Listening to a new performer handling a well-known tune is my favorite introduction to their style and philosophy. Of course there’s a website for that: Second Hand Songs. Here’s their data on the lovely tune "Blues Run the Game," which you may have learned from Simon & Garfunkel if you’re a boomer.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissa Improves My LifeMarissa Lingen MarissaLingen writes really lovely short stories — more than a hundred so far. She's disabled and her fiction generally includes the mundanity and creativity of disabled living. She lives in the Twin Cities. She's funny. She studied math and physics before turning to full-time writing — as of this writing she’s got 20 stories published in NATURE.
This isn’t the first time I’ve squeed about Dessa Wander, a rapper, musician, poet, and writer from the Twin Cities, Minnesota. I was introduced to her music thanks to fanvids. She’s multimodal!
Her most recent record was released twice: once as rap/pop CHIME and once backed by the Minnesota Orchestra as SOUND THE BELLS.
I’ve listened to both at least 50 times. It’s hard to choose a favorite track, but today it’s Five Out of Six.
( Rap & Orchestral Versions Within )
Since she’s toured the world on her own and with the Doomtree Collective, Dessa turns out to be a great travel writer. Check out this London adventure with LJ Rich, who’s a synesthete
( 130 word taste )
Dessa is not only great at song lyrics — she’s swell at prose, including technical writing.
This is her 2019 memoir as an essay collection. I deeply enjoyed listening to her narrate the audio version in her deep and melodic voice. She’s the child of committed environmental hippies, so I learned about growing up on the land in Minnesota. She spent 10 years in love with that one guy who really was bad for her.
print at libraries - audio - ebook - bookshare
She knew it wasn’t the best use of her time, and she managed to get her lovesickness imaged via a functional fMRI. This served as a great news hook — the search engines have pages on this story. Second best to reading the book, here’s her TED talk. (Meta aside: she learned about fMRI imaging of love by watching an earlier TED talk by Nancy Kanwisher.)
( TED talk embed with pro captions )
Given I love Dessa, who else should I be listening to?
https://www.vqronline.org/fiction/2018/06/mary-when-you-follow-her
Holy wow can Carmen Maria Machado carmenmmachado write!
This 1200-word story was written, oulipian-style, to a restraint. It’s so successful you won’t even notice. Can’t summarize; it does contain: Dominicans, teenagers, runaways, night, summer, love, kidnap, danger, neighborhood, work, poverty, harassment.
Visual delights abound at the Reddit community devoted to unstirred paint — that is, what you see after you pry the lid off house paint.
https://www.reddit.com/r/unstirredpaint/
Shape similar to limp head of cabbage unfolding in blue-grey-green-white-swirls
jessamyn is an internet elder, former MetaFilter mod, activist librarian, and originator of the warrant canary. She communicates a lot in this short essay examining selling out and/or compromising principles:
This list could also easily be titled “Five ways to console yourself when you’re a sell-out.” I see it both ways at the same time. My ideals need to be made real through an existing imperfect system if I’m going to get anything done at all.
Sometimes you can’t just be there, you have to get there. That takes time and possibly doing things that feel less important along the way. Be okay with that time. It’s necessary.
- Everyone’s hardest struggle is their hardest struggle.
- Be tactical. Realize you’re playing the long game.
- Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.
- Everyone, everywhere, is in some sort of compromise position with their values.
- Sometimes there are problems that money can solve. Know which ones those are.
by blacklangpod
https://blacklangpod.buzzsprout.com
Creator Anansa Benbow opens my brain to the huge varieties of black language, especially AAVE/Ebonics. The first episode declares: no grammar police and pinged my disability pride when she said, "I stutter. Imma gone make this podcast" and carried on. The second explores the pragmatic function of aight so boom in storytelling. The third episode takes direct aim at the reality that Black creativity drives US culture, including language change, and yet White people valorize White AAVE speakers while excoriating Black AAVE speakers.
She compares the experiences of Rachel Jeantel, star prosecution witness in the George Zimmerman trial whose testimony was simply not understood by white jurors, with Bhad Bhabie, a white rapper who gained fame by disrespecting her mother on Dr Phil:
Language appropriation of Black people is not simply language borrowing, unfortunately, it comes with the erasure of Black people. Again, the push to promote stan/twitter/internet language, instead of recognizing that the language used on social media comes from Black people is an example of that erasure.
Sorry to report no transcripts for this podcast.
https://www.accentricity-podcast.com
Sociolinguist Sadie Ryan explores linguistic ideology as applied to Scots. In her words:
This is a podcast about people and how they talk. About accents, and why we care about them. About languages, and how they refuse to be controlled. About why there is no such thing as bad grammar, no language is more important than any other language, and every voice is valid.
I learned that Scots language is scorned as uneducated by many English power brokers. A pair of episodes document kids just learning to talk and how they speak one year later.
I had to listen to the first episodes several times to get accustomed to her accent — sadly, no transcripts. Excellent bedtime listening.
Learned about both of these from the Huge List of Linguistics Podcasts hosted by Lauren Gawne aka superlinguo:
https://www.superlinguo.com/post/158448074588/linguistics-and-language-podcasts
Completely adorkable Good Omens gen fic, POV of a very queer, very UU minister interviewing a couple she calls Bowtie and Sunglasses. Only canon you need to know is that the couple getting married are a demon and an angel who’ve been flirting for 6000 years.
Many thanks to pauraque for introducing me to ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
turingfest, a fanwork exchange for robotic characters, which are defined for this purpose as "characters in the realm of AIs, robots, androids, mecha, machines, cyborgs, and any other technology-focused characters." The author reveals are up now; here are the 2020 contributions:
https://archiveofourown.org/collections/turingfest2020
I particularly loved Welcome to Windows 95! by izayoi-no-mikoto
https://archiveofourown.org/works/24073393
It’s a horror story told entirely in Windows 95 first-boot screen grabs. Since I’ve used Apples all my computing days, I can’t vouch for how true-to-life this portrait of an OS as a controlling bastard is. Fundamentally inaccessible, and I want to podfic this by creating the appropriate screens and feeding them to Jaws 1.0. Anyone ready to assist? ( samples and two other links )
The Tomboy Survival Guide by IvanCoyote explores growing up a tomboy AFAB and then transitioning. Coyote treasures the support they did get from their family, as well as detailing how strange it feels when everyone around you expects something you simply can't deliver. They spent a lot of time growing up in the Yukon, so there's lots of delicious Northern detail. Coyote's description of their tech-school harassment while studying to be an electrician brought back my experience as a "non-traditional student" in the 1970s. I'm very glad nobody pissed in my toolbox, though.
You are going to need to find your freak family. Your misfit soldiers and their weirdo army. Keep your eyes open. That little boy at school that the bigger kids are picking on. Ask him if he has a secret name he wants you to call him. Tell him yours. Tell him he is beautiful. Tell him you see all the ways that he is strong like you and it has nothing to do with throwing a ball. Tell him you will be there at the other end of the string between you, listening into that tin can if he needs you.
The world will be full of messages telling you to be something other than what you are. Telling you that you are too skinny or too fat or too dark or too hairy. Too poor for pretty. Low fat hide your belly quick loss how to love less and find a man maps to time machines that only ever go backward. The magazines are full of this nonsense.
Save those magazines. They can be very useful. You can duct tape them over your jeans to make shin pads for street hockey and quick, cheap armour for fencing or general swordplay. Touché.
I’m a big fan of mrissa’s humane and thoughtful science fiction stories. In the last month, she’s been posting verse that helps me cope and hope.
What Remains: the COVID Checkouts captures the strange relationship we have with the books that happened to be in our house when stay-at-home started.
In the Isolation Grocery explores how, even in that temple of mundanity, every moment has changed.
COVID Spring: Underlying recognizes our individual human worth, no matter our immune-system status.
Post Apocalyptic imagines the better world we could have when the current crisis has passed.
I bet there will be more!
https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/tag/covid+poems
My #1 podcast, 99% Invisible, unrolls the mystery
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wipe-out/
audio & transcript.
tl;dr Folks who supply workplaces don't know how to get their product to the consumer market. Folks who wipe at work now need to wipe at home.
Plus: why wipe at all? the benefits of water? the SF sewer district manager opines about "flushable" wipes. (It's a lie -- they're as persistent as nuclear waste.)
Podficcers being even more creative is the theme of the Out of the Auditory challenge, happening again this year. Thanks to sylvaine’s post, I just enjoyed a bunch from last year's challenge.
In particular:
AO3 Tags: PWP, Porn, Smut by momotastic. It’s a very dramatic reading of the many synonymous tags of AO3's canonical tags for "PWP", "Porn", and "Smut".
It made me laugh and love fandom, as well as admire momotastic ability not to crack up.
The Unofficial RCMP/CPD International Co-operation and Liaising Recipe Book by podfic_lover.
china_shop’s silly and sweet fic read aloud. Recipes include
Out of the Auditary: a fest for podficcing works that don't fit into the "standard" fiction format, such as meta, not!fic, epistolary and chatfic, video game codes entries, fake scientific articles, poetry, and many more!
If you need a snort-giggle, thefourthvine's hilarious "I Need A Sweet Potato" essay
https://littera-abactor.livejournal.com/7748.html backup
has been podficced by a conspiracy of EuroPodders
gwynne has created a masterpiece of Vorkosigan filk.
It's to the tune of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Modern Major General from Pirates of Penzance, refer to this captioned video to refresh your memory
I’ve several times with no intent been accidentally treasonous.
I always have fast answers when they ask me what my reason is.
My loyalty imperial is total, true and absolute
But sometimes I might just forget some details when the time’s acute.
https://archiveofourown.org/works/20349997
(Thanks to the person on my d-roll who recced this, and whose name has escaped.)
Tor.com hosts the first chapters of two Killjoy novellas I really enjoyed:
Both feature trans anarchist Danielle Cain solving crime in a near-now infused with death, hope, and magic. A stone SF fan, I generally find magic too twee. Killjoy addresses the tricky power dynamics magic engenders in a satisfying fashion. magpiekilljoy has mined the years spent living in her van to make a silvery, diesel-coated landscape, realistically evoking the rootlessness and solidarity needed to survive as our world falls apart.
( snippet )
Much more reading, and music, and crafts on her site:
BirdsBeforeTheStorm.net
As always, Bertolt Brecht’s poem "To Prosperity" comes to mind:
( part of verse 3 )
...and quantum physics and cooking too!
mrissa has written another wonderful essay, informed by her years writing great SF and coping with disability.
That Never Happened: Misplaced Skepticism and the Mechanisms of Suspension of Disbelief - Uncanny Magazine ( A quote and more to read else web )
Lux Alptraum, 2018
ebook, print, audio (Overdrive)
five out of five stars
I enjoyed this educational screed about Western patriarchy. Alptraum examines misogyny through the lens of lies women tell to cope, including:
Alptraum’s accessible prose is bolstered by footnotes to science as well as the popular press. She strategically deploys current media images, and she’s writing directly to the reader. I think it would be an excellent gift for any person on the threshold of sexual maturity. (Opinions from actual parents most welcome!)
content notes: no explicit discussions of violence or assault
plaidadder wrote Wild About Harry, an epic, woman-centered BBC Sherlock fix-it which is in my reread-it-and-laugh/weep comfort fics folder
https://archiveofourown.org/series/94898
Today, she wrote a song for/about Jeremy Brett which made me cry:
http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/post/182059263949/i-wrote-a-song-about-jeremy-brett
ETA: laughingacademy reblogged it with a link to "I'm in love with Jeremy Brett," a song Poi Dog Pondering, a skiffle band from the 80s
https://laughingacademy.tumblr.com/post/182064370028/i-wrote-a-song-about-jeremy-brett
ETA2: markdown doesn't work in post titles!
Dessa is fierce and smart and I love her music. She's a white rapper from Minneapolis on the DOOMTREE label.
https://www.dessawander.com/music/
( Links to two YouTube videos )
ETA: rydra_wong tells me Dessa is "half-Puerto Rican", not white.
Let it be known that Tumblr did support awesome creativity! Particularly the 221B Baker Towers headcanon universe, where all the reboot characters are marginalized folks living in a poor housing estate. A delicious improvement on the class-bound glaring-white BBC version.
I've seen most of the creative art and writing on 221b-baker-towers
Tumblr
…but just in case…
The original art manip and headcanon post, safe on AO3
https://archiveofourown.org/works/428754
Tagged Tumblr posts https://www.tumblr.com/tagged/221b+baker+towers
And on the Archive https://archiveofourown.org/tags/221B%20Baker%20Towers/works
MyGuy, who is the King of Thrifting, escorts me to a Savers, and demonstrates his magic skills by locating two heavy cotton jackets, a cashmere/cotton scarf, a merino wool scarf, an excellent sunhat in just the shape I’ve been seeking, and a pair of just-broken-in but not-worn Sanita1 clogs in my size. Under $50 for the lot.
5 Monday: Joyful Views
Swim at Highland Pool. Still friendly people, and the water’s warmer.
I stopped by Walmart for bandages and I left my wallet behind at the checkout desk. It’s gone forever. The good news is I didn’t lose my credit card, there wasn’t much cash in it, and the rest is relatively easy to recreate.
( Many Things to Love About the Sandia Tramway )
6 Tuesday More Mercantilism
I went bead-shopping with my walker
7 Wednesday
8 Thursday
In “Silver Buttons All Down His Back,” A.C. Wise captures the distance between those of us with atypical bodies and the beautiful ones. The gulf that could be bridged and often isn’t. Plus astronauts.
( taste and link )branchandroot