Stumbling Mostly Upwards

In case you have any followers in Cincinnati, OH, I wanted to share that the Cincinnati Opera is premiering a new opera this weekend called Lalovavi that was written by a Black composer (Kevin Day) and librettist (Tifara Brown) and features a predominantly (maybe entirely?) Black cast.

Cool things about this opera:

It's the first in a series of three operas being commissioned and premiered through the Black Opera Project

It's an Afrofuturist opera set in Atlanta 400 years in the future

Parts of the opera are sung in Tut, which is a language that was created by enslaved Black Americans as a mechanism for learning how to read and write when it was illegal for them to do so.

In preparation for the performance, the opera company made sure to hire Black lightwalkers (people who test lighting on stage) to get the lighting right for the actual actors

Anyway I'm stoked about this and want people to know it exists!! Opera tends to be like 50+ years behind every other art form in terms of confronting racism so I'm really excited that this is happening.

Thanks for everything you do - your blog is amazing. <3

2tbsp of peanut butter. a splash of rice vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, maple syrup. some chili flakes, some sesame seeds. a splash of water to thin it out. now you put in your noodles (cooled!!!! boiled and rinsed so they’re cold!!) and then some chopped up cucumber or carrot or avocado or cabbage or any crunchy vegetable. i just used cucumber

"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."

"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"

"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"

"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."

"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"

I laughed. "I've heard that before."

"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."

I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"

Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.

There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.

Next slide. “Brandon Sanderson is a member of the LDS”. The muttering has changed tone

“It’s not a very big amount of money though.” Someone in the audience pipes up. “His cut is only a small fraction of the cost of the book, and then-“ my next slide shows an income breakdown, it is titled ‘a small fraction of $10,000,000 is still a big number’

The argument I suspect OP was trying to make is, "this author does bad things with his money so don't consume his books." And, y'know, I can see that going either way, I do think it's a minor enough amount of money that it doesn't bother me, but whatever, you do you, and who knows maybe Sanderson actually does make $10million with his books.*

*I will not believe this without substantial sourcing, that would be highly unusual for any author, and Sanderson himself suggests otherwise.

But regardless of what OP intended, the actual result of this argument if adopted would be a dramatic increase in piracy, as people consume but don't pay for his books.

This one falls under the "people should just" heading: if your plan is that "people should just do x," it's a bad plan, because they won't just do x. And I really don't love arguments that promote book piracy, no matter how well-intentioned.

Also, LDS as a religion has what might politely be referred to as Major Fucking Flaws, yes. Agreed! But there are several other equally-shitty religions out there and you can't avoid paying all the people who engage in them. And I do mean can't; there's just straight up too many. Especially if you count Catholicism.

Like, I get it! This seems very similar to other boycott situations, such as Hobby Lobby or the Evil Chicken! But there's a fundamental scale difference between consuming the work a single author, even a successful one, who uses some of his proceeds to tithe versus the owners of Chick-fil-a, who dedicated a significant amount of money toward state-level activism.