Vinnie Tesla's Blog, page 3

THIS IS A TESLA NEWS FLASH

Readercon is in one(1) week. How the hell did that happen?

I will be reading solo at 7 PM on Friday the 15th, and participating in a panel at 8.

On Saturday the 16th, I'll be attempting to MC a Circlet Press group reading. The lineup, though still not entirely certain, is approximately, and depending on traffic and such: myself, Cecilia Tan, Andrea Trask, Sacchi Green, Frances Selkirk, and Renata Piper.

LJ's own genrereviews gave a very nice review to Erotofluidic Age this week.

I'll also be around more generally both days. Ping me if you want to hang out.

What else have I got? I gave in and got a Twitter account. Feel free to Friend me or Follow me or Like me or whatever this weeks fashionable verb is.

There will be some actual essays here soon, rather than all these fussy little updates. I've actually been working on one to clarify my thoughts on genre in preparation for the panel.

News bits

* The schedule for Readercon in Burlington, MA has been tentatively announced. I'll be doing a solo reading at 6 PM on Friday, July 15, and appearing on a panel about genre boundaries at 8 that night. On Saturday the 16th at 8 PM is the Circlet Press group reading, where I'll be appearing with ceciliatan and several other writers to be named shortly.

* I've been reposting Victim/Victorian to alt.sex.stories.moderated, and gotten some lovely bits of feedback. I'm also re-reading the story myself, and I find myself still rather proud of it.

* I can't resist checking my Amazon rankings daily. Still no reviews there, though. I urge those of you who've read Erotofluidic Age to consider writing something about it.

Ebook buying guide--draft

One thing that came up at the book club meeting last night is that ebook formats and readers are daunting cacaphony of inconsistently-named overlapping systems. For example, Erotofluidic Age is available on the Circlet site as a PRC, EPub, .lit, HTML, or two different types of PDF. That's a lot of alphabet soup if you're not used to it. I just attempted to write a roundup of the major formats, and found that it still looked more daunting and confusing than it ought to. So I'm going to try organizing the data in a user-centered, rather than technology-centered way. I'm not an expert, so please correct any errors you see, and suggest any optimizations to make it clearer or more complete.

You have a specialized e-reader The manual that came with your device lists what formats you can use. The manufacturer has probably made it easiest to buy books from their own online store, but, in all cases I know of, it's still possible to buy elsewhere and load the books onto your device.
You want to print books out to read them.Buy PDFs. They are optimized for printing.
You have a computer or smartphone, and you don't want to download any special software to read books on them.Buy books in HTML or plain text (TXT). Many people buy PDFs for this purpose, but I don't think it's actually a very good idea.
You have a computer or a smartphone you want to read books on and you want the simplest experience possible.Get the Kindle app for your device. It's straightforward, attractive, and it will sync your Amazon books to all the devices you attach your Amazon account to.
You have a computer or a smartphone you want to read books on, and you like open formats, you dislike DRM, you want more control of your reading experience, or Jeff Bezos peed on your lawn once.You will generally want to read ePub books. You have lots of options for good free readers--some cross-platform, and some platform-specific. Nook Reader is a good cross-platform option; I like Moon+ Reader on Android, and there's a kazillion others if you want to experiment.

Feminist men and feminist porn

Professor Sarah Whedon interviewed me for the Good Vibrations blog this week. I was very pleased with the piece (I do come across as a bit pompous, but that might be because I'm a bit pompous), but it did leave out what I thought was one of the more interesting bits of discussion

So, I'm going to inflict it on you guys here. She asked me whether I consider my writing to be feminist pornography. I answered:

I would describe myself as feminist, and i would describe my work as informed by that.

I enjoy and support a lot of feminist porn, and I'd love to claim that label for my own work, but I think it's best reserved for that subset of smut that actually expresses female sexual perspectives and desires.

I have some aesthetic and sexual tastes that can look like feminist ideological positions--the women I'm most attracted to tend to be feminists, and so the female characters in my smut tend to be feminists or proto-feminists--but I try to resist taking any sort of credit for that. They're my tastes, and I didn't get to choose them.

Before I get too self-abnegating here, I do think that there is a lot of value in declaring, "This is what I like, this is what turns me on" in a culture that has such an absurdly narow model of who may be considered attractive, or even just looked at. This, once again, connects with that trying to see and be skeptical about the recieved models--in this case for attractiveness.

Subsequent thinking has me wondering if a slightly broader label of "sex-positive porn" might be useful to describe smut by people who are trying to expand past a narrow prescriptive model of gender roles and sexual expectations. Could such a thing be useful, or is it insupportably vague?

Of Faith and Facts

The most effective argument for atheism (or at least against against religious doctrine) I ever heard is Voltaire's famous "if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him."

Bear with me. This is not actually a post about religion--it's about gender roles, it just takes me a bit to get there.

As an aphorism, the Voltaire line is perfect as it is, but to discuss its significance to me, it's unfortunately necessary to pin it to the dissecting table and cut it to pieces. What I really took away from the quote is the notion that religion is fully explainable in terms of human tendencies.

Let me put it more verbosely: it's impossible to account for more than a tiny sliver of world religion by objective true. Too many contradictory things are believed, by too many different people. So where does it all come from? It looks remarkably like what you might expect people to come up with if you dropped them into the world not knowing how it worked, and let them just make shit up.

So we have two choices: It's all made up, or 99% is, and 1%, superficially identical to the rest, is absolute cosmic truth. (there's actually a third possibility-that the other 99% is made up not by man but by the devil, cunningly designed to entrap people, which makes the similarity camouflage, rather than coincidence. I'm ignoring it here.)

Occam's Razor suggests that if you have one explanation that sufficiently accounts for the evidence, busting your ass to insert another explanation, in the absence of compelling evidence, is bad practice. My experience of human beings suggests that an insistence doing so tends to be indicative of a personal agenda behind the push.

Now we come to gender roles. We know for a fact that there have been millennia of vigorous, often deadly, enforcement of those roles in our culture. People who failed to conform to their neighbors' gender expectations were scorned, ostracized, disenfranchised, or killed. This is beyond any dispute.

There may also be hormonal and genetic factors that produce gendered behavior. That is an elusive, wispy possibility, hard to pin down, extremely hard to prove, and nearly impossible to disprove.

Given these choices, when I see those same behaviors that we worked so hard and so ruthlessly to enforce for so long (and that effort is by no means completely over, even in the most liberal and enlightened parts of the world), my first thought isn't, "Oh, it must biologically determined." And when someone else's is, I have to wonder what is leading them to ignore the certainty in favor of the conjecture.

You can't spell "Immense Media Fame" without ME-ME-ME

There's been a bit of coverage of Erotofluidic Age lately. In particular, Dr. Faustus of EroticMadScience.oom posted an extensive review, and today, Sarah Whedon at the Good Vibration blog has posted an interview with me that focuses a bit more on the theory and ethics of writing smut, rather than the book itself. Go check 'em out and leave lots of comments!

A few things

The book club thing got rescheduled. It is now on Thursday the 16th of June, not Monday the 14th. Same geoduck-time, same geoduck-location.
2D Goggles is totally rocking my world. It's a very silly Steampunk adventure webcomic (clean, I should probably mention) in which Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace attempt to buckle the ol' swash, but keep getting distracted by interesting equations. What makes it stand out, in my book, is the delightful art, which is rendered with the confident scratchy fluidity that is the moonlighting animator's hallmark. I might describe it as a mix of Will Eisner and Walt Kelly.
Some exciting web coverage of Erotofluidic Age coming up in the next little while. Not gonna tell you what, because I'm mean that way.

Armageddon in on this sweet deal!

Circlet is doing something pretty awesome this week: until midnight tomorrow night (Eastern time), t1he end-of-the-world-themed anthology Apocalypse Sex is on sale for 1¢. If you are not among the 3% raptured bodily into Heaven tomorrow, you can still comfort yourself during the first week of the Tribulations by acquiring it for a dollar. After that, it's back to its normal price of five dollars, but that will be the least of your problems, bucko.

Having a Blast.

The RSS summary for a recent Paul Krugman blog post reads:

A Santorum blast from the past

(emphasis mine)

Is this a very sneaky, and utterly revolting Dan Savage joke, or do I just have a dirty mind?

Another Circlet author chat

My author chat at circletpress in support of Erotofluidic Age began this afternoon. I'll be posting there regularly (or trying to) for the next several days. You are encouraged to mosey over and make adoring-crowd noises to generate the illusion that I have fans.