Beyond Selidor

This is my first year trying out a slightly new format and set of questions for the year-end meme; I made the decision this time last year to retire the previous format (which I'd been using for close to twenty years, since the Livejournal days), the questions of which seemed in many cases more suited to a teenager or undergraduate university student. I've taken this set of questions from falena.

( I'll sing a story about myself )

I don't talk a lot about my profession on here, but colleagues shared a pair of articles in quick succession, and, although unrelated, they are in a kind of conversation with one another.

I read the news about this group of academics suing Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, and my immediate reaction was that it reminded me of the group of Reddit bros demanding a rewrite of the final season of Game of Thrones, or the Star Wars sequel trilogy, or possibly both (the two things have blurred into one group of entitled male fans in my mind), when all of transformative fandom's reaction was baffled amusement. Why can't you just write fanfic like normal people? was the response to this bizarre demand. Similarly, while it's nice that academics have finally woken up to the fact that (as academic librarians have been saying for at least twenty years) academic publishing is broken and relies on a) free labour of academics conducting and writing up the research, peer reviewing it, and serving on editorial boards and b) the fact that academia uses journal prestige as a proxy for quality when evaluating CVs for job applications and career progression rather than actually looking at the research, I don't think the solution is to try and make the biggest academic publishers in the world (whose profit margins are greater than those of Disney) act altruistically. I'm struggling to understand what these academics actually want (for Elsevier to pay them? good luck with that) and genuinely appalled that they think they have a chance at success here.

Far better would be to do what TU Delft is planning to do, namely, taking away all their funds for article processing charges (APCs=paying additonal thousands of dollars to journals which you're already paying six figure sums to subscribe to in order to make a single academic's article open access to the public), and redirecting those funds to instead cover university-facilitated open access publication. I.e., instead of academics providing the research, the written article, the peer review and editorial work for free to a journal who then charges that same university twice for a subscription and to make the article open access, the academics will do all this work ... and the university will use the money to host the open access publication on their own platform.

Of course for this to work, academics will have to commit, on a global scale, to evaluating each individual research publication on its merits, rather than looking at someone's CV, seeing that they have five articles published in Nature, and assuming they're a top researcher and hiring them. But we can dream.

I found this post by historian Timothy Snyder, 'talking freedom in Kyiv', to be extraordinary:

[T]he Zelens’kyi paradox: a free person can sometimes only do one thing. If we think of freedom as just our momentary impulses, then we can always try to run. But if we think of freedom as the state in which we can make our own moral choices and thereby create our own character, we might reach a point where, given who we have chosen to become, we have only one real choice. That was how Zelens’kyi described his decision to stay in Kyiv: as not really a decision, but as the only thing he could have done and still remained true to himself. It was not only about defending freedom, although of course it was, but about remaining a free person.

There was a tendency in the west, especially in the early days of the fullscale invasion, to idealise Zelenskyy, and view him as a politician without flaws, which, if you pay attention to independent Ukrainian journalists, is far from the truth. However, Snyder is right when he recognises that Zelenskyy's decision to remain in Kyiv when it was besieged in three directions and bombarded constantly with artillery and groups of assassins were trying to infiltrate the presidential residence and murder him was a pivotal moment in the war, and — if Ukraine prevails, that, and the incredible bravery of its military in those early days will be viewed as crucial turning points. (I remember thinking at the time — when 'my' prime ministers, though I had voted for neither, were Scott Morrison and Boris Johnson — that there was absolutely no chance that either one of them would have chosen to remain in the capital city cut off in three directions by hostile forces and that both would have taken the offer of evacuation in an American helicopter at the first opportunity.) I do not think many of us would have displayed that moral courage, and I will remember it forever.

This piece about generative AI really pinpoints something that I was struggling to articulate:

If AI could say something for you, maybe it wasn’t worth saying; maybe you could have spared the world of at least one more instance of math masquerading as language. If you let it write your silly love song, it demonstrates how little love you feel, how little you are willing to risk or spare. But there are no labor shortcuts for caring, in and of itself, no stretching a little bit of intentionality to provide focused attention across some ever increasing population. Care doesn’t scale; cruelty does. You can’t automate your way around the infinite obligation to the other.

And that's all the links I have for now.

Saturday began with an early morning train into Cambridge, in order to lead a workshop for a bunch of nurses, midwives, and physiotherapists. I don't normally work on Saturdays, but I'll do so on occasion if people ask me to present/do a training session at their conference or workshop. In the end, things worked out well: the workshop venue was just a twenty-minute walk from the train station, and the timing of my spot on the programme coincided perfectly with the IMAX schedule for Dune (the IMAX cinema also being about twenty minutes' walk from the workshop), so I could meet Matthias afterwards and immerse myself in audiovisual spectacle.

Dune itself was an aural and visual feast, and overall I enjoyed it a lot, but I have to say that the pacing didn't work. I rarely say this — I'm usually of the opinion that films should be cut and edited down, or should have been a TV miniseries instead — but this really should have been split in two, to give all the plot and characters introduced in what felt like the last half-hour of the film time to breathe. There even was a natural stopping point at which these hypothetical two films could have been split! In any case, I mostly got what I was expecting: drama and spectacle and terrible, manipulative people being dramatic and destructive on a galactic scale, and it was well worth watching in the IMAX cinema — but it could have been even better if I'd been in charge of editing!

After that, Matthias and I made our meandering way back to Ely, rounding off the day by watching the Melodifestivalen final (Sweden's Eurovision selection competition). We don't watch the national selections religiously, but watch Melfest from time to time if it's scheduled at a convenient time, simply because Sweden takes the whole thing so seriously and the result is always a fun couple of hours of glittery pop music.

Today has been filled with relentless rain, which left me with zero interest in leaving the house (although I did go out to the swimming pool first thing); thankfully my only plans for this afternoon are to potter around on AO3 and Dreamwidth, and eventually cook dinner. (I got overexcited when I spotted that there were now six The Silence of the Girls fics, and then extremely deflated when these were all revealed to be The Song of Achilles crossovers; people can write whatever they want to write, of course, but I find it dispiriting when my tiny fandom-of-one that's all about the interior lives of the women of the Iliad ends up wall-to-wall crossovers with the Achilles/Patroclus megafandom, focused solely on that pairing, and to be honest their The Silence of the Girls tag feels like false advertising. The solution, of course, is just to write the Briseis/Chryseis epic for which I'm always fruitlessly searching.)

I feel as if that's a slightly sour note on which to end this post, so I'll close instead with all the little things making me happy: daffodil and freesia bulbs just beginning to flower, the perfectly calibrated caffetiere of coffee that I made this morning, the landscapers making good progress on the work for which we hired them in our back garden, lazy Sunday afternoon yoga, chatting with my mum on FaceTime as she travelled home on the ferry across Sydney Harbour, turning the camera around to show me the bridge, the Opera House, and the lights on the inky black water. They all feel like little pockets of happiness — bursts of candle flame held against grief and frustration.

I spotted this on blackcatofmisery's journal, and it looked like a lot of fun, so I thought to answer it myself!

( Questions and answers from A to Z )

It has been another exhausting week, but I'm back with a new open thread nonetheless. This prompt is brought to you by the news that my favourite work colleague is heading off for six months on secondment in another department. While I think this is a fabulous thing for him, I'll miss him a lot. We're both Australians of a roughly similar age and outlook, both grew up in Australia but moved (in his case back) to the UK as adults and spent most of our working lives here, and whenever we're in the office together we have endless conversations about pop culture, and Australian, British, and global politics.

He's probably the only colleague I relate to in this way — for the most part I prefer to keep a firm line between work and the social and personal. Polite pleasantries and professionalism with work colleagues, with my social life and access to my emotions and personal thoughts kept to ... well, my friends (both online and off) is my preferred setup.

The above is basically my answer to this week's question: how do you relate to your work colleagues, if you have colleagues? I realise that people may not want to talk about the specifics of their work on Dreamwidth, and if that's the case, please feel free to talk more about your preferences in this regard rather than the actual specifics.

I hope everyone is going well.

We're coming to the tail end of this year's snowflake_challenge. Today's prompt warms my librarian heart, because it involves peak librarian skills: searching and finding.



In your own space, post your pictures of your fandom scavenger hunt results.

My results can be found in this Instagram photoset. See the description below for details of which photo fulfills which item.

Look around your current space, whether digital or brick-n-mortar. Post a pic or description of:

1. a fannish item: A photo of some fanart of characters Aliette de Bodard's Dominion of the Fallen series. The art is by likhainstudio. Likhain also designed my wedding invitations, and I love to be able to say that my invitations were created by a Hugo Award-winning fanartist!

2. something round: An orange studded with cloves, which smells amazing, lasts forever (I have another one of these which was made by my mother in the 1960s, although this one I made myself about ten years ago), and which decorates the living room bookshelf.

3. something that is your favorite colour: Houseplants in the kitchen.

4. the last game you played (video, phone, table top, etc.): I almost never play games of any kind (I basically find every single type of game stressful; they've never been a fun leisure activity for me), so I cheated here and put a picture of my favourite local swimming pool. Swimming is my kind of 'game'.

5. a book you are currently reading: Accidental Gods by Anna Della Subin.

6. album art of the first song that comes up on shuffle: 'Fortune Presents Gifts Not According to the Book', from the Dead Can Dance album Aion.

7. the last movie you watched: The Eternals (a bloated, tedious mess, much as I love Gemma Chan).

8. TV show you're currently watching: The second season of Cheer on Netflix.

9. the homescreen, lockscreen, or desktop wallpaper from your device: I have 'The Garden of Earthly Delights' by Hieronymus Bosch as my desktop wallpaper, and I think it's basically been my wallpaper — with some brief exceptions — for close to fifteen years. Amusingly, the album art for question 6 is also taken from Bosch's artwork — a weird coincidence.

I've been promising to do a Day in the Life post for most of the pandemic, but what finally prompted me to do so was the prospect of life — as I've known it since March 2020 — being on the verge of changing a bit. Yesterday, I had a meeting with my two managers, where they told me that I would begin a partial return to the office in July. So far it's only going to be one day a week.

Therefore, I felt I needed to record an average working-from-home-in-lockdown day for posterity.

The post is text only, but I've been doing a parallel photo post over on Instagram, and I've saved the whole lot as a Highlight, but I'm not sure people without Instagram accounts will be able to view it.

( Lockdown librarianing behind the cut )

This post is basically me just closing some tabs on a few fanworks that have come into my orbit over the past week or so.

First up, an absolutely glorious Raven Cycle fic by likeadeuce:

Irregular and Wild (The Class Participation Remix) (2454 words) by likeadeuce
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III, Adam Parrish
Additional Tags: Remix, Shakespeare nerdery, Dead Welsh Kings, Pre-Canon, First Meetings, Meet-Cute
Summary:

“I participated in class twice this week because of you," said Ronan. "You’re gonna ruin my reputation.”

Gansey just smiled. “That’s what I do."

(I just love this so much: Gansey collecting friends through sheer earnest persistence! Shakespeare! these ridiculous teenagers and their ridiculous emotions!)

Next, a review which wandered across my Goodreads feed earlier today. When I read A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, it absolutely blew me away, but kind of left me speechless. It was so, so good, and spoke to me on so many levels that I was almost daunted at the prospect of putting how much it had resonated with me to words. Thankfully, this reviewer, bookswithchaima has done it all for me:

Through Mahit’s eyes, the novel moves us through the stark and painful internal realities of being a non-citizen, and longing to be acknowledged as a citizen. Mahit understood how much Teixcalaan demanded and how very little it gave back, just as acutely as she understood that there is danger in not belonging.

I’ve been an immigrant for three years, and it felt extraordinarily cathartic to find a story in which the narrator is stuck out here with me. Like Mahit, I’ve never been able to chase away the feeling that while this new world I’ve set up house in embraces me with one arm, it also pushes me away with the other. I’ve often felt that something essential within me has been loosened from its moorings, and it dangled outside me, always looking for a place to put down roots and always starved for light. Because, and to borrow some of Mahit’s words, I would never fully belong and I would never stop knowing it. Like Mahit, I’ve never forgotten the reasons why I left. I am a different person in every sense, and as far away from the me who left three years ago as a distant planet. I miss home, and I don’t miss it, and those two realities still chase circles inside my head. But there’s one growing certainty wedging itself inside me every day: once you leave, you can’t really go home again. Not all the way, anyway. No matter how hard you try. Once you leave, something is lost, and I don’t think you ever find it again.

I don't want to equate my own experiences of being a white Australian immigrant with the reviewer's experiences of being a north African immigrant: the European countries to which we have migrated perceive us very differently, and to pretend otherwise would be appropriative on my part. But what this review explains so perfectly is the thing I've been struggling to articulate for nearly two years since reading this book: this story just gets what it is to leave your home, to put down roots elsewhere while knowing doing so is fraught with difficulty, and to love the literature and pop culture of a hegemonic culture with the awareness that this love is tinged with a kind of complicity. Oh, what a perfect review of a perfect book! You can read the whole review here.

My final link is a months-old fanvid by sholio, which is essentially a love letter to the Netflix Marvel Defenders shows, but on another level a love letter to New York, or at least the kind of surreal New York which the Marvel superheroes inhabit. You can watch the vid here.

So, for various reasons (namely: I have been using my personal laptop since I began working from home in March, and do not have the relevant software installed), there is one research skills class which I have not taught for more than six months, and instead two of my colleagues have taken it in turns to teach it. However, next week, there is a scheduled session for this specific class, and both of my two colleagues are on leave, meaning that there is no one but me to teach it.

Thankfully, this has coincided with a partial return to work premises for my colleagues and me — I was not actually yet due to return, but all the various procedures and documentation was in place for me to do so, and I got permission to come in today to install/test various pieces of software on my work computer, in preparation for the class I would be teaching next week.

And so, for the first time in many months, I made the 45-minute walk to work. It was a bit strange: I was pleased to see there were far fewer cars on the road than was typical in the past, and I enjoyed walking through the allotment and seeing all the plots heavy with harvest. It was a bit tiring, as although I've obviously been exercising during lockdown, I have not had to walk while carrying heavy bags for a very long time.

My troubles began when I arrived at the library: there was a complete failure of all IT hardware across the entire building and network. I could log onto my computer, but I couldn't connect to the internet (and therefore couldn't install Teams and Zoom, or test the other software I needed to test, as it requires internet access), no email was working, and all websites were down. This has been going on since yesterday afternoon, and shows no sign of being resolved.

After hanging around for half an hour, it was clear that the problems were not going to be fixed in a timely manner, and so my manager told me to go back home. And as a result of not having been able to install/test these various things, the class I was meant to come into the office and teach next week is not going to be able to go ahead (this morning was my only window before then to do all this necessary preparation), and the students are going to have to get the prerecorded video of my colleague teaching it from last week.

So the whole episode was entirely pointless. At least I got to see the allotment, I suppose.

Since my last post, things have happened very quickly.

( COVID-19 )

I will leave you with some links to happy and amusing ways people are dealing with the crisis. I've been most moved by images and videos of city-dwellers socialising with each other from their individual apartment balconies or open windows. Urban life is not alienating: those of us who live in cities do have a sense of community, and it is coming through beautifully right now.

Scenes of people on balconies from around the world

Finns dance to 'Sandstorm' by Darude from their balconies, open windows, and back gardens

A man in Toulouse runs a marathon on his seven-metre balcony

Sports commentator with no sport on which to comment provides commentary for scenes of ordinary life

If any of you have similar links, share them in the comments and I will add them to the post. Much love to you all.