sundries

[rm]

Patty's brother and guest have arrived. We had a nice time last night and tonight we'll be taking her for her first sushi! So that'll be fun. The text message from them being lost while we were having sex trying to sleep was a little less pleasant, but what can you do?

LJ comments: still fucked. Film at 11.

I had heard there was something up regarding VividCon, but while I really dig vids, I don't make them and I'm not really a part of that community, and as such hadn't quite found my path to what the story was until this morning.

vom_marlowe has the story which involves disability-related fail, a side of transphobia, a bit of internalized misogyny and a whole lot of bad attitudes.

I have a few thoughts, that are oddly related to some thoughts I have about what jimhines has to say about rape and the police.

Actually, I have one big thought: People, the presence of rare or hypothetical bad actors in a given situation is not a reason to deny people accommodation or redress so that they may coexist comfortably, equally and fairly.

The fact that false rape accusations do happen once in a rare while is no reason for police to treat people reporting rape as criminals and dismiss their claims in a hail of threats. The fact that a person could theoretically claim an invisible disability to get someone into a vid show for free as a personal aide is no reason to make it onerous for people with disabilities to attend events, scold them for needing assistance and require that they are only the bare minimum of comfortable compared to other event guests while taking unnecessary, potentially humiliating and/or dangerous personal risks.¹

Also, don't joke about the bathroom thing. For trans people and sometimes for butch women, this can be a life and death thing.

And look, when I go to a restaurant, I understand I am taking a risk due to my celiac disease and that that risk is on me. HOWEVER, it's also perfectly reasonable for me to ask someone at the restaurant what's in the food and then make an educated decision for myself.

So if someone wants content information about your vid show due to things like migraines, epilepsy or content that they feel would be harmful to them in some way, you are not being unfairly burdened. They are being responsible and trying to make active choices for themselves and you should know what's in the tin you packed and be willing to share in such circumstances. In fact, you could save everyone a lot of misery by providing a write up on such in advance as part of your production process so that those with such concerns could research in advance without interrupting you or revealing information about themselves they might quite reasonably prefer to remain private.

Why is it, in the broadest sense possible so hard for us, as a species, to err simply on the side of kindness?

Also, a relatively trivial side note in all of this, but one I think is important in terms of how we think about ourselves and others: Enough with the tall poppy syndrome. People aren't dicks for being popular. They're dicks for being dicks about being popular or they're dicks because they're being dicks and happen to be popular. The popular (or successful or rich or whatever) isn't the inherent problem and obscures the conversation. I'm tired of it. Be grand, damn you all!

What exercise science doesn't know about women.

It may be possible to predict extreme longevity with significant accuracy.

Google is buying ITA and this could be very significant down the line, at least if you travel a lot.

Google is also supplementing the pay of employees with same-sex partners who receive insurance through them to neutralize the tax penalty these employees are hit with because of DoMA.

---

¹ I do not in any way intend to equate rape and disability here. Rather I am trying to equate people's bad attitudes about addressing rape and addressing disability accommodations as coming from related "logic" sources.

Comments

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yup, and at least in LJ you can "hide" the warning so people won't get spoiled if they don't want to. I've used that for stories before because the warned for thing was really really shocking and needed to be warned for, but I also didn't want to front-load people with the information if they didn't feel they needed to check for warnings.

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

I like hidden warnings in LJ, very useful. I know you needed to warn for the first part of IHNIIHBT but I thought that the way the reactions in the story were handled was gorgeous and nuanced and powerful. The two of you made it so much more than the warning could ever have implied.

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[rm.livejournal.com]

Thanks. That was our fear, that the warning, whatever we said would drive people off because it was cracky or gross or awful, but we also couldn't not warn. We're going to clean up typos on the whole series and put it on A03 soon, and that creates issues with their warning system that's frustrating. Because "character death" isn't the warning that scene needs.

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Oy re: AO3. Is that something you could take up with the people who administer it as a modification that could be made to the tag/warning system, or not really?

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's too unique a case to be a priority in any way, and I accept that. The warnings options they have make lots of sense, and we'll do it in the authors note in invisible text (highlight to read) if that'll work, or provide a link or something.

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing there isn't a "temporary character death" choice? Would something general like "potentially disturbing content" work or is legitimate to call it "breath play' in that fandom?

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[rm.livejournal.com]

I do think there are people who want alerts for things like breath play, and I think that's reasonable but not the central issue here, which is the temporarily dead person involved in the sex. Normally in TW people don't warn for Jack's deaths, and I wouldn't, you know, except for the complete fuckery that is everything that goes down in that story.

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

I am inordinately pleased with the idea of a warning for: Complete fuckery going down!

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

Would you consider posting the whole as a PDF as well, or a series of PDFs?

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yup, that's on our to-do list with it as well. I may also do a pod-fic of the Ianto's backstory piece of it.

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[dremiel.livejournal.com]

Yummy, thanks!

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[azn-jack-fiend.livejournal.com]

Just as a data point, IHNIIHBT was one of the first long fics I read, and based on the warnings, I remember skipping the first part. Then I went back and read it later after I had read more of the story. I think the warning was very useful, because I was not mentally prepared to read it at the time... I had to sort of ease into it. Now, of course, I love the whole thing, but it must have been tricky to start off with such a bang and to consider how it would be received.

Re: Tangential at best to the VVC thing

[rm.livejournal.com]

Well when we started writing it, we had no idea what we were doing. We'd been fucking around in email and being cracky and one of us was like "oh, let's post this" and then all of a sudden there was a sequel and somewhere around the third one we figured out that it was an arc. I think it was around the fourth one that we figured out it was serious business as opposed to "what porn is now?"

Now, going back, I don't think we'd undo the first one, but might conceivably want to revisit the tone. Both of us really like fic as moments in time though, especially considering the theme of IHNIIHBT, and so feel strongly about leaving it as it is, other than typos and such.