whispersmith

[whispersmith]

I'm getting so sick of major female characters in historical media being incredibly feisty, outspoken and public defenders of women's rights with little to no realistic repercussions. Yes it feels like pandering, yes it's unrealistic and takes me out of the story, yes the dialogue almost always rings false - but beyond all that I think it does such a disservice to the women who lived during those periods. I'm not embarrassed of the women in history who didn't use every chance they had to Stick It To The Man. I'm not ashamed of women who were resigned to or enjoyed their lot in life. They weren't letting the side down by not having and representing modern gender ideals. It says a lot about how you view average ordinary women if the idea of one of your main characters behaving like one makes them seem lame and uninteresting to you.

[whispersmith]

not to sound like a high school english teacher, but i actually think it's really interesting looking into authors backgrounds and seeing how their past has influenced their storytelling, especially as a scifi/fantasy reader. like, it makes so much sense that leguin was an anthropologist and arkady martine has a doctorate in comparative history and seth dickinson did research on racial bias in policing. just look at what they made!!

[whispersmith]

Hello! Do you think your conception of magic in YW is influenced at all by computer code? Between High Wizardry and some of the website admin stuff you discuss here, I'm guessing you've coded at least a little.

I'm an actor-turned-librarian who's cobbled together a little bit of coding competency through goofing off. The other day I tried to explain how I conceptualize a coding project and, well, first you need to figure out something's name -- and make sure you're properly specific for the context, you may need a lot of detail in how you name it -- and then you can start figuring out how to persuade it to do what you want ....

So I guess it's sort of a chicken-and-egg question: have I conceptualized coding in the image of my favorite fictional magic systems, or have I been generally drawn to magic systems with a sort of code-y, process-y inspiration?

I wouldn't like to second-guess your in-brain structure. But I can talk about my historical processes a bit, as they may apply to this.

Let me step back a bit. Before I was a writer, I was a nurse. Before I was a nurse, I was studying to be an astrophysicist. Both of these arts/sciences require a certain sense of the hard structure of the universe—of the ways it requires you to put bits of it together if you're going to get anything useful done. This general outlook has determined, to a certain extent, how I interact with the nuts and bolts of the online world.

Historically speaking: I'm one of an unusual stratum of computer users who were technologically orphaned by the failure of the Osborne computer in the mid-1980s. Those of us who had these machines, and who were at all techie-oriented, quickly became WAY more so in an attempt to keep our Osbornes running after the company went under. We learned how to keep our babies going without any available support, and when we moved on to other machines, we quickly became expert in fixing them... having learned the bitter lesson that when your computer fails, most of the time you're the only one you're going to be able to rely on to keep them going.

We learned to do things for ourselves, from the bottom up: hardware to programming. That mindset has remained with me from then until now.

After my Osborne, I moved from an early Apple (lent by our old friend Michael Reaves) to various early DOS/TRS machines when I moved over to this side of the Atlantic. I wrote STAR TREK: THE KOBAYASHI ALTERNATIVE on a TRS-80 Model 100, gods bless its gentle hardworking heart. (I can still see in my mind the pale, pine-panelled interior of the ancient creaky London hotel, just south of Notting Hill Gate Tube, where I did most of the Trek work while I was in town on other business. I'd hooked the computer's modem to the hotel's phone system with alligator clips.) While Peter and I were later sorting out where we'd live on this side of things, for a long time—before portable computers, except for the TRS—the big machines lived in the boot of the Volvo while we migrated from place to place. And always the alligator clips were there.

Finally we settled in Ireland, and not too long after us, so did the Internet. (But not before I had to go up to Dublin one time, with the alligator clips again FFS!, and show the adorably clueless national telephone company guys how to hook up/in. ...I never pass that building without thinking of it: once Telecom Eireann, then Eircom, then Eir. Now it's a Starbucks. No matter. I remember where to hook the alligator clips in.)

And then, with the internet, lo, there came the (net-oriented) coding. Our first household web site went online in 1995. I handcoded our site's HTML (Because what's a girl to do: wait for the techbois to make it accessible or affordable? Bwahahahaha). I continued to do that until the early 2000s, at which point I moved our sites to Drupal and learned its obscure ways. These days—having decided that Updating Damn Drupal Core Every Week is not what my mom raised me for—I've migrated all our household sites to WordPress, and I like it. I still pay a lot of attention to them, but at least I don't have to custom-code every whole damn page. I'm happy enough to let Elementor do that, while inserting occasional custom CSS, because (a) I have writing to do, ad (b) Life Is Too Short.

(I also used to hand-build our household computers, because (a) money was short and (b) why not know exactly what all your hardware is? But more recently I've started letting Scan in the UK do that. It's another Life Is Too Short thing... and Scan does good work. Lovely tight builds, and good customer service when needed.)

So: yeah, I code. :) Summing up: I'm fluent in HTML. I'm nearly as fluent in CSS. I have enough PHP to be dangerous (to myself as well as others). I have memories of C that I can dredge up when necessary. I generated most of the Rihannsu language in MS-BASIC, gods bless it. ...And beyond that (as we say around here), deponent saith not. :)

[whispersmith]

#star wars #ahsoka tano #darth vader

[whispersmith]

more seriously, the stories are well crafted, but like *obviously* they’re well crafted? the raptor story is critical. gonna read kij johnson’s chicken vs raptor story in celebration later probably

Anne Leckie’s short story collection is splendid. There’s one about raptors going to Mars

#I have a raptor story I could rework.

[whispersmith]

Anne Leckie’s short story collection is splendid. There’s one about raptors going to Mars

#lake of souls

[whispersmith]

#star wars #the high republic

[whispersmith]

Star Wars wallpaper sample (1977)

#star wars

[whispersmith]

that sand movie

#dune

[whispersmith]

And thus began the greatest inside/running joke in the galaxy

#star wars

[whispersmith]

Did you know

That the GOVERNMENT

Is just a bunch of humans.

[whispersmith]

Harrison Ford hating playing Han Solo made him better at playing Han Solo because Han Solo did not want to be there doing those things either.

#star wars

[whispersmith]

Dystopian setting: in the far future, humans have traveled the Galaxy and made peaceful contact with dozens of other sapient species -- but not one of them, in any aspect of their culture or biology, makes a good allegory for an identity group found in early 21st century American society.

[whispersmith]

“I, too, feel the need to reread the books I have already read,“ a third reader says, “but at every rereading I seem to be reading a new book, for the first time. Is it I who keep changing and seeing new things of which I was not previously aware? Or is reading a construction that assumes form, assembling a great number of variables, and therefore something that cannot be repeated twice according to the same pattern? Every time I seek to relive the emotion of a previous reading, I experience different and unexpected impressions, and do not find again those of before. At certain moments it seems to me that between one reading and the next there is a progression: in the sense, for example, of penetrating further into the spirit of the text, or of increasing my critical detachment. At other moments, on the contrary, I seem to retain the memory of the readings of a single book one next to another, enthusiastic or cold or hostile, scattered in time without a perspective, without a thread that ties them together. The conclusion I have reached is that reading is an operation without object; or that its true object is itself. The book is an accessory aid, or even a pretext.”

— Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler

[whispersmith]

Obsessed with this bit in the preface to the 10th Anniversary edition of Ancillary Justice:

Specifics aside, "I thought this would be fun and relaxing. It was not." is a great summation of what happens with like 80% of creative endeavors.

[whispersmith]

My ideal murderbot tv series would need 5 screens to watch. I want 7 different inputs playing at all times. You only see murderbot in reflections of its own video feed. I want Sanctuary Moon playing in the background 60% of the time there's always a performance reliability measure in the corner. There's 30 input feeds from its bots. Yeah murderbot is talking to Ratthi but also a really juicy part of Sanctuary moon is playing at the same time.

[whispersmith]

Hey anybody going to talk about rescued sacrificial maidens. Like yes a guy with a fuck off sword turned up and so you're not getting fed to the dragon/water creature/mountain spirit/vague embodiment of all things scary and you get to go back home, but is that really home? Your mom hugs you and your dad says he's so happy you're alive and you know that when they said they'll do anything to keep you safe they didn't really mean it. They have a feast prepared and you get to taste what they cooked for your funeral, help wash the dishes after. And it's selfish to think that between the whole village with everyone in it and you they wouldn't pick the lesser evil but it still leaves an emptiness in your chest, knowing exactly how much your life is worth. And the neighbors smile at you awkwardly and the neighbors' kids yell "hey! I thought you died!" because they don't know not to do that yet and maybe you did. Maybe you did.

And the hero with the fuck-off sword rode off into the sunset the way they always do but you're still here and you herd the cows by the cliff where you were tied up in your cleanest clothes waiting to not be alive anymore and sometimes you think that would be easier and when you don't come back one day, you can imagine it's a relief for everyone involved. Maybe you'll be the new thing to haunt the mountain, or maybe you'll follow down the road and listen for cries that sound like yours did. Either way, there's little left to fear. You know exactly how much your life is worth.

#csorwe