Let's play strip global thermonuclear war

SPN: Rough Riders, NC-17

Thu, 23 May 2013 01:01:36 GMT

(Hi, school is out?)

Rough Riders
Sam/Dean, NC-17
From two spnkinkmeme prompts seeking a Sam who likes rough sex and a Dean who doesn’t nearly like it nearly as much, but won’t admit that until Sam figures it out. Additional contents: fantasy/roleplay noncon.
Thanks to giandujakiss for beta.

It wasn’t like they’d done more than fool around sporadically before both of them went to Hell and back, so Dean didn’t have a great base for comparison. And Sam might’ve got a taste for the rough stuff to show that he had his strength back, or because of what he’d gone through in his life, or, who knew, just because he liked it the same way he liked Lucky Charms, a random preference that couldn’t and didn’t need to be explained, like naughty French maid outfits.

Usually Dean was all about asking his fucks what they wanted, because that was the easiest way to find out and he rarely had time to waste. With Sam, he’d had time to build up an understanding. ‘What d’you want, baby?’ was hard to say to Sam even when he already had Sam’s cock in his hand, but there’d been a couple of nights when he’d been half-lit that he’d managed, and Sam’s answer had always been the same: pushing Dean into place and giving it to him.

Sam was a man of consistent preferences, from his shampoo (unchanged since Sam was fifteen and started buying for himself) to his sneakers (if Puma ever sought an endorsement from hunters, they ought to put Sam first on the list). And the way Sam liked sex was to shove Dean up against some hard surface and use that gravedigging strength to fuck his brains out. Sam wasn’t selfish—he’d take as long as he needed to make sure Dean got off first. But that was almost a problem in itself, since Dean didn’t always have the easiest time keeping it up when he’d just been given a new set of bruises, Sam’s teeth digging into his shoulder or Sam’s hands tight on his hips. He got the job done—Dean’s body had never been his weak point—but sometimes it took a while, and then it was a lot of not sitting down for the next day or so.

Dean didn’t have many blessings to count, but Sam would’ve been at the top of the list even if there’d been an unending supply. If hard and fast was what Sam wanted, then he was going to get it—and maybe it’d be enough for Dean to keep him, after so many attempts to leave. Dean could handle anything Sam could dish out. He wasn’t about to stretch his luck to breaking by trying for something Sam didn’t have any interest in.

****

Sam was restless, the way he always got around his birthday, another year older and still in the life. Being a Man of Letters had done him some good, made him feel part of something bigger, but Dean could tell he was having regrets. He’d been willing to die for the greater good; living for it was different, as Dean knew all too well.

His usual crappy gas station gifts weren’t going to cut it, and Sam had figured out that Dean cooked comfort food when he was worried about Sam, so that was also a no-go.

Head-on seemed like the only option.

“Got a birthday coming up,” he observed while they were doing some routine refiling (okay, Sam had dragged Dean along and Dean was helping once in a while, when he saw something interesting, but they were together).

“Yeah?” Sam sounded dubious, not sure why Dean was bringing this up.

“Just wondered what was on your wish list.” He waited until Sam closed the file drawer and looked at him, still skeptical. “You know,” he waggled his eyebrows suggestively, “anything special you want.” Asking during sex was different, more about positions than big fancy scenarios; if Sam really wanted to see him in red panties or something, that would require planning. Okay, maybe the red panties wouldn’t require a lot of planning, but Sam didn’t know that.

Sam opened his mouth, then closed it, looking thoughtful. “… Really?”

“Or I could get you a bottle of Jack and a Penthouse like always,” Dean said lightly. “Your call.”

“Hunh,” Sam said, and went back to filing.

But that night, with his forehead still pressed to the back of Dean’s neck, sweaty and sticky, he said, “I want you to know, you can say no and I won’t be on your case about it.”

That’d be a first, but Dean was smart enough not to say that. “Do I get to know what I’m rejecting?”

Sam huffed, wet and warm against Dean’s skin. “It’s … a little kinky.”

Dean didn’t even bother to turn his head so that he could stare at Sam in incredulity, and let the line of his back say ‘yeah, because bouncing your big brother on your dick on the regular is so very vanilla.’

“Right.” Sam half-laughed, and Dean could tell that it was mostly at himself, and a little bit of nerves. Dean really hoped that this wasn’t going to involve knives. Or piercings. Or—

“I, uh, want you to fight me. Like, we’ve never done this before and you struggle and I overpower you. You say no and I don’t stop. I mean, you’d have a safe word, obviously. But it wouldn’t be ‘no’—”

“I get it,” Dean interrupted, because Sam was pretty clearly working himself up to full word-tornado mode, and there was no need. “Sure. Why not?” They always had sex that was practically fighting, anyway, all shoves and biting. Dean wasn’t sure why Sam wouldn’t have asked for that already if he wanted it, but it was harmless enough, and Sam sounded like he’d given it a bunch of thought.

“Yeah?” Sam sounded … grateful.

“Yeah,” Dean agreed. He was warmed by the thought: giving Sammy something that made him happy. Dean had a limited range of techniques for doing that, and it was nice to add a new one.

****

Sam didn’t mention it again until the evening of his birthday, when he suggested that Dean take a shower, “and I’ll see you after?”

“Sounds good,” Dean said. “Safe word’s ‘frog,’ by the way.”

Sam grimaced in that way that meant that he thought Dean was a freak, which was pretty standard. Dean didn’t know why Sam even cared, since the word wasn’t going to get used.

Dean took his time, letting his skin soften under the unbelievable water pressure of their hideout. He even shaved his face, so that Sam wouldn’t have cause to complain about stubble burn. When he was done (with maybe a little hair gel to make sure he looked good), he wrapped a towel around his waist and headed out.

Sam was sitting on his bed, in a T-shirt and sweats, looking expectant, maybe nervous.

“What are you doing in my room, Sam?” Dean asked. He could get into this: pretending to be someone else, some guy who’d never voluntarily choked on his little brother’s not-so-little dick.

Sam took a deep breath. “I’m here to settle some things, Dean.”

Dean raised a challenging eyebrow. “Yeah? What needs settling, Sammy?”

Sam stood, suddenly looming over Dean. “You know what.” His mouth descended on Dean’s, bruisingly hard, his tongue sliding into Dean’s mouth—

But Dean was supposed to be shocked. He pulled back, grabbing at his slipping towel. “What the fuck!?”

“No,” Sam said, shaking his head. “You don’t get to pull that on me.” He swiftly tugged his T-shirt over his head and threw it to the side, so now they were both bare-chested. “It’s time you admitted what’s between us.”

Dean scoffed. “I don’t know what—”

And Sam had his arm twisted up behind him, shoving him forward so that he lost his towel as he landed on the bed, his face pressed into the soft coverlet that was almost as much a favorite of his as the memory foam. It smelled familiar, the way no motel room ever had.

“You’ve been asking for this for years,” Sam said, securing Dean’s other hand. He’d brought padded cuffs, concealed somewhere, and Dean felt them cinch around his wrists, keeping them trapped behind his back. “Walking around like that, giving it up to everyone else. You don’t get to say no now.”

“Sam, don’t—” Dean said, because that was an important part of this for Sam. “No.”

Sam shoved Dean’s knees apart with his own. Dean started to struggle harder, like he was just now realizing that Sam was serious, but Sam had him pinned, one hand at the small of Dean’s back and the other probably fumbling with his sweats.

The restraints meant that Dean wasn’t responsible for taking care of Sam: he didn’t have to hold himself still or move in the most convenient way. He lunged forward, trying to get out of Sam’s grip that way, but Sam caught him by the upper thighs and yanked him back.

“You can’t pretend you don’t want it too,” Sam said. But when his lubed-up finger touched Dean’s hole, it was a slow stroke, not the immediate thrust Dean had expected. He was tentative, rubbing over the roughened skin, as if he’d used up all his violence getting Dean here. “I know you haven’t done this, so I’m going to go easy on you this time.”

“Sam, stop,” Dean said, his heartbeat going triple time now.

“I don’t care what you say,” Sam continued, just the pad of his finger pushing inside, careful despite Dean’s thrashing. He took his time opening Dean up, like he never did in real life, talking in Dean’s ear about how pretty Dean was going to look split open on his dick.

Dean was shaking and Sam was so gentle, nothing Dean had ever imagined from him. Dean made an embarrassing little whimper and Sam hissed. “You can’t lie to me any more,” Sam ground out. “Gonna have you begging for it, like you really want to,” all the time moving almost delicately, like Dean needed taking care of, like he needed convincing. He kept it slow, pressing deeper inside as he kissed across the line of Dean’s shoulders without even a hint of teeth.

When Sam put a third finger inside, he started a reacharound with his other hand, and Dean was having no trouble at all this time, starting to fuck himself back on Sam’s fingers without even meaning to.

“Yeah,” Sam said, raw and victorious, “that’s right, knew you wanted it,” still sliding into him so carefully, his lube-slippery hand moving easily over Dean’s cock.

“Please—” Dean managed, which was when Sam pulled his fingers out and replaced them with the wide head of his dick.

Dean blew his load before Sam’s cock got halfway inside, which was Sam’s cue to start pounding away, but Dean was so relaxed and open that it didn’t hurt, Sam’s dick hot and slick, practically holding Dean up just with the force of the fuck. Sam’s arms were wrapped around him, strong muscles clutching him so tight, like a shield keeping him from the rest of the world; the strain on his arms bound behind him didn’t even matter, his fingers scrabbling helplessly against the ridges of Sam’s abs.

Sam came with a howl, collapsing on him and panting like he’d just been running from the cops.

“Wow,” he said after a minute, raising his head just enough to get a look at Dean. Then—“Dean?” suddenly worried, and Dean tried to make his brain come back online.

“Yeah?” Dean said. His voice was weirdly rough.

“You’re crying,” Sam said, and he sounded devastated, because why would anything ever go right for Dean trying to make Sam happy?

“What? No,” Dean denied, reflexively. But when he blinked, he could feel wetness on his cheek. “Sam, no, I liked it,” he insisted, twisting around so that he could look Sam in the face. “I don’t know why—I swear to you. It was good. I wasn’t just—it was good,” he repeated, hating his goddamned traitor body, his inability to get even this right.

Sam was watching him, a canny hunting look in his eyes. “I believe you,” he said, soft, after a long moment in which Dean felt himself shrinking under Sam’s scrutiny. “I do. Thank you,” he added, and leaned down to kiss Dean’s now salt-slicked mouth before bringing out the key to free Dean from the cuffs.

But when Sam immediately retreated to his room, Dean knew he’d screwed up, bigtime. One thing, Sam asked. One fucking thing, not even a big deal, and Dean had made a huge mess without even trying.

Dean wasn’t all that surprised when Sam didn’t come to him the next night, or the night after.

****

They did a couple of routine salt-and-burns, and it was like they’d gone back in time, to the years when there was so much unsaid and hurt in between them that they were only held together by blood and history.

Dean knew he should go to Sam and apologize, show Sam that he could be the way Sam wanted him. The trouble was, he was pretty sure Sam was going to turn him down. And it wasn’t like Dean wasn’t used to striking out—you didn’t get Dean’s level of experience without getting a lot of ‘no’s in between—but it would be different with Sam. It might even be the kick Sam needed to get out of Dean’s space entirely.

But this was misery, and it wasn’t going to get better, so two weeks in Dean got himself ready with some Dutch courage and then went to knock on Sam’s door. “Can I come in?”

“Sure,” Sam said. Dean entered, looking around. They didn’t end up here much—Sam liked his privacy, now that he had some, and he also liked to stack books up into tottering piles that Dean would probably knock over just by being in the general area. Sam was sitting on the chair in front of his desk, swiveled to watch Dean.

Sam probably knew that Dean was nervous, but that was no reason to show it. Dean crossed to him and didn’t waste any time. “So I was thinking—” he said, leaning down with a leer, hoping to get Sam’s little head interested enough to overwhelm the big head.

From the expression on Sam’s face—resolute, ready to do an unpleasant job—Dean knew instantly he’d made the wrong move. He tried to pull back, but Sam’s arms were already octopused around him as Sam stood.

“Hey,” Sam said, not breathing hard even though Dean was legitimately fighting to get away now. “Dean. Look at me.”

Dean gritted his teeth and obeyed, because pretending wasn’t going to buy him time.

“I like where this is going,” Sam said gently, the big fat liar. “But last time, you did something for me. How about this time I do something for you?”

Dean just stared at him.

“What would you like?”

“Sex,” Dean said, mulish. “Fucking, I like fucking, what the fuck, Sam—?”

Sam settled his hands on Dean’s waist. “How do you want it?”

“You know how!” Dean protested. “My ass, your dick, it’s not complicated.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, and he looked regretful, half-smiling, “I kinda think it is.”

Dean stared at him.

Eventually, Sam sighed and began talking again. “I was furious at myself at first, because I should’ve known better than to assume you’d speak up if there was something you weren’t getting. And then I was furious at you, because you didn’t speak up, and it’s insulting. You didn’t trust me to do that for you. You’d rather suffer in silence because being a martyr is easier than telling me the truth. But that’s you, which I already knew.”

That was some bullshit, because Dean knew suffering, and taking it up the ass was not it. Okay, maybe Dean hadn’t wanted to find out if Sam wasn’t willing to trade off what he liked best for what worked for Dean. There were some things it was better not to know for sure. Anyway everything had been fine, fine, until Dean had fucked it up.

Sam put a hand on Dean’s cheek, drawing their faces closer together. “And the thing is, Dean, all the aggravation, all the shit you pull, I don’t care. You’re it for me. You’re everything. I want to give you what you give me. So fucking open your mouth and tell me what you want, or show me if you can’t say it. Trust me. I can’t promise I’ll get everything right, but I can promise to keep trying.”

Dean couldn’t—Sam was so fucking stubborn, that vow was even halfway believable, but the more Dean was work, the easier it would be for Sam to leave again.

“Was it the dirty talk?” Sam asked, kind, and Dean’s hands clenched into fists. “Okay, no, or not really.” Damn the kid for knowing him too well. “Was it—did you want to be seduced?” His breath caught on the last word.

Dean wanted, more than anything, an honest-to-God Batsignal, so there’d be something to interrupt Sam.

“Maybe it’s some macho thing that’d make me want to smack you if you could actually say it. I love you and I want you, and I can deal with you not being able to talk about this, us, because I do know it’s fucked up. But I need something, man.”

“You don’t have to,” Dean made himself say.

Sam huffed and brought their foreheads together. “I know. What is it I don’t have to do again?”

The worst part was not knowing whether Sam meant it, instead of just wanting to mean it. Longterm, that last one was no good. He’d been through that trying to stay with Lisa, even if the problem there hadn’t been in bed.

Sam obviously tired of waiting for Dean to say more. “It wasn’t the cuffs, either,” he said, and got confirmation from Dean’s aura, or something. “So—” and Dean felt Sam get it all the way, that Dean had gotten off on being treated like some virgin, someone who needed to be warmed up.

“Dean,” he said, and it was compassion and want and everything that Dean was terrified of and starving for. His hands gripped Dean’s biceps and he kissed Dean, not feather-soft but with precise intent.

Sam could usually get revved and ready with just a couple of minutes like this, but he made no move to push Dean down to the bed. Dean pulled away, gasping, when it became clear that Sam wasn’t going to take this further. He looked up at Sam, trying to ask him to drop this without saying the words. But instead, Sam shook his head a little, still with that terrible patience on his face. “We can do anything you want.”

His heart felt like it was crumpling in his chest. To shut Sam up, he kissed him again—Dean knew what Sam liked, and he could get Sam riled up soon enough.

Sam let him control the kiss, and Dean tried to do it right, biting Sam’s lip as he ran his hands up Sam’s chest. “C’mon, man,” Dean urged. And Sam did wrap his arms around Dean, pulling their bodies tight. He could feel Sam’s cock, just starting to get interested, through Sam’s flannel pajama pants and his own jeans, which really needed to go if Dean was going to get this show on the road. He paused long enough to shuck them, still kissing Sam because Sam was right there, and then continued shuffling them bedwards.

Dean grabbed Sam’s ass, muscles flexing under his fingers. Sam’s breath hitched—yeah, that’s right, Dean thought—and he squeezed Dean even closer. Dean tangled their legs together and brought them down, bouncing a bit off the mattress and ending under Sam. The fall had broken the kiss, and Sam looked down at Dean, lips swelling but expression still annoyingly analytical. Dean closed his eyes and went for Sam’s mouth again, just to keep it busy.

And sure, Dean liked this—their bodies talking to each other, making promises. Usually it was all about learning what the other person wanted, taking his time along the way. But he already knew with Sam, and it was fucking him up, knowing that Sam didn’t have any real interest in wasting time on the preliminaries.

Except that Sam was just kissing him, changing the angle a little now and then. He was still Sam—now that they’d really settled into it, his tongue searched out every crevice of Dean’s mouth, like he was worried Dean’s teeth were going to put up a fight—but the aggressiveness of the kiss wasn’t going anywhere.

Sam should’ve been getting them both naked by now. Instead, he was only pulsing his hips against Dean’s, letting most of his weight rest on Dean. And it was nice—safe, Dean thought, dumb as that was—to be pinned like this, alone in the quiet of Sam’s room, hearing only the small wet noises as their lips met and parted. He let his hands move up, sliding under Sam’s T-shirt and along the smooth muscles of his back.

But he wanted more skin to skin, and Sam would too. He paused to tug at Sam’s shirt, and Sam levered himself up long enough to get rid of it and then not-help Dean wriggle out of his own, still humping Dean’s leg distractingly. Any minute now Sam would get tired of this whole not taking the initiative thing—a hard-on was hard to argue with. Dean rocked up, rubbing their dicks together through layers of cotton, and bit his lip at the shock of pleasure. Above him, Sam groaned.

Still Sam didn’t make any move to actually fuck him, not even after a few more minutes of this. It felt great, no denying, but it was also like being lost on a back road in some place Dean had never been, behind schedule and unable to see more than a few feet ahead.

“Shh,” Sam murmured in Dean’s ear. “Whatever you want, it’s okay.”

Dean hadn’t realized he’d been making noise. He wanted to be fucked, not to be cracked open. It was one thing to give himself up to some chick he’d never see again, who didn’t understand what it meant. Sam had everything already.

Sam tangled his fingers in Dean’s hair and kissed his way wetly along the line of Dean’s neck and behind his ear. He arched up, and Sam moved down, mouthing over Dean’s jaw, down past his Adam’s apple, like he had all the time in the world.

It was so good Dean couldn’t stand it. “You gonna do anything about that?” he asked with effort, working his hand down Sam’s pajamas and in between them, fingers grazing the hot ridge of Sam’s cock.

Sam grunted. “Gonna do what you tell me to do.” He sounded strained, but unwavering.

“Then how ‘bout you get out of those fugly pants and on your back,” Dean said, rough with want. It was more than gratifying to watch Sam scramble to obey.

Sam’s body had recovered from the trials enough to re-approach the ridiculous anatomy model end of the spectrum, which was awesome for a whole bunch of reasons, but now Dean was only thinking of himself. He licked his way up the ridges of Sam’s abs and chest, going as slow as he could stand, not letting up just because Sam was shaking beneath him like a hemi in neutral. Sam’s hands kneaded Dean’s shoulders, the pressure warm and just tight enough. He thumbed Sam’s nipples and loved how Sam jolted, soft surprised gasps like Sam was learning something about himself, too. Sam’s cock bumped against Dean’s skin, the head warm and slick already.

Finally Dean’s face was level with Sam’s, his hands pinning Sam’s shoulders and his knees straddling Sam’s narrow hips. Sam’s eyes were glazed, sweat at his temples, panting like he’d just outrun a werewolf.

Maybe Dean was pushing too far, or maybe he just wanted to see if there was a too far. “Get me ready,” he said, growling to disguise his nerves. “Use your mouth.”

Sam’s eyes got huge, which would’ve been hilarious some other time. Then, before Dean could even start to feel uncertain, Sam grabbed him by the hips and simultaneously eeled himself downwards, so now Dean was all but sitting on his face. And his tongue was sliding over Dean’s ass, between his cheeks, Sam’s big hands pulling them apart and holding tight enough that Dean couldn’t have gotten away without a struggle.

“Oh,” he said, because the sensation drove everything else out of his brain. It was just that tiny stretch of skin but he felt it everywhere, hot and wet and demanding. He shifted up because it was too much, then down because he wanted more. Sam’s tongue was inside him, fuck, he was surging up and down Sam like he’d fuck a girl, his hips pumping and his whole body seizing with how good it was.

He could’ve gone on like that for hours. Sam’s sloppy noises beneath him sounded enthusiastic, and also increasingly desperate. And this was good, more than enough. He was tempted to shove himself down Sam’s body and land on his cock, even though that would probably have ended with an unsexy trip to the hospital. “Use your fingers,” he gritted out. “C’mon, Sammy.”

Sam’s hand disappeared somewhere unknown, then returned moments later completely messy with lube, nothing like Sam’s usual precise amounts. Dean could feel it drip down Sam’s wrist, catching on the hairs of Dean’s thigh, while Sam slowly pressed two fingers inside, up against his tongue. The stretch buzzed through him like electric shock, his legs shaking as he grabbed on to his own head just to have something to do with his hands, struggling to keep his balance. Sam stayed like that, teasing, bringing him right to the edge.

“More,” he demanded, and Sam obliged. His muscles were relaxing and clenching without any conscious control now, finally ready for anything. Sam’s fingers were thick and long, but not enough. “Get your dick wet,” he managed, and Sam pulled out before he’d finished speaking. There were wet smacking sounds, and Sam groaned.

Dean’s legs were wobbly, but he eased himself down Sam’s body without falling over, and in a triumph of coordination managed to reach behind himself to grab Sam’s fat cock, so slippery and ready for him.

Sam was making noises that might’ve had Dean’s name in them, long half-sobbing words. Dean lost all control as he slid down, stuffing himself full so fast that they both gasped, but Sam had gotten him so hot that there was nothing but pleasure in the feeling.

Some switch had been flipped in him, and now he wanted this to last forever, heedless of anything but the way every cell was yearning, enjoying the ride.

Sam thrust up, and Dean moved with him, keeping himself just on the edge of too much. Sam was flushed, his cheeks and chin spit-smeared, his hair damp with sweat, but his eyes were locked on Dean’s face like he wanted to tear Dean apart and swallow the pieces.

Dean’s head fell back as he set a slow rhythm, rolling through him like a wave. He wanted to go on forever, wrapped around Sam. Sam’s hands clamped around his hips like usual, but this time Dean pried them loose, lacing their fingers and leaning forward so that Sam’s hands ended up braced on his own pecs. The position made Sam’s biceps bulge, which was a bonus, and Dean used the new angle to go even slower, teasing himself with the careful slide of Sam’s cock.

Sam bit his own lip, eyes slitted with the effort of keeping Dean’s pace.

“Yeah,” Dean said, mindless with the pleasure of it, “yeah, that’s right.” Beneath him, Sam turned his head from side to side, all his power leashed. Sam’s skin was glowing with sweat as he panted, beautiful. “You like that?” It slipped out of Dean’s mouth, uncontrolled—

“Yes,” Sam gasped, before Dean could second-guess himself. “God, yes, please, tell me—”

Dean tilted his hips and saw white, so close, so right. “Feel so good, Sammy—”

“Dean,” Sam said, begged really. “Dean, ‘m gonna—”

But Dean wasn’t done with him yet, crazily hoping that Sam could want Dean’s selfishness. He rose up, until Sam’s ragged thrusts couldn’t keep him inside any longer, and Sam flat-out whined. His teeth were bared and he looked half a second from throwing Dean to the floor and fucking him through it, but he collapsed back to the mattress, panting. Dean shifted his weight and brought one hand to his own cock, dragging Sam’s hand with his.

When Sam was stroking him slow and firm, fingers still sticky-slick with lube, Dean shifted back just far enough to reach behind himself and find Sam’s dick, easing himself down again. The thick pressure was even better this time, taking Sam all the way. Sam’s thumb rubbed up and down just underneath the shiny red head of Dean’s cock, and the ropy veins of Sam’s forearms stood out as he jacked Dean with one hand and cupped Dean’s hip with the other, not grabbing but holding.

Dean came in thick, messy spurts, the orgasm rolling through him like thunder. Sam howled and pushed up so hard that Dean nearly fell, and then Sam was coming too, so far inside that he’d never get out.

Much later, Dean was brought out of his half-doze when Sam squeezed his shoulder. “I can’t believe you don’t know this,” Sam said in his ear, “but I want what you want.”

Dean knew he should say something like ‘Yeah? I want you to get your giant paws off of me.’ But somehow, he only managed the first word.

“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “You will never be more trouble than you’re worth. And that’s really saying something.” But he said it with a smile in his voice, and a hand sneaking around to rest on Dean’s belly, pulling them closer together. And suddenly it didn’t seem so impossible, letting Sam see where Dean was soft and open and still all Sam’s. If he really wanted to know, then Dean had a lot to show him.

END

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The fandom is the political

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:50:44 GMT

What Flourish Klink says about Amazon’s new fan fiction monetization project is all worth taking seriously, especially the parts about incremental change and bringing in people who weren’t traditionally “fan fiction writers.” I think that’s actually the riskiest part (and I don’t think she argues otherwise); the internet grew to its present point in a context in which it was much easier to go from inventing fan fiction in your own bedroom to finding a community of people who’d made the same invention than it had been when you had to find a convention or a round robin or the like. I’m skeptical of Golden Age thinking, but at the same time I do want to make sure that people who find fandom through places like Amazon can also easily find some non-walled gardens to play in. I also don’t think this is going to be a model for many franchises/works other than those created using the Alloy Entertainment model of monetizing a concept for teen audiences, though I’ve been wrong before!

(Flourish also points out that it’s standard white folk cluelessness to ban “racism” in Vampire Diaries fan fiction given its canonical basis in chattel slavery, though I’m pretty sure Amazon’s enforcers will be defining that term differently than many who might be reading her work; others have noted the ironies in banning excessive brand placement in Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars fic. I guess the official versions have that covered?)

Letters from Titan has a great post too, raising what seem to me to be exactly the key questions. Sure wish I had answers:

Question 1: To what degree does Kindle Worlds suggest that the fanfiction can only be legitimized through the eradication of fan culture’s gift economy?
Question 2: Fanfiction has significantly changed our media culture. Kindle Worlds isn’t just capitalizing on it, but arguably represents an attempt to shape it. Is this a feedback loop in action or an attempt to stop the catalyst that is fan work?
Questions 3: The contractual terms of Kindle Worlds are the sort traditional professional writers would be strongly advised against signing on to. Is fannish work worth less? Should it be?
Question 4: Fanfiction has, arguably, always been about the option to use use all the tools, particularly those often discouraged by corporate content production (e.g., sexuality), to tell story. If the toolbox is limited, whether a given writer would choose to use all the tools or not, is it fanfiction or is it some other form of derivative (vs. transformative) work?
Question 5: How will fan readers view/treat fan writers who use a tool like Kindle Worlds? And how does that impact our communities, hierarchies, and barriers to entry?

I also said some stuff on tumblr. Hi tumblr, I’m trying you out. And wow are you terrible for conversations!

Relatedly: like vids? Vote in the US? Call your representatives and tell them to support DMCA reform so that vidding stays lawful. There are a variety of proposals, but only one bill that is any good and that fixes anything but cellphone unlocking.

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Many reviews

Wed, 22 May 2013 02:26:05 GMT

This discussion of Star Trek: Into Darkness has an intriguing treatment of prequels v. reboots along with a bunch of great lines, many spoilery, along with a reaction from Henry Jenkins that is interesting in its own right. My only hitch—and I have done this too many times myself, so it’s mostly a note for myself—was tripping over “‘the Captain’s Chair’ has been occupied by an American (Kirk); a European (Picard); an African-American (Sisko);”—because doesn’t it have to be “a white American (Kirk),” at a minimum?

Women by the Wayside: on the invisibility of women on the road (and the violence against them).

This person has gone so far past pedantry that s/he’s come out the other side into awesomeness: Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong (or, the lies typographers tell about history).

Mary Roach, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal: Roach likes the weird and the bodily, so that’s what you get, from the importance of saliva to whether mealworms can survive in a lizard’s gut long enough to get out to smuggling contraband via the anal cavity. Entertaining, if scattered.

Dulce Pinzón, The Real Story of the Superheroes: Mexican and Latino immigrants on the streets and in the businesses of New York, wearing American and Mexico superhero costumes as they go about their lives, with captions about how much they remit home. The project is to make viewers rethink the concept of (super)heroism, and it succeeds. While having the Thing and the Hulk as construction workers was easy, it was particularly striking to see Robin working as a “gigolo” in Times Square (remitting $200/week).

David Sedaris, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls: Essays making humor out of awkwardness and occasional pathos, especially when Sedaris discusses the cruelty of his father.

David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing: Military history of the key early portions of the American War of Independence, emphasizing both generalship and reliance on groups of soldiers. Fischer gives biographies of the key men (and a couple of women) in what was essentially, from both sides’ perspectives, a civil war, and concentrates on what began as a very bad year for the rebels, with constant losses, and ended with momentum on the American side after key New Jersey battles. One thing that stood out was that some things haven’t changed at all: if you rape/plunder/kill the locals, you lose their support; small unorganized forces can inflict disproportionate damage on even well-trained organized troops far from home.

Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City: Sympathetic, pro-labor portrait of the job of people who are generally disrespected when they aren’t invisible. Nagle portrays the physical demands of the job along with the status toll it takes, and argues that the least we can do for the people who keep the city from becoming quite literally uninhabitable is to respect their work.

Harvey Molotch, Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger: The book actually begins with a chapter on how badly designed toilets—especially public toilets—are, and how that disproportionately disadvantages people who are poor and/or female. This does fit with the general theme: we get what we design for, and by ignoring human factors and presuming evil we are designing our public spaces to be ever more difficult to deal with for people of good faith, yet no safer against people who pay attention to the brittleness of “hardened” security measures. Nor are we safer against natural disasters, preferring to fight the waters with levees (that we then don’t fully maintain) to consider measures like a planned retreat from rising sea levels. It’s a depressing book, despite Molotch’s chapter-ending recommendations for, essentially, being nicer to each other and designing spaces and institutions based on trust—at this point, it’s just so hard to imagine things like “let responders on the ground make more of the decisions.”

Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America: Entertaining and informative book about the times surrounding McKinley’s assassination, though disorganized/lacking a through-line. One of the most interesting parts was about how the African-American man who first tackled the assassin was written out of the story, which connected to the broader abandonment of African-Americans by Republicans like Roosevelt and native white cultural anxieties about immigrants overtaking their willingness to pay attention to blacks. The assassin Leon Czolgosz, a native-born American, was perceived as a foreigner, and connected with anarchism; he was apparently shaped by the experience of extreme economic uncertainty under the robber barons of the age. The other really neat section discussed the tension between the idea that only a madman would assassinate a president—which if true would give Czolgosz a good insanity defense—and the idea that he had actual political grievances, however misguided—which if true would force Americans to confront the severe consequences of capitalist development. The hostility to immigrants and the huge wealth inequalities have obvious resonances for today’s America, too.

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SPN/TVD, Dean/Damon

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:14:07 GMT

Vintage
NC-17
For a prompt from on_verra : SPN/TVD crossover - One of the Winchester brothers gets into a fight with Damon Salvatore without even realizing that Damon's a vampire until after the fact.
Damon Salvatore/Dean Winchester, timeline undefined but sometime post-S8 for SPN; references to Benny. Thanks to giandujakiss for beta even though Damon puts her to sleep.

“Say that again,” Dean suggested.

The guy smiled, like a sliver of wood shoved under a fingernail. “Don’t tell me your hearing is as ancient and decrepit as that car.”

“See,” Dean smiled, wide and unfriendly, “I know you’re just tryin’ to start something, because my car? She is a goddess. But that’s okay. You wanna go? I’m good,” and he was swinging before he’d finished, because it had been a long and frustrating day trying to get the locals to talk about all the mysterious deaths and he didn’t think he’d get run out of town for putting a beatdown on this asshole, given how all the rest of the people in the bar had given him a wide berth.

Unfortunately, the guy’s jaw felt just about as sharp as it looked. Dean didn’t let it slow him down any. The guy got in a few good hits—Dean wasn’t feeling it yet, the fight pumping him full of adrenalin—and then they were rolling around the floor, digging fists into each other without enough distance to even call them punches.

Dean headbutted the guy and felt a flash of heat as a blood vessel burst in his nose, which spattered across the guy’s face—

Which changed.

Dean disentangled himself in a flat second, on his feet and reaching for his knife. He didn’t want to saw off a vamp’s head in public, but he’d gotten out of worse situations.

This one looked different, but Dean wasn’t about to analyze vampire subspecies mid-fight—

Suddenly he was across the room, being held there by a hot young blonde with a perky though strained smile. Over her shoulder, he could see the asshole similarly being restrained by some other dude.

“Hey,” the hot blonde said. “Damon is a real jerk, but that doesn’t mean you can saw his head off. If anyone kills him, it’ll definitely be me.”

Since she was holding him against the wall with what looked like no effort at all, Dean was willing to accept that she was capable of it. He didn’t let go of his knife. He had some of those specially modified bullets like the ones Chrissy had made, but what he didn’t have was the ability to go for his gun right now. “Somebody’s killing people in this town, and right now I’m guessing it’s one of you.”

The blonde rolled her eyes. “Everybody’s killing people in this town. Some days I think we have more murderers than we have Starbucks. But I’m a good guy, Stefan is totally under control, and Damon’s mostly tame.”

“And you?” Dean squirmed a little, trying for a better angle. Not that he gave himself huge odds, but he had to try. Maybe she was one of those cow-drinking vampires, like Lenore had been.

“I’m Caroline,” she said, and gave him a huge smile as she released him and stepped back. “I don’t kill people. But if you’re here hunting vampires, we need to talk.”

‘Hunting’ turned out to mean something pretty specific to her, which took a while to sort out. At this point, there were so many secret societies collecting hidden knowledge that Dean half expected the Initiative from Buffy to exist too.

He sat with her at one of the booths and heard more (and believed maybe half of it, though he tried to keep his skepticism from showing), he called Sam and told him the basics: vampires, werewolves, witches, plus something called a hybrid which seemed about as nasty as an Alpha. “Where did you get this, Dean?” Sam asked, justly suspicious.

“Local informant,” he said. The asshole guy, who of course was named Damon, had joined his little pow-wow with Caroline, and grimaced at Dean’s description. “Look, I’m thinking we need to regroup, maybe up the arsenal a little. I’ll see you back at the room?”

This was supposed to be the signal for Sam to bug out. Not that he would, because they were both idiots like that—concern for Dean would probably be enough to keep him here, and anyway the hunt would tip the scales—but at least he wouldn’t return to the motel and he’d be watching his back.

“Got it,” Sam said and hung up. Sam was probably going to call Garth to see if there was any intel on this new subspecies of vampire or the little supernatural soap opera that appeared to be going down in Mystic Falls. What Sam wouldn’t do was charge in blind, since—as he never failed to point out—he wasn’t Dean.

“So,” Damon said, “this partner of yours—” he made it sound just that dirty—“is he going to be a problem?”

Dean gave him the side-eye. “Not for anybody who keeps their fangs inside.” He considered, and then decided on the truth, even though he couldn’t imagine they’d believe him. “Time was, we’d gank anything supernatural. But it’s not black and white. We only hunt killers now.”

“Yeah, I’m not fully reassured,” Damon said.

Caroline rolled her eyes. “That’s because you barely even count as reformed.”

“Not in front of the children,” Damon cautioned, his tone so oversweet that Dean wanted to punch him again just on general principles, not even to defend Caroline, who seemed like a nice … vampire. “So, Dean Winchester—” and his eyes did something Dean had never seen before. It was like watching a 3-D movie without the glasses; the world shivered. “Leave Mystic Falls. There’s nothing here for you to do.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” Dean said, his head aching like the second day of a tequila bender.

“Good job, Damon,” Caroline said. “I’m shocked that a vampire hunter knew about vervain.”

Dean wasn’t out of it enough to react to that, even though he had no fucking clue what she was on about. Sam could look it up for him later. Okay, so these vampires had the whammy. Awesome. Maybe Dean’s tattoo had given him some protection, or maybe they’d just been messed with so many times by so many different kinds of creepy crawlies that he had some immunity.

“Fine,” Damon said. “I tried it the nice way.”

Dean blinked through the pain, his scowl making it pretty clear that he was going to enjoy explaining the difference between ‘naughty’ and ‘nice’ once his ability to stand up returned.

“My point is, the fatality rate for outsiders coming in and trying to rejigger the vampire/werewolf balance of power in this town is over one hundred percent, which I guarantee is possible once witches are involved. I’m not trying to be altruistic, just practical. I can’t compel you, but I can tell you the truth: this can’t end well for you. There are plenty of other bad guys out there. You should go hunt them.”

And even though he’d just tried to mindfuck Dean, Dean didn’t think he was lying. Dean tried to stand, but the pressure in his head increased, and he fell back into the booth, huffing in pain.

Caroline sighed. “Look, you broke him, you get to take him back to his motel, or wherever rogue vampire slayers hang out.”

“You trust me with the wellbeing of a human who isn’t related to Elena?” Damon asked. “I’m touched.”

Caroline reached out and patted Dean on the arm. “I am really sorry about him. Just ignore everything he says.”

And somehow she was gone, and Damon was tugging him up. Dean could walk on his own, but he was wincing with pain and it was just easier to let Damon keep a hand on his shoulder, guiding him outside.

“You can leave your sexmobile in the parking lot,” Damon said—hah! Dean’d known the guy was jealous—and led him to another classic, which made Dean stop and stare incredulously. Damon shrugged, unashamed. “At least to me, this is an innovation,” he said, which made Dean wonder just how old he was.

“So where am I taking you?” Damon asked. Dean had a momentary thought about getting into cars with strange men, which only proved that whatever Damon had done was still hitting him pretty hard. Vampire or not, skull splitting headache or not, Dean was pretty sure he wasn’t the one who ought to be worried in this situation.

Dean named the motel they’d rejected for being too close to the sheriff’s office, in case they’d needed to bust out the FBI suits. Sure, that wouldn’t give Sam much cover, given that he was at the only other motel within screaming distance of the town, but it was something.

Damon drove him in silence, and waited in his car while Dean went into the main office on the pretense that Sam had the room key.

“Well, thanks for everything,” Dean said, leaning down on the driver’s side window to say his goodbyes. At least he could walk straight now, even if he could’ve sworn there was a spike jammed into his brain by way of his right eyeball.

Damon’s mouth scrunched up. “I’m sorry,” he said reluctantly. “Compulsion shouldn’t hurt, even if you’re taking vervain. I don’t know what went wrong.” Sounded like that last was the most annoying part as far as he was concerned.

“No worries,” Dean said.

Damon bit his lip. “Let me make it up to you.”

Dean raised his eyebrows. Damon got out of the car, went around to the trunk, and pulled out a bottle of—

“Is that Pappy Van Winkle?” Dean asked, hushed. “I’ve read about that stuff—”

Damon smiled, and he didn’t need pointy teeth to look like a predator. “Want to split it?”

Forty-five minutes later, Dean was painless and nearly weightless, or at least that was how he felt. Damon had started talking about his girl troubles a few shots in—Dean had the sense that Caroline’s general attitude of dislike was pretty standard for him, which was why he was confiding in a homicidal—vampicidal?—drifter instead of talking to someone who actually knew and cared about the people he was angsting about. Dean himself was lying on one of the beds, his feet on the ground but staring up at the ceiling, which seemed to be moving a little, if that wasn’t the drunk.

“Hey,” Damon said, as if a great idea had just occurred to him. “How many vampires have you killed?”

“Lifetime?” Dean pondered the question. “Twenty, maybe thirty.”

He heard the creak of the other mattress shifting. “And have you ever had sex with one?”

“I don’t think I know you well enough to answer that question,” Dean said with careful dignity. Sam had come close enough to asking as had made no difference, and maybe it’d be easier to tell this stranger, but that didn’t mean Dean was in the mood for confessions.

“Do you want to?” And with what was either vampire speed or the stop-motion effects of half a bottle of premium hooch, Damon was looming over him, dark-haired and pretty and within spitting distance of Dean’s type.

“So, you got me drunk so’s I’d put out,” Dean observed as Damon knelt in front of him and began to work on his belt.

“That’s just a bonus,” Damon said. “I really am sorry.” He didn’t sound sincere, but Dean had the feeling that the tone was calculated to let him get away with saying things that were unfortunately true. Dean might’ve recognized it from his own life.

Dean let Damon get him naked, helping by not interfering any and even lifting up as required. Then he watched Damon’s own striptease. “Anyone ever sire a vampire who isn’t smoking hot?” he asked, reaching a hand down to help his growing hard-on, stroking it slowly, enjoying the feel of his own hand, dry and just shy of painful.

Damon smirked. “Only the young and pretty should get to live forever.” He didn’t have Sam’s muscles, but his abs could’ve been on the cover of a workout magazine. “I propose to suck you off—in the sex way, not the drinking way—and then fuck you.”

“Yeah, all right,” Dean said, like his cock hadn’t jumped as soon as Damon had said ‘suck.’

The thing about vampires was that, reflexes aside, they didn’t need to breathe. Damon took him all the way down his throat, gasflame eyes staring up Dean’s body amused and greedy as Dean groaned. He pulled off after a minute, and when Dean grunted a complaint, he licked his lips. “Aren’t you just a little worried I might fang out on you?”

Dean’s hands fisted on the coverlet and he had to close his eyes.

“Ohhh,” Damon said, like he hadn’t already known, the bastard, “it’s like that, then.” And he bent back to his work. There wasn’t even a hint of his teeth, but Dean was still so keyed up that, even with the bourbon weighing him down, it wasn’t long before Dean’s thighs clenched and his whole body jolted with the orgasm, made better by the way Damon’s hands held his hips in place like they were made of iron.

Damon spat out, straight onto Dean’s hole, then worked his thumbs in to open him up, not gentle but not too fast. Dean felt a blurry moment of relief when Damon produced a condom, since he didn’t have the energy to win an argument about slightly safer sex (and who the fuck knew what kinds of diseases vampires might be carrying around, especially the sluttier ones like Damon). His cock was just right, thick enough that Dean would really be feeling it, not too big to hurt.

Dean was aware that he wasn’t doing a lot here, other than to wriggle and make approving noises, but Damon seemed to have the fuck well under control, and Dean was willing to bet that he’d speak up if there was something else he wanted. He stretched back, changing the angle some as he wrapped his legs around Damon’s razor-sharp hips, and enjoyed the ride.

Afterwards, Damon didn’t spend any time lounging around in the buff, which was sort of a pity. He left Dean the bottle, and Dean lied about how they’d check in with Caroline before dispensing any justice (though Dean thought it might be a good idea to do that, he wasn’t about to make any promises).

He scratched at his belly and watched Damon make his way to the door. “You didn’t ask if I’d ever been bitten.”

Damon’s eyebrows went up. He looked like what people who knew jack shit about Lucifer would call satanic. “Have you?”

“I been fed on once by a vamp I killed. There was another—I let him feed. It was—we were on the same side.”

“I don’t suppose you’re telling me this because you want me to be your third,” Damon said. But he looked hopeful anyway.

“Don’t know you well enough.” Yeah, Damon could’ve drunk him down any time in the last hour. But it was one thing to take a risk like that, and another to ask for it. “Yet,” Dean finished, and enjoyed the flash of want in Damon’s eyes. Benny had said that whether the meal was voluntary or not didn’t change the taste, but that the taste wasn’t what mattered. He thought it might be the same for these vampires, despite their differences from the ones he’d known.

“Seriously,” Damon said, opening the door, “get out of town. You’d be a terrible waste of a corpse.”

Dean gave him a one-fingered salute, and Damon left.

Sam was going to bitch him out for getting drunk on duty and failing to report back. But he’d gotten laid, and if he wasn’t wrong he’d gotten Damon interested. Whether or not there was anything for them to kill in Mystic Falls, Dean was pretty sure that having a vampire who wanted him alive for later would be good insurance.

Dean wasn’t the smartest gun in the armory, but once in a while, he had a good day.

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fiction

Sat, 18 May 2013 02:37:25 GMT

Relevant to your interests?: What is going on with the accents in Game of Thrones?

Brandon Sanderson, The Emperor’s Soul: Sanderson’s talent for setting up interesting magical rules is on display in this short book about a Forger, someone whose magical talent is to rewrite the history of objects—and even people—to make them different, thus allowing them to transform. In an empire in which Forgery of souls is the worst kind of apostasy, the rulers demand that a captured thief-Forger make their emperor a new soul, and she has to figure out what to do to survive. Though the book could’ve used one more editing run to remove a couple of ‘as you know, Bob’ awkward bits, it was a quick enough read, and seems to represent Sanderson’s version of magic as storytelling/storytelling as magic.

Scott Westerfeld, Stupid Perfect World: Shortish story (ebook) about what people do in a future of zero scarcity—make their kids take Scarcity class, where the final project is to experience something the way people used to, which in the protagonists’ cases are respectively to sleep (and dream) and to shut off hormone regulation so that she experiences the same rush of emotions as a non-regulated teenager. This leads to self-discovery and romance. It’s got some cute bits, like the kid who complains about having to travel by boat instead of teleporting: “‘Capsizing, Mr. Solomon!’ Lao said. ‘That’s a special word just for ships turning upside down. I checked in headspace, and I couldn’t find a single word for trains turning upside down! Or cars or hovercraft—just ships. Think about it!’” And the male narrator on Hamlet: “We’d been practicing this scene for hours, trying to get the blocking right. Most of this was William Shakespeare’s fault; it’s pretty hard to switch two swords in the middle of a fight by accident. Come on.” (Though he’s wrong about that with good performers, it’s still funny.)

P.D. James, Death Comes to Pemberley: As it says on the tin, P.D. James writes Austen fic. There is meta (If only there were some way that we could determine the person whose blood this is! Isn’t it a little bit odd that Elizabeth and Darcy figured out their true love after a total of about half an hour alone with each other in total?) and some Darcy groveling at the end, but I admit I’m not an Austen fan and was mostly reading to see what James could do. It seemed a creditable attempt to me, with much pondering of social meaning and rather more overt acknowledgement of the sexual exploitation of vulnerable women by powerful men than I recall from Austen herself.

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SPN season finale

Thu, 16 May 2013 14:11:16 GMT

Dangling plot issue with respect to Crowley: You know what would have made sense but clearly won't happen? Why wouldn't Dean just go back inside, confess (to the clearly unlistening absence of God, but whatever, I have given up on that part of the mythology), cut his own damn palm, and try the exorcism himself? Yes, possibly it has to be the same purified blood all the way through ... but they've tried dumber things.

Especially given the shout-out in 8x23, I really want to integrate this Sondheim exchange into a SPN fic, where Dean is explaining himself to someone he just met:
Person: What do you do?
Dean: I drink.
Person: No, what do you really do?
Dean: I really drink.

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Big Data discontents

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:02:28 GMT

Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism: Morozov’s excellent first book, The Net Delusion, established him as a major critic of internet eschatology, particularly the utopian brand. His latest book attempts to expand on that critique, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. (Insert joke about sophomore efforts and snark here.) For a sample mostly taken from the book, here’s Morozov on why we shouldn’t be sanguine about using technology to “improve” incarceration. A good sampling of Morozov’s work is available online; I would recommend avoiding his debate with Farhad Manjoo in Slate, where Morozov mostly ignores legitimate hits (he attacks generalizations like “the internet” but himself has no trouble criticizing “Silicon Valley”) in favor of snide near-ad hominems.

Morozov wouldn’t be surprised that I, as an internet reviewer (“ordinary people don’t write reviews for the same reasons as professional critics; they are mostly interested in reviewing their own experience, not in making sense of a given work”), can’t improve on Kevin Driscoll’s take in the LA Review of Books, which has some very smart things to say about Morozov’s critiques of “solutionism” (social issues as problems with a fixed solution rather than approaches that have to be negotiated and compromised on) and internet-centrism. [Side note on that Internet reviewer thing--there's a very interesting piece to be written here bringing in Janice Radway's Reading the Romance and a discussion of what "making sense of a given work" might mean.] For a rather harsher view, there’s Tim Wu, who is attacked in the book and understandably annoyed; his criticisms are not unwarranted.

Morozov is a skeptic not just of whether Silicon Valley’s big promises can be carried out but, more importantly, whether they should be. Friction, lack of transparency, inefficiency, and so on are not just hinderers of efficiency, but crucial parts of human self-definition and autonomy; politics isn’t politics if it’s not messy and a bit hypocritical. Compromises and imperfections can be good, not bad; politics can’t be improved the same way that market transactions can be—if all interactions could be win-win, we wouldn’t have politics. “Try telling [an Amazon] shopper that not all of his or her desires can be satisfied because someone else has equally compelling interests and those have to be taken into account as well; the market simply doesn’t work that way.” And the consumerist mentality that solutionists bring to political challenges leads to disappointment and disgust with “politics,” when it should lead to a rejection of solutionism: “Most public institutions should not be held to the same standards as their private counterparts because their mission is to provide goods and services that markets cannot or should not provide.” More generally, inefficiencies, hypocrisies, and the existence of crime “might be problematic in some limited sense, but they do not necessarily add up to a problem worth solving—any more than having a soccer match that lasts for ninety minutes rather than an eternity and features twenty-two people instead of everyone at the stadium is a problem to be solved.”

Relatedly, the “frictionless” solutions promoted by techno-utopians often don’t solve the problems they purport to, and they don’t solve them in particular ways reflecting existing political and social inequalities. For example, biometric identification technologies turn out to have particular trouble with certain racial groups, and fingerprint scanners have difficulty with people in certain working-class occupations--not that this is anything new, as Morozov is at pains to point out. (See also the way in which visual communications technology is bound up in whiteness: Richard Dyer, "Making 'White' People White, in The Social Shaping of Technology, eds. Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman (noting that, among other things, videotape quality was evaluated by how well it displayed a blank, pale orange signal called "skin" that was supposed to match white skin); Brian Winston, A Whole Technology of Dyeing: A Note on Ideology and the Apparatus of the Chromatic Moving Image, Daedalus, Vol. 114, No. 4, The Moving Image (Fall, 1985), pp. 105-123 (discussing how, at every stage, film development was guided by how it did at showing white skin).)

For another example, massive online open courses, Morozov, as many others have done, points out that what they offer isn’t individual contact with an expert (even a grad student) but rather something else, and they don’t exist in a political vacuum: “In promising almost immediate and much cheaper results, they can easily undermine support for more ambitious, more intellectually stimulating, but also more demanding reform projects.” Algorithms to recommend books to you have their biases, but that’s nothing compared to the dangers of algorithms that predict crime based on current circumstances (including poverty and racism that mean that crimes are committed and detected in particular ways). And design that simply prevents the possibility of crime also often prevents the possibility of civil disobedience, an important driver of social change: “Sometimes being caught with marijuana in one’s pocket is better than being prevented from putting it there, simply because an arrest is likely to generate media attention and trigger a public debate about drug laws.” But he’s always context-sensitive, and not dismissive of all better living through technology—anti-drunk-driving technology might be a good idea even if other technological interventions aren’t.

I was reminded of Morozov’s critique of big data solutionism by this bit in Slate about how facts can change their meanings when you have more context:

Marti Barletta, a consultant in marketing to women, told me one of the reasons women have gained a reputation for caring about frivolous details is because they do so much research. By the time they arrive at dealerships, they’ve already logged countless hours online finding cars that satisfy their main criteria. Now, they’re picking through minutiae—what, precisely, makes the Nissan Maxima better than the Toyota Camry? (Could it be the number of cup holders?) These questions, Barletta says, contribute to an impression among salesmen that women care mostly about the little stuff.

This is a good example of the point that “data-driven solutions” can’t ever be entirely data-driven: you always need a theory.

Morozov also constantly emphasizes that people construct technologies. There’s nothing inevitable about the configuration of “the internet,” or “Facebook” or “Google” for that matter. Facebook could limit the number of ads it shows; Google could write different algorithms. As Tarleton Gillespie insightfully noted, Twitter’s algorithm for picking trending topics favors breadth (many groups using the same hashtag) over depth (a united group using the hashtag a lot), which is a political design choice that can be contested. When we focus on current numbers, such as monitoring how much water we consume, we may be motivated to take individual action but we don’t understand or consider the complex systems of overall water consumption, and we aren’t challenged to think of how we might get a different set of numbers—Morozov wants our technologies to confound and challenge us.

This is an important reminder, but it leads Morozov to be highly critical of activist discourses around things like SOPA/PIPA/ACTA’s “don’t break the internet” advocacy, and here (like many of his reviewers) I think he somewhat misses the mark. Very few of the leaders, and I suspect very few of the followers, of the anti-SOPA/PIPA/ACTA protests believed that http and IP addresses and the like would disappear under SOPA/PIPA/ACTA etc. Rather, they believed that key features of the internet they knew and liked would be hampered if not destroyed. The “internet” that existed, they thought, would be similar to the “Medicare” that would exist if what we now call Medicare were replaced by a voucher system. It’s fair game in such a debate to say that “Medicare” would be destroyed by such a change; it’s even fair game to say that “marriage” would be destroyed by extending it to women who want to marry women, even if that’s a dumb argument on its own merits. Yes, of course we should often question definitions, where much of the important rhetorical work is getting done, and Morozov is right to point that out—but many of the people he accuses really do know that already, and have made it pretty clear that they do.

(He’s particularly unfair, it seems to me, to Jonathan Zittrain, whose The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It comes under attack for internet-centrism and quixotic desire to keep the internet in a single state forever. E.g, Morozov says “to claim that Apple—one of Zittrain’s culprits—is bad for innovation because it’s bad for ‘the Internet’ is like claiming that ‘the Internet’ is bad for innovation because it’s bad for the telephone. Well, it might have been bad for the telephone—but when did preservation of the telephone become a lofty social goal?” Yet a significant chunk of Zittrain’s book is devoted precisely to addressing questions of when we can say a technological configuration/change in the direction of greater or lesser centralized control is a good thing. Zittrain isn’t entirely successful, I think, but by failing to acknowledge his explicit attempts to grapple with Morozov’s points, Morozov makes it seem as if Zittrain were silly or hypocritical, and himself ends up fighting a straw man. This ungenerosity isn’t unique in the book. Later, for example, Morozov suggests that those who favor market transactions trading private data for material benefits as mutually beneficial must also therefore approve torture “provided the prisoners ‘strike the right deal’ and are well compensated,” whatever that might mean.)

Morozov is at his best discussing tradeoffs and political reactions to technology: greater access to information can be manipulated by governments just like other new forms of power can be, and if—which is not yet established—there is a link between the two, he’s right that it’s not clear that the “local politics in Bahía Blanca [Argentina] [should] make sacrifices so that a fifteen-year-old in Palo Alto can remix cat videos without going to jail.” He doesn’t want that fifteen-year-old to go to jail, but he also doesn’t want arguments for that remixer’s protection to prevent any tinkering with technologies to make them “safer,” for some politically chosen definition of safer, especially since private parties and nondemocratic states are willing to tinker anyway.

Some have found his attack on extreme self-monitoring technologies and technologists, who are really outliers, to be a bit much, but I really liked his point (again, not new, but well made) that there is a deep political problem with proposing self-monitoring as the solution to the barrage of advertising and subsidies that keep us eating terrible, unhealthy food: “yes, some of us might find ingenious engineering solutions to resist insidious marketing, but in all this celebration of modern technology, shouldn’t we also do something about the marketing itself? …. [P]olitical action all but disappears; rather than reforming the system, we just tinker with ourselves and tend to our reservoirs of willpower the way Swiss bankers tend to their vaults.” But Morozov also hates “nudging” via technical or legal structures, even though that’s pretty much the opposite of the individualistic solutions he condemns, because he wants us all to think deeply, and exhaustingly, about all our politically relevant choices, which is to say basically all of them, though he talks most about energy consumption.

Probably Morozov’s most effective assault is on the concept of “openness” as an unqualified good. Because of preexisting political struggles, “open” data will be used in politically inflected ways—for example, maps that visualize crime statistics across different neighborhoods could help improve police effectiveness, but they could also devalue properties and make people living in dodgy neighborhoods to be less willing to report crimes. Openness has feedback effects. Likewise, digitization of land records in India, in an attempt to empower the weak, may have benefited the rich and powerful by exposing which occupants lacked formal title despite being morally and even legally owners. Morozov advocates for context-specific solutions—here, accepting other methods of proving title such as old family photos or maps along with official land titles, or selectively limiting access to land records so that people with “no obvious need” to see them can’t do so. Information, he argues, should be “collected and distributed in full awareness of the social and cultural complexity of the institutional environment in which it is gathered. Sometimes preserving the social relations that enable that environment to exist … might require producing data that is only half transparent or half accessible …. [D]emocracy thrives on compromise and the art of reconciling seemingly irreconcilable interests.” And it’s hard to disagree with that last point, whatever excesses are in the rest of the book.

By way of contrast, see Viktor Mayer-Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think: The promises, and a few perils, of stacks of data so large and computing power so great that we no longer have to sample or select much in advance and can derive insights previously unavailable, like using Google searches to identify flu outbreaks or combining data from multiple city services (rat reports, ambulance calls, etc.) to identify buildings that are particularly likely to be fire hazards. For an alternate perspective, here’s an argument that the foundational assumption of Big Data boosters that they’re collecting as near to N = all as makes no difference is deeply flawed, because of what remains uncounted. The authors of Big Data argue for keeping data as long and as comprehensively as possible because of its “option value”—the possibility that it will be useful later in unexpected ways—and controlling possible abuses on the use end rather than on the collection/retention end, despite the risks (they see government as mostly the solution as back-end regulator, rather than part of the problem as having an interest in access to these new pools of data). The other controversial bit is their disinterest in causation, as long as correlation is found. Their position is that we have big problems right now, so finding correlations between previously unrecognized signals and existing problems is enough to judge a project worthy—see the rat reports-fire hazards link above. But of course there’s likely to be an underlying cause there, and we might actually want to address it; and other instances of correlation may be less benign. Anyway, if you want a largely go-big-data overview of how technologists are changing the world, this is a readable version.

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SPN: It's Not Like That at All

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:49:17 GMT

It’s Not Like That at All
Takes place post S8, in a time of blissful peace. Because I couldn’t not. Girl!Dean/Charlie Bradbury. PG-13. Title from Star Wars, of course.
Thanks to giandujakiss for beta.

“Hello?”

Charlie’s voice was excited, but also wary, which in Dean’s opinion was just the way a Winchester phone call ought to be answered, given their history and all. “Hey, Charlie.”

“Who is this?” Now she’d added ‘suspicious.’

“Dean Winchester,” he articulated carefully.

“You … don’t sound like Dean,” she noted.

“Yeah, so about that. Long story short, I’m a girl—woman—for the next six days, and I was wondering—”

But he was already talking to a dead phone. He raised his eyebrows at it and went to go bother Sam.

****

They’d set up a surveillance camera to alert them when anybody nosed around the Batcave. Dean made sure that Sam was the one who got notified when Charlie arrived ten hours later, so Sam let her in and took her to Dean to watch their reunion.

Sure enough: “Happy birthday to me!” she squealed, actually wringing her hands with joy.

“I know, right?” Dean looked down at his awesome rack, which looked even better since he’d had time to run out and get some fitted tops.

Then Charlie jumped on him, wrapping her legs and arms around him all at once, which since he was a bit smaller now nearly knocked him on his extremely shapely ass. Fortunately he was near enough to a table that he could turn the movement into a swivel that let him get her settled on the table, and then her hands were on his ears, tugging him into place so that she could shove her tongue down his throat.

Sam was making pathetic mortified noises that only made the whole experience better.

“We’ll be in Dean’s bunk,” Charlie said when she released him, and pushed him away just far enough to get back on her feet and grab his hand.

****

“You bake, too?” Charlie enthused, grabbing the plate of cookies out of Sam’s hand. “Oh, this is so unfair. You’re, like, the perfect woman, but only for the next three days.”

Sam, hampered by his unwillingness to use his bulk against a normal-sized human, grappled with her and managed to get a few cookies back while Dean watched and snickered, his arms crossed over his chest (not-so-accidentally copping a feel of himself as he stood). “Dean made those for me,” Sam mourned.

Charlie waved a cookie dismissively, then had to grab at a chocolate chip that detached from the main body before it could fall to the floor. “See, when you say it like that, it’s sexist.”

Dean grinned, because tormenting Sam never got old. “Yeah, Sammy, what am I, some kinda housewife catering to your every whim?”

“Well, my mind just went to a weird place,” Charlie said. Dean looked away, Sam swallowed, and in the silence Charlie went and got herself a big glass of milk. (Okay, so maybe Dean did like to keep the kitchen well supplied. They were grown men, but they had nutritional needs, all right?)

****

Charlie sighed, pillowing her head on Dean’s stomach. “Are you sure you’ve only got a day left?”

“Pretty sure,” Dean said, twisting a strand of her hair idly around his finger and admiring the color. He liked how it was so clearly something she’d chosen for herself. As an American, she had a right to the hair color that was hers by nature, even if it wasn’t natural.

“Gonna miss this,” she said with a sigh, curling her hand around his thigh. He was so glad she didn’t mind his not shaving. He would’ve done it if she’d asked (not that he necessarily wanted her to know that) but it was much easier—and less stubbly—that she didn’t.

“Charlie, as awesome as you are and as amazing as these past few days have been, I’m not gonna lie: I miss my dick.”

She grimaced. “Really? You had to go there?”

“I can’t go there for another day,” Dean pointed out.

She slapped him, right on the sensitive skin of his inner thigh, and he hissed. “I think you should stop talking now.”

“Well, okay,” he said, and rolled her over so that he could get a better angle. (Yes, he missed his dick in a serious way. But the replacement parts had their own advantages.)

****

Charlie insisted on getting fully showered and dressed several hours before the change was due to reverse itself. “Margin of error!” she kept saying. Dean figured she’d probably seen naked dudes before—for one thing, she knew way too much about the Carver Edlund books to have missed that side of the fandom—but he was in a mood to indulge her.

Also, she wanted to spend some time talking with Sam about Men—Person—of Letters business, and eating to make up for all the calories they’d worked off.

That left Dean by himself to wait for the return of little Dean. Which was okay, because that also let him stare at his own breasts for a while, which he’d been informed was creepy when he was in company. And anyway, it was a good idea to have her carbing up with Sam while Dean’s body rewrote itself, because that shit was ugly and painful and she didn’t need to see that part.

He took a shower of his own to get the last of the change-goo off of him (did he mention both painful and ugly?) and went out to say goodbye. Charlie looked happy to see him, real-him. He’d take that over lust any day of the week.

“So where are you headed?” he asked when she’d gotten her backpack over her shoulder, ready to leave.

She shrugged. “I was thinking I’d try California for a while. I hear they have a couple of Internet companies there that might need a coder or two.”

He nodded. “You call if you find a hunt, all right? You have learned much, young Skywalker, but—”

Charlie whacked his bicep, hard enough to sting. “You know that’s not an actual quote, right? It’s the ‘play it again, Sam’ of Star Wars quotes.”

He wrapped her in his arms, hugging her tight and closing his eyes. He didn’t have anyone left to pray for her safety to, so he just wished. “I love you, Charlie.”

Her kiss on his cheek was feather-light. “I know.”

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nattering

Fri, 10 May 2013 04:30:25 GMT

I’m finally catching up with SPN, and I love Charlie Bradbury. I love Ripley and Hicks. I love that Dean must’ve been the one to name them Ripley and Hicks. (I might have had a bit of a thing for Hicks back in the day.) That is all for now.

From the department of ‘I don’t know quite how I feel about that’: I met a fellow XF fan who told me, “I read Iolokus when I was fourteen and it changed my life!” I told her that we were very angry at the time, and she indicated that she’d been able to tell. (Additional note to self: I’m old.)

From Deadspin: “You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.”

Interesting fan-relevant argument from Jess Nevins about why Lovecraft became canonized and other, better writers of the period didn’t (the second reason strikes me as dependent on context-specific definitions of “first” relating to the rise of copyright, but is still worthy of consideration):

Lovecraft escaped the fate of the vast majority of writers — obscurity, to a greater or lesser degree — through several extra-literary events. … Lovecraft’s letter writing … was critical in establishing Lovecraft as a literary presence to his contemporaries. Lovecraft was an extraordinary correspondent, writing an estimated hundred thousand letters in his lifetime, to fans and fellow writers, especially those working for the pulp Weird Tales. Decades before the social media, Lovecraft used letter writing to create a presence for himself in the consciousness of fans and writers and to create the social capital that paid off after his death.
Too, Lovecraft was the first author to create an open-source fictional universe. The crossover, the meeting between two or more characters from discrete texts, is nearly as old as human culture, beginning with the Greeks if not the Sumerians. The idea of a fictional universe open to any creator who wants to take part in it is considerably newer. French authors like Verne and Balzac had created the idea of a single universe linked through multiple texts, and following them, the dime novels and story papers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had established the idea of ongoing fictional universes, but those universes were limited to magazines published by the original stories’ publishers. It was Lovecraft who first created a fictional universe that anyone was welcome to take part in. Both during his lifetime and immediately afterward, other authors made use of Lovecraft’s ideas and creations in their own stories and novels. Lovecraft’s generosity with his own creations ultimately gave them a longevity that other, better writers’ ideas and characters did not have.

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Now caught up on Person of Interest

Wed, 08 May 2013 16:12:29 GMT

Warning: these Person of Interest thoughts are unlikely to be new, though they’re new to me!

(1) I love Joss Carter, and scarily sort of ship Carter/Reese. Cavaziel’s choice to act smugly amused by every situation has grown on me, and my liking was cemented by the Finch/Reese exchange “Please don’t do that [maintain/assemble your sniper rifle] here”/“They look at me funny when I do it in the park.” Yes, I am that easy. (Though given that they started the show with him assembling his assault weapon in a cab, which apparently went unremarked by the cab driver, I contest the premise of his assertion in the alternate New York in which this show apparently takes place.)

(2) The most unrealistic thing about the show is the idea that “we’d all go to jail if the public found out.” Seriously? This America would give Finch a fucking medal. Or if we threw him in jail, it’d be for failing to predict more (see below).

(3) There’s something deeply TV-standard about the intro voiceover, which disavows the actual diegesis in favor of something more heroic: Finch says that the government doesn’t care about the irrelevant numbers but he does, when in fact it’s almost exactly the opposite. He deliberately built the Machine to ignore the irrelevant numbers, then eventually felt sad about it. There’s no coherent reason the Machine couldn’t at least give the irrelevant numbers to an official source as well, whether or not the government would devote the resources to investigating them/decline to follow up on most to protect the integrity of the system. I imagine there are a few non-New Yorkers who might benefit from something like that. But the storytelling part of it that fascinates me is that the intro voiceover, explaining the premise of the show every week, feels the need to reverse the causation on that: the government wants these numbers ignored; the government doesn’t care. (Joss Carter cares—what is she, chopped liver?) It’s very much like the way Dollhouse kept saying “the Dolls consented to be Dolls!” and then showing us that, no, not so much. I don’t know what it means that the show can’t live with its own premise, other than that it’s easy to rag on “government.”

(4) Fandom, where is my Root vid to Flawed Design? Can someone get on that?

(5) Second most unrealistic foundational assumption: the standard gov’t bad guy assumption that there is an infinite supply of loyal, highly trained operatives who can therefore be thrown away the moment they acquire a smidgen of sensitive information, kind of like surgical gloves. If surgical gloves cost millions of dollars to train and replace and were likely to come back and kill you if you missed your toss to the trash, anyway. Just sayin’, why not at least give them the benefit of the doubt? See: Samantha Shaw.

(6) Separately: Samantha Shaw! Who should be seen, heard, and otherwise present all the time.

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Woo and hoo!

Tue, 07 May 2013 00:20:23 GMT

Via giandujakiss, the AO3 is one of Time's top 50 websites of 2013.

Also: My relationship to Diet Coke, summed up.

An essay on Superman’s dog, in the form of a conversation between the author of an unauthorized bio of Superman and his editor. I may have to buy this book ….

Pretty Little Liars spinoff! (Spoiler for a character who will leave PLL.) The guy who’s been cast reminds me just a little bit of Jensen Ackles, so I guess we can add that to my DVR at least in the first instance.

And some fiction reviews:

Diane Duane, Omnitopia Dawn: Ok, so the crew of the Enterprise, as Duane writes them, instead run a MMORPG the day after tomorrow. I mean, not exactly the crew of the Enterprise, but you will recognize the types if you love Duane’s Star Trek books as I very much do. Hard work, competence, and compassion are her highest values and they are rewarded (along with a little bit of cheating only those who have been confirmed as trying to cheat you). It’s a cozy book, in its way.

C.J. Cherryh, Merchanter’s Luck: Rendezvous at Downbelow Station: The good: down-on-his-luck tiny-spaceship captain and high-status but junior officer on major vessel hook up and have apparently awesome sex, and he falls for her but their chemistry (which I have to take on faith) is not the most important thing in their lives, which also involve plenty of space politics, leading to situations in which the captain thinks, for example, that his now partner Allison Reilly is about to kill him, and it’s not a wacky misunderstanding. The bad: it’s all allusions, to politics and to feelings both, so I felt constantly buffeted by undercurrents but was less clear on why I should care. It struck me as written in a particular kind of 70s style, if that makes any sense (though the publication date is 1982).

C.J. Cherryh, The Dreamstone: Celtic-ish fantasy setting where the elves are fading and Men are rising. There are politics/wars and interventions at elvish whim, but no one I could care about. (I picked up a bunch of Cherryh a while back and am only now getting to them.)

Prudence Shen & Faith Erin Hicks, Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong: Charming high school graphic novel about the robot team, the cheerleaders, and their power struggle over whether the school will fund a robot competition or new uniforms, which also turns out to be a struggle over Charlie, the captain of the basketball team—who has some issues of his own. Very enjoyable and bantery.

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The Other Side!

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:53:40 GMT

Counteragent’s awesome SPN genderswap fan film, The Other Side, has started!

Other random links:

Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens: a Kickstarter for a documentary about the spectrum of gender performance.

Enjoyable language rant.

Russian priest uses internet memes to fight slash.

Austin Grossman, Professor Incognito Apologizes: the flavor of this short story can be captured by this quote:

There have been a hundred moments when I was on the brink of telling you. I tried to say the words out loud. I knew you were a physics major and all, but I didn’t think you’d be into it—power and wrongdoing—it was too strange. And I admit, a part of me worries that if I told you about it, the secret part of me would disappear.
And it’s too complicated now. If I’d just told you at the very start, maybe you could have understood, but now? After the diggings and archenemies and sea planes . . . If I started now I’d have to explain why I came to I speak Mandarin and what happened to my original eyes. It’s gone a little far.

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slightly disappointing fiction

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 17:02:34 GMT

Octavia Butler, Survivor: As I understand it, Butler later disavowed this book, which fits into her other stories about Clay’s Ark and the involuntary transformation of humanity. Alanna is a “wild human,” rescued by strict God-fearing Missionaries on Earth and taught to at least mouth the same prayers they do, though her background (and to some extent her race) keep her apart from the largely-white community. When the Missionaries get a chance to leave a dying Earth and settle on a new planet, they don’t realize that they’re being used and, in some senses, enslaved by the aliens they find. Another competing group of aliens kidnaps Alanna, and when she’s rescued two years later no one—to some extent not even Alanna—is sure where here loyalties lie. It’s easy to see Butler’s themes—gender, race, power and power plays, coerced consent and the accommodations people make to survive—but it is true that the story jumps around more, and does a bit less with the alien/human encounter, than Butler at her peak mastery did.

Alaya Dawn Johnson, Racing the Dark: Lana is a young diver on the outer islands, collecting the jewels released by dying fish. But she has the potential for great power, and that—along with the ecological collapse of the outer islands, which may have something to do with the weakening bindings that keep the world’s fire, death, and water spirits bound—leads her into the hands of a witch who has mysterious and potentially devastating plans for her. I like Johnson’s later books a lot better; Lana is jerked around by the narrative in ways that make logical sense (many people are jerked around by their circumstances) but that still leave her seeming flat as a character. I for one look forward to more of Johnson’s AU 1920s New York.

William Sleator, Test: House of Stairs was one of the creepiest YA books I ever read; unfortunately, this recent Sleator didn’t do the same for me (though it’s possible that my tastes have changed). In a world where only the bubble test determines whether you’ll have a job that allows you to escape from the constant traffic (unless you’re in private school and don’t have to take the test) and whether your teachers will keep their own jobs, a young immigrant trades his complicity in unlawful and dangerous acts by a landlord in return for answers to the test; meanwhile, his classmate is under threat because of her father’s acts to protect the tenants. Add in a stereotypical rich bitch, daughter of the landlord/test king, not as pretty as the heroine and prone to making recordable threats, and you have the basis for a challenge to the whole system…. Even though journalism is corrupt and only interested in running slapfight stories. The story’s neatness makes it somewhat incoherent, is what I’m saying. There is something to seeing “No Child Left Behind” treated like the Orwellian slogan it is, though.

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Those of us who are still alive

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 02:50:40 GMT

Quick question before school eats me again: my computer died and I'm trying to get good XF casefile recs ... anyone have a good list?

Free pilots on Amazon—all kids’ shows and (apparently vulgar) comedies now, but one of the comedies involves the zombie apocalypse and another is divas against the supernatural, if this is of interest.

Valedictatorian:

Testing is the accounting of the reform movement, and the executives are cooking the books. They’re manipulating the statements so it looks like the venture is turning a profit. Well, actually, it’s got negative cash flow. The gains are phantoms. The enterprise is insolvent. Even by its own standards, reform fails.
The central proposition of so-called education reform is that it endeavors to make schooling more entrepreneurial. Now this is bogus on its face. The most salient fact about entrepreneurialism is that most ventures fail. Is that the proper model for the delivery of a universal service? …
Like most pro-market types, these people are ignorant of the actual workings of capitalism. They see Apple’s glittering headquarters, Google’s quarterly revenue numbers, and they think, Damn! I wish schools could be more like that! Strewn across the historic landscape behind all this success are hundreds of thousands of failed attempts, many of which don’t make it out of their first year. And you want school to look like this? Well, uh, no; we only want school to imitate successful ventures! Well, I want better arms and a bigger dick, but editing every other eighth of an inch out of the measuring tape will not make it so.

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OTW fundraising drive

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 22:41:54 GMT

Fandom is love--but fandom is also people. If you can, please consider supporting the Organization for Transformative Works, the Archive of Our Own, and the other great work the OTW does, including defending vidders in front of the US Copyright Office! If DMCA reform goes forward, we might even get to do it in front of the Congress.

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Very random links

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 23:00:09 GMT

I am so far behind fannishly I now have no hope until the end of the semester. Also, I got a student telling me he expected to hate my class but didn't, which is sort of the equivalent of the feedback that says "I usually hate your kink, but I liked this story!" Thanks, I guess?

PSA: Benedict Cumberbatch and James MacAvoy perform Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, the whole thing streaming on the BBC for a short time.

What is it like to be a vampire and/or parent? For what it’s worth, I’m with the writer of this post: I do not feel that I’ve changed into the undead, no matter how tired I am. Reference.

Too good not to quote: a condensed version of oral argument in the Prop. 8 case:

BREYER: I’m going to ask you an extremely long question riddled with nonspecific nouns, and you’re going to have to guess what I mean by it.
COOPER: I’m pretty sure the answer is no? But let’s stop talking about whether I should be allowed to talk, and get on to what I’m going to be talking about. Which is: nostalgia. Nostalgia for the good old days of traditional, bedrock values. Man, back in 1971, this Court said there was no federal question as to same-sex marriage. Those were the fucking days.

I’ve rarely seen Breyer better described.

Kate Hines, I love you, but WT actual F?

M.T. Anderson, Feed: 2002 dystopian novel that could have been written today. Kids who can afford it have feeds implanted at birth that deliver a constant stream of commercials and other come-ons; our protagonist, a teen of limited vocabulary and corporate-stunted intelligence (since American schools lost all government funding) meets a girl whose feed was installed much later in life and who’s been homeschooled. She sparks in him a desire for something he quite literally cannot name, while she wants to know what it’s like to be normal. Then their feeds get hacked, and the situation deteriorates.W They’re star-crossed lovers, except the environment is breaking down around them and no one really knows or cares. Not a happy story, and the only things easy to read as pure exaggeration for satire’s sake are the parts where fake lesions mimicking the common, unexplained skin lesions become popular and where the protagonist’s father hunts a whale that’s been given a special inorganic skin that lets it continue to live in the dead oceans.

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Nonfiction

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:15:46 GMT

Yu Hua, China in Ten Words: The book conveys something of the dislocations and upside-downness of growing up during the Cultural Revolution, then seeing China lurch towards capitalism (full of corruption and inequality, different than the randomness and destructiveness of Maoist times). One striking story involves books—during the Cultural Revolution, most were destroyed, and the few remaining in his village were passed around through so many hands that they tended to lose front and back pages. Desperate to know the endings, he resorted to inventing them, his first steps to becoming a writer: “I owe a debt to those truncated novels for sparking creative tendencies in me.” Discussing redevelopment, which means the destruction of poor people’s houses, he recounts a joke in which the CIA traces Osama bin Laden to an urban location. “A spy plane enters the airspace overhead, only to discover a scene of utter devastation. ‘I don’t know who ordered the bombing,’ the American pilot reports back to headquarters, ‘but there’s no way bin Laden could have survived this.’” Later, he eloquently and sympathetically identifies the “gifts” required to transact business with a corrupt broker as a form of communication: “gifts not only are the most vital prerequisite for interaction but actually constitute an alternative language, one predicated on a certain degree of personal loss but also able to communicate such sentiments as favor, homage, and esteem. … When they presented to him their cabbages, tomatoes, or eggs, they would be paying him a compliment and addressing him with deference, whereas if they arrived empty-handed, this would be to forfeit language and lose the power of speech.” He likens the Cultural Revolution to today’s economic development in how disruptive they were, how there was and is no stability in expectations.

Yu devotes a whole chapter to the “copycat” and China’s copy culture, which among other things means that this book—officially banned in China—can only circulate (and does) in pirate copies. He believes that copycatting is a result of “lopsided” development. “[A]ll kinds of social emotions accumulate over time and find only limited channels of release, transmuted constantly into seemingly farcical acts of rebellion that have certain anti-authoritarian, anti-mainstream, and anti-monopoly elements. The force and scale of copycatting demonstrate that the whole nation has taken to it as a form of performance art.” Copying isn’t just piracy: he discusses a prostitution business that explicitly modeled itself after the structure of the Communist Party, with a hierarchy, self-criticism, and similar attributes. Copycatting includes making up interviews with people—something that slides into another topic, bamboozling, a term whose cozy connotations are used for everything from flattery to melamine-in-milk fraud. I was left with the strong sense that anyone who purports to tell you what will happen in this huge, diverse nation in five years is bamboozling you.

Philip Houston, Michael Floyd, & Susan Carnicero with Don Tennant, Spy the Lie: Former CIA Officers Teach You How To Detect Deception: Slight but entertaining book about how to catch people out by asking nonjudgmental, focused questions, and identifying specific verbal/nonverbal behaviors as indicating a need for further investigation (e.g., a lot of weasel words, distraction claims about the person’s general character in response to a question about a specific matter, jiggling feet, etc.). They aren’t fans of microexpressions or of giving much weight to lack of eye contact, and several times emphasize the importance of understanding the interviewee’s culture, because some behaviors are simply different across cultures.

Matt Stahl, Unfree Masters: Recording Artists and the Politics of Work: Stahl argues that recording artists are both embodiments of the current contradictions of capitalism and partial holdouts against the standard view of the worker as a disposable part not entitled to any of the surplus created by his/her work. A recording artist’s work is understood, by both herself and her audience, as self-expressive, yet she generally works under contract to a major company, and also works with other creative people (producers, session musicians, etc.) to whom she denies control/authorship rights. (Stahl doesn’t quite explain the ridiculously complex law behind this, but the point is that both legally and culturally featured artists claim rights by virtue of being the only relevant “authors” of a multiperson-created experience.) Neoliberalism claims to enhance and honor individual freedom while in practice leaving individuals exposed to subordination by employers, and American Idol and other images of popular music play out the valorization of freedom and individual success while helping undermine the political and economic basis of independence. American Idol also instructs people how to be good workers: committed to the production of self in the service of commerce, owed no duty of loyalty by an employer but always having to be producing something new and valuable; all insecurity and vulnerability are borne by the individual, while the benefits of flexibility accrue to the corporation. (As Stahl points out, one of the ironies here is that historically entertainment/media workers have high unionization rates, but that isn’t visible.) The book makes an interesting contrast with Karen Ho’s book on Wall Street workers. Both address how the workers they examine are held out as a model for other types of workers, identifying a core sectoral assumption that risk and failure should be common, and the consequences borne by individuals, while noting that the model doesn’t actually work very well for other workers, e.g., teachers.

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Links and fiction

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 01:11:22 GMT

I know it’s a bit late for a Poker Face parody, but it’s font humor and it’s very well done, so there you go. Neutra Face.

Amazing facts about bear hibernation, sex, etc.

Lynn Parramore on personal finance myths.

Ben Aaronovitch, Whispers Under Ground: Another installment in the tale of Peter, learning proper English wizardry and practicing proper English policing (sort of). Herein of the Underground, where a mysterious murder leads him into the bowels of the earth and the art world. The story is slight, but there’s one sewer scene in which the over-the-top bantering abilities of everyone involved (including a slightly improbable FBI agent) both lowered my suspended disbelief and made me grin with pleasure. I want more of the main story—where is the mysterious evil Faceless Man? But I’ll wait.

Troll’s-Eye View: A Book of Villainous Tales, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling: Featuring Peter Beagle (best title: Up the Down Beanstalk), Holly Black, Michael Cadnum, Nancy Farmer, Wendy Froud, Neil Gaiman (poem), Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Ellen Kushner, Kelly Link (less annoying than I usually find her), Garth Nix, Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, Joseph Stanton, Catherynne Valente, and Jane Yolen. Fairy tales retold from the villain’s point of view, for author-defined values of villain which (plus, I think, the YA focus) means that the villains are generally rewritten as the heroes of their own stories, and the former heroes often revealed to be, in particular, unappealingly greedy—which may say something about current cultural values (among popular fantasy authors at least). Overall, quite enjoyable.

Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd, ed. Holly Black & Cecil Castellucci: This YA collection was pretty enjoyable, with fan-friendly geekiness of all sorts, and even a Kelly Link story about a girl who goes to meet a man she met online (at a hotel that happens to be hosting a dentist convention and a superhero convention) that I loved, which never happens. Scott Westerfeld, Cassandra Clare, M.T. Anderson, Garth Nix, and Lisa Yee, among others, also contributed. Except then there was this terrible slut-shaming story by Barry Lyga. Maybe he meant to write a cautionary tale about revenge fantasies and geeks being capable of horrific behavior, but it didn’t read that way and I suspect he really thought that it was awesome revenge for the humiliated geek girl to distribute a picture of her enemy’s breasts and destroy her reputation by suggesting that she liked sex. The illustrations in between the stories lean hard on broad stereotypes, while the stories are generally more nuanced. Skip the Lyga, and it’s worth checking out.

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Only Sweeter timestamp

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 17:44:02 GMT

for citrusjava: Tell us about that time, after the end of Only Sweeter, when the boys met someone who'd known them as a couple. … Oh! I really really want Dean with his memories thinking about how he fell for Sam when he didn't have them. Really, I just want anything in that verse :)

The thing was, Dean had known a bunch of different Sams even before he’d lost his memory. There was the Sammy of his childhood, all worshipful and trusting; the Sammy of his adolescence, rebellious and resentful; the Sam he’d found at Stanford, grown-up and ambitious; the grieving, vision-wracked Sam he’d gone on the road with; the wild-eyed Sam trying to save him from his deal; the junkie Sam lying to him after Hell; the Sam-after-averting-the-apocalypse who looked at him all soft like Dean was broken. That was what made it so ridiculously hard to keep that last Sam, the one he was—the one he’d fucked, separate from the ones who were his brother.

He’d looked up to Sam, was maybe the worst part. Not just admired him, not just wanted him. Dean knew well enough why Sam hadn’t felt that kind of respect for him, the real him, in years; Dean hadn’t deserved it. But it still burned.

And then the family of the little girl he’d made the dreamcatcher for called. They thought their neighbors’ house was haunted. The neighbors’ teenage son had almost been killed. Could Sam and Dean help?

Sam didn’t like the idea, Dean could tell. He thought Dean was back to trying to get himself killed. Or, still trying to get himself killed, really, since the person in Dean’s body hadn’t been Dean for a while.

“Don’t worry,” he said and grinned so that Sam flinched, “I’ll let you get thrown around this time.”

They drove.

The Solorz family was right about the problem, wrong about the number—five ghosts: victims of a friendly neighborhood serial killer who’d never been caught. (Dean was screwed up, yes, but jesus fuck people were awful to each other; kind of made you wonder about the point of having Hell be separate.) Five might be a personal best for them. Or worst, Dean thought, as he staggered upright and managed to fire his last shell, fumbling to reload as Sam frantically dug bones out of the basement walls, salting and burning as he went.

The Solorzes offered them a place to stay and patch themselves up, afterwards, and Dean wasn’t in a driving mood—he hated having to get blood out of the seats—so he agreed.

The guest room only had one bed, he realized when he stepped inside.

Of course, they’d known Sam and Dean, the partners.

Fuck.

He would’ve up and left, but he was pretty woozy, and Sam was still bleeding.

Give him credit, Sam knew to keep his mouth shut when he saw the bed, and just sat down. Of course then he had to ruin it by trying to get his own shirt off, pulling at the wound, and Dean ended up touching him even more, making him stop wriggling and then closing up the cut with surgical glue and tape, with a bandage on top.

Dean remembered tending Sam’s wounds, from before and after his life had been stolen by the fairy; he remembered being so careful with Sam, who put himself in danger to protect anyone in need. How could anyone meet someone like Sam and not respond to that heroism, that strength? Not that he’d have admitted it even mid-amnesia, but Sam had been a golden god, even the bossiness understandable and a little bit charming, because Sam was always so thorough in his plans. And his idol had, amazingly, loved him back. Missing that Sam felt like having his heart carved right out of his chest, worse because Sam was still right here. Dean was the one who’d been turned back into who he really was.

Whatever Sam saw in Dean’s face, he didn’t say anything. Always so careful now, trying to let Dean take the lead.

But Dean knew that if he let himself sleep in the same bed with Sam, he’d wake up snuggled close, his own traitor body thinking it’d found its home.

He didn’t want to be that half-man again, born at thirty-two and his family lost to him. Bitter and twisted as they’d made him, his memories were his, and no magic motherfucker’s to take away. But the way the Solorzes treated them—the way they’d been—

It would’ve taken a bigger fool than Dean not to want that back.

So Dean bedded down on the floor in front of the door, just a pillow and one of the blankets. He didn’t look at Sam and he didn’t let himself think. He’d slept in worse places.

In the morning, they’d smile and thank the family. They’d eat breakfast and they’d get back on the road.

They’d pretended to be other people for years when they were working cases. Pretending to be that Dean, the one who had everything he wanted, wouldn’t be any different.

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Crowdsourcing

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:30:04 GMT

I need a good name for a Metropolis strip club featuring male performers. The Metropole? Other suggestions in comments?

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Miscellany; short books

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:46:38 GMT

Head Like a Hole mashed up with Call Me Maybe. You’re welcome. (Batman Maybe is better, but this will do.)

From the hazel orbs files, this footnote from a recent copyright opinion about whether one romance novel infringed another might be of interest:

The parties debate the extent to which the heroines’ eyes “change color with their mood and emotions in critical scenes. (Merrick: ‘emerald flames at him’, ‘eyes darkening’).” Regardless of the degree of similarity of change, this is not truly a description of the characters. Their eyes do not literally change color depending on their moods. This is a literary device meant to express the well-known idea that one’s eyes can express thoughts or emotions. The expression of that idea — a shift in eye color reflecting a change in mood — is generic and not protectable.

Pat Conroy, My Reading Life: Memoirish book of reminiscences about books and literary people Conroy has known, in Conrad’s standard style, which is to say charmingly florid. I should probably just reread The Prince of Tides instead.

Neil Barofsky, Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street: Insider account of Barofsky’s time as inspector general for TARP within Treasury. Barofsky is really mad, and has reason to be given that the key decisionmakers only wanted to save banks, even when Congress had given them money explicitly to be used to help homeowners. He’s at his best explaining the perverse incentives that applied so that many people ended up worse off trying to get help from TARP, which Treasury then defined as existing to “foam the runway” for the banks and slow down the rate of foreclosures so the banks would be okay—without acknowledging that that slowing-down meant encouraging people to run through their life savings and destroy their credit and then still lose their homes. But don’t worry; the banks are bigger now and I’m sure this time they won’t take risks requiring taxpayer bailouts, since that would cost them their credibility (not their bonuses, though).

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Once Upon a Time

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 02:58:34 GMT

Wow, Mary Margaret, that plan was "attack the mayor with hummus" level bad. Sure, let's go find the dagger! It's not like Cora might be monitoring that or anything! Query: will darkside Mary Margaret be equally dumb? I for one can't wait to find out.

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Nonfiction and Cult

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 04:39:57 GMT

Cult on the CW--anyone have thoughts? I watched the pilot but was severely underwhelmed.

Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief: Interesting partially for its constant footnotes clearly put in to stave off defamation litigation by the notoriously litigious Church, Wright’s story is a complex one about a religion and a simple one about abuse. In its incoherent extremes, Scientology’s doctrine isn’t all that much weirder than the burning bush and drinking your savior’s blood, just younger, though the portions of the book quoting Scientologists explaining how the system was supposed to work/give them power over external events were often hard to listen to because they did resemble the statements of a person having a break from reality. As usual, it’s the people who are the problem: Wright relates convincing stories of abuse, not just by L. Ron Hubbard (who was particularly vicious to women) but by his successor, David Miscavige. He also identifies a sick institutional structure that coerces people into laboring almost as slaves—and sometimes physically barring them from escape—in terrible conditions, all the time telling them that they were the ones at fault. And many do stay because they believe it, or because they don’t think they have alternatives. An outer ring of Scientologists, including many of the celebrities who Hubbard and Miscavige courted, didn’t have much of an idea about the abuses/found it easy to close their eyes—again, an old story about abuses in the name of religion. It’s a depressing book, because the IRS gave up on going after Scientology for back taxes and it’s not clear how anyone can help many of the people involved, especially those raised in Scientology’s Sea Org who lack knowledge of the outside world and marketable skills.

James Fallows, China Airborne: Short book about China’s possibly burgeoning aeronautic industry, and the challenges and opportunities it faces/offers. Fallows emphasizes that there’s a huge amount of divergence in conditions across China, but also that there’s a great sense of possibility for improvement—something that often seems lacking in the US, where we don’t expect our government to do much that’s big. Of course, there’s plenty of cronyism and dysfunction in China; much of China’s investment in aeronautics may end up wasted as it produces planes that are too heavy and fails to innovate at the design end. Or not: Fallows concludes that anyone who claims to know what’s really going to happen in China is deluded at best. It sounds wishy-washy, but I found it a useful portrait of a fast-churning environment in which giant successes and failures are possible—and likely to have world-wide effects.

Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?: Diamond contrasts traditional and modern societies in their treatment of harms (torts or crimes, in the language of the formal state), wars, the elderly, childrearing, languages, eating, and several other major areas. I learned a fair amount about New Guinea, but this isn’t really a book with a big idea in the way that his earlier two popular works were. He thinks we should do more to integrate the elderly into the broader society, and to a certain extent children too; we should eat less and exercise more; and we should make an effort to raise children with more than one language. Here’s Slate’s view, with which I sympathize: “By the end of the book, it is impossible to tell if one has finished reading a masterpiece of rigorous analysis or a masterfully written collection of just-so stories.”

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Fiction

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 15:29:27 GMT

Madeleine Ashby, vN: In the future, a messianic tech genius has created von Neumann machines—robots who can’t bear to see humans in pain (and thus sometimes turn away so that they don’t have their response circuits triggered). Except Amy’s failsafe doesn’t work, something proved very publicly when her murderous grandmother comes for her at her kindergarden graduation (vN will iterate if fed well enough with the metals and plastics that make up their diet). Now Amy’s on the run, trying to stay away from her grandmother and the rest of her clade, trying to get back to her human father and vN mother. It was an engaging enough story, though I wasn’t sure the worldbuilding held up, what with the resource demands that iteration would place on the world—there were hungry vN and armored junkyards, but it seemed underthought.

Daniel Handler (art by Maira Kalman), Why We Broke Up: Girl meets boy. Girl falls in love with boy. Girl loses boy and writes him an epic letter, with demonstrative exhibits, about why they broke up. I think Handler’s best as Lemony Snicket, and this book didn’t convince me otherwise, though the tone of desperate, half-insightful and half-self-deluding teenagerhood rang true.

Stephen King, Mile 81: Classic King short story: at the abandoned Mile 81 rest stop, a car apparently crashes to a stop. Everyone who gets out to investigate has something very bad happen to them. Only kids believe, and only kids can stop it.

Shannon Phillips, The Millennial Sword: Urban fantasy in the Seanan McGuire vein, though lower-drama/angst. Viveka, newly arrived in San Francisco for an entry-level PR job, accepts Excalibur and becomes the Lady of the Lake. She collects a hacker knight, an intriguing boyfriend/investigative journalist with a name suspiciously like “Arthur,” and some enemies, most prominently the mad fairy queen Morgan. I was very grateful that she didn’t immediately become the best ever at fighting just because she had Excalibur—she needed training; plus she was still eking out a living as a junior PR person and had real budget issues in the midst of trying to save the city from fairy takeover.

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Fiction

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 20:46:15 GMT

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places: Twenty-five years ago, Libby Day’s two older sisters and her mother were brutally slaughtered in what looked like a Satanic killing. She testified against her teenage brother, Ben, who went to prison. Grown, she’s depressed, out of money and lacking any skills, so when some murder enthusiasts promise to pay her for revisiting the past, she goes along with it. But the past bites back; her brother’s secrets, her terrible father’s, and her mother’s all intersect in tragic/horrifying ways. Flynn’s trademark is nasty people in juicy situations that also manage to force your reluctant sympathy for how terrible the circumstances are, but I wasn’t feeling the sympathy here, so it was basically just nastiness. There’s a fine line between gothic and ridiculous, which I felt was crossed. Maybe it was the Satanism.

Ilona Andrews, Steel’s Edge: Magical healers who use their powers to harm lose their minds and can become deadly plaguebringers, so when Charlotte—the most powerful healer of her generation—feels herself about to give in to temptation, she heads to the Edge, where her magic will be blunted and she can live in peace. Then she saves a hot guy, wounded near to death, who turns out to be hunting slavers—and those slavers quickly give her a reason to seek revenge as well. Passion, violence, sex, and palace intrigue follow. I didn’t like this one quite as much as Andrews’ other books. Though people weren’t making head-bangingly stupid decisions, everything just fell out a little too neatly. The bad guys made just the right/wrong moves, and the heroes’ powers were just exactly at the right level. Usually that doesn’t bother me, and I’m probably making it sound like I disliked it, which I didn’t.

Meljean Brook, Heart of Steel: The further adventures of some characters from The Iron Duke: Yasmeen, the genetically modified airship captain, meets up with the adventurer Archimedes Fox, whom she earlier kicked off her ship into zombie-infested waters because he pulled a gun on her. (As a woman in a sexist society she couldn’t afford the challenge to her authority, but also she just couldn’t abide the insult to her competence.) Did I mention that the airship used to be his abusive father’s, before she killed the father? Archimedes survived and thrived, and there are no hard feelings—well, not that kind. Steampunk romance with light political intrigue. A little too heavy on the romance and mooning over the hardness of Yasmeen’s heart and how Archimedes will suffer for his love, but on the other hand neither of them play head games about love and one of the things he adores about her is that she’s got her own agenda and won’t let him get in the way. I’d be tempted to read anything set in the same world (the Horde and its nanomachines conquered Europe centuries ago, but empires fall; mechanically altered former slaves are making their own ways in the world while the Continent is still mostly zombified), but hope for more worldbuilding in the next outing.

Elizabeth Wein, Code Name Verity: Ok, outside my wheelhouse, but several rave reviews convinced me to try this story of two Scottish women—a pilot and a radio operator—in WWII. The story begins as one of the women writes her “confession” after being captured in occupied France and tortured by the Nazis, but in the midst of giving up what she knows about British war arrangements she’s actually telling the story of their friendship. Other women—including the German who assists in the narrator’s torture and a French prisoner who didn’t break and despises the narrator—are also memorable; the men are there, and they are powerful, but this isn’t their story. There are twists, which I didn’t find particularly surprising, but they were well-done and, yes, I cried at the end. Wein’s afterword notes that women did have these jobs, though she made up this particular story.

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