thestarfishdancer

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The Great Northern Arts Festival: Entry #2

So I’ve been home for a bit but am finally finding the time – and brainspace! – to finish up my blogging about my Great Northern Arts Festival adventure. It was a whirlwind of a time followed by a whirlwind of day job busyness, hence why it has taken me so long! Friday was spent mostly doing my booth duties during the day, since I was sent for the purpose of making connections with writers and…

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crazy how fanfic authors drop the most beautiful and gorgeous pieces of work ever, leaving you speechless and sobbing at three in the morning as you quietly contemplate the masterpiece you just read

and they don’t get paid for it they just do it because they’re having fun and they want to share their joy with you

like I would literally die for all of you fanfic authors out there reblog to swear your allegiance to fanfic authors

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Look at the fun I had at the Great Northern Arts Festival!

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The Great Northern Arts Festival in Inuvik. So great. So incredibly, incredibly great.

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The Great Northern Arts Festival: Entry #1

Good evening, readers! I am tucked in my quiet hotel room in Inuvik, NWT, where I am participating in the Great Northern Arts Festival on behalf of Northern Quill Publishing and Northwords NWT. I’ve got a brief bit of down time before the evening’s event, so am back at the Mackenzie Hotel to decompress and introvert a little before heading back to the Midnight Sun Complex for the fashion show…

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CHAPPELL ROAN accepts the Best New Artist award onstage during the 67th Annual GRAMMY Awards (Feb 2, 2025)

[thestarfishdancer]

hey do you think you could expand a bit on separating the art from the artist? clearly you’ve done it with jk rowling but what are your thoughts on it as a general idea?

okay, but you’re not going to like the answer.

here’s the truth: you can’t separate the art from the artist. not entirely. HP Lovecraft was an incredibly talented, but much more incredibly racist man. It would nice to say you don’t agree with his views but you can enjoy his works without that leaking in but…. well, I’m afraid that would be misunderstanding his books entirely.

Consider, for a second, that Lovecraft’s works were horror stories about extradimensional alien monsters having mutant children with humans, they were about invasions from distant monsters, they were about the purity of quaint European towns being tainted. Consider how this may have all been inflicted by the fact that he just simply despised anybody who wasn’t white. Consider how is opinions on “mixing the races” might fight into this; consider why being unable to maintain the “purity” of white Europe was the scariest thing of all to him.

This extends to Rowling too.

I would love to say we can just acknowledge that she is an awful, racist, antisemitic, transphobic person and then say “but at least her books are good,” because, well, they are, aren’t they? I would say so, for sure. But to suggest that one can separate her from them is…. ridiculous.

Consider why an antisemitic woman wrote about a species of goblins who live among us, but who for the most part keep to themselvesand are maybe a little bit oppressed by the institution, but also hold all the cards, all the money, run the banks.

Consider why a racist woman would write about a species of slaves who loved being enslaved, who enjoyed working for no pay, and cleaning up after humans, with the only small caveat of that they didn’t want to be beaten. Imagine that only the most radical of their species wanted to be free, and he still spent the rest of his life working for no pay and helping out a little white boy and his friends wherever he could. Consider why the only person in the story who thought they should be free, that they should have rights, was treated as an overzealous joke, who was acting against the wishes of those slaves who really LOVE being enslaved. Consider that Rowling went on to say that she kind of considers that girl to be black, now.

Consider why JK Rowling, an open and proud transphobe, wrote Rita Skeeter as having a large square jaw, thick “manly” hands, and dressing incredibly gaudily with the most obvious fake nails and fake teeth and fake hair and fake everything. Consider why a woman who tweets about how trans women are “foxes pretending to be hens to get in the hen house” might write this Rita Skeeter to then illegally transform her body in order to spy on children.

Harry Potter is full of Rowling’s bigotry, start to finish. Not even tangentially, like, “oh the goblins are bad, Rita Skeeter is bad, the house elves are bad, but most of it’s good!” because the deeper you dig and the longer you think the more you realise the entire story is based on her prejudices.

Harry Potter pretends to be an aracial story about found family, but if that were true, why are Harry’s distant ancestors important to who he is today even in the seventh book? Why does Harry have to live with his cousin and aunt and uncle? Because magic inherently prefers blood ties. Whilst Rowling was writing a story that seemed to say, “your heritage is not that important and doesn’t make you better than others” she was still writing a story about a boy who got all of his money through his bloodline, who was protected by living with his bloodline, no matter how evil, who was uniquely able to stop Voldemort because his bloodline passed down the invisibility cloak for generations and generations. Any step Harry takes he is compared to his perfect parents who were exactly like him — he looks just like his father, but he has his mother’s eyes, you know! — consider WHY a woman who is racist might’ve written a story like this. A story that on its surface, condemns a blood caste, but still in every step it takes, validates the idea that blood is thicker than water, and your geneological origin is what makes you special.

You can enjoy Harry Pottwr, of course you can. There are fantastic parts. I love a small group of teenagers deciding to become anarchies rebels and train to fight against fascism in secret. I love the murder mystery plots, I love how the series tells kids that it’s a good thing to be brave, and a good thing to fight injustice, and a good thing to challenge the government. But I cannot separate it from its author because it is such a product of its author. All of the structures of the world, the way things work in the universe, and drenched in Rowling’s beliefs, her bigotries. Of course they are: she made them.

Again. This doesn’t mean you cannot enjoy it. But I think we are past the day where we can pretend that disavowing a bigoted author is enough, and that that somehow separates the text from its bigotry. I think we are past the day where we can pretend that Harry Potter isn’t a deeply, inherently bigoted piece of media. Even the bits we love. I think we are beyond the day where we can truthfully pretend to separate it from her, because she is present through all of it. We MUST recognise its flaws. We MUST admit that she is in every part of it.

[thestarfishdancer]

Someday your hands will be old and wrinkled, the skin spotted and bunching over your knuckles. And a child will watch you make something. It's a simple task, you'll have done it a thousand times before. But to that child, the smooth, confident way your hands move will seem like impossible magic. You have to keep living.

[thestarfishdancer]

From AOC on Bluesky. It says:

“Yes, this administration is dangerous and cruel, but they are also shockingly dim and incompetent.

Opportunities are everywhere.

Make everything as hard as possible. Resist every demand. Refuse entry without a warrant. Don’t take the buyout. Their problem solving skills are 📉

It’s important to know that a lot of productive activity is happening in person and offline, too.

Not all of it can be broadcast online, but we’ve had hundreds of people showing up to our trainings, mobilizations, and more.

Keep going. Tyranny is eroded by a sea of small acts. Everything matters.”

[thestarfishdancer]

Women and people with a uterus in the USA, it's starting:

Plan B has a shelf life of about 4 years!

If you haven't already, now is the time to delete all data from whatever period tracking app you might have used and uninstall it. No matter what any of these companies say, they can and will be subpoenaed.

If you don't plan on having children get your tubes tied and/or have your partner get a vasectomy (but be aware that it takes time for the sperm count to reach zero). Because they will come for contraceptives eventually.

Which also means, that you should make plans for that next step.

And under no circumstances do you from now on know anyone who is pregnant. You will not ask anyone if they are pregnant. You will not speculate if someone is pregnant. Not out in public, not on social media, and not within your house.

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I'm working out my business expenses for last year so I can file my taxes, and the sheer amount of ADHD tax I accidentally accumulated by forgetting to pause or cancel payments for subscription-based services (looking at you, stamps.com) is infuriating.

Like, I'm mad at me for forgetting, but why does everything have to be subscription-based? Why can't I just pay for shit when I use it.

Anyway. I've been derailed from doing my taxes and now I'm hunting down all the shit I'm not using but apparently still paying for. Fucksake.

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[thestarfishdancer]

Tl;dr how you can personally make Neil Gaiman lose money (and not be a jerk to others.)

I see a lot of folks upset that NG will financially benefit from residual and other compensation surrounding his involvement in the adaptation of Sandman and Good Omens (and he will.) But the answer isn’t “rage at the fans who are so emotionally attached to his blorbos because they grieve differently, and then somehow NG will be financially punished.” That’s lower-class/middle-class thinking. NG is too rich and financially diversified to really be hurt by little boycott or a couple of show cancellations (though said cancellations can cause life-changing poverty to the little guys who signed contracts and turned down other opportunities before all of this came out. And boy does NG love women in poverty 🤮)

So if you want to substantially reduce the wealth of someone at NGs financial level—you need to do it with professional services fees.

Details below the cut:

The firm that NG has apparently engaged for online reputation management (ORM), called edendale, was once paid for their professional testimony in an unrelated slander lawsuit, which was delivered in the form of report outlining the strategy ORM firms use and just how ludicrously expensive those professional services cost. (credit to horrornobody77 for digging up the report.) We’re talking hundred of thousands of dollars for a small potatoes case, where NG’s could easily get into the millions for ORM and associated legal fees.

It’s not that long of a read, but to summarize the key action items you can take:

-ORMs wait for the discourse to die down because active discourse is much more expensive to counter. Wanna cost NG money? Talk about the accusations over time. Set a quarterly calendar event in your phone to remind yourself to post (and otherwise engage on other people’s posts) about the Vulture article. This needs to happens for years, so that NG has to pay for more comprehensive ORM and for longer.

-Make discourse that is Google-friendly. Use the words edendale will find concerning (they’re already running fluff pieces with the terms Neil Gaiman Uncovered to try and bury the similarly named subreddit.) If you just post a link without much comment, it’s not gonna be prioritized by search engines. Similarly, if you make a low effort post and then no one else engages with it, it’s not going to make it to the top ten search results. Engage with each other, for heaven’s sake!

-Don’t let the fluff sit unaddressed. If you see random bot posts sharing NG quotes captioning random fantasy art (probably stolen) with the comments turned on? Respond! Make it hard for the bots to understand your comment but easy for humans. “Nice quote! Mega bummer about what NG did, I used to really like him.” is hard for a bot to auto-delete. “Fuck NG” is practically doing the bot’s autodelete command for it.

-If/when you post fan works for properties strongly related to Neil Gaiman, leave a lil callout in the authors notes. Nothing that will get you sued, just a few words like: “I would definitely personally choose to not ever meet Neil Gaiman at a comic con.” Maybe throw in a link to your fav tumblr summary.

Anyway, to the person being paid hundred or thousands of dollars per hour by Neil Gaiman for professional services—you’re welcome for the extra billable hours 😘

Also Edendale sounds like a law firm in a Good Omens legal AU fic, and I can’t believe it’s real.

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Food for thought

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The State department has changed LGBTQ to LGB.

If you claim to care about trans people now is a good time to show genuine ally ship.

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miles “who’s morales” morales’s biggest weakness is the cover story