frances-kafka

[frances-kafka]

I don't RELATE to Team Funko and I don't even enjoy those things anymore. I barely watch TV, I don't read many modern books. It is incredibly isolating to not be into normie media but not be someone that's been let into the places where people talk about anything else.

And being around Normies With Kids is just a painful reminder that I didn't get to be that and never got a choice in it, while Normies With Kids generally gaslight you into some form of bootstrap rhetoric about how you could have been a Normie With Kids if only you'd married a normie and had kids

I feel like Team Funko and altspace/nerdspace were always just a cope. I feel like even being childfree was always just a cope and I don't relate to THOSE people

There is no fucking thing for anyone my age

you're either an old or a young.

If you're a middle then you're either a permachild/permateen collecting funky pops or you are a normie with kids and fuck you if you're neither one of those things I guess

[frances-kafka]

There is no fucking thing for anyone my age

you're either an old or a young.

If you're a middle then you're either a permachild/permateen collecting funky pops or you are a normie with kids and fuck you if you're neither one of those things I guess

[frances-kafka]

mormonism has caused a lot of problems but the scifi it inspired is also pretty decent

[frances-kafka]

I feel like I'm rounding a new corner in my relationship with my mom. I don't know. I just feel like I finally understand her better

She never understood me at all except about one thing. But now that one thing is pretty much all I'm left with

[frances-kafka]

The conversations about accountability & apologies that we've been having in social justice circles these last few years have basically trained everybody to fawn.

We've been telling people that if they are accused of any wrongdoing or of hurting anybody's feelings, it is their obligation to apologize immediately, and never to hedge, disagree, or to explain their rationale what they've done.

In their apology, we expect them to articulate every single thing that they have done that was damaging in the strongest language possible and to declare outright that they have harmed someone, often multiple groups of people, even if they are not sure of the impact (or could not even possibly be sure).

If a person's apology is anything but immediate and entirely self-excoriating, we accuse the person of downplaying the damage they have done, failing to be accountable, and manipulating others.

In this way, we've made it impossible for a person to ever take their own side lest that be taken itself as a form of wrongdoing. We have trained our fellow social-justice-minded people to believe that if they do anything but worsen the case against themselves, they are being irresponsible.

I say we, in all of this, because I have partaken in all of this rhetoric, made these kinds of criticism, given accused people this type of advice.

And I have followed it myself, often to a damaging effect.

I have taken responsibility for problems in which I truly did not believe I played a part, I've overstated the damage that I've done so as not to risk understating it, I've ascribed malice to my intentions when I knew it wasn't there, I've agreed with people's most negative, bad-faith narratives about conflicts involving me that they were not even present for, offered up information about myself that was not a third party's business in the name of transparency, apologized for things I haven't done -- and in doing all of this, I have denied my loved ones the opportunity to really hear me about what I was going through and my motivations when I was in conflict with them, things that any true friend or close associate would obviously want to hear about if they cared about me.

This aim of giving the perfect apology and taking perfect accountability has been nothing but an isolating force in my life, because it has barred me from openly entering into necessary conflict with people when our needs were incompatible or they had hurt me just as much as I'd hurt them. The fear of being a manipulative, unaccountable DARVO-er has led me to roll onto my back and expose my belly, falling over myself with panicked apologies and the most unflattering information possible cast in the least explicable light, almost outright begging for others to become angrier at me and believing that it was only way I could ever possibly be accepted back.

We've drilled into people that the way to be good and responsible is to allow people to view us as negatively as possible, to even arm others with information that will confirm that point of view, and to never insert our own perspective or needs on the matter at all.

And yeah, there are a lot of shitty people out there who dodge accountability easily because their power ensconces them from any consequences. but the primary problem with that was never that they wrote a shitty notesapp apology that used the unforgivable phrase "I am sorry if you felt XYZ." The real problem was that there was no community that held enough influence to hold them to account, and for their victims there weren't ever adequate supports or protections.

instead of addressing any of that in a remotely systematic way, we have taken to picking apart every accused person's every word and deed for evidence of inner moral failure and created a culture in which we think we can determine a person's safety by how artfully they put words together when they are under threat. and what do you know, plenty of bad faith actors and conflict avoidant cowards and people who just dont understand what they are even being accused of can do that just fine.

[frances-kafka]

I read a podcast transcript about commodified sff/the kind of rot in fandomgenic media you sometimes talk about. These authors call it ‘squeecore’ — you might enjoy it https://kittysneezes.com/squeecore-transcript/

[“And there’s almost a weird, like, YA-ish, young-adult fiction tone to it, even when it’s supposed to be “for adults”. Someone on our Discord, Kurt(?), pointed this out – characters feel weirdly young: they always think and act and feel like they’re in their late teens or early twenties; they’re kind of inexperienced, naive, still very full of wonder, and you get the sense they haven’t really lived a life before the story began?

JR: You could probably attribute a lot of that to, of course, to the YA thing that blew up in the last twenty years since Harry Potter; but there’s also a lot of influence from films, and a lot of influence from mainstream commercial narratives – the MCU, the She-Ras [sic], and the “save the cat”-style 3-act-structure screenplays that have really become the blueprint for a lot of storytelling.

RSB: Right, they almost feel like… maybe bad RPG protagonists; those silent protagonists that were very popular in the 90s who don’t really have personalities? Because you’re the player character, you put yourself in there. And I’ve been trying to figure out why, because for me, characters who are a little older, who have lived their life, maybe they have a haunted past and terrible secrets and regrets, and there’s something driving them toward this need to redeem themselves, but it never really tells you what it is, like – I love that shit. That shit’s – that’s the good shit.

JR [crosstalk]: Yeah, I think so –

RSB: Characters who have seen too much, and are kind of haunted, but you don’t know what it is? Like, aww, hell yeah, that’s right… [laughs]

JR: Yeah, and the older I get, the more I gravitate toward older protagonists as well; because I have nothing to learn from a teenager, right? Or a 57-year-old HR manager who writes like a teenager, and to teenagers.

RSB: Yeah, and it’s such a strange thing; I’m wondering if it’s because we have this need to eliminate or fill negative space. We need to explain everyone’s motivations; we can’t just let a character be the way they are; we have to have some kind of detailed flashback to The Traumatic Experience that made them this way. And that takes up a lot of space, so in order to evade– avoid having to do that, we just have these kind of flat, like, “JRPG from the ‘90s” protagonists that feel –

JR [crosstalk]: Yeah, like –

RSB: “Oh, they’re on the cusp of their life’s journey, and they haven’t lived.”]

…

[“JR: But I think that’s broadly – it’s sort of a tendency in the writers themselves, because as less people start out with the ability to make a living income with writing, it sort of becomes a hobby; but at the same time, the people with all the free time are the sort of white-collar professionals who have the the ability and the money to network, and to have the leisure time to write, and to pay attention to the submission grinder, and do all of these things that maybe a working-class person doesn’t have time to do, especially now.

RSB: Right. Someone working multiple jobs, and working blue-collar jobs where you don’t have downtime at work. In most white-collar jobs, you can usually squeeze out an hour a day to write. You can usually, if you work really efficiently, you can squeeze out a little bit of time to write. If you’re waiting tables, you really can’t do that; you rest your feet for two seconds, and your boss barks at you: “if you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.” That’s it.

JR: Yeah, and of course, there’s a lot of wonderful working-class writers, but they’re not really being published because they’re out of the zone, they’re out of the clique.

RSB: Connections unfortunately do play a huge role in what gets published. You see pretty frequently in SFF magazines… Whenever I see a story that looks kind of mediocre, and I’m like “how did that get published?”, I look down and I always find out that, according to the writer’s bio, the writer is an alumna of one of the same workshops that the editors are an alumna of. It’s like, “oh. Okay, you’re in the same club.”

JR [crosstalk]: Yes, it’s very much social networking.

RSB: And it’s this club giving each other – publishing each other’s works, and giving each other awards. This is what it is. And the club costs five thousand dollars.

JR: Yup.

RSB: So, if you don’t have that, you can’t get in. And… maybe you can sneak in, if you’re – fucking – an amazing writer, but it’s definitely an uphill battle for you in a way that it isn’t for other people. And chances are you might have a different sensibility than other people will have. There’s very much a certain type of, I don’t know, socializing that’s acceptable, where it’s like that very WASPy, passive-aggressive condescension is okay; but being direct and straightforward in a way that a sort-of working-class person might be, that a person from a non-WASPy culture might be, gets you branded as “unsafe” and “abusive”. “]

cackling

[frances-kafka]

BlueSky isn't less anti Semitic than X, the big difference is that leftists use consistent language for Jews and you can mute those words whereas with rightists, you can't

[frances-kafka]

Really thinking a lot about how much better I did when I had a specific and strict meditation schedule and was accountable to a group to keep it up, and in retrospect it really did not matter what that thing was or what tradition it was or what the format was, it was load bearing for reasons that had zero to do with spirituality.

[frances-kafka]

*ancient seafloor rumbling*

YOU'RE LISTENING TO

*scuttling of trilobites*

107.9

*crunching of exoskeleton*

REAL ANOMALOCARIS FM

*undulating of imbricating lateral lobes*

WHERE WE ROCK THE PRIMORDIAL DEPTHS!

*bubbling underwater sounds*

NO MODERN TUNES HERE, JUST PALEOZOIC ROCK!

*ocean waves crashing*

*clicking of appendages*

THIS AIN'T YOUR SOFT-BODIED ORGANISM'S STATION

*Imagine Dragons - Radioactive starts playing*

[frances-kafka]

I've gone back to therapy cleaning

[frances-kafka]

There is a whole entire song about this https://youtu.be/USR3bX_PtU4?si=oxt7A-0SVb_Wzl0x

imagine meeting god and they're just some fucking guy.

[frances-kafka]

Someone on here (I think it was balioc) once said the problem with modern sf/f is that the core appeal is being some sort of special person, a hero, a wizard, a starship pilot, whatever. But an entire generation or two now, both writers and readers, has been raised in the extremely-online milieu that says being special is bad, it's inherently damaging to other people, a just and moral society would never allow it. And while that can be a valuable theme to explore in isolation, when everyone (especially the smart, forward-thinking ones) is doing it, it amounts to genre autocannibalism. You're smashing to bits the thing that makes the genre appealing in the first place.

Which is why so much contemporary sf/f is either communist-revolution-fanfiction or the-author-as hectoring, finger-wagging schoolmarm saying you only want to be Superman because you're a bad person, because you lust for power over others. A genre, a culture that, within my lifetime, was a haven for lonely and misunderstood people to dream of something beyond mundane reality, has curdled into mocking and tearing down that idea, into forcing people to admit the normies were right all along. I know I'm just some unpublished shmuck but as a writer my goal is to remove myself from that mindset as much as possible.

[frances-kafka]

Genuinely beginning to entertain the notion that I am living in a fallen world

[frances-kafka]

How do you live through waking up as a foreigner in your own land that your family has been in for 4 generations on one side, and somewhere between 2 centuries and 10,000 years on the other?

[frances-kafka]

I feel like I've experienced a totally alienating reality break with the vast majority of media, only some people really share any understanding of this or how total and painful it is, and it's caused me to not have anything in common with anyone around me. I feel like there are things I'm sensitive to in modern media that other people around me just don't care about, or don't pick up. At the same time I feel like I can't engage in But What About The Sensitive People discourse with media because nobody cares about MY sensitivities. So the whole discourse leaves me completely cold and I've retreated just into being a weird intellectual hermit.

[frances-kafka]

I'm going through a whole fucking meltdown about my life online and I'm really worried that I don't know how to run a life as an artist or writer without being online. I feel like I'm being pushed off the open internet.

And like at this point it may be too risky to my family for me to promote anything on social media. I feel like I may have to just leave any kind of internet based work altogether, retrain in something completely In Person (which may or may not be doable because one of the reasons I do what I do is because of chronic pain), and just be a counterculture writer, and you can't even really Do That anymore the way you could in the 80s-90s.

At the same time I don't have hobbies anymore either so I'm basically my very socially engaged and vivacious partner's Vera (reference to Vera, Norm's wife from Cheers) whom nobody ever sees, except in this case I'm just an intellectual hermit.

I want to write about how I'm being pushed off THE FUCKING PLANET now that we have a global internet, full enclosure, and no place left to go except I'm having to think about how 1) to keep the half of my family safe that is part of group being PUSHED OFF THE FUCKING PLANET and 2) everything I'm weighed down with otherwise.

[frances-kafka]

This is why I have had to pull back so much from the internet. It's exhausting and I see it everywhere I go. At least I don't see it in the real world where I live because there are barely jews here for anyone to actively hate. But I'm applying for a job at a school so wish me luck, I'm sure I will see it there

I just saw a post in the Jewish/Israeli community

It said they were taking a break from Tumblr for a while because the antisemitism was really affecting their mental health.

I've been seriously thinking of doing the same, and just wondered how many other Jewish folk on Jumblr feel as I do.