#sturgeons revelation

[ikementally-deficient]

Obligatory note: This does not apply to people spewing hate instead of thoughts, people who break the social contract of mutual tolerance, and people who go out of their way to mis-tag or otherwise sneak under your radar things they know are triggers for you.

Okay, so, fandom wank/discourse/whatever:

I do totally support people's right to set boundaries over what they want to see and interact with. Block/filter/mute to your heart's content.

But I also don't like the idea that everyone exists in their own little echo chamber. They're fragile bubbles, and the cognitive dissonance when they pop can be worse than the slight callouses on your psyche of seeing stuff that annoys you on the regular.

And I love seeing that other people are enjoying things that I don't enjoy. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

I like being able to talk about why I don't like something. And have people talk to me about it, and why they don't like the things I do like. Maybe they'll change my mind! Maybe I'll change theirs! Maybe neither of us will think any different at the end but still walk away with a new appreciation of how the character was handled in canon or fan-works.

F'rinstance: I'm not saying I should be able to spam every IkePrince Rio fan's dash with my hate for Rio, but being able to talk about the fact that Rio's constant unrelenting love-bombing has me back in my early twenties with the breakup that lasted longer than the actual relationship because dude kept threating to commit suicide and why that dynamic just really doesn't work for me these days can be an interesting discussion! And we can talk about it, and maybe some Rio fan will point me to some fan-work where an author has managed to work his characterization into something a little less over the top, or really leaned into the red flags and turned what I see as bland and a little creepy into something dark and psychological and cool. Or maybe not and we'll agree to disagree and I might just scroll a little faster the next time I see some Rio art but otherwise be fine.

OTOH: I dig IkeSen Shingen so much and also I kind of have a thing for older men (which is much less problematic in my 40s than it was in my 20s but that's a story for a different day), and if someone wants to talk to me about why that really squicks them because they had a creepy uncle or because Shingen's cheesy lines in-game are bullshit, I am totally up for that conversation!

Rio's not a trigger for me so I feel like blocking his tag or Rio-centric blogs is kind of like napalming mosquitos.

This post is not really about Rio, clearly. I dunno, I'm not feeling very coherent about this, but it's still important.

Aim for a reverse-Sturgeon's Revelation: "90% of what I'm seeing is pretty good, and the remaining 10% is worth discussing."

No joke you guys NEED to get more comfortable blocking people. No more insulting people in public over different blorbo opinions no more making 2k long posts on how whatever ship you don't like shouldn't exist we've grown past that shit. Consistent posts about shit that make you uncomfortable? Block. Rancid blorbo opinions? Block. Is mildly annoying in your replies? Block. Pisses you off for reasons so petty you could never admit it publicly? Block. YOUR mental health will improve from not being upset 24/7, THEIR mental health will not be at risk of you lashing out because you happened to catch their posts on a bad day, and EVERYONE ELSE will benefit from not seeing the most embarrassing arguments known to man on their dash. "Oooh but they didn't deserve it-" dude you're presumably running a personal blog as a hobby not a public service. Who fucking cares.

[bitterkarella]

Midnight Pals: Trapdoor Spiders

Fletcher Pratt: i'd like to welcome you all to the first meeting of the No Mildreds Club Mildred Baldwin: hey what are you boys doing in here Pratt: um excuse me Pratt: [pointing at sign] sorry mildred

Pratt: first order of business for the NO MILDREDS Club Pratt: the chair recognizes isaac asimov Isaac Asimov: yes can we change the name? Asimov: its a little on the nose Pratt: well what would you call it? Asimov: how about Asimov: the trapdoor spiders

[meanwhile] Poe: hey did you guys hear about this Trapdoor Spiders club? Poe: seems really exclusive King: whys it called that? Barker: its a sex act Poe: no its not clive Barker: be a lot cooler if it was

King: so what is it? Poe: its a male eating club Barker: haha well i know all about that Poe: no clive it's not that kind of male eating CB Blanchard: i know all about that Poe: it's not that either

King: so it's an exclusive club for boys? Patricia Highsmith: sounds fun. maybe i'll stop by Poe: oh sorry patricia it's men only Highsmith: yeah i think they'll let me in Poe: Poe: yeah i don't know why but that scans Barker: yeah that really does doesn't it? Highsmith: you know, chat with the boys, hang a few laughs, maybe chase a skirt

Franz Kafka: can i join? Poe: King: Koontz: Lovecraft: Barker: Barker: i'm going to tell her Poe: no clive Poe: the prime directive Barker: that's stupid Barker: i'm going to do it

Barker: we need to get into this club King: well gosh clive it's invite only King: and they're sci fi guys King: i don't know that we have any horror guys in that you could ask Dean Koontz: there's theodore sturgeon Barker: why yes Barker: there IS theodore sturgeon Barker: dean, you're a genius Koontz: i helped :)

Theodore Sturgeon: [wearing lab coat, holding erlenmeyer flask] behold it is i Sturgeon: theodore sturgeon Sturgeon: critical thinker and seeker of knowledge Sturgeon: excelsior!

Barker: hey theo Barker: i wanna ask a favor Sturgeon: speak, fellow science fan!

Barker: so Sturgeon: [scribbling equations on chalkboard] silence, clive! i'm almost at a break-through Sturgeon: soon, if my calculations are correct Sturgeon: i shall soon perfect Sturgeon's Revelation Sturgeon: or perhaps even Sturgeon: Sturgeon's law

Barker: Barker: yeah so anyway Sturgeon: eureka! I've found it Sturgeon: by my calculations Sturgeon: 80% of everything is crud Sturgeon: wait a second Sturgeon: 90%. 90% of everything is crud Sturgeon: sorry, forgot to carry the one

Barker: yeah ok i'm gonna leave you to Barker: whatever the hell all this is Sturgeon: scientific progress! Sturgeon: behold! the fruits of science! Sturgeon: a marvel of modern technology! Sturgeon: i'm building a killdozer

Sturgeon: behold! the killdozer! Sturgeon: bullet proof glass. Touchscreen gear shift. Sturgeon: and the steering wheel is a squircle

Sturgeon: the killdozer can cross water up to 2.5 feet deep Sturgeon: but also um you shouldn't get it wet Barker: Sturgeon: especially don't back it into a lake or something

Barker: you scientists are always so busy asking whether you CAN build a killdozer, you never stop to ask whether you SHOULD build a killdozer Barker: cuz that thing looks like shit Barker: like it really looks like shit

Sturgeon: you think i'm smart? you should see my brother peter Sturgeon: you know mensa? Barker: i've heard of it Sturgeon: he's so smart he FOUNDED it Barker: yeah? is he a member? Sturgeon: Sturgeon: i don't know

Barker: so you're pretty smart huh? Peter Sturgeon: [levitating, enormous saucer person head throbbing] Heard of Plato? Aristotle? Socrates? Peter Sturgeon: all morons!

[konmarkimageswords]

Philip K. Dick (1928-82) was the kind of science-fiction writer who is read and praised by people who don’t like science fiction. His fame moved beyond the genre’s ghetto after some of his novels and short stories were turned into movies—Blade Runner (1982),  Minority Report (2002), and A Scanner Darkly (2006), to name a few. He is sometimes compared to Jorge Luis Borges, one of the finest short-story writers, and his work has influenced many authors (genre-bending Jonathan Lethem, for example) and filmmakers (the Wachowski brothers, directors of The Matrix).

Just as critics dub certain writers’ visions of the world “Orwellian” or “Kafkaesque,” some now use the awkward term “Dickian.” Dick’s paranoid vision is a unique, sad, funny, and—in its strange and sometimes very moving manner—even ennobling way to think about what we are meant to be as humans. In his later work, Dick’s outlook became deeply, even explicitly, informed by a Gnostic sense of the struggle to be fully human. Ancient Gnosticism was, among other things, concerned with the dilemma of humanity trapped in delusion, imprisoned in a world ruled by malign and unseen forces—a recurrent theme in Dick’s work.

What does science fiction have to say about human nature? For many serious readers, this is GeekCity, a corner of genre fiction inhabited by sad and lonely people who go to Star Trek conventions and collect action figures. The science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon is credited with what has entered the wider critical discourse as “Sturgeon’s Law.” When it was said of science fiction that “90 percent of it is crap,” his answer was, “90 percent of everything is crap.” Who can disagree? Serious science-fiction criticism finds examples of imagined alternatives that illuminate our own world in Plato’s description of Atlantis in the Timaeus, in his vision of an ideal society in The Republic, and in Thomas More’s imaginary society in Utopia. Some writers prefer another name for the genre, “speculative fiction,” since much science fiction has little to do with science. Whatever term you choose, the best examples show that one way to see our situation clearly is to imagine another, very different one. This can be done by placing a story in the remote past, an alternative present, or a near or far future. Philip K. Dick was the writer who did it best.

The animating idea behind Dick’s fiction—hardly original in itself—is that things are not as they seem. This is, of course, a major part of any religious insight—and as an Episcopalian, Dick understood this. Walker Percy’s essay “The Message in the Bottle,” for example, describes an island (this could be the beginning of a sci-fi plot) where everything is pleasant. Life seems good for all its inhabitants; then someone walking along a beach finds a bottle with the message, “Don’t despair, help is on the way.” This is what the Christian gospel says to a complacent, obtuse world, and it is not unlike one of Dick’s plots. In many of his stories, as in Gnostic theology, the world is depicted as not merely asleep, but deliberately deceived. Any remedy or salvation will therefore have to include a battle against powers that not only seem insane, but are evil. Overcoming the ruse requires special insight or special revelation that is shared by only a few.

This theme of widespread deception is woven throughout several of his plots. In The Simulacra (1964), the U.S. president is an android, but the citizenry has no idea. In The Penultimate Truth (1964), World War III starts with a fight between two superpowers. The battle begins on Mars, spreads to Earth, and is fought by robots. Humans are forced to live and work underground in huge shelters. The war ends, but the people are told that the battle rages above them on an uninhabitable surface. Meanwhile, the authorities continue to generate false war stories while they themselves live a bucolic life on the earth above. In The Zap Gun (1967), two great superpowers are at peace, and citizens of both nations are reassured that they are secure because of their side’s superior arsenal—but the weapons are designed not to function. Weapon design is, in effect, a kind of conceptual art, although the fact that the weapons do not work is kept from the masses. This is what keeps the world truly disarmed. When aliens threaten the earth, the weapon designers have to come up with something that really functions. There is an implicit Gnosticism here: only a select few know what is going on; most of humanity is sleepwalking.

This isn’t a happy point of view, to be sure. Yet what’s missing from the film adaptations of Dick’s work (of which the best are Minority Report and the director’s cut of Blade Runner) is Dick’s humor. Even his darkest stories are laced with funny moments. Another quality missing in the movies is Dick’s enduring compassion for the sadness of ordinary, confused human existence. His stories usually take place in a future, or in an alternate reality, where paranoia reigns, where appearances cannot be trusted, where people may be androids—robots made to resemble humans—and androids may be whatever human beings are, where the world we are presented with is a lie.

Dick’s life was messy. (Lawrence Sutin has written a good biography, Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, Carrol & Graf, 2005.) He was born inChicago in 1928 and died in 1982; his twin sister died in infancy. Dick’s parents moved toCalifornia and divorced. He lived with his mother until he matriculated at UC Berkeley for a short time, majoring in German. He was fascinated by German culture. After dropping out of college, he worked in a record store, and music plays an important part in much of his work. He was married and divorced five times, used drugs, was convinced at various points that the FBI was after him, feared for his sanity, and hoped for spiritual deliverance.

At the same time, Dick felt a keen loyalty to many friends, whose lives were often as complicated as his own. His novels are full of regular people with ordinary, often dull jobs; they struggle for decency, sometimes fail, sometimes succeed. There is always something sad, frustrating, and funny about their struggles, and I can’t think of another science-fiction writer who comes close to describing this sort of ordinary life with such compassion. The science-fiction novelist Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote that Dick’s characters reminded her of Dickens’s; sometimes you remember one and can’t place which novel he or she appears in, but the humanity remains vivid. Dick drew from his own life, sometimes quite directly, in writing his novels. A Scanner Darkly is about drug use—based in large part on his own experience—and it’s scary. It begins, “Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair.” It contains the only funny suicide scene I’ve ever read, and at the end of the novel Dick uncharacteristically explains what he has just written:

This is a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow…. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error, a lifestyle. In this particular lifestyle the motto is “Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying,” but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your lifestyle, it is only faster.

Before movies made him known beyond science-fiction circles, Dick’s best-known work was The Man in the High Castle. It won the Hugo award (science fiction’s highest) in 1962. It describes an alternative 1962 America, in which the Nazis and the Japanese won World War II. There are some nicely imagined touches (Americans forge Wild West artifacts to sell to wealthy Japanese collectors; Germans fly rapidly around the world not in jets, but in passenger rockets), but at the center of the novel is a search for the author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, an alternative-world tale in which Germany and Japan were defeated. This alternative world is not the one we know, the one that really followed from the defeat of Hitler; and finally, it is suggested that the world the protagonists live in isn’t real either. The I Ching, an ancient Chinese text, figures in the book’s plot, and Dick apparently used its chance-based methods of divination in composing the story. Although Dick never alluded to it, this sense of not being able to know what reality really is reminded me of the Taoist sage Chuang Tsu’s dream that he was a butterfly: it wasn’t clear to him whether he was Chuang Tsu dreaming that he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Chuang Tsu.

In 1978, Dick delivered a lecture, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.” In it, he said: “The two basic topics that fascinate me are ‘What is reality?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being?’” This fascination went back to his first published story, “Roog,” which “had to do with a dog who imagined that the garbage men who came every Friday morning were stealing valuable food that the family had carefully stored away in a safe metal container. Every day, members of the family carried out paper sacks of nice ripe food, stuffed them into the metal container, shut the lid tightly—and when the container was full, these dreadful-looking creatures came and stole everything but the can… [T]he dog’s extrapolation was in a sense logical, given the facts at his disposal.”

Dick’s approach was not always so light. In an angry short story about abortion, “The Pre-Persons,” he wrote of a future in which the courts had decided that a person was a real human being only when capable of doing algebra. Children not yet old enough to grasp algebraic concepts lived in dread of extermination trucks that could come and take them away. Dick’s antiabortion stance led the feminist science-fiction writer Joanna Russ to send Dick a letter, “the nastiest letter I’ve ever received.” Although he later apologized for any hurt feelings, he said, “for the pre-persons’ sake, I am not sorry.”

If Dick’s early work sometimes had an implicitly Gnostic aspect, that quality became more explicit in his later writing. In 1974, Dick, recovering from minor surgery, answered his door for a delivery of painkillers. The young woman delivering the medication was wearing a fish pendant, and when he asked what it was, she told him that it was a sign worn by the early Christians. In “How to Build a Universe,” he writes,

I suddenly experienced what I later learned is called anamnesis—a Greek word meaning, literally, “loss of forgetfulness.” I remembered who I was and where I was. In an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, it all came back to me. And not only could I remember it but I could see it. The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with secret signs. She had just told me all this, and it was true.

For a short time, as hard as this is to believe or explain, I saw fading into view the black, prison-like contours of hatefulRome. But, of much more importance, I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return. My emotion was one of joy. We were secretly preparing to welcome him back. It would not be long. And the Romans did not know. They thought he was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return, and our delight and anticipation was boundless.

Dick was never entirely clear about what that experience meant. But he was convinced that something of great significance had happened to him, and wrote at length about his encounters with what he called “the cosmic Christ” in a free-form journal called “The Exegesis,” in which he understood Christ as part of a continuity which included Ikhnaton, Zoroaster, and Hephaestus. This syncretism is typical of Gnosticism. Dick’s efforts to explain what all this meant are less interesting than the work that came from the experience, his final three novels.

Dick’s visions and dreams coalesced in the VALIS trilogy—VALIS being an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, or God (of a sort). The most tangled, complicated, and autobiographical is the first, VALIS (1981). It is the least successful of the three, but worth reading because of its seriousness and its painful closeness to Dick’s own life. The plot of VALIS contains not only autobiographical fragments, but a movie with a secret meaning and a rock-star couple whose daughter, Sophia, is thought by some to be the returned Savior. The novel wrestles with the first question that haunted Dick—“What is reality?”—and it suggests one good answer, based on a real incident in Dick’s life. When a student asked him during a lecture for a simple definition of reality, he answered, “Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn’t go away.” Toward the end of the book Dick writes, “I lack Kevin’s faith and Fat’s madness…. I don’t know what to think. Maybe I am not required to think anything, or to have faith, or to have madness; maybe all that I need to do—all that is asked of me—is to wait. To wait and to stay awake.”

The second book of the trilogy, The Divine Invasion (1981), tells of an exiled or absent God—another Gnostic theme—trying to return to earth, which has been held captive by Belial, a fallen angel, since the fall of Masada. The novel involves a virgin birth, which perplexes the Catholic woman who is pregnant with a divine child. She says remotely, “Catholic doctrine, I never thought it would apply to me personally.” The child must struggle to awaken to his own identity. As in classic Gnostic teaching, a perverse power holds the world in its grasp, and it is represented by both the established church (the Christian-Islamic Church) and the imperial political establishment, whose members are uncomfortably but profitably allied. The Divine Invasion is an amazing story of parallel realities, redemption, and the war between good and evil, with a wonderful ending.

The final novel in the trilogy, the last Dick completed, is The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982). The author based Bishop Timothy Archer on Episcopalian Bishop James Pike, who went on an odd pilgrimage into the Judean desert with too little preparation and died of exposure. So does Timothy Archer, in search of the truth about Gnostic scroll fragments. Archer is a complicated character: brilliant and selfish, genuinely insightful and clueless. The novel is narrated by Archer’s daughter-in-law, Angel Archer. In Dick’s novels, the point of view frequently shifts from person to person; but here Angel is the sole narrator, and her voice carries the novel, which contains serious arguments about Gnosticism and a few genuinely funny and politically incorrect jokes.

In these and his other stories, Dick creates characters who struggle not only for salvation, for ultimate truths, but sometimes merely to be decent human beings—and the two struggles are really one. What reality is and what it means to be authentically human are intrinsically linked. Dick’s answers, such as they are, range randomly from new-age nonsense, through his own episodes of delusion and paranoia, to a Gnostic Christianity that contains more of the pain and compassion of real Christianity than most Gnostic visions. Many Gnostic writings advance an elitism that delights in being among the chosen in whom the divine light resides. Dick saw glimmers of the shattered divine light in many confused and struggling people, and he found something of cosmic significance there, both in the light and in the struggle. His finest novel, The Divine Invasion, for example, ends with the fall of Belial, the angelic dark force that held the good God at bay. Belial “lay broken everywhere, vast and lovely and destroyed. In pieces, like damaged light.”

“This is how he was once,” Linda said. “Originally. Before he fell. This was his original shape. We called him the Moth. The Moth that fell slowly, over thousands of years, intersecting the earth, like a geometrical shape descending stage by stage until nothing remained of its shape.”

Herb Asher said, “He was very beautiful.”

“He was the morning star,” Linda said. “The brightest star in the heavens. And now nothing remains of him but this….”

“Will he ever be as he once was?” Herb Asher said.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps we all may be.” And then she sang for Herb Asher one of the Dowland songs…. The most tender, the most haunting song that she had adapted from John Dowland’s lute books:

When the poor cripple by the pool did lie Full many years in misery and pain, No sooner he on Christ had set his eye, But he was well, and comfort came again.

Philip K. Dick’s fiction—perhaps because most of it was written in a genre known for conceptual risk-taking—dealt in an unembarrassed way with questions involving the ultimate meaning of our lives in a tone that was compassionate, often funny, and at some unexpected moments very moving.

[anothermessagetoyou]

The Revelation

Ninety percent of everything is crap

— Theodore Sturgeon

“Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.”

— Thornton Wilder

"90% of everything is crap. That is true, whether you are talking about physics, chemistry, evolutionary psychology, sociology, medicine – you name it – rock music, country western. 90% of everything is crap."

— Daniel Dennett

since this blog started I realized that only sexy posts were appreciated enough and political posts were not appreciated at all. after that I started posting about the genocide, things went even worse...

the few messages received were almost exclusively sexting requests

of course, I also like watching and posting sexy content but It seems like my readership consists mostly of porn addicts and pro-genocide people

I should close the blog and migrate for the second time, maybe to bluesky, but I'm a lazy and tired lady

PS don't get me wrong most likely I'm in the 99% me too

[beliestelar]

Leer en algún momento

El chico de la piel de cerdo y otros relatos que jamás deberías leer - Raiza Revelles

Consumidores de pesadillas - Alfonso Orejel

KAIKI Cuentos de terror y locura

Ante el dolor de los demás - Susan Sontag

Cuando la oscuridad nos ama - Elizabeth Engstrom

Estrella distante - Roberto Bolaño

Nuestra parte de la noche - Mariana Enriquez

Anatomía de la melancolía - Robert Burton

Psicología del arte - Liev Semionovich Vigotski

La interpretación de los sueños - Freud

Un asesinato brillante - Anthony Horowitz

Lógica de la crueldad - Joan Carles Melich

El libro de los seres imaginarios - Borges

El color que cayó del cielo - H. P. Lovecraft

El poeta que rugió a la luna y se convirtió en tigre - Atsushi Nakajima

Los cansados - Michele Serra

Lo bello y lo triste - Yasunari Kawabata

Vidas frágiles, noches oscuras - Hiromi Kawakami

El ruiseñor y la rosa - Oscar Wilde

El buscador de esencias - Dominique Roques

Cuanto más profunda es el agua, más feo es el pez - Katya Apekina

Ese maldito yo - E. M. Cioran

Emma - Jane Austen

Los elixires del diablo - E. T. A. Hoffmann

Más que humano - Theodore Sturgeon

[manfredkitsune]

Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap". ~ Wikipedia I apologize in advance for the quality of this... thing.

[athelind]

Ladies, gentlemen, and honored readers, I give you:

The Revelation of Theodore Sturgeon.

It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of S.F. is crud. The Revelation Ninety percent of everything is crud. Corollary 1 The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere. Corollary 2 The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field. (From Venture magazine, March 1958)

Replace "science fiction/S.F." with "fan fiction" -- or, indeed, "television" or "movies" or "new music" or "old music" -- and all of the above still holds true.

All things – cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people, and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like. (From Venture magazine, September 1957. Emphasis mine.)

It is a universal constant. It is an axiom.

the vast majority of fanworks are bad, and that's fine, actually. they are bad for the same reason that the average number of legs for a human person to have is less than two: statistics. like with all endeavours and especially creative ones, most people who write fanfiction or draw art of their favourite characters are bad at it. if you line up all the crochet projects in the world, most of them will be, well, bad. some are bad because they're the first thing a person ever made, or the second or third or tenth, and this kind of thing takes practice. others are bad because the person who made them is just not very good at it. maybe they just learned how to make granny squares and they're perfectly happy to never expand or improve on that. most people who dance or bake or garden or braid hair are not amazing at it! and you'd never go to your kid's dance recital or eat your friend's homemade carrot cake and expect the same experience as you'd have at a professional ballet performance or award-winning bakery. And that's if we assume there is an objective measure of Good Art, which there isn't! Some art is just "bad" because you don't like it!

I think though that specifically with fanfiction, we sometimes forget that when we read a book or watch a movie, dozens of people have looked at it and given feedback and made changes and done quality control before the final product reaches our shelves or screens, and that's not counting the original writer's learning process and past experience. A published book is not anyone's first crochet project, even if it is their debut novel. But with fanfiction, the barrier to entry is so low (on purpose! this is a good thing!) that we do get to see a lot of wonky granny squares, and on sites like AO3 they're sitting on the same shelf as the hand-made silk lace wedding dress and you can't always tell just by looking at it which is which. The consequence of this is that we encounter fic that we think is unpolished, has bad punctuation, is out of character, and we are tempted to think "well, this is awful! how dare this person put this wonky granny square on the same shelf as the lace wedding dress!" But that's not how fandom is supposed to work! That wonky granny square is somebody who is really excited about this TV show they just watched and they are reaching out into the void to share their excitement with you. To scoff at them for not making a lace wedding dress is really, really rude. Even if they did make a lace wedding dress, maybe it's just really not your style, or you think they should have used a different pattern, and it's still their wedding dress. You don't have to wear the dress and you don't have to read the fic.

We all know that there is some fanfic out there that is incredible. I think it's important to talk about that! But the vast majority of people who post their writing online are just sharing their little hobby projects that they make for fun and I also think it's important to remember that.

[caviarlover1]

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[afactaday]

#aFactADay2023

#825: Theodore Sturgeon, a sci-fi writer, was sad at how much sci-fi was just,,, bad. so he had a revelation, Sturgeon's Revelation (aka Sturgeon's Law): "ninety percent of everything is cr*p". from books to cars to fashion to people, 90% of it is completely "crud". he first said this in 1951, but it didn't appear in print until 1957. in 1958, he defined two corollaries: firstly, the existence of so much bad sci-fi is only as unnatural as the existence of so much bad everything; secondly, the best sci-fi is as good as the best anything else.

it's unfair to say that Sturgeon invented his law though: Rudyard Kipling wrote a similar thing but with 4/5 in 1890, and George Orwell in 1946, saying that over nine out of ten books are worthless and cannot be criticised lol

the more useful part is when Daniel Dennett revived the idea in 2013, saying that it was an important element of critical thinking. similarly, Kipling said that the remaining 20% was basically worth it.

link: adages

[lindajenni]

aug 23

a rapture, but when?

"gather My saints together to Me, those who have made a covenant with Me by sacrifice." psa 50:5

do i believe in a rapture - with all my heart. i think most of the body of Christ do also, the only dispute being when it will occur. that differs widely. although it shouldn't be a matter of division among us, one side is constantly trying to disprove the other. some, i believe, just so they can prove themselves right while others are genuinely concerned pre-trib believers might be the cause of many falling from faith should they have to go through the tribulation.

i would answer those who believe pre-tribbers might cause a falling away that it is only a shallow, escapist view that would allow such a thing to happen. those departing would be the ones Jesus foretold of in the planting of the seeds parable. "but when the sun was up they were scorched, and because they had no root they withered away." matt 13:6

those who have dug deep roots and tapped into that "river of life" would continue to drink of whatever cup their heavenly Father desired. like our Lord Jesus they would say: "shall I not drink the cup which My Father has given Me?" john 18:11 we know, like our Lord, that the world "could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above." john 19:11

whichever the case may be, i think we will all soon find out because i see the tribulation fast approaching. that either means we will all soon be out of here or there is awaiting us the most terrible time the world has ever known. it is a time which will really require commitment and endurance - no fair-weather christians here.

us pre-tribbers see it different. we "wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come." 1 thes 1:10 we are promised immunity from God's wrath. so then the question might be whether we are sure the tribulation is really God's wrath fulfilled. we are told in revelation about, "seven angels having the seven last plagues, for in them the wrath of God is complete." rev 15:1 His wrath is COMPLETE. after that remains only a certain and righteous judgment. so yes, it is His wrath; His wrath complete.

a lot of us are now looking to a soon rapture because the two-thousand year, two-day typology of God's timing is nearing completion. a pre-trib rapture would mean seven years subtracted from that; thus this year or presumably the next. do i assume too much for a mere mortal, imbecilic to our God's vastness?

it's not just time we're counting. just look around you. too much differentiates us from any previous generation. "and there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring." luke 21:25

yes, the heavens are also declaring it. the revelation 12 sign of the woman (virgo), which precedes the catching up to God, is coming into it's fullness next month (feast of trumpets). i would suggest watching a video on youtube to help understand this more - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQazQSEDeIA. the moon is very important in God's timing. we know the beginning of each month is determined at the fist sliver of a new moon - called rosh chodesh.

we have three special moons in a month! we have a "super sturgeon moon" that started the month off on august 1, a "micro new moon" on august 16, and a "super blue moon" will end the month with a bang on august 31. the heavens are God's to maneuver and cannot be manipulated by satan. even one asteroid sought to be diverted by man from it's trajectory towards earth, now is moving into the constellation virgo and into God's perfect plan. He does indeed cause "all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose." rom 8:28

i know it is a fine line to walk between astronomy and astrology. satan tries to imitate God in all things, but the heavens belong to God, just as the rainbow does. we must not neglect the message God is sending in each of them to His chosen. did not the three wise men follow a star to worship our Lord?

we have a hope set before us that reaches beyond any human imagination. that hope will be fulfilled in all who hold it tight to the end. whenever the rapture might occur, it will be in God's perfect timing for He does all things well. that's a fact that all of us can believe in.

"for, behold, the Lord cometh forth out of his place, and will come down, and tread upon the high places of the earth." mic 1:3 friends, He's really coming for us. He has promised to revive us after two days. keep waiting. keep watching. this feast of trumpets - the one feast many have mostly looked to at as a possible rapture time - could this really be THE one? heads up, everyone. maranatha!

[itsmonika]

Salmon Birth Totem Overview

The living excursion of a salmon is known for its inventive and energetic soul. They will generally need all that they contact to light up and inspire them towards progress.

Salmon Birth Symbol Outline Some local spot Americans, medication wheel celestial prophets, and shamans Salmon Totem Pole Animal use sturgeon for this emblem. Assume your introduction to the world date falls between July 22nd/August 22nd in the northern half of the globe or January twentieth/February eighteenth in the Southern Side of the equator. All things considered, you are drifting under the Local American Zodiac Indication of the Salmon.

In Western Crystal gazing, in the event that you are under the Northern Side of the equator, it makes you a Leo. Moreover, assuming you are under the Southern Half of the globe, you are an Aquarius. A salmon soul will in general control things and get things done in the most capricious manner, which makes them very unusual.

These needs are accused of interminable power and mental fortitude — so they can be adamant, or would things go how they wish. Albeit, this prompts this soul creature adhering to their standards and consider everything in life to be dark or white. One of the hardest examples for Salmon Emblem is to figure out how to take the path of least resistance with however everything pan out as opposed to going against the flow.

In the event that this Soul Creature is in a gathering, they will be the best chief for everybody to gain from and will constantly give their 100 percent and complete all undertakings while never wanting to surrender, no matter what. The Universe will constantly show that this Local American Zodiac Indication of Salmon will continuously need to make something of their own, something that will put them beside the remainder of the world! This soul creature trains you to follow your fantasies and yearnings no matter what the inconceivable chances that might stop you.

Salmon Attributes, Character, And Qualities Salmon's blood is imbued with Way-finding. This Soul creature will continuously follow their senses — they will constantly know where they need to go.

They will generally consistently search for the endorsement of others in their circle and on occasion even be viewed as all in all too emotional about things. In any case, misguided judgments will ultimately vanish in light of the fact that it's about self image yet rather part of Salmon's changing way towards self-revelation. Salmon partakes in the better things throughout everyday life and is the most joyful to impart them to other people. Salmon is viewed as an image of success and favorable luck by the Local Americans.

[newstfionline]

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Canada to deploy navy vessels to Haiti as violence worsens (AP) Canada will send navy vessels to Haiti for intelligence-gathering as part of efforts to quell worsening gang violence in the Caribbean nation, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced Thursday. Trudeau made the announcement in the Bahamas at an annual meeting of Caribbean leaders where a key topic has been Haiti’s surge in killings, rapes and kidnappings blamed on gangs emboldened since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry, also at the meeting, has pleaded for a full-fledged international military intervention to stem the mayhem. His country requested help from the U.N. Security Council in October, and has suggested the U.S. and Canada lead a force. No such intervention has come together, and neither country has offered to take the lead.

Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon, flag-bearer for independence, to resign (Washington Post) Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of Scotland and a relentless advocate for Scottish independence, announced her surprise resignation on Wednesday, saying she no longer felt she could give the job her all. She also worried about her role as a polarizing figure in a country divided over its future in the United Kingdom. A thorn in the side of successive British prime ministers, Sturgeon won international praise for her handling of the coronavirus pandemic and helped make Scotland a global leader on climate—even as she failed to make progress on her animating cause: independence. Her remarks were intensely personal—and not overtly political. She took no parting shots and burned no bridges. She has recently faced head winds but no career-ending scandal. Instead, Sturgeon spoke of feelings. She said she missed getting a coffee with a friend or going for a peaceful walk. Sturgeon’s resignation remarks were similar to those made by New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, 42, who announced last month, “I have given my absolute all. I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.”

Revelers celebrate street Carnival across German Rhineland (AP) Tens of thousands of revelers danced in the streets of Cologne, Duesseldorf, Bonn and other cities and towns across the Rhineland Thursday as they celebrated the traditional start of Carnival in Germany. Dressed up in bright colors and creative costumes, they sang loudly and swayed to familiar tunes of brass bands and folklore music, and drank lots of beer. It is the first time since the start of the pandemic that Carnival is being celebrated in Germany without any coronavirus restrictions. The first day of Carnival in Germany is also traditionally dedicated to women taking over the power in city halls across the Rhineland for a day. They symbolically take away the keys from the—mostly male—mayors, and cut off men’s ties and shoelaces in return for kisses.

Pistorius’s task (Washington Post) Despite promises of a huge boost in defense spending in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany’s armed forces are in a worse place than a year ago, the country’s new defense minister, Boris Pistorius, told The Washington Post this week. Germany is not alone among Ukrainian allies in struggling to fill a gap created by deliveries to Kyiv, and the military’s operational readiness has been impacted only “to a limited extent,” Pistorius said on the sidelines of a NATO meeting in Brussels, in his first interview with an English-language newspaper since taking office last month. But it may be some time before the vision of a strengthened German military is realized. “Given the rate at which materiel and weapons and ammunition are being provided, it’s impossible to reorder and deliver again,” Pistorius said. The pressure points are similar elsewhere. Many allies who have helped supply Ukraine’s military are now expressing unease about the dent to their strategic assets. Of particular concern is ammunition: Ukraine has been firing as many as 7,000 artillery shells a day, which is more than European industry has the capability to manufacture.

Russian ‘spy’ balloons over Ukraine are often decoys designed to draw fire (Washington Post) Amid everything else, balloons—presumably sent by Russia—are also menacing Ukraine. Top Ukrainian officials this week joined the new worldwide focus on the threat of unmanned aerial balloons and their potential use for espionage and disruption. The officials said they routinely shoot down small objects that could be used by Russia for spying but mostly seem to be decoys intended to draw the Ukrainian military’s attention, and ammunition, from more important targets. The widening worldwide interest was set off by the discovery of a Chinese spy balloon over the United States last month, which the U.S. military shot down after tracking it across the country. At least three other objects believed to be balloons were also shot down in U.S. or Canadian airspace officials said. While balloons seem to be having a moment, Yuriy Ihnat, a spokesman for Ukraine’s air force, said that his country was focused far more on the latest barrage of Russian missiles that were fired at Ukraine overnight, including Kh-22 ballistic missiles that are almost impossible to intercept.

The earthquake in Turkey and Syria offers lessons and reminders for disaster response (NPR) In the immediate aftermath of a devastating earthquake, where someone is trapped in their collapsed home or office building and waiting for help, it’s likely that the first people to help won’t be trained professionals. “The people who are going to have the most effect on the rescue is going to be your neighbors. Because they’re the ones right there, right when it happens,” Forrest Lanning told NPR. He’s an earthquake and volcano response liaison with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and a structural engineer. Lanning and other emergency and disaster response experts say that no matter the area around the world hit by an earthquake or other kind of emergency, people should know that effective help often comes from the immediate community. Spreading that awareness, and training people to respond when official rescuers aren’t able to do so, are among the measures emergency response experts say are essential to saving the most lives in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Even if a bystander can’t pull someone out of the rubble, they can still pinpoint for responders areas where people were located.

Syria’s Assad Uses Disaster Diplomacy to Inch Back Onto World Stage (NYT) A powerful earthquake last week catapulted Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, into the global spotlight, creating an opportunity for him to inch further back onto the international stage through disaster diplomacy. As the death toll soared from the region’s deadliest quake in a century, Mr. al-Assad, long a pariah for bombing and torturing his own people during Syria’s civil war, received a steady flow of sympathy, aid and attention from other countries. Arab leaders who had shunned him for a decade picked up the phone and called. Senior United Nations officials trooped through his office, offering assistance and posing for photographs. Planeloads of aid landed from more than a dozen countries—allies like Russia, Iran and China, but also Saudi Arabia, which previously had only sent aid (and weapons) to the rebels seeking to topple Mr. al-Assad. “There’s no doubt this is a good moment for Assad,” said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “A tragedy for Syrians is a boon for Assad, because nobody else wants to manage this mess.” Touring Syria’s quake-torn cities over the past week, Mr. al-Assad could for once blame the destruction in his country on nature rather than war.

China declares ‘decisive victory’ over COVID-19 (Reuters) China’s top leaders declared a “decisive victory” over COVID-19, claiming the world’s lowest fatality rate, although experts have questioned Beijing’s data as the coronovirus tore across the country after largely being kept at bay for three years. China abruptly ended its zero-COVID policy in early December, with 80% of its 1.4 billion population becoming infected, a prominent government scientist said last month. Though there were widespread reports of packed hospital wards and mortuaries, China recorded only about 80,000 COVID deaths in hospitals in the two months after dropping its curbs. Some experts say the actual toll was far higher, as many patients die at home and doctors were widely reported to have been discouraged from reporting COVID as a cause of death.

New Zealand, Battered by a Record Storm, Faces a Painful Cleanup (NYT) In Hawke’s Bay, cows swam for their lives. In Northland, unremitting winds toppled electricity poles like matchsticks. And throughout New Zealand’s sodden North Island, people who had lost homes and livelihoods looked anxiously ahead to a slow, painful and expensive cleanup. As of Friday morning, at least six people had died and more than 3,500 were still unaccounted for days after Cyclone Gabrielle lashed the northern half of New Zealand, devastating vast swaths of land and displacing more than 10,000 people. With communications still out in multiple New Zealand regions, the full extent of the damage from the storm—the worst in the country’s record—was unknown. At least one economist has estimated that the recovery will cost billions, and Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said New Zealand would accept international aid. “This is a traumatic event,” Mr. Hipkins said at a news conference. “It’s a very big challenge to restore infrastructure as fast as we can, but we have to acknowledge that we are in for a bumpy ride.”

Forget Milk and Eggs: Supermarkets Are Selling Data About You (The Markup) When you hit the checkout line at your local supermarket and give the cashier your phone number or loyalty card, you are handing over a valuable treasure trove of data that may not be limited to the items in your shopping cart. Many grocers systematically infer information about you from your purchases and “enrich” the personal information you provide with additional data from third-party brokers, potentially including your race, ethnicity, age, finances, employment, and online activities. Some of them even track your precise movements in stores. They then analyze all this data about you and sell it to consumer brands eager to use it to precisely target you with advertising and otherwise improve their sales efforts. Leveraging customer data this way has become a crucial growth area for top supermarket chain Kroger and other retailers over the past few years, offering much higher margins than milk and eggs.

A Consistent Sleep Schedule Might Protect Your Heart (NYT) There are a few tried and true pieces of advice that sleep doctors always give for battling insomnia: Watch those alcoholic drinks at dinner, cut the afternoon coffee, stop scrolling before bed. And please, they beg: Keep your sleep schedule consistent. Flip-flopping between wake-up times—jolting awake at 7:30 on a Friday morning and then dozing until the afternoon on Saturday—wreaks havoc on our internal body clocks. Sleep experts refer to this as “social jet lag,” said Dr. Sabra Abbott, a sleep medicine specialist at the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine. Similar to changing time zones, heading to bed at vastly different times from night to night may throw off your circadian rhythm. Kelsie Full, a behavioral epidemiologist and an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is the lead author of a new study that tied irregular sleep to an early marker of cardiovascular disease. Researchers examined a week’s worth of sleep data from 2,000 adults over 45 and found that those who slept varying amounts each night and went to bed at different times were more likely to have hardened arteries than those with more regular sleep patterns. People whose overall sleep amounts varied by two or more hours from night to night throughout the week—getting five hours of sleep on Tuesday, say, and then eight hours on Wednesday—were particularly likely to have high levels of calcified fatty plaque built up in their arteries, compared with those who slept the same number of hours each night.

[books]

Writer Spotlight: Lina Rather

Lina Rather is a speculative fiction author from Michigan now living in Washington, D.C. Her stories have appeared in various publications, including Shimmer, Flash Fiction Online, and Lightspeed.

Her current work, Our Lady of Endless Worlds, is a space opera about faith and duty, redemption and revelation, and nuns in a giant slug in outer space. The first book in the series, Sisters of the Vast Black, won the Golden Crown Literary Society Goldie award and was shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Its sequel, Sisters of the Forsaken Stars, is now out to all the places that sell good books—possibly interrupting Lina’s non-writing pursuits of cooking overly elaborate recipes, reading history, and collecting cool rocks and terrible 90s comic books.

Click through to read more about squishy technology, advice for burgeoning SFF authors, and some amazing SFF litfic reading recs!

How would you describe Sisters of the Forsaken Stars to someone new to your work?

Sisters of the Forsaken Stars is the sequel to Sisters of the Vast Black (definitely start there!) and follows an order of interplanetary nuns as they travel in their living slug-ship between worlds in need of charity or medical help. In the second book, the Sisters are on their own, cast out of the Church after uncovering a terrible conspiracy—the whole foundation of their lives has changed. They have to deal with that grief and trauma while also choosing what role they will play in a war that is surely coming.

SOTFS is the second novella in your space opera series. Did you always envision a series?

Not initially, but by the time I finished the first book, I knew I wanted to spend more time with the women aboard the ship, Our Lady of Impossible Constellations. Each of them is a little bit of me in a different way, and I loved following them as they found their way down new paths in the wake of the first book.

The Sisters in SOTFS all have very different personalities. How do you approach writing different personalities’ coping mechanisms?

Each of the Sisters has something they truly cherish in life. Whether that’s faith, stability, or community, the events of the previous book have shaken those tenets. I focused on each of those things—what does it feel like for each of them to lose their grounding? What will they do to regain it? What happens if they can’t?

There are several intricate and complex bonds between characters in SOTFS—for example, a romantic lesbian relationship that’s refreshing in that it isn’t a focal point of the story and gets to just be quiet and tender. Did you enjoy writing that relationship?

I did! With Gemma, I wanted to write about someone who is going through a new “coming-of-age” later in life and having to learn who she is and how to be part of a relationship. I think many queer people, myself included, are familiar with feeling like they’re stumbling through another adolescence after coming out or leaving home. Too often, starting a relationship is the end of a story, but so often, that’s just the beginning—Gemma may love Vauca, but at the start of SOTFS, she doesn’t know how to do the work of that.

The living ships are such a brilliant element in the series, bringing up questions of agency and validity of the more-than-human. What first drew you to blur the lines between technology and animals?

I love organic technology—the squishier, the better! And because so much of the Sisters’ vocation is about care and community, it seemed natural that their ship should also be a member of their community, one they have to care for. It’s been really interesting to see different readers’ perspectives on the ship and its relative level of sentience and autonomy.

You have reworked your stories for audio; what’s that process like? Have you written for radio from scratch before?

I’ve only done a little bit of adaption for audio—mostly smoothing out things that look good on paper but sound funny narrated. For the most part, my stories have appeared in audio after appearing in print, so changes have to be small. I would love to write for a narrative mystery or horror podcast, though. I’m a huge fan of the genre (shoutout to Arden, Magnus Archives, Passenger List, The Last Movie…)!

Does your approach differ according to the format you’re working with (short story vs. novella, for instance)?

I tend to have the same process for most of my work—I’m a very methodical writer, and by the time I start a draft, I generally have a beginning, an ending, and the general feeling of the story in between. On the upside, that means I usually only write one (very, very slow) draft that is very close to the final product. On the downside, it means a lot more fallow time. SOTFS was a little different because I had an external timeline. I ended up writing all of the big scenes out of order, then fitting them together like puzzle pieces and filling in the connective tissue.

Do you have any advice for writers starting in SFF and hoping to make a career out of their writing?

Take risks—write that oddball story—and make friends! Writing is a lot more fun when you have a group of people pursuing the same goals (whether in real life, on a forum, or social media). Writing can be a weird and insular world.

What’s next for you?

I just sold the last short story I had in the archive (about an old cheesemaker and the king of death, forthcoming in Lightspeed soon-ish), so I would love to take some time to play in that sandbox again. Between the Order of Endless Worlds books and general life in the pandemic, it’s been a while since I’ve had the chance to. But I really enjoy the short form, and you can try out weird and wacky ideas that can’t sustain a longer work (maybe I will finally finish my “talking goat goes to see the world’s largest rubber band ball” story).

Do you have any hopes for the future of the SFF genre? What would you like to see more of?

I would love to see more slipstream and litfic-y SFF coming out. Some of my favorite books are speculative fiction published by non-SFF publishers (let me drop a plug for the very weird Secret Lives of the Monster Dogs and Famous Men Who Never Lived here). I also want to see a new venue for this kind of short fiction crop up—this corner of the market has really suffered in the past few years with the loss of Liminal, Shimmer, and now Lackington’s. I adore this subgenre, and it deserves more appreciation!

Thanks to Lina for her brilliant answers! Sisters of The Forsaken Stars is out now!

[malwen-sosialaidd]

Nicola Sturgeon, whose government is currently putting through a bill to streamline how people change their sex on their birth certificate, warned that “every time we oversimplify this debate, trans people actually suffer”.

Referring to the latest revelations of misogyny in Westminster, along with the assault on abortion rights in the US, Sturgeon said:

These are the threats against women. I do not believe that trans rights and women’s rights are or should in any way be in conflict and I will argue that case until my dying breath.

Refusing to define the characteristics of a woman – a question that has been used by some media in an attempt to trip up or embarrass politicians across the political spectrum – Sturgeon said: “I’m not going to, I’m just not going to get into this debate at a level that’s about simplified and lurid headlines.”

More of this, please

[somewhere-south-of-neutral]

Relevant TvTropes page:

“fanfiction,” as a concept, only exists because of intellectual property. at the end of the day, it’s just fiction. some of it is great, some of it sucks ass. sometimes, it can reveal something damning about the author—prejudices, biases, whether or not they think cats should be left indoors, how they feel about offshore tax evasion, whatever. that’s the nature of fiction. this is not news to anyone who’s ever opened a book

what’s truly unique about fanfiction is that it’s anonymous and free with a barrier to entry that ants wouldn’t notice climbing. also, it’s amateur by necessity; barring a few notable exceptions, nobody expects their gaudy slash fiction to win them an award or make them a million dollars. this crock pot of internet fuckery lends itself to two things—a monumental diversity of skill level and buck wild nasty behavior

fanfiction is neither god’s gift to all man kind nor an incurable blight. it’s just a thing. that exists. it’s neither defenseless nor indefensible. it can be harmful, helpful, or benign. more importantly, it’s not going anywhere, so i wish we’d stop arguing about whether or not it’s “legitimate” and talk about what’s actually happening with it instead