friday random elevenish: “can’t believe what i’m watching” edition
It’s been another long week, even if the end of this particular project is in sight at work. We’ll get there. But that’s not what I’m going to focus on this morning.
What I’m going to talk about is watching one of my favorite things in the world destroy itself in real time. I’m not going to get particularly specific, because it involves a dear friend of mine who doesn’t need the extra attention, and a bunch of assholes who I’m not going to honor by actually naming.
So, a particular sci-fi convention I’ve been attending and performing at for years and years and has given me some amazing times has booked, for it’s author guest-of-honor next year, a writer who’s known for macho-shooty sorts of novels where men are men (with meticulous knowledge of firearms) and women don’t matter much, and right-of-center political commentary is often front and center. He’s one of the leaders in a certain movement that’s upset that this kind of “old-fashioned” adventure stuff isn’t winning awards anymore, and caused a bunch of fuss a few years ago.
In social media discussions of this guests merits (or demerits), a friend of mine expressed concerns about this guy’s aggressive tone and confrontational tendencies, and whether they were appropriate for this particular venue. It’s not so much about him (though he’s certainly “difficult”), but about how his army of fans are also known for their tendencies toward harassment, confrontation, and violation of behavior and weapons policies at events such as these.
For the last week or so, the community’s been up in arms, in part because this fan army (and the author himself) has been harassing my friend specifically, and the general population at large with all kinds of regressive, political, and obnoxious behavior online, and the con’s newish management has been largely allowing it to go on; I swear, every time I take a look, management is just digging deeper.
It really sucks. The author and his crew are being total assholes, and the way management is handling things is encouraging them. I hate seeing my friend getting harassed about this and other (largely imagined) slights. It’s bad for the community, bad for the event, and generally just the worst sort of thing to watch, and it hurts to watch this thing that’s been around for decades just destroy itself.
If you put a few things together, you can easily figure out what I’m talking about, but again, I don’t want to fan the flames. A bunch of us have a whole lot of things to think about in terms of how we’ll participate in the community in the future, however.
Oh, and I’m doing fawm again; that link goes to my stuff. Two songs written so far, and one more basically in the can.
But anyway, tunes. A big interesting mix of stuff from bands my kids like to string quartets to a song from the 90s I always dug. Take a listen while I wish my lovely spouse a happy birthday:
