Will Shetterly's Blog, page 136

Bordertown sensibilities: Lindsey Stirling and Landfill Harmonic

Transcendence (Orchestral)- Lindsey Stirling - YouTube:

About Landfill Harmonic:

weird tricks for getting Smashwords to accept an epub made with Apple Pages

SmashWords is extremely useful and extremely tricky to deal with, at least for me. Making epubs with Pages for Amazon and Barnes & Noble is simple, but making epubs for SmashWords isn't. Here's what currently works for me:

1. Make the epub in Pages without a cover image.

2. Place the cover image in the epub using Calibre.

3. Unzip the epub file with ePub Zip/Unzip. (The Mac's usual unzipping tools will only create new problems.)

4. Open the folder you just created, find OPS/toc.xhtml, a...

the primitive drumming of my people

Because St. Patrick's is coming up, the dance class did an Irish tune. I was, as usual, a little lost at the beginning, but I think I caught on reasonably well by the end of the song. It made me think about rhythms, and how people used to talk about "primitive" African drumming, which is actually extraordinarily complex—European rhythms are primitive.

If you want to research this, you could start at Polyrhythm - Wikipedia: "In traditional European ("Western") rhythms, the most fundamental...

RAINN: stop blaming "rape culture" and blame individuals—a post especially for social justice warriors

Anyone interested in the issue of rape should read RAINN Urges White House Task Force to Overhaul Colleges’ Treatment of Rape.

The key bits:

"Rape is caused not by cultural factors but by the conscious decisions, of a small percentage of the community, to commit a violent crime,” said the letter to the task force from RAINN’s president, Scott Berkowitz, and vice president for public policy, Rebecca O’Connor.

and

RAINN’s recommendations pointed to research that suggests that more than 90% o...

on spoilers

Just left this comment at Why I refuse to watch movies without spoilers:

What spoilers spoil are the artist's intention of how the story should be revealed and the audience's initial experience of the art. Because I respect both of those things, I don't care how old something is—I won't spoil it. If you don't know what Oedipus Rex is about, read or watch it before someone rushes in to tell you. 

​The thing I hate most about people who spoil is their attitude. I'm not sure which are w...

Race relations are low on the concerns of all Americans—a post especially for social justice warriors

I saw this rather hectoring article: The Only Thing Americans Worry About Less than Climate Change? Race Relations - The Wire. The writer, a white guy named Philip Bump, thinks the low ranking of race relations is a bad thing. Here are the priorities Gallup found:


I went looking for the original study and failed to find a break-out for white and black folks, so I'm guessing the results weren't very different. Pollsters usually mention wide divergences in subgroups. But I googled a bit and...

Four quotes about Guaranteed Income

“The solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.” —Martin Luther King
"Will a guaranteed annual wage kill incentive among the poor? If a man is given a certain amount of security, won't he quit working? Exactly the same contention could be made about the sons of the wealthy who are left large fortunes. Yet the evidence suggests that, given economic freedom, people will generally choose to do that which interests them most. It is up to...

Matt Bruenig on Black and White Poverty

Why Paul Ryan Is Wrong to Blame Black Culture for Poverty | Demos: "As of 2012, black poverty is down 50 percent from its 1959 starting point while white poverty is down just 30 percent. The swing in percentage points is even more dramatic, with black poverty down 27.9 points and white poverty down just 5.4 points. The historical trend data don't support Paul Ryan's racist theory of poverty, but they do support a racism theory of it."

My feminism will be Minchin or it will be bullshit

The song, Confessions:


The intro to the song, which I recommend playing after the song:


Now, you could also say my feminism is Clara Zetkin's or Emma Goldman's. Here's Zetkin on the difference between socialist and bourgeois feminism:

...the liberation struggle of the proletarian woman cannot be, as it is for the bourgeois woman, a struggle against the men of their own class. She does not need to struggle, as against the men of her own class, to tear down the barriers erected to limit her free c...

Based on Forbes' most powerful people, straight white males are not the definition of privilege now

From The World's Most Powerful People List - Forbes:

RankName/TitleOrganizationAge1
Vladimir PutinPresidentRussia612
Barack ObamaPresidentUnited States523
Xi JinpingGeneral Secretary, Communist PartyChina604
Pope FrancisPopeRoman Catholic Church775
Angela MerkelChancellorGermany59
If you focus on political power, Putin's the only white male among the world's four most powerful leaders. If you include religious power, remember that to have the Pope's power, his sexuality must remain unknown—celi...