Stuff on a cloudy day

[starlady]

First, Dreamwidth stuff! I'm fascinated by the new site stats page and by the multiple accounts model proposals. The latter sounds like it could be pretty cool.

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SF3 has withdrawn Elizabeth Moon's invitation to be a Guest of Honor at WisCon 35. Ugh, finally.

cofax7 has some pertinent comments on the definition of "censorship" for some of the anonymous commenters on the WisCon blog. The post also mentions the case of Juan Williams' recent dismissal from NPR over Islamophobic comments made on FOX News. My reaction is pretty much the same: ugh, finally. Unfortunately, I cherish my doubts as to whether this will have any effect on NPR's de facto policy of general pandering to the right, and I think that WisCon's decision to do the right thing and disinvite Moon is also only a beginning.

Also, Cat Valente's post and N.K. Jemisin's post are both worth reading.

In much happier convention news, I have just registered for the first annual FOGcon (Friends of Genre Convention). It will be held in the fair City by the Bay, San Francisco, this March, and its theme this year is the the City in SF/F, with Jeff Vandermeer and Pat Murphy as GoHs. Its organizers' stated goals are to create a sort of ReaderCon West, and I'm very much looking forward to joining the discussions. Registration is $55 USD until November 1.

You can also register for Sirens 2011 for $150 at this link until November 1.

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And finally, while I'm fairly confident the warning is superfluous, as a reminder: this journal is a private entity, and I will not allow hate speech on it. Comments I consider hate speech will be deleted, and commenters will be banned.

Comments

[seekingferret]

Huh... I liked Juan Williams on NPR, in general. His book on Thurgood Marshall actually was really good at exploring the divisions in the civil rights community that swirled around Marshall. But he did have a funny way of trying to straddle the fence, and yeah, those comments about Muslims aren't just unacceptable, they're headscratchingly unacceptable. He has to know that if you substitute Muslim for black in that sentence, you produce a statement that he'd be first in line to condemn. He's not that dumb. So I don't know how he could make that comment.

[starlady]

Yeah, he is a smart dude and I did generally like what he said in his NPR appearances. But he's been providing commentary on FOX News for like two years now, and a lot of what he said there has been much more questionable.

So I don't know how he could make that comment.

I think we are in the realm of unthinking here, sadly.

[corneredangel.livejournal.com]

I'm sure pretty much everything that can be said about the WisCon thing already has been...but the first thing that leaps into my mind is how this illustrates just how much anime cons exist in their own world - I guess mainly in terms of the relationship between the anime fans, the anime convention organizers, and the Industry. It's pretty much a very poorly kept secret that some guests are difficult to deal with, others are plain-out unpleasant to be around...and at least a couple of others are fairly infamous for basically treating a con primarily as the place where they get to hook up with a fangirl, with no consequences and very little work on their part.

But, hey, they are Industry - and therefore, on a different level from us mere non-industry people. And of course, this then goes back to that whole "It's not about what you're like, it's about what you like" (or I guess, 'what you do'") motto that's supposed or alleged to lie at the root of being a fan - and about the con being that place where you the fan (well, and the organizer) get to set the rules precisely because you don't really get to set them in the outside world.

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

a very poorly kept secret

to say the least! /snrk

I think what you've picked up on is very much a strand of what's happening with Wiscon and which may possibly play out at the larger sf cons one day. The idolization of sff authors has become much less common in the age of the internet, when authors have the chance to show their asses, metaphorically speaking, 24/7, for anyone with an ISP to see, and when fans crucially have the same networking resources available to connect with each other. (By the same token, the ability to make "personal" connections with authors has granted a certain section of the blog-reading fanbase a new fervor in defending authors from perceived slights.) The younger, more irreverent, more likely to be non-male and non-white sff fans are ostensibly nowhere so prominently represented as at Wiscon, and on one discrete level revoking Moon's invitation was very much a reflection of a much different attitude towards what cons are and should be about.