Owen Jacobson @owen@mastodon.transneptune.net

Brown recluses are like someone’s first draft of a spider

It's a bit pat to accuse redditors of being, ah, inappropriate, but I also don't think that any of the posters taking these positions considered that they might be telling on themselves.

I'm no stranger to authors drawing on their own kinks, consciously or not, to make their writing run. I very much enjoy it, in general. What I can't do is take a scalpel to the relationship between the penman and the words and treat them as two separate entities.

The handful of threads on the sub that touched these subjects, however, instantly devolved into arguing, variously, that that appeal is in-character only and not authorial, or that you can't judge far-future people by modern morality, or exceptionalism for saviour figures (someone drew an analogy to Alia from Herbert's writing).

The notion that they could appreciate a work and simultaneously accept that the author is behaving strangely appears to be beyond them.

That's the high point.

It's hard to pick out a low point. On the one hand, The Hollow Man involves magical autism. On the other hand, a number of the novels in that collection demonstrate that Professor Simmons is extremely into the idea of an affair with a young protege who is wowed by his worldliness and the breadth of his literary knowledge. Some parts of Olympos and _many_ parts of The Rise of Endymion are difficult to stomach, and form the core of my dislike for the man.

The Terror evinces a fairly entrenched colonial and paternalistic mindset, and culminates in Crozier - officer of the Royal Navy - being violently initiated into a shamanistic role for a First Nations group, despite understanding nothing of the people or their traditions. Practically, the latter third of the book could be cut and it would be improved for it by focusing more on the disaster unfolding and less - ideally none - on Spooky Native Curses.

I've read Hyperion &c, Ilium &c, The Hollow Man, and The Terror.

Of the set, I'd say I got the most lasting value out of The Terror, because it motivated me to understand my country better. The story's tosh, though.

Dan Simmons occupies a weird spot in my own psyche, because on the one hand his novels were formative for me: cleverly constructed, engaging, relatable, _fun_, and they showed up when I was at a great point in my life to appreciate them.

But on the other hand, I can never read them again, and I hold great animosity towards him as a person based entirely on what he put into his works.

I made the mistake of learning that there's a subreddit for Dan Simmons' most well-known novels, which has once again snapped into focus just how worrying the median Redditor's beliefs are.

I don't want to go into specifics, but suffice it to say that some people need to learn how to accept that authors put things in their work without intending to do so, and that critical responses to those unexamined beliefs are valid.

The onlyfans thing is too fucking much.

Looking for at least two or three like-minded Canadians to discuss a worker-owned cooperative specializing in self-expressive adult content. DMs are open, or email me at the address in my profile.

If you work with cryptocurrencies, I don't want to hear from you unless you have repented. I _will_ check this. CC work means I cannot trust you.

If you have friends who work in FAANG companies, help them. Make sure they have somewhere to go afterwards. Help them find roles in organizations that are not just increasingly complicated financial vehicles.

I do not have the moral high ground here, and I've got a lot of my own work to do on this front.

If you work for Google, you can fix this. If you work for Wikia/Fandom, you can fix this. If you work for Facebook, you can fix this. All it takes is accepting that you are part of the problem and making the decision to stop supporting parasitic organizations. Quit, and take your coworkers with you.

(No, you can't unionize your way out of a destructive business.)

Thinking about how ten to fifteen years ago, if you searched the internet for "System Shock" or "Ultima" you got weird, personal stuff like it-he's antiwalkthroughs, and now if you search for those phrases you get five competing wiki content farms all vying for your ad impressions.

The former kind of content is still out there, but it's unfindable unless you already know where to look. This isn't what we were promised. This is a failure.

anyways all of this is to say that 1. when you write code for work you are empowering the system you work for whether you like it or not, and 2. if you write code, your day job is almost certainly not what you think it is

Engineering-oriented organizations inside of businesses go through this time and time again: someone will make the (cogent) observation that the code would be much cleaner if it only did one thing, write a version that does only do one thing, and then discover that they are unable to answer basic business questions like "how many people paid us to use this last week" and "how much does it cost us to run this."