KJ

I posted a mini-rant on this subject to Twitter last month, but apparently I decided that wasn't sufficient:

The Tyranny of "Do It Yourself!"

As discussions about representation in media continue to grow and gain traction around the Internets and through different corners of fandom, we start seeing a lot of repetition: the same unhelpful arguments being made again and again. One of the responses I see a lot, and that I find among the most tiresome, boils down to this: "Stop complaining that other people aren't making the media you want, and just do it yourself!"

I first encountered this response in media fandom, as a pushback against people who wanted to see more content for an unusual pairing, and/or more diversity in romantic pairings (more femslash, more pairings involving people of color, etc.). It was frustrating there, but it's even more pervasive in the wider SF/F fandom, and follows many of the same patterns. And although I don't want to say that this is the very worst response to calls for diversity -- there are a lot of contenders for that title -- it's certainly up there.

Check it out!

I would like to have something coherent to say about Google shutting down Google Talk and forcing the functionality into Google Hangouts, but right now all I've got is "Google argh bargle WHY??? [insert profanity here]"

News article about the change, more positive than I'm feeling, but at least it acknowledges my main concern: will Google stop supporting the ability to log in via a client? Because if I can't access Google's chatting function through a client (I use Adium for the most part), it becomes useless to me.

Anyone still on AIM? Any thoughts on Skype as a text-only chat service?

I still need to decide what I'm using instead of Reader, too. Goddammit Google, why are you dismantling my online life? To paraphrase a quote regarding Google's decision to take sharing out of Reader (which happened only a few months before they announced that Reader would be sunset), you aren't going to get me to use Google+ by taking away bits and pieces of the services I use. That's not how this is going down.

I would like to direct your attention to this most excellent rant by madlori about the trope that women are fun killers. I tried to pick a pull quote, but I would have just ended up copying and pasting the whole thing. So go read it. Highly recommended.

The rant was brought on by some of yesterday's Super Bowl ads, which apparently were egregious examples of the trope. I haven't seen these ads, but I can picture them. Why? Because in my 36 years of life, I have seen approximately a million ads just like them: ads (and sitcoms, and movies) based on the concept that women have no purpose except to suck the joy out of men's lives. (And for women, read "wives", because of course, for a man, getting married is the end; it's nothing but drudgery from that day onward.) It all comes back to the idea that women are something men put up with to get sex. There's also the flip-side: women put up with sex, and men generally, for financial stability and for someone else to mow the lawn and take out the garbage. It couldn't be that marriage is ever a partnership of equals, two people who compromise and negotiate and want one another to be happy, oh no. That never happens!

Fortunately, it happens in my house, most of the time. I know I'm lucky that way. I wish society would teach us to hold out for it, rather than perpetuate destructive stereotypes. And this is why media representations matter. As madlori points out:

And it's everywhere. To the point that sometimes I think some actual women act like this because they've been led to expect it, like it's their role in society. As a woman, it saddens me that my gender is saddled with this perception that we're to be tolerated and endured, instead of enjoyed and appreciated.

Yes. This, exactly. I think that's what leads men to assume that women aren't interested in "guy" things (like videogames, and baseball, and comic books, and science fiction, and...), and it's what leads some women to assume that they aren't interested in them, either. It limits us all, and to what purpose?

This is not a good time to be reading library news blogs. Closures, layoffs, unpaid furloughs. Yet another reason to add to the list of why I'm glad I didn't go into the public library sector.

Why, when people need the services a library can provide more than ever, are they the target of the most ferocious budget cuts? I will never understand.

We haven't had a good political rant in awhile...

Check out this Eric Boehlert column on Obama, the press, and "bipartisanship" (quotation marks his):

Virtually all the news accounts are stressing the same story: If there's little or no bipartisan support for Obama's stimulus package, then it's Obama fault, and his fault alone. (No surprise, the media narrative echoes the latest GOP talking point, as dutifully pushed by RNC writers like Peggy Noonan.)

A bit ironic, isn't it? While addressing the issue of bipartisanship (i.e. "involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties") the press holds only one party accountable: the Democrats. Apparently, that's how the press now views the issue of bipartisanship -- it's something Democrats must bring to fruition.

In fact, the press has set up Republicans with perhaps the easiest short-term political victory on record. All the GOP has to do is oppose Obama on the stimulus package, and the Beltway media will proclaim Obama the loser. (Heck, they already have.) Does it get any easier than that? Republicans literally do nothing and then get crowned the winner.

One of the reasons I voted for Obama was his apparently sincere belief in bipartisanship. Most of the time, I don't think anything meaningful gets done in government without some level of compromise, and sometimes the system demands it. But there is such a thing as going too far, and I think we've reached that point, and then some. When Obama and the Congressional Democratic leadership go out of their way to court Republican votes, and are rewarded for their efforts by not receiving a single one, bipartisanship has failed, and it's not the fault of the people who reached out.

All that would be bad enough without the media painting Obama and the Democrats as the obstructionists. That's just the icing on the ever-more-rancid cake. The article has many examples and is highly recommended. Eric Boehlert is rapidly becoming my hero.

So tomorrow is the CA State Supreme Court hearing on the challenges to state marriage law. There's good article from today's SF Chronicle outlining the issues and how various groups have responded to them (thanks to Jed for the link!), and while I've heard most of it before, it brings up yet again an argument against court rulings for marriage equality that makes my blood boil.

Same-sex marriage may someday be legalized in California, [the state's Deputy Attorney General] said, "but such a change should appropriately come from the people rather than the judiciary as long as constitutional rights are protected"

Oh really? And how long do you think it would have been before interracial marriage were legal if we waited for approval to come from "the people"? Or desegregation, or abortion, or any other issue of minority rights? It's an excuse for not doing the right thing. And not even a particularly good one. "The people aren't ready." The people will never be ready, not for any significant social change. Not unless they're dragged forward. And once they get there, they'll see it's not so bad -- Massachusetts seems not to have descended into chaos, after all. But a complacent majority will not take that step on their own. Isn't this what an independent judiciary is supposed to be for???

Unfortunately, the State Supreme Court is packed with Republican nominees, and (as Jerry Brown reminds us in such a classy fashion) subject to popular election, so I have a strong suspicion that this time, we will not have an independent judiciary doing the right thing. But there's always the chance that they'll prove me wrong. The ruling will come 90 days after the hearing, so after tomorrow all there is left to do, is wait.

So I have been thinking a lot lately about videogames, and people's attitudes toward them. This is actually a subject of great interest to me on a number of levels -- as a gamer, as a librarian, as a consumer of media, as an educator at a school that teaches game art and game programming. So it's not like this is a new topic for me, but a number of things have gotten me to thinking about it more specifically. First was madlori's post last month about her unapologetic love of television, then an article that bottle_of_shine sent me about getting boys to read that gratuitously insults games, and last, but definitely not least, an entry on the Annoyed Librarian blog that blasts public libraries that circulate games and sponsor gaming events.

There seems to be a media hierarchy in our society: Books are at the top, followed by movies, then television, then games. So why is that? Why should form matter more than content? Why should a game be inherently inferior? T and I just finished Super Paper Mario this afternoon; it was enjoyable, a challenge, and I had fun playing it. Would the 30 hours we spent playing it been better used reading? What if I'd spent that whole time reading trashy romance novels? Or watching television? That's probably about the amount of time I've spent watching Heroes so far; is that a better intellectual exercise than playing a game? What if I were to tell you that Super Paper Mario had a plot, and a complex backstory that led to some significant character development? I'd hardly call it the Citizen Kane of games* but it wasn't mindless fluff either.

It seems to me that most of the people who dismiss games, and their potential as learning tools and/or quality entertainment, have probably never played. Do they really understand the complexity of a good game, the way it rewards learning how to do a task more efficiently, the depth of story and character that some of them contain? A couple of years ago, Roger Ebert (whom I normally adore) famously dismissed the possibility that video games could ever be an art form:

There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

Leaving aside the question of whether art "requires" authorial control (can't improv theater or interactive multimedia be a type of art?) I think this response hits the problem with that belief on the head: even if the progress of a game can be influenced by reader choices, all the various paths that the game can take were created by an author. Quotes like the above show a fundamental lack of understanding about what games are.

All of this is problematic, but it's the librarian's attitude that drove me over the line to post. She (I assume, the blogger uses a pseudonym) keeps harping on the point that games are "only" entertainment, and that the library's mission is to educate, not entertain. Really? I guess we should get rid of all the novels then. And the music, and the DVDs (except for the documentaries), and all the Internet access except for the scholarly databases. Seriously, in what world is this the mission of the library? Especially a public library. Fiction, in whatever medium is an important part of the life of the mind. That's what the library is about -- the pursuit of all human knowledge, not just the parts that someone somewhere has deemed "educational".

I don't think it's any accident that the hierarchy I listed above orders the media by age (books are older than movies are older than TV is older than games). If Pong is the first videogame, then games have only been part of the popular consciousness since the early 1970s. I wonder how the view of games will change when the people who write cultural criticism -- and write award-winning books for teens, and run libraries -- were not only gamers themselves, but were raised by parents who played videogames. We're approaching that era with television, and already I'm starting to see more people taking TV seriously as an artistic medium. Will games be far behind? It'll be interesting to see.

*Which raised an interesting question: what is the Citizen Kane of videogames? Has it been created yet? Will we look back on the history of games some day and be able to point to some game and say "This game changed everything"?

For the last couple of weeks I'd been meaning to write up my thoughts on LJ's announcement and clarifications regarding exactly what constitutes unacceptable content according to their terms of service. Given the latest developments, I don't know whether to be glad or sorry that I never got around to it.

( Really, really long. )

I'm not saying not to be angry at LJ. I'm pretty irritated myself, especially given that I've stood up for them throughout this mess and now I'm starting to feel like they're going out of their way to prove me wrong. Protest, and leave if you feel you need to, and take whatever measures you need to take to protect yourself. (Although really at this point I wouldn't worry about fic too much -- the obscenity standards for textual materials are much stricter than those for images.) But what if we took all this energy we've built up being upset at LJ and turned it into action to get behind the Electronic Frontier Foundation? What might we be able to do? What if we found a way to make this about something more than "OMG they took away my pr0n!!11!"? This might be our opportunity to become a force for change, not just on LJ, but in the larger world. Something to think about, anyway.

House of Reps passed that bill I was complaining about the other day, the one that would ban all social networking sites from schools and public libraries. By a vote of 410 to 15. Was there even a pretense of an attempt to understand this issue?

This bit of satire expressed my feelings quite nicely.

Gaaaaaah.

Dear Stanford University,

Please stop constructing new buildings on every parking lot on campus. You have more than enough buildings and not nearly enough parking, and the balance continues to get more and more out of whack.

Regards,
A disgruntled driver who was ten minutes late to chorus tonight because she was circling Tressider looking for a parking place

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Dear Cigarette-Smoking Alto,

Smoking is bad for the pipes, but hey, it's your voice and your life, so far be it from us to tell you to stop. But when you smoke your cigarette five minutes before practice, that's just rude. You may be used to breathing the scent of smoke deeply, but the rest of us aren't -- you drove at least one person to go home at the break because her allergies were acting up. We have the no perfume and no smoke policy for a reason. It's three hours out of your life once a week; you can deal.

Best wishes,
The row of altos sitting behind you

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Dear Johannes Brahms,

Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Love,
Me