Every quarter I donate 10% of my royalties, both because I feel grateful to be able to earn this way, & because I want to connect my readers to organizations doing the real work on the issues I write about.
(I will post about the Null States donation later, hopefully tomorrow, just waiting to hear from the organization about how they prefer to receive it; whether there's a specific campaign or match that would benefit this quarter, for example)
Thanks to everyone who bought State Tectonics last quarter, I just donated 50 dollars (rounding up a little) to @globalvoices for the incredible grassroots reporting and translation they do.
I wrote more about why I do this and why I chose Global Voices here: tor.com/2018/07/30/mal…
There's your reminder: If you loved Infomocracy, read the sequels! If you loved the whole trilogy, buy it for a friend!
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There is no such thing as a natural disaster. Natural hazards like hurricanes, earthquakes, extreme temperatures become human disasters when they interact with unsafe housing, poor drainage, lack of savings, misinformation, inadequate health care, an absence of solidarity.
Of course we have also learned how to produce unnatural hazards, causing earthquakes with fracking and worsening extreme weather by burning down the forests, polluting the atmosphere and the ocean. But even before we get into that, society determines who is hurt in disasters.
And it gets so much worse when we factor in the human-made hazards. Communities of color face disproportionate pollution and dangerous contaminants ALL THE TIME: in a disaster these may overflow, explode, leach into groundwater. theguardian.com/environment/20…
Module 6 -the final set of readings!- is about long-term predictions and planning. (For anyone new here, I'm live-tweeting the lecture prep for my course, Predictive Fictions, which I'm teaching for the first time this session at @ASU_SFIS. Full syllabus: malkaolder.wordpress.com/2020/12/17/syl…)
I'm so angry that when I was a kid, all I knew about Dolly Parton was the size of her chest. And her hair color, I guess. Imagine taking all that talent and decency and goodness and organization -Imagination Library!!!- and reducing it, dismissively, to jokes about her appearance
I don't even know where that impression came from - movies? comedians? other kids? -but I remember it. And yeah, she hadn't done everything then that she has now, but that kind of proves my point: you focus on appearance, you miss what someone has done AND what they're capable of
AND she had already written Jolene and I Will Always Love You among many others. Why wasn't her main reputation, the first thing you learned about her, that of a major songwriter like Dylan or Paul Simon or ..?
so...is there anyone out there who actually likes it when you're watching a fun caper-type show and they introduce a character and transparently build up the relationship/backstory so there's an emotional impact when said character is unnecessarily killed off?
yes this is le subtweet ಠ_ಠ
but I'm genuinely curious because shows do this ALL the time & it's always a downer for me, not just to lose the character but because they tip their hand so hard narratively. You *know* it's about to happen, which makes it boring. it feels like an admission that only MC matters
I quit my Sherlock Holmes reread when the racism got to be too much (it was getting pretty repetitive by that point, too) but 1 thing that struck me was the constant emphasis on individuals who are the ONLY ONES IN THE WORLD who can deal with whatever
Obviously this is often Sherlock, but not always, and anyway it's a really irritating example of the continuing emphasis on a single person being the only possible way to solve a problem, an excuse for that person to martyr themself or otherwise demonstrate unhealthy feats (eg
not sleeping, not eating, working non-stop, etc). narratively it's a lazy sort of stakes-building, but through #NarrativeDisorder it translates into real-world thinking way too often, and it's a problem.