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Miscellany
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.
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.