Inside a Newer Plastic Castle

The third installment in my @fansplaining tiny zine series! This one was written by @elizabethminkel and was published a year ago for Fansplaining’s patreon backers. Fansplaining is one of my all-time favorite podcasts, I highly recommend the show and also the many great bonus episodes available only to  patreon backers :) You can read my previous two Fansplaining zines here and here and you can find all of for sale in my etsy shop. 

Full text below the cut. 

The guy being dragged by a bird – part of an installation titled Hacienda Paradise – Utopia Experiment by Fredrik Raddum.

The balancing elephant – Balancing Elephant by Daniel Firman.

The tea splashes kissing – Kiss of Eternity by Johnson Tsang.

The figure emerging from the wall – Break Through From Your Mold by Zenos Frudakis

The meditating figure splitting apart – Expansion by Paige Bradley.

The horses running through water – Mustangs at Las Colinas by Robert Glen.

The giant peeking from under the lawn – Popped Up by Ervin Loránth Hervé

The man under the raining umbrella –  L’uomo della Pioggia (The Rain Man) by Jean-Michel Folon.

The huge bearded guy – The Appennnine Colossus by Giambologna.

The impossibly balanced stones on a beach – Untitled by Adrian Gray

The dragons with an egg – The Dragons in Love or The Varna Dragons by  Darin Lazarov.

The stairway to nowhere –  Diminish And Ascend by David McCracken

The underwater circle – Vicissitudes by Jason deCaires Taylor.

The epic warrior guy – General Guan Yu by Han Meilin

The sinking library –  Sinking Building Outside State Library, Melbourne, Australia.  I couldn’t find an artist’s name.

Here's a video with a nondisabled rider and a physical therapist narrator demonstrating, and explaining, how horse riding benefits the body ... there's also a brief allusion to how it can provide good a good stim for some autistic folk.

(And this is just riding around in a nice, flat arena, never mind riding through mountain trails in the forest, ducking branches, and keeping alert for bears while eluding the evil duke's soldiers.)

And kudos to the therapist for pointing out the psychological benefit of getting a chance to look down at other people (When you're a kid in a wheelchair, you're even looking up at ambulatory peers your own age -- unless you're all on the floor together*).

Though the kid's view hippotherapy is still being framed as the 'spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down': "A lot of the kids think they're out here just having a good time. But we're really working them, and getting benefits."

A) Having a good time is a benefit.** B) If you have to go to therapy, anyway, it's better to do it out in "the real world" of fresh air than under the fluorescent lights of a hospital.

And the biggest benefit of all (IMNSHO):

C) You are developing a relationship with a fellow sapient Earthling Who Does Not Care that you are Disabled.

(Raises an imaginary glass to the memory of all the horses I've known and befriended).

*Floor-Time = Good Time!

That's okay, what you're wearing looks good on you.

You need to take a lot of breaks doing anything intimate because you're easily overwhelmed?

I understand, I'm just happy to be here with you.

You're on medication that impacts your libido/makes reaching orgasm really difficult?

No pressure, tell me what feels good for you, and if you get frustrated we can do something else together.

Sex isn't going to look the same for everybody and that's fine, that's normal.

Sometimes you don't orgasm, sometimes you need to stop because your mood changes out of nowhere, sometimes you get really self conscious and need accommodations to take your mind off of it.

The release of the 7th book in the Murderbot Diaries series, System Collapse, approaches in November!

I've seen at least one person looking for a summary of past events... So I've made just that! If it's been a while since you read previous books (or you just like hopping into series half-way through), this will get you up to speed!

That said, this absolutely has spoilers, so if that's not your jam, turn away now.

LINK: tinyurl.com/oldgaySF

I'd like to share with y'all a project I've poured my heart and soul into over the last couple of years: a database cataloguing every single older queer science fiction book I've managed to track down, consisting of just over 200 titles with LGBT characters/themes & by LGBT authors, spanning over a century (1880-2000) 🚀

I hate how most people's initial reaction to stories like that are things like:

"How could you have ever done those things?!" "Oh my god, you believed those things?!" "Well it doesn't un-do the harm you did!"

People incessantly advocate for change but then refuse to allow people who have changed the grace of being acknowledged and given opportunities and chances.

I love hearing about ex-antis talking about how they don't spend their days being angry and sending death threats anymore.

I love hearing about ex-homophobes who realized there's no magic law about what is "natural."

I love reformed bullies talking about how they made amends with their victims and spend their days being considerate of others.

You can't scream about wanting people to change but then expect them to spend the rest of their lives stuck in the past and on who they used to be. You can't expect people to spend the entire rest of their lives grovelling and apologizing and demeaning themselves.

Instead of clinging to who they were, latch onto who they are.

#48 from The Vatican Sayings of Epicurus (translator not acknowledged): A 14th C. compilation of sayings attributed to Epicurus and his followers, residing in the Vatican library. [Source]

Reblog this if you want readers to come into your ask box and ask for the “director’s commentary” on a particular story, section of a story, or set of lines. 

So, @PhoenixFalls and I were brainstorming for @pod-together, a challenge where a work is written for podficcing, and then podficced. She pointed out that despite Bujold’s willingness to write marginalized identities (disability, queerness, women), Bujold never writes marginalized communities, and doesn’t that seem a gross oversight? (Yes, I said, and also yes.) Could we do something with that? And what do we think of Cordelia being an inspiration for Barrayar’s queer community?

I gave that a think, and decided that while I see Cordelia as straight-and-cis in her own Betan context, she’s clearly gender-nonconforming in the Barrayaran context – in fact, it’s implied that that’s part of Aral’s attraction to her. I could very well see Cordelia inspiring a Ring of Keys moment for someone. And thus we had our first vignette: an impressionable young thing spotting Cordelia striding through the shuttleport, and suddenly understanding a bunch of things about herself.

Another early vignette was the spacer who had escaped Barrayar when it was more conservative, had a great time kissing and fucking through the spaceways, and came home to discover that queer rights had improved in her absence. And she’s happy about that, she is, but there’s also grief for her own youth and the choices she was forced to make that the young'uns don’t have to make today.

As we continued to brainstorm vignettes, the whole piece became a love letter to queer history as we knew it: gossipy queens, and the mid-century lesbian infiltration of the military, and drag benefit galas… All the vibrant things we knew and loved – and the tragedies we grieved over! – we took as inspiration, asking if/how/when something parallel might have gone down on Barrayar. The big celebrations, and the private feelings. And the messiness of it all, the fits and starts and backlashes and co-opting. Cordelia was the connecting link for every vignette, but we wanted her strictly as an icon and advocate, a Liz Taylor or a Princess Diana: an ally who was genuinely beloved, whose advocacy was real and meaningful, but who was not herself one of the people bleeding and dying on the front lines. We never wanted to imply that Cordelia herself fixed queer rights on Barrayar – that honor very much belongs to queer activists themselves! But that she was visible, and fierce, and reliable, and how that much matters when you spend most of your life with your back to the wall for your own protection.

So yeah, we just dumped a ton of our own love for the queer community and our history in there, and I think that came through. Different readers responded to different things, but most chapters have at least one comment suggesting that particular vignette spoke to someone. (Which makes me all verklempt! <3)

We always planned to end it with her memorial – and through her memorial, a retrospective of how far the community has come, what’s remembered and what isn’t, and who is doing the remembering. And damn it, I’m tearing up as I write this, because it was never about Cordelia, it was about the whole big beautiful struggle, and the elders who remember it all and the youth picking up the torch for the coming generations.

Which, damnit, is what I want for us: the elders who remember it all, and the youth who are picking up the torch, and the stalwart backbone of the people who lie between. And I think we have that, we are that. Even with all the shitfuckery going down, we still have ourselves, and that will always, always, be enough.

I am not the natural audience for podfic. It is the channel of information transfer that my brain is worst at utilizing, taking the largest share of my concentration and having the least retention.

And yet, ever since my dad was reading me fairy tales and poetry at bedtime, I’ve loved the way that a human voice can bring an added layer of magic to stories.

Additionally, part of my job involves ensuring accessibility of training for my agency, and it’s a frequently frustrating part of my job because most days it feels like I’m the only person pushing for it and there are absolutely no resources being allocated to it - and then someone will complain and suddenly it’s an EMERGENCY OMG HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN DON’T YOU ALL KNOW THAT WE’RE LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO BE 100% ACCESSIBLE AT ALL TIMES!!!

(Yes. I do know that. I was the one reminding everyone of that legal requirement and flagging that yet another thing we’ve made doesn’t meet that requirement just yesterday.)

So. That’s a long way of saying that while I’m not the natural audience for podfic, it matters to me that they exist, and that they be plentiful and diverse and delightful. And I like learning new skills! So every year I try to see if I can fit a @pod-together project in my schedule.

With the Vorkosigan Saga specifically, one of my favorite elements of the series is how lived in the series feels. So many offhand details that, in many series half the length (16 novels plus a handful of short stories) would end up flat-out contradicting each other because they were never intended to hold up to narrative scrutiny over that length of time, *do* hang together. In fact, they may come back to bite you or break your heart five novels later!

And honestly, I don’t think it’s because Bujold has everything mapped out. I think it’s because she just fundamentally gets people, so when she reaches for one of those offhand details to make a particular plot device work, what she comes up with slots seamlessly in with everything else, and the fit is so good that it can become load-bearing if necessary.

Which is why her lack of communities of marginalized people on Barrayar has always been so jarring to me!

So as Sang and I started to toss ideas back and forth for these vignettes, I was very conscious of wanting to ensure that our final project had that same fully-fleshed-out, lived-in feel. Even though it was a podfic project, It didn’t feel like it could be *only* a podfic project - as soon as we hit on the museum exhibit concept, I started turning around ideas for visual components that would add yet more layers to the alternate history we were building.

I also started trying out voices for all the different characters Sang was writing. Sadly, I am nowhere near as skilled at that as my dad is! But I did my best, after Sang talked me down from a ledge or two.

And at the end of the day, I love what our project is about - queer community, queer struggle and queer triumph, queer people in all their glorious people-ness. But it was equally important to me (to both of us, I believe!) that the audience is able to engage with it in many different ways, fully visually, fully aurally, or a mixture.

The experience is different but equally comprehensive (and, I hope, compelling!) no matter the medium you choose. That, to me, honors both the depth of the Vorkosigan Saga’s worldbuilding and the diversity of of our audience.

Reblogging for Phoenix’s comments!

And *do* go read/listen to the fabulous

"Pity" is actually Hatred wearing the bloody, and freshly-flayed Skin taken from "Mercy's" body.

We have compassion for others. We sympathize with others. But pity is something we do to others.

A friend sent this today. I needed it.

Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.

And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.

The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.

But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.

Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.

I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 7 f-stops more light. That is 128 times or 12,700% more light.

So, I woke up about 4 minutes before the eclipse. I was very unprepared to photograph it in the normal quality you'd expect from a photographer. However, I did capture some interesting details that I thought I'd share beyond the lack of polarized light.

First up... the shadows.

The shadows were very sharp. In photography there is this concept of light going from a spectrum of hard to soft. Hard light has very high contrast and sharp shadows. Soft light is more flattering and diffused with softer shadows.

To get hard light and sharp shadows you need a small "point" light source. A point light can either be very small or it can be very far away or a combination thereof.

In the studio you could use a bare bulb flash to get a point source.

Or you can attach a modifier like a softbox to create a large light source. The bigger, the softer.

The sun is massive, but it is also super duper far away. So it ends up being the smallest point light source available. However, the atmosphere can scatter and diffuse that light, essentially "enlarging" the light source.

To get perfect hard light shadows you need to go to... the moon.

But the eclipse blocked out about 99% of the sun and it reduced the amount of scattered light. And it greatly reduced the size of the light source causing some very defined sharp shadows.

But not *all* of the shadow was sharp. My left shoulder is very defined but my right shoulder is a bit fuzzy.

You can see it on my fingers too.

Sharp on one side, soft on the other.

This is essentially because the sun has been split into two different light sources in two different directions.

In one direction you have a larger light source causing softer shadows.

And in the other direction you have a smaller light source causing sharper shadows.

In photography we have these strip softboxes that we usually place behind a subject to create an edge light.

Only a narrow, small band of light is hitting the body. If we were to use a strip box to light a face, it would be a small light source creating sharp shadows.

But one trick we can do is to turn the strip light horizontal.

Now the light source hitting the face is large as it wraps around the head.

So a long and narrow light source is essentially large and small simultaneously. And depending on the direction the light is coming from it is either hard or soft light.

Destin from Smarter Every Day explained this phenomenon briefly in his eclipse video.

I also think this large and small light source phenomenon affected my lens flares when I photographed the sun.

In this photo it literally looks like I'm getting starburst flares from two light sources.

And in this photo the flares have a sharp bright edge as well as a dimmer more diffused area.

Normally these starburst flares (caused by light leaking through the metal aperture blades in the lens) have more homogenous tines without that feathering effect.

And then I noticed a different kind of flare in my photos—with all the colors of the rainbow.

And each band of color matched the crescent shape of my partial eclipse.

Like a camera obscura, these flares were in reverse orientation to the crescent sun. And while I wasn't able to get the sun in sharp focus, the purple section of the flare is very defined. I think that represents approximately how much of the sun was covered by the moon at my location—about 130 miles from totality.

ALT

Cesium-133, let it be. Cesium-134, let it be even more.

Periodic Table Regions [Explained]

Transcript

[A periodic table with regions labeled.]