#and i did add a disclaimer that i was choosing Story over Historical Accuracy just in case a passing medievalist reads it

[nostalgia-tblr]

Shoutout to MYSELF and that time i wrote an early medieval AU that utilised various features of a castle before I finally thought to check if castles had been invented yet and THEY HAD NOT.

[cafffine]

Hey guys, I’ve decided to stop publishing Saltcoats for a number of reasons. I'm aware that many of you are going to initially be let down or confused, but hopefully once you’ve read through this post you’ll understand why this had to stop. I’ll try to hit all my points, but of course if you have any questions pls feel free to dm me or reply to this post.

DISCLAIMER: Ending this fic was a decision I came to by myself! No one asked me to do this, though many did help, and if you have something to add please do not bring other tumblr or ao3 users into the conversation unless they’ve explicitly said they’re ok with that. It’s a draining and heavy topic (not to me, but for those affected) and I don’t want to cause anymore unneeded distress.

Also, I’m the only author, all the problems with this story were created by me, and were biases I should have recognized and acted on much sooner. I’m very thankful to all the people that have reached out to me about the negative impacts on this fic, but it really does come down to: I wrote and published a story that was fundamentally ignorant of its setting and racist. So now I have to do my part to apologize and educate myself/take accountability.

First off, this was a flawed concept to begin with because I was trying to do a low fantasy setting with aliens in period clothes and a work of historical fiction at the same time, and those are not things you can go halfway on.

Historical fiction that centers around people of color has a long history of simply going race-blind and faking diversity by giving poc the roles of white people in Eurocentric stories and erasing their identities. (This article about Bridgerton explains the problem better than I could.) And it was something I tried to avoid by still having the Fetts written as immigrants from Aotearoa (NZ), but completely missed the execution on because I didn’t commit to full historical accuracy in all characters and aspects of the story. Meaning, I might as well have gone race-blind because you can’t pick and choose what to include, it’s just as racist.

This creates situations like the Fetts being immigrants facing real life oppression while the Organas, also people of color, are unaffected by the social climate and living as members of the British upper class. That’s not accurate to any version of history and ends up wiping clean any point I was trying to make about race and oppression. That also extends beyond the Fetts, I was not addressing how the american characters come from a country that still allows for the ownership of slaves, the British oppression of Scottish people and their culture, or even an in-depth look at real Queer communities of that era. (and more)

Given the real life historical climate in the 1850s, a multi-racial story like this one is not successful, and is racist in its ignorance of the struggles of poc, immigrants, and the intersectionality that had with class and crime.

In addition, the Fetts being written as criminals, even if it is framed as a morally correct choice*, is still playing into negative racial stereotypes that shouldn’t have been ignored.

* I should add, I don’t mean to make it sound like i’m creating excuses for myself when I give explanations for some of these choices such as “but it was framed as morally correct”, that doesn’t lessen the damage being done, it’s still racist, I guess I'm just trying to show why so many of these things went overlooked for as long as they did, and how easy it is for white/privileged people to find mental loopholes around racism when you’re not being sufficiently critical of yourself.

On another note, the Fetts being indigenous immigrants to Britain in the 1800s is not something I should have tried to tackle in fanfiction - a medium that often lacks nuance and can easily end up romanticizing or glossing over most heavy topics. This goes for period typical homophobia, addiction, and class struggles as well.

That being said! I’m not implying that any of those things should be completely ignored in fanfiction. Addiction, for example, is something very close to me that I do still want to explore in fanfic for the purposes of education and normalization, I’m not telling anyone what not to write, just checking myself. Because in a story like this where literally everything is so heavily dramatized and also applied to characters of color by me, a white person? It’s only going to end up being out of place, lacking in historical accuracy, and wholly disrespectful.

Another major problem I wanted to address is the relationship between a rich white person and a poverty stricken poc. That's a bad stereotype to begin with, but then I tried and failed to frame Obi-Wan as ignorant and biased to a point where his social status plays into the theme of class critique. But, if he’s still being written as Cody’s love interest, all his negative characteristics are ultimately going to be ignored and excused by the narrative (by me).

I’m not trying to end this conversation, I’ll always be willing to talk about this to anyone who’d want to say/hear more, but I don’t want run the point into the ground with over-explanation.

So, in conclusion, this fic had to stop and be broken down into the problem that it was. All white authors who write for the clones need to be hyper-vigilant about the fact that we are creating narratives for poc, and that our inherent racism is always in threat of being baked into in the stories we publish and spread to an audience. I was in the wrong when I wrote this story, and it should never have gone on for this long. I apologize for both my actions, and to anyone I may have hurt along the way.

This is getting posted on ao3 in the fic, and then, for now anyway, the fic is going to be deleted after a week. I’ll leave this post up and answer everyone unless it's someone trying to change my mind. Also, if I ignore an ask please send it again, tumblr might just have deleted it. I don’t want to try and bury this or run from my mistakes, I just don’t think that leaving the fic up where it can still find an audience will do anyone any good. Thank you for reading

If you're interested here's some resources I've been using to educate myself further:

What caused the New Zealand Wars? - An excerpt of the book by Vincent O'Malley of the same title. It gives a good summary of the violent colonization and oppression of Māori people and their culture by the British empire.

NZ Wars: Stories of Waitara (video) - Very educational documentary about the NZ wars and British colonialism. There are some historical recreations that get violent so pls watch with caution.

Historical American Fiction without the Racism - Tumblr post by @/writingwithcolor that talks specifically about Black people in the 1920's, but makes a good point about race and historical fiction in general. I'd recommend any post from this blog, especially their navigation page just a lot of great resources

Who Gave You the Right to Tell That Story? - An article about writing outside of your race that includes a diverse series of testimonials

History of Scottish Independence - Details the colonization of Scotland by the British empire, sort of long, can cntrl + f to "The Acts of Union" for a more direct explanation.

The best books on Racism and How to Write History - A list of well written and diverse works of historical fiction and why they are good examples of representation

I have a lot more that I can share if you're interested (x x x x) but this post is getting a bit too long.

[vapaus-ystavyys-tasaarvo]

The Basic Anglophone Les Mis Adaptation Formula

Or BALMAF for short

If you’ve seen more than one non-musical Les Mis movie in English (whether it’s American OR British), you might have noticed that sometimes they’re eerily similar to each other. I’m talking about the 1935, 1952, 1978 and 1998 movies, as seen above.

I honestly think these are all at least somewhat based on each other. They all follow the same rough structure, they share suspiciously specific details… it’s not really hard to make the connections. So I figured I’d try to put that structure into words.

Disclaimer: I’m not necessarily saying these are all bad things. (Although most of them are.) They’re just shared features and I get that plot needs to be streamlined when you adapt a giant novel into a movie. But it’s amusing to make fun of them. Also I only included the ones that show up in at least three of the movies.

BASIC STRUCTURE:

1: This is the story of Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, everybody else is mostly just there to drive the plot forward.

2: Prison porn, lots of prison porn Okay okay not literal porn but you know what I mean. (exception: ‘98)

3: Fantine? Who’s that? Oh right Cosette’s mom. I guess we should give her a couple of scenes then… (exception: in '98 Fantine gets an actual story arc.)

4: We should really linger on this Montreuil-sur-Mer part of the plot, that’s the good stuff (but we can’t call the town “Montreuil-sur-Mer”, that would be ridiculous.)

5: The Thénardiers can only appear once, when Valjean goes to pick up Cosette, or not at all. Who needs all those plot points later on, this story is about the EPIC CHASE between Valjean and Javert!

6: You can have either Gavroche or adult Éponine but never both and they’re not related to the Thénardiers because we’re done with the Thénardiers already, didn’t I just tell you? Child Éponine may be allowed with the Thénardiers but she’s never named and has no lines.

7: Wow, Hugo really went off the plot rails after they arrive in Paris, didn’t he? There’s barely anything about Javert hunting Valjean in here! Let’s fix that and remove all this irrelevant stuff about all these side characters. We’ll just keep the love story because you gotta have a love story

8: I guess the revolution thing is kind of cool as a set piece for Valjean and Javert’s DRAMATIC REUNION. But we don’t really need to explain the politics and ideology and the fighting and all the minor character stuff, all that has nothing to do with Valjean and Javert!

9: Oh wait I guess we should still kill off whichever not!Thénardier kid we decided to include, though, for Dramatic Effect and to show how Tragic and Horrible revolutions are. (Exception: in ‘52 Gavroche doesn’t die)

10: Obviously Javert should go to the barricades to find Valjean, that’s much more important to him than “spying on the revolutionaries” lol (exception: '78)

11: Sewer chase scene! Yes, finally we’re back to the REAL story of Les Mis! Javert chasing Valjean in the sewers!

12: Well, Javert is dead so I guess we’re done now. VALJEAN WON! WHOO! HAPPY ENDING!

(more details under the cut)

CHARACTERIZATION:

- Javert is obsessed with Valjean! That’s what his whole character is ABOUT, you know?

- Okay we can’t give Valjean a proper love interest but he should at least fall in love with someone. Too bad there’s only two women to choose from so it HAS to be either Fantine or Cosette! (exception: '78 (because that one just fully embraces the homoerotic subtext option… and I’m pretty sure it’s intentional.))

- Cosette should actually get to do some stuff and find out about Valjean’s past DURING the story rather than after it’s over (exception: '78) 

^ (Ftr, I have no problem with the above point. I’m all for Cosette having more agency. Not all changes are bad.)

- Does this Marius guy really need all this backstory and hobbies and personality and whatever? He’s basically just Cosette’s love interest. This is all way too complicated for movie audiences, I mean is he even a revolutionary or not? We can’t tell! We should just fuse him with the Enjolras character to kill two bird with one stone. This makes perfect sense. (’78 doesn’t have him fused with Enjolras and does have at least a hint of a backstory but otherwise this still applies.)

MISCELLANEOUS:

- All these French names are so weird and hard to remember. What was the Bishop’s sister’s name again? Actually never mind, I’ll just come up with something that sounds French. Also “Monsieur Madeleine” sounds stupid, let’s just not use his name at all, it’s not like anybody will notice. And Montreuil-sur-Mer is too hard to pronounce, let’s just change the name or awkwardly avoid saying it. 

(”Hey guys, what’s the name of this town where we live?” “The Town, obviously.” “What’s our mayor called again?” “He’s called The Mayor.”)

(Alternate options: Monteis-sur-Monteis. Vigaux. Monsieur Madleen.)

- How many years did Valjean and Cosette spend at the convent? Nah, it’s too much trouble to look it up. Let’s just say ten. (What year even is this? Which uprising? Who’s the king we’re talking about here? HOW old is Cosette again? WE JUST CAN’T KNOW.)

- Historical accuracy, what historical accuracy? (THERE SURE ARE A LOT OF TRICOLOR FLAGS IN BOURBON RESTORATION FRANCE. Also What The Hell Are You Wearing Cosette. Valjean are those culottes? Is that a pilgrim hat?? What era IS this? Did you just raid the studio’s costume storage for whatever vaguely old-fashioned clothes you could find? Actually that’s totally what you did, wasn’t it?)

- Valjean needs to be hot and shouldn’t age too much during the movie. I mean we don’t really even know how time works so why should he age anyway? Okay fine, ‘78!Valjean, you get a grey wig and a beard.

- Cosette first sees Marius  '35: when he’s giving a speech which is interrupted by guards '52: when he’s running away from guards after giving a speech '78: when he’s with Enjolras who is giving a speech which is interrupted by guards and spied on by Javert '98: when he’s giving a speech which is spied on by Javert

- Valjean takes the wounded Marius to Cosette rather than to Gillenormand (exception: ‘78 where it’s never shown where he takes Marius)

- Valjean witnesses Javert’s suicide (exception: '78)

I think there are also some similarities in editing and blocking and cinematography but it would get really technical if I tried to explain them and I’m not even sure I know enough about the subject to really talk about it. Also there are a bunch of really mundane similarities that I didn’t think were worth mentioning (like the glass walls thing).

I didn’t include the 1917 silent film because I haven’t seen it. I don’t know if it fits this pattern.

Anyway, feel free to add things!

EDIT: Okay something I left out earlier but should be pointed out is the focus on ~*~Redemption~*~ that these movies have. (With the exception of ‘52.) And ‘78 especially does this what with Valjean actually escaping from prison rather than being released and then he just flat out assaults a guy and we never even see if the guy lives. So suddenly the focus is on Valjean being a sinner, rather than on him having been wronged by society.

‘35 does this in another way, having Valjean actually consider killing Javert at the barricades. ‘98 does it by having Valjean be a huge dick. I mean I think that’s what that was about anyway.

[deekshithj-blog]

Nutanix Introduces Application Mobility from Public to Private Clouds

When Xtract for VMs launched just seven months ago, it provided Nutanix customers with a simple and granular method to onboard existing workloads to on-premises Nutanix Enterprise Clouds. The ease and speed in which migrations are completed reduces the time taken to onboard workloads, providing customers with a short time-to-value. This has resulted in great customer adoption with Xtract being used by hundreds of organizations to migrate in excess of 12,000 VMs, based on a variety of Microsoft Windows and Linux operating systems.

Today we proudly announce the next phase of Xtract’s application mobility story, enabling VM migrations from public cloud, available in a future release.

What VM migrations are being announced?

With the next release of Xtract, Nutanix adds Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a source for VM migrations from the public cloud to an on-premises Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.

Why introduce VM migrations from AWS?

To build or rent is a question all organizations ask themselves, and even when it appears easier and cheaper to rent infrastructure, a public cloud first strategy can prove both time consuming and costly when business priorities change and there is need to migrate VMs elsewhere, to another public cloud or on-premises infrastructure.

Examples of organizations that chose to migrate from public cloud deployments are not difficult to come by, and include names such as Facebook and Dropbox, however similar migration challenges exist regardless of organizational size. Recent high profile public cloud outages and latency issues only add to organizational fears over security and compliance.

Nutanix believes organizations should have freedom to manage hybrid cloud complexity with ease, without lock-in or spiraling costs.

How are migrations managed?

Xtract for VMs has been designed to simply add the AWS VM migration feature as a new source for VM migrations, adding to VMware ESXi used for on-premises migrations to AHV. Architecting Xtract in this manner means that the migration processes remains the same as it did before.

Adding an AWS connection source is very simple, requiring only an appropriate friendly name, your AWS access key ID, and AWS secret access key.

Once connected to your AWS account, the number of available regions and VMs contained in those regions is visible.

The process for creating a migration plan is now the same, requiring the same few steps as for other on-premises migration plans, including VM(s) selection.

The network mapping from the source to target occurs in the same manner as for on-premises migrations, and then within a few clicks, the migration plan is complete and can be executed.

Once a migration plan is executed, the initial data-seeding starts, taking as long as necessary dependent on the volume of data and connection speeds. This process doesn’t impact the source VM which remains up and running.

Once all migrated VMs have been synchronised, they remain in-sync with periodic delta updates until such time you choose to cutover to the new target VM. Control of the cutover process is a key feature of Xtract enabling businesses to choose when is most appropriate to cutover, and helping to minimise any VM outage.

Nutanix testing has shown t2.micro instances to take as little as twenty minutes to complete, with the cutover being as short as one minute.

Can I migrate all workloads?

One of the more difficult aspects of public cloud migrations are the dependencies formed to cloud-native services. As such, for this initial release, standalone EC2 instances with attached EBS volumes are supported.

When can I start migrating AWS VMs to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud?

Nutanix is announcing this new public cloud VM migration feature just as the Xtract product team is preparing for an early access release, and we are looking for a small number of customers willing to participate in it. If you have an AWS public cloud presence and are willing to participate in an initial 30-60 minute exploratory call to discuss your requirements, please email xtractfromaws@nutanix.com.

Learn more about Nutanix Xtract at www.nutanix.com/xtract, and join in with the community discussion here.

Disclaimer: This blog may contain links to external websites that are not part of Nutanix.com. Nutanix does not control these sites and disclaims all responsibility for the content or accuracy of any external site. Our decision to link to an external site should not be considered an endorsement of any content on such site.

Forward-Looking Disclaimer: This blog includes forward-looking statements, including but not limited to statements concerning our plans and expectations relating to product features and technology that are under development or in process and capabilities of such product features and technology and our plans to introduce product features in future releases. These forward-looking statements are not historical facts, and instead are based on our current expectations, estimates, opinions and beliefs. The accuracy of such forward-looking statements depends upon future events, and involves risks, uncertainties and other factors beyond our control that may cause these statements to be inaccurate and cause our actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially and adversely from those anticipated or implied by such statements, including, among others: failure to develop, or unexpected difficulties or delays in developing, new product features or technology on a timely or cost-effective basis; delays in or lack of customer or market acceptance of our new product features or technology; and other risks detailed in our Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended January 31, 2018, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this presentation and, except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update forward-looking statements to reflect actual results or subsequent events or circumstances.

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