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Out of Ambit

Diane Duane's weblog

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things that piss you off

Alma-Tadema, Sappho and Alcaeus
Hobbyhorses and General RantingMythologyPoetrythings that piss you offWritersWriting

Greek mythology, feminist reclamation of lost/ancient tradition, and an interface issue: or, The Thing I Got So Cranky About The Other Day

by Diane Duane September 13, 2020

(The other day being April 2, 2014. This post is ported in from Tumblr — I’m in the process of moving some longer posts from there to here, where they belong.)

The passage below, when I ran across it last week, initially caused my mouth to drop open in sheer disbelief. And since then the thought that it is even now wandering blithely about unchallenged has been sort of gnawing at me. So some ranting is about to ensue. If you’re not in the mood for that, best turn your eyes away now and look at some nice pics of kittens drinking beer or something.

…I can’t now even remember what brought me to this particular page, and I want to emphasize that this isn’t in any way about the OP, who doubtless thought the source (or at least the quote) was reliable.

However…

…it’s not. And since this (as some around here like to say) is relevant to my interests, I just want to drop a few notes about this one quote, and leave further considerations to those who feel like going into them.

So here’s the material that got up my nose.

Greek myths mention several Islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men, only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies. The Greeks apparently feared them. They said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores; and the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once. The Greek writers seemed to have no doubt that women could destroy whole populations of adult males, and there was no effective defense against them.
The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker (p. 26)

(rolls up her sleeves) It’s hard to even know where to begin shredding this like wet kleenex analyzing this…

In order, I guess:

“Greek myths mention several islands of Women, where Amazons lived without men…”

Okay. Even though the Amazons were specifically known1 for living on the Anatolian coast of what is now Turkey — this being the location of their main city, Thermyskira or Themyskira, depending on whose orthography / spelling you prefer: Wonder Woman fans will of course recognize the name — well, who knows? Maybe the Amazons had some all-female island colonies as well. (They are reported by a historian or two as having founded Paphos, but that city [on the island of Cyprus]  was co-ed, and all the other colonies mentioned in connection with Amazons were in mainland Turkey.) So let’s run with that possibility for the moment.

“…only consorting with neighboring colonies of males at certain seasons when they wanted to conceive their children. Taurus, Lemnos, and Lesbos were said to be such all-female societies.”

…WHOOPSIE!

Let’s look at the islands in question.

Taurus / Tauros: Or as the more recent ancients came to call it, Taurica. Only an island by courtesy. It’s a peninsula (though one sort of hanging by a thread): in fact, the southernmost peninsula of the Crimean region, which has been somewhat in the news of late. Nonetheless, whether it’s an island or a peninsula, that didn’t stop the near-classical-era ancient (male) Greeks from planting trading towns all over it.

image

Lemnos:

A genuine island, maybe two thirds of the way between mainland Greece and Turkey. Myrina is its main town.

Lesbos:

Right there southeast of Lemnos, off the present-day Turkish coast. Mitylene / Mitilini is the major city.

…These places’ mythological associations are no less valid just because they’re real than are those of places like Circe’s island of Aeaea or the Isles of the Blest. But because these places do exist, that means we’re kind of forced to apply physical laws and common sense to them.

Two out of three of these places, with good weather and the right wind, are within two to four days’ sail (if not less) of the home harbors of some of the greatest sailors of antiquity. The third one is a slightly longer trip, maybe a week to ten days of coasting depending on the weather. But even if we knew nothing else about these places, their generally exposed nature and their propinquity to a significant group of the time’s major interlocking patriarchal cultures force us to set the odds very, very low against any of these places being woman-only islands… whether the women are Amazons or not.

And as it happens, we know a lot more about all of them. We can handle that issue one island at a time as we move through the quotation.

But first a warning about something specific: the phrase “were said to be…”. Anyone who’s spent enough time on the Discovery Channel to find themselves watching some of the dodgier documentaries — the ones where the bar for telling where you got your facts is set fairly low — will recognize this phrase and its friends “It is said that…”, “Legend has it…”,  “Some say…”. This formulation is a sign of someone who either can’t be bothered to provide you with a solid citation or doesn’t have one and just wants to get on with selling you their own merchandise without being bothered too much about the sordid details (i.e., “verifiable data”). Any use of these phrases, especially in a scholarly work, should make the reader slow down and look carefully at the details.

So, island by island:

[The Greeks] said the women of Taurus sacrificed to their Goddess all men who landed on their shores…

Bzzt! Sorry, wrong answer. No women of Tauris. In fact, no women. Just one.

The writer is here referring to the myth that is the source for Euripides’ play Iphigenia in Tauris, in which Agamemnon’s daughter, theoretically sacrificed by the King for good winds on the way to the war in Troy, is instead actually caught away in the act by Artemis (who as protector of maidenhood and young innocence wants no such crap done in her name, thank you very much). Artemis proceeds to dump a deer with its throat cut onto the ground by the altar as a substitute sacrifice, and then deposits the doubtless very confused maiden in Tauris to be priestess of her temple there.2 Iphigenia is understandably shocked and horrified to find that her duty as priestess is to sacrifice to the Goddess all strangers3 who come to Tauris. Not just the men: all woman strangers too, should any turn up.

And there are definitely men living in Tauris, before, during and after the unfortunate princess’s arrival. When Iphigenia’s brother Orestes and his best friend show up to rescue her, the messenger who brings the news that she’s going to have to sacrifice these strangers is male. Additionally, Iphigenia at one point, doubting whether Artemis is actually behind this barbarous rule at all, says to herself, “Would a Goddess command such things? Would she take pleasure in sacrificial murder? I do not believe it. …It is the men of this land who are bloodthirsty and they lay their own guilt on the Gods.”4 And finally there’s the King of the Taurians, whom Iphigenia refuses to be allowed to be killed as part of her rescue because “he was kind to her”. You would think all-female cultures who only send out for guys when they want to have babies would generally be kind of short on kings. Also: you will look in vain for any evidence of the women of Tauris being Amazons.

…So we have a bit of misrepresentation here about the population of the island, and about who they were killing, and (granted, the motives being unclear by the principals’ own admission, but we’re plainly meant to think it was a let’s-all-us-women-kill-all-the-men thing) about why. …Well, maybe the writer got confused, or it was an error: these things do creep in. Let’s move on.

…[the Greeks said] the women of Lemnos had risen up against their husbands and murdered all of them at once.

In myth, this did happen once. But it was (a) “a long time ago”, and (b) extremely situational and something that the participants seemed willing, if not glad, to get over and done with.

The tl;dr version of this story comes in a number of versions spread across five or six centuries. Basically it breaks down like this:

  • Women of Lemnos fail to perform proper rites honoring Aphrodite for (apparently) several years. No one seems to know why.
  • Aphrodite gets pissed off at the women and “afflicts them with a foul odor” which causes their husbands to avoid them and instead run over to Thrace and raid the place for female sex slaves. These they bring home and screw instead of their wives.
  • The Lemnian women, very very annoyed by this turn of events, all kill their husbands (some writers say their fathers, too). The only woman in on the plot who fails to do likewise is the Lemnian princess, Hypsipyle, who manages to smuggle her father the King offshore before the mass murder goes down, and then becomes Queen of an all-female island.
  • Jason and the Argonauts arrive. They apparently have no problem with any foul odors and during a visit of at least several months quickly bed down with various Lemnian women (this turn of events being from all available data quite consensual). Numerous children are conceived. Most if not all of these children are boys, as they’re given Argonauts’ names when they’re born. Regardless of their maleness, they are not killed or sent away.
  • Jason himself hooks up with Hypsipyle during this period, and she later bears twin boys as a result, one of whom when grown becomes King of Lemnos and turns up in the Iliad. (There are ancient writers who claim that this was the cause of the odor problem: Medea, they say, inflicted it on the Lemnian women in revenge on Hypsipyle for Jason’s infidelity. In any case, you wonder what the heck he was thinking; you’d think he’d have worked out by then that you seriously did not screw around with / on Medea. But it’s also true that evidence suggests Jason was not exactly the sharpest knife in the block.)

Anyway, the ancient writers go out of their way to make it plain that this long-ago event, distant even in mythological terms, had been a temporary situation (cf. Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 1. 114: “Lemnos happened to have no males at the time [when the Argonauts visited the island]”) and had nothing to do with the way things normally went on Lemnos.

So… a wee bit more of the truth being bent, there? Or not being completely told, in order to buttress a point the writer’s trying to make? Also: these women are not Amazons, either. Somewhere along the line, with all this other stuff going on, someone surely would have mentioned.

Anyway. Last of all comes Lesbos, “said to be…” one of three “all-female societies.”

Well, not in any myth I can find a record of. And, historically, never. Certainly the mother-goddess Cybele was worshipped there in deep antiquity, to judge by the pottery, but there is no sign of the island ever having been an all-female reserve. As one can judge from the Lemnian situation, when such things existed or occurred, notice was taken in the literature.

Sappho in particular would probably have been amused to hear about this allegation. She lived in the island’s main town of Mitylene for most of her life, as far as we can tell, and had two (maybe three) adult brothers who to present best knowledge show no signs of having been murdered or exiled for their maleness. Yes, she sponsored a thiasos where the possibility or benefits of an all-female society were discussed with the participants. But Lesbos was co-ed — cf. famous male Lesbians5 like Alcaeus, Phaenias and Terpander. (And still no sign of Amazons.)

(sigh) So.

The multiple errors in the paragraph above could have a number of causes: (a) A confused writer. (b) A lazy writer. (c) A writer who’s pushing a specific thesis or agenda and doesn’t mind the reader being accidentally misled into it. I am not a mindreader and can’t be certain of which of the above might be accurate. But the impression I’m left with is that of someone trying to bend a complex set of facts to her own purposes.

Now, in fiction, as fiction, that kind of thing has its place. But in what purports to be a genuine history of the suppression of truths about female roles in religion, mysticism and spiritual life in the ancient world? Engaging in jiggery-pokery with the facts as they are known is not a good thing, no matter how good one considers one’s own intentions to be. One does not combat lies or suppressions of the truth with misrepresentations and other truths themselves bent out of shape.

All I can say further about Walker’s book (as I don’t have it and have never read it in detail) is that I have dipped into numerous quotes from it here and found a significant number of them to be at best kind of factually suspect and at worst as potentially error-ridden and misleading as the single paragraph discussed above.

I’m not saying that the book will not have been useful in forming (or opening up) potential feminist thought in many ways for its readers as  regards the ancient world and what has happened to the Goddesses of old, and as regards women’s interior/mystical/mythological lives and how they may be enhanced and enriched by thoughtful reclamation of the lost, strayed or stolen. But I do want to suggest that content in this book should be taken with a grain of salt, and checked before internalizing. Because if the above is broadly representative… then it needs checking.

…That’s all.

1Appolonius Rhodius, Argonautica 2. 370 ff (trans. Seaton): “[regarding the Black Sea coast of Anatolia :] Onward from thence the bend of a huge and towering cape reaches out from the land, next Thermodon at its mouth flows into a quiet bay at the Themiskyreian headland, after wandering through a broad continent. And here is the plain of Doias, and near are the three cities of the Amazones, and after them the Khalybes…” Plainly not some vague description of Someplace Far, Far Away In The Story, but a landscape the writer thought might possibly have been familiar to some of the people reading or hearing this. It’s like something out of a Michelin Green Guide.

2One has to wonder whether this particular misfortune of Iphigenia’s is meant to be thought of as a near-final operation of the curse of the House of Atreus, a godawful karmic trainwreck that had already gone on for generations. Certainly the ancient writers return again and again to the family’s alternately horrible and tragic doings with a near tabloid-like fascination.

3Edith Hamilton‘s great classic Mythology (liberally studded with Hamilton’s beautifully clean translations from original sources) narrows this specification down to “all Greeks”. Whatever: gender isn’t the issue here.

4Hamilton, ibid., pp. 366ff.

5How often does one get to use that phrase legitimately? I couldn’t resist.

September 13, 2020
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Home lifeIrelandMedicine, nursing, healththings that piss you off

The Adventure of the Dexter Eye

by Diane Duane November 27, 2016

I’d have preferred to call it The Adventure of the Sinister Eye because that sounds a lot cooler, but that eye’s not the problem today. (For a change.) I’ve been reading Arthur Conan Doyle this weekend, so let’s think of this as an Adventure for the time being.

The news is that I may or may not have developed a tear in the retina of my right eye. This being the case, one way or another life around here for the next week is about to get lively.

Some of you will have noted from previous posts over this year that I’ve had an ongoing problem with the retina in my left eye. This kind of thing is no surprise with someone who’s (a) over 60 and (b) very very nearsighted: the shape of the eyeball means the retina’s more likely to have trouble staying in place.

Well, this morning I woke up with a shadow in my right eye that has no business being there. It’s not a floater (of which I have plenty). This thing is holding still. (Cue irate fist-shaking at unresponsive ceiling. “THIS IS THE *GOOD(ish)* EYE, DAMMIT!!”)

Now, this being rural Ireland and relatively late on a Sunday, there is not a damn thing I can do that will do any good until tomorrow. I get to hold still until tomorrow morning and call my retinologist in Dublin first thing.

This is all insanely annoying because I’m presently doing the last work on INTERIM ERRANTRY 2, the completed version of which is supposed to launch tomorrow in the Ebooks Direct store to coincide with #CyberMonday. (And I’m still doing the work: sitting here and twitching isn’t going to help anything.)

We’ll see how that goes. But some folks have said they wish they could help. If you’d like to, then the best thing you can do right now is pop over to Ebooks Direct and buy some ebook that you like the look of… as with one thing and another, this is going to get to be an expensive week.

I think I may also have committed to livetweet the Journey To The Eye Doctor. (rolls eyes at self) (gingerly) My eye lady has an office full of nifty equipment, and I bet I can get her to at least give me a .jpg of the back of my retina to share with everybody.

Anyway, let’s all cross our fingers. It might just be something transient and not so bad as a tear. But if it *is* just a tear, there are ways to mend it that are actually office procedures these days. We’ll see how it goes…  Starting tomorrow morning, I’ll update this post as we go along. But for the time being I may as well get back to work.

(Oh, and if you’re interested in buying anything, here’s the store’s sale page’s URL. The entire store inventory will appear at the bottom of it: give it a moment to load and then scroll down. Also, if you know someone you think might be interested in the situation [or the sale!] and care to share this with them, please feel free. The sale will be continuing, at the 50%-off-everything level for a little while more.)

http://ebooksdirect.co/…/our-2016-black-friday-cyber-monday…

ETA: And here’s a copy of the post at Facebook that tells what happened next.)

Part 1: What happened to me was (thank all Gods in the neighbourhood) NOT any kind of retinal detachment, vitreous detachment, or similar traumatic damage to the retina. So today’s teaching moment is: even if you are a health care professional (or former one) and expert at Googling For Symptoms, don’t be so sure you know what’s going on.
 
This means that I’ve dodged this bullet, only to find I’m standing in front of a bigger, slower one.*
 
Part 2: What seems to have happened to me is a small transient circulatory blockage in the retina. The signature of this event can be seen as what is called over here a “cotton wool spot”. When I scan the pic from the dye photography and post it here later, you’ll see it quite clearly. (This is why my retinologist was very definite with me that she wanted this test done today: this evidence, she says, would likely have vanished within a few weeks.)
 
This is a herald of other things that are likely going on elsewhere. So over the next couple of weeks I get to go to my GP here and have a full workup of bloods and various other diagnostic procedures, with an eye to ruling in/out a complex of possibilities: circulatory system problems, heart problems, incipient diabetes, plaque, sunspots, you name it. (There are way too many possible causes for this event…) (OKAY, maybe not sunspots.)
 
There will also need to be a detailed ultrasound of both eyes. Which I get to pay for. (Notwithstanding that the left eye, aka The Bad Wicked Naughty Eye, has been blissfully quiet through all this and is described by the retinologist as “behaving itself just fine”.)
So I’ll be leaving the Ebooks Direct store running in sale mode (50% off everything) for a little while. Thanks again HUGELY to those who by picking up an ebook or so assisted in the day’s events. I was thinking of you all the time. Well, maybe not when I was eating the scone. It was a REALLY GOOD SCONE.) Those who might like to continue to assist with all the other medical stuff that will need to be paid for over December, please feel to nip over to the store’s sale page, which shows our whole inventory, and grab something that you like the look of.
 
Part 3: So I’m recovering by eating a double portion of calamari at Gotham Cafe in South Anne Street, and sopping up a glass or two of white Cab Sauv. What I would LIKE to do now? Go over to Chez Max by Dublin Castle and MURDER a *steak frites*. What I am GOING to do now? Run over to Asia Market and buy a jug of soy sauce (seriously, how do we go through this shit so fast? I swear Peter drinks it the way he drinks maple syrup), then take the bus home and hug my honey.
 
Thank you all for accompanying me on this madness. 🙂 More bulletins from the front line as they become available.
 
(also: later I’ll tell you about how I missed the bus to the clinic. Not NSFW by any means, but possibly TMI. Never mind: if you read my posts you’ve probably signed up for that. Or should know that you have.)
 
*If you read my work, you know this anyway. But here I’m not speaking of the Slowest Bullet, which hits us all. …Hmm, what a great anthology title..
November 27, 2016
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AdministriviaOnline lifethings that piss you off

The joys of webmastering

by Diane Duane September 12, 2016

So after various struggles and craziness the YoungWizards.com site finally has its WordPress install running for all to see, and the old Drupal install is packed away, and I can look forward to a week or three of fixing busted links and installing URL redirects and handling other delights. It’s all a bit shambolic at the moment, but at least (in the sense of being blissfully unhacked) it’s clean.

Some other issues, though, are raising their heads as I watch the new install bed in. The security software’s “live traffic” function is showing me the most charming things! Especially spammers’ scripts battering futilely at the spot where the Errantry Concordance wiki used to be. I’m taking notes and blocking IPs and having so much fun. (I don’t want to block all of Russia, there are fans of the YW books in Russia, but, you know, if I have to…)

Less fun, though, and more of an annoyance, are the bandwidth thieves. One New York Jets website in particular keeps calling and calling and CALLING on the server that holds the YW discussion forums, trying to pull up a particular smiley.

Now, this smiley isn’t even on my server any more. God knows how many years ago it was there. But this damn website is hitting the Forums about once every five seconds, and this annoys me. Yes, teeny tiny bits of bandwidth are involved in the short term, but how long has this been going on? It’s just not right.

So I’m going to break the site in question of this habit by the most straightforward means I can think of. I am loading the graphic you see below into the directory and giving it the filename in question. We’ll see how long it takes for the website’s sysadmins to kill that particular link… but I’m betting it won’t take more than a day or so, as the image is 800×800 px and the sentiment is, well, not that polite.

worlds_smallest_dick_nonexistent_file_full

(Yes, I know some people use explicit porn images for this kind of thing. Not my style, though it’s fun to think about.)

…And now let’s see how good their sysadmins are. 🙂

Save

September 12, 2016
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Computer stuffHobbyhorses and General RantingOnline lifethings that piss you offWindows

Do. Not. WANT.

by Diane Duane July 28, 2015

ETA: Thanks to those who set me straight on the non-mandatory side of the upgrade. I’ll take refuge in Rick’s excuse here: “I was misinformed.” As for the rest of it, the “download opportunity” still behaves like malware: you should be able to decline the download. Not allowing your users to make the choice themselves is abysmally bad practice. 

I don’t often get stirred up enough to go into full-blown editorial mode, but today is one of the days when that seems to be happening.

A lot of you who have Windows 7 or Windows 8 machines will have noticed the appearance, earlier in the month, of a little white Windows logo in your system tray. This, when you click on it, munificently offers you a free upgrade to Windows 10. Those of you who have experimented with the thing will probably have noticed there is no way to get rid of the impending update download — or at least, no obvious way. And that it starts rolling out tomorrow, July 29th.

For those of you who do not want the 3-gig download and would like to turn it off, let me point you at this webpage:

How To Remove The Windows 10 GMX upgrade nonsense

This cranky and civic-minded person has laid out, step-by-step, a method by which you can get rid of that pestilent little icon in your tray and stop the unavoidable downloading and implementation of three gigabytes of material you don’t want and have no intention of using.

Don’t get me wrong, here. I understand perfectly well Microsoft’s rationale behind this, or at least their stated rationale; to keep security upgrades consistent across all the installs of their new OS. That said, rolling it out in this particular way is really unsavory. It smacks of the behavior of malware installers, rather than that of any responsible company with any kind of interest in keeping its customers on board.*

(Also, it’s worth noting in this context that many people who have already updated to 10 — particularly users with Nvidia graphics cards — have been reporting horrific driver problems with the new Windows version, secondary to this ill-thought-out policy of “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”. Only just now has the beginnings of a fix for this particular problem begun to propagate, but this strikes me as a sign of more bad things to come, a slow-motion trainwreck better watched from outside it than inside.)

Now who knows, over the course of the next six months or so, when I get ready to build my new desktop machine, I may indeed go for Windows 10 — once I’ve had time to make the choice, the informed decision, as to whether it’s right for me, and whether I can find alternatives to the various programs whose function I like and would like to keep. Or who knows? Maybe I’ll go whole hog and just switch over to Apple. (I know a lot of you who’re Young Wizards fans, considering the frequent appearance of hardware with the Biteless Apple on it in the books, will be surprised that this is an issue for me at all. However, in this as in many other parts of my tech life, I am an amphibian and have for a long time worked happily on more than one side of the divide at the same time. But this present behavior of Microsoft’s is trying my patience way more than usual.)

Anyway, I’ve used the method detailed in the webpage above on my present Win7 desktop, and it seems to work perfectly. I strongly recommend that if you are ambivalent about the prospect of this forced update of your software, you go over there and have a look at it and decide whether it’s an option you’d like to avail of.

*I also understand that in recent online talks, Microsoft upper-level management have let it be known that people who find ways of avoiding this upgrade will eventually be cut off from normal product updates. And you know what? I can think of no quicker way for them to drive me straight into what Euripides called “the apple-laden land.” Yeah, there’s just one of me, and I doubt my loss is going to break Microsoft’s corporate heart. (shrug) No matter.

July 28, 2015
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Fantasy and SFMediaOnline lifethings that piss you off

Dinosaurs and Dinosaur Shit

by Diane Duane April 6, 2015

dinosaur-asteroid

This last weekend has been spent reading, working on this and that, making a lot of waffles, and attempting to deal with some thorny issues, the least important of which has been “How on Earth did we eat that Valrhona chocolate syrup and not remember doing it?”

The most important of the issues, though, has been increasingly occupying my mind since the Hugo Award nominations came out a couple of days back.

I suspect that most writers don’t mind being nominated for awards. It’s happened to me every now and then: I still remember with considerable pleasure (even though I didn’t win) the crazed adrenaline rush that came with being nominated for the Campbell two years in a row.

Being nominated for a Hugo is something that’s not likely to happen to me in the near future — at the very least, for various logistical reasons. But now, with the circumstances surrounding this year’s Hugo nomination ballot, the thought that keeps recurring is this: “I am so, so, so, so, SO glad that this year I wasn’t in a position to be nominated for anything.”

This is because this year the Hugo Awards nomination system has been nastily and cynically gamed, much to the detriment of various people who deserved to be considered for the awards — and whose nominations are now more or less irrevocably tainted by the approbation of the bloc voters supporting one or another set of nomination “slates”.  Some writers were put on one or another of these slates without their knowledge or agreement, and are now horrified by the ugly situation they’re in.

The Book News page at the online version of the Telegraph has a roundup of the general / basic facts of the situation. Also, if you check the #HugoAwards tag on Twitter you will find plenty of links discussing what’s been going on.

As I said, while this has been unfolding I’ve been wondering what to say about it, and am not surprised that others (i.e., those less preoccupied with screenplay work and waffle irons) have been quicker off the mark and have summed up much of what I was thinking more gracefully or incisively than I can at the moment.  Most specifically, I’m very much on the same page as Elizabeth Bear, whose LJ posting speaks very clearly about the intersection between fandom and prodom and how this situation seems to her to affect it. (Also worth reading are Matthew David Surridge’s quite long but beautifully comprehensive reaction to being nominated via one of these slates and how he declined the nomination, and Sarah Chorn’s “lamentation”. Charlie Stross’s post about a publisher that no one’s ever heard of but which suddenly has nine Hugo nominations also makes interesting reading.)

Meanwhile, my only worthwhile contribution to these alarums and excursions is to say: I now and forever decline to be placed on any Hugo (or other) nomination slate, by anybody. If I get put on such a slate without my knowledge I will immediately decline any actual nomination that happens.

Nor will I ever vote for anyone or anything that achieves Hugo (or other) nomination via being put on such a slate. …And in company with many other potential Hugo nomination-voters this year, I can see a whole lot of “No Award” (or “No Vote”, I need to get clear on the detail…) votes being marked on my ballot in the near future.

One last thing: I think, finally, that what we’re hearing behind this ugly fooforaw is what Chuck Wendig memorably describes as “dinosaurs losing their collective dinosaur shit and waving their tiny ineffective arms at the coming meteors (and subsequent mammal survival party).“ And leaving their little proto-coproliths scattered all over the landscape, for good measure.

Well, this too shall pass. And this particular batch of dinosaurs, no one will miss.

April 6, 2015
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DiscworldGermanypublishingStar TrekStar Trek and other licensed propertiesthings that piss you off

What’s the Rihannsu for “soup”?

by Diane Duane February 14, 2015

If the above (and below) images look a little bizarre, well, they should. They’re from long-ago German editions of My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way into which the publisher inserted soup ads.

Yes, really.

The story came up again briefly in a series of posts over at the forums at Mark Reads, and I thought I’d store the images here now that I’ve got the scanner seeing sense (short version: disagreement between new printer and old legacy TWAIN driver, never mind the long version, too annoying, solved now).

To quote the original posting:

…It was in or near this chapter of the German translation [of Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids (“Pyramiden“) that Peter ran into something that made our conjoint blood run cold: a soup advertisement.

 

 

Maggi Soups were at that time in some kind of pestilential relationship with Heyne Verlag (then the German publisher of Terry’s books, BUT NOT FOR LONG), and Maggi had taken to inserting little soup ads into the plots of books Heyne were publishing. I knew this because they had stuck one into the middle of the German edition of The Romulan Way (a.k.a Die Romulaner.* One minute things are normal on the Bridge… the next minute, Mr. Sulu is wishing he had a nice cup of soup. GOD I wish I was not making this up. …The altered passages were instantly identifiable by page-wide black spacer bars inserted into the text to make them fit into the flow of the printing.

 

 

So we picked up this copy of Pyramiden as we were passing through Zurich, and we were on our way to the Jungfrau, and in the hotel that night in Interlaken Ost, Peter was paging through the book… and there were the Black Lines. And so he called the Pratchett residence, and Terry was out, but he got Lyn.

 

 

And Lyn, being a sensible woman, didn’t believe him at first. Because who would dare pull crap like that with Terry? So Peter read the altered text to her, translating as he went. And Lyn’s mouth fell open, audibly. She said, “I’ll tell Terry when he gets home.” And when Terry got home, he straightway called Colin the Agent of Doom, and Colin called Heyne, and shortly Terry was not with Heyne any more. AND SERVED THEM RIGHT.

 

 

It was a pleasure to do Terry that service, but a pain in the butt that it had to be done. Seriously: SOUP??

…We no longer have that copy of Pyramiden, alas: it was sold long ago at a Discworld convention charity auction. But we still have the Rihannsu books in question, so now you can see what the pages looked like. Behold: one of the more sordid yet somehow mean and small and pitiful examples of corporate greed you’re likely to see.

*I keep thinking the “a” here should take an umlaut. …Never mind.

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February 14, 2015
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"Disk boot failure..."
Computer stuffHome lifeIrelandOnline lifethings that piss you offUncategorized

Hardware issues

by Diane Duane June 5, 2014

image

Those of you who may remember the above image from a week and a half or so ago might be curious about how things have been progressing.

Briefly, not real well.

(Inserting a cut here (on the Tumblr side) to shield the eyes of innocent onlookers from the discussion of painful technical issues. The tl;dr version: My big work computer is screwed, I’m going to be fixing it for days, I will be cranky while this happens, my apologies in advance for an anticipated decrease in cheerful posts. (sigh))

Having tried everything one normally tries inside the case when a drive has non-noisily failed — swapping power and data cables around, checking everywhere for loose or dirty connections, fiddling with the BIOS (insofar as I dare to… I don’t like messing with the BIOS: there is nothing more pathetic and annoying than a motherboard you fried yourself), I then turned to out-of-case remedies and ordered in a SATA drive enclosure (we needed one anyway…) so that I could test the drive using a USB connection and find out whether any data could be reclaimed from it at all.

So yesterday the enclosure arrived. (Along with a Seagate 3-Tb external drive for backing things up from now on.) Very nice, too: sleek design, pretty. With due care the failed drive was put into it and powered up.

Nada. (Or as I originally just typed, Dana, which as Irish people will tell you is another thing entirely. )

So the situation is as follows:

(a) I now have a failed boot drive that will have to be sent off for data recovery in a clean room. What diagnosis I can perform at this end suggests that the failure was very likely electronic (drive board chipset failure, a short, etc etc) rather than mechanical, which is about as good as the news gets at this end: probably the disk platters will not have been damaged. Nonetheless this is going to be annoying and expensive to recover from.I haven’t actively started soliciting quotes yet, but my best guess suggests that if I get away with paying as little as €500 for recovery, I should count myself lucky. It could be double or triple that. (sigh) I will also have to spend a while wondering whether it’s worth sending the thing off for recovery at all, as I have no definitive list of What Used To Be There to compare against What’s there Now in the files restored from backups. (See  (b).) I think I know. But then I thought the backups were complete and that most important program installs had been done to the 1Tb F: drive.

Gaaaah.

(b) While there are fairly recent backups of C: drive material (the most recent was May 18th, [heavyirony] whoopee, happy birthday to me [/heavyirony]), they are not as complete as I wish they were: some directories in the C: drive that should have been tagged for backup were not. (Mea culpa, mea bloody maxima culpa.) Some of them are/were quite important, like my installation of Dragon Naturally Speaking, Scrivener and so forth. Now, these can be reconstructed: in almost all cases I still have, or can quickly recover, the original installation media / files. But doing so, weary piece by piece — including in some cases having to install original files and then their upgrades, one after another — is going to take days of time that I really wish I didn’t have to spend right now. (While I am also busy finishing a writing project.) Ah well.

(c) The backups that did restore haven’t quite settled in at the W7 system end. In particular, user profiles from the old installation, though their files are all there, have not re-manifested themselves in W7 as yet… so that desktops are MIA/unavailable, and everything has to be searched for before it can be used or worked on. (And if the profiles don’t come back after a few reboots, I’m going to have to start working out how to make them come back. Oh joy. The Descent Into The Registry: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.” Gaaaaaaah x2.)

…So. Those of you who follow me may find me a little less forthcoming with posts than usual for the next 3-5 days, and if my tone sounds a little strained when I do post, you’ll know why Please bear with me until I get this mess as sorted as as it can get in the short term.

Thank you. 🙂

This was crossposted from DD’s tumblr http://ift.tt/1pHE23c, where it was published on June 05, 2014 at 11:18AM

June 5, 2014
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Computer stuffOnline lifethings that piss you off

Blocking China

by Diane Duane April 25, 2013

It’s nothing personal, not at all. But since yesterday both Out of Ambit and the new WordPress writing-stuff blog at Eating Paper (which I haven’t even put up a link to as yet, must fix that…) have been getting a blizzard of incoming trackback spam from Chinese sources. (Indian too, but way fewer of those.) As a result, for the immediate future I’m blocking everything from the .cn and .tw top-level domains. (And also Guatemala. Seriously, why? Well, I don’t care.) Doubtless this too will pass. In the meantime it’s just an annoyance.

The only good thing about this has been that some of the earnest-sounding, I-want-you-to-approve-this-comment text that comes with these things is so hilarious. Get this:

I would like to comprehend when you write this article is what kind of mood, why would you write this article, also written so good, is that I can emulate.

Wow, by all means. Or:

I am fond of your article.Your article is like a big tree, so that we can be seated in your tree, feel yourself a real.

No, I’m flattered but I wouldn’t presume to attempt the latter: certainly only Benedict  Cumberbatch may properly inhabit that lofty eminence.

And then… this:

This article made me effulge.

(deep breath)

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

…Bye bye China… gonna miss you for a while…

(effulge…)

 

April 25, 2013
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Computer stuffHome lifeTechnogeekerythings that piss you off

Calanda acts out

by Diane Duane April 5, 2013

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have noticed an uncharacteristic outbreak of annoyed language the other morning.

FECKFECKFECKFECK FECK SHIT DAMMITALLSTRAIGHTTOHELL. …Also “tits”.

— Diane Duane (@dduane) March 29, 2013

Well, this was the cause.

ETA: Secondary to all the below, and after no steps taken at home proved useful, the machine is going to be heading back to its lovely builders for service… so we’re having a sale at the Ebooks Direct store to “celebrate”. Details are here.

…I have two computers. One is a Samsung NC10 netbook on which a surprising amount of writing gets done (because it has a lovely keyboard; while I do dictate a lot of my work in Dragon Naturally Speaking, sometimes you just want to type, and the Samsung is the best machine in the house for Just Typing on). The other computer is a desktop named Calanda, as all my desktops are these days. (For the curious: Calanda is both a [theoretically] haunted mountain near the Swiss city of Chur*, and a Graubuendner beer brewery that produces a very superior dunkel and a lovely weissbier. All my other devices except for the iPad (Spot: of course it would be Spot) are named after characters from Tenchi Muyo. The netbook is Ayeka, the phone is Tsunami, etc etc.)

…Anyway. The present Calanda (II, or probably III at this point) is the first custom build I’ve ever owned, made by Scan in the UK: a lovely machine. It has never given me a lick of trouble. (Well, the video card has, but that comes under the “Occasional Wobblies / God Knows Why It Did That / Maybe It’s Sunspots / Never Mind, It Got Better” class of problems. It did get better.) Despite many years of home-building our machines, I’ve never had the urge to do anything with it except crack the case occasionally to do a little dusting.

naughty_calanda

And everything has pretty much been hunkydory until a week ago today, when in the middle of some website work the display froze, then went black. And then the machine rebooted itself.

Fine, I thought. This happens very, very occasionally. No problem.

Except that it then rebooted itself again. And again. And again. No display to the screen: just the fans coming on. And then more attempted rebooting. Much moar.

So I forced the machine off, pulled the power cord, waited, did deep breathing for a bit, then plugged the cord back in again and hit the Go button.

Same deal.

…Now, over twenty years or so of building PCs from the bits up, I’ve seen most kinds of errors they can throw… drive stuff, motherboard stuff, memory stuff, slot stuff. But this was a new one on me. And when I realized this, and that it was really problematic due to several projects I have working right now that really need the big machine rather than the netbook, several things happened in sequence.

(a) A great disturbance in the local Force: as if a single voice had cried out in anguish, and then shut right up because the crying-out-in-anguish stuff upsets the cat.

(b) The above distressed tweet. (Followed by much helpful advice from various people who saw it and the ones that followed, which were a shade more coherent.)

(c) Crack the case, look inside, and start diagnostics.

(d) Breathe some more and decide to wait until today to start doing anything whatsoever about it: because trying to get anything tech-meaningful done in Ireland (or to a lesser extent in the UK) on Good Friday is a challenge not worth taking.

…So I started working my way down the least invasive of the suggestions this morning. On cracking the case I found the original tight beautiful build, undisturbed (I’ve never added anything because the original build had everything I wanted). I had a careful look around to make sure that there was nothing obviously burnt, oozing or otherwise deranged. And nothing was.

Then I hit the button and let the machine run through the cycle a few times. The results you can see in the embedded video.

The thing most of note for me: the processor’s heatsink fan will not run. It tries, but fails. There are a number of things this implies, but I need to talk to the guys at Scan who built the machine before I go doing what my mother used to refer to as “jumping to concussions”.

Meanwhile, for those of you who were trying to work out what was wrong: that’s what we’ve got to work with so far.

…Also, for those of you who wanted system specs to assist you in diagnosis: here they are. It’s essentially a system built for fast graphics work (it spends a lot of its spare time rendering in Terragen, in particular) but also obviously handles WP work at damn-near-blazing speed.

  • Housing: Antec Three Hundred Black Midi Tower Case w/o PSU
  • Mobo: Gigabyte H55M-UD2H, Intel H55, 1156, DDR3 1600/1800/2133, RAID, VGA, ATX
  • Processor: Intel Core i3 530 2.93GHz S1156
  • To keep the processor chilled: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2
  • Memory: 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair XMS3 DDR3, PC3-12800 (1600), CAS 9
  • Video: ATI Graphics 1GB XFX HD 5870 XT, 865Mhz GPU, 1600 SPs, 5200Mhz GDDR5
  • Display: It’s a Samsung 28-inch (I think?) flat screen. I can’t find the model info at the moment: it was bought separately from the main system, an open-box bargain.
  • PSU: 650W Corsair CMPSU-650HXUK PSU (High End Graphics Card)
  • HD 1: 500 GB Samsung Spinpoint F3, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache
  • HD 2: 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3, 7200rpm, 32MB Cache
  • CD/DVD drives: Sony AD-7240S-0B – 24x DVDRW (x2)
  • Sound: Creative X-Fi Titanium – PCI-E (x1)
  • Still more cooling: 120mm Akasa Amber Case Fan
  • System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit

…So there you have it. To those of you who’ve tried to help so far, many thanks!  🙂

And now I’m off to let Moffat make me scared of WiFi.

ETA: Secondary to all the above, and after no steps taken at home proved useful, the machine is going to be heading back to its lovely builders for service… so we’re having a sale at the Ebooks Direct store to “celebrate”. Details are here.

*Disambiguation: for the worldgating complex, see the Chur entry at ErrantryWiki.

April 5, 2013
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AstronomyEuropeHistoryHome lifeHumorIrelandMediaOOA2tumblrpredicting the futurepredicting the future badlyreligionthings that piss you off

Dude, where’s my Apocalypse?!

by Diane Duane December 21, 2012

Does anybody have an 800 number for the ancient Mayans? Because I need to lodge a complaint.

Seriously, 2012 has been something of a wash all around.  Tragedies. Mass shootings. Anguish of all kinds. Local cataclysms of the flood-and-earthquake variety. Wars and rumors of war (well, yeah, we always have those, but this year has seemed worse than usual for some reason).  Superstorms. Droughts and famines. Endless human pain. (And other species are suffering too, obviously, but in typically human fashion it’s our own pain we notice most.)

A nice hefty apocalypse would’ve really taken the edge off all of those.

Because just think of it.  No more… well, no more [fill in the blank with whatever really gets on your case]. I have my own list:  full of the great tragedies above, but also full of many lesser ones, of annoyances and  disappointments and things that just get under my skin. No more Prometheus.  No more robocalling marketers. No more fiscal cliffs.  No more spam. No more Windows 8.  No more Apple Maps.  Crash a runaway planet or so into us and it’s all over with, and good riddance. (I really would miss never seeing season 3 of Sherlock or the remaining Hobbit films, but when so much evil would be wiped out at the same time, it seems petty to complain.)

Yet after all this effing buildup, what have we got this morning?

Bupkis!

It’s been beyond annoying, really: partly because we were promised two others of these this year. One of them was going to be a few days after my birthday. I thought, “Yeah, typical. I hit a landmark year and then have three days to enjoy it: whose good idea was this??” And the day came — it was supposed to be one of those raptures or something similar — and what do we get?

Nothing.

Then immediately the guy responsible for the math says, “Whoops, no, calculation error, God moves in mysterious ways, I haven’t been told everything, uh, human error, that’s the ticket. It’s going to be October.” The designated date was right after Peter’s birthday this time.  P. simply said, “Great, I get a party and no hangover!” — trust him to see the bright side of an apocalypse: this kind of behavior is the reason I married the man. And the day comes, and we have our little party, and the day goes, and what do we get?

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

What’s the saying? Once might be an accident. Twice could be coincidence. But the third time? Enemy action. The third time, any sensible person would pick up the phone and call Customer Service and say, “This is unacceptable. Something is really wrong at the fulfillment end. You need to do something to put this right.”

But who do I complain to?

Because now we’re going to hear the old song again…  all the stuff about how complex the problem is, how you can’t possibly blame any one person or organization. It was this writer. Or that broadcasting personality. It was a runaway meme. It was publicity-seeking New Agers — that’ll be a popular one. You can just see what the news is going to look like tomorrow, as all these people who promised us an End Of The World that could actually be worth something start pointing at each other and trying to shift the blame.

“Miscalculations in the calendar” — I bet that’ll be the most popular excuse. Rounding errors. Failure to correctly convert metric to imperial, or the other way around. (At least one Mars probe went God knows where because of that: you’d think people would’ve learned better by now! Seriously.) Or wait a moment, no, it’ll all have been a translation error, won’t it? Such a subjective art. Yeah, let’s blame the translators. Like they don’t already have enough on their plates.

I guess there’s nothing for it but to settle in for a nice long session of watching the fingerpointing, until the news cycle gets bored with it and cycles on.  (And I bet that won’t happen soon enough for some of these people, who’ve thought nothing in particular of inflicting their own crazy paranoias on the rest of the planet at large.) It’ll be just like the week after the US Presidential election all over again, with all the people who thought Romney was such a shoe-in suddenly finding all these great reasons how the other guys in the party screwed it up. “Wait, what? Women? Black and hispanic voters? Young voters? He said not to pay them any mind…! Yeah, him over there. And Romney, pff, I never really liked him anyway…”

Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not going to let this slide.  I want to march up to somebody’s desk and get this made right. I don’t care what it takes: they can bloody well get DHL or FedEx on it, for God’s sake, but I want that runaway planet or whatever the hell it was supposed to be on my desk by tomorrow morning at the latest. And in the meantime, until the email with the tracking number comes in, I just want an answer.

Dude, where’s my apocalypse?!

December 21, 2012
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40 years in print, 50+ novels, assorted TV/movies, NYT Bestseller List a few times, blah blah blah. Young Wizards series, 1983-2020 and beyond; Middle Kingdoms series, 1979-2019. And now, also: Proud past Guest of Honour at Dublin2019, the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin, Ireland.

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