One silent tear

[james_davis_nicoll]

How sad it is to see a man reach out, only to be rejected

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Carboy of brain bleach, stat!

[eagle]

I don't think I dare click on that link. The tags are terrifying.

[thistleingrey]

I clicked, and I am going to go and read something entirely different now. whoa.

Also, like Shetterly, I cannot duplicate the browser-cookie result that a commenter alleges as linking Cherie Priest with specfriction. Commenter must've gotten something crossed in browser history after visiting her site. (Like, someone's attempt to link Priest to that Tumblr is the only other reason to skim the linked page, and here I am to say that that part is empty.)

[centuryplant]

__utmz cookies are used by Google Analytics to track how people get to a site. The one posted on that thread simply means that at some point in the last six months, that commenter followed a link from cheriepriest.com to authorlife.tumblr.com. It has nothing to do with the specfriction Tumblr and nothing to do with the ownership of any Tumblr.

[thistleingrey]

Yes--thanks for providing a clearer explanation!

[rydra_wong]

Likewise. I. Just. No.

[kate_nepveu]

Those are some excellently informative tags. I thank you.

[james_davis_nicoll]

Not usefully visible on LJ. This is James' sad face.

[kate_nepveu]

If so, it's because of people's own reading page styles; they show up just fine for me on my LJ friends page and on your own journal page when I unclick "view in own style".

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

There really needs to be a way to read the tags without first clicking the post.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Hovering over the link was enough for me.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I forgot something. Sorry.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

OH GOD THE WILL SHITTERLY TAG MAKES ME WANT TO GO BACK TO SEE JUST HOW STUPID HE IS TODAY AND I ALREADY SAW HIM MAKING A STUPID FUCKING ASS OF HIMSELF ON MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL'S POST.

You are a bad person. I am certain of it. For the record.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

Okay, I don't generally read comments on random blogs%, so I can't tell if I should be deeply grateful, or if I'm missing something unintentionally hilarious.

----
% James is not chaotic, not random.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

%James is neither chaotic, nor random. He is often very, very, Canadianly dry.

And sometimes he doesn't see things. But when he links them, Linking Is Clearly Not Endorsement, unless you miss the dry.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I PUT TAGS ON IT! I KEEP THINKING PEOPLE SEE THE TAGS.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I read the tags first on your blog.

[mme-hardy.livejournal.com]

I get mail notifications. I always read the ones tagged "memetic prophylactic", because I am like that.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

I always look at your tags first. I learned that the hard way.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

Reading the comments is almost worth it for the response Shetterly gets.

Click on tools from the menu bar, then click on options, then go fuck yourself.

There is room for detente!

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

The tags don't show up in the RSS feed, I think. So I clicked on it there. Blast it. I obviously need to look at what the link is before clicking it.

What is a "pinkshirt"? Is that a dig at Scalzi?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Yes. Scalzi is a "gamma" and a "rabbit" and a "pinkshirt" because he is stupid and believes "women" might be "people" and not "vending machines with vaginas". This gives him and everyone like him a totally unmanly pink shirt.

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

My ability to understand other people's perspective fails at times.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

And he crossplays!
http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2013/07/a-scandal-day-for-sfwa.html#c6242768167212190144

[kithrup.livejournal.com]

I am not clicking on that!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I associate pink shirts for men with that notoriously empowering decade, the 1950s. They were de rigueur with a gray suit.

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

The funny part is, of course, pink = female is, as I recall, at the earliest a mid-19th century concept and didn't receive widespread acceptance in North America (at least) until well into the 20th century. So, for someone like Beale who claims he's so into tradition...

[peter-erwin.livejournal.com]

It's very much a 20th Century thing, at least when it comes to associations with the gender of children.

From http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/When-Did-Girls-Start-Wearing-Pink.html :

For example, a June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw's Infants' Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Other sources said blue was flattering for blonds, pink for brunettes; or blue was for blue-eyed babies, pink for brown-eyed babies

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

The article suggests that the now-standard associations really didn't become set until the 1940s. (There are some great photos accompanying the article, such as that of a long-haired, 2 1/2-year-old FDR in a white dress, the standard costume for young children of both sexes in the late 19th Century.)

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

I associate them with the 80s, along with other pastel colors. I have photographic evidence of a friend of mine, who also likes to shoot rifles and blow things up, wearing one, avec mullet, circa 1985.

[doc-lemming.livejournal.com]

Hey!

We called the color "salmon" so it was manly.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

That sounds fishy.

[jamoche]

Mine is one of the most laid-back of my fellow black belts, who didn't give a damn what anyone else thought of him.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

Not to be confused with Redshirts, I suppose. Or have I missed the point of the joke?

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

A pinkshirt is a redshirt who does the laundry.

[bunsen-h.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that a pinkshirt was a whiteshirt that had shared a laundry load with a redshirt.

[mmegaera.livejournal.com]

Only real men wear pink shirts.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

Which ties in (sorry) with the old saying "More man than YOU'LL ever be, and more woman than you'll ever GET!".

--Dave, free to be whichever me is real

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

And men who don't brusquely domineer their women, I think.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

LIKE SCALZI.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Is there any evidence that Beale has even met a woman? His Wikipedia entry claims three children, but there's no cite. Maybe they're like Lou Antonelli's furbabies.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Dude, *Leo Frankowski* managed to meet and marry a woman.

(BTW, fans of Leo: obit locked due to a spam problem. Probably be unlocked in a year or so)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

True enough, but Frankowski was a courtly gentleman of the old school compared to Beale.

The unmotivated jumps in tone and logic in his prose style make me wonder. They're a little like Dave Sim's.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Damn, the Wikipedia page reminded me of The Two-Space War. I've been trying to forget that for years.

[editrx.livejournal.com]

To be fair, and even though I sorta liked the guy personally, he did have to go all the way to Russia to find a girl, and did it through one of those Bride Auction thingies. (Not that he paid money, but, ya know...)

[tb-doc-smith.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that the Bride of Frankowski (a mature woman with a daughter approaching marriageable age) dumped LF before he died.

[editrx.livejournal.com]

That is indeed true. There was an interpretor living with them as well. It was all ... bizarre.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Frankowski *paid a poor Russian woman to marry him*, with her fully understanding that the wealthy American was two generations her senior and would die and leave her his money eventually. And, after meeting him, she dumped him anyway.

Frankowski is perhaps not a relevant comparison.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Pinkshirt = godwin's law (ala blackshirts or brownshirts etc...) + implying people are stinking commies.

Literally, pinko-nazi.

[nathan helfinstine (from livejournal.com)]

Really? I thought it was a gender thing, not a politics thing.

("Why not both!")

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

I thought I was the only one who still remembered Pinko as a communist insult. Of course I may have gotten it from the Chad Mitchell Trio song the John Birch Society. "We're after Rosie Clooney, we've gotten Pinky Lee, and the day we get Red Skelton won't that be a victory!" And it was my mom's family's tape, I was just indoctrinated early.

[raycun.livejournal.com]

vox popoli?
Is there supposed to be a joke in the misspelling?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Just have to keep stirring the cesspool, don't you?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Our host is something of an ohnotheydidnt for the SFF world at times...

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

At times?

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

[x] Cats

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I will note, just as a generality, that your linking helps give him the attention he so craves.

[seth ellis (from livejournal.com)]

The funniest thing about the whole Beale/SFWA thing to me is that Beale transparently wants SFWA to kick him out, because it would feed his heroic-victim delusions. So he did something that in any other trade organization would be immediately, obviously worthy of expulsion. But my heavens, judging someone on the basis of their actions might be hasty, hroom hroom.

Beale's clearly having a grand old time with all this. The convenient thing about having a persecution complex is that every situation's win-win: if you win, you've just won; if you lose, you get to complain about it.

[jamoche]

The whole thing has reached popehat: http://www.popehat.com/2013/07/01/why-does-talking-about-creepers-and-harassment-make-people-so-angry/

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Why is Popehat linking to Vox Day with the label "alarmingly close to the mainstream"?

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Ten percent of the SFWA did vote for him in all his misogynist white supremacist glory, which does strike me as "alarmingly close to the mainstream". Given that there's a basic filter of "capable of writing and selling at least a couple works" which presumably clears out the real droolers.

[avram]

At 10%, the crazification factor for SFWA is considerably lower than that for the general US population.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Thank you. You rendered my response more concisely than I did, so I deleted mine.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

Ten percent of those who voted. If I remember the number of voters wasn't all that high.

And the excuse someone had for voting for him so the Cabal wouldn't get a hold of the treasury! was amusing.

[jamoche]

Someone else raises that question. The author replies:

I don't mean "alarmingly close to the mainstream" as a compliment. I mean that nutty and frothing freakery is more common and closer to accepted on issues of gender than on, say, issues of race. "Society conspires to advance the interests of women over men, and women can't be trusted" is tolerated to a greater extent than the same comment with "blacks" substituted would be, for no logical reason.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

There's some intersectionalism going on, however. There have been some very nasty racial slurs thrown at NK Jemisin, who is a woman of color.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

Yes, and the thread James links to has at least a dozen of those racial slurs. Personally, I find Popehat to be routinely clueless on things such as intersectionalism (and politeness, and modesty, etc. etc.)

[tavella.livejournal.com]

Oh, look. Comments filled with guys explaining how geekdom is a men-only space where the socially awkward found sweet refuge, and all those evil fake geek girls are coming in and making them uncomfortable and shit! Because guuuuuuuuurls didn't go to conventions decades ago! Or play RPGs! Or read SF! I was a figment of my own imagination!

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

As a socially awkward geek man myself, those guys can go and boil their heads. They're embarrassing.