groups spending energy fighting against each others' causes.

[KingRoyal]

Honestly Dave being a TERF seems inline with his low-key dislike of women, honestly.

[Thad]

Yeah, that too. I saw somebody comment the other day that Dave's not even a TERF, he's just TE.

[KingRoyal]

Also a casual search of his remarks on trans people keeps bringing up jokes and controversies on the topic going back at least a decade. This is enough of a pattern that Dave is, probably, honestly telling us who he is

[Thad]

Yeah, I wasn't kidding with that "latest entry in his series of transphobic standup specials" part. It's been a consistent feature of his act since he reappeared.

[mharr]

Tiring and upsetting to watch the latest generation of 'progressive' stand-ups circling the wagons just because he's of their tribe. Lewis Spears' position appears to be that this is a black vs. trans fight so the latter can be dismissed because they're a smaller minority. I look forward to Atlas Shrugged appearing on his background wall.

[Thad]

I liked Redshirts a lot and I think what I liked best about it was Scalzi's willingness not just to acknowledge its obvious influences and similarities to other works but to actually integrate them into the story and have the characters make decisions based on them.

Like, I didn't expect him to mention Star Trek by name at all, but he has the confidence not just to do that but to have a character point out that hey, this plot is kind of similar to Stranger than Fiction, and another character think about that and what it means and come up with a plan based on the existence of other works of fiction with similar tropes.

It even ends with the main character sussing out that he's the main character, because really, none of this actually makes sense if he's really a redshirt. Because he's spent the whole book teasing out narrative tropes, he realizes that the "real world" he's just been to can't be real either, it's just another fictional construct. Which of course it is. It's not quite the Animal Man "I see you!" scene, but it's pretty close in terms of Scalzi's willingness to go full meta.

As far as Star Trek deconstructions, it doesn't beat Galaxy Quest, but really, what does? It's still pretty damn good.

And better than a lot of actual Star Trek, though that's not exactly a difficult feat. I'd say "especially with the ones we've got today," but really, Redshirts reminds us that when you come right down to it, a lot of TOS was pretty bad.

[zaratustra]

a friend just released a book, it's available on kindle now and paper in a couple days

https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09SVVVXK ... TF8&btkr=1

[Mongrel]

The Mysteries - By Bill Watterson, Illustrated by John Kascht

From Bill Watterson, bestselling creator of the beloved comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, and John Kascht, one of America’s most renowned caricaturists, comes a mysterious and beautifully illustrated fable about what lies beyond human understanding.

In a fable for grown-ups by cartoonist Bill Watterson, a long-ago kingdom is afflicted with unexplainable calamities. Hoping to end the torment, the king dispatches his knights to discover the source of the mysterious events. Years later, a single battered knight returns.

For the book's illustrations, Watterson and caricaturist John Kascht worked together for several years in unusually close collaboration. Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate—a mysterious process in its own right.

[Thad]

Gamemaster Classified is out and I'm enjoying it but the decision for Phillips to write parts of it as if he's writing them in 1982 or whenever is distracting.

There's this cognitive dissonance when, for example, he talks about what a great innovation the D-pad in the Donkey Kong Game & Watch is as if he's writing it when it's brand new, and it's like "Howard, I know you're writing this in 2021 and you are talking about the D-pad because you are retroactively aware of how significant a design it is, and also nobody called it a D-pad until like the mid-1990s."

I like his recollections just fine, it's just, you can use the past tense, dude. It's okay.

[Thad]

Humble's got an audiobook bundle on that includes all the Murderbot Diaries books to date at the $20 tier. I keep hearing good things about them and I'd definitely grab this if it were an ebook bundle, but I really don't listen to many audiobooks.

OTOH, I'm currently in a brief window where I'm spending about an hour a day driving, for the first time since I stopped commuting to work, so if I were going to run through some audiobooks now would be the time to do it.

I went ahead and grabbed the bundle and listened to the first Murderbot novella, All Systems Red, and it was good! It was less of a comedy than I expected from something called The Murderbot Diaries. It's not that there aren't comedic elements -- on a fundamental level it's a workplace satire -- but it's played surprisingly straight.

Murderbot is a truly relatable hero: he doesn't like being around people, he just wants to be left alone and watch TV, but he also doesn't want to call attention to himself so he spends his days doing his job well enough not to stand out.

All Systems Red is a solid first outing that doesn't overstay its welcome. It introduces Murderbot, hints at a larger universe and a tragic backstory, gives him a supporting cast, and a mystery -- the first question of which is, "Is this the result of deliberate sabotage, or just a company cutting costs on safety protocols?" Either way, the villain is capitalism. (Also, it's the result of deliberate sabotage. Obviously. That's just a better story.) I quite liked it and will eventually get around to the others!

[Thad]

I got Carrier Wave, by Robert Brockway, in the same bundle, and decided to check it out because I like Robert Brockway, and hoo boy do I have very mixed feelings about it!

tl;dr I was really impressed by it but tapped out halfway through track 6 because the graphic violence was too much for me.

Formally and narratively, this is good shit. It's a short story cycle, at least so far as I got, with each chapter comprising a self-contained story but all of them interconnecting; every story has a beginning, middle, and end, and mostly its own cast of characters (though some recur from one to the next), but they build on each other and develop a progressive narrative. That is a complicated damn thing to pull off satisfyingly, and Brockway does it.

But.

It's a story about a rage virus (more or less; I'm simplifying) and I've got a pretty strong stomach but I've got my limits, and a few chapters of graphic descriptions of limbs getting torn off and throats getting ripped out were enough to hit them. At a certain point it got to the weird "scalpel" and I was like "Nah, I'm good" (pretty sure I actually said that out loud) and turned it off, and as curious as I am to see how the story plays out, on balance I do not need 30 more tracks of this.

So, a qualified recommendation. At least, based on the first few chapters; I can't say for certain that it maintains that level of quality throughout, but the first few chapters are strong. Just, y'know, too graphic for my tastes. If you like horror and don't mind graphic violence, maybe check it out?

[Thad]

Gamemaster Classified is out and I'm enjoying it but the decision for Phillips to write parts of it as if he's writing them in 1982 or whenever is distracting.

There's this cognitive dissonance when, for example, he talks about what a great innovation the D-pad in the Donkey Kong Game & Watch is as if he's writing it when it's brand new, and it's like "Howard, I know you're writing this in 2021 and you are talking about the D-pad because you are retroactively aware of how significant a design it is, and also nobody called it a D-pad until like the mid-1990s."

I like his recollections just fine, it's just, you can use the past tense, dude. It's okay.

I read through it a few bits at a time and finally finished it.

Gamemaster Classified does wind up having a narrative arc, and it's a familiar one: the transformation of a company from a small, scrappy underdog to an international market player, and how that feels for a guy who's there in the beginning. It's not really a surprise why Phillips ultimately left Nintendo: it wasn't the same job anymore; he was being handed talking points by a marketing department instead of speaking off the cuff.

It's funny how little the book actually talks about his time at Nintendo Power given how its entire format and layout is based on NP.

Anyway, not a lot of new information, ultimately, but as a firsthand account of the Golden Age of Nintendo of America (from Donkey Kong up until right before the US launch of the SNES), from a guy who went from working in the warehouse to being the public face of the company, it's a unique perspective even if it's a familiar story.

[Thad]

Got my copy of 42: The Wildly Improbable Ideas of Douglas Adams in the mail the other day and hell's bells, it is a doorstop. I haven't done much more than thumb through it, but it's already clear that it's pretty special. It's more than 300 pages of Adams's personal effects and comments on same; editor Kevin Jon Davies calls it "less a biography than it is a collection of precious artefacts", and I can see he's made good choices in what to include and how to present it.

[KingRoyal]

Humble has a bunch of Pratchett's Discworld books in a bundle for $18

[Thad]

Adobe DRM.

That's pretty disappointing. I'm not sure I ever saw a Humble book bundle that wasn't DRM-free.

[KingRoyal]

I believe Calibre can be used to break such DRM