#427 - Steampunk Lovecraft, Tone Policing White Fragility, and Comics Self Regulation
I am currently completely enthralled with Perdido Street Station, a 'new weird' fantasy book by China Mieville from 2000 that helped define the genre.
Can't remember the last time I was this sucked into a fictional world. Steampunk Lovecraft doesn't begin to describe it!
Tech
Comics Code Authority - Wikipedia
This week's Wikipedia hole unearthed this interesting piece of self regulation by the comics industry in their Golden Age of Comics.
Congress threatened to regulate them, so they all got together and decided to self-regulated along the normal Puritan lines of sex and violence, and that spared them for decades, until the public eye lessened enough that they just abandoned it on their own.
I wonder what other industries self regulated to get away from official regulation? I'm surprised it worked!
Lifehacks
There's a bestselling version of this old free workbook out now, that walks people through their relationship to white supremacy and the ways they may have contributed to it.
Skimming through the book, it's clear its a bracing exercise for anyone with privilege, but seems to be well-constructed inquiry. I'll keep reading.
I find it telling that 'tone policing' is the chapter after 'white fragility' and is written such that the unprivileged cannot tone police the privileged, only vice versa. If they could, the very concept of white fragility would be tone policing, wouldn't it?
This googled piece I found does a better job of distinguishing the two, in my opinion - certainly takes some discipline to take what works and leave what doesn't with this kind of work.
I myself find myself often dealing with 'woke fragility' where I try to have these kinds of conversations and people get defensive or shut down. Always working on improving my tone to ensure it's not my communication style at fault, to be sure.
Choosing the location of the Neighborhood — paper.dropbox.com
Jason Benn continues his noble quest for adult coliving with this comprehensive document describing potential neighborhoods in SF that could have houses nearby. Too bad he decided that existing architecture wasn't workable enough for such an exercise - but glad to see you could still carry the spirit of the idea by being nearby.
Fun
"Words men know but women don't and vice versa." — twitter.com
Interesting study that also compares US and UK words. A lot of ones in there I've never heard of before!
I knew most of the 'male' ones due to science fiction, for what its worth.
LOADSTAR b2b DC BREAKS b2b MIND VORTEX ft DAXTA MC - Rampage 2017 — www.youtube.com
Speaking of being enthralled, this is the most effective combination of lights and music I've ever seen at an EDM event - drum and bass at Rampage in Belgium 2017. Been smashing the repeat button on this one.