bloggable bits

[rax]

Random things:

• This morning Krinn convinced me not to write a mail client with the most effective threat I have ever had made to me. (Recently our office mail server upgraded, and while in theory getting new webmail and access to Apple Mail and Outlook 2012 should make things better, each of those three clients has some critical flaw I can't chase down that makes me have to run a minimum of two of them at all times. I now understand why people write mail clients.) She said: "If you try to write a mail client, all of your Shaymins will stop smiling." I think I actually gasped. The image is SO SAD. Good work, Krinn. <3
• I dreamt last night about being part of a band that did abstract process-as-performance shows where we dragged beanbag chairs on stage and had shitty rehearsals at various venues. It was awesome. I think the other members of the band were punk kids from our Pokemon league and from Albuquerque's. If no one has done this schtick yet, someone should. *finger on nose*
• rushthatspeaks 's blog (and in particular this book review) got me thinking about generation ships --- which, if I understand correctly, are giant spaeships meant to serve as a habitat for many generations of human as they go off to colonize some new planet. I mean, I have never actually read a book or really consumed any media that used generation ships, because I'm a very sporadic consumer of science fiction, but the idea in and of itself makes sense and has some plausibility benefits over AND THEN THEY WOKE UP FROM CRYOSTASIS ON "EARTH, BUT WITH CAT PEOPLE" or what have you. What it did get me thinking about was Lyotard's essay "Can Thought Go On Without A Body?," which I am pretty sure is in The Inhuman. He talks about the difficulty of producing machines capable of thought, with the idea of sending them outside of the sphere of influence of the sun so that  thought will persist after the sun explodes/implodes/whatever. The reason he thinks it wouldn't work is that machines don't have gender --- that is, some difference between some fo them that has an almost religious inscrutability and implies the imbrication of the other with the self. Or something, I'm butchering his argument. The point is, if I take that argument at face value, I actually think generation ships could be the cure for gender, if that inscrutable difference as expressed in the people on the generation ship was the difference between the people who did and didn't stay on Earth. Maybe? I dunno. Been chewing on it, figured I'd share. (Also: Does gender need a cure? "Curing gender" is not unproblematic, but boy are there some interesting thought experiments and maybe stories in here. Haha. "Boy." GENDER WHY)
• It turns out I can make fairly spicy lentil curry by just milling good black pepper into it until my arms are tired and then asking someone else to do the same. :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D I have been trying and failing to make reasonable curry since losing nightshades from my diet, and apparently the trick was to start from an Ethiopian recipe and modify, rather than starting from an Indian one? Once I've got it at "I know what I'm doing" I will post a recipe or something.
• I hate to do anything that even comes off as complaining about weather when I know a number of my friends are still stuck under snowdrifts, but on Sunday Rik and I walked for five miles or so and it was cold enough with the wind that my legs were covered in hives. Stupid cold allergy, and arguably, stupid me for walking five miles in shorts in February. It seems mostly better although my calves are still itchy as all get out, and while this is mostly not a huge deal I scratch in my sleep. :( I think as fashion disastery as this is, the best solution I have without spending money might be shorts, leg warmers, and sandals. ... ... ... how does one go about selecting good hiking pants? I don't know how to garment.
• There's still a long-form life update email... coming... soon... ish? Hope y'all are doing well!

Comments

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

Dust, by Elizabeth Bear, is about a generation ship that sort of got lost, so it turns into a fantasy story. Recommended, with warnings for incest and a frustrating ending. I think I remember it engaging a bit with notions of gender and identity differentiation. (I feel like race/caste has had some association with trumping gendered sorting in the past, but always in otherwise-problematic ways that seem to make things worse and leave the gender differentiation of the hegemonic un-questioned, but that shouldn't discourage future explorations of alternative non-gender differentiation schemes.)

Good hiking pants are soft enough not to chafe and sturdy enough not to fall apart. Softer cargo pants are classic, as is long-underwear-under-other-pants, so the pants rub against the leggings instead of one's legs.

[rax.livejournal.com]

Love the icon. :)

I've had both strong recommendations and strong anti-recommendations for Elizabeth Bear. I will probably try something of hers eventually but it's always weird to approach a book with both of those? Thanks for the suggestion.

Long underwear under other pants would probably not work even in desert winter, although maybe there exists nice long underwear that is not like the kind I wore and hated when young. I might just go to, gasp, a hiking store and be like "yo I need pants" and see what happens.

[sylvanstargazer.livejournal.com]

Clearly, I know nothing about the specific recommendations you've encountered, so this isn't targeted at anyone in particular. I just overthink things sometimes.

Her early work is super-uneven (she has, for example, an Avatar-eque novel about fish-people and a classic second-wave-ish matriarchy novel, which I think only reads as a critique of that essentialism if you are familiar with the original 1980's genre of gloriously-bad matriarchy novels and even then is not particularly good, because it is still in the style of bad 1980's SF writing.) I suspect that if I didn't have the cultural context I do her prose would flow less smoothly since it at times relies on mythology, queer/poly/feminism references or quasi-academic language. She doesn't explain what is going on when she uses them, so, for example, I knew someone who wasn't used to hearing about multiple boyfriends for one person who ended up confused about why one guy was being referred to by two different names and seemed to teleport.
Then there was the racism disaster centered on her, so she is now known in some of my circles as "that RaceFail author". It didn't change how I read her books, for reasons omitted because it got long. I can respect people who choose not to read her because of that, though my perspective is different. I do think she, as an author, has become overdetermined in a way that can rapidly lead to that weird place of recommendations/anti-recommendations depending on the context in which one first encountered her work.

The classic hiker-specific long underwear is often made out of silk, which makes it slightly less irritating than traditional stuff but also more expensive. If you go to a hiking store they probably have fancier pants now made out of spacesuit material or something.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I really liked Undertow -- it's one of my favorite books of hers, actually. (Although I say that about, like, half of her books I've read.) I'm not sure I'd call it Avatar-esque, or at least I didn't get such a "what we need is a honky" vibe from it.

A big part of what I like about Bear's writing, in Undertow and Dust in particular, is the way she writes technology, and technology as a part of people's bodies -- which I think is germane to the discussion.

"Overdetermined" is a good way to describe people's reaction. I'm sad about it, because she's an extremely important author for me, and her work is problematic in its own ways, surely, but I think less in the ways than that association would suggest.

[sprrwhwk.livejournal.com]

I'll second the recommendation for Elizabeth Bear, and for Dust in particular if the interaction of gender and generation ships is of interest to you. (ISTR badoingdoing enjoyed them as well -- "They have a character like me in them!")

Without trying to apologize for or diminish the mistakes Bear has made, or for the blind spots that she has, I see her trying so damn hard to get stuff -- especially around gender and sexuality -- right. She succeeds much more often than not, for me at least, and I have learned more from her failures than from the vast majority of successes. I can't help but give her credit for that. (With the disclaimer that she's my favorite living SF writer, now a mentor, and... kind of a personal friend? So I'm not exactly unbiased.)

Modern long underwear is nothing like the nasty old waffle-weave stuff. It's silky-soft polypro; it's really nice.