Miscellany

[sholio]

Thank you to everyone for your input on my island question! I found lots of useful info and I think I have a pretty good handle on which way I want to take the project. I've done a ton of worldbuilding on it over the last few days. This isn't exactly one of the projects that I meant to work on in January, but I'm having fun ...

In other writing-related news, I have a sci-fi short story in the anthology Fierce Family from Crossed Genres, which is out this month.

WTF, nature, WTF. (Here, have some more weird pterosaurs. The one that died from getting a leaf stuck in its jaw, which we know because the leaf fossilized also, is especially cool to me!)

I've been spending more time on Tumblr lately, but I recently put my finger on something that bothers me about Tumblr-style discourse, which is that both the site design and the culture over there are set up to encourage passive-aggressively talking about someone behind their back in a venue where they're basically guaranteed to see it ... know what I mean? There have been a few posts that crossed my dash which were basically "Person A posts something" --> "Person B & C add commentary about what a dumbass A is" ... and even when I basically agreed with the commentary, I was still uncomfortable about it.

I suppose it's not that different from a blog post which links to something, but at least there's a level of separation there, rather than everything showing up as notes and potentially notifications on the original poster's dash. Plus, a lot of the original posters are very obviously quite young -- and yeah, maybe they're being idiots about veganism or cultural appropriation or whatever, but they're also just 15 or 16, and Tumblr is probably their main social circle, so they can't easily walk away if something they posted is getting reblogged across their dash a few dozen times with sarcastic commentary attached.

... I dunno, it's not that I think anything posted publicly is above critique; it's just that Tumblr's reblog-style blend of commentary and interaction -- the lack of easy separability between talking to someone and talking about someone -- seems to encourage a kind of critique that often feels closer to bullying than I'm comfortable with.

Comments

[muccamukk]

Glad the Island project is going well.

I have trouble with tumblr too, because I can't tell the commons from personal space, and I don't think anyone else can either. There's no community/personal journal divide.

You post "I thought XYZ's ABC was cool" to the XYZ tag, and I see it and don't agree, so I reblog adding, "Cool in concept, but the ABC execution didn't work at all," or even, "I'm so tired of all the hype ABC is getting all the hype when CDE did it so much better and didn't have the squiffy gender issues." I'm replying to you, yes, but also entering discussion with the tag, and with everyone on my list. Now, I could make a separate post saying either of those things, and post IT to the tag, where you would in all likelihood see it, but NOW who's talking behind who's back. And if the conversation has been reblogged six times, then are you talking to or about the OP at all?

So for a while I was treating everything like it was the commons, but then people would PM me being upset that I was arguing with their posts, when I wasn't even talking to them! Then I gave up.

Tumblr feelings, I HAVE THEM.

[sholio]

Yeah, that's exactly the problem, really! It's all in the same stream. Saying something to somebody isn't really separable from commenting on what they said, and I think you get this terrible crossed-wires thing going on.

I typically avoid saying anything at all, because when I have something I want to say directly to the person ("Cool picture!") it seems pointless to do it in a reblog because they may not ever see it, but if I have something thinky I want to say, it either doesn't seem worth importing it into my space, or it seems more critical than I want to get in a space that is partly shared with the person I'm criticizing. I mean, maybe it shouldn't matter, but -- it's the idea I want to engage with, not the person, and Tumblr doesn't really give you a good way of making the distinction clear. And people being people, we are social animals and we are going to treat it as social interaction even if it's not meant to be. (I read somewhere that the incredible clumsiness of the social interaction tools on Tumblr are actually by design -- that the site's creator meant for it to be impossible for people to interact with each other to avoid flaming ... but, well, look how that turned out.)

[ambyr]

They had copies of Fierce Families for sale at Arisia--the cover design was really attractive, and I kept picking it up! Unfortunately, the copies there had really bad interior printing, with smudged ink on almost every page, so I decided not to buy it. (Hopefully it's just a problem with whatever box they brought with them, and not the whole print run.) But it looked interesting enough to get in eBook, and knowing you have a story in it makes it even more appealing.

[sholio]

Awww, that's really frustrating to hear about the poor printing job. *vex* It's really great that they had them there, but ... that's sort of the opposite of good PR.

However, I'm delighted you're interested enough to check it out, and I hope you enjoy it! (And I agree about the cover being a nice one -- I was really happy when I saw it!)