Weird thought of the day

How much fiction that’s important to me has influenced me, and therefore how much I’ve been influenced by random coincidences in libraries/ cool cover art/ recommendations or idle mentions from random people.

I owe a pretty large percentage of my brain to, essentially, a random stranger who I met on a fan forum. I never particularly interacted with her, but her post in the “what other online fiction do you read?” thread brought me to Hitherby Dragons, most importantly, and also to this, which I think about every time I hear this song, which is what brought this to mind tonight.

Book Squee

I got one of the Hammer’s Slammers anthologies as a belated Christmas gift to myself a while ago. I just started reading it, and I guess I can stop having opinions about David Drake’s writing now, because the author of the introduction did such an excellent job.

It’s kind of weird to hear that a lot of people were/are against having too much military in their sci-fi? Like, intellectually, I know that, I just happen to be in the middle of a bunch of pro-military topics people.

Plus, the chunk of the book-spectrum that I typically read actually includes more fantasy than sci-fi of any kind, so (1) I feel like I Should read more hard sci-fi to compensate/fit in better, and (2) people don’t usually get around to criticizing violence in high fantasy, so it’s kind of dissonant. “Ew, the main character Commits Acts of Violence” is an extremely weird critique from the perspective of e.g. Tolkien.

And that’s all beside the fact that David Drake’s books are clearly not positive about war, and only marginally more positive about the military as an institution, either.

Another interesting genre-y thing: apparently Drake started out writing horror. That probably would have been more obvious to me if I ever voluntarily read/watched anything described as horror. (I did sort of realize, with The Seas of Venus.)

Instead of the post I half-finished, a quick thought

I’ve gone from feeling lonely and weird because I couldn’t find anyone who shared my experiences, to failing to find anyone who shares a specific experience and thinking, “That means this is my thing to tell other people about, so they won’t feel alone.”

(Let’s assume for the moment that I’m something approximating correct when I think that.)

That’s a really cool thing and I owe my ability to conceive of that idea to everyone whose blogs I read.

Precariously Verbal 2

So, here’s a thing: My parents are awesome people. Genuinely. I don’t know if ideas like “attachment parenting” were common when I was little, but from what I’ve seen of those ideas, my parents would agree with them.

They were so strongly against the normalization of violence that they were reluctant to let me play with water squirt guns if they looked too much like real guns. My father disapproved of Pokemon, because Pokemon are supposed to be living creatures that are like pets, and then you make them fight each other? That’s not ok, why would you do that? (I never really wanted to get into Pokemon, so I thought it was kind of endearing that he cared so much about fictional magical animals.)

Corporal punishment was completely out of the question, and not only that– I can count the number of times I’ve heard my mother either curse or even just raise her voice in anger on one hand.

Gentle describes everything about my upbringing, I believe, not only the outward actions I’ve described but also in subtext and intent. I was sometimes worried about disappointing my parents, but I was never afraid of angering them or of being punished. I never felt unsafe because of them.

The only problem is, their gentle and well-meaning way of dealing with my childhood misbehavior often involved asking me to explain why I did things. So they could understand. So they could help. And I don’t want this to sound like I think they weren’t sincere, because I believe they were, and I don’t want to suggest that this is always a bad strategy, because it would probably work for some children, but for me, it didn’t work.

(to be continued when I’m less tired)

Intent again

I am apparently so settled on this idea  now, that when other people try to define stuff around intent it really confuses me. Like, why would you do that? Don’t you know you can just… not?

I spent my writing time tonight writing about topics adjacent to this somewhere else, so this sort of a placeholder.

Something that happened in my high school history class

(Brought to you by my internal debate about how long is safe to leave my stuff unattended in public places.)

The girl sitting in front of me stole my mechanical pencil while I wasn’t looking.

I was (comically, I assume) confused at first, because I assumed it had rolled off the desk and looked all over for it. But class was starting, so after a bit I just got out another pencil.

I didn’t realize what had happened until later, when the girl in front of me started complaining aloud about her pencil not working. It had actually broken weeks before, and I had jury-rigged it to work somehow– I don’t remember the details, but part of it was wrapped in blue painter’s tape– and she couldn’t figure out how to advance the lead.

I didn’t confront her about it, but that made me feel like I’d won something back anyway.

She was actually pretty approachable and nice to me most of the time, and I don’t know whether that makes this better or worse.

Ughhhh

Conversations about Abuse Discourse on Tumblr. It actually turned out pretty well, and I should have known this would happen sooner or later, but still. Ugh.

My ugh in this case is actually more about defensiveness than about the actual content of the Discourse, which is something for me to keep in mind.