One downside of constantly traveling is that you don’t really have time to get a costume together for halloween. Or at least, I haven’t successfully in the past few years. But then I got to thinking about it. It’s halloween. I’m a goth. I’m allowed to just go as myself. One night a year where that isn’t weird. Might as well just be happy about it. Anyhow, this is my “costume”: more or less the same as usual, only with makeup.
As anyone who has heard me ramble in the past two months knows, I’ve been accepted by a writer-in-residency program in Pittsburgh at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse. While I’m here I’ll be polishing up my super-secret project that I’ll be talking about incessantly once I’ve got it done. I’m excited as hell to be in a house (well, two houses) full of radical writers, folks who can talk about plotting and printing while making dinner and drinking (or not drinking, of course!).
I quit myspace years ago when Fox bought it, and haven’t really looked back. Today I joined Goodreads. Anyhow, you can find me on there as “Margaret Killjoy.” Anyhow, it’s kinda neat, so hopefully I’ll keep up with it.
I ran across a traveler friend of mine who carries a view camera and darkroom in the trunk of their car. They make tintypes. So I found a handsome fellow named Parks, got all gussied up, and sat still for several seconds. I’m quite pleased with the results! See their flickr for more wonderfulness!
I always romanticized Finland when I was a teenager, and Helsinki was the first foreign city I ever visited by myself, and is one of only two that I’ve bothered to go to twice. In Finland, there are no gendered pronouns. And during midsummer, the sun doesn’t really go down so much and you can walk from bar to bar and sit in the sunshine (moving as the shadows move, you understand), while a middle-aged, wealthy, kinda depressed guy buys you and your even-more-depressed and not-wealthy friends beer. Then you can black out and pass out in a gutter and wake up with 40 American bucks in your pocket that you didn’t start out with, acquired by means of telling strange tourists a sob-story when they ask you why you were passed out in the above-mentioned gutter. As the night progresses towards 5am, you can declare your love and desire for marriage to someone you haven’t seen in 6 years, and then you can leave town like 2 days later heartbroken and happy, perhaps ne’er to return.
But I digress.
The reason that, today, I remember why I love Finland is for two of their marvelous inventions: the sauna and the molotov cocktail.
Veganarchist.
I hate the word veganarchist. It makes me want to go eat chicken or something. I’ve been vegan for 8 years now, an anarchist for 7. They are really different things. Vegan is a dietary choice. At best, it’s a tactic for reducing animal suffering. Anarchist reflects so much more. Sigh.
I figure most people already feel however it is they’re going to feel about the word veganarchist. It just… it just really gets under my skin. I’m often at odds with other vegans, because I’m sick of how people wield it like a big dogma club. I’m sick of vegans thinking they’re on to something pure and wonderful and beautiful. I mean, yeah. I’m glad I’m vegan. I don’t see myself stopping. We live in a world of factory farming, of domestication, of all sorts of horrors, and I’d like to avoid supporting that (though as far as food choices go, local/organic is probably more important than vegan). But for chrissake. Veganarchist? It’s insulting to anarchism.
I found this comic today, from A Softer World. This is an exact thing that happened to me, about 3 years ago. Not much has changed since then.
I would apologize for the ranting I’m about to do, but fuck it, it’s my blog anyhow.
Ever since I started SteamPunk Magazine two years ago, the internet has been full of sharks, hungry to tear apart every single word we wrote. Before we went to print, when steampunk magazine was a splash page on a domain asking for contributors, there were posts across the web about it. As a random example, “You say you don’t want pro-colonial fiction. LOL, how can you be steampunk without being pro-colonial?”
It was a bit better once the magazine came out. The number of haters increased, to be sure, but we finally had appreciators. Still, in the end, the internet hate is a large part of what drove me away from steampunk. There are people out there who are very, very bitter about the idea that steampunk could have political and social meaning. And those people are very vocal. “OMG, we just want fiction. Stop talking about politics.”
But the political crowd is no better. It might be worse. Since many anarchists defend shittalk as being “critical thinking”, they go about it as self-righteously as they go about everything else they do. I’m frustrated, honestly. I’m tempted to give up on the internet. Could you imagine it in person?
Could you imagine walking up to a table at a bookfair, picking up a book, reading the back, and then attacking the author to their face? What if that was the norm? (Granted, people have actually done this to us at bookfairs before, but it is certainly the exception).
So this week I’ve had steampunks yell at me for being political, anarchists yell at me for watering-down their politics, red anarchists critique me for being too anti-civilization, green anarchists yell at me for being pro-civilization. I’ve been chastised for my choice in publisher (since, despite employing less than 10 people and being entirely anarchist run, they aren’t enough of a small press).
Yeah, I know. We all know the world is ruthless, and you’ve got to have thick skin to keep it up doing anything public. I’m not going to stop doing what I’m going to do. It just wears on you, that’s all.
*addendum* The thing is, posting comments rather than communicating directly with someone is saying “I’m saying this and I want everyone to see it.” When you see someone with food in their beard, do you say “hey everyone! that man has food in their beard!” or do you tell them directly? (As a side note, no longer metaphorical, don’t tell me I have food in my beard till I’m done eating. Thanks.)
I didn’t realize that it’s obligatory to do a year-in-review post when you have a blog. My apologies. As you might have noticed, I don’t really talk about my personal life online, so that will more or less be left out of it.
Next year? I don’t really make resolutions, but I will say I will be disappointed if I haven’t finished a longer form fiction work by the end of it. But yeah, more shows, more zines, more photography, more books, more traveling.
So there’s this archipelago, Socotra, in the Indian Ocean. And near as I can figure out, everything there is amazing and beautiful and wonderful, at least visually. There are 40,000 people but they only put roads in two years ago. There aren’t any fancy oceanside resorts, though it caters to eco-tourism. And there are tons of species of plants and animals (like the trees above) that are only found on those four islands. I want to go there. That’s all.
*offer not valid unless I was going to marry you regardless, which is rather unlikely.
