|
Recent innovations in my quest to learn to play the guitar:
1) I bought a music stand, thus making it feasible for me to be able to see the music I'm working off without craning my neck and exacerbating my pain issues. (Mostly, I practice with a deluxe anthology of Queen songs, because... I love Queen, I have a book of sheet music for guitar, piano and vocals for 60 Queen songs almost all of which I love, and guitar, piano and vocals are the musical skills I want to acquire... although I don't yet have a way to practice piano. At some point I'm likely to acquire a keyboard. And in addition to chord notations, this book has chord diagrams, but doesn't use guitar tab. I have just about no interest in guitar tab.)
2) I gave up on finding my missing shark fin pick, and bought not just a replacement for that one, but - having discovered I prefer the shape - five of them, in the full range of gauges. I also found a little bag to hang on my guitar stand and hold my picks, so I don't keep losing them (or, in fact, having to find where I left them before I can start playing). They're Dunlop Fins, and the nifty thing about Dunlop Fins is that they're colour-coded for thickness - the darker the colour (in shades of grey), the heavier the gauge. White is 0.42mm, black is 1.07mm, with a range in between. Nice.
3) I continue to practice daily, and am gradually becoming accustomed to life without fingernails. If my fingernails grow out pretty much at all, they make it hard to get clean string pressures. (In theory I could let the nails on my right hand grow a little longer, but that would make typing feel weird. It's already been odd adjusting to having steel-string callouses on my left hand...) My chording is becoming surer and faster. I remain reasonably confident I can continue to improve. (Also, my hands are developing automatic associations - if my left hand is in a C position, say, my right hand automatically skips the sixth string on the strum.)
I need a guitar icon.
People are still being Wrong On The Internet, and I will probably post about it soon, but right now, I don't have the spoons, so I'm going to watch humourous videos and practice my guitar.
|
|
I'm going to try to express this with as much clarity as possible, and to break it down as atomically as I can, because this was either inadequate, or people aren't reading it, or any of the other posts I and a zillion other people have been making about this stuff.
Let's see what's cropping up around the net. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) peake: And in fact, as I understand it, Wrede did not 'erase' the Native Americans from her book, she just imagined a world in which their forebears did not cross the land bridge from Siberia, a perfectly legitimate invention since that crossing is one of the great might-have-beens of history
Your understanding, it isn't quite right.
This was, indeed, the justification Wrede employed. Wrede: The current plan is to have the primary difference before 1492 be that the various pre-historic attempts to colonize the Americas were unsuccessful; thus, no Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, Mississippi Valley civilization, or Native Americans of any sort.... The absence of an indiginous population in the Americas is obviously going to have a significant impact on the way things develop during the exploration and colonization period, and I'm still feeling my way through how I'm going to finagle that to get to where I want. '
Which is, basically: A North America in which the threat of Indians was
replaced by the threat of un-extinct megafauna... You'll note that she perceives Indians as a "threat"... but okay, that could be argued as being just a slight miswording, right? So as far as we've established, she is, in fact, looking at a vaguely legitimate alt-history setup. However, this quickly becomes extremely problematic: Wrede: The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel. As I've discussed before, this is unsupportable as alt-history now - it's just bad history. It does not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny. So you can't legitimise Wrede's book as an alt-history explanation. To be acceptable on that basis, it would have to have at least some effort to recognise the historical impact of this kind of change, which it doesn't. The closest Wrede gets to acknowledgement of that is this: Wrede: ...since there won't be any Native Americans to have already done a certain amount of prepping land for human occupation, nor to be exploited later. If you cannot see the flaw in viewing the net effect of thousands of years of inhabiting the land, modifying the environment, and cultivating crops by the indigenous population as "prepping the land for human occupation", there is a serious problem, but I'll try to explain it anyway:
1) Native Americans are, in fact, humans. Therefore they weren't "prepping the land for human occupation", they were improving the conditions of the human occupation already underway.
2) Viewing it as background preparation for the arrival of humans dehumanises the population there, and reinforces the "terra nullius" view that renders acceptable the invasion and occupation of inhabited land, with the attendant attempted genocide upon the people who were already there.
3) By viewing the Indians as a "problem" to be "eliminated" so that she gets to "play with cool megafauna", she is buying into a lot of very nasty assumptions about whether the native populations had a right to exist - or at least, to continue existing once the white people had shown up and made use of what they had done up until that point.
(Anyone else: Feel free to expand upon this in comments, I find it difficult to explain things which, to me, are intuitively obvious.)
If you still think this is a "legitimate" alt-history, please read the post I linked above, wherein I explain in depth why it is historically unsupportable.
As I have said before: I'm not saying it's impossible to write speculative fantasy on these premises - what I'm saying is that you can't do it as background. If you write a people out of existence as background, rather than as the setup for an exploration of how the world is different without their influence, then you're almost guaranteed to be doing it for reasons that are entirely offensive.
Meanwhile, kerravongenius says: However, the general tone remains that it is racist and evil and mean of Patricia C. Wrede to write about an America with no Native Americans but it is fine and good and reasonable to write an America with no European settlers.
Why cannot our dear raceflailers understand that if someone's ethnicity is the deciding factor in how they may be treated, that is racist?
Personally, I think it is the vilest possible insult to suggest that Native Americans cannot grasp the concept of fiction. Don't the raceflailers know that there are Native American authors WRITING fiction?
Raceflailers, accept it, you're all patronising bigots, insulting the very people you pretend to defend. And I regret that I'm writing this sitting on my bed with my laptop on a chair next to it, because I have no desk to slam my head into. *headpillow*
No-one is suggesting that anyone - Native American or otherwise - can't tell the difference between fact and fiction. What we are saying is that the inherent assumptions behind The Thirteenth Child are extremely problematic and predicated on some very skeevy race issues, that the world-building is shoddy and implicitly dismissive of all contributions by natives of the Americas to world and local history, and that these things, in fiction, do in fact need to be challenged, because ideas are meaningful, and words matter.
Are we clear now?
|
|
This is going to have to be posted to my LJ friendslocked, if at all, because my LJ has its trolls who attack me, in part, for being overweight.
So, this afternoon, my brother-out-law (Chas), his fiancee/my BFF (Dean, or ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) velithya) and I went out to run a couple of errands - voting in the referendum (which I would have voted in even if it weren't compulsory, because it's a referendum on an issue I feel fairly strongly about).
(Explanation for non-Western Australians: For the fourth time in the last few decades, our state is holding a referendum on whether or not to adopt Daylight Savings. Western Australia has said no every single time; this time, we were forced to spend three years under daylight savings in an effort to overcome resistance to it. Me? I still hate it.)
Idly: At time of writing, votes are 22.49% counted, with 57.99% going to NO and 42.01% going to YES. Looking at the breakdown by electoral district, there's a massive NO vote in the rural districts. I am unsurprised.
Anyway. After voting (from the above, you can probably guess what my vote was, but since I was voting outside my district, my vote has almost certainly not been counted yet), we swung by uni because I had to do something at the library.
As we crossed from the carpark towards the entrance of the library, a man called my attention.
Not to be too snotty about appearances, but: he had a massive beer gut, slurred as if drunk, and was rather badly groomed. He was carrying a shopping bag of sushi and on the campus of the University, so I hasten to add that the chances that he was impoverished or whatever are actually rather slim.
Also, even if he is, he's a douchebag, because:
Him, to me: I don't want to be offensive, but have you ever been diagnosed with obesity?
Cue yours truly snapping eyes straight forward and walking slightly faster towards the library door. Behind me I could hear the douchebag in question shouting after me, repeating that he didn't mean to give offence, some more comments about obesity as it applies to me, and "is that insulting?" questions, possibly aimed at me, possibly at Chas and Dean, who were telling him to go away and to shut up. (Chas and Dean are both slender.)
The shouts followed me until I entered the library - glad I had passcard access to the staff/disabled entrance, which was nearer, and which automatically locked behind us.
Inside, Chas and Dean tried to comfort me, but my mind was all static - I didn't know how, just at that moment, even to take comfort, because what do you say to that? I know he's an idiot, I know he's not worth caring about, but that shit still hurts like knives in my low self-esteem.
And it wasn't even that bad. I've had worse. Probably every fat person has. But today I was fragile, all raw nerves and mental illness. Today I felt humiliated in front of two people I love - even if I know that both of them love me, that neither of them thinks less of me for being the size I am, that both of them were angry at him, not me, even so - I felt humiliated, in the presence of the two people who are most important to me in all the world.
This post is just to say - he can kiss my fat arse. Because a drunken, beer-raddled douchebag doesn't get to define my day.
|
|
|