Keep on keepin' on

Not much to say; I was out of town most of the holiday weekend and didn't get the itch to write anything extensive. I'm also looking forward to some upcoming changes: after a year living in the hallway/closet I grew up in, I'm soon to start looking into apartments with a wee bit more space, along with making certain other changes in my schedule and goings on. If it proves interesting or thought provoking, I might blog about it; otherwise, it'll just happen. Have a good week, and look forward to me revisiting and finishing off one of my several unfinished drafts the next time I have a day off. o7

Do I work for Facebook, or does Facebook work for me?

Here's a thought I've been having.

One of the things that Twitter does right is it allows you to customize and subdivide your news feed. If you want to make a list of only people you actually know, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just feminist film critics, you can do that. If you want to have a list of just ginsing growers in Laos, you probably can do that (assuming that there are actually ginsing growers in Laos with twitter accounts, which would not surprise me in the slightest). Google plus has something similar, allowing you to add accounts to one or more custom-made circles that you can check independently. Facebook, though, is all or nothing. There used to be an option to set a given contact to more or less frequent appearances on your wall, but those controls seem to be removed, and instead we see what the FB sorting algorithm thinks we want to see. There are no options that I can find to create specialty lists, and the only option to affect the frequency of a particular poster appearing on your wall is to block their posts entirely, in which case, you might as well not be following them. (You also can set your FB to show most recent posts rather than top posts, but I find that it seems to reset itself frequently, and that the result is flooded by even more garbage posts from pages you liked once four years ago and forgot about)

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Facebook's algorithm is designed to serve the dual masters of telling us what our friends are doing and making money for Facebook, to the detriment of the former. In particular, the feed prioritizes high-engagement content with lots of likes and shares. Among a group of friends, this might lead to more people seeing important posts like engagement announcements and the like. When a user follows both friends and other pages, however, the balance seems to become badly skewed toward pages. It's hard for anyone I know in real life to compete with Cracked and The Lion King and Al Jazeera English for post engagement, meaning that the people I actually know and care about are buried beneath posts from national and international pages. Furthermore, even posts from popular pages are filtered by their engagement. Felicia Day has blogged about the problems this causes for her - that it incentivizes her to post things tailored for higher traffic (read: pictures of her being attractive) and makes it harder for views - artistic, social, intellectual - to compete with 'mainstream' views; in effect, Facebook becomes an enforcer of the societal status quo. And that's a problem.

Fault and responsibility

I've been pondering for a while that there is a shortcoming in the English language. If someone does something bad, it's their fault. If someone is in charge when a bad thing happens, it's their responsibility. But we don't really have a word or phrase to describe someone whose actions knowingly make it more likely that someone else will do a bad thing. It's not their fault; the person who actually does the bad thing needs to get the blame. They're not responsible for the bad thing, because they didn't do a bad thing and weren't in charge of making sure other people don't do bad things. And yet, if they hadn't done what they did, the bad thing would not have happened (or at least been less likely to happen).

This has been on my mind for personal reasons - during a disagreement, I used fault/blame language, implying that the person I was speaking to would be to blame if a third party did a bad thing, when what I wanted to say was that his/her actions were making it enormously more likely that a third party would do a bad thing; this did not do a lot to resolve the disagreement. I'm hoping that in the future I'll be wiser about using language that addresses causes without apportioning blame.

But in addition to my own experience, this distinction between fault and contributing cause also, I think, is very relevant to the latest outbreak of bloodshed between Israel and Gaza. If you're fed up with that whole situation and don't want to read about it any more, this is your cue to wander off; otherwise, read on.

High five, low five: Guardians of the Galaxy

First, a note from the management: Google tells me that people are reading this! Granted, Google tells me that sometimes 20 people at a time are reading this in Turkey, which seems implausible, but many strange and magical things are possible on the internet. While I enjoy declaring my opinions to the self-affirming nods of the masses as much as the next guy, loyal readers and Turkish spambots also are reminded that comments are welcome and encouraged from whoever has something to add on any topic (which probably rules out the Turkish spambots, but oh well).

My expectations for Marvel's latest movie were fairly high. Guardians of the Galaxy is rocking a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes (for the first twenty or so reviews, it was 100%) and I had several positive endorsements from friends and coworkers. I have to say, what I saw did not live up to those expectations.  It's not a bad movie - there are things it did quite well, and things it didn't - but overall, I came away unsatisfied. And I'm disappointed, not to mention a little bit surprised; I've usually been in agreement with the general degree of approbation or opprobrium applied to MCU movies, or even erred on the side of liking movies that other reviewers found blah, and it's puzzling that so many reviewers and writers are responding to this one so much more positively than I. Are we sure we're all watching the same movie?

I'm not a huge fan of the traditional 'movie review' - I enjoy reading them after I watch a movie because they sometimes catch things I missed, but they're generally far to short and subjective to guide one in actually forming an opinion - but I kinda liked what I did for the second HTTYD movie, a list of five successful and unsuccessful elements, so I'm doing that again. Read on for five things I liked a lot and five that I liked not so much at all in Guardians of the Galaxy, complete with exhaustive explanations and diatribes thereupon.

Poster a gift from my boss, who saw it in IMAX instead of working on a night the state
supreme court issued three major rulings. I might forgive him eventually.

And yes, there are **SPOILERS.** Duh. Consider yourself warned.

(I've also tried to avoid too much discussion of the overall Marvel Cinematic Universe and the greater interaction of comic books and movies, not because that's not an interesting topic, but because it's too interesting, and to complex, to try to tackle alongside my specific thoughts on GotG. Look for another post on that sometime soon.)

Spend your principles wisely

Missed my update earlier this week, but I have another day off today, so here's a somewhat belated post.

I mentioned in my last post the "Lost Fleet" books by Jack Campbell, which I've been rereading lately (the main reason I didn't have a post together on Monday). While I'm still not convinced that the books are 'good' by any conventional standard, they do have the occasional flash of very keen insight so contrary to the general level of the books that I wonder if they slip in by accident (example: earlier today I read a passage where a character witnesses an orbital bombardment and muses that this is what hell must be: not a place of torment, but a place where death has come and gone and human hands have wiped away any trace that life - human or otherwise - was ever here. I had to stop and think about that one for a bit.)

Another bit that has stuck with me comes from an earlier book. A central theme, inasmuch as these books can be said to have themes, in the series is the conflict and mistrust between military and political institutions and mindsets. One character, attempting to explain the latter to the former, uses an interesting comparison. While military leaders must carefully husband their forces and, if necessary, risk and sacrifice them reluctantly and only in pursuit of essential goals, a political leader must do the same with his principles, defending and stewarding them until the day comes that they must be dearly spent for a more urgent purpose. I thought that was very insightful at the time, and the more I've thought about it sense, the more it has affected my understanding of both military and political conflict and leadership.

Which brings me to the present.

Three stages of mastery

It's a little dismaying to look back at the coursework I did in education classes and realize how little I actually know today about how people learn things. Some I've forgotten in the 5-ish years since Ed Psych, but most I don't think I ever learned in the first place, nor realized I hadn't until I got to actual teaching. But while I don't have much to show for my academic training in learning, I have found a model that I quite like to explain the stages - if not the process - of learning, and on a related tangent, when, whether and how rules ought to be broken.

This almost - almost - pushed me to figure out how to resubmit memebase posters so that I could
say something along the lines of  'Oddly enough, Marvel seems to agree with you ...'

Creating necessary characters

First, some required reading. Before I explain my thoughts on how to fix Strong Female Character problems in fiction (not the sociological or economic forces that sustain them, but the legitimate and thorny storytelling problems that drive well-meaning storytellers so often to use Strong Female Characters), as I am about to do, you should read the following (unless you already read them after I scattered them around in this post, in which case, good job).

https://medium.com/@directordanic/the-problem-with-false-feminism-7c0bbc7252ef

http://thedissolve.com/features/exposition/618-were-losing-all-our-strong-female-characters-to-tr/

http://www.overthinkingit.com/2008/08/18/why-strong-female-characters-are-bad-for-women/

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/08/i-hate-strong-female-characters

Ok, back? Good. Now, a little context: a few weeks ago, a friend posted the first two of those on Facebook, which led to a very interesting discussion in the comments. I kept thinking about the issues raised in these (and the other two, which were linked off the others), and they helped me define the issues I saw with Astrid in the How to Train Your Dragon movies, as described in the post linked above. 

Because here's the thing: the articles are right. Strong Female Characters as they currently appear all too often in media are a flawed and ultimately unhelpful way to depict gender relations. At the same time, though, Strong Female Characters arose as an attempt to solve these problems, and to replace the even more flawed roles assigned to women before this new archetype was created. And I suspect that the vast majority of content creators who include Strong Female Characters in their works are doing so out of a sincere desire to do right by women, whether for ideological or market-driven reasons, because they have been told again and again about the need to avoid the problematic tropes about women that have been floating around ever since people first started using vocal grunts to signify abstract concepts. While their efforts are not entirely successful and demonstrate a certain lack of awareness and sensitivity on their parts, it's not really fair to demonize the creators who do so, unless they work for Disney, in which case for crying out loud, they should know better by now.

I also think that the debate about gender equity in fiction is too often approached from a perspective of things NOT to do. And to be fair, there are an awful lot of things on that list. But I wonder sometimes if the problem is that we spend all our time telling creators they're doing it wrong and not enough giving suggestions on doing it right. The Bechdel test is one of the more helpful offerings; it offers a basic, easy-to-follow checklist for creators to run through to see if they're doing it right. However, even the Bechdel test doesn't give terribly specific guidance about how to go about fixing a problem once diagnosed, and lord knows it's possible to write a thoroughly sexist and unenlightened story that passes the test; Bechdel is a helpful benchmark, but I think its primary value is as a statistical evaluation of fiction as a whole rather than a litmus test for individual works. And so creators - the test was originally and remains most often applied to movies, the vast majority of which are created by men - know that they AREN'T supposed to make women wimpy and submissive and reliant on men, but actual guidance on what they SHOULD be doing is sparse. And so they make female characters unwimpy and unsubmissive and (at least at first) unreliant on men, and if they're really daring, they try to create TWO such women, but they're still approaching the female sex as a list of don'ts rather than a list of dos.

So let's see if we can fix that.