The Default State Is Broken

    I made a joke on Twitter a while ago: Do I need to post the Thomas M Comeau Organizing Principles again? https://t.co/QQIrJ9Sd3i — Jerome Comeau says Defund The Police (@Heronymus) July 15, 2021 and it recently came back up because a member of my family got their first union job and was like "every job should be offering these sorts of benefits" and so I went ahead and wrote down what I remember of what my dad told me. My father had many jobs, but his profession was basically a labor union organizer, and he talked a lot about the bedrock foundation items needed to be serious about organizing collective action. Here's what I remember.    The Thomas M. Comeau Principles of Organizing -- a fundamental list for finding and building worker solidarity from 50 years of Union Involvement. This list is not ranked; all of the principles stated herein are coequal in their importance. Numbering is a rhetorical choice, not a valuation. 1) Be good at your job. Even in...

 I'm pretty sure if you spend any sort of time at all on Twitter and/or spend any sort of time playing videogames, you are by now at least aware of the lawsuit brought forth by the State of California's Department of Fair Employment and Housing versus Activision Blizzard, Inc., et al. From this point on, I'll add a Content Warning for folks who are sensitive about sexual assault, suicide, and discrimination based on sex, gender, and skin color, as well as crude humor around and about sexual assault , and what the State of California refers to as "a pervasive 'frat boy' culture" around Act/Bliz, especially in the World of Warcraft-associated departments.   Just reading the complaint is hard rowing, even with the clinical legalese in place. The complaint itself is relatively short; 29 pages laying out ten Causes of Action (basically, "these are the legs on which our lawsuit stands"). I'm not sure I have the vocabulary to properly express how a...

Every so often, there's a movie where I watch it and think, "that was pretty bad", and then time goes by, and I see other people talking about it, and so I watch it again, thinking I was too harsh on it, and after watching it again, I think "not only was that movie bad, it was worse  than I remember". I try very hard not to hate-watch anything, movies or TV or whatever, because that's a waste of time, energy, and emotion. My expectation was that my first reading of this film was overblown, that my reaction to it was as an outsider, someone who didn't know the depth and breadth of the Clark Kent / Kal-El story, and who couldn't appreciate the subtleties or easter eggs or whatever. But in the intervening years, I've read a bunch of DC comics, and many of them Superman comics. And I've come to a conclusion upon rewatching this movie, one that surprised me given the budget, the cast, and the story being told. Rarely has any movie so misunderstood...

So let's get this out of the way first: this movie is bad. I mean, it's bad . And not in the way that most superhero movies are bad, though it is bad in that way too: inconsistent characterizations, lack of understanding of motivations, weirdly-shot fight scenes, dodgy use of CG, etc. I mean, it is bad in all of these ways too, especially the whole thing where they digitally removed a mustache from Henry Cavill, who's honestly doing his best with a bad script and a character he's fundamentally unsuited to play. Gail Godot, in an iconic roll for her, suddenly shoved out of the way to make room for (also fundamentally-miscast) Ben Affleck's the Batman and Cavill's Superman, And Ray Fisher and Ezra Miller trying to introduce characters that honestly deserve their own movies. Jason Momoa's Aquaman got his own movie, but as far as I can tell he's just stepped into this one from a whole different universe and is basically pretending to live in the grim-n-gritt...

Mobster Movies are effectively their own genre. They run the gamut, from comedies like Mickey Blue Eyes to dramas like Miller’s Crossing , but they are almost always about bad people doing bad things in somewhat sympathetic ways. They are also almost always about guys doing guy things with guy people in guy ways; to say that mobster movies are made with testosterone the same way that they are made with film would not be entirely hyperbole. Despite having seen many, many many of these, I’m not exactly a fan of the genre; the films are almost entirely too sexist for me to enjoy even as a satire. Which is one of the reasons I liked The Family so much: the women are strong, intelligent, involved, and agents in their own right.  It’s clear right from the beginning that The Family is about exactly what it says on the tin: a group of people tied together by blood and love and the experience of being alone in the world together, and relying on one another in just the way you do when you...

Money really does buy happiness. Anyone who tells you differently has a vested interest in keeping you poor, unhappy, or both. I know this because I grew up on the ragged edge of poor, and then backed my way into a career in IT, which is where the modern world keeps all the money that isn't in Finance. So I am one of the extreme minority of Generation X that actually had an adulthood that was markedly more financially stable than my parents. And let me tell you: money really does buy happiness. To be clear: at 45 years old, I'm now in a relationship and a period of my life where our household is effectively double-income, no kids. I live in the city, but I own a house, and can only afford to do that because of our combined income. We also have two cars -- one new, one used (though neither of them is getting driven very much these days) -- and we have a small discretionary budget every month for things like videogames, books, and the like. What my brother used to call DAM -- Dic...

"When we look at the ocean, we see that each wave has a beginning and an end. A wave can be compared with other waves, and we can call it more or less beautiful, higher or lower, longer lasting or less long lasting. But if we look more deeply, we see that a wave is made of water. While living the life of a wave, the wave also lives the life of water. It would be sad if the wave did not know that it is water." -- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddah's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation The elevator pitch for this show, according the showrunner and writer Mike Schur, was "dead people read philosophy". Which is a hell of an elevator pitch for a 22-minute, multi-camera network TV sitcom. Then again, Mike Schur also created the US version of the Office, Parks & Rec, and Brooklyn 99, all of which are shows that are smarter than their premises would seem to indicate. So someone somewhere was willing to take a risk on the show, whic...

There is -- I won't say no  trick, but perhaps -- very little trick to introducing the reader to a character and then making us like that character. An author can make it a bit harder for themselves by making the character somewhat disagreeable, at least at the start, but eventually we get to the bits where the character does something good and then we like them. An author can do this in reverse, too: show the reader a character, and them make us not like that character. Arguably, it's slightly easier, because we just see the character being an asshole, and then we don't like them. But there is a positive magic in the trick of taking a character, and making us not like them, and then changing our minds . It's a hell of a trick, too. We're introduced to a character, and then the do something disagreeable or assholish, and then we don't like the character. And then, little by little, the author peels back the layers, and suddenly we understand. The character was l...

My niblings  and I were talking, during our week-long vacation/family reunion together, about the experience of unreliable narrators. This was during our discussion of another book, and of course we talked about Catcher in the Rye , and how when I first read it as a tween I was so taken in by the experience, and how much I loved it, and how as I've grown older I've come to love it less and less. And a big part of that was realizing that every  book that has a narrator, by definition, has an unreliable narrator, because books told from a point of view by necessity take on the position of the person telling us the story (which is different from the author  telling us the story, obviously, but that's what parenthetical disclaimers are for, right?). So the experience of various narrators suddenly turning out to be unreliable is a trope that maybe I've outgrown in my old age. If you're going to be honest with anyone, you can be honest with me, dear narrator. So how ref...

The most amazing thing to me, in a book filled with amazing things, is that McGuire never addresses the title choice of the book, and yet it was perfectly, brilliantly obvious from about a third of the way in. No, I won't spoil it; I'm not an asshole. But it is amazing, and exactly appropriate for the story being told. There are a LOT of things being juggled in this book. Pairs of characters. Solo characters. Histories. Magic. The modern world. Alchemy. The hidden corners everywhere in the world, and some of the people who live there. And the places that exist in the social unconscious, that are there but not there any longer. It's hard to talk about this book without spoiling it, because many of the choices the author makes are so outside the norm of the genre that to give them away is to take away from the ingeniousness of the move itself. But in the same way, I've also read several books that leverage exactly the same tropes and choices in similar ways, to great an...

There's been a lot of discussion recently (well, in my spheres anyway) of whether someone who considers themselves a "fan" of SF/F should or needs to read the "classics" before really understanding the current mise-en-scène of the genre. Setting aside for the nonce what absolute garbage gatekeeping bullshit this is, the definitive answer to that question is answered by Kameron Hurley's Light Brigade , and that answer is "Fuck, no." If you want to, then there's no reason why you shouldn't read Heinlein's Starship Troopers , and then Haldeman's The Forever War , and then Scalzi's Old Man's War before taking on Light Brigade ; but that's optional. Light Brigade is sufficient unto itself as a story and also as an answer to these previous works. As I said before, because we stand on the shoulders of giants does not mean we must worship at their feet, and there's no worship in this book; just a clear grasp of the ideas...

It entirely escaped my memory that, while on my cruise, I finished Elizabeth Bear's new novel, Ancestral Night , and hadn't managed to review it yet, because I spent so much time gushing about it while on the boat. Like, honestly, for a couple of days it was my opening conversational gambit: "Hi! Have you read Ancestral Night ? Yes? Let's talk about it! No? You should read it right now!" So yes, this is going to be a positive review, in case you hadn't guessed. As a fan of Star Trek and Ian Banks' Culture novels, I can absolutely see the underpinnings of the Synarche (and the dark mirror of the Freeporters) present in this novel, which I desperately hope is about to become a series. The main characters in the story are two humans, two cats, a giant preying mantis, and an AI and all of them have hidden fracture-points and surprising secrets that are hidden, sometimes even from the person who's hiding them. And like the best parts of ST and Culture s...

  We drove up to Seattle, because there are no direct flights from Portland to Fort Lauderdale, but there are from Seattle to FLL. Here's the tricky bit: the nonstop Alaska flight from SEA to FLL is a redeye. It arrives at 6AM local time in Florida. Programming note: this was not a great idea. I'm just too old to do redeyes; I can't sleep and I can't go without sleep and this makes me very, very cranky. Our next trip out to Fort Lauderdale will have to be done differently, for sure. The flight had several mechanical difficulties which resulted in us not taking off for more than two hours, including 90 minutes sitting on the tarmac at the gate while they double-checked everything to make sure things weren't going to break. That was actually fine with me; the longer we waited to take off, the later we landed. (I have a whole bit in my talk about Support about five nines and moving parts and the 737 so I'll spare you the repeat and let you watch it yourself he...

I don't know if you've noticed me mentioning it on Twitter, but I'm about to go on vacation. (Yes, that was sarcasm.) On Thursday afternoon, my partner and I are driving up to Seattle to catch a non-stop redeye flight from SeaTac to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We'll land Friday morning, stumble blearily into a taxi, ride to the hotel, and camp in the lobby until they let us check in. Then Saturday morning we'll get up, relax, and around noon we'll head over to the Port of Ft. Lauderdale (which is just fun to say) where we'll board the MS Oosterdam for a 7-day cruise through the Caribbean with 1,934 other nerds for JoCoCruise 2019. My partner and I did this in 2017, and we had a goddamn blast, and this time there's at least two other couples going that we'll know well enough to hang out with, which means we won't spend all of our time holed up with each other. Which is fun, but sometimes it's better to hang out with other people? Anyway, w...

In an introduction to a book once, Neil Gaiman may have written it -- I'm not sure because my google-fu is failing me right now, but that's not the important part -- where the essayist points out that while yes, Moby-Dick is about man's inhumanity and also the relationships that we have with one another and what happens to us in extremis but, most importantly, it is also a book about a whale . The point being made was, of course, that truly excellent books are about  something, but they are also about something . And that's the thing I keep coming back to again and again having read Charlie Jane Anders' The City in the Middle of the Night.  There is a lot of things that this book is about , but it's also a book about first contact on an alien world. And if it didn't work on that fundamental level, it wouldn't work at all. I'm not going to spoil anything, because I'm not an asshole, but I will say this: the tone and voice and flow of this novel ...

In 17 days, I and my partner will be sailing out of Fort Lauderdale on a 7-day Caribbean cruise and I will be entirely unreachable for the better part of 10 days including travel days. When I was an individual contributor, this was fine; I made sure my work was handed off to someone, I made sure my tickets were up to date, and I told my boss I was going, and then I walked away. But now, I  am the boss. There are things, including interfacing with the clients, that no one else on my team is even authorized  to do by dint of corporate policy. Now, this isn't insurmountable; my boss knows I'm going to be unavailable, I'm getting everything lined up and squared away before I leave, and I'll be doing a handoff briefing before I leave. But honestly, I now totally understand why sometimes managers have a tough time stepping away. There's a lot hanging over my head, and I definitely don't want it hanging over my team's head because they already have enough hangi...

I have, as anyone who knows me can tell you, a penchant for reading (devouring, consuming, blazing through) Science Fiction novels. Other people enjoy big thick-brick-of-prose fantasy novels where there's a fight every third page and everyone eats a lot of stew. Some folk like reading about big spaceship battles where there's a lot of lasers and dogfighting and possibly some shooting at people and to be fair, I will often read those novels, too; I'm not trying to say you shouldn't. There's a lot of great work out there and almost all of it is worth reading for someone. But the books I really love, the ones I really sink my teeth into, are what I like to call the Political Manuvering Novels. The PMNs are, on their face, not for everyone. Let's face it, the delicate maneuvering and internal monologues of various characters as they reason their way to a solution (or more often out of a sticky situation) do not, for most people, make a tense and gripping read, nor...

As I said in a tweet the other day, I thought about doing an end-of-year roundup but 2018 has been seventeen years long, so it felt like a lot of work. But really, It's only been 11 and a half months, and that shouldn't be so bad if I stick to the important points. I mean, sure, the world is boiling and the government is a tire fire of garbage and nobody can manage to get things pointed in the right direction, but what about the personal stuff? So that's what you get. Right after New Year I started seriously taking classes for my bachelor's degree. Well, prerequisites for it, anyway; I've been attending classes at Portland Community College with the intention of transferring to Oregon State to finish up, mostly because they both had strong online class options. And boy, did I learn a LOT about myself in that first term. I took CS 120 (Computer Concepts), Math 75 (Remedial Algebra), and English 201 (Shakespeare's Early Plays). It doesn't sound like a lot, b...

I'm not sure how to say what I want to say without saying it wrong. I don't think I have been this excited for a new author's work since I was in the rapid process of discovering and then chewing through the back catalog of C.J. Cherryh, who at that point had just published Foreigner and grabbed me by my whiskers and screamed (metaphorically) "Look! Here is an author whose style of prose and choice of character speaks directly and entirely to you!" Or that moment in my high school years when I stumbled upon Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends and I suddenly knew, with a certainty that has still not yet left me, that I wanted to be a part of the future (and the culture) of technology. And yet that's not fair, because T. Kingfisher, nee Ursula Vernon, is her own writer, her own voice, her own authorial person, and doesn't deserve to be compared to others.   To say that Kingfisher's prose style and choice of genre (which is to say, a ...

A while ago some friends of mine pointed out to me online that they were involved in a kickstarter that was live, so I went to check it out. And it was a kickstarter for a gaming convention in the Bay Area in October, and a whole bunch of people that I cared a bunch about were going to be involved and wanted it to succeed. And I was a bit flush that month, so I said 'fuck it' and I backed the kickstarter and that got me a ticket to BigBadCon 2018. And so I had a ticket, and I made reservations, and bought a plane ticket, and everything was looking up. And then I broke my foot. And now I was mobility-limited. And then my mom died. And I had to go out of town and deal with all of that basically the week before the con, which included taking a bunch of unpaid time off from work. And I thought really seriously about not going, but then I was like: no, there are cool people there that you haven't seen in literal-years. And you've already spent the money. So I said 'fuc...