Sorry for the intense lag bout there – after getting back from Vancouver, Friday got swallowed whole by more cat problems and a mountain of paperwork. The weekend… yeah, mostly more cat pee cleanup. I tried to put my studio back together on Saturday, but had to take it apart again.

But I think I’ve found the last hidden spot in my studio which has been driving me insane for a week^*, at last, tonight.

BUT. ENOUGH ABOUT CAT PEE. Vancouver and the Great Big Sea show at the PNE was awesome. Geri and Robert let us crash at their place again – thanks! The Fair, by the way, has this:

Oh Jesus

…which is something I’m sure nobody needed to know. I did not partake, but I almost did. Instead, I bought alcohol and Siegel’s, which are now safely stashed in our pantry.

Of course, the show:

Setting the Stage
(More photos on my Flickr stream.)

GBS was good, as always, but the experience – I hate to say this, but I knew it would be true – paled against seeing them last year on their home turf. The crowd was into it, don’t get me wrong, but not on the same order of magnitude.

The funniest moment in the show was when Alan realised one of the giant mobile sculpture-like metal towers behind the audience (Revelation) was actually a ride and there “are people up there,” at which point he was all, “…what did you do?!”

He looked genuinely freaked out. It was hilarious.

Thursday was the last day of Mt. Pleasant/East Van icon Rhizome, which is a sad and terrible thing – they’re moving to Toronto, partly for family reasons, and re-opening there. DAMN YOU, EASTERN STANDARD TRIBE!

I stopped by for a last lunch and to hang out a bit, and ended up putting them back in contact with another person who moved from Vancouver to Toronto, and took a few pictures; this one is fitting:

Accidental Sepiatone

Accidental sepiatone actually was accidental, a mis-exposure and happy accident. I have a regular-colour shot too, but I like this one better. Anna and I also helped Robert move his old rear-projection TV to the recycle centre; a relaxed and lazy day before catching the train south.

Once back, at King Street Station, we walked by this beautiful beast:

Private Car

I asked the station employee in the photo what the deal was, and she told me it was a private car. I know about these, but hadn’t yet seen one; essentially, you can buy an old rail car and pay rail companies to haul them around for you – with cargo trains too, this isn’t just CascadiaRail or Amtrak – with you and yours in them. It’s like an RV, but for the rails.

I want one so much. 😀

So, that’s a bit of catching up. Today we’ll have another go at putting the studio back together sans remaining stink, and try to get back on proper track.

*: Honestly, you have no idea how disruptive this has been. He started while we were gone, and it went from never to 2-4 times a day, and there’s not a day I’m not spending at least a couple of hours cleaning cat pee or aftereffects thereof, just trying to catch up. It’s all I did for a solid week; at least it’s not all my time anymore. On top of that, everything is stacked up in fenced-off areas he can’t reach; it’s like we’re in the middle of packing for a move, and that includes my studio. I’m having anxiety nightmares. We have an action plan now, but… yeah.

Saw Pacific Rim on Sunday, and I can’t remember walking out of a theatre after a film, including Avatar, with my brain still going how did I just see that and how can I can see it again? I’ve been told this is how people felt coming out of Star Wars in 1977.

Let’s go to my post-film tweets, to be followed by one very minor spoiler:

Solarbirdy: JFC YOU GUYS WHY IS NOT EVERYONE AND EVERY BLOG NOT NOW ENTIRELY ABOUT PACIFIC RIM OMG #seriously #NOSERIOUSLY
Solarbirdy: I’M GONNA TWEET ALL CAPS FOR A WHILE BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS THAT AWESOME I AM IN KIND OF A DAZE FROM AWESOME SO DEAL WITH IT
Solarbirdy: ALSO WHY HAS THIS MOVIE NOT MADE EIGHT HUNDRED BILLION DOLLARS
Solarbirdy: BECAUSE OH MY GOD
Solarbirdy: FUCK STAR WARS LET’S TALK KAIJU
Solarbirdy: HAVE YOU SEEN THE BATTLE OF HONG KONG? NO? WHY THE HELL NOT BECAUSE YOU NEED TO #obviously
Solarbirdy: ON THE BIGGEST SCREEN POSSIBLE. PERHAPS A LARGER ONE SHOUD BE MADE. I SUGGEST WE REPURPOSE NEBRASKA. #nobodysusingit
Solarbirdy: I WILL ALSO ACCEPT KANSAS IN A PINCH, IT HAS THE RIGHT RATIO FOR IMAX #sorta #oristhatcolorado #oneofthoserectangles
Solarbirdy: OH MY GOD WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME #iwasnotprepared
Solarbirdy: GIANT MECHA KATA I WAS LITERALLY DOING SQUEEFLAIL IN MY SEAT LIKE A QUARTER OF THE MOVIE #armworkout
Solarbirdy: WELL I AM NOW UP TO SPEED. <BASH FISTS TOGETHER>

Okay, one – rather clever – phrase going around is that it lacks character development in the same way that The English Patient lacks kaiju and giant robots. I dispute this. Rinko Kikuchi’s spectacularly-realised Mako Mori goes through the Hero’s Arc, and while that’s not unusual development, it’s one of the classic literary progressions of character. I would make different but important arguments for two other characters.

Further, it’s one of the most emotionally intelligent action films I’ve seen in I don’t even know how long. This Tumblr post does a great job of explaining how and why, and it’s spoilerriffic, so don’t click until you’ve seen the movie.

On the negative side, I’d grant that the call-to-action speech that always happens in these things is the only weak moment in Idris Elba’s otherwise lovely performance of Stacker Pentecost, and you can argue that the last 20 minutes doesn’t live up to the Battle of Y’KNOW WHAT NOBODY FUCKING CARES AND NONE OF THAT MATTERS BECAUSE THIS MOVIE IS AWESOME. WERE THERE PROBLEMS IN STAR WARS BEFORE LUCAS FUCKED IT UP? YES. AND NOBODY CARED. AND NOBODY SHOULD CARE ABOUT THESE BECAUSE THIS ENTIRE MOVIE IS MADE OF AWESOME.

Seriously, there are flaws, NOBODY CARES IT HAS TOO MUCH AWESOME FOR ANYONE TO CARE. If you aren’t squeeflailing uncontrollably through the Hong Kong sequences I don’t even want to know you. The more you know about kaiju and giant robot/jaeger film and anime of the past the more you’ll see, know, and love, about this. There’re nods to everything from NGE back to Ray Harryhausen, and you are in the hands of a genius who cares about all of it. Go watch this on IMAX, right now, while you still can.

eta: Oh, on a technical note: the IMAX 3D in this movie is so good that I forgot it was there. That’s never happened in a 3D movie either. I don’t know whether that’d be true in regular-theatre 3D, tho’.

Cellist Betsy Tinney has launched a Kickstarter to fund the solo album everyone has been trying to get her to record for years. If you care at all for cello, check out this project.

You may know Betsy as one third of Tricky Pixie (along with SJ Tucker and Alexander James Adams) or you may have seen her playing with The Heather Dale Band or Gaia’s Consort. She’s a studio artist with and occasionally plays out for Leannan Sidhe, and Vixy & Tony… the list goes on. But she’s never stepped out on her own, before now.

I’ve had the pleasant opportunity to jam with her a few times, and work with her in studio. She’s a consummate professional – she’s recorded for Windham Hill, ffs – and you can be damn sure she’ll deliver. I’ve never been to Mystic Fig Studios, where she’s recording all her tracks, but I know it by reputation. Some of you may have seen musician and Mystic Fig studio engineer Jeff Bohnhoff’s contributions to this blog in the past.

See, here’s the thing: Betsy wasn’t just doing the geek cello thing before cello was geekmusic cool; she was part of the reason cello became geekmusic cool. In other words, Betsy didn’t follow this trend; she started it. Or at least certainly helped. And now that she’s finally recording her solo album, it’s time to throw some Kickstarter love. Go. Now!

ALSO, since it’s been a while since I’ve opened comments up for a Go Plug Yourself Friday: COMMENT ON THE BAND BLOG WITH YOUR ART! NOT THE ECHOS, THE OFFICIAL BLOG ONLY! Everybody who comments on the official blog will be included in the collection post next week. No account needed. But it has to be work you create, either solo or as part of a group – no resellers.

Have a good weekend, everybody!

The new Pussy Riot single (and video) is out. In short: screw you, Putin.

I’ve just recorded the feature segment for the next Geekmusic Podcast – we talk to Heather Dale about the new game Gates of Camelot – and I’ll be recording the news segment when I’m back from British Columbia, early next week. So get me your news items NOW, and tell anybody else you know who might have geekmusic-related news to get it to me!

Also, if you’ve had problems using the contact form because of bad CAPTCHAs, we’ve fixed it… by turning CAPTCHA off. I don’t know what triggers it, but sometimes the form just starts throwing out the wrong graphic. I thought it had to be cache-related, but turning all that off didn’t fix anything, so yeah, no.

The weird part is that it works just fine for Anna. Exact same plugin. I have no idea why.

Finally, your SFWAdenfreude Update: Mary Robinette Kowal’s PLEASE SHUT THE FUCK UP to the people she calls the 12 Rabid Weasels of SFWA has really taken off. I tweeted about it yesterday; it’s kind of awesome. Apparently, it made Gawker today, which is kind of a big deal – but I don’t have a link. And Scalzi has put up a co-sign thread for people who wish to declare a harassment-policy policy akin to his. Enjoy the fireworks!
 

laughing at a streetview prank / changed the view to find my place / sudden scent of tokyo bay
#irrationallyhomesick

Remember all that SFWA fail I kept posting about? White supremacists using the SFWA promotions twitter account, the rampant sexism, all that? The discussions are still ongoing on the SFWA message boards, and, whelp, looks like somebody has decided to leak them via screencaps. This isn’t the best one, I just like it because it’s talking about the importance of voting for the White Supremacist:

Oh my. No wonder Scalzi made a big deal out of the end of his term as SFWA president.
 

eta2: Welcome, Radish Review readers! You may wish to look at a follow-up post, Power and Supervillainy, about harassment at conventions and online, if you’re following this topic closely. The SFWA Twelve only part of the problem.
eta: Welcome, visitors from James Nicoll‘s LJ and Dreamwidth blogs! Nice to meet you. I’m a musician who is also a long-time F&SF fan; I run nwcMUSIC, the pan-geekmusic programme at Norwescon; and I invite you to poke around the site a bit and listen to my work. Thanks for coming by!

Anna is giving away both ebook and audiobook copies of Valor of the Healer. This isn’t the universe the soundtrack is from, but it is the same writer, and you should go enter!

The soundtrack has been dragging on, and how long it’s been taking has been getting on my nerves in a serious way. There’s not all that much to be done about that; I wasn’t ever intending to play melody on the traditional Irish Tune portions, then had to, which means I had to learn tunes playing well enough to do it in studio, and then when some of the selections weren’t going to work in a traditional set type arrangement, meant I had to learn to write tunes, or portions thereof, in a way that sounded right.

We are moving along, tho’. Slowly. We had Ellen Eades in last week, recording hammer dulcimer for one set, and Sunnie Larsen will be in tomorrow, recording more fiddle. I’m desperately hoping that between having to deal with the remains of Sewer Implosion 2013 and rehearsal tonight with Leannan Sidhe for their six shows over on the dry side that I’ll be able to rebuild the Chapter 1 track project, which corrupted itself after a crash.

Don’t worry, we didn’t lose any data, it’s just… jumbled a bit. So I have to import everything into a new project. It’s not difficult, just incredibly annoying and a bit time-consuming.

But that’ll depend upon letting the CD labeller get finished with the short run of CDs that are being printed up for those aforementioned shows. See how everything stacks up and gets in the way of everything else? So frustrating.

Whup, sounds like a certain wallboarder has had to get out a larger saw. I’d best check what’s up.

Meet Carol Kaye, bass goddess of the The Clique, a.k.a. the Wrecking Crew, the semi-famous group of top-level session musicians who could play anything, anywhere, for anyone, and generally did. You’ve heard her work many times if you’ve heard anything from the mid-20th century.

Here’s a bit of work where she’s featured, on YouTube – fuck yeah bass melodies! – and here’s a cool exercise for bass she invented I should adopt because it’s awesome, also on YouTube. I didn’t see a video of her demonstrating this exercise herself, or I’d’ve linked that instead. She’s still around, too, which is awesome.

For those following along on plumbing adventures: yeaaaaaah that … was not cheap. But not as expensive as it could’ve been. And! No greywater in the ceiling anymore? A bargain at twice the price. Today I start meeting up with drywall repair. We’re going to have to change the wall a little bit. That won’t be cheap either.

As the current SFWA fail event continues – tho’ they have, to their credit, formed what appears to be a serious committee to figure out paths forward – you’ve seen some calls about forming a new organisation. Cora Buhlert does so, at the end of a particularly good roundup of links^*.

Now, I’m not going to say what a group of writers should and shouldn’t do. But I have a fair bit of organisational experience, some of which is relevant, so am going to provide some council here. There are things any such effort must know and consider.

First, getting a bunch of people together to all sign up for something is fairly easy – particularly if they’re all pissed off at somebody else and want to make that statement.

But getting said pissed off people to do actual work? That’s not easy at all. Most of them won’t, ever. Understand this before you start.

And that’s bad, because building a credible organisation is hard, not-fun work. SFWA’s already having credibility – don’t laugh, okay, laugh, but also cry – is what makes all this insanity over the last six months a serious problem, as opposed to being fan wankery. Were SFWA just a fan club for writers, a lot fewer people would care.

But they’re not just a fan club for writers. For better or for worse, they’re a fairly legitimate professional organisation, which can and has successfully lobbied in the past for the business interests of their members. Consider Harlequin Horizons and Publish America as recent examples, but there are others.

They provide access to legal council, help with contracts, have an established and somewhat-recognised award – the Nebulas – that publishers and fans recognise. They have, as an organisation, helped stop abusive business practices towards writers, and their actions are taken seriously because of the weight of their organisation.

They have a lot of organisational knowledge which would be lost.

Now, that doesn’t mean people can’t go and start a competitor. It doesn’t even mean that you shouldn’t. But anyone starting such an organisation needs to know that it will take many years of hard work by many people to establish the first solid levels of credibility and durability needed by any such organisation.

That might now be necessary. But approach the task knowing this.

The second thing you need to know – or decide – is whether you want a professional organisation that actually is a professional organisation, or a protest/fan club.

The latter is easy, but utterly meaningless in this context. And it’s really easy to fall into that latter category. It’s so tempting to let as many people join as want – you get more names, you get a bigger membership so it looks like you have some clout with writers, you get a funding boost from their membership fees.

Such organisations can be great fan clubs, but are rarely good protectors of business interests. SFWA’s requirements for membership are there for a reason: to insure that only those serious enough and business-savvy enough to get an advance-paying contract with a major publisher are in the organisation.

In other words, pros, or at least, semi-professionals. Why? So it doesn’t turn into a fan club. So that everybody who joins cares about the business side of writing, and doesn’t just LURVE TEH SKIFFIES.

At very least, you’d need to go the Romance Writers of America route. Sure, they let anyone join who says they want to be a romance writer. But they also have their pro-membership inner group, which is a separate membership class. And to join that, you actually have to prove things.

So, were you to go up against SFWA as a competing professional organisation, you’d have to have the same sorts of standards just to be considered at all legitimate. And you’ll have to grow to a reasonable fraction of their size before the sorts of people who talk to professional organisations will also talk to you, and you will long be the, aheh, “weak sister.”

Which defeats the purpose.

And that gets to my third point: to accomplish the real goal, you’d need to supplant SFWA.

Right now, SFWA is the kind of place where vicious and sincere misogynists like Vox “women ruin everything” Day can get 40-ish votes for President. It’s also the leading F&SF English-language writers’ organisation^*, and is likely to remain so for some time.

That should not be allowed to stand.

Even were a peer competitor to be successfully launched, SFWA would stay around, and by being first, and by having a track record, and by having durability, would remain by reputation the ‘more important’ version – or worse, the ‘real’ version – for a long time. A successful and sustained launch still does not mean you’ve won.

So to win^** here, through competition, what do you need to do?

You need to either replace SFWA outright – drive it into irrelevance – or force it to reform from the outside. Failing to do either means you end up with a likely-even-more-mysognistic SFWA still being the leading writer’s association in F&SF.

So, in the end, you have three options (other than do nothing). One and two are both reform SFWA, just through different paths. The third option is to supplant it, and drive it into irrelevance. The third option is much more difficult.

And given that should either one or two succeed, the need for a competing organisation goes away^*** – well, I know what my choice would be.

But I’m not a writer, and it’s not my call.

Good luck.

*: See also Jim Hines’s continuing collection of reactions/Q&A.
**: Note that winning w.r.t SFWA won’t do a lot regarding horrible fan misogyny that Ann Aguirre writes about. That’s a societal issue and has to be fought on a far wider front.
***: The World SF Blog has totally legitimate complaints about SFWA being American-specific. But forming a transnational professional organisation limits that organisation’s scope dramatically. The legal support has to be unique per country, as does the business support, to fit national law; it’s less one organisation and several separate ones with an umbrella group, in practice. To be a truly transnational organisation requires doing either a lot less, or a lot more, and spending a lot more money.

eta: No matter how you slice it, Angela Highland points out certain market realities that say SFWA needs to rethink the specifics of its membership requirements. Maybe they should follow RWA’s lead.

Not bring a fiction writer – I gave it a go once and have a couple of awfully nice personal rejection letters from high-level editors for efforts – what SFWA does isn’t entirely my bailiwick. But the latest sexist eruption from the old guard has Anna, who is a writer, asking – in rather clear terms – what the hell this organisation is for, and why it’s worth her time.

I’ve read excerpts from Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg’s “rebuttal”/”counter-opinion” piece (courtesy Foz Meadows, who posted them), responding to a Jim Hines commentary on sexism in the field, and I find myself led back to a place I’ve been before.

Now, I don’t like making this kind of generalisation, and if it weren’t such a matter of strong self-identification of the group itself, I wouldn’t. But Baby Boomers have always been generationally hyper-identified. Until 1978, it was a rallying cry: “don’t trust anybody over 30.” Then they started turning 30, and it became “don’t trust anybody under 30,” and they’ve never listened to anyone else since.

Of course, I speak in the general, and there are always exceptions; I even know a couple. But over the broad spectrum, that self-proclaimed generational hyper-self-identification has led them to hearing no one else. Which is why they’ve been having the same damn arguments since Vietnam, and why it’s Team D vs. Team R in politics and why it can be so fierce on so many levels while still being so utterly disconnected from reality on the ground.

As I’ve said many times, when I was more commonly posting about politics: this will go on until it can’t.

But now we’re on the leading edge of a change: where they’re going to have to deal outside their own. Just a little, just on the fringes. The world is changing out from underneath them, right as they’re starting to think a good bit more about mortality, and they’ve spent the last 30 years being determinedly unaware and dismissive of the either possibility.

And they don’t like it.

This isn’t unique to them. A lot of the War Generation sat out the 60s, then got slapped upside the head by the 70s, tried to get reconnected, and found themselves totally, and I do mean totally, lost. We’ve been seeing these erupt more often, lately – see also this bad-even-for-Fox sexist explosion a few days ago – as reality starts to close in.

It’s going to be kind of awful. And in some ways, if you’re a bad person – like, say, a supervillain – kind of hilarious. But no matter how you choose to react, it’s going to be common.

Because Reality – who is one of the Supervillains of Crime and the Forces of Evil, she’s in the back on the Sketchy Characters cover – she may not be the fastest of us. But she is cold, and hard, and she will take you down.

And there is nothing you can do to stop that.
 
eta: Since most people don’t check comments, Mary Robinette Kowal has good commentary on how this kind of thing undoes so much of what SFWA is supposed to be about, and Ann Aguirre talks about how this feeds back into conventions and career – that second one is pretty hard reading at times, so be warned.
 

This post is part of a series of articles on sexism and racism in geek culture.