Spontaneous ∂erivation

In response to that really weird high school whose board decided to ban same-sex dating and girls wearing tuxes to prom, then decided to cancel the whole thing instead, AutoStraddle wants to know: if you’re a girl, did you take a girl to your prom?

If so, you can submit that lovely picture to their gallery! Here are some examples (scaled down; full-size and many more pictures available at the Autostraddle gallery):

Names will not be revealed.

My gods, was prom always this chintzy?

Yes. Yes it was.

More at Autostraddle. Some of those tuxes are quite sharp. And some aren’t. About the same ratio as for guys at my prom, from what I recall. It’s amazing what a good tailor will do for you, girl or boy.

I don’t have any prom pictures, unfortunately. Not that I would want to have them.

I had to do a double-take on this news article:

The Itawamba County school board announced today it would cancel the Itawamba County Agricultural High School prom after a gay student challenged the district on its policy forbidding same-sex dates.

This, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be a teenager’s overreaction, and does indeed appear to be the school board being… I don’t even know. They actually ban same-sex dates over there. It’s actually a school policy. The ACLU is involved.

I am particularly fascinated by this part:

School officials told McMillen last month that she could not bring her sophomore girlfriend to the prom and also told her she could not wear a tuxedo.

(Emphasis mine.)

I wonder what school officials were thinking to accomplish with the ban on tuxedo-wearing gals. Were they thinking, “If we let the gals wear tuxedos, then we’d have to let the boys wear gowns, and that’s wrong!”?

Of course, I remember my prom. There were a lot of things wrong with it, primarily involving my father, but one of the things wrong with it was that I hated gowns. I hated fancy dresses. I hated spaghetti straps and especially the kind of bra you have to wear with a spaghetti strap/shoulder-less dress. I hated pantyhose. I hated heels. I still hate all those, actually.

But you had to wear that kind of ensemble for prom if you were a girl. Back then it didn’t have to be a school policy, it was simply an implied, immutable law of nature: Girls wear dresses, boys wear suits. Girls could wear dresses that were only as long as their upper thighs, and boys could wear suits that burned your retinas, but as long as the clothing was correct gender-wise, that was okay. (Both happened at that prom.)

And that was that.

Things didn’t change for me in college, except that I learned a lot more about the kinds of people I was attracted to (both male and female, which is worrying to someone whose sex education came only from a special field trip made in high school¹), and observe more closely the difference between male and female clothing. Especially when it came to formal wear.

No, I never got involved with anybody; I just made a trip with a guy who needed to get a nice interview suit, and he had money, and needed shopping support.² I was impressed at how sensible men’s clothing tended to be, sizing-wise; actually measured in inches by inseam and outer seam, for instance, whereas with women’s clothing you could define a “size 10″ to mean almost anything.

And while men’s clothing tended to be more or less same-y, there was no pantyhose, and there were quite comfortable shoes. There wasn’t freezing your shoulders off with some paper-thin scarf that did nothing but set off your, your, I don’t know; there were jackets, which you could take off and fling over one shoulder to look cool, or at least attempt to.

And vests. Vests fascinated me for some reason, possibly in ways that bodices fascinate others.

Granted, men’s clothing could be rather over-warm, but there is such a thing as shirt sleeves. And ties, one could definitely do without ties, but there are such things as clip-ons (now, if there was a clip-on that actually looked like a real tie…).

I did not dare mention any of this to my parents. To tell the truth, this was little more than a minute side interest compared with trying to survive my parents’ controlling intentions and abuse.

Perhaps it’s telling that literally two days after I cut off all contact with my parents³ I bought a tux.

Well. Not really a tux. My friends wouldn’t allow me to go into the men’s clothing store. So I got a women’s knockoff, which was one step away from a tuxedo anyways. It didn’t matter that the only color it was available in was shiny powder blue. It was a tux. -ish.

But it didn’t really matter. I never got to wear the tux to any of the functions for professors/students. My friends strongly discouraged it, because it would attract ire from professors, and if you’re trying to hang onto a teaching or research assistantship, you do not want to do that. So I had to get… a short spaghetti strap dress. With pantyhose. And heels. I believe they’re the type of heels that are called “fuck-me heels.”

Eventually I lost the tux, along with a lot of other things. But hell. It wasn’t a real tux anyways.

These days I work for a dot.com, so suits and dresses don’t really matter in any way at all. Everyone is in some variant of a t-shirt and jeans (or kilt). Recently I also discovered that loose skirts are wonderful and I think everyone should try them.

But really… I still want my tux.

1. I know people like certain kinds of traits in other people they’re attracted to. I prefer people who look androgynous, and are as at home in a gown as they are in a tux. Still do, it’s never gotten “fixed.” [↩]
2. I love shopping. It’s the gatherer in me. In person. Via catalog. Online. Clothes? Books? Hardware? It doesn’t matter. It’s shopping! [↩]
3. And after an exciting weekend of my parents sending me a death threat, then my parents threatening my dorm’s clerk, then my parents showing up on my friends’ doorsteps! [↩]

Peter Watts kindly provides his work online for free on his website, under the backlist section, under a Creative Commons Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Unfortunately, an eBay seller, e-bookkeeper_norwich, is fraudulently selling copies of Watts books in clear violation of both copyright and the non-commercial Creative Commons license, which is quite a feat of legal stupidity. ETA: These copies were not authorized by Peter Watts.

Do not buy from this guy, and report him to eBay.co.uk as much as possible.

Please spread the word.

Update: Peter Watts also posted about this, and the seller actually apologized in the comments and removed the item, as well as all the other copyright-infringing CD-roms and now sells club wear.

I wouldn’t even have remarked on the most recent slight flare-up—I didn’t even comment when Helix Magazine took its ball home shut down, what, a couple months back?—but the minor wank spawned of course spread to the SFF.net newsgroups.

So apparently Helix Magazine, of late racism, wank, and lols, has decided to pull all of its archives after all, claiming that they were scared of Janis Ian after she requested Helix remove a story of hers because

And she is, after all, a well-off popular entertainer, with legal and financial resources we could not hope to match; and none of us had the time nor the energy for a courtroom fight.

Yes, Janis Ian, who had to resort to the resources of the SFWA grievance committee, obviously had deep pockets of cash to drop on this.

And of course the right response is to pull down all the archives, even though this was not requested.

Deathless comment by Nick Mamatas: “I’d call even remarking on this beating a dead horse, except that in this case the dead horse has actually managed to get a bat in its teeth and with a posthumous twitch, smack itself!”

And because this is William Sanders, the baby train wreck doesn’t stop there.

Oh Sanders, never change.

Okay, there’s been a lot of FAIL on the interwebs lately, and the most recent one is the hubbub about the Rowling and Vander Ark case. A lot of people think Rowling’s being a big meanie. What I want to say about that I’ll keep under wraps, because I think there’s been more misleading articles than not in the media.

Right now I’ll just say: it’s a shame that, while Stanford Law seems unable to read court documents, especially the ones from the history of the case—you know, why read what’s been going on when you pass judgment in public or something [/sarcasm]—fandom_wank, as a collective entity, can.¹

For people who may be wondering about the “Pie Chart of Doom”, it’s a breakdown, in graphical form, of the amount of text that’s been plagiarized by Vander Ark’s book from the Harry Potter books versus other kinds of text. It’s also available in bar graph form. For larger images, clicky to embiggen:

pics extracted from documents by B.K. DeLong

It may be a surprise to some, but it’s not only professional writers who live on LiveJournal; there are professional lawyers as well. Thankfully they’re less obtuse on LJ, and tend to break down testimonies and documents into easily digestible forms for the layman:

• praetorianguard covers the circus that the case became, and also highlights from the trial.
• praetorianguard explains why settling is good and why the defendant’s attorneys are awful; if only RDR had a dream team I suppose.²
• Not on LJ, but Dan Slater covers the following: RDR refuses to settle. And of course, Steven Vander Ark, no matter what he wishes he could do, is along for the ride.
• foresthouse breaks down the ruling, starting with Part I: Findings of Fact.
• foresthouse continues ruling breakdown: Part II: Conclusions of Law, Copyright Infringement.
• Update: foresthouse continues with: Part III: Conclusions of Law, Derivative Work. (Also lists more links to ruminations, past and present, on the case.)
• Update: foresthouse continues with: Part IV: Conclusions of Law, Fair Use; Part V, Damages and Conclusion
• Update: praetorianguard breaks down the ruling as well.
• And Scrivener’s Error, not on LJ but on Blogger, weighs in.
• Update: At Harvard’s Info/Law blog, Derek Bambauer speaks.

And finally, Nora Roberts, who tends to be a clueful and reader/fandom-with-it author (along with Diane Duane) comments curtly here.

For those who wonder what would have happened if RDR won: it would have been the worst thing possible for fandom. The ruling would prod studios, lawyers for authors, and other copyright holders to crack down on fan fiction and other fan creations; while they’ve always been looked at with a wary and willingly ignoring eye before, now they would actually pose a legal threat due to precedent set by Rowling vs. RDR Books. We’d start seeing fanfiction sites get shut down left and right, in other words.

So digest before you judge and shout.

(By the way, for folks who might wonder where I was yesterday, since the 8th (sob!) is without a blog post: on Twitter, mostly, since I was traveling to and from a doctor’s appointment and then to and from the pharmacy, which took its sweet time in preparing some of the stuff.)

1. For those who don’t remember Orson Scott Card’s opinion: he thought Rowling was wrong. These days, being on the same side as OSC tends to be a strong indicator of being on the wrong side. [↩]
2. Another point for those just coming in: Vander Ark is not the defendant. His publisher, RDR Books, is. [↩]

As you may all know by now, the rumors on the web about a Kindle 2.0 this year are not true. Is this Amazon’s fault, as some say?

Well, no. Mostly because the rumors never came from Amazon officially, and Amazon (the company) never dropped any “snrr snrr snrr” hints. The rumor originated from CrunchGear on July 15th, which claimed an insider had “let it slip”, which is completely different from a statement by the company itself. Despite all attempts to the contrary, employees are not actually all part of a hive mind, and some people screw up (or are bragging. Unfortunately, it happens).

However, you can get a Kindle for $259 if you sign up for an Amazon rewards card. I have one myself, and have had it for three years. It’s a normal credit card, no weird strings attached. Well, except the one where you get $25 in rebates for every $100 you spend on Amazon stuff. Which I do not count as a string per se, because you aren’t required to do that, although it’s a strong incentive to. Indeed, it’s how I got my own Kindle for $259; I ended up with a bunch of $25 gift certificates over a year and then just piled them on the Kindle order.

C’est la vie.

An update to the glorious trainwreck that is William Sanders and Helix SF Magazine.

Over at Rachel Swirsky’s That which deranges the senses, the writers whom Sanders has either called “pantiwadulous”, or denied their requests to remove stories from his archive, have banded together. The result is Transcriptase, a mirror of Helix—without the racist lunatic at the wheel, of course.

And yes, this effort is entirely legal—the Helix contract doesn’t disallow stories being placed in other web archives.

So visit Transcriptase and take a peek at the wonderful stories there—and all packaged in a far better website, too.

Goodbye, Sanders. Thanks for playing.

Is it worth it to submit to some place or other in the mere hopes of publication?

As the worms turned up from Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly’s recent wankery show, sometimes it is decidedly not.

Come with me as we explore a trail of

• racism, bigotry, and rejection letters;
• the acts of nonprofessional spewage from an editor of a Hugo-nominated semi-prozine;
• what happens when your contract with your publisher is not well-examined;
• and how to deal with the blatant wankery.

Click here to read more »