@Freeirony @JustinHowe Then they drew a full graphic novel and inked it using software and everything. I have it around here somewhere, I swear…
Archives: Tweets
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@Freeirony @JustinHowe Have I ever mentioned the “Goose Dad” comic I worked on with students for a Creative English Study course years ago? They wrote a script for a comic about a “Goose Dad” family, and the process involved loooong discussions about the themes. @Freeirony @JustinHowe (Which included what it’s like to be effectively a single mom abroad; what it’s like to move abroad and be immersed in a foreign language as a kid; how the “Goose Dad” phenomenon is really socially sanctioned separation for at least some couples.)
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@pintsizehorror @tweetsbymoi Mind, the cafés I drove past on the way home from the doctor just now looked mostly empty. Well, the ones with windows not 100% plastered with advertising. But also, I’m talking about last week. (Classes ended for me Monday, but def. last week students joined Zoom from cafés.)
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@Freeirony @JustinHowe I usually get the feeling it’s like a marital separation in everything but name and address. Like the Goose Dad thing, or when marital weekend couples where it’s a single income family and the family could move to stay together, but chooses to live apart. @Freeirony @JustinHowe (I get the feeling it’s really just various socially acceptable forms of marital separation. Probably part of it is how unfashionable long engagements seem to be here.)
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@tweetsbymoi From what I hear? It’s just lots of people acting like nothing out of the ordinary is going on. (The local mommy board in our city reported grocery stores & restaurants all crammed full of people, lineups of cars at Costco, etc.) @tweetsbymoi (Also, having taught Zoom classes last week, I can confirm that some people are indeed still hanging out in cafes all day long.) 🙄
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The first time I saw this, it was at a mini-festival in Montreal, with French subtitles. Unlike my friends, I couldn’t read French quickly enough to keep up. (But it still amazed me.) twitter.com/nancywyuen/sta…
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@JustinHowe @pauljessup And yeah, the ads are probably the most remembered of all ads from Dragon magazine. Miles Teves did some amazing art for the game…
Oh, pretty much everything Jorune is also available on the Internet Archive. @JustinHowe @pauljessup My understanding is that the computer game resulted in the rights to the game being contested, which made newer editions impossible legally. The creator kinda gave up on the game and moved on to software development, IIRC.
(He permits nonprofit fan work, and some has come out.)
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@JustinHowe @pauljessup Justin gave me some of the books! I think I have almost everything 1st and 2nd edition for Jorune except the rare stuff and the Earth-Tec book. Great setting… totally broken system. Like, the rules are headache inducing, like many 80s/90s games, but it’s a great setting. @JustinHowe @pauljessup And a very beloved setting: there’s maybe a dozen or more 3rd party “hacks” for running a game in Jorune using all kinds of rulesets. I’ve been surprised there hasn’t been an OSR Jorune knock-off, to be honest!
The video game is available as abandonware online.
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(This probably means nothing to you if you haven’t seen later seasons of The Walking Dead, but…)
Every time I run across someone I knew once who’s jumped headfirst down an alt-right/MRA/etc. rabbithole, you know what runs through my mind? The phrase, “I am Negan.” (That said, I think the Whisperers are a much better analogue to the alt-right. The Saviors/Negan map better to what mainline Republicanism looked like back in the wake of 9-11, for reasons I imagine are pretty obvious… or anyway too numerous for Twitter.)
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@ahimsakerp I think it’s a newly coined term? Nobody used it any of my classes before this week. From Tuesday, suddenly it was used in *all* of my classes. Okay, not all: four out of five. @ahimsakerp Googling suggests it’s some kind of app/brand name for short-term rental, which… 🤪 “G-bike” doesn’t sound weird, but “G-cooter”? Yikes…
(I mean, not that it matters much if nobody knows that old slang word here, but…)
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Oh, and if you’re not in Korea, I mean these things:
EMOVE Cruiser S 52V Dual Suspension – Long Range Electric Scooter
They’ve grown popular and despite a small number of incidents the government is removing some restrictions on their use… so an inevitable moral panic about their supposed dangers has followed. It can be confusing to call these “electric scooters” here because Korea already has lots of scooters of that other kind, especially used for food delivery:
(But some media outlets do call them electric scooters here anyway.)
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The whole moral panic over electric/motorized scooters/kickboards aside, who coined the term “G-cooter” to refer to them? Many students now seem to think it’s the standard English term and are surprised when I tell them it isn’t, and that they should avoid using it in English. When they ask why, I suggest they Google, “What does cooter mean?” (It’s dated slang, but lots of people remember the word, and, well… yeah, that’s why I laughed aloud when I first heard someone say “riding G-cooters.”) Mostly they laugh out loud in surprise when googling it.
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Worth a read. It’s a lot like what I’ve been thinking, terms of how weak, selfish, & soft are the people rushing to get back to normal. Especially who claim their faith gives them strength, but somehow can’t handle staying home…
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@BruceRedux @jessnevins It was in his monthly email newsletter, wasn’t it? I remember people receiving it and discussing online the same day on mailing lists. Most science fiction folks I knew were (rightly) revolted.
(I also remember lots of “Wait, you know about Orson Scott Card, right?” that day.)
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@isasv Note that she could choose plenty of other things that haven’t been shut down while some churches have—the vast majority of corporate offices, say. It’s really a twofer: she can dismiss the validity of the BLM protests while also decrying the “oppression” of churches. 🙄 @isasv But it definitely helps that Korean society was accustomed to the notion you should wear facemasks when sick to avoid infecting others. That’s been a thing for ages here.
Otherwise, I’m not sure what compliance would have looked like, to be honest.
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@isasv As for Shelley’s avowed apolitics: well, she’s talking about churches being asked to cease indoor services while BLM protests are being permitted outdoors. She’s really angry that progressive protest is “permitted” while Baby Jeebus Time needs to be at home for a while. @isasv Equating the two—even beyond the indoor/outdoor difference—is political in itself: white folks’ desire to pray in groups is equal (in her head) to Black people’s need to protest a system that murders and imprisons them en masse.
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@isasv Perhaps she was in denial, and then ended up spinning a story about “not believing in” because, you know, how else do you explain knowingly exposing other people?
I tend not to take people’s claims at face value about such things: they’re so disconnected from themselves. @isasv People really, really suck at explaining their actions a lot of the time. Think about therapy: you have to pay someone so they can ask you questions that make you think about your feelings & motivations & needs. This is commonly needed because people suck at doing it themselves.
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@isasv (And to be clear, again: I wish the guy had cooperated from the start and not infected his students, but given how identifying data was not very well-anonymized (though it could have been), and the lack of anti-discrimination law here, it was inevitable…) @isasv (If you want people to cooperate, maybe set things up in such a way that doing so doesn’t mean risking losing one’s family, job, social circle from past stages of their lives like high school and college, and so on.)
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@isasv I mean, there was a cram school teacher who made front page news here because he infected his students. He lied to investigators about his employment, IIRC—didn’t want word to get back to his employer since he was exposed it at a gay club. He was a big news story for a while. @isasv Which is just to say I think people have a pretty clear sense that non-cooperation can cause a LOT of problems for them. You get middle-aged smoker guys who don’t wear masks, but all in all, most people have been pretty compliant. (Except not staying home in recent months, sigh.)
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@isasv But yeah, in general, people have generally been pretty compliant about working with virus containment efforts.
Not that lots of people don’t start socializing publicly everytime there’s a lull in infections, but when there’s a cluster or wave, people start staying home again. @isasv There are exceptions, mostly kooky religious groups. One (the one responsible for the early explosion of cases in Daegu) was, AFAIK outlawed; another was dealt with less harshly but still there’s been threats of legal accountability for non-cooperation.
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@isasv Of course, they also had to make some accommodations when there was a cluster of infections centered on gay clubs. The track-and-trace data was released, it was only semi-anonymous, and people were scared of being outed to their families, so anonymous tests were permitted. @isasv (Since Protestant groups here have repeatedly blocked the passage of anti-discrimination law here—specifically because they want the right to discriminate against gays—people who risked being outed also risked losing families, careers, possibly even worse repercussions.)
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@isasv Oh, hell no. No infection parties here. You can go to prison for knowingly exposing people here—if you know you’re infected, you’re already under quarantine order and are required to stay home or in a quarantine center (even if asymptomatic). @isasv I mean, there are people who have knowingly infected others, but not “let’s all get infected” parties like I’ve heard about in some US states.
You can also go to prison here for lying to public health officials about being exposed, or otherwise not cooperating. Rightly so.
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@isasv Well, again, if you look at moral panics: all people (but especially conservatives) are deeply neophobic, I guess due to apparently heightened threat sensitivity.
https://t.co/rZrBUc0jFz @isasv (Or, as I’ve seen it suggested, it may be that people genetically predisposed to higher levels of anxiety and threat sensitivity tend toward conservative politics. Though I will say years of bad run-ins with racists over here have left me hypervigilant, but not rightwing, so…)
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@isasv Definitely that too. I talked with a class today about moral panics and how powerful they are for driving illogical reactions and generate emotion about things people actually know nothing about. Folks like Shelley are *very* susceptible to moral panic. @isasv (And I think moral panic is probably the crucial force in Western politics these days… especially the moral panic of the aging white majority seeing social changes it fears and cannot comprehend rolling in fast.)
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@isasv Oh, sure. Also, less-educated people have fewer tools for dealing with the psychologically erosive forces I’m talking about, and tend to have stronger taboos about even talking about them. @isasv But that said, my impression is that it’s solidly identitarian, and it’s about being able to justify XYZ due to party-affiliation identity. (Just as some Democrats seem to justify or ignore some pretty awful things under Obama’s watch.)
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@isasv The thing is, talking about mental health this way—as in, “we all experience erosion and damage as we go, and it’s all about maintenance and keeping the thing functional” challenges profoundly a lot of our assumptions about agency—and thus culpability, citizenship, and so on. @isasv These are challenges we don’t seem to be ready to confront yet, as a civilization. We’re still stuck trying to work past the conflict between people who embrace diversity and tolerance, versus people who want a strong powerful daddy figure to rule them in an ethno-state.
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@isasv Some degree of weathering is inevitable, and each individual has specific personal limits built in, but also has specific tools and methods of dealing with the wear and tear, with our primary tools (and built-in reinforcements) often enculturated into us. @isasv Which is why you get predictable patterns of crazy-asshole in any given society, and they tend to be to some degree distinct from society to society. (Just as they also tend to be somewhat universal, because humans all run on the same basic hardware.)
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@isasv See, this is the thing, I struggle to understand how someone can embrace this kind of thinking without some kind of mental dysfunction of some kind. @isasv I’ll say this: my sense of mental health is less binary than the social consensus suggests. It’s not about how “well” or “ill” you are: it’s more like how well you’ve handled the inevitable weathering effects of living in our world and your given society.
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@isasv (And I think that’s enough to sort of force wider the range of things that pass for normal, in a positive way… but also, as we’re being rudely reminded these days, in a negative one. People literally “feel no shame” for rebuking consensus reality.”) @isasv The key is that really a balance between the two is probably better, but societies seem to often go to extremes one way or the other, and this leads to differing social ills depending on which pattern you’re stuck in.
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@isasv Conformity is highly, highly reinforced here in most institutions, from schooling to military service to social clubs to work. It’s one reason you have so incredibly many crazy cults here, I’d argue: that’s one area where people have more freedom to choose to be different. @isasv I mean, I think North Americans are way more conformist than they realize. Look at their slang, look at their music taste, look at their hobbies. Narrow band.
But I think “individualism” is celebrated. We have tons of narratives that celebrate “mavericks” and “iconoclasts.”
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@isasv … also leaves people less-equipped to recognize them, which is a pattern I’ve noticed. Stuff that stands out as clearly “something’s wrong with this person” doesn’t seem to come up on most people’s radar as quickly here. At least that’s been my repeated experience. @isasv But you also get fewer people who’re just immediately and obviously bananas because there’s such a strong incentive to fit in, and because fitting in creates a feedback loop reinforcing a limited number of channels for kooky people to act out in.
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@isasv But one thing we can say most “collectivist” societies do have is very porous personal boundaries. People are encouraged to self-identify with organizations, and to go to great lengths to fit in and mesh with expectations. You can be different, but you MUST NOT stand out as such. @isasv I would guess it’s enough pressure for a larger proportion of people with (universal) subclinical mental issues to kind of keep them under wraps and avoid talking about them.
Which also feeds a cycle of people avoiding talking about mental health issues. Which…